A Pilgrim’s Digression

“Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously / He brags of his misery…” Bob Dylan

The blessing and the bane of blogging are one and the same: its immediacy. So often, what one writes is quickly rendered moot, or else proven to have been based in ignorance and carelessness. Sloppiness is the dominant trait of modern communications.

I feel like if I had last week to write over again, I’d choose not to write my post on the Baptist church we’ve been attending and my feelings concomitant with returning to regular church attendance. I should have learned by now not to write about religion. It’s a subject on which I am not qualified to hold an opinion. Thus when I insist on holding forth in one of my long-winded self-flagellations I prove only my utter foolishness and self-absorption.

I cannot think about religion, God, or theology outside the box of my own emotionalism. Furthermore, since I cannot provoke in myself the slightest interest in ever reading any theology, my ignorance is likely to remain at a level roughly equivalent to a six year-old in a Fundamentalist Sunday School. So I’d best just keep quiet. Stick to writing about politics, or whatever pleases me, so long as it is not religion related.

By the time we went to church yesterday, I was already inclining in the direction of repenting of my post (I won’t even link to it here; it’s better forgotten). During church, I came to a fuller realization of the immaturity of my response to what happened with Sammy last week, not to mention the immaturity of my guilt and perpetual picking away at old scabs.

The preacher said nothing yesterday that led me to this conclusion; sitting there, I just gradually came to that regret one feels when one has done something embarassing or wrong. Or maybe the pastor’s sermon did have something to do with it.

Last week, he started an instructional series of sermons titled “Why?” Last week’s sermon was “Why Sunday?” (why do we choose to worship on Sunday?) and this week’s sermon was “Why a sermon?” The goal is to educate parishioners as to why Baptists worship the way they do, but also apparently to defend the status quo by conceding agreement with “reformers” on a few non-essential points. In yesterday’s sermon, I was particularly struck that the pastor said he felt that Protestant devaluation of communion, in opposition to Catholic over-emphasis, had led to a contrary vice: the elevation of the preacher as star. He didn’t name names, but his point was that no Christian should become wealthy and powerful from his association with Christ. I was reminded of that message again today, upon reading an article in Time Magazine about Ralph Reed’s relationship with Jack Abramoff, An Unholy Alliance?.

However, the pastor also said some things I thought questionable. At one point, he mentioned how when he was in seminary in the late eighties, seminarians were advised to shorten sermons from the traditional thirty minutes to about fifteen minutes. Today, he said, seminarians are advised to shorten sermons to about seven minutes. This led him to a veiled criticism of new churches which use video clips and music, plays and dancing, to supplement or even to take the place of a sermon. Although I agree with him, I don’t regard my opinion as definitive and would not attempt to uphold it in an argument, and I don’t think he should have levelled his criticism on the way other people worship in front of the congregation.

He backed away from his critique, saying that it was not for him to judge (though he had just done so). And earlier he had warned of how the power to stand before a congregation and preach could corrupt, though maybe he had just demonstrated that corruption, too.

Yet the sermon overall was good, and as I sat there listening, my feelings gradually shrank from the feelings of outrage over the boy, Sammy, whose salvation is to be “voted” on next week. I choose to go back to this church with my wife and son every week, and if I haven’t found the motivation to go somewhere else, then I need to just bite my tongue and live with it.

On the subject of narcissism, which was kind of the serpent in the garden of that regrettable post last week, I don’t have much to say except that I do see vanity as the sin underlying all my other sins. In me is such a mixture of self-loathing and arrogant self-regard, only poison can be the result. If I make a fool of myself in posts such as that one, it is because I am of such high pretentions that I cannot see my own foolishness. I may right now be writing words that I will regret for their vanity, maybe as soon as tonight. Who knows? The irony of self-reflection is that one can never be sure one is really seeing one’s self, or only a reflection of one’s self in the pool of one’s own emotions, desires, and regrets. Probably it’s always best to assume the latter is true.

Sometimes when I try to enumerate the things that keep me from growing, I think writing is at the top of the list. If I really want to grow, I ought to stop writing. Writing exacerbates a tendency in me to become overly preoccupied with myself, my feelings, and my opinions. Writing is a talent that has been with me so long that sometimes I wonder if I’ve become like the middle aged man who was once a star football player in High School, but who has gradually become a self-parody. He retains his youthful arrogance, but none of his youthful powers or freshness. We all know annoying people like that. They are merely bores who know everything there is to know about the sport, supplemented with tiresome personal anecdotes from when they played twenty years ago.

I have been writing this blog post for two days now, and I am weary of it. Just more sickening self-preoccupation. I can feel depresson creeping in all around the edges of my mind. Grey fog turns to dark night. It has been raining a long time now. The window is cracked, so I can hear the rain. It damps down the dead leaves on the trees and soothes the sodden ground. I like the rain, it’s sound; it fits my mood. I feel like my very veins and arteries are clotted with the damp, musky leaves of Fall. I did not go to the bonfire on Saturday night; it was rained out. I was glad. Times like these, I want nothing to do with anyone, least of all myself.

God I hate my self, wish I could be rid of it, dream of cutting the vein and letting it drain out, this poison in me. I am so sick. I’m going to listen to some music on my iPod, maybe Bob Dylan. “Highway 61 Revisited.” Then, to bed.