Revisionist History

I'd like to say that this blog served its original purpose beautifully. That it was an amazing insight on the life of a Torontonian expatriated to the Maritimes. That it was an outlet for me to vent out my joys and frustrations from living in a place so far from home on so many levels.

Unfortunately that wasn't really how it turned out.

If I can describe best how I feel about my time in Fredericton, it can be probably put best in a single word: fatigue. Being tired and sapped of energy on a variety of fronts left me unable to spare some time or even a thought to updating and posting my thoughts on my life in Fredericton. And it wasn't like I was trying to be this way. A lot of times I deleted posts that I'd spent hours writing, simply because at their core, they were horrid little rants that didn't serve any purpose except to spread more bile and vitriol on the Internet (as if it didn't have enough of it already).

So here I now am, in a time and place far away from Fredericton, and I have to admit it, I have to be honest, and I have to be plain and truthful to anyone reading these words: I'm happier for it.

As a great man once said through the collective voice of a particularly intelligent band of Cetaceans: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

Disconnections

(Crossposted to The Chrysalis.)

I’ve often observed that whenever a significant event occurs in someone’s life, what they expect doesn’t quite live up to what they actually experience. This works both ways of course: I remember that when my friend Shauna got married, the look on her face throughout the whole experience left her feeling like the entire enterprise of marriage was something far beyond what even she - the woman for whom it seemed like marriage was what she was preparing her whole life for - was expecting.

In my case, moving to Fredericton was met by my expectations being succeeded, quite handily, in ways both positive and negative. For the positive side of things, I was expecting, to some extent, the people I’d encounter to be quite friendly, and indeed, some of the most friendliest and open people I’ve ever met in my life have been the friends and acquaintances that I’ve made here. On the other hand, I’ve come across a lot of interpersonal issues that have left me, for lack of a better word, vexed.

When I lived in Toronto, I thought nothing of the relationships I had with people of the opposite sex. I naturally gravitated toward them, towards the fact that I could have actual conversations with the girls in my life, as opposed to many of the guys I’d befriended who seemed to talk about things I’d thought of as puerile and banal. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t come across as the most “masculine” person around, and I make no pretensions as to what I think of manliness and my own sexuality. Suffice to say, with girls I developed a sense that I didn’t have to go around waving my penis (intellectually or otherwise) around to show that I was someone worth hanging around, and I didn’t have to brag or lie about my said member’s size or length to show that I was someone of value and merit in someone’s life.

I think one of the first things that I came across was an attitude towards relationships between men and women that were a complete 180 to what I was used to. Now, I had to brag. I had to drop the pretensions and act and feel like I was someone which I wasn’t.

A case in point: I learned some time ago that someone I knew was uncertain as to my sexuality. I’ve never had an issue with where my preferences lay (and in fact, one of my great stumbling blocks with respect to sin is that my preferences are too strong for my own good), but between how I displayed that and how some people saw it was a disconnection. Sadly, as what happens all too often, disconnections were followed up not with a desire for dialogue, but a set of assumptions which left me feeling emasculated and divorced from the people around me. I’ve thankfully had the experience to not dwell too deeply on that (er, much), and to at least focus on that separation in a positive way - a way to know what I shouldn’t do as opposed to what I should do when faced with people who defy common expectations. If I may be allowed, I think I should be permitted to feel just a tad incensed that, on top of the emotional work I’ve had to do to try to “fit in” with the lay of local culture and practice, I’ve had to also work to break out of the assumptions and expectations suddenly laid upon me. The shortest path between two places may be a straight line, but sometimes, that line can feel like it’s as long as infinity.

Capitulation

I've been thinking a great deal about a post on Christianity and the imagination that I've had sitting on the back burner of my mind for some time. Alas, I've had other things to think about lately.

I've had a lot of things on my mind that I don't believe are appropriate for this blog and the tone and setting I had in mind for it. As such I'll continue to be posting my thoughts and roughshod essays on Christianity to this blog; meanwhile, I'll be returning to my old site at The Chrysalis for my more personal postings.

A Bridge Across The Stars.

The last time I updated this blog, I was well on my way to finishing a series of ten posts that I was writing up to illustrate my top ten list of general things I don't like about Christianity that are contributing to the rather awful state of affairs that Christianity is in. Yes, those two posts are still coming (for anyone left who actually cares!) but before I continue, I feel like I have something to say about why I feel like such a "Negative Nancy", and why, to be perfectly honest, I just don't feel like I want to do it anymore.

I know it's important to take a stand against what's clearly wrong - hate, injustice, intolerance - but how important is it to constantly go against the flow, against the tide, really, if it costs you your sanity and your happiness? Some may actually want to break free of the Matrix, and deal with all of the consequences which that kind of decision entails...but can you really blame people for being content to be little more than a faceless, nameless battery? Perhaps I am being overly harsh to fellow Christians when I make those kinds of comparisons (fair enough) but when people continue to not critically ask important questions about the things they do as Christians (or even worse, just fake it), to me it almost feels easier to just give up and either go back to joining in the current. Or, perhaps, to decide that it's time to step out of the stream altogether and see what life on dry land is like.

To me, Christianity always seems like that close friend I know who has other people consistently tell him (or her) not to do something which clearly wouldn't lead to anything good or useful or productive...and yet are left flabbergasted when they go ahead and do it anyway. In one ear and out the other. When the lesson is finally learned, it's too little, too late, and who's willing to be that they'll likely forget all about it tomorrow? (Or worse yet, twist it into a reason to keep on doing whatever it was they were doing, but harder, faster, better, stronger.) The token crowd of atheists/agnostics and such who love to rag on Christianity and Christians of course, conveniently ignore the fact that this is just as much a problem for people of other faiths and other belief systems (and them) as it is for Christians.

My point is that it just leaves me feeling frustrated, this constant desire to try to see Christianity improve beyond the constant closed-mindedness I see so rampantly, a closed-mindedness I see in how many Christians relate to the outside culture, to people outside their church, and people outside whatever social or economic grouping they belong to. It seems so sad when I look around me and find that as bad as I think things are, the reality is actually quite worse. I keep wondering when people are going to start getting tired of attaching and resting their faith and even whole theological world on things like the Culture War, and yet find that people are almost too eager to take up arms against Obama, the Homosexual Agenda, and modern science. It's left me feeling so alienated from Christianity that I find myself almost alienating myself from the Christians I know in my day to day life. I have a conversation with them and it feels like our minds aren't just on different levels -- they're on different planets altogether. And it hurt even more when you see that everyone's on that other planet, no one's on yours, and no one from over there isn't even trying to build a rocket to get to where you are.

Before this metaphor collapses under it's own weight, I just want to ask if it's possible to live on theological lonely planet - or if there's another way of building a bridge across the stars to span that distance.

Ten Things I Hate About You: #8 - The Persecution Complex

It's been Election Time lately - a fascinating mixture of Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, All Saints Day/Halloween and just about every other religious holiday of any significance you can think of. These past few months have been a mosaic of hope, anxiety, anticipation, thankfulness, pride, and a sense of a rebirth, a baptism of fire leading to a promised victory which will come for the faithful, "any day now". The antics we often see around the time of any major election reminds me of little kids fussing about in a sandbox, and the canvassers are like grown up versions of kids trick-or-treating - mind you of course, they're asking for a little more out of you than a couple of Tootsie Rolls and some change for the UNICEF box.

But above all, there's one emotion, state of mind, and mindset present, especially seen at these times, and among some of the more verbally visible elements of the Christian family - fear. The kind of fear I want to talk about here though is one fear you may have seen in others: the fear of persecution.

The story of the GOP in Arkansas from the 2004 US Presidential Election boldly proclaiming that you need to vote for the Republican Party lest dirty liberals ban the Bible is certainly one of the most extreme aspects of what I want to talk about in this post, and I'm certainly not asserting that such shouting is common to Christianity as a whole. However, it's a good example of something I like to call "The Persecution Complex". Let me try to break it down in manageable chunks so I can try to put it in basic terms:


1) Christianity is Under Attack:

This isn't so much a pervasive phenomenon in Canada, from what I see at least, but it seems to be something which is a lot more prevalent in the US. The basic point argued is that Christianity as a way of life is under attack from an overwhelmingly powerful and dominant force which seeks to suppress and/or destroy it.

To be fair to the people who make this a focal point of their view towards popular/secular culture, there is a considerable amount of truth to that basic idea. We live in a highly market-driven, extremely consumeristic and materialistic society feeding upon novelty; not innovation, but novelty - the next manufactured pop star, the next cookie-cutter sequel action movie, the next fashion trend or new shiny thing to buy. (People aren't rushing out to buy, say music from independent artists that are pushing the boundaries of traditional music styles and forms, regardless of the genre. Ironically, the Next Big Thing that consumer society chases after seems to be just another permutation of whatever came before.)

It's a hard world for any person of any spiritual level to live in while keeping a level head, and there's no denying that it's a potentially powerfully corrupting force.

Rebelling against this is all well and good, but the first problem is that you run the danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As I mentioned in a past post, there are a considerable amount of things in popular, secular culture which are worth considering and bringing into our collective experience as Christians. To lose out on that would be to lose out on a wonderful way to add depth to the spiritual journey on which Christianity leads. A one-dimensional view of culture outside of Christianity threatens to reduce Christianity itself to being one-dimensional.

The second problem is who exactly are the villains in this story? The answer is very nuanced, and you could round up a whole list of reasonable perps as long as your arm, from the abstract (Free-Market Capitalism, Consumer Culture, Hyper-Materialism), to the concrete (CEOs, business and socio-ecnomically corrupt political leaders, multinational corporations, and other profit-driven institutions), to the unsettling (us, for being a willing -- be it consciously or subconsciously -- participant in the system). To probe the question of who's at fault is both hard and easy - it's easy in that if we go up the food chain, we can likely find something or someone to hold accountable. It's also hard though, because in the end, the person who you're going to blame likely had his or her strings pulled by someone else, who was beholden to someone else, and so-on, until you get lost in the tangle of who ordered who to do what that the only thing you have left to clearly blame is "The System".

Human beings though, are, I think it's safe to say, pretty lazy. So who do we blame? It's easy: Gays and Lesbians. Muslims. Jewish Hollywood. The Secular Liberal Media. All of these are excellent places to put our blame because they so easily symbolize everything we fail to understand, is outside our standardized view of what is accepted, and everything we find distasteful and hateful. (Or all of the above!)

The problem is that when it comes addressing the root cause of the problem, again, it's easy for us to take a one-dimensional view. When we have a one-dimensional view of a problem, we often always have a one-dimensional view of the solution, and how often do things like that work out?


2) Christianity is Being Oppressed

There are of course, various forms of this - Christians are being censored for the sake of political correctness; Christians are/have lost their freedom to express their religion on the grounds of other people not taking it so well (*gasp*! The Nerve!). The list goes on, and on. I'm sure that at church services, fellowship meetings, Bible studies and other such places, we've all heard at least *once*, a prayer request for the sake of poor innocent Christians who've, somewhere, been unfairly muzzled because of their beliefs.

Now, to start off, I know that there are actual places in which being a Christian, even on a very casual level (i.e. someone openly affirming their Christian faith to the man on the street vs. people who are obnoxious about it) is actually quite dangerous. The reasons for that are beyond the scope of this post, but suffice to say there are still places in the world where being a Christian does invite a serious and genuine level of peril.

The problem is when this notion is carried over to the realm of places where such a situation clearly doesn't exist. CNN founder Ted Turner's infamous "Jesus Freaks" comment is one example of an incident in the day to day lives of Christians where they came across very derogatory comments from someone outside Christianity - and its incidents like this, among other things like the teaching of evolutionary biology in schools vs. a Biblically Literal Christian view of science, or the equally infamous lawsuits to get "Under God" removed from the US Pledge of Allegiance, which drive people to believe that the sky is indeed falling on Christianity.

I don't want to turn this into a debate on the issue of the Separation of Church and State as codified in the US Constitution, but suffice to say, the fact of the matter is that we live in a pluralistic society, whether we like it or not, for better or for worse. We live in a society that we must share with people of other faith traditions and ethnicities and it's foolish of us to ignore the truth that they can see Christians and see their dirty laundry being aired for all of to look at. It may be the sexual immoralities of our grandstanding spiritual leaders or even the hypocrisies of Christians in their daily lives. The moment Christians start to get on their moral high horse and elevate themselves above others, others around us have every right to call us out on each and every one of our hypocrisies.

To get a true feel for oppression and persecution, we need only to look at our own history, and I don't need to fill in the blanks of the many examples where ethnic or religious groups were singled out for the deprivation of their rights as citizens in their own country and/or targeted for ethnic cleansing. We haven't gotten anywhere even close to that in North America, and it's insulting to the people who have suffered in places like that when Christians view ultimately petty annoyances like Turner's comment or even the question of whether the phrase "One Nation Under God" has any credibility within the US Pledge of Allegiance as examples of the persecution of Christianity. In short, it seemingly all boils down to the observation that apparently, while Christians can dish it out, they certainly can't seem to take it.

What's even more perverse about it is that when we look at how people have viewed the matter of religion in the public square, it's clearly front and centre. Both the GOP and Democractic Party campaigns in the US heavily leverage the religious element, whether they're conscious of it or not. The US has had a self-professed Born-Again Christian in the Oval Office for two presidential terms now. The backlash seen towards the American commercial media after Janet Jackson's notorious "wardrobe malfunction" is proof positive that Christians can have an incredible effect on the media landscape in North America. Sure, there's still plenty of sex and violence in the media today, and the outcry of enraged Christian parents has done little to change that, but in turning to the time-honored solution of just rolling your own alternative, Christianity itself has become a media force to be reckoned with.

"It's probably best to send them straight to bed with no dinner!"

It's the sort of rhetoric that I see talking about Christianity being the target of oppression which reminds me most of whiny children (of which I used to be and to a certain extent still am). Talk to a kid about how they're doing and likely they'll complain about how their parents didn't get them item X or take them to go to event Y or see person Z. There's of course all sorts of mitigating factors at play here on the parent's side of things, but the child seldom sees things from his or her parent's perspective. Hence, they're being treated in a way that's unfair and unjust.

Hopefully though, those children grow up, get older, start to live a little, and begin to understand reality as not being so one-sided as they once thought; that the world really doesn't revolve around them. We'll have to wait and see if Christians steeped in the Persecution Complex can have the ability to eventually mature as they can.

Swift and sudden fall from grace/Sunny days seem far away

The Internet Monk reflects on the the year in his life where the proverbial excrement hit the fan.

Ordinary life, extraordinary events and stuff that just don’t make no sense all combine to rearrange the furniture of my world. Every time I head for a comfortable seat, God sells it. Every time I look for the comfort food, the fridge is empty. Every time I get out my copy of “Things You KNOW Are True,” the dog has eaten it.

I think back over everything I lost since 2004, things ripped from my life which have left a deep gaping wound inside of me which has yet to heal, and struggle to see some sort of rational purpose and reason for it all. And time and time again I've come up empty-handed. I still feel myself lost in the static and noise that's surrounded me since then, and while I can almost see the lights in the distance beckoning me to a brighter future, I can't seem to see for sure if they're really there or if they're just a hallucination of what little optimism I have left still beating inside my addled brain.

A phone call from a friend in Ontario reminded me that the lights are indeed there, they're real, and they're worth working toward. Just keep on trudging, keep on going, don't stop, don't give up, never give up. The lights at the end of the journey aren't just there because you want them to be there. They’ve always been there for you, from the start.

Bethelemian Rhapsody

The Morning News' Daniel Nester, on Christian Parody Band ApologetiX:

The band first crossed my radar one morning in 2005, while I read my daily check of news updates on Queen, my favorite rock band. On the same day, Queenzone.com (“News and information about Freddie Mercury, Brian May, Roger Taylor, and John Deacon”) and BrianMay.com (“The Official Brian May Web Site,” guitarist for Queen) reported a parody of the band’s 1976 opus “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Renamed “Bethlehemian Rhapsody,” ApologetiX’s version retold the story of David and Goliath. The song opens:

Is this a real guy? Is he just fantasy?

‘Cause of his grand size, no one’s safe from fatality

Open your eyes, look up at Goliath, and see:

I’m dressed for war, boys. I need no infantry

The later, rocking movement begins “So you think you can scorn me and spit at my tribe? / So you think you’re above me just based on your size?”