Christianity, religious tolerance

I yearn to worship again at Friends UCC. God was different there than he is anywhere else, I am not kidding. He was not a jealous god, he was not a god that closed doors or refused to answer questions. He opened the door up and threw guilt right out.

We were married in that church, by the minister I revere above all others. Is that not a reason to celebrate and affirm?

God was a Mother and a Father, and they did not play mere lip service to God's Motherhood there. I felt the Earth Mother there. I felt that I could worship the God of Heaven and the Goddess of Earth, I felt I could read books about zen, fairies, paganism, and Christ was my dearest friend yet. It's who I am, I can't stand not to question. I can't stand to blindly accept. I can't stand being among worshippers who disapprove of these doings.

Dove

Well, that is a dove. It seems like my camera has degraded over the years. This Treo is at least three years old now. I still remember that I was listening to Nightwish on my Treo 600 when I dropped it and it lost its speaker abilities. Things have changed so much for me. I look back through the tunnel of years and feel strange and lost. I wonder if I made some bad career decisions, then I wonder if I care about this sort of work at all.

Am I going to making mincing steps through life without committing to anything? Always I have said, I'm just here waiting for the next thing. Or, when I was in high school, because I had to be, but my mind was in a "better" place, college, but I learned quickly I couldn't settle my mind there either so lived in my future job.

Here I am in, I guess, my fourth job. In one sense I would have been pleased I managed to be hired by four different people. Part of me asks for very, very little in life. And then the other part of me asks for so incredibly much.

Jeremiah 9:23-24

--
This is what the Lord says:
"Let not the wise man boast of his wisdom
or the strong man boast of his strength
or the rich man boast of his riches,
but let him who boasts boast about this:
that he understands and knows me,
that I am the Lord, who exercises kindness,
justice and righteousness on earth,
for in these I delight,"
declares the Lord.
--
What this suggests to me on my very quick morning meditation is that knowing God is a choice we can make. There is no sense in boasting about something that we didn't make ourselves, and that would be anything about our physical or mental beings.

Recipe journal

Today Nathan and I went to Tuesday Morning and browsed. It was so fun. We bought random things there and at Tom Thumb. I got this recipe journal kit at Tuesday Morning and spent this afternoon breaking it in. I already have three pages done. At Tom Thumb I found glittering black tea lights on Halloween clearance.

This weekend has been full of the unexpected. We saw four houses Friday evening after work in an incredible heat wave. The first two were pretty fascinating. We started putting together an offer on the first house with our realtor this weekend. This morning I checked my email, and the seller dropped the price on the farm house so that we could afford it with our mortgage. We accepted the offer. So the farm house I described back in April, well, that's probably going to be our home. I won't believe it until we're moved in, and I'm not talking about it till it's a done deal. But I did start back embroidering my curtains today, and I felt a deep brooding happiness over it all. For the most part though I'm done with feelings for a home. It's really not wise, especially the way mortgages are going these days.

Another big surprise was that I contracted poison ivy from one of our woodland jaunts, and it has spread like wildfire over my body. I have never had poison ivy this extensively in my life, and it has been over ten years since I had it at all. Wildfire is the best description for it. My skin is flaming all over. Nathan has caught it now, but he doesn't itch. I have calamine lotion all over, but nothing stops the inflammation, and it keeps spreading. I am thinking of taking the day off tomorrow, because when I have to wear anything on my legs it's excruciating and spreads more. Last week I actually prayed I would get sick so I wouldn't have to go to work. But I am suffering right now. My nerves are throbbing all over. I scratched in my sleep last night like a madwoman and woke myself up with raw and swollen pox all over. I had to reapply the lotion at 3 a.m. Tonight I am already feeling worse.

Complaining makes me feel better.

Black dahlia, Pt. II

Tonight I did a little more than I thought I could. I always think that if I could just get organized I would be able to sit myself right down after a day's work, pick up some sewing work and go after it, but maybe that's a perfect world.

I planned meals for the weekend, bought groceries and set my sauerbraten to marinate. It will have to marinate two days since the recipe specified at least 24 hours and I will not be home until late evening tomorrow.

I wish I had written out my Black Dahlia dream earlier. I could remember it better then. I woke at about midnight with my blood running cold. I got up and checked all the locks and even looked out the window. I don't really understand what scared me so much, because I wasn't in danger in the dream.

Some murder details follow.

In my dream we lived in a dorm, one of those with covered walkways between buildings, and the exterior walls that look like they've been laid in glue, then laid in some rocks. The areas on either side of the walkway were filled in with pebbles, and on my way through the glass doors I was wont to look at beautiful objects I found within the pebbles each day. In particular I gazed at some amethyst-colored glass marbles.

Then one day I learned that the Black Dahlia had been murdered in my dorm/home, and her limbs were partially buried in the pebbles on either side of the exterior walkway, and they looked like alabaster pieces. The beautiful marbles I noticed every day were actually her eyes.

This filled me with numbing horror.

In reality an actress in 1940's Hollywood was murdered by a surgeon acquaintance who disconnected her limbs, drained them of blood, and cleaned and polished them so meticulously that a woman pushing a baby carriage down the street saw them standing upright in an overgrown field and thought they were pieces of a mannequin.

For me when I read the story I felt a vicarious horror at the woman who discovered the body. To see something strange and artistic, like a Salvador Dali painting, and then realize it's the work of a murderer, that you are looking at a corpse.

The actress was given the name Black Dahlia in hype surrounding her death and partially-unsolved murder, due I think to her pallor and black hair which gave her a gothic look.

Anyway, I was surprised Gothic Beauty didn't actually describe the murder, since I doubt most people know the story.

To me it sort of relates to my search for beauty, my reaching out and then being stunned or deeply disillusioned, as far as the dream. The dorm is one of the ultimate visions I can conceive of a standard-issue no-frills building, and I think I felt betrayed because when I finally found something beautiful in my dull environment it turned out to be deeply profane.

When I woke I felt the presence of God. Through the mist of my fear I felt a strange and stern guidance, perhaps even a rebuke.

I don't really know what God may be trying to tell me. He needs to know that I can't be force-fed other peoples' beliefs, theories, churches. He needs to know I can't blindly go along. I want to be his sheep, but not the sheep of other humans. I haven't been reading my Bible or making time for meditation. I feel guilty about it, and I can't find God through my guilt. I have felt very frustrated about that. If I stop altogether my study and prayer I stop my relationship with God; however I don't want God to become a routine or something I feel guilty about skipping. This is a huge struggle for me, and the more I hear what other people think and do with God, the worse it becomes.