May 20, 2013

• It’s Been A While.

   

  As is usually the case, I have been here about eight times in the past three weeks, starting posts and wandering away, frustrated, or distracted, or both. Most mornings, I wake up wanting to write. The sun spills in through the apartment’s enormous windows and I stand at my desk and look out at green treetops and I want to tell a story, to write myself into my life. But I can’t find a way to climb over the same obstacle I have been trying to hurdle during all these months of absence from this blog, which is that I no longer really know how to write about what I love, about what captures my imagination, in a way that makes me entirely comfortable. 

  In the interest of being straightforward (and in an attempt to save myself a lot of awkward dancing around terms before giving up and walking away, again, as usual): I think about God all the time. It is the single thought from which every other thought branches out. This hasn’t always been the case, though it has been increasingly the case as I have written this blog over the past few years, and I have never really known what to do about it, or what to say. I could try to tell the story of how this came to be, and maybe eventually I will, but for now it doesn’t matter. This isn’t about explaining myself, but about trying to sort out what to do with myself now that I am here. And what to write.

  I know there are plenty of ways to write about God without actually writing about God – this is how we ended up with such marvels as The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. And maybe I will find that this is the way for me, too. But for now, I struggle with the difference between being subtle and being apologetic. This is a complicated, unpopular topic, yes, and it is also a topic that I find endlessly interesting, that stirs my imagination in beautiful ways, and keeps me engaged in the world and finding joy in all that it contains. And I am not sorry. And to detach my experience of the world from it’s endlessly mysterious source feels like a lie. 

  (I don’t think C.S. Lewis was sorry, either, for the record. But what I mean is that I don’t know if I want to veil what I really mean, at least not all the time.) 

  I have always been annoyingly aware of how I might be perceived. So I have always worried about writing about these things, fearing that I will sound like a televangelist or like I am trying to shove something down someone’s throat. That isn’t what I intend to do at all. I just genuinely think this is interesting, and it is indisputably what I want to explore, in what I write and, more than that, in what I do with my life. 

  I have no idea what that will actually mean, in terms of what gets written here. I am basically an enormous mass of existential drama, but I like it that way. I have long been tired of answering questions that seemed to stop short of the point. What sort of a career do I want? I don’t know, what is the purpose of my existence? I actually, honestly cannot separate these things – for years, I tried to do so and it made me miserable. And although it wasn’t as logical or sequential as simply this, there was a whole lot of freedom in acknowledging that certain things that always seemed deeply consequential were things I actually didn’t care about, and to then accordingly stop giving a shit. 

  The truth of me is that I am somehow hardwired for this – for building my life around questions belief and existence and meaning, and for wanting to face these head on. I no longer care if that’s weird. And I don’t care if it’s difficult (and it often is – rarely am I actually appropriately brave; I typically meet my life with tears). And I don’t even care about not having answers, so long as I know I am working on the questions that mean the most to me. 

  For a while I wondered if this was a phase. But it all began nearly three years ago, and it only grows.

  So, here we are. 

   

  h.

   

  • 12:15 pm
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