I Know All at Once Who I Am Thursday, May 12, 2005

A long day, editing from beginning to end. The cats were kind enough to start scratching at the door for breakfast at 4 a.m. I manage to sleep through Wrong Turn Jr. wailing and whimpering through the night; but the scratching and patting will skeeve me out of dreamland in no time flat.

Tomorrow, more of the same, plus we look at a house. It's been on the market a full eleven days without ending up under contract. Well, did you evah. My best guess: They moved the headstones but not the bodies.

Oh yeah, God, politics, sci-fi, movies suck, etc.

More later.

@ 11:02:00 PM,

1 Comments:

At 6:46 AM, Blogger Jennifer said...

Dear Rob and Friends (especially Aaron),

Thank you all for the great commentary on God and atheism. As of tomorrow I will no longer be able to stall on pondering such issues, as I will no longer be burdened with exams, case studies and term papers. I am very excited to move on from the subject of Finance to the subject of God.

As you may know I contemplated seminary for about five years prior to pursuing an MBA. My original idea was to get an MDiv/MSW and save the world. I even know where I would have gone to school (Union Theological). Instead now I have an MBA from Rutgers. But I still plan to save the world. (My hubris is breathtaking, no? Business school teaches you to think BIG.)

Contemporaneously I have been engaging a discernment process about What I Believe; a process that has been protracted, groping and very painfully real.

"So what happened to seminary?" would be at the top of my personal FAQ. My answer is still not totally clear. It isn’t even clear that I have abandoned it altogether. But I have arrived at some form of an answer, and here goes: I was born and raised a Roman Catholic. As a married woman there is no place for me at the rectory. I am the sullied of the sullied, the bane and the shame. I bleed and I labor when I have children because I am fallen and because I was born to suffer for the sins of my kind. If I remain within the Jesus axis, the only hope I have to be able to be a preacher is via Protestantism, the Land of Inclusion. And heck, if I am going that route, I am going hardcore to the place where they take everybody – the Unitarian Universalists. Who, as sullied of the sullied, am I to exclude anybody?

So, in contemplating that, I realize that I need to include everyone in my heart; that no construct supercedes the other so why am I constraining myself to do good work within a Protestant construct? Why a pastoral orientation? I’ll tell you why – VANITY. The enormous vanity of needing to reaffirm my construct with years of schooling, at great sacrifice to my family, merely for the privilege of excluding others seems wrong in light of the fact that my status is so low in the Catholic Church. Why would I exclude others as I have been excluded? It just ends up seeming so self-hating.

So I go back to the core of why I wanted to go to seminary: because I want to get that warm holy feeling when I earn my keep. I want people to be inspired to engage their higher selves when I collaborate with them. I realized that I did not need to get a master’s nor did I need to go to seminary to achieve this goal. Instead I started working on behalf of service to others by way of nonprofit.

I did not need God to tell me that I want that warm holy feeling. When I realized this and when the inclusion issue occurred to me, I decided that the answers for my existential dilemmas of existence lay beyond the Judeo/Christian orientation.

So where did I end up? I won’t get into all that yet. Suffice to say that I am still formulating language for my ethical/religious orientation. Saying anything more specific than that makes me sound (rightfully) like a religious dilettante. But I feel a need to figure this out. I owe Sansa an answer. She did not ask to be here and I need to be ready for that moment when she reminds me of that truth. What do I say? Well, I can start with the following... That Jesus was a good guy. That Buddha was a good guy. That we have reasons for being here. That it is important to do good things and that most of us agree on what good things look like. That doing good things leads to your own personal happiness as well as the happiness of others. That our pain, like our happiness, is ephemeral. That pain is important too, as it reminds us of our common bond as humans. That diminishing the humanity of others diminishes us. Did I need God to inspire that notion? I don’t think so. It came from the grist mill of life and experience. Anything short of that feels inauthentic.

 

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