Back to bother and live a lot being lost?

-AmandaBot

That's a computer-generated status from an online toy called http://what-would-i-say.com/. I discovered it on Facebook this morning and was quickly fascinated with that particularly narcissistic curiosity that has often driven me to fill out dozens of pointless "personality quizzes" online. The premise is simple: you give the bot access to your Facebook status updates and, with a similar action to a particularly dynamic word cloud, it spits back a status that it "thinks" you would say, based on your history. It's both hilarious and damning. Clearly over the years I've quoted a lot of poetry, complained an awful lot, and obsessed about cooking. Swearwords, anxiety, and silliness are prevalent.

A euro worth of shrill desperate meows. I think I somehow doubt this

-AmandaBot

It's an explicitly self-conscious exercise but randomised just enough to startle me into seeing myself in a slightly different light. I don't consciously craft my social media "persona", and though I've grown a lot of filters since I was last blogging, I think I was surprised to find how much of the bits of myself I think I'm good at hiding still come through. I'm self-centred, somewhat dramatic, somewhat profane, often uncertain. I guess what this shows me is that I'm better at hiding from myself than I am at hiding from the world, even through the screens of the internet. 

They are terrifying the exhausted and hardworking blackbird parents currently cloistered existence.

-AmandaBot

In a similar but more serious way, reading back over some of this blog again was difficult. There's a large part of me that would like to knock it down and start again, but I find the ugliness and the pain instructive. I'm amazed at how different I am now, and equally amazed at how much the same I still am. The parts I like best and least about myself are all still here and accounted for.

That feeling when night I addressed the light. Someone needs to sleep.

-AmandaBot

I have a fairly respectable lifetime behind me now, and as I turn again towards "something greater than myself" I'm struck again by how interior, and how self-centred I have always been. My religious explorations of the past have always been (by necessity it seemed, or I thought) entirely based on my own experiences, thoughts, ideas, and longings.

"Therefore be still awhile from  your own thoughts, searching, seeking, desires and imaginations, and be stayed in the principle of God in you, that it may raise your mind up to God, and stay it upon God, and you will find strength from him, and find him to be a God at hand, a present help in time of trouble and of need."

I'm sure I've probably quoted those lines from George Fox before on this very blog, but I know I almost never succeeded in putting them into practice. The second half was especially difficult, because my thoughts, searching, seeking, desires and imaginations were all about "God" and again and again I found myself stopped there. I desperately desired an exterior God to swoop in and heal me and cure me and make me fit for life.

So stressed about my life has been wanting to sip a little sick.

-AmandaBot

My mental health is sound now, but like many people, I still often feel as though I am somehow not quite equipped to face the day, even in its most practical and selfish aspects. It leaves me feeling weak and afraid when I think of trying to reach beyond myself to help anyone else or to make any difference in the world. Without supernatural intervention (which seemed at best a fickle thing, obviously outside of my control to command, in the unlikely event it existed), it seemed to me that getting through my life day to day was a big enough job for me, so I shut the rest down. 

I have heard and read and encountered the truth many times, in religious and psychological contexts, that the only way to "Salvation" was to go beyond yourself, to "deny yourself" through love, for the good of another, and I've misinterpreted that truth in various ways with various unhappy results, so I withdrew from that, too.

So I switch to defensive tactic #2 self mockery. Works every time, most of it

-AmandaBot

Starting again, I have had to come to a very calm and silent and empty place. No god there, no no-god there. Myself as it exists: the movements of self-protection, the movements of love, the layers of experience, the celebration, the worry, the strife. Daily failure and daily triumph, and all of those thoughts and desires and seekings and imaginations. I am not trying to judge them, or destroy them, or even to sift through them, I am only seeking to be still a while from them. Even the principle of God is a risky thing for me because it so often consists of all that stuff, and it gets in the way of moving out of my own narcissistic circle.

So the principle for me is this: to put aside the grandiose expectations for and of myself which give me an excuse to feel like a failure and give up. To be honest about who and what I am, to give what I actually have in the moment, and not demand or expect more. To value and have gratitude for my gifts as they exist now, and not as I wish they would be, if I were "better". To see abundance in myself where I am tempted to see only lack. To find the humility to accept and exist in the moment-to-moment struggles and joys and (most of all) choices with a sense of faithfulness and purpose, and to lay everything else aside.

Housekeeping

It's strange to poke my nose back into the Quaker blogosphere. The landscape is almost entirely different. I looked around and found conversations I'd missed, a couple of years old, which I'm sure I would have had a lot to say about. I found that many of the blogs I read and loved and wrestled with years ago are dormant, or taken over by spambots, or simply just gone. I went in to tidy up my links and ended up just deleting the whole thing. I'll be adding links as I go, just adding what I read and what stirs my mind and heart, no matter where we stand on opinions and theology.

While it's a little disorienting and maybe even a bit lonely to discover that the conversations have moved on without me, in a way, it's very freeing, and a bit exciting. I positioned myself very strongly when I first began to blog. In my early twenties, full of fire and notions and the excitement of a new way to see the world, a new place to stand. I was urgently seeking truth, usually with a capital T, and I dove headfirst into matters of theology and conservatism and liberalism and testimony and ministry. I can see now that I didn't really understand these things, but I know how badly I wanted to understand them. And even from this distance I can appreciate the qualities and gifts which fueled that drive, and I can be grateful for them. It's almost a decade since the birth of this blog, and my approach to life in general has lost a lot of that blazing urgency and conviction. I don't exactly think of it as a loss, although occasionally in a sad moment I'll feel it as one. At any rate, it wasn't thrown away, it was traded for things of different, but hopefully equal value. Things which have more utility in my life as it now exists.

I'm rambling a bit, but there is a point somewhere in here. In thinking about why I left meeting and the community behind, I realized how much of it had to do with fear of disappointing people. If I ended up a non-theist, it would be embarrassing. That sounds much more trite than I intend it to. There is some matter of pride in there, though not monstrously. In fact, "embarrassment" was the Victorian euphemism for bankruptcy, and it felt a lot more like that. I felt impoverished, unable to meet my commitments. I felt as if I had failed to fulfill the promise of my early passion. I felt, in fact, like something of a fraud.

It goes to show how little trust and faith I actually put in my community, the Friends who loved me no matter what, in spite of and because of my questioning and changing. I like to think that if I had stayed in the community, I would have learned better. I would have healed and grown, perhaps, on a shorter and sweeter timescale. You can never be sure. I'm not too hard on myself for the choices I made. I was who I was, and circumstances are powerful things.

Then there's the name of the blog. When I laid down plainness and had taken up the overwhelming and involuntary concern of my serious depression years ago, I changed the name of the blog. It was a slightly glib way of attempting to be brave and truthful, though as usual I may have over-egged things a little. "Cracked" is a bit of a loaded, silly term, although as always interpretation is everything. I can't really think of a replacement at the moment, so I think the name will stay.

I intend to write as I always did here, sharing the impressions and movements of my heart as they occur. I think I will be less striving than I was. I will endeavor to be honest in the moment, though I no longer have that overwhelming urge to track and then nail down a Truth which I can then display for the benefit of humankind. I expect this will be a relief to us all.

And almost another year...

Well, it took many more months of wandering and wondering to bring me back again. I have may more to say, I may have more posts in me, I'm not entirely sure.

It's been a year of tremendous healing, and a general restoration of my self. It was a tough time when I was last writing here regularly, and it was a tough time when I wasn't. I'm in a much better place, now, and it's only now that I've been able to begin to revisit the part of myself which used to move me to write here.

I visited Frederick Street meeting in Belfast today, and it was good. I've been to less than five meetings on either side of the ocean in the last five years. I actually attempted to go last week, but got lost, and ended up finding myself in Saint Anne's cathedral, lifting up my soul on the sung service of the Church of Ireland, where the police posted by the door stood in dark contrast to the light and joy of the young choir's voices singing Mozart. I was moved by the music, and moved by the priest's generous sermon on mean little Zacchaeus in the tree and his change of heart. I still felt more outside of the experience than inside of it, but bid my fretful (a)theology be quiet and just sat with the experience. I escaped before tea, but felt the warmth and love of that little congregation in the huge church, and was glad my misadventures had brought me there.

This week, armed with better information, I arrived at Meeting just in time. I sat down in the very warm room, made a series of decisions about the several sweaters I was wearing, and tried to settle.

There were a lot of reasons why I had avoided meeting for the last five years. The most pressing was the continuing disintegration of my "notions" of God. I kept erasing and re-drawing the line for years, desperate to find some firm sense of who or what I was speaking of or to, some line of experience I could hold fast to, but I could never lay my hands on something solid and sure. I felt "cut to the heart" again, and again, like Margaret Fell.

"Then what had any to do with the scriptures but as thy came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, Christ saith this, and the apostles say this, but what canst thou say? Art thou a Child of Light, and hast walked in the Light, and what thou speakest is inwardly from God, etc?"

This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart, and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat me down in my pew again and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, "We are all thieves, we are all thieves..."

but it didn't stop there. I couldn't trust my experience. I could not say at all that anything came inwardly from God, because it seemed to me that I couldn't truthfully say I was ever sure that what I experienced was not "simply" the agitation of my own emotions, the ignition of inherited ideas and forms, and again and again I found myself thrown against a possibility I didn't want to consider. It was desperately painful, another wound in a very wounded time of my life.

So I withdrew entirely. I avoided the question, I diverted what little "spiritual" attention I still possessed into a nominal humanism and tried to live my life by the "light" of what seemed the most loving and right thing to do at the time. I was still struggling with the aftershocks of a personally devastating breakdown, but I threw myself into a new country, a new relationship, and new pursuits.

And there was a lot of good there. I recovered some of my creative power, I made wonderful friendships, and I grew up in many ways. I entered therapy and did a lot of deep work.

But my world was bound by the simple existence of the day to day. My eyes and heart were focused on the business of keeping my mind together and keeping my relationship together. I avoided conversations or even thoughts about "spiritual" things. I resigned my role in any greater "plan" and even my ability to make any real difference in the world beyond my small immediate sphere. Many times, I even sincerely doubted my power there.

I'll skip over the gulf of pain and despair and hope and betrayal and my own many, many, many mistakes and say I finally washed ashore and found my mind and heart free for the first time in a long time, and I began to carefully feel my way back, and like I said, I began looking for some precious things I left behind. Most of them were questions. I've spent the last ten months examining them gently.

I still don't have any answers, and there's still no line I can draw, or hold. To put it plainly, I still don't have a God I can define, let alone address, or trust, or expect to speak in, or to, or through me.

What I do have, though, is some peace with that. And a strong conviction that I do need a community, and a space where I can raise my mind and heart to things beyond myself.

So I sat in meeting and waited. Listened to the messages. Sweated in my thermal shirt. Tried to clear my mind. Someone spoke of forgiveness, and I thought of repentance, of turning back. I thought of lifting up my heart, of how there is almost a physical (metaphysical?) sensation to that. So I did, I lifted up my heart, even without a God to lift it to. I lifted it out into the meeting, and out into the nothing, and everything. And I felt it, there, again, for the first time in a long time. That electric thump, half painful, in the centre of my chest, and the sting of tears at the back of my eyes. That sense of connection, that sense of height, of clarity and warmth, of light, of love. It is unmistakable and good and knowable, and it informs and changes your life. Wherever it comes from, a "divine" source, a mess of associations and expectations in my mind, or mere neurology, I don't care any more. It is good, it is a source of power, I have missed it dreadfully, and it is necessary to my life. I'm just going to follow it, and I am not going to worry about its origin anymore.

I am laying down that concern, and I am simply going to continue to lift up my heart, moment by moment. Lift it up, with courage, a dozen times in a day of depression. Lift it up in the face of the world's pain and my own confusion. Lift it up, consciously, continuously, with conviction and with discipline. I'm going to read more Whitman.

And I'm going to go to meeting.