I knew that new Pepsi logo was lame...

... and apparently someone else thinks so too...

love (eleventy bazillion and one)

Sense, Sensibility and Getting Incensed

So on teh Rav I got sucked into Yet Another Fiber Club... the Castle Fibers Jane Austen yarn 'n' book club. The first installment came last Friday in a cute little box... the Sense and Sensibility sock kit. Pretty, isn't it? Plus it came with really cute stitch markers. I'm on about the 4th rep of the cuff pattern, it's a ripple/lace sort of like (but not exactly) Feather and Fan. Also I'm on about chapter 13 or 14 of the book. I can really relate to Elinor's and Marianne's romantic woes...

Meanwhile over the weekend I finished up Seven Chakras, a/k/a the tsuspense project. It's drying after being blocked so no pics yet. EDIT to add: At top of post is a pic I took today (Thursday) with my phone... yes that is my foot :-D

On getting incensed... somehow yesterday I wound up in a shitstorm on teh Rav. I won't go into the details, but the Readers' Digest version is that I got massively triggered by a discussion of Biblical submission in marriage, and should you submit to a husband who clearly doesn't deserve it, and blah blah blah, and I posted some stuff I probably shouldn't have. Or more accurately, the stuff I posted, I posted in anger or as a reaction to being triggered, not in love.

So. How does one keep one's cool when being triggered? Shit happens, even to the best of us. Paul wrote,

I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

Rom. 7:15-20. A few verses later, Paul posits the question and the answer: "Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

Hm. Wonder if it's time to reread Romans? After all, it liberated St. Augustine, and it liberated Martin Luther...

Deep thoughts, or not

One should not have deep thoughts on a Friday morning. Especially not while driving to work when one can't write out those deep thoughts. Guess I should have dictated them into my Blackberry... oh well...

I finished reading Searching for God Knows What by Don Miller over breakfast. I got a lot out of it. I'll have to reread it, prolly in the not too distant future.

I wonder what God thinks about the people who get his message wrong, the people who screw up his message to the point that it drives other people away. I look at some of the posts on Ravelry to the effect of "this _________ (fill in the blank) bullshit is why I'm not a Christian (or why I'm not religious)." Yesterday one of the topics was a site that sells t-shirts that say things like "ex-adulterer" or "ex-fornicator" or "ex-hypocrite." I looked at the t-shirt site, didn't see any of Jesus' love anywhere on there.

Having been exposed to rigid, extreme, legalistic religious views, I now have only pity for those who hold those views to the point of driving others away from God. They're going to have an interesting conversation with God at some point...

All I know is, God wants a relationship with us, and I've let the stumbling blocks keep me from that for way too long.

More on this later...

Dyed, redyed, and renewed

'K, you know the sock yarn I dyed with Kool-Aid, that I blogged about here? I decided I wasn't happy about it and decided to overdye it with Jacquard dye in a mixture of vermilion and sky blue. The results:



Pretty, wouldn't you agree? A lovely wine-dark color, with some lighter reddish-purple highlights. I like it much much much better than the original.

And here's some Bare sock yarn I dyed in sort of a spruce green, blending Jacquard dye in sapphire blue, yellow sun, and a little black to mute it:



Been doing a lot of reading and thinking the past several days. Philip Yancey and Donald Miller have given voice to so many of my concerns, stumbling blocks, bêtes noires, etc. On the question of why God allows screwed-up teachings and heretical theologies: Yancey observes in Disappointment with God that God delegated His work on earth and His holiness on earth to us flawed humans. God takes a huge risk in doing so - the risk that we will "badly misrepresent him." And Christians have misrepresented God throughout history - the Crusades, anti-Semitism, slavery, misogyny, homophobia, the Religious Right. But that was still God's plan. Paul referred to that as "the foolishness of God" and observed. "And yet the foolishness of God is wiser than men." Somehow, it works more often than not, even if we humans screw it up from time to time.

On the subject of how some of God's delegates on earth really screw it up and make God look bad: Donald Miller writes about how Robert Tilton was exposed on TV as having stolen money from his flock, was disgraced, and lost his ministry. Miller observes, "[G]uys like Robert Tilton make me like Jesus more because the people Jesus had the least patience with were the people who said they represented God but didn't." Miller finds that he actually feels sorry for Tilton, for what Tilton will face when he goes before God at the final judgment. He notes that "God-imposters" don't really worship God, they worship their own little god that they have made in their own image, instead of the other way around. I'm still not sure what the answer here is, except that we shouldn't try to make God in our own image, not when He did it the other way around.

Anyway. I'm kind of feeling like my overdyed yarn. Not happy the way things came out originally (or the way things were for several years), but I'm being overdyed and coming out better. I know this doesn't make a lot of sense. I guess I'm still in the dye pot and haven't been rinsed and dried yet, so I don't know exactly what color I'll come out as. I just know it'll be better than what was.

High brow and middle brow faith...

Andrew Sullivan is teh awesome:

When theoconservatism inevitably retreats in the face of evolving human thought and enduring human faith, the full implications of Darwin for Christianity will emerge. In my view, both will be strengthened. Christianity can and will survive by embracing the truths of science for what they are. Faith and Truth cannot definitionally compete. What we are going through is an evolutionary moment of theological transformation. As it happens, we see more dust than light. In the future, more light.

Sullivan is commenting on this post by Jim Manzi on The American Scene, in which Manzi criticizes a Jerry Coyne review of two books on science and religion in The New Republic. Most trenchantly, Manzi writes:

By about the year 400, Augustine described a view of Creation in which “seeds of potentiality” were established by God, which then unfolded through time in an incomprehensibly complicated set of processes. By the 13th century, Aquinas — working with the thought of Aristotle and Augustine — identified God with ultimate causes, while accepting naturalistic interpretations of secondary causes. Today, the formal position of the Catholic church, incorporating this long train of thought, is that there is no conflict between evolution through natural selection and Catholic theology. So, in this example, we’re describing an orientation supported by those esoteric theologians Augustine and Aquinas, and promulgated today by that so-liberal-he’s-practically-an-atheist Pope Benedict in that weirdo minority Roman Catholic sect. You know, “unrecognizable as religion to most Americans.”

Random post...

Hm, what happened to the font thingy on here? I may have to edit this to get it into Verdana...

Obligatory knitting/fiber content: Let's see, last night I took the yarn I dyed with Kool-Aid and overdyed it with Jacquard dyes - vermilion with some sky blue mixed in. It's still drying but looks like it will be a lovely dark red-wine color. Pics to follow.

Also I'm still working on my clapotis.

Spiritual journey content: I'm still sorting through my issues. I do feel freer spiritually than I have felt in years. It's a great feeling, that I can be free to let God be God and not put him in a box, or a jar, or whatever.

Here is something I wrote late last week:

A couple interesting books I ran across this week (Amazon works in mysterious ways hehehe): Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller and What’s So Amazing About Grace? by Philip Yancey. The thing about Searching for God Knows What: I was just kind of hopping from book to book (I started out with Philip Yancey and that kind of led me into Donald Miller) and I did the search inside the book thing, and it took me to a passage about putting God in little jars… just like my metaphor of God-in-a-box. So of course I had to download the book to my Kindle. I’m about 2/3 of the way through it. He talks at length about how we try to create God in our own image, and how that gets in the way of having a relationship with God, and that hurts God because all he ever wanted was to have a perfect Relationship with us from the get go. (There’s an interesting exposition on Genesis 2-3. I had a little trouble with it at first since he appears to come at it from a YEC standpoint and I have a real problem with YEC theology, see above, but now I’m coming to realize that Gen 2-3 really talks about how God wanted a perfect Relationship with his blessed, created humans and how we humans fucked it up and continue to fuck it up.)

As for What’s So Amazing About Grace?: I skipped ahead to a chapter where Yancey talks about the passage in Leviticus about “don’t eat shellfish” and other holiness code passages about men with damaged testicles and women who have their period and people with open sores and people with physical disabilities – all unclean, and the passage in Acts where God tells Peter that what was once unclean, is now clean – both unclean foods, and “unclean” people like the Roman centurion. Yancey takes those passages and talks about how even today we make stupid rules about no dancing or no jewelry or no whatever, or no oddballs allowed (you have to be and act and talk a certain way to be a Christian) and those rules get in the way of a relationship with God. He points out that a “no oddballs allowed” rule would mean that NoBoDy could possibly be a Christian. We’re all oddballs. We’re all seafood in the diet of life. (Just as long as no one tries to eat me with melted butter or cocktail sauce.)

Jesus invited people from all walks of life – the seafood of society – to dine with him at the table. The ones he had a problem with were the theocrats who thought they were perfect and had God’s rules down pat. I can see Jesus today – he’d be hanging out with hookers and meth-heads and high school dropouts working graveyards at Loaf & Jug, and showing his love to them and helping them clean up their acts because he showed them love that they had never felt before, and telling the likes of James Dobson where to put it. (Man, that would be a beautiful sight to see…)

Yanno, the thing about James Dobson and the like: That’s long been a hangup of mine. I guess this is something to process or think about for another day. But I guess I see him and his ilk as the Pharisees of our time. Jesus sure didn’t have much patience with the Pharisees, their legalism and literalism. He had great fun challenging them to a battle of wits, and always coming out on top. And he reserved his harshest scorn for the Pharisees and the teachers of the Jewish law because they were so damn legalistic, and their legalism and literalism were barriers to a relationship with God. More God in a box, I guess… (Hm. I just turned to Matt 23 – “I’ve had it with you! You Pharisees, you religion scholars, you’re hopeless, frauds, your lives are roadblocks to God’s kingdom!” Woah…)

Anyhoo.

I did start an online meditation course Saturday. I am struggling with it some, when I sit quietly and meditate I find that fears and other negative feelings come bubbling to the surface. Things I've been trying to suppress for years, I suppose. It's kind of scaring me away from meditation. I've noticed in the past that when the quieting of the mind in yoga or meditation causes negative thoughts and feelings to surface, I shy away from activities that quiet the mind because I'm afraid of the thoughts and feelings. I think I need to face those thoughts and feelings head on tho.

God in a box

Warning, no fiber content in this post, and there's some back story that isn't in this post. I may post the backstory at some point.

The following is a condensed form of a journal I just wrote.

So here I go starting to try to sort out some of what I learned/discovered/whatevered over the weekend. I spent much of the weekend railing on paper about why God allows things to happen such as allowing a MI to masquerade as the Holy Spirit, and ranting about legalistic churchianity and stuff like the prosperity gospel. I did come out of the weekend feeling God’s presence, which was a big breakthrough for me. I hadn’t felt that presence for a long time.

I’m still struggling with the things that are stumbling blocks for me, which I think pretty much boil down to conservatism. I ran across a comment on Slacktivist that got me thinking, to the effect of “for some people, it isn’t Christ that they’re worshiping.” Hm, I’m starting to think that some conservatives, literalist, legalists etc. aren’t worshiping the living Christ so much as worshiping a political theory, or a particular translation of the Bible, (AV 1611 comes to mind here) or worshiping certain rules and regulations, cherry picking the verses in the Bible that support those rules and regulations or that political theory (shrimp cocktail, anyone?) or whatever.

I’m actually starting to feel sorry for such people, because they can never feel God’s grace and love so long as their object of worship isn’t the living Christ but is a man-made construct. False idols, much? I know there are verses about not worshiping false idols but I don’t recall them off the top of my head. And I don’t want to fall into the same trap fundamentalists tend to fall into – “if you violate verse X, you’re condemned” or whatever. Probably better to ask God’s grace and love to fill their hearts so that they aren’t trapped by fear and hatred.

Maybe some of the other Slacktivist comments got me moving in this line of thought.
In the latest LBTM post, Fred explores a scene between Rayford and Hattie and comments on an interview in which Tim LaHaye said that a RL encounter between an airline pilot and a flight attendant was the genesis of that plot line. Which engendered a number of comments to the effect of, LaHaye must think that it’s impossible for men and women to work together because ZOMG that will lead to sin… and therefore LaHaye must think that for him, any encounter with a woman other than his wife must be avoided, because he can’t be exposed to temptation because he doesn’t want to risk Being Left Behind…

Yanno, it must be terribly sad to live that way, to think that your every action could lead to being condemned to hell. Somehow I don’t think that’s what Jesus was here for and what he died for. He died to save us, not to scare the hell out of us (literally and figuratively).

And don’t get me started on whether people and dinosaurs co-existed. I do think that being trapped in a mindset that the world can’t be more than a few thousand years old, and that God literally created the world in 6, 24-hour days, and that dinosaurs HAD to be on the ark because Noah was commanded to bring critters of “every kind” on board, has to be incredibly constraining and difficult.

God is too big, too powerful, too wonderful to be squeezed into a box. And when we force him into a box of our own creating, we are forcing ourselves into that box as well. No wonder so many people reject God, they look at that tiny box and can’t imagine being squeezed into such a tiny, confining space – and they don’t realize that the box isn’t God.

I spent too many years seeing only God-in-a-box. When I rejected the box, I kinda threw God out with the box. I think by doing so, I created a box of my own. Only now am I realizing that God isn’t the box, and the box isn’t God.

OK, I know this doesn't make a lot of sense, but I'm still sorting things out.