thread: 2006-09-08 : Salvation, damnation, justification, a la Sydney
On 2006-09-12, Twila wrote:
Thanks for the welcome, Vincent.
I know you don't find it sad, too. And that's okay. You are going to believe what you do, and I just hope that one day we'll meet in person and I can tell you why it makes me sad in a way that makes sense to you, if we get to that topic... But right now, I'm not very articulate about what I believe and why—I'm just beginning to think through these issues, partly because I want to explain them to my daughter and to myself, as well. I don't expect her (or anyone) to just change her mind because I say it's important—I need to find out what makes it true to/for me, so I can explain it in a way that, with luck/hope/God's grace (or a bit of all three), will give them insight into what might make it true for them.
And, y'know, I kind of like the idea of my physical body becoming one with the elements when I'm done with it (though I still want to be cremated and bound into a book and snuck into the library of congress, because I love me my books, yes I do). It's just that I think there is more to me than just this shell. God, there had better be, because I don't do well with this old shell that I've got—it's creaky, and can't see, and I've lived most of my life inside my head, where the true self of me lives.
Okay, too, I've got a lot of people I want to have words with when I'm where they are—if they're just gone, that leaves quite a lot of things left undone in this life. My boss/best friend, who committed suicide—I want to find out why. I want to tell her I loved her, and that I wish she were here so often, even after eleven years without her. My mother-in-law, the mother of my heart, who I miss with every day that passes, and who I want advice from about parenting in the very worst way... My father—who I know was so much more complex than I ever saw him—because he had a stroke when he was 44, and could not move or speak or communicate for the next twenty years (I believe sincerely that the person he was before that stroke died that day) and who suffered so much before he finally died—and I want to get to know the boy, the young man, the person he was before life flattened him and made him so angry, so abusive—and I hope that I will be able to learn who he was, how he was, what shaped him and why. Because I want that with all of my heart and soul, and because I do not think that there could be just a cessation, a blackness, after we die, because what would be the POINT of living and learning and spending fifty or seventy or a hundred years here if we couldn't exist somehow after that? All of what we are evolves while we live, and there has to be a point to it all. Even loving and being loved and giving birth to new life and seeing that continued to the next generation—what point does it have if we don't continue, or at least our essential selves don't continue?
And that's where I am right now. Maybe this outpouring will make sense to you, maybe it won't. I'm exploring things here, getting them out "on paper" as it were. It is hard. But this place is a place for honesty, and that's what you're getting.
Thank you for letting me explode all over your space like this.
