Old Friends and Idiots, Worth the Effort

A short, “normal” entry, then back to our crazy, rambling theories.

Recently, I’ve had the chance to sit down and talk with a few friends that I haven’t seen in a while, friends that happened to be some of the people who’ve been around me the longest.

One of those times, I saw a friend that I used to see nearly every day, and whom I now still see on the rare occasion. We were catching up, and when I spoke, I began to go right to the normal script–what I’ve been up to in my professional life and how I’ve volunteered my time lately–but I stopped myself. It’s not that he wouldn’t have cared; he probably would have listened politely. However, I realized that all of that didn’t mean anything to him, didn’t have a context in how the two of us know each other. In fact, he has a completely different idea of the person I am than my work and church acquaintances.

I spend a lot of time–more time than ever, lately–wearing my “professional” hat. Since I’ve been especially busy these past few weeks, I’ve been sort of feeling stuck in that mode, parceling out the hours of my life to be expended for the sake of productivity and accomplishment. Most of my conversations are polite, and are either functional or small talk, so rarely do I have the elusive “real conversation,” and when I do, I always feel like I’ve opened my big mouth too much, that this probably isn’t the place for the sharing and examining of opinions.

It was refreshing, then, to have a genuine conversation with someone that wasn’t tailoring his opinion for the sake of propriety, to whom I could speak honestly. I like that sort of interaction best. I keep up a lot of walls, and when I don’t, run the risk of being inappropriately candid and violating some sort of unspoken social contract, as it’s taken me years to learn (and yet, not master, unfortunately.)

So, we caught up, and I didn’t mention a word about work. We talked about my wanting to see Weezer at Austin City Limits, who was playing at Bonnaroo (I advised him to bring baby wipes), how his girlfriend was doing, what sort of work his truck needed. Then he said, “Hold on, this guy’s an idiot, I have to go make sure he doesn’t f–k this up,” and stepped away purposefully.

Hearing it made me laugh and laugh (and I’m still laughing now), and suddenly, I was relaxed in a way that I hadn’t been in a while. I’m not really sure why, but I think it’s because it was such a jarring contrast to the polite, inoffensive vernacular that I hear all day every day in the professional settings that I frequent. I’ve told this friend before that he has a very keen sense of justice, and I think it was kicking into drive in his character assessment of said “idiot.”  I am never going to have to pretend to be anything other than who I am in from of him, the guy that, years ago, had to help carry me to my car after a night of partying, who knew me as a helplessly awkward, obnoxious teenager. Sometimes I need the reminder that I am more than my functions, that I am allowed my indiscretions and my humanity (and the occasional horribly offensive thought or comment.)

The other incident was when I briefly got to visit someone who has been my friend longer than anyone. We didn’t have much time, and our conversation, in the presence of others, was polite. It was good to see her, though, stirred up a lot of fondness and nostalgia that I don’t know if I’ve always been capable of, since I have only recently been programmed to feel emotion (kidding… sort of.) She’s one of those people that I don’t realize how much I miss until I’m in her presence, is a tie to some part of my life to which I don’t dedicate a lot of thought anymore unless it is in some way brought to my attention–the girl that I was.

I can tell that we’ve both changed, that we’re becoming capable, happy, well-rounded women. She now has a successful career and several creative enterprises, and I’ve finally found a way to launch myself out of inertia and into adulthood. It’s a long shot from pretending we were Power Rangers together and giving boys code names so we could talk about them in anonymity. She’ll be moving far away soon, much farther away than she lives now, but her influence on my life is undeniable, and is only now, with the benefit of hindsight, beginning to crystallize. Of all the people that I “ran off” in my life, she was the first to forgive me and keep hanging around anyway. The lesson has taken a while to sink in, and I realize that I haven’t been so kind to some of the people in my life.

That’s the thing about old friends–they shape us, make us who we are, give us some perspective, even keep us humble while reminding us that we are valued. She was present before my behaviors were patterns, when they were just decisions made in response to some stimulus. If she hadn’t been there, who would I have become? Who else would have been there, if anyone had been at all? What would I have learned?

I can rant and rave about the government and technology to a couple of friends that I saw meet, marry, and raise a family, knowing that they won’t think any less of me for my hare-brained, quasi-paranoid rhetoric because we’re building on the foundation of many late night talks in college about faith, theology, and dreams of self reliance. I’ve so enjoyed corresponding by e-mail with one of my dearest friends from high school because he is a special mix of change and the same–still the same man of character and a connection to the my Baptist “roots” and foundations in theology, but always engaging his life, growing and changing and enjoying returns on his efforts, yet still with some pristine, untarnished, hopeful image of me. I don’t often see that in myself, and it helps to have someone who believes the best in me.

Then, there’s Cass, not an “old friend,” but the one who knows me the best, but that’s another entry (A Kingdom of Its Own, I think I called one once. If I’m not lazy or forgetful, I’ll come back and link it.)

The point of all of this is that old friends orient you, keep you in a special awareness of the person you are by reminding you each of the person you once were, and how much of that person you still are sometimes. It strengthens my belief in community, in forgiveness and loving others, in opening up and letting others love me. That being said, there’s no guarantee that the friendships I’m making now will be lasting; a few people have made abrupt, unexplained departures from my life, some have been borne away by distance and time. Yet, some of them have stuck around, to my unending amazement (after all these years, I’m still surprised when people like me, it turns out), and that makes the effort worth it.

Brain Gymnasium (Part 2)

Part two of my message to a correspondent. 

 

—————————–

On second thought, add 

 

Theory and Practice and

Focus and Attention

 

to our list of metaphors. 

 

Anyway, to continue:

 

Government cannot only be one or the other–a social program or a moral standard–because we cannot divorce these things in our existence, and neither can we if we are going to be a society. We are responsible for our own identity, and also for our treatment of others. Jesus said that all of the commandments hung on two things: To love God, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. 

 

When we expand the concept to a graph, it’s a lot easier to examine the dynamics of the relationship, and how we achieve balance. 

 

“How can you say ‘I love God,’ but hate your brother?” Jesus tells us that without loving our brother, it is impossible to love God. What if we love our brother as well as ourself, but not God (that is to say, are solipsistic and not anchored in Reality)? If God is the ground of our being and we don’t love him, then can not love ourselves, and therefore reduce our capacity to love and cannot love our brother. 

 

So, a deficit in either Loving God or Loving Brother eventuates in annihilation. It stands to reason that the only way to secure existence (and eternal life/life abundant, a life without limit in fullness or duration, is the point of all of this, though many are too short-sighted to realize it) is to do both of these things. 

 

We’ve begun to enter into the concept of Christ, the Man Who called Himself “the Way, the Truth, and the Light.” If Father God and the Holy Spirit are the Y and X axes (respectively, and in relation to how the political compass is structured), then Christ is the Z axis, creating the 3rd dimension on our little graph. 

 

(I vaguely remember some diagrams in physics that have to do with magnetic orientation and electronic flow, but the memories are very vague and possibly faulty. I think that if I understood them, it would help to shed light on these concepts that I’m painstakingly piecing together.)

 

So, more on the concept of Christ, as I promised when we were talking about a ball rolling down the hill: 

 

I said a little while back that God was Him in Whom we live, move, and have our being. When living and moving are in proper balance, and that is to say neither has lead the other (or the whole entity, as would eventually happen) into annihilation, we are. We enter the third dimension, which, in our world, is where existence is, where we have our being. How fully we enter it is up to us.

 

It didn’t click with me until we were discussing kinetic and potential energy and where that went that Christ must be the “environment” in some way. We cannot exist in a vacuum, and nature abhors a vacuum, so it stands to reason that Christ is the alternative. In fact, I like the Greek way of thinking about it–Christ as the Logos, the Living Word. A lot of contemporary Christians have trouble seeing past the particular circumstances that surrounded Christ while He walked on Earth–a man named Jesus, born of a Virgin in Bethlehem, performed miracles, had 12 disciples, died on the cross and rose from the dead. That’s all completely true of Christ, but He is so much more, and His flesh was just one of an infinite number of manifestations of the Logos, of God’s Living Word. 

 

The word “Word,” in fact, implies many things, such as there being a speaker and someone to hear, a direction in which the call proceeds, meaning contained within what is spoken, etc. 

 

So, how do we enter into or exit being? This is where an understanding of electricity and magnetism would come in handy, but I’ll get to that later, most likely tomorrow since I have a late night ahead. As it is, however, I have to leave, and so really, I suppose I’ve just set the stage to answer your questions about what exactly I meant by my comments on creativity versus destruction, and all that stuff about black holes and increasing/decreasing the magnitude of the Self. 

 

Hope you enjoyed the read! I’m excited to talk with you about it because I think you’re a very strong conceptual thinker, especially given how talented you were in mathematics. 

Brain Gymnasium: The Merger of Science and Theology (Part 1)

Part One of my e-mail correspondence from today, broken up into two parts because I am a believer in mercy, and I really want you to stick with the whole thing.

Same caveats: Not edited, just copied and pasted. Forgive typos, grammar, incoherence, etc. It was typed in a frenzy.

———————————-

 

Okay, so here goes nothing.

The funny thing is, before I was going to write you, I was writing an entry for Being Steph Mabou on focus and attention… but kept getting distracted. Maybe for another day.

It helps for me to talk with people about my ideas, because I like I said to you in chat, I often think that some logic is self evident when actually, it is. My comprehension has tended to be more wordless lately, and I’m not sure if that’s because of an advance or decline on my reasoning abilities–have my verbal abilities gotten rusty from lack of use, or have I discovered a new way of understand that transcends words? I think it’s probably a little bit of both; although while I don’t think that I’ve lost too terribly much of my vocabulary, it takes a lot more effort to maintain a linear train of thought as I age an am exposed to multitasking and attention-suckers for hours a day. Then again, it’s much more efficient for me to understand concepts by their relation to each other and in the context of a unified theory, so the words often aren’t necessary, or it’s actually less efficient to expound verbally. I think a fair mix of both is optimal, and is why Jesus spoke in parables, which are metaphors set to prose.

It’s important to understand my method of thinking if you’re going to understand the whole point of this little metaphor that I keep referring to as wave/particle, matter/energy, love/will, etc. Like I said, the drawing looks like this:

O~>

We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how attention and memory works, and it’s generally accepted that the more associations between two points of data, the more likely it is that we’ll remember. I see several implications right away. The first is, without an “anchor,” we just have a loose associations of data. Without a reference point to which we may connect and refer this data, any and all of it could slowly dissociate and fade from memory. Who’s to say what parts of it we’ll lose? We’d probably start with those data that are least often utilized, bits of information on the fringe of our thinking, but how can there be a fringe if there is no center? Without synthesis into broad concepts, the information is at stake and easily lost. It’s why rote memorization is one of the lowest forms of learning, and also why you tend to remember concepts more than particulars when you recall a subject that you learned in school–that there was a war and these two countries were in it, what decade it took place in, and what they were fighting over, but not the names of the generals, the date of the shot first fired, where the bloodiest battles took place. Sometimes a detail or two will stick for whatever reason–you made a mnemonic device that really worked, or were just particularly interested in a certain tidbit–but mostly, you remember the “core” of the data, the broad themes, the simplified version. In short, we are more likely to remember that which is unified.

This is the way that the human brain functions most efficiently, and this is the way to higher awareness. It also makes thought processes much more efficient as far as the time and energy that you have to devote to a subject to comprehend it.

That being said, I didn’t really realize what I was doing, but I seem to have located my “central point.” Now, that’s not to say that this is the end all be all of knowing for me, but at this stage in my life, this is the work that my brain has been doing. Who knows what’s ahead? I feel like I’m building a foundation.

The concepts are all rooted in theology, and like I’ve mentioned to you before, I believe that God is “the ground of being.” The Book of Common Prayer says something about the God “in which we live, and move, and have our being,” so we’ll start there, but I may have to leave soon. I function better on a time crunch, it seems.

I’ve been drawing that little picture: O~> for a couple years now, and have tried talking with people about it, but always end up feeling sort of foolish when they look at me like I’m insane. It seems very self evident to me, but I’m aware that it’s not, and that it takes some work to relate it, at least. The diagram is, essentially, of a relationship. My thought that was it was similar to the Father and Holy Spirit concepts of God from Christian theology. I haven’t been able to factor in the Son, but it’s beginning to dawn on me. Anyway, we’ll get to that.

The relationship is like:
Form and Function
Love and Will
Particle and Wave
Matter and Energy
Meaning and Purpose

I’m sitting here thinking of how to explain it and it’s difficult. Remember those puzzles we had to do for SAT practice? That’s the best way that I can explain it.

Form: function :: Love : will.
Particle: wave :: Matter : Energy.

My only guess is that in picking two qualifiers, we add dimension, and allow for being. There are conditions for these qualifiers–they should have an inseparable quality, but at the same time, it is impossible to unify them completely. Allow me to attempt to clarify, although in this next example, we’re increasing the degree to which this metaphor applies.

Another favorite drawing of mine is a graph, with an X and Y axis. For the sake of illustartion, we’ll look at the political compass. On the vertical axis are issues of morals and authority. On the horizontal, issues of society and economics. In order for government to exist, it must find a place on both of these two axes. A body that takes a stance on social/economic issues also inevitably takes a stance on authoritative issues, even if that stance is laissez-faire. Once you’ve “bought in” to one axis, you’re bound to the other.

If you’re for government having authority to make rules promoting the common good (or however they sell it to you), then in order to be “plottable,” you have to have a stance on social/economic issues.

(Modern Conservatives tend to fall in the top right quadrant, whereas Liberals fall in the bottom right. At least, that’s how it used to be, or how it is in theory. What we’re seeing now is more and more people shifting towards positions of either Libertarianism–in the pure sense, like anarchy, not like Tea Partiers–or Authoritarianism. These positions are far less stable but also have a lot more “energy,” and it reminds me of chemical reagents undergoing changes and pausing briefly in these high energy states on their way to a lower energy, stable conformation.)

Brain Sweat, Black Holes, A Unified Theory of Existence, and of course, Pinkerton

This is unusual, but I’ve spent a long time playing with a lot of little theories that are beginning to coalesce and unite, and so I’ve begun to discuss them with my peers. I have a few different correspondents  with whom I communicate regularly to occasionally. Most of them have some theological element, whereas the “flavor” of each changes.

The following (loooong) entry is a message I’ve just sent the friend to whom I go with scientific or mathematical inquiries. I’m leaving it largely unedited, so please remember the intended audience and forgive me any non-sequitors. I was a lot less careful with this e-mail than I would have been for an entry, and in sort of a rush, so there are spelling and grammar errors, incomplete sentences, unfinished thoughts, etc. Without further ado:

5/18/2012
To: Correspondent
Subject: messages from the black hole

Hey!

Had a few thoughts this morning I thought I’d share. I’m beginning to find that the metaphor is the language of theology. Jesus’ parables were really extended metaphors, after all.

Before that, though, a short comment: I’m sorry I’m such a horrible correspondence. I really crave the communication with people, but a lot of times I’m too lazy to make the effort when the correspondence requires more of it (and yours often require a lot of “brain sweat,” to use a term I read yesterday), so for that I’m sorry. Anyway, thanks for writing as often as you do and not giving up on me, and for the frequent words of encouragement (especially the message you sent about not giving up on the story. It ended up being one more “puzzle piece” and I think I’m working my way towards a solution.) I’ve written “messages from the black hole” as the subject line because 1) I am a black hole of correspondences 2) Rivers Cuomo’s rock opera was titled “Songs from the Black Hole,” and 3) some of my message is going to address black holes, in a little segment I like to call “some idiot’s theories on the super massive and its relationship to destruction and The Lie.”

I haven’t reread your message on God and being in a little while, but a short comment to clarify (I hope), mentioned here because it leads into the topics I’d like to discuss, and even incorporates some of our discussion on the nature and implications of sin: if we are made “in the image of God,” and God is being, or “I am,” then it must be that the closer to union with the Divine we are, the more we are. (I suppose the further away we are, the more we are not, or the more the statement becomes false, which makes me ask–is there some “tipping point” between being righteous and wicked? There are active and passive forms of good and evil, like the difference between “the wicked” and “the fool” in scripture? but I digress.)

Anyway, to move closer to union with God is to be more fully, so it stands to reason that any attempt we make to be will bring us closer to union with God.

So, if God is “the ground of being” like I’ve asserted before, then what is the nature of being?

I may have told you about the little dichotomy that I like to play around with. It sort of nestled itself into my head shortly after my conversion, and has become the basis for a lot of my reflections. It’s the relationship between Love and Will, matter and energy, wave and particle, meaning and purpose, form and function, potential and kinetic energy, etc. There’s no better way to explain it than to refer to it by examples, and the examine the connection between the concepts. I.e., matter is energy, and energy is matter, but the two, while completely of each other, are not the same, or are at least different manifestations. Do you remember hearing in science class that every particle that had mass also had movement? I think that they called it “brownian motion.” You cannot divorce energy from matter, and vice versa.

You begin to get a clue as to the nature of the Trinity, I think, when you consider Christian concepts of “God the Father” and “God the Holy Spirit.” If the Father is the “particle” part of the metaphor, that makes the Holy Spirit the “wave.” From what I understand about Christianity, this makes the most sense. The Holy Spirit is “like the wind,” which is, I think, to say all action and yet, no substance of which to speak (ignoring, of course, particles in the air, etc. for the sake of the metaphor.) The Son is the part that I have trouble working into the equation. I think that He must be Beauty or Mystery to Meaning and Purpose, maybe Impact when you consider Wave and Particle. His very nature is paradoxical and very difficult to understand, so I’ll pass over that for now.

I think that this is the basic functional unit of being, and you can see its echos throughout creation. For instance, in the individual human, who we are and what we do comprise our identity. A society is defined by its moral/authoritative stance, and also by its social/economic actions. (We’ll revisit this and the nature of government eventually.)

Okay, so that being said, now that we have an idea of the functional unit of being, I want to tell you about some little theories I’ve been working on.

Are you familiar with the concept of solipsism? Briefly, it it’s the claim that only the self can be proven to exist, and I’ve begun to think that this is the nature of “The Lie.” Of course, I’m going to have to define what the self is, or rather, which self I’m talking about, since the human being is a Self and a Pseudo-self.

I’m going to explain my premise, and then elaborate. It’s going to be difficult for me; there are a lot of concepts that I consider parallel, so it’s difficult to make them “linear” or to ascertain in which order they should be presented for the most coherence, but let’s give it a shot. (I should have worn some brain deodorant.)

I started by considering two concepts:

1) The nature of prayer is a connection with Being. The power we get from prayer naturally translates into God’s action in the world (I heard it said a short time ago that whenever Jesus was recorded as praying, action always followed), and my thought is that this action further disposes us to the reception of prayer. (In case you didn’t see a recent entry I wrote, Love informs Will, which perpetuates Love.)

There are many forms of prayer, but I believe that prayer of the highest order is reception of the Divine, and that we are most likely to receive when we have disposed ourselves to silence and stillness. That is, we increasingly work to become nothing. The prayer and the subsequent action begin to reduce the part of our being that we may perceive.

Prayer is such a mysterious concept, but I think that it stands to reason that prayer is the way to eternal life, for reasons I’ll explain soon.

2) According to Christ, “The love of mammon is the root of all evil.” Mammon is often translated to money, and I never knew that there was an alternative interpretation until college. Mammon, of course, being material wealth or gain, an investment in substance.

That always struck me as pretty bold–the root of all evil?–but the words were from Jesus. If they’d been from the Apostle Paul or one of the other epistles, I might have dismissed them. I stored them away and puzzled over them for years–money didn’t seem evil to me, and it certainly didn’t seem sinful to want to have money. (Although, remember that thing that went around senior year about women being evil, using that verse as a proof? Hahaha.)

As an adult, though, now I’m able to tease out the concept a little more and relate to it in metaphors. Let’s revert back to the term “mammon” for clarity. I’d draw you pictures, but I’m running out of time and I’m going to attempt to explain it in words. There is one picture that you need in your head, though, and it’s how I draw my little dichotomy. I draw a circle, and then, projecting from it, a squiggly line, capped by an arrow. There we have it: form/function, particle/wave, etc.

Okay, now that we have the two considerations and an illustration to work with, here goes:

Imagine, if you will, that the action of the particle we’re consider goes into investing into the material being of the particle. Or, in other words and for the sake of example, we start as a neutral matter/energy. At this point, either our matter may convert for the sake of fortifying our energy, so now our matter is at zero, and our energy is at +1. That +1 energy may then direct itself towards investing in matter. I believe the mechanism by which this happens has to do with consumption (and therefore, destruction/conversion of some other entity.) Regardless, now we have a matter of +1. That matter is now able, through gravity, or consumption, or whatever this mysterious mechanism is, to command more energy for itself, I believe increasingly proportionally to its existing state. This time, in its conversion to energy, we end up with a greater value: +2.

(Let me interrupt myself to say that you don’t necessarily have to start with matter to energy. You may start with energy and first reinforce matter, but there’s no determinable origin, or rather, God is the origin and we have no way to determine which way we’re going to go first. Maybe it’s our choice, maybe it’s chance, or a combination of both.)

The cycle can continue on and on. The being is reinforcing itself, gaining greater and greater mass and energy for the sole purpose of reinforcing its own being.

Now, there’s a spectrum here, and there are fluctuations. It won’t continue to go up in stages of integers, or even in a linear direction. Some beings may spend their existence reaching a plateau and then sort of hanging around that particular quantifiable level for as long as they exist. (Then again, don’t all beings eventually chose to exist or not exist? What is the “tipping point?”)

What’s the alternative? In the first consideration, we said that prayer was reception, and that it was achieved by silence and stillness. Essentially, the being releases its claim to the matter and energy. Instead of commanding substance and force, substance and force are freely spent, donated to the environment (the same place from which these massive entities above are drawing their energy.)

Now, let’s consider the fate of these two beings. The first draws from its environment (no attempts in this message to describe it, short on time) and by consuming/destroying that which it gains, reinforces itself. Eventually, this little cluster becomes more and more fortified with sameness, dedication to the preservation of a finite entity which has severed itself from the Source. I think of it as cooling down, approaching Absolute Zero, but I couldn’t say why. It eventually becomes supermassive, and its gravitational pull becomes impossible to escape.

The other particle is spending itself for the benefit of the environment, in an effort that is creative. Eventually, its mass becomes so small as to be impossible to detect, and instead of its energy being used to consume its environment and trap it with its gravitational pull, it’s actually donating to the environment, like light and heat do, mysterious imbuing other particles with substance and force. A star is the closet physical entity that I can think of that exemplifies this, to say nothing of the many different types of stars, and those that become black holes, etc.

Now, let’s consider the implications at which we’ve arrived. I’m sure you’ve jumped ahead of me with a few of your own.

We’ve arrived at a paradox. The first particle has spent all its efforts at reinforcing its own being, and yet, couldn’t have found a more certain way to secure its own nothingness. In fact, the more that it tries to reinforce itself, the less of an entity it becomes until finally, it’s converted completely into a force for destruction. It has made the fatal error of solipsism, believing that only its self exists. Its actions have followed suit, and worked to reinforce this belief until finally a “tipping point” is reached. It’s severed itself from any method of redemption or conversion. It cannot be “at one” with anything in the universe except for itself. This is isolation, separateness from God, in short, what I think Hell must mean. At the center of this entity is death, or nonexistence, because does a vacuum really exist? In this case, the more “positive” the identity value of the entity, the more “negative” it actually is.

Its concern for its medium or material is its undoing. It’s will is completely directed towards the acquisition of pseudo-substance and pseudo-force, which it “wins” by its efforts.

What about the other particle? It has been spent, and yet, long after its substance is no longer detectable, it remains a creative force, an agent for genesis and change. It’s reached a “tipping point” as well, become a conduit for the Eternal Source. The other particle has reached isolation, and yet, this particle has reached the eternal bliss of Union with the Divine, and anchored itself in Meaning. In short, it has found The Way, The Truth, the Life. This is, in short, how Christ lives. (I have supporting diagrams, but like I said, low on time, and I’m already 15 minutes beyond my first cut off time.)

In short, “He who would gain his life must lose it.”

I have a few other thoughts related to black holes, the substance of the universe, dark matter, time, and separation, but that’s way, way too much for this message.

So, out of the metaphysical and into philosophical implications:
There is a method by which we can reach eternal life: by dying to our Selves, as we understand them, to be spent in genesis and creativity, the actions of Love.

There are others that will choose to pursue mammon, or material gain/security. This is a seductive trap because we can quantify our success this way (even though we don’t realize that we are assigning a positive value to what is essentially a negative force–I’ll say again, this is the nature of The Lie.) Existence is a game that we must play, and our efforts decide whether we will win or lose. You can see this manifest itself in every single human being that’s walked the Earth, with the exception of Jesus. Every time I am faced with a decision which I may make for the benefit of myself over others, or in which my will is in direct opposition to God’s (though, truthfully, we may never understand which of our options is which, and just have blindly to trust.)

Sociopaths and Saints are a good example of this; extremes often are the best examples. A defining characteristic of a sociopath is that “the win” is the ultimate objective, at the expense of all other considerations. Often, these individuals have gained such momentum for their own will (consumptive, gravitational pull) and invested so much into the self that they have become agents of chaos and destruction, increasingly distance from reality.

Saints, however, seem to be willing “to spend and be spent” for the cause, as Fowler describes individuals in Stage 6 of his Stages of Faith. They, too, have a momentum and a special gravity, or rather, radiation. Around the time of WWII, Evelyn Underhill would marvel at how “costly” was the “spiritual radiation of the saints.”

So, I hope that’s an interesting little read for you, and from this I look forward to branching off into discussions about prayer, evil, space and time, dark matter, sin and separation, conversion, etc. There are also fascinating societal implications, from the way we run our government to the purpose of technology.

I don’t know what I’m working on, some sort of unified theory of existence as explained by Christian theology. I think that something like this, the ability to find a unified truth within the various manifestations of the faith, could eliminate the perceived need for denominations, and really serve to unite the scientific and theological communities. We’re all searching for truth, after all.

I also meant to tell you: Songs from the Black Hole ended up being Pinkerton, my favorite album of all time. I’ve recently read The Pinkerton Diaries, and Rivers Cuomo included a lot of his notes from Songs from the Black Hole. It ends the same way that Pinkerton does: in isolation. Jonas, the protagonist, is on a journey in space with four other people. While he’s on this adventure, he falls in love with a woman, but is ensnared and eventually impregnates another. (The women are the typical dichotomy of the Madonna and the whore.) After the mission is over, the crew must return to earth, but there are only enough teleporters for five people. Jonas sends the child in his place and opts to spend the rest of his existence lost in outer space, alone.

Many of the songs from Songs from the Black Hole become songs on Pinkerton, and some never saw the light of day until recently. Pinkerton ends with a lament about lost love and leaves us to wonder if the artist will ever find love, or if he’ll remain alone forever.

I realized that this little story I’ve been working on for years is an answer to that. I’d been working on it long before I ever read the notes on SFTBH, but the argument is for hope, love, and unity, and against despair and isolation. Pinkerton means a lot to me and has been very formative, but I’ve never been happy with the ending, and I think maybe this is my reconciliation, and an answer to the question the album leaves. Anyway, just FYI.

Keep Your Eye on the Ball

I think that I may have found my athletic calling. I’m in love.

I’ve never been a very physical person. However, I’m getting older now, and watching my body and the bodies of those around me start to undergo the changes that come with age and sitting on your rear end for decades–stooped posture, excess weight around the middle, scrawnier arms and legs, dull skin–and it’s dawned on me that it’s up to me to stave off weakness, frailty, and flabbiness while I’m still young enough to do it with relative ease. I also think that healthy exertion might help to temper some of these dips and spikes in mood to which I’m so prone. It’s not that I’m opposed to aerobic activity, and sweating, and moving. I just haven’t found a way to do it that really suits me.

I hate running. Walking doesn’t make me sweat, and tends to bore me, although I do a fair amount of it, living in New Orleans. I like the ease of aerobic machines, but I hate public gyms and end up feeling like a hamster on a little wheel. I’m not aggressive enough to be very good at fencing, and I was beginning to get some scar tissue from the bruising. I haven’t found a team sport I could get into, and without a work out partner, my resolution to get up early to do P90X in the living room has evaporated. (Call it a Mardi Gras casualty; I was going strong for six entire weeks, my longest record yet, before the chaos of Carnival season hit.) In high school, I quit the softball team after one practice, concerned about having to miss my academically challenging last hour math class (which, coincidentally, had several cute boys in it. Yowza.)

That being said, I used to play tennis as a teenager. There were some courts at a park near my house, so in the summer time, I’d occasionally visit them with my friends and family. My father was constantly trying to cajole my sister into taking up the sport, telling her that it would give her a place to channel her aggression. I guess for that reason, I never thought of it as “my” sport, something that I could get into; I never would have considered myself as aggressive. I failed to notice, though, how unusual it was for me to rouse myself from the house and tear myself away from the computer time and time again to go out to that patch of concrete and volley a ball around.

I liked it. I might even have come to realize how much I liked it if I hadn’t fallen on the court one day and badly injured myself (it was an excellent save, by the way.) I still have a deep scar on my right hand and spots in my palm where dirt worked its way into my wounds and stayed under my skin. It took months for my hands and wrists to heal, and after that, I just never got back on the horse–until yesterday.

The stars had aligned just so, and Cass and I both had the same day off. After a pleasant sleep in and a little time playing Skyrim, we made our way out to City Park’s courts with our brand new tennis rackets. I had no expectation of being decent, but we began to play and I was pleasantly surprised–I’m not half bad, especially not after a decade long hiatus. I was rusty at first, and Cass gave me some time-honored advice: “Keep your eye on the ball.”

I heard the words in my father’s voice, and it stirred up some reflection in me. I think that he probably said it to me when we were playing a game of catch in the front yard with one of his old baseball gloves that I loved. It’s advice that I’ve heard echoed, verbatim, throughout my life, and seems to be the golden rule of any sport involving a ball. It’s good advice, and I listened. My game improved immediately.

Tennis makes sense to me. I have one objective–getting that ball back over the net. After I send it on its way, I have a moment to regroup, reposition, and ready myself to focus on my new objective–getting the ball back over the net again. I like that break between short bursts of activity, and the tempo keeps my attention stimulated. I especially like the contact, feeling the racket make a connection with the ball, and the swinging motion of my arm feels very instinctual and logical for me. All I have to do is wait for that little neon sphere to come my way, and as I see where it lands, my body instantly calibrates itself to be in the right spot, to hit it the right way, to accomplish my primary objective. (Most of the time, anyway. I’m still learning, and half of the time I hit the ball too far or into the net.)

As the hour for which we’d reserved the court progressed, Cass and I started some good-natured teasing, and suddenly, instead of merely trying to hit the ball over the net, my objective shifted: Kill. I was trying to hit it hard, to make him run after it, maybe even to hit him with the ball. Needless to say, I began to play very badly, which made the teasing worse and thrilled Cass, who, after my third shot that went waaay out of bounds, commented, “Gee, I’d like to get some exercise at some time today.” I threw the ball at his head–and missed.

I re-calibrated, telling myself to focus on the ball, and my playing improved, until the end of the hour approached. I’d been doing a lot of running around, and leaping after the ball. It felt fantastic; I was finally getting one of those rumored endorphin rushes that happy, fit people are always going on about. As I tired out, however, I stopped running after the ball so much, started trying to swing and hit it from where I stood, taking just a few steps in any direction towards it instead of hustling like I’d been doing when I was fresh on the court.

It turns out, keeping your eye on the ball is about more than just vision. It’s about focus and attention (remember that dichotomy I talked about in the last entry?) It’s tempting to let something besides playing the game become your priority–winning or the logistics of performance, most often (or in my case, punishing your opponent for his smart remarks.) As soon as I let my focus shift to something besides my primary objective, my performance suffered. When I remained focused, however, and kept my concentration on the ball, my body seemed to know what to do. Turns out, I have a pretty decent backhand when I’m not thinking too much about it, and even though I made mistakes, after I’d made them a few times, I seemed to be on a learning curve, and my shots and positioning got a lot more accurate with practice.

The other part of the dichotomy is attention (and I’ve long been meaning to write an entry on the mechanics of focus and attention.) Keeping my eye on the ball often meant watching it sail right past my outstretched arm when I was too lazy to run for it. My game started to suffer before I realized what was going on–I was cutting corners with the effort I was making to attend to the ball, to give top priority to answering the demands it made when it flew towards me, all for the sake of avoiding suffering and exertion. When I remedied that, with some grumbling from my muscles, making the effort to hustle again, I was able to play pretty well until it was time to leave.

Like I said, I’m in love. I left sweaty, exhausted, and a little dizzy from being in the sun for so long, but I carried with me a new sense of excitement. I can’t wait to go back out, and I keep revisiting just how fun it was. I’m looking forward to getting good, to having more control over where I send the ball, to all that this game is going to teach me. It’s the first sport that I’ve really felt like I could be good at.

Part of my growth theologically in the last couple years or so has been an increasing awareness of my need for unity and balance. I’ve long wanted some sort of athletic endeavor to balance out the cerebral nature of my life. I’m happy and comfortable in my brain, but isolated from my heart and my gut, and so have tried to pursue different avenues that will allow me to become familiar with these long-neglected parts of my being. (On a side note, I tend to find myself forming deeper friendships with those who are heart and gut oriented, as opposed to–but not to the neglect of–the intellectual types with which I’ve surrounded myself for years. Maybe I’ve been so drawn to them because I’ve sensed that they have something to teach me.)

The more I learn and grow, the more life seems to call for me to differentiate my actions, and yet my experience is increasingly unified. Part of the reason I haven’t posted in so long is that I’ve been grappling with severe difficulties in the areas of mental focus and attention. It’s been unreal, and I’ve been a harried wreck. Spending an hour on the courts informed me with concepts that are going to be useful to my mental functioning, concepts that I may never have arrived at by figuring alone. I may have even turned the corner I’ve long been seeking. Physical activity has a remarkable quality of letting you work something out on a deeper level, somewhere that’s beyond the frantic, scrambling grasp of the mind.

I’ve been so focused (fixated, even) on my own well being, on the state of my soul, my heart, my brain, my body, my estate, my affairs that I’ve been in a dull state of panic, driven into frenzy. I’m aging, and I’m broken. I have no control or power or redeeming value of which to speak. I am going to die. I am already dying. I’m spending my life instead of living it, trading in my efforts and hours for consolation. I’m not even a good Christian–I only seek God on two conditions: for the sake of His gifts and a good feeling, or for the sake of His mercy and alleviation of my fear or torment, but never for His own sake. I’m not capable of love, only of self-absorption.

It’s a pitiful state, to be aware of my being such a wretch, of having no way out and having to depend solely on Divine mercy. I’ve tried and failed many times to find the answer, to craft a solution with my own hands, and after months of this latest cycle (manic this time, instead of depressive), I think the dawn is finally approaching.

Lately, I’ve been very grateful to be alive, and amazed at what it means to be a human being, to have a brain that is capable of learning so much, a spirit that is willing to strive through countless obstacles, and the freedom  to be a co-creator in my destiny. The awareness of this has been sneaking up on me slowly, as all of my other options pan out and die off. I’ve grown tired of my amusements and bored with my vices. What once seemed seductive and irresistible is revealed for what it is–bondage and dependence, a cheap substitute for the peace and fulfillment that I desperately need.

What do you do when you can’t find here God is hiding in all the mess, and when you’ve become bored with all your other palliatives? The only option left is to suffer, and to wait. So, waiting and suffering I’ve been doing, and some hoping and praying as well.

How marvelous, how much life gives when you’re open to receive it, when you maintain your focus and attention to the liberty of being. It’s just a matter of “keeping your eye on the ball.”

Wisdom from Dave Grohl, Without Justification, The Antidote

It’s only been in my adult life that I’ve realized how out of touch with feeling and emotion I really am. Or maybe, I just don’t feel as strongly as I did when I was a teenager and my hormones were “raging,” as they say. My other suspicion is that all the time I spend interacting with machines is in some way deadening or muting my ability to feel and to what degree I’m stimulated by emotion.

That being said, I don’t know how I’ve been lately. I’ve had a lot on my mind. Nothing in my life is terrible or excellent at the moment, although I can’t shake the feeling that something might be a little off. The sensation is sort of like not realizing that you’re being bothered by an itchy clothing tag or an offensive background noise until suddenly it’s brought to your attention in a sudden flash of awareness. I’ve been so busy and distracted that it’s only lately I’ve begun to feel something like that tickling the edge of my brain, trying to break through.

What is it? I’m not sure. I’ve begun to identify the secondary emotions–edgy, irritable, harried, rushed, and bored (above all, excruciating boredom)–but their source escapes me. I’m sure of a few truths–that this is a spiritual issue, and that my condition is most likely exacerbated by a combination of fear and laziness. In fact, I’ve been living kind of backwards.

What’s the nature of this phenomenon? What do I know about fear and laziness? All that I can figure out comes from my understanding of love and will.

I have this little model in my head to which I often refer when I’m trying to puzzle out some theory. It’s the idea of a specific interdependent relationship–form and function, particle and wave, matter and energy, meaning and purpose, etc. My inclination is that this is “the image of God” that creation mirrors, the idea of a Father and a Holy Spirit. I haven’t figured out the nature of the third part of the Trinity, the Son, and His inclusion, except for the clue in the Lord’s Prayer (or what we decided to add as a close, anyway), “for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever and ever.” Kingdom being the “matter” or make up, power being the “energy” or force, and glory as–what? beauty? essence? mystery? truth/self evidence? all of the above? (I’ve been looking into Aristotle’s divisions of pathos, ethos, logos. They’re semi-appropriate.)

I digress. Along with the other dichotomies that I’ve drawn above, I frequently revisit the concepts of Love and Will, and their antitheses, Fear and Laziness. In fact, when I clear away all the non-essentials, it’s relatively easy to trace the source of my problems back to a deficiency in one or both of these, if only I know where to look. This time is no different.

As proof that inspiration can come from unlikely sources, this entry has been brought to you by a line from a Foo Fighter’s song, Best of You: “I was too weak to give in, too strong to lose.” Best of You is my favorite Foo Fighters song (Monkey Wrench is a close second), but I’ve never really paid much attention to that line before. Last night, however, the paradox of that line struck me as a clue to my current problem.

I said that I was living backwards, and that Fear and Laziness were the antitheses to Love and Will, which was a claim that I haven’t yet supported. First you have to understand the relationship between Love and Will. Love informs Will. If we have love, or rather, if we are love, then our will is more perfectly informed, more “right,” for lack of a better term. If our will is correctly aligned with Divine Will, then our love is more perfectly perpetuated and preserved. Love is perception, Will is action, and at their crux lies choice, our essence. (Guess I’ve probably fallen off that Calvinism bandwagon by now.)

Some may have objections to my assertion that Will is “correct” only when aligned with Divine Will. It’s important to remember, however, that we cannot exist in a vacuum. If our will is only to serve ourselves, if our love is only for ourselves, then we become solipsistic. Solipsism is fatal, ever more turning inward on itself until it collapses into meaninglessness, severed from the Source of meaning by its own volition. I think that there are many intermediate stages to this process but that ultimately, the choice comes down to unity or disintegration, which is a word I’ve chosen deliberately.

So, how does fear relate to love? My assertion is that fear corrupts love. “There is no fear in perfect love, for perfect love casts out fear,” as the scripture goes. If hate is love’s absence, fear appears to be an agent working against love, a force that is repelled by healthy, functioning love.

What, then, is fear, to have such an influence on love? I think the answer lies in the fact that fear may also inform will. This function is love’s prerogative, but the moment that we submit to fear–and submitting to fear is always a choice, conscious or not–we begin to let it make decisions as to the orientation of our will. That’s not to say that it isn’t perfectly human to defer to fear, or that there isn’t any redemption for decisions made in fear, but fear corrupts the integrity of our being.

Fear can take many insidious forms–pride, ambition, greed, etc.–but make no mistake, any end that serves the individual will over the Divine is based on some surreptitious sort of fear: fear that I will never be good enough, fear that I will never be secure enough, fear that I will always be alone, fear that I have no purpose. Essentially, these fears are all reactions to the stark revelation that we are mortal and will some day perish. (Unless, of course, we make the difficult and labor intensive choice to embrace the Divine, to become eternal and real.) A false representation of love, a force that attempts to act in love’s stead but not towards love’s ends, fear is “the Lie.”

Laziness operates in much the same matter, instead corrupting the execution of our will. “Inertia” might be a more fitting term, only I’m not sure what separates the two terms except that one refers more precisely to human behavior and the other to that of all matter, respectively. If fear is the agent that disintegrates love, then laziness or inertia works to make impotent our will by constantly imposing itself upon us to compromise our integrity by dissociating and negating will, which functions best as a unified, whole force.

If we say that we have love, or do love, or are love, and we don’t complete the actions that love deems necessary because our will is dissolute, then we are rendering love false. False love has no way to perfectly inform will, and so will is damaged from its inception, and we begin to see how the cycle perpetuates itself…

…which brings us back to our friend Dave Grohl, and out of the vague and abstract world of theory.

I’ve begun to get the idea that a big part of the trouble I have in life is that I have little idea of how to surrender. This is evidenced by the amount of time I seem to spend suffering from boredom and running from silence and solitude. Life has become very much reduced to function for me lately. I’ve shifted more towards “doing” than “being.” It feel okay and I’m functioning at a decent level, but I wonder that I haven’t run out of steam or dropped the ball entirely. How long can I keep running? It feels like forever.

I don’t know how to explain it except to say that I am constantly evaluating, analyzing, attempting to know, and hence, to control. I can’t shut it off. I don’t know how to be if I’m not right or wrong, if there’s not some sort of justification for my decisions, actions, for my very being, or conversely, if there’s something measurable that I may correct to become “right.”

I’m “too weak to give in,” because, in all honesty, I’m afraid. Afraid that without having at least tried to figure out what “right” is and taken a stab at it, I will be wrong, that once my justification has slipped away there will be nothing left to me. What’s even more terrifying is that I know this to be true, at least on an intellectual level. There is no substance to me, no form, no force. I am mortal, flawed, weak.

I’m “too strong to lose,” care too much about self preservation to stop fighting any way that I can, even though I know how futile and misdirected my efforts are. They seem to do for now, and I have an endless supply of distractions and palliatives to keep me in the race.

The whole thing is very backwards. I’m trying too hard where I should be surrendering, and throwing in the towel were I should be fighting. That’s not to say that there’s been absolutely no redemption in my life–I am God’s child as much as I am a human being–but I’ve paid my price in the form of numbness, exhaustion, and a nosedive in creativity. (What do you know? Another Trinity parallel.)

My ability to love is hindered by the fear of my mortality. My will is stultified by my lack of love; I’ve been extending myself in every which direction but towards a functioning center, living on the periphery of life where all of the noise and activity can keep me company. There is no overflow of spirit left to do anything creative since it is all being spent, eaten up by the products of friction, and so I am an automaton.

What is there to be done? Too weak and too strong, with no idea how to surrender, stuck in a self-defeating cycle of dysfunction? I am too exhausted to try any harder, and too keyed up to get any rest.

The only place that I know where to start is gratitude. This is going to require an entire entry to flush out fully, but I think that gratitude is the antidote for which I’ve been searching.

Gratitude is, first and foremost, a change in perception. Instead of seeing my life as not enough, the key is to see what I’ve been given as sufficient, or even abundant. I keep trying to “fill up” on noise and heat and light and activity, but I think that the trick is to empty out, to stop trying to take control of my own existence and just to be.

So, the next time that I write, it will probably be about gratitude, if I’ve figured it out any time soon. This entry was quite a labor (mostly a fight against distraction, laziness, and despair), but it’s good to be back.

An Entry for April

Being Steph Mabou has been on an unintentional hiatus. I hope to be back to writing soon. In the mean time, words from my pal Thomas Merton:

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you and I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing. And I know that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road although I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death, I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.

Amen.