the problem with staying friends with someone you're breaking up with is finding room to mourn. it's easy to find room to be ecstatic and to worry and to be scared, but i at least am having trouble remembering how to be sad, not for myself but for this ungainly hatchling thing that has landed in my life and just as abruptly has flumped off somewhere else.
i'm a little bit lost; my army has disbanded; i'm wandering the same terrain but without the wind at my back and the roads turned to mud and nowhere can I find the wide plain stretching with tents. but see?
the majesty of an army isn't being part of a team. it's being part of a unity, an identity, a whole. i am these. the branding of cults book describes the end of marines training and i'm caught by the image of the exhausted recruits coming over the top of their last mountain and down the hill towards the sun rising over the pacific ocean and becoming aware of hundreds of other marines cresting the same rise and the ones near by and beginning barely to cry and their commanding officers addressing them for the first time as Marines.
made me want to be a marine. heck, that book made me want to be a lot of things. marine, mormon, member of various cults, a Harley Davidson rider. it's that sense of membership i'm after. i haven't really felt part of something bigger in that way in a long time--i feel very out-for-myself even when i'm working towards what i think will be best for the institutions i care about.
maybe that's why i'm going to church? because i see in that church (and in that ceremony) a chance for the kind of membership i miss from Balmoral and even Lake Travis? i'm not entirely sure that i believe that. maybe mag and me at that church feels like my own little family. i know there's something there that i need to need.
cheap trick: i want you to want me
during my last serious brush with faith--or rather with my unbelief--i could only come to terms with two prayers. one was "lord, I believe, help my unbelief" and the other was the prayer of the sinner beside the side of the pharisee in the Temple in one of the Gospels. I can't even remember its words. over the past few years, those have slipped away from me; i'm not Christian in any sense and I lost my ability to pray them meaningfully.
since then, i've gained prayers, too. Once i tried the prayer in /Franny and Zooey/ for a few days--"Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy in me"--trying to pray ceaselessly to see what it was like and its remained something that my mouth does when i'm at my most afflicted. similarly, the hymn "sanctuary" has been a solace to me, just in its sounds, because i associate it with such happy thoughts. and junior year, when i wanted so much to be cared for, the Prayer of St. Francis took over my heart.
but none of them have meant much to me religiously. they've been mantras or invocations, summoning-ups of mental states and tools to regulate my brain processes. i haven't had even that belief that allows one to pray to an imaginary God. (this, presumably, only makes sense to those who have had the feeling.)
also--and probably unrelatedly--i've become entirely egotistical. ben franklin has become a symbol for me of relentless self-improvement backed by a limitless self-regard, like a fashioning of self out of the materials of ego--i feel very ben franklin.
to bow my head in that church (everyone else kneels; i'm not Catholic) and repeat to myself "I recognize that I am powerless" from something the priest said was somehow transformative. i recognize that i am powerless to defeat sin on my own. i am constantly striving to be good and constantly failing. i mistreat the people i love; i am selfish; i think hurtful thoughts that i don't believe; i benefit from a position of power and privilege that i have not earned and am not doing anything to redeem; i sin. i recognize that i am powerless to fix myself on my own. there's no ben-franklin-ing out of this one. i can and should and must strive to be better, but i can't fight egotism with more egotism. i recognize that i am powerless.
that last paragraph doesn't really manage to say what i'm trying to say, but i suspect that i'm going to keep trying to say it for awhile. i've always thought christianity's views on sin are HORRIBLY wack. i'm skeptical of any moral philosophy that believes that people are fundamentally bad or that encourages guilt or that tries to replace the hard work of repairing the world with some sort of spiritual balderdash. i think religious wars are monumentally stupid. i can't buy any of the mythology.
but sunday i was struck by the fact that i can't fix myself. i'm trying to change my tires while driving. and maybe the idea of the Divine gives me room to be broken and the energy to love myself while i set about the work of being who I want to be and maybe a space where i can offer others myself rather than a fabrication for public consumption and maybe the peace to love others in their brokenness.
sometimes this seems enlightening and sometimes this seems like words.
O Lord, make me an instrument of Your Peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is discord, harmony.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sorrow, joy.
Oh Divine Master, grant that I may not
so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive;
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
