Home again, am I, from a 5-day whirlwind into a place and people who were my world 35 years ago. I had not been back for any college reunion until this one, and what drew me to this one is a longer story than these words need. Suffice to say, a 3-day wilderness fast in a 10-day circle of women led me to return en route to the deeper wholeness I knew on the Sacred Mountain. This past week before I left for Northfield, I realized one of the reasons I was returning was to reclaim some parts of my soul that I had left there, unknowingly. I wanted those parts of me back.
They are back now, which is incredibly grace-filled for me. Deep belly praise. A bit disorienting too, as I don’t quite know how to name ‘the parts.’ Saturday morning, I took my little package of tobacco to various spots around the campus–Olin Hall lecture rooms, Leighton Hall, Laird Hall, Gould Library–welcoming the scared, shamed, insecure parts of me back into my energies, now expansive and strong enough to embrace the all of it, of me. For all that hurt here, that wounded me knowing and unknowingly, I release you. With gratitude, I bow to how these made me who I am today. I welcome you. I welcome all of you. Each place. A pinch of tobacco and a prayer. And I felt more and more myself. Lighter somehow. More and more whole. Not unsurprisingly, then, I bumped into a woman there for her 50th Reunion, with deeply seeking eyes and heart. We recognized one another in this moment, though we’d never actually met before. I know I walked away from her smiling, wondering into the mysteries of how wholeness finds us, when we seek in this way.
The story I had had for decades–I failed at college–seems silly in retrospect, though I want to honor how it formed. I was a chemistry major who never went into anything remotely chemistry-related. “Failure” at continuity and competence. The course that changed my life was not one that I desired nor chose, though from hindsight, I’m eternally grateful. At the ages of 17-21, I failed at knowing what I wanted and how to accomplish it. My roommate freshman year had to withdraw for serious family happenings, losing her father in winter term. Though I had 1-2 close friends in my early college years, I never quite “found my people” en masse until I joined the soccer team junior year. I was grateful to have landed into circles of connection and hilarity, of course, and they all had several years of solidified friendship with one another that I came into belatedly. Behind in belonging was I, always. And finally finding these wonderful folks during junior year…finally landing in a Kierkegaard class where I literally awoke with my heart bursting into flame, I began to make choices that were for me, for what and who I yearned to explore. This resulted in extreme displeasure from my earliest Carleton friendships, even losing connection with two I had roomed with, spent so much time with in our years there together. I was becoming someone less a fit with them, as now I know can happen when we grow in different ways, each to her own.
But the result? I’ve never felt relationally able to return for any reunion. I’ve carried around whisps of shame for choices I made that were precisely the exploratory choices I had needed to make. I chose my seeking path over staying in friendships that had become too small, somehow. It did seem like I had “failed” at the longstanding connections for which Carleton is renowned. I knew the Sacred Mountain was urging my return, but I entered into Reunion's Friday morning with deep belly dread, not a little fear.
Here, now, the ‘morning after’, the first day back after the 35th Reunion for Class of 1991, I’m overwhelmed by how familiar and welcomed I was. It feels like a world I’d not had access to for decades is back in place somehow. Life has ‘lifed’ each of us, perhaps making each of us appreciate those years in our earlier lives, how they interconnected us all, as weird and quirky as each of us is, in our own ways. Most significantly and strangely: In this place, I did not feel out of place. As incomprehensible as it is/was to my 35 years' experience of felt-absence, I felt so very strongly: these are my people–all of them, regardless of how we knew or did not know one another. Liberal arts habits of mind? Yes. Four years of proximity and learning, sadnesses and joys? Yes. A connectional way of being in a world fragmented and polarizing? Yes. I feel like an entire world I'd not had access to has whooshed back into my life, with points of connection all over the States, World, even. (I touched in briefly with a Carl from '91 who now lives in Portugal, did not/could not come).
So Brian Maguire (‘91) and I sat for our debrief-cocktail-hour a couple hours after I returned home from the last hours of the second-day drive out of Northfield. After 25 years of marriage, we know how to fly autonomously and return harmoniously. Tonight, however, we both learned anew how very different our experiences had been at Carleton, though Carleton is also what made us perfect for one another.
When I realized I was going to my first-ever Reunion, he had said quickly, I’m NOT. He works weekends. The challenges of rearranging calendars with colleagues and work were too great for him to come with me. Both of us recognized this was something I had needed to do on my own anyway. It really was. It would have been a vastly different experience to be there as a couple.
As I told him some stories and shared my new realizations of overwhelming grace and grief, both, he finally spoke his own grief into the room. Those years at Carleton were the happiest, most fulfilling, most connectional and communal years he had ever known…paired now with the realization that he would never have access to that much belonging again. And I can tell you, speaking as a theology prof who labors to shape today’s pastoral leaders, he’s right. Ministry is professionally isolating, and returning to Carleton, to the belonging-lost? “It was like being kicked out of Eden,” he said to me. His sizeable grief has prevented him from returning for Reunion. Just too painful.
My grief is different, though I resonate with his experience, for him. (As an empath, I often do). I will write more publicly about the graces of these last five days. But this morning, it is the grief that overflows inside of me. Carleton draws the kind of people who share Brian’s and my values, even as they also find us incomprehensible in our most sacred callings of purpose, meaning, spiritual growth into maturity, wisdom-tradition deepenings. I spent three days immersed in my people, feeling a belonging and familiarity that dwarfed my stories of failure, shame, growth into divergent directions. I spent three days getting to speak some of my present-day storying while receiving so many others’ present-day storying. I spent three days doing what comes naturally to me, which is holding space for community, nourishing and being nourished, laughing and lamenting and laughing again. I have missed 35 years with these, our people, which saddens me deeply. At the same time, I know it's not time until it's time. (What was that cheesy wine commercial? Really bad wine?)
There is so much pain in the world, always, with social media/communications making it everpresent, tumultuous, and chaotic, uncertain, today. I drove away from Northfield so thankful, full of tears, for belonging in a place that has deep contributions to make in being-with-one-another in continuously-learning ways.
Carleton’s marketing slogan for alumni used to grate on me, the tendernesses I’ve carried these 35 years, but damn it, it’s true. You are forever a part of Carleton and Carleton is forever a part of you. I had been carrying Carleton in a place of pain, unhealed storying, easy stories of failure or not being enough. All these closed me off from some of the most marvelous people on the planet. But because I’m seasoned in the deepening, healing, seeking work of the soul, what had been painful is now a strengthened scar or Seed of More. I can now see every Carleton alum as somehow part of my people, even as they may or may not welcome me in that way.
In closing, Martin Prechtel says it so very well: Grief doesn’t care if he’s badly misunderstood, underestimated, or forgotten; he’s not hurt because people run away when they see him coming, because Grief has one real good friend. Grief is the best friend of Praise…Grief and Praise are renters whose landlord is Love. … Grief is a worker on life’s big highways, and Praise is Grief’s eternal freight train, forever hauling the vision of life’s bigger picture from stars whose light hasn’t got here yet, which Grief uses to refill the potholes of our losses. Life’s bigger picture showed up in me in these Reunion days, from stars whose light simply took 35 years to get to me. Folks in Class of 1991 with whom I got to chat, even nominally this weekend? Other year's alums with whom I encountered hospitality and connection? Stars. All of you. You helped refill some of my potholes of loss. I'm grateful.
Deep bow from the path of devotion, healing, wholeness.
P.S. When more of all this is more integrated into my bodysoul, more appropriate for public consumption, protective of private conversations, maybe I’ll riff on the power of liberal arts to bring thinking-feeling-heartfull people together…in a world that needs more together. Forthcoming SubStack, perhaps.
Comments
Post a Comment