I Am Henry Sugar

In preparation for my year of Druid candidate training, I have been trying to get into the habit of meditating. So far, I’ve only been working on color breathing and training my concentration, using the suggested meditation target (from John Michael Greer‘s Druidry Handbook):

The process has been fascinating and enlightening. Although I find my mind wandering behind my back, slipping away for me only to realize it a few minutes later, I’m always able to round up my thoughts and walk back along the path that took me to where I found them, and bring my conscious mind back to the Moon-target where I can simply be. I realize that the aim here is to develop concentration in preparation for discursive meditation later on (which I want to be able to begin right away with Samhainn), but the effortless effort spent being completely present to the image I am concentrating on is nevertheless very zenlike, and I find myself having the same sort of physical and mental sensations (a sort of trancelike, not-unpleasant feeling of fraying at the edges of my existence) as I did with zen meditation back when I was giving that a go.

Also, it’s amazing how good I feel after meditating–positively euphoric. Fifteen quick minutes leaves me completely energized and focused, and it goes a long way to calming the anxiety and depression that my own personal brand of crazy inflicts on me. I’m looking forward to learning and practicing discursive meditation, but I think I will ultimately want to mix in something more zenlike, and maybe explore Indian techniques like Kunalindi yoga to supplement my Western, Druidic approach.

I’m interested in exploring moving meditation, specifically trying to achieve a meditative state while running. Usually while I run I either listen to heavy metal at unsafe volumes on my headphones (which is not necessarily not conducive to a calm state of mind…) or I just let my mind completely wander, but i have an intuition that a kind of physical meditation should be workable. I’m just not necessarily sure how I would go about it.

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Why Special Names?

I have noticed that the use of special or religious names is pretty common among Neopagans. I am honestly curious as to why someone needs to call themself “Moonferret Starshine” or something Welsh or whatever instead of just using their real name. I’m not talking about internet handles or nicknames–those are a part of a pretty well-established internet tradition of anonymity. I’m talking about new religious or spiritual names that people use in real life in spiritual contexts.

I realize that Neopagans aren’t the only ones to do this: converts to Islam often take an Arabic name, and I think Hare Krishnas take new names, too. I believe Zen priests have a special Zen name, and I know for a fact that Mormons get a secret new name in the temple endowment ceremony that seems to serve no understandable function outside of the endowment ceremony itself. I have also known converts to Christianity from Islam who took a Western “Christian” name.

So maybe I am being unfair to Neopagans, since they’re just doing what everyone else does. But sometimes it just seems silly. Like LARPing. But I am willing to extend the question to other religious traditions who do this, as well. Why new names? What’s wrong with the old one?

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My Own Goddess

So this is a post I have been meaning to write for a long time.  I mention my beautiful and sexy wife often, but not often enough.  It’s high time I gave her some much-deserved praise and explained how vital she has been in my spiritual journey.

When I first started questioning Mormonism, she was loving and supportive.  She didn’t freak out (to me, at least).  She was willing to talk about long-term ramifications of being a two-faith household should it come to that.  She was willing to listen and to talk, and was willing to think and read and consider.  Poke around the exmormon bloggerverse a bit and see how often you find people telling a story like that.  Good luck.

Even if that was the whole story,it would be one worth telling over and over.  But a quick browse through my blog archives should be plenty of evidence that that ain’t the whole story.  I’ve struggled to figure out what I believe for years now, and she has supported me every step of the way.  And not just in a hands-off “whatever you say, dear” way.  She’s read about and carefully considered Buddhism when I was interested in Zen.  We had long talks about Hinduism when I first read the Baghavad Gita.  Even as she has cautiously explored the limits of her own spirituality (in a nonchalant pretending-shes-not-doing-it way), she has been willing to accommodate whatever harebrained religious idea I am entertaining at the moment.

I have a really hard time talking about genuine spiritual feelings, but she gives me a safe place where I can do it.  She doesn’t judge; she doesn’t mock.  She’s just there for me.  When I finally told her about Dionysus and the gods, she encouraged me to explore this new spiritual world.  She even suggested we get a good book of Greek mythology for the kids.  When I experienced the presence of Aphrodite, she was excited for me, and thrilled about the new development.  I can’t imagine that this is kind of thing is typical.

There’s more I could say–like about how the decision to pursue a relationship with her, ultimately resulting in our marriage involved what may have been one of the few genuine spiritual experiences in my life–but in the end, it all boils down to this one thing: she is my everything.  She is the universe.  When I love her, I feel like I am loving divinity.  When I touch her, I feel like I am touching a goddess.  I know what it feels like to be in the presence of  deity because it’s llike what I feel like when I am in her presence.

I love katyjane.

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Some Conceptual Spackle

While cleaning up around here and updating my Where I’ve Been page, I felt the need to tackle some of the blogging lacunae that I have left during periods where I did not blog very much, but nevertheless continued on with my spiritual development and my quest to figure out life, the universe, and everything.  So if you’re interested, I have retroactively inserted the following posts:

Placeholder Post: Zen and Christianity in 2008 covers a period from the Spring to the Summer of 2008, starting around when I temporarily dropped this blog to start the now-defunct Dharma Bum and ending sometime in the early Fall when we came back from New York and got back into the swing of things here in Maryland.  It’s a brief summary of my dabbling with first Zen Buddhism and then an abortive attempt to fling myself headfirst (or mind-first at least) into the Episcopal Church.

Searching For A Source, Unfinished Notes on Part III: Religious Choices And Their Values is the final installment in my Searching for a Source series about morality. But it’s not really finished, and I decided I didn’t really want to finish it, so it’s basically some notes, more or less fleshed out in different parts, about the ramifications of the question of objective morality on my process of choosing a religion or at least a spiritual direction.

Both of them have been added to my collected chronicles page of important posts, so future readers who want to go back and get the whole story don’t have to deal with confusing gaps.  But the rest of you might be interested, too.

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Christianity Just Doesn’t Work For Me

My initial reason for leaving Mormonism was because it conflicted with Christianity (at least the way I understood Christianity). So somewhat naturally, my assumption on the way out of Mormonism was that really finding God was just a matter of figuring out which Christian denomination I belonged in. The questions I was asking and trying to figure out were still sort of narrow Christian theological questions about soteriology, ecclesiology, and so on: what points of Christian doctrine were non-negotiable for me, and what points were less important. I spent about a half a year investigating different flavors of Christianity without feeling that “click”–that sense of coming home that I was waiting for.  Something more than an intellectual affinity that would enable me to adopt a new identity as a Christian. Christianity as a religion held a lot of appeal (and still does!), but there was something deeply visceral that I needed but that was just missing. There was a sense of “aha!–this is it!” that just was not happening with Christianity. Eventually, I started to question whether Christianity was the right direction for me at all, and I started looking elsewhere.

For the most part, that’s been the story of my post-Mormon life: back and forth between Christianity and “vaguely searching.” I like Christian liturgy, Christian prayer, I like theology, hymns, churches and cathedrals, Christian philosophy, the Bible, the whole nine yards. But it just doesn’t click. I’m not sure what’s actually supposed to happen that makes me say “there, that’s it; now I am a Christian,” but it never happens. Its like there’s a Christianity neuron in my brain that just isn’t firing. I like Christianity a lot, but I neither believe Christianity nor am able to commit to Christianity. That’s the thing. So I dive into Christianity again and again–at least in my head–hoping that this time that click in my head will happen and I will realize what it feels like to be a Christian, but it keeps not happening.  So I look around in, at, and under other things: Hinduism, New Age gobbledygook, Atheism, LaVeyan Satanism, Zen, Revival Druidry, Asatru, whatever. But the click doesn’t happen in those places either, and then I can’t shake Christianity’s powerful hold on me, so I wander back and throw myself in, but the click still doesn’t happen.

I understand Christianity conceptually. I have read the Bible. But it just isn’t relevant to me on the deep, personal level that I feel like it should, like I need it to in order to get me to a place where I am willing to say “I am a Christian; this I believe.”  The Bible connects to me as a cultural relic, a powerful one even, that is fundamental to the history of western civilization.  But as God’s Word, it just doesn’t resonate the right way.

A few weeks ago I was talking to my wife about religion and our different outlooks on the universe, and I told her that I really wish I could somehow make Christianity work for me, because it would be so much easier. And she said, simply but incisively, “but it doesn’t.” And there it was. No matter how much I like Christianity, no matter how much I love every word C. S. Lewis wrote, no matter how much I like Episcopal services and liturgy, no matter how much I think the Bible is amazing, Christianity just doesn’t work for me. The click I need to happen just… doesn’t happen.

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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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