A couple of days ago Andrew Sullivan highlighted a post by former Anglican priest Mark Vernon, in his blog “Philosophy and Life.”  Vernon’s post which he called “The great waves of Japan”, is worth quoting in full:

I was hearing about the famous painting, The Great Wave of Kanagawa, by Hokusai. It captures something of the horror of what’s fallen northern Japan, with its image of the fishermen dwarfed by the majestic, indifferent tower of water.

It’s a religious image, representing the very different approach that Shintoism has towards nature, compared with Christianity. In Christianity, human beings are at the centre of nature: creation is for humanity, along with other creatures, and it’s humanity’s task to care for it. Hence, in part, the offence we feel when nature turns against us.

In Shintoism, nature is recognised as infinitely more powerful than humankind — as in the wave — and that humankind is in nature with the permission of the gods but with no particular concern from the gods. Shinto rituals show respect for the gods of nature, befriending the enormity of the forces, if you like. But, apparently, there won’t be much of the moral affront at what’s happened — the problem of evil — from the Japanese perspective.

Vernon explained further in response to a commenter’s question,

The problem of evil arises from the Christian doctrine that an all-powerful and good God made the world for us, in some sense, though that world is full of horrors. How come? In the Shinto cosmology, though, the gods are not anthropocentric with their attention, so Shintoism teaches, as I understand it, that one should expect evil from nature quite as much as good.

Good and evil — that’s the question that theologians call theodicy (not to be confused with Homer’s masterpiece The Odyssey, though they’re pronounced much the same).  Theodicy comes from the Greek, theos “god” + dike “justice” (Dikē was the Greek goddess of moral justice), & has to do with trying to reconcile a benevolent all-powerful God (especially as understood in Christianity & other monotheistic religions like Judaism & Islam) with the existence of evil.  Or with, simply, the fact that bad things happen to good people — as happened, & is happening, to the people of Japan in the aftermath of last week’s devastating earthquake & tsunami.

I’ve written on this blog about theodicy before — most extensively just a little over a year ago, after Christianist lackwit Pat Robertson blamed the January 2010 Haiti earthquake on Haitians.

And sure enough, another lackwit, this time Glenn Beck of Fox News, has made a similar suggestion about the Japan quake.  So has South Korean pastor David Yonggi Cho of Yoido Full Gospel Church, the largest Christian church in the world.  Meanwhile, a longtime Internet troll who posed as an extreme Christianist pulled her YouTube account after public outrage over a video she posted last Monday praising God for killing the “atheist” victims of the quake. Her authenticity had apparently long been debated; but, strikingly, a lot of people believed she was for real.  After all, many Christianists are routinely just as offensive, even as they earnestly call upon others to worship a god whose “acts of god” they attribute to their god’s own enforcement of ideological purity.

(It sure as hell ain’t to enforce moral purity that a god would slaughter innocents by the thousands.)

(Reminder: Christian and Christianist — not the same thing.  A Christian is a follower of the Christian faith, whatever politics she or he might follow — conservative, moderate, liberal, independent.  A Christianist is one whose supposed Christianity has become, in the words of Andrew Sullivan, “ideology, politics, an ism…. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.”)

But back to what Vernon said about Shintoism:

In the Shinto cosmology, though, the gods are not anthropocentric with their attention, so Shintoism teaches, as I understand it, that one should expect evil from nature quite as much as good.

(I don’t think that a natural event like an earthquake or tsunami has a moral dimension such as evil per se; but beyond that quibble) … there’s a book of the Bible that teaches much the same: the Book of Job.  As Stephen Mitchell writes in the introduction to his 1992 translation of the Book of Job regarding Job and his friends, who are  “comforting” Job after he’s lost nearly everything, including all his children:

The friends and Job all agree that God is wise and can see into the hearts of men.  He is not the kind of character who would allow a good man to be tortured because of a bet; nor is he a well-intentioned bungler.  Given this premise, they construct opposite syllogisms.  The friends: Suffering comes from God.  God is just.  Therefore Job is guilty. Job: Suffering comes from God. I am innocent. Therefore God is unjust.  A third possibility is not even thinkable: Suffering comes from God.  God is just.  Job is innocent. (No therefore.)

And later,

[Job] wants to die; he wants to prove that he is innocent; he wants to shake his fist at God for leaving the world in such a wretched shambles. God is his enemy; God has made a terrible mistake; God has forgotten him; or doesn’t care; God will surely defend him, against God. His question, the harrowing question of someone who has only heard of God, is “Why me?” There is no answer, because it is the wrong question.

The harrowing question of someone who has only heard of God.  But then the Voice from the Whirlwind comes, and Job not only hears but actually sees:

The storm rumbled and thundered.  The wind tore at my clothing
and took my breath.  I could not stand or speak,
and she had not the breath to make a curse.
Here was the justice of the Unnameable!
We would be smitten by that self-same howling wind
that had poured from the desert like a band of outlaws
to destroy my sons and murder my daughters.

And then was stillness, as death, a steep silence.
And look! we raised our eyes to the maelstrom’s clouded throat,
dizzied.  Spinning vapors formed and broke away and blew;
lightning flashed in the turbulent dark belly of the wind.
I was dust to be blown by that wind  but was not blown.
I stood under the very eye of the Unnameable.  And within me grew a stillness.

(from my poem “Job 42.13″)

It’s hard to put into words what Job’s experience of the Unnameable was, that we so often name “God” — and which I name as god with a lower case g, the very substance & being & energy of which the universe & everything in it has its being.  The poet of Job did a damn good job, nonetheless, of pointing to what that wordless and awesome and terrifying and profound experience was.

But none of it has a damn thing to do with human understandings of justice and injustice, of good and evil.  It just is what it is.  Sometimes bad things happen to good people. In hopes of being good people ourselves, let’s help those who need our help.

* * *

“Behind the Great Wave at Kanagawa” (神奈川沖波裏) by Hokusai (1760–1849) is actually not a painting, but rather a color woodcut.  It’s one of the series “36 Views of Mount Fuji.”  I come by the reproduction of it at the head of this post by way of Wikimedia Commons.  The Wikimedia contributor comments, “Although it is often used in tsunami literature, there is no reason to suspect that Hokusai intended it to be interpreted in that way. The waves in this work are sometimes mistakenly referred to as tsunami (津波), but they are more accurately called okinami (沖波), great off-shore waves.” M.J.  a commenter on Vernon’s blog post, shared the explanation given him/her by a docent at the Smithsonian Sackler Gallery during a Hokusai exhibit there:

All the diagonal lines and dots represent movement, things not always remaining the same. Some of Hokusai’s paintings, such as this one, depict scary moments like this big storm. You can see the ends of the waves looking almost like claws, which are scary but also symbolize our wishing to hang on to things the way they are, not wanting things to change. Our wish for things to remain the same makes the situation look worse than it really is.

When you look closely at this picture, the waves don’t don’t look so scary and are actually quite beautiful…. In this painting, you can see people in boats huddled together and crouching down. This is not because they’re scared but because they know how they should position themselves to take on this challenge. Actually, they seem to be in reverence of the big waves. In the midst and at the end of this picture is Mt. Fuji, representing calm at the end of the storm.

A good meaning; and also, I think, one which ties well with the peace, even joy, of Job by the end of the book that bears his name.  The end of my poem “Job 42.13″ —

There are tears now in her eyes as she watches them play —
yes, seven sons, three daughters — as before.
I rejoice in them, but also grieve for our windlost children —
the only love I gave them was to make burnt offerings
against sins I feared lay hidden in their unknown hearts.

But listen! they laugh! she laughs!  And I laugh, too.

May it be so also for the survivors of Japan.

* * *

The Book of Job is obviously important to me — my favorite of all the books of the Bible. But Hokusai’s Great Wave has also been important to me, ever since I got it engraved in my skin in December 1983.

Due to the process used by the tattoo artist — Larry Allen of Anchorage Tattoo Studio —my tatt is a mirror image of Hokusai’s original.

At the time it was done, I was still deeply enmeshed in my pre-aha period of self-hatred and almost continual despair.  But I had come across to a reference somewhere to the Chinese ideogram that we translate as crisis.  According to my source (which may or may not be correct), the Chinese character literally meant opportunity rides a dangerous wind.

Or something to that effect.  That’s, at least, how I wrote it in a poem the following year, after the aha.  And there is Hokusai as well, his Great Wave etched on my arm, linked to the meaning (putative or not) of that Chinese character —

On my arm, tattooed, is the large wave, the boats,
the mountain — my life, crisis on crisis:
opportunity rides on the dangerous wind.

It’s wonderful then to read what the commenter on Vernon’s post said about Mt. Fuji in Hokusai’s woodcut:

In the midst and at the end of this picture is Mt. Fuji, representing calm at the end of the storm.

Or the Chugach Mountains, for me —

Day followed day, the old stream of time,
just the same as before.
But each day I saw the mountains change —
one day growing gold in the afternoon sun —
one day dusted white by the season’s first snow —
one day touched by clouds as soft as white roses —
I could see them and breathe them and touch them and feel them.
Each day I saw the mountains change —

so did change find me.

Related posts:

1. Job 42.13
2. On celebrating the death of bin Laden
3. Japan’s earthquake heard from Alaska

Valentine’s Day. One of the stories Julia O’Malley included in her Anchorage Daily News Valentine’s Day piece about love stories was that of a woman at a florist shop, who purchased $200 worth of flowers. When the shop clerk asked who she wanted to write the accompanying card out to, the woman replied, “To me. With love, from me.”

In 1984, during my troubled early twenties, I fell in love with a friend of mine.  This poem was written to her.   But it’s especially a poem about how I came to love myself, & to give up my former self-hatred.

Alaska Love Poem

For L.

If I thought I had let go, I did not.
It was hidden only, riding low,
deep in the labyrinth of my soul.
But now I play the waiting game:
the labyrinth dissolves — soon my heart
will have courage to speak to you –

I practice here now.

I

Just past the longest day last year –
but the nights were still bright with the light of the sun
until very late.
And we met on the dancefloor where the music played loudly,
we danced where the fan blew our sweat down to coolness,
we danced when the others fell off the floor
in exhaustion.

Then another told me your words of me –
that I could hold my place in the song
as long as could you.
And when next in the noisy rhythm,
the loudness of the soap opera bar,
we moved our bodies to the beat –
I opened my eyes to your movement and knew
that my heart could open in such a way still,
and the protest of my mind and fear
could not dampen the joy that rose above
the smoke from so many nostrils.
Still alive! — I could feel this
for one, for you, the love, the hope
I thought had forsaken me –
dropped dead in the post with the letter
that at last said goodbye to one far away.

The woman can hurt me as no man can,
so far all that time in this country
I counted only men friends, too afraid
to end the pain of my long loneliness.
I clung like a fool to she who was past,
who I could not touch, not in my dreams.
I let go of her, at last, to find
myself face to face with you.

But our eyes were all drawn to the woman who died
a month later.
We gathered and mourned, and her loss sealed us all
in a friendship blessed by remembrance, then more.

In those days my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth
like thick peanut butter.
I sought like one possessed, obsessed,
in the bar, in the smoke, the music, the dance,
the hope of you there within it.

But my tongue now cut out — I bought you a rose,
cut the thorns off — I
would give you no bitterness, no — just the rose –
clean-stemmed — its thorns
cast away, like my voice.

In my silence I uttered no protest when
I saw how you spent time with her.
My friend also she was, and is, and I
said nothing when she told us that
you loved one another,
that you were together — I
said nothing.

But deep inside I screamed as though
my life were being taken from me.

I knew I’d survive.
This I’ve gone through before.
And I heard her say it with some relief.
I taught myself that it was due
to my leaving, how I did not want to be
tied down when another place called me.
But the deeper truth I well knew, that my
relief in spite of the pain was due
to the knowledge of how now I need not dare
to be brave, to tell what I felt to you.

For I know quite well how to hide.
This game is mine, conceived of shame,
the shame I somehow grew up with.
To hide, and to no one show what’s inside,
this deep confusion and maze of myself,
disbelief at my right to exist — or to
love a woman — such as you.

II

A year passed.  I was doing a dance with death.
I can’t count the times, the times, the times
you both rescued me from that fixation.
Just someone to talk with, just someone to hear,
just someone to witness the tears, the tears
that had drowned me for so many years.

You both were important to me.
I did not know always why.
I left but came back because I knew
that something awaited me here.
As if by merest accident,
I came upon some faith –
I felt I was on the brink
of some vast realization
that would make life bearable for me.

She told me the way from my troubles
was to find the right woman for me.
But I knew that the warm old wool
of my anguish could not be unraveled
by pulling another under my blanket,
a lover to suffocate with me.

I wanted to breathe — not stale old air,
not the air of my bell-jar depression, not
the smoky air of the soap-opera bar –
but to breathe, fresh and clear and new,
to inhale the mountains, the sky, and the sea,
and to know that someone shared in this breathing,
someone who wanted to explore
what it means to have life — with me.

But the noose around my neck was tight.
I was my own hangman, adjudged guilty by
the interrogator inside, who did not
recognize the existence of innocence.

III

Do I believe I am to die,
my last words to be spoken to you? — or is this
an instinctive necessary step,
one step closer to liberation
from this lonely cell on death row?

You are tired, but you sit with the patience
that only my friends can muster.
I am afraid, I cannot meet your eyes.
Each word is an effort of all of my body.
This one sentence takes whole minutes to say,
whole hours, it takes my whole lifetime:

I am . . . in love . . . with you.

When I have said it you ask me
how long I have held this hidden.
Its history I repeat to you,
puncuated with tears, aeons of fear,
despair so much older than only a year.

It is only a year that I tell you…
but in lifetimes past I have ever been
ashamed of my desire,
ashamed of my lust for life,
convicted by the illusion that
I was not worthy of it.

I sentenced myself to whole lifetimes
of wandering lost in the labyrinth,
suffocating on stale smoky air
I had breathed countless times before.
And for what crime?  The simple fact
that I was afraid to love.

IV

Some nights later we went to the soap opera bar.
There, without warning, the fear came upon me.
I stood unmoved by the noise of the dancefloor –
all its rhythm was but a dull thumping –
I stared, transfixed, at the terror within
and deeper and deeper the maze sucked me in,
it swallowed me whole with a terrible grin.

When we went home my body moved to the car,
but my mind and my soul were locked into the hellhole.
The butcher knife beckoned, its sharp gleaming called.
I wanted to cut the hole in my belly,
the empty chunk of unreasonable pain –
to slice through skin and muscle and tissue,
to kill the demon, even if
my murder would be accomplished with it.

I cried in the dark for someone to save me,
to come to my aid.  But I knew that you could not.
Not you, not her — you both had tried
too many times before.
We all knew that.  What I must face
here, in this last confrontation,
I must face alone.

Never before would I have believed
there existed such utter loneliness.
All that there was in the universe
was me, alone, agony, me –
no care, no hope, no love, no reprieve…
no reprieve but the butcher knife.

My hands tight on each other, they thrusted
my thoughts through my belly.  Had they
held not just thoughts, but violent steel
reality, stabbing — had they held the knife…
then the rug I had countless times soaked with my weeping,
this my bed between couch and coffee table,
would have been my final bed, my deathbed,
brown shag stained dark with my red blood.

But the butcher knife was in the kitchen.
That alone saved me — the distance to me
from the right-hand drawer, the second one down –
only that distance prevented the living
blade from sheathing itself in my guts…
in a tangle on your living room floor,
I fell to a drunken slumber.

V

I woke numb, glad to find that you both still slept.
I could bear to see no one, too full of remorse
and shame at what I had put my friends through,
how I had tortured myself.
Too certain that it would happen again.
It always had before.

I escaped to the grey day,
the dull routine of a mundane life,
hopeless resignation.

I’m not sure what it was I waited for.
Some escape, some release,
a saviour to cart me away
the next time, the ambulance, DOA….

VI    (Arctic Valley)

Remember the day we hiked Arctic Valley?
You, me, and two dogs –
one which you lost and found over the hill –

so did freedom find me.

How we climbed, our legs straining, over the city.
We sat at the summit, the world at our feet.
We ate in the high place where ancients saw god….

The way back down was more difficult yet:
it was steep, we used muscles we normally didn’t.
Our legs shook like the legs of delirium tremens…
but peace found them again when they found flat ground –

so did peace find me.

Slowly as the slow dawn
of the sun on an autumn morning
I awoke from my delirium.
Nine years to recognize my healer –

so did life find me.

Day followed day, the old stream of time,
just the same as before.
But each day I saw the mountains change –
one day growing gold in the afternoon sun –
one day dusted white by the season’s first snow –
one day touched by clouds as soft as white roses –
I could see them and breathe them and touch them and feel them.
Each day I saw the mountains change –

so did change find me.

VII

Things about me have changed.
Not in what I feel for you –
I find that I still do love you.
I also find that where there has been
occasion to speak of it to you
I can meet your eyes.
Across a table, in the light,
I can meet your eyes.
I can love you without shame.
And of all joys, surely this is the greatest –
that I, at last, consider myself
worthy to love and to be loved.

But in awe I hold the power of this
feeling — how it takes hold of me –
when I am so at a loss to know
how with this strength and depth of care,
I do not hold you.

At times I am plainly satisfied
to enjoy your company –
to visit your home, you and your lover,
to drop by for lunch and sit over coffee,
to go to the malls and watch women together,
to drink dark beer, to talk, to dance…

but then as we wait at Baskin & Robbins
for our scoops of Jamocha Almond Fudge
a rich and vibrant chord of you
plays itself upon my intestines
and echoes and echoes and echoes, fading….
My whole body rings of you
and groans at the lack of your touch,
groans at the wanting to touch you,
to show you all the ways,
the infinite ways that I love you.

I am at a loss to understand
how the great power that freed me from my living death
can imprison me yet in this unfulfilled love.
As the days pass in my wanting you
I begin to wonder if I have returned
to my folly of loving, as a lover would,
a woman who I cannot reach.

VIII

I still feel sorrow.  Each time I’m afraid
the old dank despair will possess me again.
But I know too much now for that.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

The staleness that turns to a petrified stink –
no longer can it envelop me.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

In my deepest sadness there is yet joy.
I know I won’t die alone in the wallow.
I know I’ll come out on the other side.

I have a guide.  I know the way.

On my arm, tattooed, is the large wave, the boats,
the mountain — my life, crisis on crisis:
opportunity rides on the dangerous wind.

You’re my friend, and in that way I’ll never forsake you –
just as you, my friend, never have forsaken me.
But I find myself caught in the hurts you are going through.
I find them likewise hurting me
in the old pattern — to place expectations on love.
When I expect things of you, am I really a friend?
Is love to enslave, or is it to free?

This love, my love and desire for you,
is a dangerous wind, destructive and mean,
and though in the past it has helped sweep me clean,
given me breath and a hope to cling onto –
my only hope now — opportunity –
is to let go at last, all the way to my bones –
to my soul, no longer a labyrinth.

Understand me — I am not angry,
not depressed — that is past history.
I am grieving this death, the death of a dream.
A hard death, a cruel death, to fall like a leaf
from the thrill of riding a dangerous wind.

To fall like a leaf, to fall to the ground.
I come to a leaf and, turning it over,
I find myself, a woman, and stand.

Alive without protest, I’ll be on my way.

[Jul 8-Nov 17, 1984]

Related posts:

1. Distance
2. Theodicy (poem)
3. Ode to Alcohol (poem)

… when they look as cool as this, anyway.  I caught these clouds one morning on the UAA campus at the beginning of October 2003, on the first of what I still remember so clearly as a two or three-day period of some really remarkable skies in Anchorage.

Even though I was feeling pretty crappy yesterday, I like the cloud pic in my yesterday post too.  I took it from my dentist’s office a few months ago.  I take a lot of cloud pics, because — well, yeah.  Clouds are not really all about bleakness.  It just feels like that sometimes, when one is inhabited by grey.  But the grey I feel when I’m in that state of depression I call the grey is not full of lifegiving rain, or a blizzard of snow, or even the destructive force of Job’s Voice from the Whirlwind — like that Oklahoma tornado I posted last week.  The grey is just this featureless, lifeless, blah.

But when it dissolves away… ahhhhh.

Or aha.

The aha! experience — that’s what I call the thing that happened to me in August 1984, when self-hatred went away — one of the central defining experiences of my life.  (But it was my sister-in-law Linda who first called it that — thanks Linda! & happy birthday!)  I wrote a brief account of it a few years ago.  Very brief account, which leaves out a lot.

As soon as it happened, it’s as if I could feel all the universe flowing into me, breathing in & out with me.  That lasted a long time, & I can still feel it on my best days.  I later came to call it the cool breeze — another one of those phrases for my various feeling states.  But here’s the deal: I found I could feel it even when I was sad.

One day, not long after the aha, I had a big falling out with a friend of mine who lived in that big trailer court that used to be at the corner of Muldoon & Debarr in east Anchorage.  Bang! — I slammed out the door & left her, & I walked a long ways crying about it, until I stopped and sat on Russian Jack Hill overlooking traffic.  It was late September.  I was still crying, but at the same time I could see the Chugach Mountains just to the east of Anchorage dusted with their first snow — termination dust, we call it here — & it was beautiful, & I could feel that beauty inside me instead of just perceive it intellectually. And here I was still crying. And I suddenly realized: This is what sadness feels like. Not depression: but sadness. I had never known that feeling before.  It was like other feelings I hadn’t known before, like beauty that I could see with my eyes & recognize with my intellect, but not feel at all.

Now I could feel it.  Ever since then, I’ve been able to feel it… except when I take one of those dips, long or short, into the pit or the grey — but now those times are the exception, rather than the rule.

But it still always feels pretty damn good when the blanket of yuck slides off me. & I can breathe again.

Day followed day, the old stream of time,
just the same as before.
But each day I saw the mountains change –
one day growing gold in the afternoon sun –
one day dusted white by the season’s first snow –
one day touched by clouds as soft as white roses –
I could see them and breathe them and touch them and feel them.
Each day I saw the mountains change –

so did change find me.

– from “Alaska Love Poem” (1984)

That was half my life ago.  I thought at the time that the depression/despair gig & I were entirely quits, which of course proved not to be the case; but on the other hand, I never returned to the self-hatred; & it was a fundamental step #2 in having the stuff I needed to deal with depression/despair ever after.  (The first step having been to accept my lesbianism five years previously.)

So… I’m feeling pretty good now.  Heading over to my friend Sylvia’s for our normal Wednesday night get-together.  Tonight, we’re re-watching the pilot for “Caprica” as a refresher for its season premiere this Friday.  I’m stopping to get some Bear Tooth food on the way there.  Life could be better, life could be worse — life goes on.  And right now, that’s just about right.

Here’s some more clouds from October 1, 2003, with some Chugach Mountains thrown in for good measure.

Related posts:

1. Dissolve
2. Pausing under the clouds: A how-to guide for getting out of the grey
3. The grey

I’m a safe drinker nowadays (& besides, I love this photo, & Midnight Sun Brewery makes some good stuff!), but back in the day I drank waaaaay too much. Yet it played a role in my letting go, eventually, of self-hatred. It, & my friends.  Same poem I mentioned in my last post.

Prosody geeks: this is in the form of a pantoum (albeit a loose use of the form).  Gonna have to get around to getting a new WordPress theme. This one isn’t wide enough for this poem’s longer lines, & WordPress doesn’t seem to permit hanging indents.  Bugga.

Ode to Alcohol

O Alcohol, you were an instrument of my deliverance.
In that long-ago dormitory room with Heidi and Julie
you loosed my tight fist of self.
Words came, however slurred, however slow.

In that long-ago dormitory room with Heidi and Julie,
in a Boston bar, a bar in Anchorage, an East Anchorage trailer with Lori and Sharon,
words came, however slurred, however slow.
You were like grease, like WD-40 on an old tight rusted bolt.

In a Boston bar, a bar in Anchorage, an East Anchorage trailer with Lori and Sharon,
my flesh stank of liquor and self-condemnation.
You were like grease, like WD-40 on an old tight rusted bolt –
it took the weight of all friends, all love leaning on the wrench of me to break it loose.

My flesh stank of liquor and self-condemnation.
When the gaping space between stars swallowed me,
it took the weight of all friends, all love straining on the rope of me to pull me back.
I woke to late August snow on the mountains.

When the gaping space between stars swallowed me,
my drunkenness boiled away into the vacuum.
I woke to late August snow on the mountains.
All friends, all love stood at ease with me, regarding them.

My despair boiled away into the vacuum.
You loosed my tight fist of self.
All friends, all love stood at ease, rejoicing with me.
O Alcohol, you were an instrument of my deliverance.

[November 16, 1995]

Related posts:

1. Alaska Love Poem
2. Bar Fragments (poem)
3. Hatcher Pass

Here’s the short version, as written there (with some emendations).

1.

Junior high Jesus freak

I was raised in the Episcopal Church (the American version of the Anglican Church), but sometime during the summer after sixth grade I found a sort of emptiness inside of myself that I knew had to do with the god thing. My sister came back from a music camp where some Jesus people stuff had been going on, & next thing you know she & I were the only two Jesus freaks in Columbia Falls, Montana. I used to read anything I could get my hands on about the Rapture, & speaking in tongues, & all kinds of evangelical stuff. I even have a picture to illustrate this — which I usually entitle “Junior high Jesus freak.”

I don’t know how I reconciled this with being a Trekkie — I was a bigtime fan of the original, & at that time only, series.)

But,

first I was a Jesus freak
& then I turned the other cheek

Which is to say, I started questioning some of the things that the evangelical Christians were saying. For example, if homosexuality was a sin, why did I see in Time magazine that some denominations were ordaining gay ministers? This was long before I came out, too. I also remember reading an article in a Jesus People newspaper from Spokane called The Truth that attempted to explain why Abraham’s wife Sarah let her husband take the kid (Isaac) up the mountain to sacrifice hiim like a goat: being a good wife, the story went, she accepted his decision because he was The Man & women always obeyed Their Man. And I thought (but in far less profane language), Fuck that shit! I’d kill Abraham before I let him kill my kid!

But the biggest question was raised by the popular Christian slogan One Way, as in, there is but one way to God, & Christianity is It. The stuff I was reading told me that if a person was a really good caring loving person who treated other people with care & respect & compassion, that person would still go to hell & suffer eternal damnation simply if she or he hadn’t accepted Jesus as her/his personal savior.

I decided that a god who would set up things this way was an immoral god, & so by the time I completed junior high, I had ceased being a Christian.

But I never ceased believing in God. Over time this became lower case g: god. Over time, after flirtations with Zen Buddhism, feminist witchcraft, Unitarian Universalism — not to mention getting a B.A. in Religion (1981) — my “confession of faith” gradually became “god is the universe & everything in it.”

I have been afflicted all my life with depression & despair, & it is what has probably shaped my spiritual journey more than anything. That’s what the hole I felt in my gut at the beginning of my “Jesus freak” period was about. My coming out & acceptance of myself as a lesbian at age 19 when I was in college was the first strong spiritual foundation that I had to deal with that: because I was accepting Who I Am, & beginning to live according to my own integrity, instead of according to arbitrary rules & regulations foisted on me by other people.

2.

After the Aha!

The picture here takes its name from what my sister-in-law termed the aha! experience — a profound spiritual experience I underwent in August 1984, when I stopped hating myself, stopped living continually at the edge of or inside the pit of despair. It happened like this:

I had a long long battle in from about 6th grade to about age 25 with depression & despair. Thought about suicide a lot. Never did attempt it, but that’s mostly because I knew it wouldn’t be just an attempt. And because I couldn’t do that to my family. About age 25, had a spiritual experience (nothing to do with any organized religions though) that put the end to most of the self-hate, though I’ve never been completely free of the despair or occasional, & sometimes very debilitating, bouts of depression. And still, being a dyke is one of those things which gives me the greatest strength to get through it….

I had been doing a lot of stuff that year (1984) trying to deal w/ my depression/despair stuff. One thing was to get involved for a time w/ a 12-Step group (similar to AA) called Emotions Anonymous. I did a lot of writing about the first three steps, & most crucial was the stuff about “Came to believe in a power greater than ourselves that could restore our sanity” (or however that goes) & “Made a decision to turn our lives & our will over to the care of god as we understood god.”

My problem was, how can I turn my life & my will over to the care of someone I don’t flat fucking trust? Mind you, I had by that time a B.A. in Religion, knew craploads about a whole big variety of religions, was an adherent of none of them because much as I believed in god (lower-case g), which I define as “the universe & everything in it,” I didn’t trust any of the Gods that various religions put up as who I should be kowtowing to.

When they told me who to put on the throne
I said no, I will not be ruled
the gods they showed me were tyrants
who displeased me with their judgments,
their injustice, yes, their cruelty.

— from “Mielikki”

So, in short, I made up my own self-defined “religion.” I reckoned that the universe & everything in it (god) is awfully damn hard to develop a personal relationship w/, so I had to whittle it down somehow, so I “invented” a sort of big sister/helping spirit/personal guide type of “imaginary” being to act as my personal connection to the “all of the above” that is god.

I named her Mielikki, after the Finnish spirit of woodland. The name comes from the Finnish word mieli which means mind or heart or desire, plus the suffix of endearment -kki. It’s sometimes translated as darling but to me her name means my dearest desire. She is an “imaginary” being who is bigger than myself, while at once she is a part of me… like my gut feelings (which have always been more accurate than my conscious brain-thoughts about how to live life). So her “will” is the same a mine: what is best for me, to be most fully me. If that makes sense.

That was February/March of that year that I did that work. Fast forward to August: I was spending about 20 minutes each night before falling asleep doing a sort of meditation breathing in & out to the phrase “Thou art / with me” (a borrowing w/ slight rewrite of part of the 23rd Psalm). Although some things were changing, I was still pretty messed up, still self-hating, & still going a lot into deep ugly pits of suicidal ideation. And then I was fired from my job.

My job was at a bookstore, one of several in a large Alaska-owned chain called the Book Cache, & the reason I was fired made no sense. I got confirmation later that I was fired for being a lesbian. But the important point is that as I was leaving the mall, in a matter of just a few steps down that hallway by the phone booth, a whole bunch of thoughts went like at-tat-tat-tat through my brain:

“This doesn’t make sense. Why me? I should just give up. First last night” [a particularly nasty evening in the pit] “& now this. I’ll never be free of this depression. I should just kill myself…. ” blah blah blah.

And then: “Thou art / with me.”

And with that thought, it all just… changed. I knew my brother & sister-in-law & friends wouldn’t let me die in the gutter. I knew I’d get through this, & would find another job. I knew I would be okay. (And I also knew that even if she was just a made up figment of my imagination, Mielikki was right there.)

And I went & got on the bus & went over to my brother’s & sister-in-law’s house to tell them about it.

Although I’ve had my bouts in the pit since then, I’ve never hated myself since, & have generally known that I could get through whatever hard times I have. Well, usually. Mielikki is still here — one of, & the most central of, what I now refer to as my “household gods.”

I call this belief in something I can’t prove, & even made up, but which is beneficial to me & nonharming to anyone, intentional belief. It works pretty well.

– Mel

(Mielikki is also the title character in one of my eternally-forthcoming novels, Mistress of Woodland.)

Related posts:

1. Mielikki
2. Illimitable god, & related thoughts about why I’m not a Christian
3. The god thing