Someone said to me:
"As you would put it, ["Terrible Lie" by NIN] resonates with me. Maybe not everyone has these moments in these, or have them as much as I do sometimes these days. I suppose the only difference now is not renouncing everything. You can take the person out of the Orthodox Church but you can't take the Orthodox Church out of them. Funny part is, unlike past protestant churches, I wouldn't want to anyway. I do actual reasons, and just like that high school girlfriend I totally had who lived in Vancouver, they do exist. All joking aside, there are real reasons but I'm not here to talk about that.So I have been thinking about this for the last couple of days. Listened to the song, with the words, again. And it’s deep. Songs like this touch that place inside of us where the anxiety and doubt live. “Bring Me To Life” by Evanescence does it for me.
This is the kind of stuff going through my mind when I say I ain't gonna make it. The usual hellfire and fear of devils ready to punish you isn't what bothers me. We know that isn't even what happens anyway. For me, it's whether it is even worth trying now. We seek the life of the world to come but...is it worth what we gotta go through to be supposedly free from sin and whatnot? Believing and "knowing" things don't mean shit if you don't want to or can't bring yourself to do it. Even if you do, it can almost be arguably worse that doing nothing if you fuck it up enough. It doesn't matter how wrong or much it deviates or corrupts whatever you claim you're doing. The damage is already done and if you can't make it right, you better hope someone else can figure out how to fix the mess you've made."
I was trying to come up with something helpful and then I realized I had read something helpful recently by someone who has been doing this thing far longer than me — Steve Robinson. It’s a bit long but this part stuck with me:
“If any man be zealous and love God and become obsessed with the Church, and drove his priest nuts demanding to be let in NOW, if any have labored long in fasting and two hour prayer rules before you were even catechumens, and attended every service even with six kids from the first hour, then fell off the wagon at the third hour and went to the bar, then staggered to the job at the sixth hour but half-assed it and ended up taking a nap behind the J-John until the Ninth Hour, then decided to give it a go until the eleventh hour, then just gave up and threw in the towel and had the balls to ask for an advance on your paycheck just because you showed up again… the Lord, who is jealous of his honor, will accept it all, from the first flirtation, to the zealous pursuit, to the lapse in focus, to the falling asleep, to the half-assed attempt, to the well intentioned screw ups: He gives full recompense and rest unto all.” ~Staying Orthodox by Steve Robinson
The rest of the article is great too but this made me relax my shoulders from around my ears, unclench my jaw, and do a little wiggle of relaxation.
That being said, the below is ALL ME.
Let's face it...the
OT is built on a foundation of war waged against Those Who Are Not Like
Us, women-blaming, and literally the destruction and murder of other
lands and people in the name of a war and thunder god of a relatively minor
people group in Western Asia during a time when gods popped up like
mushrooms after a rain.
The man Jesus called Christ (“the
Anointed”) looked at that and said, “Nah, fam. We’re doing something
different.” I believe he worked with what he had, the Torah and the
Prophets and the Temple, and founded something entirely new because the
character of the god in his parables is not that of a war-mongering,
vengeful, jealous, bloodthirsty tyrant. The character of Christ’s god is
the father of the prodigal son and the man who gets up out of his bed to
give bread to his neighbor at midnight; the vaguely annoyed judge who gives in to
the persistent old woman seeking justice and the rich man who forgives the debtor but serves justice when said debtor does not pay that forgiveness forward; the Samaritan who cares for the man beaten by thieves and the man with two sons.
And,
as for hellfire and brimstone, well…Somewhere it says “absent from the
body is present with the Lord” and “every knee shall bow”. To me this means that every being from Day One of all humanity's sentience/sapience, pre- and
post-Resurrection, will stand before him, see that he/They are god and have
the chance to acknowledge him/Them and be ushered in. (Interestingly enough, when Paul wrote that every knee would bow and every tongue praise God, he referenced Isaiah who used the word "swear" instead of "praise/confess" an change of phrase I find quite fascinating).
Because eternal conscious
torment for all eternity based on a finite understanding and/or
ignorance is neither just nor loving and that is not the character of
the god described by Christ.
My chosen expression of worship has become more...eclectic...as time has moved on but I’ve chosen Christ (NOT Christianity; there is a difference and I am not a Christian regardless of the fact that I do my best to follow Christ) and when I want to be
in a church I choose an Orthodox church with all of its rites and almost all of it's doctrines and dogmas. I know he/They are there. I am
fairly certain he/They are also elsewhere because it says so in the Book, but as I
am not familiar with other expressions, I am not
going to go there. Literally and figuratively.
And then I run off and do my thing because I am not built for existential navel-gazing.
The
upshot of this is as follows - either god is loving and just or they aren’t and
their chosen physical expression of themselves was a lying liar or he
was not.
Regardless, the prodigal son’s dad was pretty cool and this is where my brain went.
Relevant Reading
"Terrible Lie" by NIN
"Bring Me to Life" by Evanescence
Staying Orthodox by Steve Robinson
Parable of the Prodigal Son
Parable of the Man in Bed
Parable of the Persistent Widow
Parable of the Unforgiving Servant
Parable of the Good Samaritan
2 Corinthians 5:1-8
Isaiah 45:23 and Romans 14:11
The dEǝЯDeRe-Construction of Me, Part 6
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