Whingefest

We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses.
~ Carl Jung

Today just hasn't happened, you know? I don't know what I'm feeling. I feel like I am grieving for lost things and I don't even really know what they are, or I don't want to look at them. I am so fucking sick of looking at those things.

It's hot and I don't want it to be. I want to stay inside and shore up myself and try and regain some peace and equilibrium. Staying inside here when it is hot, in my flat-roofed house, requires air conditioning. I don't like using the aircon. This is the one thing I dislike very much about my house.

I dislike a lot of things today. I don't know if I am sick in my body or just in my soul. Or is it my spirit? I get my parts mixed up. Today I have basically sat around all day feeling discombobulated, only to go and sleep at 3 o'clock for three hours. Which isn't exactly the best thing to do to combobulate yourself, but today was shot to hell to begin with. I don't know why my spirit is troubled, but it is and it has been for days.

I know the things I need to do to work towards getting myself out of funks. It doesn't take much for me to return to the land of the living again. This post is the beginning of it. I am spinning The Smiths' Hatful of Hollow on their first rotation belonging to me. This is a start. This removing yourself out of a funk is doing things with the left hand while not telling the right hand. Before I know it, I'm spinning out about particle theory and the infinite possibilities of life lived in an extra few dimensions, and chatting to a friend and catching up, and then it's okay, you know? So many everyday things seem wonderful to me these days. Just the small, simple things have such beauty.

But not tonight. Tonight it's all flat. I feel lonely. Sometimes my mistakes weigh heavy. I will never have children. I want an extended holiday. I want to meet a few people who actually want to connect with me. The future unnerves me. My flaws and wounds sit heavy this evening and once again I am in the space of radical not-okayness. Andrea texted me earlier, inviting me over for dinner, and though I really wanted to go, I just couldn't rouse myself, but instead went to bed. Now I wish I was there.

Some people live in the space of radical not-okayness all their lives, only shaking it off when the eccies kick in, or in those short, sharp bursts of joy and pleasure that come upon us suddenly out of the blue and contain just as much pain as joy. I listened to a podcast this afternoon, called Zencast, which spoke about this radical not-okayness that characterises so much of our lives. It was nice to be reminded again of the okayness, even if I don't feel like I am swimming in it this evening. Spiritual seers such as Richard Rohr talk about the okayness underpining such things also. It feeds out into what is called by some the joy of the Lord. Yes, it is most certainly my strength. It has pulled me out of many funks and maybe, writing these words here this evening, it will pull me out of this one.

Not that I want to be pulled into bright, shiny spaces. If I had a choice, I would rather stay in the funk of moroseness than the pretence of bright shininess. The former is healthier for the soul than the latter, after all, and I feel God especially close to me in my moroseness, as he is to all. If God favours anyone, it is the poor, in whatever incarnation that takes.

No, the radical okayness of things is not bright shininess, although there is certainly great beautiful light there, and certainly glittering things that dazzle my eyes. The potentiality of all things. The whispers that I feel deeper than my marrow that are in so many respects the opposite of what cultural Churchianity sees. That is almost something akin to a spiritual negative of what the reality of things is, with their overemphasis on sin and the separation of everything, of the body from a life in God, of the body from their own souls, of God from the multitude of his creation, and really, sometimes I wonder if this generation of Christians are not the most spiritually depleted of all time? Surely they are some of the ugliest people, and I can say that from personal experience also. Fall into a life of God and then fall into a ditch of legalism and hatred of others, doing and saying all the right things without the spirit. How much evil human beings can commit out of doing what they believe is right.

Perhaps that is all purposeful. Perhaps that ugly rock of Christianity is needed to show us what is inside us, the strands to be teased out so micro-thin, our inablity to discern wheat from tares and life from death so strong that it takes years of walking in the death spaces in the name of God before we wake up. He is so very patient about it all.

Walking in the spaces of everything is okay doesn't mean that everything is right, however. This is what I was reminded of this afternoon as I listened to that podcast full of such wisdom. What it means is that there is room for us to sit tight and not be carried away. But of course, what we need to do that - and this is where cultural Churchianity has failed most - is to be reminded over and over again that everything is only radically okay because we, in our messes and our horriblenesses, are also radically okay. It seems counterintuitive, does it not? But it is as Jung said - there is no moving forward into growth and change without knowing that where you are you are still loved.

This is partly where my irritation is coming in. Today I am not okay with myself. The ugliness of my own soul is apparent to my own soul. I feel like something stinking to myself and it's not only because I haven't had a shower. These spaces are becoming less familiar to me, I must say. It is a reminder to me that this is how many people in the world feel everyday, dragging themselves behind themselves, feeling the slight unease that somehow they are wrong, they just don't measure up. But surely that is the radical good news of the gospel, that we are bigger than we once thought, that we are free to love and cherish ourselves as something of infinite worth, as people who have greater stores of strength than we realise much of the time. Because if you don't even love yourself well, you will not love your neighbour very well either.

I believe that. Tonight, though, I just don't feel it.