Prayer, and scenery, and youth groups.

I never noticed how beautiful the view from the Northwest side of the library is - I'm on the second floor. Three sets of big windows. In the foreground of the left, the yellow branches of a willow, with green scattered throughout; farther back and in the further right-hand part of the window, a dull orange tree in a rounded triangle. Along the bottom frame of the windows, dark pines and orange hardwoods rise a few inches up into bluish dusty pine-covered hills, halfway up the window comprising, as usual, the horizon. The next window-set starts with a bright, glossy scarlet tree throwing a few branches out towards the center. It's not the blood-red of a sugar maple, but the pinkish-deep red of a Japanese maple. There's another of the tall dull orange trees, and a yellow-orange willow fading into a more vivid orange tree of some kind or other, all in the background - the Psychology building, unfortunately, is the background for that one, all harsh concrete and sharp vertical windows, rather than gentle desert-pine hills. The last set of windows is a cacophony of color, just trees jumbled together against the background of wires rising over the stadium, which manages to be pretty and symmetrical, rather than harsh and discordant.

Last night, I attended the student Methodist group. It was interesting. Er. I don't know if I can fully express how incredibly uncomfortable "contemporary Christian music" makes me. There's just something that seems so hollow about them, the 'modern' hymns, and so your brain is free to fill in its own background meaning, and I suppose it will come as no big surprise that most of my past associations with Christian youth groups are overwhelmingly* negative. A circle of kids about my own age in a room with modern contemporary lyrics on a slideshow accompanied by an electric keyboard feels almost as unsafe as, comparatively, a stone floor and a group of people standing to sing the Doxology, does safe. It's fellowship, but it doesn't fit. It feels - not wrong, but shallow. I didn't bolt and run. But a not-insignificant part of me wanted to. I'm torn between thinking it's important to challenge that part of me - to accept that everyone has a different path and there's nothing wrong with youth groups and contemporary hymns have meaning for a lot of people and that's not a bad thing... but at the same time, I think it is okay to accept that that's a legitimate path for some people, but I am not going to force myself to feel the same way.

Relatedly, the Methodist p... priest? pastor? preacher? Oh God I don't know any terminology - anyway, she gave us some background on prayer beads and some interesting thoughts on them and the evening's activity was making a small set. I didn't know Anglicans had a prayer bead tradition. Er, a recent one, I guess. 'S interesting.

And unrelatedly, I have a somewhat massive and looming article to get in this weekend, if I can get the information together, and it's just news-big enough that I really, really don't want to put it off for another week. I've sorta been praying for guidance on this, which is... new. Normally "prayers for guidance" are a lot more general, and tend to consist of things like "I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong. HELP PLZ." Specifically asking for help and understanding and strength in the face of an individual task seems weird. Like I'm going back to the way we were Supposed to pray when I was a kid. Think I'm okay with that, though.

*I don't just mean individually, though I've got plenty of bad experiences of my own. I cannot think of a single anecdote in my entire lexicon that involves youth groups and portrays them in a positive light. Not one. Probably sample bias, though.

Aftermath (Or: Sausages and the Canonical Laws)

"So, what did you think?" said about everyone who I'd talked to at all this weekend. Our rector had a somewhat different question. "How has this changed the way you think about religion?" (Paraphrased. I don't remember his exact wording.)

I'm trying, still, to sort that out. While listening to a presentation about - some international relief fund, anyway - I found an answer to a question surfacing. The question, never quite verbalized, but lurking semi-permanently under the mental surface for several hours, went something like: "But what is the point of all this administrative stuff?"

It's really hard, as an individual, to have a good answer to "What have you done, today, to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoners, comfort the sick, the lonely, the widows and poor..." As a body, we have a far much better... a... well, we have the avenues to answer that question, anyway. I don't know that it's ever "enough." But it's a hell of a lot better than trying, and failing, to do it alone.

At the same time, though... a lot of talk about organization, development, and mammon, and not so much talk about Love? I'm torn. On the one hand, "feed the hungry" is pretty damn important. Yes, I think, more important than "make sure the hungry also convert to Episcopalians." Or even Christians. That's a - a thing a lot of more hard-line evangelicals do that drives me crazy. "We'll feed them, but only if they agree with our doctrines [out loud]."

But... there's a weird undercurrent in some of the conversations about "bringing in the Sstrangers" that seems to go back to the same flipping numbers game! Bring people in, get them into the church, and add them to the tally - even if they don't actually agree with or understand or care about what's going on in the service. Presto! Better numbers - look, the church isn't dying, isn't struggling, attendance is up! Bah.

So I guess I'm with our rector on that one. Social justice is awesome. It's necessary. It's something we absolutely should be doing. But it cannot be empty of the gospel. We should still be looking for Love in that effort. Love must be the center of our missions, of our outreach, of our works, or what the hell is the point? Likewise, sitting around staring at our navels and contemplating theoretical love without ever doing anything about it isn't much better. Gah, I don't know. Like everything else, it's a paradox and a balance and the Episcopal Church seems to be looking, always, for that balance, rather than just shrugging and letting it go. Which is the important part.

And I'm sitting up [or I was last night, when I wrote this out], having gotten out of the newsroom at a reasonable hour, turning this over on paper with the hope that ink will make it make sense, as neurons tend not to. I do know that this doesn't change my belief that I am in the right place here, at the Episcopal Church. Solidifies it, to some extent. Yes, it's an organization that is made up of flawed, broken humans, and therefore--
but maybe that's why we have so many prayers asking God to look favorably on the Church, and the church.

And I am coming to believe that schism really is a greater sin than heresy. That it is far, far better to stand in the company of a people willing to strive for love together, in all our broken flawed selves, than to seek love alone-- how can we see God if we do not look with and in each other?

Environmental influences, Reflector

For the past day or so, Arcade Fire's Reflektor has been rattling around in my head - alternately loud echoes of the refrain and quiet demands to be played again. The guys in the newsroom have rather more diverse (and, I have to admit, just plain better) taste in music than I do. I've learned a lot of stuff and started listening to bands I'd forgotten existed.

Yesterday morning, we finished layout on the paper over an hour early, so when the .pdfs had been sent, I headed down to Scripture Study, for the first time on time (or really at all) since the quarter started. It was... I shy away from the word 'edifying' as a general rule for various reasons, but... yeah. Spiritually fulfilling? God, I love these people. (Things to work on: loving the world outside the people I know. That's about a million times harder, I can't help but notice.)

It's strange how we can take solace, soul-nourishing fellowship, from such completely different settings. Sitting in a polygon circle talking about Jacob's blessing and arguing with God and the nature of pain with the church study group is an atmosphere that, on its surface, could not be more different from leaning against the brick wall outside of the newsroom, late at night or very, very early in the morning, talking through wreaths of smoke before we go back in to finish the week's edits. But there's something in my soul that craves both.

The Diocesan convention is this weekend. Our rector is having some minor (we hope) health issues. I'm trying to redirect static nervous energy into prayer instead of worrying... but worrying is a lot easier, comes more naturally, than prayer. Apparently no one bothered to inform humanity while it was evolving that worrying is a completely useless impulse. (Seriously though, what kind of an evolutionary advantage could anxiety possibly have? Bah.)

This was originally written longhand, and typed up over three different devices - two borrowed from school, and the last a two-inch touchscreen. I do humbly beg pardon for any loss of coherency. There was another paragraph written, about call-and-response, but I'll think leave it off for now and poke at that idea later.

Unrelatedly, layout housekeeping:

...more recently, it was pointed out to our class at large that light text on dark background is very, very difficult to read. I think I knew that on some level, but had forgotten. (I'm running a news blog for class, in theory. In practice, it hasn't really got any content yet. I doubt I'll ever link the two, but it's cool to be picking up the knowledge.)

So I'll be tinkering a bit with the layout here. I like it where it is now, but might fool around with it further. I hope it's a bit easier on the eyes with this background and such.

Uncentred rambling.

I am sad, and afraid, and the world has taken on a lot of very sharp edges in the past few days. A conflict has been growing in my life, shadowing larger and larger segments of thought, coyly, vying for attention; I have been trying in vain to ignore it.

It was pointed out to me some time last summer that I did not have to allow my profession to define me, that the immense stress I was under had quite a bit to do with an identity crisis. I had somehow managed to hold the impression that I had to choose humanity or reporting – to grieve for a life lost, or to cheer at a story told right. A false choice, in that respect, but the worldview it represented was more or less accurate, as far as I can see. Wrong, but accurate.

Wrong, because obviously I do not have to choose profession over humanity; that doesn’t even make sense. Accurate, because the way my mind usually works, I throw myself utterly into whatever work I have – even more so, when it’s something I’m passionate about. It was easy over the non-class summer, to spend six to eight hours at a time doing yard work, because that is honestly my natural inclination – to go overboard, to take one aspect of life and make it the whole.

It’s a good thing sometimes. I do believe that work can be a sacrifice to the Lord, if we put our hearts to it. That’s no less true now than it was over the summer, I don’t think – making a layout line up perfectly, spacing an article and a headline, spending a night working at an article that needs editing, that’s not less holy than making the facing edge of a juniper bush line up perfectly along the center of a parking lot, or raking leaves, or pulling weeds.

The problem starts to show up when the work starts to consume life – and it does, always, trend in that direction. I don’t know how to stop halfway, and I don’t know how to find a balance. So now I’ve got reporting at the center of my life, and I’m pretty sure there is Someone else who is supposed to be there. No amount of prayer by the side of the river in the night seems to carry into the newsroom in the evening, where the paper reasserts itself as the center of my heart.

Is that blasphemy? That God does not reach with me into the newsroom? I’m not saying God is outside; the blame lies with me, with my inability to change. I have been trying to remind myself that Love is the reason I am a journalist. From Love springs all light, from Love springs all that is good. From God, light, love, all. The problem is… I lose sight of that. Constantly – and I do mean constantly. I can’t seem to keep that fixed. It slips out of perception, leaving me with no center, and the first thing I come across slides in and takes its place. Which, I am pretty sure, is blasphemy. Of some sort or other – allowing something other than love to take the place in the center of one’s heart? How could it not be? (On the other hand, I’m also pretty sure it’s the origin of most human failings, and, well, Grace.)

The more I think about it, the more obvious it is that asking for grace, admitting that I need forgiveness, need grace, not only to reach for perfect love but to reach for love at all… is sorta massively necessary. I can’t look away, I can’t avoid it, and my pride is such an idiotically useless thing. It should be the easiest thing in the world to give up, and sometimes it actually makes me angry that it’s still clinging. (Which is, of course, a prideful reaction in itself. Damn it, can’t anything ever be simple?)

Anyway.

I am sad and afraid, because I am making mistakes and not doing every part of my job right, and because I have allowed my job to become the center of my heart (again), this shakes me more than it should.

The worst part is, it does need to be near the center. I just need – balance. Maybe this year I can actually work on that. Maybe.

Beauty and delight and other such things

It's been utterly beautiful, the past few weeks. Even when the sky is overcast, cold raindrops blowing sporadically out of the West, the world seems to have this ethereal beauty, surreal... glorious. It's Autumn. Colors, frost, the shapes of the sky, so enormous out here, and the dorsal curves of the hills rising up to meet it, some outlined in spare desert rock, some carpeted in dark pine trees... oh, I don't know. (Also, the blue spruce. They're such gorgeous trees, and the wind through them is really... musical.)

The other day, I had the thought, "I was made for this," meaning reporting - and that all else, beauty and laughter, was a sort of gift, outside of my purpose. Sort of a bonus to life. Ridiculous, of course, and arrogant to think a purpose could be that clear (and I'm just as prone to mistakes in reporting as anything else, of course). And... well, I am more than a one-purpose tool with the strange ability to occasionally appreciate non-utilitarian things.

But it was interesting, because beauty is a gift, really. And I think it's really easy sometimes to miss that, to eschew that gift. Some churches seem to regard it - delight - as almost sinful. It still astounds me sometimes, to think ghat God meant us to laugh, to delight in Creation. It also makes beauty that much sweeter, though. This is a gift, this ray of light through a fluttering cloud of red and gold, this spray of sea on rock, this rill down a cliff side, this flock of flashing waxwings...

This is the world the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

It's especially easy in the fall, though.

Life is so much easier on paper.

So I'm writing a carefully nuanced apology to someone who got burned in my article last week. The entry from "Forward Day by Day" yesterday was all about forgiveness, and the vague undertones about not carrying a world's weight of guilt on our backs. That's a hell of a tough thing to take on mentally every day. Taking it on at the end of a day might work. You've made your mistakes, committed your sins, and now it is time to embrace and seek forgiveness and call it a day, rather than beat yourself up. Yup.

Problem is, the next day, you get up, and keep making mistakes, and keep sinning, and hurting people, and doing things wrong, and basically screwing up your life and every other life in reach on a cosmic level. And... that's where it's no longer a matter of asking for forgiveness and letting go of the beating-yourself-up impulse. In this world we're all pretty closely tied together; it's nearly impossible for our actions to effect only ourselves. We need to seek forgiveness from everyone else, too. Frequently. Constantly. Which means humbling yourself. A lot.

See, this article I wrote talked to a handful of people about the resignation of someone on campus. What they told me was that he'd been asked to resign over a fairly nasty scandal that had happened to folks in/under his authority, which he hadn't stopped. No one would give details on the record, because one of the principals of the story was still in proximity. So I had a story that was supposed to be a little brush-up that turned into a scandal half-told. What I should have done was told my boss that we couldn't run the article until I had a chance to dig the story up in full. But it was two days to print, and I had another article to finish, and classwork, so I printed it - as much of it as I could back up without delving, I thought, into overly personal issues - and left it.

There are a few people who were mentioned - necessarily - in the first two paragraphs, who are quite unhappy about the tone. Understandably so. I didn't have enough to give the full story, so I gave what I could: folks were unhappy, sources say the environment was negative, and HR investigated and fired people. And then I talked about the positive forward movement in the new staff they're hoping for.

I've now heard from two of the people who are unhappy about it. I'm trying to work out a way to apologize - because honestly and sincerely, that is something I need to do. My haste to get the story out led to them both getting an unfair rap, and my name is on that article. Those are my words, and I used them wrongly. That requires an apology.

But... at the same time, there was a scandal, and telling "the other side" does not mean I can just brush off what I've been told. So I'm trying to figure out how to word an apology that says, sincerely, "I screwed up, and I'm sorry, and I will do anything in my power to rectify that," but also to clarify that there's nothing I can do to change the facts, and the answer to telling a story without one side is not to go back and tell the story again, but without the other side. "I screwed up, but I can't screw up again intentionally in your favor?"

Or the simplest, "I'm sorry. Please give me another chance to write this and piss off all sides equally."

Life is just so much easier as a theoretical exercise.

The Illusion of loneliness?

Sometimes I think there must be an army - no, a nation - no, an entire planet's worth - of us, stumbling through life unawares. That was how the sermon yesterday morning closed, with a quote from Einstein about the distinction of consciousness being an illusion, which I'm probably badly misrepresenting. I can't recall the correct words at the moment. (It was really good, though, the sermon. Homily. Reflection. Is there a word that's more correct than the others there? Faith, and how it's a growing thing we must bring to life within ourselves, like love, rather than a static thing that is given to us, which is sorta what the disciples seemed to be asking for.)

Biological Anthology is slowly picking up speed, though we're still spending a lot of time on building blocks. Our prof today, in explaining mitosis and meiosis and diploids and haploids and somatic cells and gametes, paused after explaining the X and Y chromosomes, and what they mean, to point out that this referred to sex and not gender, by the way. Y' know, I've sat through the lecture of gametes and somatic cells more times than I can count, and I have never, ever, ever had a prof or teacher make that distinction. It made me absurdly happy - afterwards, I stopped by to talk a bit, to thank him for that and attempt to clarify a disagreement about mathematics.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, at this point, when conversation with people turns to gender identity and religion and all the deepest points of what constitutes our humanity. But it still takes me aback sometimes. (He accused me of being politician-level of evasive with regards to poetry - I hadn't realized, I have developed the habit, or possibly skill, of dodging certain sensitive subjects. "What makes a poem good, for you?" is one of them. "Well, that depends on the poem, that's like asking what makes a person good, isn't it?") Talking religion is an odd thing, and an interesting one, and one that makes sense for a conversation that started going around about Creationism. What throws me for a loop is when it veers, unexpectedly, into gender. Oh, shit. But it... well, I dunno.

There must be a world of us, stumbling through life so very alone, trying to figure out where and how we got to who we are. Queer, and trying to first admit that to ourselves, and then to each other, and then staring down the world with the scarlet rainbow flashing over our hearts...

Anyway. Daniel is in California for the week, so it'll likely be two more weeks before I see him - having not seen him since before his birthday. I'm going to resist the urge to grind my teeth at reality, and take two weeks to do something somewhat spectacular. Letter-writing is a dying art, I have been told (sometime, not recently). While talking about gender today, and the way some people fall in love with minds, and gender doesn't much enter into it, I explained that I'd come out here for a boy whose mind I fell in love with before I ever laid eyes on him. Thinking about Daniel makes me grin like an idiot, and I don't even care. Talking about him, even in passing, I suspect leads passers-by to imagine me some sort of defunct sappish fool.

I have two weeks, and an elaborate plot involving baked ziti and a ridiculous amount of cheese and sauce. (I was going to make it tomorrow and freeze it until Saturday - now I'm glad I asked, I'll hold off and do that next week.) The other part of the plan involves moss, waterfalls, and books, and is approximately half complete (it takes a full month to work all the way, but I didn't have the funding to start a month before his birthday). And in the meantime, I'll haunt the library at night to talk to him, or sit in silence with the invisible wires of internet and thought between us.

There must be worlds of us, stumbling through life under the painful illusion that we're all alone, in parallel journey with a thousand thousand great-souled companions.

Pendulums

The theology in which I was raised was overwhelmingly physical - divorced from the spiritual, or nearly so. God was Spirit - we were to trust Him to deal with all that, and steer clear of meddling too much with that side of the line, lest we be led astray by evil spirits.

The opposite of this, of course, is New Age religion, in which spirituality is basically all that matters, and half the point is (or seems to be) to get as far away from physical being as possible, moving towards 'pure' spirituality. (C.S. Lewis had a villain of this bent in Perelandra.) And that - or very close to it - is where I wound up in my rambling journey.

So now, having been all over the map of both realms, I find myself at some odds with the Episcopal Church doctrines, very solidly betwixt and between. (Not that the church is lukewarm. Far from it - firmly, solidly, and beautifully embracing the paradoxes of faith. But... those paradoxes necessarily mean being in the middle.) As a Baptist, I understood Baptism and Communion to be symbolic - the physical reminders of our faith, and no more. As a whatever-on-earth I was in the time after, I didn't think about Baptism or Communion, except in occasional memory. I thought about vision quests and sweat lodges (look, I said I was sorry). (I should note that I have since been made aware that this is not the case - of course - in ALL Baptist churches. But it was in mine.)

Coming back to church, my old habits quickly re-asserted - although acknowledging the Spirit, even welcoming... I have no idea what pronoun to use there really - I still thought of Baptism, at least, as a symbol of faith, and it was entirely startling to hear that it is... otherwise. Sacraments... take some getting used to, as a concept. That the action, this physical action, is not merely symbolic, but is a direct... conduit? Uh, path? Bridge? A way of opening oneself to the Spirit. Literally. Literally!

That's the part I'm still not quite... I mean, literally. When they - when we - say it, the Spirit, all those prayers - they mean something. They mean a whole lot, actually, but the big thing, the major part of it all, is that God is present. I guess it's just been a long, long time since I thought seriously enough about that. Childlike faith? Oh God, please. Please.

Anyway, today I talked for a while with our senior warden about sacraments, and priests, and what the deal is with administering sacraments, and why, if priests are not uber-humans (in the literal sense there, as 'over'), it is always/only a priest who can administer sacraments. She clarified that no one will strike down a layperson for administering a sacrament. Priests are just - sort of trained? To open themselves to the Spirit, I guess. The way I put it, after, trying to word it all, was that we trust priests to be doing that, to be able to - they were ordained, and thus we trust them to do the work of it in faith. I am making a hash of this point, and so I am going to close this specific discussion, because I think I understand this, even if I can't exactly put it into words.

It has been difficult to retrain myself to think of God. To think of God as neither a distant, modernist clockmaker, nor as... well, there's the fundamentalist too-literal Always There in the sense that if we have "Enough Faith," God will reach down and make our lives easier. It's gospel-of-wealth-ish. And that's one I run screaming from. But then you've got that paradox of if God is here, why doesn't he reach down and Fix stuff? Us? But, y' know, that I do understand. Kinda. So thinking of God as here in Spirit - in a literal sense - argh, how do I put this? Spiritually here. Here in spirit. It's really easy to start thinking of that in really lukewarm/wishy-washy terms. "Here in spirit" we say often in secular terms to translate to Really Not Here at All, but maybe thinking about us. Which is most certainly not what is meant by God being here in Spirit. The Spirit - the Holy Spirit - is a real and present... er, presence. Person. Being. Real and present. And ministering to our spirits. Which, y' know, Eucharist. And prayer. And everything.

Like I said, it's a struggle. But it's a struggle I enter with joy. I'd rather wrestle with these concepts, work towrds a greater understanding of God, and spend my whole life asking these questions (even ever unanswered) than dodge away, back to one end of the pendulum or the other.

The missing piece of this narrative is the part where part of my fleeing the church, and eventual wanderings through New Age stuff, was a rejection of all things... er, church-ish. I believed myself sundered from God, I guess. I remember thinking, very seriously, that part of the reason I would not go back to church was because I could not. I was only half-joking, if even half, when I would joke about bursting into flames if I stepped across the threshold of a church. God was Up There, and His strength was behind the Church, which had cast me out for being... whatever I was, not entirely human, I thought.

So to return to a flock, to forsake the spirits I tried to chase down for so long, and kneel to receive the Holy Spirit and believe, honestly believe, that it is no symbol, that the Spirit I believed would strike me down is in fact there to strengthen and uplift...

Like I said, it's taking some serious thought, and some getting used to. Maybe I never will be used to it, and maybe that is a good thing.