BACK TO CHURCH...

So there it was Sunday morning, and having stayed up way too late re-working my last post until it put me to sleep, I then got up too late to make coffee AND get to church and...

made coffee. I have been spending a fair amount of time wondering why I have not reached out more, have not put more effort into finding a local church, well, have just been focused so relentlessly on...

The First Non-Congregational Church of ME.

And it's not a pretty picture. Some of that is the need to blog, which is one of the core dogmas of the FNC/ME, but that's not the whole story. I think one of the real reasons, which I guess like everything else I've ever posted, I have mentioned before, is the degree of incomprehension I meet everywhere. My long-suffering hosts of the other weekend actually asked me the Gay Friend's Question: how on earth could/why on earth should a gay man stay married to a woman?

They weren't tactless enough to ask about me, of course, but one of the first things that my situation seems to call up for people is the other person they know in my situation. That's natural -- we all work that way. But in discussing this other friend, my hostess admitted that she could not understand why someone who wrestled so hard with temptation to stay married would stay married, and why he would have married in the first place [the fact that the description fits lots of straight husbands seems to have eluded her]. And I found myself remarking, as politely as I could, that he might very well love his wife and family, might very well love his life with them, and he might very well have married because he had fallen in love. Even unexpectedly. That is, of course, complete and groundless projection of my own experience onto someone I have never met, but it is at least some kind of answer to the question. I think the anguish of most of my Blog Brothers makes pretty clear that the answer has more than merely immediate validity...

The problem, just as it is with my hostess' political opinions, lies in the human unwillingness to admit truth that doesn't match a simplistic or ideological world-view -- the ideology is often unwitting, probably usually unwitting, but it is there, claiming to be the whole truth. Real adult life requires us to be able to walk with apparent contradictions in our hands, bound together and reconciled by the connections that pass through our hearts. The more irreconcilable the differences appear, the closer we approach the profound depth of what it means to be human. I believe I have posted elsewhere that these differences may include the lives of people who were never able to make peace while alive, but where the peace made between them is the basis for a living person's ability to face life. Like mine.

Among the Troll's dogmas, which I believe have a better chance at validity than those of the FNC/ME, are, in no particular order:

Truth is one and must be believed.

Truth is whole and must be defended against partition and balkanization.

Truth is of vital importance, and must be lived out; it fits our own decadent days best when it is lived out in humble silence and its validity is left to be shown in its fruits.

Truth is by nature superhuman; no one person can hope to completely understand.

Truth in human experience is polyphonous; no one human voice can hope to encompass it.

Now:

Heresy adds and subtracts. [Take a close look at the difference of the treatment of the Old Testament in Christian and Muslim scriptures, for beginners. Or the fact that Protestantism, of which I am a devoted disciple, begins with Luther's condemnation of canonical epistles that don't fit his vision, and ends in the Jesus Seminar, which sifts the words of Jesus and votes as to which might be authentic...]

Ideology divides and multiplies. Every ideology is partial truth. It will, as Bill Stringfellow demonstrated so tellingly in his work on Revelation, in time begin to claim to be the whole truth and will begin to subject everything in its path to its power, and everything in its power to its own survival.

Every ideology separates human beings, and subjects the rights of the human heart to the power of arbitrary "sacred" law [and I would certainly class Communism as the prime imposer of sacred law in the past century]. Ideology eventually claims to separate humanity into easily recognizable camps, one of may be subjected to any indignity and cruelty in the name of truth.

Against all of this, the voice of the human heart is powerless in the short term, but powerful beyond measure over time. Who can doubt the voice of a man like Solzhenitzyn in his powerlessness against the entire Empire? He suffered so for his truth. On leaving Vermont and trying to follow Vaclav Havel's path to power, on the other hand, he failed completely. Well, let us stick to the enduring truth of his daring in speaking truth to power:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

He goes on to say [in the Gulag Archipelago]:

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: "Know thyself." Contronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.

From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb. And correspondingly, from evil to good.

Well, that about says it all. Even for people who thought they would never see the words "leather" and "church" in the same posting...

Be well.
Hang in there.
And don't give up hope -- what's life without hope?
Life without hope, like war, is easily recognizable as hell.