vacation thoughts

So, I haven't posted in the past few days, because I was here:

When I went on my honeymoon (three and a half years ago!), my husband and I got roped into one of those timeshare presentations. Next to the part where Z threatened to black out from hypoglycemic shock if they didn't release us to go get our promised free buffet, my favorite part of the presentation was a video that stressed the importance of vacations in re-establishing relationships with family members and learning more about the people you love.

Evidently, no one takes their five month old along on these timeshare vacations. If I hadn't know it already, I guess I could have learned that my son enjoys waking up at four am, while my husband prefers to sleep until eleven.

But we had a terrific time. I don't ever actually forget that my husband is amazing and funny and smart; we go on vacations rarely enough that it would be a waste to wait til we got to the seashore to remember this about him.

Other things I did while on vacation that will hopefully occupy the next few entries in this blog:

1. panic about my mortality and/or potential spinal cord injury,
2. manage, in a limited, imperfect way, to parent through these anxiety attacks,
3. reflect on the respective roles of prayer and of immediate and concrete actions in managing this anxiety,
4. finish Dynamics of Faith (!),
5. re-consider how to properly view the contents and symbols of my faith, specifically the cross and the Bible, and whether or not this means I can stop thinking Jews and Muslims are wrong,
6. take many walks;
7. pray, such as one can pray in a house full of godparents, in-laws, dogs and babies

I'm probably going to be re-reading Dynamics of Faith, but on my mind right now, and probably next up for this blog, is the idea that faith requires a community of faith -- and how do I find such a community in a cultural moment in which Christianity seems largely to have lost the capacity for self-criticism that Tillich believes is essential to it? Where do I find a Christian community that views the Bible as a way to access God rather than as the content of its faith?

If I can find that community, I may not have to have any more conversations about what the Bible says about being gay, or about whether the Genesis story is or is not compatible with what we know now to be true about the material world.

That would be a relief. My suspicion, thinking about what's occupied my mind and spiritual life lately, is that I may have become less than ultimately concerned with God -- that to some extent, my faith is, and has always been, vaguely idolatrous, and that I may need to reconsider my relationship to the specific elements and symbols of Christianity in order to better access a God who transcends Christianity, who transcends the Bible itself.