Death is nothing at all

Death is nothing at all

I have only slipped away into
the next room
I am I, and you are you,
Whatever we were to each other,
that we are still.

Call me by the old familiar name.
Speak of me in the easy way
which you always used
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity
or sorrow.
Laugh as we always laughed
At the little jokes that we
enjoyed together

Play, smile, think of me,
pray for me.

Let my name be ever the
household word that it always was.
Let it be spoken without an effort,
Without the ghost of a
shadow upon it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same as it ever was.
There is absolute and
unbroken continuity.

What is this death but a
negligible accident?
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you,
for an interval,
Somewhere very near,
Just around the corner.

All is well.

- Henry Scott Holland

I dug through my house a few days ago and dug up the poetry I had written throughout middle school, high school, and the first year of college. In my middle school poetry journal, this poem (actually an excerpt from a sermon) is pasted onto the first page. I think I was much more fascinated by death when I was younger. At the very least, I glamorized the idea of dying, as it is still glamorized in movies, stories, cheap novels, and so on.

Either way, I've discovered that suddenly, I'm older now, and somewhere along those 10 years that went missing between middle school and now, my attitude towards death changed. Maybe I could think of death so easily then because it was so far from me, similar to the ways we can gossip about celebrities or people we don't know personally. But things change. You meet people and they might tell you how they've had to deal with life and the alternative to life.

Ever since my last college year, I feel like I've been scared. Scared to leave friends, home, and especially family now. I feel like I'm fearful all the time now, anxious about passing my tests and staying in school, finding a job in the future, finding friends to be with or someone to love, losing friends and family and loved ones, and (if this weren't bad enough) fearful of coming to the end of my life and realizing that I've wasted so much of it while being scared of everything.

I'm reading a book by Os Guinness, and the first few chapters talk about the human condition, and sort of the strange situation we find ourselves in. It mentioned life, death, the hard questions, and yet so did many books that I read during college. I find it kind of odd that before this, I had a grandparent and a freshman from Wiess both die, yet I never thought about it too hard then (maybe I couldn't back then). But now...it's as if everything hits harder, is more personal, is a little more painful to think about.

I used to think about my own death rather calmly, what people might say at my funeral, what I might say to them right before I die. Nowadays, I'm scared to think of the idea at all, for fear that I might have to consider that some day, I might have to say a eulogy for those I love - friends, grandparents, even my mother and father. The idea absolutely terrifies me, makes my heart ache so much I wish I could just turn off my conscious thought sometimes.

I don't know what exactly changed. Perhaps it's because I had things taken away from me during that last year of college - relationships, family, purpose, comfort, familiarity. Maybe I started to worry about losing things that I didn't think I could bear to lose. I think that after things started being easy, after Rice stopped providing me with everything I needed, after I got sent out on my own, I started being scared. During Rice, I felt the death of a relative and a freshman at Wiess, but recovered fairly well. However, after Rice, I've started to feel and fear deaths that haven't even come close to happening yet. I'm paralyzed by a fear things that may happen in a future that I won't change because I feel paralyzed, and so life goes by, I get nothing done, and time ticks ever on. Great.

I've heard pastors claim that the Bible's most often given commandment is "do not fear", and to paraphrase what Paul once said, the law is there to show me what sin and imperfection is. If this phase I'm going through is one that everyone hits eventually, I can understand why God would give this commandment so often.

I'm working on it.

two years

I like to think I'm allowed one heavily emo post every couple of months, so here's mine for the spring semester.

going home to houston, I had a wonderful talk with an close old friend, during which he made the comment that I haven't been the same person he knew in college ever since the end of my first relationship, that all the joy that defined my first 3 years at Rice had somehow vanished, replaced by an unacknowledged cynicism and skepticism masked as "careful reasoning".

After that one relationship, from February to March, two years ago now. How does one month change someone so much? I'll try to answer that...by starting with a seemingly tangential non-sequitur.

After reading the most recent post on Matt Dunn's blog about "initiative evangelism" and a non-Christian's view of Christians, I have to admit that over these last two years, I think I've been looking at my own faith through that sort of perspective.

And I think that all started with the line "I think God is leading me to break up with you".

The way it had happened was that she had a few doubts about the relationship, so we took 3 days apart to pray and ask for guidance to see if we should continue. I thought yes; apparently God told her differently. For the first week, I took it seriously. A week later, not so much. After talking to several sympathetic Christians, I started to think there might have been more hidden in that line than just the prophetic hand of God intervening in a relationship. Eventually, I think I started to wonder if God was even present in that line at all.

Maybe this is what started the downward spiral. For the first time, I could look at the Christian life and see contradictions and issues, fallacies, things that didn't make sense. Talking with non-Christian friends about the breakup made me feel better, since they all basically shared the exact same reaction - shock and incredulity at the way she ended the relationship. It felt so good to be able to feel like I'd been wronged somehow, that somehow she had taken God's name in vain. Eventually, this evolved into the thought that she had just done something irrational and dishonest, using God as a cover.

And so it started. I began to remove the hand of God from my interpretation of events. The breakup was because she didn't feel confident, and therefore invoking God was an excuse to cover up her real reasons. Someone's "led by the Spirit"? Just a combination of their emotions and their own thoughts. Even better, this easily explained stupid, hurtful, or violent actions done by the leading of (and in the name of) the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without having to directly attribute them to God. And so I started to distrust the way Christians take things as the action of God, without mystery or uncertainty, applied to their personal lives.

Admittedly, the breakup hurt like nothing had ever hurt before, so negative feelings associated with that probably exacerbated my growing skepticism. Don't get me wrong, though - my battle with doubt is something completely different. Doubting God, creation, Jesus, etc originated elsewhere and was resolved apart from this issue (though the condition of my heart probably had something to do with both).

I do believe Jesus was the Son of God, physically resurrected from the dead to redeem us from our sins. I believe that God has called us to live morally upright lives, serving each other in love, being his hands and feet into the world, sharing our faith with others, and being salt and light to a veiled and decomposing world. I have more trouble believing God continues to work in blatantly supernatural ways: not that he can't; but that he chooses instead involved in the natural processes that guide our paths, our actions, our thoughts - that he (usually) interacts with us in a quiet, nuanced, mysterious way, and not just crudely, directly breaks into our lives and picks us up, forcefully turning us to go a certain direction.

Therefore, I still believe God is at work in the world. I just don't know if he works in the way I naively imagined him to do early in my Christian life. A good artist doesn't just force the theme of his art upon you brusquely; they guide you in a nuanced way to a given interpretation. Most of the time, good art may look like nothing at first glance, but upon a closer inspection, the genius behind the piece comes out. In terms of engineering and mathematics, I wonder if God's taking action in the world is a little like creating a function (the action) that satisfies certain conditions (purposes). There is often an easy, straightforward way to construct a valid function, but that function usually ends up being either trivial or useless for any application purposes without continual tinkering with the function and its processes. The construction of a useful function (action) is usually much less straightforward, and may seem to take several paths that seem completely unrelated to the problem, but ends up giving you a function that has a distinct purpose, yet isn't something that's completely alien to (and thus useless in) the natural settings.

(Theologically, if God works in this way, I believe it has very interesting applications to the way we as Christians should interact/approach the world, consider science, etc...but that's another blog post)

...

(Here, I realize that I've started to ramble and need to connect it back to what I started the blog post about)

I'd be willing to bet that these ideas about God's action in the world aren't impossible to swallow for most Christians - I've heard these metaphors and ideas before, and I don't think that they're out of line with the Bible (at least, I think if there are verses against it, there are also verses supporting it). However, it looks like somehow these ideas got twisted by my feelings about the breakup. Pride in me makes it easy enough to see someone who doesn't hold this similar (intellectual) view as being overly conservative, sheltered, and slightly backwards. However, throw a breakup and one misspoken line about God's guidance into the picture, and pride combines with fear into distrust, and I think that if I've changed for the worse these past two years, it's because of this.

Truth be told, two years later, I'm still reliving parts of the breakup, and unfortunately, I'm also still having trouble trusting other Christians "led by the Spirit". I think I'm slowly coming to the point where I can say things like "God taught me" or "God worked in my life" again, but after experiencing the consequences of taking God's name in vain, I find that I still hesitate in taking God's name at all anymore.

placeholder

I've been visiting churches for the past few months, and I've promised to do a thorough sweep of them all. I haven't forgotten, but I do have one more church I'd like to visit before I do a broad sweep of the Austin area congregations. A brief trailer for each church I've seen - large/mainstream Evangelical, Episcopalean, emergent-but-not-really, Korean...so stay tuned.

In addition to this, I've been reading one of the best books I've read in a while - C.S. Lewis' "Miracles". I hope to write on this one in a bit too - I wish I had read this sooner, like at Rice when I was questioning the validity of Christianity (instead of the random slew of poor-quality literature that I read instead). In particular, I took a humbling message from one of its chapters that talked about the validity of ideas despite misinterpretation (I confess I've probably been a bit of in intellectual snob in my treatment of other Christians =\ not something I'm proud of). Anyhow, in a future post, I'd like to do my best to convince any readers of this blog to read this book as well, because I found it very stimulating, with just the right balance of intellectual rigor and accessibility.

----------------cue beginning of actual post----------------

Thus, this post acts as sort of a placeholder, awaiting more important and thoughtful posts. Ironically, my time in Austin (cue sermon-like tie-in to actual content!) seems to feel much the same - for now, my years here at UT feel like they're just being used to wait it out until I get a job, or (God willing) get married, or move back home, or experience a more important event in my life than just work and grad school.

As the novelty of being somewhere new wears off, I'm finding myself spending more and more time alone. It feels hard to go out and meet people - there hasn't been a Friday night large group for post-grads, and investing a chunk of time into hanging out with one person can be awkward if they're not someone you know well/feel comfortable with. I don't feel like I should try to invest in a college group on campus either, otherwise I could see myself just trying to relive college instead of moving on and growing. Whatever the reasons (and I'm still sorting thru these), I find myself alone at home a lot, doing a social thing maybe once a month at best. Currently, I'm blogging because I feel fairly lonely, which is a pretty terrible reason to blog (still, perhaps something constructive may come out of this - especially if anyone has any comments/advice, they'd be much appreciated).

In trying to reason why I feel so lonely here, I came up with the following chain of logic: I don't feel very connected to Austin (tied in to investing in Austin is the church search as well...), so I'm not too motivated to connect myself to Austin either, and therefore have not built a stable group of friends to be around here either.

I got an email from a friend commenting on how hard it was to invest in a solid church community given that he would only be around the area for a few months. Somehow, though I will probably be here a good few years at least, I seem to have motivations similar to someone who's just passing through a town. Since I have friends in Houston, family in California, it's difficult to see myself giving either of those up to stay here long-term. The whole feel of Austin seems much too "cool" as well, and I don't really feel like I fit in well with "cool" kids (hence I loved Rice).
In the end though, I still believe I should make the most of my time here. While I don't THINK I'll have the college experience all over again, forming deep friendships everywhere I go, I KNOW I won't get anything done isolating myself either.

Any thoughts/experiences/advice on adapting to a new place?

nostalgia

I came back to Houston for LNY yesterday, and I miss it here. A lot more than I realized while in Austin. UT's college experience seems very different from what I experienced during college, and I think I know more of why I was so drawn to Rice now.

There's a sense of welcome here that stems not only from Rice, its atmosphere, and the friends I still have there, but from the 20+ years of my life that I invested here. I know this place, and in some sense, it knows me - the house I grew up in is still here, and though Jimmy and Pat have made changes to it while they've lived here, I can still remember when my parents and I built parts of it. Austin is so new; but new is not the way most people would want to describe their home.

Since then, it seems things have been pulled apart with family and I both moving away. Nostalgia hits hard whenever I come home and open up old boxes to find old memories that I had nearly forgotten, and I toy with the idea of either transferring to Rice for grad school or finding a job in order to move back home.

Is it easier for people who moved away from home for college and then stayed in the same town after graduation? Is it as difficult adjusting to post-college life?

makes me think

I don't know what it is about it, but returning home always makes me think about the "big questions". Whether home to CA, or home to here in Houston, I feel like I enter into some sort of cognitively-dissonant phase of questioning whenever I come back to an old familiar haunt. When I'm not exciting nostalgia, flipping through mementos of memories that have gathered dust while I've been away, I sit down, become oddly philosophical, doubtful, and temporarily load up my Amazon cart full of books that I hope will cure my current state.

Odd things seem to trigger thoughts on topics, but the topics are ones that I'm sure anyone can relate to: death, the meaning of life, the existence and identity of God.

1. Death: I enjoyed my time with my parents in CA, which makes the thought of their aging all the scarier. I was conceived late - my parents were past 30 by the time I was born, so they are rapidly approaching 60. As I read obituaries and hear of deaths, I can't help but reflect that they're rapidly approaching a human's average life span. Nothing paralyzes me more than to think about this - I love them, have so much I want to tell them, and depend on them for so much advice that I need at this point. And more so than ever, I've begun to understand how family is precious: their relationships with you are unique, stronger than any others. While they may not identify with me as well as others, they share memories of and know me far better than maybe anyone else on this planet ever will.
   
   Just in terms of time spent, they've been around far longer than even my closest friends, and leaving my closest friends for Austin has only reinforced these thoughts; making new friends and building new relationships is difficult. How much more so to build a family.
   
   
2. Meaning of life: I didn't use to think this was a difficult question. Glorifying God, obviously. Sure, the realization of this end was difficult to characterize since it was unique for everyone, but at least that was far off and I had a long time to consider it. Almost 10 years have passed since then, and I think I'm less certain of how to achieve this goal in my life. How do I do so in my job and career? Do I need to be passionate about what I do? What if my passions change? What about serving outside my job and in the community? What about my beliefs and thoughts? What about family?
   
   Over all of this, the end question still looms - is glorifying God the correct meaning of life? I don't often question the goal itself, but that's probably due to the fact that, given a broad view/definition of God and a broad view/definition of glorifying, almost any positive activity can be said to strive towards this goal. At the very least, I have to question the way that I answer this question at any specific moment in time and ask if my criteria for glorifying God is even correct.
   
   
3. The existence and identity of God: such an interesting question. I always keep coming back to the science-and-religion discussions. Just thinking about it can waste a good hour of time (as evidenced by my writing of this blog post). My views seem to have become much more "liberal", to use the umbrella term. I can never be completely sure of any view, so at any time, I guess I tend to rate the views I know by some rough estimation of how likely it is that that view is true (given current knowledge). The existence of God is hard enough; the identity and nature of God are even more difficult.
   
   The question of evolution is especially interesting. Ray always gives great points I can't answer, but there's so much evidence and a massive scientific consensus behind macroevolution as well. Yet, questions arise; not necessarily complicated theological questions and consequences (though those exist too), but simple ones as well. What do we do about the first 11 chapters of Genesis if humans evolved? How does this tie into evolutionary psychology and psychology's interface with ethics and morality? What does this tell us about the dualistic idea of an immaterial soul? And many more.
   
   Thankfully, like Dr. Greg Boyd and a German theologian whose name escapes me now (EDIT: Jurgen Moltmann), I feel like I can always approach Christianity and God through Jesus whenever the rest of the science-religion discussion becomes too much for me to handle. For the moment, it seems as if Jesus is a concrete example of a historical anomaly, an event that changed much about the world. I may not know what I believe about science and religion, but I think I believe in the Resurrection, and I finally am beginning to understand why Paul writes that without the Resurrection, our faith is in vain.
   

At the same time, at the encouragement of my Dad, I've started trying stocks, thought about getting a job, wondered about how I will make new friends, wondered about how I will ever meet a girl, and on and on and on. It's difficult growing up - I don't know exactly what changed, but somewhere along the line, whatever box wrapped up all my thoughts into a nice simple package ended up tearing, and everything just fell out, expanded, and made a very complex mess.

Yet, at the same time, I don't think I could go back to the way I used to be. Everything's more complex, everything's messier after coming out of the box, but things become more accessible. Once things come out of hiding from that simplistic box, they're there to examine more closely, understand more fully, and interact with more wholly.

credit where it's due

I had a facebook binge tonight, where I looked at one picture, and ended up scrolling through about 500 pictures where I was tagged. With each picture, I saw a scene, a memory, an event of some sort, and was able to relive it and recall it pretty clearly. As I did so, memories of other people popped up, and I felt an intense longing to connect with a lot of these people that I hadn't talked with in a while. A few I did; the rest, I hope to.

But, as the title of this post says, I have to give them credit where it's due - walking back through these years makes it clear to me how much I owe these people that appear in my life, in terms of any character development I might have made, in terms of the fun I had, in terms of things I learned. For many, I wish I could write a long letter to them telling them the specific ways in which they impacted me and the reasons for which I remember them.

Eventually, I have to go to sleep (which I plan to do after this blog post), but these pictures and reminiscing kept me up for a good 2 hours. So if you had anything to do with me during my last 4 years and summers, there's a good chance I remembered you in these last two hours, that I wished you were still close enough for me to just walk over and talk to you, and that I thanked you for the ways you changed, taught, and influenced me in my time with you.

an open confession and an open question

I have had my ego crushed once again. I confess two things. One, I hate expectations - it feels like the very existence of an expectation of me adds pressure. Laura Rabalais made a comment once that I tend to be very good at false modesty. In every single one of my "talents" (guitar, math, cooking?, etc), I have found people whose skills surpass mine, by which I measure "talent".

So when someone introduces me as a great bassist (or whatever), there's always a moment where I freeze for a second and hope that the people listening aren't themselves great bassists (or whatever), or they might see right through me and know that I'm just a fake who deceives people less knowledgable on a subject. Yet, I still thrive on compliments - I like to surprise people and show them I'm more than what they'd expect.

Two, I have a very difficult time moving past a failure. I've noticed this in small ways, like when I make mistakes on tests or homeworks. If it ever happens to be that the mistake is a stupid one (which happened recently with a test), I tend to obsess over it, suddenly lose drive over everything. It happened at Rice a lot; however, it probably showed most clearly when my first real dating relationship ended. For the next year (and possibly even longer; I kid you not), I'd obsess over what I could have possibly done differently to change the course of things, so much so that I feel I've changed my views on relationships because of this.

In other words, I have issues with not exceeding other's expectations. I feel like I'm being cheated when other people see me on an off day, and in the chance that my best doesn't stand up to someone else's skill level, it's usually ok because they saw me at my best and usually my best is above what they'd expect of the average person. But failing to live up to what people expect of me makes me feel like I've failed a qualifying exam to be accepted, noticed, or to be part their lives.

Somehow, I can't seem to accept that, for some people, my character and my person are more than just the sum of my actions and abilities.

-----------------------------

Now for the open question. Are the existence of transcendent moral imperatives and the existence of God necessarily mutually exclusive? i.e., can there be a moral law without a moral lawgiver? I read a blog argument where a commenter noted that concluding God from moral law is simply pushing the question back a step. Quoting his comment

Why can’t morality just “be”, in the same way — to your mind — God just “is”? i.e., If God doesn’t require an explanation/origin, then why should morality?

Thoughts?

safe

I find I'm writing songs again. They're much different than the ones I used to write. In retrospect, I think those old songs were meant most of all to elicit a certain type of reaction and response (from girls), and to have them think I was a certain type of guy. Granted, I believed that was who I was, but I think I tried extra hard to show everyone else I was the shy, romantic, slightly nerdy, super enthusiastic type of guy.

These new ones seem different. When I wrote my old songs, I wrote them in a lighter mood that could be described as daydreaming, imagining scenarios that I would base a song off of. These new ones seem a heavier; maybe just a little less light. For example, I wrote about a first kiss - a little less creative than my previous songs about girls, but probably a little more mature in content as well.

I also started writing a song "Safe" - the words just sort of came out on their own, and I never imagined writing a song like this about being safe due to distance in my relationships with others. I never used to be scared of meeting people, of new relationships, and while I don't think I'm opposed to them now, I definitely have found myself more reserved and careful. Part of this is leaving college, I think; part of it is a change in my own personality. I feel more reserved, more cautious, and I don't think it's as easy for me to just be vulnerable and open with just anyone anymore.

Like the comic says, right? Love grants someone else power over you, and we never trust anyone as easily as we do the first time.