..lies

There has been a long hiatus from this blog and I'm okay with that. I am the blogger, this is my blog, I do what I want (and I don't do what I don't want to do).

Today, I've been thinking about lying, mostly about lying to myself.

I think it's funny when people describe maturity as "getting to know yourself better", or when something shitty happens a layer of meaning will be created since someone somewhere got to know themselves better. It is strange on two levels: 1. this discovery assumes that there is an essential self waiting to be unearthed (much like religions that yearn for utopias or neo-classical economists who yearn for utopian free markets); 2. it assumes that the self is a stable destination/experience/object that can be arrived at/experienced/sensed. This process seems to be linear, as in as I get older, I "get to know myself better", and it also seems to be an unachievable goal. I can never seem to know myself well enough and that sucks, I guess.

I think the quest to know me is strange and I don't really see much of a point in it, although some person perched on a couch in an office somewhere is probably mourning my loss.

I think I am going to start thinking of "knowing myself" as being honest with myself. I have said this before, but it was much more edgy to be honest with myself, it was the part of my story where I needed to trust my doubts and intuitions when I hadn't in the past. I suppose this time it feels more like being honest with my shit, and not assuming that everything I have categorized as such, is such. I am scared to acknowledge the lies I have been telling myself about what I want and what I don't want, and I am ready to stop playing hide-and-go-seek with what I am.

I feel 23 right now, and this post makes me feel much like I am saturated in mid-twenties existential shoe-gazing.

I want to get into the practice of being honest with myself, and I want it to be something I am good at. Maybe it will negatively effect other people, I don't know, but I know that even when I am offended by someone who is being brutally honest, I always have a twinge of jealousy too.

..obsession

Over the last few days I have been obsessed with Jesus, or more specifically the fact that he seems to be the object of so much obsession within Christianity.   Thinking about the the bigger biblical story, what it says as a whole, and what that means for me today involves Jesus,  but much less ubiquitously than an Evangelical sermon or dogma session would make you think.  I suppose I am annoyed when the entirety of the Bible is unnecessarily warped to Jesus, as though every part of the text is pregnant with him and he is just waiting to be discovered behind all of the verbiage.  

What I am not saying is that the purpose, place, and life of Jesus are inconsequential or are not profoundly pivotal in the Biblical story.  The incarnation, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus are the details of the Christian narrative that embody the hope of redemption, wholeness, and healing found in the Kingdom in a profoundly loving and humble way.  That in the story of Jesus we find one of the most tangible and authentic manifestations of the love God extended to humans in our brokenness, and I do not believe that should be diminished.

What I am saying is that "it's" not actually all about Jesus.  All of the Bible is not about Jesus, all of theology should not be only about Jesus, and my faith should not entirely orbit around a bleeding Jesus on a cross.  Even though the lure of simplifying my faith to be "only about Jesus" has a certain streamlining appeal to it, engaging in that limited perspective of God's interaction with humanity and the world leaves me with a blunted and brittle understanding of God's history with people and what the future of the Kingdom looks like.

For example:  I went to a Christmas Eve service at my parents church.  It is located in a suburb of Seattle and would be considered solidly Evangelical by most standards.  Going to the service I anticipated that it would be about the coming holiday, how Jesus chose to become a shitty human being and how that was pretty cool.  After I ate my cookie and sat in my chair for a few minutes, the prelude started and the pastor walked to the front of the church.  He welcomed everyone and then proceeded to let them know that Christmas wouldn't be meaningful to them if they didn't know Jesus and ask him into their hearts.  So he lead everyone in a "sinner's prayer".   In this moment, the sequential life of Jesus (in which the sequence of events may have significance) was disregarded and an unborn Jesus was nailed to the cross in a confusing way (perhaps some sort of Evangelical abortion, but I won't go there), completely omitting his life and his teachings from the importance of his incarnation and death, let alone the grander purpose for his actions.  The resurrection was never mentioned, but I suppose that's what Easter is for.

And while the case can be made that Christmas should be about Jesus, the significance of Jesus' incarnation and birth was overshadowed and devalued when Jesus' death was superimposed over it.  The significance of the story of Jesus does not rest upon his death, it rests in the totality of his incarnation, human experience, death, and in his resurrection.  And not only that, but the purpose his life, death, and resurrection only makes sense within the broader story and hold hollow significance without the binding of a narrative.  To only understand Jesus as a God-man on the cross is to devalue the rest of his existence and purpose.

But the same skewed theology can develop when all of the Bible is highjacked and told as a story about Jesus.  Rather than viewing Jesus as an amazing tool for God to accomplish a bigger plan (the healing of people and the restoration of the Kingdom) he is viewed as the end all, be all of the biblical story, making you wonder what exactly the point is of everything besides the Gospels.

I believe that Jesus is who he says he is, and I believe that he is fully God.  But he is not God in God's entirety and creating a theology that only orbits around him ignores the dynamic and active nature of God in many other ways.  Jesus plays a role in the Story of God and humanity and his life is the most explicit example we have of Kingdom living, but he is a part of the whole, not the whole.

..identity

It has been quite a while since I have written on this blog, and I have been wondering about the role it will play in my life looking outwards.  I don't think I need to decide its fate preemptively, but allow it to be what it will become.

Since I last wrote, I have become different things: an employee, a commuter, a long-distance girlfriend, a grocery shopper.  And in all of these shifts and transitions, the role of identity and identity politics have been slowly consuming me, both in thought and in behavior.

Transition is usually difficult for people, and I feel like I fall in the normal distribution in my reaction to it.  It's exciting, terrifying, unsettling, and slightly disorienting.  Each shift dislodges a part of my identity, allows me to examine it more closely and from a different angle, and then provides me with the opportunity to retire it or reactive the identity particle in a different location.  This process brings layers into my life and gives me rosy cheeks, but it can be an exhausting endeavor to undertake.

In some ways, the transition process is a microscope into my presentation and understanding of self.  Who am I?  What elements of my self are unmovable, and what parts should be moved due to a shift in context or condition.  And how are these elements determined?  On what grounds do they stand?  Genetics, social conditioning, context, education, privilege, access to resources, values, relationships, philosophical paradigms, religious beliefs, stereotypes, positive social sanctioning, metatheories, 'unfounded' & unexplainable preference sets?  Most likely it is a yes to all of these (I have no idea about the link between genetics and preference formation), which means that a lot of who I am is determined by where I am, and who I am surrounded by.  I don't find this to be a 'bad' thing, but a condition of being a human in relationship with the world and other humans.

But I do think there is danger in allowing any of those categories (again, discounting genetics) to become hard and unmovable.  This might be seen in a person who has settled into their life, perhaps with a partner and a stable job, where the future could be remarkably orchestrated to reflect their static preferences.  Perhaps the shear fact that preferences are a plastic set of characteristics allows people to be infinitely complex, without threatening their humanity or connection to others and society.

I think that this complexity is what drives people to become concrete as they age, and it also drives people to categorize and summarize other people.  As people begin to more fully embody their definition of self, the game of identity politic becomes more straight forward and streamlined, both for the individual and the other people who are trying to 'figure them out'.

If I have learned one thing interesting in working with memory studies, it is that there is a good likelihood that people who do not actively learn and entertain abstract ideas have a more difficult time retaining their memory in their old age.  The ability of your brain to create new pathways and connections diminishes over time, until you reach a point where no new connects are made and established connections are lost.  Maybe the way our memories work is similar to the ways our identities work, as soon as you stop changing and allowing yourself to be complex and abstract, you begin to die.

I wrote this in February and I can't remember why, but I think that some of it is still true in my life today.

reality and myth

possibility and hope

want and disgust

prohibited and dangerous

fraught with bad timing, bad location, bad motivation.

always wrong, always watched, always calculated.

but what beyond all of this exists? is there anything true in the fabric of the mystery, 

or will the mystery complete itself and never be realized?

come and find peace, in the unknown and unexplored.

come to terms with change and end and lingering metal on mouth and the sense that tomorrow has no promises, 

for good and sad

amen.

Lately I have been thinking of the necessity of leaving and returning, as a natural pattern in life that facilitates growth and maturity.  Leaving is often good and expanding and returning reminds us of our elements that are more secure and lasting, and it is good to remember what we are made of.  Leaving and returning also shine a different glow on to the dailiness of life, on the little bits of mildew that form in our Wednesday afternoons that are both meaningless and profound.  Perhaps all of life is a dance of leaving and returning to ourselves and others.

Every time our cats pee on another object (like my bed, our couch, raincoats, rugs, and Carissa's computer) they look more and more rodent-like to me.

I can feel my skin shedding and I feel slightly naked in the world.

following...

This sums it up for me (or the nutshell of all of my theology):

For me being a follower of Christ means that I am an active participant in the story of God’s people and God’s love and healing of the world. I am learning how to recognize, embrace, and confront the ways in which I am broken and hurt other people, while gaining the ability to trust in God’s vision of a future where everything is whole and healed. The challenge of being a follower of Jesus is learning from his life, death, and resurrection and then translating those principles and paradigms into the small, seemingly inconsequential activities of my life. This requires me to be honest with my inabilities and shortcomings while developing in my faith of a loving and grace-filled God, who desires to be in working relationship with me. Learning from the example of Jesus, my love for other broken people is paramount in my life of faith and without these interactions my belief would lack a medium of expression. Following Jesus distinctly also shapes the way I view the future of the world and people’s lives, allowing me to imagine the Kingdom of God as a coming reality, which in turn marks my outlook with practical, redemptive hope. Ultimately, being a follower of Jesus means that I am devoted to a God that is healing my brokenness through grace and love, and through my personal resurrection I am able to turn and embrace the world in a way that models God’s grace and love to other people and systems, participating with God in the current and coming Kingdom.

..pain/hope

"Faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but, but is itself this unquiet heart in man.  Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contract it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.  Does this hope cheat man of the happiness of the present?   How could it do so!  For it is itself the happiness of the present.  It pronounce poor blessed, receive the weary and heavy laden the humbled  and wronged, the hungry and the dying, because it perceives the parousia of the kingdom for them.  Expectation makes life good, for in expectation man can accept his whole present and find joy not only in its joy but also in its sorrow, happiness not only in its happiness but also in its pain.  Thus hope goes on its way through the midst of happiness  and pain, because in the promised of God it can see a future also for the transient, the dying and the dead.  That is why it can be said that living without hope is like no longer living.  Hell is hopelessness, and it is not for nothing at the entrance to Dante's hell there stand the words: 'Abandon hope, all you who enter here.'"

-Jurgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope

..reality

Two thoughts:

1. There has been an increasing frequency of 'real world' 'real job' talk.  This dichotomy of 'real'ness/fakeness is annoying and splices up life into different sectors that probably shouldn't exist.  This morning I was thinking about what makes a world real or a job real and I think it has something to do with capitalism.  Being in school is somehow a different experience of reality, working at a coffee stand is somehow not a 'real job', but maybe its because these experiences are not within the capitalistic hierarchy.  Perhaps there is a need for money making, advancement opportunities, and pencil skirts for parts of life to be considered 'real'.  I reject this.

2. Father's Day/Mother's Day...  In some of the places fathers were being congratulated there was also recognition for single mothers and their particularly difficult parenting situation.  Reading these recognitions made me wonder a lot about the gendered nature of parenting.  I am starting to think that there is nothing inherently unique/needed in the parenting contributions of a father or mother.  The most important element of this might be that someone is willing to parent, which is a skill that transcends gender and biology.  Instead of thinking about the essential nature of a mother/father in the development of a child, I would rather think about the unique contributions two different people make to the lives of children.  This also means that a child can easily have more than two parents without it being a competition for the two highest positions.  And it means that two dads or two moms is really a non-issue too.

Apparently, I'm anti-category today.