So much can change in a week. So much can change in 42 hours. So much stays exactly the same. One moment I’m writing a PM on my fire escape, the light of dawn pale and clean with promise. The next, it seems, I’m half a world away, having touched down in five different time zones, gained a day and traded twelve thousand dollars to say, “Happy birthday.”
I’ve spent the last week seventy years back in time and forty years in the future, every time I turned around, or west, or blinked my eyes, it changed. This wasn’t culture shock. It was generational flux. I’ve heard stories both fact and fiction and both were stranger and more compelling than my “real life” of beta testing, scripts, pilots and ratios. For one week I was embraced and shattered, cocooned in living myth and exposed by it. I played the role of angel, rebel, mother, sister, daughter, lover, friend. I drew water from a well and used a GPS. I prayed holding hands and I saw my mother blush for the first time. I beat my chest with indignation to prove my heart was beating.
I remembered what it was like to be among people like me. The undeniable truth that a racially diverse but religiously homonogized community can provide. Never complain, never explain. The knowing is there in every gaze. There is no argument. There is no unspoken heart. The knowledge that I am understood, not tolerated; loved, not accepted despite; respected without conditions and modifiers. I remembered the solace and strength that “congregation” provides... and why so many of my brothers and sisters in faith are so strong and steely. Because we *don’t* prescribe to this path and, by golly, life is a lot harder without a mob of one’s own.
Take your council not from man but from God. Walk with Christ.
This week, I’ve traveled more than ten thousand miles, Erik. And in all that travelling I came to many conclusions about man and God and the nature of tattoos. I’m falling asleep as I type these words, stretched belly down on my bed, literally waking up when my forehead hits the space bar. I *want* to do a million things – eat apples, drink coffee, talk to a lady friend, call another, even paint or draw – but as I know I’ll sleep most of Sunday away, there is only one thing I *must* do. I must write to you.
The quiltwork of our lives is a mystery to everyone but ourselves. If a friend says he knows you, he really is saying only that he recognizes some of the panels in that quilt. Some of the textures and images and bit of cloth are shared in his own life’s patchwork and so he understands.
Our parents are the same way. They wrap us in soft colors and carry us – much longer than any of us like to admit – into the world until our quilt is warm enough, complex enough, big enough to keep us well. They know some of the patches, they helped stitch them there, but others are alien to them, unknown and secretive. Those parts of us that are understood by only two – us and God.
A man at a pulpit (or a woman or a chorus) says to you, Erik, that “We all are together and feel the same.” This is comfort food like saying, “Thor is angry... look at that lightning!” This is words to name the unknowable. You wrote me while I was away and said, “I feel angry at him. He doesn’t know me. He stands and includes me but I am not included.”
Because why? Because he doesn’t understand your parents? (No, not mine either, most likely, my friend.) Because he doesn’t understand the fury in your heart? (I don’t understand it either, Erik, but I love you for it and I would carry it too.) Because you are not easily pigeon-holed. You are the intelligent, gentle, spiritual man that European countries seem to produce in joyous poetics but that America like to label as deviant. You are looking for a faith that may only be found in your own heart, in the eyes of your mother when you look at her, in the good morning call of your little herd that have come to rely on you and find comfort in your presence.
One of the first things I learned, and that came to me again and again this week, is that my feelings – about anything – belong to me. They are valid and part of me because they are my own. I claim how I feel about everything – the life examined can also be lived. I can deconstruct, remodel and rebuild how I feel about politics, art, or love. My feelings do not depend upon someone or something else. My heart is not dictated by the pulpit, the White House, or my time zone.
Christ passes His hand over the quiltwork of my life. He knows every patch – sorrow, humiliation, rapture, passion, inspiration – even some patches that I do not remember myself. He knows. He whispers: This is all part of you, E.J.. And I walk with all of you.
You say that when you spend your Sundays in a church building that you end your day feeling “confused, patronized, and simplified.” You have spent every other weekend trying a different denomination. But on those Sundays that you stay home, that you spend your day with your mother, your siblings, your herd and your friends... that you spend your hours (not just two hours or three) talking about God, talking about life, talking and laughing and adding silver threads to that quiltwork of you, that you end your day with a joyous heart filled with light, filled with what you are beginning to recognize as Christ.
What is He telling you?
I spent the week with people who told me I was divine... and I was foolish. That I was impassioned... and I was blind. But there were travelers in my journey who just smiled at me. Who say those patches in my quilt and embraced me, crushed me wonderfully, and murmured, “Of course. I see. I understand.”
You will find your fellow travelers, Erik. You may, my friend, have already found them. Don’t put your butt on a pew. Put your feet on the path. You know where it will lead you.
In love,
E.J.
