Easter, a little late

In the process of trying to re-imagine my Christian heritage, Easter has become a tough holiday. It wasn't always that way. When I was considerably younger, I leaped straight out of conservative Christianity into a liberal Episcopal church where it would have been considered a bit naive to actually believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. And that suited me just fine. I find the resurrection, as a symbol of the triumph of good over evil, love over hatred, and life over death, to be an inspiring and worthwhile story with endless layers of meaning that have little to do with whether or not it actually happened. You have the underdog, itinerant preacher with no political power who manages to outlast by many centuries the power structures that destroyed him. You have the man who simply, with great love and little fanfare, lays down his life for his friends, and is met (during the hours before his death) with hatred, cruelty, and torture-- and yet the love is stronger than the hate and consumes it. You have the symbolism of spring, the rebirth of life after the long winter, that resonates with the rolling away of the stone and the empty tomb--the endless cycle of life after death. It's an archetypal story with endless interpretations that really don’t depend on whether or not Jesus's three-days-dead body actually got up out of the tomb and walked away.

But as I've delved back into my past and tried to understand my background better, I've realized I missed some steps in there, some steps in the process of moving from a literal interpretation of Jesus' resurrection to the more symbolic. Because if you read the accounts of the resurrection carefully, you can't escape it. It is abundantly clear that the writers of the New Testament believed that Jesus reappeared to his disciples after his death.

Of course there are whole books on this topic. There are all kinds of ways to explain it away. Jesus wasn't really dead and he revived in the tomb. Jesus' body was stolen, and when the disciples found his empty tomb, they erroneously concluded that he had risen, and subsequent stories of Jesus sightings are just like Elvis sightings today. And then there are books by people who tried to explain it away and couldn't and ended up being converted (such as, famously, Josh McDowell in Evidence that Demands a Verdict).

But even if you accept that Jesus did die and was resurrected, the story is not nearly as clear cut as I believed when I was growing up. In the New Testament accounts, no one actually witnessed the resurrection. In the Gospel of Mark, the earliest account, a few of Jesus' disciples arrive at the tomb to find a man in a white robe sitting there, who tells them that Jesus has risen and gone ahead of them into Galilee. The resurrection has already happened. And that's where the earliest manuscripts end (check this out in Mark 16-- every modern translation includes a footnote that says the most reliable manuscripts end at verse 8). The sightings of Jesus after his resurrection and the interactions of the resurrected Jesus with his followers were added later, possibly decades later, and are therefore considered by some to be less reliable.

If you read it from this perspective, it makes a kind of sense. The kinds of interactions that are described are exactly the kinds of things that you would say if you were trying to convince someone that the resurrection happened—lots of people saw him; he was seen eating food; people touched him; my friend Thomas who is a terrible skeptic was even convinced. It’s the way rumors get started, and it still happens today. It's not hard to imagine that someone who passionately believed that Jesus had been resurrected might years afterward add a series of events that would prove the point, with no deception intended. They are just verifying what they are sure is true.

And, anyway, what exactly would it mean if Jesus was resurrected? Did the body in the tomb re-animate and get up and walk out? (Growing up, that’s what I always assumed.) Or did he rise again with a "resurrection body," a body that was physical, but different in some way from the body he had before he died? Or did he rise again in spirit only, without a literal physical body? If you choose your verses carefully, you can argue each of those interpretations of the resurrection fairly convincingly. But whichever interpretation you choose, if you're going to take the New Testament accounts seriously, you can't deny that the authors themselves believed most sincerely that Jesus came back to life after he died, however it was accomplished. And furthermore, they felt the resurrection-- not the teachings of Christ, not the symbolism of what he did-- was what made their new religion possible. Paul says in the first letter to the Corinthians, "And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith." Hard to get much clearer than that.

In a way, it's my whole dilemma in a nutshell. I want to move on to a different kind of faith (and honestly, I already have-- there's no going back at this point), but the parameters of my former religion as spelled out in its founding documents don't allow for a this. I haven't been able to reason my way from literalism to a more nuanced understanding, because the writings themselves want to be taken literally. What I've done is decide that it was important for them, in their time and their situation, to be literal, but literalism is not possible for me (as I've explained ad nauseum in other posts). The way I read the Bible now involves some give and take with the text, some flexibility, some interpretation. and of course that is sacrilege to anyone who still believes it, not to mention the sacrilege of questioning the resurrection.

AB
p.s. just for the record, I would like to point out that the point of this post is not whether or not the resurrection occurred—I think I managed to avoid stating an opinion on that. It's just the most in-your-face obvious example of the difficulties involved in moving away from the fundamentalist mindset.

About ten years ago I read a book called Archangel by Sharon Shinn. It has become my all-time favorite beach read. I'm almost embarrassed to admit how much I love that book, because it is mainly a straight-up romance, and I'm usually pretty snooty about romance novels. Of course since it was successful, it is the first book of a series, which now includes at least four other books-- I've sort of lost count, beause none of the rest of them are as good as the first so I haven't paid as much attention to them. (Stay with me here, eventually this will be relevant to the topic at hand.)

Archangel is vaguely science fiction-y, although once the story gets started, that doesn't really enter into it. It takes place on a planet called Samaria, which is governed by a race of angels-- real-life angels that fly around with feathered wings. The head guy, the archangel, is forced to marry a slave girl, and like all Cinderella stories, it turns out happily after a series of obstacles have been overcome.

But the reason I'm bringing it up, other than to recommend it if you need a beach read, is because of an interesting subplot that runs throughout the series. What you find out, only very gradually, is that the inhabitants of Samaria are refugees from Earth, but other than a single person per generation, no one on the planet knows this. The angels are actually genetically altered humans, and they have abilities that appear magical because they are aided by a spaceship that is still up there orbiting the planet. The angels and the ordinary people of Samaria all believe that it is God who causes medicines to fall down out of the sky, or brings rain in times of drought, etc, but the reader starts to figure out that all of this is happening because of the spaceship.

Not much is made of this in the first book. But as the series progresses, the implications are spelled out more thoroughly. The spaceship begins to break down, and someone has to figure out how to repair it. And eventually, in the second book, the archangel (who is female this time) actually visits the spaceship.

So what do you do when the God you have believed in is proven unequivocally to be false? There she is on the spaceship, seeing the mechanisms that alter the weather and provide the medicines and so on. It is clear that these functions are being handled in ways that have nothing to do with a Supreme Being. But she has a whole lifetime of spiritual experiences that go beyond these pseudo-miracles that say that there is something true about what she has believed all these years, even though the framework has been proven false. So you might even say: she's learning that her religion isn't true, but her spirituality still has validity. She's trying to understand what that means.

Me, too.

AB

Surprise! a new look. I think it is spring-ier, and I am definitely in the mood for spring. In fact, I could get off on a tangent here with my annual whine about how slow spring is in the Rockies. But I'll spare you. You can just go back to last year's if you want to read it. I just went back and looked it up so I could link to it (here) and was depressed to realize that last year's rant was written IN MAY. We still have a long ways to go......... maybe this year I will rant twice.

But anyway, I just wanted to say how inordinately proud I am of myself because after taking two six-week courses on web design, I was able to tweak the HTML of this new design template (which was written by some amazing person named Douglas Bowman) to get it to look the way I wanted it to, and it only took me about fifteen minutes to figure it out.  Oh, I am just so pleased with myself.

and how often does THAT happen?!

It seems so commonplace to make a distinction between spirituality and religion that I've taken it for granted in this blog. And I still do, but I've been thinking about the two and the contrast/connection between them recently. (to define them briefly: I think of spirituality as the inner pursuit of the spiritual aspect of life, and religion as the outward expression of that.)

Most mornings I spend about 20-30 minutes doing... well, how do I describe it? I haven't really put a name to it, it's just what I do. It usually involves meditation, sometimes it involves writing, or reading some sort of spiritually-oriented text. Often these blog entries spring out of that. But there's no formal thing that I do, it varies from day to day depending on how much time I have and what I feel the need for and what's going on. And sometimes (and sometimes often) it just doesn't happen.

Last week, I had a really nice experience one day. I would even say it felt significant. It was very affirming for me that I'm doing OK and I'm on a path that's effective for me. I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it, because it wasn't anything earth shattering and if I describe in detail what happened, it will make it into something it wasn't. So suffice it to say: it seemed like a good thing.

The next day I found myself trying to recreate the experience, trying to get all the external details exactly the same so it could happen again. And it occurred to me that exactly that impulse is the religious impulse. The desire to protect and reproduce a significant spiritual experience, to figure out what made it happen and facilitate making it happen again. Like the disciples after Christ's transfiguration-- let's stay right here and build an altar and do it again! I wanted to spell it out, figure out the details so I could reproduce it. The impulse to codify it, if you will, so you can explain it to other people and they can have the great experience, too.

maybe more on this later, but that's all for now--
AB

The best thing about having read Velvet Elvis (see Monday's post) is that I think it will give me a week or so of things to post about. There's lots of food for thought in it, even when I disagree with him. Here is something that I will pass along in that vein (food for thought, that is). Early in his pastoral life, Bell burns out and ends up going to see a therapist. (which is fine by me, I've seen a couple of excellent therapists and have found it very helpful.) And in his very first session, the therapist tells him something to the effect of "Your only task is the relentless pursuit of becoming the person God created you to be." Interesting, yes? relentless pursuit. I like that. Who knows if it's literally true, but it's interesting to think about.

Of course, then he practically ruins it by adding, "Anything outside of that is sin and you need to repent of it." which is so much in the style of things I would have heard as a child that it practically made me laugh.

But the first bit is still worth thinking about.

We went to see the Spiderwick Chronicles last night. It's OK, but not worth seeing if you're not a fan of the books. My daughter loved the books and we wanted an excuse for a family outing, so we went. There was one moment that stuck out for me, completely out of context, that I thought I would pass along. The main character is Jared, a 12-ish year old boy who comes to live in an enormous old house in the country. The story revolves around a book, a field guide, that contains some powerful secrets about the natural world. The book has become highly sought after by various different forces, particularly an evil guy named Morgrath or something like that. Jared tells his great uncle that he is afraid of what will happen if the book is lost. And his uncle replies, "You've read the book. The knowledge is in you. You are the book."

Which is kind of an interesting new way of looking at how to interpret one's sacred text, if that's not too much of a logical leap for this early in the morning. Once you've read it, digested it, you've worked on it and it's worked on you, it lives inside you. Literalism is irrelevant in that case, I think.

the problem of wineskins

I've been reading Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith (by Rob Bell) for awhile now. I read about a third of it last fall, and then finished it over the last week or so. His writing style drives me nuts at times, but his target audience is probably mostly people in their teens and twenties, so I tried to keep that in mind. But style aside, he has some interesting things to say. I found myself at various different points wanting to wave it around and say, "See, someone else thinks about these things, too!" Particularly when he was talking about inerrancy, although I don't think he ever uses that term. That was the high point of the book for me, since he covers many of the same difficulties in interpreting scripture that I have in this blog. He also pokes holes in many of "sacred" beliefs that turn out to be just part of middle class American culture. For example, he makes the point that he is put off by any political group that would call themselves "Christian" because of the assumption that all Christians will have the same opinions. What if he feels, as a Christian, that the most Christian thing he can do is vote in the exact opposite way? All along these bits, I was nodding my head vigorously, happily.

But I ended up being disappointed. He still seems to come down on the side of mostly conservative Christianity. He never really gets specific about many issues, so it's hard to say. It reminded me of a book by Philip Yancey that I read years ago, Disappointment with God. In both books, the author does a bang-up job of running through all the inconsistencies and difficulties of what happens when Americanized, middle-class-ized Christianity runs up against the wider world, although neither of them phrases it exactly like that. But also in both books, the author ends up defaulting (in my opinion) in favor of staying in a church that would be clearly recognizable as having most of the same flaws that they spent the first half of the book pointing out. The message, in both books, seemed to me to be, "Well, yes, you can argue that the theology of middle-class American Christianity is flawed here, here, here and here; but you know, they're mostly good guys, so let's just keep paddling along in the same boat with them anyway." In other words, let's continue to vigorously evangelize people of other religions, let's feel comfortable condemning the sexual lives of people we know nothing about, let's all vote Republican. I'm exaggerating, of course. And it's more of an exaggeration with Bell than it is with Yancey (although it's been ten years since I read that book, so maybe I shouldn't even say that). But what about those of us who can't do that? Who have proceeded far enough out on the limb that it just doesn't feel right coming back in?

It's exactly the problem of putting new wine in old wineskins. Jesus' use of this analogy is recorded in all three of the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke). If you put new wine in old wineskins, the old wineskins will burst. It's a common enough metaphor, one that has been used by Christians for centuries in all sorts of contexts. Once you reach the point where your understanding has changed, where your reading of scripture has gone beyond the point of just being further out on the bell curve of the variety of opinions in your church, can you continue to put yourself in the same old container, the same old church, with the same old label? Can you just give in and say, "Oh, well, I'm staying here because....." insert reason here... it's easier than rocking the boat? my family would be so disappointed if I left the church? I really love the people in this church even though I disagree with them?

It's just so damn complicated. Because all of those are the reasons why I still go to a Christian church a couple of times a month, however grudgingly it may be on certain Sundays. Most of the time I don't have a problem with considering myself to be a Christian, as in "a follower of the teachings of Christ" (a definition I first heard in an interview with Bono). But my belief system has become so far out there that I'm pretty sure that if I were to spell out exactly what I believe, most of the Christians I know would say that I'm not Christian. One writer I read last year said he quit going to church when he could no longer say the creeds, since the creeds were (to him, anyway) the essence of what it means to be Christian. It's been years since I could say the creeds, but I'm still going to church.

I guess my question is, at what point are you so far out there that you can no longer participate? You need a new wineskin. I think I'm getting there. Neither Bell nor Yancey has reached this point, I think, since they leave this question almost entirely unaddressed. In the final page of his book, Bell says you have two choices: become bitter and filled with hate and leave the church; or remain hopeful and "reclaim the innocence" of your faith and stay in the church. But of course there are plenty of other options out there, including remain hopeful and reclaim your innocence and leave the church. which is why I was disappointed. I'd like to have some advice here, some input into how one figures this out. But it wasn't in Velvet Elvis.

AB

OK, so here's a theory. Best read late at night, which is when I usually think about it, though I'm typing it out in the morning.

Eons ago, before there were stars or black holes or even the universe itself; before time had started, there existed a Something that was Everything. There are no good words to describe this Something, because our words are bound by time and our sense of space and dimension. This Something can hardly even be imagined, let alone understood. But we must call it something, so we will call it Bob. Bob is a vast field of everything, holding all potential within itself. Everything that might ever exist is present in nascent form in Bob: light and dark, heavy and light, wet and dry, existence and non-existence. But since Bob is everything and everything is Bob, Bob cannot understand who or what it is, or why it exists, or what it might be able to be. So Bob decides to make itself into something, to more or less activate its potential and see what happens.

And in that instant, the Universe begins. Father Time winds up his clock. Mother Universe unfurls her starry cloak. The Big Bang occurs, to use language that is already becoming archaic. And it takes all of it -- all the stars in all of the galaxies, all of the black holes, all of the planets, all of the mountains and lakes and highways and skyscrapers, all of the life forms, starfish and hooded mergansers and oak trees and turtles and mosquitoes; all kinds of humans-- willful two-year-olds and crotchety 89-year-olds and bright-eyed 18-year-olds-- whatever life forms exist on other planets -- all of it, to express what/who Bob is. All of it. Bob is every atom, every quark, every gluon. Bob is always watching, learning, figuring things out, understanding what it is, what the totality of everything is.

And a further interesting part of this theory. Bob is also still there behind everything, the original vast Something, and you and I can interact with it. But Bob doesn't have a preset personality, a character or a way of being that would make sense to you and me. It is far too vast for that, far beyond what our tiny minds can comprehend. When we interact with Bob, to some extent we get what we expect. If we expect loving acceptance, there it is. If we expect a cruel and demanding taskmaster, OK, Bob can do that, too. If we expect nothing but sensory input, that's all you'll get.

So, that's all. No conclusions, just some late night ideas. Apologies for calling Bob "it" but it seemed much better than assigning a gender, and there's no other way to do it in English. I think you can sort of fit this in with string theory if you allow for more than one Bob. Or if Bob is so immeasurably vast that it can manage gazillions of universes with ease, I suppose.

AB

I changed my profile to read that I am a "Buddhist Christian skeptic" recently, but I'm changing it back. "Agnostic" may not have precisely the meaning that I want, but it's better than skeptic. Maybe I should just change it to "terminally undecided."

more accurate.

AB

thinking about Buddhism- detachment

This was the hardest one for me to wrap my brain around, and I have to be honest-- it still is not all that appealing to me. But the Buddhist idea of being detached, of not allowing yourself to be attached to anything, still has been very interesting to me as a mental exercise. Again, I think part of the reason that it took me so long to even begin to understand detachment is because there is no good word in English for what is meant when a Buddhist uses it. Before I knew anything about Buddhism, if you had asked me to tell you what it means to say someone is "detached," I would have said they were emotionally cold, unavailable, and stand-offish. But I don't think that is what Buddhists mean by the term at all. The word "un-attached" is somewhat closer to the meaning, I think, but still doesn't quite get it.

My understanding is that Buddhists believe that everything we do and see and feel is dictated by our thoughts. And our thoughts are nothing but our perceptions; they have no literal value, no basis in what is truly real. So there is no point in becoming attached to the way we think. You may think that it's depressing when it rains. You may think that you are worthless because your parents were so horrible when you were a child. You may think that you aren't capable of achieving greatness because you tried once or twice and failed. You may think that your neighbor is angry at you because he barely spoke to you at the mailbox yesterday. All of those are thoughts that could have a strong influence on how you act, maybe with all kinds of consequences that could go on for a lifetime. But all of those thoughts are just your impressions, they're just smoke, or maybe soap bubbles. They have no validity beyond what you give them. They may or may not have anything to do with anything.

So the idea is that there is no point in getting attached to your ideas or opinions. The goal is to live your life with an open mind, not let pre-conceptions get in the way of your direct experience of reality. Try to drop all your opinions and just live, keep breathing. Just see what happens. I'm not sure I'm explaining this very well. I'm trying to learn to approach my experience with a feeling of softness and vulnerability, rather being defensive and clutching tightly onto my ideas about what is scary and what is impossible.

Each of us has situations where this is harder or easier, depending on our own experience and personality. Ideas and objects and people that are particularly difficult to let go of are "sticky"-- they cause us to grab on tight to our fears and insecurities and not want to let go. We know that new pair of shoes would (briefly) make us feel better so we clench tightly the idea that having a new pair of shoes will make us happy. We are absolutely positive that this job is essential to staying financially solvent, so we fuss and fret about every little detail of what goes on at work. We try to protect ourselves by clutching tightly onto whatever makes us feel safe.

But the only thing that is dependable, really, is that things will change. The tighter we clutch, the more seriously we take our attachments, the more miserable we will be when they fail us. When the shoes don't provide durable happiness. When my job is eliminated and I don't know what to do.

In classical Buddhism, you want to get to the point where you attach no importance to anything in this world. And that's where I get stuck (um, so to speak). I do think there are things in this world that are worth forming attachments to, even if it will hurt like hell when the attachment fails. And I think if you follow the philosophy of non-attachment to its conclusion, it is difficult to make a case for art (art for art's sake, anyway)-- which is very important to me. So a classical Buddhist would probably just think that I am admitting to my immaturity, and of course I am. But I'm OK with that.

So that's my take on it. Since I think this is the last of my posts on Buddhism (for now, anyway), I'll just say it one more time: I'm a beginner in the study of Buddhism. If someone out there with more experience would chime in and clarify things, I'd appreciate it.

AB

thinking about Buddhism- meditation

When I first came in contact with Buddhism, more than ten years ago, it wasn't very appealing to me. The couple of books I had read and the Buddhists I was acquainted with at that time made it sound like it was all about discipline-- being cool and detached, unemotional, your thoughts under perfect control. I was curious about it, so I tried meditation a bit and read a bit more, but it went nowhere. But about four or five years ago, I ran across the writings of Pema Chodron and met some different Buddhists, and my impression began to change.

The heart of Buddhist practice is meditation. But my early understanding of what that meant was looking at it slantwise. I thought the idea was to completely shut down all thought in your brain and try to merge with the Great Nothing. I don't think I had any idea exactly what that meant, it was just my impression of Buddhist meditation. When I sit down to meditate now, my goal isn't to stop thinking, what I want is to create a little space between me and my thoughts, to watch them, see them go by-- the classic example is like watching clouds float across the sky. (I especially like that example when it is the night sky, with clouds floating by in front of the vast starry expanse.) The idea is to not attach any significance to them, to realize that they're just thoughts, electrical impulses that have no meaning outside what I give them.

I should confess here that I am terrible at this. I have what I think of as Busy Brain Syndrome. Not that meditation is easy for anyone, but I think a lot. In the space of a minute, I might think about what we're having for dinner, who's picking up my son from school, what responsibilities are "real" vs. ones that I've just picked up out of guilt, where my daughter is going to college next year, whether or not I'm over-involved in her decision, is that load of laundry done, and if evil starts small, how am I participating? And honestly, I have rarely managed to stop this flow of constant mental chatter for more than a minute or two, although I've spent far longer than that sitting and working on it.

but what I'm learning to do is to just observe all that constant stream of thought. Just sit and watch it. When I first started, I would imagine that I had some sort of helmet that completely covered my head and it was all covered with lights and dials and wires that were constantly blinking and humming and clicking, representing all my mental activity. And then I would just slip out of the helmet and leave it sitting there, flashing and humming and clicking away, all by itself. It is such an enormous relief sometimes to leave it aside. According to the Buddhist teachers I've read in the last few years, the mind is innately spacious. We just have to step away from the claustrophobic stream of thoughts that makes us feel stressed, overwhelmed, and anxious to experience that spacious, open feeling. I've only rarely experienced this; I'm not the most disciplined of practitioners. but I've experienced it enough to continue to work at it.

Should I put my disclaimer in every day? I'm a beginning student of Buddhism. Take all of this with a grain of salt.

AB

thinking about Buddhism- suffering

Suffering is an important concept in Buddhism, but one that took me a long time to understand. Maybe I still don't understand it very well.

At first reading, it seems so entirely different than the Christian understanding of suffering. In my Evangelical childhood, I was taught to see suffering as a means to an end. The New Testament epistle of James says quite bluntly: "Consider it all joy, my brothers, when you encounter various trials (ie, when you suffer), knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance, and endurances produces perfect results, that you may be full and complete, lacking in nothing."

In Christianity, Suffering is the refiner's fire. You pass through problems and "tribulations" so that the trivial and unimportant is burned away, and you become a better Christian, a better person. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, more or less.

The not-so-subtle undercurrent (for me, back in the day) was: the more I suffer, the more deserving I will be of God's love; and even this: the more I suffer, the more God loves me. It leads to a sort of "Bring It On" mentality among some of us. Oh, yeah, I'm suffering, but it's making me into a better person. I think you find this attitude particularly among Christians of Northern European descent. :-)

So when I first started studying Buddhism and ran across the idea that "All is suffering" (a summary of the First Noble Truth), and that the point of Buddhism is to escape suffering, it made no sense to me. Why would you want to escape suffering? Suffering is part of life. Suffering is what helps you grow up. If you run from suffering, you miss out on life, you are a baby.

I struggled with this misunderstanding for a long time. I spent the whole time I was reading the Dalai Lama's book on happiness arguing with him. (Arrogant, much?)

I've come to think it's mainly a problem in translation, though. There is no way in English to differentiate between what His Holiness is talking about and the kind of suffering I was thinking about. The word suffering is used to mean something different, and it was a bit of a stretch for my WASP brain.

Finally one day last spring I GOT it. I was drying my hair, and feeling irritated that it was already time to get a haircut again. You get a haircut; it's too short for a week; then it's just right for a couple of weeks; then it's getting too long; then it's already time for a hair cut again.

And like the proverbial lightbulb going on, I thought, "Oh! that's it!" Nothing like the small mundane things to help you see larger truths. The Buddhist idea of suffering is more about the endless cycle, the daily grind, the unending work of getting through life. You get up, eat breakfast, go to work, come home, eat dinner, clean up, go to bed, then the next day you do it all over again. It's all about the cycle, the endless cycle.

It's a classic East/West difference. I was trained to think of suffering as a linear thing, something that happens along the way that is a means to an end, a process that gets you to a goal-- the goal of being a better Christian. Your life is going along just fine, then some big problem hits, and you have to get through it. Then things go back to normal (usually). Getting through the time of suffering helps you grow.

The Buddhist idea is about endless reiterations of the same things, the kinds of things my WASP brain would have considered background, white noise. In Christianity, suffering is big stuff--persecution, illness, losing your job. In Buddhism, suffering is just the grind, the stuff you have to do over and over to get through the day.

Like laundry. Laundry never ends. There is always more laundry to do at our house. Or cooking. Someone is always hungry at our house. Or batteries. Here are the rechargeable batteries I have: cell phone, iPod, camera, laptop. You charge them up, use them for a few hours or days, then they have to be recharged again. It's an endless cycle, and it's a pain in the ass.

But once I got that figured out, it seems that the attitude that you have toward suffering in both traditions is pretty similar. You don't run from it, you don't avoid it, you dive in. But where Christianity emphasizes endurance, getting through it, Buddhism emphasizes staying open, not shutting down, while you are in the midst of suffering.

Pema Chodron says you try to stay soft, instead of closing up like a clenched fist. You let yourself experience your suffering fully. You grow up. What I had interpreted in Buddhism as wanting to run away from suffering is actually not attaching importance to suffering, not letting yourself get caught up in thinking that the daily soap opera of our lives is important.

Disclaimer: As always, my understanding of Buddhism is anything but expert. More experienced insights welcome.

AB

thinking about Buddhism

I'm going to be posting about Buddhism for the next few days. That's the plan, anyway. Buddhism has become very important to me as a source of wisdom, and as a counterpoint to the way I was raised. I love the way it stretches my mind, makes me think about things from a new angle. But for reasons I'm not sure I can really explain, I'm not at all interested in becoming Buddhist. Maybe I'll write more about that at some point.

But I'm having a harder and harder time continuing to attend a Christian church. So. just thought I should put that out there. No conclusions to announce because I haven't reached any.

AB
(as always, a work in progress)

A couple of weeks ago I posted about dealing with fear-- fear of rejection from family, fear of bucking the system, fear of being seen as a troublemaker. This past weekend, I spent quite a bit of time with fear of a more visceral sort. I drove my daughter to Oregon to visit a school there. The drive over was ten hours of easy interstate driving-- a long day, but nothing exciting. The drive back was a different story. A severe winter storm swooped in as we were leaving. It was just rain in Salem, where we started, but by the time we had driven through Portland, it had turned into sleet, and then ice and snow. Three days and 24 hours of driving later, we finally got home about 8 last night. It was awful, white knuckle driving almost the entire way, sprinkled in with some even more terrifying moments.

There was plenty of time to think about fear, and how it feels, and what it does to you. Hours and hours of creeping along at speeds ranging from 2 mph to 45-- we didn't get up over 50 until the last few hours. From small things, like what if I don't make it back in time for this, this and this; to huge things, like What if I never see my spouse and son again? Now that I'm home and sitting in my nice warm house, fear becomes something interesting to think about. But I can still feel it; my stomach still knots up everytime I think about the hour and a half we spent on an overpass waiting for a tow truck to come and clear an accident that happened four cars in front of us. Most of us were friendly in spite of the tension, but tempers flared and a couple of different times people came storming up from further back in the line ready to give hell to anyone they could find. As if the poor woman whose car had spun out had done it on purpose. (there were no injuries, thank goodness, just her car which was probably totaled, another car with minor damage, and traffic backed up for miles, I'm sure.)

I'm so grateful to be home. But we're supposed to get 1-3" of snow tonight. Ah, the joys of winter.

AB

The Index post

This used to be a blog about recovering from fundamentalism (Christian, in my case). I'm now some sort of mishmash of Christian/Buddhist/Agnostic, and if that sounds complicated, let me just say that you have no idea. Then it was a blog about going back to school in your forties, which I did so that I could finally finish my Master's in English. In fact, I was in my late forties. I turned fifty in grad school.

Now it is just a blog. At the moment it doesn't have a particular theme, although usually I post about books/literature, spirituality, religion, very rarely politics, and whatever else I can think of.

So for the most part you can find posts that are related to any of those topics by clicking on one of the labels over on the left. But for a long time I didn't know how to do labels, so I created this index post to help me find things--and maybe it will help you find things, too. The labels are over there on the right if you scroll down, way down. If you click on a label, to read them in chronological order, you have to scroll down to the bottom and read "up" (and sometimes you even have to click on "Older Posts" to get all the way back to the early ones).  I wish they'd fix that, but currently there's no way around it in Blogger.

The ones about going back to school when you are way too old for it are labeled back2school (applies to anyone going back to school as an older adult) or gradschool (about my specific experiences in English grad school).  The ones about faith and spirituality are labeled Groundwork, Lent, Easter, why I still go to church, gays and Christianity, etc. If you just want to hit the high points without reading all that mess, try the one on Abeyance, or click on the label for Easter.

If you're new to this blog and would like to read through only the ones involving fundamentalism, here is a partial list from back before I figured out how to use labels. Some of these are so old that I would probably word them differently now, but here they are. Note: this is my third blog (click here if you want an explanation of that), so the older posts have been moved over from my first blog. Confusing, I know.

part one of my history (11/04)
part four of my history (1/05)
(parts two and three were about my forays into New Age spirituality. If you're interested, let me know and I'll see if I can still find them.)
while reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran" (08/04)
thoughts after taking a Belief.net quiz (10/04)
why this is not a political blog (11/04)
concerning sin (4/05)
concerning agnosticism (5/05)
while reading "The Spiral Staircase" (04/06)
After listening to Julia Sweeney (12/06)

part 1 of trying to figure something out (01/07)
part 2 of trying to figure something out
I never really figured it out, but here are some ideas

don't know what to call this one
a technical aside (6/07)
inerrancy part 1 (6/5/07)- background
inerrancy part 2 (6/21/07)
inerrancy part 3 (7/9/07)
inerrancy follow-up (8/07)
after trying to read Blue Like Jazz
thoughts on faith
trip to a Christian music festival (there are a bunch of these in the last week of July07 and the beginning of Aug07, but the main ones are Creation 1 Creation 2 Creation 3
another (12/07)


January 2009 update: rather than creating a new index post for last year, I thought I'd just add on to this one. Here are the relevant posts from last year:

fear (1/08)
Buddhism- Part 1 Part 2 Part 3
Bob (2/08)
The Problem of Wineskins (2/08)
religion/spirituality (2/08)
the infamous Easter posts (4/08) second one third and another follow-up
(infamous to me, anyway)
(it might be easier to read those if you just click on April 2008, but then you have to scroll down to the bottom and read up to get them in order)
a short one that's important to me (8/08)
Trust (8/08)
posts inspired by The Shack: first second third

Posts of interest from 2009:
why fundamentalism?  part 2
on a friend's birthday
two stories
interview with Bart Ehrman
What I think of as God
belief/unbelief  part 2  and the fear that goes with it

So, you may have noticed I haven't posted much in awhile. I could use the holidays as my excuse, and it wouldn't be a lie-- the holiday season always wears me out. But it's not the whole story. Over the last several months, I've come right up against the dark underbelly of having been raised fundamentalist, which is fear. It takes two forms-- one, the normal fear that people won't like you, your family will disown you, no one will want to be friends with you; the other, the fear of bucking the system, the fear of pitting your little voice against the wisdom of the group, which is a deeper, darker thing. In my experience, the hold that fundamentalism has over you is based on the subtle undermining of your own opinions at the same time you are groomed to see the beauty of supporting the group-- in other words, inimidation. In other words, bullying. It's difficult to tease out, because often, and certainly in my case, the people who are doing the intimidating and bullying are people who love you and only want the best for you-- it's just that their definition of "best" turned out to be pretty different than mine. And also, it is innocent on their part; my parents, extended family, and church didn't do anything "to" me that hadn't been done "to" them, that wasn't part of the culture in which they were/I was raised.

I run this blog anonymously for several reasons. The main one is that I really am a privacy freak, in my normal life as well as online. But another important reason is that I don't want my family to read this. They know I no longer consider myself a conservative Christian, but I've never been much more specific than that.

If they read this blog, I'm afraid of what would happen, honestly. It sounds silly, doesn't it? I mean, after all, they're not going to come after me with pitchforks. My family is not so fundamentalist that they would cast me out, as happens in many conservative faiths (I read "Leaving the Saints" by Martha Beck last month). They would be sure to point out to me the error of my ways, but they wouldn't disown me. There might be one or two more distant relations that would refuse to speak to me, but most would just disapprove. Pointedly. And they would pray for me, that I would see the light (by their definition, natch).

I hate that. I want them to see my point. I want to believe that if they started at the beginning and read through my reasoning, they would agree with me, or at least understand where I was going, and I could take my family with me on my journey. But I'm pretty sure that's not true. I'm pretty sure they would agree with certain points, but there would be a mental line in the sand beyond which they would not go. It makes me sad.

Oh, I'm babbling on again, and neglecting the main point which is that I've been dealing with this gut-level fear of speaking out, "speaking my own truth," as they say. I'd like to be able to say I'm done with it and now I'll be fine. But I don't think that's true. It will be an ongoing thing.

photos, for the first time

We had freezing fog here today, a not-uncommon weather event in our area. It usually dissipates not long after the sun comes up (one hesitates to say it "burns off" since the temperature didn't get above 25 degrees today), but today it hung around until noon. The amazing thing, though, is that it coats every stick, needle, and twig with frost. It's quite lovely. So I tromped out to the field next to our subdivision, the same one that will be the largest mall in the state in two years, to take some pictures to share with you, my gentle readers. Loyal but stupid dog in tow, happily rolling in every patch of yellow snow she could find.



AB

Here are the books I read last year that were worth reading, in no particular order:

The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion
Great Expectations, Dickens
What Remains, Radziwill
Leaving the Saints, Beck
Beowulf, Heaney trans.
The Seven-Storey Mountain, Merton
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Rowling
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Foer
Three Cups of Tea, Mortensen
Wintersmith, Pratchett (young adult)
Jane Eyre, Bronte
Thirteenth Tale, Setterfield

An even dozen. Not bad.

evidence of schizophrenia

Here is a conversation:

Me: It is stupid to keep a blog. Who wants to know my silly opinions?

Other Me: Yeah, but you enjoy it. You compose posts in your head all the time.

Me: Yeah, but nobody reads them.

Other Me: well, that doesn't mean you can't write them anyway. And besides, some people read it, and they tell you they like it.

Me: But I don't even know what I'm doing. I use this voice that sounds like I know what I'm talking about, but the reality is that I'm not sure about anything.


Other Me: I don't think you're fooling anybody. I think it's obvious you don't know what you're talking about.

And on and on. And this is why there's not many posts recently. Because the "Me" voice is usually stronger than the "other me" voice.

But on the other hand, I've had fairly profound experiences that meant a great deal to me during the past month with each of my "areas" (Christian, Buddhism, agnosticism). I just don't see how I could give any of them up. I'm reading a book by Brian McLaren (Finding Faith)(the old, single volume version) that has really helped me. McLaren is the pastor of a Bible church in Maryland. I don't always agree with his conclusions, but his line of thinking has been like a balm for my wounded Christian spirit. I don't think I'll ever end up being an orthodox Christian again -- meaning one that believes in the Virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, the existence of a literal heaven and hell and specific people who go there, etc-- but I believe in the message of Christianity. Not the evangelical message, I've already talked about my disagreements with that. But the message of love for one's neighbor, and one's neighbor is everyone you encounter. The message of the power of love to heal the wounds of living in this messed-up world, no matter what the nature of those wounds. The message of the Sermon on the Mount-- true power doesn't come from financial, military, or authoritarian power; true power comes from loving and serving and giving.

I'm also listening to Pema Chodron's Noble Heart, a ten-day retreat on cultivating bodichitta, the practice of an awakened heart. I'm not comfortable acting as a spokesperson for Buddhism, but it's effect on me has been profound. Even while typing what I believed about Christianity, I found myself thinking in Buddhist terms. "the wounds of living in Samsara." True compassion for one's neighbor begins with true compassion for one's self, "unlimited friendliness" toward our own failings and limitations, Pema calls it. This morning I was listening to the bit about how our minds have an innate capacity for being open and spacious, not tied up with the soap opera of our lives, if we can just shut up long enough to let our minds do their spacious thing. (she didn't phrase it like that, of course). This isn't new to me-- it's the kind of thing you read all the time in buddhist writing. But if you've been raised as an over-achieving Westerner, it's not intuitively obvious, and sometimes it's hard to believe. All those busy, busy thoughts seem so important. I've been trying meditation for some time now. I could easily concentrate here on how terrible-- no, how truly awful -- I am at meditation (maybe I'll do another post on that sometime), but what's relevant for the moment is that just this morning I caught a glimmer of that spaciousness. It's there, if we can just let go of the drama long enough to let it be.

And then there's agnosticism. To be honest, this is the one that feels the most real to me right now. I'm having a hard time believing in anything at the moment. I have a long track record of this. To doubt is fundamental to who I am, or at least, to who I perceive myself to be (Buddhism again). I love to question, to rip things apart. I'm not always great at putting them back together again. I'm reading God is not Great, which is atheist and not agnostic, of course. But I'm not done yet, so more on that later.

But I'm re-thinking my fractions. (you know, the one-third this, one-third that, one-third the other bit.) Because I'm not an agnostic in the sense Huxley intended. At least I don't think so. I think a true agnostic believes that since we can't know the answer to most of our questions about God and eternal truths, we can't believe. But I do believe. I don't know precisely how to name what it is that I believe in, but I do know that there is something there. Make that capital-S Something. There is Something beyond the ordinary sensory experience of life. I've said this so many times before I'm feeling redundant but it has been awhile, so here it is again. I don't know what it is that I connect with-- if it's something within my own consciousness or subconsciousness, if it's God or the Divine Source or cosmic strings or neurons firing in my cerebral cortex or what. But there is definitely Something that I connect with, and I believe in it. I have faith in it, even though my faith falters at times. And further: I believe it is worth connecting with. I think that last bit is the thing that atheists miss.

I'm so glad I'm not worrying about dangling prepositions anymore. That paragraph is full of them.

So I'm changing my fractions. One-third Christian, one-third Buddhist, and one-third something else, and I'm not sure what to call it. I've been thinking about this for awhile, but haven't typed it out because I don't know how to put it into words. But it has something to do with what we do with the stuff of our life, our experience; what we create out of the day-to-day details of living. I'm tempted to call it art. I believe in what we create out of ourselves and our experience, whether it is a literal work of art or a family or a home or a business. Or is it that I believe in the process of creating something out of ourselves? I was reminded of this today-- and here, far too many words later, I finally get to what prompted me to write this today.

My daughter's high school is a half dozen blocks from our church. Every year in December, the high school choir, which is excellent, walks down to our church at lunchtime and puts on a brief Christmas concert. I was there for it today and it was lovely. I've known a dozen or so of these kids for years-- one since she was in kindergarten with my daughter, many others since they were gangly, awkward 13 or 14 year olds. And some of them are still pretty goofy. Lovable, but goofy. But you put all of them together and their love for each other and their affection for their director and their respect and care for the music comes together and creates something far more than the sum of its parts, something that can move me nearly to tears. The concert wasn't perfect; they were trying out some new songs and there were a few rough edges. But it was something else, something better than clinical perfection, something that I aspire to myself. Let me know if you think of how to describe this, a word for it. Life is what you make it, yes? But I mean that in a much deeper way than the flip, casual way in which that phrase is usually said.

Oh, have I ever gone on too long this time. My apologies for the length. And reading over this, I realize that I've used the word "something" way too often and with many different meanings, but I don't know how to re-word it at the moment, so that's all for today.

Aunt BeaN

I've said before that I'm a Buddhist agnostic Christian. Or an Agnostic Christian Buddhist. Or a Christian Buddhist agnostic. You get the idea. It depends on the day you ask which one of those is the noun and which are the qualifiers. This isn't always popular. You get the impression from some people that it is wrong to combine ideas. If you're Christian, you're somehow betraying The Church if you adopt ideas from Buddhists or atheists. Or if you're atheist, you're lower than dirt if you admit that sometimes you have spiritual feelings that make you wonder. You don't get that from everyone, of course. Lots of people out there have cobbled together their own belief system. But I get it from enough people, from all three of my "areas," that it bugs me sometimes.

And I have to admit that the idea of adopting a single belief system and declaring complete loyalty to it is pretty appealing to me. Probably partly because I was raised to believe that is the "right" way to do it, but also because I know some people who are that way whose faith I envy. In the past week I've spent time with two dear friends, one Mormon and one Buddhist, who are both radiant with the happiness that their belief system brings them. They have each found the system that suits them, clearly. It's obvious from the way they glow when they talk about it. I'm fairly comfortable with my weird, one-person path most of the time, but I don't glow. I was envious.

AB

I made it to 40,400-odd words. Better than last year, but still not 50,000. Maybe next year. Third time's the charm, right? The main consequence (for me) of participating in NaNoWriMo has been the most utter, profound respect for anyone who has written a real, full-length book. You are all gods, every one of you.

I read a review of "Enchanted," the new Disney movie that opened over the weekend, that said it was "one of those rare 'all-ages entertainment' that really does appeal to all ages," and I just have to add: well, maybe, but it definitely will not appeal to all genders. My ten-year-old son, who was willing to go based on a couple of funny scenes in the trailers he's been seeing ad nauseum for the past several weeks, was completely disgusted. He had been sitting down in front with one of his buddies and the look of utter disdain on his face when he turned around to find me after the lights came up was priceless. I told him, "It's your first chick flick, dear. Get used to it." It is so cute it falls all over itself being cute. Get your girlfriends, a big bucket of popcorn, some chocolate, and prepare to be cuted to death.

I'm at just under 25,000 words with a week to go. I go back and forth between cheering myself on, "I can still do this! I can! I can!!" to thinking, well, I'll definitely make it further than I did last year (which was 30,038 words), and wanting to just stop. I have the world's stupidest plot this year, so it's hard to make myself keep going sometimes. But I'm trying to look at it as practice, just plain old practice, at stringing 50,000 words together. I've never done it before. If I just keep going, it will give me an idea of what it takes to do that many words.

I've always been the type that needed a deadline to really get serious about something, so we'll see how this goes. If I didn't have anything else to do this week, it wouldn't be a problem but, well, it's shaping up to be a pretty normal week which means I have plenty of other things I have to do.

Hope everybody had a great Turkey Day.
H&K,
Aunt BeaN

This is the only thing I wrote while On Hiatus that seems worth posting, written on a day when I was feeling pretty low.

I have nowhere to stand. The ground has disappeared underneath me. If I fall, where will I land? is there anywhere to land? this is exactly where Buddhism and Christianity diverge. Christianity says God has the hairs on your head numbered, he knows when the sparrow falls. If you jump, He will catch you, you will fall into His arms of love. Buddhism says, there is nowhere to stand. If you jump, you will fall into nothing. But you will be better off because you're not standing on false ground anymore. There is only groundlessness. Which is true? Does it matter? Both are human ways of thinking about something that is not within the realm of human comprehension. ...

and so on for a couple more paragraphs. Boring paragraphs. BUt I wanted to post that, because it will be relevant to some other things I want to say later.

As I've said before, I'm not a very outgoing person. So it was with a great deal of courage that I packed up my laptop and headed to Borders tonight to meet up with a half dozen other local writers who are participating in NaNoWriMo. Fortunately everyone was very friendly and it was a lot of fun. After an hour or so of talking with the others, I can tell you this: I need to get out more. My life has become so boring. It was very stimulating to hear what others are doing. We have one fantasy writer, one history buff, one writing a near-future suspense novel with worldwide catastrophes, one with the most amazing cast of characters I've ever heard, and me, with my 10,000 words and NO IDEAS. Well, I think I might actually be coming up with some ideas now that I can riff off what other people are doing. It was fun. I hope we do it again. And just think, only another FORTY THOUSAND words to go in a mere 17 days. Ah, I love Nano.

Aunt BeaN

While I was On Hiatus, I read Great Expectations. You know, the one we all had to read in junior high-- Pip, Estella, Miss Havisham, the wedding cake covered with spiderwebs. I remembered the basics (I thought), and I remembered that I often didn't understand what I was reading. I was probably 13 at the time, and had no patience for Victorian English. And Miss Kimbrough, my 9th grade english teacher, the one who wore two different shoes for most of the day without even realizing it until one of her students pointed it out to her during 4th period, wasn't exactly a genius at explicating it for witless adolescents.

But what I discovered upon re-reading it surprised me. First of all, either I bagged on the novel halfway through, or we were only required to read half of it. I had no memory whatsoever of anything that happened after Pip discovered that Miss Havisham was not his benefactor. In fact, in my memory, that was where the novel ended. I was also surprised by how funny it is. Not in a Jim Carrey kind of way, of course, but in a subtler way. And further, I found myself truly moved by Pip. He undergoes a transformation from an arrogant young man to a humble, contented adult that is quite profound-- but also quite clearly planned by Dickens. There's no missing the moral to the story, although it's proof of Dickens genius that the lesson doesn't overpower the story. It's not a quick read, or at least not for me: Victorian english is slow going. I spread it out over the entire seven weeks. But highly recommended.

But BEST OF ALL: early on in the book, Dickens ends a sentence with a dangling preposition. And that settles it. If no less a writer than Charles Dickens can publish a book with a dangling preposition in it, who am I to worry? No more apologies for bad grammar. Or at least, not as many.

I'm trying to think of a witty way to end this post with a dangling preposition but of course not a single thing is coming to mind.

AB

The death knell of sanity for someone who writes is becoming utterly convinced that one has nothing to say. It is easy to fall into, because what can one say that is anything more than a pebble tossed into the sea? Even great writers, real writers, writers with true works of art (or alternatively, bestsellers) to their credit can't claim to have changed the world. Remember awhile back when I said I had become more cynical in some ways and less cynical in others? That is where I am more cynical: I no longer believe it is possible to change the world.

But here is the way in which I have become less cynical: it doesn't matter. Or, rather: changing the world isn't what matters. And I'm still figuring out the implications of this. It is, on the one hand, an enormous relief. To not be responsible for changing the world, I mean. But on the other hand, the things that remain to be done become both less huge and more important. Faugh. words are failing me again.

to participate in nanowrimo is to come up with intricate, philosophical, bizarre, and hilarious excuses not to write.

epononymously yours,
Aunt BeaN

Oh, that just sounded so confident yesterday, about how I wouldn't be able to post much this month because I would be writing my novel. Oh, such delusions. I finally made myself sit down and start typing this morning, after avoiding it all day yesterday because I was afraid nothing would happen. And it was predictably awful. Triggering all sorts of dire thoughts about what an awful writer I am, how insane it was to think I would be able to do this again, etc etc etc. I could bore you to tears with this stuff, trust me. But at least I got 595 words done, so on day two, I only have 49,405 words left to go................ what the hell was I thinking???

The topic I left unaddressed yesterday was the whole realm of coffee substitutes. Coffee substitutes are in and of themselves a sufficient reason to stay addicted to coffee for the rest of your life. I'm trying to be caffeine-free, not just decaffeinated, which limits my options severely. But I still want something hot and somewhat coffee-like in the morning. So far I've tried Pero, Teeccino, Postum, and malted milk. They must definitely be an acquired taste, and I have not acquired it yet. But I'm trying. Teeccino is the best so far. Herbal teas are OK for the afternoon, but in the morning, they are too feeble. wimpy. anemic. whatever.

and that's it for today.
AB

Well, I'm back. But since it is NOVEMBER and November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo.org) I don't know how much I'll be posting. I'm trying something very different this year and it may make me crazy. I was going to start first thing this morning, but since I was on a plane yesterday, and since being on a plane requires motion sickness meds, I am like a zombie this morning-- still, at 11:20 a.m.

I will tell you about one adventure I had in the past seven weeks, though. I think I am coherent enough for that. Starting almost immediately after I went on hiatus, I decided that I would wean myself off caffeine. (I thought using the word "hiatus" would make it sound glamorous, like a TV show that had left you with a season-ending cliffhanger or something.) I am a caffeine addict, there is no denying it. Any form-- chocolate, coffee, tea, Diet Dr. Pepper, chocolate, and... well, chocolate. I've had caffeine every single day for at least the last ten years. I know that because if I didn't, I'd get a migraine. The leaning-over-the-toilet throwing-up-your-toes kind of migraine, which I hate. I even bought caffeine in pill form (yes, they still sell NoDoz) so if we were camping or travelling, I wouldn't have to worry about finding coffee.

But for some reason I decided it was a good idea to do this insane thing, so I plunged in. The first week, I just pushed back the first caffeine of the day -- so instead of having it first thing in the morning, I would wait until 11:00 a.m., and then 1 p.m., and then 4:00 p.m. That went OK. Then the next week I cut back to decaf (which still has a little caffeine, you know). That was pretty dang miserable. I'm prone to migraines anyway, and I had a mild migraine every day. "Mild migraine" may sound like an oxymoron, but if you have them often as I do, there is definitely such a thing. I classify a headache as a migraine if no over-the-counter meds will touch it (advil, tylenol, aspirin, excedrin-- though of course excedrin has caffeine in it, so it was no good for this purpose). A "mild" migraine would be one that makes you grumpy as hell, but you can still be up and about and haven't needed to take anything stronger. (You can imagine how much my family enjoyed this, by the way. It has already entered the status of legend when my kids talk about it: Remember When Mom Went Off Caffeine? and how horrible it was?)

But then the next week I cut out caffeine entirely and it was MISERABLE. I had a "real" migraine practically every day for the next ten days. Meaning, imitrex/zomig/maxalt (pick one of those three) and/or percocet. But then finally, a month after starting, it got better. And now I think I am truly off, although I am still adjusting behaviorally (I swear it was like getting off something much worse). I still want that damn cup of coffee in the morning, and I want it bad. And I miss the Diet Dr. Pepper caffeine boost in the afternoon. Oddly, I haven't missed chocolate as much as I miss the coffee. I walk down the coffee aisle at the grocery store and I find myself stopped in the middle of the aisle, just inhaling the smell of coffee.

Was it worth it? I honestly don't know yet. Preliminary results are inconculsive. I think I have to stick with it for awhile to see if it makes a difference.

This is somewhat crazy. I admit it. Hey, I wonder if I could use this in my noveL???

SWAK.
Aunt BeaN

my six weeks are up, but we're going out of town tomorrow so it will have to be seven.

later gator.

AB

I'm taking a break for awhile, probably 4-6 weeks. I could go on about why, but I'm not sure I even know. so ................. more later.

H&K,
Auntie BeaN

Somebody shut me up
So I can live out loud
-Toby Mac

Reading Merton also helped me define some of what has been so helpful to me about Buddhism over the past four years or so. I've been reading about Buddhism for a lot longer than that-- I read Natalie Goldberg's book on Zen Buddhism Long Quiet Highway at least ten years ago, I know, and a few others along the way, too--like the Dalai Lama's book on happiness and an odd book about sheep and Buddhism called the Barn at the End of the World (I think). But I didn't really take an interest in Buddhism for its relevance to me personally until about four years ago when I ran across The Wisdom of No Escape, by Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun who is the director of Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. I've picked up from reading the various reviews on amazon.com that she is considered something of a lightweight among certain buddhists, but she has been more helpful to me than I can say. I never underline in books, but almost without thinking about it, I grabbed a pen and underlined half of practically every paragraph in the first few chapters of that book. I think I've read four of hers now, and listened to a number of her teachings on CD, too. Then last year I listened to The Teaching Company's lectures on Buddhism and I've read a few other authors, too-- Sharon Salzberg, Tara Brach, Jack Kornfield, a little of Chogyam Trungpa and Thich Nhat Hanh, and a bit more by the Dalai Lama.

If that sounds like I'm bragging, it's meant to be the opposite. One of the reasons it has been hard for me to talk about how important Buddhism is to me is that I don't feel qualified. I've done all this reading, but I know it's minimal compared to what's out there. Unlike my history with Christianity, I've never lived as a Buddhist for an extended period of time, I've never even been on a Buddhist retreat. When talking about Christianity, I know it from the inside, I've lived it and breathed it. Of course I don't speak for all Christians, but there's no doubt in my mind that my upbringing was representative of a certain type of Christianity and I can speak about it with some level of comfort. But when I start talking about Buddhism, I'm way out of my league. But I can't talk about where I am now without bringing it up. So I guess I just wanted to make it clear that my understanding of Buddhism is that of a beginner. Very beginner.

So anyway. All that to say: while reading Merton, it struck me how similar the Christian practice of denying the self is to the Buddhist practice of No Self. I know that theologically there is a big difference-- I could go on for pages on the difference between "dying to self so I can live for Christ," "being broken so that Christ can shine through," and the Buddhist idea that the self is a construct that exists in our head that has no other meaning. But in practice, the way you live this out without thinking about what it means, I think they are more similar than different. The idea is to let go of the belief that your wants and perceived needs and desires have any significance at all. Merton talks about how the all the striving after the "desires of the flesh" keeps you from finding what is really important. Pema Chodron says when our minds are spinning with cares and worries and problems, to let go of the story line and see what remains, what is underneath. (I love the Buddhist definition of ego: Ego is the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.) The two ideas are not the same, but in terms of how I put them into practice in my life, they're pretty similar. And reading about the Buddhist take on this has breathed new life into an idea that had become extremely stale for me.

enough already.
AB

My working definition of faith, which is borrowed verbatim from Sharon Salzburg, a Buddhist writer and teacher, in her amazing book Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience:

"Faith does not require a belief system, and is not necessarily connected to a deity or God, though it doesn't deny one. This faith is not a commodity that we have or don't have-- it is an inner quality that unfolds as we learn to trust our own deepest experience.... No matter what we encounter in life, it is faith that enables us to try again, to trust again, to love again. Even in times of immense suffering, it is faith that enables us to relate to the present moment in such a way that we can go on, we can move forward, instead of becoming lost in resignation or despair. Faith links our present-day expereince, whether wonderful or terrible, to the underlying pulse of life itself." (I could also have just excerpted the entire book here, but that would be a bit impractical.)

I had originally planned to do quite a bit more reading of current evangelical Christian thinking before moving on, but I was so burned by Blue that I've decided to move on, at least for the time being. I have a Brian McLaren and Velvet Elvis by Rob Bell, and I may still read them at some point, but it will be sometime in the future.

So what I've been thinking about recently is- exactly what does it mean to have faith? The analogy I think of most often goes back to a math and chemistry fair that I attended when I was in high school-- so (clears throat: ahem), obviously this was a long time ago. We went off to a huge high school a couple of hours away and attended various classes on interesting things (and I really did think they were interesting, which tells you exactly how much of a nerd I was then)(and still am). The only one I remember was about fractals, imaginary numbers, and chaos theory. I will tell you my memory of it because it's relevant to my point and then tell you what I found out when I went back to fact check this afternoon.

What I remember most is the explanation of imaginary numbers. An imaginary number is a number whose square is a negative number. Got that? Since a negative number times a negative number is a positive number, this shouldn't be possible. For example. The square of 4 is 16, because 4 times 4 is 16. The square of 3 is 9, because 3 times 3 is 9. But what number squared is -9? If you multiply -3 times -3, you still get 9. (hmmm. So is the square root of 9 also -3? but I digress) If you multiply 3 times -3, you get -9 but it's not a square.

BUT. the interesting thing is this: if you allow for the existence of these seemingly impossible imaginary numbers, you can do all kinds of neat things with them in equations that describe phenomena in the real world and help mathematicians and scientists solve real world problems-- I think particularly in electronics and the mechanics of turbulence and fluid dynamics.

And that's how I've come to think of faith. It doesn't have any objective existence in the real world. There is no real, tangible, sensory evidence that you can produce for why you have faith. There is no reason to have faith, it shouldn't exist. But if you accept that faith exists and you work with it, it changes things; it adds dimension and understanding to my life that would otherwise be impossible. If you act as if faith exists, it becomes true, and leads to all kinds of practical, useful corollaries.

Interesting analogy, isn't it? But when I went to wikipedia this afternoon to read read about imaginary numbers to make sure I had the idea right, I found out that the math behind imaginary numbers is more mind-boggling than I knew. It turns out that all numbers are abstractions that are only useful in context. (you can read the wikipedia entry on imaginary numbers for more on this topic. it's really interesting.) So even though imaginary numbers are called "imaginary," they are no less real than what we think of as "real" numbers. So maybe my analogy doesn't hold up too well to close scrutiny, but I'm giving it to you anyway, because I just found that out this afternoon and I haven't had time to think of a new analogy yet.

but you know......... maybe that makes it an even better analogy. I think it needs to be late at night and half-a-bottle-of-wine-gone to follow this train of thought, at least for the non-mathematically inclined, like me.

Sign me boggled.
Aunt BeaN

In Which Aunt BeaN Revisits the Contrast Between The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton, and Blue Like Jazz, by Donald Miller. The latter had been recommended to me by several people as an example of the new, innovative thinking coming out of the evangelical Christian community, and that was reinforced by the reviews on amazon.com. But I couldn't get through it. I'd even say it was downright awful. I objected to it so much that I don't even really want to write about it, because the strength of my response suggests that it is more about my own personal axe-grinding than it is about the book itself. To me, it was a maze of circular reasoning, bad logic, and poor analogies. But obviously it has been very meaningful to a lot of other people, witness the reviews on amazon.

I'll just say this: I have no patience with anyone who can dismiss a major world religion with 300 million followers as a fad, as Miller does with Buddhism. I admit I didn't finish the book, so maybe he makes up for it at the end. But I put it down in disgust after the 2nd time he referred to someone who was interested in Buddhism as only wanting to look cool and trendy. I'm sure there are people who are interested in looking cool and trendy who are also interested in Buddhism. But about four or five years ago, it was awfully trendy to be involved in a conservative Christian church, too, and you don't hear him complaining about that. and anyway, what about the hundreds of millions of people for whom Buddhism works just fine? Oh, I wasn't going to rant and I can just hardly help it.

Well, OK, you twisted my arm so I'll keep going. Somewhere toward the beginning, he talks about his big crisis of faith, which was resolved while he was still in college, so he was probably hung up in this big crisis for what, a year? Anyway. the way he was able to resolve it was through an analogy he made in a literature class. Since the Christian faith has all the classic elements of a story (as defined by his literature professor), that means it's TRUE! Really! I'm not making this up, that was what resolved his crisis of faith. It was so silly that it was several days before I could pick it up again.

I do think there is some innovative thinking coming out of the Evangelical community, there is no question about that. And Miller is probably more representative of that than I want to admit. But as long as they hang on to their exclusivist theology-- that only the people who are Evangelical Christians are going to "heaven" (if that even has any meaning)-- it just isn't enough of a change for me personally.

Which is what brings me back to Merton. Merton is equally sure of the exclusivity of salvation for Catholics, so why didn't it bug me the same way that Donald Miller did? Is it just because he's a better writer? (would I forgive anything for art?) or because there seems to be more intelligence behind his passionate embrace of the Catholic faith? or because he's not evangelical, so I don't have such a big chip on my shoulder when I'm reading? I suspect it's all of that and also this: Merton is so fearlessly passionate about his embrace of the Catholic faith that you can't help but admire him and his willingness to put everything on the line to pursue it-- and that is literally everything, since he spent the rest of his life as a Trappist monk. Next to that, Miller's plays on words and riffing on the traditional themes of the protestant faith seem lightweight at best.

TTFN.
Aunt BeaN

sort-of the book and movie post for this summer

Last week I did something I've never done before: I went to see two movies in one day. I normally see 4-5 movies a year. But it was a cool, cloudy day (although unfortunately not much rain fell). My son went to a birthday party in the afternoon, so Nell and I went to see "Becoming Jane." It's a beautifully made movie, and to my surprise, Anne Hathaway did a creditable job as Jane Austen. It's an absorbing account of what happens to two young people who fall in love in a restrictive society. But I didn't find it very convincing as a biographical account of Austen's formative years (about which not all that much is known, as I understand it). I don't know much about Austen besides what you learn in college, but I've read her work fairly avidly, and I've never picked up much sympathy for young, passionate, ill-considered love. I think if she had been through what the movie describes, she would have been quite a bit more sympathetic to the Mariannes of the world.

Then that night we packed up the whole crew, including the neighbor kids, and went to see Stardust. I loved Stardust. That's as much fun as I've had sitting in a theater since the Lord of the Rings movies came out. It's not a great movie, and you can pick at it, it's true. but it was great entertainment. Everybody I had with me, ranging in age from nine to 46 (me), agreed. I might even go see it again.

So that brought me to spend my birthday Borders gift card on the hardback version of Stardust written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Charles Vess, which was also good, but maybe slightly less fun than the movie (my favorite characters in the movie, the chorus line of ghosts, play a far more minor role in the book). That makes several times in the past few years now that I've seen movies that I enjoyed more than the books-- it seems like that never used to happen. But the book is well worth perusing. The illustrations are wonderful and add a completely different element to the story-- I believe it was a collaboration, rather than a book that had a few illustrations done for it after the story was finished.

And this week (finally, finally, after months of chipping away at it), I finished The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton's autobiographical account of his early years and decision to enter a Trappist monastery. I'm not sure why it took me so long; I liked it well enough and found it very absorbing while I was reading it, but then I'd put it down and weeks would go by before I'd pick it up again. It is beautifully written and as heartfelt as anything I've read in a long time. Although there is no question that Merton feels he has found the Ultimate Truth in his Catholica faith, I didn't find that opinion offensive here the way I did in Blue Like Jazz, which I tried to read this summer and finally gave up a couple of weeks ago. More about this in another post.

Off to take my son fishing. He is a fanatic. I don't fish, I don't have the patience for it. but I can take a book and sit in a lawn chair and we are both happy.

Aunt BeaN

So, after you decide you're not going to take the Bible literally as if God dictated it, the next question is: how do you read the Bible? The simple answer, and the one I used for years, is: seriously. You read it seriously, but not literally. It turns out to be much more complex than that, but it is the answer I keep coming back to. (someday I'm going to quit apologizing for dangling prepositions, but not yet: sorry about that one.)

Early on, I went through a number of moments of panic about this, because it is inevitable that you will hear derisive comments made by those who are still literalists and it's hard not to take them personally. My favorite is: "It must be nice to be able to cherry-pick which verses you're going to pay attention to." (do I have to apologize for other people's dangling prepositions?) And the only advice I have is: you just have to let that stuff roll off your back. Because all Christians cherry pick verses. You can't give equal weight to all the thousands and thousands of verses in the bible. It's just that literalists don't admit this, even to themselves-- they hide under the banner of "God wrote it, I believe it, that settles it," often without really being clear about what that means.

this is going off in a direction "on which I had not planned" when I sat down to write this post, so maybe I will stop there and re-start in the next. Which may have to be Monday since the rest of today and the weekend are dang busy. We're taking 15 high school seniors camping tonight. No, I'm not making that up. I have cooler full of hamburger fixings and a case of Red Bull.

It's pretty smoky here-- there are three major and a half-dozen smaller forest fires near the town where I live, and some sort of inversion is holding all the smoke in where we can breathe it more deeply. I should post a picture. Maybe I will for once. If you can see blue sky where you live, appreciate it.............

Have a great weekend and be good.

Aunt BeaN

p.s. (posted later) the case of Red Bull wasn't nearly enough. ack.

The Creation Report, Part 3: what WAS said

I'm getting tired of writing about Creation so this will be short. I told you I have ADD, right?

But what I continue to find disturbing and problematic is the insistence that only Christians are OK. There was less talk about converting people from other religions than I expected, I admit, but there was all kinds of talk about how only Christians can have good marriages, only Christian teens will survive with their morals intact, only Christians can withstand the temptation to use drugs and alcohol and so on.

This is the Fear Factor, nothing else. If you don't become a Christian, you'll be a failure. If you don't become a Christian, you'll never be happy. (this was not from the musicians, mind you-- except a couple of the more conservative ones-- it was from the speakers). Since a I know a number of people from a variety of religious backgrounds (and also some who have no religious preference at all) who have happy marriages, healthy teenagers, and well-rounded lives, this is just ludicrous to me. Not to mention that I know plenty of Christians who have difficult marriages and difficult teenagers. I think this is one of the main reasons that conservative Christians tend to hang out with each other and avoid close friendships with non-Christians-- because their prejudices just wouldn't hold up to reality. We all have similar struggles. There's no magic pill/religious belief that buys you an easy ride.

Oh, wait, I'm up on my soapbox again.

But I'm only getting started, because the thing that really got me going was the haranguing about female sexuality. Or the smothering thereof. Not everyone brought this up, but it was a constant theme. Modesty. Abstinence. Virginity. I'm not opposed to any of those things. In fact, since my daughter was in the 10-12 year old range in the midst of the Britney Spears rage, I would have been happy to hear a little more of it than was being said at that time. As part of a range of healthy sexual options for teens, abstinence works just great for me. BUT what mystifies me is why it's all directed at GIRLS. OK, in order for them to be sexually active, there is usually a guy involved. These people may be opposed to sex education, but there's no way I'm believing they don't know that. How come NONE of it was directed at the guys? Nothing to the guys: keep your mind out of the gutter, keep your pants up above your crack, keep it in your pants (excuse me for being blunt).

I think I've made my point. Packing up soapbox and moving on. I guess this wasn't exactly short but it was short-ER.

Love and kisses,
Aunt BeaN

The Creation Report, Part 2: what WASN'T said

Part two in a series of posts about my recent experience at Creation Festival West, a four-day Christian music festival that was held the last bit of July at the Gorge Ampitheater in George, WA:

One of my biggest fears going into Creation was that there would be a lot of anti-gay, anti-abortion rhetoric. I could write separate posts about why I am not opposed to either of those things, and maybe I will someday, but for now suffice it to say that I'm offended by the Religious Right's stance on those (and many other) issues. Well, I can very quickly in one sentence sum up why I'm not opposed to gays, and that's because I know a bunch of gay people and they are just fine, thank you very much. My opinion about abortion is much more complicated than that, but one way to state it briefly would be: I would never want someone else, especially the government, to make that decision for me or anyone else.

But back to Creation. I was assuming there would be lots of posturing about those two hot topics. But you know, I have to say it: there wasn't. The only discussion I hard about abortion was within our own group. And I didn't hear a word about gays, either pro or con. Which I suppose you could complain makes them into an invisible population, but still the point remains that nothing was said, either by any of the musicians or any of the speakers (that I heard, I didn't hear them all). I was surprised. As someone who has for more than twenty years now considered herself a liberal (at least politically speaking), it made me wonder about liberal paranoia. The numbers show, in poll after poll, that most Americans disagree with conservatives on those issues. All the noise is made by a very vocal, very powerful minority. Maybe we should just drop the paranoia and ignore them. They're very quickly falling out of favor anyway.

You could of course argue that the spokespeople at Creation are savvy enough to stay away from hot-button issues until they lure kids in with great music and inspirational talk about the love of God. Maybe the indoctrination into conservative opinions will take place after they return to their home churches. But then again, our church was there with 20 kids, and when those kids show up at our church, they won't hear anything like that. Opinions in our church range from extremely liberal to extremely conservative (that's one of the reasons I love our church, lots of diversity on theological issues), so they will be exposed to a wide variety of opinions and they will see that all of those opinions are acceptable at a Christian church.

So on the whole, in this particular area, I found that Creation was surprisingly OK. It seemed to me that if a teenager with no religious inclinations at all had come with friends, they would leave having been exposed to the parts of Christianity that I would want them to be exposed to: the importance of service-- ie., helping fellow human beings who need help; the importance of supporting each other; the nature of love and forgiveness.

in the next post: what WAS said, the good, the bad, and the ugly

Aunt BeaN
Intrepid Grammatically-Challenged Reporter
(with apologies for dangling prepositions and all other grammatical sins)

Creation music festival report, part I

Well, I'll try and get some of this down before it's so far in my rear view mirror that I can't remember anymore.

Before we left to go to Creation (a huge, multi-day Christian music festival at an outdoor ampitheater in central Washington state), I was sure I was going to have to just grit my teeth and get through it. My spouse and daughter have been going for years, some years with our church youth group, some years with just the two of them plus a few of our daughter's friends. They would come back glowing, and both of them have wanted me to go for a long time. I kept begging off because it sounded so awful-- miserably hot, primitive camping conditions, and lots of conservative Christian rhetoric floating around. But unfortunately I used as my excuse that our son wasn't old enough yet. I had randomly picked ten as the age when he would be old enough to go, and guess who turned ten last month??

So I had no excuses left, and I was kind of curious how it would go, given that I'm working through my conservative Christian background anyway. This year we went with our church youth group and a bunch of various friends, so it ended up being a group of about 25 of us. All of them that know me thought it would be a brand new experience for me since it's not the type of thing that I do these days, but honestly, I grew up going to this kind of stuff. I've been to stadium revivals, Christian music concerts, and smaller church revivals; I've heard Billy Graham, Luis Pulau, Leighton Ford, Hal Lindsey... well, I could go on, but you get the idea. I even went with my family to a huge thing called Explo '72 (short for Evangelism Explosion) that was held in Dallas in June, 1972 (I honestly don't remember that much about it since I was only 11 at the time but OF COURSE there is a wikipedia entry about it that I just found-- apparently 80,000 students showed up for it and at the final concert, there were more than 100,000).

I find these days that I distrust emotionalism in religious practice. Cynicism, again, I confess. But you would not believe how many times I've been to retreats, meetings, seminars, camps, conferences, concerts, etc (not just Christian) and seen people (myself included) get on a so-called "spiritual high" that just doesn't have much to do with living life in the trenches: the everyday grind. But as reported last week, I'm discovering that maybe I've taken my own cynicism a little too seriously. Plus, it was obvious within twenty minutes of arriving that if I was going to dismiss the "spiritual high" phenomenon, there was going to be little to nothing for me to experience at Creation. So I threw caution to the wind and decided to just let myself experience it as if I were a lot more naive than I really am. Or maybe that is an illusion, too.

So I found myself there, the first night, listening to a speaker whose agenda was clearly to convert as many as possible. Normally I would just tune this guy out, because to me, conversion is the least useful spiritual experience (maybe because I was raised in a religious tradition so I've never had a conversion experience?). But I was trying to allow myself to get into the spirit of the thing, so I listened. As I said, I'm fairly adept at re-writing things in my head on the fly, so it ended up being pretty interesting. Toward the end, he was addressing the fears that people might have that keep them from God. So in the spirit of the thing, I was examining my own fears. And I discovered to my own surprise that my biggest fear was that the conservative evangelical thinking of my youth might actually be true. I don't like the person I was then. I don't like the opinions I held as if they were Ultimate Truth. I don't want to be like that again. But here I am twenty years later, so afraid that it might be true that I don't even want to think about it, or let any of those types of thoughts into my head. Possibly what it would feel like to have been brainwashed by some cult and have to go back into it-- what if I get sucked back in? I believed this once, what if I end up believing it again? what if, just what if, it turns out to be true, and-- as someone who professes to want to know what is true -- I have to believe it?

But the cool thing was that the act of discovering and articulating this fear seems to have been all that was required to let it go. I don't think I knew it was there, although I've felt some of it before (what if it's true? what if I get sucked back in?). And as soon as I let it go, I knew it had lost its power over me. It was a very cool feeling. So I was able to experience the rest of the three-day festival as a curious observer: taking in some of it, letting some of it pass me by, watching the people around me, listening to the artists, and just not worrying about whether or not some awful thing was going to happen as a result of having participated. It was very freeing. Just that one experience the very first night made it worth going.

to be continued....
Aunt BeaN