A Little Something or Other

It's been a little while since I wrote my first entry on this blog.  A lot has changed in me since then, as if my heart that had become so hard has become softer, pliable.  I feel at times like I can cry, which is something that for a while I had wondered if I'd be able to do again.  When you think there might be nothing, you might try to do what Sartre did, you make yourself a god.  Meaning that you fortify your defenses against the hard parts of life.  That's what I was doing for a long time.  My failed marriage was a reflection of my failure to be the kind of person that I wanted to be.  I reacted to my failure by acting as though I was soaring above it.  Two people over there named Sarah and Patrick were breaking up and I as an outsider looking at them, which made me able to react unemotionally.  Sure there were moments of emotion, especially during the time that I was realizing that I couldn't lure her back in.  But when I came to the conclusion that it was over I was solid.  I was unaffected and better than all those whose marriages were failing yet were floundering in their emotions.  I was my own strong tower, I ran into myself, and wouldn't you know it, salvation was not there.  That's a struggle that I have all the time.  I thrive on the fact that I can be emotionally strong when others are not.  In reality my emotional mechanisms are all out of whack.  But that's something I'm just going to have to work on.  As a being-in-becoming, as someone who is finally, after a long time, allowing God to transform him, that's the way things are going to be.  Anyway, this is not where I expected to go with this blog.  I just wanted to point out that I am on a trajectory that is quite different than just over a month ago.  Things seem to be falling in to place.  Not that I have many answers, or that my life is all smooth sailing, but still.  I'm not one to get all fluffy about God, but I look at how things are going and I don't know how I've gotten to where I am right now, writing this blog, if it is not for God involving Himself in my life the very moment I needed him (I always need Him, this I know).  Deep was calling to deep.  And the God who is there was there.  He is still.  You don't know how much I need to say that.

You Can't Make It On Your Own

"Listen to me now/I need to let you know/You don't have to go it alone.../Sometimes you can't make it on your own." -U2

When going on any kind of journey the question to ask is "What do I take with me?"  How do you answer that question when thinking eschatologically?  My guess is that list will include things that are both temporal and eternal.  While things temporal may be somewhat important, the essential needs should be the primary focus.  And the only thing that I can think of, at least in a Christian context, that is both temporary and eternal is relationships.  Your relationship with God, others, and yourself.  It is these relationships which are necessary for embarking, traveling, and finishing the journey.  And it is also these relationships that when developed and intensified (improved), that make the journey at all doable.  The journey of living eschatologically is a journey of relationships.  It is important here to note that eschatology for the Christian is both future and present-forward.  As we grow in our relationships, as we travel together, we are demonstrating the looking-forward-to kingdom now.  We are living the kingdom, not sitting around waiting for Left Behind to happen so we can be free of the world.  

If the journey each Christian is on is thought of eschatologically, we realize that we not only can journey together, but we must.  Missing a relational element means missing one or more of the necessary essentials of the journey.  So while U2 is on the right track, they are not quite to the point.  "Sometimes you can't make it on your own" for the Christian becomes simply, "You can't make it on your own."  And indeed we can't.  Our attempts at going on the journey alone are futile, because like Pilgrim, in Pilgrim's Progress, we will be confronted on the road by men who are greater than we are by ourselves.  It is only when we recognize that we are on the journey together, and that the journey means growing in relationship with each other, that we can truly journey at all.  When we do recognize the reality of this is when the we begin to see the Church being the Church.  For all the problems that the Church faces, the lie of individual freedom is perhaps one of the greatest.  But if we can get beyond the lure of that freedom, we can begin to live in relationship, and we can begin to journey eschatologically.

In Which The Hero Journeys Toward The Rising Sun

It wasn't long ago that I had reached a precipice.  I found myself standing at the edge of an infinitely immense chasm.   As far as I could see was nothing but futility and darkness.  The path of my life the past year and a half or so had led me to this place.  At times I stuck a foot out, testing the emptiness, taking in its lack of substance.  I would wiggle my foot, imagining what it would be like to force myself forward, to step onto the plane of nothing that lay before me.  In a way it was as if the invisible before me was more real that the ground I was standing on.  I felt compelled to make the move and see what happened.  Would the fall hurt?  Was the ground below closer or farther than I could imagine?  In the quiet I stood there with my thoughts.

When I was younger, I never doubted the truth of my Christian beliefs.  They were a given.  There is a God, I believe in Him, and so I believe in Christianity.  That was the way I thought.  The struggle for me was in relating that to the world around me.  My biggest question was why so many people believed differently.  Why were they so blind to the truth?  Years later I would find myself with a whole new set of questions.  The childish naivete of my beliefs was subsiding and the simple acceptance of all I had grown to hold as true wasn't good enough any more.  I was coming to the end of my journey, to the edge of belief where doubt and disbelief create a shelf of blankness.  And I was becoming convinced that what lay past the edge was where reality began.

To put it bluntly:  a month ago I was close to abandoning belief in God, throwing in the towel on any hope of Christianity being true, rejecting things I had once thought unrejectable.  I was ready to give up and take a step forward, letting the plunge lead me where it would.

I hesitate moving forward here, explaining what happened to change things.  Besides it being somewhat of a blur, I feel inadequate to describe what occurred.  I will only say one thing about it:  I have embarked on a new journey, which is really just a fresh start on a path that I have intersected with in the past.  The questions I was once asking, I am finding to be the wrong questions.  And so many of the things I was once thinking, I am finding that others think as well.  

On this journey of being-in-becoming, I am going in a new direction.  It's kind of like going east or west when the only options you ever had before were north or south.  And while I'm not completely sure where this path will lead me, I know that it is a direction which will lead me where the sun rises and sets, which is so much better that the direction that was leading me to one of two poles, both of which are as cold as Dante's center of hell.