This is pretty awesome.
Monthly Archive for July, 2009
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This morning, for the first time ever, I found myself fantasizing about taking a vacation somewhere far far far away from where the internet can find me. (This is an impossible fantasy, of course, given how cell phones work these days but…) It seems utterly luxurious to go on a vacation where I couldn’t check my email, update my status on Twitter or Facebook or MySpace or Plaxo or Linked In, write a blog…
I think it has something to do with the dream I had last night, where a friend of a friend sent me an email saying, “Let’s connect on All Ratings!” I don’t know if a company called All Ratings actually exists but in my dream, it was like Goodreads only you rated any product that existed out in the world. So every time you bought a hair dryer, for example, you could rate it on All Ratings and all the people who were your “friends” could see how you rated it.
I woke up and thought, “This is really going overboard. I’m dreaming about it now?”
I quit church almost twelve years ago.
Sometimes, especially when I think about becoming a parent, I consider going back. But Sunday rolls around and, truth be told, the last thing I want to do is go to some boring service with people I wouldn’t hang out with except for the fact that we’re at church together. Because I became Catholic after leaving church (that’s a long story, but it’s sufficient to point out that I’ve never attended mass regularly either), I’ve considered Saturday night mass, but once again, I usually find myself occupied doing more interesting things on Saturday nights.
I like the idea of church. I like the idea of a community of people committed to spiritual practice and to helping others. To me, this is the real power of church: its involvement in the local community. The spiritual thing that binds people together in a church propels members to do very generous acts for virtual strangers. You can be committed to your son’s soccer team, and be very involved, but you’re not going to call the other soccer parents when your son o.d.s and you discover his secret stash of cocaine. No, you’re going to call the people you know at church. Somebody will know somebody who can give you son the best help available at a highly reduced price, people will bring meals while he’s recovering in the hospital, everybody will be praying–all because you go to the same church together.
So….I like the idea of church.
This is why I left. My life in Christianity was a very tiny cave packed full of people who were, like me, scared to leave that cave. Many of these people insisted that the world outside that cave was full of degenerates, dangerous people who would seduce you into sinful behaviors that would lead to your utter ruin and downfall. You couldn’t trust those people outside the cave and you certainly couldn’t be friends with them, not until you managed to convert them. This was apparently the only basis for friendship with outsiders. And while the people inside that cave were chanting praises to Jesus, and claiming that Jesus had transformed them into good, kind, generous, compassionate people, I watched as they hurt good, kind, generous, compassionate people in the name of Jesus.
It made me sick. Continue reading ‘Why I’m Not in Church’
We went to see Eek-A-Mouse last night at a free concert in San Jose’s downtown park. This is our fourth time to see Eek-a-Mouse and it doesn’t get much better than free concert, outdoors, summer nights, fairly cheap beer, surrounded by a bunch of thugs, all chilled out because it is, after all, a reggae concert in northern California.
I’ve lived in the Bay Area for four years now but usually we go to outdoor concerts in San Francisco. With our move to Livermore, San Jose is closer so it may become our port of call. Anyway, right away, as we walked to the park, I was surprised by three things: how everybody was dressed in black, how many dudes there had gold teeth (can I just say, ew), and completely beside the gold teeth, how many tough guys were hanging around. What I mean to say is, every other person looked like a gangsta.
Maybe to outsiders, the Bay Area is lumped together as one big cauldron of weird-ass rainbow-wearin’ gay lovin’ hippiefied liberals. But for the record, Continue reading ‘Eek-A-Mouse and the thugs in San Jose’
When I started writing my latest novel, I was chattering away about it and Chris said, “I just want to know, who dies?” Continue reading ‘Somebody always dies’
I love reading mystery novels—hell, I love writing them, too—but it is only recently that I connected the love of mysteries with belief in God.
There’s a moment in The Boy Detective Fails by Joe Meno where the narration suddenly breaks out of the storyline and the narrator addresses the reader directly with a philosophical assault: “Why is a mystery so terrifying to us as adults? Is it because our worlds have become worlds of routine and safety and order the older we’ve grown? Is it because we have learned the answer to everything and that answer is that there is never a secret passageway, a hidden treasure or a note written in code to save us from our darkest moments? Why are we struggling so hard against believing there is a world we don’t know? Is it more frightening to accept our lives as they are than it is to entertain a fantasy of hope?” (p. 129-130)
Joe Meno, you sound like a believer to me!
Maybe because we like Nancy Drew as kids, it’s also easier to accept the fantastical idea that God loves the world. As adults, it is so hard to believe in these mysterious things called God, miracles, hope.
Religion at its best—at its purest, truest, most comprehensible—doesn’t pretend to offer all the answers. There may be that note written in code that will save us from our darkest moment—that is part of the mystery, just like the part of the mystery is the fact that that note, offered to us in our darkest moment, doesn’t explain everything we want to understand, either.
The truth is, believing in God means accepting that we don’t have the answer to everything. That there are still mysteries to investigate. And the hope that there will always be another mystery around the corner
