October Surprise

Hello and Welcome to you, the reader of this blog.  Happiness fills my heart as I compose these words, grateful that you are giving me not only some of your time but also lending me space in your heart and mind.

And now, minimizing my superhero powers of bullshit, as much as is humanly possible, I offer some poetry.

Me is about to be with me and work out some important stuff.  Who told me to live life this way right now?  Well, me.  I've wanted people close to me to understand why I had to leave and be alone, but, I've got to do what I've got to do.

I've never been comfortable being alone.

My relationships have not always been great.

I've hoped others would keep me company.

Now I go, alone, to comfort/confront myself.

I'll rejoin you in a month.

Re-entry

Indecipherable 70's music blared in the background, barely drowning out her screams, while I watched the violence, stricken by the horrors. All I could do was lie on the kitchen floor and shake.  Even at it's worst, I knew it wasn't real, but I felt it.  I felt it all, two weeks ago, here in Durham, NC.  My dad's been dead for eight years, my mom for thirty-seven, but that night two weeks ago, staring at the linoleum floor, it felt more real than ever.

After some time away, I've decided to write another blog entry.  Where did I go? Nowhere.  I just started writing about my childhood, and here I am, waking up from a fog of retrospection.  This was supposed to be a healing journey.  It has been, in many ways, but I'm starting to feel like I'm drawing from a potentially endless well of pain. How far do I want to go into my own mind?  How much can I tolerate and still function?

One of the things I'm learning is that lots of people grew up in abusive homes.  Everyone has fear.  Everyone has shame.  Everyone has secrets, even if only from themselves.  First, I was disappointed that the rest of the world is just as full of suffering as my childhood home.  That's been a depressing realization.  Now, I'm starting to adjust, remembering that we're all just people.  Whatever we've been through, whatever we're afraid to face, we're still just human beings, doing the best we can.

I think the world might still be a beautiful place.  I think it still could be.

Dear God

In 2006, shortly after my father's death, I sought answers from God. I had prayed to Jesus and sought to follow Him all my life, and at this point, I wanted to know why He had allowed so much pain in my life. God didn't provide any answers, so I wrote Him this heartfelt letter.
The reader may find my language extreme and excuse it as an emotional rant. Please don't. I stand by this statement and ask that, should I face God on judgment day, that this letter be my only testimony. I will stand by my words.

Is that it?

Alright, I'll add some explanation.  This was not the rant of an angry, disgruntled atheist.  It would be years before I finally transformed into one of those. No, at this point I was just another hurting Christian, staring at the walls of my hospital room, struggling with shame over my whole existence, wondering how my life had gotten so out of control, and angry at God for putting so much on my shoulders without explaining his purpose.  

Now I know God's purpose is beyond my understanding. Still, I was angry at Him. Now anger is a secondary emotion. Anger toward God masked my very real feelings of helplessness. All my life, I had striven to be what God wanted and to know and do His will.  I could see my glaring failures, but, on top of that, were the constant reminders from everyone at church that nothing I ever did would be good enough.  I had always accepted that I was a sinner, that I would never be as good as God.  I wasn't mad at God. I was feeling disappointed in myself, and somehow, for the first time in my Christian life, I felt like I didn't deserve all the blame. There in my room, waiting to go to group therapy, I decided that God had done enough to me throughout my life to warrant a personal explanation. I didn't care about the excuses that Christians make for His lack of personal appearances. I was tired of waiting politely.  God could come talk to me and help me understand why, or He could buzz off and leave me alone.

I never got an answer. God never showed up, not there, not then.  The next day, I asked my therapist about the meaning of life.  "Everything happens for a reason." she began.  I perked up, ready for my answer. She let me down hard with "sometimes the reason is just that your dad did meth."  Again, my anger stirred.  I wanted someone to provide the answers. Hadn't they always told me to listen to adults, obey God, and be good?  Hadn't they said it was for the best?  Well, what is one to do when we get to the end of our ability to cope?  

When I was eleven, I used to study a poster of a kitten hanging from a rope by one claw. The caption read: "When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on."  The happy hopeful message got me through many a beating in that room.  I kept praying and holding on and hoping. It helped when I was eleven. At 35, I wanted more.  God didn't seem to want to give it, and I decided to stand up for myself. I would rather have my dignity.  Maybe this was the beginning of me walking away from belief in God, god, or gods.  I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing.  I'm just trying to face reality.  

I tried to make myself better for my Dad, good enough to avoid being beaten. Long after I left home, I tried to please God.  Frankly, if he doesn't want to face me with some answers, then I don't think much of him. Honestly, I don't think any such being exists.

A Holiday Blog Update

Thank you, reader, for taking this short journey through my thoughts. Writing is cathartic but not like knowing that I'm being heard and possibly even understood.  Life from inside my skull has been frighteningly lonely all my life, so much so that I've barely been able to face my feelings of loneliness until recent years. Most of my life, I've run from my own thoughts and feelings. I've run from myself. I've turned on the television, made myself a snack, tended to the people around me, sought connection and validation through sex and intimacy.  I've also bored, and possibly entertained, countless listeners with my monologues, mostly performed to keep from having to sit, alone, with myself.  When you read these words, part of a bridge has been made.

With the Holidays upon us, and being a survivor of severe abuse in a home where Jesus was "Lord," my thoughts turn to the idea of "God."  I'm always thinking about God

Yesterday, I tried to have a conversation with a pastor.  For a short while, years ago, I attended his church with my family. When I saw him, I thought it would be nice to say "hello" and reconnect, another of my methods for staving off the unbearable loneliness of being. So, we talked for a bit, and the talking turned to theology.  He seemed intent on making the point that thinking about God was not as valuable as "knowing" God.  My regular readers can probably guess that I disagree completely, but I didn't fight with this man. Of course, now that I'm here alone with my computer but cherishing the time-lapse connection I share with you, my reader, I would like to go ahead and make my counterpoint to his argument.

Compared with dubious claims of "knowing" God, I prefer thinking about God, conceptually. As a for instance, consider whether you know anyone who claims that God is their god but lives in a way that almost makes it look more like money is their god. In my mind, whatever drive has the most influence on my behavior is my god. If we think of "god" as a word or, metaphorically, as a position of hierarchy in any given set of ideas, then we can more easily evaluate what kind of relationship we actually have with "him."

I used to know God. That's what I told people. "It's not a religion; it's a relationship." Right? You've heard this before? Yeah, me too.  My pastor/friend would surely agree. He seemed to think that knowing God was more important than knowing about God. To me, relationships must grow past insisting that we truly love and know a person to a deeper level, actually finding out about them and also about ourselves.  Ironically, while insisting that knowing God was more important than knowing ABOUT God, my friend was not so concerned with what I thought as he was with telling me what to think. While claiming, when it came to God, that he was about knowing above knowing about, when it came to his relationship with me, this man was ironically more concerned with informing me than knowing me. In all the talk about relationship over religion, have people just made a religion of the concept of relationship?

I don't mean to pick on my friend the pastor, but he doesn't really know me. Do any of us know each other? However well we think we know each other, truthfully, we all live in our own distinct worlds of memory, thought, and belief. To prove this to yourself, think of a romantic relationship in which you were surprised at some point, long after those glorious moments of knowing and being known, to find that you didn't really know the person at all.  I was married for 12 years to the mother of my four children. We've been separated for seven years now, and in the last few of those, I have, again and again, been shocked by simple discoveries about her mental experience which had previously been unknown to me.  How could I have missed these things? I live in my own mental world. Knowing another is no simple feat.  How can anyone say with confidence "I know God?"

Hey Christians, I get it. I've always preferred to serve my own mental comfort and banish indecision about God and the meaning of it all. For most of my life, it was comforting to find answers to my questions and settle on more definite ideas about who God is, what God wants, and, most importantly, what choices I should be making at any given moment.  Mystery is uncomfortable.

If I hadn't had a complete mental crisis over memories from childhood and their effect on my present-day life, I never would have dared to entertain my doubts.  So, I'm not bragging or trying to insult believers.  There's nothing extra-special about me.  I just got desperate enough to admit that my imaginary relationship with God, along with all the corporate Christian thought connected to it, was just another exercise in distraction from the fearful truth that I don't know which door to open next.

Maybe I'm allergic to claims of a close relationship with God, because my dad claimed to be God's right-hand man in the dirty work of handing out vengeance to evil-doers. He believed that a super-being created this planet with humans in mind and was in complete control of our days as well as the moments of our deaths.  It seemed like sound Biblical theology when he would assert these things. He reasoned that if God brought someone into his life, it was for judgment. If the almighty creator wanted that person corrected, He would allow them to anger my dad.  If God wanted that person dead, He would allow my dad to kill them. As a kid, reading Bible stories of an angry, jealous God who wiped out ungrateful non-believers in mass groups without apology or regret, it was easy to see how my dad came to these conclusions.

I didn't know how to make sense of God killing people, but I didn't like the idea of my dad killing anyone, whether or not God approved.  Somewhere opposite of selfish anger and murder, I learned to value connection and love.  Thank you for allowing me to build a bridge and exorcise my memories and demons. If you don't mind sharing these alarming moments of pain, I would like to lay them out over the ravine between us and join you, Dear Reader, in the land of the living.  Perhaps together, we can leave the simple judgments and answers behind and learn to discover one another in the light of love.