Thursday 2 May 2013

"What's Next?"

I think I will have to write another book.  I think the introduction should read like this:



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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