Christmas always brings me here

This time of year really is full of magic. I have my advent candles again, and I'll be going to a cathedral on Christmas eve. I haven't ended up in any church: in the end there's always more dissonance than seems fruitful in the moment. But I can visit without pain. My spiritual life these days is still entirely without anything that I could nail down as belief, but I have more room for magic, mystery, the unseen, and the edges of my own reason. I've laid down the thought that I could maybe scratch out a literal God for myself that would line up with my intellect and experience of the world, who I could lean on for hep or guidance, but I've also found compassion for the part of myself which needs something greater than this small fragile shaky stumbling self in order to tolerate the terrifying world. Right now I'm spending time with the Buddhists asking if I can ever believe that I really am the same substance as that "more." It feels unlikely, but everything is entirely unlikely if you think about it long enough. Self-compassion is my biggest practice, and remains both immensely difficult and tremendously fruitful.

When I think about this blog and my many years of spiritual questing, I feel gentle compassion. I love this generous poem by Hafiz:

You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to hold hands with the Beautiful One.
You have waltzed with great style,
My sweet, crushed angel,
To have ever neared God's heart at all.
Our Partner is notoriously difficult to follow,
And even His best musicians are not always easy
To hear.
So what if the music has stopped for a while.
So what
If the price of admission to the Divine
Is out of reach tonight.
So what, my dear,
If you do not have the ante to gamble for Real Love.
The mind and the body are famous
For holding the heart ransom,
But Hafiz knows the Beloved's eternal habits.
Have patience,
For He will not be able to resist your longing
For Long.
You have not danced so badly, my dear,
Trying to kiss the Beautiful One.
You have actually waltzed with tremendous style,
O my sweet,
O my sweet crushed angel.

2015. I like that impossible number.

So Christmas came and went. It was meaningful, and intense, and helpful. I have not been back to church since Christmas eve, but I continue to rotate around the idea of practice and liturgy and how helpful it could or could not be to me and how I feel about the integrity of my concepts of god and not-god and the usual fascinating/boring/unanswerable/ineffable. I continue to swing between the intellectual purity of my Quakerism and the right-brain riot of Anglican liturgy, though swing is a strog word. I'm sort of just dangling there somewhere in the middle. The new year is well underway, and I have all sorts of exciting things happening in my exterior life. Aside from the occasional morning candle lighting and journal writing session, I haven't remained as purposeful about my interior life.

I am considering doing with Lent what I did with Advent, and perhaps taking up a discipline. Suddenly grand gestures like walking the Camino seem hugely attractive, which is usually a sign that I am running away from something. Even writing this post is running away in a small way because I ought to be doing some work. But ah.

I am interested in turning Lent inside out for myself. I have nursed a hatred for the season, for the story of the crucifixion and resurrection. Even once I dropped a literal belief in the substitutionary redemption idea I still thought it was a cruel and gory story and a disgusting myth. Some of that anger lingers. But I recognise in it the anger and disgust I have about the state of the world, about the existence of suffering, about my life-long inability to reconcile the Christian idea of embracing suffering or even the Buddhist idea of accepting suffering. I rage and rail and cry and pout and despair and flail my fists upon reality and it's all a bit messy and futile and embarassing. Still don't know what to do with it. But anyway. I have some guy-lines in my mind about all of this and how it may connect and the metaphorical truths in there but I need some way to lash it down to my experience or...something.

Thinking about thinking about all of this in a structured way for Lent, leaning into the gory metaphors of the Christian myth and seeing if they have something for me. I am of two minds about discipline or fasting...I would like to reclaim that too, because I know I have a very messed up relationship with it. Guilt, self-hatred, self-punishment, self-cruelty: those are all strong "demons" in my life, and I have done a lot of work to try to get out from under them. Self-acceptance and gentleness are hard-won. But still I struggle and want a better balance. At the moment I seem to have a foot in both camps: indulging myself and then yelling at myself for it later. Living without structure or discipline and then suffering the consequences. I'd like to make it better but never seem to gain any ground. With the disclaimer that I really am happy and healthy on almost any scale you care to use, this interior conflict is the most troublesome thing in my life. I am trying to approach it with fearless curiosity, but it is a challenge. Is this something that the scaffolding of a liturgical season could help me with?

I found a new-to-me Rilke poem today which I will carry around with me carefully.


I have many brothers in the South

who move, handsome in their vestments,

through cloister gardens.

The Madonnas they make are so human,

and I dream often of their Titians,

where God becomes an ardent flame.



But when I lean over the chasm of myself -

it seems

my God is dark

and like a web: a hundred roots

silently drinking.



This is the ferment I grow out of.



More I don't know, because my branches

rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

~Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of a Monastic Life

Dawn

My favourite part of my advent experiment so far really is the candles. I don't have space in my little room for a wreath, so I just lined them up on my windowsill. Still, the purple and pink are so evocative, and the flames are clear and strong: they are pure paraffin wax candles made out in Connemara. The hippie/hipster part of me wanted beeswax, but these do the job beautifully.

My idea was to light them every morning and evening and read the daily prayers in the Anglican office...there's an app for that, of course. In practice I have been doing the morning, but I usually get behind myself in the course of the day and by the time night falls I'm still sweating to get it all done, and only stop when I more or less fall over in bed. Not ideal, but it's my reality right now. The morning, though: the morning is really working. I have always hated getting up in the dark, have resented the harsh elecric light flipped on in one second, blinding and stinging my eyes. This ritual of candle-lighting has rescued the mornings. It's easier to get up, and I'm getting up earlier. Lighting the candles eases me into the day. Perhaps it's just the novelty, but for now it's been a blessing.

And the prayers and scripture. Well, mixed reactions. I am finding that reading them with as little judgement or reaction as possible is a challenge. I remind myself that they are poetry, that the intent is prophetic and that their time is not my time. I've found moments of loveliness and encouragement and interest, though on the whole they ring a little hollow. The beseeching of God for protection and guidance and the praise and worship for him...I'm not surprised, obviously, that's basically prayer in a nutshell. It doesn't have huge meaning for me when I do not believe that there's anyone listening but me. I have been thinking of prayer as appealing to that ideal, bigger, kinder, wiser, more compassionate and more understanding part of myself, and that is very helpful. I know it sets my brain in the right groove for the coming day. But I do wonder about the forms of the prayer...it's a stretch, not a perfect fit. It's not how I would generally address any part of myself. (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!)

The orthodox among my theoretical readers must be groaning at the idea of praying to myself. I know. I'm not particularly pleased about it either. But maybe the strangeness of it is instructive. After all, I am reaching towards a wholeness, or a realization of a wholeness, that at the moment is not a perfect fit. Maybe that's the lesson. I read a great quote the other day in an article from The Guardian:

"At its heart, religion is that category of belief in which the world does not revolve around me but around something other than me. It is a sort of Copernican revolution in which the human being is not at the centre of all things. That is not its only characteristic, but it is essential."
Giles Fraiser

There's something in that. I wouldn't assign the centre to something supernatural, necessarily, but certainly to something larger than myself or even humanity in general.

On Sunday I went to Communion at the local Church of Ireland. It wasn't the peak experience that the advent procession had been: the choir was squeakier, the congregation more full of coughing and sniffling and whispering, but I was down with the humanity of the event. After all, that's sort of the point. The readings and the sermon centered around Isaiah 40, which was always one of my favourite passages:

Comfort, comfort my people,
says your God.
Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,
and proclaim to her
that her hard service has been completed,
that her sin has been paid for,
that she has received from the Lord’s hand
double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling:
“In the wilderness prepare
the way for the Lord;
make straight in the desert
a highway for our God.
 Every valley shall be raised up,
every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level,
the rugged places a plain.
 And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

“All people are like grass,
and all their faithfulness is like the flowers of the field.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
because the breath of the Lord blows on them.
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God endures forever.”

The sermon was, for the most part, actually quite lovely. Thoughtful, most of all, kind and understanding, gently challenging, and carefully meditating on the transience of our lives. From our resistance to change (except when we're uncomfortable or unhappy) to our mortality and even edging on the great existential terrors of our fragile lives. I was quite moved and engaged, until the final punchline, which was, basically "But we don't have to worry, because we are in God's hands, and he will take care of everything." Which, of course. I mean, that's why many people go to church.

How would I have ended the sermon? I'm not sure. I suppose that's why I was going to church. I suppose my sermon just ends with the transience, in a very Buddhist way. Though the message I would add, which I have not found in Buddhism (perhaps I haven't looked hard enough) is "so we must love each other as fiercely and as well as we possibly can, with every fibre of our being."

I suppose that's close to the Buddhist concept of the Oneness of all. And that's the same as another Christian idea that appeals strongly to me. The concept of the church (ie all people: perhaps all beings: perhaps the univerise) being one body, one heart, under Christ, which I define as that divine(ie: best, supernatural only because it prompts us above the "natural" selfishness and small-mindedness of any creature) nature in us all, under the sacrificial (holy) spirit of love, and under the sum total of our shared ideals of goodness, empowerment, and creativity (God, pretty much.) That trinity is still not really something I feel drawn to "pray" to, but it is something that I want to keep to the front of my mind and heart, inspiring my movement in the world. I went to communion, because the symbolism is strong, and because I often need reminding that I do not live in my bubble with selected company. Not really. Not properly. So sharing a symbolic "meal" with a congregation, in memory of sacrificial love (however literal or not I may consider it) was moving, and kind of a Big Deal to me. The Quaker in me was muttering something about "empty forms" but I had a strong sense that forms are only empty if you leave them so.

Will this experiment stick? I don't know. I do find my busy brain often frantically shoehorning disclaimers and translations and justifications all over the place. I'm not sure that's really the point of the whole thing. Or maybe it is. At any rate, inbetween, I'm finding a consistent way to create "sacred" space in my day and my life, and I'm finding that really powerful and legitimately helpful. So, we'll see. 

William Blake and Pullman and Auden and ways of seeing.

I have never sat down with Blake in the way he quite deserves, but I certainly will now. I am familiar with the most common themes and stanzas of his poetry, and have found it powerful, but haven't ever properly plunged in. This lovely meditation by Philip Pullman in the Guardian recently has spoken to my condition in a big way, and inspired me to seek out more Blake for myself. I just said to someone "sometimes poetry is my only church" but something about this makes me feel even a little more like I may be on the right track:

"And when it comes to vision, we need to be able to see contrary things and believe them both true: “Without Contraries is no progression” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell), despite the scorn of rationalists whose single vision rejects anything that is not logically coherent...

...I believe this, too. Single vision is deadly. Those who exalt reason over every other faculty, who condemn those who don’t respond to life with logic but allow themselves to be swayed by emotion, or who maintain that other ways of seeing (the imaginative, the poetic, etc) are fine in their place but the scientific is the only true one, find this position ridiculous. But no symphony, no painting, no poem, no art at all was ever reasoned into existence, and I knew from my youth that art of some kind was going to be the preoccupation of my life. Single vision would not do. “I will not Reason & Compare: my business is to Create” (Blake, “Jerusalem”).

If I didn’t know that from experience when I was young, I know it now. We find the truth of it most forcibly when twofold or threefold vision fails, and we fall into the state described by that great Blakeian WB Yeats as “the will trying to do the work of the imagination”. It’s a condition, I dare say, in which most writers and artists have found themselves marooned from time to time. To get lost in that bleak state when inspiration fails is to find yourself only a step away from an even darker labyrinth, which goes by the entirely inadequate name of depression. A savage deadly heaviness, a desolation of the spirits, an evil gnawing at the very roots of our life: if we’re unlucky enough to feel that, we will know from experience that the opposite of that abominable condition is not happiness, but energy. “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). In its absence, goodness, intellect, beauty – and reason, too – are listless, useless phantoms pining for the blood of life."

Oh boy.

In the piece, Pullman also talks about his BODY responding to certain lines of poetry, and that resonated strongly, too. My own split from my body is old and troublesome and I've only just barely been taking any steps to address it, but I do know that inner vibration I have gotten from poetry, and it is as intense and real a sensation as I have ever had. And this is part of what I was talking about before. That sensual engagement with art and with spiritual experience and with mythology and symbolism. That it is "real" and that it deserves dignity, and that it is another type of vision, of seeing, of knowing. I actually had a strange thought while listening to the sacred music the other day, being transported. I remembered a warning in some spiritual book or other about the dangers of using certain spiritual joys "for the flesh" and I think music was included. I am pretty sure the idea was that if you focus just on the thing itself and not on the deeper experience or meaning, that you're missing out. But I didn't take it that way. How I became such a vicious puritain towards myself I'm not sure. But anyway, that little feeling, very old, that maybe I was doing something wrong by just enjoying the music and the church and the words and the candles in a sensual way.

Funny. But that's the thing. I have only my senses. They are how I engage with the world. They are holy. I've been finding some new flourishing of interest in Auden, another poet I have cared for but not spent enough time with. I am attracted to the paradox of his being, in so many ways, a worldly and sensual person, of his passionate love for another man, and for his devoted faith. How he managed to synthesize it all. And his poem "Precious Five" has recently taken on a strong personal meaning:

Be happy, precious five,
So long as I’m alive
Nor try to ask me what
You should be happy for;
Think, if it helps, of love
Or alcohol or gold,
But do as you are told.
I could (which you cannot)
Find reasons fast enough
To face the sky and roar
In anger and despair
At what is going on,
Demanding that it name
Whoever is to blame:
The sky would only wait
Till all my breath was gone
And then reiterate
As if I wasn’t there
That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing.

The "precious five", of course, are the five senses. Experience again, seeing, but also feeling, tasting, hearing, touching, smelling. Experience, and then "Bless what there is for being." Whether or not I get it or understand it or am told what the hell is going on. That's all I'm doing, or trying to do. 

Advent: here as on a darkling plain

I visited the medieval church here in Galway for the Anglican advent processional service. Candlight, stone, robes, incense, a choir...deeply moving. These high-church rites do have some power. It was the first time since leaving the Catholic church that I'd allowed myself to really enter into the spirit of the ritual. It meant a lot. I have decided to just relax into this inner urging and longing for the season of advent.

My non-theism is as strong as ever, but I'm reconsidering the role of religion in my life. (Again! Surprise!) My understanding of the world and right-relationship remain very Quaker and probably always will, but that whole-person immersion of rite does have power. It's something I was very suspicious of for years -- just for that reason. I have been afraid of emotionalism, and that held whether I was listening to plainchant or getting caught up in my own mental processes in the silence of meeting. Was it inspiration or self-indulgence? I think, as so often, I've had a baby/bathwater reaction. I have been so very intolerant, especially of myself, and those words at the beginning of Mary Oliver's Wild Geese have come back to me with some force:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

As with religion, so with non-theism. It seems that with or without a creed I find new ways to doubt, and new ways to fall short or feel guilty.

I was weary and sad at the first sight of Christmas on the tv and in the shops this year. Part of it is plain homesickness, but part of it is the usual world-sickness that gets to me so often. Meaningless and noisy and greedy and irritating and harsh and selfish. (I make these judgements not just on "holiday season" adverisments but on myself from time to time. But some of those ads!!) I remembered, with a feeling close to tears, how I used to feel about Christmas. I made an advent wreath for a church at the flowershop the other day and felt a pang for those evenings of candle lighting and anticipation and wonder. I decided to go to church.

That I cannot believe in a literal God has been hurting me for a long time. I've gotten over some of the waves of grief, for sure, and have come to better and deeper understandings, and have a much clearer picture of many things. But the soreness remains, the panic over an infinite universe and my finite (getting more so every day) existence within it. I have read so much and have come to a strong sense of that non-literal-divinity-light-in-all-of-us-take-meaning-from-the-brief-improbable-beauty-of-life thing, which offers me some sense consolation, purpose, and allows me to honour my intellectual integrity. But something is still missing. 

I feel the lack of spirtual (well, and temporal, actually) routine and discipline in my life quite strongly. I'm accomplishing so much, and there's so much going on, and I am traveling all the time, but I lack a centre or a framework for the more transcendent parts of my heart. I ponder and then forget to ponder. I take a step towards service to others and get distracted. I try to prod myself into meditation or a short period of "silent worship" or whatever and it falls aside. Until I wake in the middle of the night, heart pounding, and stare at the ceiling for a long time. 

Split between cities and traveling so much, and also just lacking motivation, I still have no relationship with a Frends' meeting. I think it would help. As I said before, I had violently barred myself from community when I found that I could not summon the belief I thought I needed to participate. Friends were the closest I could get (no creed) but even then I felt like a fraud. Finding the non-theist Friends online helped to open me up to the idea of re-engaging with religion on these new terms, but so far in practice I just haven't gotten it together. But through them I discovered the Sea of Faith network and an ocean of literature by and about people of "non-realist" faith. I don't know, something moved in me. 

It all sounds a bit muddy and weird (and it is) but it's striking home somewhere. This idea that religion has uses even for the atheist and that even the atheist has uses for the church may be infuriating to many but it is meaningful for me. I have been very lonely. To think that perhaps there is a community of heretics who still long for communion, and that there may yet be a home for people like me (in spite of firings and theological quarrels and politics and the usual institutional pain) is comforting. The poem from which the SoF network takes its name is Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold:

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Agaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Which...well, wow. A lot to parse and think about, but oh I know that emotion in the last paragraph.

Anyway. I don't know where I am going here with this, exactly, except this: perhaps I can be a little less literal with my non-literalism. I've spent a lot of time sitting with the idea of "true myth" ala Joseph Campbell: over a decade. I've had an intellectual understanding of it, but it felt meaningless emotionally and foggy spiritually. Then I ran into George over at the Post-Modern Quaker a couple of years ago and he gave me a totally new mental framework for Christianity, but it still hasn't settled, entirely. I've been thinking a lot about the deep symbolism of the solstice, and watching that cold stone church warm up and fill up slowly with light from West to East as people passed candles, in a symbolic interpretation of the Light of Christ, was powerful. The singing was powerful. The incense and the ancient words were powerful, even when I didn't take them literally. I left feeling stronger, quieter, more solid, more balanced, more tolerant, more hopeful, more able to extend myself to others. What else is religion for?

I don't know. Perhaps I can revisit the high-church Christianity that my senses crave and my spirit loves, without cringing at the creeds I do not believe. Perhaps I can be a little more generous about the word "God" and a little more patient with the parts of the prayers or the bible that I hate: perhaps I can look deeper, interperet or even dismiss them for myself if I must but perhaps without hatred or rage or a loss of the good. Perhaps there is room for reflection and love and the deep poetry and challenge of this symbolism and story. Perhaps I can bring my Quaker truth about the primacy of experience to the raw primal experience of ritual, if only for a little while. I honestly don't know the answer to any of that, and I know I've broken my brain against these questions a hundred times before, but I do know that a prompting came, strong and clear. I no longer believe that there's an exterior God sending me messages, but I am trying to listen better to those messages that come from that deep part of myself. 

So, for advent, I'm going to attend all the choral services I can between now and Christmas. I'm going to say all the daily prayers and just look for what they have to say to me, regardless of whether I think I'm actually saying them to anyone else.

It's a weird move for me, I admit. But I'm looking forward to it. I am allowing the soft animal of myself to creep towards the manger. 

The bi-annual blog

Oh hi. 

I seem to come here every so often in the middle of the night, reading back and wondering. The older I get the more my life and its "quests" appear to be endless circles, though I do gain a few millimetres of ground every year or so. Still, it's a little crazy to look back and see, almost 10 years ago, a girl wrestling with the exact same questions I bore my journal with each and every morning. 

From 2005:
"Coming to terms with the fact that just getting up and facing the petty responsiblities of the day can take all the courage and generosity I posess, or maybe more, is pretty humbling. Also a bit scary. Also a bit sad. But I’m realizing that maybe living my life in a fever of Miss America dreams for a single-handed Change the World campaign is actually a bit selfish, completely inefficient, and in the end, leaves me anything but a heroine... 

I find myself pondering how thin the lines might be between consideration and cowardice, discernment and denial... 

...my current pattern of expecting the impossible is threatening to make me worse than useless. Is there a realism that doesn’t smack of defeatism? ... 

I know I need to find a way to unite my dreams and visions of what my family, meeting, country, and world can be to a calm, reasoned, responsible routine of faithfulness. There must be a way to focus my efforts without reducing my drive. I can’t deny my nature, but what makes me think I can save the world when I can’t even pay my phone bill on time, or keep my temper? ... If I was coming from a humble, quiet place, would I be upset, or would I respond with the love and wisdom that I’d fostered by just getting up and making my bed every day? How much energy am I wasting on emotionalism and dramatic thrashings about and wailings over the state of things? ... 

It would mean changing at a deep and maybe painful level. It would be a conversion of huge dimensions. It would mean going beyond soarings of the spirit and wallowings in the depths of despair. It would mean growing up, for real."

Oh dear. Indeed. That lesson is a bugger. My millimetres of growth here have been horribly hard won, but they've bought me a measure of peace. If I've learned anything in almost 10 years, it's never to underestimate the courage and generosity that any average daily serving of responsibility may require. It's only very recently that I've managed to make a practice of treating my small daily responsibilities with the dignity and respect they deserve. And it's only in that practice that I've managed to slowly, slowly, slowly grow my capabilities. It's still a daily struggle. Hence the journal where I write instead of here, these days circling, circling. For a bright girl, I am a very slow learner. But paying my phone bill and keeping my temper (I still don't make my bed) actually has helped me to be braver and kinder and even stronger. Back in 2005 I was so terrified of mindfulness. I was afraid that if I took my eyes off of the "higher things" to focus on what was in front of me that I would somehow lose my passion, and God knows what else. I'm not saying I'm immune to those delusions now, but at least now I know that humilty and realism are not the same thing as defeatism and despair. I guess I knew it on some level all along, but at least I'm a little better at doing. A little. There is so much more pleasure and peace to be had in just doing the damned thing in front of you. And it's okay if the thing in front of you is a huge challenge, even if it's something you think should be simple or automatic. Despising the struggles of your life (no matter how "small") as petty or mundane or worthless is not constructive. Nobody said it was easy or that it was supposed to be easy, so don't get mad at yourself for sweating. What you have to do is all you can do before you can do anything else. Sheesh. 

Again from 2005

"I had a very humbling moment in worship. I was trying to centre down, trying to pray, and I was just being faced back with this great emptiness. I was sad and frustrated, wanting to say "Speak, Lord, thy servant listens!" but I felt I was just bellowing it into blackness....
Once I sat with that a minute, I realized it was the same crashing lesson that I can't seem to learn. I'm still asking for knowledge of a seperate God, floating somewhere in the ether, ready to come down and explain the universe to me if I just dash my brains out finding the secret code that will unlock heaven. I was told last night, not in sweet comforting terms, either, that what I have of God right now is what is right in front of me...the tasks, the people, the situations... I am to stop looking for more at the expense of what I already have. My response was "That's all? That's all there is to God? Just people? Just the world? Just the universe?" 

I immediately thought of the movie Neverland. J.M. Barrie, played by Johnny Depp, is putting on a circus in the park for some children, using only his imagination and the services of his big sheepdog, who he claims is a fierce performing bear. A little boy named Peter interrupts the performance, calling out "This is absurd. He's just a dog."  

Barrie strides up, puts his reproachful face right into the boy's and cries "Just...What a horrible candle-snuffing word! That's like saying...that's not a diamond, it's just a rock.Just." and turns away to continue the makebelieve he was performing for the other boys, while Peter sits it out because of his heartbreak and doubt, missing all the magic. 
I've been told, "This is all the God you're getting for now, until you figure out how use it." and "Finish what's on your plate before you look for another serving, or something else.""

 OH GOOD GRIEF. I stopped in my tracks when I read that the other night. When I think of the mountains and valleys and extraterrestrial territories my soul has walked in the decade between then and now I have to laugh. All of that wandering, all of that angst, just to end up in the exact same place. Just just just. Oh, the internal and external debates and anguish I could have avoided if I could only have listened to myself back then. Theism, non theism, materialism, metaphysics, meaning and absurdity. Not particularly relevant. 

Of course, the paradox is that all of my wandering and thrashing and struggling and raging and acquiescing were part of what I had to do to get to where I am now. Even now the temptation is to look back and lament that I haven't been doing things right, that I could have been better, or smarter, or more efficient, or whatever value I'm valuing at this point. The truth is that we're all just flailing along, and all we can do is our best, and often our best is ridiculous. But even that pathetic best has its beauty and deserves respect. I am learning, I think, not to sneer at the truth about myself too much, and to see the worth in even the parts of myself that I once scorned as frivolous or sad.

Why I am I writing this? Why am I back on this old blog, retreading this old ground? I suppose just to place a marker, to scatter some breadcrumbs. To visit a certain tree, a dip or swell of land, an exceptional rock, and nod in recognition. To say, I was here, and here I am, and in another 10 years, when I pass by this place again, to measure myself against the past and smile. 

I've been talking all this over with the dearest, wisest companion of my life, recently. We've been talking about growing up, about healing, contentment and peace, about what we owe ourselves and each other, and the world. My life has gotten very much simpler in the last few years, and much more beautiful. I am able to love and recieve love more freely and truly than I ever have before. I am slowly allowing myself more more joy. I'm slowly clearing more room for all of those dazzling "little things" that make up a life, be they pleasures, responsibilities, or both. Choosing seeds for my garden, watching silly tv shows, spending an hour in the sunshine, losing myself in the frivolity and creativity of artwork, cooking dinner, pondering wallpaper, writing boring technical articles for work, sweeping the floor, washing the dishes, pairing the socks, teasing the cat, stroking the hair of the one that I love. So many saints I've quoted on this blog told me and told me and told me that this is where God and divinity and the transformation of the world truly live, but I couldn't hear them until I wore myself out so entirely that I had no other choice. I'm so grateful that I am finally learning. I still lose my way on a weekly basis. I still lose sleep, and cry, and shut myself down from time to time. But the discipline holds. I can get back up more easily now. I can reach out my hand for support more easily now. I can refind my direction more easily now. It's a great gift.   

I've been building myself a sanctuary, a place to rest, a source of strength. It's slow work, and it feels selfish, and I've to make many trips around the sun and back to gather the sticks and dirt and flowers and cushions and everything I've needed to build it. I've needed help, and I've found it. It's not finished, and it's not fancy, but it is beautiful. Do I sound smug? I'm not. I know well both the fragility and the resilience of goodness, and I don't take it for granted. At least, I try not to. 

Wincing, wistfulness, wishy-washyness, and words.

After much farting around the subject, I finally ordered Godless for God's Sake and read nearly all of it. I am savouring the last few chapters. What a wonderful little book. I had all sorts of reactions to the thoughtful sharing of the 26 authors. The biggest one was joy. I felt a loosening and a relief to read these words from other people who have wrestled as I have, and who have each, in their own way, found a way to affirm their presence in the Society of Friends. I was recalled back the emotions I had almost a decade ago when I first realised that Quakerism was "a real thing." A sense of warmth, and hope, and home.

I also felt a little sad, unexpectedly. I won't dwell on the "lost years" of the nearly half decade that elapsed between my drifting away from Friends and finally beginning to feel my way back. But I did feel a pang. Several contributors to the book were from the meeting where I lived and worked and worshipped and fell apart in my early twenties, and I was never in a place to have the conversations with them that I'd like to have now. Well, I wasn't ready for those conversations. I was able to visit some of my very favourite f/Friends in Boston just before Christmas and I felt a similar wistfulness. I was so caught up in myself and in so many things back then, I thought. I have missed so much. I would appreciate them better now.

Last night I signed up to the non-theist Friends mailing list, finally. Funny, wonderful, strange, to look read back and recognise names, patterns of debate, support, disagreement, growth, frustration, mutual discovery, commitment to a deep way of being in the world. The whole thing. Quakers! Theist or non-theist, being together is always messy, always limited by our current states. Almost always worth it.

A Friend I knew from the old days of blogging appeared on the list to welcome me: "more than a little surprised that you're identifying as an atheist now... (and then again, not all THAT surprised!)" 

In spite of the genuine warmth and friendliness of her tone, I winced. The years where I silently, spitefully, painfully called myself an atheist were painful. The years where I didn't, where I was writing in this blog regularly, sometimes ecstatically, were also painful. I  also winced a little in shame: I'm so changeable. I am a little embarrassed about some aspects my early presence here. I am a bit embarrassed by my later absence. A little sheepish about my re-emergence.

Another moment that brought its own flinch: looking at a brochure of Quaker events in the UK, I find myself now a year too old for YAF status, officially, in terms of fees. Silly, but I winced. Not because of fears of aging, but a sense of loss, of waste. All those years. I thought. That special energy of YAFs that I wasted being so confused, so intense about the wrong things, so self-obsessed, and then, so gone.

But I only flinched for a moment. That kind of dreary regret doesn't do me any good. I was who I was. I am who I am. I keep circling. I keep changing. The quieter I am, the calmer I feel about the questions that used to torture me. It is overwhelmingly a wonderful thing.

At first, my atheism was not a graceful acceptance of reason. It was a reaction of pain and despair and frustration and confusion and generally being burnt out. No matter what I did, it seemed, I was stuck being me. When I reached outside of myself to my invisible God, I couldn't rely on his answers or aid, because more and more I suspected that those things were just me, and that they weren't enough. I was right, and I was wrong. I was so caught up in my own emotional turmoil, I tantrumed so violently over the dilemma, I was exhausted. Well, I thought, **** this.

A lack of faithfulness (to the community, to my path)? Perhaps. But I just don't find it helpful to think of it that way. I wasn't ready. I needed a break. I had other work to do. I went and did it. It was messy. I missed a lot. But here I am.

It's still hard, in a way, to attach the label "non-theist Friend" to myself, but mostly, I feel a sense of relief and peace. It's easy because it's true. It's hard because of the baggage I still carry which I've spent years putting down piece by piece. Finally, in the generosity, integrity, and courage of these non-theist Friends, I feel restored.

A part of me feels as if a lot of the pain and a lot of the missing-out could have been avoided if I could have relaxed a little, not been so desperately black and white in my thinking, explored the option of non-theism quietly and gently. I didn't lack the opportunity. I lacked courage and confidence. I didn't want to alienate anyone. I was embarrassed to be so wishy-washy. I was confused by the intersections of language and truth. In spite of years of reading Joseph Campbell I couldn't grasp the idea of mythological truth in a way that could comfort me. A thing was true or it wasn't true. I was terrified that if there wasn't literally a God, (in some sense, no matter how fluffy,) then all of this was a lie, and that was that. I was afraid that if I lost my ability to talk about God with my f/Friends in the way we always had, I would lose my special connection with them. I know now how little justice I did to my Friends (theist and non-theist alike) in all of this. In spite of the love and support that surrounded me, I felt isolated within myself. It was easier just to move away and disengage.

I had a lot of reasons. None of them good, but all of them valid for who I was at the time. And I still feel that slight wince when I think of old f/Friends on both sides of the theism fence being "surprised" to hear me identify as non-theist. In the past the fear of that flinch was enough to make me excommunicate myself. I couldn't reconcile it all in my mind with any integrity, and in the end I was too tired and confused and distracted by the idea of a Whole New Life in Ireland to even try.

I made it to meeting in Belfast last weekend. The messages were about community, in a homely and specific way that moved me deeply. I thought of love, and integrity, those two words that are so central to everything I understand about being human. How it's impossible to have one without the other. I thought about the definition of integrity which means "whole, entire". How to love someone properly you must be able to see them, whole. The integrity required. The wholeness of community. The intense challenge of all of those things. All quite difficult to express in a way which doesn't become reduced to cliche in the expression, but I felt them and understood them with a burning sense of truth which felt every bit as great and transcendent as it had back in the days when I named it God, but without the doubt and conflict.

This post is messy. I'm aware that I'm rambling, conscious that I may be repeating myself. None of this is new, and yet all of it is new. I am carefully and joyfully holding the sense that nothing is lost. The passion and ecstasy and longing for truth and community I felt in my early days here are all still real and reachable. In fact, the things I was most afraid to lose in giving up God are finally available to me with a solidity and peacefulness I couldn't access before. I don't have to look to the supernatural to find the transcendent. I wouldn't have expected it. I feel more able and ready and focused now. The brave and truthful words of the non-theist friends I've finally encountered have helped me to re-open my heart to the possibility of a loving community, and a shared search for meaning within Quakerism. I'm grateful.