I have a stack of unread books double paper bagged, sitting on the floor in the corner of my living room that have been in need of a ride back home to the local library for… oh my god, six months now. Since I’ve likely incurred well over one hundred dollars in fees/charges for essentially (though unintentionally) thieving library books, I figured I should probably read a few. The initial visit was intended for physics/physical science concepts that were already written simply because I was experiencing one of the most intense periods of burnout in my adult life and couldn’t write a damn thing. Recall has always been tough for me even when I’m presently immersed in a subject but typically once I get going, hyper-focus takes over and I recall far more than I remember learning. During burnout there are no functioning backup safety features to kick in when I struggle. There’s just a wide expanse of nothingness, and the void is telling me to watch Gilmore Girls until I can remember words again. But I have a child, so instead we watch Zoey 101 which is her burnout phase comfort show.

I found this book near the top of the bag. It’s one that my daughter picked out from some adult choices. I’ve mostly parented in a loosely regulated but intentionally communicative fashion. Sometimes it works well but sometimes it does not. When you parent with the intention of being openly approachable about any topic, it’s necessary to maintain a high level of trust and mutual respect. I have been failing to do this sufficiently for at least the amount of time those library books have been crashing in my living room. But as is typical in life, circumstances begin to shift and we become aware of the areas we have neglected to nurture in our relationships, and we work to restore the balance.

I flipped the book open to a random page to see what was going on. Turns out this is a Christian book which would typically not be my thing as a recovering Evangelical but Anne uses profanity so I trust her for now. In a chapter titled Snail Hymn, I found this:

People like to say that we cannot forgive others until we forgive ourselves. Isn’t that nice? People like to say all sorts of stupid bumper-sticker things that aren’t true and that in fact can be shaming, such as that God never gives us more than we can handle. What a crock. (My friend Mary says, in response, that you should never give God any idea of how much you might be able to bear. Lowball Him, like a trainer at the gym who thinks you might be able to lift heavier weight. Say that you injured your lower back doing that once. Hint at liability.)

I have forgiven most people who have hurt me or behaved atrociously to those I love, although there is one extended family member who (I’m positive) makes Jesus sick to His stomach. Yet from time to time, I forgive myself for being a bad forgiver. Forgiving ourselves is the advanced practice–it’s Senior Lifesaving.

It is tricky business. Comedian Cameron Esposito put it well: “I remember a close friend’s mom asking me if I really felt comfortable wearing a swimsuit next to her daughter’s much more slender body. I was eight. When you are a little kid, you can’t protect yourself from this shit. You think the shit is you.”

You thought the shit was you, all through the years, and droplets got trapped in various chambers of memory. Even with years of recovery or therapy–after making amends and working on self-acceptance and even experiencing patchy moments of transcendence, after having mostly forgiven ourselves for not caring, for ambition, materialism, wasting time, and gluttony–it can still be exacting. The fear of your defective nature resurfaces, the way chicken pox resurfaces as shingles. But at some point you realize that we all have dual citizenship here, perfect and neurotic. Ram Dass said you have to remember only two things: your Buddha nature and your Social Security number. And wonderfully, there is not enough memory to keep track of every old grievance. This is the grace of age. So one forgives as one is able, except for maybe those two or three special contenders and oneself.

Each full act of forgiveness and even each partial act is not only a miracle, but a prize of redemption, as with books of S&H Green Stamps. But instead of a toaster, you get a unit of peace. Each act of forgiveness gives us more awareness of the beauty that surrounds us and of the friendly light inside, the tiny usually ignored part that hasn’t been faked, cheapened, or exploited. It is an infinitesimally small point of light–like when our ancient TVs were turning off–and eternity, the world in a blade of grass.

[…] Forgiveness, I know now, is maturity. Mercy is maturity. It is slow release, like certain medicines. It’s incremental, like traveling along the spiral chambers of a nautilus.

I once brought my Sunday school kids a nautilus shell, because if you want to help kids fall in love with God, help them fall in love with nature. My friend Mark, who also teaches Sunday school, taught me that, and it is one of only a few great lessons I can teach.

He also showed me a way to help my kids with their terror of what we’ve done to the earth. “Ah!” he said, excitedly, when I asked for guidance, as if I had come to the right place. “First teach them how we live with sin.”

I nodded Hasidically. Then I asked, “How do we live with sin?”

I sinned so much in my twenties and early thirties, until I got sober, when I moved from moral turpitude to the simple cloth-coat sins of inertia, judgment, and morbid reflection. The woman who helped me get sober in the eighties, when I told them how bad my behavior had been, waved their hands dismissively and said, “Oh, me too.” This began to relieve me of my bottomless shame. They said, Leave it alone. Don’t pick at it. Let it heal. Don’t have any affairs today.

Sin is not just affairs, or porn shops, or drug cartels. It is also the ignorance and brokenness of the world, extreme self-centeredness, hoarding wealth, using others as objects, not caring.

Mark said that to teach the kids how we live with sin, take them to a beach. So I did. (Never disobey Sunday school teachers. They will fuck with you.)

The beach was cluttered and littered with plastic bottles and crap of every kind. We walked around and saw what we saw–damage to this gorgeous beach, what human behavior had wrought. I invited the kids to experience sorrow, disgust, and anger. I asked them how it made them feel.

It made them feel sad, scared, hopeless. So we cleaned up one part of the beach as much as we could. Mark had recommended that we bring back some of the garbage. Bring in the ugly and the sad, along with sand and shells. So we brought in some trash and some treasures. Then, this being Sunday school and not biology, we laid it all beneath the arms of the cross, because then it is held; it became part of the bigger story, the bigger reality. Not just the crud from one section of one ruined beach, but a variety of things from what was now a cleaner beach, a beach loved and held by caring people, kids who care. You admit that the ugly and repulsive and sad do exist, and they are happening, but we don’t have to believe it is us, and run away from it, from the cross, from the beach, from our own crooked hearts.

This is how we live with sin, sickness, and a world on fire.

Taking kids outside to love God in nature is just about the most Jesusy thing we can do. Jesus was nearly always outside with His disciples or alone with the stars. To take kids to a beach, even one that is littered, is to bring them to an altar, a big one, surrounded by the blue-gray ocean billowing outward like a skirt, flecked with sunlight, like foil or diamonds.

But the nautilus class was at the end of summer and was scheduled to be a short service, and it didn’t make sense to take the kids to the beach. Only one girl was in the Sunday school classroom that day. So I brought the beach to her, as a bag of shrimp chips, a Hawaiian Punch from the church pantry, and a few nautilus shells. Far be it from me to dive into such a New Age cliche, although even my bad attitude atheist friends have to admit that the nautilus is mathematically interesting and beautiful, the inside especially. But I could show the girl only the outside, and a photo of the inside.

Each of the nautilus shell chambers, starting at the very inside of the spiral, is incrementally bigger than the one before, until there is the outermost space where the mollusk lives. It’s the creature’s living quarters, its crib. The chambers hold gas extracted during respiration, for buoyancy and propulsion. The nautilus, protected in the final chamber, is both inside and yet connected to the outside, to water and food. Even my atheist friends admit, too, that this is a good metaphor for the safe space that’s in each of us, where there is relief from anxiety and self-consciousness, where there is room to breathe, to settle in, settle down, mull things over without anyone’s hot breath on our necks.

The girl handled the shell with due reverence. It was all curves and stripes, reminiscent of animal stripes, asymmetrical and good for camouflage. She traced the curve with her small fingers, as you might stroke a cat’s back. Nature seems to know that the curve is the best way to be, smooth and flowing, without any sharp edges. A shield is curved, our ribs are curved; there can be protection in a curve. You don’t get so easily smashed into by curves as you do by objects with sharp sides. And everything in the curve is balanced, which is so rare.

I was not going to teach the usual message of the spiral, that we can grow from the innermost kernel of understanding into expansion.

Well, maybe I would, just for a second, in passing.

A spiral is the ultimate statement of the harmonious. It does not grow in fits, starts, and back steps, but rather, in a flow. And chambers can be sacred, because they invite you in, even as they protect you, perhaps somewhat like your parents were supposed to, and possibly meant to.

The girl turned the shell over in her hand to study the opening. It was small, unlike a conch, but still she held it to her ear to hear the song of the universe, elegant and playful, like Bach with a girl-group backup, centered in harmonies.

We took some time to study the photograph of the shell’s inside chambers, the swirl of its expansion from barely visible to roomy. It has an exquisite, perpetually steady rhythm, like the ocean or our heartbeats.

The last detail I wanted to point out, before we had the sacrament of shrimp chips, was that when everything keeps expanding, there is still room in all of us for breath, which is what keeps us alive.

What is nature sharing with us? If something is allowed to grow the way it was designed to, it works. When we try to get it to conform to the supposedly more efficient image we have of it, we get grotesqueries, imbalances. When we try to get difficulties to conform to our way of thinking, we often push them toward being fancier, and thus absurd. We strip away the grace of what is real, and true, and maybe even lovely.

My Sunday school class and I had only ten minutes left, so we couldn’t get into the Fibonacci spiral, the mathematical sequence we find in pine cones, seed heads, and the nautilus. The outside of a pineapple or seeds in a sunflower, for instance, are arranged in uniform, efficient spirals so that the seeds in the center don’t get crowded and squished and the ones outside don’t fall off. This sort of exactitude, balance, and order are what we humans rarely experience but so long for.

I note that, coincidentally, the designs I didn’t design seem to work much more often than mine.

Something about the spiral and other kinds of curves makes you want to throw your arms outward and around as in the port de bras of a ballerina, with a deep breath and a long sweep of your arms, so you become a curve, too.

“And then what makes it sacred,” I told the girl, “is the life inside, its being–the snail!” I was so moved by what I had just said that I clutched my chest.

“Hmmm.” she said, opening the bag of chips.

“It breathes, it has babies, it scooches around through jet propulsion. It has memory. It can live twenty years.” I paused for effect. “Brother snail!”

When I got home from church, I went online and ordered a split nautilus shell for her, so she could see the coil of chambers, how it (and maybe we) grow.

Forgiveness grows like this, too.

It seems as though intuition might still be guiding me.