I Like It, Too

13 Things You May Not Know About Me

A la Tamie. Make a list of your own, if you like.

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1. I have a neurotic habit of adding up numbers - on clock displays, barcodes, phone digits; anything. And multiples of three are lucky. If I set the microwave timer, it has to add up to a multiple of three. (34 seconds on power level 8, for example. 3+4+8 = 15.)


2. I also like some contemporary Christian music. I hide it away like most people probably hide their porn.

3. I went to a Lutheran preschool. My teacher was a British woman named Mrs. Kibsey. Her assistant teacher was Ms. Young, who made me eat my sandwich when it got all crusty and yelled at my best friend Elliott and I for kicking up dust in the sandbox playing trucks. I didn't like her.

4. Speaking of Elliott, I totally stalk my elementary school peers on social networking sites. I love seeing what they're up to.

5. I love the teeny-tiny little spiders that sit in corners staring at the wall for months on end.

6. From age 9 to 14, to I was overweight. I still don't like people watching me eat.

7. I once hit a pigeon on the way to school. It landed directly in front of my car, and exploded in a spectacular display of feathers. The drivers around passed by laughing, but I felt so bad I pulled over, was late for class, and prayed for the poor bird. In retrospect, it was just a little bit funny.

8. The sound of people chewing noisily makes me cringe. Thank God for restaurants!

9. Same story for vacuum cleaners. I have to turn up my MP3 player obnoxiously loud when I'm cleaning.

10. I've never been able to keep a plant alive for more than a month.

11. If my feet are uncovered, I absolutely cannot fall asleep.

12. I've kept a journal since I was seven.

13. There is a large xylophone under my bed.

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My Life, This Year, So Far (And a Favorite Poem)

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have

one.  It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses
my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)
standing near my
(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see
nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved my
            (suddenly in sunlight
he will bow,
& the whole garden will bow)

(e.e. cummings)

Pokiehl

"When you can enjoy the state of being lost,

you are set free from loss."

-Pokiehl, the Dreamteller

I've had this quote on my MySpace (yes, I have one of those awful things, and yes, they are stupid) for a long time, dunno why I've never shared it. This is one of my favorite quotes, and it's from - of all places - "Kingdom of Heaven."

Happiness is $0.95 off your next purchase

Today, a woman at the grocery store came up behind me while I was buying milk, and handed me a coupon. She said, "You need this more than I do, I'm an old woman!" She was only maybe 46 , with fair brown skin like parchment and short, neatly hairsprayed hair framed around gold earrings.

Touched by this small gesture, I thanked her, and you know what? I couldn't stop smiling, and I smiled at people in the store and they smiled back at me. Which made me smile more.

Waiting in line, I saw a tabloid about Dr. Phil apparently dumping his spouse, with the yellow block-letter exclamation, "Wife tells all! The lies! The screaming! The pain! The abuse! And more!" As if lies, screaming, pain and abuse are products to be marketed and sold.

And as I handed the cashier my coupon, I had a "real" moment, where everything is made abundantly clear, and the most insignificant things become all-important.

So, God lurks in Safeway. Who knew?

Sit Down and Shut Up

Sit down and shut up is exactly what I need to do. This past week has been insane. There are tons of things going on in my life and in the lives of those close to me lately. Birthdays, ministries, new births, illnesses, schoolwork, tragedies, music, new friendships, money, old friendships, heartache - you name it.

At night, my brain just won't shut up either, mostly because I've been chattering away all day, and it's remembering that. This week, heavy doses of alone time and silence and "letting the dust settle" are in order.

Glory to God, whose power working in us can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine. Glory to him from generation to generation in the Church, and in Christ Jesus for ever and ever, Amen.

Perspectives

Perspective is a funny thing. I'm thinking about how two people can agree on, or like a particular "thing" - but for different reasons.

For example, I love elaborate vestments (see below!) because they're beautiful and aesthetics help me draw closer to the Divine. Someone else may like them because they're canonically "correct," and what "the Church ought to do," and order helps them see God more clearly. Someone else may like them because they're subversive to the culture around them, and there they find Christ. Yet another might hate them for the same reason.

We think we're all in agreement, but it can be disconcerting to realize we like the same "thing," but for a different reason. We may not be in agreement at all!

And sometimes, we realize that what we thought we liked about it - the aesthetic, the order, the subversiveness - points to a deeper truth about ourselves and our relationship with God. We may have to let go of the reason for liking or disliking something - the aesthetic, the order - in order to see things the way they really are.

Using vestments as an example here - it could be anything. Church-related or not. An object, an ideal, a place, a person.

I know I'm being all highly theoretical and wishy-washy, so if this makes any sense at all to you, bravo :) Just thinking out loud again.

Some Day, Somehow...

I've decided I want to make the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela.

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Speechless

Sometimes you're speechless because you don't have anything to say, or you feel that what you have to say is somehow irrelevant or inadequate, or sometimes you are speechless because silence will say everything.

But right now, I'm speechless because I have so many things I'd like to say, and they're all piling up in the back of my throat and I simply can't speak. So, I will write about this past weekend later, once I've had time to "unpack" all my spiritual baggage.

"Let old wounds be reopened and exposed,
so that a new life and a new Resurrection may begin."


...

4w5

Somebody please tell me I'm not the only loser who bawls every time he watches Contact?

Silence

"Have you ever watched the clouds move across the sky when they fly by faster than your eyes can chase them? And when they finally fly in front of the moon the sky is dark for a moment. Your favorite song ends and for 3 seconds there is no sound. You realize that tonight you would much prefer the silence over the noise, and you wish upon stars you can't see that the sky might stay still for a few more hours, or that you could stay still for a few more years. And you find yourself correcting your thoughts - oh, how I'd love to stay still for the rest of time. No movement, no thoughts, no judgment or pain...just silence."

-Christine Htoon, my dear friend.

The Only Sense of Time I Have...

...is that it's passing.

Know what I mean?

"Eternity" is such a strange concept - it's endless, we can't escape it, we constantly live and have our being in it - but we can't ever get it back. Not all of it. Not really. Not ever.

Lately, I've been overwhelmed with a sense of nostalgia, and a very real, tangible discomfort with my own mortality, and the inability to return to the past - aside from memories and photographs. Every month and day and time period in my life has its own distinct emotional binding, its own music - its own life.

It seems like just yesterday I was happily nestled in my dorm room 200 miles away, snowed in and content with good company and good wine, watching a scary movie before finals week. Or at band camp, shivering as the sun sets beneath the black treeline and feeling that paradoxical adolescent yearning for both freedom and security.

...until I wake up and realize that I'm surrounded by hundreds of cardboard boxes in the cold cement stock room, dreading my next bank account statement and fretting over car payments and student loans. There's no more music. No more snow.

How much longer until I'm relishing the long-past sound of ripping cardboard in an empty, fluorescent stock room?

In the end, what we have are photographs and memories - treasure them. And treasure the "now."

Here are a few of my memories:

Goodbye 2007.

Let Be

After reading Tamie's blog, one of my favorite quotes came to mind, and I wanted to share. It's an excerpt from My Antonia, by Willa Cather:


"I did not believe that my dead father and mother were watching me from up there; they would still be looking for me at the sheep-fold down by the creek or along the white road that lead to the mountain pastures. I had left even their spirits behind me. The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not wither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out. I did not say my prayers that night: here, I felt, what would be would be."

- - -

Six Years Later

Lord
Take me where you want me to go,
Let me meet who you want me to meet
Tell me what you want me to say, and keep me out of your way.
-Fr.Mychal Judge, FDNY Chaplain

Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Mormonism

There was a time, when, every Sunday morning I listened to a middle-aged man clad in business suit and tie, surrounded by at least 200 others - men in suits and ties, women in 'modest' dresses. That scene seems bizarre now - yet it will always have an undeniable air of familiarity.

Salt Lake is a long way from Canterbury.

It's about time I shared my spiritual past, and how it looks in retrospect.

I was raised as a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, more commonly known as "Mormons." (You can read about the doctrinal beliefs and practices in that article.)

My father's side of the family have been practising Mormons since the mid-to-late 19th century - they were Scottish and English converts who sailed across the Atlantic to settle in Utah and Arizona. I'm a 3rd generation Mormon through my mom's side.

It is ironic, then, that my dad is an atheist, while my mom remains a devout member of the LDS church. It is my mother who has been my biggest supporter, and a great obstacle throughout this. I'm grateful for the virtues she taught me, and I'm proud to be her son.

I started having issues with Mormonism when I was 13. I put aside my doubts and struggled to become the best little "Peter Priesthood" I could be. I was the kid who wore an "Angel Moroni" tie tack to band concerts and carried the Book of Mormon around at school ready to "share the Gospel" at any given moment.

Yeah, I was that kid.

Everything came crashing down when I was about 15. I had been praying to God for three years to make me straight. No reply. My problems with the church weren't going away, and I felt like I had no one to turn to. Every day and night was spent paralyzed in terror of the growing suspicion that I was going to burn for all eternity for being gay, cut off from all family and friends, and that I deserved it. I hated myself, and was on the verge of acting out the ultimate expression of self-hatred in the form of suicide, but by the grace of God, I was saved from myself. I experienced an overwhelmingly powerful spiritual transformation that night. It was as though the very arms of Christ were around me. For the first time in my life, I knew that I, along with everybody else, was completely and unconditionally loved by God.

And that's the whole point of it all, right?

Religion, belief, ritual - it all points to the single most important Truth that any human being can and must learn - You are loved by the One who created you.

I had no idea what to do with this new information.

All I knew was that what 'the Church' was saying was different from what God was saying. The two just weren't quite connecting on the level they ought to be if this was truly God's "one true church."

So I researched.

I devoted all my energies to learning everything I could about the LDS faith, and was shocked by what I found. Alternative versions of Joseph Smith's "First Vision" story, shocking statements by church leaders about race and religion, bizarre doctrines taught by early church leaders, especially Brigham Young, temple rituals which remarkably resemble Masonic rites, not to mention the 4,000+ changes to the Book of Mormon - just to name a few.

I was furious! Had I and my entire family really been deceived by a religion scarcely more credible than the Church of Scientology? How could so many people believe these lies? Why didn't most members know these things? How could I be so stupid?

I started exploring different religions - Judaism, Buddhism - even Wicca, remaining an outwardly practicing Mormon but inwardly agnostic. Yet it was Jesus who always held a strange lure. And so, two years after the unexpected collision with Grace, I started attending Christian churches. The United Church of Christ, Lutheran, and United Methodist churches specifically. (I also did the whole Baptist/Non-denominational thing....not my cup of tea.)

Guess what brought me to the doorstep an Episcopal church? Why, that delightfully short-lived series on NBC, The Book of Daniel! I know, it's weird, but there it is. The Lord works in mysterious ways, huh? The Episcopal Church seemed to be the open-minded version of the Catholic church I was looking for. Ancient, apostolic truth, progressive identity. And, the first time I set foot in an Episcopal church, I was (not to get all Pentecostal) moved by the Spirit, completely at peace with the world. I knew this was where God was calling me.

As for Mormonism?

I remained angry for a long time - It felt like righteous anger, and maybe some of it was. Anger can be healthy, even healing, but it can also be destructive. So I've been letting that anger go.

So what do I think about Mormons and the LDS church now?



I don't believe Mormonism and Christianity are the same thing. Perhaps from a secular/dictionary definition they are, but as traditional Christianity defines itself, Mormonism is radically different, and cannot be considered another Christian denomination. The fact of the matter is, the LDS church considers itself the only true Christian church in existence, and is therefore by definition technically opposed to the existence of all other churches claiming to be Christian.

Are individual Mormons Christians?


Maybe.
Probably.


There are so many good Mormons out there. Who am I to judge whether or not someone is a Christian? There are many whose faith is known to God alone.

Speaking of good Mormons, I'm proud of my mom, who has come a long way. I know this hasn't been easy for her, seeing her son become an "apostate." But she's getting better. We've even prayed Compline together a few times.



You can also read the letters I received from the LDS church: Here and here. No surprises here. To be honest, I was incredibly happy when I received them - freedom, at last.

So in the end, it all worked out. These things usually do.