The Slacktiverse

Board Business, June 30 2011

Don't forget to send in items that you want included in This week in The Slacktiverse July 2/3.

The three sections of the weekend post are:

The Blogaround

Any denizen of the Slacktiverse who has posted an article to their own website during since the previous weekend post is invited to send a short summary of that article along with its permalink to TBAT. That summary and link will be included in the next weekend blogaround. This will help to keep members of our community aware of the many excellent websites hosters by other members.

In Case You Missed This

Readers of The Slacktiverse can send short summaries of, and permalinks to, articles that they feel might be of interest to other readers.

Things You Can Do

Anyone who knows of a worthy cause or important petition should send a short description of the petition/cause along with its url to TBAT.

Deadlines

Please email all submissions to slackmods at gmail dot com. The deadline this week will be 2000 GMT on Saturday.

Urgent or time-sensitive announcements will be posted immediately rather than being held for the next regular "This Weekend" post.

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The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



101 Wednesday - Web Accessibilty

The purpose of the session is to share knowledge on issues of web accessibility. We would like to make this site easy to negotiate for all of its community and thus hope for feedback on ease of navigation / use / loading for everyone. Anyone who has questions, answers, or resources to share is encouraged to join the discussion. Since our goal is to remain as easy and user-friendly as possible, we ask that the technically experienced both avoid jargon and respect the different priorities of those who don't want to change their Internet habits. The purpose is to improve websites, not readers' tech skills. Answers, suggestions and links to resources will be collected and organized into a 101 guideline that will be permanently available here.

We would like to get the ball rolling by asking a number of questions.

1. Are there any parts of the website that are difficult to negotiate for those who are using a screen reader?


2. Are there any parts of the website that could be coded/designed in a way that would be more friendly to those using screen readers?


3. Would members of our community prefer that long posts were partially hidden "behind the fold", kept as they are now or continued (by hyperlink) on a sibling site?


4. Do any of our readers find parts of the site difficult to read/negotiate? If so can they suggestions as to what could be done to make it easier/more friendly?


5. In your opinion what makes a website easy to use / easy to read?


6. We would appreciate feedback if the embedded poll in the previous posting didn't work for you.

UPDATE: FEEDBACK REQUESTED

We are trying out three different spacing widths for the Blogs of the Slacktiverse section of the sidebar.
Section 1 begins with Aaaaaaaaaargh (dispensinggrace)
Section 2 begins with CarbyB
Section 3 begins with hagrus
Section 4 begins with Laiima

Let us know which spacing is easiest for you to read.


NOTE: Our primary concern is that there were members of our community who found the original spacing (see Section 4) difficult to read. The goal is find the design easiest to read not the design which is most attractive.

 

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The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



Board Business, June 28 2011

Ongoing Board Business

A couple of weeks ago TBAT mentioned a piece about sexual assault and asked the community's opinion about publishing it. Since then, we have been working with the author trying to edit it into a condition where it would be, if not entirely trigger-free, as safe-feeling for the women and sexual assault survivors of the community as was realistically possible. For reasons we cannot disclose in order to preserve confidentiality, this proved more difficult than we had hoped.

We regret to announce that we have been unable to reach an agreement with the author as to the acceptable limits of safety, and hence, after discussion with the author, it has been agreed that the piece cannot be published on this board.

While we value free discussion in the comments, TBAT feels that a higher level of caution must be exercised when it comes to publishing posts, as their greater prominence and 'official' status seem liable to increase any risk of harm to community members they may cause: we are concerned that vulnerable members will feel marginalized and unsafe on a board that puts an official imprimatur on posts that jeopardize their wellbeing. For this reason we will not be linking to this post in the blogaround should it be published elsewhere.

We do not moderate comments, so the author is free to link to it should it be published elsewhere as long as appropriate trigger warnings are appended; if they are not, TBAT will add them, and reserve the right to comment as individuals. This event should not be taken as a sign that TBAT will automatically reject other pieces on the subject of sexual assault: we assess every piece on a case by case basis.

Collaborative Roundtables

TBAT is organizing a series of semi-regular "101 Wednesdays." These are days which will be set aside for question and answer sessions about issues and/or topics of special interest or concern to members of our community.

The first of these sessions has been scheduled to begin late in the afternoon (EDT) Wednesday June 29 2011. The purpose of the session will be to share knowledge on issues of web accessibility. We would like to make this site easy to negotiate for all of its community and thus hope for feedback on ease of navigation / use / loading for everyone.. Anyone who has questions, answers, or resources to share is encouraged to join the discussion. Since our goal is to remain as easy and user-friendly as possible, we ask that the technically experienced both avoid jargon and respect the different priorities of those who don't want to change their Internet habits. The purpose is to improve websites, not readers' tech skills. Answers, suggestions and links to resources will be collected and organized into a 101 guideline that will be permanently available here.

In order to organize future "101 Wednesdays" TBAT would appreciate some feedback from our community. A large number of the great ideas were suggested on the June 15 (Nearly) open-thread Wednesday thread. A list of these ideas was generated (ordered simply by which was mentioned first).

TBAT asks community members on which of the following topics they would feel comfortable facilitating discussions and answering questions. TBAT will contact volunteers and arrange the question/answer session dates. [Note: this is not an exhaustive list of the topic that were suggested on the thread in question it is merely a list things mentioned on the first page of comments. It will take some time to deal with all of the interesting topics that were suggested.]

Select which topics you would be willing to facilitate / answer questions about.

Transgender Issues
Atheism
Colour Blindness
Mormonism
Cultural Appropriation/Loss of voice
ASD/Asperger's
Paganism
Depression
ADHD

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The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



At Patheos: TF: 788,400 moments so dear

Fred Clark has posted a new Left Behind post, TF: 788,400 moments so dear, at Patheos

This week Fred writes about pp. 398-399 of Tribulation Force.

Excerpt:

I also don’t want to read too much into a single preposition, but you may be wondering why someone would say “under our preaching,” rather than the more normal-sounding “through our preaching.” I suspect that if you attended Tim LaHaye’s church then the peculiar choice of that word would make more sense. In some circles it’s a common idiomatic reminder of who is expected to “submit” to whom. I have many friends and acquaintances who speak this way, sometimes telling me of what they’ve learned “under” their pastor’s teaching and never quite recognizing that the biggest thing they’re learning might be who is “under” whom.

[Fred Clark, TF: 788,400 moments so dear, June 27 2011, posted at Patheos.com]


Commentators who would like to share their responses to the new post with all of Fred's fans (old and new) can cross-post to both boards.

 

Depart from me, I never knew you

Trigger warning/disclaimer: This is a story of my experience with the Christian religion and its (primarily negative) effect on my life and values. It is categorically NOT any kind of indictment against Christians. Since the transition described in this post, I have come to develop great respect and affection for Christianity and its adherents which was oddly lacking during the years I spent as one of them.

When I was seven years old, my dad and I had a conversation about the Book of Life.

Much of the conversation has since been lost in the holes of my notorious Swiss-cheese memory, but I distinctly remember one comment of my dad’s. It has never left me.

"When you were born, God wrote down your name in the Book of Life. God wants everyone to be in his book. But some people reject God. If you were to ever reject God, then he would sadly erase your name from the Book of Life.”

It sounds harsh now, but it was neither intended nor taken as such at the time. As a child, I had a deep desire to be known by God. I liked the idea that he had my name in his book, that he had always loved me, that he had designed every hair on my head and planned my life out.

It made sense that I would go to church and Sunday school right from the start.* That tends to make sense when some form of Christianity is the norm in your school, your community, even your nation. It also makes it easy to lose yourself in the echo chamber. I do not recall salient meetings with anyone of a different religious persuasion until I was in my late teens. Some people were more Christian than others, granted, but that was about the only variation I saw. (I suspect this is a fairly devastating description of religious norming, and I am sorry to report it.)

For me, it felt like I wore my Christianity as a mask (mind you, a mask that showcased my true identity rather than hiding it – an important distinction), and a lot of other people around me wore a similar mask so we could easily identify each other. And if I met anyone who wasn’t wearing one, they didn’t make a big point about it.

My childhood was steady and predictable to the point of being boring. For the most part, I had no major obstacles in the early part of my life. To say I was privileged is putting it mildly. So perhaps it is not so strange that I accepted the existence of God without question until I was a teenager. From my limited viewpoint, the world looked pretty good. Why not believe in the presence of a loving deity who arranged it to be that way? Why not believe that ultimately, I had been given a birthright of protection and guidance from Someone Up There? And especially, why not believe in something I had every reason to take for granted when rejecting it would put me in hell for eternity?

When the choice presented to a child is that binary, the answer seems obvious.

Fortunately, it didn’t last. I first started to doubt my religion, as so many do, once bad things began happening in my life and I received a very loud silence from God in response to my cries. My specific experiences aren’t important for the purposes of this story; they are only important in the sense that they woke me up, opened the door to the possibility that my religion might not hold all the answers I thought it did, and drove me to ask some questions. My perspective was still so myopic, however, that I considered those questions settled after reading Christian responses to them.** Such responses served to sustain, if not fully satisfy, and I was able to move on with my life and my faith.

But I was more cautious after that. It was as though my Christian mask had slipped, temporarily allowing me access to peripheral vision and the troubling ideas to be found there. Of course, the mask went back on immediately – I still thought it was my true face at the time.

When I was twenty years old, I made a pivotal decision in my life – one which, while significant in its own right, also foreshadowed my eventual decision to leave Christianity. In order to distinguish the two, I’ll call this decision the Radical Decision.

The Radical Decision itself, like the trauma to which I alluded above, is not relevant here. (I chose to leave out such details to avoid confusion and to spare you all from an even longer post, not because I do not wish to disclose them.) But two things about it are worth highlighting, because they were the same key elements of my decision to leave my faith. Had I not worked through these elements when I made the Radical Decision, I am not at all sure I could have later left Christianity:

1. Fear of rejection. The Radical Decision hurt my family greatly. I rejected one of their most important values (or so it seemed at the time) and I was very afraid of the consequences – I thought they would reject me in turn. They didn’t (although it caused problems for awhile) but that fear was one of the main reasons it was so difficult to make the Radical Decision.


2. Personal responsibility. The Radical Decision was the first I ever made completely on my own, and the first over which I took full responsibility. Even with the knowledge of #1 at the forefront of my mind, I chose to do it anyway because I knew that it was the right thing.

The second point was crucial – it was everything, really. I had never before taken responsibility for my own choices. After I made the Radical Decision, I realized how much more significant my choices were when I took responsibility for them, and how much I had missed by not doing so before now.

When I later left Christianity, I struggled with the same two points and precisely the same corresponding emotions. It was spooky.

That conversation with my dad when I was a child was only the beginning of my internalization of the idea that God turns his back on those that reject him. In my experience, this was not typically presented as a terrible thing but rather as something Unbelievers brought upon themselves (which apparently made it okay) and as something that didn’t apply to any of us anyway. Why should it, when we knew the self-evident truth of Christianity? That truth was expected to carry us through any doubts we might have, any logical inconsistencies we might discover, any skeptics we might encounter.

The Unbelievers (for us, that term referred solely to people who had heard The Truth and chosen to reject it knowingly) were not part of us. They were the Other, and the matter of their fates did not appear to cause significant distress to anyone I knew, including me. We just figured that the fate of the Unbelievers was perfectly just and merciful because God is perfectly just and merciful.

Shockingly, that wasn’t quite so reassuring once I began to contemplate becoming one of that nameless, faceless mass of Unbelievers. The prospect of defecting literally scared the hell out of me. Much of the fear has since left me, but not all. It may never leave me completely, because it was not meant to leave me completely. It was the final safeguard of my faith, a reason to stay if all others should fail.

Professor Dumbledore, the headmaster of Hogwarts school for wizards in the Harry Potter series, said that it is the unknown we fear when we look on death and darkness. The Christianity I grew up with enhances that unknown with an even scarier prospect – the idea that by rejecting Christ, we will not only be left behind in the unknown but that we will become part of the unknown. We will cease to be remembered, to be loved, to exist. We will be erased.

That fear was extremely effective – for me, at least. Overcoming a similar (if slightly less intense) fear when I made the Radical Decision for the sake of the second reason was no small matter. It caused a psychological shift in my beliefs and my personhood that is still having surprising effects five years later.

As a Christian, I believed that God was in control of my life, and I always let him guide me. If I attempted something and it didn’t work out, God must not have wanted it to work out. If something went well, I took no credit because all things work to the glory of God. I never made significant choices without feeling that I had God’s approval (or convincing myself that I did), and as a result I never had to own the consequences. In short, I never had reason to think about what sort of person I was, what sort of choices I would make if I wasn’t trying to please God. My lifelong attempt to do what God wanted had quite effectively prevented me from internalizing a sense of ownership over my choices.

No one could see under my mask, so it didn’t matter what it looked like under there.

The Radical Decision was the first I’d ever made without my family’s approval. It was, therefore, the first decision I’d ever made without one of the two key influences which had run my life up to that point. It was a decision that in some ways cost me their influence. It was a decision that would alter the vision they had for my life – after this, I would have to figure out things on my own. And I would have to live with it if the Radical Decision turned out to be a disaster.

When I left Christianity, it felt remarkably similar. In both cases, I risked consequences that horrified me. In both cases, I rejected good things from people that I loved. In both cases, the catalyst for the decision occurred when my desire to take responsibility for myself grew greater than my desire to stay on a path which had been so clearly marked for me with love in mind. In both cases, the desire to stop doing something that was harming me became stronger than the fear of leaving.

In both cases, I lost significant pieces of myself.

By the time I left Christianity, the mask I wore was much more than a mask – it was an inexorable part of my identity. I believed that by removing my Christian mask I was removing the face that God would recognize. I was renouncing my claim to the identity he had written in his book all those years ago.

[Sidebar: Before I go on, I must stress that I had other reasons for leaving. Taking personal responsibility for my choices was not something I was able to do effectively within the context of Christianity, but I know others who have come to terms with the same issue without leaving the faith. When I made the Radical Decision and began to think in terms of who I was and why I wanted the things I wanted, it highlighted other areas of Christianity which were irreconcilable with the person I wanted to be, and those factored into my decision as well. So I do not mean to suggest that it is impossible to live a personally responsible life as a Christian just because it wasn’t possible for me.]

When I made the Radical Decision without my parents’ approval, I realized that I could never authentically take responsibility for my choices as long as I was living for someone else. And the former added so much significance to my life that it eventually outweighed my commitment to Christianity (along with other things – see sidebar above). I decided that I would rather live my own life, even if I lived it badly and went to hell afterward, than live the life that someone had chosen for me. It didn’t matter if “someone” was God or my parents or anyone else – no one but me should choose the person I am, and was, and will become.

“All right, then I’ll go to hell!” When the cost is that high, there is no easy choice. It is possible to make the right choice and feel horribly about it. I do not regret my decision to leave Christianity because I know that it was right, for this and many other reasons. But doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a terrible choice to make. It took a long time to let go of my resentment toward the deity that forced me to make it. Who wants to choose between being recognized as a loved one, a child of the king, a resident of the heavenly empire where there are no more tears… and being recognized for who you really are?***

If the Christian God exists, I believe that he no longer knows me – because I have chosen to depart from the identity he chose for me in favor of my own. My life is a gift, yes, but in the giving it became mine. I will not live it to please anyone else, or in fear of what will happen if I don’t. No one but me will be responsible for what I bring to the world or leave behind when I go, and to me that’s as it should be. I am my own. I am learning to know myself. And for me that has made all the difference

--Phoenix
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* We were a Protestant family. My father was raised Catholic, but by the time he met my mother (a lifelong Protestant), he was not overly religious and certainly not looking for a Catholic woman. Both of my parents later converted to Catholicism, something that happened roughly in tandem with my own breaking-away process. Observing their journey has added an extra dimension to my own. It ‘s been fascinating, illuminating, and restorative in some ways. But that is another story.

**One of my favorite books as a kid was Letters From A Skeptic. I recommended it to my fellow Christian friends who were struggling with doubts, and it never occurred to me that great whacks of that particular book make zero sense if one hasn’t accepted the essence of a particular monotheist worldview. It was recently recommended to me by an older Christian with whom I’d spent the greater part of a night debating theology, and who very much wanted to see me rejoin the faith. He seemed genuinely surprised when I told him that I had already read it.

*** It is, of course, possible that God could still accept me for who I really am despite my renunciation of the Christian faith. I do not take comfort in that possibility, partially because I don’t think it’s likely and partially because depending on that possibility would feel too much like lying to myself. The fear of probably I’ll go to hell for this was an inextricable part of why this decision was so difficult, and so important.

Alternatively, it’s also possible that he created me to rebel against him, and in so doing I actually have become the person he created me to be. A troubling possibility from an equally troubling God.

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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

This week in The Slacktiverse, June 25/26 2011

The Blogaround

Sarah wrote posted three articles: one about the male bloggers pretending to be women; another on Bloomsday; and a reflection on the festival zie helped to organize.

Last week, Storiteller wrote about the first vegetables her garden has produced and a recipe to use them. This week, she wrote about losing a beloved childhood farm and recapturing a bit of that memory at a local pick-your-own berry grower.

Laiima writes of her posts this week: I recently found out the last member of my grandparents' generation has died. I'm fumbling toward ancestor veneration, and as part of that, honor a still-living elder I've had a difficult relationship with.

My life has trained me in making the best of bad situations, not so much in first deciding what I really deeply want, then finding ways to make that happen. (And being kind to myself when something doesn't work out.) In perils of volunteering, I figure out another piece of the puzzle.

This week Kit Whitfield posted on the up-side of royalism.

This week the former conservative blogger wrote about disturbing misogynistic humor in the video game, Duke Nukem Forever; criticized a minister's evangelism techniques; discussed conservative Christians' love for Ayn Rand; talked about hir religious background; and shared the music of the Taize monastic community.

This week aravind posted at a second look at orientalism in "The Prince of Persia," specifically focusing on [Trigger Warning: sexual threats, implications of sexual violence] the sexualizing and fetishizing aspects of the movie.

Coleslaw writes: After whining about problems with wheelchair access in public places, I finally come clean and admit my house is not very wheelchair friendly, either in Access Denied 3 - The Home Version. But I find a way to keep myself occupied by participating in the Arbitron Radio Ratings, which leads me to reflect on the effect on self-observation on behavior, the meaning of "listening" and how fuzzy logic doesn't mean what you might think it means, in Arbitrary.

Last week Ana Mardoll posted
Twilight: Playing with the Cheat Codes On
Is there a point to an immortal life where all financial barriers and everyday struggles are already solved with psychic stock market gaming? Come help us figure out a raison d'etre for the Cullens in this week’s Twilight post!

In case you missed this

Trigger Warning: Rape, rape culture, physician assault

The Florida Board of Medicine has voted to allow a physician who has been convicted of rape to practice medicine in the state.

Hummingwolf writes: As the Wall Street Journal puts it, Gay Rites Law Passes. "With the vote, New York is poised to become the largest state in the country to pass a gay marriage bill, more than doubling the number of Americans who can participate in such unions."

Things you can do

Sarah writes: Sunday June 26 is the International Day of Support for Victims of Torture.

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) is asking Americans to call or email their senators to "to support the public release of the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation into CIA interrogation practices."

If anyone's in DC, TASSC (Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition) is holding a vigil on Saturday, June 25, in front of the White House. TASSC was founded by torture survivors, and, to my knowledge, all of the full-time staff are also torture survivors.

MercuryBlue writes: Signal boost: if you're interested in stopping the spread of young-earth creationism and the accompanying anti-science fervor, the company that made the pro-YEC documentary Expelled is auctioning off the rights to the film and production materials (including the interviews with the scientists in the film, the way they were before the editors got at them), and TalkOrigins is raising funds to buy the rights to Expelled. We're hoping that by pooling our resources, we can beat whatever the reserve price is and either win the rights to the film (whereupon we can do all sorts of fun things with it) or put a serious dent in the YEC side's resources by forcing them to outbid us.

This one's kind of urgent, folks--the auction's Tuesday, and because Paypal has a delay between the donors sending the money and TalkOrigins receiving it, only donations made before a given time Monday will be counted into the maximum bid TalkOrigins makes. Also, this isn't Kickstarter, so donations will not be returned if we don't win, but it's TalkOrigins. Halting the spread of disinformation is a good cause.

__________________________________________________________________________________

The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)

Living The Trinity

[Note: the following is a lightly edited version of a sermon I gave on Trinity Sunday of this year. I thought it might be of some interest, since advertant members of the Slacktiverse will note allusions and outright steals from several of our commenters: Amaryllis (I had to cut so much of the poetry, alas), Augustine (who now mostly posts at Patheos), cjmr, Deird, Froborr, Will Wildman, and several others who I know I'm forgetting. Thank you all for helping to expand and clarify my thoughts.]

The best sermon on the Trinity of which I'd ever heard tell is one my spouse can still recite word-for-word. His rather posh Episcopalian boarding school managed to land a certain Famous Theologian to preach on Trinity Sunday. The teachers and priests were terribly excited; at last, they told the students, we are going to get the straight scoop on this profound, insoluble Mystery, from someone who has made it his life's work to ponder the secrets of the Divine.

So you can imagine the hush of eager anticipation when the great man stood up to the pulpit. "The doctrine of the Trinity," he began his sermon, "is one of the core teachings of the Christian faith." He paused. "I don't really understand it. NOBODY understands it. So... just believe it." Then he sat down.

And it would probably be wiser of me to follow that example.

Yet there is something so important to Christians about this obviously impossible nonsense, that One can be Three yet still One, that makes us keep circling around it, poking at it, trying to trap it in a box of our words.

We do it because we are compelled to speak what we believe. To "commend the faith that is in us", what our Scripture and tradition and reason and experience have convinced us with unshakeable subjective certainty. And so we MUST bear witness that God is One. Our elder siblings in Judaism hold this as the core of faith: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One." Our younger brothers and sisters in Islam proclaim the same: "There is no God but God." Any number of mystics and sages through time and around the world keep coming back to this conclusion. Not that everybody's God is the same; but if there is Divinity, it is Whole, Complete , at Unity with Itself -- One.

And yet.

As Christians, we MUST bear witness to something else as well. Our scripture and tradition and experience point to this guy -- Jesus of Nazareth -- and teach us that to really know this historical figure, this wandering rabbi and convicted criminal, is in a very meaningful way the same thing as knowing God, the God this same Jesus called "Father". More, in the life and teachings of this Jesus we know something in particular about God -- God revealed as "Logos", as Word, as Plan, as Message -- that predates this one human life all the way back to eternity, and is so powerful that it overcomes death itself.

And yet.

Our Christian spiritual life tells us something even more. Through testimony and our own experience we MUST bear witness that God, the ultimate source and ground and life of all that is; God, the Divine Plan made flesh in one particular human life; very God of very God; is also right here among us. In the room where I sit. In this online community. Wherever people are being fruitful and wise and compassionate.

So we take what we know, and we toss all of that to the theologians and say, "We've got a contradiction here. Fix it."

And the theologians say, "Okay." And after tinkering for several hundred years they come up with this: "The Trinity consists of Three distinct and co-equal Hypostases or Persons, mutually indwelling without confusion or co-mingling in one undivided Divine Essence or Being. How's that?"

Mm. No.

So we turn to our liturgy, and come up with titles. Labels. You've heard them: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier. Source, Word, and Inspiration. Rock, Savior, and Friend.

We come up with metaphors and analogies. Google "Trinity + metaphor" and you get over three million hits. (Even after excluding references to the Matrix movies, there's still a good two million). Try it some time. The Trinity is like a shamrock! The Trinity is like a cube! The Trinity is like a sunbeam through a window pane! The Trinity is like a river with three currents! The Trinity is like a wheel of cheese!

Or there's my personal favorite metaphor: God is a Storyteller, the great Storyteller, and creation is the story that God tells. The Word is the narrative, the plot, and the theme. And the Spirit is the breath that carries the Word far and wide, for any ears that care to hear, including God's own.

But as so often happens when talking about the Trinity, I came awful close to skirting heresy as soon as I began spouting these analogies. That's because they might be beautiful, and they might be helpful, they might be inspiring, but ultimately they all miss the mark.

God isn't a cloverleaf, or a light, or a fountain. God isn't any sort of noun. God is a verb; an active verb. A transitive verb.

God, the theologians tell us, is "that Being whose Essence is identical with Existence." In real people talk, what makes God, well, God, is God is always Godding. Doing the God thing. Begetting, sustaining, speaking. Descending, suffering, liberating. Proceeding, inspiring, binding. Creating, redeeming, sanctifying. Loving.

As much as we Peeping Tom theologians like to think that with the doctrine of the Trinity we've managed to peer into the interior life of the Divine, we've only succeeded in embarrassing ourselves.

So let's try this: the Trinity may be our way of explaining how we experience God. But it can also serve as a model for how God can experience us.

"What are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?”

Designed in the very image of God, we are invited into the story God is forever telling. God has brought us into the heart of the Sacred Paradox. We are Created, and we in turn create. We are Redeemed, to be the hands and feet and mouths and brains of the Body of Christ. We are sanctified, so that through and in and with and by us the whole world is brought into God's eternal Kingdom.

We learn to love God by loving each other. And in the Trinity, God gives us the model of how we are to live in love.

So how do we live a Trinity life?

Be Who We Are

We begin "in the beginning" -- by trying to bring our existence into congruence with our essence. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, when we find our own backyards, where our real selves reside, we will find our hearts as well.

But finding out who I truly am isn't as easy as following the Yellow Brick Road. I have to crack out of the shells of false selves that I layer around myself, out of pride, out of envy, out of fear. Too often I substitute a title -- "Reference Librarian" or "Mom". Too often I resort to a shallow analogy that leads me astray. If I ask myself "who am I?" and the answer comes easily, and doesn't leave me feeling naked and vulnerable, than it's almost certainly incomplete.

But sometimes there comes a moment -- at the altar, or while staring at the stars, or while talking about books, or even while washing dishes -- when suddenly, for a brief fleeting eternity, I am my truest, most authentic self. I am ME, completely, fully, with integrity.

When I am in that time outside of time, Whole, at One with myself, this isn't an occasion for sitting still, contemplating the wonder of Me. Instead, I'm filled with power, an explosion of energy, a Big Bang of joy and love and laughter, that I can feel radiating out of my fingers and toes and the ends of my hair. I have to do. I need to create, to pour out, to connect, to share.

That's where the Second Person of the Trinity comes in.

Have A Plan

Living in the Trinity calls for more than just a random explosion of ecstasy, leaving splatters of joy all over the walls. I need a Plan. Like the Divine Logos, the surge of grace from finding my essential self must take on a shape, a human nature: MY human nature, incarnate in my personal gifts and opportunities.

With the Spirit of adoption, I can, like Paul, claim with Christ the inheritance that God has saved for me. In my everyday work. In my social relationships. In every chance to care and share and make a difference. Maybe, like God, I can be a storyteller, with colors or words or song or dance or fabric or pixels on a screen.

After all, the Logos comes as a Word. A Story. The Good News. This isn't a secret; we proclaim it every Sunday: "Have you heard? The Kingdom of Heaven is in the midst of us! Right here! Right now! So let's ACT like it!"

But when Jesus gave us his mission statement -- "I come that you might have life, and have it more abundantly" -- there was no promise there that this life would come more safely, or comfortably, or successfully. The Trinity's great Plan led straight to the Cross.

But it led beyond it, too.

Breathe

It's a staple of sermons that many languages (including the Greek and Hebrew in the Scriptures) use the same word for "Spirit", "Breath", and "Wind." So if we are going to live in the Trinity, we have to remember to breathe. And breathing is a perpetual cycle: we breathe out, we breathe in.

Just as God's Word goes forth, carried on the wings of the Spirit, so I can pour out my own story, to accomplish what I am meant to do. But as that Divine Message was not complete until it returned back to the fullness of God, so must I constantly return to myself, my true self, to be refreshed and strengthened and inspired.

We learn at the Feast of the Ascension that the Word sent out is not quite the same as the Word that returns. The Son brings back to the Father not just the triumph and glory of a Plan accomplished, but also all the accumulated gunk of a life incarnate, all the soil and spit and sweat and sorrow and suffering of our human existence.

So it is to live in the Trinity. The Sacred Wind is going to carry me to places I don't want to go. Among people I don't want to speak to. Them. And I'm going to have to embrace all that stuff I don't like, because I think it's different from who I am. Even worse, I need to embrace all of my own foolishness and frustration and failure that causes me to make false division. Everything needs to be breathed back in: accepted, incorporated, loved, sanctified into the very heart of my true self.

I have to trust the Spirit not just to sustain me, not just to inspire me, but to CHANGE me. To blow, to flow, to let go with faith, with confidence, with openness of heart and mind and body.

That's HARD. That's TERRIFYING. That's enough to send me scurrying back to the safety of my textbooks and doctrines and definitions, where I can pretend that I understand what I'm talking about.

So I'm going to leave you with the words of T. S. Eliot.:

These are only hints and guesses,
Hints followed by guesses; and the rest
Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

"The Trinity. I don't really understand it. NOBODY understands it. So... just believe it."

And then go out and be it.

What kind of Trinity are you called to be?

--hapax

---

The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Board Business, June 23 2011

Sad news from the original Slacktivist

Yesterday, in his article What's Next Fred Clark announced as of yesterday, I am no longer an employee of the nation’s largest newspaper chain.

TBAT encourages all of those who have read and enjoyed Fred's work over the years to send him a message of sympathy and support.

Schedules for 101/articles/Roundtables

The range of experiences / interests / skills and insight within this community was reflected in the many fascinating ideas for posts and articles. TBAT has kept track of these ideas and will post a "sign-up" schedule next week.

Technical Stuff

TBAT is working on building an archive of all the guest posts. As soon as it has been completed a link to it will be added on the sidebar.

On Tuesday we asked for feedback on the name of that link (we suggest "Who wrote What, When) and for authors to send us abstracts of their already published articles. Today TBAT asks for feedback at to the accessibility not only of the sample archive of articles but also of the entire website.

Regular Board Business

Don't forget to send in items that you want included in This week in The Slacktiverse June 25/26.

The three sections of the weekend post are:

The Blogaround

Any denizen of the Slacktiverse who has posted an article to their own website during since the previous weekend post is invited to send a short summary of that article along with its permalink to TBAT. That summary and link will be included in the next weekend blogaround. This will help to keep members of our community aware of the many excellent websites hosters by other members.

In Case You Missed This

Readers of The Slacktiverse can send short summaries of, and permalinks to, articles that they feel might be of interest to other readers.

Things You Can Do

Anyone who knows of a worthy cause or important petition should send a short description of the petition/cause along with its url to TBAT.

Deadlines

Please email all submissions to slackmods at gmail dot com. The deadline this week will be 2000 GMT on Saturday.

Urgent or time-sensitive announcements will be posted immediately rather than being held for the next regular "This Weekend" post.

__________

 

The Board Administration Team
(hapax, Kit Whitfield and mmy)



My Estranged Father in Heaven

I was born into the Church, but not exactly.

On the one hand, I was born to very young LDS parents in Provo, Utah. My father is a returned missionary. I spent the first three years of my life living on the campus of BYU. I lived in Utah, mostly in Salt Lake City, until college. My family has always been a church-going folk. My mother is particularly devout, but we'd all get up and go to church for three hours every Sunday for all of my life. When each of my mother's four children turned eight, we were baptized.

On the other hand, I was not born into the church. Both of my parents were converts from other states who migrated to Utah. We had no pioneer heritage. We didn't have recipes for green Jell-o with carrots or for funeral potatoes and, even if we had, they wouldn't have been passed down from generation to generation. We, as a family, are very culturally different from many of our neighbors. Both of my parents are Democrats. Both of my parents are intellectuals who raised their children to be independent and to value critical thinking and education. My mother is a lawyer. She's the breadwinner, rather than a stay-at-home mom with eight kids. A lot of Utah Mormon culture is effectively stuck in the 1950s ideals, but we were a family for the 1990s.

When I was ten, we bought our first house. My mother and siblings still live there. The neighborhood was already established. Only a couple of families really had children anymore and these children tended to be number five or six of seven or eight. Everybody knew everybody and had stories about everybody else's older brothers and sisters, many of whom were on missions, or had already moved away.

I wasn't part of that. For years, I was “the new kid” and I felt it. Girls preferred their old friends to becoming buddies with me. Boys ignored me outright. However, it's also true that, even if I hadn't been perpetually the new kid by virtue of not having been born in the neighborhood, I'd have been different anyway. I was outspoken, always the first to raise my hand when a question was asked in Sunday school, I preferred adults to other children, I played video games and read fantasy books. In the end, that was probably enough to leave me feeling alone.

These differences became especially clear in Sunday school when I turned twelve and was moved from the children's age group, Primary, to Young Women's. The youth[1] of the church do a lot of things together, notably camping trips and ward[2] basketball or volleyball tournaments. Young men get together weekly to do Boy Scouts. Young women do the same to do a variety of things including community service, cooking lessons, sewing little pillows to give away, and trying on wedding dresses. Both young men and women are supposed to be working towards a big award. The criterion for these awards are arranged not unlike a badge in the Boy or Girl Scouts, but are meant to be a culmination of what the young person in question is supposed to have learned. For the young men, this is literally the Eagle Scout award. For young women it's something called the Personal Progress Award.[3]

I relished the yearly camping trips, but was less than interested in the young women's activities or in the sports. I hardly ever went to these things. This lead to me going to church every Sunday, but being almost completely socially disconnected from the other kids in my ward. We went to school together. We went to church together. But I never had a single friend in my ward.

When I was about thirteen, I started to really suffer from depression. I was eventually retroactively diagnosed with psychotic major depression. It was at this point that I first started questioning my faith.

I had a lot of issues with the social structure of the Church, or how it looked to me. I didn't like the fact that as members we were encouraged to make friends with non-members and to invite them to things like ward basketball but that we seemed to not spend very much time with our non-member friend and favor the fellowship of our ward mates. I also didn't like that we were taught “every member a missionary,” but that we should be careful of who we made friends with so that we were not lead astray. These policies seemed to me to encourage false, demeaning, casual pseudo-friendships with non-members, created for the sole purpose of evangelizing. It seemed callous to me to try and reach out and touch non-members, but never let them get too close for fear that they might bring us down to their level.

I was also angry, personally angry, all of the time at the members of my ward. I was suffering. Couldn't they see that I was suffering? Shouldn't the Holy Spirit whisper to them, “Carrie's going through a hard time. Maybe you should sit by her at lunch”? What made me even angrier was the fact that some of the same boys who teased me most brutally at school would be sitting in the other pews at church. How dare they be so mean to me and then show their faces in church on Sunday, I thought. How dare they? I was appalled that a church based so much on fellowship and on community could let its youth ignore me like this.

Now, bear in mind that I was fourteen and I was primarily angry at other fourteen-year-olds. The adults of the Church were a rather different story. My family was going through a very hard time at that point. My sister had just been born, my mother was overworked, my grandmother was living with us and was slowly dying of renal failure, and my parents were separated. I think we must have gotten a home-made dinner two or three times a week from the folks in our ward. They spontaneously arranged themselves to help us out, and it was great.

More generally, I was also uncomfortable with the Church because I'm a girl. The leadership of the Church is entirely made of men. Men lead wards, they lead stakes[4]. They lead the whole apparatus. They have the gift of the priesthood, both the Aaronic and Melchizedek[5], neither of which are allowed to women, ever. Women lead their own organizations, both the Young Women's and the Relief Society, but are ultimately beholden to the leadership of men. This made me uncomfortable for obvious reasons. Are men really better than women in the eyes of God? If not, why do men have both the priesthood and leadership positions? I don't want to serve my husband. I want equality. Is that even possible with this model? Does God want that? How can I love and serve a god who doesn't want that?

I was comforted by my belief in Heavenly Mother, an equal counterpart to the male God, but I still had a lot of questions and no one could provide me with any answers. Sometimes people told me that the ability to be a mother was equal to the ability to hold the priesthood. Sometimes people told me that men were actually given leadership positions and so forth so that they could learn the skills of responsibility, which women already possessed; that men holding the priesthood and leadership positions was actually a sign of the superiority of females. A lot of the time I was told that the person I was asking wondered the same things and we would just have to wait until we died to ask God directly. I was impatient. I felt snubbed. I could wait to ask God, I supposed, but I didn't feel okay about the fact that I was going to spend my entire life wondering and feeling unimportant. Why weren't there answers to my questions now?

Eventually, I got over it. A cross between medication and some very charismatic seminary[6] teachers led to me to go through a really passionately faithful period when I was between fifteen and sixteen. I can't really explain this period and am always surprised when I remember that it happened.

It ended because I switched to an alternative high school where seminary was not offered and where almost none of my fellow students were LDS. Being out of touch with things like Seminary and having my more alternative views supported made me feel more distant from the Church. But it wasn't necessarily that I felt as though distance was growing between me and the Church, it was more like the fissures that were already between us were beginning to have more and more spotlights shone on them.

But I didn't leave the Church. My struggles with my faith were renewed, especially now that I could see how badly the Church had treated my newfound friends, but I didn't leave. I still went to church every Sunday, though I often felt uneasy. Eventually, I began to skip Young Women's altogether and walked home, instead. I decided, after a lesson on how I should support the priesthood holder in my home because his life is difficult, that it was useless, misogynist drivel and I wanted no part of it. I considered myself a conscientious objector. But I didn't leave.

I didn't leave, even when I fell in love with another girl.

That was the most difficult part for me, the part I struggled with the hardest. I'd always known I was bisexual. During the periods of my faith, I still embraced and accepted my attraction to females as part of who I was, but I never thought it would be a problem. After all, I wasn't a lesbian. I couldn't choose who I was and was not attracted to, but I'd be fine, wouldn't I? I'd just choose not to act on my feelings towards other females, only date men, and eventually marry a returned missionary.[7] It was gonna be great.

And then, suddenly, she was my girlfriend and I was so happy with her, but I couldn't be happy with her, because it was a sin. And I knew it.

I apologize if, at this point, my narrative becomes somewhat disjointed. I don't know how to describe how I felt. I was still LDS, to my mind. I still went to church, I still was the first to raise my hand in Sunday school, I wanted my patriarchal blessing,[8] but the things I'd done had invalidated my recommend[9] for it, and I knew that. I believed, really and honestly, what I was supposed to believe.

But I wasn't what I was supposed to be. I was this insignificant twit, this intellectual, this liberal, this homosexual who would spend until late Saturday night with her girlfriend and then go to church the next day. I felt wrong, I felt disconnected. I felt hurt and alienated, not just from the fellowship of my church, but actually alienated from God.

I felt like I couldn't practice what I wanted to because I wasn't right. I felt like I should be different, but I wasn't different and I couldn't bring myself to be how I was supposed to be. For all of my suffering, I couldn't bring myself to change. Writing this, I wonder if, maybe I wasn't so faithful after all. Maybe it was a sham. But, then I remember that I was angry, too. I was angry at God for giving me these feelings--these pure, beautiful feelings--and then telling me that to act on them was a sin. I was pissed. I was militant. I was hurting and deeply sad, but I also felt vindicated and justified. If God was going to do this to me, fine. I'd fall. Because this wasn't fair and it wasn't right and I wasn't going to be good out of fear.

But I still didn't leave. I finally left when I went away to college and here's why: it was easy. It was so easy. I was in a new place with new people. None of them were LDS and none of them had to know about my history, even if they were. Being physically away from the Church helped me get mental distance and helped me focus on other things. I pushed away from my heritage, slowly moving from a non-practicing, guilt-worn believer, to someone who is confused and still wounded and then, finally, to where I am now: uncertain, but steady. I consider myself a Deist. I find it comfortable to believe in a higher power, but I no longer deliberately connect myself in any way to my former religion. It feels pretty good. I don't have all the answers. I don't think I have any of the answers, actually. What matters is that I'm not hurting anymore. Religion doesn't keep me awake at night. I'm pretty comfortable.

I haven't set foot in an LDS church since leaving the fold, but my links to the religion still aren't severed. I find myself defending the Church a lot, like I still owe it something. I find myself thinking with “eternal perspective,” wondering how much I'll regret my decisions if and when I'm judged for them later. I can't let go of theism to save my life.

Mormonism snuck under my skin during my eighteen year run as a Latter Day Saint and, as far as I can tell, it's not going anywhere fast. I get nervous when people like Mr. Camping say the world's ending because I'm terrified that he's right and I'm doomed. I tell myself that I'm a good person and that I try not to hurt people and to love them, but the standards of my youth have stuck with me. Deep down, I still think I'm a sinner. I still feel like I'm wrong. I know I'm not keeping the commandments that I'm supposed to. I still feel like my Heavenly Father is looking down at me, disappointed. I feel like I'm wasting my talents because I don't practice a religion that I've found to be harmful to myself and others, whose doctrine I often reject utterly, and which has left me feeling spiritually damaged.

I don't like the Church, I don't like how it makes me feel, I don't want to be there, but I sometimes can't resist the idea that it's where I ought to be.


--Carrie
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[1] Those of us who are between the ages of twelve and eighteen.

[2] A given congregation in the LDS church is called a "ward." It consists of the people in a specific geographical area. Sometimes, these areas are huge if the LDS population in them is quite small, other times they can consist merely of the families living within a couple of blocks.

[3] More info than you could ever want here.

[4] A stake is a group of wards in the same rough geographical area. This can be an entire town, or a neighborhood depending on the concentration of members.

[5] Wikipedia should tell you all you wanna know here and here.

[6] LDS high school students are encouraged to take seminary classes. These essentially function as a sort of Bible study course during the week. In most places, if seminary is even available, it's necessary to take it before or after school. In Utah, however, seminary buildings are often located just off of school grounds and seminary may be taken essentially as a non-academic credit during school hours.

[7] The goal of every good, Mormon girl.

[8] A patriarchal blessing is “a page of scripture just for you.” There's no set age to get one, but most folks get them in their late teens, or before going off on missions.

[9] Certain ordinances in the Church require a recommend. These tend to be the more important ordinances, like the patriarchal blessing, marriage, and going to the temple in general. You get a recommend by talking to the head of your ward, the bishop and having an interview. You are also interviewed before baptism. In my experience, the interview is more or less to confirm that you are a believing and practicing member of the Church. You are asked if you believe in Heavenly Father and in Christ as Redeemer. You are asked if you believe that Joseph Smith was a prophet. You are asked if you obey the Word of Wisdom which is to say, if you do not imbibe alcohol, illegal drugs, coffee, or tea and if you adhere to the Ten Commandments. Ordinances that require a recommend are only supposed to be performed on or by the worthy and the purpose of the recommend and the interview is to confirm that you are among their number. Physically, the recommend is a little slip of paper signed by your bishop. In cases like the “living ordinance” recommend for marriage, your Stake President must also sign your recommend. All recommends expire after a specific amount of time.

____________________________________________________________________________

 

The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

At Patheos: TF: Jesus stole your children

Fred Clark has posted a new Left Behind post, TF: Jesus stole your children, at Patheos

This week Fred writes about pp. 396-397 of Tribulation Force.

Excerpt:

Tsion’s whole broadcast has been a kind of extended political attack ad trying to tip the balance in some contest between Christianity and Judaism. He might as well have used unflattering grainy black-and-white footage of Orthodox Jews moving in slow motion while getting the movie-trailer guy to do a menacing, sarcastic voiceover, “Judaism claims to be awaiting the Messiah, but it’s voting record tells a different story. …”

Sadly, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins aren’t alone in imagining that negative advertising is the key to effective evangelism. There’s a vast and thriving cottage industry of this sort of thing in the evangelical subculture, one that has existed for decades on the traveling-speaker and seminar circuit and in recent years has proliferated online. Look around and you’ll find scores of purportedly “evangelistic ministries” that spend nearly all of their time on negative campaigning, as though the only way to promote the Christian gospel was to tear down everything else. These “ministries” stake out their little niches based on whatever it is they’re attacking — “secular humanism,” Paganism, Mormonism, Methodism, science or whatever else it is they’ve decided to attack as a “cult.”

Those ministries tend to engage in a great deal of bearing false witness, but even if their attacks were not so thoroughly distorting and dishonest — even if these liars for Jesus weren’t lying — it would be impossible to accept their claims that what they’re doing has anything to do with evangelism. Such negative attack ads may be useful for drawing thick lines between Us and Them. But they have never, ever been of any use for persuading Them to join Us.

[Fred Clark, TF: Jesus stole your children, June 21 2011, posted at Patheos.com]


Commentators who would like to share their responses to the new post with all of Fred's fans (old and new) can cross-post to both boards.