A stranger in my own life

The tag and concept of "presence" were created because I'm really bad at it. I got that from my father.

When he was of a mind to, and he had a chance to show it off, Dad could hit some inner switch and could turn his amicability on. He could be the life of the party. A month or so ago, Mom remembered that he could be "dazzling," and the word struck me: Dad actually could turn on Bishie Sparkles if he tried.

My love says that I got that from him, but when I introspect, what I see most of him in myself is the other side of that switch: he didn't try. "It was his story," I remembered to Mom at the funeral reception, "and I was honored to be a secondary character in it." - and it's true. It was my father's world, and we were all invited into it only if and as he made it known. How much of it was the fact that he was devoted first and foremost to his art, and how much was his undiagnosed cancer, I'll never be able to say. But when I compare myself to him, I do see that: I'm in the presence of another world. [viz], and just as he can devote himself tirelessly to photography, so can I to demiurgy: attending to the art and neglecting the world of the artist.

Sometimes it's small, like not even trying to meet up with the friends last night. Other times it's bigger, like revisiting a blogger I haven't thought about in years and discovering that while I was away she became a mother.

I had to say no

Saturday came. And with Saturday, the completion of the car work. So the time came to deal with the last logistical headache: "How do I get there from here?"

So I asked H. She was at work, but she'd swing by as soon as she was able. That gave me time to pick up a new umbrella, and wait in the rain for a bit, and such...

"As soon as she was able" turned out to be later than I thought. The bus route wasn't running the right way, and so she had to take a windy one home that ran around the campus once. Okay, no problem. I had time to wait. So I waited, and walked back to the library and such...

...and then got the call that she was in her car and would be on her way, and where did I want to get picked up. "Haigis," I said, and she was okay with that, and F. would be coming with her, and maybe ten minutes later, lo! she was there.

She took the back route to Holyoke. Why I honestly don't remember at this point, although there was a reason for it. F. was gushing about Pokémon number-crunching, and to be honest I wasn't paying anybody any mind. And at 6:00, we made it down there.

And that's when I discovered that the lights were out.

"Maybe they parked it in front?" F. said, and so we carefully backed up and drove over to the cars parked in front of the dealership, gingerly, to see if one of them had the license plate that was mine. Nope. Not a blessed one. My car was parked securely behind the chain-link fence.

At which point, F. asked me directly: "Did you even call to see how late they were open?"

In which I am a glorified chauffeur

Before I headed home to sleep last night, I settled down in this very computer bay to have some nice quiet time alone. Then, at ten minutes to ten, the phone call came.

It was from B.: "I need you to come over and take me by Jimmie's place. It's an emergency."

I told him the truth: "I'm parked away from the car. I'll be there in half an hour." And dragging my body out of the seat, I started the long trudge back to the center of town.

In which I am Cassandra

This was me, on August 9, 2012, on Slacktivist:

That's one of the big glaring things I'm not getting about Tony Jones's challenge: what exactly is it accomplishing? The problem with God-talk isn't that we don't do it, it's that it's easily and often dismissed as not Christian enough. Defining the parameters the way he does, it feels like his Storify stream is gonna wind up VALIDATING any future claims that "liberals are weak Christians and suck at God-talk." Because as much as I wish I was, I'm no mystic, neither apophatic or cataphatic. Without that kind of experience, I need to refer to Jesus and Scripture to say much that's substantive. And even if I did have mystical experience, without reference to the Word, in print or incarnate, it still wouldn't make the cut as being Christian enough.

(For the record, I'm gonna answer the challenge anyways.)

Today, Googling, I discovered that not even a week later it's already starting to happen. And to add insult to injury, the first comment was eaten by the Internet and didn't post.

I fucking hate being right.

This is my story

The single most visited page in the history of this blog was "Testifying." My list of 15 reasons why I spent ten years out of the church, written in response to Rachel Held Evans's post of the same name. (I've retroactively tagged it "responsive writing," because it totally was that before the tag existed for it to be.)

Rachel also wrote a follow-up piece to it, "15 Reasons I Returned to Church." It doesn't have nearly as many responses, and while I may yet itemize a 15-point list of my own, this isn't going to be that list. It's tangentially related, though, because once again I'm writing a confession of faith.

No rest for the non-rightist Christian, I guess. Last week it was Tony Jones. This week it's the Anarchist Reverend:

But in our attempt to not be the screaming of the religious right we’ve become a kind of watered down left filled with platitudes and vague warm feelings. That doesn’t cut it for me anymore. And I have a feeling that it doesn’t cut it for a lot of other people either.

I want to know why you’re in this faith. I want to know why you remain a Christian? Why does it matter?

It was a good question, and although I didn't answer before the 24-hour deadline was up, it got me thinking.

The Lower Room daily confessional: Serapion and Taliban

III.2. When [Serapion] could not be brought to the path of correct faith... Photinus, a man of very great knowledge, happened to come along from the region of Cappadocia with the desire of seeing the brothers who resided in that desert. The blessed Paphnutius welcomed him with great rejoicing...

III.3. Then he explained... Thereupon [Serapion], moved by the many very powerful statements of that most learned man, was finally drawn to the faith of the Catholic tradition.

III.4. When he gave his unconditional assent in this regard, Abbot Paphnutius and the rest of us were filled with joy.... But the old man... suddenly broke into the bitterest tears and heavy sobbing, and, throwing himself to the ground with a loud groan, cried out: "Woe is me, wretch that I am!

III.5. "They have taken my God from me, and I have no one to lay hold of, nor do I know whom I should adore or address."

-St. John Cassian, The Conferences

On Miss Rumphius, and my backyard

Sarah Bessey is a smarter person than I, and if I don't comment there it's because I regularly find nothing that feels worth adding. On impulse today, though, I clicked over there from Slacktivist, and stumbled upon "In which I share 10 books for tinies," to which I nodded through the list until I got to the honorable mentions:

Honourable Mentions: The Hockey Sweater by Roch Carrier, Sleepy Bears by Mem Fox, Strega Nona by Tomie dePaola, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and of course, Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney.

And I stopped nodding there, because that last title took me back.

The Lower Room daily confessional

I have no idea what his name was. He had the kind of hair that comes from having no comb to brush with, the kind of beard that comes from no razor to shave with. I'm not sure if he had a second change of clothes with him.

He knocked on the door, and asked in a lowered voice if he could sleep back here for the night. He'd be okay with the floor. I basically told him I'd think about it.

On regular writing

"What do you mean by 'regulate'?" Therapist asked. That was, at least, where I left off these thoughts.

Let's start off with the big issue: framing my life and work in terms of "discipline" and "goals" feels futile, because I have neither.

"Goals" imply achievable things; "setting goals" involves dreaming about what could be, looking at what was plausible, and planning how to achieve them, and doing them. For the longest time nothing was plausible; I had vague wouldn't-it-be-nice ideas, but no way to get there from here, even if I was the sort of person who could - and I'm still not. Building worlds without me was as much as I could manage. My goal was "the status quo," because hope was always and consistently the first step on the road to disappointment.

In which religion is a relationship too

Several years ago, I was talking with Chris about the "personal relationship with God" routine. I don't buy the "personal relationship with God" routine, especially not one that argues from there that Christianity isn't a religion...

Chris was the one who went down that line, and I was going to expand that passing comment into a rant against began saying when I communicated myself again a few weeks ago.

It was going to be a rant; the original version of this post began "Relationship is the freebase of the masses," and it went from there gloriously. I bounced it off a friend or two and it was met with some approval.

But then I read dynamic (r)evolution, who linked to RELEVANT on the matter, and I lost the heart to rant for a little bit. Oh, I will, because that way I can add the "regular writing" tag to this whole thing; but today I'm going to reflect, first.

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day

Not many people get excommunicated, in terms of absolute numbers. But a great many people do excommunicate themselves. That was, in a sense, what I've done; being independent meant being detached. It meant that I could poke fun from outside, or simply just lash out and rail. But it also meant that I don't remember the last time I took Communion, rather than standing by and watching it from the pews at a piss-poor Mass.
I didn't realize that until Monday night, and I've been madly craving it ever since.

Tomorrow is Pentecost. Tomorrow is the end of the written history. Tomorrow marks the final day of the liturgical calendar, the last day of the Easter season, the transition to Ordinary Time. On Monday dawn, Sacred Time will be over, and we will be reduced to the church in the world, living as we await the promised return.

It's been at least seven or eight years since I last set foot across the threshold of the church I walked away from. Tomorrow, no better and only a little worse than when I left, I will darken its doors once again.

Some of it will be to say thank you to somebody I expect will be there. Some of it will be to hear the reading of Acts 2 again. But some of it will be, I hope, to share Communion again.

Tomorrow, insha'Allah, shall be my dancing day.


I bought a red shirt just for the occasion.

Also, what she said up there at the top

So far, this series has been as follows:

• I used to define myself in oppositions...
• I used to need to assert my faith...
• I used to think of this thing as stone tablets...
• Faith used to be a capstone...

Tonight I'm going to interject with words not my own, from the same series of posts.

I used to think I needed to “reach out” to those who are marginalized, overlooked, oppressed…

I used to... but now... (4 of x+1)

In the last few nights, I've gone over bits of myself then and now:

• I used to define myself in oppositions...
• I used to have to assert my faith...
• I used to think of this thing as stone tablets...

Tonight, the long-promised part 4 of this series:

Faith used to be a capstone that needed holding up; now it's a cornerstone that needs building on.

I used to... but now... (3 of x+1)

So far in this series:

I used to define myself in oppositions; now I'm defining myself in relations.
I used to need to assert my faith; now I need to trust it.

Tonight, I used to see this whole thing as stone tablets...

I used to... but now... (2 of x+1)

This whole thing began here. In keeping with my meme du nuit tag, I continue with the second part of it tonight.

I used to need to assert my faith; now I need to trust it.

I used to... but now... (1 of x+1)

This entire thing was set in motion by a blog I've been lurking on, because I've never gotten around to posting very much this last week.The question was what are some of yours?

And I answered. These are my extended answers, because I feel like they merit some unpacking, and because there are just enough that I can make this a multi-night habit and get back into the routine of paying attention to both my functional blogs.

I used to define myself in oppositions; now I'm defining myself in relations.

Testifying.

Rachel Held Evans started this. Slacktivist made it known to me. The commenters inspired me to join them.

No two members of my family churched the same. Dad didn’t at all, despite those missionaries teaching him to speak English. Mom left Catholicism for various other things over the last thirty years. My sister spent her formative years dragging Mom to the local evangelical church, where the projector screen in the sanctuary was bigger than the parking lot outside. I was the only one raised as a purely mainline Protestant.

In some kinds of testimonies, you’re supposed to get to the part where you invited Jesus into your heart, and then you cry until your makeup runs, and then everybody prays over you. This ain’t one of those testimonies. This is mine. This is why I left.

1. I left because my confirmation was a tribal signifier.

Might I pray in sonnets?

I am religious. I want to be religious, anyways. But I'm not a believer. I get my faith second-hand, in small doses, from other people. It's addictive, and it hurts. It's why I've never posted on Irving's blog, and why I don't lurk there as much as I used to: for all of the countless failings I'm sure he could confess to, he makes it look easy.

It vexes me, because I should have faith.

I'm not sure if I believe in God, al-Lah, HaShem, however you want to try and anthropomorphize it. I can accept the cultural baggage. The problem is the verb. "Believe" is too active. Belief is an assertion. Bearing witness means that you can be cross-examined. Most importantly, belief can be refuted.

But if it was proven conclusively that God doesn't exist, I would still accept.

I accept al-Quds. I accept kami. I accept the Numinous. I have no rational way to prove its existence, but it makes sense that there be a Sacred Thing. And it follows that I acknowledge and respect.

But I don't have any empirical way to prove its existence either. And I am an emotional black box, who panicked when somebody wrote me a letter saying "I like you" because I had no idea how to respond to it. That's why I still lurk on Irving's blog: I'm trying to figure out how to experience faith.

That's the story of my religious life in a nutshell: trying to learn a new sensation because I feel that I would be made qualitatively better for it.

The Sacred is one, undivided, undifferentiated. I'm not sure if omnipotence or omniscience apply to it. I am sure that omnibenevolence does not. Only tangible sapient bodies are subject to moral judgment, and the Sacred is not tangible or embodied. It is not human. It is ahuman. It is Other, and we can't express it as a function of human terms.

(This is why I have problems calling myself Muslim. I accept the oneness of the Sacred. I have no problems with the prophecy of Muhammad. Hell, I can believe that the Qur'an was spoken by Muhammad while he experienced the Sacred. But this happened in human history and it happened in human language. To say that the Sacred has a copy of the original Arabic seems disrespectful.)

Expressions of virtue are a way to experience the Sacred. (Not directly, either. The closest thing I've ever had to an ineffable moment of faith was on the receiving end of an act of mercy.) And that experience is transformative. It changes lives. It changes people. And while it doesn't deserve worship, that experience deserves - and across history, across culture, across religion, receives - respect.

This much I've learned from non-scientific empirical data, a lot of reading, and years of demonstrably unsuccessful attempts at established religious praxes.

Which is, again, part of the problem: I know what I accept. My religious question is what to do about it.

And I've found, this afternoon, that sonnets might help. Not as a religious praxis: I have no desire to be a cloistered sacred poet.

But I find that I sigh a lot when I write sonnets. Not from frustration. Not from despair. But just from saying things that are more important than what I usually say.

Sacred things deserve that kind of respect.

Coming soon to a continuity near you

One of these years, maybe this year, I wanna do Pretend To Be A Time Traveler Day. A dystopian one, of course, because dystopians have the most fun.

But I'm not really thinking of the usual post-apocalyptic style of dystopia.

In an homage to Dan Simmons, Bruce Bawer, Bat Ye'or and the entire class of professional prophets of Islamophobia, we're gonna be

Tourists From The Grim Darkness Of The Evil United American Islamofascist Caliphate Of 1930.

(1930 Hijri. That's something like AD 2500 as the kaffirs reckoned such things.)

And I mean we, because the way I'm seeing this I'm gonna need a few lady friends to do this with me.

• Them: The actual tourists. Wanting to get out of the confines (such as they are? The United American Emirates did have to soak up a lot of unbelievers really quickly, after all, and if Iran and Europe are any indications having an official state religion really helps secularize a society quite a bit) of the mind-numbing boredom that projections of neoconservative utopias will wind up being when the whole wail-and-envy-the-dead part wears off tend to involve. (And presumably burqas. You can't have a proper Evil Islamofascist Caliphate without all the women being forced to wear burqas.) Far too genki and tourist-y for their own good. Which is where I come in.
• Me: The handler. Grim, frustrated, looking vaguely like a cross between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Uncle Jam Wants You.

  I've commented on this before talking to Engel, but I may as well say it here too: Shi'a fundamentalism would be greatly improved if it took some fashion points from George Clinton. But I digress.

  Bored out of my mind, obviously out of place, and only there because in the grim darkness of the Islamofascist future women can't go outside or do anything without a mahram male. I'm the straight man in all the jokes; the killjoy who tries to make sure they never have any fun (Sisters, it's haram! The pious ancestors never let themselves have fun. It's part of the jihad an-nafs); the enforcer of Islamopatriarchy, who's scandalized by everything they do and writes it all down in his little black book.

Not sure about what exactly we'll do, besides wander around as a group and pose for photographs. I do have one basic vignette worked out, though:

(to a passer-by) "It's so strange, all the signs in English... where I'm from everything's in Arabic."
("Where are you from?") "Milwaukee."

Or something like that.

A belated happy New Year

And may it be better than mine, which has been spent getting a bumper replaced, getting sick, infecting all my friends, and being cut off from my beloved Intarwebz for a week and counting.

*sighs*

The infection of all my friends was worth it, though. I got to make a few new ones (and infect them, too.) And to see Erin again, for the first time in months. I watched the MST3K remix of Raiders of the Lost Ark and the ball drop on Times Square through the pain and fever.

And about a half hour before that, we broke out some bottles and started a few rounds of very geeky toasts.

Not alcohol. Erin's a disgrace to her Irish ancestors, and gets visibly tipsy when she drinks nonalcoholic beverages. But yeah - several bottles of sparkling cider.

To creativity.
To health. (This was mine. It was lame, but appropriately ironic given my infectiousness.)
To Grandfather Nurgle, the Chaos Lord of Plague and Disease. (This was the one that followed me.)
To cat macros.
For the love of God and all that is holy (Adam's toast, prompted by having one of the cloud-guys on my shirt. Not his actual words, but better.)
To geekery.
To our friend, the Weighted Companion Cube.
To cat ears.
To surrealism (Fox's) - we argued back and forth about more or less.
To the two-term limit (Rob's.)
To stability. (Rob's. And mine.)

And, on the way home with Dayquil in my system, one that I said to Fox:

To surrealism and justice.

May your times be interesting and your world be better in the new year.