Messy

I'm having a tough time in my Spiritual Autobiography class.  I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking.  (Actually, I do know what I was thinking.  It was something foolish like, "Yeah.  I'm ready to revisit this."  That was a bit of a miscalculation on my part.)

Since returning to school this past September, I haven't had too many cases of anxiously staring at a blank white screen, but the number has definitely gone up in recent weeks.  I look back at the old blog posts and think that things would have aligned much more nicely had I taken this class a few years ago, when writing about my spiritual life was what I did for fun.

Now... "Meh" would be the most accurate term for how I feel about trying to find good words for the particular place I'm at in my journey.  It's one thing to fling my thoughts out into cyberspace, allowing them to be read by whoever cares to visit more than once.  It's quite another to be vulnerable on the page, and then sit in an arbitrarily selected workshopping group, nervously reading out loud to three or four blank faces who may or may not have any idea what it is I'm talking about.  Some kinds of hangups only make sense to those who have been there themselves, at least, I suspect this is the case most of the time.

Meh, indeed.

When I mentioned to Daniel that I was going to be taking a Spiritual Autobiography class, he couldn’t have been more pleased. “Let me know when the book’s coming out,” he quipped.

“Yeah, I don't know about that.  I haven’t even figured out which way is up yet when it comes to all of this,” I said. “It’s all… messy…” I said, trailing off into defeated silence. Over the last few years, “messy” has become a catch-all term for what’s left of the faith I used to know.  (Perhaps you've noticed.)

“Ah. There’s your title. ‘Which Way’s Up’ seems like a great place to start.”

I wonder if he’s always been this comfortable with uncertainty. It very nearly makes me want to slap him. Then again, it’s nice to have someone in your life I can tell all the horrible things I think sometimes. He never cringes, much as I would expect a pastor to.  I told him once that I wasn't sure if I was really a Christian anymore.  The conversation continued no differently than if I had told him that I like pepperoni pizza.

I love him for this.  It's this kind of permission that helps me keep trying to find a place for faith in my life -- somewhere I can be a thinking person and a graced one.

Still... I'm not quite sure what to say.  At 27, I haven't come close to anything resembling a landing place yet.  An autobiography of any kind, much less a spiritual one, seems like an exercise in futility, an exercise in ascribing significance to events as they're happening.  I don't have a good lens for this yet.  I haven't really moved past that moment of finding myself on the ground, looking around to see who pulled the carpet out from underneath me.

I'm not sure how to.