losing it

I haven't lost my sense of humor, maybe just my sense of perspective.

During lunch with a friend, the room started to spin and I had to focus on a single point as if it were a mooring. During another conversation, I teared up like a wide-eyed orphan. Speaking of kids, I was sitting at a red light one recent Sunday morning when the sight a young boy on a bike shattered my composure and I started to sob when it hit me that I may never have a son.

I once wrote that getting broken up with is like being pushed into another world, one with a new future. Well, that's where I am at now: contemplating a new future. And, like with many a relationship, the break came when it was time to make a greater commitment (I got a mission placement, but declined). It was like Life Dominoes: when Mission Corps fell, seminary followed--and so went the life I had planned for the next 4-5 years. I suppose now I can just say, solemnly, that I'm not cut out for the life I planned.

I'm still smiling (in that aesthetics-of-pain sorta way).  Everything is both sudden and a long-time coming. My commitments to truth and my ideas about authenticity and identity are in flux. Life, without seminary, will be different. It will be more self-directed, less circumscribed by dogma or ecclesial community.

Though, it's not as if I lost myself, woke up as a new person, and changed my creed to "to thyself, be true." As Ibsen points out in Peer Gynt, that's merely another way of saying, "to thyself, be enough." But I'm not enough. I want my church. My friends. My family. My ideals. I want God, too and I know that, for the Christian, freedom and liberation apart from God are delusions, dead-ends. Alas, I can't help but see all of this as (among other things, of course) a lack of faith. I don't want only God, or, rather, I can't live for only him. I like culture; it nourishes and envelops me. And the very studies I launched myself into because my will had failed me have handicapped any faculty for childlike, obedient faith. So I lurch toward syncretism (in life and career).

Other, emotional currents are in the fore (though I am trying to think as hard as I'm feeling) and this dogmatist (albeit of the California liberal variety)--is flirting with be-yourself-ism. I'm getting swept away--floodwaters from without and erupting within.

See the rock that you hold onto
Is it gonna save you
When the earth begins to crumble?
Why d'you feel you have to hold on?

Imagine if you let go

Let's hope there's a life ring.

With the broken pieces of abandoned aspirations at my feet, I'm trying to imagine a new future and sincerely hoping that when I look back one day, this isn't what apostasy looked like.