Fully Alive

Highlights

‘I am not [only] physically tired, just filled with a deep, vague, undefined sense of spiritual distress.’1 I don’t want to live in spiritual distress. I want to be fully alive.

trudging through a day made grey by my inattention,

As I trudge, I am saying goodbye to my faith. It feels like letting my own house fall in on itself, the inevitable result of a series of small erosions of the foundations, rather than continuing to desperately patch and prop.

I found myself muttering cynically under my breath through services, so stopped going.

The presence I had encountered in the cowshed had somehow bled out of the world, washed away by the rain, and I was alone.

I had allowed myself to hope, and that hope required excruciating vulnerability. Vulnerability betrayed becomes a hard crust of reserve and self-protection.

I missed the sense of being part of something bigger, of my life having purpose. I missed confession and absolution. I missed the regular call to be better, to be kinder, more truthful, more generous, more free. I wanted more to be asked of me than just doing a good job at work and trying to look hot.

the statement ‘I don’t believe in God’ wasn’t quite true. Despite myself, the sentence that floated up when my mind was quiet was ‘I don’t believe in you.’

I discovered that there are a lot of us, disgruntled but devoted, allergic to glib certainties but compelled by a love we can’t fully explain. I found there was a constellation of poets and mystics and morally courageous saints I could listen to and learn from.

am trying to pursue meaning, freedom and connection among my very ordinary demands of work, parenting and life admin.

some days the felt truth of the thing, the conviction that God exists and loves us, slides out of focus like I’ve got grease on my glasses, and for a while I can’t remember what it feels like when it makes sense.

just my best guess, my wager on what makes me feel most human, the strongest container I have found for the pain and love and longing of being alive.

The Human Propensity to Fuck Things Up,

HPtFtu is all the times we choose withdrawal, self-protection or attack. When we centre ourselves, not as part of a healthy rhythm of receiving and giving in a web of relationships, but because we’re terrified no one is going to meet our needs but ourselves.

HPtFtu shows up in lashing out, hiding, numbing behaviours that close down the possibilities of intimacy, with myself, others and the beyond.

Fully aliveness, for me, is summed up in connection, and my definition of sin is everything working against that.

If though, as in my understanding, fullness of life is in connection, then every time I connect with myself, with the natural world, with other people and with the divine I am moving lifewards. I am groping out over the outlines of the self into the really real. Each choice I make moves me towards life and connection, or towards disconnection, and therefore death.

If the only bit of theology that gets culturally transmitted is sin, disconnected from forgiveness, you land somewhere very bleak. It’s grace, the possibility of healing I did not earn, that keeps me sane.

If sin is the rupture of relationship, forgiveness is repair. Fuck up, tell the truth, say sorry, ask for forgiveness, be open in community, ask for help, fuck up again, but maybe, just maybe, slightly less badly.

Our sinless society, which promised liberation from the psychological harm that externally imposed guilt brings, has begun to feel a bit suffocating. No one is really responsible for anything, but neither can anyone really be forgiven.

we think we don’t like sin, but deeper down it’s forgiveness we can’t swallow. Some things should be unforgivable, shouldn’t they? But who gets to decide?

I can’t change other people. A default posture of non-judgement and a willingness to forgive when people repent is frankly less exhausting than being angry all the time, and leaves more energy for trying to become more alive, more connected, myself.

Relationships where we practise trust and respect across divides are vital for us to be effective citizens, especially in times of crisis, but no one teaches the skills you need to do it in school.

‘the tribal instinct is not just an instinct to belong. It is also an instinct to exclude.’

As I’m becoming more conscious of these dynamics, though, the brutal truth is that I tend to be judgemental of others but very quick to let myself off the hook. Wrath disconnects me from myself as well as other people because I use it to cover up what I’m really feeling and to disguise my part in the conflict.

Turning the other cheek, in its original context of physical violence, would involve overriding the strong bodily instinct to either fight (hit back) or flight (run away). It would mean standing your ground. It would have been, and still is, a surprising thing to do. A powerful statement of inner peace, resolve and control. I use the phrase ‘Stand your ground’ as shorthand for maintaining eye contact or keeping the conversation open, not as a cowering victim, but someone committed to connection.

as is often the case, these people who looked like the enemy, who perhaps saw me as an enemy, turned out to be walking worlds of meaning, bruised and beautiful and as endlessly fascinating as humans always are.

I don’t think you need to be a Christian to pray for someone. My Buddhist friends use loving-kindness meditation, which seems to have a similar effect. You also don’t need a rigorous theological framework to bless someone.

Love in theological terms is rarely about feelings at all, but about action. Praying a blessing over someone I hate is an act of resistance to that hate, to the wrath I find in myself.

I don’t believe we can become more free, more loving or more just unless we are able to name the things in ourselves we want to change.

I don’t want my life defined by wrath, to spend it clenched against the wrongness of others. It feels like death. Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. If I want more tender compassion and second chances for my own mistakes, the deal is I have to give that to others.

The line between Grandma’s joyful frugality and joyless austerity is too fine for my liking. I have put off addressing my avarice because I am scared of making my life a grey trudge devoid of treats. I love treats.

I’m talking here not about having enough, but about having more than we need, which may apply to more of us than we think.

If endless growth is the only way an economy can function, and people’s actual needs have been met, then false needs must be created, and relentlessly advertised.

Many of us have too little time and too much stuff and we’re not even enjoying it.

‘Do not toil to acquire wealth; be discerning enough to desist.’

Destitute people with too much money. This phrase has haunted me. The perception of scarcity in the midst of abundance makes it hard to share, to give freely.

Our societies, our businesses, do the exact opposite, manufacturing scarcity to keep us all on edge, constantly hoarding and acquiring to avoid missing out.

‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.’12 We are interdependent, interconnected people play-acting at being free individuals. Mimetic desire is why groups of teenage girls often wear variations on the same outfit, why middle-aged men all end up with the same coffee machine. It’s the premise of the entire advertising industry. We can fail to know a consumer good even exists, then see someone we admire with it, and suddenly it’s a ‘must have’.

The vast majority of our material desires, once our need for shelter, warmth, food and safety is met, are learned – caught, even – rather than innate.

‘People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, and joy. To try to fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth.’

Theologian Eve Poole summarises three main components to consumerism: insatiability, novelty and subjectivity.

I never reach a point of satisfaction, I always want something new, and I want, not exactly what everyone else has, but my own, personalised version. I am shaped by mimetic desire but also want to maintain the fiction of my own autonomy and authenticity. I want to be part of the crowd, but also stand out from it. It is, now I think about it, a bit pathetic.

If sin is disconnection, the sin of avarice disconnects me from the world, from what I really want and need, and from other people.

a creeping black dread about how to explain to my children just what we have done, what we have left undone, out of ignorance, weakness and our own deliberate fault.

‘What kind of people are needed at the end of the world?’18 What kind of people do I want around, do my kids need around, as we navigate the fruit of our avarice? I think we will need capable, generous, grateful people, not avaricious ones hoarding resources and compounding the problems, and so I’m seeking the practices that will help me with that.

Now we’re older, many of us with kids in tow, most of us with at least a bit more money, we pay movers. You don’t make memories with movers, don’t weave a net of reciprocity, of shared need and shared generosity. If ‘a friend is someone who will help you move’, and I never need help moving, how do I know who my friends are?

part of it is more money and therefore less need of each other.

It’s less awkward, at least early in a friendship, to offer to pick up someone from the airport or water their houseplants or lend some tools than say aloud, ‘You are an important person in my life.’ That moment of contact, of giving and receiving, builds connection and weaves a thick basket of reciprocity. It’s the stuff of community. Helping others makes us feel good. Knowing we have been helped, if we can deprogramme ourselves from the shame of vulnerability, feels good too.

If you never need material help, it is harder to become fully knit into the tapestry of community. You can give, sure, and that is good, but no one wants to be in a relationship long term that is all one way. That’s not community, it’s patronage.

I think the very rich, who are able to access abundance without dependence,20 who want for literally nothing, must be quite lonely.

The number of scripture verses about sex are outnumbered many times over by verses about money, which you wouldn’t necessarily get from media coverage of the Church. In the whole Bible there are around 500 verses on prayer and over 2,000 verses on money. It’s almost as if the whole thing is spiritually important.

Do not accumulate treasures on earth, but treasure in heaven. No one can serve both God and money. Guard against greed, because life is not in the abundance of possessions.

‘If you would be perfect, go, sell what you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.’

We should keep an eye on greed because it enslaves us while promising freedom, but also because our greed feeds endemic injustice. It enslaves others.

Who are the greedy? Those who are not satisfied with what suffices for their own needs. Who are the robbers? Those who take for themselves what rightfully belongs to everyone. And you, are you not greedy? Are you not a robber? . . . The bread you are holding back is for the hungry, the clothes you keep put away are for the naked, the shoes that are rotting away with disuse are for those who have none, the silver you [have saved] is for the needy. You are thus guilty of injustice toward as many as you might have aided, and did not.24

Poverty is not an accident or the fault of an evil few, but has something to do with me.

I want to break the enchantment. I don’t want to wake up when I’m ninety and find I’m a well-dressed, well-accessorised, lonely slave to Mammon. Past a certain point, continuing to date a charming liar, no matter how sexy, is foolishness.