Lapping the Miles

That last blog was hard on me for some reason. It was like every time I rewrote it I found more typos, more bad transitional ideas, more disordered thought, and more corn pone. Dang, this blogging crap is harder than it looks.

So for this one I wanted it to be fun. Here's one of my favorite Emily Dickinson poems. Go ahead; sing it to the tune of "Amazing Grace." You know you want to.

I'll refrain from explicating it for you (you're welcome) but I will say that when I taught it in grad school, not one out of 30 eighteen to nineteen year olds in Freshman English would admit that they'd ever heard of the word 'docile' before.

:o

That goes a long way in explaining how G. Dubya Bush got elected twice, though.

One of the reasons I like this poem is that the train can symbolize God. Poetry people generally hate when you find God in Dickinson's poems, because it makes the top of their heads explode. But what can I say? I'm just that kind of rebel. Applying the words "docile and omnipotent" to God, blows my mind.


I like to see it lap the miles,
And lick the valleys up,
And stop to feed itself at tanks;
And then, prodigious, step

Around a pile of mountains,
And, supercilious, peer
In shanties by the sides of roads;
And then a quarry pare

To fit its sides, and crawl between,
Complaining all the while
In horrid, hooting stanza;
Then chase itself down hill

And neigh like Boanerges;
Then, punctual as a star,
Stop--docile and omnipotent--
At its own stable door.

Voltaire, Bananas, and My Atheist Friends

Bananas are an example.
--Bruce Andrews



Brace yourself because I want to tell you about my friend Alexander who doesn't exist. Well ... he does, but not as one person. He's a composite of some of my atheist friends who, God bless them whether they know it or not, are willing to discuss religion and spirituality with me every now and then.

Alex keeps up with the conservative talking heads in the media. Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Tony Snow; the usual crowd. Understandably, he wants to know what they're up to, but they get his blood pressure going. It's a martyrdom kind of thing, getting ulcers by staying educated about conservative wingnuts. (And I mean "wingnuts" in the nicest possible way.)



Like all of us and some of the true sponges, though, he has a saturation point. He OD's on demagogues (republagogues?) waxing patriotic about evil liberals who are (a) taking over the country, (b) pushing general godlessness (c) trying to make everybody atheist, Democrat, gay and vegan, (d) etc. He gets riled up and wants to talk about it to somebody and my ears are sometimes the closest pair to him.

So at some point in our composite friendship, he let loose and blasted religion in general and Christianity specifically. He's a very nice guy, for a semi-fictional composite, so don't assume he did this to bait me. It's just that in his rhetoric inspired indignation he forgot that I am a Christian. However much I share his disgust with political foment and evangelical demagoguery (yes, that is a real word; I just looked it up), I'm a Christian.

And I'm his friend so I'm happy to listen to him, to let him explode and purge the GlenBeckian treacle out of his head. Then we watch The Big Bang Theory, laugh, and talk about people we've known who are exactly like Sheldon.

That's how it works most of the time, but not on let's say, last Tuesday. He was in a heated review of the wrongs done in the name of God, religion, church, and the ways they use fear to keep their sheeple piling money on the collection plate.

On that admittedly fictitious day I couldn't be his ally as usual because it was my turn for an over saturated saturation point. I interrupted him to suggest (ahem) that some of those straw men he was beating up on were starting to look an awful lot like stuff that is important to me. I reminded him that I and his other Christian friends don't much resemble the monosyllabic blind-faith zombies he was declaiming against.



He was painting with a pretty broad brush and of course I know this is normal human behavior. We all do it. It's just that some days the brush is a little broader than others and we just don't have the energy to deal with shades of gray. We just want to be mad about this thing and blindingly white versus penetrable black are easier to navigate than the grays in between.

So I understand, but at that point I couldn't be the kind of friend I usually was, soaking up all the negativity and wringing it out somewhere in north Williamson county, where a little more negativity and treacle wouldn't even be noticed.

Jon: All Christians? You're seriously saying all Christians are like that.

Alex: [stubbornly] Yes.

Jon: Man, I'm a Christian and you know I don't think that way. None of your Christian friends do. Or do you think we're all trying to trick you into converting by lying about what we really believe?

Alex: Trick me? [Calms down a little bit. He's not an unreasonable composite.] No, I don't mean that. Maybe what you mean by 'Christian' isn't the same thing that I mean when I say 'Christian'.

Curtain.



The things in life that I love more than wise and thoughtful friends -- they are so few that they're not worth numbering. Alex laded a lot of wisdom in that statement: "Well, maybe what you mean by 'Christian' isn't the same thing that I mean when I say 'Christian'." From Alex, I now give you François-Marie Arouet, who is better known as Voltaire, and one of his more famous sayings: "If you want to converse with me, define your terms." I remember reading that in high school and I thinking duh. How obvious; if you're gonna be talking about bananas make sure everybody knows what bananas are.

At fourteenish, I was too naive to understand what François-Marie was talking about, ironically. I had no idea that two people using the same word weren't always talking about the same thing. I assumed that if I said 'banana' everybody would think about the largest herbaceous flowering plant, with fruit that when ripe is sweet and yellow. And the chances are really very good that with a simple concept like 'banana' we are mostly thinking about the same thing.

When my sister was learning to talk, she confused the words 'before' and 'after' and when I tried to explain what they meant, I was stumped. 'Before' is a more complex concept than 'banana'. It's not a something you can point to or describe by shape and color. It's easy to explain what things are by pointing at them, but how do I explain words like 'think', 'process' or 'jealous'? For the answer to that, let us leave Voltaire for the moment, gentle and probably-non-existent blog reader, to turn to John Locke.



I admire John Locke a lot. If you've never read him, just trust me: it's worth deciphering the 17th century English to get to what he was talking about. The dude had it going on. He said:

The names of simple ideas are not capable of any definition. It has not, that I know, been yet observed by anybody what words are, and what are not, capable of being defined; ...[this is] the occasion of great wrangling and obscurity in men's discourses, whilst some demand definitions of terms that cannot be defined....

When I think back to the various arguments I've had about politics and religion, a common theme is assuming that my concept of 'bananas' is the same as the other guy's. More times than I care to think, I look back over old heated discussions and, in retrospect, realize that though we were using the same words, we were talking about entirely different things. How much this same theme plays into human affairs from world wars to political small talk, I'd hate to guess. We sometimes blow things up (other countries, friendships, ourselves) because of rash assumptions we make about vocabulary of all things. Whatever definition you have of the word 'good,' I doubt it applies to that.

Bananas, figure 1:


Bananas, figure 2:


Bananas, figure 3:


Last night I was bouncing some of these ideas off James, poor guy. Just before his big brown eyes glazed over from boredom, I heard myself say "And does any of that really matter?" What I meant was, is this all just about semantics? Is it only about words and human confusion?

It matters. Man, does it matter. It's about way more than poTAto vs. poTAHto because horrible things like massive genocides happen over words like right, normal, moral, liberal and especially-- and who guessed I was going there? -- God. One of the biggest mistakes I notice us making as individuals and whole societies, is to assume that because we all agree what 'banana' means that we also all agree on what 'God' means. If you're over the age of like eighteen, and still think that we all have identical ideas about words like right, normal, moral and God, don't take this the wrong way, but please don't become a teacher, vote or reproduce.

This becomes clear when I talk to Alex and try to explain that what Pat Robertson means by 'god' is not the same thing that I mean by 'God'. Even words like 'theist' and 'atheist' get blurry; from my perspective I'm a kind of atheist too. I disbelieve the same little-g god that Alex disbelieves. Exactly like Alex, I don't believe that god exists except in a conservative political agenda. And I also think that we both believe in the same big-G God. Alex just don't call Him God. He calls Him love, or self-actualization, or altruism, or the universe, or a bunch of other things but from my perspective, it all pretty much refers to the same feller. Some of my atheist friends' understanding of 'the universe' looks more like the Jesus of the gospels than anything coming from the Dove Outreach Center or the mouth of Bill O'Reilly.



So the conclusion I come to is that ultimately, John Locke is right: we can't avoid this kind of miscommunication. Excuse my frankness, Mr. Voltaire, but it's naive to think we'll ever totally define our terms. It's part of the existential separateness we're born with, that we'll never understand each other 100%, at least not until heaven (a whole nother blog). But regardless of that, we still need to acknowledge the discrepancies that can possibly exist between what we mean and what other people understand. Everything else being equal, we'll never go wrong if we proceed with love and respect not only for what other people say with words like 'bananas' and 'God', but for what they mean by 'bananas' and 'God', too. My atheist friends are loving people and love comes from God, so whoever loves is God's own and knows God. I didn't make that up; 1 John 4:7. God shines from their words and actions, and I'm confident that one day they will be surprised -- like we all will be -- about what / who God really is.



Do you ever think it's funny that a lot of life's problems boil down to one or two repeating themes? To me, this one is about humility, which engenders understanding, which causes patience, which produces peace. Having a little inner and outer peace makes it easier to understand what we're all talking about when we say stuff like "God is love" or "bananas are yellow."

Because when I think about it, bananas are not yellow. Bananas are white; banana peels are yellow.

Or does it depend on what you mean by 'bananas?

The Atheistic Christian; or, Can Jellyfish Sit on Fences?

I guess blogs are for admitting shameful secrets. My worst one is that I'm a Yahoo!Answers junky and the Religion and Spirituality board is my drug of choice. I know. I'm hanging my head as I type out these words.

Abandon all rationality ye who enter Yahoo!Answers Religion and Sprituality section.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here it is in a nutshell: you ask questions on various topics from religion to growing azaleas and other people answer. Each answer has a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down feature. If you agree with another person's answer there is a nifty thumbs up button you can click on. And there is the yin to its yang, the equally nifty thumbs down button, if you disagree with the answer.

The problem is, giving others' answers thumbs up or down is now essentially meaningless in R&S (Religion and Spirituality). It was meant to be a way to say "this answer is good" or "I don't agree so much". What it has become, sadly, is a way to make other people (the ones you recognize as generally opposed to your points of view) look bad. If certain angry evangelicals recognize you as an atheist, your answers get thumbs down on sight; likewise if you have a reputation for being a theist, some ticked off atheists give you thumbs down without ever reading what you wrote. (I've done various experiments on this, the details of which I'll spare you, but rest assured that I know this happens.)

I tend to accumulate what is known in the trade as veritable buttloads of thumbs down on R&S because I’m stuck in the crossfire coming from both camps; I'm a liberal gay Christian and lots of R&S people don't believe that such an abomination can exist, except as a spineless fence-sitting jellyfish. I'll let you picture that mixed metaphor for a minute.



R&S is a big place. I mean really big. I'm sure tens of thousands of people go there daily, which means even if you post multiple answers every day, not everyone will see all of them. They see the few, if any, that they stumble on periodically, and that means that Fred Fundamentalist reads one pro-Christian answer I posted and thinks, Aha! Jon M is a fundamentalist / Calvinist / evangelical like me.

Later, Annie Atheist tells about her experience of church as nothing but Republican politics with a pious face, something I strongly agree is a major problem with religion in the US. When I post an answer supporting her and/or adding to her thoughts, woe be unto me if Fred and friends see it. They write me very unhappy notes. (Sometimes I kinda enjoy them because they can be unintentionally funny; one guy told me I was a "trader" to Christianity and numerous others have accused me of being in various ways under the influence of "Satin".) I get Revelation 3:16 thrown at me a lot. Apparently, not agreeing with their opinions about God makes me by definition "lukewarm" and worthy of spewing from the divine mouth. Yawn.



The point is that the most of the people there are asking one basic question; "What do you believe and is that theistic or atheistic?" My thumbs down magnetism comes fitting neither definition, at least considering the usual R&S level of philosophical / theological understanding on any given school night. I get thumbs down from evangelicals who assume I'm an atheist, and more thumbs down from select atheists who think all Christians are evangelical blind-faithists. I am a one-man fence-sitting jellyfish thumbs-down magnet. And kids, I can't tell you how much sleep I've lost and how many crocodile tears I've shed over those thumbs down. I really, really can't. Oh, wait. I can: zero.

A cursory glance will show you that R&S really is a war zone; atheists diss Christians, Christians smugly condemn atheists, everybody disses the poor Muslims, and the Pagans watching it all with a kind of bemused pity. All of us assume the other guys have the same definition of the word "God," but it is strikingly clear from my vantage point that we don't. Maybe we're all using the same names for Him but extremely few of us share the same idea of who He is. So whatever the faults of R&S, I'm glad it offers the chance to ask this basic, unaswerable question: "Why do you believe what you believe?”

In my life, that is a huge and mentally dizzying question that really does bear asking over and over again. Everybody over the age of, like, 15 should ask himself that question every day just for the sake of basic mental health, if not spiritual growth. Knowing why you believe, knowing what the attitudes are that prop up your beliefs, knowing the motives behind those attitudes, is way way WAY more important than what you believe, because blind and unquestioned faith isn't faith at all. It might be superstition, self delusion, political manipulation or various other oily things, but it's not faith.



Sometimes I don't know how to answer some of the people who ask me about my faith. When they ask me if I’m a theist or an atheist I hesitate to answer because it depends on their idea of who God is. To the extremist Calvinists (the ones who like talking about God's wrath but never about His healing love) or the fundamentalists (who prefer asking you if you are "saved" rather than dealing with you on a real, loving basis) I should say that I'm an atheist. Something like, "From your perspective, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in -- much less follow -- your god. He is mean, petty, vindictive, and just happens to hate all the people that you hate. I luckily have no personal experience of his existence and I wouldn’t follow him if I did."

I do believe in the God I find in the gospels, though. He's the one Christ said was love. If I think you're talking about Him, then yes: I am an enthusiastic theist, a Bible-based Christian, a Catholic whose glutes are rounded and firm from years of genuflecting. That God is as different as a HumVee is to a tricycle to the god Pat Robertson says condemns anybody who isn't a Baptist, or the one Bill O'Reilly says is a conservative, or the one that Glen Beck invokes to hate whoever doesn't promote his political agenda. If that’s the sad little god you’re talking about, then slap a "Hi! I'm an atheist!" tag on me and call me Richard Dawkins.

He doesn’t deserve my belief or my devotion because it's comically obvious that he is a sock puppet for some kind of politics. He is the reason people leave religion in droves and why monstrosities like “prosperity gospels” and “culture wars” exist. His one great draw is that he’s easy; all he asks is that you judge people who disagree with your opinions and condemn them to eternal hell. That’s always easier and a lot less scary than humility, introspection, and questioning your faith, the stuff that the love of Christ calls us to in the gospels.

Ain't Got a Feelin, Ain't High on Believin

So, Mr. Long Winded Blogger Jon. If love isn't a feeling, then what is it, huh?

You know how you meet somebody, start dating, he likes you and you like him, and you get that feeling like when you take Benadryl on an empty stomach except you're not as foggy headed and you can still drive?



Let's say that you and he become a couple. After being married a while, is that Benadryl feeling still there every time you gaze into his eyes? Suppose one night you're laying in bed, exhausted from a day of demands, delights and disappointments. You look over at him sleeping peacefully, drooling a little on his pillow, and at that particular moment, you don't feel anything at all. Not giddy love, not hate, not apathy, not anything. No Benadryl buzz means you don't love him anymore?




For God's sake, please answer "No." Of course it doesn't mean that. The person who relies on something as capricious as a feeling to tell him when he is or isn't in a healthy, loving relationship, has some maturing to do.

So most grown ups know this: Real love isn't easy and isn't always pretty. Sometimes it involves things like emotional exhaustion and drool on the pillow. Whatever else it is, it definitely isn't a warm and fuzzy feeling. If you apply that same idea to God, it goes a long way to explain why so many adults leave church disheartened. They were told that if they did something (had faith, read the Bible, prayed a lot, tithed, whatever) then God would reward them with a constant case of the Benadryl-esque warm fuzzies. Which brings up, at long last, the point of this blog: How do I know when God is present in my heart? Does God always produce a loving feeling? Is the sign of His presence a stir in your emotions?


This was always problematic for me. For whatever reason, my upbringing (very angry dad) or my constitution (not a lot of serotonin to work with), I didn't get warm peaceful feelings very often. So equating them with God's presence was terrifying to me. It implied that when I didn't have those feelings, God wasn't there. Up to about age 30 or so, I spent a lot of time, energy, and self esteem looking for another divine Benedryl fix and I seemed doomed to jonesing for God forever.

But I didn't stop praying and I didn't stop looking for God and one day I read a quote from Flannery O'Connor. She was giving a speech about her writing and somebody asked her what God's grace felt like.

"God's grace doesn't feel like anything and if you are feeling things in the presence of God, it's most likely something else besides God's grace." she said. She saved my spiritual hide with that remark.





It was one of those lightening strike epiphany experiences. It just made sense to me. No matter what I do or don't feel, my love for God and His love for me exists. It's rooted in something more stable than a feeling: knowledge. Knowledge might very well affect your feelings to make you feel stirred up, giddy, on divine Benadryl, but it very well might not too. The initial antihistaminal (I know that's not a word) feelings are gone, replaced with something else, something more enduring and permanent. Like faith and hope, it is something willful, a decision I make to know that God is present no matter what I do or don't feel. It's a knowledge that His love is with me, when it feels warm and reassuring and when for whatever reason I can't feel anything at all.

(And PS, I love James the same way. It's a decision I make every day to love him and make his life as fulfilling as I can. And if I'm honest, after more than 5 years it still is 9 times out of 10 an intense Benadryl-giddy feeling, because ... well, look at him! He's gorgeous and awesome and I'm only human.)

Love, of all things. How embarrassing is that?

The older I get the more I hear myself talking about love. I dunno how that happened, how my mantra changed from a steely eyed dispassionate graduate student chanting think, think, for God's sake think, people! to (mostly) an adult chanting love, love, for God's sake love, people!

The people on the Religion and Spirituality section of Yahoo!Answers who read my Q&A get headaches from rolling their eyes as far up into their heads as they can go. They've told me point blank that love is (A) sentimental, (B) a throwback to flower children and be-ins in the 1960s, and that most currently acrimonious of accusations, (C) not cool. And that part of me that would agree with them is still a very fresh memory. Seeing myself from their pov, I actually do embarrass myself on a regular basis. It's easy to see myself through their eyes and notice that I look like a campy cartoon character from the Yellow Submarine movie: outdated and treading that fine line between ridiculous and satirical.


But I chant on with as much dignity as a campy caricature can scrape up. I insist that this is my reality: that the only possible basis on which to build your life is love. On another board I frequent, one guy recently said that love was an emotion fueled by brain chemicals and so no good cornerstone for your life.

Me: The love I'm talking about is not an emotion.
Him: Well, if you're going to change the definition of words on your own we can't have a meaningful discussion.

I didn't respond because I don't know any more than that right now: that the love I'm talking about is not an emotion. It isn't addressed in many songs on the radio and Robert James Waller has never addressed it in a novel.

I do know that for me love is a decision. It's about as far from being an emotion as a algebraic formula is. It's way more about thought and willfulness than emotion, especially if by emotion you mean a feeling that comes over you which you can't cause or control. So in a way I have not really come too far afield of my original mantra of think, think, fer gawds' sake think. The love I'm talking about involves a whole truckload of thinking, questioning, introspection, rethinking, analyzing.

Love without thought seems weak to me. Love without a willed decision to love, seems sentimental and floppy. To limit the term love to an emotion is cripplingly idealistic; it wants love to be that thing that happens in chick flicks; it wants love to gallop in and take you over while you submit to its overwhelming power, but ironically it gelds love into something that will serve your own emotional needs first. Flannery O'Connor warned that "To expect too much is to have a sentimental view of life and this is a softness that will end in bitterness."

How wise Flannery was: she knew that the culture saturates us with the idea that love is a sweet, sweet emotion and emotions are spontaneous and uncontrollable. To agree with that even tacitly is to expect too much from outside sources and to expect too little from myself. It's laziness, basically, and laziness and love never co-exists.

Ok, I'm wandering now. I definitely need to spelunk this idea some more. Right now I'm just in the mouth of the cave trying to let my sight focus in the dark, wondering which way will lead me down into the bottom of the cave without smashing my face into too many stalactites.