Prelude
Happy Thursday Feelers, this is your Captain speaking. In the last four days I have: received an offer from the company that I didn’t get initially and really wanted. Signed said job offer, start Monday. Quit my terrible job. Hallelujah! Am currently enjoying a week off. Changing gears as we speak, getting ready to dive into something challenging and new for the first time in a long time. It feels really good, Feelers.
This week, I present the first part of an essay. I started it a few months ago and never published it because it wasn’t finished. Upon revisiting the essay this week, I realized it should be published in installments due to length, so without further ado, I present the first installment. It’s about God.
On God | Part One:
I was raised without religion; however, almost everyone I know grew up in the church. As such, I have been perennially curious about God and the God-experiences of others, which range from extremely positive and nourishing to overbearing, traumatic, and damaging—quite the gamut. I felt, for the longest time, like a blank slate: eager and inquisitive, open, and often totally clueless about this supremely human and intensely divisive idea. How we each come to know what we deem to be God is relative— either the choice is made for you or you come to it on your own— and it is precisely these individual, interwoven experiences that give me pause. We humans set ourselves apart from all other creatures by, among other things, our spiritual inquiry. Such a feature does not make me shake my head and condemn some inherent stupidity or hubris of the human animal. We are, after all, a bunch of shaking, overstimulated animals wearing socks and shoes. In fact, such inquiry makes me swell with an intense curiosity: we are so very complex, so terribly interesting. What is it to know God? I can only really tell you how I came to know God in the way that I do now. I have found, especially recently, that many of my friends have endeavored upon similar spiritual journeys; our conversations prompted me to reflect on how I got here.
Two memories compete for my first discernible encounter with God, the church, and religion in general. In one, I am small, in South Texas with my grandparents, putting on an orange and red dress to attend Christmas service at their Lutheran church. My late aunt was there. I didn’t understand anything about the service but I remember receiving a tiny, hand-tatted lamb (referring to the embroidery-like craft called tatting), maybe a few of them, and a catechism. The catechism read like a foreign language so I shelved it, but I kept ahold of that little lamb, played with it like a worry stone in my palms, thinking about how the preacher said that we are all lambs of God, and how funny is that? I wasn’t a lamb, but lambs were pretty cute, and soft, and I loved little treasures. In the other memory, I am in Creede, having successfully convinced my parents to put me into vacation bible school so I could hang out with my friends. Nothing really made sense; my friends were reciting verses and prayers by heart and I mouthed along with them, until I realized that correct answers garnered M&M prizes. I definitely wanted M&M’s and those break-time Oreos, so I tried to listen and glean some answers from my peers, though it mostly proved fruitless; there were so many stories, so many different characters and names, and God was somehow three people? The perma-furrow in my brow probably started right there, somewhere between the Old Testament and the new, calling on all of my faculties of reason to discern this long and detailed story everyone else seemed to know. It didn’t upset me; I simply learned that some people knew a collective story about God that I had never really heard.
I did get upset, later, because the story began to appear more frequently and the story, come to find out, interacted with my experience of the world in ways that perplexed me. I began to understand that this whole religion thing was deeply rooted in the collective human experience, that its branches were many and they were in fact a kind of infrastructure. I was outside of its artifice, rapping on the beams, blowing dust from the buttresses, producing from my pocket a magnifying glass— maybe scrutiny would help me perforate this curious bubble? Here again, two memories: I went to elementary school with a kid from a very conservative, Christian family. He was not allowed to celebrate Halloween and scowled at all of us in our little costumes, muttering that it was the devil’s day. It was fourth grade. At our yearly Christmas party, I vividly remember him announcing, “you know that it’s called Christmas because of CHRIST, right? It’s CHRIST-MAS, the birth of Christ. Christmas is CHRIST’S DAY and that’s IT!” After school, I sobbed to my mom in the car— was Christmas really just about Christ? Was it not supposed to be about Santa, or Christmas trees, or presents? Reindeer? Was I bad—were we bad—for not doing Christmas right? I was more confused than ever, and for the first time, feeling a little hostile towards the whole thing. I had seen the nativity scenes, knew that some old dudes brought a baby some spices, that the baby was Jesus—sure, I knew peripherally that Christmas had something to do with Jesus, or God. But such a revelation turned my world upside down. God, as I understood the concept then, was somehow all around me and inside seemingly everything and it frustrated me because who was this God, exactly? I didn’t know.
The other memory: I sometimes went to bible study with friends in middle school, because mostly we hung out and watched movies and played games. Seemed fairly innocuous to me; my first kiss on the cheek happened in a treehouse in the local pastor’s backyard during one of these bible studies. We were invited to help paint the new rec room at the church—we could paint whatever we wanted—which was music to my budding artist ears. I was, at the time, deeply obsessed with the work of Brian Froud—the conceptual designer for Labyrinth and Dark Crystal, among many others—and was the proud owner of every single one of his beautifully illustrated books about faeries. Naturally, I began painting tiny faeries on the rec room walls, dipping the tip of a screwdriver into the paint to achieve each detail. The pastor walked around as we painted and admired our handiwork, stopping short to ask what I was painting. “I love faeries,” I said, and he gave a patronizing smile. “You know that faeries aren’t real, right? God doesn’t make faeries, okay?” I peered up at him, paint in hand, staring. What does that mean, I thought, why can’t I believe in faeries? I only returned to that church for their weekly suppers when invited by friends—for the free meal—otherwise, I was totally turned off by their lack of imagination. Angels– yes, but faeries, no?
My final youthful encounter tangential to God makes me laugh now, but was terribly confusing when it occurred, around 11 years old. It was my Dad’s birthday; my parents were newly divorced and I was, like everyone else, still trying to navigate this new familial landscape. I wanted to get my Dad something, but like most people buying for Dads in their life, I had no idea what to choose. I was milling about in a Creede store and spotted a fish decal. I thought it was cool because it was raised and made of plastic—it wasn’t just a sticker— and it just so happened to be in the shape of a fish. Score! My dad was a fishing guide—that tracks. But it wasn’t just a plain fish— this decal had little feet shooting off the bottom of the fish’s body. Even cooler, I thought, promptly purchasing the silver fish with feet. Dad would think it was neat, because it was a fish and it had feet. Right? Wrong. I remember giving it to him and learning within minutes that it was a Jesus fish. And not just that— it was a sacrilegious Jesus fish, because the feet were a playful religious critique signaling evolution. It was a Darwin fish, folks. As I’m wont, I cried, and felt deeply ashamed: again I had been confronted with this God thing—Jesus fish, CHRIST-mas—its residue infiltrating even the realm of truck decals, revealing to me that this collective story was bigger than I could have possibly imagined. On that note, I was right…
*Stay tuned for Part Two, folks*
This week’s poem references a story from the Bible. I’m still pretty clueless about Bible stories but I find some of them very beautiful. My mom had sent me the photo below while on a snowshoe; immediately upon seeing the it I was reminded of imagery from a Bible story Mauro had shared with me, and I wrote the poem. Then I got really self conscious because I wasn’t sure what people might think and I stashed it away. Now that we’re talking about God, I’m bringing out the poem. The mental picture of people holding up another’s tired, shaking arms in pursuit of something larger than themselves is simply beautiful. It is. Just like the aspens.
The Poem
Towards the Light
A pair of aspens in winter. One wraps its svelte trunk around its sturdier mate. Fortified by this love, the other grows true and straight. When Moses could not praise God anymore, the people lifted his arms in the air. Pressed his shaking arms towards the heavens. All aspens must grow skyward, compete for light. Is it so surprising that another aspen might forgo some height, lend itself eternally to another? To grow forever lifting those weary hands? Towards the light?
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