The Ryno Pen

First of all, let me bid a cordial welcome to my new reader, Seiki Mukwa, whose comment on a previous post has given me much cause for thought.

This post will follow the structure of the history it describes: haphazard and meandering.

Let’s begin with an extract from a book…

 'Now, Kitty, let's consider who it was that dreamed it all.
This is a serious question, my dear, and you should NOT go on
licking your paw like that--as if Dinah hadn't washed you this
morning!  You see, Kitty, it MUST have been either me or the Red
King.  He was part of my dream, of course--but then I was part
of his dream, too!  WAS it the Red King, Kitty?  You were his
wife, my dear, so you ought to know--Oh, Kitty, DO help to
settle it!  I'm sure your paw can wait!'  But the provoking
kitten only began on the other paw, and pretended it hadn't heard
the question.

  Which do YOU think it was?

The above is the last portion of Through The Looking Glass, a book by a man named Charles Lutwidge Dodson. I’m quoting it for a number of reasons:

1. The idea of experience, and the personal reality of the person doing the experiencing, is important here. It’s a minefield (not your’n!), and this is not an attempt to redefine your beliefs or establish absolutes. Indeed, my intent is to endow absolutes with that conditional form of reality framed by the Observer Effect.
2. The person speaking is uncertain, despite experience. In this state, the speaker is free to retrace experience and reason some more, add reference and subsequent learning, and arrive at a state of more informed uncertainty. (Of course death is the Absolute, but it’s also “pens down and turn over your papers!”)
3. The book is Through The Looking Glass, not “Alice Through…”, “Alice’s Adventure’s Through…” or any of the variations folk-wisdom gives it. The author was named Charles Lutwidge Dodson, although he wrote the book as “Lewis Carroll”. There is a large gulf of perception between the Nice Children’s Author (Carroll) and the man Dodgson. The product of a marriage between first-cousins, a misfit academic with an unnaturally keen interest in little girls that went as far as nude photography: the images of Dodgson is neatly separated from Carroll as if both were filed two different office cabinets. Isn’t the deceiving effect of culture and accepted wisdom interesting?

So, the preamble brings us to the starting point, equipped with a few tools to dig for gems of new understanding in the midden of my past.

>inventory

You have the following:
Willingness to look again at events, texts and social constructs, and examine them on the basis of what they do, not what they are said to do.

The ability to step outside the story and look at things in a clinical manner. William Of Ockham has loaned you his razor to cut away the cobwebs.

My path to belief was beset with pressure: initially from family, later from peers. The tipping point came, appropriately enough, at a time when I wasn’t standing on both feet.

The Bloke ^{WHO TALKS IN SMALL CAPS} is a great unsettler. I was (arguably) on the way to a breakdown anyway, office politics being what they were, and really didn’t need any more Big Stressy Events.

Still, they came along. First I had to CPR a good friend who was having a Jimi Hendrix Moment, complete with unconsciousness and inhalation of his own upchuckery. Then, barely a week later I managed to do my back some serious, lasting damage, only to have my job security tweaked out from under me while I recovered and got back to being able to walk.

I’m going to have to confess that I was a candidate for delusional thinking at that time. The family tendency toward showboaty charismatic churches was a contributing factor. The accident was a contributing factor too: apparently disaster or near-death does this sort of thing.

When one finds a hammer (and worse yet, imagines the hammer is Ordained For One by Forces Beyond The Ordinary), the whole world seems to be made of nails placed for the manifest destiny of being hit upon.

I would have left the government job anyway: it was pretty well dead in the water, and I was Damaged Goods in a career sense as well as physically. The religious conversion did make me more acceptable to family, so a move back to Queensland looked like a divinely-guided decision. It was the most likely option anyway.

And all these people trying to get me speaking in tongues: the glossolalia thing! (Let’s note that there’s a lot of emphasis on this in the charismatic circles I moved in. When looking for a description that might help my readers unacquainted with the practice, I came up with a reference that asserts, among other interesting points, that Mohammed did the speaking-in-tongues bit. I recommend it to Reader Mukwa for perusal.)

In order to keep things short, I’ll give only passing mention to the Backstage Helper at Toowoomba’s Spring St AOG Church who urged me to “help God along… make a few silly noises and it’ll start.” It didn’t.

Ironically, one day the glossolalia barrier cracked and I can access this mindstate even now, after my faith has gone away and I am “just doing it” for no reason whatsover, although it has become a habit no more noble or consider than unconsciously picking my nose.

Tongues is not the be-all and end-all anyway, if one goes by the words in 1 Corinthians. Love, kids… and that’s love for all the people who ain’t like you, too. Oh, sorry, did you order the Happy Clapper Meal without the Pickle Of Love? My bad, my bad, my maxima bad.

There’s a recent blog post here that absolutely MUST be read on the matter of tongues and pentecostal excitement. Apparently the Not Taking It Seriously is the key.

Anyhow, that takes me to approx 1000 words, so this history is going to want serialisation.

Remember: It can all be real for you if you like, and I have no problem with your ownership of it. For my part, I have been left feeling like a number of people have deceived me, for a variety of reasons I can only conjecture at: money, prestige, misplaced evangelistic zeal, and the same unnamed urge that turns reformed smokers into frenzied full-time anti-smoking activists (overcompensation, maybe?).

In the words of a wise man: “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” - Mahatma Gandhi.

To be continued.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 13th, 2008 at 11:43 pm and is filed under charismatic churches, ex-charismatic, ex-church, fundamentalism, hillsong, rant, religion, ritual, scams, spirituality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.