Fear and Loathing in Los Cielos

Imagine you fall in love. You meet someone who understands you, knows you at a deep level. This person loves you unconditionally and joyfully promises to be with you for ever. You cultivate a giving relationship, where both of you make deep sacrifices and share parts of yourself. The union sprouts joy, and freedom. 

But as the relationship grows more intimate, things start to change. Your lover begins to point out the many ways that you depend on them. They demand that you become scrupulous, apologizing for even minor mistakes. Continued love is conditional on constant contrition. Your primary means of communicating with your lover is through apology, and you find that they are pleased when you beg forgiveness. You alone are vulnerable; a power imbalance of servant-master becomes the norm. You are constantly on edge that your lover will abandon you. 

We have words for this sort of relationship: manipulative, gaslighting, unhealthy. 

So my question is this: why do Christians promote this sort of relationship with God? 

I read scripture and hear the black song of manipulation. I read prayers written by the Church and still the same dark refrain. Here are a few examples from psalms, readings, and prayers I came across just this morning in Morning Prayer: 

• "Have mercy on me."
• "In your compassion blot out my offense."
• "My sin is always before me."
• "[The Lord] scourged you for the works of your hands." 
• "For your name's sake, do not abandon us for ever." 
• "Let your forgiveness be won for us by the pleading of [your servant]." 

This message is regular, continuous, overwhelming in the prayers of the Church. This posture seems to be the primary way that we communicate with our Creator, our Lover. And it seems to me to run contrary to the central story of love told to me by that same Church.

As an educated Catholic, I have been trained in a certain cosmology that involves 2 steps: (1) God created existence in an act of selfless love, and (2) God intends for all of existence to become one with Him in a response of selfless love. All of life is a process of deification, where creation literally becomes creator through the activity of real intimacy.

So what gives? If our relationship with God is to be a loving relationship, the most loving and most intimate relationship we ever experience, then why does our language betray a rather primal, unhealthy arrangement? 

I get that these things evolve over time. I get that humanity has not always been in a place where "healthy relationship" is a concept with general understanding and acceptance. I get that power in relationships has had a particular character for many millennia, and the thought of transfiguring apotheosis via loving relationship didn't jive with lived experience. 

But we're here, now. We have better vocab and better frameworks. We know better. 

Honestly, I'm not sure where this leaves me. Yes, I'll continue to pray using the timeless language of scripture and yes, I'll continue to utter the beautiful words of the Church. But an internal dialog will persist, one that resists the vocab of sin and supplication even while the very words leave my lips. When the language of the Church falls short, my soul will fill the void.

Because I long for God. Deeply. I long for a lover, not a ruler. A partner, not a master. A presence that reaches out from the abyss to give meaning to existence. 

Maybe this is the design, and I'm living a secret script. Maybe the given prayers and words are supposed to fall short, and each of us must pick up the song in our hearts. Maybe we're meant to improvise, to find the point where our artistry of holiness is no longer satisfied by the words of others. 

In my experience, that is what loving is like--maybe God desires the same in this celestial tryst. 

Foxing

In grade school I had a friend named Sam. He's the kind of person I would tell about this blog. He'd know exactly what I'm trying to do here, but he would also never take the time to read it. Which is why it's safe to write about Sam.

Sam and I both loved books, but he loved them more. Sam used books as a tool for grief, and began an affair with words that had lasting power. In my life, I've shared dozens of books with Sam; Sam has only ever shared two books with me. A lopsided arrangement, but mutually agreed upon. 

You see, I like to take books everywhere I go. I carry them with me, set them down anywhere within reach, use them for coasters, bend spines, dog-ear pages, and even write notes in margins on occasion. For me, a book is a friend that comes with, getting into all sorts of trouble at my side. 

Sam had a different approach. Sam would leave the book in it's cover. He'd carry the book in a bag, set the book down on a high surface far away from danger. When he read, Sam peered into a narrow cavern between barely open pages to discern the words. He was like a paleontologist, attempting not to disturb the stories even while unearthing them. 

You can see why neither Sam nor I liked it when I borrowed his books.  

I'm still the same way: I love a well-worn book. I love when the spine is creased, when pages are marked, when someone else underlined a sentence or wrote a little note. I love old books, yellow with age, that smell of rot and mildew. I love when you can touch a book's imperfections, when even a rough calloused finger could trace scars on the cover. I love when books are held together by tape, or glue, or not even held together at all. 

I love that despite evidence of dozens of hands, if not hundreds--thousands even--still that book opens for me. What a magical experience. 

I learned the other day (from a book, no less!) that there's a name for a book's process of aging: they call it "foxing." A beautiful term for a beautiful evolution. How fantastic it is to discover that there's a word for something you cherish. 

I've begun to fox as well. Thinning hair, rounding edges, slowing movements. It's a slight process, but it's happening. Despite this, I think my stories are aging well. Beneath a foxing cover is words, poetry--life. 

Over time, I've begun to resemble my most beloved books. And I'm ok with that.

I Got High One Time

One weekday I took some PTO and I went to a weed store and I bought some weed. I smoked that weed, put Macklemore on stereo, and went for a hike in a forest park near my home. 

For someone who does not smoke often, this was some really strong weed. Seriously brah. While on my hike, I marveled at the way light reached out to touch me through the trees and I was almost paralyzed at the beauty of my heels grinding against the insides of my boots. Also my mouth got really dry--what was that about? 

At three different moments on my walk I came across a thought that I just NEEDED to jot down right away. So I Slacked them to myself. I randomly came across these messages today and thought they were hilarious, so I decided to put them here:

Gaining in elevation, I came to know for the first time that the Abyss had layers, each more abstract, terrible, and wonderful than the last. 

 

Language: intangibly grouping the atoms of the Real into illusionary layers of order.  

 

And now I walk out from under the waterfall.

 

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. 

A Beautiful Li(f)e

There’s a scene in A Beautiful Mind when John Nash (Russell Crowe) is confronted with the surprise twist: Nash is a paranoid schizophrenic. He realizes that much of the work he believes to be essential is simply a paranoid delusion; many of his closest friends are a figment of his imagination. In short, he was duped by his own mind, tricking him into delusions and relationships that weren't real. 

His very sense of self completely departs from reality. 

This is (and perhaps always will be) one of the most disturbing scenes from any movie that I have ever seen. Because every time I watch it, I ask myself the same question: "Am I John Nash?"

As far back as I can remember, I have felt a sense of king-ly greatness. Deep within me stirs a prophecy that foretells great feats, and I know that I possess unique skills and abilities that will make this prophecy a reality. This is a cornerstone belief of mine, and it gives shape to my actions. I sing to myself the triumphant song of my own future, and dance into accomplishments that others didn't think possible. 

But then I watch A Beautiful Mind and am seized with terror. Are my prophecy and strengths as unreal as Nash's delusions? Are they just megalomaniac dreams made incarnate in my mind and nowhere else? Am I just a normal man, indistinguishable from a billion others? 

My life’s accomplishments so far would seem to be evidence toward this hypothesis; I am no king--I bear no extraordinary strengths. My belief in my own future of greatness seems nothing more than a feedback loop of dreams and praise, a warped perspective carefully nourished on grandiose interpretations of mundane experiences. It would seem that my life is an "emperor's new clothes" situation, me parading foolishly down an Avenue of Reality I neither see nor understand.
 
These are old thoughts, old nightmares that torture me from time to time. Today, though, I asked myself a new question: does it matter?  After finally passing through the terrible scream of death, if it is revealed to me that my accomplishments, strengths, and relationships are all delusions--will it really matter?

Living a life of royalty seems like a good way to pass these decades of life, even if Reality is snickering at me in the background. And anyway, John Nash is still a Nobel laureate. 

If pride is the only casualty of my folly perspective, with joy will I dwell in the imagined halls of my own greatness.

Hey Siri

"Hey Siri, can dogs eat onions?"

A question that came from a genuine place. A desire to do something nice for the loving gaze staring up at me. 

"Definitely not. Your dog will die if you give it onions." 

A routine answer, an indication of how to move forward. I took it in stride, tossing down a bit of carrot instead. 

Then I stopped to think the terrible thought: how many dogs died the gruesome death of bursting red blood cells that led to major system malfunction? How long before we caught on, and added this knowledge to the bank of things to pass down to future generations? 

I'm happy to live in the present, benefitting from millennia of accumulated knowledge that forms societal bumper rails to keep me safe. Great depths of information about how to interact with my surroundings in order to make manifest the most amount of time on this earth as possible. 

I just wish we had better guidance of how to make the most of that time. 

"Hey Siri, who is God?"

Now there's one that would be a real value-add. 

Figure out who God is, and how I ought to act in response. A creative force that breathed life into matter. Is it a He or a She or an It or a Transcendence or a Great Cosmic Abyss? Does it really want me to play the Belief Lottery and figure out the one iteration of God that is really real, and work to convert the rest of the world? Or is that just people using God to feel safer? 

It just seems that Siri is way less helpful than she could be. 

Unless...and I know this is a silly thing to suggest...but I guess I'll just say it because it's Sunday and I'm in a silly mood...but Siri knows more than anyone I know and is probably the closes thing to omniscience that I've seen in my life...she just might be...

Shame, at Scale

I sat in a little desk and gazed at a chalk board, learning about rules and buildings constructed 200 years ago. 

I gobbled fruit loops and smiled at episodes of School House Rock.

I swelled with pride the first time I cast a vote.

I traveled to Europe and saw the alternatives, coming home to a Great Experiment I believed in; one that I loved. 

And yesterday I watched as that Experiment seemed, at last, to fail. 

We're all saying things today for the sake of saying them, using words like: sadness, disbelief, despair, shock, anger, healing. We reach into our Vocabulary Bags in pursuit of an adequate expression for complex emotions. 

The best word I've heard yet is this: shame. Shame is the center of gravity in my solar system of emotion. It pulls all other emotions to itself; it shines brightly on sentiments and activities that I've tried to hide in darkness. 

Yesterday, I watched as white men completed their own Middle Passage and made themselves slaves to fear. I own a part of that journey. I abandoned empathy and made people into enemies, relieving them of their humanity and reducing them to a caricature of hatred. In so doing, I gave them license to do the same with me. 

What formed between two sides was a No Man's Land, in the ruins of a vanishing class of moderates. No one could see both points of view, everyone had to choose. As things got worse, the No Man's Land expanded and expanded and ate up the whole field, until (in the view of each side) there was nothing human left. 

I don't know the way forward, I don't know how to reset this system and heal. I don't trust people who say that they do know. Perhaps that makes me a coward. History tells me that medium for resetting these kinds of things is violence, an explosive dissolution of two sides and the emergence of something new. This is the kind of thinking that got us into this situation in the first place, but how do we break the loop? 

Today, I feel what we all should feel: shame. 

Tomorrow, I hope I can feel empathy. I hope I can see a human being in the terrified eyeballs on the other side of No Man's Land. 

Back, Baybeee

It's been an actual 5 years since I've been around these parts.

5 years seems so short. I'm a historian, so I would know. Historians deal in centuries, generations, ages. So 5 years is nothing. Noise.

But his 5 years was not short. A lot has happened to me since I last touched this URL. I left a vocation, several actually. I got some therapy, let go of many angsts and relationships. I got angry at God, then abandoned God for a while, then let God back with far fewer strings. I lost a bit of my soul to Corporate America. I ate, slept, read, lusted, learned, grew. I fell in love, married, and started my life over. 

But I didn't write a lot. We'll call it the Dark Ages, where great things happened and were forgotten. 

So I'm back in this "room," by myself, mostly for the same reason I created it in the first place: "This is a canvas on which the swimming colors and words and sounds that cloud my mind will spill forth and escape my cranium." I've recommitted to the belief that I have something beautiful to say, and that practice is something I need desperately. 

It isn't much of a surprise that I'm back. Since I can remember, I've thought of myself as the hero of an epic journey. I've returned to my mental homeland, where dreams of greatness breed with a love of my own voice to create little offspring of prose. 

"We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we began and to know the place for the first time." -T.S. Eliot 

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I went back and reread all the old posts here. A tsunami of judgements rush forth: excitement, pride, horror, embarrassment, wonder. What a fascinating journey this has been.