Flagylated

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               The moment I put my tennis shoes on, I realized it: the simple pressure of tying on my shoes was enough to shift the blood back into the veins. And I was wearing, as well, relatively tight and high socks. All of this, plus the movement of walking around from place to place—going into the kitchen to make coffee, the bathroom to wash my hair, back to the bedroom to collect the pillows I had forgotten—all this made the sensation return to my feet”

‘Of course, I thought. I’d been lying in bed all weekend. Dammit, I was a nurse! How many pair of Supp Hose have I put on patients in my life?”

You may have seen them—the long, of waist high white stocking that are called Support Hose, or maybe just Supp Hose, and which are put on bedridden patients. Why? Because the heart pumps blood through the arteries, but what gets the blood back, through the veins? By the time the blood enters the venous system, the force of the heart is no longer stronger enough to return the blood to the heart.

In fact, it is the muscles of the legs that exert pressure on the veins: that pressure alone can be enough. Remember what you did the last time your foot fell asleep? You almost certainly, and instinctively, began moving your foot up and down, stepping in place. Or you simply got up and walked for a bit. At any rate, the numbness went away, and you thought nothing of it.

You didn’t, however, have a broken back. Nor were you essentially confined to a bed for a weekend, since the bedroom was at the back of the apartment, farthest away from the chaos unfolding on the streets outside.

And so I was already on edge, already besieged, and I took to my bed, shortly after venturing out early in the morning g to get food and wine. And then, when the blood began to pool in my feet, did I think like the nurse I had been? Of course not, rather than have the objectivity I would have in any hospital room, I was feeling the terror of the sickbed. The nurse would have sent Raf out to get Supp House: the patient was returning in terror to the emergency room, sure that a slow paralysis was spreading.

And so, I had acted like a complete fool. Should I now call off the trip to the ER? I decided not to, partly out of pride, and partly to be absolutely sure that nothing was happening. And indeed, despite the pillows and the blankets and all of the other accouterments I had brought for a lengthy stay in the hospital, I was seen buy a perfectly nice doctor who shot me up with muscle relaxants, and sent me out the door with prescriptions for more. His one question, really, was whether I was urinating, and that became my touchstone: if I was pissing, I was OK.

It had not been the first time that I had failed as a nurse. In fact, the most colossal failed had been what had started the long, tedious journey into the broken back itself.

Remember—I had been treated for a stomach infection in mid-November. I had gone to the emergency room of a once famed hospital, and had been treated brusquely and very slowly: two or three hours went by before I had even seen a doctor. And the doctor and I had clashed within minutes. From then on, I had undergone a series of treatments, none of which had been explained to me.

A phlebotomist appeared, drew blood, and then left the catheter in my vein, of IV fluids. Shortly thereafter, a nurse came and hung the first bag of IV fluid, with a smaller bag of Cipro piggybacked into it. OK—that made sense, and in fact, I went to get oral Cipro the day after I got out of the emergency room. Cipro attacks a number of bacteria, but what about the other possibility: intestinal parasites? And so I wasn’t surprised when the nurse appeared, and still unspeaking, hung a bag of Flagyl to be given IV as well.

I knew Flagyl, in fact, from decades ago, when I had worked in a venereal disease clinic. In fact, I had taken the drug myself, as we all did in those days of relative promiscuity—it was effective against trichomoniasis, which while common is often asymptomatic. And so we gave Flagyl out left and right, and patients undergoing the treatment were said to be being “flagylated.” And so, for every patient given Flagyl, I had counseled: be sure not to drink alcohol during the treatment, and for three or four days afterwards. Yes, it had been as much second nature as asking a patient if he had ever had an allergy to penicillin, and to making him wait for half an hour after taking the first dose, to make sure he wouldn’t go into shock.

So I had known all of this, decades ago—but what happened as I got released from the hospital, after completing the treatment? Remember, I had scuffled again with the doctor, and then managed to convince another doctor (who probably knew how impossible the first doctor could be) just to release me. He had read the CT report of my abdomen, and essentially told me it was normal. And then he sent me on my way.

Did I ask any questions? Did I do what every patient should do, such as asking about any possible drug reactions or side effects? And di I go home and Google the two drugs I had been given?

Of course not. I left the hospital and discovered that I was in a distinctly chilling ghost town. What had once been a thriving night spot was now deserted: a mugging seemed no likely but inevitable. In desperation, I hailed a cab half a block in front of me: miraculously, he stopped and waited.

So the long ordeal was over: I relaxed against the back seat of the taxi and breathed, seemingly for the first time in hours. I rolled down the window, and smelled the salt air from the ocean as it battered the rocky shore yards away. At last, I came into the old city, where there were people, where there was life, and where I was safe.

Raf, who had seen me briefly at the hospital earlier, and whom KI had incorrectly sent home to feed the cats, was waiting for my with a cheering…

….bottle of wine in his hand!            

Facing Paralysis

Fuck, it was happening, and despite all that I had tried to do, it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t…

…enough.

I had stayed in bed, mostly, but who can stay in bed all the time? And so I had to go to the store, for wine and groceries, and go as well to the café, since I needed to be among people, among the living. Staying inside, in the bedroom, in the bed, meant that my only companion was fear, and I couldn’t have that. But now I had to face it, since I had denied it all during the weekend.

Was I ashamed to go to the hospital—again—on a weekend? Hardly. It was only that there was no way to escape the madness of the San Sebastian Street Festival, which had raged on while I felt my feet, and then my crotch, grow progressively numb.

It was a fate that was supposed to be reserved for someone else, most notably Raf’s parents. What would happen if they fell during the festival? How would they get out and to the hospital—by helicopter? Boat? Because there is a road into the old city, and a road out of the old city, and that’s about it. And since the old city is located on a tiny island attached by bridges to the mainland, traffic for event …wait, did I say traffic? That would imply movement: in fact, it was a parking lot ever so slightly shifting forward.

And so the numbness had started: what the hell was wrong with my feet? Why were they going numb, for hours at a time? Was there some swelling around my spinal cord? If so, was it cutting off sensation to my feet? And why did it come on at some points during the day, and seem to go away at others?

What, I began to wonder, if there was a little chip of fractured bone embedded in the disc surrounding the vertebrae? Could it dislodge at times, press against the spinal column, and then, perhaps due to positional changes, stop pressing against the column? It didn’t seem likely—the discs are hardly fluid or even semi-fluid, but still…

…what in the hell was going on?

Outside, the festival was raging. Inside? We were prisoners, since the only way to go outside of our apartment was before 8 AM. That’s when I would creep out, dump the trash in the containers, and then buy the food and wine for the evening. I then would come back to bed, and sleep fitfully for the rest of the morning.

During the day, the noise volume would rise steadily. What had been a manageable roar in the morning became insufferable during the afternoon. What was the cause? Well, there were the whistles, the fireworks, the snap of the little snappers that the children were flinging onto the pavement. Shouts from one group to another. Impromptu bands baring away, and competing with the band one sidewalk over. Loud groups of people cheering one another on, as they did the bomba y plena, or the salsa, or the merengue. The entire island had come into the old city, to wake it and shake it to its core, and to see whether it would, at last, crumble and fall into the sea, which would rage and froth and consume and revile and spit out rocks and pavement and cobblestones. A tsunami of detritus would rain upon us all, flushing it and us and everyone into the bay, and all would be gone.

True, it had never happened before, but how often could the experiment be made? Yes, the heroin jolts your system, sets off flares in your brain—you know, at some point, you will take too much. The lethargy and the nodding will become sleep, then coma, then death. You know, you know—and you have seen it. Still, you must take the drug.

And so they came into the city—so frail, so pastel—and they raged. They hurled the noise against the old, tired buildings. They spewed vomit on the blue, iridescent cobblestones, they smeared their famished lives onto the houses and the streets and the churches. They used sound as a battering ram—those hordes who had never known music but as something given to other people. Other people, whom they sensed had things they would never have; lived lives they would never live. And so they came here, to destroy it, to vanquish it in the uncaring lust for noise and disorder. Yes, even the cracks in the ceilings of long shut-up rooms were filling and soon disgorging the rampant, surging lust of the anti-lives. They had been given no life of their own: nor could they find the path to make one for themselves. And so they had raged.

Buildings fell: the dust and the plaster rose up in mushroom clouds, and the crowd danced in the ruins, lifting their arms up and showering in the pulverized jetsam of the buildings. The sea reared back, watched anxiously, and then reversed course: no longer willing to kiss, to caress, even to batter the shore. The moon, too, looked down, and then looked away, and then gasped and sputtered and finally, whimpered out. Would there be any god to re-light the moon, to put it shining in the night sky?

No.

No, not if the crowd had its way, since with each triumph, with each sacking, the noise grew and grew, until it was not sound any longer, but vitriol, spite, fury, rage, and need.

There had been no conflict like it. We cowered in the apartment, and then I lost feeling, lost sensation in my feet. But wait—hadn’t the same thing happened a day ago? Or had it? Because it seemed the feeling came and went—or rather, the lack of feeling. Because what had plagued me before—the intense, overwhelming pain of my lower back—was now being mocked.

‘You wanted an end to the pain?’ it seemed to be saying. ‘Fine—I give you paralysis!’

I drove the panic down. I took the noise and disorder and furious chaos outside and I hurled it against the realization: I would never walk again.  And so as the crowds swelled and the noise grew, I battered the truth away from me. I nailed the coffin shut that held the corpse of my old life. I would never walk again. And I would never be entirely free again, because someone always would have to do some things for me. I would learn to accept that there were places I could not reach, places I could not go, things—oh, so many things!—I could not do.

Walking by the sea, early in the morning, listening to Bach or Bieber, seeing the waves crash against the rocky shoreline.

Gone.

Waking in the night, creeping into the kitchen, boiling the pound of shrimp that I would eat criminally in my bed.

Never again.

Dancing?

Over.

And so, finally, the festival came to an end. I woke the next morning with the realization: I had to do whatever I could to escape paralysis. What was impossible I now could do. In a panic, I wrote down things to take to the hospital: Kindle, recharger, cell phone, recharger, blanket, two pillows, passport. I wrote until I noticed that my hands, now shaking badly, were scribbling, and not even I could read what I had written.

Whom to call?

Zorba.

Voice mail.

Lady.

Voice mail.

Nydia?

My sister-in-law picks up: I tell her that it’s an emergency, we have to go to the hospital. We agree, I will get Raf up (it’s a holiday, he is sleeping) and we will leave in an hour.

I’m sobbing when I tell him: I’m losing sensation in my feet.

“Oh my God,” he cries, though he’s still half asleep. I leave him, because my heart is breaking and I cannot be in a dark room, which the bedroom is. No, because fear consumes darkness and grows; the monster grows ever-bigger and the chain restraining him ever-smaller and weaker. Will I be lying in bed, when he pounces?

No, I’m in the bathtub, because my hair is greasy, and can I go to the hospital with dirty hair? And so I wait for the tub to fill, but I’m in too much of a panic, so I get in when there is barely an inch of water. Obviously, I can barely get my head wet, but I try anyway, and then put shampoo on the wet the part of the head and scrape the foam over the dry part. I get out of the tub as quickly as I can, and so the hair is half shampooed and half rinsed, but I still try to comb it. Unfortunately, my hair is wildly long, since my barber doesn’t make house calls, and whom do I need to impress, anyway, lying in bed?

So my hair is a soapy, frothy, greasy mess; I am stabbing at it with the comb, and pulling the tangles out restlessly, because who cares if I am in pain and half-bald, since…

…I will never walk again.           

On Not Paying Attention

Well, we’ve descended to a new low, since a woman I like and respect has just sent me a critical email. Although perhaps not, since I didn’t open it but deleted it immediately. And that was her point: “Marc,” she titled it, “You have not been paying attention.”

In fact I haven’t, PelosiForCongress. So what have I done with my morning? Well, the question is better: which one? The one that started some minutes before 2 AM, when the residual of pain from a broken back woke me up just enough to try to fight back to sleep? Then it was time to make a decision—take Benadryl and hope for an additional four hours, or slug it out until the café opened at 10AM? I decided to do it, even knowing that the Benadryl, for reasons not even a Nobel physiologist could explain, wouldn’t work until after the morning soundscape had played out.

It’s a weird world, the land of the sick. Time loses meaning, space shifts, and the sounds you thought you knew are augmented by others. In my case, it is first the sound of the bags of bottles from the nearby bars being thrown into the garbage truck. The hydraulic whine of the scraper follows, and then the second crash as the bags land inside the garbage truck’s main compartment. Silence. Then church bells, from Iglesia San Francisco, which is the church everyone in Old San Juan goes to, and not the Cathedral. So I get done with those, and then the pigeons start cooing. At this point, the sun is rising, which in the paradoxical world of sickness means that my night is done, and I can go to sleep.

The time between taking the Benadryl at 2 AM and falling into chemical sleep at 7 AM has to be filled, and have I read—as I resolved—Ann Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov? Of course not, but I did start in on Renée Fleming’s book, The Inner Voice.

“I’m getting a little tired of Renée Fleming,” said my adopted older brother and opera aficionado Pablo, “she’s perfect but bland….”

I agreed at the time, but then got to wondering—wasn’t that an easy, almost cheap, criticism? Because to be perfect is no mean feat: nobody opens their mouth and belts out four hours of Puccini without a hell of a lot of work. So I began to be interested in Fleming, and began to wonder: what would it be like to be, as she certainly is, one of the leading sopranos of her day (if not the leading one)?

She is, for all her perfection, a surprising human person. She was always goody-goody, always the teacher’s pet, and it was a relief to her when she was chosen to play the part of Mother Abbess in “Sound of Music,”—then her nickname could change to “Mother Abscess.” Surprising, she got to be prom queen, and then started a long, arduous process of training her voice.

She talks about the importance of finding the right teacher, and her luck in finding two unknown but very good ones. And then, on a Fulbright Scholarship in Germany, she met the great Elizabeth Schwarzkopf.

How much of a Nazi was Schwarzkopf? We’ll never know, but if you’ve ever seen one of her master classes, you’ll pretty much know. She is the Butcheress of Buchenwald at one moment, and indulgent grandmother the next. Oh, and she changes her victims daily, so that everybody got the sting of the whip, but nobody knew on whose back Madame might chose to unleash it.

Well, Fleming had a week of it, and she later stated it took her two years to get over it. Schwarzkopf insisted that she learn the art of “covering,” which is a technical term for—if I understand it correctly—singing in a different way, with less volume and with a different physical placement of the voice. It’s done in those two places where the voice changes…

OK—I bought the book to learn more about Fleming’s development as a singer, but also to see if, at long last, I could understand the mysterious world of vocal technique. Because for anyone not a singer, it is unbelievable the things that singers believe their bodies can do. The tiniest adjustment of the lips, the tongue, the soft palette, and even the cuticle of their right big toe (OK—making that up, but try it on a singer, and they’ll believe it)…anything and everything makes a huge difference. Think I’m exaggerating? Fleming actually cites someone who believed that focusing the sound through the two tiny indentations where the nose meets the body will produce a glittering, shimmering pianissimo high C.

All right—find me one anatomist who believes that possible, and I’ll send you a school bus of biologists who believe in “creation science.” But if it worked for Montserrat Caballe—who did it better than anyone else—well, why not try it? And in fact, singers believe wildly impossible things, and it works….

…at least some of the time.

Well, Fleming came back from a week of Schwarzkopf, and met with a universal question, “what in hell happened to your voice?” And her voice teacher in New York was—seeming—adamant against covering. So now, did she have to undo a year of work?

It’s a garden that never, never stops needing a good weeding, since by the time you have mastered one level of vocal art and progressed to the next, you have also incorporated a new set of bad habits, which will have to be corrected for you to progress to the next level. That, of course, will be in addition to the work necessary to get to that level, so you are seeding, planting and watering—as well as pruning—at the same time as you are weeding and tossing on the compost heap.

In the meantime, after telling you to lift your clavicle without increasing pressure on your intercostal muscles and not tensing your shoulders while still keeping your chin ever so slightly raised while making sure that your soft palette is elevated while the tongue remains forward, so as not to compress or put any tension of the glottis, which should always…wait!

WHY ARE YOU SO TENSE? RELAX!!!

The wonder of it is that any of us survive it—this musical training that somehow spills into the rest of our lives. Because do you leave it all behind, tucked up in a neat neurotic package on top of the piano, ready for the next day? No, of course not, it follows you right out the door, where it gives you a steady stream of criticism about how to arrange the pillows on the sofa, as well as a report on what absolutely every one of your friends would think—but never say—if they saw dirty dishes in your kitchen sink.

“You have not been paying attention,” said Nancy Pelosi to me. “You have not been paying attention,” says every music teacher to every student, and so we do. We pay attention to all of the flaws, and the commentary is endless. For many of us, we always wondered what happened to us, when the piece of music that we played so easily, so freely, the first week we practiced it became wooden, dead, filled with mistakes the next? We had practiced and practiced, and it just kept getting worse! Was the solution to performance to look at a piece once, and then go on stage and perform it? Seemingly, since it was all downhill from there.

It was and it wasn’t. There had been no expectations, the first time we played the piece. By the second week, all the problems had been identified, and the criticism started on awakening, intensified during breakfast, developed a strong convection current over the well-formed eye on the way to the musical school, and burst into a category four hurricane on seeing all your cohorts in the hall of the classroom. And what were they doing?

Listening!

Oh, and commenting, among themselves:

‘does she really think she can play the Dvorak cello concerto?’

‘just wait till she gets to the bariolage section in the second theme…’

‘her thumb position was always shaky….’

“DARLING! The Dvorak you were playing sound MARVELOUS!”

So it was almost a relief, when whatever Schwarzkopf you were fated to meet blew up into your day. And at last, most of us collapsed under the weight of it all. In fact, the best of us may have collapsed: every major singer has a friend who was more talented, more driven, and more technically proficient than they. And they’re teaching public school choir, while their lesser cohorts are dazzling La Scala.

In my case, I left the cello behind, but still couldn’t shake the critic. Sleep in, as I did today, until 11 in the morning? It took a broken back to let me do that. Eat a pound of shrimp in the middle of the night? Thanks to two burst fractures of the lumbar spine, I can do it in a flash.

And I can tell you, Nancy, that you’re right. I had not been paying attention. Because something in me knew—I wasn’t crazy. They were trying to help, all of those people who told me that my shoulders were too high, and my vibrato too tight, and all the rest. They were trying to help, and in fact, they did help. Though I haven’t touched the cello since before my fall, I know that in a week I’ll be back in form, and can come into the café, play through three Bach suites, and then pack up, shop for dinner, and carry it home. By contrast, when I was studying with a teacher, I could not play through a single movement: the critic wouldn’t allow it.

The paradox is that it was critical to pay attention to the critic. It was also critical not to. Or perhaps it there finally came the time when the critic had done his job, and I ushered him out the door, thanked him, asked him to come back when needed—namely when I was practicing, no playing—and sent him off.

And so, Nancy, you’re right!

I have not been paying attention!

Or have I?

    

                

No Credence in the Creed

“It’s hardly my fault,” I told Lady, “since you’re never around any more. So I have to fabricate dialogue, and all of a sudden something or somebody put Janet on the page, and then she got out of hand. Or rather, the crotchety old invalid did. And can I help it if all your friends write you emails starting, JANET!? Anyway, we had been watching Becoming Jane on Netflix, and I think I was channeling Jane Austen.”

Well, she was clearly still grumpy, but really, anybody who doesn’t want to be written about should avoid friendships with writers, right?

“Of course I want to written about,” she says or does not say, because—once again!—she’s brillancing by her absence. “You can say things like, ‘the profound and internationally famed poet, Lady Lee Andrews…’ But you can’t call me Janet.”

Right—she’s not Janet, and I won’t call her that again. Now what I have to do is figure out what in the world to write about, since I can’t confess the truth: I spent the entire morning watching a BBC documentary concerning whether Jesus Christ was a Buddhist monk.

There are little hitches, you see, in the story line of the resurrection—coming soon to your neighborhood. First of all, Christ died either six or perhaps nine hours after being on the cross, and that’s seriously weird, since it usually takes much longer.

But wait, Robert flies in through Facebook and drops the word: Christ never died at all! “Read the gospels carefully,” he adjures, and I think: Will I? Because, unless I want to be modern and do it online, the only Bible I own (taken, of course, from a hotel room) is between two large mahogany windows and the tranae—or cross bar—that is keeping them shut. Why? Because during the last hurricane, the windows were banging frightfully, and I needed something to shut them up. Completely-absolutely-and-thoroughly coincidentally, the one book at hand to do the job was the King Jame’s Bible.

All right, I hear you sniggering out there.

But wait, I really don’t need to read the Bible, because one of the most seriously spiritual, if not religious though maybe she is…anyway, my friend Susan says I can skip the Bible. Nor is she alone—I well remember the Amazon review I once read that went something like, “I would never allow this book in a good Christian home….”

So Christ died or didn’t die, and the Bible is out—though admittedly useful during hurricanes—but now the question is if he ever lived at all. After all, there was one Biblical scholar—ok, in the 19^th century, but still—who argued that Christ didn’t exist. And if you read the gospels, as I occasionally do, when confronted with a Bach cantata I want to listen to…well, you get plenty of miracles.

The God Niggah, as I might call him, in Montalvo’s honor, certainly got around, and really might have benefited from Miracles Anonymous, so constantly was he switching the natural into the supernatural. And did he do it alone? Nay, nay, say the gospels, since Jesus (or the GN for you-know-what) never travelled without a multitude or two. And he must have chosen his multitudes well, since they always were standing about, mouths open in amazement, and then what did they do? As we’d say today, they got the news viral.

OK—so then I remembered; a Yale University professor on YouTube had dismissed the idea of the nonhistoricity of Christ as the preoccupation of—gasp—bloggers! But suppose Christ hadn’t existed? No problem, since Christ was, for the professor, quite unnecessary, since the whole business of Christianity was all about the teaching and the doctrines and the history of thought and belief—and none of that needed Christ.

Of course, maybe Christ did exist, and maybe he pulled a fast one—or another miracle—and didn’t die on the cross, but just appeared to have died. Think zombies. And so, he was entombed, and then extombed, and then what did he do? Well, he wasn’t going west—straight into Roman territory, and the GN had learned that lesson well—so where else but east? And there was both the silk trade and the spice trade—with their corresponding routes—so it was easy to get to Srinagar, India, where he spent the last 50 years or so of his life.

So says Robert, via Facebook, and so utterly, utterly devoted am I to my readership that I of course have to take the morning off to watch a YouTube documentary by the BBC—and if that’s not respectable, what is—about Jesus being a Buddhist monk.

So the GN ends up in India, but then something weird happens. Because he had never been particularly shy about publicity—remember all those multitudes?—but now he lives the rest of his life quietly. Or at least quietly enough that I, 2000 year later, had never heard any of this.

So that a puzzle, but then Susan reappears and tells me that—well, here she is:

Despite claims to the contrary, no one knows what the resurrection is, or was.   What I hear in the Episcopal Church (heavily overlaid with outdated but beloved Book of Common Prayer language) is that all we can say for certain is that after the crucifixion, the disciples continued to sense the presence of Jesus with them.  I sensed it once myself, and I hadn't been drinking, have never used illegal drugs, it was 9 AM and I was in a room full of quilters.  

Having said that, I don't believe that Jesus of Nazareth, if indeed God incarnate, is the only incarnation of the Great Generative Spirit, whatever one calls it.  A lot of Christians I know feel the same.

No, no, I thought, because I know the Nicene Creed—in Latin, because after compulsively listening to the B Minor Mass at one period of my life, I had memorized the thing. But was my Latin faulty? By no means, since I went onto something like anglican.com, and there it was. “I believe in one God,” and then it goes on. So that takes care of that, and I write Susan to—gently—remind her of the Nicene Creed, so she can get on board, theologically, and she writes back a day later and says…well, why not quote her?

Many Episcopal churches do a little exercise with the Nicene creed.  Everyone stands to recite it, and when we get to something someone can't accept, they sit down; when we get to the next thing they can accept, they stand up.  It's like watching a flock of penguins ducking and popping up!  I did this once in a group I was mentoring, and the person who sat down the most went to seminary the next year and is now a priest.

Well, I think to myself, by the time we got to the end of that little exercise, I’d have a bedsore. And it did sound suspiciously—following Robert Frost—like playing tennis without the net. Actually, without the net, but also with a dead opponent, and your best friend keeping score.

But wait—is that fair? Because the alternative to the spiritual practice of Susan and her co-religious is the kind of religious fanaticism I just abhor, and speaking of which, what is ISIS up to? Because according to The New York Times, those merry men are giving birth control to their female sex slaves, because the Koran forbids sex with pregnant women. Oh, but having a female sex slave is just fine….

Now let me see, where’s the nearest Anglican Church?

So I’m with Susan, generally, and I can get on board with her statement that the one condition to being Anglican is the willingness to pray together. But mine is the particular paradox of the atheist: I crave certainty…

…but fear it even more!