Untitled

I could see the storm coming from way off, a sheet of grey moving toward me. It was as though a gigantic artist was pulling a paintbrush laden with greyish black paint swiftly over the green of the hills. It was coming fast, likely faster than my horse could ride, but I pulled the reins to the left so that she would turn, facing away from the quickly-moving storm. I glanced over my shoulder to see that the storm had advanced in just seconds. Kicking my heels and pulling the reins, I urged the horse to gallop in the direction of home.

I could hear it before I felt it. It rolled behind us as the horse galloped on the dirt roads of the mission base. The sound of the rain as it hit first one row of houses' tin roofs, then another, was an unmistakable sound. I didn't even have to look over my shoulder; I heard the storm on the houses directly behind me, and then, immediately, my horse and I were drenched. I pulled back on the reins and told her to stop, giving up my now-pointless race to get home before the storm did.

This was the way of all the storms in the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea. In California where we lived before my family moved here to be missionaries, rain started with tiny droplets and only gradually increased in size, at least in my memory. This was no rain; calling it rain was as silly as calling a trickle of water a waterfall.

Rain here was pounding. It sometimes hit the skin so hard it made it sting. It didn't gradually wet you; you were as quickly saturated in it as you would be if you dove into a swimming pool. I was instantly, totally drenched, as was my horse.

The dirt road became a kind of creek almost immediately, and though I was almost sure the horse could navigate the roads without slipping, I felt more comfortable with her walking that distance than running, especially through the bits that involved an incline. Besides, there was no urgency to get home now. I was wet either way.

The horse approached a well-worn shortcut that jutted down steeply, far more steeply than I was comfortable with, and began to walk off the road toward it, so I jerked the reins to indicate that I wanted her to follow the road, not the scary-looking shortcut. But it was too late. She had taken this route too many times to not do it by instinct. After all, we both knew she was really in charge and only obeyed my orders because she chose to.

The path she began stepping and even slipping down made me gasp. It was one thing to walk it or even ride it, but I had never seen it this flooded. I had to almost lay back on her back to counteract the feeling that my weight was going to pitch me forward as she slowly navigated downhill. I could feel panic rising in me. There was nothing to do but hang on tightly to the reins in my hands, gripping her sides ferociously with my thigh muscles.

The path cut through the local cemetery, another thing I wasn't crazy about. I avoided this path whenever I could, but here I was riding a horse down it in pouring rain.

I suddenly registered being cold. My wet cut-off shorts and lavender t-shirt clung tightly to my body, and though the rain felt actually warm when it first pelted me, my body temperature had finally begun to drop. I was shivering.

About halfway down I began to relax just a bit. We were going to make it.

And then it happened.

The horse's foot slipped and she staggered in the effort to stay upright. My posture, lying back on her back so as not to tumble over her head, was exactly what compromised me in the second that followed. She shrieked, I cried out, my hands lost the reins, and then I was lying on my back in the muddy path. The horse was frightened and didn't even seem to hear me calling her name, trying to encourage her to stay close. I struggled to my own feet, ready to reach for the reins at the same exact moment that she regained her footing and instinctively bolted down the hill, turned at the edge of the cemetery and disappeared from sight.

At thirteen I was very rarely alone anywhere. Even in sleep I was in the top bunk above one sister, with another in the next room, and my parents in their room at the end of the hall. I walked to and from school with a group of neighbor kids. I never went walking alone. I usually rode my horse with my friend and her horse, but even when I walked back by myself, I was almost always on or leading my horse. I'd been alone in the bathroom, but that was the only exception.

Alone. So this was how it felt. As if on cue the rain suddenly stopped, as quickly as if someone had flipped a light switch.

I could feel that my leg was burning and when I looked at, I gasped. There was a cut that looked bad, but blood was only slowly trickling from it, a good sign. I looked around me and saw only trees and headstones. A chill ran through my body, but this was not because of drenched clothes, skin and hair. It was the familiar foreboding feeling that filled me when I went anywhere near the cemetery.

I'd been here before. The first time I was with dozens of other people, including my family, and I'd held my littlest sister's hand tightly as we walked behind my mom down the narrow path. Our dad walked behind me and though he didn't say anything, I knew he was ready to grab one of our arms if we lost our footing and started to slip.

I heard the group we were joining before I saw it. A sound was coming from a clearing where many people were standing that sounded more animal than human. It rose and then became a kind of scream, but a scream I had never heard before, even from my hungry or injured younger sisters.

When we got closer to the group, I saw that the sound was coming from a woman we knew very well, since our first month in the country, during which we attended language and cultural school to prepare us for the culture we were entering, was also her first week in the country. Beside Molly stood her husband of only a year, someone else who attended that same month of school with his now-wife and my family. I remembered catching them stealing glances at one another during meals in that month we all spent on the coast, and noticed the way she became sort of flustered when he was around. Even a seventh-grader could tell that there was energy coursing back and forth between Molly and Tom.

Sure enough, they began "courting" soon after, and within months were married. Mere weeks later, she was pregnant, something she announced to my mother proudly, eyes a bit wet, in the middle of one of the aisles in the small mission base store.

As we neared the group, I got a closer look at Molly. She was leaning on Tom but then fell into the dirt next to a tiny wooden box, draping herself over it. Only after reading novels years later, did I learn that that sound had a word: "keening."

Her face was twisted in a way I'd never seen it. I knew why; we had been told what had happened, and then prepared for what we were about to witness while our mother made tight, smooth ponytails of our hair in the aqua bathroom of the house we lived in. Mama's words had not prepared me for this; this was the first funeral I attended and would be the last one until my husband grandmother's funeral when I was in my twenties.

In the minutes that followed Tom helped her up and then someone slid a chair under her. Molly put her hands to her face and dropped her head between her knees and then that same wild, sad sound came from her mouth again.

I don't remember what was said as far as a funeral service, but I will never forget the way that impossibly-small, simple wood box looked, likely made by Tom himself, since he was the mission base's school shop teacher. Molly lunged from the chair toward the box.

I knew there was a baby in the box. It had been delivered still-born but otherwise perfect, my dad told us. I wondered, as I stood watching Molly lay her head on the box, knees in the dirt, then kissing it frantically as she sobbed, where the baby had been during the days between when he was born, dead, and today. I also wondered if they had dressed the baby before placing it carefully in the box, and if so, in what clothes. I'd seen all this little baby's clothes folded lovingly in the nursery of their house when we went to dinner some weeks before. They looked almost small enough for my Cabbage Patch kid, I'd told her. She'd laughed and told me that as soon as the baby was old enough, she knew I would make a perfect babysitter.

Someone pulled the box from Molly's hands, and she screamed shrilly, "Nooooooooooo...." Something jolted inside of me that made tears well up and my chest tighten, an almost uncontrolable urge to rush forward and take the box from the man's hands and give it back to Molly filled me. I buried my face in my father's side.

Thud. I looked up at the heavy, unusual sound. Molly began her keening again as Tom held her tightly. The thud had been the sound of the box hitting the ground in the bottom of the small hole, a sound I would remember long after I'd lost the ability to imagine the sound of my grandmother's voice or a song my grandpa used to sing while we walked hand in hand along the bluff before sunset.

Shovels were picked up and passed around to several men. The dirt pile next to the small hole was slowly shoveled into it, until it filled it completely and then was flattened.

The hole was gone. If I hadn't watched the scene I wouldn't have known what lay below the surface of the earth that Molly now threw herself upon. Tom crouched down next to her and spoke quietly in her ear, petting her head gently, but she seemed not to hear or feel him. She screamed, her cheek pressed against the soil and her arms and legs spread-eagle, in the posture of a sky-diver, as though she was trying to free-fall into the earth. Many years later, after having three children of my own, I would realize that's exactly what she wanted to do.

Sitting there in the mud, my horse long gone, the memory of the funeral was fresh, only about two months earlier. I registered how cold I was, interrupting the memory. I very cautiously stood to my feet, putting my hand against a nearby tree to steady me, the very tree that I might have hit if my fall from the horse had occurred closer to it. I took several careful steps away from the tree, off the path, and looked around, sure that the site of the baby's funeral was somewhere close by.

There it was. There was no flat earth this time, though, and no keening Molly. I was alone, and the spot where the infant had been buried was now marked by a small wooden cross. I stepped close enough so that I could bend down and read what was inscribed on the cross. Yes. It was his grave, his name carved into it, a name he would never be called in from outdoor play by, or hear announced as he walked across a stage to receive a diploma.

I stood there looking at the ground and then knelt next to it. I was kneeling in mud, but it didn't matter anymore. I was covered in the same red mud anyway.

"Jacob Heinrichs," I heard my own voice say aloud, reading the words inscribed on the cross. And then the second line: "Desperately Wanted, Always Loved, Waiting For Us In Heaven."

Tears filled my eyes and then sobs escaped my mouth. I didn't know why I was crying. Part of the source of my emotion was obvious: this was a cemetery and the baby that was buried not so far below my feet was someone I would have played peek-a-book with in the church nursery where I volunteered every Sunday morning. Though I never met this Jacob, I still felt a feeling of loss, especially when I remembered his mother's keening the day he was buried.

There was something else, I realized, some other reason for the sobs that I couldn't stop now, even if I tried. What was it? I looked around to make sure no one was nearby to hear me crying and was both relieved and afraid to find I was indeed totally alone.

I looked back at the cross before me and read the words again. My tears increased and my chest tightened when I read the last phrase, "Waiting For Us in Heaven."

I put my hands over my eyes and let the sobs take over, shaking my small, wet body. This little baby was somewhere in heaven, the very place that was the subject of so much of my thirteen-year-old anxiety. It was the subject of a sizeable portion of my journaling at night by flashlight and by the thin light of dawn every morning. The pages in my Bible that had verses having something to do with heaven were heavily highlighted and underlined. I knew them by heart.

"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us them, and cleanse us from all unrighteousness," I recited from I couldn't remember where in the New Testament, my voice quavering.

Another one, further back in my memory, its words in my heart since babyhood, bubbled out of my mouth. "For God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him will not perish, but have everlasting life," I quoted, wiping my tears away. John 3:16.

And then another, one that made the sobs start all over again: "And the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord."

Baby Jacob had gone straight into the arms of the Lord, my mother told me that day as we trudged back up the hill after the funeral was over. That's what happened to babies when they died; they were sinless, she said.

"But what about me," I whispered, as I looked at the cross again.

I'd become a Christian at four, I knew. I had prayed the prayer of salvation, confessing my sinfulness, acknowledging Jesus as God, directing him to take over my daily life, and asking him to give me eternal life in heaven after I died.

After I said the prayer, I was saved, I learned. I didn't know what I was saved from at four, nor did I understand what sins I was supposed to be confessing. I'd just known that a man who was God, too, was nailed by his hands and feet to a cross, a vividly rendered picture in my Bible story book. My mother told me he would have let the bad men nail him there and let him hang until he died, even if I was the only person alive.

I couldn't imagine such pain, even when I tried laying on top of pointy toys so that they pressed into my skin until it hurt. If someone went through such pain for me, I wanted to do what he wanted me to do. My mother had me repeat the prayer of salvation after her, and I was a Christian then, the closest thing I could think of to thanking this Jesus for going through such pain for me.

But now at thirteen, I'd repeated that prayer hundreds, even thousands, of times. I'd said those words so many times that, even though I tried, I could not concentrate on each word or "mean" them in the way I meant them as a child. This inability to "mean" them was something that haunted me. I wasn't sure I had understood what I was doing at four, so I prayed the prayer again, by myself this time, many times a year after that day, with the desire to concentrate all my energy and will on each word. Every time I felt failure. 

Somehow, in a way I couldn't explain, the now-familiar words fell flat. At thirteen I realized I could say the same prayer in my own words, something I'd been doing for months now in the quiet of my bed, long after my sister had fallen asleep. The fresh wording caused me to "feel" what I was saying a bit more, but still, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate, tears pouring down my cheeks, I felt something inside me not quite immersed in them.

I was afraid. Terrified, really. How could I know that I was really saved? The baby whose grave I knelt on didn't have to pray a prayer; he was sinless. I thought of my sins: arguing with my parents, sneaking a book into bed at night after they'd told me it was time to sleep, talking my sister into giving me a toy with a logic I had intentionally used to trick her.

And then there was the worst sin of all. I'd read in a book about Christian sex on my parents' bookshelf that what I'd been doing under the covers, touching my private parts in a way that felt pleasant, had a name: masturbation. The book didn't say much about it, but enough for me to understand that it was sinful.

Only my future husband could touch my private parts; I already knew that, and I'd understood it. But me touching my own body hadn't registered as "someone else" until I'd read the part about masturbating. I wasn't even supposed to touch my body. The pleasurable sensations I had when I gave into the temptation to do so were feelings I was not supposed to be having until after marriage. I wasn't even supposed to know what those feelings felt like, I'd realized guiltily, a sick feeling filling my stomach. What if that future husband resisted temptation only to find that I had not? These were feelings meant to be experienced when my husband touched me on our wedding night. Even if I got married at twenty, that was still seven years away. Light years.

Masturbating was the one sin I had the most trouble not committing. And it wasn't as if I didn't know better. As soon as the thought entered my mind, laying in my bed in the dark, of touching between my legs, I knew I was already sinning. A churning began in my stomach and an ache in my chest, the familiar sensations of "guilt," and God's spirit giving me strength to resist, as well. "There is no temptation that has overtaken you, except what is common to man. And God is faithful and will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you can endure, but with the temptation will provide a way of escape also, that you may be able to endure it." That was I Corinthians 10:13.

Sometimes I managed to resist temptation; other times I didn't. It was the times I didn't that I was thinking about now in the quiet cemetery. I'd confessed them, said I was sorry and asked God to forgive me, promising to never do it again. But then I did it again. Did that mean I wasn't really sorry? Did it mean that I wasn't really saved? And what about the sins I did that I wasn't even aware of; I hadn't known masturbation was wrong until I accidentally read about it.

The problem must have something to do with my heart not wanting to give itself up. And the masturbating.The answering churning in my stomach confirmed this thought.

I rested my head on the soft ground, my knees under me. "God, I'm sorry that I have had a hard heart. Please forgive me. I want you to have my whole heart. Please help me give it up. And please forgive me for masturbating. I know you don't want me to touch my private parts until my husband touches them, and I want to obey you. Wherever he is, he is probably not touching himself before we get married, and I don't want to disappoint him. Please help me. Please give me the strength to not give into temptation. I really want you to have every part of me. Please take every part. I don't want it. I want you and I want to spend eternity with you in heaven after I die."

I pulled my head up slowly, my eyes still teary but the sobs quelled. I searched my thoughts and feelings, looking for what I had read would follow absolute surrender of myself to God: peace. But no. It wasn't there. I didn't know what that meant. It scared me. What was I doing wrong?

The sun slanted through the overhead tree branches, hitting my face, and I stood to my feet, realizing it was getting late and not only would I have to get home before dark, I would have to find the horse, likely near the coral at the top of the hill, clean her saddle quickly, give her some food and put her away.

The cemetery suddenly felt creepy. I felt a kind of panic fill me like something dead was right behind me, at my heels, about to catch me. I ran up the hill the way the horse and I had come, topped the hill and then set off down the road toward the coral.

On a Sunday in '81

Red velvety pew seats that aren't as soft as they look
11 o'clock sun hesitantly shining through dirty stained glass windows
Heads all around me - curly, grey, short, long, brown, straight, blonde - bowed.
Pastor's soft but loud voice in the microphone murmurs
Then lifts and falls
Falls and then lifts

And then
Like a transistor radio my four-year-old ears suddenly tune in words and phrases
"...cast into burning hell"
"...a place prepared for the devil and his angels"
"...eternal separation from God"
"...those who are saved will be ushered into glory"
"...they will be with God"
Some words fall to the ground, incomprehensible
Others stick to the lobes of my brain
Where cement is quickly poured
Grey matter will eventually learn to skip agiley over those spots without even looking down

Many more words later
Many more pages later
Many more wordless cries later
Many more appeals through ragged sobs later
Many shouts into empty rooms later
Many more thoughts locked away before they can become words later...

A door opens
Fingers pick at lobes grown around cemented old words
They dig deep
Oh!
Pain in core of my being
Blood - so much blood
And then the cement is finally removed - all but a crusty film
And I am broken
So broken

Bandage up, or try to
And then the angry voices
A few sad voices
They are angry about my bandaged wound
Or more accurately, bloody pieces of cement cast aside
You can't do that, they say
But it's done, I say
There's no putting that back
That's done
That's over
That's through
They leave - for now
Silence
And then
Aching, crawling, relentless pain
I can hear my own groaning in my ears
It's your own fault, they say over their shoulders
They keep walking

Pain knocks me over
I fall in the discarded shards of broken, bloody cement
That cut my knees
That try to enter through my hands
But I roll away
Into the shadows
My own voice in my ears -
Someday wounds will heal (whispered)
Someday wounds will heal? (voice breaks into splinters as it falls like a glass into a sink)
Someday wounds will heal
And then?
Learning to think around and through
Scar tissue

Religion: The DVD

I would not say I’m an atheist and I resist labeling myself as an agnostic, mostly because I can’t stand labels anymore. But I definitely am not a Christian. I’m at a place where I no longer feel the need to believe or disbelieve anything. I know what I’m experiencing. I’m honest about it. I don’t need to label it. I don’t need to change or move. I’m where I’m at.

Because the shifts that have gradually occurred in me didn’t happen overnight, I think it’s important to write about the various stages I went through in the deconstruction of my Christianity. I know I am not alone in the feelings I have or had, but I often feel like there is a lot written from a Christian stand-point and a lot written from an atheist or agnostic paradigm, but not a lot written about the “process” people go through in between. What about the places in between belief and unbelief? Lots of people are there, but unless they read something about someone else’s similar experience or feelings, they inevitably feel alone.

Who do you talk to about the “in-between” places? Sometimes it feels like everyone – Christians and atheists, alike – would have you “hurry up and get on board, already!” There has to be a place for the process. In fact, I think I always WILL be in process and I don’t see myself ever pigeon-holing myself as “this” or “that.” I want to just be where I’m at and be honest about it, from here on out.

In the effort to talk about the in-between places, I’d like to share something I wrote about a year ago, when some questions began to surface that I think are important in the “deconstruction” process for a lot of people. Where I was at the time, it made sense to me to frame them like this:

Winter 2008 –

What if religion is the world’s effort to package up God in a manner we can offer to another at arms' length...we don't have to get too close, don't have to get the weepy, hurting friend's runny mascara on our clean shirts and we don't have to love in a palpable way that makes a difference in their circumstances?

After all, we aren't loved that way by others, so why should we get messy for someone else when no one is getting messy for us? Religion was handed to us at arm's length.

Many of us received religion as a neat and tidy package we didn’t dare unwrap. Religion was like a DVD still in the package we based our whole lives on even though we never opened or watched it ourselves.

Everybody we know gives and receives the same DVD in its' sealed form; we have forgotten there is something inside. Instead we talk about the DVD as if we've watched it. We repeat the little summary from the back cover, talking and acting as though we have seen it ourselves, when in fact we have not. We, along with our fellow-unopened-DVD owners, make special clubs we advertise as a place to talk about the DVD in depth. Instead, the clubs all go the same way: everyone repeating the description from the back cover in all the same ways. We forget the DVD is anything but the package it's inside of.

We all feel a vague discomfort- a feeling that there is something missing. Every once in awhile we might have a tiny flash of insight: what if we open up the DVD and actually watch it? What if, when we watch it, we find the story is different than our simple little clubs had interpreted it as being? What if, after actually watching it for ourselves, we can no longer stomach the "pat" conversation at our clubs? What then? This line of thinking is so uncomfortable, we more often than not push it from our minds.

We are too busy, too tired, too....afraid. We know deep inside that watching the DVD would change our lives, change our relationships, change how we do things. We, like the rich young ruler Jesus challenged to actually act on his beliefs, are willing to buy and distribute copies of the DVD to the world, stand in front of crowds and recite the blurb on the back cover and attend every single club meeting discussing the DVD. But open it up and watch it, knowing it could potentially change everything...hell, no. That is far too scary.

We give this same DVD to our children. We teach our impressionable children to memorize the blurb on the back of the DVD. We at least imply, and sometimes overtly teach, that if our children and/or other DVD-less acquaintances do not take the DVD we offer them and attend the discussion clubs, they will quite possibly go to hell. They are made to understand that if that happens, they are in danger of losing not only God's approval, but perhaps even our love.

When our children reach an age where they begin to think independently, they of course begin to doubt the "magical powers" of the DVD we touted: the rest of the world is watching all sorts of interesting DVDs, talking about them and don't live with the fear and numbed-out brains our children inherited from us. Why should they risk opening and watching the DVD for themselves; they already know the basic plot by rote, thank you very much, and they're frankly not impressed. Everywhere they look people are living their lives and watching fascinating DVDs.

And even if they had the gumption to open and watch the DVD we gave them, they'd likely meet with disapproval from us, as well as from our clubs, anyway. So why bother? It's much easier, more attractive and less of a bother to dump our DVD entirely and just subscribe to Netflix like everyone else in the world. Who cares what the movies the world watches are about; at least they WATCH them!!

What if we watched the DVD rather than leaving it unwrapped and having silly, shallow discussion groups about what someone else decided to say ABOUT the movie? What if we watch the movie, running the risk that it could change us? What if we were always meant to live in the truth the movie so beautifully pictures? What if there is no need for clubs? After all, why talk about watching it with other people, when we could be WATCHING it with other people?

Perhaps God created the movie TO change us as we watch it. If so, we shouldn't be standing arm's length from people, telling them ABOUT the movie and expecting them to be changed because they know what it's about. What if it's a movie only appreciated, only understood and only life-changing because the individual watches it themselves?

Perhaps watching the DVD yourself rather than basing your life on someone's tidy little summary would mean that the movie relates differently, personally and specifically to each individual. What if God made this movie specifically for each person, knowing exactly what that person needed to hear, see and feel? To give someone my interpretation or tell them about my experience is only helpful if they have already experienced it and been impacted by it in the way that is specific to them. If they already know the movie, they would enjoy hearing how it impacted me, what was personal to me and the individualized message I uncovered in it.

Perhaps the main difference between reading the description on the back cover and actually watching it myself is, quite simply, love. I can be told I am loved every day and twice on Sundays but until I am loved in a palpable, personal, wipe-your-snot-on-my-new-sweater-while-I-listen-to-you kind of way, others' statements of love are worth nothing to me; in fact their emptiness eventually hurts so much, I numb out to it. And yet, am I doing anything different when it comes to my interactions with others?

To be handed the DVD while the person offering it sits and watches the DVD-less person's child cry because she's hungry is insensitive and even hateful. And you better believe that when that person shouts, "goodbye!" over the deafening cries of that hungry child, the DVD-less person will be throwing their DVD, unopened, into the next rubbish bin. If she is given a DVD about African salamanders, while the cries of her child and her own tears rolling down her cheeks are ignored, the giver is worse than those that walked right by her, pretending they don't see her plight. In her world of pain, she has no use for DVDs...doesn't matter whether they are about salamanders or love. Same thing in her reality. The tidy giver doesn't see her; he or she doesn't care. They just want to go back to their happy little club and tell all their buddies how many DVDs they distributed this week.

"She wasn't very receptive," he or she will tell their friends, when asked about what the person they offered the DVD to did and said when given the DVD. These friends shake their carefully-coiffed heads sadly.

"We'll just pray that she looks at it. That's all God asks of us, after all," they say. "We've planted the seed..."

How despicable is it to distribute a DVD about love in an unloving way. We might as well replace the real cover with a new one that is entitled, "Fuck You." At least that cover is honest about what the giver really thinks and feels about the person who doesn't own the DVD. I know for a fact that such a person would rather they just ignored her. But instead we shout over the sounds of her cries what will happen to her if she continues to refuse what we are offering.

What if we just toss the DVD altogether? Or maybe we watch the DVD ourselves and then put it away. What if we meet one another, DVD-less, and simply offer the compassion, support, acceptance and love we all want? Who needs to watch a DVD about something when they can experience it themselves? I enjoy a good love story, but I'd much rather experience one than watch a movie about it.

**************************************************

This article was published in today's "ExChristian.Net" and you can find it HERE.

Questions

It's official! The first issue of The Porpoise Diving Life with me as guest editor is up! You can view it HERE.

The topic of this month's issue is "Questions," something we can all identify with in one way or another, and it's an issue packed with really great articles, some beautiful photos and a lot to think about.

"Questions" is an intentionally broad topic and I'm pleased with the wide variety of subject matter, as well as paradigms, that this issue offers. And what wonderful writers and talented photographers I was lucky enough to receive submissions from!

Starting this week I'm going to be focusing on one article/author at a time here on my blog in a interview format, with the idea of understanding the person behind the article. I'd love to get some direct feedback from you and maybe even some conversation, back and forth. This month I'm going to be working hard to get a Porpoise Diving Life blog up and running so we can do this sort of interaction there, but for now it's going to happen here. Something new and exciting! Looking forward to it!

So go on over and check it out! For now, here are some tantalizing "excerpts" from a few of the articles in this month's issues to tempt you:

"There is nothing to fear with questions since they are a natural part of an honest life and because there are so many unknowns and things about which we are uncertain. The only thing to fear is any person or group that discourages asking questions." (excerpt from Cool Questions by Glenn Hager)

"I have some great new friends I’d like to introduce to my Evangelical family-of-origin. Some of them are gay, some of them are deists and a few of them are Star Trek fans. Some of them are Christian, but not in ways that would be familiar. I don’t think any of this process has made me a better person or a better Christian than my conservative friends. But it does make me different. And if they are as afraid of liberalism as I once was, then I still have to ask these questions..." (excerpt from Family Questions: Will Evangelicals Still Love Me? by Peter Walker)

"A dark night of the senses may “feel” as though modes of prayer, experiencing God, or spiritual practices don’t “work” or satisfy. God may “feel” out of reach, distant, unavailable, or gone. It may feel like a dry period, or a time of being in a spiritual dessert. This is not cause for discouragement or alarm, but for stamina. It is a Divine invitation for growth, and greater spiritual depth beyond what one has known." (excerpt from Dark Night of the Soul, by Lisa Colon DeLay)

"There’s a lot of work there…especially for what is supposed to be a “gift.” A huge list of feelings must be ignored in order to accept this gift of salvation. And often, even in those churches that “encourage questions” and talk about wanting to be “open and real,” there still remains an expectation that eventually you’ll come around. The questions will be resolved. The doubts will be laid to rest. What if the questions and doubts are not in fact laid to rest?" (excerpt from Life Outside the Closet by Cheryl Ensom Dack)

Questions

I know it's been a long time since I've talked about it, but I'm the 2010 guest editor of The Porpoise Diving Life. Curious about what the HELL that could possibly be?!? Think it sounds like I'm a closet marine biologist? Uh...unfortunately, no. Still curious? Go HERE to find out.

This month's issue, which is going to be released in the next week or so, is on the topic of "Questions." I'm writing a piece for the issue myself, so I've got this topic on the brain.

Here are some quotes that have me thinking:

-“But we have been taught to see before our eyes have found a way of seeing
for themselves.” (Arthur Symons)

-“If the doors of perception were
cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”(William Blake)

-“Hardly anyone is able to see what is before him, just as it is in
itself. He comes expecting one thing, he finds another thing, he sees through
the veil of his preconception, he criticizes before he has apprehended, he
condemns without allowing his instinct the chance of asserting itself.” (Arthur
Symons)

-“Our normal expectations about reality are created by a social
consensus. We are taught how to see and understand the world. The trick of
socialization is to convince us that the descriptions we agree upon define the
limits of the real world. What we call reality is only one way of seeing the
world, a way that is supported by social consensus.”
(Carlos Castaneda)

Here's my thoughts today...

Early on in our lives we learn to process our experiences, our feelings, and even our senses. We are taught “right” and “wrong,” “acceptable” and “unacceptable,” “normal and abnormal,” and this skill helps us to process what happens around us as we grow in awareness. Everything we see, hear, think and feel must be qualified: is it this or that? But what if those designations are merely mental constructs and not the irrevocable truths we have learned to call them, whether that be something as complex as a moral designation or as simple as what color an object is? What would happen if we, as much as possible, separated what we see, hear, feel and experience from the “sorting system” we’ve been conditioned to use when processing our experiences?

Thoughts?