Existentialism and Theology, c. 1996

Here's a thing I wrote in what I think is 1996. I found it on a pile of papers after we moved and I realized that I don't need to keep it in paper form any more.

I learned this from my college philosophy professor, Dr. Sansom. Like an interesting piece of coral someone gave me, I take the idea out sometimes and look at it again.

Existentialism asks questions. Theology provides answers. But the answers are worthless until the questions are asked. The fact that Jesus loves you does not answer anything for you until you care enough to ask about it.

Advent Abdication 2015

Wrong species, wrong side of the fence.

Church in my life, in many ways, has been a disappointment.

I don't seem to be giving up on Jesus. As I get older and more experienced, I am ever more deeply committed. But churches, oh boy, if only I could do without them.

Somewhere in the distant past, I got the idea that church was where you went to get loved and accepted. Over and over (with a couple of notable exceptions) church has been instead where I've gone to get marginalized and blown off.

I'm weird and needy. I get that. But that's kind of Jesus's niche, right? He didn't come for the well people, right?

We're going to try somewhere new tomorrow, for the first Sunday of Advent. And it occurred to me tonight to try something new too: to just not try to find friends at church. To not hope for acceptance or love by the people I meet there.

That doesn't sound like a winning move, but at least it's different. Different than smiling and shaking hands and trying to remember names and going to activities with hope of making connection and still getting blank looks and uncomfortable silences after months of effort.

Starting tomorrow, I'll go to meet God. Frankly, he's challenge enough. I'll make relationships if they come. But I won't hunt for acceptance and friendship. Just be cool with what is, not stricken by what I don't get.

Seems paradoxical to try this tack on the very first day of the season of expectant waiting. But in here, it seems like a new direction. Let's try it and see what happens.

Bonhoeffer in the car

I read a chapter of some theology book last week, involving Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and every time I drive alone now, I think about it.

In his prison years, leading up to his execution, his writings took some corners that surprised people. He talked about Christianity needing to become religionless. Religionless.

Previous attempts in early 20th-century Germany to evangelize were religion-based; there was a not-necessarily-wrong assumption that everyone had a religion, and the gospel was telling people about a better religion in Christ.

Bonhoeffer said that state of affairs was ending/had ended. Modern people of his era did not even acknowledge that they had a religion. You couldn't tell them to get right mit Gott because there wasn't an understanding that there was a wrongness in place. That was weird and new in the 1930s, and according to Bonhoeffer, Christianity needed to be religionless to communicate with these people.

My understanding is that Bonhoeffer had a specific meaning when he said "religion" that you needed to understand to make full sense of his call to religionlessness. He thought that religion, as it had been known, was a seeking of God in ignorant places. As humans gained increasing knowledge in a widening variety of disciplines, that leaves ever-shrinking holes for religious people to look at and shrug and say, "Yeah, I dunno, God I guess." Instead, religionless Christianity would seek God in knowledge; find him and worship him among the discovered things.

But here's the first thing I drive around thinking about: That's not that different from now. The term "post-Christian" gets used to describe where we are, but according to Bonhoeffer, that was already going on 80 years ago.

I guess that explains why Bonhoeffer has been so influential among thinking Christendom; he caught the front edge of that wave when no one quite recognized it as a wave yet.

The second thing I drive around thinking about is: That was 80 years ago! Four generations of people have marched onto the marble since then, enough time for two more giant shifts in behavior, even if you don't count the world-wrenching advent of the Internet. I'd be surprised if we were still only in the middle of that wave. More likely, we are being hit with the next one or two now. But what?

Atheism is a popular bugaboo, but I think that's mainly a boon for the evangelical urge. Real, committed atheism is damn hard to live out, not least of reasons is that God is peskily real and present. Only an ubermensch can dream of staving off God for a lifetime. Anyone even slightly uncommitted to the proposition leaves God an opening to come in and change them. Really, the only downside to the rise of atheism in the world is that it causes well-intentioned people to waste time walking down stark roads before they come back to love and hope. Otherwise, it's open season for caring evangelists.

A hole where people used to keep religion is no longer the big issue. I think maybe the bigger issue is people adopting new/old religions that don't seem to involve God. Religions that think roadside bombs are good ideas, or mutant American nostrums embroidering free market ethical egoism.

We have religions again that compete with Jesus. Not that Bonhoeffer's words aren't still useful. But religion is back, and we don't know what to call it now or what to do about it yet.

When is the Riddler like Jean-Luc Picard?

I was thinking about the Riddler tonight, how he's so damn smart, but permanently smalltime. He'll never be a Ra's al Ghul, even if he is as smart as Ra's, because he's in it for the art. He has the stuff to be bigger time. He can plan a heist, he can manage a small organization of henchmen---building blocks of mastery there. It's not like he's Solomon Grundy, incapable of putting it together. He could do it. But most of all, he wants to make clever riddles. So he'll never be big time. What's important to him is not big time stuff.

Reminds me of Picard in Next Generation, that one episode where he traveled in time or whatever and was just a dude in a science officer uniform, all because he never punched a dude when he was younger. Backed down from a fight, missed his “destiny” as Mister Enterprise.

I've backed down from a lot of fights. I've spent a lot of time poring over riddles. I wonder if there's still time and chance to be a major villain, a starship captain. Or am I just a dude in a blue shirt now?

Seems like there's a chink in the thinking here, the assumption that being captain is preferable to being a science officer. But I haven't finished the thought.

Cry Havok

My eyes water a lot more in my 40s.

I'm fleetingly aware that my emotions have been out of whack for most of my life. I'm still not sure what emotional health really looks like; without a model, I'm unclear that I'm doing it "right."  But the depressions are shallower and briefer, and I like to think the mood swings have improved as I age. (Although they started surfacing again a few months before Player 3 was born. Maybe they were more untriggered than resolved.)

Another sign that the terrain is shifting though, is how much more frequently I tear up at music—compared to the "never" of my youth.

I have a long-standing love of Bill Mallonee/Vigilantes of Love music. A few years ago, I noticed that just the opening chords of his song, Nothing Like a Train, make me moisten around the eyeballs. When I hear them, I relax. It feels like everything will be OK.

"Irrational" is a word that gets thrown around a lot, and feelings are almost by definition irrational. But there's no reason for me to feel "OK" about this song. It's a sad song. I just do. A couple of Dar Williams ditties do it to me too, and a tune by the Weakerthans. Something in the folk/rock makeup that turns the spigot, somehow.

Most recently, I've noticed it at church. The community we're settling into in Austin, Servant Church, does hymn standards much more often than my beloved Circle of Hope.

Circle's DIY ethos extended all the way to worship music. They wrote a lot of their own songs, and cribbed a few others. That was fine.

But hymns have been winnowed. You don't generally hear crap hymns. Since most hymns are more than 20 years old, there's a clear consensus on what the good ones are, and there's a nice catalog of them. You can sing the good ones on a rotation, and it takes a long time to repeat.

These old, tested songs, I did not know how deeply they had burrowed into the masonry of my heart. "Immortal, Invisible" is not what you'd call a tearjerker, but that thing unpacks majesty. Somewhere in the second or third verse, once it's good and warmed up, I need a tissue.

Will this phenomenon intensify? I imagine embarrassing myself as I get older, turning weepy every Sunday, more frequently dashing to hit skip on a shuffle play because I don't want to cry right now dammit.

I don't like that I've become this way. But also, I love it. I spent a bunch of years in a Cold War with emotion. Like an arm slept on, I can expect some prickle as this limb awakes.

I like to move it

According to some social science report I'm not going to bother researching for this post, moving is one of the most stressful events in an adult's life. And it is!

A lot of the stress revolves around how much petty crap you have to remember to do. Address changes and tying up loose ends at the old place and still walking the dog at the end of the day.

I imagine that if some disaster hit, a fire or earthquake or war—from which we all made it out safely—and we had to flee our old home and start up in another location... that would have been almost preferable. Just drop the mic and walk away.

Instead there are literally dozens of hanging tendrils from the change that remain unaddressed. Nothing terrible, but all need to be done.

No one's bothered to make a list of what remains undone, so one floats by occasionally (Did we get the car registered yet?) and free-floating stress just drifts in, interrupting and complicating whatever else you were doing. (No! And it's overdue! Hope no one notices!)

My wife has commented before that I only get irritable over small things. She has been surprised by my calm during large, intense events. When our beloved (and sometimes behated) dog almost died, she was, I think, almost angry at how casually I behaved.

But then, I knew what I could do and what I couldn't. I knew what my responsibility and capability was. I wanted Autumn to live, but if she didn't, it was out of my control. If she died, we would grieve and keep living. If she lived, we would play-fight with her and take her down to the river for swimming again and things would be well.

Contrast that to a bat-swarm of responsibilities that come after a move, with no clear boundaries or action plans, or even a scope of what must be done. And we're not even done! We're just in the starter apartment! Buying and occupying a permanent home is still on the horizon!

But I still like moving. I like new places. Circle of Hope in Philadelphia taught me the joy and value in staying. But that pied piper plays a mean flute, and now I'm stressed in Austin.

Lent 2015: time-wasting

This Lent I have set myself the quixotic sacrifice of time-wasting.

It's sort of hard to know what's wasting time and what's fiddling. Sometimes reading a comic book is wasting time, and sometimes it's productive stimulation and sometimes it's research.

But as a concrete expression, I have barred myself from my ipad. No dinky time waster games for 40+ days. No reddit on the tablet.

I can still waste time on my desktop, and I do. Or even on a couple of analog time wasters I've got here. But when I find myself wandering that direction, I am at least aware of it and try to veer back in the direction of doing something instead of nothing.

At the Ash Wednesday worship we went to, it was impressed on me that the vice, the thing you give up for Lent, is not the point. You walk around and you're like "I'm giving up hooch for Lent." But that's not the deal.

The deal is that when your vice is gone, you've kicked your own crutch away. The vice was covering over a hole and now you have an obvious hole in you. 

Depending on how long you've had that cover-up there, you might not even know what's living in that hole these days. Maybe it's just an emptiness. Or maybe it contains things you put in there because you didn't want to have to look at them any more. And now you're looking at them. For 40 days.

But that's not the point either! The real point is that God is there to help you fill up the hole. The point is more God. And the by-product is a wholer, holier you when you two are done with that.

For me, living in a brand new city strips even more away, because I have a lot of free time. Which means a lot of opportunity to waste time. Which means a lot of opportunity to stare into the hole and asking God what kind of spackle this thing is going to take.

Restless and deprived of my usual consciousness salves, it's been grim so far. I've been reading a book on the Holy Spirit which isn't grabbing me. Tonight I finished a book of Robert Howard's Solomon Kane stories, which has actually been more productive. (Solomon Kane—worst Puritan ever or pure psychotic?)

But I'm hopeful about what things will look like come resurrection day. The antsier I feel now, the more I hope for an epiphanic payout. A lasting change instead of the returning tide of mild hedonism.

Go Not-Very-Far Together

The African proverb says that if you want to go fast, go alone. And if you want to go far, go together. It doesn't say anything about how exhausting going far will be when you go together.

I've been in Austin for about a month. Only now am I not falling into a comatose stupor at 10 pm every night and waking up 10 hours later, barely refreshed, having dreamed seemingly every somnolent moment.

M talks about not knowing how to make friends. I think I know how, except that there's a one-year-old in tow, who does not give a red-crayon shit about the ennobling discussion I'd like to have with a just-met would-be peer. Being responsible for a young child is like having a hobby that somehow pushes you away from sharing your interests with others.

I know how to find places where like-minded people gather, make ingratiating small talk, and slowly entwine my life with those of promising strangers. It's hard, but I understand the mechanics. I've never tried to do this under such odd restraints though. I have to flee the scene during afternoon nap time and the very second dinner ends to make it home in time to bed down the loveable demand factory.

I do not see how the African proverb makers found the ability to go anywhere together. We can barely make it to the Chipotle and back.

I would think the entire proposition untenable, except that billions of adults do it every day. 

BABYMETAL

I found this at boingboing, and it's pretty much got my head in a vise now. Amazacrazy.

1000 Pieces of Paper

Tonight I emptied a box labeled "1000 Pieces of Paper". I filled 1000 Pieces of Paper some time after college, before I moved away to work for TSR. It was full of college papers and notes and things I wrote.

 A whole lot of it got recycled tonight and a little of it got kept and winnowed into a smaller box.

We've been on a throwing-away kick around here lately. Player 3 has a proliferating amount of his own stuff, and the house has only revealed three dimensions for storage. 

It is a solution of cleansing and sorrow to do this. Saying goodbye to things is more than the things. It is saying goodbye to the person you were or wanted to be when you decided to store those things in the first place.

I've often thought that I'd be happier if a storm blew through our house and destroyed all my stuff. I would miss it, but not much. The DIY version of this however, requires you to bring the catastrophe. You must eventually destroy yourself if natural disaster won't oblige.

In the intervening 20 years, I've changed out some contents of 1000 Pieces of Paper. But it still contained a lot of mass from the mid '90s. Mass I've hauled across the country twice with a few extra tour dates added.

Looking through it tonight was a date with shame. Zippy was an ok dude. Fun at parties. But his interior life was confused and frequently depressed and ohgod so immature. I doubt I could look 24-year-old me in the eye.

A big part of the loss was realizing how terrible a thinker I was. Shallow. Dim. My philosophy notes were nonsensical. My writing had so little perspective. Now I have to put that down. I was never brilliant, and I'm probably not pulling it out in a pinch. I cannot be who I wanted to be; I have to be who I am. It's grounding, but palpably disappointing.

Here's some brightness: I saved nearly everything to do with role-playing games. A bunch of really dumb ideas there too, but the Russian judge was easily ignored as I reviewed those. Half-formed hopes about your future are disposable once you collect the courage and/or wisdom to do it. But creativity has no shelf life. You never know when something you made can be remade. Can't throw that away, however dumb it was.

I failed to grasp most of the Theological Perspectives on Modern Literature class I took in 1990. I don't need reminders of that. But as I storm middle age in 2014, I want every gun I ever drew on a church bulletin in my bag. I've got some personal demons to fuck up, and that cartoon with the surprisingly sophisticated perspective is probably a better tool for the job than a 5-page paper circumscribing my precise failure to grasp Camus.