The Life of a Caretaker

I have been learning that the life of a caretaker is as addictive as the life of an alcoholic. Here the intoxication is the emotional relief that temporarily comes when answering a loved one's need. Though it never lasts, in the moment of answering someone's need, we feel loved. While much good can come from this, especially for those the caretaker attends, the care itself becomes a drink by which we briefly numb a worthlessness that won't go away unless constantly doused by another shot of self-sacrifice.

It all tightens until what others need is anticipated beyond what is real, and then, without any true need being voiced, an anxiety to respond builds that can only be relieved if something is offered or done. At the heart of this is the ever-present worry that unless doing something for another there is no possibility of being loved. So the needs of others stand within reach like bottles behind a bar that, try as he or she will, the caretaker cannot resist.

I have experienced this even in the simple issue of calling a loved one while away from home. Even when no one expects to hear from me, I can agonize over whether to call. Often, unable to withstand the discomfor of not registering some evidence of my love, I will end up going to great lengths to call.

IN truth, caretaking, though seeming quite generous, is very self-serving, and its urgent self-centredness prevents a life of genuine compassion. In all honesty, to heal from this requires as rigorous a program of recovery as alcoholics enlist, including sponsors who will love us for who we are.

Within one's self, the remedy of spirit that allows for true giving resides somewhere in the faith to believe that each of us is worthy of love, just as we are

Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening.

This is why, if when I get involved in any sort of organised Christian group again (skipping the Sunday morning thang), it won't be with a group of people for whom the term "my ministry" does not carry any unease.

You Had a Bad Day ...

Discombobula is feeling discombobulated today. I have a ton of things to do and very little motivation to do them. My fatigue level's ramped up the past several weeks, and while it's low-level, it still scares me. However, once I get going - like last night at Theatresports with my friends - everything's good. But stick me on a chair with no outside impetus and it's easy to get stuck for hours online, sinking into my fears. The anxiety that comes out of feeling unwell has always surprised me with its weight.

There are so many fears surrounding my health dipping downhill even slightly (why am I feeling worse? Is it endometriosis? something horrible like cancer? a return to CFS? What's wrong with me?) Trailing on the ends of those thoughts are fears that I have brought this upon myself. This is an intermittent thought and one which is frustrating because there are strands of truth mixed in with error there. After all, it is taking responsibility for your health and tuning into your body which enables you to begin to act to do the things that lead to health. But sometimes I think we are encouraged in our pill-popping culture to feel a strange sort of over-responsibility whenever anything does go wrong and doesn't rectify itself in 13.4 seconds.

And yet, I am the owner of my own body and therefore responsible for what I put into it, and feeling bad today is partially linked to the McDonald's I had yesterday - twice - and the evening before that as well. Three lots of Maccas in one weekend, and I can feel it. I once hated McDonald's when I had trained my taste buds to a better place than they are at the moment. I saw it as cardboard unfood and now I gobble it up, yum yum, to comfort eat. Maybe comfort punish is a better thought. We do so easily punish ourselves with doing awful things to ourselves, do we not?

So these fears and worries about feeling more fatigued are strengthened by two underlying fears that bob their head up intermittently. I wish it was not so. I wish I could say that I would get to a certain period in my spiritual life where these thoughts have no power to affect me, being the sorts of unreal illusory unthoughts not worth my consideration, but they seem to creep in unawares sometimes, without my even realising it. The first thought is that there is something lacking with God and he is not as lovable as I believe. The second thought is that there is something wrong with me and I am not lovable. Pretty obvious how the two fit into each other, right? And yet I am more dismayed about the first thought than I am about the second, however. Even though my lenses have cleared in ways unimaginable at the beginning of my journey, I still see far too easily in the Scriptures when I open them the ogre God, as Baxter Kruger calls him, and it is dismaying. Where do these pockets of unbelief dwell within me? How do they dwell co-existent with the beliefs I do have about God? It takes courage to admit those pockets exist, or that they have sprung up again from when I last called them out onto the carpet and shot them with my reality gun.

How we want to be pearlescent. It does feel we are made to be so, and seamless and open, with no hidden pockets to trip ourselves up. How much courage therefore to steady your eye upon them and not flinch away. Their existence does not mean I am a complete giant freak but hey, who doesn't feel this way about themselves? And how hard not too when everywhere surrounding us in the world we are told we are freaks if we are imperfect.

And so even though I do not like the hidden pocket I look at it, because I am far enough along in my faith that my unfaith is acknowledgeable. These thoughts about unlovable God and unlovable us are so entrenched into our hearts. It's why the bastard God of Christianism has been given so much power and emphasis; it creeps me to ponder that it seems easier for us to believe in that God than a good god. This is surely a shocking thing to consider, and so we dismiss it. And yet the evidence seems overwhelming that this sort of God is easy to believe in even when our hearts whispher otherwise. Because hey, look at the evidence in the bible, right? There are all sorts of verses to prove that God is basically a prick. And how quickly we believe that we are seeing clear-headed when this God is presented, the petulant Jonathan Edwards version of God. But what about those times when we experience something numinous about God? How good this God is. How love, how beautiful, how massive and expansive. And then we see Jesus and we get to see how far our conceptions of God stretch as compared to this man Jesus. We are so very blind to the reality of God.

It's such a wrench to look inside yourself and see, sinkingly and with some dismay that here you are - at least today - believing small things about God again. Not even consciously. You don't believe these things consciously but then you act in ways that seem to bear out the fact that unconsciously you are believing those very things, from out of the delicious murk that comes up to you in your dreams and sculptings and ponderings and writings. You are believing what has been told to you every day by many and varied sources that because of your obvious imperfections and your self-centredness and self-absorption and your failure to continue to love your husband and the fact that your father did not show you hardly any affection and the way that person looked at you and the fact that you are stuck doing the same shithouse job you were last year and the fact that that thing over there in your soul is still there and blah blah blah blah blah means that in actual fact you really are not lovable and not loved by God (who is also not lovable himself, being a bastard, so who really cares? Let's all get drunk).

There is enough in that sort of state of mind to despair for several centuries. You feel you could sink into oblivion in that headspace. And yet sometimes faith grows upon the back of unbelief, if you let it. It's hard to climb onto the springboard from those sorts of quicksand thoughts. How surprising then the quick bounce once you have from admission into yieldedness. So much yielding in this faith life. Like a woman's pelvis cracking open for birth. A return, once again, in the spiral of life, back to somewhere you've been before. You always wonder when you come back to this place how you could ever leave it. When you are here the air is so fresh it is much easier to acknowledge just how much Vaseline sits on your lenses.

And how strange, the comfort in that. The amazement that the depth of my blindness when viewed through the lens of a loving trinity God is a far greater comfort than any of your unbelieving illusions. How good to be able to fling them off again.

Artwork by Erdmute

And after the fire, a still small voice

There is a fly buzzing around my head. A fly at the end of August. It is going to be a long, hot summer. I am dribbling at the return of the light (my pwecious) but sinking in my stomach at the return of the psychotic heat. The other evening in bed before sleep I spontaneously began praying for all of those who will die in this summer's fires. I prayed that somehow, somewhere, they will portentously know and understand and listen to the gut feelings and leave. To that still, small voice.

But perhaps it's not all that cut and dried. Perhaps God does not always warn people in advance of horrid awful things happening. Perhaps he does all the time and it is simply a demonstration of how difficult it is for us to tune ourselves into him and believe what she says. I am often baffled at God's intervention or lack thereof in things these days. I have done my fair share of tearful bellowing regarding his seeming departure.

I read yesterday about a man who believed that a tornado that ripped through a town where his Lutheran denomination was having a conference about whether being a practising gay person disqualifies you from the ministry (I say they should thank their blessings that there is something that *does* disqualify them from taking such a stupid route, but I opinionate in my digression ;)

In the past three days, I have told two people of my desire to move to the Dandenong Ranges. One was a nice but know-it-all woman on the train who struck up a conversation with me (the train has suddenly become my greatest social hub) and my mother, both who expressed concern at desiring to move somewhere that is surely going to not exist in several years time when it's burnt to the ground.

Perhaps they are wrong. Perhaps they are right. I did go through the past summer travelling to Mount Dandenong seeing Maggie on high alert, ready any time the call came via the phone up the mountain from friends to evacuate. They had to do so, several times.

And yet still, there is something that compels me about the idea. The place draws me, all those trees. Wisha wisha. I think also it is the idea of friends phoning each other up the mountain. And it is true that the Dandenong Ranges have a higher than normal concentration of fruit loopy, slightly eccentric, off-centre, artistic type people. My kind of people, you know? :)

I cannot sit with "weather as punishment" conception of God and yet I do not then know what I think. Does God never intervene ever? And does he never intervene with awful things, with the ground opening up and swallowing people? And even more baffling sometimes, the lack of intervention when children's innocence is molested and people are knifed down in the street because they happen to be "curryheads"? Is the intervention these days through us? Is this what this era of is about? About people being God for each other? Perhaps it is. No handwriting on the wall, just the voice that's in us all. Being God for each other in the midst of imperfectioin all around, threatening to swallow us alive. Such a total bloody mess at times.

I really am not so sure what I think about a whole lot of things as they relate to God. And that's okay. He seems more strange and Other the more I get to know him (and yet, and yet, deep down inside the connection goes on, in my spirit, you know? The connection that is so close that sometimes I do not know where I end and God begins, as if we are made out of the same sort of stuff.)

And this is the taste of God that I know for myself, that which lives inside of me. And yet who is this who I have to reckon with? Is it the God of love who will stop at nothing to grow up his children, his own children, all of them? Even if it means the pain of suffering that we endure in this life? The horrible, awful things that happen to people that leave you scratching your head with the curses in your mouth? Is it the conformist God of past centuries of Christianity, waiting to bash people with a big stick to keep them in line? I cannot come at such a small god anymore, he reeks of the worst of humanity. In-between those two is a giant chasm and millions of people have fallen into it. I cannot give up the thought for long, the long, cool, watery thought that love follows down to the end, and never gives up. It's what it says in that collection of letters and documents written by 66 different people and which I struggle with so.

It says it, most clearly. God is love. Jesus screams it, does it not? Screams it from a cross, for crying out loud. And yet those verses, some of them, seemingly completely contradictory. And it drives me mad sometimes because I suspect, and sometimes I know, that, like watching a 3D movie, if I put on the glasses I would see it all clear. My sight is vastly nothing like 20/20 vision. And I am stuck inside my own perceptions and my own humanity and I cannot see the Other as he is. And I want to. I want to.

Pic by Briannaorg

Take Responsibility FFS!!!

Back at work. Listening to a particularly adept professional victim blame everyone else for his pathetic life and his horrible relationship and his shithouse attitude. It's so amazing how NO ONE is responsible for their actions. It's ALWAYS someone else's fault. She made me do it. He made me do it. It's her fault, it's his fault.

Take responsibility for being a tossbag like everyone else is a tossbag! What makes you any different from anyone else?

Thank you God I'm not like that tax collector/sinner/woman/Muslim/loser/drug addict. We all say it. We want to outsource everything. We want counsellors to counsel everyone else 'cos we don't want to get involved and we're not "professionals". We want police forces to maintain law and order because we're shit at relating with each other. We want schools to teach our kids to live out in the world but how can you do that when the world is not theory, not a goddamned book? We want other people to take the blame for the shit we do because other people have done shit to us. Where does it end?

My friend got annoyed at me the other night because I got annoyed at him because he was making a face in response to what I was saying. Okay, so I was talking about wanting to live in an intentional community in Eltham. He was screwing up his face like all people do at hippies. I couldn't help but respond to such an aggressive sort of response to what I was saying, and then HE got mad at ME for getting annoyed in the first place! But I couldn't see how I was responding to HIM, so I was probably just as aggressive as he was. And so when he retaliated to me retaliating to him, we both felt justified in doing it, and we both had a case. Every single police statement is different, every suspect sees things through their own filters. Everyone rewrites their memories and recasts themselves in candlelight when maybe they were standing in energy saving light instead. How does anybody get along ever, at all? How does anyone ever get along with each other when we are such stupid, stupid beings? :) When we all feel vulnerable and exposed, and we all behave badly? And yet we do.

This incessant ongoing blaming is so what the cross speaks to me about these days. There is a way that has been made for us to be able to be honest with God and ourselves and each other. Open hearted honesty from other flawed beings is so healing to watch.

Why is it so hard to admit our faults? Especially Christians. If a life lived in God is so good and wonderful, how come so many of us are unable to hold our shit, to hold the good with the bad, to admit our faults and our flaws? Because the stupid thing is, other people can see our stuff. We're not hiding from anyone.

Fig leaved people, just now we're wearing clothes, that's all.

Where is the freedom? It begins surely in understanding that even if bad people hadn't done bad stuff to us, we would most likely still be tossbags. And just because the bad people have done bad things, this does not mean that we get to abdicate responsibility for our own behaviour. Because unfortunately it seems to be so that being a tossbag comes with the territory. Why can't we just live in the reality of what is instead of trying to force it to be what it isn't?

That same friend and I had an interesting conversation driving over the Westgate Bridge later that same night. There's some sort of railings being constructed along the sides. We wondered if it was in reaction to that man who lost the plot and threw his child over the bridge to her death. Which was awful of course. And he said that he finally realised what the line in American Idiot by Green Day means when it says, "Where everything isn't meant to be okay."

We can't change the world to be different so that people don't throw their kids off bridges. This is what we are, folks, in all our mess and glory. You can't legislate human nature into something prettier than it is. That same legislation, trying to keep us from ourselves, is also what keeps us from the good parts of ourselves as well. Since when did the nanny culture get to prevent us from learning from our own mistakes? We're already good enough at blaming the woman, the man, the serpent. Seems the culture is trying to get us to take the searchlight off of ourselves too.

Anyway, that's enough ranting. I've given myself a headache typing this :) But I've also made myself laugh so yeah :) 'Cos of course the answer to all of this is love. Loving each other even though we're tossbags. Loving each other because we're tossbags and we all need it. Loving eaach other because we are way bigger than all the tossbaggery and we are even sometimes - often - beautiful.

And now, as punishment for writing that, Radio Susie has just begun singing Burt Bacharach numbers. "What the world needs now, is love, sweet love" Blergh :0)

This post was in part inspired by the God Journey podcast I listened to last night where they were talking about this new book that sounds like a good read: Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). I would link to it if I could, but I can't, because WebMarshall at work will not let me access it, being a time-wasting website I am not meant to be accessing during working hours.

But luckily, it's not like I need to read anything like that anyway. You, however, with your beams and motes, could probably give it a whirl :P

Holy Doubt, Batman

Most of us think that the word amen means something along the lines of "let it be so," "it is so," or even "we believe it is so." While these are acceptable translations, certain scholars offer a translation that's much more helpful and perhaps even revolutionary. They have discovered that the word amen doesn't just mean "it is so" and also doesn't imply a steadfast belief that something is so. Rather, it actually means "I believe that it is true, even though I struggle to believe that it actually is the truth."

... It is never easy for me to officiate at funerals, no matter how many I have been called to, but one experience in particular has stayed with me. It was the funeral of a woman in her late forties who died after a valiant battle with cancer. Her two children were left parentless at the ages of sixteen and eighteen, as their father had died several years before. It was a terrible situation. The sanctuary overflowed with mourners. Unexpectedly, the woman's father signaled that he wanted to speak. He came to the microphone amid absolute silence. He stood there for many seconds, not saying a word. And then he yelled, as loud as he could, "Why? How dare you do this to me, God? Do you think that I carried my daughter through the Holocaust to die like this and leave two children?" There wasn't a dry eye in the room. He stayed silent for a few seconds, which felt like an eternity. Then one more time he bellowed, "WHY?" Again, silence. And then he said, "Praise be You God. Praise be You God."

Matthew Gewirtz - The Gift of Grief

Richard Dawkins

I love Richard Dawkins. He has such a wonderful mind; God must have especially loved knitting that together in his mother's womb. Heh!

Just been watching the first episode of The Enemies of Reason. He went off tonight to New Age fairs and spiritualist meetings talking to dowsers and tarot card readers about their practices, performing a few experiments. The dowsers underwent a double-blind experiment to test their abilities. Bottles containing either water or sand were hidden inside plastic bins and the dowsers went about choosing which bins contained the water. They all only got as many right as you would estimate would happen according to chance. And yet afterwards, they all had reasons why they continued to believe that their dowsing abilities remained intact.

I must admit, it seemed like one of those human quirks that people would continue trusting their dowsing ablities after they had been proven false. But people say that about God, also. I know nothing about dowsing. Do I think it's possible that people can use funny little tine things to find water? I guess so. I know nothing about how water is found from above the ground but I guess this whole deal must have developed somehow. These people must have had success finding water with their methods in the past, or they wouldn't still be called dowsers, I guess. Why couldn't they perform under a clinical trial situation? Who the hell knows? Perhaps they're all whackoes who have been found out. Perhaps they really do have some as-yet-scientifically unverifiable ability to dowse for water, and it is an intuitive, sensitive thing which is much harder to tune into when you have a camera and a bunch of people waiting to watch you fail (in the same kind of strange way that you feel guilty when you see a policeman, even though you've done nothing wrong. Performance anxiety. Who knows?)

Richard Dawkins reveres truth. I admire his heartfelt admiration for the universe. He loves verifiable, experimental truth and bemoans the reduction of students studying scientific subjects in English universities in the last several years (as he should). Dawkins compared astrology with astronomy, wondered why it was that a patently stupid system fills the pages of newspapers, takes up more space than the reportage of regularly occurring scientific discoveries about our amazing universe that go on under our noses every day without us knowing. Dawkins waxed lyrical about the amazing time machine that is the night sky, viewed in the countryside on a moonless night, with the spectre of billions of stars passing before our gaze which began their journey when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

I adore Dawkins' mind and passion. I admire his revering of reason and understand his concern about the explosion of interest in subjective realities and the snake oil salesmen that come along with that territory, the vulnerabilities of grieving people exploited by the medium who is giving a word from their loved ones in spiritualist halls.

But there is a balance in everything. And so while I enjoyed and was agreeing with so much of what he had to say, laughing my way through the show (how lovely to be in a position where these days I don't feel the need to take a hardline stand for God and demonise the person who is dismissing his existence in the process), it was still a case of, "Yes, Richard, yes, Richard, yes, Richard ... oh, well, I don't know about that" (although, not very much in this show. The show where he was proclaiming belief in God as a delusion was much more hard-going than seeing him denounce tarot cards and astrological signs, despite my chakra adventurings). But it's easy to denounce tarot readers, but it's just as easy to denounce Christianity and God's existence and criticise those things as crutches. But life is 400 million times more stranger, mysterious, terrifying than we want it to be. We all take solace in certainties and safeties because if we don't we will go insane. For those of us who have ventured into more subjective internal spiritual unverifiable certainties, blessed are us who have not seen and yet believe. Of course, within that belief there is the concern that what if, what if we've got it wrong? What if? I think asking ourselves that reasonably regularly is evidence of a people who have their wits about them, rather than doubters of faith. The answering call always comes, however faint or small or subjective seeming, at least for me. And there is no way to prove it to the rest of the world. And there is no need to, I guess. But oh, gee, sometimes I wish we could :)

But then, practitioners of science always seem to me to be betraying the endeavour and enquiry of their own field when they dismiss out of hand something which is inherently unprovable. Especially when they look at those billions of stars in that countryside sky.