Deficit

In January of this year, Gerry the spiritual director challenged me to think about deficit as part of my spiritual journey. I wrote part of a journal entry:

I live in a fortress of solitude. It is not at the North Pole, like Superman’s, but...

In those days, my main employments were shoveling lake-effect snow and brooding about my job-search. That deficit, the lack of purpose, melted into the Mediterranean on my way to the Holy Land. There is no lack of things to do, see, or write about in this context. Even if I must push creative endeavors to the back of the queue, I still have a queue. Why am I writing about deficit?

...when some ‘thing’, an object or relationship or resource or whatever, ceases or never begins to be there ... Deficit is all things that are less, insufficient, misplaced, removed and un-actualized.

I could be writing on Palestine’s behalf but I am not. They try to live abundantly. This is my last journal entry before I leave for Geneva. I will be gone.

“Gerry,” I said, “I think I understand what you mean: deficit can be a vacuum or it can be a space.” He nodded emphatically at this: “...and when it is a vacuum, all manner of things get sucked-in.”

“But when it is a space... then there is a place for, I guess, resonance?”. He was pleased with that.

“Exactly. Resonance. Very good...”

Only in resonance can the beauty of the missing ‘something’ be gleamed. Sometimes the resonance is the beauty to be gleamed, like the inside of a kettle drum or the pregnant pause after your doctor says “we successfully removed the tumor.”

Gerry encouraged me to settle into my deficits last winter and appreciate the present moment for what was there, resonating. Resonance is problematic because it is not always filled with choirs of angels.

The problem is that you can fill your deficits with whatever you want but things may not fit their container. When the jammed pieces of that life crumble and fall out, lesser substances still seep in through your cracks. This brings to mind the time I watched the movie “Office Space” and took a shot every time someone said “TPS reports”.

My use of lesser substances has tapered to nothing; I turn to friends or the news, at least, to fill spaces. Yet, however adeptly I squeeze the poisons out of my system, I must contend with being emptied. Grand Rapids or Bethlehem, a cold bed waits for me every night this December.

Gerry encouraged me to think of deficit not as an absence but as something that has a substance of its own. In the wake of this illumination, my thought life is continually mutating. Gerry, speaking on another matter, said that “perhaps it matters less what thoughts and feelings you have than how you relate to them...”

I realized today that there are two kinds of Faith and I have been enmeshed with one of them. I employ what I call “mustard seed prayers”: mountain tumblers. This audacious Faith gives us the courage to hurtle obstacles, risk failure, and stick like epoxy to our convictions. This is the Faith that empowers us to persevere through dissonances, pressing on toward what we know is right. The other side of Faith is patient it sits on top of the mountain through all weather. This Faith coats us in olive-oil and prevents adversity from lingering with our souls. This is a Faith that breathes inside a vacuum, can stomach stagnating uncertainty, and wait trustingly for conditions to ripen.

This Faith is found in fasting: embracing the deficit.

Deficit is not the woman who disappeared over a hill six months ago: it is the space she vacated and...

I do not miss her.

From time to time, I have to repel the suggestion that I try to date a nice Palestinian woman. If she is a nice lady, her culture will insulate her. Pairs come together through channels of church/mosque and family, often with beautiful results but sometimes not; romance is not necessarily absent but, either way, there is an established social network that brings nice couples together. I am a guest here. I could date another guest, an international, but we turnover every three months with no guarantees of return.

Logically, with limited energy, I would not set my sights further afield but, naturally, that is what I do. It is only speculative unless I meet someone who is a close match to what I really want, what is really missing. Then, that woman can be on the other side of the metaphorical check-point. I can enumerate all the obstacles and fill my empty time with reflection, rhetorical devices, and prayers. I can convert what might be a period of waiting, in deficit, into a situation that demands determination. “Nobody said never...”

...there was an instance...

The same friends who helped me prime my engines back-pedaled and started to pump-up the airbags. I thought they had empowered me to be confident and persistent but they all turned, in accord, from encouragement to comfort. “Be patient ... trust God ... you’re a nice guy...”

I could hardly stand it. Nothing I did had mattered very much. I used to fill the deficit with problems of my own construction, looking for what was wrong with me or what I had done wrong in order to defuse the absurdity of emptiness. Yet, there is nothing wrong with me. There is nothing wrong with her. Circumstances are more than sufficient to delay, if not preclude, the whole thing. Halas: there is nothing to be done.

Anyone who has done a large jigsaw puzzle has reached this point. It is time to lift up the puzzle and tuck it into the corner for another day. I released my epoxy grip and slipped-away, back to that vacant bed for an extra long-night of sleep. In the final hours before sunrise, I had a dream sequence:

I thought that I was in California but the flora was Belizean and the architecture was Palestinian. It was as if Bullet-Tree and Beit-Jala had a love-child. I was walking around a court-yard area, admiring the chaté palms and noticing that the stone was still wet and cool. Then, she came to get me...

I don’t know her name...

...she called me inside and we laid down together in the chill of the morning. It took a few minutes to get situated, scooching close together and getting our arms and legs positioned comfortably, but we finally got comfortable. We talked about something trivial as we snuggled each other to sleep: cozy. She was as familiar as she was beautiful but I had never seen her before in my life.

...which was the best part.

Not Black & White

A renewed interest in blogging stirred in me two weeks ago... (2000 words)

This journal is now called “In Rainbow Colors”. Besides its prominence in the My Little Pony Movies, rainbow imagery has come to be associated with aspects of LGBTQ2 movements in politics and society. My rainbow imagery does not derive from my involvement in such a movement. It’s quite the reciprocal: my involvement in such a movement, RMN, derives from my ‘rainbow’ understanding; so, the correlation is there, just not in the way you may have thought.

It must have been the ides of March. From naked perches along the highway to Holland, MI, legions of red-tailed hawks watched us pass in my Pontiac Sunfire. They are the symbol of my Creator’s eyes: watching. It had been a tough winter at the end of a tough year but I believed she and I were on the way to somewhere better. After a pause, she said to me “what if God really does see things in black & white?” I told her that God sees in rainbow colors. She did not understand. Something changed in her that day and I will never know the precise cause. Two months prior, we made a covenant to carry our partnership into marriage. That was her idea. A few months later, she was adamant that I not refer to us as partners. A matter of weeks before, we had been comfortable totally naked together; a few weeks hence, even holding hands was a conundrum to her. This journal is not about my personal laments nor is it an attempt to defend the physical or even the emotional and spiritual nature of our relationship. Our pace was questionable and I certainly had problems to resolve, not least of which was my dependence on her. Some of my issues were ‘third-degree ugly’. None should blame a woman for wanting better from her partner and I wanted to give her my best. There are a pair of exigencies here, however. First is whether it is fair to expect better from someone without partnering with them. The second is a question of God’s rods and cones: does God actually see in black & white? This is the topic I have written about in secret for two weeks now, unearthing too many thoughts to share on-screen.

She did all the ‘discerning’ without me. The black & white became her understanding of what God wanted, so that each decision carried the stamp of “God’s Will” and I, desperate to show her a better me, followed. Then I was told that men were supposed to be the spiritual leaders so I tried to lead. Then I was told that I wasn’t her husband and I could not tell her what to do. Every shade of love had become black to her, save for the idea of a perfect marriage. She had a vision of perfect man, cultivated since girlhood, to which she returned. That was white, to her, and she would not go near me anymore. At first, it was in the obvious ways (use your imagination) but then kisses became forbidden. Then hugs were wrong because they led to kisses. Then handholds were too much like hugs. Yet, I was a person who needed, deeply, to be affirmed through not just touch but through words. Eventually, she wanted to save “I love you” for her white-man; I decided to agree and hope that I could transform—-change into what she wanted. Going to sleep with guilt and inadequacy every night, I needed to feel acceptable. She told me to count on Jesus for my acceptance; I knew she was not wrong. Desperately, I wanted to feel like I had not made some critical mistake—-like someone else I know. I did not understand why I felt bad all the time. I still do not know why I had to feel so bad and why anyone I wanted to love so much could watch me feel dirty, like I was failing, all the time. Yet, I was determined to be disciplined and change the way I did everything, including faith.

The beginning of the end came right at the end of one of those happy days I have been trying to forget, the ones that make me feel like I really lost something. It was the first nice day of spring she and I had together and I took her down to Riverside Park so we could play catch and frisbee. As we were walking back, she mused that maybe we could set-up my hammock between the trees outside her new apartment in Grand Haven. That sounded like a wonderful idea—just like when we set-up a hammock between two trees at my Grandmother’s house the fall before or the hammock on her parents' porch where we had first discussed being ‘together’. I cannot make this stuff up. She changed her mind suddenly—-as if she remembered something. A few days later, I came across a passage in a book she insisted I buy: the author refuses to lay in a hammock with his fiancé. The book was by Joshua Harris –- be careful not to purchase such a book

This could be the part of the entry where I complain about the bad scholarship of the book and highlight how I studied interpersonal communication and I knew that it was quackery. The real ‘hitch’ is that I think the author wrote everything from the best part of his hyper-conservative heart. There were good things to be taken away, though as a whole it is a terrible book for couples. Yet, I played my part, trying to get to that black & white God that I thought I needed. At first, it was the black & white God I needed just to negotiate with her. Then, I was trying to sincerely worship that God. This was the God that was going to help me live in the world of bifurcations instead of diametric continuums. It is that safe world where you either eat ‘the forbidden fruit’ or you do not: the world where hammocks and cuddling are not allowed. Several arduous weeks later, she arrived with a smile on her face and all of the things she had borrowed. I was ready, with all that I had borrowed from her and a borrowed angel on my lap (a stray cat I named “Claire” who stayed with me that day and the day after—-cuddling). That day, she hugged me good-bye and climbed into a dented Jeep. She made a U-turn and disappeared over the crest of a hill to the West. I mean it. Every trace of her on the internet disappeared, too. I sent a birthday card and got no reply. She managed to do one, kind thing in her black & white world: to be completely gone. Whited-out. I have followed suit by not writing about her at all until this—and by being minimal here.

When I am not sleeping-in, I listen to a program called Mornings With Brant. Brant was broaching the topic of Bible-worship when he said something that reminded me of how I felt about Harris’s book. He said that Christianity was really about what Jesus did but that “it can be easier to relate to a book than a real, living being... a book is easier to control...”. Eliza turned to her conservative-lit rather than try to untangle my demons with me. I was tainted and she scrapped me—-perhaps she’ll find a mate who does things ‘by the book’ and be happy. I hope so, just as I hope I find someone who, like me, would light a buddy-burner* under the black & white books their ex forced them to buy and ceremonially dispose of this false doctrine. Literalists have missed the meaning of Genesis, chapter 3: its not history but an allegory for a struggle we have every day. It was not God who saw in black & white but us. The forbidden fruit, the knowledge of good & evil, is this all-or-nothing paradigm. We believed that if we could not be absolutely perfect and obedient, we needed to hang a curtain between ourselves and God. The fruit can be dealt with, it is the fig-leaves that keep us from God’s love. The temple curtain. As the Apostle Paul said “All things are permissible but not all things are beneficial.” Harris talked about keeping good boundaries and he was headed in the right direction; sometimes the right boundaries are less boundaries: torn curtains—not in romance but for all humanity.

Black & white had trouble holding me after she walked away. Black & white says you are a leper, so stay over there. Black & white says you are a gentile, so this Book is not for you. Black & white says you are unclean so you have to make atonement. Put your fig-leaves on, bitch. I’m not sticking-up for the forbidden fruit: sin is a serious problem. I am saying that fig-leaves, these safe bifurcations, are the lingering barrier. Sin is a serious problem that we need to address together, not from across barriers because we are afraid to make another mistake. The biggest mistake is to believe for even a moment that any discipline can replace Grace and Love in relationships. There is no book, not even the Bible, that replaces the living love of God passed from one person to another. There is no regimen that replaces being faithful to each other above our ideals. “In rainbow colors” is about Love.

...and if you believe Jesus was an aspect of God, you worship a God that sees in rainbow colors. Pharisees discredited him for associating with sinners like me and you. Silly Pharisees: yokes are for two! “My yoke is easy,” said Jesus, “and my burden is light” [Matthew 11:30] Jesus expected better from us but he was and still is a willing partner where others fall-short. So, I do not indict my ex here-- I merely make a point about what Love should be in The Kingdom of God.

This could easily decay into a sermon but instead I will draw it to a close. I found faithfulness in the support of friends and colleagues. I received good advice, and plenty of bad, but nothing but encouragement. I heard “I love you” from someone other than my mother: my best guy-friend. My ex-girlfriend was right in a way she never knew: our affirmations should never come from a person. They should come from a community acting as the kingdom of God. We can find slivers of God’s love in one-another’s eyes much more readily than on the pages of a text ...think about that the next time someone uses a passage from a book to push another away —especially if that book was meant to bring people together. The lasting legacy of my ex's interpretation of God’s will is that “God” will empower someone to disappear whenever the shit in your life is too deep for their liking; it is not what she meant but she did not stay long enough to clarify. That does not sound like the Jesus I read about in the Bible, or my best-friend who forgave me for dating this woman (Thom), or my previous ex-girlfriend (Christie) who got dumped for her and STILL took me to the ballet because she is my friend and she understands what it means to care about someone. This is not the Jesus that inspires people like my friend Becca F., who tells everyone “I love you darling” without ever cheapening it. As Christians, we need to have some staying power: we cannot disengage just because life does not fall into two, neat categories.

If you give the rainbow a chance, you will find the universe is much more beautiful when it has not been divided simply into stars and void—-hot oblivion and cold vacuum. All of what we are exists in between—-and I believe that we are Loved. Just ask Claire the Cat, if you ever see her.

Boston 1: Ride the Bird

Push back the dawn with blinds...
Keep the morning tea off my tie:
a short ride from Lansing to Detroit
and I'm going up in another bird--this one is for Boston
This one is for the future for which I hope--
"...get the heck out of there..." I must have said, with all due respect at dinner.

Beginning is difficult in the middle of things, thought Nicodemus.
"A man can't climb back into his mother's womb and..."
No no no... it's not like that. It's not like you just climb in the bird, either,
and fly away, never coming back to Earth. It's more like a person let's themself-- let's God--
...keeps the Evil One from doing X,Y,Z, as if we could... and so they have to burn down and
START OVER

I finally made it to Boston today, for the Religion Communicators Convention. It is too much to take in, let alone describe. That is the bloggers nice way of saying he watched NBA basketball until late and then decided to start an entirely new blog. But, I could not end a Livejournal hiatus like this-- just acting like I suddenly have anything to say. I've had things to say I have just not been in the practice of saying lately. There are things we did and should continue to do that we--- just like that.
It is hard to begin in a middle so I began at a beginning. I came off the plane and the sky wasn't pelting me with Lake Michigan's drippings anymore. It was sunny in New England, on a coast unlike I had seen before. The man in the yellow vest outside of the terminal helped me call a hybrid cab. "Sure-- why not?" he said. While we waited, I started to talk with him. He blessed me with his encouragement-- believe me, anyone who invokes the name of Almighty and then tells you good things about your future is somebody I would rather believe on faith! He said that it was going to be a good adventure, graduating; he wished me luck on my business in Boston. I shook his hand-- I made sure to thank him. He could be my prophet.

The cabby and I did not talk for a little while. I asked if he got much business on a Wednesday. He said the hybrid people always like the hybrid cars. I guess I was a hybrid person. We went into a tunnel. I wanted so badly to say something other than "this is a long tunnel".
But it was. I waited five minutes before I said "This is more tunnel than I have ever seen." Then he realized it was my first time in Boston.
So, he started to explain things to me. The tunnels cleared what used to be awful winter traffic. Across from my hotel, there would be a mall. I still have not been there. Of the city he said "You're going to love it here."
I haven't seen a shred of that bad East Coast attitude I always hear about...

"Two beds" I sighed, so relieved. No chatisty pillow: a bed for each of us. I took a moment...
...now I am taking another one-- looking out the window again at the bridge and river cutting across the hotel's shadow. (glancing at Rob while he gets ready for bed).

It's a long day coming tomorrow, judging by the contents of our meeting. Imagine how verbose I could be if I weren't forced to sleep! I could start to talk about our surprisingly expensive dinner at the hotel restaurant. I could start to describe each of my counterparts. But, we all must take our rest. Oddly, all of the things that seemed most important to write down seem to escape me: about the convention itself and what it will mean for me.

But, that is what tomorrow's were made for!