Still Building

Rebuilding after a wrecking ball crashes, figuratively, into the living room of your faith is not easy. Though, while the damage is not irreparable, I find myself in a cracked house, sitting atop the half of the sofa that hasn't been crushed, surveying the damage. All I can salvage perhaps really is gratitude that the destruction missed my person...

Or, maybe it is not as dramatic as this; the slow erosion of certainty into life's river. Nothing has been lost, just reshaped, repurposed, or reconfigured. Instead of standing atop an impermeable edifice, I just sit next to a creek, pebbles shimmering with the sun and the gentle current. Sometimes, I see a ghostly figure gesturing to me with a coy smile. Sometimes, He appears close enough for me to offer him broiled fish. At other times, it is the breeze telling me "do not fear", and at others, it's a person with breasts and wings offering a hug.

Somehow, I turned from a sweet little girl who never questioned anything into a woman whose questions never cease.
Not to say I lost my faith, or that my Faith lost me. But, it is no longer the naive faith of "a child" in the idealized sense, the shivering orphan child of William Blake, Les miserables. Not the black and white, unnuanced faith of the preoperational five year old: the world divided and neatly organized. Life is too complex for easy sunday school answers.

Why does evil exist?

Why aren't all genders and sexual, racial, and ethnic minories equally valued yet?

How can we stop our rampant consumerism?

What happens when we die?

What, exactly, does an "inerrant" Bible mean?

Adam and Eve? Or, fourteen billion years of evolution? (you can guess how I feel about evolution here)...

No, I'm more like a toddler, actually, climbing up things and learning and relearning everything, making messes, scribbling all over the walls. Learning what works. Testing boundaries. My faith is in its terrible twos. I feel I just learned the word "no," something not in my vocabulary previously. It is probably less than orthodox, but through the process of experimentation, I can distinguish the toxic from non-toxic substances.

I am so much younger than I used to be. In Jewish tradition, Midrash is not demonized as it is in protestantism. So, when I read scripture now, it is more like this, more like playing the flute than listening to a dirge. It is, more often than not, a mirror we use to find our own reflection instead of Godde. It seems like a Rorscach test. Godde knows, I read it that way sometimes.

Not that this means I do not take it seriously.

I just take my interpretations less seriously. And everyone else's as well. And, since no heavenly voice has yet called down to give us the right interpretation, all we have are, as Rufus the Lost Disciple said in the movie Dogma, a good idea or a series of good ideas (Dogma, by the way, is perhaps my favorite bit of Midrash). Ideas can change with new information; beliefs make us kill each other.

Lest i am misunderstood, I do "believe" (or, as i prefer, trust) in Godde. I'm neither "wishy-washy" nor am i relativist. I just no longer feel the need to defend anything. I am Mary after the resurrection of Christ.

"Do not cling to me," relinquish control over me.

If Godde is real, S/He does not need our defensiveness. There are no need for Bible battles. Or, culture wars. Or literal wars. Or the need for anyone else to die, or be denied life or love in the name of Godde. Truth. The American Way.

Godde does not need protection. People do.

In the Psalms, when David calls on Godde to avenge his enemies, I realized the enemies lay in wait as easily inside of him as without. The enemies of hatred, loathing, fear: dash their children on the rocks!

As they do for me. Voices of hatred, loathing, anger, and pain so internalized that only Godde can dislodge them. Voices that tempt me to hurt others, or my personal Others (everybody has an other, sadly)

When Jesus warns that the wheat and weeds will grow together before the chaff is burnt, I realize that inside myself there are both weeds and wheat. When he talks of the sheep and goats, I recognize myself in both camps. Who has not passed up the opportunity to do a good deed, or who has not gone out of their way to do a good deed? who has never been a goat, or a sheep, or both at once? Who has never felt a weed emerge from the cracks of their heart, especially after it has been wounded.

All I know, for certain, is that if we have not love, we are clanging gongs...

Maranantha!