The Prodigal's Manifesto

I've been going back to Mass for a couple of months now, maybe twice a month. I'd actually like to go more often, but it gets hard to give up those lazy mornings on Sundays since I've been working earlier during the week. But hey, it's a start.

My relationship with God has been pretty chaotic the past few years. It took a pretty hard hit when two very good friends lost their baby due to a premature birth. When the situation began to unfold, I turned to God to pray for them. It had been quite a while since I had done so, but it seemed like the right thing to do. I really put their situation out there to family, friends, co-workers, anyone whom I knew were praying folk. I asked them to join in. And the little girl did not make it.

I wrestled with that for a long time, and came to the conclusion that I didn't believe in a Santa Clause god any more. I sneered internally at anyone who prayed for specific things, like more money, to save someone from death, to heal someone that was sick, etc. My view was, and to some extent still is, that God's not going to give you what you ask for. I resolved to stop turning to God for help with my problems and the problems of others. And I stopped going to Mass. Not that I'd been a regular butt in the pew anyway, but I pretty much gave it up completely, except for Christmas and Easter as a family tradition. What's interesting is that my friends became stronger in their faith after their loss.

A couple years later I prayed again when my wife asked for a divorce. It was only really the one night when I was at rock bottom, staying downstairs in my parents house, wracked and writhing with actual physical pain from the broken heart. That was the night I prayed. I started to pray for us to get back together, and then I stopped. Because it didn't feel right. Instead I prayed for the strength to get through it, whatever happened with me and the wife. And I immediately felt at peace . Which didn't last forever, of course. Divorce is a damned difficult thing to get through, especially if you're the one getting left. But I think that's when the healing started.

But then the damnedest things started happening. I started to eat better and exercise, for one. Partly out of spite; one of the ex's complaints was that I didn't take care of myself. And a small part was hoping it would help change her mind. But after those two reasons faded, I found I had the will and determination to keep going because I just felt too bloody good not to. Then a new job opportunity presented itself in a different area of the company. Still in the Atlanta area, I'd still be close to my circle of support. More money. A more successful and self-managed IT department. And when I went to the interview I found the area to be really cool, in a college town atmosphere, and I liked the people I met a lot. So I took the job, moved to an apartment right around the corner from the new office, and continued to heal.

Of course most of this is hindsight in the spiritual sense. I didn't recognize any of this as an answer to that prayer. I guess I started awakening spiritually when I met Wildspark. She was my dream girl: geeky, intelligent, sexy, spiritual, and tattooed (hawt!). I feel like she completes me in ways I didn't even know I needed.

Perhaps I'd finally learned how to pray properly, because it feels like I hit the jackpot. :-)

The first step in awakening was getting me started on yoga (Thanks, honey). I had been working out nearly every day since the separation last January, and my back trouble had lessened a lot, but the sciatica still flared up occasionally and I was having a lot of knee pain. So I came to yoga for the physical benefits and stayed for the spiritual. If you don't know much about it, on the surface it's a combination of deep breathing and stretching exercises. But as a spiritual practice...well, I'm not very educated in the history of it and how it was used religiously, so I can only describe how it makes me feel. After a practice I get that same kind of peaceful, detached, clean feeling that I get now after I go to Mass. So I think the yoga sort of emptied out my spirit of all the garbage that had been building up in it for years.

Wildspark and I come from completely different traditions, but I had always been of the mind that any religion, Christian or no, is just a different path to the same place. That place being a oneness with God, Goddess, Christ, Buddah, Allah, or whatever mask of God resonates with a person. I had allowed myself to stray from that path due to the suffering I saw around me, from lurking on Internet forums watching atheists pat each other on the back and arguing with straw men against the existence of God, complaining about Christianity. I look on a lot of that now as groupthink, but there are admittedly some good arguments out there.

Anywho, Wildspark loaned me this book by Joseph Campbell, who I already respected as a scholar, but hadn't read any of his stuff in quite awhile. The title is "Thou Art That", and it's a collection of lectures, interviews, and essays about Judeo-Christian mythology. What's that you say? "Hellfar and damnation, boy, I'm gone pray fer yew, that there Bible ain't no mythology, it's The Truth! 100% Factyool!" Yeah, well, just hold on there Bubba, I ain't done yet.

Part of what had given me so much trouble about the Bible and Christianity is that both Atheists and Christians get so bent out of shape about whether it's fact or fiction, and I got sucked into that mindset. In reading Campbell's work it suddenly hit me that, ya know what? It doesn't freakin' matter! It's neither. Campbell talks about the concept of religious metaphor, which is something above both fact and fiction.

Any mythology boiled down is a collection of stories. What makes them religious metaphor is that the characters and the lessons their trials, journeys and adventures teach resonate with people. To such an extent that the traditions and rituals that build up around these stories become a means of getting in touch with the Divine spark in all of us. One's religion is a matter of finding the stories and lessons that resonate with one's spirit and internalizing them. Sometimes it's difficult; sacred texts are hard to get through, and I hadn't really done that work before. Often one has to take these stories, images, metaphors and lessons intended for a completely different culture and time and find a way to make them work in one's own space and time.

I used to ask myself, "If you have to work so hard to force these writings to make sense in the modern times, then how can they be the Word of God? Shouldn't these truths be immediately apparent?" Now I realize I didn't want and need to do the work at that time in my life, so I manufactured questions to prevent me from doing it. It SHOULD be work, you aren't rewarded for the things you don't work at. And the reward for this work is enlightenment.

What do I need now? I need that spiritually clean feeling regularly, that enlightenment I feel from the meditation on my own and from the rituals of Mass that I was raised in. I'm seeing new meanings in these symbols because I have divorced myself from the "fact vs. fiction" debate. I find this meaning grounds me, centers me. I feel like I can take on what comes during the week if I make the time to get to that space. I used to feel ashamed of this need I think. Ashamed that it made me less intellectual, less logical, which I always strove to be. But no, not anymore.

By connecting with the Divine in myself, which is how God truly made us in His image, I feel more human than I ever have.

Good night.