Update: What I've Been Doing Lately

Sometimes it’s hard for me to remember that They don’t stop existing when I close my eyes. Infants struggle with object permanence and, apparently, as an adult, I struggle with deity permanence. But it’s clear that even if I sometimes take a break from Them, They don’t ever really leave me. They are part of me--if I ever forget that, all I need to do is pause and briefly consider living the rest of my life without ever creating something again, without ever clearing off my desk and resetting the foundation so I can build anew, without ever reinventing myself or recasting my life. That’s laughable, because creation, building, and rebuilding is in my blood. It is the substance of me. And I am that way because of them, so…

I have spent a few months wrestling with the attributes of god, and trying to make peace between my rational side and the part of me that holds fast to things that aren’t rationally explained. It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I challenge Them with the problem of Their existence, in the end they still exist and I am beginning to find the redundancy of this lesson comforting. I have changed some of my thinking about the particulars of who/what They are and how they function in the world I observe with my mortal senses. And I have dipped into the backwaters of my childhood to root out false conceptions and erroneous assumptions that seeped into me via the conservative culture that surrounded me in my small town.

Ironically, in order to make peace with my conceptions of my gods, I had to spend a lot of time reading progressive Christian blogs about a concept of god that I had long since walked away from. It gives me a certain sense of strength to know the loving progressive arguments against the toxic conservative arguments I heard as a child from within the very context in which those toxic arguments were originally made.

In other news, I have passed an important milestone which has been eating up what time I might have spent blogging about my spiritual journey as of late. The process I started last May has come to fruition here in April: I will be starting my PhD in the fall. :)

I cannot guarantee that being done with the process of applying, getting accepted, and registering for classes will mean more time for blogging or going to chats or any of the things I used to do before I got caught up in the stress and excitement of all this, but I can say that you can rest assured that things will be interesting on my side of the screen even if you don’t hear much from me.

"Should"

Somewhere along the way, my online life went from being something I was doing because I needed to do it in order to stay sane and connected, to being something I was doing because I “should” do it. And that’s a problem, because “should” is an inherently transactional thing which kills a lot of otherwise useful and enjoyable activities. 

That’s where this post could both begin and end, except that I noticed the problem of “should” cropping up in a space that hits a nerve for me. Because I noticed that it is also killing some folk’s personal religious practices, which is a crying shame.

A Road Untraveled and Three Inches of Grace

 I didn’t see the little girl lurking behind the row of parked cars until I was almost upon her. There was a bright flash of pink against the white ice that paved the street, and there was barely enough time to recognize the shape of pigtails. The roads were treacherous and I wasn’t going very fast but the ice fought me and the break pumped under my foot as I continued to slide forward. Groceries rolled off the back seat onto the floor, unheeded as I suddenly locked eyes with the child who had stopped in the middle of the road at her mother’s shout, staring at my car with the same sort of innocent fear one is more accustomed to seeing in the eyes of foolish fawns in the spring twilight.

This can’t be happening, I thought, please don’t let this be happening.

It didn’t.

Brought Into the Fold

I started folding some seven years ago after a strange and potent dream. It was 2006, some seven months before my mother’s diagnosis, when I first dreamed of paper birds. I dreamed of my fingers gliding over creases and angles of white and red coming together slowly in a figure that was more than the sum of its parts. I dreamed that the paper bird suddenly came alive and flew out of my hands, delicate and trembling with the joy of living.

Returning to A Space to Exist

After the fact, I wasn’t even sure what had happened, but I woke up with a sense that the unremembered night had been important. It was the first real snow of the year and if I were being cynical, I might think it was the cold which woke me before my alarm (despite my perpetual state of sleep deprivation). I wasn’t being cynical, though, so I thought first of my Father’s connection to the winter storm--and that’s the true miracle of the thing: that my mind leapt to the unseen explanation.