Dough and Metal: 30 September 2013

It was a conveyor belt of some sort.

Rolling along it were globs of dough, squirted down onto the belt by some kind of mechanic operation hanging down from above.

They were in a vacuum, the regular dark of the mindspace cushioning them in silence.

Then came the leaves and the trees - once again, I was in a forest. But color never faded into the scene, apart from what existed in the dough. Everything was an intense, metallic pewter. Solid, sharp, and heavy. The forest floor was carpeted by a mossy sheet of small, dark, matt little balls of steel. It moved like a sheet of chain mail, and was so dense that none of the little balls ever came out of place. The trees were sparse and formed a low canopy maybe 20 feet at most off the ground - their bark was made of sheets of metal like everything else, and their leaves were bladelike in the way they hung down from their branches.
The one conveyor belt I'd seen initially was not the only one. This forest only existed for the sake of the conveyor belts, it seemed, or at least nothing lived here apart from it. It just kept spitting out these blobs of dough and they kept moving away to god knows where - it was assumed that something more would happen to them than just this.

It was at this point that it became clear to me that I was the product of this dough; I was dough, every part of me. My body was the same one I described in my last entry, and the same one present in my meditation from last week, which I didn't write about - a very plain, very androgynous body with mid-back-length wavy blonde hair.

I walked forward, alongside the conveyor belt, and stopped by a tree to examine the leaves. I cut my index finger clean off in the process, but it only stung a little. I picked the finger back up and examined it - a white layer of clay, pink, red, and tan: all the different layers that would be in a finger, just made of dough. I stuck it back on again and reappeared in the tree. The branches must have been cold, but I didn't feel them.

As if in explanation, some kind of incredible power surged through my body and shot out through my fingertips, sending medusa-like projectiles from my arms to every conveyor belt dough spout within a 300 foot radius. Out of my body poured dough - or perhaps it was sucked, drawn out, leeched out, vacuumed - and upon having injected what was necessary into this system, my power was completely drained. But I refused to remain weak, and so I gathered more, somehow, feeding from the surroundings, from the cold, from the lifelessness.

Understand, this cold and lifelessness and monochrome comes in stark contrast to the past few months. I have been on beautiful adventures and seen beautiful things. But there was some kind of unstoppable dark power in the utter defiance of this ecosystem's self-perpetuating death... It was alive, but only seemed to exist to prove how unliving and hostile and mechanical it could be.

A kind of invisible, silent vibration rose from the earth and formed a sheath around my body, and I drew it into myself, harvesting this power to whirl myself up above the leaf canopy, completely unhindered by, perhaps simply invincible to, the seemingly-lethal edges on both sides of every leaf.

Not going to lie, it was something like being in the avatar state. That's pretty close to what it was. My hair was rippling with static potential and wind, my fingers were tingling with power, and with every moment in the air and every moment I was able to see this wretched, indifferent expanse, I became stronger and angrier until.... something in my gut erupted.

My eyes lit up with a kind of lightning, as though anyone that so much dared look at them, at me, would have their corneas burned out (probably along with the rest of their face). Lightning shot from my core through my fingers and down through my feet to the trees below - but nothing burned, though the impulse was conducted from one side to the opposite side of the entire planet within seconds, because it was all just cold, hard steel.

The universe I was in seemed to feed off of that self-frustration. It generated more electricity and produced more dough. Thriving off of the explosion occurring in the sky above them, the trees all just seemed to ask for more, which gave me more power even as it infuriated me (since they refused to burn). The same beams shot out through my limbs again - every finger, every hair on my body, every toe, simply pouring out immense bolts of lightning from a completely unknown source in my gut. Sustaining this hold, I raised my arms and my eyes up to the sky, projecting it all somewhere beyond, commanding it to fall, to humble itself. There was some kind of brittle, flat, slate sky far, far away that received the bolts and shook, cracked, and crumbled, and the pieces catapulted down as though being sucked in by a black hole.

I remained completely invincible to this catapulting of slate meteorites, unsatisfied with the results - because it only grew, the more I tried to destroy it, the more viciously it gobbled up my attacks. And so the more vicious I became - the more intensely my eyes burned and the more fiercely my hair sizzled and the more pointed my teeth became and the more utterly neutral my expression seemed and the more fiercely my limbs swung lasers around as though it were some kind of apocalyptic light show... But this would not, could not, end. That Ola Gjeilo piece, Tundra, that I linked from my last entry? It had been transposed to some other, more ominous minor key, and to full orchestra, but half of that orchestra was playing on the wrong side of their bridges, and half the choir was shrieking.

The next slate sky, a world beyond the one I had broken, shattered and fell; and the next; and the next, and the world of chaos just kept growing and growing, seeming to bristle with the energy it was feeding itself. But it was never enough, it kept growing - though everything was still cold, my arms became flamethrowers as well, a kind of sun, a combustion engine, a bringer of defiant, unliving death. I was in these three states at once: the naïve, new, quiet piece of raw dough; the witchlike provider of dough, peer of the trees; and the godlike, wrathful beast, attempting to destroy the world by expanding it... or perhaps expand the world by destroying it.

It was fairly nightmarish and by 45 minutes in, I was very, very tired. Horrified. But it wasn't horrified because I didn't know why it was there or what it was telling me, teaching me. I was horrified because it was such a perfect depiction.

I've been very frustrated of late with a great number of things. It, like this world I entered into, has been a fairly quiet but extremely explosive presence. I am frustrated with myself for lacking the self-control to be as responsible as I need to be; for forgetting things I need to remember; for having chosen to be where I am (as per this post to Apostrophe); for caring about things I probably would do better not to care about; for the death of a past I could never have saved. Infuriation about the state of Christianity and of Calvin and of those things I was always promised would be freeing but discovered not to be. Anger that I believed for so long and kept trying to when I always knew in the back of my mind how good it would feel to throw it away. I hate to admit it, but this world is a fairly accurate depiction of my soul from this past week, and living it through Meeting was the most cathartic spiritual experience I could have had.

I wasn't going to write about this week because it was so dark and so frightening. But today I find myself in the same kind of spiritual self-destruction - an inability to soothe the beast raging on this pillar of fire. When I tried to do so on sunday, I sent in a calming mist (to no avail), and then a numbing cloud (also futile). Then... well, all that worked was to implode the universe into a ball and carry it into the mindspace, enter my beautiful sea - the one with the sailboat - and drop it far down into the ocean, for use as my anchor. And there I lay, buoyed up by the water, soothed, peaceful, calm.

But I have found myself numb. I think it's simply true, on a descriptive, existential level, that Spirit leaves us sometimes. Well, I don't mean that it's not there, but perhaps that we are absent from Spirit. I'm unsure at times how to solve anything in my life productively, how not to engage self-destruction when I get the urge. Perhaps writing about this will create some type of calm. I find it more realistic to believe that that's not how this story will end, because that would seem disingenuous. I hope for more beautiful days with calmer weather; for big swallows to ride through the arboretum, valleys with blossom patchworks, orcas and soft sails and warm fires and children and waterfalls. I'd prefer that. But until then, perhaps this is how Spirit's urging me to hold my own issues in the light.

My Sailboat's Electric Blanket: 15 September 2013

Grand Rapids has returned to my field of vision, and I find myself blessed to have such a warm community around me. The new season has brought interesting new things to learn: I met with a few people from the Meeting this week to talk about the history of GRFM and am glad to have candid conversation around the various points of drama and politics that have been around now and in the past. The Meeting seems very ashamed or irritated by these problems, and they are difficult, no doubt, but they're the same kinds of struggles faced by every church or religious group. Someone does something in a way that's not as thorough or as considerate as someone else wants it to be, doesn't spend money the way others want the money to be spent, and people get upset. I think that this type of knowledge sometimes drives people away from social or religious groups because they experience it to be disillusioning. I may be young and dreadfully naïve, but I've been tired enough of the general obnoxiousness, pettiness, and idiocy of churches for such a large percentage of my life that these conflicts - like one between spending money on spiritual training versus donating to charity/education/outreach groups - seem like the right conflicts to be having, if conflicts are to be had.

The image that presented itself today came to me immediately. It's one that came to me momentarily this morning when I got up and centered myself for a few seconds - it only took a few to appear. The image is of a beautiful sailboat on a vast grey sea, restless, but not angry. My boat is pristine, almost fantastic: its paneling on the inside, like sides of the top of the boat, were pearly and gold stripes - they may have been wood, but the most polished, the hardest, the glossiest. Most of the rest of the boat was mostly this dark, off-black wood. The same intense sheen, the same solidity, reliability. The mast was this color, and on top was this gorgeous finial - like this, but far more ornate, with the ridges made up in swirls that reflected the twilight bouncing off the water. And of course, a sail. It was large and heavy, but had fine, delicate fibers, so that it wasn't as rough as a typical piece of canvas. It looked like milk in the wind.

The setting was dark, but there was ample light, creating a shimmer on the water. This is more or less what it looked like, except that the boat was much smaller:


And this is what it sounded like:

http://olagjeilo.com/sheet-music/choral-ssaa/tundra

This song was playing in my head the entire time I was in this place, and the scene was being built, as if by the brush of an artist, as if it were to the beat of the music. As this was happening, I was laying in the belly of the boat, under the deck. It was dark and warm, but I was simultaneously looking down at the boat from the sky, as in a dream. I swayed back and forth with the motion of the arpeggio as the clouds came into greater focus and the ship gained greater definition and detail.

I did not move normally during this vision. I was like a spirit, evaporating and spinning through various states and positions in the scene. In some ways, I think I was the scene, or at least partaking in the scene, similarly to the way I partake in God. It was a symbiosis with something larger than myself, with infinitely more energy and power than me, but which radiated from me and my ship nonetheless.

If you're following the music, at the sopranos' lyric line at 1:03 in the recording I linked, there appeared an orca by the side of the boat, and soon I dove into the water to join it. My back was arched and I lay on the back of the orca, held there by some kind of magnetic, majestic spiritual energy as it shot through the water. I wasn't wearing anything, but I had a very plain, androgynous body - almost childlike, except that it was fairly toned. The water and the orca and the ship and the clouds were connected in some way, and we knew each other.

Soon I was on top of the mast, clinging to the finial and feeling my hair  - slightly longer and slightly wavier than it is, but still fairly androgynous - whip in the breeze. The music was building and building and at the musical section in 1:31, something cracked: with a burst, a rainbow-colored web of electric shock burst from the ship across the entire expanse of water, the entire sea brimming with static energy. In some vague way, it felt as if I were exploding out of the ship in the form of this energy, hovering in and over the water in this net of ethereal matter, as I imagine God in the Genesis story, where God hovers over the waters before Creation. As songs do when they are stuck in your head, the next time it reached that point in the song, the same thing happened: as if it were a wave hitting the boat, the mast, upon which I was perched again, shot such a burst of energy up out of its top, lighting the clouds on fire and sending bursts of bright, intense shocks through the entire sky.

And then came the rain: after several waves of this shock reverberating through the sky and the water, the drops of rainbow came pouring down from the dark, grey clouds - like they simply could not contain themselves any longer, and had to go down to greet the water. So there I was, on top of the mast on a Peter-Pan-like ship of glowing golden and pearl and off-black wood, floating in and atop and above an endless body of water, perched on the top of a mast, feeling my hair wave along with this creamy, fluid sail... It was incredible. (Unbelievably enough, no mind-altering substances required.) As is typical of my trips into these various fantastic worlds during Meeting, it was one of the most gorgeous things I have seen.

Again, it comes down to a very basic, very powerful experience with imagination. Here I was, this timeless, androgynous, powerful version of myself, completely by myself in this contained, isolated little world, with absolutely no one or anything to speak of in my company. Except the orca. And the fish. And the lightning, and my boat. And, of course, the music, which was the fiber of the universe, holding it al together, inexplicably oozing out of every crack that didn't exist. Even so alone, without anyone with whom to speak or to interact, I was in community, because this place was community. It was an audio-visuo-spatial expression of a soul.

Much of the reason people seem to cling to trinity doctrine is because it guarantees that God is in community with itself. I love that idea. God's internal community resonates with our own self-awareness and consciousness that's inherited as part of the human psyche. I like the idea of God knowing that God loves Godself and continuing in that love, understanding, self-knowing, and wisdom because it simply knows it to be that way. Trinity isn't the only way to get there, but the impact of this theology is an element of my natal tradition I haven't completely relinquished.

The human soul is an expression of God. This world, however alone or however stormy or however electric, is one we can retreat into to find peace - peace between the fibers of chaos. Because God, the human soul's expression of God, has put it there. Or it can put it there, if it's not. These worlds are hidden between synapses in our brains. It's such a simple joy. All it needs is to be dug out.

Family Water: 14 July 2013

On lazy summertime weekends, I sometimes put aside my laptop so late at night, when I'm so tired, that  when I wake up the next morning, I can hardly remember closing it and setting it aside. And as the sun through my window wakes me up some number of hours later, when I roll over and drag my computer toward me to continue the lazy summertime weekend thing, opening it back up is like a jolt back into a train of thought the Sandman had forced me to abandon.

My mindspace opened in a similar way this morning, onto an image of the last time I was meditating with a friend of mine in a park on Friday. My friend is seven years old - just going into second grade - and had used his boyish hyperenergy to run out in front of us on the trail we were hiking. When I caught up to him in the grass by the parking lot, he was sitting cross-legged with an exaggerated long expression and his hands resting palm-up on his knees, fingers touching like a little Buddhist monk. It was clear that he'd been doing it partially as a joke, but he must've been sitting there for awhile, and he resisted getting up when I addressed him.

Intrigued by his interest - the kid is intelligent and has a keen depth of insight, as I believe many children do - I told him we should move away from the path, and we sat down on a shady patch of grass looking into the forest. Our eyes closed, and I found myself entering a normal posture of meditation, which I found strange, considering that he's seven and there were only two of us. When we both got distracted by a couple people calling to one another across the parking lot, I told him to just hear it and let it go, to let thoughts come and leave without reacting to them. I opened my eyes and glanced over at him to my right - he had dropped his playful expression and had this air of serene calm over him. After about half a minute, he moved down in front of me off of the little hill we were sitting on, repositioning his sweatshirt under him in order to be more comfortable.

It was clear to me in May that some important brainwork I'd have to do this summer would be a reconfiguration of my understanding of family, of nationality, of belonging, my expectations for the future, my priorities, the way I see myself and my religion - everything I've had firm thoughts about in the past and since deconstructed. These are things I did on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day, from seventh grade until college, but I got bored as I found myself capable of emotional maturity. That has also meant, however, that many of the emotional qualities I was best at a couple years ago have gotten traded for entirely different qualities, and the original strengths have become weaknesses. I no longer overprocess, but that itself is a shift which I find myself having to process - the irony.

For one, I've begun to self-identify as Quaker. Not only is it the only religious ideology in which I've felt comfortable for any significant stretch of time, in the objective, modernist sense, but the dogmatic parameters of the community are loose enough that I don't feel threatened by anything people say. I still hesitate to say that "I am a Quaker" to other people because I'm still fairly uneducated on the kind of thing you'd have to read to know and I've only been attending Meetings for half a year, but I intend to stick it out.

Another thing is that I'm re-confirming to myself - in the midst of a pretty intense submersion in queer language and culture this summer, as I'm throwing out norms left and right - that I still deeply want to be a parent one day. I don't want a husband, I don't want a big house, I don't want to be a homemaker, and I don't want to be a woman as much as I want to be an adult. But I want to have a partner and family, and I want other childhoods to be part of my life when I've grown a few decades removed from my own. I want to teach a couple kids my language and culture. I like the grandma / grandpa / uncle / neice / nephew / grandkids dealie. I'd love for it to work out that way.

As I sat on that piece of grass watching that seven-year-old kid breathe and listen to the birds in Meeting this morning, I realized that it's completely unnecessary for my genes to be part of any child I raise. Most of the deepest love and pride I've felt hasn't been dependent on genes or pregnancy in the past - my best friends, the people I've been in love with, my teachers, my cat, my tree, the communities I've been part of. When my friend joined me in meditation for those ten minutes at the edge of a parking lot, we shared a unique bond that transcended any blood or familial or age or gender or sexual or even religious ties, and the same thing happens in community with Friends every week. I have believed and have taught myself for years, but especially in these past few months, that this bond exists between everything and everyone. Why not give more connections the chance to develop?


* * *

The image was fascinating today. It was one of this kid in front of me on the lawn, as I said - and soon an ethereal bubble of water appeared above his head - roughly 150% its size. It seemed to represent the state in which his mind dwelled, a representation of his mindspace.

And then it broke. I can't say it shattered - it's more that a massive torrent of water suddenly fell out from it down upon him, as though it had been relieved of the tension that had kept it in its spherical shape. He was drenched, but he did not flinch or turn or shudder or react in any way. It seemed to cause him some kind of glow, in the way a plant does after you give it some fertilizer and sunshine. The memetic counterpart to the above thoughts came through my mind - the vivacity of this child and any child's life, its strength and independence from blood ties. The water was still streaming down in a small, cylindrical waterfall - and suddenly there came an intermission to the scene.

There were three tiny children of genders as fluid as the water - their genders flowed in and out of femininity and masculinity and androgyny and can't-tell and weird combinations of it all - that were climbing up a rope in the middle of the waterfall. This location seemed fairly similar to the one I blogged about in The Most Beautiful Nature I've Ever Seen, in a dreamlike kind of way.

The top child was blonde, had short hair, and was the quickest. The middle one had redish blonde hair and was very curious, but slower than the first. The third had mopish, curly, brown hair that stayed the same shoulder length regardless of gender. There was a playful back-and-forth banter between them, Blonde urging Red and Brown on, Brown complaining of splinters, Red telling Blonde to wait up, Brown getting distracted by something cool on the rocks. Each child's face and hair changed from moment to moment as genders and gender expressions changed, as if all their different cheeks and chins were nothing more than images in a stop-motion movie. The rushing of the water seemed to drown out their shrill, excited voices after a time, and my thoughts wandered into formless Brain Just Needa Process Stuff mode.

Four people gave ministry today, and every one of them mentioned the recently-announced verdict of the Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case. Their messages were about inclusion and exclusion and the horrors of racism and compassion and the importance of nonjudgment, the importance of making all these values a political reality for the communities we interact with. That fit particularly well with the first image and train of thought I had been following, and just as Meeting was about to close, it came back in a sort of classical recapitulation.

I was back at the edge of the parking lot and the kid was in front of me on the grass. But as he slowly turned around to look at me, he was not just a he - he was all genders, and all races, and all sizes, all shapes. Every seven-year-old child in one body, grinning at me soaked in this water, which had returned to a bubble above their head: a bubble that I now recognized meant family, meant mindspace connection, meant the Life and Light that binds us together, the water that flows in and out of humanity, the same formula in each body and animal and plant and bacterium. The breaking of the water was like a baptismal water and like a uterine breaking of water - the Living Water is what brings us into this life and whence we return when we leave. It is the Fountain with which we commune when we pray and what we see in our brothers and sisters when we call them by name.

 It has been said that God, Jesus, is the Fountain of Life - in every other sermon I heard as a child, in countless praise songs, in Christian books and prayers and stamped into the fabric of the culture I was raised in. But I believe it is of equal worth - not blasphemous, not insane, not even unChristian - to say that we are also the Water of life. It is my deep conviction that God invites us with every breath we take to discover the extent to which we might one day incarnate that reality.

From Lost to Listening: 7 July 2013

A couple weeks ago, my younger brother Jaco and I finally made it to University Friends Meeting in Seattle. We met the experience with a degree of glee - for me especially, it had been over a month away from one of the first religious institutions/traditions I've ever really loved associating myself with. There's a sign by a spot in the parking lot that reads "NO PARKING. VIOLATORS WILL BE HELD IN THE LIGHT." We both erupted into smiles and it only took a couple seconds for smartphones to come out.

We were there way early, and it's already awkward being new somewhere, so I was more than a little thankful I had Jaco there to talk to while standing around uncomfortably. The building is square, with a fellowship hall on one side, the worship space on the other, and the library, offices, and stairs down to the children's space on the third side. In the middle is a Zen-looking garden - please forgive my complete ignorance about Japanese architecture and culture - and the walls facing the middle where the little garden is are all glass, with panels I believe are meant to look like sliding doors. The worship room in particular is heavily influenced by the clean, square design of Japanese buildings. There is a light fixture in the middle of the room that is probably about 10 by 25 feet that lets in natural light where this picture above has lightbulbs. The chairs under it are organized in four triangles, facing each other in a really interesting clean-cut visual interpretation of what I'm used to. It's definitely much bigger and has a different feel from the early-1900s, ornate old family house that Grand Rapids Friends Meeting meets in.

This building is a mid-20th century creation, inspired by the Japanese architecture one of the Friends had had experience with when he was rebuilding houses there after the Second World War. (This man was in the habit of going wherever every major American war in the 20th century wreaked destruction to rebuild afterward. I was inspired by the story.) We were told this by a kind, very typically Quaker-ish man (about 60; white hair; intelligent, calm disposition; deep eyes; lots of stories about history from both American colonial times and the 20th century) that approached us while we were standing around hoping that anyone that happened to see us and think we were a couple would hear our Afrikaans and assume something else.

There was a 9:30 adult religious education gathering about the structurally-engrained racism inherent in our current American prison system, and particularly the prison system in our county. It was amazing to witness this kind of conversation the moment we walked into the Meeting house. First impressions can be so telling. There have been other first times at places where I've walked into conversations about how there's a disturbing growth of the doubt, among our secularizing youth, that miracles are possible; others about how the church was dying; others about the incredible healing power of Jesus; others about the peace God brings when we surrender our busy busy lives to Him. Though none of these churches were churches I disliked, it was clear how I would come to relate to them very quickly.

I feel a million times more at home anywhere where I can walk in and randomly attend an "adult religious education" session that's literally about racial injustice. I cannot describe how happy that, on its own, makes me. But that it was conducted by a woman that had just authored a book about it and that was very conscious of the fact that we were almost all white and mostly pretty privileged, that it was received critically, earnestly, and practically by the group? This is the kind of religion I want to be part of.

Another very kind man, named Robert, talked to us after the gathering disbanded. He's in his 70s and has a Southern accent - he only moved here about ten years ago, and was, according to him, a very stubborn, dogmatic, old crotchety Southern man until a few years ago when it all fell apart and he sought out the Friends meeting. He was a Biology teacher in his young life, and then a professor of Education in - what was it? Guam, I think. The melting pot of identities bottled up in this one very simple and sincere character was amazing to me. I wish I had had more time today to go up and say hello to him. I very much appreciated his story and his conversation.

I regret that I did not write about the experience two weeks ago directly after I got back as I normally do. I had a fascinating, refreshing time of meditation, and some beautiful, fascinating images. The one that stuck with me most was that of a gigantic bird in the middle of the same room I was sitting in, but the room was much larger and flatter - the detailing seemed smaller as well. It seemed much like a bird cage. When the bird flew out of the room, I hung onto its feathers like a little kid riding bareback. I saw everything from above - the water, the cars, the University, the trees - and then I landed back in my seat again.

Everything would suddenly seem like it looked so much smaller than I knew it really was in those moments. It was as if I were being shown the enormity of the world, the openness of possibility, the importance of thinking of the world in those ways. The humanity and clunkiness of the world outside of this joyride on the back of the bird seemed, counter-intuitively, to minimize the importance of thinking of the world in that clunky, limited state of mind. The sky was the limit on the back of the bird, and everything seemed immeasurably fresh and real.

Today, there was no such exploration. There was no ball, no flame, no air, no journey. I have never had the kind of meeting as I had today. I know that a large part of that is because I really know no one at this meeting and had talked to no one before sitting down, and I could tell there were several others present that were in my shoes. There was a vibe - where the vibe was clean-cut and fresh and pure and straight-edged the week prior, this week it was its antitheseis: void, still, clinical. Those words may sound more negative than I intend them. What I mean to say is that for the first time since I began attending meetings, nothing really happened today.

I focused for a long time on the bodily feeling of discomfort I brought with me. Part of being slanted towards a tendency for depression is that sometimes tiny things set me off and I'm unsure what they are until I examine the feeling very deeply, and even then, it's not the incident itself that was responsible. Someone had asked us to move our conversation from the space outside the meeting hall about five minutes before the start of meeting, and it served as a way for me to channel my insecurity about being in a new place, leading a sibling that was hiding in my shadow.

My reading from Whipping Girl, by Julia Serano, has given me new thoughts about the nature of what she calls "body feelings" - a deep sense of where and how things are in your body that contributes meaningfully to your self of self and identity. I spent some time doing body scans, focusing on the location of the faint pains, trying to decipher for myself what "discomfort" actually felt like, bodily. This exercise has replaced for me a process that used to be going to God "with open hands and an open heart," carrying the burdens I was bearing. The reason that this no longer works for me is that it's a passive, weak motion - it's not productive for me to risk becoming needy and whiny (as I have in the past) as a byproduct of finding emotional community and release.

Again, this process of mediation may not seem to have anything to do with the standard conception of the Christian deity, but I never rejected that deity as I've morphed into the understanding of the universe  I have now. Whatever it is I am doing and whatever it is that God has become to me, I do it all in God's presence. God is the mother's blood flowing through my thought fetuses - my meditation is just the umbilical cord, and the place I meditate is just the placenta. God is life and movement and learning and community - I love using a mother or father figure to represent the metaphorical source of all these things, because it grants a sense of unity to experience. The unity rings so true when I dwell in it: I see reflections, pieces, of God in every person I meet, in every tree, in every book, in every article I read.

That is no different than it's ever been. The way I think and believe has changed immensely in the past year, and with surprising apathy on my part. But while I was taught that this release would surely be surrendering to darkness, this process of letting go is as much surrendering myself to God as anything I have ever done. Probably more. It means I'm no longer occupied by the existential strain of truth and falsity on my own mind. God - my metaphor God - directs my thoughts and my revelations and my understanding of truth without my trying to coerce reality and rightness into boxes.

My thoughts this morning were cloudy and uncomfortable - a kind of Pepto Bismol texture, murky and amorphous. I saw a piece of chalk start sentences on a green chalk board over and over and never really write anything coherent - it was the same sentence over and over, in fragments: "My thoughts are a sea of disjointed restrictions." It only existed to deliver the emotion I seemed to need to express, and it went nowhere. But then I gave up.

It was like taking the needle off of a scratched record - like finally popping your ears after a sudden climb in elevation and being able to hear again - like turning off some static background noise your subconscious had been distracted by. I just gave up, and gave in, and listened. I did nothing. I just sat there and rested. I listened to some annoying tapping sound someone on the other side of the room was making. I listend to the yawns and coughs and shifts and knuckle cracking of the people in the room, the birds outside, the cars, the sound of the room itself. I felt my body in that space and kept feeling the way I physically reacted, despite the numbing of my previous physical discomfort. And something just worked, somehow. It didn't feel brilliant or bright or hopeful like the best weeks, but it was honest and plain.

Maybe sometimes Meeting is like waiting for a bus that never came. But listening to the other cars as they come by seems a worthwhile activity in and of itself.

The Most Beautiful Nature I've Ever Seen: 1 June 2013

I have made it through May in appreciably better condition than I anticipated. Though I miss Grand Rapids and everyone I got to know this year, I have settled back into a comfortable rhythm back home. I've applied for jobs, watched some shows, seen some friends, and rediscovered my relationship with my parents (which, probably - ironically - due in part to my paranoia, internal conflict, and fear approaching my return, is almost entirely positive, and for that I am eternally thankful). I've literally had a different plan every single week to get to Seattle for meeting and I have failed every time - catching rides with friends, taking the bus, going with other friends, not communicating properly, yada yada yada.

As I've mentioned, unlike ever before, I legitimately start to feel spiritual unrest when I spend too much time out of meditation now, so I have very randomly decided to plop down on the spot to recenter my mind on two different occasions in the past couple weeks. Too much time has passed since the first to merit a post of its own, but it was probably one of the most beautiful meditative experiences I have had. Driving home from a coffee date, one day, I was suddenly filled with an antsy anger, perhaps regret, for the way I had portrayed myself in the conversation. I'd been stuck at home for a few days and hadn't gotten exercise, either, so leaving this meeting, I suddenly felt extremely claustrophobic and embarrassed of myself, pulling off to the side of the road completely spontaneously to charge into the woods.

My first attempt to do this resulted in my landing in a ditch, which had a couple passing bikers worriedly looking at me over their shoulders, because my back wheels were in the air. No matter - I got back on the road, and Lo! there was a trail, maybe 100 yards ahead of me.

Maybe it's because I'm older, or because I've been in Michigan winter with nothing to see but grey for half a year, or because it was completely in the middle of nowhere, or because the sun was shining just right through the trees, but it was legitimately the most beautiful hike I've ever hiked. It seemed to be primarily built for mountain biking, because it was fairly narrow and rocky, with as many bikers on it as runners. (I was clearly the only awkward nonathletic person there, in my skinnies, sweater, and sneakers.) The first leg of the trip was me cathartically running out my frustration to a Protest soundtrack, and the second half, I put everything away so that I could pay attention to the finer details of the forest and soak in the smells and sounds.

There were two mountains, essentially, that I climbed down and then up, with a swampy valley in the middle of them. This swamp had a wonderful, fairly new, wide wood bridge spanning it, and halfway through, there was a bench (just half a log on two more logs - Pacific Northwest style). On my way back, I sat there in silence for 40 minutes, and it was incredibly healthy for me. I learned something very interesting, but now I don't remember what it was. I almost like it better that way - the experience is something I like to remember and then let go of.

That was a week ago. Yesterday, I and a friend of mine were walking through this random little town that literally has only one street and a single coffee shop. We happened upon an adorable, eccentric old house-turned-store, where I found a couple candles and a ring. I've amassed a decent collection of candles, now, and wanted to test them out, so I made a makeshift table and put them all on it. My family later remarked that it looks like I have a shrine in my room, but it didn't even occur to me at the time that it might seem that way. I do suppose meditating cross-legged in front of a small table with eccentric-looking candles on it is fairly nonwestern. Whatever works.

One of my candles has a difficult wick that I was trying to test out today, and the fire gave me the same antsy desire to explore, to be quiet, to be free, to be full, to escape, that came to me last week. So I lit all the rest of the candles and arranged them symmetrically, turned off all the lights, and sat down. It wasn't long before I was interrupted by my family to go watch Star Wars, but one of the most incredible, erm, visions came to me.

I had spent almost no time in Observation before the image came: a very plain, poor, victorian-era little girl was hugging her young mother. The image wasn't clear, though I would describe it as faded, rather than dim, but the world they lived in is the same world I created in which to imagine Great Expectations when I read it.

The girl had long, wavy, sand-colored blonde hair, slightly tangled, but only from play. She wore a light brown dress with three-quarter sleeves and a little white frock - perhaps apron - with frills on the straps and hems and a white bow in the back. In this first image, she was incredibly distraught. As has been the case before, despite the fact that I was not the girl, nor the mother, nor did I find that they represented my relationship to my mother or any tentative daughter, I could feel the girl's pain and the mood of her surroundings in perfect detail.

As children often are, the girl was thoroughly saturated with the sadness - a very plain, very pure sadness that sunk to her bones. It was the kind that makes you feel so helpless you forget about everything that was good, and tears seem like a natural outpouring of your state of being. That state of being where, if only you still remembered something that was good, the misery couldn't possibly be so miserable.

It was a deep pain, not just the scrape of a knee. I don't know what happened - perhaps she got betrayed by some friends, or teased, or kicked out of a game, but I get the feeling it was accompanied by harsh movement and some kind of physical consequence. Do you remember that deep ache that wells up in you as a child when you've cried so much the whining becomes an expression of the ache in your abs? It was that kind of all-consuming ache, accompanied by shame and rejection and emotional hurt.

The mother had a small frame, dark hair, rosy cheeks, a dainty nose. She cradled the girl in her arms so beautifully. The two fit together like a puzzle, as if they had always been meant to be together, to comfort one another. Her mother was a safe haven for the little girl, a home base from which she need never depart. She was warmth and beauty and simplicity and goodness to her, and the girl could see absolutely nothing wrong in her.

This scene faded into a nature scene. She had run a long way to arrive here, and she'd discarded her shoes by the edge of the clearing in which I found her. It was a waterfall, maybe three meters wide and three or four stories tall. There was a perfectly clear pool at its base, and the vegetation was overflowing at the seams. It seemed to speak of pixies and fairies and dwarves and magical kingdoms in some kind of subtle way; there was magic in the air. At least, that's what it seemed to the little girl, who had run a very long way, and had just reached this oasis, and knelt by the water to wash her hands and face.

As she was exploring the area, turning up rocks and splashing in the water, a little boy about her age came out of the woods, or perhaps a cave to the right of the waterfall, and told her that he could show her something cool. Again, typical of children, it didn't really seem strange to her that he was there, nor did she think to ask for his name. It didn't occur to me that he had no identity and that I didn't know where he came from until just now.

He was a skinny boy with a feminine face - pink lips, sharp chin, pale complexion. His build was small - smaller than the girl's - but he'd clearly found his way around the direction he'd come from and was eager to show it to the girl, despite his shy, quiet disposition. The two children waded through waist-deep water into a cave to the right of the waterfall, behind some bushes and through a nest of ferns. There was a long cliff face that went on for significantly longer than the waterfall, and the cave was a relatively shallow, but impressively cavernous space that had evidently been appreciated by some kind of carnivorous animal before us. The boy had been collecting stones he'd found in the pool and in the cave, sorting them by color and shining them to make them look nicer.

After he'd shown me his rocks (as the victorian girl had now morphed into my consciousness, almost as though in freedom, she became me), I asked whether he'd explored much further - maybe, up the cliff. He said he hadn't tried to climb it, and wondered whether we even could. Before he'd finished his sentence, I had made my way through to the cliff face and had climbed up a couple feet - the slope was slightly to my advantage, but it was clearly a difficult climb for such a small kid in a damp dress and bare feet. The boy was afraid and questioned my decision, but I pointed out that there was another cave behind the waterfall that we could get into fairly easily if we climbed carefully.

And so we did - each climbing carefully a story up and about twice as far over, into a far more impressive (though damp) cave than before. The story ends here, but the moment is one I feel deserves description. The waterfall was out of reach from the mouth of the cave, easily three times an arm's length, but we could feel the spray where we crouched together, playing with some stones we found on the cave floor. Outside the cave, watermark rainbows where the sun touched the spray, and from our vantage point, we could see the splashes and ripples the waterfall made in the pool below from its own point of view. The green was so green, and the blue was so blue, and the black so black, the white so white. As if everything was more purely exactly what it was, and everything was more easily understood.

Her mood was such contrast to the state I had found her in. It was an escape for her, no doubt, to come here and play, explore, lose herself in the beauty of a magical world. And what incredible beauty. I'm not sure I've ever felt a place more eternal, old, wise, calm, living, so bright and full of color. It was genuinely a gift to be given a window into that world for a moment, and to experience along with these children, and especially the little girl, the release of pain and frustration into life and light and goodness.

Plants and Birds and Mothers: 12 May 2013

This Sunday was my last trip out to Grand Rapids Friends Meeting until late August. I took a bike again, and it was the craziest trip - such an array of weather patterns. Sunshine, blasts of freezing cold wind, warm gentle breezes, hail, more sunshine, enough heat to make me sweat. Craziness. The world is beautiful, though, and it was a fun trip out. Having now learned the optimal path, both in terms of distance and scenery, well enough not to have to check my phone, it was certainly the most pleasant bike trip I've made out yet. It was certainly a bittersweet morning for me.

The meditation I've had over the last few weeks has been deeply involved with that idea: that the life around us and the life in us and the life between us all stems from the same Source, and so we can learn more about any of these branches by studying the rest of the tree. Walking past all the flowers and the little leaves emerging, a couple weeks after the sun had started to shine, I felt a very simple community with the little buds. I'm in such a spring season of my life, and I fear sometimes that when the Summer comes, I might look back on this time and criticize the blossom for failing to photosynthesize as prolifically as the leaf. There's always an apprehension in the back of my mind that I'll be more like the daffodils, which shrivel after brightening the world with a couple weeks of colorful display, than like the apple blossoms, which are equally lovely, but which are signs of the coming fruit. Especially when the point of college is to cultivate a certain anticipated fruit, it's nerve wrecking not to know why so many petals are dropping from the tree.

I arrived to an empty meeting house and texted Walt Marston that I wasn't sure if I'd missed a memo, since I'd never been the first to arrive. But I figured I would wait until Meeting was scheduled to start and take a moment to calm my spirit, regardless. The blossoms on all the trees - though they still seem a bit out of place to me by the middle of May, since I'm used to March and April being blossom season back home - just make everything look softer and more painterly. Every leaf is more noticeable after the winter season, when we become accustomed to the barren, fairly ugly branches - at least in Michigan, everything's just grey in the wintertime. But now that everything has suddenly exploded out of its cocoon, there is a subtle vivacity to the air and the dirt and the color and the sounds that makes something deep within me feel very warm.

Hearing something behind me, I turned around to see Mike Holladay approaching the steps where I was sitting, asking whether no one had arrived yet. We started chatting and went inside, and I explained that I'd come a little early because it was my last week. He gave a warm hug, and his laughter and lightheartedness was the same warmth in the breeze. And as more people began to filter in toward the start of the meeting, I got to shake hands and meet a couple that has just returned from their winter in Florida. I love shaking people's hands - it's so telling. The man's - I'm terrible with names, even when I've met people several times, forgive me - was firm, but not decisive. He shook maybe four or five times, where I normally only shake twice, but it communicated an appreciation of the moment, and the interest in his eyes when he asked for my name was inspiring. His wife, who was around the corner at the time, proceeded to ask for my name in precisely the same way - and my last name in precisely the same way - and shook my hand, but with about twenty times less movement, as light as a feather, with softness to match it. They both welcomed me, though they've been absent since my first visit to the meeting in October, and though it'll be my last for months. One does not simply extend that kind of greeting unless they've made the space their home.

I was glad to see Walt, who chuckled and said something about people having shown up in the end. Ron Irvine came in, too, and though I've followed him on Facebook, he's been in California for a month, and I've missed speaking with him. There was soon a small circle of people sharing mundane little jokes about the weather and the changing of seasons, the end of my Academic year, a book that's just been put out for sale by a lady named Anita who attends the meeting, things like that. The old wood and brick of the building and the warm lights and the warm faces and hands and smiles and hugs going around are so simple, but they're so rich and full and meaningful.

My heart was full when I sat down. Being around people like these - not just for their kindness, but openness of spirit and the clarity with which they see other people - humbles me incredibly. Again, it occurred to me that the "great cloud of witnesses" is not limited to Abrahamic forefathers, nor to religious figures, nor to just these people in Meeting, but also to the animals and the carpet and the phone in my pocket and the air and the Spirit and children. There is a weight to Life that contains a wise constancy I'd like to spend my time learning from, and I have a disposition that allows me to do so easily if I simply listen.

I have friends with whom I have been in conversation lately about the personal ethics of mind-altering drugs like pot. I'm intrigued by the debate, and it's very clear to me that pot is less harmful than tobacco. People have told me about all the great effects it has on your ability to meditate, and notice detail, and all that. And as I have let go of my old conclusions, I have come to the realization that regardless of whether I'm okay with whatever, I'm really not a fan on the conceptual level. A phrase kept popping up in my mind through most of meeting:

My soul sees deeper than any altered state. My spirit knows more peace than any breath of smoke. My imagination is realer than any high. To suddenly feel the room become alive with a Presence - or, rather, to suddenly notice that it already is - makes me feel as though . . . something can be done here. As if the soil is simply too rich for something not to grow, and that I am part of this garden. That we are all growing together.

Along with the fullness, the humility makes me feel very small. And because this is a disorienting and worthless feeling, I think, when it is not grounded in reality or linked to practical application, I began to imagine myself putting this newfound humility I have learned the past few months into my interactions with people, into the work I do. Not gonna lie, I'm very nervous to go back home. I recently shared a picture from the pretty big facebook page "I fucking love science" about a couple functional prosthetic legs given to a cat after a run in with a car, I received a comment from my mother that the picture was "cool, but I hope that's not the kind of language you're using."

My life has grown beyond this kind of issue since I have left home. I don't swear excessively, or in inappropriate contexts, but I certainly don't have barbed wire protecting me from some kind of canon dictionary of profanity. It is this way with many things in my life, the way it has become, where regardless of the answers produced, the questions I am asking now are fundamentally different from the ones I was asking twelve months ago. It is not, "What is really true?," but instead, "What is really meaningful?," and not "Where is God in this?," but "Where is this in God?." I, like many young people in my position, I'm sure, am afraid to return to a community that expects me to be someone I am no longer. I do not feel changed; I feel matured. I feel as though I have matured in precisely the way my community has taught me to do it - always seeking God, always making conclusions or coming to decisions with great discernment and integrity. As I have said many times, this has not been a process of rebellion for me, at all. It has been like letting a bird out of a cage, allowing it to perch on top of it instead of on the little swing inside. This morning, the fullness of my humility brought me the understanding that returning home will mean having to respect people that have taught me to learn things with which they will not agree.

I deeply want to maintain the peaceful love of life I have learned this year, both in meeting and out of it.  It has been months since I have really argued with anyone, and I would not like this to change. My nonacademic goals and desires have become very simple: to love, and be loved - or, alternatively, to appreciate and be appreciated - and to spread the peace that is a product of such actions. Reflecting on Mother's Day today was an anticipation of returning to someone that I have learned to appreciate much more objectively this year, which has been an extremely humanizing and worthwhile experience for me. I no longer see my mother as simply my mother, but as a person that acted in certain ways and did certain things and made decisions for and around me, growing up, someone that also has a personality of her own.

My hope is that we will be able to develop a closer friendship this Summer, but my apprehension is that both with her and with my father, there will simply be too great a divide between the daughter they expect and the person I am (though I honestly believe that they would like the person I am now better) for them to be able to approach me as a full being. Speaking as their kid, it's the bittersweet reality that home might not feel like this life and freedom, at first. But speaking as a newborn adult, it's knowing that for the first time in my life, it is first and foremost my responsibility to take this liveliness back home, not something for me to expect of them.

I have been given a million incredible opportunities, nourishment from everyone around me, and I have had life poured into me as if through a funnel. My prayer is that I will be capable of wrapping that up and bringing it home to my parents, so that I can give back to them what they have given to me; that I will be strong enough not to shrink back into my seed cap when the caretakers of my childhood garden continue trying to coax out of the earth things that have long since sprouted.

Today I recognize the shortness of season, and the youth of the world, and the youth of my mother, and the youth of myself. I recognize the simplicity of goodness, the goodness of simplicity, the depth of simple goodness. I recognize the flux between generations, the apprehensions inherent in this whole process, the great desire I have for my parents to understand (despite whatever doubt) that their work has been well done. But more than that, I recognize that this is not the first time my life has been doused in miracle grow, and that the way my life has worked, people - my dear mother in chief - have been constantly trying to help me find what I realize I have found to the best of their ability. I have a world to thank my mother for, because this is a world she helped me create. She tilled the soil, she planted the seeds, she trimmed the branches (and she tried to trim some branches that never came off). Maybe, this summer, I can bring back some of this fruit to the family dinner table.

Arcs: 21 April 2013

After my typical few minutes of calm and "Observation," as I described last week, and a few more minutes of - what to call it - prayer, specific meditation on the presence of God, invocation, the mindspace produced the image of a huge candle. I attended a concert at St. Andrew's Cathedral in downtown yesterday, and they, like most liturgical churches, had those caps on top of their candles, which seem to exaggerate the candles' (already large) size. The candle in mind today was like those candles, but about ten times their size. I'm not sure how I knew this, because in the mindspace, there's no relativity of perspective, but it was huge, and the flame was equally huge - probably larger than the candle itself. After a few minutes playing with the image of the candle, a tiny flame blower-type flame appeared and came closer to the main, gigantic flame. A phrase started looping as some kind of echo:

If a flame is lit within another, will it shine ever brighter?

The new image was of the little flame drifting inside the big flame. It didn't have a wick, but it was very sure, very intense, very small. Soon there was a ring of little flames like it, slowly turning in a circle around the circumference of the main flame. The imagery's pretty obvious - Spirit is the large flame, and we, our energies each separate from the Spirit's, are still within and subsumed and - well this is the question - strengthened by the flame we have in common. And though we each be separate, we're all made of the same substance, the same organic reaction. By dwelling in Spirit, we are made more aware of the flame in us; by joining in a circle of fellowship, not only are we in the presence of a greater light, but also contribute to a greater illumination of the light itself. The more of us are present in the light, the lighter our surroundings - and the cycle is perpetuated.

It was about here that our friend Jonathon arrived. It was his first time visiting, and he'd gotten lost. I rose to greet him, and sat back down with fresh concentration. Jonathon's making plans to visit me in Seattle this summer, and so I'm unsurprised that the next image to come to mind was that of a plane's trajectory over the North American continent.

At first, there was just one; then, there were many. They increased in distance and speed and momentum, almost, from the slow, realistic speed of an actual plane to an electrical zapping across continents almost instantly. And unlike in these pictures, they got thinner and thinner, more hairlike - they were no longer just planes, but energy, the Light, connecting people to one another internationally.

There was a man at meeting today, named Silas, who is the pastor of a church in the programmed tradition in Kenya. With Jonathon and his Mexican heritage plus the Seattle travel motif, his place next to Silas created an interesting energy for this image to feed on. The arcs had been a clear, colorless energy before, but they became increasingly golden, until they resembled the color of the flames from the beginning. It's really the same concept: the connection between all people, unity in an energy that's in all people and places.

Having made this connection, and sensing - imagining - the connection between everyone in the meeting room as similar hair-thin projection, the arcs morphed into the rim of the edge of the first, big flame. It was solid - perhaps metal. But it was glowing and hot, which made anything that got placed on the rim move very quickly, as though it were oiled, or as if it were a puck on the surface of a pingpong table. I was spinning by my hands like a gymnast on the round bar that was the rim of the flame - it was maybe 8cm in diameter - and went all the way up it, then down the other side. This image had been fully absorbed when it was interrupted by vocal ministry.

It was about the recent floods in Grand Rapids, and how the presence of water everywhere points out how crooked everything else is. How the water always finds an equilibrium, that it's always straight, always even, when it just calms down. I've never thought of water in this symbolic light - that of equality. And as I contemplated the image, I realized that no one water molecule is actually exactly on the same plane as another, because what's up and down, high and low, is subjective - water covers our whole planet. Even if we understand people in relation to one another and no one is exactly the same, the way water flows into equilibrium is a great illustration of the way we ought to relate to one another. Like our planet's surface is a mass of mostly water, the human race is a mass of mostly water - yet energy still holds it together. Even submersed in the water, as we are, there is the energy of the flame in every molecule: electrons zooming in and out of orbits, moving atoms past one another, particles moving at nearly unmeasurable speeds, even while in the deepest of calm.

Carnage: 16 April 2013

Today is Tuesday, and I normally never write here on Tuesdays. The prodding to write certainly does not come from meditation, today, but it does come from collision of my imagination with my faith life, and the experience at hand relates to some themes I've explored here in the past. Please take with a grain of salt that which I'm about to say - this is far from the first time things like this have happened, and I'm sure they will happen again. I have had years of experience handling the reactions and have learned to control them well.

On Tuesdays, I have my favorite class: Religion 121, which is Biblical Literature. It's just a survey of the Bible, but it's been so realistic, informative, and scientifically-credible that it has been one of the first faith-related classes I've been in that I've never encountered with any fear. There has always been the possibility that something go wrong in the past - judging that I approached it with a desire to pursue "dangerous faith" while also craving intellectual integrity - and this has historically made me struggle through everything in the Bible, "wrestling" with it, trying to come to terms with it, trying to synchronize texts.

How can God say this if he means that? How can these two totally - no, surely, only seemingly - contradictory ideas come from the same author? How could God possibly say something so ridiculous, so mean, so ... off? So little like God?

It was pretty recently that I was terrified of the Bible. This blog of mine that I wrote just this past September makes that fairly obvious: "I am scared of reading the Bible, but I read it occasionally anyways. I've read pretty much the whole New Testament and large chunks of the Old Testament, but I have no one ask questions, and huge chunks of it does little but remind me of ways people have used the words to justify their exclusion and moral superiority." The thing is, when I said I'd read the Old Testament, I had only done so without the context of the historical narrative of the Hebrew people. Though I had read, I had not understood, and it mostly seemed pretty irrelevant to me. The New Testament was the bread and butter of all the sermons, all the devotions, all the random posters and bookmarks, all the theology, all the random verses we had to memorize for various classes. I had a conflicted relationship with the text, because as much as I felt that my faith was grounded in some things it taught, there were so many ignorant or hurtful things I associated with certain parts of it - or perhaps things that the text itself actually communicates. And what didn't have a negative connotation, I had enough questions that I never had any idea what to think about it and it was always hit or miss whether I could appreciate the reading or not.

Today in Biblical Literature class, we did Paul.

I wasn't expecting this class to be any different from other classes I've had in this course. It was supposed to be another step along the way in reframing the roots of Christianity to me, redeeming religion, continuing this revolutionary reconstructive process. But the thing is, some combination of what I mentioned above and the fact that Christian culture treats Paul like he's the Biblical author of primary authority in speaking the Gospel to us Gentiles makes me feel much more uncomfortable being critical of the text than I normally would.

You must understand that I have struggled constantly for years to apply this text - mostly Galatians, but also Romans, 1/2 Corinthians, Ephesians, Philippians  Colossians, and the rest of the epistles - to my faith. This is the Christianity I've had most contact with, and these are words I've heard incessantly in descriptions of God's direct, interventionary connection to humankind. These are the ideas I have been told are dogmatic truth, in the reflection of Paul's and other apocalyptic-era New Testament radicals' firm commitment to moral purification before the apocalyptic purging and judgement. I've put lots of thought into Pauline morality, I've invested so much in it. The unfortunate consequence is that with all this has also come a ton of negative attachment - these texts have been incredibly abused, and it is extremely difficult for me to read them, let alone to hear them talked about.

I've described before the way my history with self-injury factors into the processes of my imagination. But it deeply impacts the way I approach religion as a whole because of the intimacy between religious frustration and the origins of self-injury in my past. My first moments of intentional, masochistic self-injury were during the weekly Lord's Prayer, in Chapel, and in Bible class that year. The way prayer was being used as a legalistic duty or a self-beneficial supernatural vending machine by a bunch of gender-segregated, privileged, sheltered, naïve white girls bothered me incredibly even then, and the inescapability of the environment was incredibly oppressive to me. This frustration, fear, and disgust was released by my biting my thumb while they prayed, sometimes to keep myself from crying. It felt like a fitting expression of my anger, my depression, my claustrophobia.

Throughout the rest of high school, I continued to care about Bible classes - they became even more important to me as my faith grew and changed. I applied myself very deeply and very spiritually and very intelligently, seeking to have integrity in whatever I learned there. My desire to be fully engaged and attentive was almost compulsive at times - I would have my computer out, looking up different translations or etymology dictionaries or Wikipedia articles, just to make sure I was understanding everything with the greatest precision possible. I asked tons of questions and developed a somewhat negative reputation with some peers toward the end because I'd sidetrack the teacher entirely, asking too many questions, questions that others sometimes perceived as idealistic or annoying. I tried to teach myself only to ask questions that would be tactful and interesting to the rest of the class. Personal notes crowded the margins of my notes - countless prayers, occasionally occupying as much paper as my notes.

And when I was in church or youth group, I filled the margins of bulletins with questions and then tore open offering envelopes to continue writing, making sure that I recorded anything with which I took issue. I did the same thing here - I made sure to rephrase my questions as well as I could to keep from provoking long debates with kids in my youth group or agitating anyone with my controversies. I didn't want to create unnecessary distance from them when a functional discussion could yield productive learning on both sides. Regardless of the occasion, my learning was pretty thoroughly integrated into my life, and my life into learning. So with the kinds of existential claims made by traditional Christianity, and with my nearly tireless desire to consider seriously what I was told by teachers, of course I would come to care deeply about the texts behind it all.

Like I said, I didn't go into class today any differently than I've gone into any lecture this year. I had done the reading and was anticipating an interesting lecture. But within a few minutes of class, I began to feel uneasy: where the rest of the class had been so objective, suddenly, I felt as though inquiry had been restricted again. I'm not sure whether or not my professor was communicating differently, in a way that suggested to me that I was being taught lies. I do know that in my experience, Paul's message of salvation has always been applied very literally and out of context. I do know that reading Paul made me intensely uncomfortable, and that hearing that Paul preach the basic Christian message - the forgiveness of sins by the atoning sacrifice of God's Son Jesus Christ - was a trigger for me, and I ended up in a fairly terrible place.

This is where the part starts that's authentic to this blog. My imagination went wild after this trigger. The last thing I wrote of the official notes was that Pauline Christianity focuses on salvation through faith in Christ, and after that it was all lost. I was thinking like my old self - the neurotic near-literalist - rather than with nuanced understanding and historical perspective.

I wrote in the margin of my notes.

Paul's God is not my God.
Paul's God is not my God.
Paul's God is not my God.
Paul's God is not my God.

Although I've recently become quite enthusiastic about reading Samuel and Amos and Ezra and Job in a state of mind that allows me to recognize that people's understandings of God have changed, and that's okay, something about Galatians felt like it had to be objective truth, and that by identifying as Christian, it was mandatory to accept as perfect everything he said. It crept up in a stain - a mindspace visual stain, like one I might describe in my regular posts on this blog. It had a red-yellow tint, but was pale and see-through and I didn't have my eyes closed, as I normally do. This makes it difficult to describe; it wasn't overlaid on my vision, but it existed clearly, and I could feel it encroaching on my ability to see.

It occurred to me to ask, as I normally would, what Paul really meant. We understand so much of his writing through a totally modernistic lens, a culture he predates by seventeen centuries. Certainly he didn't write this way. What was "salvation" to an apocalyptic, early Christian, pre-Destruction of Jerusalem Jewish evangelist? It certainly wasn't the same spiritual salvation from the fiery afterlife pit of punishment and isolation from God Evangelicals sometimes speak of today, nor was it quite the moralistic salvation presence of the resurrected Christ in our everyday, as some more liberal Christians might say. But it wouldn't've been right for me to question the validity of the core Gospel message in front of that class, in front of a group of peers that were almost completely uninterested in any conversation that would come of my question and might even be offended by what I said. No, it's better that, for the first time ever in this class, I force myself to remain quiet.

judgment. silence. be quiet. no questions. NO PASTORS. YOU ARE FREE.

This is where the first sign came: the ache in my palms. I have this strange psychosomatic thing that's been going on for several years where if I feel like I'm violating someone else's space (or need to deny myself in order to keep myself from doing so), my palms begin to ache, and it spreads up my arms and neck and through the rest of my body, until I feel unable to quite move my limbs. I lose coordination and concentration - sometimes I lose the ability to look at anyone, because it hurts my eyes, and my face feels exposed and raw. The professor was just explaining the Gospel - we're saved through grace, sanctified through Christ's redeeming work in us, produce the Fruit of the Spirit. They are not things I completely disbelieve, and I've come to love these ideas through the lens of the Old Testament. But hearing them said in the context of a Christian class, by someone male in authority, to a class of dogmatic students, dragged me back into my old rut, and I lost control of my mind.

nopaulnopaulnopaulnopaulnopaulnopaul
nopaulnopaulstopstopstoepnopaulNOPAULSTOPSTOPNO

The aching spread through my head first this time, before it spread out my arms through my body, and was in the roots of my molars and canines, more on the left than the right. I felt lopsided and physically hypersensitive, and it just got worse with every minute.

paul is God
paul is God
God is dead God is dead
GOD IS DEAD

And then came the images.
It was a full limb - an arm and a leg at once, severed at the joint. It was not a clean cut - it was torn; the bone was shattered where it stuck out at the end of it and in several other places. It was spinning, as if it had been thrown in a place without gravity - falling and falling without end. Startled, I shook myself out of it and tried to remember, tried to recall the reformation of thought I've learned from the Exile.

God is low
God is meek
God is light
God is peace

It was as though I remembered the words but couldn't quite grasp their meaning - as though their definitions had escaped me for a moment. I listened for a moment - I remember flashes of it, snapshots, that are completely disconnected from the rest of the event. Pulling down the map - the story of Paul in jail - Paul's angry with people trying to get Gentiles to be Jews - a piece of chalk on the board, an underline - freedom from the law - it's all a bit of a blur. I couldn't hear him. The words didn't go in. And the shoots of aching pain through my limbs were... interesting.

I am not paul
I don't need to be paul
I am not like Paul,
I am not LIKE PAUL
no more. I am free. I am free from the law. I am free 
NO! NOT PAUL! NOT HIS FREEDOM! PAUL DOES NOT SET ME FREE

There was a body without most of the limbs - I'm hardly sure whether male or female. It was evidently fairly beaten up, bruised, bloody. After it had hung in the mindspace for a couple seconds, there was a sudden burst of energy from within it, tearing it into a pattern of ragged, but intricately-connected strips, so that no part was detached, but every part - inside and out - was exposed. Again, shocked, the mindspace zoomed shut on itself and the explosion reversed.

I shook my head, trying to clear my mind, and flipped my open Bible from Galatians to some random piece of the Old Testament, trying to recover the frame-shift understanding of Theology I've discovered of late.

There was a time when I flipped to random portions of the Bible to see if God would speak to me, if he would "reveal himself," but today the randomness had quite a different intention. These texts are unspoiled to me, and have no strange connotations. I have firmly established them as part of a narrative, and not as dogmatic theology, so hardly anything there can really bother me. It's part of a story. Something caught my eye and I started reading - eventually, I arrived at Ecclesiastes.

I, the Teacher, when king over Israel in Jerusalem, applied my mind to seek and to search out by wisdom all that is done under heaven; it is an unhappy business that God has given to human beings to be busy with. I saw all the deeds that are done under the sun; and see, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.

        What is crooked cannot be made straight, 
        and what is lacking cannot be counted. 

I said to myself, "I have acquired great wisdom, surpassing all who were over Jerusalem before me; and my mind has had great experience of wisdom and knowledge." And I applied my mind to know wisdom and to know madness and folly. I perceived that this also is but a chasing after wind.

        For in much wisdom is much vexation,
        and those who increase knowledge increase sorrow.

In this text, I did not find a description of my state of mind, though I have felt this way before. I did not hear the "voice of God." I did not hear truth, and I heard nothing false. But I heard an honest description of someone's mind, and they were fully human to me in that moment. In those words, I found solace; but when I lost concentration, I heard the words of evangelism.

Paul is dead
Paul is dead
Paul is dead
Paul is dead
The dead are not raised
they are not raised
He was crucified
he was killed 
he was DEAD
he is DEAD!

Alternating between attention to class and my strange little coping mechanism, I tried to understand Paul as human, as a voice like the author of Ecclesiastes, as a being just like me, like my professor, just another person. I wasn't able. As little as I believe Paul has special authority, and as much as I have loved and understood this class perfectly on every other occasion, I have been rendered incapable of reading Paul's words or hearing Christian jargon without feeling as though my very understanding of the faith is an insult to the Church.

Be quiet, Marié. Don't speak. Those aren't the right questions. Those are not questions. They are not rational. Faith is a different matter. Sola fide. Sola gratia. Sola scriptura. Sola scriptura. Solo Paulo. You believe what he says. (An arm - my arm, though not the one resting on my desk - is vertically sliced open by an expo knife, exposing tendons and both radius and ulna. My mindspace smiles, and I try to clear it away.) Believe what he says - have faith - and you will inherit the Kingdom of heaven. And you want to "inherit the Kingdom of heaven," because that's the only way between God and you. It's unfathomable to spend your energy on any other thought - be calm. Rest. Give up. (Blood flows like spilled milk in every direction.) Your questions can be answered. They're silly questions. (The exploding body comes back.) You only need clarification. Look around - no one else is confused like you are! - they're all doing fine. (A small flurry of flaking severed limbs.) Don't ask your questions. They don't need to hear your thoughts. You don't even need to hear these thoughts. Be quiet. Give up. Be at peace.

All the fucking irony!

Over and over I have told myself these words. For as much as I talk and as many questions as I really have asked, there have been almost an equal number of times I have forced myself not to, and the only way I was able to was by feeding myself lies about the things that are most important to me. I'm not sure whose fault it is that my mind has constructed these triggers and barriers. I don't think I can blame anyone, even myself, for my dazed clumsiness, dizziness, shortness of breath, and near limp as I walked out of class. (I would've cried, but it felt like I'd forgotten how.) I have done a lot of research and never quite understood why the most intense physical pain I ever feel results from completely mental processes - I've had to write this post in several sessions, and just having worked on it now, I feel it in my left forearm - my right ring finger and pinky - my left ankle - my right eyebrow - my left armpit. But hopefully this open dialogue and the reconstruction of my faith that I am writing for this class will grant me opportunity for sufficient free expression to begin to heal these internal wounds. What can I do but hope and pray? Perhaps one day I will be able to read Paul again.