Christians as Cannibals

In the church where I grew up, communion was little squares of Ben’s white bread and a small plastic glass of Welch’s grape juice. I remember when I was really young being jealous of everybody who got a special snack in the middle of the service. Jealous enough that, once my parents were done with their grape juice, I used to sick my tongue in to lick up the last little bit of juice.

One particular Good Friday Service, when I was almost through being a teenager, sitting with Optimus Prime, my brother, and various other young guys from the church, and trying to stifle laughter through the entire thing. A woman with terrible terrible hairspray hair had just finished singing a horrible version of some Sandi Patti song, and someone made a joke about the bride of Frankenstein, and that started the chain reaction. It’s amazing how trying to stop laughing because it’s so inappropriate only makes it worse. And just when we thought we had it under control, a pastor with a strong Scottish accent prayed over the communion, and it started all over again.

Pastor Goofy, from the Art Church had some interesting ideas about communion that sort of spiraled out of control. He thought the purpose of communion was to eat together, not just remember the death of Christ. In that sense, he argued, any meal you have with a group of Christians was communion. To illustrate his point, we had communion with coffee and a muffin. Those who weren’t entirely offended just thought it was lame.

The night before I moved to Waterloo, I had communion with Optimus Prime in a rock overlooking the harbour. We had real wine, and French bread. We served each other and said the little “this is my body, which is broken for you…” stuff, but both of us agreed by that point that we had no idea what that actually meant, or if we believed it at all. A wave of fog came across the water and I joked that this is where everything fades to black and the credits come up. I was leaving and this was over. It was a little freaky. I ended up at home that night, with almost a full bottle of wine, and packing yet to do, but I couldn’t leave the wine behind. I decided the best thing to do was finish it off. I would drink it slow, I thought. It would be ok. But since I was an inexperienced drinker, I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into. I spent the next day with my first hangover, in the cab of a pickup truck with my brother and my father.

I stopped taking communion a long time ago. I figured it was dishonest to commemorate something I didn’t really believe in, and that if I did participate dishonestly it would dirty the experience of everyone else around me. Plus, I didn’t want to participate in a religious ritual just because I was embarrassed not to. I was still uncomfortable, so instead of defiantly passing the tray along when I went to church on a communion Sunday, I conveniently left to go to the bathroom. The first time I did this at Wilma’s parent’s church, she was very upset. We were actually at come sort of camp that her church was visiting. I told her I couldn’t do it because I didn’t believe in atonement. That, if I were to take communion, I would have to reinterpret it and have everyone present understand that I was reappropriating the symbols. She went and got two glasses of grape juice and two hunks of break (since in this church people ripped pieces off a huge loaf of bread… interesting symbolism, the church ripping the body of Christ into little bits and consuming it…). We had communion together by a stump overlooking a lake.

This Easter Sunday, I was trapped between my Grandmother and my parents when I suddenly realized there might be communion. We were sitting in the front row, listening to my cousin-in-law Pastor Arthur preach about the deception of pluralism, and I had already gone to the bathroom. I have never told my parents, or any of my extended family that I don’t believe in atonement anymore. They aren’t blind, they see I don’t ever go to church anymore, but at least some of them think I have just backslid, that I still truly believe, I just don’t act it. I prepared myself to come out to my family. Finally, a big holiday controversy that I hear so much about on television and movies. My family never has those, and now I would be the first. I was the official black sheep. And then I realized that there was no communion on Easter Sunday. That was on Good Friday. So my secret was preserved for another day.

Oh God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?

Another song I played all the time on my radio show was Sarah Mclachlan’s Dear God.

It’s a cover of an XTC song, which is clearly anti-Christian. In the video to the song, a boy is screaming the words of the song to a bunch of people sitting in a tree, shaped interestingly, like a cross. And at the end, when you get the strong beats, he chops down the tree.

But clever person that I am, I turned it around. Prayer should not be interrupted by doubt or waning belief, I said. Look through the Bible, at the Psalms, at the Prophets, at Job, even Jesus Himself. They all prayed without doubt, all cried out to God asking for explanations. But the important thing, I said, was that none of them stopped praying.

And years later, that is exactly what I have done.

It’s a gradual process this falling away. It starts with questioning, leads to escape, and then to disbelief.

I used to pray. Even after I left the church. As I have said, I left the church because it didn’t match with my perception of God. I used to pray all the time. Every night.

I started using fewer words, and spent more time speaking in tongues. It was around then I wrote the piece I had published.

Then I started meditating more. Not saying anything, just remaining open.

But I can do that all the time, I thought. I don’t need to use a candle. So I didn’t.

And if God isn’t some mean old man keeping track of how many times I “pray” (for by then it was surely only a vague relationship to what most people refer to as prayer) then in the long run, it doesn’t matter how many times I pray. So I prayed less.

And when I did pray, I didn’t know why I was praying. The “opening myself up to God” thingy seemed like a worthless exercise. What’s the difference between that and, say, whacking off? Except that stroking my pole gives me a sense of pleasure and euphoria. So I tossed more than I prayed.

Slowly, I started to question my belief in God at all. I mean, everything that I felt when I prayed could easily be simulated, and seemed to lead people in contradictory directions. I had read lots and lots about how people are manipulated into experiences of spiritual ecstasy, which made me trust those experiences a lot less. The Bible wasn’t really a good reason to believe in God anymore. Logic didn’t support the existence of a God (or at least, no more than the lack of a God). What was left? I certainly didn’t have that driving sense that there was a God. I had nothing. Praying seemed pointless, so I outright avoided it.

There have been a few times when I have prayed in the past few years. Still no words. And not times of desperation, as one might expect. Times of quiet contemplation. I feel something, but nothing that solidifies a belief in God. It could be my charkas aligning for all I know (although I doubt that since my posture is still awful).

That’s part of the reason my lack of faith feels like a loss. For the longest time, I have had no firm beliefs to replace it with, no spiritual sense of the world, and no clear, concrete one either.

I have become a wanderer, in a dark woods, without even the Lord to guide me.

The Jesus That Just Wouldn't Die

A personal review of Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

Both Flannery O’Connior’s novels feature characters who are trying to escape their faith. In Wise Blood, Hazel Motes tries to escape his faith in Jesus.

First, he tries to show everybody that he doesn’t need salvation, that he doesn’t need to be saved from his sin because there is no sin. And to prove it, he decided to buy a night with a hooker just to prove he can without any guilt, since there is no sin.

When that doesn’t work out so well, and leads more to him feeling embarrassed, he decides what he needs to do is start the “Church Without Christ.” He stands on top of his car and preaches that people don’t need salvation. People stop and listen for a while, but he only garners a handful of followers: a con artist who pretends he’s blid to get money, his daughter, and Enoch Emery. The con artist begins to corrupt Hazel’s idea of the church by asking for money, while Enoch feels like God is leading him to something and just follows “his blood,” which in the end, leads him to present Hazel with a replacement for Jesus in his new Church.

Hazel is disgusted by his lack of success in the church, as well as with his followers, so he decides to move on to the next town. He is excited by his new plans and stops to think about what he will do in the new town. He ends up drifting off to sleep, and wakes up to find a police officer near his car, which rests at the top of a hill. Hazel, unwilling to submit to any authority but his own, talks back to the police officer, who promptly pushes his car down the hill. Hazel watches dumb struck as his car, his church, and his means of escape crashes.

Without an escape, he finally succumbs to the wild ragged Jesus in his head, calling him off into the darkness. He blinds himself, and spends the rest of his days following the Jesus in his head, all the way back to Jerusalem where Jesus is born.

Yeah, he sounds crazy, but this is the kind of faith I respect, and sometimes even envy. The kind that you can’t escape, the kind you fight against but can’t get rid of, the kind that haunts you when you try to ignore it, the kind that will make you miserable until you give in to it.

Few people in the evangelical world have this faith, or at least, few people show this faith so others can see it. They prefer to show a faith that makes perfect sense, that makes everything better, and is perfect. They prefer to think of doubt and contradictions as enemies and obstacles.

But those few, those who when presented with the doubt and contradictions simply say “I know it doesn’t make sense, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s right anyway,” are the people whose faith I sometimes want.

I seem to be on the other side. Or at least I was for a little while. I wanted faith, wanted it badly, but no matter what I did, I couldn’t get past the doubt and contradictions. Any faith in Jesus as my savior seemed false. And when I finally accepted that, I didn’t feel victorious. For a little while, I felt liberated, but with that liberation came a sense of loss. Not only because I would never find comfort in the church, as I had hoped, but because it seemed I had given into something I was fighting against.

So even though I ended up on the opposite side of Hazel Motes, I understand the quiet resignation to a belief system (or lack thereof) you have been trying to avoid. It may feel right and natural, but it still feels like you lost the game.

Jesus of Fire

Giving up on Evangelical churches isn’t the same as giving up on God, or even Jesus as a divine figure.

In fact, it was my belief that God was a particular way that lead me to leave the Evangelical church in the first place.

I still prayed, although a little differently than I used to. And I still believed Jesus was, in some way, divine.

I got it in my head that the historical Jesus mattered less than the figure of Jesus. Even if Jesus was a fictional character, at that point, he still helped me understand God better. I saw it as a skin God could walk into.

Ok, here’s my cheesy Sci-Fi analogy. In the crappy crappy series Babylon 5, the Vorlon Race of aliens are always in an “encounter suit” because no other race of aliens could handle or understand what they really looked like. But with the suit, they could interact with people.

This was how I viewed Jesus. A character people could relate to. A starting point for understanding God.

My idea of Jesus had morphed quite a lot over the years. But at some point along the way, I wrote a poem. At the time of the poem, Jesus was especially representative of what I thought was divine inspiration to write:

Jesus

Night
And a hand
Fingers burning like candles
A body barely separate from darkness

Reaching
Touching Me
Lighting my fingers
And a choir of moans and sighs and shrieks

Closing
Now a fiery fist
Pushing between my ribs
Flames rolling against the roof of my mouth

(1997)

Liberation Day

This is a cliché.

On March 17, 1999, I was getting ready to go to the Campus Church, and I was dreading it. I had already decided not to go to the Grape Church
anymore, but I hadn't given up on all Evangelical churches... yet.

But I started to think about why I hadn't. Why was I going to these churches and trying to be a part of them if I clearly had different beliefs. I couldn't authentically participate in the activities they held, and at the same time, I couldn't protest the activities without looking like either a backslider, a troublemaker or both.

So then I decided to stop. Stop trying to be an Evangelical. I had been thinking about it for a while, thinking that this was my last chance to figure out a way to fit in there. And on March 17, 1999, I realized the chance was over.

George Michael's "Freedom" was on Much Music as I got ready to go to the Campus Church for the last time.

Afterwards, I sat on the sunny deck of the grad house bar with some classmates and discussed my decision, and my intention to get drunk that night. We also discussed the role of secrecy in society and whether religion was really "the opiate of the masses" or whether there was something more to it.

We discussed this, of course, over beer.

Through the course of the night, I drank more beer than I ever had before. Eventually, I couldn't taste it anymore. But I was happy.
This was the first time I had intentionally gotten drunk.

I also picked up. Unfortunately, I was too drunk to notice.

I went home with a very sexy, very available classmate, but I was so drunk, that when she kissed me, all I could do was smile dumbly at her. It didn't occur to me until the next morning that she was interested in more than a goodnight kiss.

I spent the next two days nursing my hangover, and other than that, feeling pretty damn good about being Evangelical-free.

Churches

1. Family Church: I once wrote a poem, as part of a writing exercise that summed up my relationship to this church in my youth. It wasn’t particularly poetic, but it was able to sum it up in a few ideas: that my parents brought me to church two weeks after I was born, and I didn’t miss a Sunday unless I was sick until I was in high school.

But that is only partly true. When I was eight, the church split, and my family went with the Pastor who was kicked out. We had church at the Wandalin Inn for almost a year. Then we went back. At the time, I was just happy to see Optimus Prime again (his family stayed), but now that I’m older, I realize that the families who left were mostly lower-middle class and the ones that stayed, the ones who got the Pastor kicked out in the first place, were upper-middle class.

If I knew what was going on, I would have been disillusioned by church a long time ago.

Instead, I joined the youth group, and then the youth group leadership. I took ,y role seriously, especially when Pastor Donald Duck became the youth pastor. He made me believe that a revival was really going to happen at the church, and it would start with the youth group. But he was also a loud mouth who liked to get people riled up. I ended up being the go between when he offended people because I wasn’t afraid to stick up to him. We had that kind of relationship him and I. He thought I was wise.

When he left, and there was no revival, I started to feel like maybe it was all hype. Well, the feeling started before he left, but it grew even bigger when was gone.

I was also involved in sound (which was a big deal for this church) ushering and various other duties.

I still go back now and then. One summer, after I stopped going to church, I even filled in for my Dad cleaning the place. Very weird to have all that time alone in a place where you literally grew up, and then essentially rejected.

2. Art Church: Pastor Goofy seduced me with talk of a church that would be open to sharing all kinds of ideas and forms of worship, a church that would emphasize art and artistic expression. I was enamoured. Unfortunately, Goofy was a salesperson. He knew what to say to everybody, what everybody was looking for in a church, and there was no way it could live up to all those expectations. As a result, a lot of the people who helped start the church left unsatisfied.

I stayed after the first exodus because I had a job there (working on Aporia). It didn’t help. Goofy couldn’t concentrate on any one task or idea long enough to make any concrete plans, and my frustration with working for him helped feed my dissatisfaction with church in general.

I left because I moved to Waterloo, and I visited when I went back (I even met Wilma there) but I never felt a part of it again, and when I moved back for good, I stayed away.

3. Campus Church: This wasn’t really a church, it was an intervarsity group, but it was all I had the first few months I was in Waterloo. I was church hopping then, looking for something. This gave me stability. But it also made me feel out of place. I had given up on atonement and the Bible, and that didn’t sit well with those people, so I had to either keep my mouth shut and play along or leave. I eventually picked the latter, and had the balls to tell a few people whom I had developed friendships with why I made my decision. It felt similar, I imagine, to coming out of the closet.

4. Grape Church: I actually attended a Vineyard church in Waterloo for about a month. That’s where I met Peter Parker. He was a Catholic who had a girlfriend that attended the church. The relationship didn’t last, and we both decided that we didn’t belong in an evangelical church anyway. So instead, we spent lots of time wandering through downtown Waterloo and Kitchener discussing atonement, the bible, hell and Catholicism. AND we are still friends.

5. Hungry Church: This was an Anglican church, and I really only went a few times, but I was a regular volunteer at their soup kitchen. It was the time I felt most useful to other human beings, not because my cutting of vegetables was so valuable, or my expert dish washing abilities were miraculous, but because when I sat down to eat, I sat down with people nobody else would, and I tried to have real conversations with them. And it seemed like, at least for a moment, they didn’t feel so alone. I actually made an impact on somebody else’s life. Even if it was a little one, and a fleeting one. The director of the soup kitchen talked to me about religion and my beliefs and prayed for me and hugged me and accepted me.

6 Mystery Church: One Sunday I wandered through the snow, not really sure where I was going, and I came across a church. I don’t even remember what kind. But I remember feeling like God was there. I remember feeling like it didn’t matter where I went to church, or if I went to church, I could find God anywhere if I just looked.

From Aporia to Aporia

I decided to continue working on Aporia after I left for Waterloo. The church had pretty much abandoned it to me anyway. I enjoyed writing opinion pieces, and I was starting to get submissions. Putting them togehter so it was visually attractive was fun too.

Unfortunately, by January the following year, I was getting so busy with school that I had spent three days without sleep and fucked up a major assignment in the process. So I decided to pare back on the things I was doing.

Aporia was one of the things that got cut.

By the end, I didn't believe in attonement or a literal interpretation of the Bible, and I was starting to feel a little disillusioned in my search for a church in Waterloo. But I still considered myself a Christian, just, a post-modern one, or an alternative one, or something different than what most Christians were.

Here is my last "My Word!"


Aporia: A Final Word

It's been a year and a half since Aporia began. I intended it to be a place where people could talk about the struggles they faced as Christians, not necessarily so they could get passed them, but so that they could have some company. I thought, and still think, the difficulties are inevitable, but knowing you're not the only one struggling makes them a little easier to endure.

To a certain extent, Aporia has done that. Submissions weren't as high as I would have liked, but what did go up allowed me and a few other people to share what they were thinking. And I received a few e-mails thanking me for the site and the articles. Despite this, I found it hard to keep my excitement about the site, and often focussed on other, more immediate projects that were demanding my attention.

Now I feel pulled in even more directions, almost all of them away from Aporia. So rather than try to fight it I've decided to give in and cancel any future updates for Aporia.

But that isn't really the end. There is a group of people (including myself) that is developing a web site/discussion group for people who struggle with their faith, and when it's ready, I'll be sure to post a link here. I will also be creating two new sites of my own, one focussing on writing and faith and the other on photography (I'll post those links when I'm finished as well). In the meantime, feel free to browse the archives of Aporia. I'll leave it up as long as I can.

Thank you all for visiting and writing. If nothing else you helped me to remember I'm not the only one struggling.

(2000)

The First Aporia

After the disappointment of Fires and Clouds, you’d think I’d leave the idea of a religious paper alone right?

Nope.

The summer before I left for Waterloo, I convinced the church I was attending to apply for three grants for summer employment to start a multi-faith newspaper. They only got approved for one position so I started to try to put together another paper by myself.

After just a few weeks, I decided it was impossible, so instead, I proposed an e-zine. The church approved, and Aporia was born.

Unfortunately, after my hard drive crashed a couple of years ago, I lost most of the content. All I was able to recover was the first and last editorial (cleverly called “My Word!”). I’ll post the first today and the last tomorrow.

“Sometimes the best map will not guide you
You can’t see what’s round the bend
Sometimes the road leads to dark places
Sometimes the darkness is your friend”

Those lines are from a Bruce Cockburn song called “Pacing the Cage” on his Charity of Night cd. They puzzled an early reviewer who interpreted them in light of Cockburn’s Christian faith. She couldn’t understand why the best map (which she assumed was the Bible) would not guide a person or how darkness could be friendly, since in the Bible darkness is almost always used as a metaphors for evil or a fatal lack of understanding.

But it made perfect sense to me. It ties into a theory I’ve had for a long time: Christianity is hard and doesn’t always make sense.

Of course I didn’t make this up all on my own. I had a lot of help from a woman named Flannery O’Connor who wrote a few novels and essays about that very theory.

In one of her novels, Wise Blood, she introduces the world to Hazel Motes, the son of a Southern Baptist minister who is trying to run away from God, but is having a little difficulty. He sees “Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he was not sure of his footing, where he might be walking on water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown. Where he wanted to stay was Eastrod with his two eyes open, and his hands always handling a familiar thing, his feet on the known track, and his tongue not too loose.”

O’Connor’s reference to walking on water might help put this all into perspective for some of you who are still a little sceptical. In Matthew 14, Peter steps out of a fishing boat and starts walking on water towards Jesus. Before Peter gets there, he realizes just how big of a storm he is walking into and he starts to get scared, and when he gets scared, he starts to sink.

Hazel has this in the back of his mind as he’s running away. For him, following Jesus means setting aside all the things he’s certain of and perusing something he doesn’t know down a path he’s unfamiliar with and can’t even see. He doesn’t have to see the storm to be scared. The unknown is frightening enough.

In the end he does give in and moves into the dark to persue Jesus. That’s where the novel ends, but somehow I don’t think it would be smooth sailing from there on in. Somehow I imagine Hazel Motes still afraid of the water, still not really sure where he’s going and how he’s going to get there, still cautious about taking another step deeper into the darkness, even though he is moving towards Jesus, “the pinpoint of light.”

This whole process can be summed up in one word: aporia. Aporia is one of those neat Greek words that means a whole bunch of different things at the same time. It’s when you don’t know where to go next; when you can’t see any path at all; when there are so many paths that you don’t know which one to choose; when you realize which path to choose but can’t or won’t take it...etc.

Somehow it describes my own faith as well. For me, being a Christian means not having all the answers, not understanding everything, not really knowing where I’m going and how I’m going to get there, but still perusing Jesus who I don’t really understand or know very well. Every once in a while I think I understand things, and I’ll try to put all the pieces together and make sense of everything. Then something usually happens that destroys all my theories and I’m left in the dark again, more confused than ever, more scared than ever. Sometimes, in those situations, I feel like giving up, or just staying where I am. Eventually, Jesus comes to me, swinging in the trees of my mind, calling me deeper into the darkness, towards Him. And I finally take another step.

That’s when I feel closest to God. When I’ve stopped trying to understand and explain everything, and I just give in.

And that’s why, sometimes the darkness is my friend.
(1998)

Tied Up in Knott

Anyone who knows me well will have heard me mention Michael Knott at least once. He was, of course, a mainstay on my radio show.

I can remember drooling over the new release of Aunt Bettys, Knott’s newly formed “secular” band. When I saw it come in to the radio station one afternoon, while I was on the air I nearly jizzed my pants. I scrapped whatever it was I had planned for the show and dedicated it to the new album.

Mike Knott has been playing music since the late 70s, although back then it was cheesy garage band stuff. Eventually it morphed into cheesy Christian garage band stuff, mostly under the name of his band Lifesavers.

However, in 1986, he came out with a new band and a new album that made people in the Christian marketplace sit up and notice. The band was “L.S.U.” (which stands for Lifesavers Underground), and the album was Shaded Pain. While some of it was still the cheesy Christian Rock people had come to expect, some songs explored some deeper issues of Christianity. The title track in particular took on the tendency of Evangelical Christians to hide behind a fake mask of happiness, and pressure others in the church to do the same.

While there are many fun songs in Knott’s repertoire, a lot of them after that point consisted of Knott putting his own flawed and painful Christianity on display. Throughout his career, Knott has experienced a divorce, disillusionment with the church, alcoholism, bankruptcy, and critics who constantly attacked his faith.

So when Knott attempted to leave the Christian Music Industry with the Aunt Bettys (originally Aunt Betty’s Ford, but was sued by the Ford Motor Company) he recorded "Jesus". The song begins in almost exactly the same way as a song he had put out just a few years earlier which was a desperate, quiet song of prayer by a man who had lost his girlfriend in a car accident. This song, however, featured a brutally honest Knott asking Jesus for money so he could stay out of jail, or at least a drink so he could forget about it a while.

Through all this, Knott maintains a Christian faith, one that holds firm to the idea of atonement. Again, something I respect, but don’t share.

I repeatedly held him up as an example, on my radio show, as someone who was able to maneuver the difficulties and contradictions of Christianity without losing his faith.

Another song, which sticks out in my mind, comes from his Grace Shaker album, probably my favorite. It’s called "Double" and it features Knott pondering the failures in his own life, and in those of the people around him without offering any simple way out. In fact, the only consolation for Knott is that Jesus accepts you anyway, no matter how much you drink and fuck up your family.

Turn the Tables Over and Get Out the Whips

I tried hard to play as many different songs as I could on my radio show. In fact, I kept records of which songs I played when so I could avoid playing stuff too often.

But I made some exceptions.

Sage’s “Den of Thieves” was one of those exceptions. It was on a Tooth and Nail sampler, and it is the only song I have ever heard by this band.

But it seemed to capture, more so than any other song, the righteous anger I felt when I was faced with how Christianity was marketed.

In my most Evangelical days, I never ever thought it was great that there were so many Christian trinkets for sale about everything, and I certainly never bought into the idea that Testamints were a form of ministry.

I even worked at a Christian Bookstore for four years under someone who believed it was a ministry. I was angered frequently at the commercialization of what I considered a sacred and valuable belief system.

Not to mention that my boss was a raging homophobe, who actually made it on a local gay paper’s list of top ten threats to the gay community in our fair city.

My point then, and still is, that evangelical Christians aren’t all materialistic wackos who think that everything that has “Jesus” on it is somehow beneficial for humanity. In fact, the people who produce that stuff are similar to the money changers in the temple.

“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, and said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.”

I was a firm believer that commerce and spirituality should be kept separate. It still makes my skin crawl when I see a TV preacher selling something he says people need to make it through their lives, or pass by a Christian trinket store and see the latest product rip-off (a-la Jesus in the style of the Pepsi logo on a t-shirt).

I’m not in any position to do it, but I would sure like to see someone put together “a scourge of small cords” and teach those capitalists a lesson.

Matches and Rain

At some point, I became enamored with Christian rock music. It was definitely after the early 90s, because I remember having Nirvana and Pearl Jam albums that I purged in a fit of guilt for having music that might have a demonic effect on my life.

I really thought this music was great, and I still do. But I found that most other people thought it was derivative trash. So, I dreamed of having a radio show where I could present my music to the world.

Eventually, I did get a radio show at the college radio station.

By the time I did, there were more reasons I wanted one. First, and most selfishly, I wanted to get free music. Second, I wanted to find some way to use the journalism skills I was learning. And thirdly, because I felt like I could do something that people weren’t doing.

My original idea was to intersperse music with stories from Christians I interview. They would describe the highs and lows of Christian life. My theory was that Christianity was hard, and that if Christians acknowledged that, instead of pretending it was all roses, they could better explain the benefits of Christianity to others.

Unfortunately, I had a bit of a break down before that idea took off. I was just finishing my paper (Fires and Clouds), I was trying to lead a campus Bible Study (“KCF, nothing to do with chicken”… boy I’m clever), I was still on the leadership committee at my church’s youth group, working a part-time job, oh, and I was trying to work on my bachelor degree. All this without the use of a car, relying on my mom and dad to truck me around. Finally, my body said “nope”, and my doctor said I had to pay attention.

So, I started to scale back. I remember going into the program director’s office and explaining my situation, and proposing a new show where I would spend more time talking about my own experiences instead of interviewing others. He agreed, and my show was born.

I named it “Matches and Rain”, essentially, what came in between the revelations of the fires and clouds.

My theme song was “Harder to Believe Than Not To” by Fleming and John. The haunting, strained vocals of Fleming McWilliams combined with the crunchy guitar of John McWilliams gave the song an added sense of turmoil which I liked.

The song was a cover of a song originally recorded by Steve Taylor. Taylor's version was accompanied by an orchestra, giving the lyrics a sort of quiet desperation. He was a controversial Christian Rocker because, although he was a staunch evangelical fundamentalist, he frequently criticized the church in his music. In fact, in one song (“I Want To Be A Clone”), he takes on the tendency of the church to encourage conformity rather than diversity.
I read somewhere that the song was inspired by something in the letters of Flannery O’Connor. This was how I first discovered the brilliance Ms. O’Connor. I dug through a copy of her letters and finally came across this passage from a 1959 letter to Lousie Abbot:

“I think there is no greater suffering that what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe. I know what torment this is, but I can only see it, in myself anyway, as the process by which faith is deepened. A faith that just accepts is a child’s faith and all right for children, but eventually you have to grow religiously as every other way, though some never do.

“What some people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe. If you feel you can’t believe, you must do at least this: keep an open mind. Keep it open toward faith, keep wanting it, keep asking for it, and leave the rest to God.”

This became the overarching theme of my radio show.

When I was explaining this to Sylvester later, during my Religious Studies degree, in a somewhat drunken and timid state, she shocked me.

“I don’t believe that,” she said. Sylvester was an older woman who was going back to school because she didn’t know what else to do with her life. She was a left-over hippy, who had, by her own admission, done too many drugs, was only casually into Wicca and native spirituality, enough to have a few icons around her house, but not enough to really be a “member of anything.

“I think life is hard whether you believe or not.” She said it laughingly, and somewhat drunk herself. But it completely changed how I viewed faith and Christianity.

Fires and Clouds

Nine years ago, when I was still struggling through my bachelor’s Degree, I decided it would be a great idea for me to put together a Christian Literary paper. I took on the task of collecting submissions, editing submissions, soliciting advertisers, doing layout, arranging a printer and distribution.

Boy was I an idiot.

I have never been so stressed in my life. My girlfriend at the time said I was almost intolerable. I got her\, and anyone who would listen to me, to help out just a little. I finished it in the end, and when I look back, I’m actually pretty impressed I was able to pull it off.

There was only one issue. After that I decided it was impossible for me to continue.

Here is my first and only editorial for Fires and Clouds:

The Pillar of fire and the pillar of clouds were more than God’s method of directing the Israelites after they left Egypt. The pillars were a constant reminder that God was with the Israelites, that God had led them out of Egypt and was still leading them, that God was going before them. If the Israelites had any doubt, they only had to look up and see the pillar of fire or clouds.

Whenever I watch a cloud mutating in the sky, or a fire consuming a pile of wood, I am reminded that God is with me. I know it’s not quite the same. God didn’t set the fires and clouds in the sky in order to remind me that He is there, but whenever I’m faced with these natural phenomena my thoughts eventually drift to God and I seem to enter into an intimate interaction with Him. God doesn’t use the fires and clouds to lead me in a physical direction, but while I’m watching them the things I’ve read in the Bible or heard in church begin to make a whole lot more sense to me. I gain an understanding that I didn’t have before which helps me make decisions.

I have the same kind of reaction to some of the poems and stories in this newspaper. They may not make a direct reference to God, or suggest a specific course of action, but somehow I end up thinking about God. I end up being drawn closer to Him and He shows me how to see things more like He does. It’s not the poems or the stories themselves. They’re just catalysts.

Of course, not everyone reacts to catalysts in the same way. A poem that strengthens my link with God may cause someone else to grimace and dismiss the work as useless gibberish. In the same way, a story that doesn’t have a big effect on me may lead someone else to the biggest revelation they’ve ever had. That’s why I’ve included some poems and stories that didn’t do a whole lot for me. The only real qualification that I had for submissions is that they were well written and different… and I had some help deciding that.

I put this paper together because I wanted to help other people find their own fires and clouds.

(1996)