The Agony and the Apostasy

Yesterday, I more or less publicly—if you count the ten people who pay attention to my Facebook posts—renounced my participation in organised religion. And then I cried for a good half hour.

The breaking point had been coming for some time. For my entire adult life, I have been patiently explaining that “Christianity” is not monolithic. We have denominations, and we do not all believe the same things, but are bound together by a basic shared philosophy. The former two points are things I still find to be true. The latter is not.

The vast group of people who call themselves Christians do not share the same basic philosophy any more than the Daesh and Boko Haram, and pretty much every other Islamic group ever do. At best, we have a shared scriptural canon and a mostly shared history.

And I am tired of engaging in apologetics. I've tried, and I've failed.

I am probably still willing to call myself Lutheran, of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, but that is so specific that I am not even sure how to go about explaining that. I just want to distance myself from any notion that I might be a Chtistian because I am ashamed of the idea that I might be perceived as such.

The irony is that when I was in elementary school, I attended a nondenominational youth group on Wednesday nights called AWANA (which stands for Approved Workmen are not Ashamed. The phrase is taken from Paul's second epistle to Timothy. Pretty sure it is in the second chapter). Well, perhaps I am not an approved workman, because I am damn well ashamed.

I am also disappointed.

I see nothing of Jesus in the cowards who will not allow Syrian refugees into our country. We did not let Jewish refugees into our country in the thirties, either.

I see nothing of Jesus in the people who hate gay people so much. I do not care what they think of me; I can take care of myself. But I do have a problem with a philosophy that instills fear in people. This has affected me personally, and both breaks my heart and makes me angry.

I see nothing of Jesus in the platitude that “everything happens for a reason” when someone is grieving. Eat that. That is not compassion; that is laziness and cowardice and selfishness.

I could go on.

What I find distressing is that when I, in a fit of pique, did post my anger, I was immediately greeted with the “don't paint us all with a broad brush,” “we aren't all like that,” “I am not like that.”

I KNOW.

I've been fighting this fight for years. I know, better than a lot of people, to be honest, the differences between religious groups. It is not God in whom I have lost my faith, though my relationship with God continues to be complicated. It is the people who claim to follow the philosophy laid out in the Christian scriptures, and I shan't defend them any longer. I have taken enough arrows, especially this year. I am tired.

Take your own damn arrows.

Gutted

I dreaded going to her class. Dreaded it.

In my four years of high school, I only got detentions from her: seven of them in my first semester of freshman year. It got to be a joke. I would be in detention with a whole bunch of other people who never got detentions.

“Miss Clark?” we would ask each other. Solemn nods all around, and then snickers. My best friend received a detention from her for “excessive happiness.”

Miss Clark was mean, and harsh. We found a certain unity in that no one was safe from her ascerbic wit, not even the smartest guy in our grade (probably, actually, in the entire school, for several years before and after our graduating class. Yes, you, Tom). At the time, the only redemption in going to her class was that she made it clear that she thought my archnemesis was the stupidest person she had ever come across.

God bless her.

Miss Clark wore starched men's button-down shirts, stonewashed jeans, and Birkenstocks every day, weather irrelevant. Her grey hair was shaved short on the sides and only a bit longer on top, just enough to curl a bit. And she did not give a good damn what anyone thought about her attire. She, alone of nearly all teachers at Sterling High School, had the spine to tell us when we were being idiots, when we were not thinking things through, or when we were being straight up careless. No one else talked to us like that. She was absolutely terrifying.

I dreaded her class, in which the powers that were enrolled me because I had the temerity to be on the drill team (Do Not Say A Word) and orchestra at the same time. My punishment, therefore, was to have class at half past seven in the morning with the most intimidating teacher I had ever had, who, I was certain, existed solely to torture me.

However, the great thing about it was---and it did not actually take sixteen years of retrospect to come up with this (in other news, Holy God I was a freshman sixteen years ago aaaaahhhhhh)---she never talked down to me. Other teachers would put on their Very Disappointed face and tell me that I simply was not applying myself, and I could do so much better, and I should prioritise their class, et cetera. Not so with Miss Clark.

“Holly Ivy,” she would say, keeping me after class. She always called me Holly Ivy. I do not know why. Probably specifically because it irritated me. “Holly Ivy, what was your point here? Don't say 'uh' to me. This paragraph is completely unecessary. Tell me what your point is here. I would somehow managed to stammer an answer. “Okay, so why did not not write that?” I would say something about how I was not sure if I was right.

In reply, she glanced up, on this occasion, at the door, then lowered her voice. “Holly Ivy. I don't give a damn if you agree with me or if I agree with you. I only care that you can make a decent argument. If your argument is dumb, I will tell you.”

Then she sat down on her desk and winked at me. “You know I'll tell you the truth.”

Damn right she would, like no other adult. If one were to looke up “Brutal Honesty” in a dictionary which included adjectives, Miss Clark's picture would be there, accompanied by no words. Somehow I survived that year.

Imagine my horror when I received my class schedule for my junior year and found out that I had Miss Clark again. I walked into her room, probably looking like I was being led to the gallows. She laughed at me. “Good to see you, too, Holly Ivy.” It turns out that she actually just hated teaching freshman.

Day two of her class, she took me to the book closet and I picked up copies of All Quiet on the Western Front, Catcher in the Rye, The Chosen, and five or six other books I cannot remember right off hand. This year, she said, everyone would read what they wanted, and we would write analytical essays, present our findings, and discuss each other's work in class.

It was amazing, for a couple of weeks.

Then, in a stroke of bullshit of enormous magnitude even for the powers that were at Ross Sterling High School, we were unceremoniously removed from Miss Clark's class and sent to the class of one of the most milquetoast individuals I have ever had the misfortune to come across.*

I did not really get the impact Miss Clark had on me for a few years, but I am pretty sure I survived the Honours program at Lee College because she started getting in my face about thinking at the tender age of fourteen. I survived my bachelor's degree because after having my wee fourteen year old ego ripped to shreds and then nuked from orbit, I was used to criticism and there was not a lot that could faze me. One of my professors actually, sarcastically, told me that she “assume[d] that [I] have more than two brain cells rattling around in there” while lecturing me on some transgression that more than likely had to do with my attendance.

In retrospect, that is one of the greatest complements I have ever received from a professor. Backhanded and brutal, but great.

Normally, when I write one of these essays about someone who had a significant impact on me who has died, I trot out the fact that I, fortunately, am not one of those people who “never listened and now it's too late woe and regret.” This remains true, but still I have some woe and regret because my thirty-year-old self wishes that my eighteen-year-old self would have had the damn sense to go get a mailing address from her so I could keep in touch. I am quite convinced that she had yet more wisdom to impart.

I did run into Miss Clark at the grocery store in Baytown a few years ago, and I hugged her and told her the standard rubbish about what I was doing with my life. I hope that encounter was enough for her to know the affection which I, in retrospect, held for her. I knew that I respected the hell out of her, and I am pretty sure she did know that, so I have that going for me.

However, last night, when I found out that she had died, I felt absolutely gutted. This is what it is like to not realise how much someone means to me until they are gone.

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*This was actually the beginning of the end for my high school career. In retaliation for being put into this class, I tested out of junior and senior English. Then I tested out of junior and senior history. Then I tested out of health and government. I tested out of everything except for physics and mathematics. Eat it, GCCISD.

HUGE Tracts of Land!

I have come to the important conclusion that I have been persistently making a fundamental error in how I have gone about conducting my life. I do not think that this is particularly anyone's fault, or caused by any one thing or event that has happened to me. I can point to two specific issues, however, which I know for sure contributed the problem. The first is that I made the naive mistake of showing far too much literacy too early in my life. That, of course, sounds really backhandedly arrogant. Oh, woe is me. I could read when I was but a wee lass. My life has been ruined.

Whatever. I make no bones about the fact that I am quite literate and always have been. Other people get to be extremely attractive or talented or athletic, and I get to be literate.

Anyway, the actual problem is that all of the adults in my life noticed this, and as a result, told me two things:

• That I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, and

• That the thing I would be would be Great.

No pressure. By Great, I mean rocket scientist (this was not unheard of, given the proximity of NASA. I knew actual rocket scientists). President. Murphy by-God Brown. Of course, who is going to tell a kid that they are going to grow up to be tech support? That would be a great way to induce alcoholism in six-year-olds. So, upon being told that I was really smart and would therefore be Great, I spent the next twenty-two years trying to be just that.

Great.

There is just one problem: I, it turns out, am not Great. I do not suck or anything. I received a marriage proposal from a man in Tanzania at four this morning because I fixed his website. So, I would definitely argue that I am above average, but Great may not be in the cards, and I think I understand the origin of this rather drastic misunderstanding, and it comes down to algebra (and if we are speaking literally, Algebra II. Thanks Ms. Stark. You ruined me for maths at a very important juncture and as a result I am not a physicist. And yes, I blame you, personally, for this.); consider a graph where x is age and y is academic prowess. I feel like I started out with a greater y-intercept than my peers but have a less steep slope. Everyone else started out with a lesser y-intercept but have a steeper slope. As a result, we have all ended up at roughly the same (x,y) by now.

Except for those bitches who made my life miserable in eighth grade. May all of their soufflés fall flat into eternity.*

Verily.

I had a point.

Oh, it is that I am probably merely above average, and I find that I am happier having come to that conclusion. Strange as it is, I actually rather enjoy my eight hours at a desk. Perhaps I enjoy it because it is new, or because I know I shall not be doing this job in six months' time, or because I am aware that I am no longer sinking into the swamp of student debt. I built the castle of college, and it sank into the swamp. So then I built the castle of grad school, and that sank into the swamp. But now I am building a castle of employment---and this one is going to stay up.

There may yet be a capacity for greatness within me, but I have have to say that I prefer happiness to greatness, and I shall not ever again sacrifice the former for the latter. I know for sure that it is the unconditional love I have received from such luminaries as my parents, my friends, and my wife which has made me comfortable with this decision. My attempts at greatness required far too many sacrifices and far too many bottles of wine, and the thing is, by the time I actually got into a position where I could get to alleged greatness, I was so damned sick of it that I pretty well just hated it all, and if I were married to someone with a more volatile temperament, I would be incredibly divorced right now.

And that would suck all over the place.

Anyway, I still might do something super awesome with myself. I am still working on my alleged novel (in fact, that is the working title. Alleged Novel: A Memoir of the Future), and I am going to take all the trainings at work so that I can have a slightly less frenetic job (because I am here to tell you that I only have about six months of this in me. Seriously). I am going to continue to improve myself, but in the interim I have every intention of being content.

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*Seriously, fuck them. Assholes.

Academic L'esprit de L'escalier

I maintain my dislike of the methodology of graduate school, and I have realised why: I need time.

I need time to ruminate on things, and I need time to read things carefully -- not all the things -- but the things which need reading, I need to be able to read, not skim, and think carefully about their implications. I need time to make the connections. This might mean that I am not smart and/or quick enough for graduate school.

The problem is, though, that most of the cognitive revelations I have made in my life have come over the course of time. Sometimes I require only days, but usually it is weeks or months. Just last night I came to a conclusion regarding a nuance of my relationship with Amber. Coincidentally, it took just precisely four and one half years as we began dating on the sixteenth of June in 2007.

Four and one half years. I have lived with this woman for four years. Lived with her.

So it ought not have come as a surprise to me when I realised that given time to ruminate on something, I can actually come up with useful things to say about it. This is to say that I have a severe, chronic, and perhaps terminal case of academic l'esprit de l'escalier.

One of the things I told the kids at my erstwhile employment was that if one does not know what to write for one's paper, it is incredibly likely that one has not read enough. That is probably one of the reasons they did not like me, other than my scintillating personality. At any rate, I have recently discovered that for the whole of this semester, I was simply not reading enough -- or, at least, I was not reading the right things.

For some reason or other, I find reading articles less daunting than reading books. It is probably because if I read a forty page article, it has made the whole of its point in that time and I may now consider the implications. However, if I am reading a book and leave off at forty pages to pick it up later, I have to backtrack several pages to remember what the author was on about. I suspect also that it is easier to distill the contents an article into a point without achieving too much distraction. When I read books, I invariably find more questions than I find answers. I hear that is a good thing, but when I have a paper to write and it is not meant to be thesis or dissertation length, it is highly problematic.

It is all of these problems which lead me to have an extension for my Historiography term paper. Fortunately, I am now performing competently, having had time to consider the issue without the obstreperous commentary of Smugly McHipsterpants. As God is my witness, if he is in any other class with me, I will destroy him with my mind. We could power small cities on his ego.

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In other news, I realised earlier, in reading a retrospective on Christopher Hitchens, that my largest bone to pick with him is actually not at all over the existence of God. It is over his support of the war in Iraq.

Which is allegedly over.

I still want to move to Gloucestershire and be a blacksmith.