Seeing Brent

I looked forward to a long Saturday afternoon of mass, class, and a talk with (Father) Brent, so I took 30 mgs of oxycodone and 900 mgs of Neurontin in the hope that I could quiet the pain enough to sleep. The pain persisted, but hallucinations of blossoming bouquets, flowery kimonos, and pullulating patterns of colors, provided a pleasant distraction. It is usually true that the more I want to sleep, the less I am able to sleep.

During our talk, three needy men came in separately. One asked Brent to jump-start his motorcycle battery, and the others consulted briefly, but I didn’t listen to what they said. I had taken enough food—for Brent and me—to feed several people, so I invited each of the men to eat with us, and one did. Along with caring for his 200-300 person congregation, Brent works with prisoners, Occupy Eugene, homeless campers, and maybe others (I learn new things about him all the time). Our talk went as well as expected, the following being some of the highlights in my own words and to the best of my understanding.

Brent opened by saying that my passion for religion is rare even among churchgoers, and that those who have it usually go to seminary.

I said that I didn’t know what to do with the questions that come up for me in catechism class because it seems inappropriate to ask for answers that I know don’t exist, but I feel untrue to myself if I remain silent. Besides, my feelings are sometimes too intense for me to trust myself to share them appropriately. He said he has no “conclusive answers,” about religion, and he made no suggestions about the class beyond saying that he wants me in it.

Brent regards Christianity and other religions as human attempts to comprehend the incomprehensible and express the inexpressible. His idea of a good church is a place where people share interests rather than answers.

He has never had what people refer to as a “personal experience of God,” and intercessory prayer makes no sense to him except as a morale builder, but after a few years in a Massachusetts’ monastery, he came to believe that those who devote their lives to prayer make the world a better place if only by virtue of the fact that other people are encouraged by their devotion.

I said that one my biggest problems with Christianity has always been that Jesus’ talk of loving your neighbor as yourself sets too high a standard, that I come nowhere near that standard, and that I have no plans to even attempt to come near it. Brent said that he hasn’t been terribly successful in that regard either, but he holds to the thought that nothing need be accomplished overnight.

By the time he went to seminary, Brent had been an officer in the Marine Corps and worked in big business. He wasn’t even a Christian when he experienced a desire to go to seminary, but he has gradually become what he does. What he does is to be a paid Christian, but he gives a lot more to the job than his salary covers. Whether he’s talking to one person or 200 people, Brent’s passion for the priesthood is evident.

He said that he wants to do everything he can to make me feel welcome at Resurrection, and then it was time for class. I participated circumspectly in a discussion of the creeds and the nature of the Trinity, and then we went to high mass. I’ve seen the sanctuary go from unpleasantly hot to unpleasingly cold during the months I’ve been at Resurrection, but yesterday was the first time that Brent asked me to pass inside the altar rail and read aloud from the Bible. I would have laughed if the reading had contained the verse about the fool saying in his heart that there is no God, but it didn’t. I loved being asked to read, though, and I loved everything else too.

Thoughts following my second catechism class

The following is a letter that I just sent to (Father) Brent who had encouraged me to take his catechism class, although, having belonged to four churches, I wouldn't join another one unless I had been going there for years. Besides, I became an Episcopalian at age 23, so I wouldn't need to join the national body, and I wouldn't have to take the class to join the local parish. I think my letter might qualify as blunt, but sometimes I just don't know how to soften things without diluting their meaning. Perhaps, if I sat on it for weeks, but I don't have weeks, and I've already worked on this letter over a period of three days.

I know you're awfully busy, so I hate to burden you with a fairly long letter, but I find it necessary.

I was surprised to hear people in our catechism class speak of struggling to believe, because in the church of my childhood, no one would have admitted as much. Is it not the case that people need never struggle to believe that which they know to be true, and that to do so suggests the triumph of need over integrity? I don’t know what I can be to such people other than an obstacle to their “faith,” and therefore an object of their hatred, and this raises the question of why you wanted me in the class.

The catechism (not you, the catechism) takes me back to my fundamentalist childhood in that the preachers I knew then also addressed difficult questions with smug authority, as if their answers were meaningful, obvious, and incontrovertible, when they were anything but. I see little difference between the fundamentalism I knew then and the fundamentalism of the catechism and creeds, although my childhood church disavowed both as “the works of men.”

I said nothing in our recent class because I could see no benefit in questioning every point—something that I came very near doing in the first class—that is unless I imagined that answers were to be had, which I did not. While I appreciate the fact that you encourage “hard questions,” I still imagine that there is a limit to the number that I, as a nonbeliever, might in good faith ask, and as you said during our last class, if someone isn’t open to learning from the material, then he doesn’t belong in church. As I wrote to you on the day we met, I’m an atheist, and as such I’m not open to learning about the characteristics of a supernatural deity except inasmuch as I can interpret them metaphorically, and I see no way to interpret the catechism and the creeds metaphorically. My attendance at church has been solely a right-brain endeavor through which I had hoped to find some peace with religion. By contrast, the catechism and creeds are entirely left-brain. 

I regard the catechism—and the creeds it supposedly elucidates—simply as the position of the side that won; the side that canonized the Bible; that wrote the creeds; that excommunicated, persecuted, tortured, imprisoned, and murdered those who held other views. As if all this weren’t enough, they did everything they could to destroy the writings and the memory of those whom they persecuted. So, I’m to be open to their writings, to imagine that men with blood on their hands were inspired by God! I’m hardly less open to the Islamic State, the main difference being that these “Christians” successfully carried on their program of control through terrorism for well over a thousand years, and are still doing it right here in America to the extent that they’re able (I write this as one who spent 37 years in the Bible-Belt).

I’m ever aware that for most of the history of Christianity, I would have been tortured and killed in the name of Jesus, and that right here in America, people whose views are considered heretical are still losing their jobs, being disowned by their families, having their pets poisoned and their children bullied. While Jesus had his faults, I never imagine that he would have approved of people who use viciousness to support their claim to having a corner on the truth, but this is what the creeds represent to me.

The creeds don’t even pretend to encourage love and acceptance, but are instead tools for enforcing propositions that never made the first person kinder or more moral. You say that they need not be taken literally, and that the word belief doesn’t have to mean intellectual acceptance, yet people were once murdered because they didn’t take the creeds literally (how easily the church forgets its crimes). When I read those creeds, I hear the screams of people being burned at the stake, and their screams are no less anguished for having happened hundreds of years ago. When I’m in church, I simply tell myself that I’m hearing the mythology of the people among whom I have come, so I will take whatever of good I can from it, and leave that which I regard as bad. It is the best that I can do, the best that anyone with integrity could do.

When you said that the creeds were an anchor to the church, I remembered the time from my childhood when I stepped on a plank and a nail went into my foot and was held there by the sole of my shoe, because that too was an anchor of sorts. Given your statement that the biggest complaint that Episcopalians have about church is the creeds, maybe I’m not alone. Since the entire class won’t be about the catechism, I would like to continue if you still want me, and can help me figure out how to make it work, because just as questioning everything didn’t go well the first time, questioning nothing didn’t work any better the second time.

Despite my atheism, you told me that there was a place for me at Resurrection, and I have tried to believe you. Now, I don't know what to think, nor do I know what you think in light of what you said about the necessity of remaining open to that which I told you from the outset I didn't believe. It's as if I'm suddenly back in the Church of Christ where the heart means little and the acceptance of authority everything. In case I have somehow failed to make myself clear, I don't accept the creeds or the catechism as having any authority. Those writers whom the church silenced produced far more profound and beautiful writings than these.

Appreciatively,

On the death of a corporal

Carol Off

The following link is to a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) interview that was on yesterday’s radio program As it Happens. The subject of the interview was a bystander’s response to Wednesday’s terrorist killing of 24-year-old Corporal Nathan Carillo, who was on honorary guard duty at the Canadian National War Memorial. The interviewer is Carol Off and the interviewee Barbara Winter. I envy Carol’s ability to carry on so admirably through an interview that left me wrecked, and I especially envy Barbara Winter’s ability to be emotionally present, both with the dying corporal and on an internationally broadcast radio program. How I wish I could remain so in touch with the best that is within me.

http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/popupaudio.html?clipIds=2568457500

Barbara Winter

Check-in time

A rare good picture of both of us. I like being married
to a woman who still looks hot at age 63.

I think a lot, and I can’t help but notice that what I think is more interesting than what other people think. I’m aware, of course, that other people might disagree, but that just shows you how wrong they can be. 

Three weeks ago, Father Brent wrote that we should get together again, and he proposed last week as a good time. A lot was going on in his life, so I heard nothing more from him, which was fine, but I wrote to him that when we do talk again, I would like for him to read my last blogpost first because it represents my best effort to say why I’m coming to his church. After trying to find it on Google, he admitted that he didn’t have my blog address anymore. Because of how extremely interesting my blog is, I was disappointed in him about this, but I expect so little of people anyway that it didn’t really matter. I still think he’s a good man in terms of caring about people, and that’s what’s important. It’s also why I couldn’t be a priest. Of course my atheism would be deal-killer right off the bat, but even without that obstacle, my poorly disguised antipathy for humanity would keep me out of the priesthood.

I really don’t know what to think about how cold I am. Like with that Ebola epidemic in Africa. I can’t help but think that the vanishing wildlife of Africa would be greatly helped if several million people died, so this makes me think that it would be for the best if they did die, what with the non-human animal population dropping by half in just the last thirty years. You might ask how I would feel if the epidemic were in America. Well, I would just shit, but that doesn’t negate my point.

I went to the back doctor this week for what I thought might be my last visit. My back hurts all the time from my upper shoulder blades down to either side of my crackie, and I had hoped he might be able to do something about it, but I’ve had enough experience with doctors to doubt that he could, and I was right. He always orders an x-ray, and this one showed that my broken vertebra is continuing to collapse. It was at 21% three months ago and at 24% now. He says that if it reaches 30, I’ll need a surgery called pedicle subtraction osteotomy with thoracolumbar fusion. This means that he re-breaks my back, rebuilds the vertebra, and fuses four of the surrounding vertebra. I naturally wanted to know more, but he said it’s still too early to talk about it, and that doing so would only upset me. I took this to mean that he had’t even told me the worst of it, so I came home and googled the surgery, and found that he really hadn’t told me the worst. I won’t say anything more because it’s still too early to talk about it, and I woudn’t want to upset you. Ha.

I’ve been taking a lot of narcotics lately, not to mention Ambien, Neurontin, and Cymbalta. I take the last three drugs at night and the narcotics during the day. 30 mgs of oxycodone (three to six times the starting dose) doesn’t slow me down, but it does it make it easier to keep going, both in terms of pain control and mood. I drive, run power tools, ride my bike, prune trees from ladders (no, I wasn’t on oxycodone when I fell last year), clean roof gutters while leaning forward on a sloping surface, and so on without feeling unsafe. The drug probably makes some difference in my performance, but other than problems with memory, I’m unaware of any.

I’ve thought a lot about narcotics over the years because I take so many of them, and because they’re supposed to be such a horrible thing. Given how well I function, I think it likely that the worst problems addicts face are simply getting their drug and having to worry about being caught. Certainly, marijuana and alcohol both have a more detrimental affect on my abilities than do narcotics, so I would assume that the same is probably true for addicts. Obviously, narcotics are a health risk, but to repeat myself, so is overeating, and a lot of other things. I can but say that so far, knock on wood, my energy level is fairly good considering that I’m kept awake by pain for a significant portion of every single night, and if I’m developing organ problems, I’m unaware of it.

I’ll tell you, though, I’m low right now. I did so good on my fencing project that I was encouraged to think I might do okay with emptying out our large living room, dining room, and hallway, removing the old carpet, painting the walls, and then having new carpet installed. The first thing I did was to move about fifty shelf-feet of books into the garage, and I was in more shoulder pain that night than I’ve been in a long time, maybe years. I was planning to move the furniture the next day, and had asked our friends, Lee and Robin, to give Peggy and me a hand with the big pieces, but I was in so much pain that I didn’t even try to move the little pieces. It’s an awful thing to watch other people do my work, but I have to stay in good enough shape to tear out the carpet and wash and paint the walls, and I knew that if I moved furniture, I might be in too much pain to do the rest. So, while they worked, I babysat with their little girl, Sidney, aka my granddaughter. That needs some explaining.

Lee and Robin were Jehovah’s Witnesses before they became atheists, and when they left the JW, their families, being filled with the love of Christ and all, naturally shunned them. When Sidney was born, they shunned her too, the damned little sinner. Even before she was born, Lee and Robin named Peggy and me Sidney’s grandparents, and Lee told me that in the unlikely event that his parents should come back into his life, I would still be Sidney’s grandpa. I probably love Sidney as well as I would if she were the offspring of the son or daughter that I never had (how can anyone not fully love a little child?), but as much as I care about her, Peggy is invested several times over. I find it poignant and worrisome to see how much she needs that kid in her life. 

Peggy is off for a long weekend with two friends for their 20th annual “Girls’ Weekend Away.” When she’s home, Brewsky has to sleep in the laundry room because he keeps her awake. When she’s gone, he sleeps wherever he pleases, and this weekend has been the first time that he spent most of each night in bed with me. I’m awake so much that he gets a lot of petting during the wee hours, and sometimes, he’ll even wake me up just to be petted. That’s what Peggy objects to, but I don’t mind it, at least for a few nights. After having him for four years, I’ve finally become enough attached to him that I actually think I might miss him if he died as much as I would miss a dog.

Well, that’s enough of a check-in. I’ve got to clean house and finish getting ready to paint because the carpet is coming next week.