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the toxic conservative arguments I heard as a child from within the very context in which those toxic arguments were originally made.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.