"Are you born again?"
I am born
Each morning in sunrise
In wet hung grasses
In webs bright with dewdrops.
"We are gathered this Sabbath"- nasal voice
Sweat beads on his forehead, he smiles
A palisade of teeth, and he squints at us
Happy. To be here, voice booming
Echoing into our inertia, strident.
"To worship the Most High-
Let's shout it and sing it.
Amen! Can I get an amen?"
There are echoes and echoes.
"When we sing it, when we shout it together
Brothers and sisters
We chase that old devil-"
But they are chasing me, my ears are retreating
They chase my eyes to the window.
Joyous in purity, the grey light of winter.
Below are highway and billboards and cars
All shouting; my eyes lift
I will lift mine eyes to where
Tree branches against the clouds are stark and lovely; the streets
Cannot mar the unbroken purity of the sky.
"Cry to the Holy Ghost!" and I cry
To all that is holy
Swaying tree limbs, scudding clouds.
"Get down on your knees and repent!" I cannot
The window is lovely
I am on my knees in a wood and the altar
Is fernbank and birdsong, my heart
Too bright for repentance. Leaves
Lie dappled in sunlight.
The silence is worship.
"Softly and tenderly" braying their loud invitation
"Come weep away the sin" I stand
Grim-jawed and quiet, both eyes in the hymnal,
Still seeing the window.
Monday, January 26, 2015
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Conflict
This past year I've read little and written less. I hardly know why. Confusion, depression, a long and miserable spiritual dry spell lived in no-man's land, perhaps.
I used to be buoyed up by a passionate belief in beauty. In retrospect, I think I may have believed more in beauty than in God, or at least they were so intertwined somehow, for me, that I could never think of separating them. I didn't believe the Bible because it was true but because it was beautiful, and true because of it's beauty. However, the beauty in the Bible sometimes felt like a well too quickly exhausted, a celebratory dish that became dry and bland if I tried to live on it from day to day. So the beauty of the Bible became the beauty of my idea of the Bible, broadened to include the exquisite detailing I found in the natural world, the heady fascination of literature and art. The Bible was history, humanity, falling snow, a lacy black pattern of tree branches traced against a winter sunset. I went to the fields to pray. When I prayed, I addressed myself in a wondering delight to 'God, who created all this' 'God, creator of beauty'. Beauty, beauty, harmony and beauty, beauty that could exalt me to wistful, melancholy ecstasy was the hunger of my heart. When my faith struggled, Lewis and Chesterton bolstered it up. I hardly know now whether it was my faith in beauty they bolstered or my faith in God. The God I still instinctively believe in now, in spite of my bleak sense of futility, the elusiveness, the impossibility of knowing any spiritual truth with certainty is the God of Lewis, of Chesterton- the God of hidden magical kingdoms, music, the God who surprises with joy, who speaks in legends and poetry and changing seasons. When it was impossible for me to believe any longer in the church as I saw it every day, I clung to their vision of a Church stretching across history, glorious as an army with banners, tried to believe that something transcended the petty selfishness, the narrowness, the lazy minds and plodding intellects of myself and those who surrounded me. When the Christianity I found in America bored and sickened me to death, when I had to conquer my revulsion to speak in our trite spiritual phrases and accept the platitudes of those I previously respected, my focus became global. I thought that in China, in Cambodia, in France I might find a higher idealism, a pure flame I could aspire to. I began to immerse myself in international relationships, cultural study, language study. It exhilarated me. It was easy to believe that God's calling was here, that in following him I could escape, live a life of joyous adventure, convert the heathen, mold them into the sort of Christian community I was searching in vain, share in their resultant persecution and somehow vicariously elevate myself to the sort of superior cultural and spiritual plain I imagined Christians of other nations to inhabit. I still occasionally meet younger versions of myself at this stage in the church, and it leaves me with a tired sadness. Perhaps during this period I was more sophisticated, better spoken (and perhaps not), but the raw idealism, the smug cultural assumptions are there. It was an impassioned moment in my life. I'm not ashamed of it. But I'm tired. Tired and sick at the heart and cynical. The missionary girl is dead. She couldn't convince herself.
I didn't leave the church. Emotionally and intellectually I was pushed out of it day by day by a version of Christianity unable to separate itself from a brutal and childish patriotism, a hatred of science, a fear of intellectual attainments and the honest study of anything, by a culture that glorified ignorance and oversimplification. The fundamentalist world I come from was impossibly narrow. During the moments when I felt myself honestly a part of it, when I was able to fit myself easily to that narrowness, trust it in all its invasive dogmatism, I was happy in a way. I was a part of a community. I belonged. I knew what I (we) believed and it was simple and safe. Nearly everyone I love is still there, and happy there.
The world I come from is all or nothing. The world I come from is black and white. In the world I come from, the worst is to be unsure, noncommittal lukewarm. God will spit you out like rotting meat. In the world I come from, one deviation from the accepted narrative, one false step towards independence, and your only options are repentance or hell. I no longer belong in this world, but these patterns of thinking are burned on my brain. I don't know how to find compromise, enjoy exploring possibilities. The anxiety of deviation from the pattern is overwhelming. I live in a gray wilderness, and how can I tell anyone?
'We' don't believe in gray.
I don't know how to find balance in my relationship with a God who seems so far away right now, whose character and identity seem so fluid.
The day I realized that my absolute faith in the Bible as a perfect and reliable way to know God and his will was shattered, something in me was shattered too. I can't go back to pick up the pieces I loved among the ruins, to search for unbroken images, or at least fragments whose beauty is still discernible and reassuring. The voices from my childhood are mocking, won't let me forget the perceived hypocrisy of those who 'pick and choose' what to believe, who take what they want from the Bible and throw away the rest. Maybe I'm too honest to construct a faith I'm comfortable with, maybe I'm only too broken. I can't be sure.
For now, there's a grey world of poetry, of physical realities- sunlight warm on my hair, the peculiar golden quality the light has just before evening, gardens to be planted, the delicate impudence of squirrels and birds in the yard. There's music, and humanity to study and sigh over. There's love, the beginning of a marriage, a home and family to plan for and dream of and create. There's a hesitant idealism afraid to believe too fervently in itself, in anything. Maybe someday there will be more. I think I can wait. I don't feel like having any choice.
The world of Christianity- not necessarily Christianity itself, but my experience of it, the culture of Christianity I've known so far in my life leaves me cold. The secular world equally so. I'm not traveling from one place to another. I can't stay here and there's nowhere else I wish to go. Maybe it's only a matter of learning to accept never belonging anywhere again. Rootlessness may be the price of freedom, may always have been so.
I used to be buoyed up by a passionate belief in beauty. In retrospect, I think I may have believed more in beauty than in God, or at least they were so intertwined somehow, for me, that I could never think of separating them. I didn't believe the Bible because it was true but because it was beautiful, and true because of it's beauty. However, the beauty in the Bible sometimes felt like a well too quickly exhausted, a celebratory dish that became dry and bland if I tried to live on it from day to day. So the beauty of the Bible became the beauty of my idea of the Bible, broadened to include the exquisite detailing I found in the natural world, the heady fascination of literature and art. The Bible was history, humanity, falling snow, a lacy black pattern of tree branches traced against a winter sunset. I went to the fields to pray. When I prayed, I addressed myself in a wondering delight to 'God, who created all this' 'God, creator of beauty'. Beauty, beauty, harmony and beauty, beauty that could exalt me to wistful, melancholy ecstasy was the hunger of my heart. When my faith struggled, Lewis and Chesterton bolstered it up. I hardly know now whether it was my faith in beauty they bolstered or my faith in God. The God I still instinctively believe in now, in spite of my bleak sense of futility, the elusiveness, the impossibility of knowing any spiritual truth with certainty is the God of Lewis, of Chesterton- the God of hidden magical kingdoms, music, the God who surprises with joy, who speaks in legends and poetry and changing seasons. When it was impossible for me to believe any longer in the church as I saw it every day, I clung to their vision of a Church stretching across history, glorious as an army with banners, tried to believe that something transcended the petty selfishness, the narrowness, the lazy minds and plodding intellects of myself and those who surrounded me. When the Christianity I found in America bored and sickened me to death, when I had to conquer my revulsion to speak in our trite spiritual phrases and accept the platitudes of those I previously respected, my focus became global. I thought that in China, in Cambodia, in France I might find a higher idealism, a pure flame I could aspire to. I began to immerse myself in international relationships, cultural study, language study. It exhilarated me. It was easy to believe that God's calling was here, that in following him I could escape, live a life of joyous adventure, convert the heathen, mold them into the sort of Christian community I was searching in vain, share in their resultant persecution and somehow vicariously elevate myself to the sort of superior cultural and spiritual plain I imagined Christians of other nations to inhabit. I still occasionally meet younger versions of myself at this stage in the church, and it leaves me with a tired sadness. Perhaps during this period I was more sophisticated, better spoken (and perhaps not), but the raw idealism, the smug cultural assumptions are there. It was an impassioned moment in my life. I'm not ashamed of it. But I'm tired. Tired and sick at the heart and cynical. The missionary girl is dead. She couldn't convince herself.
I didn't leave the church. Emotionally and intellectually I was pushed out of it day by day by a version of Christianity unable to separate itself from a brutal and childish patriotism, a hatred of science, a fear of intellectual attainments and the honest study of anything, by a culture that glorified ignorance and oversimplification. The fundamentalist world I come from was impossibly narrow. During the moments when I felt myself honestly a part of it, when I was able to fit myself easily to that narrowness, trust it in all its invasive dogmatism, I was happy in a way. I was a part of a community. I belonged. I knew what I (we) believed and it was simple and safe. Nearly everyone I love is still there, and happy there.
The world I come from is all or nothing. The world I come from is black and white. In the world I come from, the worst is to be unsure, noncommittal lukewarm. God will spit you out like rotting meat. In the world I come from, one deviation from the accepted narrative, one false step towards independence, and your only options are repentance or hell. I no longer belong in this world, but these patterns of thinking are burned on my brain. I don't know how to find compromise, enjoy exploring possibilities. The anxiety of deviation from the pattern is overwhelming. I live in a gray wilderness, and how can I tell anyone?
'We' don't believe in gray.
I don't know how to find balance in my relationship with a God who seems so far away right now, whose character and identity seem so fluid.
The day I realized that my absolute faith in the Bible as a perfect and reliable way to know God and his will was shattered, something in me was shattered too. I can't go back to pick up the pieces I loved among the ruins, to search for unbroken images, or at least fragments whose beauty is still discernible and reassuring. The voices from my childhood are mocking, won't let me forget the perceived hypocrisy of those who 'pick and choose' what to believe, who take what they want from the Bible and throw away the rest. Maybe I'm too honest to construct a faith I'm comfortable with, maybe I'm only too broken. I can't be sure.
For now, there's a grey world of poetry, of physical realities- sunlight warm on my hair, the peculiar golden quality the light has just before evening, gardens to be planted, the delicate impudence of squirrels and birds in the yard. There's music, and humanity to study and sigh over. There's love, the beginning of a marriage, a home and family to plan for and dream of and create. There's a hesitant idealism afraid to believe too fervently in itself, in anything. Maybe someday there will be more. I think I can wait. I don't feel like having any choice.
The world of Christianity- not necessarily Christianity itself, but my experience of it, the culture of Christianity I've known so far in my life leaves me cold. The secular world equally so. I'm not traveling from one place to another. I can't stay here and there's nowhere else I wish to go. Maybe it's only a matter of learning to accept never belonging anywhere again. Rootlessness may be the price of freedom, may always have been so.
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