Waking Up
This is personal. You've been warned.
From a very young age, I have had a voice. Though my voice was restricted under certain circumstances—for instance, within worship—I never felt that my speech, thoughts, ideas, and internal dialogue were limited, except by my own time and effort. No one made me feel unworthy of speaking; in fact, everything my parents did encouraged my own sense of intelligence and rationality.
In undergrad, after a period while I studied abroad and became aware of other voices besides my own, I went into a month of what I think of as silence. Did I stop communicating through speech? No. Instead, aware that my voice was not the sole source of truth and that my subsequent knowledge of self and other had been subjective in nature, I began to wake. That is the best way I can describe it. It was as if I came out of a long, dark night where only a single star flickered in the void, into the dawn of a thousand different voices, rays of pure truth that blotted out the feeble starlight. In my everyday life, this did not manifest itself obviously to others. The only real difference was that I was quiet when I would have otherwise spoken, gentle when I would have otherwise been stubborn and unyielding.
Soon my voice recovered from its alarmed retreat, but afterward when I spoke, I was more careful. I considered the possibility that my voice was, if not wrong, at least less helpful than other voices that could speak to the situation. My eyes were opened to the fact—and the blessing—that other voices, wiser voices, could be heard not only from around me in my peers but also from before me in the whispers of the dead. I became a philosophy major. Always enchanted by meditation and intelligent articulation and debate, I craved truths that could fill the apparent deficiency in my own thinking. I came to believe that if I could gather all of the voices into one place, I would know the answer to every question, be able to speak with a new and well-founded authority. I collected voices without integrating them into my own.
Then I came to VDS. Slowly my voice was drowned in an ocean of deconstructing viewpoints. Nothing I had believed was true seemed true; worse, nothing of what was true or not could be proven by anyone. The voices, once manageable enough that I could choose between one and another, were opposed to one another as mortal enemies, hostile to the point of complete annihilation. I lost myself. A voice founded upon nothing—upon utter lack of self-regard or dispossession of a safe ground on which to stand—dies a painful death. The last year has been truly a year of silence. Nothing except a few poems has been my own; the voices surrounding me fight for control, wrestling each other in chaos with no clear winner and no rubric for rules of valid conflict.
Only in the past few weeks have my professors enabled me to build a pure voice. Not pure in the way I knew in high school with no opposition or dialogue, but pure in the sense of being based on a strong sense of identity. They have shown me—or forced me to see, rather—how to engage the myriad voices living in my mind in conversation, to ask one, “Wouldn’t it be better if you said it this way?” or another, “I think you have a valid point there, but here you are weak.” For someone not used to this kind of dialogue, the effort is exhausting. To come to even the simplest of conclusions takes hours of concentrated effort, but the satisfaction of one solid conclusion based on an engagement with all of the sources of information—a balanced view that fits reality better than the blanket generalities of my childhood and adolescence—is worth all of the time. I don’t have to be ashamed or unwilling to share an opinion anymore, because I now have a voice that can speak to what is.
I also know that I am behind my peers in many ways, probably because of my own stubborness and unwillingness to see the plainest thing if I don’t feel like it. But as I said, I am waking up. And in the end, being fully awake is all that matters.
It’s a funny word, and what’s more, I hate using it. Because of my religious background, guilt conjures up all kinds of nasty phantoms: sin, debt, total depravity, helplessness, hatred of self, shame, hell, judgment.
And because of the ghosts of guilt, my Christology is almost non-existent. My reaction to guilt (justifiably, I think) is to reject the notion of debt to God altogether. How can God, who placed us all here, who can control our genetics and environment, who threw Eve and Adam out of the Garden (the figurative nature of Scripture being a different discussion), and who is a relational being whose very nature is love, how can such a transcendent being hold us accountable for anything? It’s like destroying an unlocked door for letting a thief in.
Even if we do screw up—and I believe strongly that the very nature of human beings is to screw up—most of the time we are either unaware of it or our nature dictates it. Further, of what I can see from mature relationships between people (which should be modeled after our relationship with God, right?), one does not hold another in debt for something that person does wrong. A mature person forgives—with no conditions—as long as the forgiveness comes in a form that is healing for both people. I am not going to ask for my ex-boyfriends to pay me for all the shit they put me through (though, now that I think of it, maybe that’s not a bad idea…). What is best for all concerned is to forgive, accept, and love one another. That’s the only constructive way to deal with it.
Which brings me back to guilt/sin. The God of the Bible seems to want something for what we’ve done wrong, even before we are born. There is a debt to be paid that no one (obviously) can pay. We, who are made by God, are unable to live up to God’s standards, so we get burdened with a debt we can’t pay. Now, if that’s not unfair, I don’t know what is.
I look at sin and evil—because I believe in both—not as engendering debt but instead as built-in stimulants to ensure growth. I don’t know about you, but the only way I can learn and grow is to experience what is destructive to growth, what doesn’t work. Instead of looking at the process as wrong, maybe we should start looking at it as natural and as a path toward spiritual maturity.
So, if there is no debt, there is no need for Jesus’ sacrifice. I didn’t say there is no need for Jesus, just for Jesus’ sacrifice. And if there is no need for a perfect/divine sacrifice, there is no need for God to come in the flesh to make that sacrifice. Ta-da! No Christology, at least in my tradition’s perception of the matter.
I do believe that Jesus was divine, but not that he was God incarnate, and I also believe that he played a significant role in God’s eschatological vision for the world.
But that’s enough for tonight.
The light is different in the fall. The air is freer and more responsive, as if it had been held tightly in place by the closeness of the sun and is now able to laugh and run around. Possibilities fall from the trees like leaves, and I smile at its exhilaration, its childlike unbounded future.
I have a lot of loves to tell you about. Tonight I informed a friend that I have been falling in love with lots of things lately, my mood matching the season’s.
Loves from today: living with three girls who want the best for me, the fall, a cup of Zen tea, three new poetry books, a supportive church home, health, cats, and laughter with friends. And my Bible has melted red wax stains in the gospel of Luke. I couldn’t ask for anything more (except maybe stains in John).
Between a birthday party for friends and a trip to the bookstore, this weekend ranks high on my favorite list for the semester, and we’re not even halfway through. Happiness, though supremely boring, is all I can write about tonight.
For me, revelation is truth. The implications of this for my theology are far-reaching and, in light of my roots, heretical, because within the context of this broad conception of revelation, people become prophets and holy books become on par with the experience of any individual, only differing in the scope of their influence and the sacredness that has accrued to them through their use in many communities over a long span of time. (In some ways, too, holy texts can be used as tools to engender revelation instead of revelation itself.)
What is truth, then? Truth is the knowledge created for an individual by her experience in the world, especially with pain and guilt (the “not-right” which incites the “right” to appear obvious). All truth comes from God, and since revelation is defined in most circles with the language of “unveiling,” or God making Godself known to humans, then my definition of truth is also my definition of revelation.
I am not saying that there are as many truths as there are people; indeed, I am claiming that there is only one truth, the truth of God. What is implied, instead, is that there are an infinite views of the same truth, just as there are an infinite amount of stances that can be taken in viewing one painting; the painting remains immobile and unchanging while the people around it change stances and view the painting from varying heights.
But what does this imply about contradictory truths that come from opposite perspectives on life? If someone has one experience that leads him to believe that it is true that someone must die for the crime of murder, for example, while another person has come to believe that it is unjust at any time to kill a human being, then has God given two people opposite revelations?
The goal of this life is not to reach heaven but to reach spiritual maturity, or oneness with God. God reveals aspects of the same truth in differing ways in order to meet the needs of all people in their unique journeys toward maturity. Truth is only the light in which the plant can grow. The growth itself is what is desired, and the fullness of the bloom, complete maturity, is the end to which we are all led, but each bloom differs from another in appearance. Importance is placed not on the “correct answer” but instead the “correct response” to God. Responding to God does not mean one is right; it only means one is trying. The point is not that Muhammad and Buddha climbed different mountains, but that they climbed. Thus, the truth that people profess does not matter, only that they came to those views honestly—in striving to find the truth. This is how two well-intentioned people, synthesizing their experiences and seeking truth in everything, can disagree and both be truthful.
I began my former blog because of someone else. I begin this one because of me.
I could give several reasons for my renewal of this outlet—journaling with pen is too slow, writing takes practice (including practice outside the academic arena), or taking the time to write slows down my thinking and centers me—but the real answer is all of these and none of them. Finding myself in a place where nothing makes sense, that everything is me and yet nothing really is, a place where interconnection is the true substance of life and individuality is a pale, threadbare myth that no one knows the ending of anymore, I also find that I must build my own room—my own place for being—before I bleed out completely into the rivers of others swirling around me.
It’s a typical practice, really. We all feel the need to be heard, but like talking in an overcrowded cafeteria, every conversation builds in volume until everyone is screaming to be heard, even by the person beside her. In a world where everyone has a voice, and so no one really does, we do all what we can to be distinctive, be new, be beautiful, when in fact we already are but never will be in the ways that we want to be. Consider this my drowning scream in the eternal roar of life.
Have you read “The Death of the Moth,” by Virginia Woolf? The essay is devoted to a tiny window of time in which the author witnesses the frantic life and quick death of a creature that doesn’t quite fit, a day moth. Both the life of the moth (so tiny, so dingy, so brief) and the death (so quick and so quiet) are strange. Unfitting. None of it makes sense. Maybe it’s not supposed to.
