From Rainer Marie – I have a vested interest in one of the members! (Upload to YouTube, Dec. 18, 2006)
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Category Archives: personal
The Analytical vs. The Creative
These past three years have been tough ones. I have no idea of the what and why of the goings on, but I’ve endured them… not quite sure yet whether I’m worse for wear or whether I will end up strengthened.
One thing I do know, now that I’m able to more favorably move forward, I’ve got to get to a place where life isn’t simply dressing or mechanically moving from one thing to another. I’m in a position right now that all is analytical, and while I have done and continue to do analytical stuff, I am much more of a creative type person than anything else. Heck, even coding for me is a creative endeavor.
I’ve got to get back to the creative. If I don’t, I’m going to go nuts. I’ve got to find balance in my life, and right now I’m not sure how to do that.
2013 moves into 2014 – what will change? Up to me, I suppose.
A New Year Cometh…
The eve of a new year is upon us. I wonder, sometimes, how open we are to whatever-may-come. Are we more apt to rigidly attempt to force life into a mold of our own imagining, perhaps because of fear or intimidation or weariness or confusion or insecurity or, perhaps, due to being lost to our own humanity, an honest sense-of-self, lost to our own possibilities?
We limit ourselves, terribly, I suppose. We limit our ability to love – and I think more significantly our ability to receive love. What does it mean to be fearfully and wonderfully made? Where along the line have we bought the lie that our consumerist culture peddles, and that we as a people soak up lock, stock, and barrel?
If we imagine ourselves to be free, particularly of the fear of what we cannot know or control, free from even the fear of death, then where do limits exist in understanding the potential and possibilities existing all around us?
If only we take one step, if only we run the race set before us, if only we decide to move beyond the boundaries of our own creation, then why limit ourselves and capitulate to whatever binds up our hope, our lives? What can we discover in this new year if our imaginations are set loose to run free and run wild? God’s peace and blessing we with us all, I pray. Happy 2014!
Reality and Life
I have some friends telling me, “Give yourself a break.” Why? Well, I tend to be fairly hard on myself. I tend to be a type “A” personality and feel as if I need to be an overachiever (or am one regardless of what I may feel). I tend to think that I should be able to easily “hold up” and do, do, do… overcome, overcome, overcome… without any downside or downtime.
If I step back for a moment (considering the advice of friends to give-myself-a-break) and consider my life over the past 6-years… well, maybe I should stop, consider, and reflect (kind of like when you catch fire you should “stop, drop, and roll”). I may be on fire. (Not like “the Girl-on-Fire”!)
A number of years ago, close friends of mine gave me a single sheet of paper with words all over it. There were lines and columns of adjectives. They lovingly and sarcastically said, “We’re going to tell you to point to your words – and then you have to.” It seems they thought that I never really talked about me – as in using adjectives – and how I was really doing, going through, or feeling. They were frustrated. I guess it really wasn’t (isn’t) very conducive for people getting to know me, really.
A very close friend of mine, who I rarely see any more, regrettably – distance and all that – has her PhD in community counseling. She is a great listener, but it always frustrated me that she never really talked about herself. So, I know my friends’ frustration!
Well, “giving myself a break” probably means being open with others about what has happened over the past 6-years and accepting that the results on my psyche (and everything else interrelated) just might be real. Well… Of course, what the hell do I need to complain about when considering what the majority of humanity has to endure on a daily basis! I’ve got “first-world” issues, as some would say. Maybe…
I took a job after seminary in NYC in 2006 that I never wanted and had to struggle through every day. It wash good job, with a very good company, and the people I worked with were great! So what’s the problem, right? It was just soul-killing work to do full-time, at least for me. I took the job to stay in NYC for my partner. A reasonable reason. We all have to have our share of sacrifices for the good sake of our beloved.
So, I’m working. Blah. Then, six years ago, I was dumped, unexpectedly and unwantingly. Things were not perfect, of course; they never are. But, I was not expecting it and I was emotionally shocked and hurt, hurt, hurt. Not only that, but I was dumped for another guy that is (still) destructive to my former partner. That makes is doubly hard because I don’t want that for someone I love(d). Co-dependence is an oh so wonderful thing, right? Maybe I’m better without the relationship (that’s what some tell me), but I don’t feel that way… I don’t believe it.
Then, nearly four years ago I was appointed to my dream job! I was amazed, shocked, and thrilled that I was going to be able to do this! Pinch me, really! Do it again because this can’t be true! I began the position in 2010. I took a $20,000 pay cut. That’s alright because I was still making decent money. From my just resigned job (hallelujah – even though I really like my co-workers and the company), I was able to accumulate a really good savings account!
I started me dream job and poured everything into it! It was so exciting, stimulating, and fulfilling. I had a very hard time turning off the job and taking some down time. I was creating something totally new drawn from a lifetime of experience, education, and lots of research and study-groups. I was good at it, and it was succeeding!
A year and a half later the rug was pulled out from under me. The project was being shut down – at least the sponsors’ sponsorship of it. Politics. Lots of opposition from others who thought it was a tremendous waste of dwindling resources that should be directed to their ministries and enterprises (often failing, which is just the reality).
Of course, what I was doing was for the long term, for revitalization, to provide ways and means for them to do their work in newer ways that actually resonate with younger people – their very future. That didn’t matter. They needed the money right NOW, and they couldn’t conceive that what I was doing was to benefit them… just not so much right this second. Of course, it also meant that they would have to change their presumptions and mindset and do things differently in a postmodern, post-Christian reality. It meant (still means) that they give up “old-ways-of-thinking”, which means the ways of thinking of the 1970’s and 80’s. Ouch.
They also didn’t like that I kept pointing out the elephants in the room. Stupid, I know. I’m like that, however – I actually want to deal with things. What else can one do when we have to honestly grapple with why things are not working and we are not succeeding when others are? We have to understand the problems forthrightly and in the glaring light of noonday before we can fix anything. What people generally want, alas, is everything else to change so that what they do and the way they do it magically succeeds.
General Motors, alone 25% of the American economy at the end of the 1970’s, went bankrupt because they lost track of how to make cars that people actually wanted to drive. The Church is not alone. GM is getting better after everything came crashing down, after the tipping point of insolvency. Hopefully, we will, too. It would be nice if insolvency wasn’t necessary, but for us perhaps it is. Sad and shameful, isn’t it? Such a waste of the financial and spiritual patrimony of generations past and their sacrifice.
So, the rug was pulled out from under me. No more money. No more health insurance. No more support, even as I continued to do what I was doing as much as I could without their help, support, or sponsorship (even thought they still will reap a benefits, tangentially). (After asking, they did continue paying for my health insurance after a time and for a year.)
After losing my job, I entered the rolls of the unemployed in the heat of the economic downturn. Wonderful. The next blow was that I wasn’t eligible for unemployment. (IRS rules stipulate that when an ordained person is employed in ministry work, the ministry/employer is not required to pay into unemployment.) Yup, no money. My savings account didn’t last for long. Thankfully, after several months, I was able to secure a very part-time position back with the company I worked for, before. From taking a huge pay cut to do my dream job, complete unemployment that completely drained me of all my liquid assets, to a very part-time job that didn’t quite cover even my rent. Fun.
Unemployed for two years with no unemployment benefits, health insurance for only one of those years, applying for all kinds of positions to no avail. I just heard an NPR piece on the psychological and emotional effects of being unemployed for 6-months. Phhww, what’s 6-months? Wimps!
Can I say how thankful I am for the generosity of my parents and that they are in a position to help me! Even though I bleed through all my assets, lived as simply as I could in NYC, I would never have made it without my parents. Of course, a 50-year old man doesn’t want to think that he is in a position that makes him go back to Mom & Dad for a hand-out (a nearly two year huge hand-out). That was tough… really tough!
Well, thankfully, this past June I secured a full-time job back with the company I worked before and with which I worked part-time this past year. (For the first time, I now honesty understand the peculiar world of clergy compensation and church payroll!) And I am thankful. It is a great company and I like the people I work with. It’s just that what I am good at doing is going completely unused, unutilized, and unappreciated. My skills are not being honed. I’m just a hard worker and good at organizational stuff. I can now support myself, however, and I am very happy about that! It is a tremendous emotional relief.
My former boss at Kent State, where I created the Technology Support office for our new hybrid academic/student services unit, the Vice-Provost and Dean, wrote a recommendation letter to my seminary. He wrote that he thought this endeavor of mine would end up being a “tremendous waste of talent and skill.” He is one of few men that I truly look up to and respect, but I thought he was completely wrong. After all, this reluctant priest-to-be was told repeatedly by those in authority that there is always “a place in the Church for good priests.” Hum.
The bishop under whom I became a postulant seemed to have a high impression of me. He told the new, incoming bishop (co-adjutor), “You don’t want to lose this one.” I was in Ohio for my final candidacy interviews, and I was dumbfounded when he said this. See, my Dean wasn’t right! I tend to not recognize in myself what others seem to – at least according to them. I also don’t use “my words” enough when talking about myself… when interviewing. I also tend to thank that people actually want to improve and fix things. I also tend to be wrong – a lot, it seems.
I’ve come to realize that the Vice-Provost and Dean was probably right. It wasn’t that he was anti-religion, but I realize now that he didn’t believe they would recognize what they actually had in me. I still don’t see it, even though I know I’m good at what ever I do, I’m a quick study, and I’m conscientious. Go figure.
Lots of people fret and complain, “Where was God when I needed him?” Many people say this because they want or expect their concept of God to magically work and make them a rose garden. What God actually promises is that He will be with us through it all. He gives us the charge to go and do and He will give us the strength to do. Never easy, in the midst not emotionally uplifting, but we can endure. When we come out the other end, the other side, exit the tunnel, we are wiser and more honest with ourselves, more patient, more understanding, more kind, more generous, more fully human – as God intends. We are, that is, if we don’t expect God to be a magician that we can manipulate to get our current will.
Within 6-years I was unexpectantly dumped and lost my relationship – the reason I stayed in NYC and for which I worked a job I didn’t’ like. I was given my dream job. I had that dream job unexpectantly yanked away and told to fend for myself. I was unemployed and unable to support myself for two years. At 50, I had to depend on the generosity of my parents. I am in a position in life right now that if I knew this would be where I would end up 11-years later, I never would have entered seminary to begin with – even though I would not want to forgo the experience of my seminary education and formation and the people I’ve met and friends I’ve made along the way.
I’m stressed. I need to give myself a break. I need to understand what the last 6-years have done to me – particularly the last 2-years. It is hard to admit. It is hard to let go. It is hard to let some things end. It is hard to humble myself and not feel compelled to “prove them wrong” about me and the things I’ve discovered and created. I need to “use my word” more forthrightly, and this entry is my attempt.
Do We all bleed just the same…
We all bleed just the same – whether from the flesh, the heart-ache of loved ones lost, mental anguish. It makes no difference our political, religious, or social rank. It makes no difference our ethnicity or race or gender – identity of any kind. It makes no difference whether Gentile or Jew, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free – we all bleed just the same.
When I sit on my stoop in the early morning and talk to a hardened pain-in-the-butt regular who just arrived home on a bus from Florida, from his last parent’s funeral… wanting someone to acknowledge his crying grief and to just find someone to show his father’s Purple Heart, medals from Korea, his folded flag, the reference of his great-grandfather in a book about African-Americans in Seminole County – I know we all bleed just the same.
When a well-to-do uncle, husband, cousin, father, friend suddenly and unexpectedly dies on the operating table. When his funeral will be dignified and well attended in the midst of grief and heart-ache – know that we all bleed just the same.
Just Because He Breathes – Learning to Truly Love our Gay Son…
From a blog post by Linda Robertson, who prayed to not have a gay son. And, as she writes, their family got their wish, but just not in the way they thought. Her and her husband’s talking about their experiences and their late son is very moving.
In the years after Ryan came out to us, we often made decisions that caused him to feel distant and alone – alienated from the people that were supposed to know and love him best. Yes, sometimes parents of teenagers have to make those kind of decisions, and some that we made were, indeed, necessary and wise. But others served no purpose other than to control Ryan out of our own fear, and they resulted in painful division and strife between us.
Several years ago my friend Jodie said this, “I wonder if it has become easier to oppose ideologies than to actually love people.” There is a great deal of wisdom in that statement. For many Christian parents of LGBTQ adult children, I think it might be easier to “take a stance for the truth” and avoid attending their weddings, inviting their partners over for dinner, or including the person they are dating to the family Christmas gathering. It is harder, actually, to lean in and be a bit uncomfortable; it is more challenging to make myself vulnerable to being in an unfamiliar situation where I might not know how to act. I might feel out of place or unwanted. And sometimes I have felt out of place and unwanted. But from our experience, each time we take those kind of risks, when we intentionally get out of our comfort zones and follow God into the lives of others, He teaches us – through them – so many, many things we couldn’t have learned otherwise.
via Posts | Just Because He Breathes | Learning to Truly Love our Gay Son….
Read Linda’s piece in the Huffington Post, here.
Changing perceptions
It was interesting to me to see and hear what these young “creatives” from the Pratt Institute are thinking about in their design theory, creative process, social understanding, and sense of where things are going through their art (fine, graphic, communications, media, digital, etc.) and design (architecture, industrial, interior, fashion, furniture, etc.). 300 of Pratt’s most accomplished graduating students are presenting their work at the annual Pratt Institute juried exhibit at the Manhattan Center.
One observation deals with their projection of the “post-digital” age – their words. Did you “hear” that? A rediscovery and assertion of the analogue concept – not really about sound recording, but applied to all manner of things. There is a sense that their current reality is within a developing “post-digital” age in conceptual ways, but most profoundly in relational ways.
The other interesting observance deals with social understandings. In the “interior design” exhibit, there is a presentation of interior space as a means for relational community generation and development. The project deals with ways of designing large, interior gathering spaces, and in this instance a “mega-church” is the project focus. Remember, these are all incredibly well thought out projects – many have won national awards. Smack-dab in the middle of the interior depiction graphic of the “mega-church” are people in pews (yes, pews) as if right after the service is ending. Along with others, there are two guys holding hands, a couple. There are a good number of Christians at Pratt – and they are very adept at naturally integrating their faith in their creative work, but not like what general society is used to. My assumption is that a project depicting a “mega-church” is probably a Christian student’s.
Which leads me to this: The profoundly destructive battles being waged in the Culture Wars are just not there for these folks (a war mostly being fought by Baby-Boomers and the first part of GenX – like me). The dualistic tendencies (and frankly, fundamentalistic whether political or religious) are not present, as of yet. Yet, I say, because moving into adulthood in these times seems to dictate a giving up of hope, excitement, wonder, and discovery for something like cynicism, drudgery, abject anger, bitterness, and forlornness.
In these students, there is still hope! That’s why I like working with students – there is still positive hope!
Sex and Post-Christian
I came across this article in “The American Conservative” website. To be honest, I’m unfamiliar with the website or what I presume is the print magazine. This article, “Sex After Christianity: Gay marriage is not just a social revolution but a cosmological one,” by Rod Dreher brings up some interesting thoughts.
I find in the author’s analysis a lack of consideration that gay marriage may actually add to and encourage the same kind of communal commitments that are not individualistic. Marriage necessitates a giving up of a completely centered self. The equating of homosexuality and the desire for gay marriage with the relinquishing of a cultural propensity for the common good is wrong, I think.
I agree that the sexual revolution of the 1960’s changed nearly everything related to ideas of marriage and sexual ethics. I do think that the sexual revolution open more widely the doors of possibility for acceptance of same-sex relationships. Yet, heterosexual marriage was even more impacted by the sexual-revolution than were notions of acceptance of same-sex relationships.
I think same-sex marriage is a conservative position, as well as a progressive one. I have yet to find sociological studies of any substance (within technical definitions) that show that promiscuity, infidelity, hyper-individualism within sexual expression, etc., benefits the individuals involved or the common society. Yet, that is separate from same-sex relationships in and of themselves and whether same-sex marriage is a help or hindrance for the common good.
Anyway, here are a few paragraphs commenting on sociologist Philip Rieff’s ideas that I think should be considered on matter one’s position on same-sex marriage.
Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.
Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.
You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).
Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.
It is nearly impossible for contemporary Americans to grasp why sex was a central concern of early Christianity. Sarah Ruden, the Yale-trained classics translator, explains the culture into which Christianity appeared in her 2010 book Paul Among The People. Ruden contends that it’s profoundly ignorant to think of the Apostle Paul as a dour proto-Puritan descending upon happy-go-lucky pagan hippies, ordering them to stop having fun.
In fact, Paul’s teachings on sexual purity and marriage were adopted as liberating in the pornographic, sexually exploitive Greco-Roman culture of the time—exploitive especially of slaves and women, whose value to pagan males lay chiefly in their ability to produce children and provide sexual pleasure. Christianity, as articulated by Paul, worked a cultural revolution, restraining and channeling male eros, elevating the status of both women and of the human body, and infusing marriage—and marital sexuality—with love.
Christian marriage, Ruden writes, was “as different from anything before or since as the command to turn the other cheek.” The point is not that Christianity was only, or primarily, about redefining and revaluing sexuality, but that within a Christian anthropology sex takes on a new and different meaning, one that mandated a radical change of behavior and cultural norms. In Christianity, what people do with their sexuality cannot be separated from what the human person is.
It would be absurd to claim that Christian civilization ever achieved a golden age of social harmony and sexual bliss. It is easy to find eras in Christian history when church authorities were obsessed with sexual purity. But as Rieff recognizes, Christianity did establish a way to harness the sexual instinct, embed it within a community, and direct it in positive ways.
What makes our own era different from the past, says Rieff, is that we have ceased to believe in the Christian cultural framework, yet we have made it impossible to believe in any other that does what culture must do: restrain individual passions and channel them creatively toward communal purposes.
Rather, in the modern era, we have inverted the role of culture. Instead of teaching us what we must deprive ourselves of to be civilized, we have a society that tells us we find meaning and purpose in releasing ourselves from the old prohibitions.
How this came to be is a complicated story involving the rise of humanism, the advent of the Enlightenment, and the coming of modernity. As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.
Gradually the West lost the sense that Christianity had much to do with civilizational order, Taylor writes. In the 20th century, casting off restrictive Christian ideals about sexuality became increasingly identified with health. By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.
To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”
Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.
“Soldier” by Ingrid Michaelson
I’ve become…
I saw “Life of Pi”, yesterday, with Don. I had put off seeing the movie because I heard a number of more negative reports. I am so glad I saw it! As Don said something like, “I’ll have to be thinking about this movie for a long while.”, and I agree. It is an well done movie and an incredible story. The ending is what might be referred to as “profound.” (Only if you let it be, however.)
So much depends on what we choose to dwell on, what we choose to accommodate, what we decide to believe. It makes all the difference in the world, really. What story do we choose to inhabit?
I find myself in the spot I am now in, which, frankly, is not a particularly good spot, and I realize in many ways that I have put myself, here, or a least didn’t oppose progressing to this spot. I have lost an abiding joy, a positive outlook, and I’m afraid, hope. Doesn’t sound so good.
There are so many things I need to and have to let go of. While I may believe that I “fight the good fight” and for right reasons, if such a “fight” becomes poisonous, then I must stop. Over the last 10-years or so, I have allowed myself to be swallowed up by a whole lot of negativity, a whole lot of arguments that I cannot win because others are determined to win, taking upon my shoulders a burden that I cannot hope to throw off. I find myself poisoned. I let the poison happen. At times I might have even taken it willingly, though I didn’t consider the end result.
How does one let go? Blah, blah, blah… okay, but how? Really. Let go of situations, let go of people, let go of institutions… just let go. I need to let go, for my own sake. After 10-years, I don’t think I’ve changed anyone’s mind, helped changed anyone’s behavior, helped mold any outcome. I’ve just become poison, myself.