mix it all up

So I understand the importance, and even the necessity of, compartmentalizing. It's super helpful and often, I think, probably healthy. Don't bring your work home, etc. I think one could compartmentalize in a healthy way and still live a holistic life. 

I find for myself, however, that I almost have a compulsion toward integration. It's like a have a drive to take all the disparate aspects and interests of my life, throw them all together, and mix them up into a heaping pile of "this is me" all in the hopes of having it validated.

I've noticed this especially in my use of media. I want to see (some) of what my friends/family post. I want to see content from fandoms, authors, and artists that I like. I also want to see work stuff and whatever else tickles my fancy.

But I also want to throw all of those various aspects of myself out there (maybe). I've convinced myself, though, that I cannot. I'm not sure what it is.

For one thing, I tend see the both sides of everything to a fault. Before I ever post anything vaguely political or arguable in anyway, I usually internet-troll or crazy-Republican-aunt myself down into submission.

When I was an "on fire" Christian, I would post passages from the Bible but would hardly ever post commentary. Argue with that!

I would also say that I have a mortal fear of being corrected. Constructive criticism? No thanks. Helpful advice? I'm good.

The dread I feel when I need help or discover that I might not have what it takes to do x, y, or z is similar to the other reason why I('ve convinced myself) I cannot be open with who I am in the world. Everyone say it with me: "shame!" Whether it's my body, my skills, or my opinions, I think I'm often just fucking ashamed to be me. Add on to that my sundering from my whole religious foundation over the last few years and...

So I'll continue to compartmentalize in maybe some unhealthy ways, like taking a blog meant to be that beautiful mixture of interests described above and splitting into two. One is fun and full of book reviews and interesting fandom thoughts, and the other is what you're reading now. Because I sure as hell don't want anyone close to me or who knew me in a former life to read this.

the stories we tell

Humans define themselves by the stories they tell.

This notion has deeply affected the way I have processed my story and my faith. My parents got divorced the year I turned twenty-two, which also happened to be the year Liz and I got married. I of course knew before this that they weren't in a great spot in their marriage.

In those pre-divorce years, my parents relationship and my Dad's relationship with God became a centerpiece of my prayers and my "relationship with God." I was living in a story in which one of *God's* priorities was that my parents would get back together and have a thriving, loving, God-centered marriage. Longing and waiting for this became a part of my own story, fueled by an eschatology depicted with marriage imagery, i.e., the Bible talks about the people of God as "the bride of Christ" and the eschatalogical New Jerusalem is described as a bride. There was some connection there in my brain in which the story I was telling about my own life was wrapped up in the story I had given about the cosmos.

The way this all affected me uniquely as an Enneagram Nine was that my parent's relationship, which very primal and rooted in my early life, was a sort of representation of my internal peace. And peace with self and the world is the primary need for Type Nine.

There's a lot to unpack here, so thankfully writing is cheaper than therapy.

When my parents got divorced I had to give up the story that I thought I was living in. 

Now, I don't look back on this event as a trial that I had to live through. I learned a lot, but I don't think I learned anything that young Evangelical me would have expected someone in my situation to learn from it. That is, I didn't develop a renewed sense of connection to God or understanding of suffering or anything. It was just a shitty thing that happened.

When I began to truly give up that story--the one about my parents--the cosmic story started to unravel. I do not mean that I connected "my parent's couldn't stay married" to "God isn't real." But the whole thing--the Bible, the structure, the dogma (even the progressive dogma that embrace doubt)--began to feel like a story I was clinging to in order to have a center and to keep going. There might not be anything wrong with having a story like that. I'm currently just not sure what that is for me. But even acknowledging the power of narratives that shape human life and culture, in a real sense for me it all became just a story. 

sexy Christian music

While at seminary in Southern California, I got to meet musician, writer, activist, and "coolest guy you know" Andre Henry. Andre is doing a lot of great work in this world, not the least of which is making music, so you should definitely look him up.

So Andre has this song called "The Love in Her Eyes"

I see love in her eyes for me
and I'm not afraid anymore
of what may or may not be
All I feel is the warmth of her love

The lyrics are beautiful, yes, but this song is seeeeexy. Go listen now.

At the time I was first listening, though, I wasn't sure if it was acceptable to openly feel this way. Even thinking my wife and I had a fairly healthy sex life, I felt weird expressing to her the way that a piece of media was making me feel like a sexual being.

Sexual shame is seemingly ubiquitous, be it Christian sex shame, Hollywood sex shame, or whatever else. In my background, sex wasn't totally taboo, but you could only talk about it in context of Christian, heterosexual monogamy. The juxtaposition of some song being "Christian" and being sexy was somewhat jarring. Now, I wouldn't actually label Andre's music (or any music, if I can avoid it) as "Christian." But in the whole seminary context plus my own background, that label is always floating around any one who openly associates with Jesus/church in some way and makes art.

As I talked about the other day, I've been in a process of demythologizing many of my spiritual experiences. There were a lot of charismatic elements later in my Christian upbringing. Lots of shared space, hugging, "laying hands" on one another in prayer, singing together in dimly lit spaces. It all seems so sexual, and that seems fine to me. I don't mean that everyone was turned on and that we were always just one step away from an orgy. But I feel like so much of the passion that was present was a real desire to connect with people deeply. Art connects people. Music in some way draws out what is deep inside ourselves and can put us in touch with different facets of who we are.

To give some credit to my Evangelical setting, I don't think their true aim was to suppress people's sexuality and force people into a one-size-fits-all version of body positivity. But I think the inherited limits for body and sexuality had continually warped the Christian imagination over time to the point where there is really only a narrow strip of acceptable experience in which one acknowledges that one is a sexual being.

In the Evangelical version of sex positivity, the preacher can make off-color jokes or call his wife hot and even make suggestions during the Valentine's Day-week sermon that wives make sure to wear some lingerie from time to time (true story!) But one never leaves the safe zone of closed-door, hetero-normative, patriarchal coitus. It's a sort of compromise that I think hints at the ways in which everyone wants to be affirmed in their own sexuality and to not feel shame.

I guess those compromises are a large part of the fissure in my relationship to Christianity. I'm interested in that underlying desire to be seen and known for who one really is. To let the boundaries that are only there to maintain the hegemonic status quo fade and to find out what it truly is to be human.

two objections

In my post yesterday, I wrote something that resonated with me throughout the day. It was something I thought of nearly as I wrote it for the first time. I said that if the light in my son's face was one of the greatest things I ever experienced here or in whatever comes after, that would be okay with me. I'm not looking for something else. I mean...I often am, but I'm pretty skeptical about the idea of a life hereafter that will be the greatest thing I've ever experienced.

I was thinking about some possible objections to that sentiment. One is about all of the shit that humans experience on a daily basis, as in, if one's life is all trash, surely there must be something better coming. The other objection might come from a perspective of belief in or even an experience of the divine that seems to outstrip other great life experiences.

I don't feel very qualified to address the first objection except to say that for many people, I think that the struggle becomes part of the meaning of life. People who live their lives for the betterment of themselves and their own or for the betterment of others--I suspect--are finding a deep sense of purpose and meaning. The path becomes the purpose. Indignation over injustice and hope in the best parts of humanity become a source of life in the here and now that, rather than pointing to a glorious utopia, are themselves the point. The journey is the destination.*

On the second objection, well-founded belief or experience in the divine, I can really only speak from my own experience.

I talked about some of my own charismatic background in my last post. I was quite "on fire" for God. I've started seeing so many of those spiritual experiences in a different light. I don't meant to minimize them. They were profound, but I don't know that what I thought was happening at the time is what was happening.

For example, I was thinking about someone I really bonded with at the church I grew up in. We really connected during a time in which we would lead worship together for a small group of people for a few hours at a time. Near the room we were in, small groups were praying over certain people who had come for prayer. In my head at the time, my friend and I were connecting because we were just loving God so much together. Looking back, I think the connection was definitely happening, but I attribute it much more to our joint musical efforts. Often we would do one song then move into an improvisational time where we were writing refrains and musical lines on the spot. Music is so powerful. Creation is so powerful. Put together two guys who are looking for more than what their world has given them, throw in music and shared space and time and damn. Magic.

I wonder if people are looking for bliss in the hereafter because they can't stop and enjoy the life they're living. If I could have stopped and enjoyed some of my religious experiences for what they were--physical and emotional connection, shared space and time, creating and experiencing art--instead of always having to sanctify things or move on to something else, I wonder if I would have been better situated to love myself and pursue the things I want to do, both of which would be nice.

The word "deconstruction" is popular, so I'll try not to throw it around. But if I had to describe my journey of deconstruction or whatever, it would be learning to love many aspects of my story, but seeing them in a whole new way. I've largely been demythologizing my experience and trying to really enjoy the people, places, and things right in front of me.

--

*One of the tenet's of the Knights Radiant in Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive is "journey before destination." But I think I'm really drawing from some of Martin Luther King Jr. and how he talks about the ends being present in the means. He's making a point about nonviolent resistance, but for me that puts such a supreme importance on now over then. We're not trying to get somewhere. We are somewhere.

the life we're living

Similarly to many in my Midwestern milieu*, I have a background of faith. Specifically, Christian faith. Specifically, Evangelical Christian faith. The specifics of this background seem less and less important to me as time goes on. Distinctions such as, "we're denomination x vs. denomination y" or "one is allowed to do this but not that" that once seemed meaningful have been revealed in time as unimportant. In the American Christianity in which I grew up, identity is mostly conceived of negatively. That is, it is much easier to describe what one is not than what one is, e.g., not Muslim, not liberal, etc.

I also grew up as what I would still** call a "true believer"--not so much in orthodoxy (right belief), though there was some of that, but in orthopraxy. No, not the good, progressive kind of orthopraxy. The charismatic, "on fire," sort. I was fucking in love with God, man. Here are some of the sweet nothings one might here me whispering to God at night:

• I want to waste my life pursuing you
• I want to give everything for you
• I want to be consumed by you
• Give me more of yourself

Yep.

So the problem is that while I may have left behind the American Christian God, I haven't been able to fill that "God-shaped hole," though I'm pretty convinced that a lot of what my faith taught me was not only to fill the void with God but to make sure to maintain that emptiness in order to keep filling it. Like...one of the goals is to sustain the process of remembering how fucking broken and depraved I am so that I can keep experiencing the sense of God filling the void.

It's not just that faith might be some sort of wish-fulfillment as people often accuse, but that I think it propagates the wishes/needs/desires so that it can supply the fulfillment too.

In time I sought a new Christian home. I thought I could drop the American and keep the Christian. Or at least, I thought that I wanted to do that. I vacillated between "progressive" Christianity and high-church "orthodox" Christianity. I imagined some sort of overlap between those two in which we did all of the "liturgical" stuff (Eucharist from a priest, baptism, incense, old prayers, etc.) I like to think that part of what I was doing was trying to forge an identity that had content rather than the absence of other content.

I haven't really found anything that scratches that charismatic/fill-the-God-bucket itch though. I turned away from the subjective toward belief and structure but didn't find it subjective enough. The structure of rules and beliefs started to seem to me just another wish-fulfillment mechanism. I've listened to New Age-y, (white), meditation-y stuff, but I always seem to ride the same track around and around. Only this time "nothing" becomes the something which I desire to fill the void.

All of that to say: I look around me right now, and I tend to think, "this is it." And I'm okay with that. I'm okay with this being it. If there's nothing after I die that tops the light in my son's face, that's fine with me. That God-ache or drive for more or whatever--the lack--is just part of the deal, and it's beautiful.***

The life we're living is the life we're living.

----

*Looking back on this, I hate that I used this word. I didn't want to take it out, though. Just wanted to make sure it was known that I hated myself for using it.

**This is frustrating too, since even though I don't think I conceive of myself in the same old Christian ways, I still have a sense of who are the "true" Christians and who aren't, mostly defined by my own experience.

***This is also my take on Peter Rollins's The Idolatry of God.

the nine anthem

I'm not gonna settle

Not gonna do the same old thing

'Til I die

I want to live

Breathe.

For as long as I can, yes.

But really live in the meantime.

"Peace" is alluring

But it's not worth the sacrifice

[But isn't it?]

It's not worth the self-contradiction

Or the self-effacement

Or the self-loathing

But there is a life that's worthy.

Worthy of time.

Of devotion.

Of love.

Of sacrifice--not the sacrifice of the self:

Me--the real me

But of my self-image.

Of the self that is an amalgamation of what Dad was or wasn't or what I should or shouldn't be.

What I have, what I do, what other people say about me

To settle into a lived existence, an experienced existence full of contradiction.