Excuses

We watched The King's Speech Saturday. Every bit as good as it was made out to be. And the story really resonated with me--the story of man unmistakably, and unavoidably called to greatness, who nonetheless has a terrible, embarrassing weakness obvious to everyone.

My own vocation is not nearly so great, and neither is my weakness so obvious. But as I get closer to ordination, I have felt some intensification of anxiety about the significant amount of responsibility I will be taking on, and the fact that I am at heart so flawed and fragile.

I've always been something of a hypochondriac--never about physical illness, but about psychological maladies. My imagination keeps cooking up all these excuses, reasons why I'm really not fit to be a minister.

I can't do this job because I have an undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. I can't do this job because I'm really bipolar. I can't do this job because I'm on the verge of a psychotic episode. Or I'm suicidally depressed. Or I'm really transgendered. I can't do this because I'm not a human being at all, but a super-realistic android, and my whole life is just an experiment to see if a robot raised as a human can attain to a normal life. The experiment is failing. I should be deactivated and recycled for scrap metal.

But I'm afraid the truth is, I'm not crazy (above paragraph notwithstanding). I would like to be. I would like to have an excuse to give up, throw in the towel, jump off a bridge. But the truth is, I can do this job.

I keep clinging to an image of myself as utterly incapable of accomplishing anything, a complete and total failure. And yet, here I am one quarter away from completing an M.Div., getting ready to take ordination exams in August ...

Honestly, I don't know what to make of that. Obviously, the thoughts I have about myself are ridiculous distortions. Yet they hold some truth. I may not be crazy, except that to be human is a kind of madness.

Perhaps George VI was lucky to have such an obvious weakness--it made it clear up front that he was a flawed and fragile human being, like me, like everybody else--and that his greatness did not eliminate that frailty, but transcended it.

Una Poema

So last night, Brandon gets home and notes that I seem tired.

Slumped over at the table, each word requiring an effort, I exclaim, "Must ... write ... perfect ... brief, explanation ... for my blog ... of what is wrong ... with Platonic metaphysics ... from a Christian perspective ..."

"Is this for your internship?" Brandon begins to ask and stops himself, "This is just to appease the demands of your muse, isn't it?"

Oh, the muse. Indeed a harsh taskmaster yesterday--but then (of course, when I was supposed to be going to bed) she graced me with a very special gift: my first ever poem in Spanish.

It's certainly not in the beautiful/profound category--just quirky/philosophical. But it sure was fun to write. (English translation below.)

Fingir a Querer

Yo quiero lo que no puedo tener
quiero el imposible
Pero si de verdad no puedo tenerlo
¿es un verdadero deseo?
¿o quiero querer y solo fingir
que quiero tener lo que quiero?

Ahora escucho a mi corazon
¿Quieres querer o tener?
Me dice, "Yo debo fingir a querer"
Así le pregunto por qué
"¡No sé! Que extraño. ... Ahora yo veo:
es porque yo no quiero nada."

Yo no quiero nada. ¡Que serenidad!
Siento tan mucho mejor
quiero sentir esta paz por siempre
--¿o solo quiero quererla?


Pretending to Want

I want what I can't have
I want the impossible
But if I really can't have it,
is it a real desire?
Or do I want to want and only pretend
to want to have what I want?

Now I listen to my heart
Do you want to want or to have?
It says to me, "I have to pretend to want"
So I ask it why
"I don't know! How strange. ... Now I see:
it's because I don't want anything."

I don't want anything. What serenity!
I feel much better.
I want to feel this peace forever
--or do I only want to want it?

Clumsy

So, last month, we started doing Zumba classes at the gym. I kept thinking, the first two weeks, I should write some silly little piece about how terribly clumsy and uncoordinated, how absolutely awful I was at it--you know, quick, before I got really good.

Um ... dream on, me-of-the-past.

Okay, so, yeah, definitely been at this for over a month now, and definitely still chronically about one and one third beat behind the rest of the class, still the gaping dope struggling to catch on, even when all the instructor is doing is marching in place. "C'mon, dummy--left, right, left, right--no, your other right! How can it be that hard?" Once I finally get the hang of some step, I cannot allow my mind to wander even for a moment, or else all is lost, and suddenly, I'm just standing there, looking like a complete idiot, as everyone else moves gracefully, all together, in perfect sync, or so it seems to me.

I blame it on my autism spectrum non-disorder. (Because even with the supposed over-diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders, people like me, without a disorder at all, continue to slip through the cracks.) It's all about having a one-track mind--being able to block out external stimuli, finding the world at large to be overwhelming, shutting it all out, except a small, manageable bit.

But more specifically, related to my utter ineptitude at Zumba, it's about only being able to think about one thing at a time. If I try to do the footwork, I can't manage the arm/hand motions. Even once I get the hang of the leg part, if I try to add the arms, it just all goes to pieces.

This is also why I am the world's second worst driver. "Oh dear God," I hear you say, "Someone out there is a worse driver than Virgie?!" Indeed. The world is not safe.

How Does This Even HAPPEN???

Brandon caught a whiff of some horrible stench the other day and was having a hard time locating its origin. It seemed to disappear when he shut the case of the DVD he'd just checked out from the library. Puzzled, he re-opened the case, sniffed the inside of it and retched in disgust.

I guess he must not really love me, because what he did next was bring the DVD over to where I was and have me smell it, too. Horrible, horrible, horrible stinking body odor. The discs and the inside of the case positively reeked of B.O.

How does that even happen???

The only explanation I can think of is that it was lost for a week in the fat folds of some 700-lb person. I wiped it with copious amounts of glass cleaner, which helped, but did not entirely eliminate the odor. So bizarre.

Drowsy

Jesus walked this lonesome valley
He had to walk it by himself
Oh, nobody else could walk it for him
He had to walk it by himself

Sometimes when I'm under a lot of stress, I desperately want someone to notice and rescue me. Not just anyone, though. Some person I am particularly fond of. But then when I finally do get that person's attention, and they're all concerned and kind, just like I had hoped, it turns out not to be the solution I was looking for. And then I feel very lonely, indeed.

After reaching that point of despair ("Oh God, no one can help me, after all! I'm doomed!") other defense mechanisms set in. Most notably, drowsiness. At such times, I can sleep 10, 12, even 14 hours per day.

I hate wasting so much of the day, but sleep can have such a wonderful, mysterious restorative power. I sometimes find in dreams the most intense and ineffable beauty. I have caught glimpses of heaven which leave me upon waking in a peculiarly vulnerable state. One might call them dreams from which one truly awakens--dreams that open one's eyes to the radiant glory of reality which is so often hidden.

I like to think of Abraham, sleeping as God cuts the covenant with him. And Adam, snoring away while God creates the woman from his side. And the disciples, asleep during the crucial hour in Gethsemane. Someone recently said (I forget who), in the Jewish reckoning, where the day begins at sundown, about the first thing you do each day is go to sleep. God is at work whilst we slumber and sleep.

All that being said, however, I think maybe next time I feel like sleeping 14 hrs. straight I will try to wake myself up with some sort of caffeine. You know, that never occurred to me until just now ...

Florence: first impressions

We arrived in Florence yesterday (that's me and my mother, for those who aren't aware). The only other countries I've visited before are Canada (which is pretty much like the U.S. but with funny road signs) and Mexico. Coming back from a month in Guadalajara, I was so shocked in the hours after getting off the plane by how grey and colorless everything looked. I don't know about all of Mexico, but at least the parts I've been to, they sure like bright colors. Well. Getting off the plane in Florence, I had a similar feeling: "Oh my gosh, this place is even more drab and colorless than the U.S.!"

We arrived at our B&B utterly exhausted, of course, but it was 4pm (not a good time for a nap) so I went for a walk to familiarize myself with the neighborhood. Holy freakin' cow. There are incredible, and I mean, included-in-Gardner's-friggin'-Art Through the Ages-famous statues and buildings everywhere. The Duomo is unbelievable. Gazing at it, I understood the term "Wonders of the World." Photos do it no justice whatsoever. I wish I was a painter so I could capture the--the--I don't even know how to describe it. Maybe I will write a poem about it or something.

But anyway, getting back to the colorlessness: I have blogged before about my theory that the eye/brain in some sense has to choose between processing color and processing contrast. That would be why the great old black and white movies are ruined by colorization: it detracts from the subtlties of contrast between light and darkness. And so I thought, perhaps that is why Florence is so drab: it's all about statues and edifices whose beauty is in the complexity and subtlety of form and shape. If there was more color, you wouldn't see the shadows as clearly, so you wouldn't see the shape as well.

The Duomo, though. Oh my God, the Duomo. It has color--quiet colors--light green and pink marble. Again, I am at a loss for words to decribe the astounding beauty of that magnificent structure. Anyway, those were some first impressions. I will probably write more later ...

Evangelical at Heart

These days I find myself moving between the world of Fuller, where most of the people I know are firmly on the conservative end of the spectrum, and Immanuel Pres., a more progressive community where I’m doing an internship. It was a bit disorienting at first. Sometimes I don’t know which group I love more—evangelicals or liberals. Other times I don’t know whom I find more frustrating. I don’t strongly identify myself with either camp, but I think in this post my true colors come out.

Someone at my “liberal church” said that he has felt closer to God reading Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth than reading the Bible. That definitely set off the heresy alarm, my first thought being, “Eckhart Tolle! OH NO! I must do anything I can to keep this man from slipping into a horrid abyss of wrong-headed thinking!” Not that I know much about Eckhart Tolle—but in spite of my own longings for a mystic communion with God, I am very wary of that path, as it is well known that mystics tend away from orthodoxy.

I guess I really am evangelical at heart: I see the Bible as the necessary anchor and foundation of theology because it holds objective truth. And if subjective experience is leading someone away from the truth as revealed in scripture, I would have to label that subjective experience as demonic, not divine.

The problem with mysticism is that if you’re not careful (and I think you can be—as Thomas Aquinas[!]—but if you’re not) it becomes merely a journey inward, where there is no way of correcting one’s own biases and blind spots. I think it is no coincidence that this guy who likes Tolle so much also was complaining just before about how he disagrees with Immanuel’s focus on social justice issues. He would rather the church focused on God, and the Bible, and improving oneself. Perhaps if he was spending more time reading the Bible and less with Eckhart Tolle, he would see that social justice is very near to the heart of the gospel message.

When people just believe whatever “feels right,” whatever they find “inspiring,” whatever gives them a subjective experience of closeness to God, they cease to be honest seekers of the truth. Truth is objective. Objective reality has the ability to challenge us, to confront us, to show us when we are wrong.

As soon as the mystic blasphemously declares, “I and the Father are one,” she can no longer encounter God as Other. When the mystic proclaims himself divine, he loses the ability to learn from God, to hear God’s voice as distinct from his own. Thinking he is perfect jus t as he is, he cannot repent of the evil that still exists within him. Feeling that all of the universe is as it should be, she sees no reason to fight against injustice.

The Bible is in some ways hard to understand precisely because it is a witness to the objective facts of God’s intervention in history. Because of the historical nature of revelation, we have in scripture a source of objective truth. That is why we need to trust in scripture before our own feelings, so that we can remain open to being transformed by a God whose ways are higher than our ways.

P.S. A note on Eckhart Tolle:
As I said, I don’t know much about him, but I tried looking him up online to see what I could learn. His website is nothing but an advertisement. I am extremely skeptical about the “enlightenment” of any person who refuses to share their supposedly wonderful teachings for free and instead uses their renown to make money.