Last night I bought my first house. We’ll be moving to East Atlanta in a week and half. The meantime will be spent painting, caulking, and mowing. You are an old, old man when you’re looking forward to mowing the lawn.
Among the assets included with the house is one electric wheelchair, which with new batteries will do a fine job of getting me back and forth to the bar. (Who needs a Segway?) We also have a tenant, one Charlotte the Spider, who is as big as my fist and has built her own luxury condo just past the shed. Charlotte will not be charged rent or chased with the lawn mower so long as she doesn’t try to recreate the forest scene from the first Harry Potter movie.
A new friend has asked if, instead of letting my angst and ennui drive my writing here at MyIrony, I should let my angst and ennui be my writing. If, instead of speaking from the safe distance of theological abstraction, I should embrace the danger of personal revelation.
So I ask, gentle reader, am I become J. Alfred Prufrock: do I dare not eat a peach? Should I dare peak out from behind the mask of “chutney,” or would you dread yet another blog about me, myself, and I?
Over the past week, MyIrony has been getting spammed in the comments section. On all individual post pages now, you’ll notice a warning to would-be spammers. Regular posters should just skip over it. Schillers of porn sites and penis enlargement pills should go the fuck away.
Imagine, if you will, the young man going off to seminary, his ideals firmly in place. His place of employment is a dying church with a youth group of two, a church that wants young adults but doesn’t want to go get them. The church asks the world but will not lift a finger, and wonders at his frustration. The senior minister lost his faith long ago and now works to pay the rent, which, after all, is all his wife demands. He resents the young man, resents his success, resents his ideals.
Imagine, then, the young man crashing. At home the minister, who lives in the apartment upstairs, is a constant presence even when he cannot be seen or heard. At school, no one looks at one another, instead staring across the river, longing to be somewhere they are not and competing for prizes that are not there to be won. Friends are half a continent away. Depression comes in full force. The young man has walking pneumonia, but it is all in his head.
And so therapy and pills, tests and papers, prayers and hymns, therapy and pills. In time he improves, but the minister still lives upstairs.
But then the marriage to an old friend from home, an ally. They look to move out from the minister’s house. He writes for advice, but the bishop sends a rebuke intead.. Some friend are kicked out of the ministry for daring the prophetic edge of ministry, one friend after another. Embittered from years of faithful, faithless church work, he leaves the ministry, says good riddance, and weeps.
The young man and his wife are moved safely away. They begin to rest. But then she falls sick, falls in the night, and for a moment he thinks she is dead. Whatever was left of his Christian faith died that night, died for good. It is all dead now, and he is thankful.
Let him learn to rejoice in his misfortune. Let him wander to find friends who will comfort him. Let him seek after those who will call his name, who will know it even before he speaks.
Imagine, if you will, the boy going off to college. He is confused, determined, excited. He has been sent to save the school, but he finds that he has stumbled into a new freedom. Imagine the boy jumping on the bed, shouting to the dorm that he can think what he wants to think, feel what he wants to feel.
Imagine, then, the boy tracing out his thoughts, tracing each to each. His classes he selects for this purpose, to find the origins of his beliefs. Those that have clear origins, he begins to discard. He finds others like him, others raised to save others–others finding their way out. Together, they leave the churches and exult in their freedom (and rejoice in their bitterness). They are free.
But the freedom brings a calling. The freedom is a grace, and grace longs to be shared. He leads youth groups, and finds they he can be an extrovert when he needs to. He finds that he loves adolescents (perhaps because he was such a bad one). He continues to trace out his beliefs, and continues to discard them. Still, there are enough beliefs left for ministry.
He discovers that his melancholy is not mere introversion; it is depression. A kind friend’s father makes the diagnosis, prescribes meds. He wonders how long the friend’s father knew–all his life, or just this visit? But no matter. It can be fixed. It is fixed. But he cannot afford the pills, and his working class pride denies him the chance to ask for a handout, a handout that would surely be given. His parents are frightened and will not provide. Let him make do on his own.
Let him go off to seminary, without his pills in hand. Let him rejoice in his scholarship, not realizing–working class boy that he is–how little money, in fact, he has been given. Let a friend of a friend find him a job in a dying church, with a pastor who has lost his faith. Send him your congratulations, but do not call.
