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.