againsttheglass.com

The view from our Jersey City roots, July, 2008.

Left to right: My nephew Joe, great-nephew Peter, sister Babs (behind Joe’s shoulder), neice-in-law Stephanie, great-niece, Mary, brother Mike (in back with sunglasses), sister-in-law Sue, niece Tarin, sister-in-law Annie (half her face not visible), sister Mary (in front of Annie), me, sister Joanie (next to Annie), sister-in-law Joy, sister Maggie (next to me and Joy), nephew and Godson Stephen, brother Tom (the eldest), brother Pete, niece Maureen.

I had to practice last night for singing at church tomorrow. So, I sat at the piano to pick out they key and figure out how to play John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Key of F (Lennon sings it in C). It’s a pretty simple song, so, I hoped that I could wing it since it was the lat minute and all. I played it through a few times, then began to lay the singing on top when I got confident of the chords and arrangement.

All the while, I was aware that Blake had walked into the living room behind me, sat on the sofa, and was utterly quiet. That is out of character for him in general, but I was concentrating on the song, so took his presence in unconsciously as I played and sang. I went through the song a few times kind of faking the lyrics (doesn’t everyone?). I turned from the bench to go to my computer, Google the lyrics and print them out.

When I turned, I saw those big brown eyes under that crown of blond curls looking into my soul, tears falling down his cheeks.

“I’m going to get old and die. You’re going to die. And I will miss you so much.”

I leaned over to hug him, and he wrapped his arms around my neck, clinging to me as if for life itself. I gave him a parent’s reassurance — Everyone dies, but it will be a long, long time before that happens, and that I would be around for many years with him. I assured him that Mommy was doing all she could to stay healthy, that she was looking forward to seeing him become a Daddy someday and loving his children.

He seemed comforted for the moment by the closeness and the presence of his mother. But, my smart boy knows that all in life is not permanent, and his comfort was one of a growing child who is beginning to connect the dots between the infinite and the inevitable. These moments in his life, when he comes upon a deeper understanding of what has heretofore been simplistically accepted, are encounters with the mystery of human life itself. His brain unfolds reality to him in pieces and parts, and he weaves them together when he’s lived through enough to grasp the connections, and make them for himself.

At my mother’s wake (like every good Irish wake, 3 days long), I went into the parking lot for a break, looked to the sky, and said, “Mom, what do I do now?”

My mother was the core, the center, of my life. I knew, when she was gone, I would never have that sense of my unconditional champion in my corner, that perfect and flawed love that I knew through her. When Blake’s arms pulled me towards him, wrapping my neck tightly, I felt my mother letting me know that it’s now his turn to feel that love, that sense of boundless eternity that love from a mother, and only a mother, can give to a child.

A love most profound, now humbly returns in my direction. Blake, I pray for the strength and humility to earn the greatest give you’ve given me: your trusting, enduring love.

Okay, so I’m suitably devastated in a very self-centered way. My boss, whose name shall remain a mystery, announced he is leaving for greener pastures.

I could not be more happy for him. He has been underappreciated for a long time, and it has deeply affected his personal happiness. He is a man of unusual insight, intelligence, and compassion, and I’ve never worked for someone like him in my entire 26 year working life. To say I will miss him as a boss is an understatement. To say I will miss him as a dear friend is closer to the truth, and I don’t have many dear friends.

He has championed my work, fought for equity in my pay, argued for my telecommuting arrangements, and given me the time I need for me and my family to get settled. He has done so with utter unassuming compassion, and always treats those who work for him with trust and professionalism.

Words cannot describe how I feel right now. Boss (who shall remain nameless), you are the best.

I have joined a Yahoo! group for US families adopting from Ethiopia. My reasons are to gather information from folks about their experiences. I’ve gleaned a few hard useful facts that will help us ease our child’s journey (when that moment arrives), but for the most part, this group appears dedicated to assuaging the worries of overly-controlling white Americans who can’t stand that Ethiopian courts actually make their own decisions about who is permitted to adopt their most precious natural resource: the children.

The nerve!

There is an air of entitlement in America, and one really sees a side of it once embarking on the infertility and adoption journeys. I understand the feeling of panic. I went through it, too. Usually, many of us decide to adopt at a later age because we no longer can have kids, or started a bit late for our bodies to be quite up to the job. So, when the American delusion of success at everything if you try hard enough breaks down, and the biological clock starts ticking louder and louder, women can get desperate. But this desperation, I hate to tell you, does nothing to speed the process. And if you are impatient for a process as important as the caring of another human life, particularly one that has already suffered slings and arrows at such a tender age, then you don’t have the mettle it takes to be a good parent.

I have seen parents refer to these children as “cuties,” like they are beanie babies or something. We are not catalog shopping for children here, folks. We are making a solid and sacred commitment to a child who was abandoned for reasons none of us will ever have to face. Poverty, death, disease, starvation. There is nothing “cute” about this. These kids are human beings, plain and simple, and the confusion they must undergo when we take them must be immense.

I understand why some folks think that taking a child from his home country is not a good thing to do. However, after much prayer, research, counsel with folks I respect, and time, as well as a little growing up, I realize that life is not so black & white. There are times when the ideal cannot be achieved because the situation is simply untenable for a family. In that case, adoption sure beats trafficking in children for labor or prostitution, and that is precisely why the courts have to be so very careful.

But I don’t see a lot of compassion around. In general, though, I must confess that most birthparents I know have trouble with acknowledging the “subject” nature of their children. Children can be seen as objects by many folks, objects that reflect ourselves back to us, objects that sometimes fail along the way and make us disappointed, like a faulty consumer good (only you can’t send it back).

Kids are messy human beings the world over, just as all of us are messy human beings. God didn’t make things very neat and tidy, did he? Our job in the adult world is to navigate the messiness of it all with grace and hope, and to impart that on our children, whatever their origin. It is a privilege to be a parent, not a right, no matter what our constitution implies. The thing in the Declaration of Independence about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” also applies to our kids, hate to tell you. And it applies to children we bring into this country with the sacred promise to provide them with life, love, hope, and if all goes well, their own slice of happiness, however bittersweet.

So, worry if you want that you will be unjustifiably rejected by the Ethiopian courts. We may be, too, and it will hurt if that happens. But, I’ve been through infertility, a failed adoption (the birthmother made the decision to raise the child), and a long, long wait to adopt again. So, after a while, you kind of realize that all you can do is trust in God, fill out the paperwork, pray for that child every day, and wait for God’s will to unfold. As much as I hate to admit it, and as painful as it’s been to swallow on so many occasions, that methodology hasn’t let me down yet.

My mom said that “Worry is the interest you pay on a debt you may never owe.” So, while you wait, pursue your own happiness so you can share some with your child someday. They are going to need some very, very much.

To get more sleep, I got myself a DVR to record John Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I know they re-air at 8 pm the following evening, but I’m usually not in front of the TV until about 9:30, so I saw the general “necessity” (read in the context of my white pseudo-bourgeois lifestyle) to have DVR service from Comcast.

Added bonus: I get to catch up on my favorite soap. I’ve been watching All My Children since 1973 and it became something that my Mother and I shared. So, I still watch, and feel my mother by my side, making sideways, smoke-filled wisecracks about the idiocy of the characters we were addicted to watching. I also record House and The Office.

However, there is one show I’m totally ashamed about recording: Dr. Phil. I think the guy is an all-out jerk who bullies people, but, I’m addicted now to watching it. I am absolutely astounded by how many people there are who are willing to go on stage, tell their most private stuff, and have a bald guy yell at them to stop what they are doing. If that’s all it took, most of these folks would never need to show up on the Dr. Phil show. The world is lousy with old bald guys yelling at you to stop playing in the street or get off their lawn. I’m sure at least one of them would help if you asked them to tell you to stop just about anything.

What causes me to write today is the subject matter of the show which is one of those things that makes me feel like a foreigner in my own culture. It’s about disaster wedding stories. The young woman was absolutely devastated that it rained on her wedding and the cake fell down. She recounted how this type of disaster plagued her at all her major life events, which she listed as: Sweet 16, Homecoming, Senior Prom, First Valentine’s Day with hubby, Second Valentine’s Day with hubby.

This list of events seem to be the boilerplate list that American girls/women check off as they go through puberty and early adulthood, culminating with the wedding. She said something that I have heard so many times, “Every girl dreams of the perfect wedding.”

I didn’t have or want a Sweet 16 party, hated that I had to go to the prom (I was President of the Student Council so it was “good form” to go), didn’t have a homecoming in our all-girls school and never liked that kind of school/sports-centric thing anyway. As for Valentine’s Days, I can’t keep track of what I’ve done on any Valentine’s day enough to have kept a list of the bad ones, and there have been quite a few of those.

As sad as I am that this young woman is trapped in this illusion that life is measured by the level of perfection for all of these proscribed tableaus along the trajectory towards womanhood, I am alienated that I was never one of those girls who always dreamed of the perfect wedding. To be honest, I didn’t give marriage much thought until I got to college. And then, I was always more interested in finding the right person than having the right kind of party. I was so interested in finding the right person that I did it 3 times:)

This last time with Noel was in our apartment in Brooklyn with 35 of our AA friends and some family. I baked the odd looking cake, an uncle and my mother-in-law made the food, and we took our vows barefoot in front of the fireplace. It was a quirky, poorly-planned party, but it seemed the proper scale for my life at the time.

Maybe it’s because I’ve had so many big events in my life that seem so important to me, I’ve never aspired to the perfect wedding. The marriage always seemed more like the event than the wedding. I think there is a danger in aspiring for perfect moments based on a standard that is not necessarily driven by the moment when it comes. The one time I had a blowout wedding was the second time, and that’s because my father had just died, and my mother wanted a big wedding to get her mind off of things. I hated it, and I threw the pictures out years ago because that perfect wedding was just too darned painfully not-me that I could not bear to look at them. I later used one of the pictures for publicity for a comedy show I was doing called “Busy Being Beautiful.” The look on my face was like I was hermetically sealed in an emotional iron maiden that said “stand with your ankles at a right angle to each other and smile.” To my mother, I was beautiful, and I was marrying an architect! To me, I was as far from myself as I’ve ever been.

Measuring the success of one’s life based on the quality of these essentially lifeless and stationary programmatic events in time comprises a spiritual poverty. Unfortunately, this kind of impoverished thinking is like a virus in our culture. It’s just one of those things that makes me feel less and less a part of the culture that surrounds me.

Maybe I should stop watching Dr. Phil?

My son’s psychiatrist is going out of business (I guess you have to say “closing her practice”) because she can get paid only 37% of the time from the insurance companies. She is a developmental pediatrician AND a child psychiatrist so charges health insurance as a primary care physician. I like that mental health treatment can be considered a component of primary care. Alas, the health insurance companies are getting wind that cognitive and behavioral struggles can actually be claimed as an organic, medical issue, and will have none of that. So, the only competent physician in this area in Charlottesville is being put out of business. She has to refer us to someone in Richmond, so bad is the local consciousness about children’s brain issues. But, no fear! The kids she WON’T treat will grow up and be forced into involuntary treatment by our spiffy new laws! Problem solved.

My own health insurance paid for Blake’s sessions with the doctor, but, although there was a prescription for speech and language therapy, and a full evaluation, will not pay for the speech and language therapy. Anyone who has a child struggling with a different brain knows that learning issues like speech and language can frequently exhibit as part of, or in conjunction with, the underlying condition. School psychologists LOVE to parse the chicken and egg on this one, and talk about childhood traumas as a “cause,” as though that’s a way to help “cure” the problem. Zen philosopher Alan Watts said that humans are the only species that bother trying to find out why. To my mind, in matters of psychology and personal narrative, the why can be a barrier — the genius of the why is in the sciences, and that’s where it belongs.

Color me simplistic, but, how about we forget about psychological “why” and treat the whole child’s whole brain: anxiety, executive functioning, speech and language. I must be crazy! It will never work. We need months of talk therapy to find out which psychological trauma specifically caused it. And, we need to get reimbursed for only 50% of the cost of that by our behavioral health (I LOVE that term!) insurance.

In my son’s case, a very low dose of methylphenidate is helping with the impulse control and executive functioning. He is no doubt happier, calmer and better equipped at school. But his anxiety issues are still present, and exacerbated situationally as well as cyclically. Since language processing and retrieval is difficult for him, this heightens anxiety at a charged moment when you’re trying to calm him down: he can’t tell you well what’s happening, so he explodes. The only thing you can do is restrain him from hurting himself, talk calmly, bring him down to the moment (What color is the ceiling? Where are we?) and wait for it to subside. After the mayhem, he manages to squeeze out amazing things like “I was angry and I apologize.” A kid that makes a statement like that is not a kid with issues of maturity, discipline or intelligence. He just has trouble retrieving what to say when the feelings take hold.

Thanks to an amazing teacher at his school (not his teacher, unfortunately), we are using Social Stories to help with the situational anxiety. But, overall, his difficulty with language heightens the anxiety and makes the mood swings worse. To me, that’s a sign that something’s going on in the brain (part of the body, no?) and therefore a medical issue. But, to the insurance company, his language struggles are a “developmental” issue. In order to be considered a medical issue, and therefore reimbursed, our son would have had to have been part of an early intervention program. So, here’s the deal with that.

Since he was born prematurely, we were entitled to an early intervention screening. In addition, in the NICU, he was tested for brain bleed, Apgar, the whole nine and nothing was wrong (or, as they like to say, “remarkable”). I took him for our one complimentary early intervention screening when he was 3 months old. He was right on target, no worries. Therefore, if we wanted treatment for anything that arose, they could provide it, but at a cost.

Here’s the flaw with that: many of the more subtle brain issues that affect learning and behavior don’t manifest until the child is in an environment that demands those skills. We saw at 3 years old that his language was suffering and that there were issues with his mood. His pediatrician said it was fine. His psychotherapist said that his speech was fine, but that he was traumatized by a failed adoption we experienced when Blake just turned 3, and that being adopted was traumatic. The treatment for the former was paid for by our health insurance. The treatment for the latter, over a period of a year and a half, was paid, only 50% worth, by our behavioral health insurance. In neither case was the money well spent.

So, Blake is in school this year, and his language struggles (determined to be normal) are enhancing his anxiety to the point where he runs out of the classroom and acts aggressively at moments when he feels pressured. The school psychologist says that its attachment disorder from being adopted (he’s been with us since he was 10 hours old). I think psychologists in general consider adoption to be a disorder, or a treasure-trove for unlimited sessions of painful and futile inquiry. At any rate, that was a useful diagnosis. I’ll get right on that.

We finally were referred to the person who can help him. This amazing pediatrician/psychiatrist/NEW YORKER (!) who pinpointed his language difficulties in 5 minutes. We felt so validated we could hardly speak. He got the evaluation, diagnosis, and treatment plan he needs. But, it won’t be paid for because THERE WAS NO RECORD OF AN EARLY INTERVENTION PROBLEM.

Now, I could have asked Blake at 3 months old to conjugate verbs and exhibit proper syntax for the purpose of the evaluation, but, I was negligent in that regard. Now, since there is NO apparent neurological problem afoot (according to the records), it’s a developmental issue, not a medical issue.

My friends who fight these issues for their autistic son every day say that this is the medical insurance’s way of kicking back to the school system. But, the school language person can’t get him to speak with her, so says she can’t evaluate. I find that kind of ironic: not speaking seems to be a speech and language issue, no? But, I’m being far too intelligent. I sent her a video from home, showing how he constructs sentences. She thanked me and said that “What I saw was pretty good.” Oops! I guess we’re not getting treatment there either.

So, here’s the deal: If our son had a stroke, or fell on his head, and exhibited the same speech and language struggles, he could get the same treatment. However, if he simply has a problem that our diagnostic tools are not yet sophisticated enough to pinpoint on an MRI, then, well, it’s “developmental”. The bottom line is that we can’t afford $135 twice per week for treatment. We are going to argue this one out until we are blue in the face (I’m a shade of purple at the moment). We will GET him what he needs. But what about all those other kids out there who don’t have a smart, obnoxious mother from NYC, a father in a neuroscience PhD program, whose school systems are even worse than ours, whose parents may have the same issues that have gone untreated (like Blake’s birthmother, whom we offered to get treatment for, but she declined). Will they wind up in involuntary commitment when they slug someone out of panic because they never got the tools they needed to go through life with their brain as it is?

Ask Governor Kaine.

I am a day late in the May 1 Blogging Against Disablism event. Life intervened on my schedule, and I’ve been working on this post for a few days. Although this is tardy, I offer it as my contribution.

A little over a year ago, a student named Cho Seung-Hui went on a shooting rampage at Virginia Tech. It was an unbelievable tragedy: 32 people shot, with the 33rd being the shooter himself. Parents lost children, families lost parents, friends lost friends, and the nation lost trust in the safety of colleges and universities. What ensued as a result was a national dialog, and an expanded legislative menu, dedicated to issues of liability, accountability, and enforcement.

As with so many public tragedies on this scale, we lack the will as a people to swim further up the food chain of an event to get to its origins. We like dealing with preventing horrific results, and that rarely pays off in solutions that drip with compassion. When you have a group of grieving parents, students, and a nation, the need for urgent action overcomes the need for deeper understanding. This is particularly true in the realm of political leadership, appointed and elected. Public money generally goes towards demonstrable solutions that guarantee re-election and a continual flow of local pork, not necessarily deeper problem-solving about why our society is like a petri dish for violence and tragedy. As one of my favorite Disney heroes, Shrek, would say, “Grab your torches and pitchforks!” We like doing that a lot.

Torches and pitchforks firmly in hand, we can march together, simultaneously feeling like we’re solving the problem while conveniently disowning our part in perpetuating it. We disown those whose brains are structured differently because the results of their disability demonstrates so clearly that they are not like us, less than human, having to be “dealt with” rather than understood. They can’t be understood, which we chalk up to the inhumanness of their behavior.

I remember the days following the shooting, feeling like I was in a surreal place. “We are all Hokies!” Why, in my own struggles, did I feel like, “We and those like me are all Cho.” Who, by the way, was a Hokie, however ambivalently so.

As a person suffering with major depressive disorder, and loving folks in my immediate family who are bipolar, alcoholic, and living with the Cho diagnosis of “selective mutism,” I do not have the luxury of disowning the humanity of those to whom my fellow citizens conveniently refer as other. I can’t apply that narrative because I know too much about the humanity that inhabits those of us whose brains were hard-wired on, shall we say, the alternate specifications. And the minute that a disowned object becomes subject, narrative goes away. You are confronted with only one thing: the bare, beautiful, horrible reality of the human mind in its infinite potential for choice, informed as much by simple chemistry as by what we call (in our theologically-generated narratives), conscience. You arrive at the unavoidable compassion that arises from stepping inside of the experience of the conflicted, and you cannot escape your responsibility in shaping a world that makes room for them, too.

We make room, in institutions like prisons and psychiatric facilities. We physically separate from this population so as to not be confronted, day by day, with humans who think differently on the alternate specs. We like to kill them sometimes. We like to demonize their parents, as though the 19th century notion of the sins of the parent visiting the child were still a metaphysical supernatural truth (but now we have Freud to give that old take a more modern narrative — phew!).

Then, we pass legistlation like Virginia’s brand spankin’ new involuntary commitment laws, which Alison Hymes has bravely railed against daily — a windmill-tilter if there ever was one, and one of my heroes. Able-minded folks have trouble listening because to open up this dialog is to open up their responsibility in building a world that prevents tragedy through compassionate health care and housing (more economical and efficient, by the way) than punishment for those with the alternate spec who need an alternately-appointed environment in which to thrive.

I was doing architectural planning and building code consulting in NYC in the 1980s when the disability act came to fruition in the codes. Folks lined up at the Department of Buildings the day before to secure an appointment for plan approvals prior to the onset of the law. Folks didn’t like the extra expense involved in grab bars, wheelchair ramps, and larger bathrooms. I remember working on a project for a bar/restaurant on the upper west side that didn’t make it in under the wire, so they had to provide a wheelchair accessible area to enable the hiring of a disabled bartender. The restaurant owner, not the nicest of men, was, shall we say, colorfully dismayed in a NYC kind of way.

Being kind, and open to the possibility of sharing the world with those needing accommodations that on the surface we read as “unfair,” is more work than punishment, but much less flashy than a shiny new prison and gleamingly extreme legislation. I remember even in a Unitarian Universalist church I was met by a supposed bleeding-heart liberal person with “I’m sorry, but these people are NOT going to be cured just by loving them!”

I could parse that many ways, but for now, I’ll focus on the word “cured.” We like to “cure” because it eliminates the problem. But, compassion does not imply cure. It implies living with a condition in dignity and cooperation, in community, getting treatment openly and without shame. It means the same coverage for preventive psychotherapy as for medical treatment. Here are a few alternate versions of recent events that could have been prevented by such a world:

1) A brilliant academic living on the alternate spec rises to the top of his field, to the level of President of a university. He does not fear reaching out for help under tremendous stress because, like a diabetic or someone with heart disease, his spec requires alternate treatment. He openly negotiates a contract allowing for time at AA meetings, psychotherapy, money for medications, and flexibilty in workstyle that suits his temperament. As a result, he is able to fend off crisis episodes, keep functioning brilliantly, bringing insight to the job that someone else, who may not be on the alternate spec, cannot. (the real story here>)

2) A young man on the alternate spec includes this information openly on his university application. All of his teachers, advisors, and deans know about it. His need for accommodation is expressed as openly as the needs of the man in the wheelchair or the woman with the guide dog. It is not hidden under a cloak of shame, so everyone in his environment has the information they need to help him complete his academic career. As a result, he is able to live in a special community on campus with others who are hard-wired more as he is. They even have a public voice on campus, and walk in the sun, instead of the shadows. His professors confer with each other each semester to make sure that they are all on the same page about the student’s progress and accommodations. Rage that could otherwise build up in shame and secrecy instead is prevented. He is loved, and he walks side by side with others like him. (the real story here>)

3) A little boy who is adopted inherits an alternate spec from his birthparents. His adoptive parents are able to let the neighbors and teachers know about this so that they can understand and assist in providing the boy with an openly-welcoming environment in which to grow. They let the boys parents know when he seems to be struggling so that he can be helped. They use the boy’s situation as an opportunity to teach their own kids about how everyone is different, and everyone is deserving of compassion. The boy, as a result, is never shunned, but is aided in his development and embraced for his difference. (the real story here>)

It’s simple economics that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Compassion is, therefore, the most economical way to create a better world. It’s time to grind the torches and pitchforks into plowshares, to lose our insatiable appetites for retribution, and hunger instead for a world of universal justice and love.

I should empty out my camera phone more often. Get a load of this Easter bunny. Between him and Blake, I don’t know who’s having the more rollicking great time at the Easter Egg hunt this year:

Allison tagged me. Sigh…

As if, after all this blogging, there are five things anyone DOESN’T know about me Seriously, here it is:

5 Things Found In Your Bag

1. Wallet

2. Checkbook

3. Lexapro and Wellbutrin in a pill box

4. Receipts from Lowe’s, Target, and Sally’s

5. Bright Green Hairbrush (so I can find it when I’m digging in my purse around all those receipts)

5 Favorite Things In Your Room

This one makes me laugh and cry at the same time. As a married person, there is no “my room.” Just the least appointed room in the house that my husband and I share. But, here goes, to your horror:

1. Unpacked boxes from our move

2. Piles of laundry spilling from laundry baskets

3. Piles of clothes that spilled on the floor when our closet rod broke, so I went to Lowe’s to get hardware (hence the receipts)

4. Mair Mair, the cat, who never leaves the bedroom

5. Mair Mair’s litter box, which will be leaving the bedroom as soon as I can find another place she’ll actually go to

5 Things You Have Always Wanted To Do

1. Form a sketch comedy group in Charlottesville

2. Have a daughter

3. Settle down

4. Not have a day job

5. Work on my art and music full time

5 Things You Are Currently Into

1. Championing my son’s happiness

2. Staying alive (here, here, Allison!)

3. Writing

4. Trying to find an AA meeting in Charlottesville that’s not loaded with pontificating good ol’ boys (but, I’m not bitter)

5. Trying to become a better person

5 People You Want To Tag

I will tag folks, but hope they will still be my friends anyway. No offense if you’re not into it — I understand:

1. The Fish Wrapper

2. Mixed Veggies

3. Neuronerd

4. John Wills Lloyd

5. Wags Outside

ALTERNATE MEME

If anyone herein tagged would like to post a different meme, how about:

Five Reasons I Would Not be Caught DEAD Watching American Idol

1. I don’t really want to die at this point in time. Hoping that will happen long after American Idol has been cancelled.

2. There’s something Hitlerian about everyone having to watch, then discuss, then watch again, then discuss.

3. Believe that while we are watching, the superdelegates are plotting against us.

4. Would interfere with my channel surfing for round-the-clock reruns of Law & Order and House.

5. Have to wash my hair.

Okay, I’m a little dramatic.

Blake is doing better, and I’m beginning to come out of my self-imposed exile inside myself to blog again. I feel really stupid. The last couple of days, I’ve had the “I’ll have to blog about that tonight” experience, but I didn’t because I said I was closing the blog. That’s completely ridiculous, as if I made a promise on someone’s death bed that “I will never blog again.”

So, now that the apologies are done, as are the premature reports of my demise between my ears, I have to begin trying to shape in words a powerful set of images that I’ve been having about faith, about God, about existence and how mainstream Christianity may be missing the mark big time. I know, it’s not a terribly narrow topic, but I’ve had this image in my head for a while now.

If you ever get a chance to read “Thinking in Pictures” by Temple Grandin, I highly recommend it. Ms. Grandin is autistic, and is a world-renowned expert on the humane slaughter of animals. The book opens up a world within her autistic mind where she talks about her ability to think like a cow. She thinks in pictures, not in words. Her creative thoughts express in language only to communicate, but not to shape, concepts.

That is very, very much the way I think. When I was doing Web design, I had a couple of programmers who worked with me and I’d always have to lead the conversation with chalk. I’m not by any means verbally-challenged, but words do not serve my creative process as well as a picture.

So what the hell does this mean about faith, god, existence, and mainstream Christianity?

If I were a painter, this would be the painting. It would be a landscape, but a scalable one like Google Earth. You could zoom in at any point, and see all forms of life on the surface. Everything is beautiful and horrible and real. Embedded beneath the surface of all of the chemical and biological reality that is what in some Buddhist traditions is called the “phenomenological realm,” is a force that gave rise to it. I call that God.

God would be painted as an amoeba-like single energy that is within and joins every move, every thought, every experience that lives on this earth. Like breath is the votive force for the human voice, but is invisible, so is God.

There is nothing I’ve written so far that is anything new, I know. Pantheists, animists, even some liberal Christians, think this way. But, there’s something profoundly different for me (if not for the world of learned philosophers and theologians) about this realization. The different part is that it renders the need for what we call a human soul meaningless. It has occurred to me in this vision of the known world that the notion of an eternal human soul, saved or damned, is an unnecessary appendage onto the to one spirit that is God. By eliminating the notion that I have a soul, all sorts of new possibilities have opened up for me, and I’m a lot clearer about my faith than I’ve ever been.

I’m tired, and I’m going to bed. I’ll write more about this tomorrow. Good to be back.