Coronary Muscle, Warmth, and Gratitude: 3 March 2013

My weekend hadn't been particularly sunny. The week it followed had several existential weights that, although they weren't universally bad, served to mute some of the high-spirited momentum I'd had the rest of the month:

A good, but very difficult, nearly three-hour-long conversation with a Christian fundamentalist about the nature of God, Christ, epistemology, homosexuality, and postmodernism left me so drained - nothing like defending the worth of love to a skeptic at the end of a long week.

I ended up having to wear some random girl's dress (I hate dresses) at a concert I was almost late to, granting me a hefty dose of dysphoric self-consciousness to deal with for several days following.

A test I'd been calling the "Chem Test of Death" that had received nearly ten hours of my attention over the past week returned to me wearing a much poorer grade than I would've liked.

I felt dragged down by the extent to which my friends and peers seem to dismiss how lucky we are as LGBT people at Calvin, seeming to take equality for granted and wishing for more without really wanting to work for it, as I do. Because of these dynamics and a few other slightly off-kilter conversations with friends, I became embarrassed about my writing and speaking and the passion I put into them.

I had the opportunity to explain to my Psych prof the issues I had with certain childhood disciplinary procedures, allowing me a moment of intense appreciation for the person I was as a kid. I felt as though I was finally actualizing a lifelong dream: to serve as an ambassador for children to the adult world. This is how I first became interested in controversy. It was my first desire to build bridges between people with inherent worldview differences.

An absolutely incredible realization I came to about the personality type of the guy I dated last year moved me to tears, helping me to understand why he was the way he was, why we didn't work out as a couple, why I loved him, and why I still love the person he is despite whatever distance we have between each other now.

...So regardless of the particular emotions at hand, it was a pretty emotionally-heavy week, and I found myself a bit depressed and tired and burdened come Saturday. As is fairly regular for me in moments of low self-worth and frustration, I started craving self-injury (don't worry, I haven't acted upon this in years) and wasting huge amounts of time, even though I should've been sleeping. Needless to say, I walked into Meeting this morning in a very strange, disoriented state of mind.

As always, Ron Irvine provided his gentle listening ear and good-natured conversation in the car on the way over, and Mike Holladay approached me before silence to ask if I had received his email. The email he'd sent was one of appreciation for my blog - the one that I'd kept secret out of fear of chastisement until only two weeks ago - and an extremely warm extension of affection and acceptance that I'm not sure I knew what to do with. It had come at a strange place in my week, and all the things I mentioned up top and more seem to have blown over it, though it stayed at the back of my mind like a little lighter flame, a little encouragement. When he asked me whether I'd received it, I was embarrassed to hesitate for a moment and was shocked into remembrance. The simple, down-to-earth goodness of the people I have gotten to know and speak with at Meeting has been a very touching, transformative part of my life lately. I can tell stories, but otherwise, I'm kind of at a loss for words, which happens infrequently enough that I find it embarrassing. This has all come as a very strange, wonderful, unexpected surprise in my religious life.

My word of gratitude to Mike as we sat down in the meeting room was that I'm unused to receiving such positive feedback on my blogs, particularly the secret one, and especially approval that isn't based on philosophical judgment. Even Apostrophe was always mostly a forum for argument: it was where I wrote essays about my disagreements with people and the arguments I couldn't finish for myself in person. The culture in which I was intellectually reared created colleagues of my peers, and, by extension, intellectual rivals of my most intimate friends and romantic interests. As I explained this, I realized with a bit of shock that I had condensed of the some of the greatest (and quietest) struggles of my past few years into a couple sentences and was greeted with warm, lighthearted, understanding laughter - it shouldn't've been as strange to me as it was. Just to be truly heard, truly seen, touched me. It occurs to me now that the magnitude of my reaction is owed in large part to the fact that many of the people that have been warm toward me and truly respected me - dare I say, as an equal - at Meeting have been middle-aged men, and some part of me is still instinctively unused to that.

When I meditate, I either conjure up a simple image - a flame, a ball, a magnet, a pill-shaped blob - or some image will present itself. For the images I conjure up consciously, usually the flame, I concentrate on it until I have come to an understanding of the wholeness of myself and the life around me, as though I have become the flame: steady, full of energy, controlled, bright, ethereal. Like a soul. But today, the first image presented itself, and almost immediately: a human heart, still beating, but isolated from any image of a human chest or body. After it had beaten for a few seconds, it was violently torn aside by the force of a cut that passed through it, product of an invisible blade. It shuddered slightly, but kept its ground, and kept beating. After a few seconds, another and another came, and I witnessed the ruthless laceration of the poor piece of meat by some kind of inscrutable, unstoppable power. The right ventricle and left atrium had both been punctured and the aorta had been ripped to shreds, but it continued beating normally, as though oblivious to the fact that it was under attack.

One cut for that time your entire circle of "peers" (more like colleagues) and your most respected mentor and teacher attacked your views in Philosophy of Religion. One cut for that time you were called a blasphemer between kisses in your lover's arms. One cut for every time you were told your writing was too embarrassingly pretentious to read. One cut for that time you were told you were incapable of giving an introductory presentation on your most passionate interest by your (tall, athletic, guy) friend that runs all the school's Bible studies because you're not a "weathered male." One cut for every time someone thought your orientation meant you were a slut. One cut for every time you were told that it's against God's will that women ever be spiritual leaders to men. One cut for every time you wondered whether you could ever become more than the middle-aged housewife you never wanted to be.

Given the cravings I was experiencing last night and this morning, you can probably imagine that it was more powerful than pure symbolism. Strangely enough, the cuts were not cuts of self-injury: they were the cuts of a victim, a victim without an attacker. My response was not one of grudge, and has never been a grudge. I have never really blamed my friends and teachers and loved ones for these various things they did that hurt me, because those things were symptoms of a broken culture, not the malice of their intention. And I rationalized all that happened, so I was certainly not aware at the time that I was being hurt as badly as I was. Don't get me wrong - I had a very, very positive high school experience, I am very privileged, and I am very thankful. But where there are people, there is hurt, and all the little scars still tear open from time to time.

The heart kept beating, kept pumping, and somehow, blood did not come pouring out. Eventually the adrenaline fades, though, and you're left with a bunch of swollen wounds that need healing.

It wasn't very long before the tears came. I had no desire to stop them; they felt like the blood that should've been gushing from the wounds. As the tears rolled down my cheeks, I saw a creamy jel begin to form in the space around this pathetic collection of mutilated tissues, filling in the cracks like a soothing salve. The object continued to smooth itself over until it was coated in a thin, mucous-like protective layer, beating in a dull throb instead of in a piercing pain. It occurred to me that I was not ashamed of crying, and that I felt no desire to leave the room as I would've in church at home.

Within fifteen or twenty minutes, this image had faded and that of a large fireplace came into view. It was such soft light and it felt so warm that the heart curled up by it, resting and thankful. The golden glow that fell over the soothed little organ, beating happily and steadily in its little clump by the fire, was so peaceful. Just seeing it at rest instead of being torn back and forth across my field of vision by some vicious mysterious enemy was adorable and beautiful in a way, as though I were connected to it by some kind of spiritual bond. I was drawn to the light; I couldn't distinguish the flames. I knew only that it was the source of warmth.

As is often the case in my meditations on fire and candles, I became aware that this warmth and energy was the warmth and energy of life, the mysterious energy contained like a present to discover within everything around me. The fire emulates the sun, our original source of light and energy; the sun gives its energy to the plants and the plants to us and other animals; that energy goes from starch and protein and whatever else and gets broken down into amino acids and glucose molecules; and from there it becomes energy again, the warmth that we feel under our skin. The same warmth we feel in the carbon combusting before our eyes. This is the energy that flows through the veins of every person we know and every thing that we eat and breathe, the energy that decided it would organize itself into life.

I have been thinking for several months now about the possibility that God might be the personification of the natural meta-law that determines that matter would defy entropy with gravity and evolution, somehow finding greater stability in the complexity of life than in random disorder. My life is so deeply governed by my connection to this natural meta-law, the same concept I have called "mother" and "father" and "God" and "teacher" and "friend." It is fairly unimportant to me what I call it, because I know Life well enough by now to know at least this: that that cohesive order is our ally. That the universe itself, through all the precedent time and space has established for us, seems to be urging us forward, into stability, simplicity, community, peace, and beauty. That sounds like the urge of a parent to me. It sounds like the will of a mighty and just king. It sounds like a construct to make us feel good. It sounds like a still small voice within my heart. It feels like the truth. And all at once. I feel no need to distinguish.

It was in this warmth that I found my place in the Light's peace and quiet energy, the same quiet energy I normally find when I have become the candle's flame. A steady pulse, a heartbeat, the contant warmth of a flickering fireplace. And my mind was mostly empty, at rest, for the rest of Meeting.