"Vacation" time

Everyone is telling me to think positive about traveling to North Carolina for our weeklong vacation tomorrow. We're getting up at 3:45am to make our early morning flight and then, after three hours of flying, we have a three hour drive out to my uncle's beach house. Yes, I suppose there's a chance that my super active, hyper-alert 19-month-old toddler will doze off or merrily flip through Elmo books for three hours on the plane. And I suppose that his recent enchantment with screaming the word "NO!" to everything we say and throwing himself on the floor and kicking when he doesn't get his way will subside for our travel day tomorrow. So I'm trying to take everyone's advice and think positive. But, in the back of my mind, I am getting ready for the possibility, probably somewhere around 99%, that tomorrow is going to be utterly miserable. On the bright side, it'll be a great opportunity for God to teach everyone on the plane a lesson about being patient and forgiving!

Anyway, wish us luck. I'm taking my laptop and would like to put up a couple of posts I've been working on, but if all I can manage is something like "Me think about God, me confused," you'll know why.

Prayer request

I would like to ask you to say a prayer for my dad. As I've mentioned before, he's an atheist. He's been through many long spells of not being happy with his life, which I suspect has a lot to do with his atheistic worldview. He is firmly entrenched in his beliefs and, as an engineer, prides himself on being a scientific, logical thinker who doesn't need any psychological "crutches" like religion to get by in life (I actually spent quite some time wondering if that comment from Anonymous was him).

Right now he's living on the other side of the world in the United Arab Emirates, working on an engineering project over there. He's lonely and a bit bored and emailed me the other day to ask if I had any good books to recommend. I wasn't going to let this opportunity pass me by! I gave him the names and a brief review of four books I thought he might enjoy and threw in Lee Strobel's Case for the Creator.

Of all the Christian authors I've read I've found that Strobel is the only one who really knows how to talk to atheists about the Christian perspective. His Case for Christ was the first thing I ever read that made me think that maybe these New Testament stories are true.

To my great surprise, my dad actually ordered the book and I guess is actually going to read it. I don't have very high hopes for this since he's undoubtedly going to read it with an eye towards picking it apart. But I suppose there's a small glimmer of hope that it might spark him to be slightly more open-minded on the issue of God. I don't think he's ever read a book by a Christian author so I doubt he's heard these ideas before.

And of course now I'm second-guessing myself and wondering if this was really the best book I could recommend. I think this is probably my one shot to get my dad to read a pro-Christian or pro-God book, that if I'm mis-remembering it and it actually sucks he's going to roll his eyes at any future suggestions. Ugh.

Anyway, please say a prayer that perhaps this book will at least take one little brick out of the mental wall my father's built up against religion. It's so painfully obvious how much more fulfilled he would be if he would just admit that maybe, just maybe, he and me and my son who he loves so dearly are something more than a bunch of chemicals. That maybe life actually does have a purpose.

Great post about homebirth

I loved Selkie's recent post about homebirth. Check it out if you're even remotely interested in the issue.

Courage

I actually have a long response written to the theological issues brought up in this old comment from "anon" but have decided not to post it. These arguments have been had over and over again and I don't want to start a theological debate here because a) I don't want this to turn into a debate blog where I have to deal with pissy atheist commentors all the time (I have enough of that in real life), and b) I am woefully unequipped to defend Christianity.

I do want to address one thing from his comment, though. This I can speak to since it's a matter of personal experience.

"...Most people do not have the courage to just say 'I don't know'."

First of all, most atheists (this commentor included) don't say "I don't know." They claim to know definitively that there is no God. But whatever. Let's not split hairs on that one. Let's use the term "atheism" loosely here.

I've tried atheism and I've tried belief, and I find that the route that takes most courage is belief. For me, non-belief was a great crutch. I could do whatever I wanted because, hey, who's to say what's right and wrong? I could sit back and smugly judge everyone, live my life according to whatever brought me the most immediate pleasure, use people, lie, gossip -- whatever! As long as I didn't think about that pesky issue that all my hopes and dreams and happiness were nothing more than a collection of soulless chemical reactions that would one day cease to exist and it didn't matter, life was good. And you'd be surprised, it's surprisingly easy not to think about that stuff. I eventually came to terms with the fact that that was true, there was nothing I could do about it, and so if I didn't want to kill myself immediately (which would actually make more sense and be more efficient based on that worldview), I might as well go out and have a damn good time while it lasts. And I did. After a period of depression I felt quite happy and fulfilled.

When I started looking for God it was not because I felt something was lacking or because I didn't have the courage to face my life, but because my research and thinking on the subject led me to think that there's something else going here, something more than just random chemicals and forces. I would read that all serious physicists agree that matter AND time AND space were created with the big bang. So what was before that? As I read up on DNA I had the shocking realization that this is information. I racked my brain to think of an example of information coming from nonintelligent, random forces and could come up with nothing. How do you get DNA (i.e. information/instructions for building a life) without intelligence?

I could go on but you get the drift. I just couldn't answer these questions. I didn't immediately jump to "so there must be one, monotheistic God!" but I did decide to open my mind to the teachings of various religions for the first time in my life. And, as I chronicle in this and my old blog, a long and winding road has led me to Christianity, the Catholic Church in particular.

And I've found this to be the most difficult intellectual endeavor of my life. Not just because some of the concepts are difficult, but because it's risky. It takes courage. It's risky to put my belief in something that can't be proven on paper. What if I'm wrong? How ridiculous would I be for turning my life upside down and changing everything about myself for a totally incorrect belief system? And I may very well be doing that. In this life I'll never even know for sure if I'm right or wrong, if all the sacrifices I have and will make for these beliefs are for naught. But with my atheist belief system it was actually pretty easy: I might not know what's going to happen after we die, but I am 100% sure that making all this money and getting drunk with my friends every weekend is bringing me happiness right now!

I think that some people do use religion as a crutch. They don't put their beliefs to the test of logic and reason because, understandably, they know that they need it to avoid sliding into utter despair at the meaninglessness of life. I think these people are naturally more deep, intellectual thinkers than people like myself. Because there are plenty of us out there who are shallow enough to live our lives in happiness amidst the elephant in the room that it's all for nothing. And for us, atheism is the perfect crutch. It takes no courage. We can prove all our beliefs on paper so we're 100% sure that we're not wasting any effort on anything for which we won't be rewarded.

Most religions (the monotheistic ones anyway) require great sacrifices of their adherents, often with no tangible payoff, all for something that cannot be seen or measured. You can say that these people are wrong, but you can't say they don't have courage.

A spiritual block

My lack of posts is partially due to the fact that I am easily overwhelmed by day-to-day life with a toddler. But the biggest reason is that I'm suffering from a sort of spiritual block, kind of like a writer's block.

After I wrote that post about suffering and read up on the issue I realized that understanding God's role in suffering requires understanding Christian doctrine and all its nuances. I found John Paul II's letter on suffering and all of Jennifer's posts on the topic very interesting, but often waaay over my head. I've found the same thing with most of the books I've read on Catholicism and Christianity.

As a person who went to church on Easter for the first time ever just yesterday, has never been to church with her parents, only attended Sunday school once or twice with friends, didn't live in a house that had a Bible until a couple years ago and didn't even know who this Jesus person was supposed to be until around high school, there is just so much I don't know. And it's really overwhelming.

I read something about why Jesus had to die for our sins and the author casually mentions something about a "new covenant". (There was an old one? What exactly is a covenant, again?) I read something about joining in Jesus' suffering and the author casually throws out the concept of "grace". (No idea what that's about). Another author mentions in passing the good news that Jesus conquered death (didn't the pre-Jesus Jews believe in an afterlife?) and that his resurrection means that we'll be resurrected (how do we get from A to B on that one?) All of these concepts are so elementary, yet so over my head. [I list these examples to illustrate a point only -- I don't want my kind readers to spend too much time trying to explain this stuff to me via this post. I'll clarify my questions and re-post them individually later.]

So I find myself at a standstill right now, and often slide back into my old atheist mindset since that's what's comfortable for me. All the books and info I read to try to deepen my faith assume that the reader has some sort of basic knowledge of Christianity and the stories of the Bible. (It might be because I usually read Catholic authors. For some reason their doesn't seem to be a lot of Christianity 101 type stuff by Catholics. It's either heavy Catholic theology or apologetics aimed at Protestant converts.)

So anyway, if I'm quiet on the spirituality front for a while, that's why. I feel really overwhelmed by what I don't know and don't understand right now. And I get frustrated when I look around and see that SO many other people totally have a handle on this. I don't usually think of myself as an idiot but, man, I've been trying to understand how Christ's death on the cross conquered sin and evil and death for like five months now and just cannot wrap my mind around it.

I'm going to go hit the books (probably starting with cardboard picture books aimed at toddlers since that appears to be my level of understanding) and possibly toss out a few questions to you readers, and hopefully I'll one day get this stuff figured out. Wish me luck. Or, better yet, pray for me. :)

Getting out of the "system"

I remember when I was younger I would see movies and TV shows sometimes portray parents of young children as hyper-competitive, obsessed with making sure that their child had all the latest educational toys, was enrolled in the most exclusive pre-pre-school, was reading Homer by three years old, etc. I always wondered where the media got these outlandish stereotypes because, c'mon, nobody's really like that.

Well, one of the bigger shocks I've received since becoming a parent is that a *lot* of parents really are like that. One of my good friends called me last week to say that she just got her son into one of the last waiting list slots for some ritzy preschool about 45 minutes away from here and was encouraging me to drop what I'm doing right now and make sure DB (my 18-month-old son) is on that list. Then yesterday I was at Barnes and Noble and heard two other mothers talk for close to an hour about which pre-school is best, what elementary schools have the highest test scores, what waiting lists their kids are on, what toddler soccer leagues are best, etc.

All this just for toddlers! And from what I've seen, it only gets more intense from there. My 17-year-old neighbor is a senior in high school and her life revolves around tests, college applications, scholarship competitions -- all while squeezing in volleyball practice a few times a week and games on the weekends. Her mother recently told me that she (the daughter) recently decided that not only is she no longer Catholic but she doesn't believe in God. Shocked, I asked the mother what she was going to do about it. She explained that with all the tests and applications and campus visits and practices and games they just don't have time to worry about that kind of thing right now.

I don't want this for my life, for my family's lives. I don't want to stress about what PRE-school my child attends, I don't want their lives to revolve around this-or-that test, I don't want their high school years to be so filled with competing and applying and testing that there's little left for family and God.

More and more I find myself feeling alienated from most other mothers I know because I don't want to obsess about and nit-pick every last detail of my children's education, starting when their barely out of diapers. Ironically, education is really important to me. But not important enough to get sucked into this treadmill that values school names and test scores over real learning, not important enough to put educational bureaucracy before family and God. (And, besides, I'm not convinced that their education will really be any better going to name brand pre-schools and the "best" high schools and taking zillions of test prep courses than if we all just relax and choose whatever schooling route is in line with our priorities and I spend a lot of time with my kids.)

I worry a lot that maybe everyone else is right, and maybe I'm throwing away my kids' chances at a college education by not getting them into the "system" early on. But my gut tells me that you really can't go wrong putting family and God first, and that it'll all work out for the best.