looking up

It is almost the end of my birthday. My 32nd celebration of my inauguration into this world.

I just came in from a few minutes of staring at the stars from my mom's back porch. It has been a while since I have seen so many stars. You can only see the brightest ones from the city so it seems that your focus in drawn downward, rather than upward.

It is easy to loose hold of oneself in a place where you feel rushed, and pressured and torn in many different ways. Looking up sometimes gives one some perspective, a realization that there is so much more in the universe than waking up, working, coming home and sleeping.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam all tell us that there is something flawed about humanity. That we tend to "sin" or in more familiar language, make mistakes. For some of us, that is our character, we constantly make the same mistakes over and over, these are the black sheep, the family members we don't talk about, the guy that everyone knows as a living example of how not to be. Then there are some of us who are generally on the straight and narrow, but they make a mistake, and it is not something you would expect. Those people react in different ways, usually based on how they view themselves.

They can either hide their mistakes or make them known. Hiding is a function of not acknowledging that one has made a mistake. It is the action of trying to erase the mistake by making it fade with time. But that mistake will always live with whoever committed it and it will shape their future actions. Owning up to one's mistakes allows them to be put to rest however, acknowledging that one has erred allows that person to call on help from others to help prevent that error in the future.

Since I don't profess to know a significant amount about Judaism or Islam, I can't say I know how they deal with the idea of sin. In Christianity(at least in Orthodoxy), sin is dealt with as a disease, something that infects a healthy organism and that organism tries to fight it off. One characteristic of Orthodoxy is that sin is not transmitted at birth, meaning that a baby is sinless and has the possibility of staying sinless. What is transmitted is the potential, even the propensity toward sin. Think of this as analogous to someone that is very fair being born in the desert. They have the possibility of avoiding sunburn and eventually sun cancer, but they are far more likely to get a sunburn and eventually a complication because of it. The tools of the church are supposed to be like sunscreen, in a way. You confess to prevent yourself from hiding and letting your mistakes and errors fester in secrecy, you pray for forgiveness to attempt to unburden yourself so that you can have the strength to avoid those mistakes in the future. This is a long, and arduous process of self-perfection that tries to account for the fact that humans aren't perfect.

I suppose in some ways I find that process beautiful and simple and incredibly hard to put into practice for myself. I come from a family and background, where emotions are bottled up and one tried to fix stuff on their own. My heart is full of misdirected pride and the tendency to hide my mistakes because I don't want others to know that I make mistakes. But, trust me, I do, in spades. Whenever I do something that is really out of character for me, I hide that more. I convince myself that it will be better off if I hide it and just focus on avoiding that behavior in the future. This routine never works and I end up disclosing my mistakes at a time when the consequences of those errors in action and judgement have been compounded by the secrecy and hiding. In general, I am not very good at being a Christian. Thankfully, I am not asked to be good at it, but rather to not give up and be honest with myself.

This last year has been hard, and I have to work on being better about acknowledging that I make mistakes. I have made more mistakes than there are stars in the sky. Perhaps my vision of myself has just been blurred the way the light of the city obscures the billions of little stars shining above me. Sometimes I just have to be in a dark place to see things more clearly.

Lost time

I haven't posted in a while, but that doesn't mean my mind hasn't been active and processing the relationship between day to day life and the eternal. Eternity is an interested word, many people conflate the idea of eternity with time unending, or a continuation of time with out end. I prefer to think of eternity as an alternative to temporality, living outside of time and its constant forward motion. Some religions believe that there is an immutable soul that passes from the temporal to the atemporal, or from this world to eternity at the time of death. There are lots of wonderful ways to express this poetically, but for the most part our knowledge of life after death is either divinely inspired, raw/cold observation or comforting suppositions. I do not claim to be divinely inspired, and I have a hard time saying there is nothing after this life, so I usually grasp at ways to comfort myself when a loved one passes.

Recently my mother-in-law, passed away. I used to call her Mama Ro. She was funny, and lively and as my wife and I come to find out she seems to have lived many lives. We took on the task of cleaning out her apartment and saw the types of things she collected, pictures of herself, family and friends, clothes, shoes, and lots of memories. As we continued this work over the last month or so, I had a chance to get to know more about Mama Ro before I met her. To see some of the back story in her life and to fix a picture of her in my mind. I have been trying to understand her more so that I have stories to tell my son about his grandmother. In this way, she has passed from this world to eternity for me. She has fixed herself, outside of the turbulences of the constant march of time and become a whole person, from start to finish.

One time I was describing to a friend the impact a person has on the world, and history and the future. I described each person as a stone thrown into the lake of human history. As the stone enters the lake, ripples vibrate outward, affecting firstly the immediate surroundings of that person, but eventually the entire lake is somehow affected by that one person, and the ripples, while they diminish, never actually end. This is another way that a person achieves eternity, as they affect others, even in the smallest way. Sometimes this affect is good, sometimes it is bad.

I will miss Mama Ro, I am glad I got to do the work of cleaning out her home and hope that I can help share her impact on the world with my son.

Walking

In Boston, Spring is tantalizingly close. The plants look a little more perky, the sky promises warmth, the wind has a little less bite, and there is light out when I get home from work. I can feel my spirits rising. My desire to be outside is getting stronger. Soon the trees on Bay State Road will blossom and the street will be fragrant and colorful.

Boston in the Spring is like awakening from a black and white dream to be reminded that the world is in color. You can almost feel the pulse of the city quickening.

On Wednesday, I went to a client downtown before work. It was early and the T wasn't packed. The air still had a chill, but it wasn't the same as a month ago. I did my work and left, and walked toward BU through Boston Commons, and the Gardens. The pigeons weaved in and out of my path. There were people hustling to work, homeless people sleeping in tattered lumps, new flowers planted so they will bloom early in the spring, and a sense of relief that winter might just be over. But as any good Bostonian knows, saying winter is over in Mid-March is just madness. But maybe, the winter that clouds up our minds is lifting and we can start to dream in color again.

Tired

I just feel tired, stagnant. I spend my days fixing things when I want to explore. I thought this morning about how the day felt like Scotland did so many years ago. I tried looking at the street I was walking down in a new way. But all I saw was my memories. Fourteen years of memories. I have spent nearly half my life in Boston. I remember how when I was a freshman here for undergrad I just wanted to finish school and leave. I felt like the place, the tenor of the place was hostile to me. I was an invader in a new town and it desired me gone. Now I go other places and I miss Boston. But when I am at home I miss the feeling of seeing the world as a big place for me to learn about. I am itching to see new things, and I want to be able to see new things here, for convenience sake, but every where I look it is something I know. The neighborhood I live in now is the first neighborhood I saw in Boston. Sometimes I hear my senior year AP Lit teacher saying, "it is the circularity of the novel". Is my life some novel with a circular narrative. Am I just a living version of "Light in August". Where is the burning house? Where is my mixed heritage, my outsiderness. I fear getting old sometimes, not because of death but because I feel like I am getting farther and farther from greatness. Perhaps it was profound hubris, but when I was young I thought I really could be or do anything. It wasn't just that my mom told me that, I actually thought I had the capacity to be as great, in an epic sense, as I wanted to be. As I get older that feeling is fading. I feel myself edging towards complacency and normalcy. It is all just making me tired.

Why Christians should read Nietzsche

I consider myself a Christian. I can't really identify which denomination or say that I agree with church doctrines one by one. I am even skeptical about parts of the Bible as historical truth(that doesn't mean there isn't value there however). But still, through all my imperfections, misguided notions, bad decisions, hypocritical actions and thought, etc. I am Christian.

I had a number of years where I knew that I was Christian, in that I believe Jesus was the Son of God, become man, to proclaim the kingdom of Heaven and then die as a subsitute for our own deaths, but I didn't say that I was a Christian. If someone asked I would say "I didn't know", or "maybe". This period of doubt was in many ways inspired and instigated by a philosopher named Frederich Nietzsche. Nietzsche is pretty famous and very maligned. Many call him anti-semitic, but I think they are wrong. Many say he hated religion, which may be true but was not his point. The essence of Nietzsche is to force one to live their lives because they have chosen to live it.

Complacency, blind acceptance, the meaningless sway of fad and mindless obedience was disgusting to him. It is ironic that the Nazi's justified their horrible campaign of suffering and conquest using his words, he would have found the mindless mobs committing the atrocities to be like sheep, subhuman, and would have been offended that they used him to do it.

What Nietzsche did to me was make me choose to be a Christian. He made me look at what I was and make a choice about my identity that I would either accept or reject. I didn't want to call myself something because I felt like my friends thought I should be, or my family had always been, or I was born that way. I have a natural tendency towards analyzing my beliefs and behavior anyway, but this particular philosopher, challenged me to believe in Christianity because that is what I believe, not because someone else wanted me to believe it.

I am attracted to Christianity for the same reason I like reading Nietzsche or even Plato. It is a challenge. I am challenged to identify myself, to make choices about who I want to be, what I want to do, how I want to think. I will admit, I do not make the same choices as the churches I have attended, I will never. But I will consider why those churches make those choices and choose my own actions accordingly.

Even if you aren't a Christian or don't believe in God, I would recommend reading Nietzsche. Start with something like "Twilight of the Idols", it is short and it was written late in his career when he had started to more clearly form his worldview. Read it once quickly, don't worry about the meaning, then read it again and think. Don't be literal, consider what the words mean and then think about your life. By the way, this is the way I read the Bible as well. I try do away with the preconceptions about the text like that it must be historical fact, but I read it to see what it might mean, or what it might have meant at the time.