Warning: May Exceed Your RDA of Angst
My entire being is a jumbled mess of everything. In yoga classes, when you’re supposed to close your eyes and look into your own soul from the outside, I usually just pray instead because I don’t know what “looking at your soul from the outside” really means. But right now I do. And it’s that scene on the news, the helicopter cam looking down on the land where a tornado was. It’s those paintings in the children’s section of the Frist where all the colors are muddled together into brown because kids can’t really use paintbrushes. It’s that sentence you can’t get out so you keep stuttering and mixing words together because you’re nervous. It’s how you would imagine drowning being like if you can see the glimmer of daylight through the water but can’t tell which way is up. That’s my soul. That’s what it looks like from the outside.
I’ve been going through the days by swinging in the middle of calmness and frenzy. Silence and screaming. Fake and real. Up and down. I keep thinking either things will start to make sense again or I’ll reject everything and forget how to live. I’m waiting for that explosion. But the building up process is taking a while and it’s like waiting to sneeze. Uncomfortable for you and everyone around you, but unstoppable for that moment.
So I feel the need to diffuse some things by writing, even though I am well aware of the messiness of everything coming out of my mind. Some really highly acclaimed art is messy like that, so I won’t feel too bad about it. Regardless of the fact that this is not art and therefore I am using a really bad parallel.
Anyway, I guess I should start by saying this is not a faith crisis. I am not capable of having a faith crisis, because I am not brave enough for it and I am much too attached to my faith to ever allow a crisis to occur. My faith and my existence are inextricably intertwined and if I ever renounced my faith entirely I firmly believe my sense of self would be so erased I would not be able to continue living with any semblance of mental health. That is probably a fault of mine, a side effect of my extreme (often irrational) loyalty to the things I find myself identified with. But it’s a fact. I’m not strong enough or committed enough to truth to sacrifice my own existence for it.
I wish I were. Sometimes I think I am. Maybe I am almost there. But if the truth was that there was no God, I would still live a life of faith. In that way I think my commitment to God gets in the way of God, or at least could if there was ever an opportunity for it.
I’ve been questioning ever since I got to Belmont and started studying religion. That’s nothing new. But for some reason the extent to which I am questioning has only just now resulted in complete confusion and the option, as I see it, to continue believing into nothingness and formlessness or retreat to what I have always been told and always held to. One is safe and concrete. The other makes me fear for my life. And yet I feel I cannot be true to myself and my own intelligence by choosing safety over the obvious academic answers to these questions of religion.
I see why people are always hung up on the question of faith versus science. I still think it’s a false distinction, but I see why people are conflicted about it.
My church and tradition and culture and gut all tell me that the Bible is literally true. My professors and history and common sense and academia all tell me it cannot be. It’s not a faith versus science question. It’s not a faith crisis. It’s a question of HOW to understand the Bible and HOW to view the roles of the Bible and reason. Yet I feel I am not equipped to answer these questions because I am terrified that if I reevaluate my “HOW”s, my whole life will crumble.
I am terrified that not believing in the inerrancy of Scripture (for example) will leave me no ground to stand on, no foothold by which to seek God, no platform upon which to formulate my beliefs. Because if the Bible is not 100% reliable, I don’t know where to find the revelation of God. And if I can’t find the revelation of God, my faith is incredibly unfounded and useless. At best it would be consolation in distress, a band-aid on the wound of my humanity, an opiate of the masses.
And again, since I am unwilling to consider the fact that my faith is invalid, perhaps out of fault or perhaps out of devotion, or both, I can’t consider that.
When I began to realize I had no idea how to understand the Bible or how to read it, Micah told me to stop reading the Bible for a while. Stop ascribing so much power to that book, for just a while, till I could see past it and see God instead. But what I’m finding after taking his advice, and this is what is terrifying me and pushing me to the edge of sanity really, is that I can’t find much of Him anymore. Seeing God in anything else – people, nature, church, worship – is all just eisegesis. It’s all subjective experience into which we can put meaning or not. The Bible is comfort to me. It is power. It is safety and truth and wisdom. It tells me the story of me; it tells me why it is I should even care. It gives me the only reason I have to live. Jesus. Jesus and the Kingdom of God, and redemption to the glory of Yahweh. I care more about the words in that book than I do about my past, present, and future. Because those words ARE my past, present, and future. They are how I see God.
To remove the Bible is to remove all of that. I thought I would be ok without it, because I know God is more than that book. I know God does not equal the Bible and the Bible does not equal God. I know Jews and Christians from the beginning of time until the 400’s and later did not have the Bible I have, and they were fine. But for some reason, and maybe it’s my Baptist and nondenom background, my Bible is the backbone of my faith in Christ.
So lately I have started to become irrationally convicted of a conservative theology, simply out of an existential need to. I’m still deciding whether to turn from this decision point and run the other way or stay here and see what happens. I could block out the fact that my view of Scripture is inconsistent and impossible. Or I could attempt to reformulate it and risk losing my trust in the Bible completely. I understand the latter is probably right. But the jury is still out as to whether or not I’m going to choose it.
I feel like an island. No, I feel like the water flowing around the island, kinda formless and kinda discredited and always changing, never stopping to find some good friends to anchor it down.
I’m struggling with guilt from a lot of choices I’ve made recently. I’m struggling with loneliness because of the distance getting older creates between people. I’m struggling with fear because of my unanswered questions and demolished view of the world. I’m struggling with cynicism because of my disillusionment with the church and with its culture. I’m struggling with confusion because of the clutter in my mind, heart, emotions, and calendar. I’m struggling with neediness because I’m not being filled by anyone or anything, only emptied. I distrust people because I am continually let down. I wonder if any of the things that disturb me are worth caring about. I wonder what the future holds and if I’m smart enough to direct my life in a good way.
My overarching mood is melancholy, and I’m starting to worry for myself. I hate seeing the people I love and respect fall, because it’s making me think my fall is impending and this is just that moment when I realize I missed the step and I’m about to eat the pavement.
So that’s cool. That’s really great. Hopelessness is really the best thing ever. This is the punch line because the point of Jesus’ death is to bring hope, and here I am a Christian, not knowing how hope works and how to put it on.
That’s all I have to say tonight. I can’t make any of it wrap up or come together. I’m simply in a really strange process and in need of a lot more wisdom than I can find. I apologize for how depressing my posts have been lately, but I think some day I might get to the other side of it. In the meantime, welcome to the mind of a Christian Ethics major at BU. I hope it inspires you to never study religion academically. ☺ Just kidding.
I’ve been going through the days by swinging in the middle of calmness and frenzy. Silence and screaming. Fake and real. Up and down. I keep thinking either things will start to make sense again or I’ll reject everything and forget how to live. I’m waiting for that explosion. But the building up process is taking a while and it’s like waiting to sneeze. Uncomfortable for you and everyone around you, but unstoppable for that moment.
So I feel the need to diffuse some things by writing, even though I am well aware of the messiness of everything coming out of my mind. Some really highly acclaimed art is messy like that, so I won’t feel too bad about it. Regardless of the fact that this is not art and therefore I am using a really bad parallel.
Anyway, I guess I should start by saying this is not a faith crisis. I am not capable of having a faith crisis, because I am not brave enough for it and I am much too attached to my faith to ever allow a crisis to occur. My faith and my existence are inextricably intertwined and if I ever renounced my faith entirely I firmly believe my sense of self would be so erased I would not be able to continue living with any semblance of mental health. That is probably a fault of mine, a side effect of my extreme (often irrational) loyalty to the things I find myself identified with. But it’s a fact. I’m not strong enough or committed enough to truth to sacrifice my own existence for it.
I wish I were. Sometimes I think I am. Maybe I am almost there. But if the truth was that there was no God, I would still live a life of faith. In that way I think my commitment to God gets in the way of God, or at least could if there was ever an opportunity for it.
I’ve been questioning ever since I got to Belmont and started studying religion. That’s nothing new. But for some reason the extent to which I am questioning has only just now resulted in complete confusion and the option, as I see it, to continue believing into nothingness and formlessness or retreat to what I have always been told and always held to. One is safe and concrete. The other makes me fear for my life. And yet I feel I cannot be true to myself and my own intelligence by choosing safety over the obvious academic answers to these questions of religion.
I see why people are always hung up on the question of faith versus science. I still think it’s a false distinction, but I see why people are conflicted about it.
My church and tradition and culture and gut all tell me that the Bible is literally true. My professors and history and common sense and academia all tell me it cannot be. It’s not a faith versus science question. It’s not a faith crisis. It’s a question of HOW to understand the Bible and HOW to view the roles of the Bible and reason. Yet I feel I am not equipped to answer these questions because I am terrified that if I reevaluate my “HOW”s, my whole life will crumble.
I am terrified that not believing in the inerrancy of Scripture (for example) will leave me no ground to stand on, no foothold by which to seek God, no platform upon which to formulate my beliefs. Because if the Bible is not 100% reliable, I don’t know where to find the revelation of God. And if I can’t find the revelation of God, my faith is incredibly unfounded and useless. At best it would be consolation in distress, a band-aid on the wound of my humanity, an opiate of the masses.
And again, since I am unwilling to consider the fact that my faith is invalid, perhaps out of fault or perhaps out of devotion, or both, I can’t consider that.
When I began to realize I had no idea how to understand the Bible or how to read it, Micah told me to stop reading the Bible for a while. Stop ascribing so much power to that book, for just a while, till I could see past it and see God instead. But what I’m finding after taking his advice, and this is what is terrifying me and pushing me to the edge of sanity really, is that I can’t find much of Him anymore. Seeing God in anything else – people, nature, church, worship – is all just eisegesis. It’s all subjective experience into which we can put meaning or not. The Bible is comfort to me. It is power. It is safety and truth and wisdom. It tells me the story of me; it tells me why it is I should even care. It gives me the only reason I have to live. Jesus. Jesus and the Kingdom of God, and redemption to the glory of Yahweh. I care more about the words in that book than I do about my past, present, and future. Because those words ARE my past, present, and future. They are how I see God.
To remove the Bible is to remove all of that. I thought I would be ok without it, because I know God is more than that book. I know God does not equal the Bible and the Bible does not equal God. I know Jews and Christians from the beginning of time until the 400’s and later did not have the Bible I have, and they were fine. But for some reason, and maybe it’s my Baptist and nondenom background, my Bible is the backbone of my faith in Christ.
So lately I have started to become irrationally convicted of a conservative theology, simply out of an existential need to. I’m still deciding whether to turn from this decision point and run the other way or stay here and see what happens. I could block out the fact that my view of Scripture is inconsistent and impossible. Or I could attempt to reformulate it and risk losing my trust in the Bible completely. I understand the latter is probably right. But the jury is still out as to whether or not I’m going to choose it.
I feel like an island. No, I feel like the water flowing around the island, kinda formless and kinda discredited and always changing, never stopping to find some good friends to anchor it down.
I’m struggling with guilt from a lot of choices I’ve made recently. I’m struggling with loneliness because of the distance getting older creates between people. I’m struggling with fear because of my unanswered questions and demolished view of the world. I’m struggling with cynicism because of my disillusionment with the church and with its culture. I’m struggling with confusion because of the clutter in my mind, heart, emotions, and calendar. I’m struggling with neediness because I’m not being filled by anyone or anything, only emptied. I distrust people because I am continually let down. I wonder if any of the things that disturb me are worth caring about. I wonder what the future holds and if I’m smart enough to direct my life in a good way.
My overarching mood is melancholy, and I’m starting to worry for myself. I hate seeing the people I love and respect fall, because it’s making me think my fall is impending and this is just that moment when I realize I missed the step and I’m about to eat the pavement.
So that’s cool. That’s really great. Hopelessness is really the best thing ever. This is the punch line because the point of Jesus’ death is to bring hope, and here I am a Christian, not knowing how hope works and how to put it on.
That’s all I have to say tonight. I can’t make any of it wrap up or come together. I’m simply in a really strange process and in need of a lot more wisdom than I can find. I apologize for how depressing my posts have been lately, but I think some day I might get to the other side of it. In the meantime, welcome to the mind of a Christian Ethics major at BU. I hope it inspires you to never study religion academically. ☺ Just kidding.
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