Rites of Passage

I've been watching a series of lectures by University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson again.  Peterson is very unusual, because his thinking seems to be a mishmash of a large number of different academic disciplines.  which don't normally work terribly closely together. (Developmental theory, behaviourism, anthropology and mythological symbology, psychoanalytic theory, evolutionary theories, neuroscience and other stuff.)  Most "experts" want to follow just one or two of those, as a discipline, and see what it talks about, and ignore what it doesn't hit upon.
  Peterson is making strange stuff out of bits and pieces cobbled together from all of it.  He draws apparently abritrary, but research-supported conclusions, like the idea that right-wing thinking increases proportionately with one's inability to deal with clutter.  He thinks the ancients were pursuing vital, real, human experiences, concerns and challenges that we have lost sight of.  Problems we have stopped wrestling with, though they are deeply important and utterly unsolved.  He thinks the world is about meaning, not matter.  Objectives, not objects.  And that the idea that the latter things are "real" and the former ones are just subjective made up stuff?  The idea that the former stuff will somehow become handleable and understood eventually, through extensive cataloguing of the latter?  Ridiculous. (Irresponsible, even.)

   He looks a lot at commonality.  Stuff that's the same over centuries and across cultural divides.  Things that all animals and human beings have in common, in terms of stages of development, instinctual responses to millennia of danger situations, and so on.  So, he points to the fact that dominance hierarchies (pecking orders) are deeply ingrained in not only human brain development in "patriarchal, western socieity," but in all animals, pretty much forever.  We can't, he doesn't feel, simply decide to be less focused on status.  He thinks our brain is literally wired to navigate those concerns.  Has built in "response circuits" which read the situation in those terms.
   Bad news for people complaining about our patriarchal status-based society, he says.  You can't make it less status-focused, because it's been like that for millennia, and it's because of the physical construction of our brains.  That's too ancient and deep to fix with a campaign.   You can change how you engage in status seeking, though.  You can broaden who can contend for it, and how it is measured and acquired.   The game stays.  But maybe more people can play, and there are a few new rules or pieces of equipment.

Fighting Lobsters

Peterson points to the fact that male lobsters (with such simple brains that crustaceans are, compared to humans, barely sentient) continually fight each other to occupy the top of the status pyramid.  He says that all creatures, including humans, predictably, statistically tend to die "from the bottom" of such status pyramids, upward.  The lobster or CFO or 5 star General at the top generally is least likely to die on any given day, even though everyone's fighting for his position.  Good reason to want that position.
   Peterson cites research relating to how, when a male lobster loses a status fight, he crawls into a hole and "sulks" until he once again is ready to fight.  He won't budge until he once again believes or feels he is ready to win.  Peterson said that while a male lobster is sulking, he will withdraw from any fights he is challenged to, and won't even respond if poked with a stick, except to hide deeper in his hole.
  BUT: if a male lobster who has lost a fight is given anti-depressants (serotonin uptake disrupters, primarily) he will instantly fight and pick fights, without needing to sulk at all.  It's like you can disrupt his brain's need to deal with failure altogether.  The brain can no longer even interpret failure as failure, nor deal with the experience of failure as evidence that failure is likely in future, without some kind of new tactic.  The lobster fights on and continues to lose.

   Peterson uses this research to indicate the universality of the human experience of handling (bouncing back from) setbacks that adversely affect one's status.  The attempt, the failure, the retreat and re-evaluation and possible future attempt.  Lobsters do it.  We do it.  We always have done it.  With something so universal and so ancient, he argues, we can't simply stop thinking that way, or stop letting it affect us, (without artificially altering how our brain works.)
   He points out that ancient people used drugs not to daily shut out the fear and chaos, but to give themselves artificially intense and accelerated (often one-time) experiences of just those very things.  There's a reason, he argues, why mushrooms in fairytale drawings so frequently have exactly the same red colour (with white dots) as the very strain of hallucinogenic mushrooms commonly used by the ancient to bring on visions in order to confront the stuff they felt sane people were hiding from and unable to gaze upon.
   And I can't help but notice that God speaks in the bible, not of stopping the Status Game, but of making the first, last and the last, first.  Changing how status is gained, but maintaining the status hierarchy.  Just as if the game, as it is played on earth, rewards the wrong characteristics and results in the wrong people ending up holding power. The ones who can be least trusted.

People Who Fail To Be Normal/Fail To Ignore The Unusual

Peterson thinks that ancient alchemists, artists, shamans, scientists and religious theologians were all trying to discover important things about the world, and that the relatively recent decision to view the whole world in terms of matter and energy only, and to dismiss all other considerations, no matter how vital our need to understand them may be, is dangerous and irresponsible.
   So, Peterson thinks that when people get into a real struggle, as to their mental health, as to their psychological and spiritual development, that there are things going on that we just really don't know anything about, really.  Things that ancient drawings and stories and rituals (and mushrooms) were attempts to engage with, explore and help.  Things that are not really permanently helped by trying to drug the person so you could make their ability to try to deal with it stop.  Things that were no doubt made instantly hellish by giving the person hallucinogens to allow that chaos to flood in uncontrollably, in an attempt to deal with it all, once and for all.

   I was watching Peterson describe various cultures' shared observations about wise men, prophets or shamans.  Now, the descriptions of what they went through (wandering off into the forest a lot, not eating, hearing voices, seeing things, engaging in self-harm, oddities in sleeping habits, odd connections to geography and nature, and eventually coming back into society hugely changed, as if they'd become a whole different person) sounded like:

a) biblical stories of demon possession

b) modern stories of schizophrenia/psychotic breaks

c) biblical stories of people who interacted with God in really any direct way.

The view seems to be, fairly universally, that human communities are predominately made up of people who are able to accept what their society deals with and not worry about much else.  Most people can successfully avoid thinking about the mysterious, the unsolvable, the stuff that the society itself really doesn't seem to have sorted out.
   Societies are not perfect, and they focus upon a few things and recommend people not engage with all the other things.  Cultures decide what is known and under control, and they focus upon that, and carefully avoid looking at what they decide isn't known and isn't even predictable. To focus upon what can be explained and planned for.  Handled.  Orderly.  What isn't known is chaos.  Unpredictable.  You can't plan for it.    Stay out of the woods.  Don't go outside at night.
   Peterson mentions Sleeping Beauty, and how, because the witch wasn't included in the infant's preparation for life, her revenge is that she will be part of the young princess' life in a very big way. By the end, she's a dragon.   And the princess will be asleep.  Some people, Peterson explains, cannot be, or a purposely not shielded from the choas that can happen.  And they can't stay asleep, or ignore it.  They find they have to deal with it instead.

   Because there always seem to be people who can't escape dealing with Everything Else.  With the stuff that the society can't quite explain.  They can't look away.  They see things others want to deny the existence of, or forbid discussion about.  These are people who have urges and thoughts that aren't what everyone's expecting, and which their community can't deal with.  People who seem destined to become lunatics or wise men and women.  Experts.  Artists.
   Of course, some people just have stuff wrong with their brains and the chemicals flowing in and out of them, and that's very sad.  But other people have brains that are more complicated, or differently constructed than the regular folk, and quickly demonstrate special needs, special interests, special weaknesses and special strengths.  And mostly, the latter group tends to get locked up and medicated with the former.

A Dark Journey of Rebirth

And for these kinds of people who fail to fit, there's obviously a "dealing" process they are inevitably going to have to try to go through.  A readjusting of their expectations and orientation to life.  Because society has not prepared normal people for this.  Now, their society might even have a special system in place to help people like them, a support group of others who have gone through the tough time that invariably arrives for people like that, when they're first trying to live as functioning adults. Or more often it may just cast such people out, burn them at the stake, mark them and warn against them, throw them off a mountain or chase them out of the region.  Or medicate them to make their brains stop wrestling with these matters.

   From Harry Potter through The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings and earlier, one can trace an unbroken lineage of stories back farther than we can measure.   Joseph Campbell called it "the hero cycle" but people in it don't feel like, and don't always end up acting like, heroes.  These are stories of someone who, like Jonah, has an insight, a message, a role he or she absolutely must fulfil.  There's no one else.  He or she is uniquely made for that one job.  But doing that job, playing that role, isn't something for normal people.  And he or she invariably tries to be normal, tries to fit in, tries to hide, tries to run away, tries to not use the Ring, not cause magic, not hear what the animals say, not hear the voice of the Lord outlining his dissatisfaction with Ninevah, not see the burning bush, or whatever.
  And he or she usually can't, and then starts really losing it.  And flees his or her destiny.  Flees who he or she is.  And ends up, like Jonah, in the belly of a monster/dragon/fish/cave.  In the eye of Chaos.  Alone.  A place where everything one has learned, everything one does out of habit, everything one was prepared for and expects, suddenly have completely random and chaotic, unpredictable effects instead of just working.

   If he or she can survive, can hold it together, he or she does it, ironically by symbolicly dying, in terms of ceasing to be merely that person who couldn't deal, and is born again. A new person.
   In shamanic tradition, the symbology was that you would die, having your flesh stripped down to the bone, and then "them dry bones" would be resurrected.  Would generate a new body, and one more suited to dealing with what had destroyed the previous one.
   Peterson thinks, in terms of evolution, of a species of animal, and how ones with traits that aren't working die off, and ones with special traits that help, continue.  And connects an animal species adapting, to an individual adapting.  Some ways to be dying off because they don't work, and some ways to be continuing on, or springing up as adaptations to external dangers and needs.
  In most ways, really, the "reborn"  person in the story has become someone who has somehow found a way to come to terms with the very real chaos.  With having a special role.  With not being able to "do normal" and having some idea about and intentions toward doing Something Else.  The person doesn't learn that the world isn't, after all, chaotic and scary. The person learns to become more than he or she was, and to deal with the world, as it really is.  And in the real world, there be dragons.  And they will eat your sanity.  Addictions will burn you and take your gold.  Stress kills.  Literally.

   These stories resonate strongly with people who become paraplegics, who kick addictions, who have some kind of emotional breakdown, who leave their birth culture and who remake themselves/are remade into people who can deal. Orthodox Jews who've moved to Ohio and "gone native."  Lesbian Sikhs.  Muslims who write books critical of Islam and survive fatwas.  Heroin addicts who open treatment centres.  Amputees who train for wheelchair basketball teams and become captain. War veterans who try to express the horrors of needless death in poetry or painting.

   The one thing all these stories have in common is that it's absolute chaotic, terrifying, unprecedented hell while in the belly of the monster.  You can't see in there.  Can't breathe.  Everything has changed.  Nothing works anymore.  So, it's chaos. While learning that one's life is going to be different now.  While contemplating that one is going to be born again and in many ways live a new life. And no one's going to understand.  What one might need is simply to talk to others who've been through the closest one can find to "pretty much sort of the same kind of thing."  To be less alone.  To be not the only one.
 

End Result?

And then, if one survives all of it?  A curious role.  People come to seek one out as to trouble that their society doesn't seem able to deal with.  But one is forever "outside" the village.  Maybe documenting it, looking in on it, celebrating and also seeing the flaws in it.  Trying to be a "catcher in the rye" for children who wander outside it and don't know what to do, who aren't ready for what dangers lie outside.
   A true prophet, shaman, wise woman, seer, journalist or scholar?  Is outside looking in.  Outside where one isn't supposed to go.  One foot in societal order and the other in the chaos.  Outside on the edge where visitors will only come out of desperation, because Society On Autopilot doesn't seem to be handling something Unknown that is starting to get downright chaotic sounding.  When the tides of chaos seem to be up past one's chest. When someone saw a sheep get burned and eaten by a dragon, and the King says there're no such things as dragons.
    But if you're been in the belly or the cave of the dragon, you know they exist.  Then people like you become uniquely important.

My Conscience

Two things happened which, in my head anyway, seem quite connected.  The first thing happened right after Robin Williams died.  I saw Christian Facebook statuses divided sharply down the traditional two lines, over something Matt Walsh, Christian blogger extraordinaire, blogged about the matter.  Matt Walsh was mad/concerned/troubled/offended/whatever, over this:

Robin Williams, who made so many of us so happy so many times in so many ways, was sad and he took his own life, and this made a whole lot of us more sad than we ever imagined it could.  It was like a support we didn't know we had, suddenly shifted without warning, and made us feel how uncertain things are.  Shook us.

   And in the wake of it, people did various things.  This image was, I think, one way of trying to mourn Robin Williams, with, however, a rather dubious bit of "genie trapped in a lamp" imagery, and an equating of death with "freedom."  The image itself reminded me of what they did way back when Walt Disney died:

And when Jim Henson died:

These images are, to me, pretty heartbreaking.  Now, I'd been repeatedly told by my culture that the entertainment achievements of these men weren't important. Were, in fact, an enticing trap.  That their art was something we should sacrifice for God, that it was "of this world" and that we'd do best to steer clear of it all.  Entertaining, sure, but not edifying.  Not fit for us to waste time on.  Not for people like us.  The important thing, they told us, was where these men were going to spend Eternity.  Had they made a profession of faith?  Had they made their choice for Christ?  How awesome would it have been if Jim Henson had converted to preachy Christianity and had "used his talents for Christ" and had made Kermit deliver a Clear Gospel Message right on TV?  Right?

   And that stuff made me a tiny bit disgusted.  When Wayne Gretzky broke some important hockey record back in the day, and when various celebrities died, the next Sunday evening when we trooped out to Gospel meeting, I would listen to see if they'd get a Gospel Namecheck.  Often they did.  

   "Thousands cheered when Wayne Gretzky made that shot.  We know this is true.  But there is joy in HEAVEN each time one sinner repenteth.  We know from scripture that this is true as well.  And how much better than the human, temporary, fleeting efforts of Wayne Gretzky. Rejoicing in Heaven! Could that be you, tonight?"  

   "Foolish people used to pay to laugh at this man's jokes about Hell.  Well, he's not laughing now.  If he didn't accept the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal saviour between making the jokes and dying in that crash, he's experiencing hell right now.  (What a solemn thought which isn't in any way filling me with giggling delight!)"  

   And I felt like it was a cheap form of pandering that both made them look bad, and also vaguely impugned the importance of the record broken, of the art and life of the human being who'd died.

   I didn't read Matt Walsh's whole blog.  I read a few out-of-context quotes from it and didn't want to.  I understood that, while we were kind of reeling with the shock of how much we suddenly cared that Robin Williams would no more be doing stuff to make us feel good, that Matt Walsh disapproved of the genie image.  Wanted to clarify that suicide was a choice (a wrong choice).  Didn't like pairing the word "free" with death.

    I understood his objections.  But I didn't like him blogging right then.  (When I read a followup young woman linked me to, and found out that he'd gotten death threats over the blog, I dialled back my dislike of his blogging significantly, and just felt sorry that this had happened to him.)  I felt like Christians "correct" or "one-up" everyone and everything too much.  It makes us look like assholes.  (Too good to say "assholes," but certainly not above acting in a way that can really only be adequately conveyed using that very word and that word only.)
  I felt like the scripture tells us to weep with them that weep, and rejoice with them that rejoice. This requires being able to be touched by the feelings of others.  And I think, just as the prodigal's elder brother in the Prodigal Son story is unable to rejoice with his family that his brother has returned, safe and sound, having been thought dead, but is being a jerk instead and trying to "correct" the rejoicing Father, we also sometimes suck at weeping with them that weep.  And in my own, far removed small way, Robin Williams taking his own life was quite upsetting to me.  And I didn't want to argue with anyone over how best to deal with it.  I just wanted people to deal with being sad however they needed to.

   I said this on Facebook.  That I didn't like Matt Walsh blogging this, though I agreed with his points.  Just shut up, I thought.  At least for now.  And then a bunch of twenty and thirty-somethings who don't normally take an interest in anything I do on Facebook all posted their support of the "Matt Walsh, please wait a week, and weep with them that weep before 'correcting' the merits of the language used while they wept" message in my Facebook status.  So I felt, as one does, supported and agreed with.  There was no arguing.

   Then one of the authors of the division that resulted in my parents having to leave/being kicked out of their church this spring posted on my Robin Williams status.  Trying to "correct" my "correcting" of Matt Walsh's "correcting" of the genie image above.  And I didn't want to talk about it.  Had to tell him that a few times. Thwarted in his mission to fight with me over it, he kinda left me then with the message "Have fun supporting unbelievers!" (which I couldn't help but picture him saying in a whiny, bitchy voice) and moved on with only a couple of additional loving comments tossed over his shoulder.  Seemed to be positively spoiling for a fight and I really didn't want to give him one.  He can go work on the next division and leave me and my parents alone.  Can see to kicking someone else out for pointing out things that aren't in the bible.

   I've often felt that of all the things we brethren people screw up, we actually do pretty well with death.  Funerals we do well at.  I have been to many funerals that were nothing less than the reason for thousands of formerly or differently Brethren people to get in the same room again and get along and care about each other.  I sometimes think that Brethren people never behave more like warm, nuanced, empathetic human beings than at a funeral.  We're actually better people.
  What on Earth could induce me, people who kicked me out of my church, my mother, my aunt and all kinds of various Brethren and ex-Brethren people to all gather in the same room to eat together, in the Missionary Alliance Church in Ottawa, (which isn't, I must point, a Brethren church)?  Someone we cared about, dying.  A funeral.

  So, we "do" funerals pretty well, I always thought.  We kind of enjoy them, I suspect.  They tend to validate our whole view of the pointlessness and brevity of human life on earth.  Provides a reason for a kind of low-key, food-centred celebration we can handle.  Or something. 

Ice, Ice, Baby

And happening at the same time Robin Williams' face was all over the Internet, something else was all over the Internet.  The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.  It was entertaining.  It was fun.  George W. Bush did it and challenged Bill Clinton to do it.

  It was clearly fun, but I think most who see the videos still don't really know what ALS does, or what needs to be done or can be done about it. Is much money being donated? (And yes, there's that whole white guy "throw money at everything" solution to everything bad  thing going on, here as usual.)

  But I didn't post a Facebook status saying anything about it.  I want it to continue.  But I have this thing, working in a high school as I do, about kids thinking there's nothing left to do once they've "raised awareness" by wearing a rubber wristband, or a t-shirt or something.  I tend to think it trivializes the issue and declares "the world is now a better place, thanks to all we've done" without us having really done much.  Much besides making ourselves feel like we did something when maybe, really, we didn't do much.
   But I didn't post anything on Facebook.  I've often said what I think of the wrist bands and so on.  When you give money to those less fortunate than you with your right hand, even your left hand shouldn't "be informed" as to your charity work, let alone all of your Facebook friends.  Pray in your closet.  And so on.  Stuff Jesus cared enough to say.  Stuff I've gone on about before. 

   But then a Facebook friend whose beloved grandma died of ALS did a status.  She didn't say she was against the Ice Bucket Challenge. She did ask, though, if people really were coming out of the Challenge knowing anything more about ALS, or if any money was really going anywhere good about it.  Like, they should do the Challenge, but do more.  With more information.  And I commented on her status in some more detail about this old topic of mine. The "raising awareness doesn't do much but raise people's awareness that we want to raise their awareness that we have done something totally insignificant in order to supposedly raise awareness" thing.

   And then my conscience tapped me on the shoulder.  Wanted a word.  Thought that I was missing something.  As usual, I was.   It came down to this:

   When there is something "negative" (unpleasant) like a death or a funeral, I am all over supporting that, and attending the funeral, and wanting people to shut up if they say stuff that isn't, to my mind, appropriate.  Stuff that is "correcting" expressions of grief rather than weeping with them that weep.  So I want people like Matt Walsh, "correcting" an expression of grief, to shut up.  At least for a week or so.

  So why, my conscience asked, when someone is doing something "positive" (pleasant) like a fun, viral video, Internet, awareness-raising fundraiser, do I feel free to "correct" that wonderful activity? Isn't that a double-standard?

   Yes. It is. Mea culpa.
   And then my conscience pointed out that really, all my blog does is raise awareness.  And that that's worthwhile.

Kinds of Families

I have often written about the things that were missing from my childhood due to us sacrificing them for God.  Joy-things like music and TV and movies and dancing and alcohol and so on.  Also Christmas, Halloween and Easter.  

   But there's a whole other angle on that that I haven't really written about before.  I'm having a look at it by identifying three kinds of Brethren families.

(Of course every family is utterly unique and doesn't appreciate being put into a category.  But how you going to learn about families in general without generalizing?  Huh?  How? And who knew there was more than one kind?)

Family Style #1: Ours

Sure, our family and the other Brethren families in our area were all editing out these joy-things together, to varying degrees.  But there were these other, special Brethren families of which mine was not one.  We lived on a hobby farm, and my Dad believed that all the free time we had, due to the no socializing, television-watching, sports and going to see live entertainment?  He felt, as did some other families (many with bigger, more actual farms) that free time should all be filled with "work." Because there was "work" to do, and what kind of person didn't do it? 

   My dad grew up on a farm and clearly thought, as did many of his relatives and neighbours, that a boy who was useless on a farm was a useless person who should shut up.  It's pretty rural around here.  My father had no respect for a man who didn't change his own oil and filters.  Or who couldn't toss firewood or haybales in the July heat for a day without complaint.  Or for a woman who didn't know how to make a loaf of bread, starting from flour.  Or for kids who didn't work about as hard as their parents.

   On a hobby farm, almost as much as on a real farm, there's always something one can be doing outside at all times. "Work." There's always heavy stuff to move from one place to another place. There is always animal feed and water, for instance, to attend to.  There is always hay.  Dealing with keeping the house stocked with firewood for the winter was a year-round, never-ending job, too.  (And I never got to use the chainsaw.  I did split my share of wood in my time, first with an axe when I was big enough, and then with a hydraulic thingie when we got one of those.)

  Most importantly, on a farm of any size, it goes without saying, there is crap.  Always lots and lots of crap.  It needs to be moved from one place to another.  And there is endless lawn to mow and hay to see to and a giant garden to pick weeds and rocks out of, to spray for bugs and water if it gets dry.  Work.  In all the decades I've known my parents, there has never not been more work than any five people could do, at which they're never making any headway, but at which they are reluctant to accept any help.  It's just there, calling to all good, useful people to step up and do their duty.  It can be very, very mindless.
    My parents followed our cultural leading and removed almost every bit of joy or fun from our lives, and they filled in the empty space with "work."  This does not appear to have been a recipe for happiness for any of us. 

Family Style #2: Active Families

But there were these other Brethren families.  I didn't really like them.  They had a bit of money, compared to us.  Dressed all preppy.  Had nice cars.  And they were active.  They were outside a whole lot, and they never worked, most of them.  Not that I saw, anyway.  Other people cut their lawns for them, often.  The neighbour kid got paid a few bucks to shovel their walks, too.   They didn't change their own oil or filters.  They had a cottage or something like that. Some of them had a pool table, air hockey, basketball courts, hockey rinks in the back yard, ski boats and waterskis, cross country or snow skis and all manner of that stuff.  It helped to have a bit of money.  It helped to have parents who didn't mind you playing with other kids, even if they didn't go to our church.  It helped if you had a whole lot of siblings to play with.

    Well, our family didn't really go in for all of that.  I don't really know why.  I had the one sister and we didn't play together.  Can't imagine being our own little kid's club with rec facilities.  Would have been quite different.  I surmise that, even if Mom won't let you watch TV, if she often takes you out cross-country skiing or hiking or swimming, or to hockey or basketball, then probably you don't sit around thinking too much, unenriched.  You probably thrive more.  You probably introspect less.  You probably don't mind the rules nearly as much, because there's other stuff you do instead.  

    But our family didn't do things, generally.  Each of us was alone, most of the time.  Mom puttered away, ostensibly cleaning and cooking, to no apparent effect, for no particular purpose or event.  And after twelve, I insisted on cooking my own food and doing my own laundry anyway.  Dad worked outside, getting dirty and sweaty and oftentimes bloody, serving purposes known only to himself.  Increasingly, the two of them conspired to avoid having any "company" whatsoever over to disrupt their careful routines, which (not too coincidentally) didn't require them to be anywhere near each other.  Invitations for me to go to other people's houses or for family meals increasingly got turned down for increasingly odd reasons.  We were, all of us, very alone most of the time, yet just within shouting distance of one another.  And the prospect of going out into crowded social settings, or letting people flood into our sterile, silent setting?  Seemed pretty daunting.

   My memories of childhood involve my mother, seemingly always in the kitchen and/or vacuuming and dusting things, and my father seemingly always outside "fixing" and building and tearing down stuff.  My memories involve knowing that the other kids from Active Families with a bit more money were no doubt playing hockey or volleyball or waterskiing or something.  And knowing that I didn't know anything about all that stuff, and wasn't remotely interested in doing it or hanging out with them either.  And trying to stay inside so I could read or something, yet inevitably being made to go outside, always to go off by myself and do some utterly pointless work that involved getting a sunburn and having every allergy I possessed get tripped, for nothing that seemed terribly vital.  

   And my dad was a gym teacher.  What that meant, in case you never thought about it, was that every single time I had a day off school, he always had that whole day off too.  So he was always there, trying to make me stop being "useless on a farm" by sending me off to do things, hoping I wouldn't need any direction from him.  When I finally got my allergies tested to see what exactly it was that made my head leak so badly, I ended up being allergic to (cutting) grass, (tossing) hay, (carrying and stacking bits of) trees, (cleaning up to get rid of) dust and dust mites and mold and fungus.  And nothing else.

    It was like I developed an allergy to everything my father wanted me to do, to such a degree that the nurse doing the test needed no background knowledge at all in order to basically label me "allergic to what Dad does."  And the thing is?  I think I get those allergies from him.  I think he's allergic to all of those things too and just "works" right through it, hawking up phlegm and having a running nose and eyes like me while he does it, coughing and wheezing.  I think he just accepts it as part of how work works.  He's tough like that.

   I think it's safe to say that my summer and Christmas and spring vacations were about my father desperately fighting me, head-to-head, to make me stop being "useless on a farm," and me fighting to be useless enough that he'd give up and let me read things and play with computer programming and electronic and music and recording stuff.  He, quite naturally, feared all this was evidence I was gay.  (And he wouldn't let me help him with his spelling or what bible words meant.  And he needed some help with all of that. Years later, he's learned a lot.  On his own.)

   And I think I'd get no argument at all that, after a long hard battle, by the time I got my first job at age 16, I had won.  I was and am, useless on a farm.  I know very well exactly how to change my own oil and filters, and yet I let the ten year old girls at Mr. Lube do it for me. The only skills I come out of the experience with are animals liking me and me liking them, being able to split firewood with an axe, and being able to also use the axe to cut the heads off protesting chickens and turkeys.  Nowadays, I seldom have need of an axe.  I make a point of not having one in my classroom.  But no doubt that head-to-head struggle to try to force children not to be useless (in reading and writing) is something my students would recognize.  But they only have to deal with me for an hour a day.  And not on holidays, evenings and weekends.

Family Style #3 Activist Families

But I eventually learned there was a whole third type of Brethren family too.  I didn't quite believe they existed or were really true for the longest time.  We didn't have that kind of family around here, really.  Often they moved to remote parts of the planet.  Their parents tended to be missionaries or similar.  They edited out all the joy-stuff just like we did, but they filled it in with actually trying to do good for the world.  "Charity work."  Some of them got medals for it.
   But most of us didn't do it at all.   Thing is, we'd all been raised to believe that the world was evil and dangerous and beyond saving.  It was going to burn.  Any day now. Spontaneous global warming/combustion.  Trying to help was condescendingly called "painting deck chairs on the Titanic."

    If people came to our door asking for money, we often gave them a bit, though we didn't have a lot.  But we certainly never fundraised or did charities.  We let other people do all that.  After all, we could just donate money and old clothes to other churches like the Salvation Army so they could go and do it for us.
   But we ourselves didn't go do that stuff.   We wouldn't have known where to begin.  Might have involved actually learning who the needy people in our town were, and who under heaven thought that would be a good idea? So we never got to look someone in the eye and give them stuff that they needed.  So as a kid, my old clothes and a bit of our family money here and there just...disappeared.  And that was that.  Charity without feeling charitable.

   This summer I proof-read a doctoral thesis which makes the point that this "the world's soon gonna burn!" attitude goes hand in hand with a "why not throw your trash all over it and rip it the frack up to get whatever we want out of it as fast as we can?" one.  I wonder a whole lot right now what my emotional and spiritual development would have been like if my church and my family had given me the experience of helping actual people with actual stuff they needed help with.

   But as it is, we viewed with suspicion any work that brought one into too much contact with "the children of this world."  We needed to remember the blessed truth of separation.  Heads were shaken and tuts were tutted over people who had neighbour kids into their house in an attempt to try to get them to come to church, and ended up with neighbour kids dating their daughters.  How foolish!  (more than one neighbourhood kid ended up at church because they thought the Brethren girls were hot.  And they were. They had to look good even without makeup and sexy clothes.)

The doctoral thesis that I edited also spoke of:

a) Christians who try to make the world better only by preaching at it and giving out pamphlets (which soon become litter in a landfill), 

b) Christians who at least pretend to be doing charity work, but are mainly using it as a cover story while they REALLY are simply planning to evangelise, 

and 

c) Christians who actually want to make a difference and care and therefore do the charity work so hard that it works, rather than just to be seen doing it, and get a "gospel message" in.

Most of the folks in our area churches did none of those three things.  Our family certainly didn't, and we didn't really know anyone who was much different.  Mostly, people who want to do stuff soon left our church.  Our church had a way of filtering them out.  Or they were on the other side of the globe.  We sent a few odd, old guys to go do our preaching for us, mostly as far away from our area as we could afford to send them.   We had guys in African and Indian and Brazilian and Columbian metropolises the likes of which our country knew nothing, trying to hand out our gospel pamphlets to Catholics, Methodists and Baptists there.

   But I never tried to achieve any sectual reproduction on the sidewalk.  I never played on a team.  I was never part of cubs or boyscouts.  I never took lessons.  I never raised money for charity.  I never felt like I was helping.  And I think I would be a better person today if I had done more of those things.  As it is, I don't play well with others.

   This is important: you can show your kids that they can help solve problems, or you can show your kids that you think they are a problem, and little else.  I think that all those rules and all of that pious sacrificing of joy-stuff wouldn't have hurt many of us so much if we'd actually done some good for the world while we were busy not doing all of that fun stuff.  I really do.

  

Words

I talk a lot.  The bible says that "out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaketh."  I imagine that anyone hearing me speakething can tell a lot about my heart.  I wear it, mostly, in my words, though some parts get kept back when I lack the mechanism for expressing them.  And some parts of the heart are really only expressed in touch, which I don't do.

    It should be obvious that I don't think things in general are quite the way they ought to be, and that this matters to me a great deal.  It should be obvious that I don't think enough people mean what they say or say what they mean.  It should be obvious that I don't predict success in most ventures planned by more than about two people, expecting it to become about personalities and committees and titles and funding and credit and "say" rather than...whatever the original goal was.  It should be obvious that I don't have much belief in the mythic powers of secrecy to keep me safe from the disrespect of others.  It should be obvious that I was raised to be "special/better than normal people."  All so that I could make the world a better place by kindly not judging lesser people, and by being a good example to them as to how superior/special/Christian lives worked.
   So, whenever I screw up big-time and am just normal, more or less like everyone else, I feel like a huge failure, which is to say crappy.  Because to people raised like me, normal's not nearly good enough.  To us, the illusion of perfect is supposed to be "normal" for us.  And just coming off as "normal" is utter "failure."  (And it goes without saying that we don't even have a way of looking at ourselves if we should slip below "normal" in some way.  We don't have problems, you see, because we have Jesus.)

   But words and stories have always been very important to me.  My childhood, in many ways, could be looked at as a time when the stories and songs I longed for were being shut out of my life by the keepers of religious stories and songs.  To "protect me" from them.  I suspect they didn't trust their own stories and songs to stand up to, say The A-Team or "Beat It" in winning young hearts and challenging us and expressing what was inside us, and about to blossom.  (Joy, for instance.) There were human, living, breathing things that were daily, routinely shut out of their stories and songs (quite apart from in the bible, of course.  Lots of stuff that can be in the bible can never be in a "Christian" well... anything at all) and I was wanting to go after these stories and songs, these words, and was being denied all of it.  And it made me very unhappy.

   Thing is: if you're forbidden the majority of stories and songs, if you're lucky you can just make your own.  So, many of us did that.  And then when you grow up, you can go ahead and read Doctor Who books if you want to.  Or puzzle over Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen lyrics.  You can even enjoy time with friends, while having a drink, and listening to or singing a song about enjoying time with friends.  After all, it's what we're going to do in heaven, surely?  Eat?  Drink?  Celebrate?  According to the bible, anyway.  If that matters to anyone.

   But one thing you soon know, if you dabble in words at all: words don't quite cut it.  They do a lot, but they fall short.  So, fresh out of university, I wrote a poem/song that was intended to show words trying, but failing, to express what was in my heart.  Contradictions.  The ebb and flow of the tumultuous tides of young emotion.  It wasn't wonderful, but it made me feel better, which is why it was written:

Words Cannot Express
----------------------------

Remorse wrapped in rage kindles the grey ashes 
Of the pale black fire that on your white shore smashes 
Hurt and aching hunger fill the empty place 
Left by all the anger that's twisting on your face 
Uncomprehending glances take a careful look 
Then retreat back by the eye-trail that to you they took 
Unexpressed opinions hang in the dead air 
Soft and anguished, beating, they strain but do not dare

            Words can't tell the story

            No matter how we rage

            But to tell the story

            Words are all we have

Confused retreat to solitude, need to be alone 
To think out some solutions to the problems that you own 
But they are all feelings and they obey no laws 
Cutting through cold logic with white-hot argent claws

All this troubled turmoil of feelings with no reason 
With no reason will be gone, return another season 
Words cannot express and logic can't contain 
The recurring feelings that wake in you such pain 

Words cannot encompass, can't convey the sorrow 
You can live because the mood might not be here tomorrow 
All this feeling is the work of a child in a foul rage 
He lives in me and lives on me because I am his cage


I even tried to record a particularly ambitious version of this song, but was unable to make the pieces quite come together and work smoothly.  Various old computers conspired to help ensure each instrument was slightly out of time with each other and the voice.  Very disjointed.  But there are whales in there.  Also a backward-masked sermon about the dangers of backward masking in modern music.  And a monster baby crying.

Four Mini-Topics

So, I haven't written a blog entry since last month. There are two great reasons for that:
    The most obvious one is that I spent the end of last month and the start of this one in Alaska, where I flew in small propeller planes, four-wheeled out to see glaciers, and broke bread with an open brethren group two Sundays while there.  And then didn't want to invade the privacy of the family I stayed with by blogging all about them.

    The other reason I haven't blogged is that this summer I've been getting a lot more than my usual number of long talks with people who are into that.  Usually, I have thoughts, but I have no one to tell them to, and so I blog them.  But this summer, I've had an awful lot of excellent, lengthy conversations with equally dogged conversants.  So the blog entries don't get written.  The tension built up by having the idea is released when it gets out.  Verbally.  In person.

Anyway, with no particular order or reason, here are some things that have been percolating in the old brainbox:

#1 Connecting With People Who Disagree

My friends in Alaska are Tea Party members.  Loaded guns everywhere.  They think I'm terribly liberal and socialist. But they're really smart and informed.  I really like them.  They like me.  At first we were afraid we'd argue or disagree about everything, and we totally didn't. Not in any bad way, anyway.  In good ways we argued, just like people who already knew each other.
   I guess when a bunch of our kind of people (the kind who like to think and talk a lot) are talking, even if they feel others are very liberal or very conservative, they may often find they really like each other and really enjoy talking to each other.  They may find the fact that they all care about all that stuff, and love talking and thinking a whole lot, becomes immediately far more important than what are the actual "positions" all the people hold.  And they learn that other people's "positions" are complicated, and part of a developing process, rather than a static "location."  Moving targets, all.

    If you disagree with someone's position, but you find the two of you have just spoken to each other flowingly and eagerly for two hours straight, something interesting happens.  You find you like each other, often, respect each other, usually, and you find the different views become interesting rather than becoming insurmountable obstacles.

   I think that pretty much everyone agrees about what, generally speaking, is wrong with the world.  What bad stuff we want less of.  Rapes.  Murders.  Theft.  Poverty.  But pretty much no two people ever agree at all about exactly what (precisely) should be done to fix any of it.  So that can just be taken as a given.  We already agree about what almost all of the bad stuff is.  We may never agree about how to fix it, or even what's causing it.

#2 "Obedience Is Everything" Christians

I'm noticing: a lot of Christians are so focused on obedience (and only obedience) supposedly being "the answer" to everything, that they are, to my mind, unable to engage properly in certain discussions.  Like ones about certain people in the bible (the prodigal son's elder brother, the Pharisees, the various rich men who could honestly tell Jesus they were pretty much keeping the law). People who were zealously obedient to the rules of the bible as they saw them, yet clearly did not please God.  Who were lacking in His Eyes.

    I mean, what were they missing?  They refrained from doing all the bad stuff one is supposed to refrain from doing.  They dutifully fulfilled all the duties they were supposed to dutifully do.  Yet something was still missing.  Jesus is quite harsh with Pharisees, despite their obedience to and knowledge of their holy scriptures.  The prodigal's elder brother is not a good role model.  Is arguing, rather than celebrating with his father at the end.  And is missing stuff he may never have learned at all.  Obedience to good stuff is good.  But apparently, obedience isn't "all."  Apparently being a Christian, or reading the bible isn't, after all, "all" about obedience. There's other terribly important stuff.  Stuff so important that if you miss it, it downright invalidates the obedience and duty entirely.

   Most anyone could tell you what they're missing: They lack an understanding of and participation in love relationships.  Charity. Empathy.  Commiseration and mutual celebration.  They obey the rules, toe the line, honour the limits, give the tithes and still "have not love."  They obey the father but don't really know him.  Don't know how to rejoice with them that rejoice, or weep with them that weep.  Their emotional responses are lacking or inappropriate.  Their modern counterparts are the same: Robin Williams commits suicide.  Instead of feeling shocked and sad, they get angry about how people are expressing their grief, and go on the Internet trying to "correct" it all.

   So some of these modern Christian people reading these stories seem to miss the heart behind the bible stuff too.  They are obeying or doing religion for the same reasons as those characters in the bible stories.  The ones who were depicted in order to discuss God's dissatisfaction.  They are obeying to be right or good, or so they will be thought of as those things, or to not make God/their father angry.  But they don't "get" about doing good to touch His/his heart, or anything like that.  They do good to stave off failure, to not be sinners, or to feel superior, or stuff.  Not for good's own sake.  They seem to have no real awareness that good is good.  They just know that it's expected.  And looks good. (well, better than that other stuff, anyway)  Things that are good have inherent worth apart from making you look better.  But some rich people buy paintings they don't understand, to display in their living rooms.  Some Christians are like that about God.

   And when this kind of Christian talks about the bible at all, without an understanding of feelings, of love relationship, he's just the sound of annoying cymbals banging on endlessly about obedience, without a single good reason WHY to obey.
   That's how people like that seem to me, anyway.  And I used to be one.  Still am one, to an embarrassing degree.  A Hermione Granger.  A rule-follower (or an all-too-rules-conscious breaker of same).  Not someone who connects and understands people and forges bonds of relationship easily.  Not someone who understands that good is good, and so has inherent, rather than external, worth in it.  That's why I need God.  To show me that good isn't just something to obey, or stand beside, or associate myself and my reputation with.  It's Him.

#3 Feelings and Control

A lot of Christians don't feel comfortable with God (neither as Father or incarnated as the Lord Jesus Christ) having the full range of human emotions.  Particularly not breaking down and crying, finding things funny, or losing His temper (certainly not bursting out laughing).  None of that.  Sounds to them like it would be a flaw to do that, as it involves an apparently giving up (or loss or release) of control.  

   Because to many, the essence of not sinning is not losing control.  Control (or, as the scripture calls it in humans "the flesh") is perfection.  Completeness.  To be holy is to be always, ever in control.  To suppress our bad.  Which is anything at all which doesn't want to be suppressed.  He who loses control first, loses the interaction/debate/negotiation/argument of the moment.  (many Brethren relationships end this way.  The "control contest" winner loses his/her spouse forever).  And it is therefore commonly thought to always be sin to give up control, release it or lose it.
   (Well, if you sneeze, fart, orgasm or yawn, that's seen as a physical loss of control, so it's okay.)  But anger in particular is a thing where if you lose control, that's always sin, they think.  No matter what's just happened in front of, or to you, or to someone you care about.  If you lose your temper, you shouldn't have. No matter what.  Hitler shoots your Mom and pees on her bleeding corpse.  Be appalled.  But don't lose your temper.  Because that's always sin.  God wouldn't do that.

   Thing is, no matter what body function, humans "work" in terms of release of tension.  When you need something, whether it be sleep, to pee, to sneeze, to breathe, whatever, you get increasingly uncomfortable as you prolong satisfying this urge to release the tension.  The tension and discomfort builds and you increasingly look forward to being able to satisfy it so the discomfort and tension can leave you.  (Laughter and tears are a way of "venting off" excesses of emotional energy.  Hurts to keep them in.  Same with anger.)  So, you carefully don't pee your pants, or burst out laughing, or lose your temper and yell, and then you eventually decide it's time, and you let loose.  And you feel much better.  You needed to do that.  (Of course you try not to empty your bladder, your nose, your tears or your temper all over some innocent stranger.)

    Howard the ex-pastor was once at a retreat, and found himself involved in a discussion of how exactly one knew when the Spirit was moving one to speak or act.  Howard said it was just like when you need to take a dump. You are increasingly filled with a growing discomfort, a need to take care of this.  Something needing to come out.  And then it does, and you feel relieved.  Being moved by the Spirit is just like that, Howard explained.

    Apparently, like in many of Howard's stories, some older pastors were a tiny bit scandalized at this downright biblical choice of imagery.  When the bible's using descriptive language, it all too often goes straight to poo imagery.  (Or whores.)  When I do that, I get told to stop.  Because I'm not Jesus.  Or Ezekiel.  Or Jeremiah.  Or Isaiah.  Should talk more like pastor Billy Bob.  You know.  Should talk like "A Christian." Gosh.  Dangit.  My word.  Bless.

    So, an increasing tension, followed by release.  Built right into our design.  And all stories, pretty much, are structured that same way, to appeal to how we're made.  The reader increasingly feels a building tension/suspense which is released only when the story is pretty much over. In fact, the release (the "climax") means the story had better end pretty soon afterward.  Because the tension, the growing suspense or action, was keeping the reader's attention.  Making him eager to have it resolved.  And now it's been released, freeing him from needing to read very many more pages.

    So, do these human faculties, especially when emotional, reflect our being created in God's image, so they say something about Him, or are they more the result of our being physical?  Can God, being a spirit, or can any angel or devil, weep, laugh, or get angry?  Have emotional responses build up, hold them in until it gets uncomfortable, and then release them? 

   God presents Himself in the Old Testament prophetic books as a supernatural being, the ultimate source of all things, being able to feel broken covenants and betrayals and infidelities to a clearly supernatural degree, with a wrath that is far beyond that of any human being, as often as not resulting in the entire destruction of entire civilizations, leaving landscapes strewn with bodies, or a planet with almost every once-living creature reduced to a sea of bloated, rotting, drowned corpses floating in angry unceasing rain from a wrathful sky.  God depicts Himself as able to be jealous and hold grudges and be angry for far longer than a human lifespan.  And He seems to feel deeply.

   He can forgive.  Sometimes does. Doesn't always.  Depends who.  Some people get flowers and a rainbow. Others get fiery death from the sky.  And though of course not forgiving is His perfect prerogative, we are rather uncomfortable with the idea that He doesn't treat everyone the same.  But He doesn't.
  And the Old Testament seems largely about Him taking sides, playing favourites, picking  unlikely nations and people to back, and "walking right past" others, who He seems to value much less, though many are good, serious, obedient folk.
   And there are so many pages about Him getting and staying angry.  Really angry.  For decades.  And sending death and destruction on people.  The bible describes it as "sending evil" upon people, and then talks about Him eventually "repenting" of having done it.  If you do an Old Testament concordance search on the word "repented" in the KJV, you'll get an awful lot of hits. And the vast majority of the  time, you'll find it's God who is described as "repenting."   He "sends evil" (calamity) upon people He loves, and then "repents" of sending it after a while, and stops doing it.  Feels angry, then eventually feels regret and stops what He's doing.  That sounds rather... human?  Almost like a Person of some kind.
   Eventually, moving on from "God gets to do that because He's God," one has to ask "What kind of Person is He?"  In reading the prophetic books, it has helped me to view God as repeatedly hurt.  As feeling slights.  As jealous.  As wounded by infidelity.  As superhumanly capable of feeling it when abandoned and cheated upon and betrayed.  I dunno.  Works for me.  Try this: read all the Old Testament prophets in order in a couple of months.  See how you feel about Him.  Let me know.  He's not just forgiving everyone all the time.  He's up to a lot of pretty upsetting stuff. Why?

   Because this is pages and pages and pages of bible.  We don't picture God breaking down and crying, though as Jesus He did.  We don't picture God laughing, and scripture is silent as to whether Jesus lived for three decades and never cracked a smile or laughed, or what.
   And though God seems to be having a supernatural temper tantrum in the Old Testament, generally something cataclysmic and nearly world-ending, I find Christians don't want to imagine God first being patient, then getting more and more frustrated, and then eventually unleashing his temper, because He has gotten angry.  Not so much to teach a lesson.  Not so much to keep the world pure (?)  Because He's upset.
   Christians want to talk about justice and righteousness and things that make His anger necessary and proper.  But they don't want to talk about Him "losing His temper."  They think if He ever lost His temper, that would be losing/releasing/giving up control, and therefore, sin, or a flaw.  They want to think that He calmly, righteously, collectedly unleashed decades of city-levelling wrath in a controlled, measured fashion.  Like a blank-faced sociopath.  Because He loved Sodom and Gomorrah.

   I'm not so sure, anymore.  To me He sounds like a repeatedly jilted lover, whose spouse cheats and cheats and whores around, and whose children rape, rob, terrorize, torture, maim, disfigure and murder each other unceasingly.  And that He feels that keenly and is patient and kind for a long time, but then He responds.  That He's alive, and therefore responsive.  Not "above" feelings.  Maybe created us with them, in His image.  Maybe not bothering to build that into angels? I dunno.

#4 Howard Talks About Relationship

Howard no longer delivers my pizza, but we meet up a couple times a week, often.  I'm trying to get him to blog.  He was a pastor, and had a very rough life before, during and after doing that job for over a decade.  He's seen the extremely seamy (and pointless, bureaucratic, political and self-deluding) side of church life, but he hasn't given up on it.  Not as a concept, anyway.  Talking to him pushes me emotionally to places I don't normally go, spiritually speaking.  Stuff that church doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of.

    Howard says it's good to wake up and not say:

-Hmmmm... now what do I feel like doing today? (That's easy.  This was always presented to me, as a teenager, as a very unChristian, "worldly" mindset that we were to sacrifice entirely to God. We were to always and only seek to do what He wanted.  We weren't to want things.  The Lord is thy shepherd.  Thou shalt not want.)

nor, does Howard feel, we should either wake up and say,

-"Oh Lord, I do hereby sacrifice my own desires, and will do nothing at all whatsoever until You make clear unto me precisely what You would like me to do today, for You, so I can go and do it and then come back and tell You I did it, or tried to."

Howard says it's good to wake up and say
-"So, Lord, what are we going to do today?  Let's go do some stuff. What do You think of...?"
   Like a date.  Howard solidifies my suspicion that many of us are in a stand-off with God that goes rather like this:

Christian: [on knees] Lord, why won't you tell me what You want me to not do today?  Just tell me.  I'm ready and willing to sacrifice it to You!

God: Dude, I need you to want something.  Then we'll talk.  I love you and want to know all about, and give you, the desires of your heart. First discussing how workable and good they sound in the long term, perhaps.  But you don't appear to have any desires yet, which means you're not really being alive much yet.  And my Son died so you could live and be free.  And you're not doing that.  Be a person.  Let the identity I intended for you, the personality I have designed, flourish and grow!  Don't try to thwart my design by stifling your identity and burying your personhood in the ground, or hiding it under a basket. I made it for a reason.  I want return on that investment.  Be!

Christian: Oh Lord, just tell me who not to be, and I'll do my best to not be that person!  Tell me who and what not to want, and I promise I'll do nothing at all today but not want that, as hard as I can.  I gave up Sarah for You.  I want to not do whatever YOU don't want in my life, Lord...

God: You know, you're really being a very bad date... No fun at all.  And I built some into you.  I remember distinctly.  Where is it?  (It's a good thing I love you.)

Because, according to Howard, our relationship with Christ, with God, is supposed to be intimate.  It's supposed to be a two-way, growing, negotiated thing, with two people in it, rather than being seen purely in terms of power and "say." For one person or the other.  Because it's not meant to be an abusive relationship.  And abusive relationships are the only ones that are all about one person getting all the "say."  And many of us had those kinds of relationships at home and at church.
   It's supposed to be (like any marriage, Howard says) something other than merely a boss/employee, master/servant relationship.  More intimate than that.  More of "us" tossed into it.  Not less.  There's more than enough of Him to go around.  So we need to toss our whole selves into it wholeheartedly.  We have to be our whole selves, as hard as we can, and grow more "all of that."
   I spoke with a Brethren woman last week who told me that, very much unlike me (I felt like I was born with a very clear, indelible identity, whether I liked it or not, and people around me did nothing but try to reject, sideline or surgically alter it) she felt like she grew up with no identity.  Like, while I went to church youth group and felt continually called upon to justify why I was different, why I liked and didn't like the kinds of stuff I did and didn't, she went to youth group and went along with everyone.
   She did this to pretend that they all had strong, well-developed identities that just happened to be more or less identical to her own.  When actually, she said, she and many of them were kind of... empty.  Their identities hadn't grown.  Not yet, anyway.  And the culture wasn't encouraging or safe for people developing, having, exploring or expressing identities, despite the fact that God had planted those inside everyone.
   And she said in her twenties, after some random pinging around, terribly vulnerable to this and that and the other person or thing (way too much of a susceptible blank slate) she had to eventually come to terms with finally being who God made her to be.  Which was perhaps somewhat negotiable.  But was certainly going to end up with her being someone, rather than not being herself.  Not just a negation of natural impulse.  Not just an obedient suppression of everything He'd designed into her.  And that this was certainly something that had to be looked into, run after and explored.
   So she had to commit to that and do it up right.  And she did.  And it was very contrary to how she'd been molded.  And it took work.  But there's really no other option that isn't nihilistic and inhuman.

The odd thing is, I talk about myself, and about God, and about "Christian stuff" all the time.  With lots and lots of very different people. But after something had happened too many times for me to ignore it, I eventually had to recognize a fact:
   ...every time Howard speaks about this kind of friendly, warm, collaborative, mutual, loving interplay with God, a unity, no battle over one or the other being given all of the "say," it makes me choke up.  Literally.  At first I tried to ignore or dismiss it, but it kept happening.  Made my eyes watery.  Made my voice wobbly.  Each time. No matter what I did.  I had to pretend to be interested in the nothing that was happening out the diner window.

   I was trying not to feel it, but it was getting me.  There was a bit of a "stung," angry feeling at suddenly having something somehow get past my emotional walls and touch my heart and my hope like that.  That's not supposed to happen.  It was a vision of a relationship with God that worked.  A two-way thing.  Where He wanted something other than for me to sacrifice me and not be myself.
   Far easier to present and view all of my relationships as being at standstills or not working.  More familiar to fuss and fret over stuff not working than to have to deal with the uncomfortable, demanding reality of something working, for once, with Someone.  Seemed too good to be true to imagine something like that.  Like a trick.  Leading to my ruination as a Christian and a person.  To imagine a relationship working that needed me in it to do that at all.
   There was confusion at to why this emotional response was happening and how.  Over what was even happening.  Food for thought, certainly.

That's all I have to say right now about all of that.