Ruminations of varying degrees of interest

This morning, I braved a dust storm to look at an apartment, which as of tomorrow I will be renting, but that wasn’t important. I pulled waste-bins out of the street into which they had been blown by the gusts that elsewhere had been powerful enough to topple trees and strip roofs from garages and blow windows in, and I walked beneath precariously-placed limbs in the midst of the still-raging maelstrom of wind and dust to politely remark to a gentleman that his car was in danger of getting smashed, but while these moments certainly made an interesting morning, they weren’t really important.

In the early afternoon I did some other things I don’t remember. In the evening I ate and went to a bar with my good friends, had two mixed drinks, and got mildly tipsy. This mattered even less.

Before I left my friends’ apartment to find myself food and drink, I began, for a reason I can’t remember (not important) to talk about my desperate longing for meaning to, for, in my life. Here is what I said: I wanted direction, but more significantly I wanted connection to something larger. Put simply, in the terms I have grown up with, I needed God in my life. And I couldn’t figure out how to find it.

I have not always been rational. I doubt I truly am even now. But my mind cannot wrap around the sort of things that my acquaintances in church and church school accept with simple faith, and as I have admitted to myself before this, I feel both contemptuous and painfully jealous of them. God is, they say. Jesus loves you. The Spirit moves within me. Miracles happen.
Oh, how desperately I want to believe these things are true! I don’t know if God is God in the way I have been raised to believe he/she/it is. I don’t think the Christian way of believing is always the best. I don’t even, on a frequent basis, really think I can justify believing in a God with any sort of rationality. The only thing that keeps me hoping for that connection to something greater, to divinity, is beauty. I lust after transcendence. I catch glimpses of it in music, in art, in literature. I have always yearned for my life to have depth and mystery, and in the past, I have found ways to make it, to find it. But I have lost, these past few months, any sense of hope that I will transcend. And that is what I truly crave.

I am too afraid to experience it. I have learned to be rational, you see. I have learned that miracles don’t really happen, they are coincidence. I have learned that visions of heaven are flights of fancy the visionary perceives as real. I have learned that out-of-body experiences are in fact documented psychological phenomena, and a lot of spiritual gurus are probably on drugs. Even the average Christian will probably agree with me on these. I have also decided that “spiritual experiences” can’t be trusted as they are probably just emotional highs. So how, if I have arrayed a perfectly reasonable wall of cold, clear rationalism around myself, can I possibly attempt to climb over its icy and solid walls into the realm of fantasy and spirit and transcendence and mystery?

I can’t. In the end, I tell myself I only believe mystical things happen because I want that to be the case, and that is hardly a good enough reason to delude myself into believing in them. I can argue with myself that people I know, and trust, and who are even more rational, intelligent, and rigorously – even ruthlessly – practical…even they have had experiences I can’t imagine. Never mind that my dear friend Liz said that she herself questions them every day, and hates herself for it, but can’t seem to stop.

I haven’t had a single experience with the supernatural. Liz says this may be a good thing, because then I can more easily explain these things away, but I already half believe in them anyway; why should I be deprived of experience?

“Well,” Liz told me this evening, “You have to actively seek it.”
I am afraid to.

I want truth, you see. What if an experience isn’t true? What if I am lying to myself by saying it is? I hate the wanting because if I had no desire for supernatural connection I could be a perfectly rational atheist and live my life as best I could, fulfilled because there was no divine, and so I would have no need for one and the world would be beautifully explained by science and natural law. I hate the rationalism because if I was a born-again Christian with Jesus in my heart, I could call atheists poor Satan-misled unbelievers and take great joy in Jesus’ loving sacrifice for me, and cry at spiritual revivals and believe everything the Bible says, and all evidence to the contrary would simply be Satan trying to lead me away from God. But in truth, both options repel me.

So for a while now I have been avoiding the issue entirely. Oh, I think about myself and those two parts of me – it is the same old story I have been rediscovering about myself since I entered college. I’ve been managing, however, to suppress my spiritual side these past few months. I have not been seeking. I am simply too afraid I won’t like what I find, because I know no matter what happens, I will never be entirely happy with it. That is not even touching on the issue of I have no idea which religion is the “right” one. Or even just the right one for me. I have been raised Adventist, and I still carry that culture within me. I doubt I will ever escape it. At the same time, it is very hard not to reject it since it is the religion I come from and therefore all its flaws are revealed in crisp relief. So then I think of other religions…

Oddly enough, this was something of a tangent altogether. I have hashed out these longings and mental gymnastics to myself, to others, and on paper before. Essentially this blog entry was supposed to be something of a movie/poetry/song review. Because, bearing in mind that all of the above was still stewing in my had as I left the bar with my friends this evening, I ended up experiencing profundity in the oddest of places – sitting on a couch in front of a computer playing the DVD “Stranger than Fiction.” Which I had never seen before.

It was a glorious movie. It was, to me at that moment, a movie about living a life with meaning. It was also about what makes good literature, and even to a certain extent a debate on whether art is more important than life. But more importantly it explored, to me, the nature of a meaningful life and a meaningful death, and did so in subtle and beautiful ways. Still, the movie alone wouldn’t be enough. But I will post more about that later, because I am exceedingly sleepy.