Lost

Lost.  Perdition.  That's the name for where we are when we're lost.  Where we are when we may perish.  It's a state more than a place, but it's both.  The French word for "lost" is "perdue." 

   I grew up hearing the word "perish" in John 3:16.  God didn't want us to perish, didn't want us to be lost.  Old people in movies and books would curse folks by saying "Go to perdition!" or similar.  People perished when ships went down.  And people feared perishing when they feared ships going down which were safe the whole time: "Master, we perish!  Master, save!"

  But we Christians were told we are totally okay.  We would never be lost.  Would never perish. Not like a file in a computer can be lost.  We were, like this blog entry, saved.  Preserved.  That's what 'safe' can mean.  That you won't be lost.

    But that was only about heaven and hell.  We had lives to get through.  What about this week?  What about today?  Many of us felt lost all the time, and felt like we were perishing too.  Many of us didn't think we'd ever go to Hell, but felt like the life we were living was an eternal torture in purifying fires, lost in outer darkness.

   You know that feeling when you have lost your wallet, your bag, your phone or your keys (or all of the above?)  That feeling like, if it's lost, you yourself are lost without it?  I think there are also things in this life which if we've never had them, can make us feel utterly lost.

    Because feeling lost can mean you don't know quite where you are or how to get where you need to be, or if it is even possible to get anywhere good or safe at all.  This makes you feel like you don't know who you are or who to be, also.  Certainly not what to do, given you don't even know who you are or where you are, really.  So feeling lost can also mean feeling like there is no hope for you, like you are doomed.   And this is, obviously, the antithesis of what Christ came to achieve.  When we feel doomed, lost and on the brink of perdition, it's like he never came at all.  Like he doesn't care and perhaps isn't even real.  We aren't feeling him.

Growing Up Lost

Growing up, I often felt both kinds of lost.  Our culture is kind of dumb.  Both cultures of mine, actually.  My twentieth century Canadian consumer culture, and also my unnamed twentieth century, Canadian, exclusive Tunbridge Wells Plymouth Brethren one.  (we didn't have a name, but we were certainly expected to know exactly who we were, alright. Every hour of every day we were never to forget who we were(n't), and we were expected to always look like it.) 

   In Western culture, we have some very plastic and commercial and arbitrary ways to 'do our year,' while keeping rooted and grounded in an established structure.  Of course we don't have an ancient and rich assortment of the usual cultural myths that we would otherwise tell ourselves so we would feel like we know how hope works, where things come from, what everything means and who we are; and that there is hope, identity and meaning to begin with.  But we have movies and television, and to a lesser degree, books.  Stories help us know where we are and what's real and what isn't, and help us find how we feel about all of that.

    We modern Canadians don't have quite the same experience of the year that our ancestors did, with spring being the first time we're truly warm after a genuinely life-threatening winter, then moving through the hard, hot work of summer, with the chill of fall paying off in terms of a harvest of the fruits of our work finally coming to us, like autumn was the Friday night of the year.  

   It's not like that for us.  We don't have to preserve the berries we pick in August, or risk not having strawberry jam in December.  We can have bananas in January, raspberries in November, lemonade in February and pumpkin pie in July.  And we can shiver with cold in August if we turn the A.C. up high enough, or sweat ourselves greasy in February.  So the harvest isn't really a thing for us so much, anymore, and the seasons aren't what they once were to us either.  That rhythm is gone and no longer does what it used to in terms of adding structure to our year.  We've been unmoored from it and are adrift in however we set the dials.

Adding Structure

So we do holidays.  Look at what "art" is being done in elementary classrooms if you want to see.  Eggs and chocolate for Easter in the Spring.  Picnics in the summer with things like watermelon and lemonade which we perhaps "save" for summer, though we can have them anytime we like.  Perhaps we only swim in the summer, though we have year-round indoor community pools.  We have Thanksgiving in the fall, with pumpkin pie and turkey, which we perhaps don't enjoy at any other time of the year.  And we have Christmas, which we do in gaudy, plastic, jingly splendour.  Maybe we save eggnog for December, so it's special.  And Christmas has songs.  Lots and lots of songs.  The other holidays just don't have songs like that.

   We even have things like Valentine's Day and Halloween to go with Thanksgiving and Easter and Christmas.  Of course, we should feel totally natural buying someone flowers, or asking a beautiful stranger to leave her desk and go out for coffee, or giving compliments, or flirting or being romantic and buying (mostly pink) things for someone who makes us positively melt inside.  We should do this absolutely any time we like, any time of the year.  We should have those feelings inside, be aware of them, and let them out so they're felt by others.
    But we are Westerners and seem to need to schedule that kind of thing into our year, or we'll never get to it, what with tax season being upon us and all.  So we have Valentine's Day.  In February, of all times, anyone with a smidge of romantic anything always knows "It's Go Time.  I have an excuse. It's what's done. I don't only get to, I have to!"  We can rail against the commercialization and against Hallmark cards, but apparently we really need them to be ourselves a bit, when it's time.

   And of course we should feel free to buy people things that we know will make them happy, whenever we like.  But we're westerners. We're dumb, and have to fear someone asking "Why did you get me that?  I didn't know to get you anything..."  So we have Christmas and birthdays.  Suddenly we have permission.  An excuse.  Which gives us an opportunity.

   Every day (even if it's not Sunday) we should know it's good to recognize that Jesus came, was born and lived a life, taught us things, died and resurrected and has gone to heaven and intercedes with God for us so we don't have to walk around every day feeling and being lost.  We should know he's still at this right now.  Working to ensure that, as people, we will be preserved, and will be given the upgrades we need to even function on higher and deeper levels.  We know that he pointed out and took a costly, difficult, ever-changing, unpredictable path, but one ultimately meaningful, and love and light-focused.  

   But we seem to need Sunday to remind us to do this, and some of our Sundays are only about what scum we Christians all are, so we have Christmas.  To be sure we know, like in Narnia when Aslan was on the move, and Christmas and Spring had come at one and the same time because of him, that though the world is full of evil, cruelty, waste, emptiness and horror, we know God's not sitting back.  There is a plan.  There are things in motion. There are people in position and things we can do.  We're at the dark part of the story, but the ending is looking bright. Honest, it is.  So Merry Christmas. Whether you want it or not.

    And we have Halloween, too.  As G.K. Chesterton said, children don't need to hear scary stories to tell them there are dragons.  They know there are dragons.  What they need are stories to tell them that dragons can be beaten.  They need stories they can believe in, in their heart, without the dark bits removed to "protect" them from developing backbones and courage and hope.
   Halloween isn't about making children believe in, or want to be, evil creatures.  It's about those stories which admit the truth: there are scary people and things out there and everyone gets scared by them.  But we can survive it, and sometimes, it really is just our imaginations running away with us, and we should learn about controlling that. Through practice.  So let's explore all of that.  Let's explore feeling like evil people and things can be figured out, can be fought, and that they do not always, inevitably win.  Let's learn that fear is a normal part of daily life, but not a fatal part.  Let's work until we learn that getting a fright isn't the end of the world.  Let us learn to roll with it.  Dressing up like your fear is a way of becoming less scared of it, of trying to master it.  Not by becoming it for life, but by wearing a mask of its face for a few hours and ultimately feeling less afraid.  Hoping in being able to master and maybe even mock your fear.

A Formula For Feeling Lost   

Want to hear a recipe for making Western kids feel lost?  Raise them like all the other Western kids, without the seasons and harvest, and with the work and hardship not meaning what they once did.  But give them slave's hours to work in order to live like kings who have no down time.  Endless self-improving lessons and being driven here and there and elsewhere, perpetually having forgotten something, always trailing the odour of late-shame.  This uproots them from those old natural, community rhythms that tended to bind humans together in a universal struggle, and lent shared security.
   Take away the stories (television, movies, many of the books), particularly the ones that help them learn to deal with evil and terror and danger.  Take away the holidays too.  Make them live a year where it's always church, but never Christmas.  Expect them to get married, but not really "do" Valentines Day, or Hallmark romance.  Expect them to figure out fear without horror movies and Halloween.  Expect them to learn about hope and the coming of new things without Easter.

   That's how I grew up.  No Halloween.  No dressing up as a scary monster.  No scary stories.  Certainly not on television or in movies.  Not even in the books I could read.  (still, I voraciously read adventures and mysteries.  The virtues of finding one's way home, of exploring new places, people and things, of solving problems, of surviving danger, of learning who can't be trusted, of facing up to villainy, and figuring out what is really going on. And all that story stuff became part of who I am now.  It started in stories and now it's me.  That's what stories are for.  That's why the bible is built of them.)  But fear's a thing we need to learn to deal with, it turns out.  Scary things in the night.  Empty despair and aching dread.  One has to learn to believe the sun will rise, birds will sing, and that spring will come, after night and Winter are done.

   We also had no Valentines Day (and I didn't see any romance in my parents' marriage.  And all of my uncles got divorced and didn't really find anyone else afterward, and this was the same with my grandparents.)  

   We also had no Christmas (in a family with no hugs or compliments, buying people something was really the only way, apart from helping them lift something, or giving them food, in which you could show you kinda liked them at all.)  So we didn't learn how to graciously, open-heartedly accept generosity and kindness.  We didn't learn about grace, either in giving and even less in receiving.  We learned about giving up good things, but not about receiving good things.  We didn't learn that when you receive something, it's not about deserving it.  It's not even about you at all, much as you may need it to be.  It's about the giver's giving and you feeling their love and generosity instead of your own awkwardness and shame.
   And our Sundays at church were pretty much always and only a huge distraction from the Giver's giving.  From the hope and the triumph, from the receiving of grace, because we preferred to feel shame and guilt and blame.  We worshipped shame rather than grace.  We preferred to focus on us not being worthy.  It is more blessed to give than receive, we knew.  So we were determined not to really let anyone who cared for us give us anything, and in the giving experience that blessing.  Only we got to give.  But it is how we receive that shows where our lacks really are.

Stopping

In Jewish culture, the idea is you start work on Sunday, and you work hard, and you have to quit Friday evening.  The stress stops.  Once the sun is setting, you're done.  Even if the work isn't finished, you are finished.  If you continue working, this is sinful.  And no matter how hard the week is, you always know when it's going to end.  Because Saturday you can't work.  It's the end of the week, starting Friday evening, and you simply don't work on Saturday.  You have to wait until the next week. So every week had a rhythm of building to a climax, then releasing, providing a much-earned catharsis at the end.

   My week wasn't like that, growing up.  I'd "do school" Monday through Friday, and I knew that most Saturdays, my father, having taught school all week, would have saved up a Sisyphean regimen of tree hewing, wood piling, hay cutting, chicken slaying, stone piling, lawn mowing, hole digging, tree planting and any number of apparently pointless, tedious and arduous tasks.  It wasn't like any of that needed to be done.  Not really.  He was trying to teach me to do physical work, because he himself didn't know how to stop and rest.  So, once the school week was over, the physical work was waiting on Saturday, which was a day that was not created for fun, and certainly not for resting from the week's labours, like God had done.  It was for hard physical work.  You'd work at school and more indoor chores all week long, positively dreading what work would be coming on the Saturday, and often happened on nonChurch evenings as well.  Not working on Saturday was for lazy people who didn't know how to work.  And you did homework on Friday night and Saturday, because you'd not be allowed to do it Sunday night for Monday.

   The next day was Sunday.  On Sunday we were positively forbidden fun.  No books, no music, no running or games or sports or socializing.  No work, either.  But in its way, Sunday was more busy than any other day of the week.  I didn't, for example, actually have to wear a suit and tie to go to school.  But Sundays I did.  Right from when I was little.  And Sunday wasn't the start of a week, nor the end of a week, really.  It was all part of the year's weeks never really ending at all.
   Monday through Friday mornings, I got up and dressed like me, grabbed my lunch and was driven in and sat down in front of teachers for the school day, and was then driven home again.  Tuesday and Thursday evenings I was dressed up unlike myself, and driven in to church after supper to sit and listen to far more boring stuff than the driest of algebra classes, lectured by people far less qualified to be addressing a room.  But on Sunday this pilgrimage into the church happened three times.  These trips took up the whole day.
   We made sure that nothing else whatsoever happened on our Sundays than our work for God.  The dressiest clothes.  No fun.  no homework.  No work for anyone else but Him.  No recreation of any kind.  And yet, I never felt the Christmas in any of it.  Nor the Easter. Not in December, and not in April.  There were no Christmas carols or decorations in our church.   There weren't Spring and chocolate. There weren't "Angels We Have Heard On High."  There was only "a wretch like me" and "for such a worm as I."

   And my summer holidays were interesting, too.  There was no school, and as my father was a teacher, he had no daily work to do either.  Other teachers went to cottages or read things.  But starting in June, through until September, my dad was always there pushing the physical work six days a week, with never-ending, always outdoor, always adult, arduous tasks.  I did my very best to be useless and helpless and I got very good at that.  Allergies to hay, grass, wood, mould and mildew helped.  So I slaved away, ineffectually trailing snot and wheezing. Then when Sunday came each week, any fun there'd been was outlawed for those twenty four hours.

    For us, the work never stopped, though it was all shot through with the awareness that this chosen, empty work was what we were doing instead of hobbies.  It grew and grew, culminating in Sundays that were more stiff and formal and "on duty" than the rest of the week had been, with summer and Christmas "holidays" in which we worked more than any other time of the year, because Dad had been saving up stuff to do when he'd be off work.
   And when we grew up and became adults, we made ourselves schedules at least as arduous as any our parents set us.  And we feel guilty whenever we're not toiling away at something.

Finding Our Lost Selves

I think it's really no wonder we have so much trouble, some of us, finding ourselves.  Not feeling lost.  Knowing who and where we are, and where we're headed, moving into full, deep, multifaceted lives.  Bereft of our stories, the rhythms of our years, our seasons, our holidays (holy days) and denied the elements of our Western schedule which help us to deal with various feelings, nice and less so.  We can be like unmoored, rudderless ships forever adrift.  And being unmoored feels empty, pointless and lost. So we try to find safe, roomy habours we can moor ourselves in. Hope is symbolized by an anchor, isn't it?

   I think all of this is why we feel so lost sometimes.  So I am going to try to remember to focus on some things I think are important: I am going to look for every possible chance to be able to feel home, feel light, feel direction, feel meaning, feel hope, feel love, feel grounded and feel connection.  To let it happen around me and let it in to me. My weeks will end Friday nights, with the stress and deadlines and obligations and appointments cutting sharply off once that sun sets on Friday.  

   Things can start up again the next week, but I'm going to start my weeks gently, with time for reflection.  Getting my bearings.  Not forgetting Christ's role in Christianity, not losing him in a self-indulgent slimebath I dutifully take in my own problems, folly, fruitlessness and unworthiness.  

   Because increasingly in our weeks, in our holidays (whether we give them to ourselves and our kids or not) in our years and lives, Christ is getting lost to us. It is really no wonder we feel this way.  It is no wonder we live in fake stone, fake wood, brightly decorated castles, surrounded by time-saving, labour-saving, climate-controlling, food preserving devices, with the latest in machines to save our every thought and conversation forever and ever, yet we unthinkingly, slavishly commit ourselves to schedules impossible to do or afford.  It is no wonder we ensure that we seldom have a single moment to reflect.  It doesn't matter if we're moving in random circles, so long as we're spinning our wheels.  And we insist upon spinning our wheels without the threat of possibly being interrupted while we do it.  Because we don't want to stop.  And we measure our worth in terms of how hard we expend our time and energy. 

Stop

I say we need to regularly go outside sometimes and do nothing.  We need to know that's coming, and look ahead to it from the middle of our muddle.  We need to stop hard, and know nothing's going to interrupt our stopping.  We need to go look at the stars, the trees, the water, knowing that if someone texts us, or our phone rings, or someone messages us on Facebook, tweets or snapchats us, or asks for help with Farmville, that we won't even know about this until we return, whenever that happens.  From the field, from the side road, from the park, from the dock, from the beach, from the cliff, from the woods, from the valley.  From where we've gone to stop.

   I don't think we need to leave our schedules and our bleeping distractions behind us primarily so we can go find answers, and figure everything out and have done some sound metawork, making lists, planning plans and resolving resolutions to spin even more wildly.  I think we need to leave them behind so we can go stop, let life unfold a bit, and let it touch us, without even putting the rubber gloves on.  Let it in on its own terms, without scheduling or disinfecting or castrating it.  We need to invite it, especially if it's been knocking.  We need to let a bit of reality get on our bare hands and learn not to wash it off quite so quickly.  

   We need to exert our will over our weekly schedule so we know who it serves.  We need to feel like we aren't working like slaves in order to seem as if we are living like plastic sultans.  We need to stop pretending to be productive, just so we can accept our right to live and breathe office air.  We need to stop tidying life to desperately dispel the horror of one thing that's not away where it goes.  

   We need to prove to ourselves that we can seize an hour, if not the day, and stop.  An hour to be neither afraid, nor proud.  An hour to be, and see who we are.  And hour to let life happen and get it on us, to let it get in.  We don't need this much control, all resulting in our feeling helpless and insufficient anyway.  We need to stop.  We need to know how soon we are going to stop, and work until that time has arrived each day, and every week and year.  So we can breathe.  We need to breathe.

   God took a whole Saturday.  And He wasn't even tired.