Tinkering

When I decided I was going to write a series called “The Slippery Slope To Freedom” I think I might have been a little ambitious about the things I wanted to write about.   I wanted to sound important, confident and knowledgeable.   I wanted to wow people with my insight and wisdom.  I wanted to show folks that I had overcome terrible odds.  I wanted to laugh, really laugh.

The more I thought about this the more I realized that I was doing myself, and anyone interested in what I have to say, a disservice.  I was forcing myself to move way to fast through a maze of uncertainty and missing the nuggets and clues along the way – little objects called thoughts that deserve time to grow or wane with care.

What does the slippery slope to freedom mean to me anyway?  I think I chose that title the way a little child would belligerently choose a word or phrase to on-purpose aggravate a grownup, then stick her tongue out and run away.  I was hurting and it was my way of showing “them” I wasn’t afraid anymore.  They couldn’t hurt me and neither could their god.

I’m not sure when I actually started doubting my faith.  Some would say doubt is part of faith; to doubt is divine.  That God loves it when we doubt.  It makes us run to him and jump up on his knee so he can tell us a story.  It’s a sweet granddaddy image but an image that began to trouble me.   It began to feel like the creepy Santa Clause at the mall whose eyes you could see behind the fake white curls and glasses.  Eyes that said, “I’m not real – I’m getting paid to lie to you.”

A long time ago a friend of mine got caught up in a cult.  It was a terrible ordeal for her when she came out of it.  What she learned through counseling was this.  When we get tangled up in a belief system there comes a time when we begin to question the validity of that system.  But we put those questions on the back shelf of our minds for all kinds of reasons.  I suspect mostly from our very human need to be a part of something, be in community and mostly, to be accepted.  Then one day that shelf begins to sag, it begins to sway, the weight is too much and eventually it collapses.  I believe this is what happened to me.

I never imagined that anyone could leave Christianity.  I didn’t think it was possible.  How do you leave the savior, the one who died just for you – the one who thought about you before you were even born? As I look at that statement now, what a terrible burden for a Christian to have to bear – living with the guilt that somebody was murdered on my behalf to satisfy a god’s appetite for vengeance.  But let me back up a minute – I didn’t start out with such sophisticated questions.  My first main concern was, “is hell real and am I going there?”  And from what I’m learning from others who are trying to leave, it is surely the number one issue that has to be dealt with early on.  When I look back over my lifetime of running to or from god, it was always this one fear that drove me back to the church.  I had to deal with this first if I was ever going to be able to move on.

Jesus and His Space Cadet Dad

What if Jesus was actually the product of alien/human copulation? The bible speaks about the Nephilum being the product of alien/human coupling.   Perhaps a highly advanced civilization discovered our planet and felt compelled to help us in our struggle against an evil we did not understand.  Perhaps this assistance is another step in evolution – a readiness to share knowledge and a readiness to receive it.  I’m reminded of the book, Illusions – The adventures of a reluctant messiah, or Christian Scientists who sort of believe that Jesus was fully in touch with the powers that are within all humans and honestly attempted to teach people how to access it.  (I do find that interesting)  So let’s have fun with this for a moment.  Let’s suppose that a space cadet from the planet Nephilum was given the assignment to journey to this planet where beings with so much potential exist.

Wouldn’t it be fascinating to learn that across eternity there have been civilizations that monitor the progress of other worlds in development and when a certain world reaches a critical stage a messenger is sent to there to assist them?   Perhaps there have been many saviors, millions even. Maybe messiah means nothing more than “teacher who comes from the sky.”  How do we know that the claimed magical star in the east that pointed to the baby Jesus wasn’t simply a spacecraft?

Maybe this ambitious cadet could have been given instructions on how to choose a person to impregnate and it turns out that the spooky spector who showed up in the middle of the night to “overshadow” Mary was simply a foreigner on assignment!   The foreigner named Father or Abba, from Nephilum, explained everything to the woman named Maria. He explained his own planet and beings, how they evolved and learned to listen to, observe, and assist other worlds.  He explains;

“Every civilization that we know about so far, including our own, has wrestled with greed, sickness, and violence.  There comes a crisis moment in a civilization when we begin to detect vibrations through universal listening holes.  This is when we begin to observe and calculate the time when we will come to assist.  In times past the Nephilum attempted to be teachers but earth’s humanity was so frightened by us that they would worship us and murder their young as sacrifices to appease us.  They could not accept that we had once evolved from where they are now.  When we left, stories were written about us that were not true.  The stories told of how we were brutal and violent, and took whatever we wanted.  How we raped and pillaged and feasted.”

Father continues, “From our own historical records we learned that our early civilization was very much like yours.  We learned that we, once human like you had a great capacity for struggling for progress.  We also sadly learned that early civilizations will teach themselves to fear what it does not understand and that there is great suffering before it can push through and evolve.  It is when this fear peaks to crisis that your civilization can progress or recede.  Many choose to recede and create gods and religions to attempt to control fear by corralling humans into belief sects.  They will cry for help to invisible gods, the very gods they fabricated. “

Imagine for a moment, this young woman who has seen and spoken with a creature she has never seen before.  It is understandable that she would instantly fall to her knees in awe and worship this being mostly out of sheer terror.  She has no other frame of reference for who they are.

Silly, far-fetched, irreverent, naive, juvenile?  Yes.  Everyone of these work.  But if I look at so many stories in the bible or other religious books with outrageous stories, they too could be described the same way.  The point for me is…., I am finding the freedom and power to use my imagination.  I no longer have to  be afraid that what I always thought was absolutely true could very well have been made up or at least spiritualized beyond reality.   I no longer have to live a life according to Pascals wager.

While journaling recently, reflecting on the wild turns my life has taken in the past few years, I wrote about dealing with a tired and ragged companion I’ve been dragging around all of my adult life.  I call that companion “that old nag.”

Formed in my imagination is a freakish mutant fused from myself and my parents.  This old talking donkey has followed me around all my life whispering two things; “survive”, “Jesus is coming soon.”  To think that my life’s goals can be boiled down to such a bland concoction, that’s not much of a recipe for life!  It sounds like a harsh reflection, maybe even self-loathing.  But for me today, it is not.  It is an honest self-reflection and quite possibly the very key to the door where I have been looked from the inside.  It seems that I have found the skeleton key.

I have come to realize that I have worshipped a God that I don’t even believe in.  I have lived this life almost entirely under an imagined skybox from where my parents gaze and judge my every move.  My life has never really been lived for me.  I think I have always known this on some level.  Seeing this now with such clarity is stunning, embarrassingly elementary.   Until now, whenever I asked, “what am I doing with my life?” – I was comforted with the answer that I had chosen the noble life, one in which I “lived for others” (in the Christian sense).  But what I have discovered is that living for others can easily morph into living other people’s lives for them and using that as an excuse for doing nothing with my own.  Is this truly a selfless way to live or is it a disguise for using people as a hiding place from life’s demands like real responsibilities or healthy pursuits?  Anything of interest that I have pursued up until now has in one way or another had to do with either saving the family,( which has always been pure fantasy), or helping others figure out their lives and find the path to God, (in Christian terms “accept Jesus as their savior”).  I carried this notion that any pursuits other than this were a waste of time since Jesus was to return and the earth would turn to ashes.  That old nag clopped along.

Lately I’ve been exercising a muscle that I’ve never used before.  I’m beginning to challenge the fear of the God of my former understanding.  Each time I hear a familiar threatening passage from the bible or a distant echo from my parents, thundering preachers or past religious fundamentalist friends, I stop and say, “No, I will not bend or bow to this anymore.  This is not who I want to be.”  And what a surprise.  It’s working!

As I speculate heaven in the fantastic way that it has been presented in the Christian view and how God is supposed to behave on the “great and terrible” day, I cannot help but wonder who any of us (believers of this sort) are kidding.  If we think we have lived righteously and get to heaven to claim our prize, isn’t God going to see right through this?  I absolutely must ask, “what-is-my-motive-for-serving-God?”  No doubt there are those who claim to love almighty God but I dare say, humans have been known to love even the cruelest captors out of terror for their lives.  I wonder how many worshippers of God actually privately fear not doing so.  I remember a friend telling me once that she would rather err on the side of this belief than to face the possibility of eternal torment.  In all honesty I think this has been much of my own way of accepting the Christian God.  If God is really this way, having very thin tolerance and limited control, then from this perspective I along with many soi-disant Christians will wind up in hell anyway. 
God will know that we have worshipped him in vain.

I’ve often heard that it is nearly impossible to change later in life.  I believe different.  I think the desire to change old and tired beliefs, particularly those that consume our thoughts and rob emotional space, must be stronger than any other desire.   For me, expelling sad morbid thoughts about God and hell dislodges something from the deep inner workings of my soul, like being relieved of a dangerously stuck piece of food.  As violent an analogy as that is, the result – to breathe freely, is the same.

What is to become of my old nag?  Do I shoot her, take her out of her misery?  Put her on a carnival display to mock and ridicule?  Or, how about this?  Perhaps put her to pasture and smile,  kindly remembering that it was she who brought me this far. 

Wow.  I guess Occupy Wall Street is becoming more to me than just a fascinating observation of the next youth movement.  Tardy as this movement is on our piece of geography, I’m glad it has finally arrived.  I’m a bit sad that I cannot be counted among the youth but my heart is young and I’ll ignore my aches and pains to stand boldly with them.

Up until now I have remained somewhat in the background, taking pictures and videos and making a few signs.   But with each day that passes I find myself thinking more and more about the OWS message.  I keep remembering all the things I’ve heard at the general assemblies.  The reports coming out on listservs and various news shows are stirring.   And now I’m looking at my bank.  Can my partner and I do this; participate in this direct action of transferring our money from commercial accounts and joining a local credit union?  Can we cut the ties to what we perceived as the safe systems and truly start sharing our lives with a local community?

It’s not such a big deal to switch banks or join credit unions.  It is a big deal, however, to do it now when big bankers just might be starting to wring their hands.  Clearly this youth movement has learned from the successes and failures of the 60s movement.  From my vantage point, these guys are smart, brave, well connected and can mobilize very quickly thanks to technology.  They’re getting funding and donations without even trying.  I haven’t heard of any introduction of mind altering drugs yet.  It’s still speculated that it was infiltrators in the 60s that introduced drugs and ultimately caused horrific scenes like Kent State.  I’m betting this generation is ready for such tactics.

Hope and determination in the occupiers eyes is what I’m continuing to see.  And I see a twinkle there too, almost like a glow from a spiritual experience.  They know this is good and right for all people.  Unlike the 60s where “no one over 30 should be trusted,” these young people are welcoming to us older folks.  I hope we don’t spoil it for them by urging too much caution.  They deserve to learn by their mistakes too.  I have faith in them though.  I’ve watched them hash things out in their general assemblies.  It is far superior to anything I’ve witnessed in many conference rooms in corporate America.  I’m encouraged.