pondering
Long entry - don't expect anyone to read this. I just needed a place to write. A place to think. A place to feel something that can't be explained.
***
I was interested to read the comments on the post about what we miss the most. I, quite frankly, couldn't think of anything to say. I just listened to what others had to say and wondered about how life works. I am mystified.
***
It's Easter Sunday. I hesitate to write what I am thinking and feeling today, but this is the place for my honesty. I don't know what exactly is possesing me to write here, but so it goes.
***
My family has gone to dinner at my in-laws. I didn't have the heave-ho to go. Alone on this day of renewal and fresh hope, etc. etc. I'm not feeling it today. I haven't felt it for quite a while.
***
It would be interesting to me as a sociologist to study the spiritual nature of chronic illness. I'm wondering about how medication affects spirituality, and depression, and fatigue.
***
Here's the honesty part. I've been going to church for 50 years. I am 50 years old. I have always had more questions about how God works than I have had answers. I have always studied, not just read the scriptures. I use commentaries. I have read about Jewish mysticism, hinduism, taoism, buddhism, Islam, new age, etc. I have taught a unit about the function of religion in society in my sociology classes. I admit that I have, for as long as I can remember, taken an intellectual approach to religion. That does not mean I don't have spiritual faith.
***
I have always prayed. I have always fasted. I have always found comfort, perspective, and frustration with what I have read in the scriptures.
***
I am now 50 - sleepless, energy-less, drifting spiritually. My prayers are more, "If you're listening, here it goes", compared to the fervent frenzy faithful kind of prayers. I'm having lots of trouble with feeling spiritual things. As in, not feeling so much.
***
Chalk it up to depression and move forward? I think not. I have spent 32 years studying depression. I want to understand how spirituality works. I have my own ideas about religion. I've read about belief systems and the brain, etc. I'm talking about something more than how or what a person has been taught to believe. I'm talking about feelings that aren't necessarity taught. Instinct, awareness, premonitions, sensations, and so forth.
***
Dead to the spirit? If indeed we have a spirit that existed before, lives inside of us now, and will live on throughout time....then, how can it be that a spirit can feel dead when it is the essence of eternal life with no beginning and no end.
***
More importantly, why would God allow it? If His connection to us is through this immortal spirit, then why would there be malfunctions? Trust, faith, grace. Too much philosophy, theology, etiology - I know the arguments, the apologists have done their job time and again. I want something new.
***
Perhaps on this day of renewal I have to be content with just that - renewal. Renewing something that has already been said when I want something new. A new perspective, a new thought or idea, a new feeling. More importantly, I must admit, a new hope. Mine is old and faded and drifting away.
***
When someone on DS wrote about being a fighter, I thought with a sarcastic laught, "Right. We were all fighters, honey. We still are. We survive. But, you tell me how much fight you have left when the bad days add up to a sum they have never totalled in the past, and the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. It's the adding up of the wearing down that dissolves the fight." In other words, it's amazing how much fight there is even when the energy is at its lowest; until, there is a lower than the lowest and still dropping.
***
A counselor once told me that I intellectualize too much. I thought, "How can it be too much if that's who I am. How can I be someone I am not?" I didn't like her. I could go home and cry on my own time. I didn't need to pay her to sit in her office and have an emotional breakdown. I needed insight, answers, coping skills beyond my own. Not a pile of wet tissues.
***
I must be, admittedly in a faithless way, asking for God to be more than indiscernable feelings. Am I looking for intellectual insight when the answer is something that is more akin to wet tissues?
***
I just want to know where the "feeling" went? If what I thought was my strength isn't giving me strength, then how does that lack of strength produce faith? Grace.
***
Grace is the answer to everything that doesn't have an answer because grace is too hard to explain. It isn't mortal. I'm not even sure that it's human. It simply is, and people just throw it everywhere when I think it's actually pretty fragile and delicate. It is the breath that we don't want to take when we don't think it's possible to breathe. It still doesn't answer my questions, but perhaps it is all there is.
***
I keep thinking that this is too long for other people to read, and then I remember I'm not really writing it for anyone else. It can be as long as I want. If someone else actually reads this, they probably understand. Or like me, they are curious about how God works. And, also curious about what other people think about how God works.
***
What do I miss the most? How is it possible to answer that when the losses keep piling up and we look at the pile and miss everything in it? We look at our selves and are reminded, because of the loss, to be grateful for what we have. The loss teaches us grief and a profound sense of gratitude that we wouldn't know if we hadn't experienced the loss. To miss something is not ingratitude, but rather, the opposite. To miss something is to be more grateful than before.
***
Right now, I miss feeling my spirit. If my argument above is true, then I should have a more profound gratitude because of my loss of feeling. Hmm.... Am I more grateful for sheer resiliency? More grateful for grace? Perhaps they are inseparable and I am more grateful for both without understanding how that's possible (because I can't feel the meaning of it).
***
I can hear the garage door go up. My solitude is over. Noise arrives.
***
Carry on.
***
I was interested to read the comments on the post about what we miss the most. I, quite frankly, couldn't think of anything to say. I just listened to what others had to say and wondered about how life works. I am mystified.
***
It's Easter Sunday. I hesitate to write what I am thinking and feeling today, but this is the place for my honesty. I don't know what exactly is possesing me to write here, but so it goes.
***
My family has gone to dinner at my in-laws. I didn't have the heave-ho to go. Alone on this day of renewal and fresh hope, etc. etc. I'm not feeling it today. I haven't felt it for quite a while.
***
It would be interesting to me as a sociologist to study the spiritual nature of chronic illness. I'm wondering about how medication affects spirituality, and depression, and fatigue.
***
Here's the honesty part. I've been going to church for 50 years. I am 50 years old. I have always had more questions about how God works than I have had answers. I have always studied, not just read the scriptures. I use commentaries. I have read about Jewish mysticism, hinduism, taoism, buddhism, Islam, new age, etc. I have taught a unit about the function of religion in society in my sociology classes. I admit that I have, for as long as I can remember, taken an intellectual approach to religion. That does not mean I don't have spiritual faith.
***
I have always prayed. I have always fasted. I have always found comfort, perspective, and frustration with what I have read in the scriptures.
***
I am now 50 - sleepless, energy-less, drifting spiritually. My prayers are more, "If you're listening, here it goes", compared to the fervent frenzy faithful kind of prayers. I'm having lots of trouble with feeling spiritual things. As in, not feeling so much.
***
Chalk it up to depression and move forward? I think not. I have spent 32 years studying depression. I want to understand how spirituality works. I have my own ideas about religion. I've read about belief systems and the brain, etc. I'm talking about something more than how or what a person has been taught to believe. I'm talking about feelings that aren't necessarity taught. Instinct, awareness, premonitions, sensations, and so forth.
***
Dead to the spirit? If indeed we have a spirit that existed before, lives inside of us now, and will live on throughout time....then, how can it be that a spirit can feel dead when it is the essence of eternal life with no beginning and no end.
***
More importantly, why would God allow it? If His connection to us is through this immortal spirit, then why would there be malfunctions? Trust, faith, grace. Too much philosophy, theology, etiology - I know the arguments, the apologists have done their job time and again. I want something new.
***
Perhaps on this day of renewal I have to be content with just that - renewal. Renewing something that has already been said when I want something new. A new perspective, a new thought or idea, a new feeling. More importantly, I must admit, a new hope. Mine is old and faded and drifting away.
***
When someone on DS wrote about being a fighter, I thought with a sarcastic laught, "Right. We were all fighters, honey. We still are. We survive. But, you tell me how much fight you have left when the bad days add up to a sum they have never totalled in the past, and the whole is truly greater than the sum of its parts. It's the adding up of the wearing down that dissolves the fight." In other words, it's amazing how much fight there is even when the energy is at its lowest; until, there is a lower than the lowest and still dropping.
***
A counselor once told me that I intellectualize too much. I thought, "How can it be too much if that's who I am. How can I be someone I am not?" I didn't like her. I could go home and cry on my own time. I didn't need to pay her to sit in her office and have an emotional breakdown. I needed insight, answers, coping skills beyond my own. Not a pile of wet tissues.
***
I must be, admittedly in a faithless way, asking for God to be more than indiscernable feelings. Am I looking for intellectual insight when the answer is something that is more akin to wet tissues?
***
I just want to know where the "feeling" went? If what I thought was my strength isn't giving me strength, then how does that lack of strength produce faith? Grace.
***
Grace is the answer to everything that doesn't have an answer because grace is too hard to explain. It isn't mortal. I'm not even sure that it's human. It simply is, and people just throw it everywhere when I think it's actually pretty fragile and delicate. It is the breath that we don't want to take when we don't think it's possible to breathe. It still doesn't answer my questions, but perhaps it is all there is.
***
I keep thinking that this is too long for other people to read, and then I remember I'm not really writing it for anyone else. It can be as long as I want. If someone else actually reads this, they probably understand. Or like me, they are curious about how God works. And, also curious about what other people think about how God works.
***
What do I miss the most? How is it possible to answer that when the losses keep piling up and we look at the pile and miss everything in it? We look at our selves and are reminded, because of the loss, to be grateful for what we have. The loss teaches us grief and a profound sense of gratitude that we wouldn't know if we hadn't experienced the loss. To miss something is not ingratitude, but rather, the opposite. To miss something is to be more grateful than before.
***
Right now, I miss feeling my spirit. If my argument above is true, then I should have a more profound gratitude because of my loss of feeling. Hmm.... Am I more grateful for sheer resiliency? More grateful for grace? Perhaps they are inseparable and I am more grateful for both without understanding how that's possible (because I can't feel the meaning of it).
***
I can hear the garage door go up. My solitude is over. Noise arrives.
***
Carry on.
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