Cleaning, Maps, Tortured Metaphors

So tomorrow night, Daniel is going to give me a ride across the pass, and the following morning I'm catching a flight back East for ten days. Outside of seeing friends and family, which is (of course) massively important, and saying goodbye to my cat (I really, really would rather bring her here. But it'll be another year before I can have a place for her, and it would not be even remotely fair to deny her a happy and loving home out there so that I can keep her with me. Letting her go is still one of the hardest things I have ever had to do; she was my companion and friend for eight years.) my goal there is to go through any and all material possessions that are not books, and disperse them among friends and family.

In the meantime, I'm looking around this room and trying to get it cleaned up before check-out tomorrow. It's been an odd couple of days. I foolishly assumed I'd be able to just stash all my stuff in the dorm for next quarter, but it won't be open - so a friend from church offered to let me put some stuff in her garage. I am more glad than ever to not have tons of stuff. Four boxes or so of clothes, a folded-up blanket, and a pair of half-height bookshelves. Done. God, I never ever want to have lots of stuff. I probably shouldn't be trying to lug this many books back out here, but ye gods do I miss those things. There's so many people I know out here who would really like some of 'em, too.

Anyway. It's half past midnight, and I'm procrastinating because I don't want to vacuum. I should really vacuum. *sigh.*

I have about a million questions about various things about the Episcopal church, and the thing is, although a lot of them probably have simple answers, what I really want to know is why. What translation is the Sunday lectionary done in? Yes, I know there's probably a definite answer for that. But why is that the translation? Is there an official tr okay by now I know how ridiculous it probably is to ask if there's an "official" or accepted/official translation for the Episcopal church, but there must be some common ground - I mean, there's a Catholic Church of Japan (that falls under the umbrella of Anglican Communion), so obviously there's some differences, but for the US Episcopal church is there a standard? Is there a standard with acceptable deviations ranging off in every direction, which seems to be the case generally for all the things? Why? How? Why?

I could probably go into lengthy introspective detail about why I'm so obsessive about learning as much as possible about this church. The simple version, I suppose, is that I don't want to get blindsided ever again. I was deceived for so very long, and although young, at some point I think I was complicit in my own deception. But that faith - such as it was- got shattered... no, not shattered. Bludgeoned repeatedly over several formative years. The painful part is how every figure in my life that was supposed to be trustworthy turned out to be not so. The part that still galls me is how the truth on which my life was founded, from my earliest years, was-- well, not a lie. Well. Yes, a lie. I don't know how to express it. I believe in God, and I do believe in the Scriptures (and in Reason, and, well, I suppose I'm coming around to Tradition), but the things that I believed in then were not God, nor Scripture, nor even truth. It was the false idol of a book with no context and the depth pounded out of it, and the Great Law of Obedience. And because I obeyed and trusted and didn't ask questions, I was deceived for many years and still have not found all of that trust, and in many ways I am still tied to the fear of that idol, and I am still reacting to and against that law.

And there is something, somewhere in me - perhaps the Inner Journalist - that has sworn to never fall into that trap again. I will never follow a church or a priest or a bishop or any authority without question. And yes, that's probably a reactionary way of life - but I want to know. I feel like I was raised on - oh, I don't know, the metaphor breaks down. Like I was raised on mud instead of water, and I stayed away from streams because I thought they were all mud and now I thirst for that water more than ever. Wow, that is an overwrought metaphor. Let's try again.

I was raised in lies - mixed in with truth, yes, but not Truth. And I broke away from that and tried to find the truth on my own, but with no guide and no map and no light - or such a little light as to make almost no difference - and, unsurprisingly, made very little progress. All I managed to find out was how lost I was. Sort of. And now, I'm surrounded by folks with maps and lights and a detailed knowledge of the terrain (okay, sort of, again, not a perfect metaphor), and I don't want to just walk along with them and trust that they know where they're going - even though I'm sure they do! I want to look at the maps, and shine the light around and see the path, and talk about the topography and the geology of the land until I understand it, or at least I have an understanding of it and about it and around it, like they do.

And I'm sure that somewhere, deep down, that's because a part of me is thinking about what the hell I'm going to do if they all disappear - I'll be alone in the dark again. And a part of me is questioning those maps suspiciously yes, not because of a thirst for knowledge but because I almost can't quite believe that they're really there. That they will turn out to be as untrustworthy as the map I was raised with, a ruler-straight line through a very tricky and complicated world with straight lines all at odd angles and forms.

And now I'm going to go vacuum before the screams of the tortured metaphors wake the RAs.