Category: Religion & Spirituality

How Belief In God Limits Us

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

The question we all have as human beings is “what lies beyond our limit?”  We just watched the film Another Earth where humans are faced with the perplexing realization that there is another earth mirroring our own, even another self completely synchronized with us.

In reality, when we come into contact with other people, their inner being transcends us.  They might let us into a few thoughts, but other than that, we will never fully know them.

But to find another replicated self – would we recognize ourselves?  Would that other self transcend us as well, as though we are looking at a stranger?  Would you feel competitive of your other self?  Would you find your other self ugly?  Would you be annoyed by your other self?  Would you love your other self?  Would you tell your other self to get over all their hang-ups and get on with life?

Just as we will never meet our other self, we will never meet our idea of God.  In Gordon D. Kaufman’s book, God The Problem, he states, “If there were no experiences within the world which brought us in this way up against the Limit of our world – if there were no point at which man sensed his finitude – then there would be no justification whatsoever for the use of God-language (Kaufman, 49).”

To embrace what lies beyond the limit, we talk of God in ways that we can understand from our experience of human relationships.

“…God is spoken of as lord, father, judge, king, and he is said to love and hate, to make covenants with his people, to perform “mighty acts,” to be characterized by mercy, forgiveness, faithfulness, patience, wisdom, and the like – all terms drawn from the linguistic region of interpersonal discourse (Kaufman, 62).”

In the Webster’s Dictionary, the word God is defined as “1 cap : the supreme reality; esp : the Being worshiped as the creator of the universe.”

When I say that I do not believe in the existence of God, I am saying that the belief of a creator and a ruler do not measure up in our current state of reality, or even within the context of the past and ancient history.  He was the explanation that existed before we had a scientific explanation, used as a way to interpret people’s experiences.  People desire to make sense of things, but the problem is, God does not make sense.

I am in awe of our cosmic universe, so much so, that I find it impossible for our existence to be so limited by this idea of God.  To me, we are looking too far out into the distance, when the answers all lie within us, within and beyond our massive and destructive home on earth.

“Indeed, we have learned, that it is precisely by excluding reference to such a transcendent agent that we gain genuine knowledge of the order that obtains in nature, are enabled to predict in certain respects the natural course of events, and thus gain a measure of control over it (Kaufman, 120).”

So there is no direct encounter and never will be – no way to interpret God outside of our own imaginings – in which case, God is actually a mirror of our own humanity – full of insecurities, the need for affirmation and praise, the desire to be close to these humans who are always so distant and cold, the desire to have their obedience, to incite dominance, to be in charge, to have control.  Why does God mirror the fickle childishness of a human being?  And if God is the creator, then who created him?  The answer seems obvious – human beings created him.

“When feeling is given a dominant place in shaping the interpretation of reality or the world, a religious world-view results (Kaufman, 214).”

Lately, every time we see my parents, my mother has to make a comment about God’s existence.  God is woven deeply within the fabric of my family.  He is given praise for all the good things.  The universe is over-simplified through Bible stories taken literally.  My mom celebrates the day that she will “go to be with Jesus.”  It’s not by my father’s intelligence and diligence in over forty years of hard work that brought them financial security.  No, it’s God.

The last time I wrote about religion, I was extremely angry for being raised without a choice.  Writing is good therapy, and I’ve come to a new place of peace and acceptance.  I feel released through my own realizations and views on life.  But I’ve also chosen to keep those views separate from my family life.  They have an idea of what I think.  The problem is, no matter how much I bring it up, they will forget it, or write it off by tomorrow.  My mom especially, has selective memory.  She blocks out the things that she can’t handle.  Especially since, according to their belief, I am “lost” – whatever that means.

When I am with my family, I do my utmost to respect them.  You cannot argue with a mind-set, culture, history, or the entire fabric of someone’s life.  They will do anything to shut out conflicting views, to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay.

Family is extremely important to me.  So I hold hands with them when they pray, I smile and say nothing over the Jesus comments, I listen to my nieces simplify the world by stating the Bible as fact.  In the meantime, I hope that as my nieces grow older, they begin to see that life isn’t so cut and dry.

Coming from children, religion makes sense.  But from adults, I expect more.  Sigmund Freud said, “The roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex; the almighty and just God, and kindly Nature, appear to us as grand sublimations of father and mother, or rather, as revivals and restorations of the young child’s idea of them… when at a later date he perceives how truly forlorn and weak he is when confronted with the great forces of life, he feels his condition as he did in childhood, and attempts to deny his own despondency by a regressive revival of the forces which protected his infancy.”

A universe that circulates around our own egos – that sounds like a man-made myth if ever I heard one.  We are all in the struggle of existence whether we like it or not.  We will all one day fall prey to death.  We have no real control.

“May it not be the case, moreover, that the very act of believing in God is in itself morally dubious?  May this not be largely an attempt to avoid taking full responsibility for ourselves and our lives by creating in fantasy a “heavenly father” into whose care we can place ourselves when the facts of life become too unpleasant (Kaufman, 14)?”

I find this over and over in people who dedicate their lives to God.  Life is just too much for them.  They would like to whitewash all the realities that are too painful for them to take.  It’s a coward’s way out.

The older Christians in my life all believe that I will come back around.  They were “wanderers” in their twenties and thirties, and are convinced that by forty or fifty, I will realize that my demise is nearing.  There are too many things I cannot control.  My body will start failing me, or friends will start dying off.  I’ll be faced with the futility of my existence.  I don’t think they understand, that I have already experienced all of those things.

It seems to me, when people leave faith behind, they fail to search beyond faith.  They avoid the question of spirituality altogether.  Then eventually, they inevitably end up going back to what feels comfortable, to what they knew in their youth.

My dad told me, “Never stop searching,” with his hands clasped tightly around my shoulders in a desperate attempt to get through to me.

I replied, “I never will.”  I wish I could please him, and be what he wants me to be, but I have to be myself.  I will never go back to where I came from.  I will move forward and live to the utmost before my body turns to dust.  And believe it or not, I’m okay with that.

 

For more on this topic:

https://laurenjbarnhart.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/god-against-nature/

https://laurenjbarnhart.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/why-i-stopped-believing-in-god/

 

 

Traveling Sisterhood

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

Esther Freud’s novel, Hideous Kinky, is a semi-autobiographical novel of two sisters traveling with their hippy mother through 1960’s Morocco. Freud is the daughter of the famous figurative painter, Lucian Freud, and the granddaughter of Sigmund Freud – a fascinating family rife with details we would all like to know more about, but privacy runs in the family.

The narrator of Hideous Kinky is a four-year-old English girl. Her narration is deceptively simple, leaving the reader to comprehend the complex layers of the story on their own. Mysteries are left untold, such as what they left behind in England, who her father is, and who sends the money. Through the little girl, we are unable to decipher the details of her mother’s love life (though we can surmise), and never know where they are traveling next, or how long they will stay. We feel the confusion and the uncertainty. Time slips away without the basic information needed to succeed back home in England, such as even, how to count.

My emotions over the mother ran the gamut. At times I felt exhilarated that she could live so far off the edge with two little girls in tow. At other times, I felt angry when the girl’s were not receiving education, medical care, food; at one point even spending a day as beggars. Upon their return to England life would seem so regimented in comparison. How would they adjust? But those events take place after the last page.

I’d seen the film before I read the book – and they both have much to offer. One did not ruin the other, as is often the case, though the details of the story differ.

My two nieces are missionary kids. They have been going back and forth between a jungle village in Papua New Guinea, a mission base, and the states all of their lives. Life for them is a constant readjustment. They are flexible and easygoing, because they have to be.

The oldest is very social, relates better to boys than girls, and likes to write fantasy stories (mainly, because she lives one). The youngest is exactly the same as I was at her age – always up in her head, living in imagination, weaving thick plots to escape the boredom of the present, yet a social underdog. However, that was two years ago, and every time I see them, they are different and yet the same.

Now that they are thirteen and ten, childhood is quickly disappearing. They are on the border, where glimpses of the women they will become disarm you completely – vivacious and strong, with lively blue eyes that are full of curiosity.

The oldest is at the stage where her parents and those in her environment are forming strong opinions in her. When they were younger it wasn’t that big of a deal that we have different beliefs. But they are being taught to look down on those who do not believe what they do.

They have always looked up to me. And now, at this stage, I’m afraid of being looked down on. Maybe it’s all in my head. But it isn’t, because I was taught exactly the same thing, and at that age, I looked down on, and judged everything that was “of the world” and “fallen”. I didn’t yet understand life as it really was.

There are cracks in the veneer every now and then. The oldest is now on facebook and she once posted a comment that read something like, “Sometimes it’s hard to believe that there could be another life out there.” I went searching to find it again, but she has since erased it. Don’t we all feel trapped within our parent’s existence until we are free to go?

But for now, my nieces live below the equator, a day ahead of us. When it is summer here, it is winter there. In my neighborhood, it is loud with the noise of people and cars. In the jungle, it is loud with insects, birds, and animals. They navigate difficult terrain over-run with foliage. I navigate cracks in the pavement and annoying people asking for money.

When my oldest niece was a baby she crawled like the natives in the village – with her left knee on the ground, and her right foot walking. She had ringworm from sitting naked on the dirt. I worried over her – but she was completely resilient. It’s the babies that are born there that are really at risk. Many of them don’t even survive birth.

In four weeks, my sister’s family is coming home on furlough and will be in the States until April. When they are gone, I turn off all thoughts of them with the press of an imaginary button. But now, the button is off and I think about their return constantly.

The night before my sister’s wedding, I couldn’t stop crying. As her bridesmaids flitted about, she came into my bedroom to comfort me. It didn’t matter what she said, I knew that I was losing her. She’d found her husband and now all they needed was a distant place to be sent to. A year later they were gone.

They said it was a twenty-year mission, and it’s been sixteen years. As their responsibilities grow, I keep wondering if they’ll ever come back. And how will they cope with life here, without financial supporters, without constant movement, with some sort of steady job that is the same day in and day out?

When we were kids we used to pack our suitcases, hoist everything up on the swing-set, and pretend it was a train that would take us all over the world. It was her favorite game, her escape from boring suburbia.

We have both traveled, escaped conformity, and found an obsession with words – she as a linguist, and me as a writer. But I don’t really know who she is anymore. She never talks. We have only been alone together once in the past sixteen years. We took a walk, and she told me that there are things about my life that she envies, because as a missionary, you have to keep up the façade of minimalism. I told her that I envy her nomadic existence.

When I was a teenager, I idolized her, and thought that I would never measure up. She seemed like a saint, and I felt like a failure. I was her project, something that needed to be fixed.

My nieces represent something that was lost between my sister and I. They are the next generation of traveling sisters. They talk in secret sister code. Life will be a shock for them when they leave the fold. In some ways, they are even more sheltered than we were. I wonder where their lives will take them. I wonder if they will ever consider Seattle home.

Write To Live

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

I am feeling vulnerable.  The pitch for my memoir is about to be sent out to editors, and I have spent the last ten years pouring everything I have into this book.  It has evolved and grown with time, and thanks to rejections of past versions, it has become more refined, more complete, more honest.

Though I try my best to not take rejections personally (having worked in publishing has helped me a lot with this), it is still always a hard blow to the ego, with days spent feeling like a failure.  I know my book has enormous potential, now I just need people in the publishing industry to see that too.

In vulnerable writer moments, the best author to turn to is Erica Jong.  “Only if you have no other choice should you be a writer (Jong, 6).”

I have just finished reading her book, Seducing the Demon – Writing For My Life.  The stories from her life are all hilarious, and told in nonlinear fashion.  Most memorable would be how she broke up Martha Stewart’s marriage when it was already falling apart (picture Stewart’s husband as an emasculated chore boy).

Humorous stories aside, it seemed that Jong was speaking directly to me and everything that I am dealing with right now – death and the struggle of trying to capture life in words.

“Life is a dream, but the dream disintegrates unless you write it down (my father) reminds me (Jong, 253).”

I first began writing because I wanted to end my life.  It was a common theme throughout my adolescence, but escalated when I was twenty-one.  I always knew that I was not the person my family wanted me to be.  Within my core, I was not a Christian, but I was told by everyone around me that if I did not follow I would lose their acceptance.  I would be fallen, lost, going to hell.  I did everything to make God real to me.  But instead, I began to see that everything I’d been told was false.

In the process of all this, I was prone to deep depression and would fall into trance-like states where I left my body and began to ponder how I could destroy it.  Looking back, it was symbolic, since the Christianity I was raised with denies the body.

Eventually, when that mode became an everyday issue, I had to enter therapy.  The therapist didn’t sort my issues since I was still stuck within my Christian university and didn’t feel free to speak what I was really feeling.  What really changed my life was writing.

“Writing is tough, but it’s a lot less tough than depression.  Which basically leads to suicide.  Unless you make a joke (Jong, 232).”

At first the writing was not good.  It was melodramatic, sickeningly romantic, full of unnecessary flourishes and old-fashioned language.  Through hundreds of poems, I attempted to express what I was feeling.

I experienced a real breakthrough while reading Allen Ginsberg’s poetry.  Here was a man who bravely and beautifully wrote about gay sex in the 1950’s.  If he could do that then, than I could celebrate sensuality in my poetry, turn it in, and risk getting marked down or reprimanded.  Surprisingly, my teacher raved over the poem I wrote.

We normally looked at each other’s work anonymously.  But at the end of analyzing my poem the professor said, “And the girl who wrote this…” (Everyone looked around since there was only one other girl in the class) “Ope!  Sorry Lauren!”

The room full of boys twittered in embarrassment.  But then my professor continued, “This is the first poem I’ve seen all semester that is ready to be published.”  I sat there red in the cheeks, but brimming with pride that this professor who was such a tough nut to crack, who was known for yelling at people for using the word “deep” because it didn’t express anything, was now telling me I had potential.

“For the poet, the lover becomes the world.  The exploration of love becomes an exploration of life (Jong, 66).”

Before poetry, I painted portraits, then realized I had more to tell.  Poetry was vague enough to feel safe writing what I had to say.  But then I wanted to tell the whole truth and share the whole picture.

To write I have sacrificed money, jobs, relationships, and security.  But I have no choice, and wouldn’t be happy any other way.  My book sits there like the holy grail, full of promises that might not be met.  When I first tried to publish it, I was cocky, with no doubt that the first agent would snap it up and put it on auction, scoring a great book deal which would lead to it becoming a bestseller with a movie deal in the works.  I literally did not doubt this one iota.

In it’s earliest version (not nearly as fleshed out as it is now) it was rejected by over a hundred agents and editors.  Back then it was just a novel about a girl who parties too much.  Now it’s a memoir about a girl trying to forget an oppressive upbringing through an underground subculture that turns dark quickly.

“People who most crave ecstasy are probably least capable of moderation (Jong, 134).”

The people I write about in my book will be both horrified and gratified to see themselves frozen in time.  But the only reaction that really concerns me is that of my parents.  I hope they can forgive the fact that I need to lay them bare to understand my life.  Like many parents, it’s painful for them to allow their child to be their own person.  They will never fully accept who I am because it doesn’t fit into their worldview.  I am the reality that they find hard to face.

“If you want to be a nice person, don’t write.  There’s no way to do it without grinding up your loved ones and making them into raw hamburger (Jong, 239).”

Now when I actually see the living people who embody the other characters in the book, I hardly know how to look at them, without only seeing our past.  To me, they have become caricatures of themselves, mythology.

“Time and again I have found that once I have frozen a person in a book I can hardly remember what the real person was like (Jong, 268).”

At a memorial, I saw them all two days ago.  I realized, that they feel the same way about me.  They are completely unable to understand who I am now, unable to listen, and can only speak in jokes or insensitive diatribes.  They have frozen me in time.  I didn’t want to be there, but in coming together over the death of our beautiful friend, I came to the ending of my story.

“You are not doing it all alone.  You are standing on the shoulders of the dead.  You are writing love letters to the grave.  The word is a link in a human chain (Jong, 61).”

I’m in those last years where you can be considered young.  But I don’t feel young at all.  I feel like time is too short and I have too many stories to share to fit into that shortness of life.  Ideas keep popping into my head.  I want to write them all, to share this thing I cannot stop.  To live, I must write.

The Tree of Life

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

The minute I heard that Andras Jones had his book Accidental Initiations published, I was magnetized and couldn’t resist the pull.  It arrived in the mail, and I dropped what I was reading to dive right in.  It is strange and kind of wonderful to read a book written by an acquaintance.

“… we are sent to schools where we learn the agreed upon truths our CULTure calls reality.  These institutions ultimately release us into the wild, civilized world, to parse the varied sub-cults available to us and find our way toward a truth we determine best serves our nature (Jones, 22).”

When I first met Andras he unnerved me.  That feeling never went away.  He is quiet and introspective.  It bothered me that I never knew what he was thinking.  This was heightened by the fact that it is obvious he is a mischievous visionary, spiritually heightened but always on his guard.

In the book, Andras writes of his life experiences through various cults and relationships while guiding us through his own personal Kabalistic Tree of Life in the city of Olympia, Washington.  He finds ritual and symbolism in the map that represents different aspects of being.

The symbol of the Tree of Life has appeared to me several times, and each time it did, my life changed dramatically.  I found it again the night that I met Andras.  It was my last year living in New York.  That December, people from Seattle kept appearing, drawing me back west.  Their spirituality overwhelmed me in a place that tends to be so matter of fact.

A massage healer who was also a confessed energy vampire was staying with me off and on.  I had met him at a party in Seattle the summer before.  He was extremely pale and had a disease that aged him in the sun.  The more time he spent with me, the darker his skin got, and the lighter mine became.  Things were very trippy with him around.  I liked that he made me uncomfortable.

“Yes, many of my new friends and teachers were well-meaning charlatans or self-deluding shamans, but at least they were trying for the big consciousness shift (Jones, 52).”

He took me to midtown to an apartment where traveling tantric practitioner’s stay while working in the city.  Andras was staying there with his girlfriend at the time – an escort turned sacred sex worker.  My friend mentioned that Andras did a show called Radio8Ball based on concepts of synchronicity.  Audience members submit questions to the Pop Oracle and random songs answer their questions.  I eventually became a fan and saw the show in New York, Seattle and LA.

Andras’ girlfriend made mushroom tea, and though I normally do not do drugs, the mushrooms seemed so natural and called to me.  I played it like this was nothing out of the ordinary, but I was nervous.  Here I was with three people I didn’t trust at all about to do shrooms.  Anything could happen.  And in fact, it seemed that night that everything did happen.

At first I felt ill, but once outside and moving, the feeling subsided.  Everything unnatural was disturbing, and in New York City, that’s pretty much everything.  I realized I was not experiencing an altered state exactly.  This was true reality in another dimension, as seen through the soul of a mushroom.

“… the high was only a perspective shift from which to experience reality more realistically (Jones, 36).”

We walked past a man and I knew right away that he had killed many people.  My friend thought he could speak in foreign languages.  And I realized, in my suede jacket, that I was wearing a cow.  I could feel the cow and hear it mooing.  Unnerved, I asked my friend, “Just be my reality, okay?”

We went to Central Park and I could suddenly breathe and the world was made of rainbows and light.  Andras said nothing at all.  He had the grin of a Cheshire cat.  His girlfriend seemed like a doe – innocent and pure, an awesome contradiction to her line of work as a high-paid sex worker.

We came to a stage and my friend walked into the shadows becoming darker, then walked back becoming lighter (his favorite trick).  The three of them felt far away from me.  I climbed the stairs behind the stage, wanting to escape.  There were thick vine trees lining a path and I found the Tree.  I sat in it and the Tree began breathing up through me, rocked in a cradle of inhaling and exhaling wood.  We were melded together as one.  I wanted to be alone and away from all the uncertainty.  But my friend kept calling me, “Lauren, we’re moving on.  You need to come now.”

“No, I don’t want to.  This is where I belong.”

Eventually, I caught up to them.  We walked through a horse round and circled a statue where a panther mutated into a squirrel.  Live animals had become fluffy unreachable entities with no connection to humanity.  Electronic music was a terrible noise while church bells were the most beautiful sound I had ever heard.  People moved in herds except for some crazy disco roller skaters that all moved to their own rhythm.

When we returned we descended into an emotional slump.  I became obsessed with willing a rose to open, and then felt depressed as it began to wilt.  My friend worked on Andras doing massage and Andras had a break down, conflicted over his own masculinity.  We all sat down and my friend began to cry as he confessed that in a past life he had been on intimate terms with the insides of human bodies, opening them up to look inside.  Andras’ girlfriend wanted to work on my friend in a healing exercise where she needed to feel connected to him spread eagle on the massage table.  Andras was getting pissed, so they left us and went into the dark bedroom to finish the therapy.

Andras and I sat on the couch awkwardly feeling jealous.  He began to obsessively clean the kitchen and the living room.  I wanted to catch the train back to Hoboken, and he had plans for the next morning.  He began to yell all of this towards the bedroom, and finally my friend and I got the hell out.  I couldn’t go to sleep when we got back home, and I found the dark room disturbing.  So we lay there for a long time with the lights on, talking beneath the covers.

I would see Andras randomly here and there over the next five years.  Mostly through his show, once at an awkward networking event, and once at his past job as a bartender at Bottleneck Lounge.  He approached me at one point to help find sponsors for his radio program, but I was not at all right for that kind of job.

Accidental Initiations is enjoyable to read, and I don’t think that’s just because I knew many of the stories and people he writes about.  It’s a shame that on Amazon his ‘boring haters’ have made quite the mark, although their crazy attacks made me want to read the book even more.  He left KAOS radio station in Olympia on bad terms, fired for indeterminate reasons.  There was much slander and harassment against him and he’s hell bent on getting his show back on the station.  But he needs to let it go and move on.  The low point of his book is including all the dirty details involved in the case, including letters (that according to the ‘boring haters’) are not accurate.  This chapter has nothing to do with the spiritual journey we are all on with him throughout the rest of Accidental Initiations.  It is more suitable to a temporary platform like an article or a blog, not the pages of a book, which had the potential to go beyond his current audience for Radio8Ball.

Next week I am off to a place of solitude to finish a memoir that has been in the making for the last ten years.  Andras reminds me that our shared history is a strange one, with details impossible to recreate.  I too am not as social as I used to be because of people that have let me down.  And though I began my memoir out of spite, I somehow was able to forgive my enemies as I wrote through their voices.  I became the people that I loved, the people that I hated, and left behind the person that I was.

“One of the key components of any effective cult is some level of getting over yourself as a route to getting truly into your Self (Jones, 51).”

After that night when I sat in the Tree, everything changed.  There is strength in knowing the earth is made of magic.  I didn’t need to find my identity through someone else, because I had my own.  Nothing could stop me from being an artist.  It was time to go home.

What Kind of Girl Are You?

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

Growing up, I never really talked to any boys until I slept with one.  And by that time, they were no longer really boys – especially since I was twenty-one and I gravitated to older men.

In my senior year of college, there was a speaker at chapel who seemed more suited to Junior High students.  He neatly categorized the different stages of a relationship through a ladder analogy.  The bottom rung was eye contact.  The second rung was conversation.  The third rung was holding hands.  The further up the rungs you climbed, the more dangerous it became.  He told us it was best not to go past the third rung before marriage.

I turned to the girl next to me and said, “I started at the top rung and worked my way down.”  She gave a nervous laugh.  But I knew plenty of people who followed the ladder rule – my sister for example.  She and my brother in-law never kissed until a month before their wedding.  She was disappointed that they didn’t quite make their goal of waiting.  Their friends however, did.

At my college the divorce rate among the alumnus was huge.  Years after, I heard women complain that they didn’t enjoy sex with their husbands.  From birth onwards – girls and boys were taught that sex is dangerous, taboo, disgusting, perverted, depraved, sinful, dirty.  And then one day you find ‘the one.’  You get married and then all of a sudden – sex is beautiful.  But actually, often it isn’t.  Because how do you shake all of those old perceptions that are ingrained not only in your mindset, but in your body.

Growing up in Christian schools, education on sex was extremely limited, and friends offered silly stories that had no bearing in actual life:

“If you don’t have the gene for curling your tongue, then you can’t French kiss properly.”

“A woman is a rose.  To each man she sleeps with, or gives a part of herself, she gives away one of her petals.  If she sleeps with too many men, soon she’ll have no petals left.”

This conveniently excludes the fact that a rose is a perennial and comes back every year.  There is no direct experience in these ideas.  Admitting direct experience is taboo.  Denial even sometimes remains after a girl appears to have swallowed a watermelon.  And of course, denial is also the reason for the failure to buy condoms or birth control in the first place.

The dangers of repression became glaringly obvious one day when a group of girls decided to streak through campus.  Every year it was the tradition for guys to do this, and it was always at a very public event.  The first year it was while we were all on the lawn watching ‘The Creature From the Black Lagoon’ in 3-D.  All of a sudden naked guys were streaking past the screen – odd because at first it seemed like part of the movie.  The next year they rode their bikes through a festival.  And the third year, some girls from the Basketball team wanted to join the tradition.

They went streaking through the canyon by the dorms – and strangely enough, guys started chasing them down, driven by mad lust.  Something comical and bonding and freeing turned into something horrific.  Most of the girls darted down a gravel path, trying to get away.  They dove into the bushes to hide, getting scraped by stones and branches.  Only one saintly fellow came and offered clothes to get them back to safety.

This all reaffirmed for me my distrust and lack of interest in the guys at my school.  I had a long list of issues.  For every six girls there were only four guys.  Overall, they were unattractive, lacking in life experience, introverted with women, hypocritical.  Basically, they were a direct reflection of myself, and I did not want to be who I was.  Up to that point, I had always been at the hands of environment and religion – ingrained to think the way I thought.

Among many girls at my college there was a celebration of the infantile.  My friends sported the same haircuts they’d had since the third grade.  They liked to wear t-shirts and sweatshirts with cartoon characters emblazoned on them – most popular being Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse.  My roommate insisted on putting up hideous posters by Ann Geddes of babies in flowerpots and dressed as pea pods.  They favored the pastel colors of a baby nursery – pink, lavender, lime green, baby blue.  Bedspreads ranged from candy-colored stripes to polka dots.  Their binders had pictures of puppies and kittens in the front.  And yet – they were adults between the ages of eighteen to twenty-two.

These women preferred to remain in an infantile state because it was easy. One year I asked all the girls on my floor if they would rather marry for passion and adventure or for comfort and security.  Every girl chose comfort and security except for my roommate and I.  They went to college to get their M.R.S. degree and I listened to them complain if they didn’t get that ‘ring by spring.’  Marriage was protection from the dangers of being out in the world.  A husband would take care of them, protect them, control their lives and make the decisions.  They would spend their time scrapbooking sentimental memories, making banana bread, volunteering at church.  They would mistrust any environment not labeled ‘Christian.’  They would attempt to repeat the entire system by ingraining their children with the same unrealistic worldview.  They would secretly acknowledge that their husband was not a prince.  They would feel trapped, but the world without a husband is the great unknown.  They’d never been in it, and never wanted to be.

I just finished reading Carlene Bauer’s memoir, Not That Kind of Girl.  Maybe I was too excited to read a book that seemed comparable to my own developing memoir.  But she failed to draw me in.  I spent the entirety rolling my eyes, just wanting her to get over herself.  Was it because I relate in all the parts of myself that I don’t like, or because I saw so many of the girls that I grew up with?  Probably, a little of both.

Bauer grew up in the Protestant church, attended a small Catholic college, and then moved to New York to become an editor, still clinging to her virginity.  She eventually leaves religion behind, but not prudery.  She excuses it by saying that she is a perfectionist.

“Used improperly, said church, sex could addle you beyond repair.  If someone who didn’t love you saw you naked, you would become Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass, eyes gone wild and trembling, wanting to drown yourself in the bathtub because your awakened appetite could not be satisfied (Bauer, 176).”

God wasn’t really the reason Carlene Bauer didn’t get out there and throw herself into the depths of life like she really wanted too.  It was only herself holding her back – her fears, her introversion, her lack of confidence.

“Maybe my body was what was weighing me down, not God, and if I could just learn to forget about my body, my mind could finally, finally be free (Bauer, 62).”

The title of her book is ironic.  Not That Kind of Girl.  For the entire memoir, it is strikingly obvious that she has always longed to be that kind of girl – the kind of girl that lives a wild life, with passions and loves, throws caution to the wind, a real bohemian.  She relates to Sylvia Plath and looks up to Edna St. Vincent Millay, and chides herself for not being nearly as interesting.  Though I am happy that she is a success as a writer and has found her way outside of the beliefs that held her back, I wanted her to become what she always dreamed of being.  I saw more potential for her, and I hope she finds it for herself.

God Against Nature

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

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             A picture was posted on Facebook, “Twins in the Womb – Hey Brother!  Do you think there is life after birth?  Do you believe in Mom? – Nah!  I’m an Atheist, I mean, have you ever seen Mom?”

This analogy literally makes no sense.  First of all, we don’t leave our bodies when we exit the womb.  The mother is also a physical body and everything she does directly effects and is experienced by the fetus – Walking, talking, dancing, listening to music.  Not only are the twins physically inside of her, but they are also consuming what she eats through an umbilical cord.  Both mother and fetus are a part of and joined in nature.  But the idea of ‘God’ is not.

In Nature, Man And Woman, Alan W. Watts explains, “The architectonic and artificial style of Christianity is nowhere clearer than in the idea of God as the maker of the world, and thus of the world itself as an artifact which has been constructed in accordance with a plan, and which has, therefore, a purpose and an explanation.  But the mode of action of the Tao is called wu-wei, translatable both as “non-striving” and “non-making.”  For from the standpoint of Taoist philosophy natural forms are not made but grown, and there is a radical difference between the organic and the mechanical (Watts, 39).”

Western man would like to measure, categorize, explain, experiment, and use every last inch of our earth.  If he probes deeply enough into our insides he feels he can explain our bodies as mechanized objects.  In this way, existence is only used as a method for profit and gain.  And though we have come into an age of a more secularized society, the brain is still programmed from religious thinking to be on the outside of nature looking in.  In this way, life is experienced as a bystander, irresponsible and apart in a perceived isolation, separate from all other creatures.

As a person who grew up in the church, it was exhilarating to first experience the freedom of my natural self without guilt or shame.  I was surprised that I felt no guilt, but for me, it was like an escape from a prison that I had been in all my life.  I had struggled to make my belief real.  But it was dead and I was left hungry and thirsty for real life and the riches of gritty experience.

“For in identifying God, the Absolute, with a goodness excluding evil we make it impossible for us to accept ourselves radically: what is not in accord with the will of God is at variance with Being itself and must not under any circumstances be accepted.  Our freedom is therefore set about with such catastrophic rewards and punishments that it is not freedom at all, but resembles rather the totalitarian state in which one may vote against the government but always at the risk of being sent to a concentration camp (Watts, 133).”

I think it is obvious to everyone that merely having belief in principles does not make you those principles.  A person who lives by belief must also wear a mask, because what is occurring on the outside and what is being thought on the inside are two entirely different things.  And the more you try to be ‘good’ with all your might, the more its shadow twin ‘evil’ is increasingly prevalent from the denial of it.

Christians like to say that their belief is not about might.  They say that Jesus will change you from the inside out.  If you believe that enough, through the power of self-hypnosis and faith, yes, you will change to some extent.  But you will still have all the same feelings you had before.  Feelings that are now associated with a sinful nature.

“To give free rein to the course of feeling is therefore to observe it without interference, recognizing that because feeling is motion it is not to be understood in terms which imply not only static states but judgments of good and bad (Watts, 93).”

Allowing our feelings to guide us is the only way to be truly happy and centered, to break out of isolation and connect into the flow of life.  “… Confucius felt that in the long run human passions and feeling were more trustworthy than human principles of right and wrong… (Watts, 177).”

Christianity has a long history of denying the spiritual that we experience in the physical.  In denying the body we deny life.  And fear of experience becomes worse and more consuming than the actual experience.  In pain we learn the possibilities of ecstasy and pleasure.  In sex we find spontaneity and transcendence.  In expressing emotion freely, we are released and connected with other human beings.  The full spectrum of physical experience moves us forwards into spiritual growth.

I had a friend in college that I love very much.  She goes to a questionable church that I used to attend.  They believe in punishing the unfaithful by disassociating with them, which is probably why she doesn’t talk to me anymore. But we had also grown apart, and the last time we saw each other, it felt slightly forced and awkward.

I first fell in love with her when we were on a student trip to Europe.  We were in Salzburg, and we all ordered Wiener Schnitzel with currant sauce and lemon.  It was succulent and delicious.  It was so good that she began to cry.  I had never seen someone so moved by the pleasure of eating.  She lived out her pleasures in the most beautiful ways, and I have always admired the joy she takes in the simple things.

She has alluded to a sexual sin in her families past that resulted in an excommunication from a church.  This seems to have shaped her fear of intimacy, beyond basic morals.  She believes in waiting for marriage, and has denied herself the sexual experience of being with a man.

It is obvious to everyone who knows her well, what a truly sensual, and beautiful person she is.  Her greatest repression has become her ultimate mission.  She goes out with her church group at 3am to help prostitutes by talking to them about God and giving them toiletries.  Her passion is to help stop sex trafficking.  But I find it ironic and strange when such a difficult repression is used to fuel a passion.  I am always happy to hear that someone is helping people, but I also worry that it can be patronizing to the less fortunate tiers of society.

“…  Profound love reveals what other people really are:  beings in relation, not in isolation (Watts, 199).”  A coward’s life is in isolation.  But the lover’s life is in relation.  I see my friend as a lover who is only allowing herself a fraction of what life has to offer.  In my opinion of this, of course, I am making the judgment of an observer.  But it pains me to see how religion can limit a person’s experience of life, where feeling is repressed beneath doctrine and dogma.

“… a God to be grasped or believed in is no God, and that a continuity to be wished for is only a continuity of bondage (Watts, 116).”

Layers of Time and Existence

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

It’s always strange when the topic of one book I read leads right into the next.  Jeanette Winterson’s novel, Sexing the Cherry surprised me in many ways.  To begin with, I never got around to reading the back cover, so on the basis of the title I expected an erotic romp rather than a one-sentence reference to gardening terminology.

Then the book begins with a gruesome female giant and a boy she finds in the Thames set in 17th Century England – my least favorite time period.  I cringed.  Six pages in I wanted to toss the book in the giveaway pile because I struggled to connect with the voice of the giant.  But then Winterson’s magical gift overtook me, and I was lost in a beautiful and poetic story.

The giant suffers abuse by the Puritans, and witnesses the execution of the King.  “The Puritans who wanted a rule of saints on earth and no king but Jesus, forgot that we are born into flesh and in flesh must remain (Winterson, 70).”  She goes on a murdering spree – the best method of attack being in a brothel where the Puritans purge their fetishes in secret.

“I have met a great many Pilgrims on their way towards God and I wonder why they have chosen to look for him rather than themselves… if the other life, the secret life, could be found and brought home, then a person might live in peace and have no need for God.  After all, He has no need for us, being complete (Winterson, 116).”

The boy Jordan loves the giant, though as he grows realizes it’s not right to feel so tiny next to your mother.  He dreams of becoming a hero, and eventually sails to exotic places, both in the world and in his mind – beyond time, place, existence.  He finds more mysteries than answers.

“The inward life tells us that we are multiple not single, and that our one existence is really countless existences holding hands like those cut-out paper dolls, but unlike the dolls never coming to an end.  When we say, ‘I have been here before,’ perhaps we mean, ‘I am here now,’ but in another life, another time, doing something else.  Our lives could be stacked together like plates on a waiter’s hand.  Only the top one is showing, but the rest are there and by mistake we discover them (Winterson, 100).”

I once had a professor who always said, “We lead one life, but we have many lives within it.”  This is very true of Jeanette Winterson.  She was adopted and grew up near Manchester, England.  Her parents were working class and Pentecostal.  They intended her for the missionary field and by age six, she was evangelizing and writing sermons.  At sixteen she realized she was a lesbian and left home.  Her mother told her, “Why be happy when you could be normal?”  She took several odd jobs and eventually supported herself through an English degree at Oxford.  Her first book Oranges Are Not the Only Fruitcame out in 1985 and since then she has had a very successful literary career.

Winterson’s novel, Sexing the Cherry reminds us that we are all explorers of existence.  It is in the distance between who we are now and who we will be by the end of our lives.  Catching up to a mind and body filled with the knowledge of experience – aware that we are finite in the layers of the earth – but connected to all things in consciousness.

A friend once told me that I give her the creeps because I’m like a ghost from the 1920’s.  It might have helped that at the time we were working in a Circus tent that was one hundred years old.  But she was right.  I have always felt more akin to a life lived in 1920’s Paris – busting at the seams with artists and writers.  I keep searching to find that place wherever I go.

It’s like the feeling you get when you listen to a song that was written before you were born.  You are certain you were there.  You feel everything that was felt at that exact moment of time.  Nostalgia overwhelms you.  You almost want to go back, but were you ever there to begin with?  Is it a common shared memory passed down – or do we live through other lives?

And what has really changed between the 17th century and the present? Our needs are the same – food, shelter, companionship, sex, and the need to record and understand the human experience.  All that has changed is the scenery.

Everyday at my writing table I have the gift of an amazing view of Seattle.  Buildings stretch out from downtown past Lake Union.  The space needle looms to the right and the Puget Sound and Olympic Mountains stand behind it.  I watch hundreds of cars passing everyday.  And all day long people walk up and down the bridge.  I see the same people over and over, but most I’ve never seen before.  They are walking the dog, buying the groceries, going to work or the gym.

One old man never has a destination.  He is Native American and mentally ill. He walks in circles everyday, wearing the same clothes and the same cane, yelling obscenities to keep people away.  He lets life happen to him. He finds interesting things left by those who leave the past behind.

Perhaps I love the city for its endless layers.  The energy is invigorating.  People keep circulating within hundreds of overlapping stories. Their footsteps mark the passage of time.

the view from my window

     the view from my window

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Why I Stopped Believing in God

~ Lauren J Barnhart ~ Leave a comment

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After my sister was born, my mom was told she couldn’t have any more kids.  Six years later, I was her miracle.  She always told me I wouldn’t be here if God hadn’t intervened.  So I guess it’s kind of ironic that I no longer believe in God.

The writer Christopher Hitchens passed away last week.  In Vanity Fair he openly shared his struggle with cancer over the last year in his column.  His death brought him to life in my mind, and I knew it was time to read his book, God Is Not Great – How Religion Poisons Everything.  I had suspected this all of my life, but never had the words to fully formulate what I felt.

Over Christmas I felt agitated by the fact that my parents are not able to accept that I am not a Christian.  They gave us a book entitled Dinner With a Perfect Stranger about a modern day businessman who has dinner with Jesus.  On the back flap is a direct quote from the character of Jesus, “… You’re worried about God stealing your fun, but you’ve got it backwards…  there’s no adventure like being joined to the Creator of the Universe.”

I think my parents feel that this is why I left the church – because it wasn’t fun enough.  My mom kept telling stories about people being transformed when they were ‘saved.’  I just had to say it, “Actually, for me it was the opposite.  I was depressed when I was a Christian.  I am finally healthy after breaking down all those old mental patterns.”  Immediately my dad leapt over from the coffeemaker and held my shoulders in his hands, “Never stop searching Lauren.”

“I never do.”  Of course my search does not lead back to where my dad would like it too.  I am a creative thinker, and religion does not like either of those things.  I was in Christian schools from 3rd grade through college.  I was taught to be afraid of everything that had to do with “the world.”  But this only made me want to understand exactly why I should be afraid.  I began to have a lot of questions.  But if you question faith, you are a weak believer.  Questions equal failure.

Towards the middle of college I decided to put it all in and really discipline my life to God.  But the more time I spent praying and meditating the more delusional I became.  I started to have visions of absolute destruction that I would somehow manage to escape.  Then there was the night in my dorm room, being taunted by spirits.  I looked in the mirror and had the distinct sense that I was no longer in my body.

It felt like I was in a life or death struggle.  A poltergeist.  If Jesus wasn’t inside of me, the spirits would take me over and I would be obliterated.  I really believed this.  All the fear I’d been brainwashed with, and all the guilt, and my complete split personality was driving me mentally insane.  I’d been severely depressed since the age of nine and had been suicidal for ten years.  But it was really just the need to kill the side of myself that wasn’t me at all.  It was the side that everyone around me wanted me to be.  I felt so much pressure.  I can remember my disbelief going back to the age of five – but all that time fear had ruled the roost.

After college I began the long, arduous process of retraining my brain how to think outside of the false concepts of religion.  I went to extremes, breaking the old self through pleasure.  Eventually, I grew numb to all of my devices for forgetting.  It took me ten years to finally be ready to face what I really felt.  And then I began to feel a great deal of anger.

I don’t blame my parents.  I love them and I support them in the way that they feel.  My mom was very extreme when I was young, but I blame all the people that she was susceptible too.

More and more I began to see that pastors and leaders in all faiths are simply people hungry for power.  They like to preach that if you love God, you will get rich.  But if bad things do happen, never question God, and never question the pastor because his words come from God.  Of course, power and libido are made for each other.  I witnessed the downfalls of many pastors, usually due to a secret sexual life that leaked.

Then there is the issue that religion and the concept of God are completely man-made.  “God did not create man in his own image.  Evidently it was the other way about, which is the painless explanation for the profusion of gods and religions, and the fratricide both between and among faiths, that we see all about us and that has so retarded the development of civilization (Hitchens, 8).”  If you take the Bible literally (which many Christians are taught to do), God comes off as a complete mental case and a reflection of the lunacy of man.  And religion is responsible for more lunacy than anything else in the history of humanity.

“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience (Hitchens, 56).”

It seems lazy to never question religion, or explore all the evidence against it.  But it has more to do with fear.  When you are infiltrated with a belief system from birth, and told that everything else is wrong, and everyone you know is within the faith; if you leave, you have nothing at first.  You have to build a new life.  You have to change the way you’ve been trained to think and die to the old self to be reborn an individual.

People will always try to explain the universe.  And the more unbelievable it is, the more people are apt to believe.  “It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled.  This is an ancient problem.  Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities (Hitchens, 161).”

For a while I explored other belief systems – Buddhism and concepts of Hinduism, Shamanism and Wicca.  Anything mysterious seemed like it might be the thing.  But it all turns out to be the same.  An insecure chosen one who claims to know all the secrets, while the further in you go the more sinister it becomes.

Religion is only made real by the minds that believe it is real.  And religion will exist as long as there is fear – fear of ourselves, fear of death, fear of each other.  Religion thrives on fear.  And powerful people take advantage of this.  They have always done their best to silence anyone who questions.  “All religions take care to silence or to execute those who question them (and I choose to regard this recurrent tendency as a weakness rather than their strength) (Hitchens).”

The claim of all religions is that you will be freed from pain and suffering if you believe.  But I have not found this to be true.  In fact, my experience with Christians was always just the opposite.  Repression equals depression.  And as Christians look down on other people, it makes them feel just a little bit better.  On one hand they function as a servant to God, on the other the ego is served through a God that cares about their minute details.  At my college it was a common occurrence for a boy to approach a girl he’d never spoken to before and say, “God told me that I am to marry you.”  How wonderfully self-serving!

I believe in a universal connective energy between us.  I feel that other dimensions do exist.  But none of it has anything to do with simplistic notions of good and evil.  I am not a child who needs rules and boundaries and bedtime stories.  I am an adult who is open to the full experience of birth, life, death, and what lies beyond.

Life after religion is a gift of happiness.  I speak my mind, and question, and gather information and always remain in awe of the fact that the universe is full of inspiration in its own right – overlapping layers of time and existence, a beautiful and heroic place made even more amazing without the existence of a man-made God and dictator.  I am at peace with the unknown.