Last Exit Before Oblivion

How can I talk about matters of spirit and emotion? I don't even know how to start. Musicians understand, at least to some degree, which is why I take so much solace in music. Currently it's Ooodoo played on a system more advanced than anything else I've owned. It's glorious.

I have no idea who else might understand so I don't bother trying. Attempts in the past have been greeted with "That's nice" or blank looks. So, I have long sessions in Guild Wars, wandering the electronic hills while Bach or Bruce Cockburn echoes in my head.

I should talk with God. I know He listens. We've had some very interesting conversations, some of which I've mentioned here. How can God be real, though? Logic says I'm just talking to myself.

Logic has its place. It's great for troubleshooting and designing. It utterly fails when questions about why one should bother designing or making anything. It also fails when looking into the abyss of the future, and spends inordinate amounts of time looking about for solid blocks with which to build a future.

In the past I kept logic in its place. Oh, the balance was uneasy most of the time and it certainly couldn't be explained. So, I used rules to cover my tracks in the external world so I'd appear normal enough to be left alone.

Ah, to be left alone. My fondest desire. Which sort of started falling apart when God reintroduced himself. Being left alone didn't help when looking into that abyss. Being left alone didn't help me find a reason to go on. So, I became somewhat more open to God's touch but there ensued a long battle.

Note that God Himself never cast this in terms of takeover or slavery. I did that. My slavish devotion to rules for getting along meant that God had to be quite creative so that he could surprise me; I'm good at survival-based prediction. No, what He wanted was a relationship.

Oh, yes, the big religious cliche. A personal relationship with God. Core of a million jokes and parodies. Logic asks how could God care about one broken-down useless man? Logic is what assigns the values. Yep, it's impossible.

Well, what can I say? Life is impossible. The words are about logic but if you read between the lines you begin to note that no one really knows why they go on. Everyone has a justification they talk about but they're all thin as tissue paper, which is quite likely why arguments about this tend to become so heated. Life is made of something invisible, delicate, magic, the interstices between logic and heart, synaptic connections bridged by belief.

Why write about this? Who will understand? I don't know. All I can say is that God has stayed true to the course He hinted at 5 years back while I've waffled and wandered and ignored him. I can draw the trail forward and see... weirdness. One thing a man who wants to be left along can't deal with is standing out. Not that God is calling me to any outstanding role, but just being near Him is enough. One can't change internally without some light getting out.

So, I go back to my attempts to build a solid structure of logic. Something I can understand, something I can design to maintain anonymity. Yet the need for anonymity kind of recedes when I look more to God than anything else. Rules and roles are the past. Relationship is the now and fighting that just leads ever deeper into death.

How many times do I have to repeat this cycle before I allow whatever God's presence in me to grow? Growth is what happens when life takes place. I use rules to make sure growth is comprehensible.

Life requires freedom. Oh, I understand the need for rules. We need to keep from running into each other, but rules are about as effective at bringing about life change as a coat of paint is in rebuilding a collapsing house. How do you rebuild? How do you make something beautiful? Can I trust that God is interested in beauty? I want beauty more than anything else in this world, and God is the most beautiful sight my inner eye has ever seen.

Sight is made of more than light. There are many dimension, many factors for the sensitive. While the world hammers at defenses, a thousand arguments trying to haul me into their camps, God sits and... invites. "Come to Me," He says. "We don't need to argue. I am called the Comforter." And yet... I use rules to wall all of that away. It can't be real. If it were real, everyone would be doing it.

Where did that idea come from? One of the first real things I learned in my life is that truth isn't often found amid a crowd. The herd defines its own kind of truth, but it's not the beautiful truth that I want, so I use my senses to track beauty. Or at least I used to.

In denying God I've denied the deeper truths of myself; I've dropped into survival mode. Ah, what a mistake. God is the inescapable threat. He's here, right here, all the time, like parents I can't hide from. Unlike them He doesn't use any of what he sees against me in ridicule or belittlement. Facts are what we work with, whether the facts are the insubstantial ones of belief and feeling or the incontrovertible few, such as gravity and momentum.

He respects me. I respond by running. It can't be real. How real is a rainbow?

What does a moth think about? Resting upon a leaf, under the wide blue sky. Does the leaf look like a leaf to those eyes? Is blue a valid concept? Can a nearly weightless, winged moth know anything of gravity?

The leaf grows from a twig, which joins a bigger twig. Twig to branch to limb, inward and downward from our gravity-centred point of view anyway, eventually to the trunk. Sun's fire reaches through essential, invisible air to leaves unconscious of their photosynthetic magic.

Everyone wants to feel good. Is there any more to feelings than a kind of bubble in a vacuum, or a kite with no string, or leaves without a tree?

All the limbs come together in a massive trunk, and then the tree spreads out again, roots dividing again and again until nothing is left but nearly invisible rootlets. This is where the real business of the tree is transacted, business between bacteria, fungi, minerals, an intimate embrace of earth and water.

Trees grow. From a microscopic embryo inside a tiny, hard-cased seed to a barely visible stem and, given time and space and beneficent environment, shade for picnics and bird nests. Each leaf connected firmly to the reality of stone and earth.

To one who feels bad most of the time, a moment or minute of feeling good comes as a gift or an incomprehensible miracle with no cause. Feelings are like cats: they don't like clingy people. When they are so rare, however, how can I keep from holding on? If I were a leaf I'd be in perpetual shade every once in a while being hit by a ray of sunlight. Hang on! Don't let it go.

Like the bubble in vacuum, or the stringless kite, it can't happen. Feelings come from somewhere. Something holds them up, and they grow from one's own roots.

For a Christian to talk about this is very close to blasphemy. As soon as the topic comes up people become uncomfortable and the talk soon turns to duty. Jesus himself, however, calls the Holy Spirit the Comforter. For me the logic is simple: why do we have feelings if they are to be ruthlessly suppressed?

It could very well be that I'm the only person who needs to look into this. Jesus is the one who leaves the 99 sheep to go fetch back the one that got lost. No matter what, he will, if allowed, rescue that sheep. We celebrate the story but are pretty hard on the lost sheep themselves. What is involved in the rescue? What would you expect from One who died for His sheep? He doesn't work by halves. No whitewash over rust and decay.

To rescue a leaf, Jesus starts working at the roots. His light reaches everywhere to show the connections I'd given up on understanding. His hands hold me together as I try to stop the changes. Change is a problem for one with limited resources and stability.

It turns out, though, that most of the instability comes from inside me. Anything that looks different is a threat, so it gets town down. Repeatedly through the years I have turned the hydraulic hose of intellect upon the foundations of new, pretty structures to reduce their foundations to rubble. The life can't stand on such tumbled earth; there is no chance for roots to grow and become stronger.

Comfort is essential when change comes knocking at the door. Change is essential if I'm to continue living as anything other than an automatic eel in the world's cracks. Substantive change that really sticks around for longer than the time it takes my intellectual sun to rise is something that has never happened.

Jesus' light is both gentle and powerful. He is never vindictive, never says "I told you so," never loses patience as I require being taught the same thing again and again. How does one who has never known faith learn to believe? Like a leaf on a tree, faith is connected to experience and everything else. It doesn't exist on its own. Faith is essential. After all, if you believe you can't climb a tree you'll never try but one probably shouldn't start with an elm whose first branches are 40 feet up. Jesus knows where the beginning is, where the tiny dying roots meet the stony dry ground.

Even the memory of water is gone. If faith is to grow, there must be water. Rain falls and new ideas grow. That starts the process of destruction. How many cycles before I learn, or die? Which choice? Patience leads to living.

God places his hands gently around the warring aspects of myself. Always before, to have them in the same room leads to destruction as one tries desperately to solve the problem of warfare by outrunning or killing off the others. One voice leads to stability. It leads to sterility, too, and doesn't last long. God wants everyone to live together. Unanimity isn't needed, but it can't be like a meeting of porcupines either.

It has taken years to bring this about. I've asked the question before: what would happen if all the different voices at least quit fighting? I'm tired, bone-deep tired right down to my dry roots, of fighting. How much difference can invisible comfort make?

This morning, right now, I'm still here. I attribute this to Jesus' work over the last 30-odd years and particularly in the last 5. I've been ready to give up for the last two of them, sick to death of the fighting and running away from God's kindness. Kindness burns in the soul of one who hasn't experienced much of it. I don't even really believe in it but that's not really much of an impediment to God. What stops him is a determination not to believe. God sees the tiniest cracks, and encourages even tinier rootlets to grow in there. Nearly imperceptible to a person but these rootlets are where life starts.

And then He holds the new plant as life grows and... changes things.

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.' " (Matthew 16:25,26, from Biblegateway.com)

Barbara wrote "I sometimes wonder what the purpose of life is. Does anyone know? If so please tell me. I never used to feel this way. I used to see the future as full of hope and possibilities, now I just wonder WHY life has to be so damn difficult so much of the time."

It's simple. Just die to yourself, as the church vernacular has it. We've all heard it said. Nobody ever explains what it means in the real world. I can understand that; it's a difficult concept to explain in words. I wonder if God feels frustration with the limited means of communication that most people allow. We're never taught to go any deeper, so people spin off onto their own mystic paths, trying desperately to put some living flesh on the dead bones of logical words.

How do you tell a modern person to listen to God? I have no idea, so I don't talk about it. But for the last couple of nights I've been intensively discussing-feeling-thinking-listening with God these concepts of life, trying to find a way through the intellectual tyranny of words. Still, words are an anchor; we've all seen what happens when people become too detached.

So, it seems to be that denying the self, or soul (the Greek word can be translated as either), means allowing all of my different voices to be heard. I can't speak for others but perhaps it's a route worth exploring.

No one likes tyranny. It's simple, though, and easy to enforce, so we end up with a lot of it. Intellect has always been the iron boot on top of me, but it has also been the steel frame that has allowed me to stand against hostile hot winds. What goes on for years becomes truth to the exclusion of anything else. Now it seems I need to deny that operational truth and become open to a more flexible way of building. Who holds those soft joints together? Who makes sense of all the different voices? The same One who quieted the clamor one night five years ago and let me out of the confusion.

It wasn't what I'd consider self-denial. It was a denial of my hard-edged management, but other parts of me were allowed to speak. For a time they gained confidence and were able to speak up, and life was more balanced, but then I got scared and tried to reimpose logic. Who could trust God? Didn't he always play tricks on people, and leave them stranded at critical moments? Aren't we all supposed to be independent? Where is the truth? I tried, much as I had in the late 1970s, to find the truth on my own terms. It's hard to trust anyone when they usually perpetuate, if not lies, at least the same old tired answers that even I know don't work.

God is different. Some of the most deeply buried voices in me turned to God as a sunflower does to the sun, and enjoyed his light and life. This was incomprehensible. What did it mean? Logic! We must understand!

Well, understanding comes, but it's not just words. That still small voice speaks in many ways, and my own quiet parts, once I deny logic complete control, resonate. Rain the desert, quietly penetrating the dust.

Jesus told people he had come to make the captives free. Who is captive? To what? The idea of freedom is intensely attractive to me but it also repels me, or impels me to build intellectual walls against it.

I used to do better. My life was an uneasy, dynamic balance between impossible and daily hiding of what's important. It's easy to hide from people, especially when they're as willfully self-deluded as I am.

Five years ago God showed himself to me again. Hiding would never be the same; how do you hide from someone who lives inside the walls? We played hide and seek amid the ruins and I ceded ever more territory to no-man's land as I burrowed deeper.

Love is a bludgeon. I have seen the word used to wrap people in ever tighter bands of rules. "If you love God you will want to..." and there comes a long list of practices. If Jesus came to set the captive free, then what's with all the rules? Framing of reference, for one thing.

Five years ago I asked God to show me the truth. I expected rules, as rules are how I frame reality. Rules are like bricks that can be used to build just about anything. They're comprehensible and can be held and looked at. They don't change. Put one down today it'll still be there in a year or so. What I got instead was love, given by example.

This wasn't comprehensible to me so I translated it into rules. God became very creative in avoiding the traps I built of rules. He never did what I expected so after a while I started avoiding him. He'd answer any question I asked except those that led anywhere near containment.

Five years ago God promised rain in the desert, a feast for the prodigal, a celebration. I don't believe in love even when it's demonstrated, mainly because most of my experience of love is as a way of cloaking selfish lies whose ultimate design is to reduce me to a pale copy of someone else. I'd like to be loved, but even more I want to be myself. I have given up love in order to remain free.

God is love... and he came to make me free, five years ago. I've spent roughly four years of that time dodging, and getting tired. Is it possible to be both loved, and free? Words on one side, reality on the other. God Himself doesn't fit inside the words so I work to ignore everything that I can't comprehend. That's a lot of work. No wonder I'm tired.

The alternative seems worse. If I really leave myself open to God's thoughts, what horrible things might happen? What might I get dragged into? There was a time when I didn't worry so much about these things; I drifted along and life just sort of worked itself out. Life worked better then than it did after I put my hand on the tiller and started trying to steer. Perhaps
God had been at the helm before then.

Where did my directing lead? To the last place on earth I ever wanted to live: Los Angeles. Freedom comes in different flavors, and at least now I'm free of needing to worry about where the rent will come from. Freedom can be made, too, and in that I've just pretty much given up. It's just too wild an idea that God is really interested in freedom. Church history is not at all kind to this idea, but I think it's essential for me.

How does a rule-bound 56 year old bureaucrat learn freedom? The same way a pianist learns to play: practice, with a very patient teacher. God never gives up. A day, a year, a decade after the last contact, if I turn back in His direction He is there to continue the lesson where we left off, or to step back a few ideas and go over the ground again. This is the reality I have experienced many times. I'm not a trusting soul. I have been burned far too many times to be anything but closely guarded. God doesn't take advantage of my naivete, but waits, impossibly, sitting there in the desert waiting for me to put away the umbrella.

Telling a true story is much like shooting rapids in a small open boat. The process exposes one to much ridicule and doubt, and how much of that kind of heavy water can one take before going down? And how many times can you be sunk before you just decide not to bother floating where everyone can take a shot? Even deciding to tell the story... who would believe it? Beyond that, what difference does it make? Words go out and are usually met with silence, perhaps because I tend to toss them out there and then disavow them. A tail already cut off is one that can't be pulled by someone else.

So, I've not had much to say to anyone recently. I've largely quit trying. I do my job, come home and read or play Guild Wars. Every once in a while, in the quiet of 2AM or thereabouts, God whispers clearly, a few words before I close the fatigue-opened doors.

I'm mostly a failure as a Christian, as a human being. This doesn't seem to matter very much to God. He keeps believing He can do anything, and communicates that belief to me without rancor, without judgment. Even when I tell him how reality works he just waits for me to run the skein to its end and then I look back up to him and see forgiveness again.

I follow Jesus because He is irresistibly attractive. I can't put it into words. Picture a cat lying in a sunbeam on a cool morning: no understanding of what the sun is nor how nuclear fusion creates light visible and invisible but sensible on sensitive fur. The cat simply makes a choice: it feels good.

Following Jesus because He makes me feel good is about as shameful a statement as a modern Christian can make. Still... what else is there? To talk about the reasons for following Jesus is, I think, to exchange lies to make other people feel better. Human beings are motivated by things beyond and below logic, and logic never tells the whole story. The attempt to fit human experience into the strictures of logic leaves far too much reality on the cutting room floor.

Note that I'm not saying logic is useless. It's essential. Feelings are equally essential but much less accepted. One can, I believe, cuddle in God's lap and feel the sun of His being while also being within the stated limits of forgiveness coming from Jesus' actions. Why should there be the polarity? I read the Mosaic of Pain Blog* and links therefrom every now and then, and the discussions rapidly go from what's needed to an argument over who is more scripturally based.

We see through a glass, not very clearly. Each of us takes a guess and tries. One more reason to keep quiet: how do I know I'm right in anything that I put here? Even if if I am right, how are you to follow? No, I think it's better to think of writing as merely a way to show, not signposts on the route to be travelled, but a presentation of the fact that the journey is possible, and continues.

I'm still here. In the last two years I've ruined a number of potential relationships so have pretty much given up on that whole idea. Work is tolerable, most of the time, although recently politics has made things much more difficult. So, I come home and go to bed. On the weekends I bash imaginary monsters with imaginary heroes that are surprisingly interesting to work with. I can win the battles in Guild Wars. If I lose there's the potential for a new approach that will win. Victory may be imaginary but it's better than imaginary defeat.

How does one who grew up with defeat grow into victory? Five years ago I thought it was simple but since then things have gotten complicated. What constitutes victory, and how does one learn? No matter how basic the need, God doesn't mind teaching and the answer, unlike those offered by people, are never forced. They come in their own time. Who knows his own mind? None of us. There are aspects buried in there that, in my case, are just sick to death of being manipulated and manipulation is the name of our society. Even the church. It's an earnest attempt to present truth, but the model comes from our corrupt society.

I want something different. I want to be a whole person. I don't know how this will be done, or if. I don't even know what it will look like.

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*This is a site supposedly calling for repentance of Mosaic church management. While I too think Mosaic has problems... I think the Blog is overly polarized, and polarizing.

Karen quoted her son as saying:
"Do not walk in front of me, for I may not follow.
Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead.
Do not walk beside me, either, just pretty much leave me alone."

This reminds me of my first experience in jury duty. One of the questions prospective jurors were asked was "Do you consider yourself a leader or a follower?" Every one of them responded with leader. Got to keep up those appearances.

It got me to thinking, and my conclusion was much like Karen's quote. If one is to be considered a leader there must be people following. Nope. No one behind me. There's usually no one in front of me, either, more through unusual approaches to things than to being a die-hard nonconformist. You know, one of those people who is so determined to be different that they look just like everyone else.

I've done a lot of off-trail hiking in the mountains. Using trails is easier; the path is smoother and the down trees, rocks, holes and streams are removed, cut through or bridged. When you find your own path you're on your own to get past the obstacles. This worked fine in Colorado but in California making your own path is, um, a problem. Ever heard of ceanothus? There are many kinds, ranging from resistant to downright hostile, and forcing your way through these miniature forests is painful. I very soon learned to stay on the trail. This was very frustrating.

Basically, I just want to get to where I'm going. I'll make my own trail if needed, but following another is easier. Very rarely is there anyone going the same way, so I just walk. If there's an existing trail I'll use it until it no longer goes the direction I need, and then I'll sigh and take off across the wild country of wherever, hoping I won't get lost.

There's a major fault with this approach... and the fault can also be seen as an advantage. I look ahead to where I want to go and choose the most direct path, and simply concentrate on that. Things that are outside my light of sight tend to get ignored. Distractions, or delights. I've probably missed a lot this way, but there are times when it's good. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of getting somewhere and realize I've not seen much along the way.

Leader, follower, who cares. Just do what comes to hand. Following can be just another way of leading, and leading as demonstrated by politicians is just being led around by perceived public opinion and money. There are few real leaders; the real ones are fairly quiet, and usually villified. No one wants a truly original person in charge.

I wonder if there's a way to walk an individual path with one or more companions. There'd probably be some compromise involved, and I'm not averse to that. Most of the time, though, the compromise is made by the weaker person in a relationship, after the leader finds out which buttons to press to get the responses desired. Yes, I'm cynical. I've seen and been involved in too much of this.

One could do an interesting study of how Jesus leads. He leads because he's qualified; there is no ego involved.

Layla said there were actually some people asking her what happened to me. It's easy to feel forgotten in this world. Events move fast and it's easy to just let the days go by.

How can words be assembled to represent events in a life? Why bother? Does anyone care? If they did care... would I care?

Relationships are, to me, a sign of failure. All those years of being in school and at home, situations in which being left alone was the best option. "If you don't behave we'll send you to see the principal." "Wait until your father gets home." Yah... meeting with people means I've failed. Not too much of a problem for one who can choose when to relate to people, but a huge problem for one who has the Holy Spirit living within: a judge all built in and inescapable.

A constant reminder of failure, of need. This is a problem for long-term living. What's the point? Everything I do is wrong.

Old habits, as Lu wrote about recently, die very hard. We both know that God is NOT watching over our shoulders waiting for the slightest infraction so he can jump on us. Jesus didn't die to judge people. I have God's voice working gently to overwrite the past, but the past looms large and in strength.

I was thinking about this years ago. My life has been pretty much just waiting for the failure I knew would come. Inevitable. That I've made it this far is due more to luck than anything else. God asked me, "Why not wait for success?" I thought it was a neat idea. Then we got into the process, and that has been no fun.

If relationships are the key to life I'm still looking for the lock. I tried to overwrite my social backwardness with rational processes, basically telling myself what to do. Relationships aren't rational, not completely, and much runs under a surface that to the rational mind is opaque. Only the heart can see through the horizon.

Ah, the heart... much is written, much is sung, much is assumed. Jesus was the exemplar of a man with a heart, and he was killed for his efforts. Hearts have a hard time in this world. The process of transforming a child into an adult is in large part the process of the child learning to put ever tighter constraints upon the heart; if this is not done, the person is said to be odd, or to wear their heart on their sleeve.

I've always thought that in a contest between a sensitive man and a ravaging world, the world is wrong. This is why I've spent the better part of my time alone. Now, the big question is, what does God think of a sensitive man? I have no place to hide from him.