Before The Hit TV Show, Or Even The Comic...

I worked twelve-hour weekend day shifts in an electronics lab.  7am to 7pm Saturday and Sunday after working a couple of night shifts during the middle of the week.  Made me like a zombie.  He drank enough to always come in looking like one.  I wrote this song about him (some of us don't have the voice to do metal(ish) stuff, but want to anyway):

The Walking Dead

Leaden footsteps shuffle past him; reddened eyes are wet and blurred

Croaking they ask him for money, he acts like he hasn't heard

Doesn't drink embalming fluid, but he's got poisons of his own

And when it is time for sleeping, he has got himself a home

            Through the day he's not alive

            Only when the moon is high

            So is he and his mind's racing

            Feels that closing time draws nigh

He wants everyone to join him, watch him nullify his brain

He'll take anything that's offered, into stomach, lungs or vein

Then at work he's barely moving and he smells like rotting things

Shambling, stumbling, the light hurts him, but when it's home-time he's got wings

Guess he feels like he needs others, crowds to help bury his pains

And he's trying not to notice member's dues are pain in brains

Contrary to what he's thinking (that Oblivion is fun)

He's not stirring up a good time, just mixing up what's considered one

You all know this, you're alive

You can see and hear and taste

Pleasure dies divorced from context

Do not lay your mind to waste

Vultures In The Sky

Had a go at this one today, too.  It's prettier than the previous one.  More sad, not angry.  I had the basic song recorded, but hadn't put in the "pretty" stuff.  So wasn't sure if I liked it.  It's from an album I wrote long ago called "Death."  I was exploring my emo-ness.  It's more about pondering the inevitability of death than anything else.  It's not about murder or suicide or anything.  A lot of the death discussed in the album was more metaphorical or spiritual.  The best bit about the harmonica at the very end (just in the slow, quiet bit) is that it is a track left over from when I was playing harmonica to a completely different version of the song, which was at a different tempo (one just as fast as the rest of the song), but I just left it in because it was (obviously) rather disconnected sounding and dream-like.  Anyway:

Vultures In The Sky

Voices fade out and are gone

Resolve ebbs slowly out

Ground's too rough to lie upon

The fields are full of doubt

The sky's too bright to see just right

And the clouds are green like poison

The wanderer stands unmoving and

Looks out to…the grey horizon

And the vultures circle the air

they call out so you know they're there

the dust marks where the wanderer stands

With searching heart and two strong hands

The distant hills are rough-edged

Squatting low and looking mean

Scraggly brush disparages

Rocks that look obscene

A tree alone in a world of stone

Like a twisted, broken python

A raven croaks, looks surprised he spoke

No response from…the grey horizon

The sparse grass is a dunnish brown

Thin as an old man's hair

And (rotten through and falling down)

A small wood hut is there

Man spends youth to build a roof

Not much to lay the eyes on

Grows old and weak as it grows more leaks

Faded to grey… and a grey horizon

A sparkling pile of broken glass

Lies scattered on the ground

Once a bottle in the past

Bought to cure a frown

It poured out sick and homeless faces

Sores to lay the eyes on

Now on the stones the rap-wrapped bones adorn…

The grey horizon

The vultures circle the ground and marvel at what they've found

A feast to keep them fed. There's no shortage of the dead.

Sunday's Comin' (So It's Time To Get Christian)

Now with more cowbell.  Spent Friday evening hammering away at this song, as I'd gotten George to play drums for me, and had to build the rest of the song around them.  He also played a cowbell.  Like, a real cowbell.  From a cow.  Rusty.

  I hit a dinner plate to make kinda the sound of distant church bells.  I a lot of problems with software and keyboards and stuff.  It make me play almost all of the parts fairly angrily.  It shows. It also shows why people who love church (especially church with modern worship music) do not love me:

 Sunday’s Coming

All week long you’ve been with the others

Now it’s time to draw away

It’s time to climb up to that higher ground

Far higher than they

To be lifted up by the grace of God

To a place we hope to stay

Sunday’s coming

So it’s time to git Christian.

Sunday’s coming

So it’s time to git Christian

Remember the calling

Get back on the mission

Black and white thinking

Support our position

Sunday’s coming

So it’s time to git Christian

There are things they do that we won’t do

And don’t we not do them well

We live a life that’ll show any average Joe

How to stay right out of Hell

To lay hold of love and liberty

Christ died to the world to give

Then we cast them both down at his feet

And we’re careful (stop)

 not to love and live.

It’s so key we not be confused with them

Be a bright testimony

So we draw apart choose that better part

How bless’d God made us we

And to swear and chew may be fine for you

But we wouldn’t stoop to that

Quite beneath us

In our special position

Praise God, Praise God, Praise Go-ah-ah-od

He made you, and me, and all of us His children

His grace, His Grace, His grace May we live worthy,

Worthy, worthy, worthy of it

Praise God, Praise God, Praise God for our pastor

He’s the bomb, the bomb, the bo-ah-ah-om

And Praise our church, our church, and praise us all for going

And praise us, praise us,

Praise us all for going...

 

Imagine

Imagine God gives pastors, teachers, prophets and other gifted people to the Church as a whole, for our benefit.  To the collective.  Not to individual "churches." To all the Christians who are able to connect, either in person (or voice-to-voice, with technology), or like Paul and the apostles, through more textual means.  Imagine God is looking to see us connect, support each other, challenge each other, work things out, get angry and sin not, not let the sun go down on our wrath, and above all things, know and deal with each other.

   Imagine He judges us based on what we achieve, both in terms of inner exploration, and also in terms of networking with other Christians and all the other human beings of various kinds, who come in and out of our lives.  Imagine He cares that we connect just as much as He cares that we're correct.  Imagine when we say we "can't deal" with someone, He mostly hears the "can't."

   Imagine that salvation, personal growth, holiness/correctness/doctrine, love, charity, unity and being His agents in our community aren't "pick your favourite one to focus upon," nor even "start at the beginning with the essential ones and maybe you'll eventually get to the more advanced/less important ones later."  Imagine it's all important.  At the same time.  Imagine we're here to connect to every Christian anywhere near us (geographically, genetically, in terms of Facebook circles of friends etc.) one at a time.  Imagine we're supposed to approach each one, and see if we can love him/her and be loved in return.  Imagine the bible tells us to do that.

Imagine there are no walls keeping us out of their church circles and no walls keeping them in. Imagine there are no walls at all.  Imagine that no apostle ever wrote separate epistles to two different Christian groups in the same town.

   Imagine God sees us all as One Thing.  Imagine the walls, categories, labels, membership lists and all of that aren't real enough for Him to see, so He doesn't see them at all.  Imagine He does not recognize the different little circles, the committees, formalized structures, the decisions about who will be elders over who, and what elders are not "our" elders, but elders in a different Christian group, and one who we do not recognize the authority or relevance of.

   Imagine if ...
a) should we go out to a "church and decide that Steve is our new pastor,
b) but then we have a falling out with Steve
c) so we leave that "church" and more or less lose touch with the people there
d) and go to one in which Bob has been nominated pastor,
e) so we decide we will only deal with Bob (for as long as we want to submit to him)
f)  so we only deal with the people at Bob's "church"
g) and ignore Steve and the people at his "church,"

...that God doesn't recognize any of that.  Imagine we're all still responsible for one another, and these "Well, that's a whole different church in my town.  That's not our church. We're not responsible to deal with people from different churches..." distinctions are utter nonsense.  Imagine if the bible means what it says, and so those church distinctions aren't real.  Imagine if we really are One Body.  Imagine if it's not that we're "supposed to be" one body, but that we "are."
   Imagine if, when we sneer slightly and say "Yes, that's all well and good, but practically, we all need to choose a street address to report to Sunday morning.." we're not being remotely practical. Imagine if we're supposed to go out to each other, rather than inviting each other in to our churches (and then throwing up our hands if they don't show).

   Imagine if, in terms of serving and pleasing God, we stand and fall together.  Imagine if the Christian group that is doing the worst in our community isn't a group we're happy not to be part of, but is something we are part of.  Imagine if God views Christians as All Part Of The Same One Thing, rather than as a collection of splintered groups, insulated from each other and duplicating resources, not benefiting from each others' gifts and taking stances against each other.  Imagine if He sees us as One Thing because it's true.

   Imagine if church membership, the myriad little church groups and their mission statements, vision statements, official positions and official oversight, and all the endless, petty little squabbles, are all stuff God isn't looking at.  Imagine it's not worthy of our time.  Imagine all the umbrage, the huffiness, the red vs. the blue, the conservative vs. the liberal, the democrat vs. the republican, isn't real enough for Him to recognize as anything like what we're here to do.  Imagine He's only seeing His children making a huge number of reasons not to deal with one another, and to view one another as not really, practically, connected, let alone united.  Imagine there is only one Church and nothing else we concoct is real or Christian enough to matter much.
   Imagine engaging one another, not to see if we will continue to deal with each other in future, but as actually dealing with each other, in the present.  Imagine no longer seeing giving up as an option when we struggle to understand the views of other people. Imagine no longer viewing needing to give up on them as understandable and acceptable.

   Imagine there are no churches, no walls, no stances to be clear on if you're to stand with us.  It's easy, if you try...

Redeem This!

We know that the path to Christian growth isn't making a fake, virtuous persona, creating and weekly (weakly) playing the part of a church-acceptable self, pretending it's the real us.  We know this, right?

   Because that's fake.  That's the opposite of letting Christ actually redeem actual us.  That's pretending we didn't need redeeming, or trying to redeem ourselves, by creating a false persona-self.  We know this, I think.

   But the path to Christian growth isn't this either, despite my being raised that it really kinda was:
Making dire references to our "real self" which we keep locked away, deep in the basement, unfit to see the light of day.  Going around "being" a church-acceptable self instead, and letting everyone know that we're "being" this acceptable self because we have to.  In order to "spare" absolutely everyone, including God Himself.  Like this is what normal Christianity looks like.  Like we're playing this part rather than ever, ever letting that real us out to wreak its havoc.  Letting people know that they've never met, have never had a clear look at the real us, as it's too horrible and worse yet, embarrassing.
   This is pretending Christ can't redeem us.  Not really.  Not us.  It's kind of "helping him out" by creating that church-acceptable persona so it's not obvious that he didn't redeem us.  Not the real us.  Because of how horrible we are and everything.  This kind of thinking sounds and feels very normal to me, because of my upbringing, but I think I've grown to the point where I see through it, most days.

   Evil and sickness only work in darkness and secrets.  Pinned under the light of day/TV news cameras like Rob Ford, there's very little that evil and sickness can continue to do.  They can't continue to do their dark work, unimpeded by this exposure to the light.  It ends them.  Truth sets us free, and light burns away the darkness and secrets that evil and sickness need so badly.

What Is Redemption?

I believe that redemption is us bringing our selves (not our imagined selves, but our true, unvarnished selves) out from the basement cell(ves) we've been taught to lock them in, and making them approach Christ, instead of hiding in the garden, ass hanging out of our pathetic figleaf apron.  Approaching Christ the sin-bearer, scapegoat, saviour and redeemer.  And it's saying to him, "Redeem this!"
  Christ.  Not bringing them to our peers in an intervention, so much, and not to our church, or even to a counsellor.  Bringing our true, unacceptable selves to Christ so he can show us what acceptance actually is/feels like.  (If we genuinely believe in him and his ability to redeem real people of real Smeagolness, that is.)

    The fake self doesn't need to be redeemed, nor can it be.  It's not, after all, us, nor even anything real.  It cannot go to heaven or to hell.  It can't befriend anyone.  It can't marry anyone.  Because it can't have genuine or lasting relationships on earth.  Because it's more imaginary than Gandalf by far, and far less convincing when it speaks.
     Redeemed Christianity ("being saved") isn't about being Boromir the mighty hero who can save everyone, while really, underneath it all,  he has daddy issues and is going to be the very first to fall into temptation and imperil everyone, shattering the unity that was set up.
   And it's not being Boromir's daddy Denethor either.  It's not "just looking after things" while supposedly awaiting the return of the true King to come in love, giving, healing and fixing (the Rapture), but then actually being stingy, unhelpful, cracked, abusive and tyrannical when encountering actual people actually on the King's business.  Being unlike the King and ultimately wounding, neglecting and generally messing over our own children, willing to sacrifice them to the fire in an odd sort of nihilism which affirms one's own world image (the scriptures sayeth we are all screwed, so do not torment me with hope). 
   And it's not being Theoden, sitting day in and day out on the throne of our "Christian" life.  It's not being confident that we have a trusted human(?) counsellor at our right hand, hourly pouring sage counsel into our ear as we grow older and older, cobwebby and crusty before our time, less able to help anyone, ostracizing our own children and those who would help them, while letting dubious people near them. It's not having our mind hijacked and gradually made ever more dusty, musty, rotten and narrow with each passing year.  It's not about banishing and shutting out the voices of warning that ride in from afar, who've seen dark things going on, on the borders of the community.
  And it isn't either about being Smeagol, having selfishly murdered for the Ring (think "church status and acceptability") long ago, and then spending a "life" lurking in the dark, hiding under mountains, wandering the earth forlorn and alone, grovelling, hiding from the light and frantically denying everything, claiming "Gollum" did it all.  It isn't daily living tormented by all of this, trying to be nothing but nice and helpful and kind, but actually living divided into two warring parts which bite and devour each other all night long, arguing at us in the mirror when we need to sleep.  None of this will keep the dark servants of the Enemy away.  Dividedness isn't of Christ.  It is "the flesh," trying to help.

So, Seriously... What is Redemption?
Redeemed Christianity ("being saved") is going nakedly to Christ every time one feels a little like one of those Tolkien characters, and saying "Redeem this!"  And then waiting for it to happen.  And not faking the process, rushing it, nor creating a persona.  I don't believe we can "do a bit of both."  True Christianity is not a motion capture illusion created by Weta Digital.  In fact, Christianity is not a special effect at all.  If the lifestyle presented to us as "Christian" is no more real than The Lord of the Rings, and is so much less entertaining, it's not worth buying at Wal-Mart from the bargain bin, let alone spending decades "living."
   Redemption may take some time.  And those looking on, who preach a Gospel of The Sims, living through evangelical avatars, inside The Matrix, endlessly "faking it" in empty hopes of one day "making it," believing in nothing deeper or more authentic than fitting into a "Christian community," may never understand.  They may call the work of the Holy Spirit the work of Satan, or point to growth and describe it as succumbing to the evils of This World.  They may call not being a false self "not judging your own self."  They may never relate to the life struggles that to us and God, and a host of seraphim looking on enraptured, are clearly epic journeys, heroic battles to claim the purity and strength of the unified self-hood God is working to hand us.
   Lots of people who call themselves Christians aren't going to accept the real, heart-deep quest, so long as they maintain the acceptably bland, candy shell comfortably coating them when we no longer can maintain that, because we've got other fish to fry than candy shells.  They will judge us based on how acceptable our cracking, crumbling shell seems, compared to their immaculate facade, which nothing gets past, neither in nor out.  A shell that protects from actual acceptance and love.  Appearance, image, deportment, deeds and other outer things, rather than the inward things of the heart.  Claims and positions (talk) rather than health and ability.  Abstaining from things rather than doing much of anything.  Justifying having hearts two sizes too small, so long as the shirts that cover them are modest and carefully ironed. 
   Oh well.  They're all just a pack of cards, really, deep down (as far as they go) so long as they're "living" like that.  No sense losing one's head over them.
   I'm not just trying to "seem Christian" this week, do "Christian things," or be "a good testimony."  Though that is all I was raised to do.  Not swearing and calling that "speaking the truth out of a pure heart."  Being superficially nice and calling that "understanding love."  Closing one's eyes, mind and heart, and calling that "walking in the light."
   But God is not satisfied with that, it turns out.  I'm doing what I can to live an authentic life while God Himself makes me, progressively, more Christian.  Giving healing and growth, insight, wisdom and strength.  As much as I'll let Him.  Inner transformation.  Though often it means I'm alone, and often He tears down some of the props I lean on the very most.  Though it alienates me from people who have games of cards to play and houses of cards to build upon the shifting sands of personal reputation and public opinion.  Though it makes me not fit.  Even so, I'm in.  For the real stuff.  Waiting.

     And that's all I have to say about that.

Big Brothers Are Watching You

For several years now, I've been teaching uncertain teenagers about George Orwell's 1984, about how it presents a (then) future world he feared.
  Many of them think "Well, it didn't happen, so he was wrong, and his book is depressing, so who cares?  Others connect with it even though it's quite political and philosophical for a teenager to read.

   Obviously, many things remind me of what it was like to live under the Plymouth Brethren system I grew up in.  Not everyone who attends and takes part in Brethren stuff is "under" it, but my family and I certainly were.  And every year when I teach it, 1984 reminds me of that past, and I wonder if it's a sensible comparison.  Well, let's see:

Expectations Run Deeper Than Rules

In 1984's Oceania, there are a host of unwritten expectations for exactly how people will think, feel, dress, act and live.  The citizens somehow "just know" they are expected to live this way, without needing to be told in so many words.  It's trained into them.  They act in the expected manner, all without thinking about it.  Some stuff is understood to be good, and some stuff is understood to be bad.  And everyone is watching each other with poker faces, seeing who's thinking or feeling or acting differently than everyone else, so they can share this information and report it, "for the good" of the person in question.   So the person can be warned and then "fixed."  There is nowhere citizens can go where they are not being watched, and their motives questioned, at all times.  No one can breathe free.

Slumming It With the Dirty People of the World

Winston Smith finds a way to try to allow his brain and heart and life to "breathe" a bit.  He goes out and takes walks in the world outside the perpetually bombed-out battleground that is Airstrip One/London, the city where he lives, to walk among the "proles." The proles are the lower-class, working people who aren't trying to be approved or have any status within the system.  They drink beer and smoke and gamble and watch sports on TV in bars, and have relationships with people they're not married to, and generally dress and talk and act how they like.  They are rustic, and much more colourful.  Winston sneaks out and walks around in their neighborhood.  He talks to them to see what their lives are like, and finds their comments and memories and day to day life challenges and enriches his own.  And while there, Winston goes into a junk shop and buys something a good citizen of Oceania wouldn't need: a personal diary or journal.

Self Expression Is Rebellion

Winston goes home and starts secretly writing in it.  He finds that he needs to secretly write down a bunch of thoughts and feelings, as he has no voice, and yet knows he needs to get all that out.  So he does.  He writes about his past.  He sometimes writes angry things about the leadership and the life he's living. Things that would get him in trouble, if anyone saw them.  He must write them, but lives in fear of them ever being seen.

   Because in Oceania, one of the worst things one can be accused of (and an accusation is as powerful as proven guilt) is "thoughtcrime."  Thoughtcrime is thinking unapproved things.  Thoughts exist to support the authority structure, the political system, and so they are controlled, like any other resource.
   Thought Police may show up unannounced and question people as to their thoughtcrimes without any notice.  Ultimately, what happens to Thought Criminals is they are interrogated, tortured, re-brainwashed, and forced to publicly retract the troublesome thoughts they had, admit they were wrong about absolutely everything, and confess their utter depravity, including frequently bogus accusation tossed in to bolster the efforts of the reputation blackeners.  They are shells of their former selves, broken and old before their time, grateful to be readmitted to the system that did this to them.

Special Language

There is a special language, a jargon, spoken in Oceania.  Citizens call each other "brother" or "sister" and there is a dictionary of approved language.  The dictionary doesn't add a number of special words to the langauge.  What is being done is the vocabulary of the people is being progressively limited.  It is being systematically shrunk.  Citizens are given the terms they are to use, and children aren't even being taught any other language other than "newspeak."  This is to increase the number of thoughts and ideas which can no longer be communicated without straying outside the bounds of "insider," approved language.  For example, a citizen couldn't use newspeak to criticize his government or question its agents, as the approved langauge used to talk about them doesn't allow that, and he has no other language.  Ultimately, the approved langauge is stark and grey.  All swearing or vulgarity, and even colourful and emphatic language is slowly being edited away, and people's speech will less and less bear the stamp of a personality, as it is all "scripted."  Spies and thoughtcriminals will be recognizable by their inability to speak like the insiders do.

Special Thinking

The way the citizens in Orwell's 1984 are indoctrinated involves something he calls "doublethink."  Doublethink is the learned skill of thinking two contradictory things, and not being bothered by, or even aware of, there being any contradiction at all.  Every citizen needs to learn how to do this.  Every citizen needs to be able, when the government says, for example, "2 + 2 = 5," to set aside his or her own thinking, and just know on a deep level that this must be true, as the government has sure enough said it.  Intellectuals and deep thought are always viewed with suspicion.   They do not help the system. They have "questions."  Intellectuals disappear with regularity in Oceania, their thoughts, deeds and ideas, and even all sign they ever existed, carefully deleted and edited out from the history and consciousness of the citizens, who may not speak of these "unpersons."

Enforced Drabness

Overall, the people live in an enforced drabness, with no means of expressing one's own individuality by a brightly coloured or uniquely styled item of clothing, colourful slang, or anything of that kind.  The people become completely interchangeable, eventually. 

   The women marry lovelessly so there can be children, and the children are thoroughly indoctrinated by the continual lectures and meetings all citizens unceasingly attend, and they then spy on and report their parents if they catch a whiff of individual thinking or feeling in the home.

   The character of Tom Parsons is in many ways an "ideal" citizen.  He is always smiling, unlike the usual paranoid, frightened, depressed folk around him.  He happily eats anything the cafeteria dishes up, believes (and gets excited about) anything the government says, even when it's patently contradictory, and enjoys the public confessions and executions which are continually going on.  He gets enthusiastic about each new rally, meeting or briefing.

Apparently Profound Slogans
The Party in 1984 has slogans like these:

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

   To better reflect what is taught in Brethren circles, I would alter the first slogan to say "Division is unity."  And I am very familiar with the old saw: "in order to be truly free, one must give up one's liberty."  (to the system)
   I've sat through some big brother's meetings.  The ones which "mandated unity" through supporting division.  The ones which "helped" the people who had lost their ability to doublethink by kicking them out and making them unpersons.

Projecting?

It is very possible I am merely projecting my own crap upon this book.  Then again...

  

Real

Real is a pretty deep concept for me.  My friend Mark pointed out once that people like he and I (and many of our friends) have "trouble" with groups of people, for instance in government or churches or committees, because we are in endless pursuit of something we can recognize as "real."  Real in the sense of "This exists.  No one is making it up.  You can hope in this, or at least look forward to it continuing on in future, with an existance and a life of its own."  And groups of people always seem to be imagining things.

   I work in a school.  Most years, there's some guest speaker with what we teachers call a "magic bullet" with will supposedly turn everything about our jobs around in a great way.  The police take bullets more seriously, and when it comes to people who want to revolutionize police work, they call these little pet projects of inanely grinning, jargon-spouting fantasists "bandaid solutions."
   Every year these well turned out keeners are paid to visit.  Different people each time.  We must go sit and listen to them, and are encouraged to go to seminars and retreats and things to hear about all this stuff.  And if we do go, when we are green, it's very easy to drink the Koolaid.  To get wrapped up in the group movement.  To believe it's real.
   But the reality is, you see thing after thing after thing presented as The Next, Last, Big Thing to End All Things, and six months later no one remembers that thing ever was, nothing has been implemented fully, that person seems to have headed for the hills, and there's a new thing you can't do without not doing the old thing.  And there's always a next person with the next thing.  With a big white smile.  If said grinning someone has been appointed the new Head of Something Or Other, poised to implement a magic bullet, well a year later, that position isn't merely vacant, it frequently no longer exists.  The continual renaming of everything makes this shell game very hard to follow.  People come and go, and the first thing they do is rename everything they can, to mark their territory, and the next thing they do is present their magic bullet.

   The reality is, you can imagine fixing everyone and everything.  But you can't really do it.  Not by trusting people to be smart, after you've tried to inform them, share research, present your vision.  And not by trying to force them, Hitler-like, to follow your will.  You can't fix people.  And you really can't fix their systems.  The stuff you imagine isn't real.  You can just barely, embrace growth and do good stuff yourself. And that's good.  But you can't fix everything.  And any one-size-fixes-everything system is pretend.

Made Up?

As a child, I was continually made to fear things that didn't seem to really come to pass, or bring danger.  Star Wars does not seem to have made me worship the devil or (worse!) follow Buddhism.  And the Rapture has not happened, and so I have had to live a life I was taught I did not need to worry about. (I have had to live past the year 2000, for instance.)  And I have had to go into middle age.  Because believe in it as real or not, the Rapture has not happened in the time and way I was taught it would, as a real thing.  And my belief in it formed the person I became.  And not always in ways that have made me deep, spiritual, effective, empathetic, forward thinking, prepared, or any of that.  The danger of Star Wars and Ghostbusters and Star Trek does not seem to have been real, any more than was the hope of an imminent Rapture (occurring, it was promised, first in 1984, then 1986, then 1992, then 2000, then 2001, then 2011 and so on...)

   The response of the average secular humanist is simple, as to this: nothing about Christianity is real.  It's all made up.

   So is it?  Do we do whatever we decide to do, and then tell ourselves God told us to do that?  Because if someone observed and listened to us, and then ended up concluding exactly that, they really ought to be forgiven it.

   All this has made me think a great deal, my whole life, about what's real.  And today it leaves me always asking "Can I experience a real God, and one who is seeking me as I am seeking Him, and who doesn't need me to make Him up?"  And in all Christian doings and endeavours, I'm always sorting things into two baskets: the big basket is for stuff that can be made up.  Stuff that Moonies and Tony Robbins and countless self-help gurus and performers have done already.  The groupthink, the "comfort" in following along with a a group, following leaders who claim to be able to answer any question you can think of (or which you can't avoid tripping over), the excitement of being part of a group of excited people, wrought up on purpose, buying into being wrought up, with people there who are paid to work them up.  That kind of stuff.  Are we worshipping hype?

   What I do, is I put all of that into a basket, to place to one side.  To "screen out" while looking for something I can trust.  I don't trust stuff anyone could make up.  I don't trust stuff you can make people imagine, as a massive group catharsis, playing off their psychological problems.  I don't trust group stuff.  We've all seen footage of fresh-faced Nazi Youth, feeling humbled and honoured and ecstatic and a thousand other good, uplifted feelings, all because they got to listen to and follow Adolph Hitler.
  The other basket is for stuff that we couldn't make up.  It's a very small basket. Usually it's empty.  And it's pretty much always about meeting Christians one or two at a time.

   Because I trust people one or two at a time.  So, you're a Christian.  Can I experience and hear about that and what it is for you without you telling me stuff you mainly imagine and are making up to comfort yourself?  Oh, you need me to come to your church for that...  Why?  No, I'm being quite serious.  I'm not trying to be funny.  Why can't we talk in twos or threes?  About real stuff.  About what's actually happening, and not just what we want to imagine might be imminent.  What's with the scared face?  Wait, where are you going?

   This is all very suspicious.

   Can you be a Christian by yourself?  Can you be a Christian around me without your pastor and your church peeps hovering?  Why the hell not? I need to know.

   I try to meet Christians to get a sense of who they are, and what they've got going on that's both Christian, and perhaps something I can believe in.  And what I get it an unceasing facefull of a veritable firehose of happy "MY church..." babble.
  You're praising.  You're planting.  You're missioning.  You're mentoring. You're imaginizing. You're visioning.  You're verbing nouns like the Rapture's tomorrow.  It all sounds a bit desperate to me.  It reminds me of what extremely ADD kids do when I give them a small thing to read.  A simple, real task.  Quantifiable.  But suddenly they explode into all manner of distracting, random, desperate diversionary tactics to avoid, avoid, avoid.  It sounds to me like you live in a world of claims rather than results.  It sounds to me like you're avoiding reality.

   And this matters to me.  I need to believe in stuff that's real.  Not stuff we're making up.

Worshipping the Work of Our Own Emotional Delusions

The Old Testament, when I read it, seems to me to be about how God was real and everything, but every time He reached out to people, they demonstrated clearly that what they really wanted to do was invent their own gods, religions, rituals, sacred places, sayings, teachers, prophets and everything.  No doubt these theological inventions were unchanging, predictable and cooperative.  No doubt they provided a clear, direct connection between what you expected, and what the thing you made "did."  One sacrificed child always guaranteed a rich harvest.
  If you make a god, or a religion, you make yourself its bitch exactly how you wish to.  And you expect it to act how you've planned it will.  Many of us are suffering today because our made up stuff isn't treating us how we imagined it would. Our psychology is written all over it.  We have self-defeat, self-punishment and self-destruction running right down the middle of us.  Is God "in" that, or trying to fix that?  Is He predictable, like invented gods?  Sacrifice = favour?

   Because the God that I believe is really real doesn't work like that, I haven't found.  My parents and their church have sacrificed most of the children, in one way or other.  And there has been no harvest, for most of them, in the autumn of their lives.  There has been a spiritual drought, and an emptiness of life in which they seem befuddled but resigned to be living out their last years.  After all, their psychology tells them they deserve nothing better. 

   It's not easy to believe in a real God, for me.  I was raised that He was shame, doubt and fear.  An unattainable standard.  Judgment.  That was about it.
  (Now, how could that god have created almost anything I see out my window?)

Isaiah

I'm very used to people reading the bible, which is set in a very specific, obvious cultural and historical context, and shamelessly "making" it all about them.  Showing how Jeremiah was preaching the Calvinist gospel, or Jesus was teaching people how to be good Christian testimonies in modern America, what with Obama wrecking everything.  Explaining how what Mark wrote was really about our young people's fellowship weekend, after all.
   Today I was reading in Isaiah, and seeing how much of a "private conversation" it was between God and Israel, with Isaiah acting as intermediary. Often, these kinds of messages are not even to Israel as a whole, but only to the remaining "Judah" bit of the nation/religion/race.  So I am very conscious that it seems pretty made up for us to pretend that all of this was REALLY written aforetime so we 21st century Christians could make it all about us, who couldn't be further from the original audience in most important ways.  But we do that anyway.  It's not just "written for our learning," we don't think.  It's really written all about us.  Written directly to us, in fact.  We read it like that.  That's like reading Romeo and Juliet, believing that William Shakespeare had written it solely to seduce us, here, reading it today.

   I was trying to let Isaiah be what it was, this morning.  It's hard.  My training goes against that.  But then I read a bit which had God laying out his plans.  He reassuringly said that His wrath was only for a little time.  I'm often bothered by how much like an abusive husband His prophets present Him as being: "I'm beating you, but you earned it, it's your fault and it's for your own good.  I'm angry.  If you wouldn't make me angry all the time, I wouldn't have to beat you."  Hard to read that.
   And then I realized that I was judging God and deciding that I didn't respect it if He got mad.  Like, ever.  With anything I or anyone else ever did.  Because as a child, I was taught that He was always Puritan; dour and humourless and pinched-facedly disapproving of anything good or fun or nice.  Who could respect Someone who was like that?  No one.  So either we have to learn to respect people like that, or accept that maybe we're imagining God is like that, based mostly on our parents, and maybe we need to quit doing that.  I'm not doing terribly well at leaving all of that behind.

   But while reading Isaiah, I realized that if you have a relationship with people, people get to get mad.  Because they're people.  People need to, and do, have various changing responses to the interplay among us all.  And saying "You don't get to get angry. If you do, I don't like you" is no way to connect or relate.  It's a way of saying "If you're that part of you, then I don't like you.  Be the you I imagine you are, the part that I can like without growing or learning anything about you."

  Now, God doesn't need my permission for anything.  I don't "surrender my whole life into His Hands" Sunday mornings, because I am painfully, sometimes resentfully hyper-aware, that He has always had it in His Hands, since before I was born.  I have no say.  I am not my own and have never been.  I can't surrender to Him what is already His.  And He's not waiting for me to surrender in that imaginary way.  He's been underway with His "efforts" since absolutely forever.  He's not waiting.  And I am, Heaven help me, as much in His clutches now as I have always been.
   Often I want more freedom than that.  But God doesn't need my "permission" to get angry.  Yet this afternoon I felt this outpouring of rightness and goodness and worth in accepting the reality of what He's already doing, which is feeling however He wants to.  In not making Him up. In recognizing His personhood. 

   If He's real, and I'm not making Him up, I neither get to make up what His ideal emotional responses would be, nor what His actual emotional responses are.  And I have to live with not knowing what they even are, most of the time.  Because He's not localized to One Place, nor is He explicable and a peer of mine.  (actually, I can't really figure out any of my closest friends either, now that I'm being honest.)
   If I made God's emotional responses up, of course I could know them all the livelong day.  "God was fairly pleased when I first woke up, started to disapprove of the flow of my thoughts toward noon, lost interest around 2:30, liked something I thought at 3:05, but by 4:15 was getting downright huffy with what I was thinking."  That's not real.

   So I accepted the reality that if God's real, He will feel what He wants.  Mostly I won't know it, and I am a fool to make a lot of assumptions about how He "should" feel.  It used to be simpler.  I grew up with Him always being angry.  It was easy.  How does God feel?  Disappointed, furious and lovingly not destroying us.  Always. You could set the church clock by that.
   And I got quite tired of that "person," as time went by.  So long as I recognize that maybe this isn't real, maybe it'll work out.

   And then I read the next bit of Isaiah, and it was to foreigners.  Not Jews.  Foreigners.  Like me.  And to eunuchs.  Which I might as well be, in Brethren terms.  And there was rather a promise there: if they keep his Sabbath (stopping doing one's own business, and resting) and keep his covenant (that's a more complex idea for a modern Christian gentile), He will recognize it.  He says (through Isaiah) that He will set up a monument and give the faithful person a name/reputation/title for it.  A monument and name that are better than sons and daughters.  The eunuch is tempted to say "I am a dry branch.  There will be no new life, no off-growth or further branchings from me."  The foreigner is tempted to say "I'm not a Jew.  I don't fit.  I'm outside the loop.  God's just for Jews. He talks to them."  And God is saying that He will honour these foreigners and eunuchs, for being faithful.
  Now, maybe one has to believe in an afterlife to believe in that honouring ever happening.  Because I'm not sure I can believe that the right people always get the right honour and recognition in the span of their life on earth.  I don't think that normally happens.  So I need to try to believe in an afterlife.  I think I do, but I don't allow myself to indulge in imagining it, in order to comfort myself when it sucks right now.  I'm looking for comfort and fellowship, commiseration and ideas to try, now.  I'm looking for a God who's interested in something other than catching wrong-doing.  I'm looking for a God who gets involved and is behind actual good happening for actual people, now.

   And this is the crux of some of my spiritual wrestling: It's not that I have trouble maintaining a belief in god.  Actually the trouble is that I have real problems avoiding an ingrained belief in a god who:

a) expects us to sacrifice everything fun and good and safe and nice, just cuz,

b) is never satisfied or grateful, because we're imperfect and inconsistent in our sacrificing of ourselves and everything.

   I hate that god by now. I really, really do.  Hate.  And I think there's nothing making him any more real than my hating him.  That kind of god is imagined by people like me.  People with daddy issues.
   The real God, if one is willing to stop making Him up, seems to be wholly different.  He seems to be offering something, and not just demanding sacrifice.  Any sacrifice He needs is more to help Him give to others.  It's not just so we can avoid having fun so we can charge up the Heavenly Fun Battery that inexplicably runs on our misery, emptiness, shame and boredom.  We don't keep the electric bill for Heaven paid in this way at all.  That's not what keeps the lights on and the tunes pumping.  That's not real.
   If the work of Christ is a real thing, and God has really extended it to us, then it ought to really work.  God wouldn't screw up stuff like that.  It should work.  (If we wait for it to work, given time, and let it work because we know we need it, rather than pretending we're fine.)

What Now?

I have to stop imagining God with a sour face.  I have to stop assuming, as per my made up religion, that Something Bad is always going to happen, because God's not into giving good stuff.  I have to start embracing the fact that I don't know what He's going to do, and waiting to see what that is.

   I just can't find God in a church where people sing blissfully about how blissful they can contrive to imagine themselves, in groups, in very special non-real-world conditions.  Taking church shrooms.    I can't find God by singing and talking about myself and my substandard God-feelings in groups.  I can't find God in repeated vows to "just truly, really surrender all to Him :)", as if we had anything at all to surrender. I can't find God in sitting listening to people pray and sing about how much of a disappointment they are and how far they imagine they get from God, and how they imagine He feels, and how they pray to ask Him to help make them love Him (try doing this with a spouse or date sometime and see if it's rude or not) and how much better they imagine their relationship with Him is now, with accompanying visions of imagined heavenly choirs and shafts of imaginary sunbeam spotlights hitting them as they sing about how they feel now, and how far short they imagine it falls of how they imagine they "should" feel, and how they are imagining God is feeling about that.  I can't find God in grovelling and singing about what a worm I am, and how unfaithful and how Jesus' sufferings on the cross are totally my fault, personally, and so I should try to remember every bad thing I ever did, and every horrible thing he suffered, and jolly well work myself up into an ecstasy of misery.  I can't imagine God is my buddy, my Divine Boyfriend, my bass player.  I can't find God in listening to people preach about how great it is, in theory, to have found God, and how important they and all the church stuff really, truly are, in making sure He stays found.  I can't find God in all that noise and narcissism. In what I can't see but as false piety and false modesty.  In what, even if I don't judge it, doesn't help me connect to God even slightly, but has a predictable, consistent, plainly deleterious effect on the attempt to connect with Him, in fact.

   I need a real God.  I need Him outside churches.  I need to meet people who I believe about Him.  People who aren't playing Let's Pretend.  Who aren't mainly imagining Him.  I need Him to not need me to make Him up, including His interest in good things.  And if the bible is Him wanting to be known (I can believe in that, oddly), it is telling me that:

a) He gets frustrated and mad, but always comes back afterward once He's gotten over it a bit (not because we've repented.  Once He's gotten mad it's too late to repent. Like with anyone else.  He comes back when He's done being mad.  Like all real people do.)

b) He wants good things for us, and He wants us to help Him get good things to others.  There is no health and success and meaning that's not coming directly to us from Him. 

c) He's playing a long game. One that we're not seeing.  So we can't make it all up.  Not even with Revelation and Daniel functioning as arcane, obscure screens upon which we can project our own Endtimes Blockbusters, which concocted "interpretations" say far more about our own psychology than anything about His.

Hm.