A crisis of faith

Ok, so evidently I'm not that good at metaphor. On Sunday, I blogged something incredibly spiritual and heartfelt, after composing in my head, in my Moleskine, in my head some more, and finally here on blogger. I never do that.

But no one really seemed to *get* it. Everyone read it and kind of went, "man you really suck at writing fiction," but that's too mean to actually SAY, so they just kept their collective mouth shut, as their mothers taught them to do.

I considered explaining at the end of my "story" what it was I was writing about, but it was already so damned long, I figured a little confusion would be better than tl;dr, yeah? But now it's time to explain things to you, because dammit, no one ever comments. If you haven't read You Can't Go Home Again yet, please do so before you continue, otherwise it will make no sense.

Did you read it? No cheating, now.


Ok fine. Here you go. I suspect this is not going to be a whole lot more eloquent than Sunday's post anyway, which is why I put it in that form in the first place. Don't say you haven't been warned.




I am Mary, and Christianity itself is Christian. The story wasn't fiction so much as metaphor, and our relationship was very real and very tumultuous. I know that in the end, Christianity didn't change; I just discovered a part of it I never really knew before, and by that time, well, it was just too late for me. Even though I did attend with a friend an extremely liberal Christian church on Sunday, the kind that should have spoken to someone like me; even though I attended with the most pious of spirits and the most open of hearts, that love is lost and it's just not who I am anymore.

A few people I know and love dearly have asked me the usual questions atheists and agnostics get asked by Christians who just don't get it. "Why do you hate God?" "What do you have against Jesus?" "Aren't you afraid of going to hell???"

Well, in short, No. As you read on Sunday, I have no lingering bitterness for the religion itself (as a whole), and I certainly don't hate God or Jesus. I just don't, can't believe in the Christian god anymore (I tried, yeah?), and I don't love the religion the way I used to. As for Jesus, his mythos is far and away one of my favorites.

Something else I wrote in my Moleskine on Sunday, when I was purging the plethora of thoughts that had run through my brain all morning while I was at church, was, "What is a crisis of faith?"My crisis of faith wasn't when I left Christianity, because even then I wasn't sure what I believed about God. I still had a lot of lingering feelings and worries, as you do when a long relationship ends. In my mind would ring the idea I expressed to others so many times as a Christian - God's always waiting, and you'll never fill that hole inside with anything else.

My crisis of faith is right now. When I've opened myself up to the possibility, when I went to church, lost myself in it, and said "hey God, speak to me" and all I heard were the echoes of silence. The hardest part of all this, for me, is that I DO have a hole. I still hunger and thirst for spiritual fulfillment. But contrary to everything I believed ten years ago, Christianity and the Christian God can't fill that hole or fulfill that need for me.

I had fulfillment that reconciled with my current self, at one point, at my Unitarian Universalist church in Detroit. NWUU took excellent care of my mind and my soul and my spirit. I miss them dearly, but none of the UU churches I've attended here in Chicagoland have met that need or felt like home to me. They're all too intellectual, too focused on the mind, to focused on politics and the world. That's fine for some people, but that's a need I can fill on my own. That's not what I go to church for.

I had many more thoughts as I was thinking over my experience Sunday morning. Anger that I was raised in such a literalist version of Christianity (maybe if I hadn't been, I would never have left), sorrow at not feeling comfortable enough to join in communion, jealousy of the people who still had it in them to believe, a sense of longing for spiritual fulfillment and peace, hope for those I love to find a middle ground, curiosity as to where I'll go from here.

So many thoughts to organize, and the best way I could think to do it was in a poorly written pseudo-fictional blog post. It would have been so much easier just to pray!

You can't go home again

Mary* had always had "men" issues. Her father abandoned her before she was born, and repeatedly thereafter. She never had a truly good father figure nor male influence as she grew up, and as a result always seemed to be trying to fill that gaping void.

Like most girls with "daddy issues," Mary fell for a string of "bad" boys. She always fell hard, and the endings were always devastating. Christian* was different, and also not different at all.

Christian was probably the only "boy" Mary's mother ever approved of. He seemed sweet and kind, generous, and protective. He made Mary feel safe, loved, and worthy, something rare for her since early childhood. Christian took good care of her, and she soon lost herself completely in her passion for him.

Though Mary's mother approved of Christian, some of her friends did not. They saw his behavior as controlling and jealous where she saw only safety and love, and a sense of self-worth. Mary was happy to change who she was for Christian - after all, he loved her. If Christian didn't like her music, she wouldn't listen to it. If he didn't want her spending her time with people who didn't like him, she wouldn't. If he had an opinion on the way she dressed and how she spent her time, he deserved to be heard and his opinions respected.

Christian became irritated when Mary talked to other boys, and positively irate if she attempted to befriend them. He seemed always to have something negative to say about the way other people chose to live their lives, and he insisted Mary stay away from the friends he deemed a bad influence lest they bring her down with them. If she questioned him, his motives or authority, he would brush her off with responses worthy of a politician. Sometimes he would even threaten her with pain, torture, and threats of leaving her to be alone forever.

Young and naive though she was, Mary soon became weary of this behavior and began to distance herself from Christian. He fought back with violent fury, causing tumult and upset in her relationships with her family. They still adored him and he seemed to delight in making them choose between himself and Mary. She was finally left so brokenhearted that even when she tried to move on and find solace or love with other men, she could only think of Christian and the hurt he had caused her. Inevitably, she would pull away and be alone again.

As she retreated into her self-imposed solitary, she still followed and studied Christian's life with an almost pathological curiosity. She watched others be taken in by his sly charm and protective facade. Sometimes she was angry for them for falling for the same tricks she had, but she often found herself defending those others when her friends would sneer at them. After all, she understood how easy it was for someone hurt and in emotional need to be taken in by Christian's seemingly genuine promise to love and protect them even if they weren't worthy of love.

Over the years, though, Mary began to slowly heal. Instead of being angry or defensive of those people falling for Christian's tricks, she found herself pitying them. She was sorry their lives were such that they needed his control over them to feel safe. She wished they - and she - could find someone to truly love and accept them just as they are and not to try and change them to suit his needs.

As she kept her finger on the pulse of Christian's life, Mary started to hear different rumors about him, rumors that he was changing into exactly that kind of man she had been wishing for. They said he was getting help, becoming more accepting, and letting go of his angry, violent ways. They said he was still making people feel safe and cared for, but without the controlling behavior. They said he was learning to truly love.

Then one day, Mary's friend Hope invited her to coffee with Christian. She was ridiculously nervous about seeing him again, after all this time, but she breathed deeply and opened herself to the possibility that things would be different now. She knew that those who were close to this new Christian truly loved him, and that it wasn't the dysfunctional love she herself had experienced all those years ago. She knew they felt safe and protected by him as she had, during their lovely beginning, that he was the best friend many of them had. And how she wanted that back for herself.

So Mary went to coffee with Christian and Hope, with a heart wide open to love him again. She was surprised that, despite her nerves, when she sat down and began talking with him, she didn't feel much of anything. She glanced at Hope and saw the radiance on her face when she looked at Christian or talked about him. She saw admiring glances tossed his way by others in the shop. But no matter how hard she tried, Mary couldn't seem to feel an inkling of the love she had once had for this man who had been her life.

She truly believed Christian had changed for the better, but she could see with a clarity uncertain to her before this day that he was no longer the man for her. Though she found herself mildly jealous of her friend's relationship with Christian, she new it wasn't him she missed, but the love and peace he had once brought to her. Whatever the reason, she thought, that relationship, that love was gone for her, never to return. She and Christian no longer belonged together.

Mary harbors no lingering bitterness toward Christian. She truly believes he has changed and for the better. Or maybe, she thinks, maybe it's not Christian who has changed but herself. Maybe somewhere during their long separation she lost whatever part of herself made her cling to him so desperately in the past, that had made her open to what he offered her. Perhaps if she had asserted herself sooner, she could have found the good in Christian for herself, while there was still love to be had between them.

But it's too late for "what-ifs" and Mary has to move on and find her own peace now, and her own place in the world, without him.

-----------------
*names have been changed to protect the "innocent"

Power of a Name

One of my favorite things about having kids (and, silly as it sounds, one of the hardest things to let go of when we decided not to have any more) is naming them. It's a huge undertaking, but so meaningful. I'm not sure what it is about naming children (and pets, electronics, cars, etc) that speaks to me, but I know I'm not alone.

In nearly every culture, every religion, names are considered powerful and sacred, or at the very least, meaningful. In Korea, names are never to be written in red ink, because the color is associated with death and doing so would bring bad luck¹. In the Old Testament, G-d frequently changed a person's name to signify His promises to that person². For Navajos, names are so precious and powerful as to only be used during ceremonies³. Wiccans and Catholics choose names pertinent to their respective religions when they are initiated/confirmed, and Jewish and Hindu children are named in special ceremonies shortly after their births^{4, 5}.

Names can also be used to convey ownership. It is common in Western cultural tradition for a woman to adopt her husband's last name which may or may not have begun as a sign of a husband's ownership of his wife. More importantly, children have historically been given their father's last name, originally to prove paternity⁶ In France, America, and ancient Rome, slaves were named by their owners and freed slaves or their descendants often changed their names to express their freedom⁷.

In one apocryphal Jewish tale, Adam's first wife, Lilith, escaped her servitude to Adam in the garden of Eden by speaking the four-letter name of G-d⁸. Blogger (and 5-time baby namer) Swistle even has a separate blog solely to discuss baby name choices! Clearly, names are a huge undertaking - even twitter and facebook think so! Carrie Anne couldn't fit her process into twitter's 140 character limit (neither could I).

 Mary used family names with special meaning,

and Sarah plans to follow her family's tradition and do so as well.

Amber wanted her children's names to sound good and be gender-appropriate.

Some people balk at naming their kids after people they know unless those people are meaningful to them. My friend Ei, however, just recognized good names when she heard them.

Literary names are a common theme for kids and pets alike. My husband's cousin, Kara, considered her baby's birth mother and her own (literary-based) name preferences when naming her daughter. His grandmother named her first daughter after a character in Les Miserables, Quentin's piano teacher named her cats after Harry Potter characters, and my friend John wants a puppy named Valentine (Ender's Game). Other facebook friends have used music (Luke's aunt named her chihuahuas "Sonny and Cher"), television, and even the alphabet ("but it's too long," says Uncle Bob) as inspiration for their children's and pets' names.

Some people prefer to use their child's birth or their own life as inspiration for their children's names. Elizabeth of Making it Fun named her premature first daughter Zoe, which means "life", hoping it would give her some extra spunk. Felicia of A Work in Process gave her son a middle name to symbolize her life's resurrection, and "used up" bad names on her dogs.

Even here in the blogging world, names are sacred - many bloggers give their children "blog names," nicknames or made-up names to conceal their children's identities and protect their privacy. Tanis from Attack of the Redneck Mommy and Jennifer from Playgroups Are No Place for Children each gave their children nicknames for their blogs. Tanis admits her choices were "the first things that popped into my head; not inspired by anything," and Jennifer's weren't particularly special. In fact, she eventually switched to "made-up" names instead of nicknames for her kids, blog-christening them with the unused names from her pregnancy short-list.


As for Luke and I, we are very methodical name-choosers. First, I pick up every baby name book I can find and scour the Internet. Then Luke and I try to find a comprehensive baby name book, and each of us go through it with a highlighter (I get one color, he gets the other). And that's just for our pets. We named our first cat Mallory because she would climb anything she could see (in retrospect, that would have been a good name for Jude!). Back to naming kids; if we have strong feelings about a name, we make a note of that in the book. When we're finished with the book, I make a spreadsheet, including columns for names, meanings, origins, each of our personal feelings on the name and, importantly, how the name is trending according to the SSA. We're pretty adamant about choosing unusual names, so anything in the top 100 is basically discounted from the get-go. Then we hem and haw and think and think and think.

The funny thing is, in the end, neither of our children's names were on our mutual "OMG we love that name" list. In fact, Jude isn't on that spreadsheet at all! And meaning ended up as a fairly unimportant consideration. Quentin is certainly not the fifth child, and while we are certainly thankful for Jude⁹, that meaning was not our prime consideration. Amusingly, despite neither of us being Christian (and in fact, I think the guy gets a worse rap than he deserves), we decided against "Judas" in large part because of the negative association with Judas Iscariot. We are fans of Quentin Tarantino, but neither was he our primary consideration for the name of our eldest; however, Hey Jude was a deciding factor in our naming of our second son (and Julia had prime consideration as a girl's name for a similar reason).

As into names as I am, of course our children have middle names. Quentin's follows Luke's family tradition - his middle name is Luke's middle name, Luke's dad's middle name, Luke's paternal grandfather's middle name, Luke's paternal great-grandfather's first name. Hopefully if Quentin ever has children, and has a boy, he will continue that tradition. Jude's middle name was one of many names we liked, but which was too trendy to use as a first name. Plus his initials sound like his grandfather's name.

What about you, Constant Reader? Do you love naming your children? Hate it? Is it all pressure or none? How did you decide your children's names? Do you like popular or trendy names, or do you go against the grain? Does meaning matter? What about nicknames and acronyms created by initials? What's your naming process?

Domestic Violence Awareness

You probably noticed I decorated my blog for Halloween (ohai, October Blog Party friends, sorry I haven't posted about our cool holiday goings-on. I have my computer back now, so I can finally upload photos! COMING SOON!) but I also added a sidebar button for the National Domestic Violence Hotline. This is inspired by Domestic Violence Awareness Month (October) but will likely remain there indefinitely.

Preventing Domestic Violence and protecting its victims is my chosen cause and I've been wanting to get involved in my local shelter for a long time. My participation in the Family Shelter Service 5k is meant to be a kickoff of getting deeply involved in the shelter and other pertinent areas of this cause.

I've written a brief recap of my race and some information about the shelter for DuPage Mamas, and that's today's featured post there. Please check it out to find out a bit more about Domestic Violence, Awareness, and Family Shelter Service.

And please, if you or someone you know may be a victim of domestic violence, call the national hotline at 1800-799-SAFE.

The Plock Addict's Guide to Life

Plock is a 1-minute game I play on Facebook, where you click blocks and when two or more of the same color are next to each other, they disappear and you get points. It sounds simple, and it is, but it's also intricate and complex and terribly addictive. I've clearly been playing to much because lately, I've started to make analogies between Plock and life. Since I often fancy myself an amateur philosopher and you have nothing better to do, allow me to present to you these hints for Plock and Life. If you have Facebook, I highly recommend you go play a few times before reading.

• The in-game "how to play" guide only gives you the basics, and oversimplifies the patterns. It doesn't tell you all of the tips and tricks you really need to be good at the game (but that's what this strategy guide is for!)
  
  
• At the beginning, it's easy to be overwhelmed by the number of options, where to start. Later on, it's easy to be frustrated by the lack of options. Just take it one click at a time.
  
• Time is short; make the most of it.
  
• Click fast and furiously, even if that means sometimes nothing happens when you click.
  
• However, completely aimless clicking without vision for strategy will not get you very far.
  
• Try to form a strategy as you click, but don't get too fixated; allow it to flow with the changes in the game. Also, don't stop to plan because it wastes valuable time.
  
• The game is two parts luck of how the blocks fall, one part how fast you click, and one part strategy.
  
• You must keep the big picture in mind; avoid tunnel-vision.
  
• While multipliers are critical for a respectable score, becoming fixated on them will slow you down and do more harm than good. Besides, as long as you keep clicking, another one will come along.
  
• Sometimes what seems like a good place to click ends up ruining your plans.
  
• You will inevitably do something to completely screw up a perfectly good high scoring formation or worse, your entire strategy. Don't dwell on it, and continue on as best you can. Form a new strategy if you have to. Hindsight is 20-20.
  
• Sometimes what seems to be a mis-click can end up bringing together an excellent formation.
  
• Some games start off wonderfully only to fizzle out halfway through. Some games start off tough but you can bring it around and rack up some serious points before the end.
  
• Sometimes the blocks fall in a way that really helps you, sometimes they do you no good at all. They're not out to get you, and you just have to make the best of it.
  
• If you can help it, keep a safety net of at least one pair of blocks left un-clicked; these can come in handy if you get stuck.
  
• Try not to back yourself into a corner. Sometimes this is unavoidable, but know that the game is designed so there is always at least one pair of blocks to click on so you can keep going. Even if it doesn't seem to do you much good, if you keep clicking this will often cascade into a game-saving formation.
  
• Some games seem unsalvagable. If you keep playing anyway, you will sometimes end up better than you started. Sometimes, you will end up with a crappy score but valuable strategy for next time.
  
• The best way to guarantee a terrible score is to challenge someone else to see who is better.
  
• What seems like a good score the first time you play becomes a crap score once you've gotten a feel for how it's supposed to go.
  
• Even if you have the best overall score of your friends, someone out there has a higher score than you do.
  
• It's really easy to get so into playing the game and trying to get the best score (either a personal best or the best of your friends) that you ignore the important things in life.
  
• Even if you get really really good, some games are just better than others.
  
• The minute you most need to focus is when someone will walk RIGHT IN FRONT of your screen.
  
• If you start to develop carpal tunnel, if you find yourself yelling at your children for interrupting, if you find yourself feeling conspired against by the creators of the game, if you start dreaming the theme song (ok I'm not sure how this relates to life but it's happened to me), take a little break. It will probably improve your overall performance anyway. Besides,
  
• It's just a game. If you're not having fun, you're doing it wrong.
  
• Just when you are really getting the hang of it, the clock will run out and it's "game over."