Hmmm.

I woke up today, as I so often do on cold mornings, with sore hips.

I’ve been drifting back toward Christian Science lately, because it is the only brand of Christianity that offers anything even vaguely resembling a valid explanation for the state of the world at the moment, and I’m not quite ready to fire God and start taking applications from new deities just yet.

With that in mind, and having just read part of this week’s Lesson before bed last night, I opened the medicine cabinet, reached for the Tylenol, and felt the best part of me — the part that ran 14 painless miles on a twisted ankle in 2006, healed my instep after I dropped a 12-foot pressure-treated 4×4 on it in 2007, and dragged me kicking and screaming back into the classroom in 2008 — recoil, not with the deliberate naivete that characterized my last foray into faith, but with the fierce rage of a woman who is FED UP.

“F*ck off, error,” I said.

Pain jolted through my hips.

“I said, ‘F*ck OFF!'” I growled.

Another twinge.

I was half-asleep and couldn’t think of any appropriate quotes from Science and Health or the Bible. Instead, Peter Capaldi’s unmistakable Weegie accent drifted through my thought: “I’ve told you to f*ck off twice, and yet, you’re still here.”

Laughing, I repeated the quote out loud. It didn’t occur to me until several hours later that I hadn’t heard from my hips all day.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had the sense that the sustaining Infinite was intentionally speaking blue French to me, but the last time it happened, someone I’d adopted as a mentor suggested that it wasn’t really God, but just error manipulating me.

My 30-year-old self — earnestly performative, and desperate to get all the right answers — tried to agree, despite the fact that the message I’d received was exactly what I needed to hear at the moment, in exactly the way I needed to hear it.

My 50-year-old self has better sense. I’m still trying to unpack the last vestiges of the nonsense unmitigated bullshit I picked up during my Hermione Granger era and cast it out of my theology, but I’m done accepting fanon as literal Gospel.

I’m not sure where this will lead, but if nothing else, it should be an interesting ride.

Emily