Year of Faith

When I got home on Tuesday I felt spiritually drained.  It was cold outside, and I had just come back from my second lesson with Jack.  It was all about how God and religion were the only hope humanity had for a bright future, how every human being was imperfect, frail, and full of fault and that it was only through God that we could really change for the better.

Accepting God is a sign of maturity.  All morality has derived from religion.  Life is full of tests and it is during these times that a person who does not believe in God will act purely out of self-interest and the survival instinct.

Man is naturally impotent, ignorant, weak, wretched and imperfect, whereas all strength, power, knowledge, wisdom, ascendancy, virtue and goodness are from God, praised be His glory.  Therefore man should under all circumstances regard himself as imperfect, ignorant, and captive of self and passion.  He should not feel depressed or hurt if people impute to him these characteristics which, after all, are inherent within him.  On the contrary, he should be happy and thankful to them, while at the same time he should feel disappointed in himself, should take refuge in God and beg protection from his own base and appetitive nature.

-Revelation of Baha’u'llah Vol.2 p. 43

Through all of this all I could think was how wrong he was.  The word ‘no’ circled my head over and over again but it couldn’t settle on any one statement.  I brought up enough  questions to clarify that he thought people could be good without religion (a rarity he would insist) and that people in religion are rarely always saints, but this didn’t seem to prove anything to him.

Anyway, I came home to find one of my roommates playing a song on their guitar.  It didn’t sound familiar, turns out that they had composed it themselves, and it was beautiful.  It was soft, loving, and… well, just beautiful.  It was exactly what I needed to hear, and I thought that perhaps a real Baha’i would give thanks to God for such a perfect moment.  Not the singer and song-writer, not the instrument or all the human ingenuity necessary for the production thereof and not to mention the discovery of tones and the engineering of the fundamentals of music.  Just God, because it was good.  Because all good things come from God.

No.

No.

No.

I know, I know, I haven’t been updating like I said I would.  This is mostly due to the bad emotional state I’ve been in for the past week.  I go through these ups and down pretty naturally, actually.  Call it manic-depression, call it being moody, I just know that every once in a while shit gets put on hold while I deal with myself for a few days.  Taoism helped initially, but as my belief in my own abilities and in the project failed during the week, I just retreated into myself like I usually do.

Having a retail job hasn’t helped either.  As my fellow “sales associates,” past and present are sure to tell you, customer service exposes you to some of the most aggravating human beings on the planet.  I had to carefully consider my words there, because I don’t want to make it seem like I am involved in The Worst Thing Ever.  It doesn’t take much to imagine someone who would have it worse off than myself, living in the first world with a full time job and enough time on my hands to write a blog, and badly at that.  It’s tempting to make my plight seem terribly important, because I’m angry and frustrated and still a little depressed, but it really isn’t.  I just hope you understand that when you work in a store that is called “The X Shop” and people, day after day, walk in and say, with complete and bloody sincerity,

“Do you sell X?” Yeah, you get a little loopy.  Taoism has really helped with this. I must say that I am a whole lot more tolerant and patient with people, especially at work.  Well, I was. Like I said, this last week was a bit of a write off, and I’m not proud of that.  Losing that kind of time when I only have a month to experience these ideas is hardly… um, ideal.

Anyway, I’ll be writing up a summary of my thoughts on Taoism during the weekend.  I will also be trying to figure out how to best spend my free time so that I’m in a good state of mind going into the Baha’i Faith in March.  I get to start with a 19 day fast heading into the Baha’i New Year, so I have that to look forward to.

But on to the meat of the post.  Ridiculous news stories mean I get to vent and feel superior for a little while longer.  Science Daily ran a story a few days ago about how researchers in Montreal found evidence suggesting Zen meditation helps to mitigate pain.

Which isn’t really news.  Like, not even slightly.  The point, surely, is that these researches have figured out how this works, that the methods involved in Zen meditation help, “thicken certain areas of [the] cortex and this appears to underlie their lower sensitivity to pain.”  But to me this article reads more along the lines of, “We have found that there is a positive correlation between meditation and pain management,” not, “Thích Quảng Đức must have had a brain as dense as a neutron star.”

I just wanted to make sure everyone knew this.  Self-immolation is one of those things that kind of interests me (wow, that was a weird thing to write) and it bugs me when someone implies that people aren’t smart enough to draw these kinds of connections.  It doesn’t take much to see a man with a history of intense meditation set himself aflame without so much as twitching and realize that there is something special going on here.

Alright, I think I’m done being self-righteous.

One of my dream careers would be to become a Christian priest, probably protestant (lots more free will, a lot less tempting young boys, apparently).  I’ve always seen it as an opportunity to learn the true length and breadth of Christian doctrine and how it relates to other religions and to people directly.  I could be the spiritual head of a diverse community of believers, and lend spiritual and moral wisdom to numerous personal issues and problems, and lead compassionate initiatives internationally and throughout the community.

I’ve always seen the priest as a mix of two things that are very important to me- accumulating knowledge and wisdom, and then using that knowledge to help people in a very real and immediate fashion.  There are so many opportunities to help people deal with their faith and their understanding of God and their religion, to be able to have these kinds of conversations with the troubled and the curious.  This kind of prospect genuinely excites me.  Now I might have a completely unrealistic and romanticized view of the priesthood, but that’s the point of a dream job, isn’t it?

Slight hitch though, not a big problem, but something that may or may not come up once in a great long while- I don’t believe in God. It would be an unorthodox kind of life to lead, to be sure, an atheist priest.  Someone who is supposed to lead people to God and understand God and yet has no such faith.  Probably wouldn’t go down so well with the congregation, I fear.

Stranger still though, it’s never occurred to me that this would be detrimental to my understanding of the Christian faith, God, or Christ.  Knowing these things inside and out, as I am want to do, and knowing how to interact and converse with people in a religious sense seem to be the real necessary skills for a priest.  So long as I could cultivate these things, as well as the skills necessary for the other minutiae of the priesthood, isn’t that enough?

I honestly believe that being able to deal with a congregation from the point of view of an atheist would be a real boon rather than a blunder.  An atheist knows how difficult it is to accept the idea of God, they know the ins and outs of all the arguments, they know how absurd faith can be, how hard it can be to square this faith away with reason, and they certainly know how religion can be criticized and assailed from without and within.  I love religion and God just as much as the average Christian, I just don’t believe He exists, which changes the kind of love to be sure, but I’m still very much caught up in the whole thing on a  day to day basis.

The reason I bring all of this up is that I recently read a news story about a fellow who is actually living my dream.  Klass Hendriske turned more than few heads in the Netherlands and throughout the Christian community in 2007 when he published a book called Believing in a God Who Does not Exist: Manifesto of an Atheist Preacher. He obviously came under a lot of scrutiny from the powers that be (or may not be, in this case) but just recently the Protestant Church of the Netherlands declared that they will not be taking any action against Hendriske, saying that his views are actually sympatico with other liberal theologians within Protestantism.

So no burning collar, no cassok striping, nothing ontoward at all.  As you can imagine this news was rather uplifting for this little dream of mine.  I doubt that it will actually happen for me, but it’s nice to know that it’s possible.  Seems that the Protestants have put themselves on some shakey ground though, as Hendriske himself says, “If my view is allowed, then there’s something wrong with the foundations of the church.”  Yes Klaas, there is something wrong, and you and me both know what it is.

In any case, I’ll be looking forward to an English translation of his book.

So I’m trying to find a process by which I can update this blog on a semi-regular basis and keep my own personal journal that documents my experiences. There is a whole lot that I don’t put on this space, and that makes me feel like my lovely little blog is being neglected. So I think that I shall be a bit more regimented in keeping daily journal entries, and will put up some choicer bits here instead of trying to remake the pentagram every time, as it were. I will also use this site for reflections on current religious events, news items, etc.

Or not. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime I have made a bibliography page to keep track of all the books I have read or made reference to throughout the year. It was either this or try to organize my library.

I assure you, the choice was a simple one.

You can now read all about my lovely self and the lovely project in the about section.

I am also trying to get a contact page working.

Right now though, I really want to go outside.

I want you to imagine a terrific expanse of yellow, and a dark man composed entirely of right angles, with the exception of his smooth, hard-hat covered head.  This man, his head surfing at an unnatural height just above his shoulders, is bent low over a dark pile, also composed of right angles, wielding some kind of tool, stabbing into the unkown.

That is what you would probably see right now if Geocities and it’s atrocious gifs were still around.  But for now we have this, and as you have probably guessed, we are under construction at the moment.  Sorry about that somewhat pretentious opening paragraph.  I warn you that there may be a lot of that in the future.

At the moment I am trying to get into contact with local religious groups and lining up my reading lists for each month.  I want to try to get all of my preliminary research out of the way before the year starts, so I’m not spending time during the year trying to prepare for the months to come.  I won’t be able to mitigate that entirely, but there is still much to be done.

The schedule probably ins’t going to change now, and I’m going to start working on the different ‘About’ pages, one about the project and one about myself.  Perhaps I can finish those this evening.

One of my old proffessors has been invited to a Buddhist ceremony tomorrow morning, and he invited me to come along.  It is the celebration of the Amitbha Buddha’s birthday, a key figure in Pure Land Buddhism, at the Golden Buddha monastery. I was looking forward to it until I realized how early I need to wake up tomorrow.  Sounds like a ludicrous reason, but I really am not a morning person.

More to come.  So much more.

T-minus eight days. I am terrified by the amount of stuff yet to do.