on being sick

So maybe it's because I've been sick, but I confess I've been low lately.

Low like yellowed paper
Head in a bucket of puke low.
Low like The Dubliners: paralysis.
That's the feeling, I guess: Out of place in one's place.

I love theological conversations, but don't really have anything to offer the academic ones, and I get frustrated by some of the more limited, real-life ones. That's why this blog is so schizo. (yes, dissociative identity disorder is the correct term, but you knew what I meant...)

I love philosophy but I have a deep distrust of academia, which has never really helped anyone I know. (medicine excepted). Sometimes it feels likes it helps people with giant frontal lobes figure out stuff they invented while real life marches on elsewhere, -and no, listening to indie rock does not give you "street cred". (Though to be honest, a profound Barthian scholar that listened to hip hop would be persuasive.)

I really like the charismatic world, full of power, drama and the presence of Christ, but I'm not charismatic by temperament. Charismatic folks seem so certain of everything, even if it's the spiritual reality behind peanut butter, if not doctrine.

I Don't really like the city; I'm a little paranoid, but not so keen on moving back to unpopulated countryside, either.

I want to be just, but I'm tired of barely scraping by.

I want to be passionate, pressing forward in my convictions and making something happen, but I tend to distrust the passionately convicted. I'm also pretty sure that passionately unconvicted isn't much of a platform :)

I vacillate about whether or not free will is possible - not from a theological/sovereignty stand point, but a nagging feeling that everyone is constructed by something else. We're all epiphenomena.

And it's funny, but I don't really find the idea that Jesus knows what it's like to be alienated comforting. I can reason my way through it, of course, but, on a visceral level, it just doesn't do anything for me. I don't want commiseration, I want resolution. So the challenge is to internalize and believe that Jesus secures the things I need through his self-giving, knowing that in my own self-giving I can participate in the same life. It just doesn't roll off the tongue quite so well :)