Writing for Myself.

Having endured fairly severe abuse during childhood, I grew up feeling rather alone.  That I'm not alone, that so many of us have horrific stories to tell has slowly dawned on me in adulthood.  Honestly, I've had to heal quite a bit to even realize i was only seeing my own pain.  Escaping the gravitational pull of denial and memory repression has been no easy task.  For most of my life, I haven't wanted to hear about others' pain; I viewed their expressions as competition for limited possible attention and care in this world.  If my pain was not the worst, then no one would ever care.  Today, I still feel like people don't really care, but I understand why.  No one could ever share their love with me in a convincing way, not enough to convince me.  I felt alone, and I kept myself there.  I knew no other way to think or feel.

November is National Novel Writing Month, apparently.  I've signed up.  I'm writing a novel.  I've set aside the retelling of my life story to discipline myself with this new project.  The idea is to just get words down every day for a month, no editing, no revision.  By November 30th, I should have a 50,000 word rough draft.  That's the idea.  Friends have told me to just free-write, just let the words out, just get them down on paper.  What's coming out so far is extremely dark.  I think I'm writing a horror story.  

My sophomore English teacher had us keep a journal.  I would just put down words without editing or revising, without worrying about where it was going.  That's what she told us to do.  I still remember the day my dad came into my room while I was doing homework.  He picked up that red spiral notebook and began reading.  I had three entries at that point.  

Later that evening, sitting crouched over my bible, watching drops of blood hit the pages, I tried to focus on my reading while I waited for the next blow to come.  I had to balance paying attention to his ranting about the dangers of free-writing with my conscious connection to God.  I heard him telling me how a teacher could turn my work over to a police detective or psychologist who might then realize I was the weak link.  I heard him explain how they would pump me for information and ultimately prosecute him for his crimes.  I heard him tell me how stupid I was to carry out such a writing assignment.

"Don't write about this house or the boat or anything to do with me!  Write about yourself, you stupid fuck!"

he said stuff like that.  It went on for hours.

There are all kinds of ways that my dad's abuse hamper and constrict me in my adult life.  My relationships are tragic shit.  My car and house are a mess.  My possessions are scattered. My finances and career are completely ruined.  My mind is sometimes a torture chamber from which escape seems impossible.  

But I want to be a writer!  It's so fucking hard!  I'm behind on NaNoWriMo, but I got down 1,500 words today.  Fuck you Dad!!!

My Brain Today

She keeps my notes.  They aren’t special, only quickly scribbled thoughts on torn pieces of paper.  She hangs onto them as if looking for a place to put them.  I wonder if her internal placement of these notes is similarly carried out.  Is the note in the dish a symbol for the fact that I wrote such a note in the first place?  Is the message important to her? Is it confusing?  Is it just more noise in her already cacophonous mental territory?

I’ve often thought that the state of my car and house is a metaphor for the organizational structure of my mind.  Perhaps it’s a puzzle to be solved, a puzzle of my own making.  My world has been crafted by my hands, under the direction of my brain and to the consternation of my conscious self.  What else resides in my mind?

I’ve been running for so long, because I feared the answer to that question.  To see the truth of who I might be or what I might have done, to be surprised by the upsetting of my cherished apple cart of reality, seemed too unsettling.  My mind chose to know less rather than to face the frightening possibility of something lurking in the darkness.  I don’t so much fear that I’ll be alone.  I fear that my own thoughts might be too much for me to bear.  Running from conversation to conversation, distraction to distraction, has kept me from facing my unknown fears.

Life and love lost finally forced me to look.  Something deep within me would not let me ignore it any longer.  I call it my self-saboteur. The Wrecker.  Mainly through public social “failure,” I have forced myself to consider myself. Maybe at just the right time, when I was finally strong enough, I was able to let myself act the pain out.  All of my life tells the story.  Even though I’ve resisted self-discovery, hoping to get by with an acceptable self-presentation, the unfolding has continued.   And now, after years of struggle, I’m actually starting to embrace the process.

I don‘t know how to solve my romantic issues or clean my car, so I‘m using this blog as a stepping-stone to cleaning, organizing, or at least doing a fearless moral inventory of my mental mess.  Thank you for reading.

Up until now, I’ve been posting in a way that feels random to me.  I’ve just been getting out what I feel.  Convinced that everything is allegorical, that the metaphors of my everyday life are a window of sorts through which I can understand past events too tragically dramatic to be processed and held in clear memory form.

Here’s another example:  At 42, I’m starting to lose my close-range vision.  A lifetime at 20/10 had me thinking I was seeing clearly. My ego has always been tied to having an eagle eye.  Now, holding my phone at just the right distance from my face is becoming unnerving.  Today though, I stepped outside, coffee and cigarette in hand, and gazed upon the skies.  It’s a cloudy day, like the beginning of so many stormy days on the sea with my dad.  And, well, I noticed something about the clouds.  I noticed everything about the clouds.  Their detail is exquisite!  Really, I’m only noticing what I’m noticing.  What’s right in front of me has always been wrapped in fantasy and dissociative denial.  Now that I’m writing, I am seeing my own way of looking.  What’s in front of me, my car, my career, my love life, and the conversation in front of me are all blurry.  The possible contents of other people’s heads are fuzzy, hazy, and undecipherable to me.  But, from a distance, I’m seeing the whole picture much more clearly.

This blog is raw.  I don’t edit much.  I just throw out my thoughts, and what ends up posted is constantly changing.  If you’re enjoying the process, thank you for coming along.  I’m sorting.  The themes and direction may seem to shift in the coming months, but what you’ll get is going to be me, more and more clearly.  That’s what I’m hoping to get from all of this.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

Fear of Fighting Back

All children go through the process of individuating from their parents, more or less, and becoming their own persons in adulthood.  I am no different in that regard.  Admittedly, I got a little stuck along the way; there were some speed bumps and derailments along the path of my psychological development.  I think it’s that way for all of us.

We become physically separate before we are physically independent.  Toddlers have strong desires for autonomy.  I used to set traps for my dad.  I used to plot and threaten.  I don’t know what he thought.  I thought I was going to kill him.  After he killed my mom, I stopped fighting him, and, for many other reasons as well, he and I were stuck in a long-lasting pattern of violent, one-way engagement.

At 12, I mostly shut down while he was hitting me.  I would cry about it later, sometimes, if I was alone, if it hit me.

At 14, I was making peace with a world in which each day, at some point, he was going to end up punching me in the face.

By 15, I was used to being beaten regularly, just looking, each moment, for a way to avoid it.

After he killed Sandy, everything got more serious.  Each angry punishment/interrogation turned to him standing over me, debating the prudence of mercifully letting me live when I carried a secret that could send him to prison.  That’s right; he was being merciful.  Killing me was the only path that made sense.  If he had been a monster, any less loving and human, I would have burned in that ditch, right on top of her.  Well, that’s how he would present the situation.  See? Things got serious.

I began to study the beatings.  I was waking up, at least to my physical reality.  Dissociating for the relief of pain and fear was no longer my automatic response.  I could feel every blow, hear every word, and just stand there, taking it.  After one three-hour evening beating with a baseball bat, Dad was surprised that I could still walk.  I was starting to take pride in my strength.  Yeah, I knew that was a little bit sick at the time, but I didn’t feel guilty.  I wasn’t the one running the show.

Still, it was miserable to live that way.  I wanted a change so desperately!  I wanted to take charge of my life, but I didn’t know how to do that without his permission. I didn’t know how to do anything without his permission.  He had told me, although indirectly, that he wanted me to hit him back, to stand up for myself.  So, I knew that was an option.  I just couldn’t do it.  Whenever he was hitting me, we were already too far into my failure as a human being for me to find the will to fight back.  I would just stand there, feeling completely hopeless, worthless, and ashamed of  the miserable excuse for a human being that I had become.

Interestingly enough, my dad had already explained this process to me.  It would take me years to connect his stories with our everyday experience.  Back then, I just went through the motions of  school, family gatherings, and secret abuse helplessly, hopelessly, day after day, watching the years peel away with no conceivable end in sight.

Dad had a lot of stories. One of his favorites was about an unnamed hit man who didn’t have the courage to kill.  This man would befriend a target and take them for a ride in his car.  He would just drive, waiting for his passenger to express curiosity about their destination.  When this would-be killer started to see his victim getting nervous, fueling his courage, he would pull out a gun and gesture with it, still smiling and pretending this was only a ride.  Then, as fear mounted in the car, he would set the gun on the seat between them.  Once both men knew that both men knew that the passenger was too frightened to reach for the gun, our killer would have the nerve to pull over and complete his task.  Dad spoke of the victim’s fear and lack of action with disdain.

I knew he was disgusted with me for standing there, arms at my side, receiving his blows defenselessly.  That disgust would ramp up his intensity, often spiraling a simple grocery store mistake into a near-death experience for me, full of righteous judgment and total disregard for any human value I might have held in his eyes previously.  Fear and shame angered him.  He would take me to that place and then take it all out on me. I would have continued to just accept my fate, but he was making me nervous.  How far would he go?  Would he kill me like he killed Sandy?  He might, and it might be that any one of these violent interactions would be my last.  I started thinking more about hitting him back.  That’s what he wanted; right? I couldn’t do it unless I could stay convinced that he wanted it. Previous fatherly encouragements are hard to hang onto when your father is in the middle of stripping away your dignity.

In my senior year of high school, I went through this whole cycle with him several times, often prompted by some simple mistake I had made at the grocery store.  He would begin to threaten me.  Once he saw my fear mounting, he would become more aggressive and more violent.  After a certain point, fighting back no longer felt like an option.  I would stand there helplessly, hopelessly, waiting for him to get tired.  Then, carrying pride for being so strong with shame for being so cowardly, I would sleep soundly and wake to try and please him again the next day.  But the beatings were getting worse.  His words of hatred and disdain were getting darker....

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

We're Strangers

A couple of years after my father's death, I was flying back to Humboldt next to a gentleman who inquired about my business. He was a little older than me, a kindly, smaller man with a narrow face and a straggly goatee. I told him everything I knew. I was going back home to spend some time trying to find myself.  "Don't take too long,"  he said. Then his face retreated to a shruggish smile and our conversation was over. He read his book. I thought of something else.

I live in a strange world.  School children of the 70's heard about the Great American Melting Pot.  We were fed dreams about cooperation, potential, and a better tomorrow. At least, I was.  Teachers told me I might become the President.  Everyone praised me for being smart, tall, athletic, artistically talented.  I just wanted to be loved, to not feel so alone.  The story adults told me about the world I lived in didn't exactly fit with what I wanted, but I was good at adjusting myself to imagine happiness in it.  Of course, times alone with my dad were a complete nightmare, but I had accepted that as a temporary component of my life, a soon-to-be-overcome hindrance to my full connection with the rest of humanity, a humanity that had something figured out, something I had never quite fleshed out in my own mind.

I live in a strange world. Teenagers in the 80's sang along to "We Are The World".  We were scared by threats of nuclear war in a climate of adults who acted like the crises would be resolved soon, leaving room for something.  Peace?  No one fed me big dreams anymore.  I was hoping to land somewhere in between my grandmother insisting I could be a doctor and my dad's "you could be a good cocksucker in prison" mantras.  As my dad got more and more violent with me, I felt more and more alienated from the possibility of ever figuring out how to be like the other kids.  By my senior year, I was happy with keeping a calm look on my face, hoping for no more than an invisibility of sorts.  Can no one see how devastatingly out-of-place and disconnected I feel?  Good.  If no one saw it, maybe I didn't need to feel it.

False confidence is a machine of inertia.  Through strength of will or fear of complete rejection and destruction, I learned to keep acting as if everything was ok.  A day at school might be followed by a night waiting in the car for my dad to be kicked out of this bar so I could drive him to the next one.  Getting up and doing it all over again with a straight face took a lot of self-control, especially when I didn't know what insanity might be unfolding at home while I struggled to focus on my physics test.  The difference between refracted and reflected light got all mixed up in recalling last night's speed purchase and the general mood of my father while his female companion for the evening asked if he would buy heroin for her.  What was this one's name?  He didn't like buying heroin for women.  That look in his eye was often a precursor to murderous violence.  Coming back to the classroom, I would look around to see if anyone had noticed me, the one in the class who didn't fit.  Then I would turn back to my test paper quickly, gripped with fear that my thoughts had been on display.  What question was I working on?  Wishing I had had time to study, I felt my self-confidence falling.  Smart was all I felt like I had.  This would surely be another mediocre performance, another failure.  I always got the third highest score on these exams, always third.  What if I had the chance to really try.  At least I still had my potential.

I live in a strange world.  It's strange to me.  When dad killed Sandy in front of me, I felt like the stranger.  I hadn't let go yet of my idea that I would someday assimilate and belong, not until that moment.  Before that day, before those magnificent, gasoline and tire-fueled flames engulfing her body, mocking the light drizzle through the trees, I had had a chance to make it.  Before that grey day, before that very second, I could have fooled everyone, passed for normal, acceptable.  I watched him staring into the fire.  A single drop of rain struck my brow and dropped from the tip of my nose.  The cold mist in the air was my messenger from God.  This was the end of my hopes. I was too dirty to ever be clean again.

I gave up on my life when I was 16, and I've been beating myself into faking it ever since.  Every morning the sun has risen and forced me to keep up the charade.  At times, like everyone else, I've felt happy and hopeful, forgetting my childhood trauma for years at a time.  It's always been there, along with the nagging reality that I just don't belong here, driving me to recreate and also retreat from the patterns of my youth, sabotaging my happiness and wreaking havoc on the people around me.  At 42, I can honestly say, this is as much as I've been able to figure out.  My life is still a train wreck.  The cars stopped moving years ago, but the parts of me that still see it happening are still impacting the parts of me that tried to forget and pass for normal in this world that still seems so strange to me.

In finding myself, how long is too long?  If I don't take my whole life to do it, won't I just be accepting a false construct?  Could I be satisfied to live out the rest of my life based upon a version of me that I made up for the sake of peace?  Should I shorten the search for self to lessen the difficulty of life;  move forward in false happiness with my fingers in my ears, blind to the nightmare swirling at my deepest core?  No thanks, man on a plane who has no fucking idea what it's like to be me.  I get that people just want me to be happy, but I'm not.  Would you be?  Are you? Would it be the end of the world if we all admitted how we really feel about this life, this strange world?  Maybe it would only be the end of feeling like strangers.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

Bible Reading and Writing

Writing about Sandy's murder is hard work.  The Investigation Discovery channel has done a couple of shows on the subject featuring well-diced interview clips with me.  I am working on my own version. It's a big story to tell, for me, because remembering watching my dad kill his girlfriend opens more than just a can of worms in my mind.  I've spent most of my life stuffing that shit down and keeping the cork in tight!

Those who know me personally, while professing to like me a lot, have certainly witnessed the pressure of whatever's in my head leaking out in angry outbursts, financial failure, and self-destructive sexual scandal.  At this point, I want so badly to be the captain of my own mind, that I am going in, win or lose, to whatever horribly frightening shame and pain resides there.  I simply must. Jesus!  Why would I want to do that?  I'm not really jumping in.  I'm creeping forward, testing the waters, and, up until now, I've taken entirely too long.

If you read the rest of my blog entries, you may find them somewhat incomplete, filled with snippets of truth, shreds of emotion, and vague explanations.  I'm circling the burning bush of my soul, with no lessor goal than to integrate my history, my God, and my own true life-purpose in a way that might just alienate me from family and friends.  When, in the Bible, a man or woman follows God's direction, it's usually with an automatic judgment and death sentence from the church leaders of their time.  If I'm on the right track, I expect nothing different.  I hope for it.

Am I just looking for a fight? Sure, but my dad is dead.  I wish no one physical pain.  I cannot bring myself to fight in anger against any one.  So, I intend to fight ideas.  I intend to fight American Christianity and family values for their role in the alienation of my father and therefore, the death of my mother and LaSandra Turpin.  Perhaps my anger is misplaced, but why not?  The church needs to be judged before they successfully inoculate the whole world against ever taking seriously the book I bled for.

Yes, Christians, your book is a laughing stock among the uninitiated.  Surely you know this.  I know it's a wonderful book, full of useful guidance for turning this world around.  Properly applied, the principles in the New Testament could have saved me from my childhood nightmare.  Of course it's too late for me, but the world still groans in suffering.  And, just hold your horses.  We don't suffer because we don't have Jesus in our hearts.  The world suffers for lack of the thing offered by Jesus that the church misses as well.  Here's a good litmus test.  Church, if non-believers aren't commenting on how you're following Jesus, there's no reason for you to announce it.  Stay home on Sunday.  Beat yourself over the head until your blood stains the pages of your Bible.  That's how I read it growing up, and, after a lifetime in church, I know that hardly anyone else read the damned thing at all.  Church, if you're not going to take the word seriously, just shut up.  Even Greek mythology is useful because no one is crazily insisting on faith in Zeus!  We non worshippers are free to learn the lessons of a system.  Bending of the knee in a fancy building is no path to righteousness.  Surely, we all know that.  Surely, I don't have to explain.

So, what have I learned in this life about God, the Bible, and humanity?  Honestly, I haven't learned much.  I've mostly been caught up in unlearning.  Don't we just take in what our parents teach us at first? Then they tell us there's no Santa Claus after all, or we come to realize that they're dangerous.  Later in life, if we're lucky enough to be broken enough to seek help, we may come to see our parents as separate individuals and ourselves as changeable.  Do some parents impart this to their children peacefully?  hmm...  Interesting...

 Society discusses the rebellion issues of youth as if it's a foregone conclusion that adult systems are perfect. Surely, children who do not joyfully conform must be flawed in some way! Terrible Twos, Teenage Rebellion.  Are two year olds completely responsible for not responding well to our systems?  Are teenagers just too sinful to get things right without physical "discipline" of some sort? Do kids need to be scared by ideas like coal in their stocking or a Hell if they don't do what Mommy and Daddy say?  I don't mean to be rude and beat up on religion, but when it's used to tell children they have something wrong with them, then it's just a fancy version of all the ways in which we communicate to children that they have something wrong with them.  Maybe children ARE messed up.  But are the adult world conventions we've bought into necessarily less messed-up?

No, it's natural to rebel against that which is unnatural.  It's also natural to adapt, conform, and tell ourselves we're happy to be advancing the righteous system that was handed to us.  Can it be natural to question all that we've accepted?

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

Lend Me Your Light

I had a pretty sweet childhood.  Mom was a beautiful artist, intelligent and kind. Dad was all-powerful and safe.  I lived on a peaceful goat farm, spending my days playing alone in the fields or listening to my favorite music in my room.  I had nightmares.  Why did I have nightmares?  Was something wrong with me?

Everyone in the family knew it was remarkable that I predicted my mother's death one day in advance.  At age five, I concluded that Jesus had magically revealed the future to me.  In retrospect, I suppose their awestruck comments about my mental prowess were covering up that everyone knew he HAD actually killed her.  I bet it impressed or shocked them that such a young man might have been more clued in than they realized.

Throughout my adolescence and teen years, Dad did his best to support my fairy-tale version of Mom's death while continually acting out the truth of the matter on my ever-stronger body and mind.  He would drink and cry, sharing his shame over not being a good enough husband to her.  I heard it so many times, but I relished in the retelling.  These were the times when he was peaceful and proud of me.  Perhaps deep in my mind, the part of me that knew the truth enjoyed these lies so much because it was just a matter of days before the scene would shift.  Not consciously, but I was aware that I would soon be cowering under his blows, hearing in loud, angry, definite tones, how glad he was that my mother had not lived to see what a worthless cocksucker I had become.  It was coming.  It was always coming.  I would endure his abuse in the moment, but when it wasn't happening, I didn't give it a thought.  I lived in a delusion.

Thirty years after he killed her, almost to the day, my Dad also died.  I wrote a respectful, dutiful obituary.  I delivered his eulogy, fairly, kindly, blindly.  I was happy he was gone, until he came back.  In the months that followed his death, my mind began a multi-year unfolding that put my teenage anguish to shame.  Friends remind me that I survived the hard times, that everything is fine now.  That's so sweet.  They're just wrong.  I have mostly suffered alone the last seven years with feelings long buried.  I've coped by largely distracting myself.  Even fleeting memory glimpses have kept me on the edge of suicide for more of this time than I would have thought I could survive.

Finally, I'm starting to face that I HAVE TO face what happened.  All of it's in there, in my head, driving me, hurting those around me, keeping me in the prison constructed for me.  Hey, happy people of today, I get it.  You might think I deserve to smile and enjoy life.  Maybe you think I should put it all behind me and life the kind of life I want.  Well, how about if we compromise?  I'll live the happy life you think I deserve.  Just please accept that the life I want to live is the brutal, demon-slaying bloodbath of exploring my emotions and memories.  I must not run.

When Dad killed Sandy, I was numb inside.  The year before, when he almost killed Patty, I was barely awake enough to see her as a person.  Rewinding through my childhood, for most of my life, always lead to an idyllic story of my Mom's accidental drowning.  After seven years of feeling and opening my mind, as much as I felt I could, I am coming to what feels like my most helpless failure, the failure not only to act but even to see what he did to my Mom.  There in that trailer, alone in the country, the three of us wrote my tragic script.  Visually, I only remember the time he cut her nose off.  The rest I've pieced together from his stories, my knowledge of his lying style, and my own adult-life failures, the tapestry upon which the intuitive five-year-old in me acts out what he knows.

Now, I'm not like my dad.  I paint pain, anger and bloodshed in self-destruction and passive-aggressive emotional manipulation.  I wear the chaos in my painted, torn clothing.  I carry the baggage in mangled possessions, stacked high in my car and the room I occupy in my ex-wife's basement.  I parade my internal feelings of failure.  I always remembered hiding in my closet.  Now I'm starting to hear her screams from the adjacent room.

I want to write my life story.  I have to write it.  Soon, I'm going to be unveiling an investment plan for self-publishing, an opportunity for you, my readers to invest in this project.  It's too much for me to struggle to survive, fixing people's houses, running out of money before payday each week, while bearing the enormous burden of entering the evil dungeon of my mind.  I don't know if I can make it this way.  Stay tuned for a chance to make a difference in my life and perhaps the world we live in.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III

I'm God, and I'm Crazy

Warning: If you are prone to strong negative emotions and judgments when hearing unorthodox and potentially "heretical" declarations, turn back NOW!

I'm God.  No, seriously, I think I Am. Yeah... well, hang on a bit, and I'll try to explain. I want to address everything, all at once, my life, the human experience, the meaning of existence, and the dizzying circus of my own mental perception and interaction with the whole.  How can I boil down my experience growing up with my dad and it's deeply interwoven religious training component. I'm not exactly sure how to summarize my ideas here in a single blog entry, but I think, if I had to boil down my overall direction into a one word, one question, one answer, it would be "God."  Three words? "I am God."  Let's see if I can get there, with a surprise ending for you, my lucky reader. Save your thanks til the end. :)

Today I caused pain for someone close to me.  I probably do it every day, for someone. I could argue my case, but that's how I hurt my friend. I see that I'm always defending myself, even though I'm tragically at odds with myself or rather, my selves.

After I went forward with the circumstances of Sandy's death and whereabouts http://www.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/04/09/california.body.found/index.html  some suggested I was an accomplice to murder. Aren't we all accomplices to the entire human experience? My dad grew up in this country, in this culture, in a Christian home, in a Christian nation, in a society that worships money, individualists, and violence.  By purchasing and participating in this society, all of us are accomplices. If we did not work to stop it, we allowed it through inaction.  Of all the people in America in 1987, I was the only one that saw what my father did. I didn't stop him, ultimately, but I was trying. All of human history is complicit in the making of Ernie Christie Jr, Sandy Turpin's murder, and my traumatic childhood.  I should ask the "accomplice" crowd if it's sinking in on any level that they are accomplices through their own passivity, not only to Sandy's plight but to the suffering of a whole world, using accusation as a way to salve the shame of their own helpless inaction.  Can I let you in on a little secret? I don't think turning the tables on my dad would have been an easy manner. There were great risks.  I didn't want to get killed.  What's your excuse? We as individuals don't know how to find out who's being abused, and we don't know how to help.  True.  But do any of us spend any time trying to figure out what could be done?  How many of us are even trying? How many of us have the time? Aren't we all too busy working our jobs to pay our loans and keep our houses? Are the rich to blame? I think I'm to blame for allowing there to be rich and poor in my world. I'm certainly not doing all I can to even the playing field. I didn't stop my dad from overpowering Sandy, but I don't do anything to stop CEOs of large corporations from living high off of the sweat and misery of their armies of minimum wage slaves either.  I didn't do anything to stop my country's government from murdering millions of civilians in Iraq.

Why is it offensive for me to suggest I'm a god? Because none of us want to carry the shame of selfishly denying benefit to others when it is in our power. We want to feel justified.  How dare I acknowledge my power and lift the curtain of plausible powerlessness to which we all cling! I'm sorry.  I know it might trigger shame to think about what we're not doing.  I personally would not be able to read a blog like this, but I think people are generally better than me and less likely to take things personally than me.  Well, no, that's a lie.  I know my writing will offend.  Who cares?

I'm offended by anyone who judges me over Sandy.  Do you know why? It's because such judgment automatically puts me in a cross. I think we should choose one of two paths of thought about the crimes I witnessed.  Either I should have done everything I could to save her or I should be excused from any responsibility.  If you think I should have saved her, then I think it would only be fair for you to devote your life and finances to saving someone or something.  If you want to get away with living your life in complete denial, then please allow that I was perfectly within my rights to watch and not intervene in Sandy's death.

Of course, I'm only offended because of some expectation of fair treatment.   Clearly, my dad taught me that life is inherently unfair; he said as much on many occasions. Jesus even teaches that Heaven requires accepting less than our "fair" share for the sake of love.  Philosophically, I agree.  How about this?  I totally failed to stop my dad from killing Sandy, but I don't want to blame anyone for being oblivious to the suffering they do not see. How about we all just try to evaluate ourselves and our own contributions with the greater good of others in our minds? How about we learn from our mistakes? I'm writing a blog.  Yes, the rest of my life might be ordinary, but I try to love people as much as I can without allowing them to run over me and beat me into the ground.  Can I let you in on another secret? Do you know how people can be kind of selfish, ruthless, and uncaring? I've known a lot of cruel people. On the whole, my dad was just like everyone else.

My dad used to say "If you don't get to Heaven in this life, nothing will change when you die."  What in the world did he mean? I've spent a lot of years pondering his ideas about salvation.  I don't believe the way I used to believe, but there is a sense in which I was saved.  Through faith in something greater than the world of me and Ernie Christie Jr, I managed to hold on to hope for something greater for me.  I learned to suffer and wait.  I learned that I was capable of choosing my path, even when I didn't feel like I had a choice at all. I've been saved by Jesus in that I didn't just follow my dad's path completely.

Now, he believed in Jesus as an actual being with a personality and a plan for our lives.  I believed the same until after my dad died. Then, I began to think about all the things God "saw" when I was growing up.  Sure, I never stopped my dad, but neither did God.  Whatever impact I had on my dad was god-like in its proportions.  I never saw God adjust the situation at all.  At least I started telling dad he was wrong.  At least I convinced him to stop hitting women.  The only gods in those private moments in my childhood home were my dad, me, and the ideas of "God" in our heads.

For me, the only useful application of religion is done here, on Earth, while we live.  I turned the other cheek thousands of times.  In one sense, that got me hit a lot more.  In another sense, perhaps I had a positive impact on the whole course of things.  Either way, following Jesus kept me stuck there loving him, and following Jesus gave me the strength to survive it.  But in the end, I'm the one who was there, made choices, and now carries the weight of it all.

© 2013 Ernest Samuel Christie III