The Gauntlet

After I wrote my last full blog "Father Carey" my Uncle Derrick wrote me an email. What a great blog, he said. It was entertaining and well-written. However, he wondered if my blog had lost it's purpose. I began with the intent to explain how I got from point A to point B, from the pious to the irreverent, from faith to good fortune. Point A has been covered, Derrick said, but what does my life look like now?

Indeed, what does my life look like now? I have been mulling this one over for a few weeks, intimidated by the gauntlet he threw down. What does my life look like now?

I think it probably looks a lot like yours, but with more swearing. Jason and I clean our house and do our laundry. I try to convince him to raise alpacas with me, and he tries to convince me to turn on the fan when I take a shower. We cook alot. I sleep eight hours a night and I work forty hours a week.

I'm recording a new album, so I'm in the studio every couple of weeks. I'm currently working with a cellist from the Boise Philharmonic on a few songs. She is weird and makes me laugh and is a much better musician that I am.

I volunteer with refugees and teach English as a second language with the International Rescue Committee. This makes my life more fulfilling. I learn twice as much from these people as they learn from me and their gratitude makes me feel embarrassed.

I belong to a writing group who meets biweekly to get drunk and talk about our art. We lament how happy we are, because happy people never write anything that changes the world. Sometimes I think Jason has ruined my creative life because he's so perfect for me.

I think a lot about the friends that I've lost and the life that was once before me. I was so wrong for that life, but I kept my foot in the door until the last possible second (February 23, 2010). I tried to pretend that I still had the option of keeping those friends, of having that life, of making my parents proud.

The truth is, I never had that option. I was never that person, and I never will be. At some point in my life, I realized that experiences were worth more than ideas. I could debate politics and religion like a champ, or I could just shut up and live and figure it out. When I stopped trying to make the world fit into my narrow religious preconceptions, life got easier.

Life is easy now. I am deliriously and incandescently happy with almost everything in my life.... everything except those lost friends, everything except those disappointed parents. It makes me sad when someone I love can no longer see me as a whole person now that I've got a "God-shaped hole".

The truth is, if there is a god, and I'm not too fussed about whether or not there is, but if there is one, and if he is good, then he's here with me. If there is a god, and if he is good, then all this goodness - the goodness that filled the space that Christianity left open in my heart - it is from him.