The Resolution

Last January, I resolved (among other things) to find my faith, and possibly even join a church. The one I had in mind was the Quaker congregation in Haddonfield, the next town over. I called up and found out that services were held at 10 a.m. every Sunday, and that everyone and anyone was welcome. The idea was a fine one -- nice brisk 20-30 minute walk every week, perhaps getting to know the folks along the route so I could exchange a wave and a friendly greeting, and a grounded, contemplative experience with which to begin and end every week.

Well, I'm a sports reporter at the Courier-Post newspaper, and my hours get a little crazy. Add to that my tendency for procrastination and a slate of big-ish projects and I'm pulling all-nighters maybe once a month. That just wrecks your sleep patterns, and suddenly 10 a.m. on Sunday morning feels like 3 a.m. on a Tuesday, only the latter is now kind of doable.

So I wrote my resolution down on a piece of paper with a bunch of others. I posted that paper on the board above my desk at home, and gradually covered it with other things until I'd forgotten all about it. I never forgot about the need for more spirituality in my life, or for community, but that promise I'd made to myself went the way of hundred, even thousands, of promises I'd made to myself and others over the years.

I didn't exactly break it. Let's just say it drowned.

But this new year came around, and I'm a year older and a year closer to the crises that will define my life. The urge surfaced once again with the holidays, and once again I resolve: I will work on my spiritual life.

But this time I set myself a numeric goal. I find that this always helps me, by the way, especially if I can make some kind of chart to fill up. I can sit there for hours and just look at a chart if it's full of little scribblings that have come from adherence to some kind of personal regimen. It's an odd compulsion given all the left-brained stuff that rules so much of my life, but if I can't explain it, I'm not going to apologize.

Anyway, the magic number is 30. Thirty services this calendar year, and everything counts. Weddings count. The obligatory Christmas Eve at my wife's Lutheran church in Northeast Philly counts. God forbid I have to attend a funeral, but it counts too. A really great piece of pie, often likened to a religious experience, does not count however. Nor would a 300 game in bowling, a Phillies playoff appearance, the return of the West Wing for a seventh season or any other such miracle.

I thought about the number a lot, and I feel good about it because it demands discipline but allows for circumstances. My first impulse was 40, but I realized that would mean I'd have to go three times every single month, and four times in a few months. So if I miss the first week because I'm working, or even because I oversleep, there's no wiggle room. I thought about 20 or 25 as well, but both of those numbers represent less than half the weeks in the calendar, and that idea would defeat my feeble mind. It would have been too hard to overcome the inevitable "I'll go next Sunday" conversation in my head.

I need to feel like I have to plan to go every week, knowing that at least one quarter to one third of the time, some unforseen thing is going to intercede at the last moment.

Sometimes I wonder if everyone is this fucked up. I'm doing all this shadowboxing with my own mind just to get myself to do something that I've been wanting to do for a long time. Now I understand why people wander into the wilderness, or go live on a farm where they have to wake up before dawn just to scratch out a living and go to bed exhausted every day. I bet they come back to civilization and just do stuff when they want to do it, without having to set up an elaborate system of neurotic rewards to continually convince themselves of what they already know it right. A little trail of little carrots for our bored little minds to follow all year. When your entire life depends on whether it rains this week, boredom never sets in so easily again, I'll bet.

Anyway, I'm hoping that after a while, I won't even need that number out there, that I can forget about it and attend services because I look forward to them and get a lot from them. But to tell you the truth, this blog is even part of that cat's cradle of neuroses: the shame of the neglected site is bitter, indeed.