St. Paul and modern antitheists agree

Well, in one regard, at least: if Christ is not raised from the dead, our faith is in vain.

The modern world insists that we cannot deny ourselves: "to thine own self be true," though I think that it often misapplies this quote from Hamlet in ways that Polonius would not have intended.  Yet the gospel says that we must deny ourselves if we are to follow Jesus.

This is the only way I have found to live my life as I believe I should.  It is taking me a painfully long time for it to make all the difference I think it should. Frankly, there are so many aspects of myself that I have set aside along the way that I cannot imagine what my life would be like if it were not built on my belief in God, in Jesus' resurrection from the dead, in the presence of the Holy Spirit in my life.  Indeed, the very foundations of my concept of how I "should live" are so tightly bound up with my faith that I would be utterly lost without it. I don't know how I would keep my natural tendencies in check, how I'd keep from devolving into a selfish wretch.

The antitheists insist that my spiritual experiences can be dismissed as tricks of my mind, misinterpretations of events that can be easily explained without any invocation of the supernatural.  In fact, they argue, for my own betterment and that of society as a whole, they should be.  Building our lives around them is utter foolishness, and does more harm than good. Indeed, where is the point of denying ourselves, particularly fundamental parts of ourselves, if there is no God?  In that case, am I not truly just a frog hoping to be turned into a prince by a magic kiss, acting as if it has indeed happened?

If the antitheists are right, my faith just makes me a pretender, perhaps even an utter fraud, for no purpose whatsoever.

(This is not written in despair.)

Today's word

I knew the meaning, but absolutely didn't know the pronunciation of "halcyon."

Old and older friends

In 1982, I was a young airman with a wife and two young daughters aged 3 and under and no car, who had recently moved into our second apartment in Biloxi, MS.  My wife and I had expressed rather ephemerally the idea of "getting back to church," primarily for the sake of our girls.  Still, with no wheels, that was more lofty concept than plan.  I was commuting to work on a rented bicycle, which was obviously never going to work for getting our family to Mass!  Very much to my surprise, I ran into a friend from high school who was living in the same apartment complex.  He had moved away for senior year and we'd lost touch - there was no such thing as the internet yet - and neither of us was aware that the other had joined the Air Force.  One day soon thereafter I mentioned to Ken that we'd been wanting to attend Mass, and he soon invited me to ride along with him on a Saturday evening.  At my first Mass in years, they announced that the parish was forming a contemporary music ensemble.  "Hmm," I said to myself, "if I can just get myself committed to this group, I'll at least go to Mass every week."  It seemed like just the sort of thing I needed to move from nebulous idea to actual practice.

I must have called the contact person and made arrangements to meet with the group.  Details are sketchy.   I didn't have an acoustic guitar, so I was strictly singing at first. I might have walked the first Sunday, but the bassist from the group agreed to start picking us up and giving us a ride on Sunday mornings, and not long thereafter my wife and daughters started having breakfast with the family of the ensemble's director.  We were struck by how warm, welcoming and helpful everyone in the group was, a different experience from those I'd had in my childhood church, though that may have been rooted more in my mom's distance than the parish's. We'd eventually be in a position to purchase our own car, and soon my own spirituality was growing in ways that led me to have way more in common with this group of folks than I'd had previously.  After a particularly uplifting conversion experience, we started meeting with the covenant community to which many of these same people belonged. Within a couple years, we were transferred to Dayton, where our family has lived since.

Ken served out his enlistment and left the service, and we lost touch with each other until reconnecting on Facebook just a couple years ago.  It turns out that he comes to the area every year for a convention, and it has been nice to get reacquainted. His kids are about the age of our oldest grandsons.

Meanwhile, we'd had this experience (3rd paragraph) with other friends of ours whom we originally met in that parish in Biloxi.  This happened in 2005; their grandson was born around the time of Hurricane Katrina, and Phil and Carol came to Dayton regularly for a couple years until their daughter and son-in-law moved away.  We didn't see them for a couple of years after that linked blog post.  Now, their daughter and son-in-law have since moved back to the area, joined our parish, and our middle daughter teaches the RE class of the grandson who was born shortly after we were reunited with them.  We may have never even met Phil and Carol in the first place if it weren't for Ken. God seems to have ways of working things out, but they can often end up going very differently based on our choices along the way.

Carol is now in town for the birth of another grandchild in the coming week, the same weekend that Ken was in town for his annual convention.  They both met up with us at 10:30 mass, and I got to share my respective stories of them, and introduce them to each other.

I imagine that was way cooler for me than it was for either of them, but I find the way God (or as Adam would conclude, random chance) has worked the threads of our lives together truly remarkable.

Caught up

Well, now I have enough of last weekend's events recorded to be able to recall this wonderful time when I look back at it later!

Careful yard work

Having gotten my nasty case of poison ivy last night, I was way more careful today!  I very carefully extricated some more of the noxious vine from my neighbors side of the fence, though there is at least one more section of it that I didn't notice until I'd washed myself up and cleaned up the tools.  We also took down our grossly overgrown forsythia in the front corner of the back yard, and I have again filled in the corner by our driveway - we'll see how well we keep everyone from driving on it this time.

A break that I didn't have time to notice

Just noticed that I went 5 days between posts.  I'm not going to look back, but that was probably the first time this year I had such a long break.  It was such a nice time, I wish I'd captured more of it.  Maybe I'll have time later to pick a couple of nice thoughts from it; I can think of a couple things I'd like to record to look back over in the future.

Very weird, and not quite fear

I know what fear and paranoia feel like.  I know their physical manifestations: the increased heart rate, the cold extremities, the physical edginess, the fight or flight posture.  My therapists made sure of that because so much of abuser's dynamics have their roots in deeply-seated fear and they can never really break their cycle without recognizing it so they can respond differently to it.

So what the hell was last night?  I had none of those indicators going on.  I just thought there was an outside chance that infection would take hold of me in the night.  If I died, I was confident I'd be going home into God's loving arms, or if I'm wrong about that, have my consciousness utterly vanish and my body rot into worm food.  Still, I didn't want it to happen, was sure enough that it wasn't happening that I didn't think I needed to make a visit to the ER, but wanted to keep an eye on things to make sure they didn't deteriorate.  And I wanted to make sure I didn't leave any loose ends with the one on earth I'm closest to.  Geez, if I had actually died after a small argument over something so trivial, she'd have felt terrible!

Now, to get the new day going, and leave the weird emotional infection of the night behind.