faith beyond words

::carrie's down in her basement, all toe shoes and twin::

yesterday spun on an axis of some considerable confusion, one imbued with not inconsiderable irony... having, the previous night, written a statement of faith for myself acknowledging i am undeniably an agnostic a/theist, i went to sleep quite content, having drawn some lines of clarity and decided there was no more point pretending i could describe myself as Christian in any classically understood sense of the word. i have found myself trying to speak two languages at once and in the past couple of weeks returning to matters theological i was engaged in a persistant act of doublethink. coming to some kind of clarity and decisive point of where i am at would surely help. well, of course, not at all. when i began reading james alison's account of the story of the blind man made to see by jesus in the gospel of john as part of team fury (aka tuesday group)'s autumn reading, i immediately began to see the significant impact a previously seemingly innocuous 'acceptance' would have... by which i do not mean that i realised i was in fact actually a Christian after all, but that putting a label on my beliefs felt pretty much useless...boxing in one's unknowing and doubt, and defining oneself as being a believer and unbeliever both, well i guess it becomes a kind of end point... yesterday the deconstruction began all over again, as did the discovery and the searching... the line in the sand needs again to be scrubbed out...

better off living the ambiguity of being an (un)believer, the unknowingness, without trying to label it. that i do not need to replace Christian with anything. for some that may not work. but for me, perhaps it does. today it does. there is so much language to be explored and metaphors and paradoxes and continual acts of deconstruction and reconstruction becoming deconstruction again happening in perpetuity. if the defining label is unhelpful to me it is perhaps that it means somehow that rather than internally living in the desert and seeking out the thin places that are doorways to the kingdom, i am instead abstracting out my un/belief to a place truly outside myself. it is about my need to speak from the gut rather than the head. i guess like seeing an image and choosing to tattoo it onto skin from the outside rather than finding what is within and letting it rise up to the surface of the skin to be traced over...

i guess we all seek definition and simultaneously reject it. rather than a label, a box, a definition, i am discovering the necessity of living in ambiguity... what is perhaps demanded then is a language that allows for both conviction and lightness of holding, belief and unbelief, the paradox and the illogical fallacy of not knowing yet choosing to believe... that language for me needs to be one of story and openendedness...

i suspect much of this little stumbling bit of the journey is about trying to find such a language that can be open to dialogue... and also of recognising that deconstruction is not a phase, which is then followed by reconstruction, but a neverending act of quest and discovery... james alison calls the idea of monotheism a terrible idea but a wonderful discovery...

inside my narrative trying to pin down the mystery of unknowingness misses the point. i can see how that might be frustrating to others, those who desire, or need, clarity of definition, be it Christian or Atheist or Agnostic. but for as much as i desire defining, it does not sit comfortably. and i can only hope that grace exists to know i am not merely trying to speak both languages at once, to be acceptable to both... rather, this is about an authenticity of desire, belief, unbelief, story and maybe something that we can call faith...

my dear friend jon, ikon's resident orthodox/anarchist said the other night to me, "what better statement of faith is there than that basement poster, i want to believe?" that the search for truth that is out there is what pulls us onward, keeps us alive... our journey is a quest...peraps it is not our desire that drives us but something pulling us into belief...perhaps

that quest is shaped by the gut of experience, of its living... it is not an intellectual exercise, it is not a creed, it is not a statement of faith...

perhaps then, my confusion arose from an attempt to pin down, not God (that i believe is impossible), but myself... to define who i am... and the discovery for the most part is a discovery of the self... and if therapy has taught me anything it is that, when asked what an experience is like, my tendancy has been to say, i think... the rupture happens when i dare to say, i feel...

what we believe in seems so unimportant when we are reminded that we are bound to one another by our vulnerablity, our fragility, our humanness... the labels tell us so little, mask so little. they are a convenient facade... neither you nor i are abstract concepts, we are flesh and blood, and it is not what either of us 'think' that connects us, but what we are... what we feel, desire, grieve, hope for... we so easily see the difficult conversations when we, and God, our belief and unbelief, are ideas rather than experiences (even when the experience is one of persistant absence)... what we then might miss is the beauty of interaction, connection. can we learn that before the difficult conversations even start, before disagreement, the miscommunication, the division of lines in definition, there is the act of conversation...and before conversation there is the sitting in proximity, the being face to face, of being, being you and i... and in the sometimes silent, or gentle or tense space that exists between us, there is something sacred, perhaps divine, breathing... alive with possibility and discovery... of creativity... of beauty...

::where you think that you'll end up to the state that you're in::

yesterday evening, i was thrown over the edge on the sudden unexpected learning that the place that had been home (since five years ago this week) was yesterday sold. i have not even begun to process this experience and won't try to right now. but in that freefall, i found that space between... i found myself surrounded by some of the precious, beautiful-work-in-progress people with whom that space feels so very real and alive...for the news created a moment for which there were no words, only stunned silence... and yet there were shared silences and wordless embraces to be had, that spoke so very much of the happening that is love...that persists in spite of us...

and so the freefall falls... and it's alright... some moments of rupture are moments of rapture if you glance the right way...

LB,x

(text in bold by adam duritz)