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The anticipation of possible new readership here at the blog caused me to go back to the archives and nose around, doublechecking just what I might have agreed to reveal when inviting a new spectator.  I used to talk a lot about things I no longer do, like God and the Church and what I might believe.  It's odd, how much I use to talk about these things and how seldom it crosses the radar now.  As I sit here at my desk, I'm surrounded by books, Bibles, hymnals that used to mean something to me.  They strike me the same now as it would if it were stacks of coloring books and first readers and maybe high school yearbooks that were piled around. 

There's a copy of The Lord of the Flies sitting within arm's reach, full of highlighting and paper clips and notes from senior English in high school.  I remember that book being the topic of a major project that seemed to take up months of that last year, and we discussed the ins and outs of every metaphor and twist of that story until I felt there was nothing more to glean from it than what we had.  We had stripped every ounce of meaning from that book and laid it to rest on a mess of note cards and posterboards, presenting a eulogy of essays and speeches to forever end our fight with this book that stood in the way of our own commencements. 

I remember very little of the story and I have no desire to ever read it again.

And as I am reminded, in reading old posts, of the stories that have laced my experience over the past several years, I wonder if I will ever have a true desire to return to those either.  Someone close to me just finished reading Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christian trilogy and wants to discuss it, but I've confessed that there's not much about these books, so life-changing on first read, so I thought, that I can remember.  It's hard to return to the place I was when I read them - the people and circumstances that surrounded me at the time are far in the distance now, and where some of them deserve a thousand returns, some don't and won't receive even one.  And thus it's hard to return to the stories of that time either. 

It's a struggle I've had for years now - how do I return to everything I loved about God without returning to everything I hated about how he seemed to be manifested in the world?  How do I find answers to my own questions, when I'm my own devil's advocate?  How do I read these stories fresh and new with no bad memories attached?  I do I exchange cynicism for optimism? 

And now that I've lived for a bit in this state of pause, how do I hit play?  Things won't start back where I left off.  And if they did... I'd probably hit stop/eject next time. 

Comments

[Leslie]

Hooray for Rufus Wainwright. Did I tell you I saw him live and it changed my life?

Brian McLaren's stuff is good, but to be honest, his ideas aren't knew. Any earnest, thoughtful Christian wants to serve God and remain authentic. And in trying so hard to avoid the "other" I feel that many go too far in the opposite direction, which is just as bad, ya know?

I'm glad you read and think. Hooray for you!