Lent 2013

Thanks to the Anarchist Reverend for providing a prompt. My writing here is an expansion of my comment there.

I grew up honoring Lent in the breach. It was the time to set aside bad habits, or try to, or pretend to, or want to really hard. It was a selfish thing, or I was selfish and made it so, or I was clueless and didn't pick up that it wasn't supposed to be. It was so long ago I don't really remember now. 2002 was the last time I became anything more than an obligatory Christmas-and-Easter churchgoer, and with that Lent fell by the wayside too, unnoticed and unmissed.

Last year, the year of constellations, was the year that saw me back to church - but I still managed to miss Lent. (I actually came back on Pentecost, and started seriously attending on Trinity Sunday.) This is easily the 23rd Lent of my life, certainly of the life I can remember; but this Lent is different from the ones that came before. This is the first Lenten fast of my adult life. This is the first Lent since I grew into my baptism; my first as an Episcopalian; my first where I understood why I was fasting.

This Lent is going to be special.

The birthday gift

It was a gray day in March, about seven months ago and about three weeks after I'd asked my sister for it, that I went outside to check the mail and found a slip for a package.

It took me a little while to realize that I was supposed to go inside and ask at the front desk for the package, but I did, and I did, and they had it. There was absolutely no evidence that it was what I'd asked for: a cardboard-brown box, sealed up with tape and marked with an Amazon sticker. Even the dimensions of the thing looked wrong somehow. At this point in time, I'm not sure if I had to sign for it or not; there's a patch of my memory that's faded out. The next thing I remember was walking around the complex, back to my room, holding it in my hands. Looking forward to cracking the tape open.

The Bibles of my life

A day or two ago, the Anarchist Reverend responded to a question:

You’ve lived some radical changes between your fundamentalist upbringing and now. Out of pure curiosity, what have the Bibles of your life been, and (how) have they related to those bigger changes?

You can read his response over there. For the sake of disclosure, and because it's something I've thought and derped about but never blogged about, I'm sharing my life in Bibles here.

Christmas Eve, 2011

Several Decembers ago, a moment passed out behind the wheel taught me to keep myself alert and my radio on whenever I go on long drives, especially after dark. Usually it's tuned to a mediocre rock station, or a grainy classical frequency - but there inevitably comes a moment When that moment comes, I flip to something totally unlike what I'd normally listen to: a Christian station.

It's a habit that I really ought to break, because my motive for listening isn't because I love it, or even like it: I listen to them for the hatred. Sooner or later, there will come a moment when the music will let up, and the spoken words will begin, and that's the cue for the eight-minute countdown before the station reminds me of everything that is wrong with American Christendom.

There comes a report on "the issue of homosexuality." There comes a plug for Focus on the Family, or a unilateral condemnation of working mothers at a time when my mother was running the house because her husband was dying. There comes the break from the Oberammergau Passion Play to pray against the ACA and for the deliverance of Holy Mother Church from the oppression of the Pill. (I shit you not.) During the Holy Week, there comes... actually nothing at all, and that was the most infuriating part: an uninterrupted block of evangelical pop songs, with nothing even acknowledging that it's 3:00 in the afternoon on fucking Good Friday. ("Positive. Affirmative." Some other Christian buzzwords - at the one hour, of the one day, when Christians and Trent Reznor can join together in one voice to say that God is dead.)

It's not something I do outside of Connecticut-to-Massachusetts driving, for the very simple reason that there's usually other stations once I get off the corridor from Waterbury to Springfield. But last Christmas Eve, I discovered that a few exits into Pennsylvania the devil's music came to an end. And as I pounded through the stations with my good hand, my attention divided between the backlit numbers on the display and the harrowing road conditions of Wilkes-Barre, my worst fears were confirmed:

It was Christian stations all the way down. And with no way to resist it, I settled on the least noisy stations and settled down for a nice winter's Two Minutes Hate.

Moments: an overview

So yesterday I started writing about that "constellation of moments":

[I]n my mainline experience, no, I’ve never been Born Again™ because I’ve never had any single moment that was like that.

What I have had is a year-long constellation of moments. From memory I can identify all of them, date most of them, and time one of them to within a few minutes. No single point was decisive (not even the timed one, which involved a decision) – but the gestalt is. It hasn’t ended yet (I was saved; I am being saved; too soon to go on), but I can definitely single out a moment before which it hadn’t begun.

And today I'm going to do so.

A year-long constellation of moments

This was me, on The Anarchist Reverend:

[I]n my mainline experience, no, I’ve never been Born Again™ because I’ve never had any single moment that was like that.

What I have had is a year-long constellation of moments. From memory I can identify all of them, date most of them, and time one of them to within a few minutes. No single point was decisive (not even the timed one, which involved a decision) – but the gestalt is. It hasn’t ended yet (I was saved; I am being saved; too soon to go on), but I can definitely single out a moment before which it hadn’t begun.

Thinking about it now, it's sort of astonishing that the moments of this constellation haven't been written about already. I may just do so.

Starting tomorrow, that is, because I'm getting kicked from the library tonight.

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

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.

Communicating myself: 6/3/2012

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. (I get the point he was trying to make, but it was still simply wrong; other religions are significantly different, but they are not simply magical-going-through-the-motions, and it's bullshit to claim that "Christianity" - by which he meant Bible study - is both magically exempted from that and the true, rightful practice of what was first done in Antioch.)

In the end, to stop his well-intentioned efforts to proselytize me, I told him very simply that I did not attend church, and if and when I was ready to do so, I would do so with integrity, and not a minute before.

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.