Pre-Op

I have been thinking and even writing quite a few "blog-worthy" things the last few days, but I haven't quite got in the habit of writing on the computer. I still turn to my journal first. It may have something to do with the size of my laptop and the difficulties inherent in holding it in my lap. In any case, an update is due.

I am scheduled for a total abdominal hysterectomy on Monday the 13th. I spent the last week or so arranging for my classes to be covered and prepping my on-line course ahead as far as possible, etc. Surgeon says I won't be doing a full-day's work for at least four weeks. It is a little intimidating. While on one hand I am near-desperate to have it done and feel almost ready to grab a knife and do the operation myself . . . on the other I still ask myself if I am doing the right thing and I tremble at the thought of feeling that weak for that long. It is hard to wrap my head around four to eight weeks of recovery time. Missing out on the end - the best time - of the semester. When you've brought your students through all the hard parts and it is really paying off in sophisticated analysis and critical interpretation.

So I am dealing with it by reminding myself that I would not - am not - giving my students the best of me in any case. I would be suffering through that 4-8 week period anyway. My body has no trouble reminding me of that. And I am putting myself in mental, emotional and to an extent physical training for healing after the surgery.

I am dedicated to health. To being healthy. To being the living embodiment of health. It has begun to really sink in that I do not have to accept anything less than perfect functioning of this temple of god that I'm in. I'm not quite sure when I allowed myself to beging believing that the PHN was a permanent condition, but things went downhill from there.

I am trying to see this surgery and the recovery period as an opportunity to truly change the relationship I have with my body and with my health. I am doing a number of things to try to foster that. I've been continuining the things I've talked about some here (and that I hope to talk more about while I'm recuperating) like yoga and meditation and continuing study of sacred texts that are meaningful and helpful like the Gitas. But I am also participating in a very neat visualization/mind-body healing program offered by the Rehab Center of the hospital.

It has some fairly standard relaxation techniques, and visualizing oneself healed, along with walking yourself through getting to know and have discussions with the hurting parts of your body. That latter is something I can certainly use help with. It also has a component of asking for support; that involves requestion that people who love you send their love in a warm blanket of color (I choose peachy-pink) half an hour before surgery (7 am Central Daylight Savings Time for anyone who feels like participating - I will take all the love and healing thoughts I can get). It is hard for me to ask for this - or anything. But I am and will be grateful.

Another very cool part is that the circulating nurse will read five healing statements to me (4 are pre-selected and one I write myself) as I am going under anaesthetic and while I am under. A great many studies have demonstrated that we do hear what is going on while we are under, and it does have an amazing effect on us. For example, people who are told they will heal well do actually heal faster in controlled studies. Other studies have people using less medication, getting out of the hospital faster, having fewer side effects, and all kinds of things. Anecdotal stories also reveal the opposite; when people hear their doctors saying "Oops" or "This looks bad" or other negative things, they heal more slowly, are depressed, use more pain medication, etc.

So what I decided is that in addition to the statements that suggest I will heal well, quickly, need little medication and have no complications, why not also plant the idea that as I heal from the surgery, I will also heal from the post-herpetic neuralgia? It can't hurt, right? I am working on how to phrase it; it needs to be wholly positive and not mention pain (what happens when you say "don't think about pink elephants"?). Maybe something like "You will be whole and free of all medications forever." Or "All of your cells will work together as a field to be free and healthy for a long life." That means something to me and my body - we've been reading about the body as a quantum field which ties into the way Krishna talks about the body, too. Anyone else have any good wordsmithing for me?

I am asking for help. Hard for me, but I am learning to be humble. I've eaten a lot of crow this semester already, and as I head into this period where wiping my own bum is going to be difficult I expect I'll learn even more about humility.

I'll try to post again before the big day. Thanks for still reading - Hopefully I'll be able to say something a little more profound one of these days : )

March 2008

March 13

[Ok – now this is getting silly. I am blogging about my journal, which here is an entry about the blog I created to record my journals!]

1994 is really hard to release without commentary. It is just so clear to me now that I wanted to be a Christian, wanted Christianity to be true, largely to please my parents and make them love and accept me – which is not to say they didn't already love me.

But it didn't take long at all for the questions to arise, for me to become uncomfortable. I persisted for a couple more years – in a very serious way – because I was determined to make it work. I gave it the fairest shot I was capable of giving. And what came out of it for me was again more guilt. More pain. More inability to measure up. Where others are able to find forgiveness, I just keep finding condemnation. Standards set impossibly high. Each of my rounds with Christianity is flavored with anxiety, guilt, shame, and fear of being excluded, left behind, and rejected.

Part of that is my own personal pathology. Since my father is (was) a minister, my ideas about the Christian God will forever be entangled in my impressions, conceptions and emotions about my Dad. As others have argued before me and about gods in general, my picture of Yahweh is one big Rorschach test. Clearly I have long had issues of desperately wanting to please my father but never being able to. A great fear of being rejected by him, being unloved. An uncertainty about how my actions will be interpreted, but deep anxiety that they my intentions will always be misread. And those fears are writ onto my image of god.

But I don't think all of these feelings and ideas are personal, or ideosyncratic, I think they are a result of this kind of theology. If you posit a heaven and hell, for example, or any system of eternal rewards and punishments based on a single life – to which no one can know the outcome until they are dead, you are going to create anxiety in people.

I have written a lot in my life about the difficulty in reconciling the Yahweh of the Old Testament with the Loving Abba Jesus mentions. Well, the presence of the one ought to produce a little confusion in anyone who's paying attention. There are just too many places where Jesus himself says things that can only be interpreted as exclusionary. So you have to decide that a) he didn't really say them, b) he didn't really mean them, or c) he's preaching something different than you thought he was.

In some ways I hate this dredging up, because I really am tired of arguing with Christianity. Why can't it just go away? I mean, out of my head. I don't want to have to keep explaining why I don't practice that faith. But that's the key argument for doing this. Put it all out there on the blog – warts and all, and then my family and closest friends will know how I think and why I think that way and I will never have to explain it again.

We may have some cool discussions, and maybe even some arguments or debates, and that would be wonderful and welcome. Certainly, if anyone has the stamina to wade through the whole thing, there is no way anyone can claim I haven't thought about my position.

March 30

I haven't mentioned I'm reading Wicked, which is wonderful. Concealed as a fairytale about the backstory of Oz' Wicked Witch of the West, it's really a treatise on the nature of evil. He explores the struggle to explain and deal with evil among followers of folk religion/superstition, pagan worship of elemental and creator gods and forces, organized religion and its bureaucracies and ties to the state (and thus its interest in maintaing the status quo), and secular humanism, with its potential for revolution or democracy or anarchy; moral relativism.

Super good. He's just had a character say that evil always precedes good in folk tales. Is that true? "There once was an evil witch . . . " Or a cruel giant, an ogre, etc. Peasants and earlier, didn't care where evil came from, he argues. They just assumed its existence. Is this true universally? In Europe? In agricultural societies?

It is at first an appealing argument. One wants to accept it at face value. But the Mbuti? Do they have stories of "evil beings?" I don't know. Surely they must. How else to explain the urge to be stingy that comes over people? For them the Forest is Mother and Father, source of Life and all good things. But evil things might live in the forest. I just don't know.

The !Kung have evil beings in the myths. Or they have beings that behave evilly. Hyena, for example. Of course, Hyena is only following his nature, just as Rabbit is only following his. It isn't necessarily considered "evil" by them, the way we would consider it, any more than the scorpion is evil for stinging. So I'm doubting this hypothesis that evil always precedes good, universally. As we've defined it. Which actually is what another of Maguire's characters says, "It is at the very least a matter of definitions" p.231.

One thing I wonder about – in societies with religions like Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc., where the philosophy is non-dualist, or monistic, is it only the monks and priests and ascetics who really get that? While the masses go right on believing in devils, witches, demons and ogres? It seems the latter is more true, because look at the rich and fascinating body of evil (and good) deities, heroes, spirits, legends and magical creatures throughout Asia. Or do people kind of believe both things simultaneously, even though they contradict each other? As Holland et al quote somebody (and I cited in my dissertation but can't remember right now who said it originally) – one of the key hallmarks of human thinking is our ability to believe two or more mutually contradictory things.

This reminds me that I need to write more, soon, about the new stuff I've been learning about how brains work, which is not in a linear, analog kind of way. All our ideas about us being like computers are basically wrong. What I began to see awhile ago, about thinking metaphorically, is actually true. Means a lot of our thinking is non-linguistic, which has serious implications for how I conceptualize and how I teach about the development of language, cognition and emotion. Oops – almost to Detroit so I'll have to expand this later.

Spring 2008

February 20

On the way to New Orleans, but I've got some things to say about Genesis. Did I tell you about Biallas' interpretation? I'd forgotten it, all this time, or had forgotten to let it affect me. A lot of what I learned in my religion courses in college I've continued to apply to all religions BUT Christianity. Hmm – fair treatment, huh?

Biallas points out, much in line with my insights in Dec/Jan, that the "fruit of the Tree of Knowledge" and the Serpent's tempation are gifts – boons to humankind. When we analyze that story, of course it is obvious that if God is omnipotent and omniscient, then he put the Tree there, He created humans with a thirst for knowledge, and he had to know what would happen. Hard to argue with.

The problem is with interpretation and how we see the serpent. Christians – building largely but not wholly on Jewish tradition, have chosen to see the Serpent as an evil being, and the temptation as a test that we fail. So we need to be punished. This is an archetype – we keep acting out this story; it tells us our nature and our relationship with God.

What if instead you read the story as one in which God, knowing humans as he does, knows the best way to get them to do something is to forbid them it? So He sets up the whole situation to entice us into a world of intellectual stimulation, moral responsibility and choice, instead of just sitting on our butts enjoying the good life? The result isn't punishment – its growth. Yahweh isn't vengeful; he's an Intelligent Designer, pushing us toward our greater consciousness.

OK, so I read and thought all of that over break. Now I want to report some new stuff.

I'm reading The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn. Wonderful! Will fill in plot later. He discusses two rabbinic commentaries on the creation story (and others) in Genesis; That of Rashi and of a modern scholar, Friedman.

Two points. One, his own excellent question as a child – why does knowledge come on a tree? Why not a river? A flower? A stone? He ends up concluding it has to be a gowing, living, developing thing, like learning itself. Still, why a tree and not a flower? Tree has longevity and statliness I guess, is not frivolous. But there are an awful lot of flowers that one could hardly accuse of frivolity.

Two – All rabbinic commentators apparently accept that it was a fig tree, because Adam and Eve wrapped themselves with fig leaves! That flummoxes me. Where is the logic? Rabbis are supposed to have laid the groundwork for symbolic logic, logical reasoning in general in the West. And maybe Mendelsohn is overstating. But Rashi, widely considered one of the greatest, wisest, most important commentators, he says about the fig leaves: "By the very thing with which they were ruined, they were corrected." Since God made clothes for them. But maybe the Tree of Knowledge had tiny leaves, so they had to use a different tree . . . right? Geez! Else why would one be called "fig" and the other "Tree of Knowledge"?

Earlier, Mendelsohn points out something super important in the whole "origins" arguments. The Hebrew text of the beginning of the Torah is not "In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth" What it says is:

Bereishit bara Elohim et-hashamayim v'et ha'aretz.

"In the beginning of God's creation of the heavens and the earth . . ." That little change in emphasis is just gigantic.

March 1

I've just finished Lost. Last night and many times while reading it I had to put the book aside and weep. Mendlesohn's story is interspersed with his musings on the Torah. More correctly, on the parashah, the weekly readings of Genesis. Thinking about what happens, even just from the Creation through the birth of Jacob, I do not see how one can conclude that Yahweh is a "good" God.

Clearly the stories are meant to tell his people, his followers, who He is and what He expects of them. Let them know what kind of God they've got themselves mixed up with. And it is the story of a very specific relationship; this one god watches and chooses this one man, and tests him, and decides he has the right qualities. The qualities this particular god is looking for. So he makes a covenant with him. Forevermore, Yahweh and Abraham will be bound together, along with all of Abraham's decendents.

The Torah is a record, and an explanation, and maybe like a manual. Like a book you would leave for your successor about how to get along with a cranky and persnickety boss. And for a very long time, neither the Jews nor anyone else claimed it was anything more. You have your gods; we have ours. You have your ways; we have ours. No claims to universal truths and righteousness. Just deep intimacy and relatedness, trust and interdependency. Why will we get the land of Canaan? Not because it is the "just," the "right" thing to happen, but because Yahweh is our champion and is more powerful.

If you read the Torah in this way and in this way only, can you remain untroubled. Because if you are looking for Yahweh to be just, kind, fair or good – forget it. Even to be consistent. The only way in which he is consistent is that he demands obedience and loyalty. He is always a jealous god. But he is absolutely horrified that Cain killed his brother Abel. One human murdering another is such a terrible abomination. Then just a little while later he's commanding Abraham to murder his own son. Of course he prevents that, but inbetween, Yahweh himself has annihilated all of humankind except Noah and his family (even babies, even children), and has killed every living being in Sodom and Gomorrah. Again, there had to have been innocent infants and children in those cities.

So if these stories are myths to teach us the nature of God, I think they teach that Yahweh is/was a partisan of the family of Abraham, who insisted on loyalty and defined goodness as obedience to himself – much as people generally did define things at the time. In other words, a God of the time and place. A god created for and by the people. A god that should never have been taken out of that context and made universal. Not without a serious makeover.

Then we come to the horrors of the Holocaust. No. I do not believe a living Yahweh, who had really Chosen these people, would stand by and allow that to happen. If he would, he's not good. A god who intervenes in history – Egypt, Canaan, Jericho, Jerusalem, etc. – choosing NOT to intervene in Germany? There is no possible sin big enough for a good god. These were children. All of them. Even the elderly. They were innocent as infants in comparison to what was done to them. No one with even half a tiny bit of goodness would allow it, who had the power to stop it.

So if there is no Yahweh, there is no Jesus. Not as Savior. Which I already believed. But its amazing how deeply rooted the habit of such belief is. And I guess its that no matter how much I want to just walk away from monotheism altogether and stop thinking about it, I can't. I live in a culture in which there is no escape. One is constantly and incessantly bombarded with it.