the story of my life, so far

Recipe for a crisis

Layer in an individual:
20 years upbringing instilling conservatism of morals, inquisitiveness of intellect, and independence of will.
1 church attended in formative years where most of the people appeared to be feeling or experiencing things not felt or experienced by this particular individual
4 years education in a liberal environment, reading beautiful, tormented, difficult books and meeting beautiful, tormented, difficult people
1 year spent mostly in the company of secure, more or less fundamentalist Christians, who are quite confident in what they believe and why

Add, in quick succession:
1 father converting to Catholicism
2 friends with hard questions, who won't take crap for answers

Stir vigorously. Watch the mix boil.

So if you haven't heard from me in the last month or two, and you're the kind of person who expects to hear from me more frequently and talk at great lengths, this is why. Not that I've intentionally gone into hiding, but just that I haven't reached out to talk as much because I haven't known what I would say. I still don't, exactly.

There are a few snowflakes blowing around outside. I mention it because I love snowflakes, and also because it is important to remember how much of the world actually takes place outside of my head.

Here are some questions I am not asking right now:
Who am I? I'm not really very worried about this. Actually I'm obsessed with it, but that's nothing new, so I'm not counting it as a question which makes up the current crisis. Asking who I am is not so much an activity as a continual mode of being.
What is my purpose in life? This is even less of a worry than "Who am I?" Teleology, naturalism, extrinsic and intrinsic finality... these are interesting ideas to play with, but from a practical standpoint they all break down to much simpler questions like "What should I do for the next hour?" (or possibly, depending on your philosophical view, "What will I do for the next hour?") Much like "Who am I?" this is a question which does not wait for an answer. It merely exists, to be answered further every moment.
Is there a God? I tried asking this one for a little while, about a month ago. It didn't stick. My aesthetic framework doesn't seem able to support such a question in its purest form. Taking "God" in a very broad sense, as some force or entity which drives, shapes, and/or evaluates the universe... well either there is or there isn't. And if there isn't any such thing, then there is no story to the world (an equivalent phrase might be "no meaning.") And if there's no story, I'm really not that interested. Stories are to my mind what blood is to my body. If there is no God, then I, as a maker of stories, am the most interesting thing in the universe. And since I'm going to go on making stories whether there is a God or not, then finding out that there's not a God (if such is the case) is not a high-priority activity for me.

Now we move to the questions I am asking right now:
What is God like? This is huge. I don't know if you noticed, but "some force or entity which drives, shapes, and/or evaluates the universe" leaves a lot of room for specification. There are many possibilities within this category. I haven't even begun to try and rule some of them out. An important sub-question to this is "What, if anything, does God require of me?" On this I have some thoughts, which I may try to flesh out in a later entry.
What is the source of the Christian belief which I have held as long as I remember? To say that my parents taught me to be a Christian is true, and trivial. Why did I believe them? Why did I never, seriously, doubt that what they told me was true? Does it owe more the to quality of my relationship to my parents (and friends and teachers who reinforced what they said) or to the quality of the universe? This may be the biggest piece of this task I'm embarked on: rejecting unsatisfactory sources of my belief and replacing them, if possible, with sounder ones.
What is the Bible? In the gamut of possibilities, from "every word is stamped with God's approval" to "it's a handful of literary works cobbled together by various religious and political bodies" where does the truth lie? I don't know where the answer to this question will come from, though I'm going to begin by investigating, in detail, the historical background and origins of various parts of it. So we'll see.

There is another question, one which I can't seem to either ask or not ask. In one way, it is the most important question of them all. But it deserves its own essay, and maybe soon I will write it.

What does all this mean? I don't know. It will come as a shock to many of you... it did to me. At times I think that faith, whatever it is, exists independent of intellectual belief; that all these doubts, which for me are real and vital concessions to intellectual honesty, may persist for months, years, even a lifetime, while my identification with Christ still lives on some fundamental level where it cannot be shaken. This is a comforting thought... though it still leaves a lot of questions about the shape my life will take, particularly my place in various social worlds.

Other times I listen to songs, or read poems or passages from books, that I once sang and read and celebrated as containing truths, truths which were as real-- though not as tangible-- as the tree in my front yard. And I feel like I've been robbed of my most precious possession.