I can't believe I am still such a fool. Even now, after all this time, there is a part of me that still yearns for God, still longs to find him, to experience him as real.
Yesterday, I started a new writing project, the first one in a long, long time. I was excited, gave it my all for almost the whole day, and it felt good. So tonight, after a long day of work, coffee with my dearest friend, take-out for dinner blah blah, I opened up yesterday's document to carry on writing. And I re-read it. And it was all crap. It sucked. All the pleasure and excitement I'd felt yesterday, all the dreaming and scene-planning just fell away in a heart beat. I used to be able to write, now I'm not sure I have a usable talent any more. It all feels wooden, contrived, cliched. And that tipped me into deep sadness and despair. Writing is the only area I have ever felt I had a chance of making good in, of perhaps doing something of worthwhile, lasting value. Now, along with all the other losses that come with middle-age, I'm facing the loss of the only real talent I have ever had.
So I took myself off for a bath, knowing I needed to weep, to somehow release this sadness from my spirit. And as I soaked and cried, I found that my grief extended far beyond the simple fact that maybe I'll never be any good as a writer. Yes, I grieved for that. But in the depths of the despair and pain, I found a deeper grief. It's hard to explain, but comes down to one simple and utterly unanswerable question:
Even if I was a good writer, what would be the point of it, anyway? It seems to me that life is essentially meaningless. What, I ask, is the Meaning of Life?
I'm NOT talking about what gives my life or your life individual meaning, like maybe I write good stories that move people emotionally. I'm talking about meaning on a global scale. On an individual level, I may feel good for a while about my achievement, and my readers may either laugh, or cry, and maybe they'll learn a little more about something. But in the end, life comes down to a seventy-something- year cycle in which we eat, we drink, we reproduce, and eventually, we die. Just like plants, or animals, or algae, or tapeworms. And when we're gone, we may be remembered by a few for a short while, but most of us will be forgotten within a decade or two unless we happen to be Hitler or Churchill or Ghandi or Mandela.
No, my question is what is the point of human beings as a species existing on this planet?
If the only point to our lives is simply to reproduce ourselves so that the species is perpetuated, then I really don't get it. If there is no higher purpose to human life as a whole on this planet, then what is the friggin' point of us existing at all? Some may say that we exist to help and serve others. Fine. So what are all the 'others' doing that is so important then? Why, like us, they're basically just getting through each day, doing what they need to do to stay alive and making sure that they to manage to reproduce themselves, so that they can leave more people behind who then have to do what they need to do to get through life themselves until they die, leaving behind yet more people ...and round and round it goes.
If that's all there is, it seems extremely pointless to me, even for those of us who do manage to have a nice time while we're on the planet.
So as I lay in the bath and wept and contemplated the awful emptiness of the existential abyss, I once again realized that what I wanted above all else--above my need to be able to write properly, above my need to get all my problems solved, above my need to be loved--what I yearned for most deeply of all was, shamefully, still 'God'. Meaning someone or something who exists beyond the limitations of this physical life, to show me that there IS life beyond birth and death, and that that life--whatever form it may take--is meaningful and eternal. I was horrified to discover that even after multiple disappointments, even after countless nights spent weeping and begging God to 'help me' know the reality of himself, even after at last making a start on the deconstruction of the faith that has proved so impossible to sustain over more than 25 years, after all this, I still hope for 'God'.
About a year ago, when talking to one of my dearest friends in all the world, I said to her that even though my faith had taken a huge knock, I wasn't going anywhere. If God wanted to find me, he knew where I was, and if he wanted me, he needed to come get me because I have spent almost all my adult life running after God, and never finding him in a way that allowed me to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he is REAL.
And yet, I still cry, yearning and longing for something I'll never have. It's pathetic, really. How the hell do I get past this? Does one ever?
It's very sad.
Friday, August 31
Saturday, August 25
Burnout in Progress...
Having just got over my second bout of flu this winter (and I never usually even get sick!) and feeling very flat and wiped out, I was trying to figure out why I was proving so susceptible to passing viruses all of a sudden, and why this bout of illness had also left me all depressed and lethargic too.
So I stopped mentally and looked at what was going on in my life at the moment and that was when the "Aha!" moment happened.
If I step back and look at my life objectively, there is a heck of a lot of stressful change going on right now. And Stress leads to Burnout, which often brings with it a Depressed Immune System. Which explains why I'm getting sick and why I feel like I'm just not coping as efficiently as I usually manage to do.
I did an online stress / burnout questionnaire: The key said:
36 - 50 = Candidate for Burnout
51 - 65 = You are Burning Out
Over 66 = You Are In A Dangerous Place!!
My score is 69.
Guess some emergency stress management is called for! :-) At least I can identify most of the sources of stress, now I just need to figure out how to prioritize and then deal with all of them!
Two weeks holiday sounds like a good start.....
So I stopped mentally and looked at what was going on in my life at the moment and that was when the "Aha!" moment happened.
If I step back and look at my life objectively, there is a heck of a lot of stressful change going on right now. And Stress leads to Burnout, which often brings with it a Depressed Immune System. Which explains why I'm getting sick and why I feel like I'm just not coping as efficiently as I usually manage to do.
I did an online stress / burnout questionnaire: The key said:
36 - 50 = Candidate for Burnout
51 - 65 = You are Burning Out
Over 66 = You Are In A Dangerous Place!!
My score is 69.
Guess some emergency stress management is called for! :-) At least I can identify most of the sources of stress, now I just need to figure out how to prioritize and then deal with all of them!
Two weeks holiday sounds like a good start.....
Friday, August 24
Mother Theresa's Crisis of Faith
Mother Theresa, according to a new innocuously titled book, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (Doubleday), was a woman whose soul was divided in two. Her public face wore a smile of spiritual content and joy that hid the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" inside her: a spiritual aridity that began in 1948 and persisted, with a break in 1959 of only five weeks, until her death in 1997. Fifty years of pretending to the world that all was well with her soul... of never feeling or knowing God's presence, and at times, even doubting the existence of Heaven and God himself.
Read the FULL ARTICLE HERE.
But there's more. After reading the article, I became curious about this woman who could live with such cognitive dissonance for so long. What drove her? What kind of a personality was she? What made her the Sainted Mother so many came to see her as? Was she in fact a spiritual giant, or did she suffer from a personality disorder of some sort?
I found very little about her personality or personal life beyond that which is known already. There was much that venerated the work she did, but disturbingly, I also found much that raised hard-to-answer questions about aspects of the work too. HERE is a reprint from the conservative German magazine STERN, published in 1998, that calls both her ministry and its financial management into question--questions that remain unanswered until today....
Read the FULL ARTICLE HERE.
But there's more. After reading the article, I became curious about this woman who could live with such cognitive dissonance for so long. What drove her? What kind of a personality was she? What made her the Sainted Mother so many came to see her as? Was she in fact a spiritual giant, or did she suffer from a personality disorder of some sort?
I found very little about her personality or personal life beyond that which is known already. There was much that venerated the work she did, but disturbingly, I also found much that raised hard-to-answer questions about aspects of the work too. HERE is a reprint from the conservative German magazine STERN, published in 1998, that calls both her ministry and its financial management into question--questions that remain unanswered until today....
Sunday, August 19
Coming Out of the Closet
For weeks I have been wanting to post here about the journey I am currently on. So now I'm going to do it, probably in a series of posts over the next months as the journey continues.
At the age of 13, I became a born-again, water-baptized, spirit-filled Christian - a believer in God and a follower of His Son, Jesus. That tag has been my core identity, in one way or another, since that time. But that's no longer a core truth in my life--and may not even be a truth at all.
I'm not sure I have a tag to describe what I'd call me right now. Agnostic is probably the closest, but even that doesn't cover it - there's no easy label for what you become when your faith life falls apart and you find yourself adrift on a sea of existential doubt, despair and confusion. I've learnt that this is a well-documented process however and I'm far from the first person to have undertaken this particular journey, which btw, has a name.
It's called Deconversion.
Conversion, I read in a scholarly article somewhere online, is usually a sudden, rapid, emotional transformation. Deconversion, however, is a long, slow cognitive process, which is exactly what it's been for me. I have no idea where the journey will end, no specific goal or destination in sight except to find out the Truth about what we think of as "God" for myself, as best I can. So far, its been heartbreaking, challenging, scary, difficult and very, very lonely. But once you set foot on the road, there's no turning back--you can't undo the thoughts that have been thought, the books that have been read, the online conversations that have been held.
And some of those online conversations have become a lifeline of hope in my sea of despair! In particular, I'm relishing the conversation at Julie Unplugged (Falling Away From Faith series of posts).
I've also been reading a lot:
A History of God, by Karen Armstrong.
Leaving the Fold, by Marlene Winnell.
From Missionary Bible Translator to Agnostic, by Ken Daniels (which was one of the first things I read that helped me realize I truly wasn't mad, heretical, backslidden, unhinged or any of the above)
TBC.
At the age of 13, I became a born-again, water-baptized, spirit-filled Christian - a believer in God and a follower of His Son, Jesus. That tag has been my core identity, in one way or another, since that time. But that's no longer a core truth in my life--and may not even be a truth at all.
I'm not sure I have a tag to describe what I'd call me right now. Agnostic is probably the closest, but even that doesn't cover it - there's no easy label for what you become when your faith life falls apart and you find yourself adrift on a sea of existential doubt, despair and confusion. I've learnt that this is a well-documented process however and I'm far from the first person to have undertaken this particular journey, which btw, has a name.
It's called Deconversion.
Conversion, I read in a scholarly article somewhere online, is usually a sudden, rapid, emotional transformation. Deconversion, however, is a long, slow cognitive process, which is exactly what it's been for me. I have no idea where the journey will end, no specific goal or destination in sight except to find out the Truth about what we think of as "God" for myself, as best I can. So far, its been heartbreaking, challenging, scary, difficult and very, very lonely. But once you set foot on the road, there's no turning back--you can't undo the thoughts that have been thought, the books that have been read, the online conversations that have been held.
And some of those online conversations have become a lifeline of hope in my sea of despair! In particular, I'm relishing the conversation at Julie Unplugged (Falling Away From Faith series of posts).
I've also been reading a lot:
A History of God, by Karen Armstrong.
Leaving the Fold, by Marlene Winnell.
From Missionary Bible Translator to Agnostic, by Ken Daniels (which was one of the first things I read that helped me realize I truly wasn't mad, heretical, backslidden, unhinged or any of the above)
TBC.
Saturday, August 18
Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
This article, in the NY Times of 14th August, postulates a fascinating theory regarding the nature of the universe ...."There's a 20% chance" says Nick Bostrom, philosopher and the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, "that we might be living in someone else's computer simulation. "
What, he says, if some futuristic computer geeks, using advanced computing power, were running ancestor simulations to explore their evolutionary history, or were maybe even just having fun, the way today's kids play The Sims, Warcraft etc? It could mean that nothing we see, hear, feel, taste, touch, or experience is real. Its all virtual. WE are all virtual. Which would go a long way to supporting the idea of multiple or parallel universes
He explores the concept in some depth, wondering whether in fact those futuristic computer geeks might not be computer simulations themselves, with layer upon layer of simulations until you get all the way back to the Prime Designer....
But here's the most interesting aspect. He says: "It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude."
Read the whole article HERE.
What, he says, if some futuristic computer geeks, using advanced computing power, were running ancestor simulations to explore their evolutionary history, or were maybe even just having fun, the way today's kids play The Sims, Warcraft etc? It could mean that nothing we see, hear, feel, taste, touch, or experience is real. Its all virtual. WE are all virtual. Which would go a long way to supporting the idea of multiple or parallel universes
He explores the concept in some depth, wondering whether in fact those futuristic computer geeks might not be computer simulations themselves, with layer upon layer of simulations until you get all the way back to the Prime Designer....
But here's the most interesting aspect. He says: "It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude."
Read the whole article HERE.
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