Hey God—this is me talking. This is the genuine me. The genuine me is divided, conflicted, and a hypocrite. The real me uses people for who they are to me rather than appreciating them for who they are to themselves.
And I must admit that this is the way I approached our relationship: it was transactional. It was me trying to obtain from you what I needed to obtain from myself: validation and acceptance.
But now I can say that I am at a peace between myself and myself. Between my two divided selves. Within my hypocrisy, I have found great and comforting truths. Not because many others are conflicted as well, but because I understand that this is who I am and who I want to become. Because as you know I cannot be a singular person. Because of my multiple identities and aspirations: Christian, writer, poet, novelist, teacher, lawyer, and lover.
And I thought that denying this truth to myself would make me happier; I thought that I had to choose between the multiple occupations I listed above. But I will not. No compromise was offered to me, but I will prove the haters wrong. I will prove that I can be great. I will be a great novelist, poet, teacher, and defender of faith and law that the world will know.
Not that you should think of me this way. I’m saying that this is my dream and it is grander than anything I can think of. It’s been my dream since I was little; I wanted to make slaves of men and women through words. I wanted to be a king. I will become that king of my dreams, but I must lay heft praise to the King of kings, Jesus Christ. If I were to be truthful and not give a hoot about what people think, Jesus Christ is a compelling reason for why I live. I haven’t read a lot on Buddhism or Mohammed pbuh or Judaism but I know these faiths do not work for me. I am being dogmatic. But that is who I am at least at this point. And this is why we broke up. Because the people around me are not Christians and I am, and I only realized this at Closer.
I say this prayerfully. This letter might hurt but I have to tell you the truth. I’ve cried; I’ve gotten angry; I’ve vented and ranted onto the page; I’ve stayed up nights and felt I couldn’t sleep; I’ve had nausea so terrible that it feels like my lungs are shriveling up; this was caused by the various stressors in my life. You’ve felt this too, I imagine, so here I am asking you for empathy. To me, empathy is love and love is empathy. What is it? Could we as humans truly understand empathy—what it feels like exactly to be in another’s mind?1
This is my thesis: we are ideological beyond belief and in ways we cannot yet acknowledge to ourselves. I am a dogmatic Reformed charismatic Christian who is pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage, pro-feminism, and pro-sexual-liberation in the Church. That might be contradictory to some people but this is where I have come to after 21 years of living. It makes sense to me because I love the people that have loved me. I love the criminals I meet at LIFT; I love my friends who have become or have stopped being drug dealers. But I love my dogmatic friends: my Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Muslim friends. I love my feminist vegan friends. I love my black, white, Asian, and Hispanic friends.
I quote from an agnostic-atheist-overall awesome human being, George Bernard Shaw:
You see things; and you say, ‘Why?’ But I dream things that never were; and I say, ‘Why not?’
I say not why not? Why not sexual liberation in the church? Perhaps the people reading this blog agree. I think the best way to do it is to do it within the context of the system. I want to change the Church. And I want to change minds. I don’t want to be a pastor; I want to lead atheists, agnostics, and believers. I want to represent Muslims and all other others who are discriminated against: the rich, the poor, and the middle class.
Because poverty is a killer, but not just poverty of material things. Poverty of spirit leads to despair and eventually death, although some deaths we see and do not grasp that the dead person was living a slow death for years.
People have thought that Christian and intellectual are mutual exclusive categories: that moral beings cannot subscribe to Reformed Christian thought. I say I am both these things and they disbelieve me. If they believe me, you God, the readers of this blog, and I are in agreement.
In Jesus' name,
John
Notes:
1. That’s the trap. That’s the trap of solipsism. We’ve put empathy on a pedestal—as something to be practiced without regard to personal well-being. Mother Teresa is a saint but her love too is solipsistic. This is not to say MT acts in self-interest but that when she does her work in a religious context, the work is inescapably ideological. All “work” is inescapably ideological. Althusser says ideology interpellates us as subjects. It’s true. No one can escape ideology, and to do so is to subscribe to a particular ideology (aptly called Unbelievably Naive Positivism, cue DFW).
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