I haven’t written about synchronicity yet, but this first paragraph is a good example of it. Today I got this email telling me registration is open now for winter Continuing Studies courses at Stanford. Among the courses highlighted was one on quantum physics, and more specifically quantum entanglement. All the physics I know is based on books that were only somewhat new back in 2001 and 2002, which means the research in them was even older than that. So I’m feeling totally out of the know, now, since apparently, to the uttter shock of all, I’m sure, while I haven’t been looking, new discoveries have continued getting made. Consequently, I’ve just been swimming around online in things like quantum entanglement and teleportation and Bell’s Theorum. I guess none of these are new to the last decade, but I somehow managed never to have heard of them before now, and certainly not the most recent experimentations with them. Because of them, my ideas for a next post have all been turned on their heads.

Here’s what I was going to write about this time: I was going to talk about clairvoyance, and my own experiences with it, and try to theorize how tiny particles could travel distances, instantaneously, between people. I kept getting stalled up on the whys involved in this theorized process, though, like why, for instance, would those of us who seem to recieve these theorized particles recieve them only from certain people, and not everyone, since theoretically everyone is emitting particles all the time. What would determine the “stations” that our “radios” are tuned into, so to speak? (I will say that I have on a couple of occasions felt my dial break, and signals from everyone flood into my brain, and that these have been among the most alarming and disturbing experiences of my life.)

But! Then I read about quantum teleportation, and my mind is now spinning a whole different way. I have to begin what I want to say now by telling you what I’ve just been learning of quantum teleportation. (here is where any physicists reading this blog might need to roll their eyes or make very squeemish, contorted faces and wish I would just stick to fiction writing. And here is where I guess I’d have to say that…well…maybe I am. I think fiction is more deeply true than anything else sometimes.).

So. To explain what I’ve gleaned on quantum teleportation so far, I have to start with quantum entanglement. Apparently, very tiny systems–quantum particles, we might call them–can sometimes get entangled. What entangled means is that something happens to them, some special kind of thing, such that when they get separated, the two systems aren’t distinct entities anymore. They’ve taken on one another’s characteristics so much that now they act almost entirely as one. They’re spatially separate, but not in reality, if that makes sense. I’ve known a few couples like this. And some people with their dogs.

The guy who coined the term “entanglement” says it this way:

When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled. (Shrodinger, 1935)

Quantum teleportation, then, refers to the nearly simultaneous “communication” that happens between entangled systems. When something happens to one of them, it’s mirrored precisely in the other. Like the other is a copy of the first. And it doesn’t matter how far apart these systems are! Miles, inches: same dif. It’s as if space between them does not exist.

I know I’m still an embryo when it comes to understanding these things, but for the sake of having fun, and maybe actually stumbling into something true, I’m going to let my imagination fly.

What if clairvoyance is nothing more than entangled particles doing their thing? We’ve all heard stories of people knowing things about their loved ones–deaths, injuries, etc.–before they’d have any known reason to know such things. What if there simply are parts of these pairs (each pair being the person “knowing” and the person actually dying or being injured) that are quantumly entangled, so that nothing actually has to cross time or space for the two to experience whatever is being experienced? In effect, at least partially, or on a certain kind of level, the two people aren’t two people. They’re one.

These kinds of experiences seem like they’re reported most often by people who love each other. Maybe love is a quantum entangler. I wonder if love will ever become a variable in physicists’ experiments.

But here is where my mind goes next: What if everyone is quantumly entangled with everything? What if we’re all made from the same stuff, all rooted in some common seed, such that when Buddhists and sages from many traditions, and now the priests of science, no less, speak of oneness, they don’t mean only metaphorically, and they don’t mean only by cause-and-effect ripples that spread infinitely out from every act? What if they mean literally?

Einstein called the very notion of entanglement “spooky action at a distance” and didn’t want to believe it. And the individualism of the Enlightenment and of much in Christendom today wouldn’t want to believe it either. But what if it’s true? What if we are all one, and it’s only the distances we keep believing exist that actually keep us from reading each other’s minds? What if clairvoyance really is what its French roots imply: clear seeing, and this clarity of sight is awakeness to our own limbs, our own bodies, our own minds and extensions that just so happen not to be anywhere nearby?

This is disturbing stuff, at least to me, and I aim to talk more, next time, about how I’ve dealt with my own clairvoyant experiences, and the choice I made a couple years ago to turn my “radio” off.

In the meantime, I would love any book suggestions–related to physics or otherwise, religious or otherwise–that deal with this idea of oneness. I’d like to explore this some more.

A couple of years back my father-in-law forwarded me an article about neutrinos. Knowing I was into physics, he thought I might be interested. Was I ever! I’ve just tried to find the article and can’t, and so have spent the last half hour surfing websites, trying to get my bearings again. What I have concluded is that a) I need to get a masters in physics to understand most of what I’ve just read and b) OMG! This is crazy shit! (In the most respectful, awestruck use of the term, of course.)

Here is my laywoman definition of a neutrino: a very, very small particle. So small that any mass at all could not be detected for decades worth of testing. So small, and so amazingly constructed, that it can move through matter practically unhindered. Wikipedia says it would take a light-year of lead to block half of the neutrinos produced by the sun.

The article I first read about them talked about them moving so fast, and so unobstructed, that an explosion in space, some light years away (if I remember correctly) sent neutrinos to a detection tank, on the other side of the earth from where the explosion actually occured, instantaneously. They went through the earth, is what I’m saying. Instantly. From very, very far away.

This may not knock your socks off, but the first time I heard it, my feet were dern naked. Instantly.

Why, you ask?

Well, here’s the thing. If there are particles this small and this free of limitations…and this difficult to detect with all our most fancy neoneopostpostmodern trillions-of-dollars-worth scientific techniques–particles we’re only beginning to understand, and that challenge us to speculate on other sorts of undetectable “things”–then it seems plausible to me that some of the psi phenomenon that people observe and experience (clairvoyance, esp, psychokinesis, etc.), and that scientists have so far been unable to conclusively prove, are actually the result of matter like this. Little tiny particles traveling between people. What if we are all emitting particles, all the time, and it is these that are resposible for people knowing, for example, from a distance that a loved one has died or been injured, like right when it happened? What if the phenomenon of discoveries happening nearly simultaneously across the globe–like in science or math, for example–could be explained, in part, by actual particles traveling instantly outward from their sources (i.e. the people making them), enlightening others in the field in a subconscious way?

What if all the phenomenon that people have for centuries attributed to a spiritual realm, are really all part of the material universe? What if physical and spiritual are really the same exact thing??

I’m going to write more on this topic next time, but let this intro suffice: I totally get off on this sort of thing.

Wow.

I want to pick up on this money theme again soon, but have to say my mind is running a hundred other directions now. Among other things, I’ve been thinking about Christmas, and how tired I am of spending energy year by year feeling a) annoyed and grieved by my country’s consumerism and b) annoyed and grieved by what feels like the idolizing of Jesus. Idolizing anyone feels like a distraction from actually seeing and learning from how they live/d. In the case of Jesus, it seems like a great way to get distance from the revolutionary, irreligious, de-idolizing words the gospels have him speak.

But none of that is the point of this post.

The point I want to make is that I’m tired of giving energy to these grievances, and am actually excited about the prospect of spending this advent differently. So, in honor of the mysteries that infuse our world with things like Jesus, and Buddha, and the towering pine trees next door, I’m going to spend my posts in the next four weeks exploring things that fill me up with wonder, and get me all sparkly inside with the miracle and mystery that is life in this world…things that do the very opposite of some the ways I’ve spent energy in advents past.  I’ll consider this a spiritual discipline.
Here is a small list of potentials:

- synchronicity
- neutrinos
- string theory
- energy fields
- clairvoyance
- fourth, fifth and sixth dimensions
- the relativity of space and time

A few weeks ago I got an invitation from The Triad Institute, via Adam Walker Cleaveland, to read and review David James Duncan’s latest book. I didn’t read the invitation closely enough, however, to see that the book was called God Laughs and Plays, and had both “sermons” and “fundamentalist right” in the subtitle. I thought I was signing up to read a novel. Since Christians and I don’t generally use “God” to refer to the same thing, and since sermons and fundamentalists continue to be things I mostly try to avoid, you can imagine my horror, some days later, when the book arrives and I see the cover alone contains all three! Ack!

Luckily I looked closer this time. The real title reads God Laughs and Plays: Churchless Sermons In Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right.

Now, we can argue about whether the title accurately sums up the book, or whether I will ever get totally comfortable with it, but we can’t about this: I just sat here weeping after reading the whole thing through. I cried the kind of tears you only do when some deep, deep need you didn’t even know existed in you gets offered to you gently, lovingly, on the very platter that the grandma you’ve only ever dreamed of having owns—the one on which your imaginative matriarch of all-will-be-well serves you up cobbler and roast beef and sweet rolls and every kind of homemade Christmas treat. The one the mere glimpse of which reminds you, despite all evidence to the contrary, that you’ve always belonged somewhere, nestled deep into a clan, and that words like slick and posh and edgy and cool don’t apply here, never have, and therefore cannot touch your sense of being fine and loved and safe and known, all the way to your core. Normal, even.

He served me up these things, this David Duncan, middle-aged, writer-activist-comic-mystic-angler that apparently he is.

God Laughs and Plays is a collection of essays. It’s taken from talks, interviews and writings from Duncan’s recent past, and together is a kind of No! to any worldview—fundamentalist or otherwise—that would flatten or feign capable of stuffing our world into known and owned and heavily controlled commodities, things separate from holy, and therefore freely trampleable and disposable and looked past for finding God. It’s a Yes! to anything that expands wonder, which is to say love. Duncan writes:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love—and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly old word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder, but it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (8)

So it’s a love letter to Life, you could say, in the deepest, all-encompassing sense of the word Life, and a mama-bear growl toward anything that would defame Her…that would defame God.

Lest you fear an embittered tirade of equal, though left-handed, barb to the kinds of rants the fundamentalist right can make, however, listen to what he says early on:

There is a self-righteous knot in me that finds zealotry so repugnant it wants to sit on the sidelines with the like-minded, plaster my car with bumper stickers that say MEAN PEOPLE SUCK and NO BILLIONAIRE LEFT BEHIND and WHO WOULD JESUS BOMB?, and leave it at that. But I can’t. My sense of this life as pure gift—my sense of a grace operative in this world despite, and even amid, its hurts and terrors—propels me to allow life to open my heart still wider, even if this openness comes by breaking. For I have seen the whole world fall into a few hearts, and nothing has ever struck me as more beautiful. (xxv)

This is the kind of heart you will find beating behind and inside of all the teeth this book can bare.

So what about this heart, and the brains and words and quirks attached to it? How did it serve me up such grounding, grandmotherly kindness?

Though my past might say otherwise, I am not religious. I am not a churchgoer. I confess that most religious people and places do little by way of opening my heart to God. They don’t expand my sense of wonder, to put it Duncanly. I am, however, deeply hungry to sense my (our) union with God. And I’m seized by this—by wonder, by love—as I ponder so many things: people, trees, planets, stars, nutrinos, animals, carpentry, music, color, the texture of almost anything I touch. I see things, too, with a deep, inner eye. Visions, if you want to call them that.

So I am a mystic, even as I’m hopelessly tethered to my rational, knowledge-based side.

And in all of this, in this crazy mix of rational and irrational…metarational; in my love of all things known and unknown and my thirst for ever more of them flowing into me; in the kinds of feelings and images evoked when they do; in the echoes of wisdom and truth I see and study across religious traditions, and my chafing at claims to the contrary, I have felt alien. There’s a stamp in the shape of woowoo spiritist and a stamp in the shape of religious adherent and a stamp in the shape of rational ponderer or crazy right-brained mystic, but none of these alone has ever fit my forehead well.

But along comes Duncan, whose book I blindly and then resistantly and then with gusto stumble into, and he’s speaking my language! He’s talking my talk! Were I born twenty years earlier, and in Montana, and raised by fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventists, I’ve no doubt I would be his best friend. Maybe sister. I swear I’d know how to fish.

So he normalized me, is what I’m trying to say. And in having lived that much longer, pondered that much more, engaged that much more actively in resisting religious and political wonder-kill machines, he has blazed a kind of trail for aliens like me. Like us. Or lifted up the veil that’s hidden the existing paths surrounding us thus far.

So what does the trail he’s blazed by this book look like?

Real, for one. With or without intention, the essays of this book outline a man who feels rage and fear and pride and grief and indignation, but likewise joy and mirth and hope and gratitude and humility. He toots his own horn, but in the next breath, or essay, disappears into a kind of egoless sage, connecting with the best in all of us. I’m drawn to his aliveness to all of these parts of being human, and to the way his activist hat, and tragic/comic masks, and aged teacher of youth voice, and philosopher’s pipe, and wild prophet hairdo, and scientist’s coat, and druid’s staff, and mystic’s eyes, and any other garb or sound for any of the roles he owns aren’t glued on permanently tight. He dances, at least in this collection, within a full range of humanness. He feels real, in the very best sense of the word. And he’s funny, too.

Surely this is a trail we aliens would do well to follow.

But his trail is more than real. It winds an almost impossible path of attentiveness to detail—to place, to land, to people, and even the smallest grain of sand—but stretches that attention out beyond the scope of any single person’s sight. Politics—again local, but also national and international—get his trail’s time. Religion, of course. And cosmic things, too. One feels the pan in reading this of an intoxicated-with-life cinematographer, whose alternate delight and alarm at the interconnectedness of everything—galaxies all the way down to fundamentalists and writers and dying dogs and salmon—has his camera swinging ever out and in. But the swing is elegant, and unhurried, so by the time you reach the climax, all you can do is…all I can do is…weep. The very best, most fulfilled kind of tears.

If every book with God and fundamentalist and sermon in the title were like this one, I suspect aliens would feel alien no more. Our world would be inhabited and inhabitable by far less war, on every level, and far more kindness, far less senseless death and dying and far more life that stretches through and beyond both things. Wonder would be more like the air we all breathe.

[edited to turn off comments; getting lots of spam on this post for some reason]

I’ve just begun Paulo Coelho’s latest novel, The Devil and Miss Prym, and was surprised to be confronted in its preface with a belief I thoroughly own. The surprise wasn’t in the belief itself, since on tons of levels I resonate with Coelho’s thought, but rather in realizing it totally contradicts, at least on first blush, another of my convictions. So I want to explore this contradiction and see if it really exists.

Here’s the quote:

Each of the three books [in Coelho’s trilogy And on the Seventh Day] is concerned with a week in the life of ordinary people, all of who find themselves suddenly confronted by love, death and power. I have always believed that in the lives of individuals, just as in society at large, the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame. When we least expect it, life sets us a challenge to test our courage and willingness to change; at such a moment, there is no point in pretending that nothing has happened or in saying that we are not yet ready.

The challenge will not wait. Life does not look back. A week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destiny.

My view of destiny is broad, and is more about a pulse inside of us than any pre-ordained script, so maybe don’t get caught up on that part. The idea I’m most intrigued by is this one that “the profoundest changes take place within a very reduced time frame,” and “a week is more than enough time” for such changes to take place.

I think Coelho’s right. Totally. For all the apparent slowness of progress–inside ourselves, in the world around us–big things often happen in an instant. Big ideas get born, equations get solved, accidents kill, decisions get made, yeildedness happens to an inner voice, or to some person that we love, but haven’t been able to reconcile with. These things happen quickly, don’t they?

Or do they?

One of my biggest frustrations with certain brands of Christianity is the way conversion is understood in them. In such places, conversion is seen as the moment when a person magically transforms from something they’ve always been into something totally new. Bam! No process, no recovery, no counseling or hard work. A single prayer and the person is, or should be, if they were sincere, a happy, joyful God-child. Forever.

I have many problems with this, but for now I’ll focus on one: that person who prayed that special prayer? They won’t be happy all the time. They won’t always have joy. And odds are the same patterns that got them yearning for salvation in the first place are still, moments and even weeks or years after conversion, just that. Patterns. Anyone who has broken a pattern knows, with a few remarkable exceptions, that patterns take lots and lots of practice to break.

The transformations I’ve experienced thus far have taken terribly much time to happen, or at least I experience their unfolding that way, and the happiness and joy that I experience now, in far greater abundance than ever I experienced in any orthodox fold, have been won by terribly much work. Hundreds of hours of journaling and pondering and reading and talking and sleeping and waiting and sighing and crying and laughing and going to therapy. I’m an evangelical believer in healing and transformation and redemption and change. But I’m an angry mama bear at the suggestion that such things should happen quickly, or easily, or in response to some pre-scripted prayer.

But–and this is where the yieldedness I mentioned earlier comes in–I do believe in tipping points. I believe processes, for all their infinite unfolding, contain moments like Coelho talks about, choices that confront us, and on which mountains of things, whole worlds of things, depend.

So here’s my conclusion: I believe in conversion (religious and not), and that a choice in a moment, experienced as a turning from old to new, can make all the difference in the world. I believe a week is more than enough time for us to decide whether or not to accept our destinies, and also that our destinies are far more tenacious than to let us go if our choice, in such a week or moment (or weak moment), is against them.

Midtone Blue is back, and if you haven’t ever read him, you must go take a look!  His writing is unintended poetry.  His wisdom is deep.  His archives are full of warmth and wonder and all that makes life good.  I’m so glad you’re back, Blue.

Heather asked about my mention of fear in the last post, about how the undoing of it is one of the things I’m giving my life to. So I’ll try and explain more of what I mean by that.

I think fear is at the heart of our world’s problems. How’s that for a bold statement?? I think it’s at the heart of our individual problems, and at the heart of our collective problems, and the reason why it’s such an uphill thing, at least much of the time, to work well (or at all) together toward good.

Pushed far enough, maybe the core of our fear is fear of death, but I don’t think that’s what most of us are conscious of. I think most of us are conscious of fears like that of loneliness, joblessness, lack of clear or appealing identity, debt, getting dumped, getting raped, getting robbed, being ugly, being fat or thin in all the wrong places, losing health, losing respect, losing popularity, losing our minds.

I think there’s another whole layer of fear, though, that we’re not so conscious of, and that may be far more toxic than the rest. I think it has to do with who we are in a very deep and vulnerable place, and the kinds of questions we ask from there. Are we loveable?, is a big one. Are we okay? Is the world an inherently hostile place? Will the people I love abandon me? Will they get taken away? Will I have to suffer more than I can bear? Does God exist? Is God as critical as it seems sometimes? Are you going to hurt me? You? How ’bout you? Are you going to make me feel small? Will you take advantage of my weakness if I show it…or can’t hide it like I’d wish?

At heart, and of course to varying levels, I think we’re all afraid, and that every one of the “stupid” things we do collectively or individually can be traced to this. I think they can be traced to trying to protect ourselves, or keep from gaining or losing the things we’re afraid we’ll gain or lose. Traced to making sure that whatever hurt us before won’t ever hurt us again.

Surely many of our fears are well-founded. They make sense, and they’re there for good reason. But I think far more often than not, they’re bigger than they need to be, and when acted upon, only perpetuate the need that we and those around us have to be afraid. If I get defensive, for example, because I’m afraid you’ll trump my view, then my defensiveness will cause your voice to raise, and your defensiveness along with it. The two (three?) will escalate until we’re saying and doing things we never thought we would, given how we felt only five minutes ago. We will be fanning the flames of distrust for future interactions. We will be fanning flames of shame for having overreacted, if indeed we see that’s what we’ve done. We will be shrinking the bold, expansive, playful, curious, eager, trusting parts of ourselves that can’t come out when fear is at the helm, and nurturing an inner tightness, a vigilence, self-consciousness, clenched fists. We won’t be able to think about the common good, but be consumed with shoring up what we personally (as individuals, groups, nations) haven’t yet lost. At the farthest, most gruesome extreme, we will start wars.

I think versions of this process happen constantly, at every level, around us. It’s a web of fear and subsequent violence…and subsequent woundings, and the needs that follow our wounds to be afraid and protect ourselves…that we all get born into.

So. I want to be about the undoing of fear. I want to be about the shrinking of it, where it’s grown too big. I think the opposite of fear is trust, so I want to be on expeditions everywhere to unveil reasons for fear to actually turn into trust: trust that life can be good, that we’re okay–all the way to our core, that healing can happen, that no critical God exists apart from the ones we’ve grown inside ourselves, that our vulnerable selves can actually find safe places to be seen, and loved, and nurtured on toward Life, in the very best sense of that word.

I’m a writer, so written words are what I use most toward this end. But I think the shrinking of fear and the growth of trust can happen by many other means. I’m experiencing it through Qigong. I’ve felt it in Tai Chi, and the belly dance classes I’ve taken. In therapy. In laughter at no one’s expense. In sex and hugs and friends’ and mentors’ presence. Through music and visual arts. Through the work of raising my son. I see it happening as people love their pets, and as the motley crew of us gathers daily at the neighborhood park to talk and watch our kids play.

As far as I can tell, fear feeds on judgment and criticism and threats and looks of disapproval, so none of these, despite our best efforts at using them on ourselves or others well (said partly in jest, but partly with all seriousness), can lead to the alchemy I’m talking about, I don’t think. Trust is allergic to them. I think trust is allergic to many of the concepts of God that we work hard to feel loved by.

So this–this work of undoing fear and cultivating trust–is what I’m giving my life to. It’s the wind that fills up my sails and urges me on to write.

I’m still making my way slowly through Sam Harris’s End of Faith. I just finished a pair of chapters that details the brutish histories of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The second of the pair is on Islam, and by the end of it I found myself more afraid of Muslims than I care to admit–more afraid of their God, their customs, their worldview. And seeing “them” as something unified, too–something all, or at least mostly, alike.

I think Harris is scared, too. His whole book is about how religion, and Islam to the greatest degree, will either have to die, or be the death of us all, given the kinds of mass destruction that modern warfare-combined-with-religion is capable of. But here’s the most robust irony: he is actually giving himself more, and increasingly legitimate, reason to be afraid. By means of his book, he is creating more division, more distrust, more fear of the “other”, and therefore more layers of violence, than would otherwise exist had the book not been written.

This evening I attended a lecture given by Reza Aslan, a scholar of world religions, and expert on Islam. He’s written a book called “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” and lectured tonight on what he’s calling the Islamic Reformation. According to him, Islam is in an extreme state of flux right now, with authority shifting increasingly away from its clerics/scholars and into the hands of everyone (think Martin Luther, sola fide, sola scriptura). Groups are popping up across the globe of people reading Koranic texts differently, newly, outside of mosques, in the equivalent of home churches. And like in any decentralized institution, groups are forming along the whole spectrum of liberal to conservative, feminist to misogynist, violent to peaceful.

Aslan’s excitement to be alive in this season of change is palpable, and too his eagerness to present a more accurate picture of today’s Islam than any unified story can tell.

I know little of Islam (and plan to read Aslan’s book). But I know lots about Christianity, and can’t imagine, now that Aslan has popped the fear-bubble Harris created for me, that Islam is any more immune to the forces of peace and of violence than Christianity has been. While I plan on finishing Harris’s book (and to explore here some of the good points I think he makes), I’m eager to get a broader picture of Islam in my brain, in my bones, so that I can more fully participate in this project I’m giving my life to, this work of undoing fear.

I got tagged by Christy for this meme: Five Things Feminism has Done for Me. Let’s see…

1. I grew up believing that when I grew up, I could do whatever I wanted to do. Vocationally, I mean. :) I didn’t think that because I was a girl, I was automatically excluded from anything. I had no idea that the Christian denomination I was a part of would not ordain women or allow them to be lead pastors of churches. I assumed that women were just not choosing to do these things, like being president, and that if I wanted to do them, they were open to me. I’m guessing this latter assumption had a lot to do with my parents’ views on men’s and women’s roles, and a little to do with my churches not being particularly vocal about the limitations that women had in them. Or maybe I was oblivious to the vocalizations there were? In any case, feminism helped make vocation an open field in my childhood mind.

2. Leading up to and throughout the ten years of our marriage, N and I have worked hard to be conscious of power imbalances between us, and to do whatever we can to lessen them. This has been the hardest long-term project that either of us has ever worked at. The hardest, but the most rewarding.

3. I’m a writer, giving a significant number of prime time hours (after 8am and before 6pm) to writing each week. This while also being parent to a one-year-old. And having no money for childcare. N is in school, so we’re in a unique situation in that he has a schedule that can flex for shared kid-duty. But I think feminism has made this set-up conceivable at all by helping both of us see my writing, which at this point has no dollar signs attached to it, as a real vocation, and my pursuit of it as equally important as N’s pursuit of his. (The fact that there will be dollar signs attached to his in a few years, and that his is what will enable us to pay our bills (and loans!) and eat food that we actually buy at stores makes us give a lot more hours of work-beyond-home time to him each week. But that’s a pragmatic more than philosophic choice.) The task of coordinating work-at-home time and work-away-from-home time for both of us, and being as present to Elijah and each other as we want to be, is probably the second hardest long-term project that either of us has worked at. And of course, also totally worth it.

4. Increasingly I’m able to feel–and this beyond just knowing intellectually–that the entertainment and make-up and clothing and hair-product and skin-product and teeth-product industries are bankrupt in the ways they define feminine beauty and sexuality and life force as narrowly as being 18-25 years old with smooth skin and straight, white teeth and thick, highlighted hair and large, firm breasts and designer clothing and gym memberships and curves here and not there and fingernails that look like they’ve never seen dishwater. I feel the narrowness of these definitions, the way these industries have not stripped women down in their adds to expose our true beauty, but rather stripped beauty itself down to expose the ugliness at the heart of machines that would want all of us–as many as is inhumanly possible–not liking ourselves, wanting bodies that aren’t real, funneling huge portions of our incomes into becoming ever less so.

I feel the evil of this. And I feel the beauty and life force and sexual attractiveness of people–men and women–in things far deeper and broader than any ad will ever convey.

5. Number five is a catch-all drawer: I’m happy most of the time. I don’t feel like the world is only depressing and that an oppressive God exists. I haven’t had an ulcer for a very long time. I feel gentle toward my body. I like wearing feminine clothing and don’t have dreams anymore where I’m trying to pass as a man. I take intuition seriously. I take art seriously. I don’t feel obligated to fit my spirituality or metaphors for God into patriarchical frameworks. I’m a mom, and this by choice.

None of these would be true or possible apart from the feminist thinkers and writers and artists and theologians and mentors and friends who have helped me in my work of healing and self creation/re-creation in recent years.

Okay…I tag Jen, Adam, and Trish. And Adam’s wife, Sarah. :)  Okay, and Trish’s husband Richard, too.  Jen?  Heck…and Jen’s husband Dave!

Thank you everyone for such a great discussion!  I hope those whose perspectives differ from the ones offered so far feel free to join in.

Here is some of what I’ve heard us saying:

• Devoutness comes in many forms–both religious and not, evangelical and not.  And we’re all devoted to something…many things.
• This begins a list of ways that people are alike:
  • Early formation probably has a lot to do with our epistemology–the stories we internalize about how to know what’s true.  Some epistemologies have more wiggle room than others, and therefore lend themselves more naturally to a variety of ways of finding truth.
  • Regardless of our epistemology, respect and tolerance are challenges for all of us, inside and outside of religion.
  • Seeking security/self-protection is a natural instinct, and making sense of the world/self/God is part of how we protect ourselves.  Establishing a shared reality around this sense furthers our protection; camaraderie makes us feel (and actually be more) secure, and feel more like the sense that we’ve made is right.
  • When the sense we’ve made gets challenged, we instinctually move to protect ourselves more, by protecting what’s being challenged.  This is normal.  There’s nothing wrong with this.
  • Unlike many other types of animals, we can more easily (I say more easily because I think this doesn’t come easily for everyone) self-reflect and recognize we’re feeling challenged, feeling self-protective, and make decisions about how we want to respond to such feelings.  We can consider the ramifications of our responses for our relationships.
• Religious devotion (and possibly any devotion at all) that includes vulnerability and insecurity may be and open up the possibility for non-violence in ways that other types of devotion cannot.
• Religious devotion (and any kind of devotion at all) that requires assent to a set of assertions–assent, specifically, that claims security and invulnerability–may be and open up the possibility for violence in ways the alternatives do not.

In light of all of this, I’ve been thinking more about that list that began the last post.  I’m wondering whether all of it needs to be changed.  I have this image in my mind of what it means to differ from another person about some fundamental thing–whether God exists, for example, or what God is actually like, or what in our heart of hearts, we’re like.  It’s the image of a chasm, opened wide between you two.  I suppose the wideness of the chasm depends on how different your views actually are from each another’s.  But still, I think the chasm’s there.

And I think it’s possible to live one’s entire life feeling, and therefore believing, that that chasm defines, entirely, relationship with that other person (or group.  I think we often see people as members of groups, rather than as individuals–Jews/non-Jews, Christians/non-Christians, theists/athiests, gays/straights, men/women).  Sometimes that chasm is so deep, and so wide, that it’s nearly impossible to ever, even with the best of luck, see anything beyond it.

But this is the other thing I’m becoming convinced of:  these chasms aren’t all there is.  In any dyad, and a dyad can be two people, or two groups, or one person and a group, whatever–in any dyad I think there are multiple chasms, as well as multiple stretches where the ground between the two parts comes completely together.  And I think that even in the case of chasms, there are often also bridges, where abysses can actually be crossed, albeit sometimes only skillfully, and sometimes at great peril…or great cost.

But the terrain is varied, is what I’m saying.  Between all of us.  Try living with someone–even someone you’re madly in love with–for any length of time, and any dream of only solid, crackless ground will dissipate into all the little and big things that drive you nuts about them (God bless their soul), or, and this may be more pertinent to this conversation, all the ways you realize you don’t see things as similarly as you thought.  You’ll realize that for the sake of love, and of peace, and of sane cohabitation, both of you must work to find ways around those chasms.  Or through them.  Both of you must believe that they aren’t the only thing there is.

I think this is true of relationships across any religious or devotional divide.

So.  In the case of that list from last time, maybe people from different sides of religious divides can actually talk honestly about religion–even openly about thinking the other person is wrong–and remain genuinely respectful of one another if, and this is an enormous if, I think–they can also include in their active awareness the knowledge that the terrain between them is varied, and includes long stretches of connection.  Long stretches of ground that’s in common, and passed easily between.  Sometimes it’s probably even necessary–not optional, but necessary–for the two to explore together where those places of connection are.  Not doing so can mean the chasm (or chasms) defining the whole relationship, and consequently coloring completely both party’s feelings about one another.  Feelings for people across chasms, at least as far as I can see, aren’t generally pretty.

This "if" is a big one, though, and one that’s hard to find in many circles.

So the question then begs asking:  is it really worth finding places of connection and common ground when a) the chasms between two people or two groups are immense, and/or b) one half of the dyad in question isn’t interested in searching for them?

I think in many cases it’s not.

I think there are cases where all this kind of searching does is leave one or both parties constantly scraped and bruised, constantly hopeless and frustrated, constantly yearning for some kind of home, some kind of place to relax and be at ease.  I think there are times in certain lives when peace is what’s needed most–needed to heal, needed to discover oneself actually normal, rather than whatever alternate labels keep getting lobbed across those voids.

Maybe there are times for unpeace, too, though.  Times for unrest.  Times when getting bruised constantly is a kind of gift a person gives to those who come after.  Examples paint history, where people of color and homosexuals and women and youth and elderly–where people of all kinds have participated in the very groups that would exclude them and call them evil or less than or stupid.  Those who have stayed active in such groups, doggedly proclaiming, even if by their silent presence alone, that chasms aren’t all there is:  I could weep in gratitude.  Thank you.  What a silly, tinny phrase to give to such world-changing work.

I’m thinking that that work isn’t everyone’s though, and that each of us must decide which relationships, or potential relationships, we need to walk away from, and which ones we must navigate the chasms of.  Because chasms, it seems to me, mark them all.

What do you think, though?  Am I wrong in some of this?  And in which cases are the BIGGIES, the canyons that can make the Grand one look small, worth working around for the sake of relationship?