Monday, 31. August 2009
This is an excerpt from a book I’ve written about my childhood told from a young childs persepctive. It’s a true story and will explain a little of of where my struggles to beleive in God began.
My momma loved church. I think it made her feel like the uncertain things of life could be made certain and I guess, coming from where she was that’s understandable. Now I don’t have anything against church itself. It’s just that my momma could always find the very craziest one around and would drag me and my brothers to it. Personally, I do like them old hymns. Sometimes when I’m sad I’ll just belt out “the god on the mountains still god in the valley” and I’ll just feel better even though I aunt so sure there even is a god. My momma like snake handling Pentecostals. There weren’t any real snakes. Leastwise I don’t think there were. It’s just how my brother Mike made fun of them. They were nice sincere people on the whole I think. They didn’t mean to hurt us for the most part. They thought they was doing God’s work see. Anyway, here’s what I remember bout church. One day when my brother was 12 and in Sunday school against his will cause a momma, he was sassy to the teacher who was a big man. That man just lost it and picked my brother up by the scruff a shirt and threw him up against the wall. We could all see it because it was in the choir loft that opens onto the church where Mike’s class was. I think it probably scared Mike who was getting into all kinds a trouble at school, home and now even in God’s house, but Mike would never admit he was scared. My momma was mortified and beat Mike with a belt for sassing and so did my Daddy. I thought that man should a got at least a little beating too cause he was suppose to know better, but no one beat him. Mike never went back to that church again. I guess maybe he pretty much didn’t ever go to church again but I ain’t total sure about this because memory of that time is hard to find. I often thought, when all the sad things came later bout Mike, it probably all started there and maybe it could a been different.
Now we went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, and sometimes in revival every night a week. Whew!! We should been really holy with all that church going. Where Mike fought it, I just soaked it in. I was naturally interested in spiritual things….so much so my questions would make my Sunday school teachers scratch their heads and fall back on that old standard “some things we just got to take on faith little missy” which really meant there weren’t no satisfying answer to my question.
I ask things like, “How could god send African children to hell who maybe never heard a him?” one teacher got real creative and said god wrote the name “Jesus” on the sky and that was enough to save them al. That didn’t seem very fair to me since staying saved seem to take a whole lotta work if you didn’t live in Africa. Later on when I got older and understood peoples going to believe as they is raised by their parents and cultures and not too many people get beyond that, it seemed even more unlikely just writing Jesus on the sky would be likely to change them to Christians. After a time, I wasn’t even so sure being changed to Christian would be such a good thing anyway. But I always did like that Sunday school teacher’s nice imagination.
We wasn’t allowed to go to people’s houses who wasn’t of the church and nobody come to our house either lest we was trying to save them…then it was ok. I was very fervent and tried to save any friend I had. I didn’t have many friends cause I was changeable, fat, and had a big fat target painted on my forehead. I swear on the bible it had to be so!! Else, how come despite moving all the time I always did end up being found by the playground bully no matter how hard I tried to hide. I hadn’t yet perfected hiding behind my own face yet.
Anyway, one year my momma decided I should go to church camp to be sure I was good and saved. I never would even spend the night away from home. The one time I did when I was 5 I woke the house up screaming and they sent me home and that were that. But momma wanted me to go and I sort of wanted to too cause I figured maybe at church camp that target wouldn’t show and I could make me a friend maybe. I was nine.
That year they had a traveling children’s evangelist preaching. He could draw pictures while he told stories. He could draw really good and fast too.We did fun stuff like swimming, course the boys couldn’t swim with the girls and we couldn’t wear shorts or such. We did crafts from the bible and had campfires only we’d sing hymns. But the biggest thing was the night time service that started at 6pm and lasted till the Holy Spirit was through. That preacher would tell stories about the rapture, that’s when Jesus comes back to get the faithful and take them to heaven in case you didn’t know. But if you ain’t been faithful you’d be left behind and you never knew when it was going to happen. You might be just going about your business and notice none a your family was there and you’d done been left behind.
This particular story was about a boy who come home from school and his momma wasn’t home like she usually was, and he waited a while but his daddy and big sister didn’t come home either, and he started to get hungry so he went down to the corner store where Mr. smith who’d always been nice and joking all the time sold food. But Mr. Smith was different. He wasn’t very nice and didn’t joke at all and was downright mean (he did sell him the peanut butter though). So Johnny took his peanut butter with him and ate a sandwich by himself and fell asleep on the sofa with all the lights on. When he woke up he went running through the house calling,”Momma! Momma! Daddy, sister??” But none a them was there and now he was really, really scared.(I think I left out the part about how he come home and the iron was on like his momma had just been ironing and he had to turn it off just in time to stop the fire, but lots a houses did burn down and plane crashes and such. I wonder if that’s why they made turn off themselves irons so there wouldn’t be so many fires when the rapture happed) Anyway,….Johnny decided to go next door and check with nice Mr. Jones. When he got there and knocked on the door Mr. Jones (who wasn’t acting mean like Mr. Smith cause he hadn’t taken the mark a the devil yet and so could still be saved by trial and tribulation) said real sad,….”Oh Johnny, you got left behind too, just like me, my wife was taken in the night just like your family son and I wasn’t ready like you and so was left behind. Oh poor Johnny there’s still some chance we’ll see them again if we’re willing to die a martyrs death for Jesus. But how much better had we made our hearts right with god to begin with son. Now we got to go through all those terrible plagues a scorpions with men’s faces that sting you endlessly but you won’t die, and burning in fire that don’t kill you and the water all turned to blood and the sky darkened and,…well, I guess I done forgot some at the plagues cause I know there’s at least seven at them and ain’t none of them sound like nothing you’d like.
I’ll tell you!, there was a lots a crying kids at that altar that night making sure they was real and truly saved and maybe baptized in the spirit too for good measure, and I was right there with um too. I already had a feeling god maybe had it in for me, after all, all that stuff that happened while he watched. I sure didn’t want to miss no chance to get on his good side. Course that was when I still believed God might come and help me one day. I quit believing that cause hope can only spring just so eternal when your life is a plague.
It wasn’t for some time that I begun to wonder if some my night terrors could a come from stories I was told like that from the time I could walk. Like I said though, I don’t think they were trying to hurt me. It ain’t as simple as that. They wanted to save my soul.
I think too now, that maybe it ain’t so bad if you ain’t born to it. What your born to you eat whole cause it’s all you know, and in return sometimes it eats you right up.
I got to say on the whole I was a pretty wimpy, not well liked kid. I never fought back. I never knew I could. I just tried to hide. That was going to change though.
Posted in Stumbling towards God by wrywatcher -
Saturday, 29. August 2009
My friend Donna bases her spirituality on the 12 steps. Twelve step programs have helped more people than I could possibly count. I think it may be the level playing field everyone starts on. If you’re going to a 12 step meeting you’ve already accepted your life is broken in some way. Check your denial at the door and come on in.
Donna has a steady belief in a higher power that seems to help her deal with life. It’s not that she doesn’t struggle, she does. The program just gives her a context to put her suffering in and a community.
When I mention Christianity to Donna she shivers. “I don’t know about those Christians” she says. I find that interesting having been raised in a fundamentalist Christian back ground that did me no small measure of harm. As far as I know Donna had no religious upbringing to speak of, yet she shivers.
“What is it about Christianity that sets you off?” I ask her. “They’re just so judgmental”, she replies. That too much of a blanket statement of course. Many Christians are kind and compassionate people who truly try to walk in love as Christ loved us. I’ve had the good fortune to meet many such people in the Lutheran churches my husband is a minister for. (Yep my husband a minister!)
Christianity is where my roots lie and I seem to be on an inevitable course to try and reconcile my agnostic self with it but I really do understand why my friend Donna shivers when Christianity is mentioned.
Posted in Stumbling towards God by wrywatcher -
Saturday, 29. August 2009
I work in the medical field. A job I’m by nature not very well suited to but have adjusted well enough to be successful if not happy. I’m coming off my 12 hour shift walking the two miles(ok I’m exaggerating) to my car when I realize I’ve left my glasses upstairs. Only a person with plantar fasciitis can understand the dread I was feeling. Shit! Sigh.
Just as I’m resolving myself to the trek back, I glance down and notice (turned 50 this year) my glasses are hooked on my shirt!
Yeah! There is a God!! Woo-woo! I did a little dance right there! It doesn’t take much to make me happy. O.K. that may be a lie.
This got me to thinking of the absurdity of a sometimes agnostic seeker of God attributing to God my fortune with my glasses. There are no agnostics in fox holes somebody said.
It’s not that I don’t want to believe in God. My whole life has been one big search for a God I can believe in. This search has taken me down many paths. I’ve meandered through Carl Jung, the Bible and Buddhism just to name a few. In the end I have a hard time believing in a God that allows the atrocities of life to happen. I’ve been forced by my nature to rigorous self-honesty. I can’t pretend to believe what I know in my heart I don’t even when it would be so much easier if I did. How I do envy those with simple faith to sustain them.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not letting humanity, myself included, off the hook. We are our own worst enemies as a species and may deserve extinction. I just want to believe a purpose exist to our sometime miserable existence. What do you think? No canned answers please! Only answer if you’ve stood by the grave of a child and still believed. Only answer if you’ve felt the crushing weight of life’s sorrow and still “looked to the hills from whence my help cometh”.
So here I sit in a certain no man’s land with a nature naturally drawn to spiritual things and no place to go with it…until now.
Posted in Stumbling towards God by wrywatcher -
Saturday, 29. August 2009
Posted in Stumbling towards God by drgeoff -
Wednesday, 26. August 2009
Most everyone experiences dreams as strange, complicated and seemingly senseless collections of both familiar and exotic images. One wonders if indeed there is any meaning to dreams or if it’s all just about indigestion. However, once you understand these images are part of the dream language you can begin to create your own translation. When you begin to do this, you will be surprised by the wisdom guidance and humor dreams add to your life.
The first step is to understand that dreams are not that strange. In fact, the language of dreams can be seen in things like political cartoons in the newspaper or the symbolism in magazine advertisements. The language of dreams may be vague or it may be very pointed. For example, my husband once had a dream in which he was hanging upside down from a tree by his knees over a picnic table holding stretched out between his hands a T-shirt. People at the picnic table below him were enjoying a party and he was sad that he didn’t seem to be invited. In his waking life at the time, he was being pushed out of a job. He awoke laughing. To him the dream was saying, “No use hanging around here for that party, been there done that, got the T shirt!!”
Each part of the dream is important. Of all the millions of images and information that we take in each day our unconscious choose just the ones it needs to convey the message we need.
Not all dreams are as obvious as the one above.
There are a variety of ways to flesh out or elicit the meanings or symbols of your dream. One such method is called free association. Take just one image from the dream. It might be a ball, a hat, a car. Write the image down on a piece of paper. Underneath it writes down a list of what ever come to you as you meditate on that image or symbol. Just this process of writing it down may give you an “Aha” right away.
A second method is to dialogue with the image. Write a dialogue between you and the image. You might start out with something like, “So grandma, what are you doing in my dream?” Grandma is liable to write you right back!
If you’re serious about starting a dialogue between you and your dreams, Start by honoring them and recording them as was discussed in the last article. This act of recording your dreams lets your unconscious know you’re open to discussion.
These are only a few of many methods, but a good place to start. We’ll discuss more the next time.
Posted in Stumbling towards God by drgeoff -
Sunday, 23. August 2009
Carl Jung and many others believed dreams were communication from the unconscious part of us to the conscious part. Carl Jung believed dreams were the attempt, among other things, of the unconscious to correct a too one sided conscious attitude. Paying attention to your dreams, he believed, was the path to deeper self understanding and mental health.
Jung believed dreams also connected us to the collective unconscious and could impart direction for cultures and societies. This isn’t a new ideal. Dreams have been a part of religious traditions as diverse as Christianity to the American Indians. Abraham was directed by a dream to leave the land of Ur and go where God would leave him. Joseph interpreted dreams for the Pharaoh and was elevated to from a jail cell to second in command in Egypt. Jung had a precognitive dream about the World War two before it happened.
Dreams are thought by many cultures to be messages to the soul from God and are used in certain types of therapy as a guide to the direction the therapy should take.
For the Christain, dreams can be used to deepen your relationship with God.
Everyone dreams even if they don’t remember doing so. Dreams occur during REM sleep and when rapid eye movement occurs. If REM sleep or the dream cycle is disrupted for too long a period, hallucinations deterioration of mental capacity occurs. REM sleep and the dreams that occur during this phase of sleep are vital to our health.
How can you increase your dream recall so it’s possible to use these messages from the unconscious to improve your life?
The first step to increasing dream recall is to make the decision you want to. Making that decision often signals your unconscious you are willing to listen to what it has to say and increases the volume of dreams. Posting a question to your unconscious before sleep is one method of signaling your willingness to dream to your unconscious.
Having decided you want to remember your dreams, several possible assistive devices can be used to help you record them. Some people set up a tape recorder by their bedside and record their dreams. For others a notebook and pencil at the bedside work better. You’ll need a flashlight of some kind you can easily access or perhaps a pen light such as nurse’s use in the hospital.
After deciding you will dream and how you will record your dreams, the next most important step is to record any snippet of dream that comes you way however small and unimportant it seems. With dreams it is all too true “to he who has more will be given”.
It is also important to write your dreams down before you get out of the bed. The best intentions to remember your dreams may come to naught if you wait, as dreams tend to slip away after even moving around in the bed. Thus the importance of having your means to record dreams nearby.
If you awake during the night, write the key word of your dream down and go back to sleep. Often the key words will be enough to stimulate your memory to recall the rest of the dream upon awaking.
Often as you write down one snippet of a dream other snippets will come to you. Write them all down however unrelated they seem. Remember dream language is not the same as regular waking language and a single image can have great meaning.
Try these tips to remember your dreams. We’ll discuss ways to use your dreams to understand yourself better in the next article.
Posted in Stumbling towards God by wrywatcher -
Sunday, 23. August 2009
My heart feels heavy about the decisions made in the general assembly yesterday by the ELCA. Having been a member of the Espiscopal chruch I’ve seen up close what difficulties can come in the wake of such decisions.
I have no strong feeling regarding the question itself of gay ordination or marriage. I’m not sure what God thinks of the issue and while I know, for some people, their interpretation of the Bible leaves no question that homosexuality is wrong I’m inclined to think God is more concerned with the state of the heart than He is with our sexual orientation. Nonetheless, I have seen what the issue can do to a church and find it hard to understand how walking in love can be reconciled with the church used for political agendas whether it be gay rights or anti-abortion. I know the church, by history, has very often allowed itself to become a political force with sometime horrific consequences. I still find it disappointing and so opposed to what I believe Jesus taught.
Being married to a conservative minded priest, I have watched as my husband has struggled to determine what if any place was left for him and conservatives like him in the Episcopal Church. Is it any more correct to expel conservatives from the church by enacting decisions that will make it impossible in any good conscious for them to stay, than it was to expel and exclude homosexuals? Having friends that are homosexual and I’ve watched the pain being judged harshly has caused them.
Is there some reconciling middle way that can be found?
It’s my hearts hope that both side of this issue will be able to remember to walk in love.
Posted in Stumbling towards God by wrywatcher -
Friday, 21. August 2009
I read a very helpful book called “Stumbling towards God” by Margaret McGee. It chronicles a womans journey towards community. Her journey led her to the Episcopal and Unitarian chruches. Since my husband is an Episcopal priest and my own search had led me to a Unitarian chuch, I was caught by the title and subject. She starts her journey as an atheist and ends up reaquainted with God.
This blog wil be about my own halting, stumbling often painful journey to reconcile the existance of a God with the sometimes agony of life.
Feel free to come along if you struggle with questions you can’t seem to find answers for. I don’t claim to have any answers but as Rilke said, sometimes all we can do is live the questions honestly.
Posted in Stumbling towards God by wrywatcher -
Friday, 14. August 2009
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Posted in Uncategorized by drgeoff -
