March 9, 2004

March 10, 2004
Kerosene, match

The sky today was uncertain; it couldn't choose whether to be dismal or playful. After a balmy, bright morning, the rain returned for a brief encore this afternoon. And the scowling clouds over the highway were tinged with a cheerful pink as the sun fell.

Tthe thing that perpetually surprises me about my life these days is how intensely I want to re-create it. On days like this, it hardly matters how well things are going. I just want to burn everything down to the ground and start all over again.

(And that goes for this website, too. Sometimes I would love to chuck all my archives and start from scratch. Brand new game.)

But how do you start your entire life over again when you're 29 years old, clipping along in your merry life full of friends and family and work and church? And what does that even look like?

My tumultuous faith is not exempt from this desire to start over. I've lived 29 years as a pretty straight-line Christian. The Christian faith is so deeply a part of who I am that I can't really imagine a life outside it. But even though I know that I can probably never leave the tradition, I feel an urge to at least try.

I was working on a project today with a guy at my office. He's a creative director at my agency, in his late 40s. I suppose you could call this guy a Christian. But Brian's core beliefs bear very little resemblance to the "statement of faith" held by most conservative Christian evangelical churches.

He was the son of missionaries to Thailand and grew up overseas, sitting in a humble little church in Thailand, listening to his father preach to the locals. His whole childhood was soaked in church and Scripture, just like mine.

But when Brian was a young man, living far away from his family at boarding school, his father died unexpectedly. And I think the wound left by that loss has never really healed.

So (just to engage in a little friendly head-shrinking on my totally unsuspecting co-worker), I think that everything in Brian's life since then has been understood through this great event, this huge loss of his father. And I think this is one consequence of that loss: Brian has great regard for Christ, but holds him at a distance. He doesn't really know what to do with Christ. Or the church.

He and I were sitting in the conference room today, working on a client project. Through the conference room windows behind him, the clouds were turning like a kaleidoscope.

He started talking about Christianity, about his faith, and that's when I started to think it again: I want to burn my whole life down and start over again. (The controlled burn is always the image that comes to mind: scraping my whole life into a messy pile, sloshing a bit of kerosene over the heap, striking a bold match and dropping it as I turn away. And then, later, as the smoke clears, finding out who was strong enough to survive the flames, finding out who gets invited back to my second life.)

The things Brian says would probably be inflammatory to any self-respecting conservative Christian. But some of it resonates with me, and I'm just not quite sure what to do with it. I'm not quite sure where to put some of the things he says.

Brian attends church regularly, but his most meaningful moments are lived outside the frequency of organized religion. He finds his deepest rapture in the joys of poetry, music, art.

And that really resonates with me. I don't have a hard time saying that I find the music and poetry to be completely transcendent.

At the same time, I feel unsettled by it. After all, I've spent a great many Sunday mornings at church, and as an adult I am deeply and happily committed to my church community. The good pastor's daughter in me wants to know that the church does matter, and that the fullness of life promised by Christ (John 10:10 is where Christ talks about this) amounts to more than a heap of words printed on a page.

It's at this point that I can only whisper to myself, Damn. There you go again. Writing yourself into a corner.

I have a gift for diving head-first into entries like this, but a tragic inability to draw any useful conclusions from my own ramblings.

It's hard enough to write in my private journal about my faith; it's harder to talk about it here for web readers who may be terribly offended or terribly bored (maybe both!) by the questions I'm working through.

I hope you'll bear with me. I think it's important for me to at least try to find words for these vague, submerged feelings, these grand questions. Finding the words matters, so I keep trying. If I can assign more precise words to these below-the-surface issues, I can understand them better, I can know myself more.

At the end of the day, I suppose I shouldn't put so much pressure on myself to fit the projections of a straight-line Christian faith.

I know this in my head, but my heart still wants to steer toward the safe harbor of traditional Christianity. I am loathe to invent my own special Christian denomination; doesn't the world have enough special-interest groups?

The simple fact does remain that sometimes all I need for a true experience of the divine is a handful of Canadian geese flying in formation at night. Isn't that a gift? Should I not honor it?

Instead of feeling guilty, wondering how to better fit within this Christian tradition, I would like to spend my energy recognizing those transcendent moments as they come, and receiving them – whenever and wherever they find me.