Currently Listening Discount Fireworks By Over the Rhine Last Night on Earth Again see related

Defector

Well,  I've decided to defect over to blogger. Feel free to visit my new website, http://repatrick.blogspot.com/. Thanks and God bless.

Living the Questions.

As most of you know, I've taken a couple of months off of xanga and blogging. Overall, I'd have to say these couple of months of my life were a good couple of months. That's not to say that these months were not difficult or painful or even a little bit terrible at times, but overall, it's been good.

About the time I quit xanga-ing, I moved into my own place, 400 square feet without parents or roommates or television or internet, just me and my two cats and a lot of books and a lot of silence. While the cats were nice to have around just for the entertainment factor, the most helpful part of the last couple of months was all of the silence. I've been learning to be still, to wait and listen, to not fear silence. The books were helpful to give me words to dialogue in and with the quiet. I honestly can't tell you how many books I've read in the last couple months. . . but there were times when I had to tell myself to stop reading and go watch a movie on my computer or something.

I've had a lot of time to think during the last couple of months. I mean, I've known since I took the job that I don't plan to work in customer service at a Honda dealership for the rest of my life, but I haven't had a clue what I was supposed to do or even what I might want to do. The big plan was to get accepted to a university somewhere and start graduate school this coming fall. But even as I've filled out application after application, I balked before mailing them in, still not sure whether or not I really wanted to study ________.

But January seems to be planning to move me out of my 400 square foot nunnery. Having completed and mailed in only one application, I have an interview with the Peace Corps next week. A gentleman is coming to meet Sonja and Robert (my cats) and if all goes well and everyone gets along, he will have two new friends traveling home with him. I'm moving back in with my parents for a couple of months (only a couple and I will be living in the basement apartment, so it really should be okay, cross my fingers). And I'm joining an Episcopal church, well, getting confirmed actually, whenever the bishop makes his way down to our parish.

Lots of changes, lots of lessons learned, unlearned and relearned, some or all of which I may share a later date. I'm living, trying to live, in faith, believing that there is pattern in this randomness and the hand of a good creator behind all of this apparent chaos. I am learning to appreciate the questions, the journey, the unknown as enough, to live as Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: "Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now."

"She knew that death was only a door to the kingdom where Jesus would welcome her, there would be no crying there, no suffering, but meanwhile she was fat, her heart hurt, and she lived alone with her ill-tempered little dogs, tottering around her dark little house full of Chinese figurines and old Sunday Tribunes."

Garrison Keillor on Old Aunt Marie

An Apology

            Karin Bergquist pleads “I want to do better. I want to try harder. I want to believe down to the letter.” Those lyrics make me wonder if my drifting, straying, stumbling faith is not all that uncommon. It’s not so much that I don’t believe, I do. There are days I come skipping towards God; there are months I falter, circling somehow forwards. Circling, cycling through the same questions, maybe asked in new inflections or with a slightly different vocabulary, maybe giving an illusion of stagnancy; this circling, a picture of indeterminedness and immaturity and inability to just believe and move on, straightforwardly. But the more I circle around, seemingly lost, the more I am willing to be quiet and to accept my circuitous route—rather than continuing pleading for something more direct, obvious, charted—the more I see the slight changes of terrain, the mountain of God nearing mustard-seed-height on my horizon.

            This acceptance of questions has yet to translate into any form of comfort or content. The back of my brain continues the siren cry to “Have faith.” or “Be a mature Christian.” or “Read the Bible, pray everyday,” and, like magic, like a holy Chia pet, “I will grow, grow, grow!” Not to detract from the Holy Scriptures or the Holy Spirit, but the more I come to something like prayer or Bible reading, the less straightforward and certain and defined these nebulous concepts of spirituality and Godliness and Christlikeness appear.

            Who is God and how do I know him? What is the Bible and how do I read it? How do my encounters with Jesus inform and transform the life I wake to each day? I have so many answers, but like an achievement test from Hell, not one of these multiple choices fit the question being asked.

            So, perhaps the problem is the question. The question I can hardly define but can not keep from asking; the question that winds itself around me and my soul and this massive institution called Christianity and the truth deeper than the institution of Christianity that gives any meaning or hope or light to all of the obscurity that is this two-thousand year old invention. This question is a vague unsettledness, an unwillingness to accept that all of this doing and defining is complete and absolute.

            And I have to wonder if all of my frustration and running in circles is a lack of faith or an unwillingness to accept truth, to believe in God. I’ve been told by reputable, God-fearing, upstanding people that these questions are faithless, a failure to believe. To a point, I follow, agreeing, consigning myself to some realm reserved for those defunct in faith—until I catch at this title of unbeliever. I do believe. In a deep and true and real way, I have exhausted my other options and must take hope—take in the manner of grasping—in the veracity of the incarnation and the resurrection. I must trust all eternity and my soul and even these eighty short years to questions that I instinctively find true without understanding or answering.

            I have tried, all of you reputable, God-fearing, upstanding people, to shed my doubts, to peel them off like so many layers of dirty clothing, only to find myself peeling off layers of my own skin and losing myself in my determination to just believe and just be settled and certain. This lopsided, stumbling, limping step is my gait, and as I can, I will skip and stumble, inexorably drawn, towards God. This haze of indeterminacy and doubt is my faith, and as I can believe, I do. This flame of love and hope and faith may be weak, but I refuse to believe that the flame in no way flickers.

Currently Listening Who We Are Instead By Jars of Clay 7. Show You Love see related

On hiatus.

For an undetermined amount of time.