Stumbling Toward God?

I haven’t finished the story that I began in my last post. I did start a follow up post, but I just have not had the time to finish it. The trouble with blogs is that they are so linear. Everything is nicely in order and date stamped. I can’t talk about last week because I never got a chance to talk about the week before, or the week before that. And I certainly do not have time to go all the way back.

As I said, the story never ends, it just keeps getting longer the more you wait. And “you miss too much these days if you stop to think.” I’m really looking forward to some time off that does not involve being on an airplane. I’m thinking maybe in March.

So, one of these days you might find a post pop in at November 6th. I wouldn’t hold my breath though.

[1/9/08 Note: I never actually finished this. I only put it up now because I was going through the old archives and found a reference to it. I have long since forgotten where I was going with this, since the title seems quite incongruous with the content, but it is what it is.]

After the various revelations described in my last post (which, as I mentioned, took place over the summer), I fell into dark times. I basically became overwhelmed with the various burdens that life has to offer and more or less shut down for awhile. After a couple months of that, I was just looking for a good reason not to go to church anymore.

Some time ago, I would frequent the official website for a certain series of movies. It featured several comics and short stories, several of which contained some kind of scene in which a character would wake up covered in various tubes and encased in a vat of water. They would usually realize in one way or another that this was the real world, and that the “normal life” they were used to was only a dream of sorts.

A few weeks ago, I thought I had an awakening like that. I was in the car, driving back from San Diego late at night. This was something I knew. This was real. Just me, the car, and the darkness outside. I had been here before, and frequently. In fact, maybe I had always been there in the car. All those other things, those bits and pieces of life that seem to happen in between, those were just the dreams of a wandering mind on an endless road trip.

I had become distrustful of memory. How many past events do you actually remember living, and how many are just things that you remember remembering? And what is a dream, if not a memory of a memory?

I fell into a mindset of “There is only ‘now.'” The past is over, it’s done, it’s gone. The future is uncertain, intangible, unreal. There Is Only Now.

Sometime over the summer, I came to a website called “American Atheists” in my internet travelings. I was reading an article challenging the reliability of the authorship of the Bible, and I realized that it was basically true, from their perspective. The Bible (whatever else you want to say about it) in the simplest terms, it is a record of God’s interaction with humanity. Well, if you are convinced that there is no God, then he can not possibly interact with people, therefore any writer who claims that He has is obviously unreliable. That case practically proves itself before even looking at any evidence.

It occurred to me that you can’t possibly win- it’s like arguing with a blind man about rainbows. Using pure logic, you will never convince him that you are looking at something that he can not see. Likewise, he will never convince you that what you think you see is just a hallucination.

The trouble with this “online theology” that I have been trying to do is that there are no objective websites out there. Everyone has an agenda. Even if they did not start off with one, I believe that by the time they get around to actually telling you about it, they have already reached a conclusion that they are now trying to sell you on. No web page that I have ever come across honestly presents all the sides.

That is when a little voice in my head declared, “It’s you dude, it’s all you!” As if my humble, barely-updated page could actually capture the whole picture. For I too only relate certain bits of information, from a certain point of view. If you want to see the whole picture, you have to use all of the pieces. This echoed around in my head for a few days, perhaps even a couple of weeks:
To see the whole picture, you have to use all of the pieces…
… You have to use all of the pieces…
…ALL OF THEM.

I don’t think that anyone really wants to look at all of the pieces. I am sure that we all have things that we have stuffed away somewhere that we never want to see, admit, or think about ever again. Barring that, I do not think that I could even remember all the pieces, even if I want to.

Then began a rather odd two week period in which I repeatedly either was reminded of or actually encountered a number of people from the past whom, all other things being equal, I prefer not to think about. So the pieces are all there, but then next issue that I discovered is that it is very difficult to fit them together because I find that I really only seem capable of looking at one piece at a time…

I’ve been casually waiting for a certain “}” for a long time. It finally came today. I took it in stride at the time, merely thinking, “Ah. I was wondering where that was.” I imagine that the greater implications may take a little time to sink in. Though perhaps now I can finally evaluate the entire block.

Easter is one of the busiest times of the year for the company I used to (and occasionally still) work for. I was loading out a stage at a church in Orange County on the first Easter after I was saved. As we were finishing up, someone from the church commented to the head of our crew “See you next year.” It seemed to me like an awfully presumptuous thing to say. How did he know we would even be here in a year?
I’m not suggesting that the company might fold. Actually, influenced by a lot of stuff I was hearing on the radio, at that time, I was under the impression that the rapture really might happen any day. To talk about something a whole year away was just absurd, for you know not what tomorrow may bring, as they say. It turns out he was not the foolish one, for a couple of Easter’s have come and gone since then.

The Muppet quote in the title is not a sentiment I agree with. Life is not like a movie. There is no ending. No matter what happens, there’s always another day after that.

For some time now, I have felt as though things were winding down. They are not really. It seems like everyone I know is getting married or having babies or moving, starting a new job, whatever. Everyone is starting something new, while I keep looking at my watch wondering “Is Jesus coming back soon, ’cause I’m pretty much done here.”

I almost wish I could say I’ve stumbled again, fallen. Or that “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” The truth is, I feel like I’m standing just as tall as I ever have, only I can’t even remember what I was looking for.

On the first day of class, one of my professors was explaining how he will only allow make-up work in extreme cases. He related a story of one student whose mother had died, I think it was somewhere in Indonesia. She had to take a fourteen hour flight plus an eight hour bus ride to just get to her village. Apparently, she was back at school in four days. This student got to make up the lab she missed.

Four days? What kind of slacker am I, taking two weeks off? But wait, I protest, it is not a fair comparison… my mother was still alive when I left. So, to be fair, after she died I only missed, let’s see… oh who bloody cares? What kind of boxed up competition is this?

My mother died in Europe, and we had a sort of memorial in Europe. For a long time I had dreams in which, since we had not yet had anything in America, and the time change putting Europe ahead of us and all, in dream logic, it worked out that she had not yet died in America, and I still had time…

Nonsense of course. But either way, that time will be over… soon.

I know, I know. I don’t write… I don’t call… I rarely even check my email anymore.

I had half a dozen topics that I wanted to write about awhile ago. I had hoped that I would get to it in the break between the summer and fall quarters at school. I didn’t, of course. Mostly I just found new ways of wasting time.

…Or week… fortnight… whatever…

Religion is the opiate of the masses.
–Karl marx

Consider instead that television has become the opiate of the masses. Consider also how television has superseded the role of “religion” in terms of storytelling/mythology and as a source for morality. Consider the decline in popularity of religion with the rise of television.
Discuss.

I have not wanted so much to drink in roughly two years, four months and eighteen days. (But who’s counting?) It was merely a lab that I was woefully unprepared for, not even that dramatic of a day. Unless of course, therein lies the problem.

I was planning on buying a bigger bowl for my goldfish this weekend. Maybe even a small aquarium with a filter system. A sunken treasure chest, perhaps. I was worried though, after I changed his water and fed him Saturday morning, he simply wouldn’t touch his food. Just drifted aimlessly, for a couple of days. Well… I didn’t want to be left with an empty tank. I was hoping that maybe he just didn’t like the Redlands heat, and would perk up again when he got back to good ol’ air conditioned Pomona. He was floating on his side when I came home today, and awfully pale for a goldfish. It was two weeks, almost to the hour, since I won him in a stupid little carnival game. I honestly hadn’t expected him to make it past the first Wednesday. But he did, and I was getting fond of that little guy. Jeremiah was a good fish. He deserved better.

Am I to cry over a dead fish? Oh for the love of… I had a boxing tuna sandwich for lunch today. I’m really just tired of things dying. Relationships, dreams, people, pets, whatever. So. Very. Tired.