So, basically, my church folded, and I was really sad, and I want that church back and stopped attending at all in order to tutor Chinese kids every Saturday.
I signed up for a grad course in Critical Theory and am pushing my way through Jameson.
I make more money, doing less work, and volunteer all over and take classes and may be preggers again.
I am interested in how to read Genesis, now. I am interested in how to integrate practical truths which are deeply resonant with spiritual/religious truths which I deeply want to believe.
I guess, as a starting point, things that much occupy my time and that do not matter:
1. my bulimia. I am annoyed with it, and with my own insistence on not taking the medication/working in therapy/using the coping tools I need in order to function. Ignoring it does not make it go away.
2. my "professional life." Feeds directly into my bulimia. Trolling job sites is a waste of time. I'm where I need to be right now: focusing on the million parts of my life that do not have to do with work. The conflation of my life with my job is devastating to the parts of my life that matter, once, and my freedom to be of service in the world is not located in a "meaningful job" but in the things I am able to do besides my job that help others.
Getting this clutter out of my life, finding my bearings, getting away from my overwhelming need to control and define every single aspect of my existence -- heavy enough projects for right now.
Happy Easter...
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Genesis 22:1-19 Kill Your Darlings
We -- for once, I am including myself in the culture I'm essentializing -- don't like this Abraham story. When Americans read about parents mattering, and children not mattering, most of us get outraged and sentimental. It is easy to target as intolerable the idea that a parent could move to obey anyone, even God, by hurting his child.
If we have children, we undoubtedly have hurt them over and over, out of ignorance or selfishness or indifference; but that isn't deliberate. And then, of course, in our efforts to care for our children, to present them with the best food and stimulating toys and cute overalls, we participate in a system that also produces the deaths of children (and adults): what I have and enjoy is related to things that someone else's child does not have and has suffered through. But that's because the world is not fair; it happens far enough away that we can forget that each action that maintains this world order is itself deliberate. Killing your child is an unimaginable sin; turning a blind eye to the preventable deaths of other people's children is an unavoidable reality.
We can ignore kids who die as long as the reason for their death remains large, vague, and unrelated to our standard of living, as long as the kids remain far away and speak different languages, or are nearby, but different enough from ourselves to be somehow at fault. Abraham doesn't get an out like ours. God says: kill him. And Abraham says nothing; he just gets the knife. And that, more than the child abuse we could address and the poverty and abandonment with which we could interfere, makes a neon focal point of our self-righteousness. It costs us nothing to feel, in 2010, that this whole dilemma should have cost Abraham more. To assume that, because he was willing to do it, it couldn't have really cost him that much at all.
Abraham's violence here is the kind that post-modern Americans are conditioned hate and fear most: the deliberate violence that believes it is acting out of mission. Judging from the fact that yesterday, kids died because they didn't have clean water, and I enjoyed a tasty latte, I, for one, am much more comfortable with the passive violence of living in a system in which children die and I can afford to buy more stuff. It's normal to be too busy earning money and buying stuff to think about how this might affect other people, to wonder where all this wealth is coming from. It's inhuman to look at your child and kill him, whatever god is telling you to do so. Who could do that?
Maybe more to the point: who would want to do that? I wanted to drink that latte; I want to feel good about myself but still be able to afford what I need and what I want. Basically, I don't want to sacrifice anything, so it's really a lot better for me if this man, who will sacrifice everything, is actually crazy or selfish.
But this isn't a story about a religious fanatic or an indifferent father. It's not that Abraham doesn't love his son. He does -- the text points it out so that that small, painful fact isn't lost in less sympathetic aspects of Abraham's sacrifice. Abraham's life, with respect to his own ego, but also with respect to his God, has always been about this child, and the entire nation that will come from it. This is not just what Abraham loves most, the only real family he has left, on the alter, it is who he is and who he is meant to be. However patriarchal the society, I don't believe that you slaughter your son like an animal and still want to live with yourself.
So: why? Why do we have to give up what we love most to be a blessing? Why test us at all, when you're God and you know the outcome?
I think it's because we don't know the outcome. We can't, or it would defeat the purpose: Abraham is willing to kill Isaac, not because he has faith that God will intervene, but because he can suspend his own understanding of the world in favor of a worldview in which Isaac can die and things can still be all right.
I think this is our project on Earth: to live until we get to the point at which we no longer believe that life is about getting what we want. You start out wanting basic things, move on to wanting selfish things, and then learn to want progressively more "noble" things. But what's meant to happen, I think, is that you learn that happiness does not consist of getting the things you want, however admirable and understandable those things are, however sympathetic you appear for wanting them.
If life is about having the things you want, then it is profoundly unfair to most of us and ultimately kind of pointless for all of us. If, through having and loving and valuing something, I can learn to give up what I love for something deeper, something I can't objectify and claim, then I can understand my life in terms of a purpose that doesn't become entirely arbitrary when I die and can't have anything anymore. We are given things, I think, so we can learn that giving them up won't kill us -- or, that if it does, it won't rip the meaning from our lives.
This, I think, is how God provides: He gives us a lifetime, however long or short, to learn to reach Him. To learn that we can only do so through that process by which we learn to stop trying to hold onto the things we have or go after the things we want.
It's hard to do: a lack of ambition doesn't make you seem peaceful or spiritual. It kind of makes you seem aimless and lazy. It's hard to believe that shutting up about your own mission and goals can be the right thing to do when everyone we learn to admire, we admire precisely for what they accomplished, and since the function of self esteem seems most often to be: see yourself as as good as other people.
But I do believe that my own life is most meaningful when I can stop trying so hard to determine my next step and can listen and obey. Even when it seems to put at risk the things I value; even when other people don't see or respect what I am doing; even when I'm left with less to say at my high school reunion. There is freedom, as well as pain, in recognizing that anything I can pursue on my own -- however deeply I may love it -- ultimately has no permanent place in my life. It hurts, and it is also a blessing. I think.
If we have children, we undoubtedly have hurt them over and over, out of ignorance or selfishness or indifference; but that isn't deliberate. And then, of course, in our efforts to care for our children, to present them with the best food and stimulating toys and cute overalls, we participate in a system that also produces the deaths of children (and adults): what I have and enjoy is related to things that someone else's child does not have and has suffered through. But that's because the world is not fair; it happens far enough away that we can forget that each action that maintains this world order is itself deliberate. Killing your child is an unimaginable sin; turning a blind eye to the preventable deaths of other people's children is an unavoidable reality.
We can ignore kids who die as long as the reason for their death remains large, vague, and unrelated to our standard of living, as long as the kids remain far away and speak different languages, or are nearby, but different enough from ourselves to be somehow at fault. Abraham doesn't get an out like ours. God says: kill him. And Abraham says nothing; he just gets the knife. And that, more than the child abuse we could address and the poverty and abandonment with which we could interfere, makes a neon focal point of our self-righteousness. It costs us nothing to feel, in 2010, that this whole dilemma should have cost Abraham more. To assume that, because he was willing to do it, it couldn't have really cost him that much at all.
Abraham's violence here is the kind that post-modern Americans are conditioned hate and fear most: the deliberate violence that believes it is acting out of mission. Judging from the fact that yesterday, kids died because they didn't have clean water, and I enjoyed a tasty latte, I, for one, am much more comfortable with the passive violence of living in a system in which children die and I can afford to buy more stuff. It's normal to be too busy earning money and buying stuff to think about how this might affect other people, to wonder where all this wealth is coming from. It's inhuman to look at your child and kill him, whatever god is telling you to do so. Who could do that?
Maybe more to the point: who would want to do that? I wanted to drink that latte; I want to feel good about myself but still be able to afford what I need and what I want. Basically, I don't want to sacrifice anything, so it's really a lot better for me if this man, who will sacrifice everything, is actually crazy or selfish.
But this isn't a story about a religious fanatic or an indifferent father. It's not that Abraham doesn't love his son. He does -- the text points it out so that that small, painful fact isn't lost in less sympathetic aspects of Abraham's sacrifice. Abraham's life, with respect to his own ego, but also with respect to his God, has always been about this child, and the entire nation that will come from it. This is not just what Abraham loves most, the only real family he has left, on the alter, it is who he is and who he is meant to be. However patriarchal the society, I don't believe that you slaughter your son like an animal and still want to live with yourself.
So: why? Why do we have to give up what we love most to be a blessing? Why test us at all, when you're God and you know the outcome?
I think it's because we don't know the outcome. We can't, or it would defeat the purpose: Abraham is willing to kill Isaac, not because he has faith that God will intervene, but because he can suspend his own understanding of the world in favor of a worldview in which Isaac can die and things can still be all right.
I think this is our project on Earth: to live until we get to the point at which we no longer believe that life is about getting what we want. You start out wanting basic things, move on to wanting selfish things, and then learn to want progressively more "noble" things. But what's meant to happen, I think, is that you learn that happiness does not consist of getting the things you want, however admirable and understandable those things are, however sympathetic you appear for wanting them.
If life is about having the things you want, then it is profoundly unfair to most of us and ultimately kind of pointless for all of us. If, through having and loving and valuing something, I can learn to give up what I love for something deeper, something I can't objectify and claim, then I can understand my life in terms of a purpose that doesn't become entirely arbitrary when I die and can't have anything anymore. We are given things, I think, so we can learn that giving them up won't kill us -- or, that if it does, it won't rip the meaning from our lives.
This, I think, is how God provides: He gives us a lifetime, however long or short, to learn to reach Him. To learn that we can only do so through that process by which we learn to stop trying to hold onto the things we have or go after the things we want.
It's hard to do: a lack of ambition doesn't make you seem peaceful or spiritual. It kind of makes you seem aimless and lazy. It's hard to believe that shutting up about your own mission and goals can be the right thing to do when everyone we learn to admire, we admire precisely for what they accomplished, and since the function of self esteem seems most often to be: see yourself as as good as other people.
But I do believe that my own life is most meaningful when I can stop trying so hard to determine my next step and can listen and obey. Even when it seems to put at risk the things I value; even when other people don't see or respect what I am doing; even when I'm left with less to say at my high school reunion. There is freedom, as well as pain, in recognizing that anything I can pursue on my own -- however deeply I may love it -- ultimately has no permanent place in my life. It hurts, and it is also a blessing. I think.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
In Everything You Do: Genesis 21: 22-32
I haven't been writing because I didn't even know where my Bible was for about two weeks (it was under a bunch of library books, not far from where I sat obsessing and reading said books).
I haven't cared where the Bible was because I've been agitated and depressed, simultaneously.
I've been agitated and depressed because I haven't bothered to do any of the things that make me feel like life is worth living, really. Or, because I have been trying so doggedly to do the right thing, the good thing, the thing that will make me feel that my particular life is justified. Is earned, maybe, rather than a gift over which I have no real control?
The crux of my current malaise comes down to: I've been offered an interesting job, a job at which I think I would learn and grow a lot, and job that would allow me to continue with my nursing program, get some more administrative experience, get to know more about urban education, get to make some more money and pay off some of our loans and maybe afford to foster a child, to have a child. Maybe explore social work school, maybe have more volunteer opportunities. But -- definitely -- have to come to terms with working a Real Grown Up, not world-saving job.
Granted, I'd be ensuring that a new crop of teachers gets trained to teach. I'd be managing a program I believe in.
But I wouldn't be anyone's personal Jesus Christ.
The thing is, you know, I'm not that anyway.
Not to sound like the chick from Jesus Camp, but I prayed about this. Broken from bingeing and purging for the past week, I'm just, like, Hagar-ing it up, here. Just saying: God. Please. Please, God. Show me the right thing to do. Help me to pull it together. Cause fuck if I can do it on my own, you know?
And here's this little Abraham anecdote, which, when I first read it, seems to be totally pointless. He's just chilling with the Philistines: giving them lambs, digging wells, and what? What does this have to do with God's Work (can I get a tm?) What does this have to do with my current obsessions of Helping People and Being a Good Person?
And it's like, not much. Because Abraham, by this point, is at least moderately over himself. A stance one might heartily recommend to me.
This guy Phicol -- presumably not a scholar or priest of the Jewish God -- sees Abraham, who is a businessman, who is not running a free after school program or starting community service projects, and he says: God is with you in everything you do. I don't really know much about your God, but I can see that.
God is not waiting until what you do counts as service or seems selfless or anything else. God is with you in what you are doing, right now. God loves you -- not because you are engaged in a Noble Profession, not because you are concretely saving the world. God. loves. you. God has you here, running a household, trading and traveling and doing this not-overtly-service-oriented thing, for a reason. God wants you here, doing this, because He's got a plan in mind. A plan that doesn't so much involve you sounding impressive at a reunion or going to sleep self-satisfied or looking back on all you have accomplished.
God wants you here, doing this: being honest, showing kindness, handling disagreements with grace. Calling in My Name.
Doing good things, things that need to be done, is important. But doing things because they make you sound like a better person, is dumb. What if I need to be at this job because I'm going to meet someone who needs something I can give them, or because it will let me volunteer, or become a nurse, or afford a child? What if I need to shut up and stop this calculus of What is the Most Noble Work I can do and think, honestly, about what seems like the next best move? And trust it is happening this way for a reason? And remember that my relationship with God is infinitely more my business than is proving that I'm a Good Person?
If I can just fucking listen, and obey, for like, fifteen minutes -- rather than obsessing -- I may actually find that God is with me in everything I do. I just have to get over myself a little bit in order to see Him.
I haven't cared where the Bible was because I've been agitated and depressed, simultaneously.
I've been agitated and depressed because I haven't bothered to do any of the things that make me feel like life is worth living, really. Or, because I have been trying so doggedly to do the right thing, the good thing, the thing that will make me feel that my particular life is justified. Is earned, maybe, rather than a gift over which I have no real control?
The crux of my current malaise comes down to: I've been offered an interesting job, a job at which I think I would learn and grow a lot, and job that would allow me to continue with my nursing program, get some more administrative experience, get to know more about urban education, get to make some more money and pay off some of our loans and maybe afford to foster a child, to have a child. Maybe explore social work school, maybe have more volunteer opportunities. But -- definitely -- have to come to terms with working a Real Grown Up, not world-saving job.
Granted, I'd be ensuring that a new crop of teachers gets trained to teach. I'd be managing a program I believe in.
But I wouldn't be anyone's personal Jesus Christ.
The thing is, you know, I'm not that anyway.
Not to sound like the chick from Jesus Camp, but I prayed about this. Broken from bingeing and purging for the past week, I'm just, like, Hagar-ing it up, here. Just saying: God. Please. Please, God. Show me the right thing to do. Help me to pull it together. Cause fuck if I can do it on my own, you know?
And here's this little Abraham anecdote, which, when I first read it, seems to be totally pointless. He's just chilling with the Philistines: giving them lambs, digging wells, and what? What does this have to do with God's Work (can I get a tm?) What does this have to do with my current obsessions of Helping People and Being a Good Person?
And it's like, not much. Because Abraham, by this point, is at least moderately over himself. A stance one might heartily recommend to me.
This guy Phicol -- presumably not a scholar or priest of the Jewish God -- sees Abraham, who is a businessman, who is not running a free after school program or starting community service projects, and he says: God is with you in everything you do. I don't really know much about your God, but I can see that.
God is not waiting until what you do counts as service or seems selfless or anything else. God is with you in what you are doing, right now. God loves you -- not because you are engaged in a Noble Profession, not because you are concretely saving the world. God. loves. you. God has you here, running a household, trading and traveling and doing this not-overtly-service-oriented thing, for a reason. God wants you here, doing this, because He's got a plan in mind. A plan that doesn't so much involve you sounding impressive at a reunion or going to sleep self-satisfied or looking back on all you have accomplished.
God wants you here, doing this: being honest, showing kindness, handling disagreements with grace. Calling in My Name.
Doing good things, things that need to be done, is important. But doing things because they make you sound like a better person, is dumb. What if I need to be at this job because I'm going to meet someone who needs something I can give them, or because it will let me volunteer, or become a nurse, or afford a child? What if I need to shut up and stop this calculus of What is the Most Noble Work I can do and think, honestly, about what seems like the next best move? And trust it is happening this way for a reason? And remember that my relationship with God is infinitely more my business than is proving that I'm a Good Person?
If I can just fucking listen, and obey, for like, fifteen minutes -- rather than obsessing -- I may actually find that God is with me in everything I do. I just have to get over myself a little bit in order to see Him.
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