Natepod The weblog of Nate Cull

Tired

I'm tired. Bone-deep, soul-tired. It's been creeping for over a year. I have a week off work in the hope I can recharge. But it's not really like a holiday because I still have commitments I can't walk away from. Or have chosen not to let drop in a flaming heap. I guess it all comes down to personal choice, but it still sure feels like I'm boxed in.

Reading New Age books doesn't always help, either. There are ones that resonate with me, and there are ones that... don't. Sometimes one will seem okay, will say things I largely agree with, but still give me the screaming yeemies - I mean the deep, oh-god-I'm-really-going-to-hell-for-sure-now kind of spiritual terror that I don't really know how to convey to people who haven't grown up in a fundamentalist household. I really don't understand how the heck this works, and I'm not entirely willing to chalk it all down to Those Nasty Fundamentalists, because when it comes down to it, I actually do believe there *are* such things as fundamentals of the faith, non-negotiables, I don't actually view the word 'Conservative' as an insult, and this sort of belief puts me offside with rather a lot of New Age spiritual guides and teachers, as well as maybe 98% of political activists.

The latest book that gave me the heebie-jeebies was 'Emmanuel's Book II: The Choice for Love'. The weird thing is, that I actually do agree with most of what 'Emmanuel' says. Most of it. And yet...

The New Age idea that scares me the most is that 'there is no external morality as such, anything you do is right if you do it out of love/compassion. When it comes to sex, sleep with whoever you want, break up when you want, it all helps you advance. Abortion/euthanasia is fine if you mean well. Everyone chooses their own path.' While this is quite probably true... as far as it goes... and quite possibly Christian... as far as it goes... (after all, Christ did hang out with 'publicans and sinners', defended prostitutes, overruled the morality systems of his day)... it grates with me to the point of inducing a feeling of intense physical illness, because there's an instinct deep in me that shouts, 'But there *is* big-M Morality, there *is* big-T Truth, it is *not* all subjective, the old-school Jewish attitudes towards, eg, sexuality and euthanasia are more basically correct than the modern liberal consensus of 'anything freely chosen by consenting adults is intrinsically moral', and even if I can't figure out how or if this weird old idea applies to other people, it still seems very important to me that I integrate morality into my life, and there are things that I do not want to do even if supposedly and allegedly I am free to do them - and I believe by making this choice I am doing something more than merely exercising personal taste, nor am I being a knee-jerk reactionary blindly opposing the cosmic forces of progress and light'.

This instinct seems to put me in a very lonely position, because quite frankly I'm out of step with both conservative Christianity and consensus pop-spiritual culture on a lot of social issues, and I'm not sure how I'm ever going to reconcile such opposing forces so that my head stops exploding and my heart stops breaking. There is a deep psychic pain in me from this out-of-step-ness that I've almost got used to being there, but hurts like heck when I stop to think about it. And yet I'd much rather it be there, because it feels to me like it's representing something important that should not be forgotten. And it feels like somehow I'm carrying it mostly alone, and I don't understand why.

And I wonder why I feel tired so much.

As a sort of hair-of-the-dog antidote, I read some Frances Bird, who seems to have been doing automatic writing around World War I, as part of a cluster of similar writers (mostly women, apparently). I generally seem to have had the best experiences reading material from this era, as it seems to be more aligned with my Christian intuitions, and puts emphasis on the idea of self-discipline as well as that of freedom. There's also a kind of, for want of a better word, solidity, a sort of intellectual and religious rigour, to both the writing and the thought-forms from this older stuff that I don't really get from a lot of the post-WW2 material. A sense of God's role as a real Father and Creator, separate from us and transcendent, in a way that's not present in much of the later stuff, which tends to major on interconnection, immanence and 'we're all God really', even though it's friendly and happy enough.

(I find it interesting that Frances Bird is almost invisible on the interwebs. Possibly it's because although she seems to have written in the pre-copyright era, the books I've seen were republished in the 1980s, and so will still be locked up for a while.)

By comparison, I tried glancing at Neale Donald Walsch's 'Conversations With God', not for the first time, and try as I might, I just couldn't stomach it. Maybe it's the record of a genuine personal spiritual experience, but as channelled material, it just seems incredibly... shallow. And very trite and pop-spiritual in its teaching. I suppose people have got something out of it, but it really doesn't do anything for me.