Another smattering of thoughts from throughout the week. Is this a sustainable blogging pattern? Maybe not, but maybe!
1.
It's easy for me to be pacifist because I also believe in a deity that can dole out justice. So I can do what I need to do, I can persuade and fight and not have to take a life. I'm not sure where I would land on that if I didn't. I think it would be reasonable to believe in taking the lives of a few to save the lives of many -- I think I'd feel more urge to engage with the trolley problems of life. I'm trying to parse out how that affects (or should affect) how I think about violence in protests and/or war.
2.
I checked out my old home church's Sunday morning sermon this week, just out of curiosity. As I'm cleaning out the old pieces of hurtful theology that goofed me up, I've felt a little bolder about being able to go back into those spaces without hurting myself. I am pretty good at sensing when something's going to touch upon old wounds, though, and this week's sermon pretty early on hit on some mildly triggering stuff, so I "noped" out of there after about 5 minutes but I wanted to chat about it VERY briefly here...
The analogy being used for our relationship to God was the potter/clay one, and was used in such a way that it conjured an image of me just... being just a big gross blob of nothing with literally no value until God twists us around into whatever shape he feels like. And I think I know what they're getting at, but it's a framing that encourages me to dissociate my spiritual self from my non-spiritual self, that pushes me to see myself as a hideous husk that fortunately gets to wrap myself up in a pretty cloth that is God. But any second that cloth slips, the hideous husk remains. It is nearly impossible for me to hear these analogies and not hear again the message that the very core of my being is seen by God as useless, disposable, ugly, gross.
The potter/clay analogy is Biblical, of course, so I'm not comfortable hand-waving it away, but I always think of it much more in terms of that old story about the artist who was asked how he made a particular elephant sculpture: "You just chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." That there is a core piece of us that God already sees (he made us in his image, and something of that must remain), something valuable he is fighting for, and when he changes us and grows us it's because he's clearing away the pieces of us that cloud who we really are, who he made us to be.
That tiny reframing makes a difference because it means that we are not fighting our own nature when trying to follow God. We are instead fighting for it. And it means I'm not trying to reject my feelings, my experiences, my melancholy, my introversion, my relationships. I am trying to full realize them as they were meant to be, without being clouded by the guilt or pressure or fear of "doing things wrong" that obscure so many pieces of my life.
I hadn't processed out exactly why that sermon intro bothered me so much until just now, but that's it. It was an instinctive reaction against that idea I've wrestled against for so long: That the enemy is me.
3.
You know what I've realized stresses me out more than it should, given how mundane it is? Paperwork. I have an innate ability to screw up simple paperwork, and as my job has gotten more paperwork-heavy over the years, it's stressed me out more and more.
4.
I'm still ruminating on that Sunday sermon and the way I've reframed that sense of identity. I feel like it all comes down to the question of am I, at my core, evil, and God covers it up? Or am I, at my core, good, and sin covers it up? Which is my true self and which is the modified version of it? I feel like the doctrine of original sin, which was taught to me with great emphasis growing up, leans toward the first one, in which case of course you can't trust yourself -- you're evil to your core and there is nothing good in you. But I don't think it has to be taught that way. We are, after all, created in God's image, and what on earth does that mean if we are also simultaneously created evil? I think perhaps my parents might say we begin as evil at the core but then can be truly transformed into our Christlike selves which is also the deepest part of us, but too often that transformation gets painted in a way that still encourages us to deny our deepest wishes, fears, hopes, and emotional responses, not because they're returns to bad habits, but because they are us and we are evil.
This reframing matters to me. It matters whether my Christian faith as it matures will lead toward better hiding who I am deep down or better revealing of who I am deep down. It matters whether I as a Christian of 20 years will be better at covering up my feelings vs being better at understanding my feelings. It matters whether I'm just piling on layer after layer of new paint vs scraping away the old ugly paint to reveal what's truly underneath. One leaves me in despair and self-loathing. One inspires me to move forward toward what I was created to be.
5.
Moving from one side of the political spectrum to the other is often framed by those who didn't move in terms of that person becoming an "angrier" person. I think largely because they suddenly get passionate (and sometimes, yes, angrier) about things that their previous community didn't prioritize so now it feels like they're getting "all worked up over nothing."
But I want to take a moment to acknowledge the effect that moving further left has had on my art consumption. Deliberately diversifying my film, TV, and book reading as a part of that has brought me a great deal of joy. I love finding a new story that I feel like I can connect to in a way I know I wouldn't have before because it was dealing with experiences outside of my own. I would not have adored Black Panther and Blindspotting and Sorry to Bother You (2018 was a powerhouse year for mainstream African-American cinema!) five years ago the way I do now, but now they reach me. I would not have appreciated the quietness of Tomboy five years ago, or fallen in love with how Steven Universe plays with gender expectations. I was not as wildly delighted for the Spanish-language West Side Story or the Deaf West musical productions when they first happened as I am now. I feel like my art consumption has grown richer and deeper and more challenging and more beautiful.
It's so surreal sometimes to hear things like "the Left just wants to be outraged at everything all the time," because I associate my beliefs so strongly with this new growing feeling of love and joy at realizing the world is not all about me. (And then of course I try to take that belief into the rest of my world as well as I try to connect with those unlike me and understand what it is important to them and try to support them as best I can.)
6.
I feel like I used to have a lot of non-judgy Christian friends. Then as we all got older, either they all got judgy of me or they stopped being Christian, and now I'm just... alone.
My dad recently said something along the lines of, while we all sin and do bad things, there being inherent goodness in people that is overlooked a lot by Christian teaching. And I realized when he said that, an idea I never really heard vocalized by a fellow Christian, how much it actually aligned with what I knew to be true but never had really put into words even in my own head.
ReplyDeleteLike I've never really been able to accept that we are, throughout our very core through and through, evil, because I see people do good things and because God clearly cares about what happens to us. And I don't really think the Bible speaks to that entirely either that we're all evil. If you look at some of Jesus’ parables, such as the one with the wheat growing and the enemy coming at night to plant the bad seeds among the good, we're the good seeds in that analogy. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t make mistakes, and that we don’t need to keep trying to follow God, but…yeah the idea that we are all rotten through and through is one I don’t agree with. I think Protestant churches also oversell it because it is so ingrained in Protestant doctrine that we are saved by faith alone and they push that since it was such a big thing for them historically, so that that leaks into their pushing the whole rotten to the core business.
In *general* I have come to realize that the way God is talked about a lot in church doesn’t quite align with my relationship with him. So often it seems him as your loving father, is very much left out of the picture. It just seems like if my earthly dad can love me for who I am at my core…than God must do so and more.
To address a bit of point 5, I really love how you put all of that as my growth with media has been pretty darn similar (which makes sense). I've been thinking more about the "outraged Left" bit more the last few weeks because it's been tough figuring out how to express how angry I am with everything going on around us, and where that anger comes from since it seems like I used to just be sad about this stuff. I think it stems from a combination of my empathy, where in the past I would have only reacted so strongly if something affected my family or friends, and where my faith moved to. I'm at a place where God is less involved than I used to think, which removes justice from their hands and moves it to us. That's where my anger pops in, because anger is a good reaction when one can take action.
ReplyDeleteBuuuuuuuut it gets messy because just being angry at everything sucks and no one will like me if I do that, which is why we've gotta pick our battles.