A Lengthy Introduction
In the beginning, and in the end, it’s about growth. When you’re a child of course, but also after
that. Your body is supposed to develop;
your strength, your endurance, your agility, your senses and all the rest. Your
capacity for thinking is supposed to develop; your knowledge, your judgment,
your insight, your intuition, and perhaps above all, your wisdom. Your capacity for feeling is supposed to
develop too; your resilience, your empathy, your confidence, your ability to
engage, commit and stick with things, along with your ability to walk away. Perhaps most of all, you are to develop in
your ability to love.
Although it’s the most natural of things, the process of growth is also
pretty mysterious. Hard to be
calculating and premeditated (let alone budgeted) about it. But we like to systematize everything. We just do.
We like meal or nutrition packages, we like school curricula, we like
fitness regimens. We’re not terribly
into people “doing their own thing” nowadays.
We are perhaps not as clear as we should be about the fact that one size
does not fit all, and that in several important ways, growth is therefore a
deeply individual thing, with a different landscape spread out before each of us
every day.
When I was a child, my
parents eagerly anticipated my growth in “spiritual things” (or “the things of
the Lord,” or “the Christian walk,” whatever you want to call it.) That’s
what this book is supposed to be about, I guess. They also looked after all of my other kinds
of growing, too, as best they could. I
always had food. Often it was Froot
Loops or Kraft Dinner and Maple Leaf wieners, or sandwiches made from Wonder
Bread with Smuckers strawberry jam, and although this kind of grub might
scandalize many nowadays, physically I turned out healthy as a horse. When I’m on my game, colds and flus that
rampage through the high school in which I teach simply turn tail and run,
whimpering. I barely leave my computer
and I have excellent blood pressure.
As far as emotional growth,
our family wasn’t demonstrative, or what one would call “positive,” but
sometimes there were laughs, frequently there were relatives around, and
sometimes we listened to music, were offered music lessons, or even had people
visit who played instruments right there in our house. A lot of our affection got shown to our pets
rather than each other, but at least there were usually cats and dogs and other
pets and farm animals to feed and look after.
If you aren’t able to hug one another, at least you can make sure together
that the family animals are loved and looked after.
The situation when my father got pilloried and sidelined in the
church (the only place he really tried to be an involved adult person, outside
of his job and home) put a huge kink in everything that might have been healthy
emotionally. People came over less and
less. There was increasingly a silent,
aching emptiness, occasionally broken by snarled, snapped, passive-aggressive
comments from all of us, and a lot of not really talking. I am a child of that environment, to be sure,
but have done many things to try to develop in the areas in which I did not
develop very much as a child and young man.
My success has been limited at best.
Formative years are called that because they are the years when we are
formed, of course.
In my home and in my church
(both “Christian” ones) I did not really learn much of anything about mercy,
grace or forgiveness. In Christian
homes, very often mistakes are thought of as outright sins, and although it is
felt that God may forgive them, on paper anyway, they are not taken so lightly
by His followers, and are generally seen as harbingers of a “downward
slide.” The message is clear: Jesus
suffered a bit more pain because you argued instead of obeying your father
without question just now.
Because of this, when I
work, when I live my life and move around in the world, whenever someone gets
annoyed and unforgivingly critical with me, I get defensive, I realize at that
moment just how sick I am of people getting annoyed and unforgivingly critical with
me, and I certainly never expect to be cut even a modicum of slack. I come from an environment in which
overreaction is the order of the day. I
am very much a child of that. Looks like
drama. Stems from hypersensitivity and
lack of balanced response.
I have learned much from
people who weren’t raised like I was. I
used to have a friend named Bill, and one time he did me the favour of pointing out
that I didn’t know “how to take” criticism.
We played in bands together, and did a lot of recording and messing
about with musical instruments and song writing, so he mainly was noting how I
responded to various people criticizing my musical or songwriting choices. Bill
was no fool though, and he noticed it showing up in other parts of my life
too. He then told me what to do when
someone offers unsolicited criticism, or complains at you.
He said you say “Okay,” and then
you resolve to think about it later.
You give yourself time,
that great emotional buffer. It’s likely
going to be a criticism of something you care about, over which you probably
have the final say (in my case, something musical like what keys or tempos or
instruments I was choosing for my songs, or something not musical like how I
dressed, my hairstyle, things I said, or even how I took criticism.) According to Bill, this means that
ultimately, it really is your decision, and someone else’s opinion isn’t terribly
pressing. You can ignore it, or take it as seriously as you like, and you can always
think about it later.
You really can do any of this, rather than doing what I always did,
which was start hotly arguing my side of things, just as if, like with my
father, I had to change that person’s mind in order to do what I thought was
best, with my stuff. Right then.
In particular, Bill talked
about a human faculty that sounded mythic to me. It was an ability I’d never before seriously
considered as a human necessity.
Bill was fond of profanity as a way to make points in a brief,
concise, colourful, memorable and quotable way.
He was very good at it. Because
of the delicate eyeballs of some my audience, I will spare you the vowel in the
most colourful word in his quotable quote. Bill said:
“Mike, you don’t have a working f*ck it. You need one of
those. Sometimes, you really just
have to say f*ck it.”
Obviously, he was right in
his criticism. So I said, “Okay” and
resolved to think about it later.
My emotional growth and spiritual growth as well were tied up, hung
up, wholly arrested every time I was judged.
Didn’t matter how unfair the judgment or how unqualified or even
irrelevant the person judging me.
This meant that if anyone or any Thing (and I was raised to feel
that chaos, corruption, destruction and oppression walk around our world
enspirited, if not always embodied) wanted to neutralize me and the role I was
playing, wanted to kind of take me off the chessboard entirely, all that was
required was to put me into the “I’m being judged!” mode that would keep me
fully occupied, stuck in an agony of self-doubt and furious logic loops, without
that f*ck it “escape” key, without Control Alt Delete or reset.
This is what happens when you don’t have a f*ck it key. Everything
matters. And we live lives in which
positively everything positively cannot
matter to us.
There were other
things. Things I have been taking an
awful long time figuring out and am still working away at. I believe in God, I believe He demands growth
of us (builds it into us, as surely as He builds it into dandelions which burst
through concrete). I think that some of the main reasons I have been able somewhat
to figure out my lacks have comes down to
·
a life filled with endless
thinking time,
·
a mind that is quick to draw
connections some people miss,
·
an obsessive mind which doesn’t
let go of things,
·
a lack of distractions or
escapes from myself. Escapes such as
marriages, children and other costly, time-consuming addictions.
Whenever there’s been something to think about, I haven’t been able
to stop obsessively going over it, and I have had endless, uninterrupted time
to think about it. There is something to
be said for results gained from a great deal of time spent on something. Many people don’t really start “work” on
themselves and their beliefs and finding meaning in life until their kids are
mostly grown up.
I’ve been spending decades on this stuff. Frustrating, of course, to meet people who
naturally talent at things, and Mozart you when you’re toiling away,
though. Some people can connect to
others so naturally, and some people are undented by criticism to a degree that
is almost delightfully sociopathic.
When I approached my teen
years, as one does, I started to take control of my life and my growth. I made choices. I opted out of some things, for my own
reasons. I refused to play sports
because there was never any joy in them for me, but I started taking long walks
at night because there always was. I
refused to eat what my mother cooked and started cooking for myself. This way I could eat what I felt was good for
me, and I didn’t have to eat at specific times.
If I was up all night practicing my insomnia, I might need lunch at
3am. If I slept through breakfast, I
might need it at 3pm. Throughout my
twenties I did nothing but shift work, with a lot of evening and night and
weekend shifts, all spinning around the clock without any real pattern. And I did the same thing at church. I started refusing the “one size fits all”
ways to view God and life and everything else, along with those “vintage 1923”
ideas and lifestyle structure, and I started actually going to actual God for
that stuff, to see if I could get something that was more real and more
workable.
There was a price to be paid
for each of these decisions. Refusing to
play sports meant I was unable to connect to almost any male people my age, and
likewise unable to show off and display my dating worth to female people my
age. Make no mistake; just as in “the
world” outside my church, being a good dancer led women to believe one would be
an equally skilled lover, this being denied to us church folk meant that that
other great advertisement of bedroom prowess was all that was left:
sports. Other guys got sweaty and wowed
everyone with their relentless, unceasing feats of agility and endurance and
strength. I faded away into the
background and was unnoticed and generally forgotten by everyone. And I never learned what it’s like to work as
a group or team, striving for the same goal.
I have always been on my own, looking after myself, with random people
asking why I’m not the same as they are, and why I’m doing other stuff; things
they’d never considered.
Refusing to eat what my
mother cooked meant I had taken from her her only real way of showing me she
loved me. A bit later in life, I started
getting my own cars fixed at garages, and finally could afford cars that didn’t
need to be fixed very often, and this abruptly removed at that time what had
been my father’s only real way of showing me he loved me. We do not, generally, hug or say nice things
in my family. (To each other, anyway. We
may brag behind each other’s backs.) So
these choices cut me off from what was an already dry well of familial displays
of affection. We were all like uneasy
room-mates up until my sister and I moved out. Now it’s more of an Odd Couple situation with my parents.
But refusing the “one size
fits all” belief packages on offer at the church, and moving past 1923 in terms
of lifestyle (old was as holy to them as modern was sinful) had a different
kind of cost. It meant that I could read
the bible, I could pursue a relationship with God, but I’d be doing it
alone. I would not be allowed to teach
or help out or even socialize at the church, and eventually I would be
excommunicated and shunned for life.
Boo hoo, one might say. Snivel, snivel. Sad stuff.
But what next?
Good question. For me, anyway, first I had to gain the
courage to reject the sports, the family and church stuff without doubting that
I was headed somewhere good. Without
faltering in the belief that there was something else available, other than all
that stuff that clearly didn’t work for me.
This has taken most of my life.
Because for most of my life, I have been desperately trying to convince
uncaring legions that what they’re offering doesn’t work for me, it really,
really doesn’t. And is it okay with them
if I do something different? (It isn’t) I’ve always hammered away at them, telling
them things they don’t want to hear. Telling
them that I’ve tried it all, and am starting to become convinced that they themselves
don’t take their stuff as seriously as I have done, nor have they really put it
to the test. That they’re just cheering
for their stuff, and saying it’s keen, without giving it much of a road
test. Popular, friend-making stuff like
that.
This hasn’t been getting me anywhere. I’ve been told that all my various exercises
in 90s style post-modern Christian deconstruction, the flash cartoons, comedy
songs, funny videos, scathing blogs, serious essays, tell-all books, Internet
forum marauding and all the rest? May have been amusing and thought-provoking
for some portion of the population, but aren’t anything good most people
respect as “moving on” or “positive.”
And they haven’t quite cut it for me, entirely. They are not the end of a story. So what next, indeed?
If step one was “Seriously,
this really, really doesn’t work for me” and step two was not needing
permission and support from others to go on a quest for something else, and developing
a working f*ck it for use when people harangue and attack and vilify, shun, excommunicate
and question my commitment to God/sanity, then what would step three look
like? What next?
When a child is raised
Christian and chooses not to pursue an atheist, or Muslim or Orthodox Jewish path,
people have no trouble understanding that.
Makes sense. They were raised
that way. Even if a child is raised
Christian and then chooses not to pursue Christianity at all, people understand
that too. Happens every day.
In my case there was a
problem; I was raised to follow a Christian lifestyle and I clearly felt I was
choosing to pursue Christ instead of it.
To me the two were not the same thing.
The church felt like an impediment rather than a road to God. So I wasn’t serving it anymore, really. This was upsetting to people. I felt like God needed me to choose between
the two. God or our church? Who to serve?
Because I felt like there was something inauthentic, unworkable and
shallow in what I was supposed to be serving, and for which I was sacrificing
my Sundays, and my Tuesday and Thursday evenings, in the name of which I was
forced to sacrifice what would otherwise have been joyful parts of my
childhood. Stuff like Star Wars and Star
Trek, movies, television, pop music, cards and dancing. A million little things which all add up,
after the first hundred or so.
To me church Christianity
was an advertisement for itself, selling itself to itself. Jesus Christ was, at most, on the team flag,
or was the mascot on the field, or the cartoon clown on the sign. Something else entirely unrelated to pursing
a relationship with him was clearly going on.
The church seemed to be about selling itself to itself. Most of the time was being spent in
explaining how important it was that we remember how important it was to
remember the importance of all the church stuff. We were taught that the church we were part
of, with its unofficial (unwritten, but strictly in place) power structure and
membership list, was the only right one.
We were taught how important it was to come out to it and not lust after
the leeks and garlicks of the other churches, which no doubt had juggling,
fire-eaters and dancing girls as part of their much more interesting Sunday
morning festivities. We were taught that
there was a reward for sticking with the boring church, for sacrificing
spectacle and appeal to the senses each Sunday morning, forswearing what was
going on up the block. The reward was
being “right” in a way they weren’t. We
were taught about how important our church was, but we were also told, in
addition to church attendance, to read our bibles and pray. And I did these latter two things, even if I
slacked off on doing the first one, once I got a driver’s license.
So what happened? Did this grand
experiment, this individual journey get anywhere? Was it just folly after all? I have told the story in any number of ways,
and I have always left out a whole aspect of it. Perhaps the most important
aspect. I have burdened myself with
trying to convince various unnamed people that something was rotten in Denmark,
that we weren’t being allowed to be all we’d been created to be, that our
collective, approved attitude wasn’t as spiritual as it might have been, and
stuff like that. I have always been a
bit scared to move on and really do what I think I should, in order to make
growth possible. I was raised that a
lone sheep was straying from the flock (not the Shepherd) and would fall into
ruin.
Every time someone has challenged me (and f*ck does that happen a
lot lately!) about what God means to me, practically, I am kind of scared to
tell them. “What is your walk with the
Lord like?” people demand, when I refuse to go their church.
Then I point out that, given the fact that I refuse to go to
people’s churches, apart from immediate family and about two friends, the
result has been that I have been invited inside two perhaps three Christian
homes in the last ten or fifteen years.
They decide that something is very wrong and that I need to change
whatever it is. Either I need to go back
to my church and work out “whatever your problem is” (the problem is that I am
not allowed to think and feel and grow and be, in there) or I absolutely need
to find a new church and show that I’ve “moved on” by really enjoying myself
there. In a group. Part of a flock.
Because what does “moving
on” look like? I feel like I’ve “moved
on” from all of our myriad
dead-on-its-feet conventional Sunday Morning Church systems. I don’t think the answer to my conscience
qualms about “church” is more, or another church. But I’m being told that until I pledge
allegiance to some church or other, I’m still “stuck in the past.”
And many mistakenly believe that if I were offered
membership/fellowship back in my own church again (like that ever happens there)
that I would leap at that chance, and am deluding myself and wasting my time
waiting around hoping fruitlessly for that to happen and complaining when it
doesn’t. (see the contradiction
there?)
An honest mistake though, given my failure to answer what is, after
all, a good question. What does “moving on” look like? What is my walk with the Lord? I have gone after Christ, feeling God has
demanded I kick over the altars of church Christianity and ghettoized Christian
lifestyle to do it. And have I found
him? Can I talk about it? Can I “be positive?” Can I tell it outright without needing to
change people’s names, nor “tell it in Gath” nor “be negative?” Can I do that at all?
I think the writing, the
satire, the thrashing it out and arguing about it has been part of growing,
part of moving on. Putting that thing to
bed once and for all. Working out what
didn’t work. But clearly there is
something missing, and there should be a next step. I have shared some of the bad stuff from my
past, and worse yet, the empty, grey lack of good stuff that was a much bigger
problem. I have identified what kinds of
stuff are problems for me. I have picked
apart the soil from which I sprang. But
what’s next? What has growth looked
like, in any way that anyone could recognize as a “positive” telling of it?
And why does talking about
that make me feel far more naked than
sharing any amount of horrible crap from my past? I guess because it’s next. And I’ve been doing
the other stuff for a very long time now.
I’ve shared the negative, pointing mostly at the system and what’s wrong
with it and what it did to me and others.
I’ve not talked about what I did instead, and what worked. I have not talked about where that has got
me. I have over-stated my
dysfunction. I have worked in satire and
parody and fiction. I have allowed the
course of my life to provide a framework or structure so that even telling the
true events has meant already having an order in which to say things. I think I need to let go some of that. I have no idea how. But I think I should, so here goes nothing.
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