I Had A Dream About Jim Morrison

Last night I had a dream about Jim Morrison. It was long, vivid, and disconnected, so this might not make a lot of sense. I also don’t remember it perfectly (sometimes I remember dreams better than others), but here goes.

I was going for a run at night, maybe in New York City, and my plan was to listen to L.A. Woman while I ran one way, and then to turn around and listen to it the other way, but someone stopped me, some friends of mine stopped me for some reason and it interrupted my run. I had a tattoo of Jim Morrison’s face on my leg (in my dream, that is; in real life I have a rad tattoo of Odin riding on Sleipnir on my leg), but I don’t remember when that really came into the picture.

I went with these friends over to an apartment where a bunch of other friends of mine were hanging out, including Jim Morrison. I was really nervous because in this dream he was theoretically my friend, but I completely hero-worshipped him, and I wanted him to like me, but I knew it was chancy.

In short, he let me down. He ignored me. He was busy hanging out with my other friends, having fun with them. He didn’t even wave or say hi, he was so wrapped up with having a great time that he did not even notice I was there. Later on, I kept trying to hide the tattoo of him, because I did not want people to know how I felt about him and thus how hurt I probably was because he ignored me.

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Back In DC And So Forth

So, our summer in New York City is finished, I have a sweet job offer in hand, and we’re back in the DC area for one more year of law school.  In the meantime, we have almost the entire month of August free, since classes for me don’t start until after Labor Day, and my lovely wife is finishing out the end of her maternity leave.  We’re basically unpacked from the move, but we don’t have the apartment all put back together completely yet.  We aren’t allowing ourselves to hook up the Wii until we get this place in order, which means I’m going through some pretty serious Guitar Hero withdrawal.

My sad news is that I couldn’t find anyone to go see Jethro Tull with me tomorrow in Virginia, so it looks like I’m not going.  It turns out I pretty much just don’t know anyone–at least anyone in the DC area–who likes Tull.  I’m honestly a Jethro-come-lately when it comes to the band, but I spent a pretty good chunk of the summer discovering that I had a deep and abiding love for them.  On the up side, my Aqualung CD came in the mail today, so I at least have some more JT to listen to, even if it isn’t live.

My wife and I have been re-watching the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, so that we can then proceed to watch the third season (which we recently bought on DVD).  I’m not going to lie; this is pretty much the best show, ever.  When I figure out how to hook our cable box back up, we can check to see how much of the fourth season we managed to catch on DVR.

That’s about it for now.  I’m still trying to figure out how to get baptized and confirmed Episcopalian even though I don’t actually attend and Episcopal church right now, but that’s sort of another post for another day.

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Placeholder Post: Zen and Christianity in 2008

I am actually writing this post from… the future!

Seriously, in going back and assembling my list of high points along the journey, I realized that there are a couple of spots where important things happened, I didn’t blog about them, and I didn’t go back and explain what happened either. This is one of those spots, so I will try to recap for the sake of historical continuity.  So I am actually writing this post on April 2, 2009 to go back and fill in the blanks, and I am inserting it timewise into the summer of 2008.

In the spring of 2008, I headed east, spiritually speaking. I read a lot of the Baghavad Gita, I watched a lot of Heroes, and my daughter was born. For awhile, I thought that a kind of quasi-Dharmic Hinduism was going to be the path for me. I even went and started a new blog called “Dharma Bum” which I subsequently deleted (after bringing the important posts back here, so they wouldn’t be lost).

My brother came to visit with his wife in April, and he brought a bunch of books about Zen Buddhism, which I had never really considered seriously before. In particular, the book Hardcore Zen struck me as relevant and important. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that Zen Buddhism was the right path for me–the truths that it espoused were, for the most part, things that I believed to be self-evident truths about the universe. I had some semantic concerns about distinguishing the Hindu Atman from the Buddhist Anatman, but that was more the kind of thing that could produce long, quirky debates later on. Important was the Zen universe was a universe I believed in, and Zen meditation seemed rally helpful to me.

But there was still a nagging feeling that this wasn’t really the right thing for me. Maybe it was jsut my fear of spiritual commitment, I don’t know. But it seemed to me that the problem with Zen was not that i thought it was untrue, but that it did not provide me with things I wanted and needed, spiritually speaking: a culturally relevant context with ritual, compelling mythological framework, professional clergy, etcetera. Although I couldn’t make myself believe that Christianity was true, I still felt an attraction to the Episcopal Church that in my opinion contradicted my Zen inklings.

My brother’s advice was just to pick one, go with it, and see what happens. And eventually that’s what I did.

While studying for final exams last April, I read C. S. Lewis’s Surprised By Joy, which is an amazing book. I was surprised to see how unconventional Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was, and in the end, I started to feel like the Episcopal Church really was the place for me–a place to be, in fact, even if I was not sure about my belief in Christianity.

So when we moved to New York for the summer, we started attending an Episcopal Church in the Village, and I even went to services at Trinity during my lunch hour downtown. It was meaningful and important to me, but there was some critical quality that was just elusive. I read every C. S. Lewis book I could get my hands on, I prayed and did devotions, and I thought of myself as a Christian, a Protestant, and an Anglican.

Maybe the biggest problem was that, concurrent to all of this, I spiralled into what might have been the worst depression I have ever been in. I can’t even describe it beyond saying that it was an absolute nightmare, and finally getting help and eventually climbing out of it has saved my life. My beautiful and sexy wife was there for me in my darkest hours, even when things got scary and that means so much to me. But in a lot of ways, God was distant, and I couldn’t figure out why. I literally cried out to Jesus to deliver me, but things just kept getting darker.

My love affair with Christianity started to enter a period of uncertainty when we came back to Maryland, partly because I was just plain more interested in Led Zeppelin than I was in religion. I still kept Episcopal Christianity in my head as a spiritual placeholder, but even then I wasn’t sure anymore–not because Christianity hadn’t pulled me out of my depression, because for all I know things might have been a lot worse without prayer and devotion, but just because my interest was fading. Again, fear of spiritual commitment? Maybe. But also Christianity honestly just wasn’t punching all of the spiritual buttons I needed to have punched.

Incidentally, I haven’t really felt the need or desire to go back to Zen. It is interesting, and probably, in retrospect, the religion whose truth-claims are the closest to matching reality, but despite being true, it is so stripped down that it actually lacks Truth.

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The Open Road

So, I thought I was going to be sent to Iraq with my National Guard unit this month.  Turns out it’s not happening.  If you have any experience with the military, you know how things can change at the last minute.  Anyway, I mentioned in an older post that I was reluctant to make any big decisions because of the upcoming mysterious, major life-changing event, and that’s what it was.  Now it isn’t happening.  So life goes on, and I no longer have an excuse for resting on my laurels.  But what do I do now?

We haven’t been going to church for awhile, and I have long stopped praying (since it started to seem mechanical and pointless).  Do I start again?  Do I give Christianity another go?  If so, what kind?  Back to Cedar Ridge?  Back to Grace Episcopal?  Just be a Christian on my own and don’t worry about church?  What does becoming a Christian even mean?  What does one do?  Becoming Mormon is a fairly regimented process: you take the missionary discussions, you read the Book of Mormon, you pray to know if it’s true (and get Your Testimony), you attend church meetings, you commit to live the Word of Wisdom and the Law of Chastity, you get baptized, you get confirmed, you get the priesthood, you go to the temple, you get callings, and you endure to the end.  It’s all extremely structured.  I know how to become Mormon.  But I don’t know how you become Christian.  At what point do you become Christian?  What’s the right motivation for becoming Christian?  What does “being Christian” look like?

Do I even want to be Christian?  Right now, the answer feels like no.  Especially since Christmas is over.

Do I start a candidate year with the Ancient Order of Druids in America?  Do I want to?  Do I really want Druidry as a belief system?  Is it all just New Age flakery?  Do I want my whole life to be Celtic-y?  Do I always want to be thinking about ancient times and yearning for the forest?  Not really.  After I’m done with law school we’re moving back to New York, where we’ll probably stay.  I like the woods and nature, but I also love the city.  I feel compelled to be environmentally conscious and take care of the earth, but I actually think in many ways urban living is the best way to do that (it’s certainly more sustainable than suburban living).

There are a lot of things about Druidry that I find very appealing, but do I want to color my whole life with that crayon?  The answer feels like no?

Do I abandon the journey and just get on with life without God and without religion?  I’ve been sailing for awhile and it doesn’t seem like Byzantium is anywhere in sight.  I’m kind of getting tired of looking for it.  My main roadblock is clear (I was nervous about making any hasty decisions with such a major punctuation mark on the horizon), so what do I do?  Hinduism?  The Qur’an?  What?

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