I’m in need of a good celebration.
Well, first thing’s first, I suppose…I should get down to the business of being as sad as I need to be, but have been putting off, and then get down to celebrating.
There’s been a mishmash of emotions traveling my neural pathways for a bit now, really since my grandmother’s funeral about two weeks ago. Because our society pushes death to arm’s length and sanitizes it by bathing it in useless ritual, I was too busy the entire time I was with my family to mourn. Granted, I was in a very missional mindset of being helpful to my parents in the time of loss, but throughout the entire process everything seemed so surreal to me…so detached. Almost as though I was watching a play, wondering what changes I would have made if I had been directing. Emotional involvement was minimal on my part. I felt as though I would have been forcing anything further, and that would have been not only fake but an unhealthy rushing of the grief process, so I just existed through it, tolerated the flurry of activity, and moved on.
I experienced my first real grief days later. Psychologically speaking, that’s actually not all that delayed, but I’m glad to be getting it out of my system.
On another front, I was working through my personal study of Mark’s gospel this morning. I walked away with this heavy feeling, a sort of weight that comes with a perception of a God that doesn’t have my best interest at heart. Not the sort of God I believe in at all, but its just that I spent so many years of my life steeped in a tradition of religious practice that the pleasure was taken out of my faith, and what pleasure there was existed in a very forced half-life, as though there was to be only solemn recognition of God…that worship and happiness were mutually exclusive.
So now, in my “next life” (I use that sarcastically), I enter worship services every weekend that rock out familiar songs, and I still just don’t feel as though I can unwind. Part of it, I think, is that I’m really beyond sick of the popular sub-culture that thrives in American churches (more on that later), but a huge part of it is that I just really need to loosen up my obsessive-compulsive personality and have a good time. After all, the Christian faith is about life, not death, and life is to be celebrated, not mournfully observed.
I think the most spiritual thing I could do right now is to have a good party. Well, moving out of the “Bible Belt” would help, but, until then…pass the wine and give me some karaoke. I’m looking very forward to the house-warming party that will follow our moving to our new apartment in a couple of weeks, but, until then, perhaps I will make progress in my continual effort to shake my slightly melodramatic tendency to be a bit too weighty and sullen. After all, sun has returned to Virginia, and if surely that is a sign of life.