Category Archives: Memories

Books, Memories, Meta-Blogging, Religion

Considering Peretti books for analysis

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After some thought, I’ve decided that I’m going to do a deconstruction — if you can still call it a deconstruction if you find more about the book that you like than you dislike — of another book by Frank Peretti.

I’ve read a total of five Peretti books.  Each one of them is slightly different in some way.  This Present Darkness is about the war between angels and demons as it plays out in a small town.  Piercing the Darkness, its sequel, is also about angels battling demons, but this time the main focus is the battle over a particular soul (though it did have a swipe at the public education system, which was a popular topic at the time I was reading it due tot he emergence of outcomes based education).

The third book that I read was Prophet, which was not about angels and demons but about a journalist who found himself living a “prophetic” (in the terms of warning others of the consequences of their misdeeds) vocation.  The book mostly focused on the evils of the (liberal, of course) media and abortion.

The fourth book that I read was The Oath.  It was a strange book in that it was far more a Horror book than the others.  While it got preachy about the nature of sin, there was also no clear connections to actual spiritual movements (at least not that I’m aware of) like the first three were.  I often joked that The Oath seemed more like Peretti contracted Stephen King to write a book for him in comparison to the others I had read.

I should note that I read these four books when I was in high school, when I still considered myself a fundamentalist Christian.  As such, I read them as a member of Peretti’s target audience.

I didn’t read my fifth book, The Visitation until I was in my late twenties or early thirties, long after I became a witch and devotee of Freyja.  In many ways, I suppose that’s why i liked the book.  In this book, Peretti turned his critical eye away from “outsiders” and turned it upon his own religious subculture.  As a former member of that same subculture, I appreciated his look.

I’ve decided that I want to do an in-depth analysis of The Visitation.  As I said, I’m not sure I can call it a deconstruction, as many of the parts that I will be exploring are places where I actually identify and agree with Peretti’s thoughts.  However, given the nature of the main plot, which I wasn’t as impressed with, I don’t expect my comments to be entirely glowing, either.

I’m also hoping that it might be interesting to compare this book with This Present Darkness.  Who knows, maybe it’ll even spark up some sort of discussion between Yamikuronue and myself as we compare our experiences of our respective Peretti books.

Memories, Religion

Fundamentalism and Jargon

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This past Monday, The Former Conservative wrote a post critiquing a Rapture Ready conversation in which some people suggested that both mental illness and addiction were actually a matter of demonic oppression.  FC mentioned in passing that he had never heard the phrase “demonic oppression” before.

This surprised me for a moment.  As a former fundamentalist who had gotten involved in the spiritual warfare movement, I was all too familiar with phrase, but what it meant and why it was coined as a phrase to represent something distinct from demon possession.  The idea that other Christians were completely unfamiliar with the term surprised me, even thirteen years after I left that particular subculture.

Any group — whether you’re talking fundamentalists, more liberal Christians, or even video game players — tends to develop their own jargon, words and phrases that are not familiar to those outside of the group.  This can create communication issues with those outside the group when discussing certain topics, though it’s an issue that’s normally easy overcome.

I think this can be somewhat harder for fundamentalists and even more conservative evangelicals, however.  As I mentioned in a guest-blogging post over at CoaFC, fundamentalist identity tends to consume and isolate its adherents to a near-absolute degree.  It occurs to me that another consequence of this process is that fundamentalists can become quite oblivious to their jargon and how peculiar it is to their group.  Effectively, they’re so invested in and surrounded by their subculture, that the idea that anyone might not even be aware of their specialized terms doesn’t occur to them.

I’ve been a witch for thirteen years now, and I’ve met people who were not raised with my background.  Intellectually I know that there are people who never had a reason to hear terms like “demonic possession” and “blood bought.”  And yet, it’s easy to fall back into old thinking patterns just enough that an instance where I’m reminding of that fact catches me by surprise, however slight that surprise might be.  I think that says something.

Family, Memories

Remembrance

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Given that this is the season to honor and remember loved ones who have passed from this world, I thought I would make today’s blog post a more personal one and talk about a beloved relative, my paternal grandmother.

I forget my exact age, by Grandma Harris passed away when I was very young, before I began school, if memory serves.  The past several years of her life, she battled cancer.  I vaguely remember many nights where my sister and I would sit in the hospital waiting room with one of my parents while the other one would go upstairs to visit Grandma during her latest hospitalization.  I cannot think of Grandma without thinking of memories of her failing health because I never knew her before her battle began.

I am told that Grandma was a caring and strong woman all of her life.  I’m inclined to believe that because of the strength, grace, and dignity with which she faced her fading health in her final years.  Anyone can be strong and loving in the best of times.  However, it takes a special person — like Grandma Harris — to be strong in sir darkest hours.

One of my most cherished memories is of a day I spent alone with my grandparents.  Grandma Harris gave me a peanut butter cookie1 and I laid on one of the couches in my grandparents’ single-wide trailer munching on it.  Now, like any preschooler, I was a messy eater.  And peanut butter cookies are prone to leaving lots of crumbs.  By the time I was done, both I and the couch were covered in crumbs.  My grandparents saw it.

Grandpa Harris — who had a much harder edge than his wife — started to get upset and critical.  But Grandma Harris calmed him and told him that these things happens.  Besides, Grandma Harris had a solution.  She told Grandpa to go get the old vacuum cleaner.  He did and Grandmother began to vacuum up all the crumbs, both those on the couch and those on me.  Grandma Harris was a rather practical woman.2

When I think about the kind of person I want to be, I often think of Grandma Harris.  If I manage to embody half the love, strength, and no-nonsense approach to living that she did, I think I’ll have done a great job.  And I’d like to think she’d be pleased with the man that little boy grew up to be.

[1] Grandma Harris loved making peanut butter cookies, and they are forever intwined with memories of her in my mind.  If you asked me for an honest evaluation of which cookies I thought tasted the best, I would likely say chocolate chip cookies.  But if you ask me what my favorite cookie is, I will still tell you “peanut butter” cookies more than three decades later.  It’s not about how they taste, it’s about the fact that they are the cookies Grandma Harris used to make.

[2]  Plus it gave me countless opportunities to watch people’s reactions whenever I mention in passing that I got hovered by my own grandmother.

Memories, Meta-Blogging, Religion

Guest-blogging, Day Three

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My final day of guest-blogging at Confessions of a Former Conservative is being met with My enemy’s pawn is still just a pawn to me.  Here’s the teaser:

Of course, I told myself that I didn’t hate these Pagan people. 
After all, they ultimately were not the enemy, and I was no Jack Chick. 
I understood that these poor peers of mine were mere dupes of Satan,
pawns of the enemy that were being used.  I didn’t hate them.  I did not
spew venom at them directly, but at their invisible masters, of whom
they were completely unaware.

Gender and Sexuality, Memories

The Path Left Behind

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I came out to myself and my best friend at the time on Monday, 1 April 1996.  Today, 1 April 2011 marks the fifteenth anniversary of that event.  In honor of that, I’ve decided to do a series of posts on the topic.  This is the second one.


As I said in my previous post, the night I came out to Merion in that little alcove was the beginning of a new journey to self-acceptance and personal discovery.  However, the start of that journey meant the end of a different, darker journey.  The journey that ended that night, the journey towards “freedom from unwanted same-sex attractions,” was a painful and self-destructive one and one I’m glad I left behind.  And yet, this anniversary would not be complete without talking about it at least a little.
Truth be told, I can’t cover that journey — which lasted for roughly eight years — in a single blog post.  I hope to restart A Journey to Queerdom soon, and I will explore it more fully there.  For this post, I hope to tell just enough to capture a glimpse of the emotional chaos that overshadowed me as I came to that fateful April Fool’s Day night.
At the end of my sophomore year in college, I had finally admitted that my feelings for other guys was more than “just a phase.”  It was a very real part of my psychological makeup and it was there to stay unless I took some drastic measures.  So I started trying to turn myself straight.  Granted, I didn’t go to any sort of therapy or ex-gay ministry — fortunately, I wouldn’t have known where to find such help in Selinsgrove of the surrounding area.  So instead, I simply tried to go through the process of praying for healing on my own and asking friends I could trust to also pray for me.*
Asking for friends’ help actually created a cycle of increasing frustration.  I would admit my “struggle” to each of them separately — a frightening prospect in itself each time, as I was never sure how they might react to the experience and there’s a lot of shame in admitting you like members of your own sex in evangelical and fundamentalist circles, even if you make it clear that you don’t want them.  They’d pray with me and for me, and I’d feel better.  I’d get an emotional boost and would feel like I could take on the world.
But the emotional high would eventually wear off while the feelings of attraction would persist.  My frustrations and sense of shame over feeling the way I felt would return, often magnified by the sense of added failure that somehow I had lost forfeited the “spiritual help” I had gotten and failed yet again.  So I’d decide that I needed more help, and that meant telling another friend and seeking further support and help.  And there, the cycle would begin all over.
The thing is, dealing with one’s feelings is ultimately something one has to do alone.  No one can feel those feelings for you.  No one can take them away from you.  No one can do anything other than support you through it all, and no one can give that support 24/7.  I found that late at night, laying in my bed, I was left all alone to either face my desire for love and intimacy with another man alone or repress it alone.  It was my burden to carry, and the more I fought it, the heavier that burden got.
One of the things that drove me to the breaking point on Saturday night, 30 March 1996** was the fact that my loneliness was driven home when my closest friends and my biggest supporters all ended up spending that night with their respective female love interests.  I realized that night that this really was my burden to carry, because when push comes to shove, they got to go to their God- and church-approved girlfriends (or potential girlfriends) and find some degree of intimacy and the promise of full intimacy sometime down the road.  That realization, and their unintentional acts of rubbing it in my face, pushed me into a full tailspin that night.  I spent over half an hour considering and even planning to end my own life.
I’m not going to describe that night.  I think I’ve described it well enough elsewhere.  But what I will say is that in that night, I wanted to die because I realized that I could never “beat” my sexual feelings and romantic desires.  There was no going straight for me.  I had tried and failed.  If I continued down that path, the only thing waiting for me was depression, loneliness, and shame.  And I couldn’t face that path.  If that path was my only choice, I knew it would be better to end my life.  So I seriously contemplated it.
And at some point, that realization horrified me.  So two nights later, I chose to walk another path.
—
* Given the number of ex-gays who talk about going to therapy, support groups, or even residency programs, I felt out of place at first.  I was quite relieved when I discovered that the bXg community had an entire group for people who went through self-guided attempts at becoming ex-gay.
** I’ve searched every aspect of my memory, and everything convinces me that the truly terrifying dark night was two nights before I came out on April Fool’s Day.  Curiously, this means I surived in some sort of in-between state for a full day on Sunday.  I have no idea what that day was like or how I managed to survive and not find myself with the same dark thoughts that night as I had entertained the night before.

Memories

Memories of Guilt

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Back when I was a kid, I thought I had to ask for forgiveness of every little sin in order to be forgiven and get into heaven.  I’m not really sure where I got this idea.  I know when I was a teenager, Harry did introduce me to the idea and explained the theology behind it.  He taught it to his junior high Sunday school class (which I took over for him when he left our church to join New Covenant).

But I know that my belief in this idea predated Harry’s teaching.  I remember being a little kid (I’d say eight or nine) lying in bed, worried that I’d forgotten to tell Jesus I was sorry about something.  I’d be trying to fall asleep and a pattern would emerge.  I’d ask Jesus to forgive me for something sin I thought I had committed.  Then I’d suddenly have a thought and realize that the thought I just had was probably sinful too (and it was usually some silly little thought, though I can’t think of any examples).  So I’d quickly whisper a quick “please forgive me, Jesus” to cover the new thought.  And the cycle would continue.

I think that carried with me right through to the day that I finally decided to make a break from Christianity.  I think it’s one of the reasons I made that break.  It was just too much pressure for me, a pressure that convinced me that I was constantly in a state of sin, constantly rotten, and even constantly worthless.  This idea that you have constantly monitor everything and ask for forgiveness is hell on one’s self esteem and sense of worth.

In some ways, I think it contributed to the codependency I’m currently seeking help for.  My codependency was a way to show myself that I wasn’t that bad and there was good in me.  I was redeemable.  Of course, I told myself when I left Christianity that those days were over.  I no longer had to prove myself or be “good enough.”

But I think some part of my unconscious didn’t get that memo back then.  Because I still set out to be the best person I can be.  Don’t get me wrong, being the best person you can be is a good thing.  But putting yourself under all the pressure because you have to be the best person you can be in order to be “good enough” or “worth something” is self-destructive.

So as I think about this, I feel like I’m coming back and relearning that lesson now.  I have value.  It’s good to do good and care about and for others, but it’s not something I have to do to be worthy of love, respect, or human dignity.  It’s as if that lesson is taking deeper root, that I’m learning it on a whole different level, and that feels great.

Dating, Emotions, Love, Memories, Music

Music, Memories, and Emotions

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The other day, I was listening to the radio while driving, and “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith came on.  I absolutely love that song and want to include it here.  So thanks to YouTube, enjoy a nice rendition with lyrics, no less:

I actually have an emotional history associated with this song.  The song was quite popular on the radio back in 1998, thanks to Armageddon.  At the time, I was also involved with a young man name Zech.  It was actually my first relationship, providing you don’t count the friend I experimented with in high school.  The song meant a lot to me back then.  Every time I heard it, I thought of Zech.

The other day when I heard the same song, it made me think of another guy.  I’ll call this guy D (until he tells me he’s ready for me to talk about him by name.  D and I have been talking, hanging out, and otherwise enjoying each other’s company.  We’re not actually dating, though I hope that changes some day in the not-too-distant future.

What I find interesting is that while similar, the reaction the song evokes in me regarding D now and the reaction I had back when I was involved with Zech.  In both cases, the theme of the song — the desire to be with that special someone as much as possible — resonated deeply with me.  However, the emotional undercurrents are worlds apart.

As I mentioned, Zech was my first boyfriend (though come to think of it, we never officially dated).  We were both young and immature, and I was only recently out (I had only finally accepted my sexuality two years earlier).  This meant that I was going through a lot of emotional turmoil, and tended to cling to Zech in a sense of desperation.  And that desperation came through back then as I’d listen to the song.  I didn’t want to miss a thing, because I was terrified that things would end.  Part of me wanted to squeeze as much out of the relationship before the horrible ending came, and part of me foolishly believed that simply by being ever-present, ever-vigilant, and ever-suffocating, I could actually prevent the horrible ending from coming.

I’ve grown up a great deal in the intervening twelve years, and I now listen to that song again with a new guy in mind.  And once again, I find myself nodding along with the song.  But rather than a nagging sense of desperation, my heart is filled with a sense of peace and contentment.

The funny thing is, there area  few parallels.  There’s no guarantee that things will work out between D and I.  (Is there ever really any such guarantee?)  I don’t know how long I have with him or even if we’ll ever become a couple like I’m hoping for.  I think it’s likely though.

But in the end, it doesn’t matter.  I have this time now, and I want to make the most of it.  Not out of fear or desperation, but out of hope and joy.

People often talk about how music can evoke powerful emotions and we can associate specific memories and feelings with a song.  However, I sometimes think that people forget that new connections and associations can be made with old songs that replace or overpower the old ones.  I know from personal experience that this is true, because I enjoy “Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” far more today than I did back in 1998.

In fact, I think I’m going to go listen to it again.

Memories, Writing

Entering a writing contest and reminiscing about roleplaying

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Writing samples: Parker 75

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I’ve spent the past several days playing around with Writing.com (WDC).  It’s been good for me, as it’s helped get me motivated again to actually write.  And I’ve enjoyed the feedback I’ve gotten from some truly skilled writers over there.  Tonight, I decided to further participate in the site by joining my first writing contest.  I chose to submit an entry to the Character Creation Contest. I figure I’m pretty good at character creation, so it’s a good place to get my feet wet. I’ll move on to more challenging contests — one that force me to work on my weak points — as time goes by. So I put together a character profile for Hargath, a dark priest.

Hargath is actually a recreated and edited version of a character I played in an online freeform roleplaying campaign. The way I came up with him always amused me.

When the group on the BBS decided to set up the room for the campaign, I hadn’t decided if I was going to participate yet. So I sat back as people started making posts introducing their characters. I noticed that everyone was creating noticeably good — as in morally upright — characters. As I watched the party form up, I realized that this was looking like it would be a campaign where the players worked together perfectly well.

Now, perhaps it’s because one of my favorite roleplaying games (though I never got to actually play it) was Paranoia, but that state of affairs didn’t sit well with me. I felt that like good storytelling, good role-playing (I’m also of the opinion that the difference between the two is almost negligible) required some conflict between characters. It wasn’t enough to just have to overcome the obstacles of the NPC’s. There needed to be some obstacles to teamwork that needed to be overcome as well.

So I decided to introduce a dark priest. I forget what his name was, and I don’t think I described him quite as well as I’ve described Hargath. But he was definitely the dark cloud looming over the party. And his presence did make for some interesting role-playing.

Shortly before the campaign fell apart (those of us involve simply found ourselves with not enough time to continue it), I remember an exchange between my priest and the mage that my friend, Ben played. At one point, the party came up against a particularly nasty captain we had to get rid of. The party agreed that assassination was the best course of action, and my priest volunteered to do the dirty work. The mage decided that my priest needed a disguise in order to get close enough. The mage happily helped out in that department obliged, by transforming my priest into a woman!

Of course, my priest got his revenge. His new disguise allowed him to get the captain in private and dispatch the captain in a formal ritual sacrifice to the dark goddess. And the mage’s spell further enabled my priest to psychically link said mage to the victim. The end result, the mage experienced everything done to the captain as if it was happening to him. Ben thought the whole idea was a hoot. In fact, he wrote the entire scene for me because I didn’t have time.

Of course, my choice of characters did create problems between me and at least one other player. Another friend, Jared, played a Druid. Jared was interested in Druidism himself at the time. And my priest character did a couple things (like steal the soul of a horse so that it would bend to his will) that freaked Jared out. Note that I said it freaked Jared out rather than his character. Jared was mad at me for days. That much was unfortunate. But as I explained to him, part of role-playing and fiction is allowing some characters to do things we wouldn’t dream of doing in real life. After all, if all characters were the goody-two-shoes most of us try to be, our games and stories wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

And I admit that playing an evil character helped me write such characters much better.

Friends, Memories, Personal Development

A Bad Leadership Fit

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I remember how frustrated Diane, our old IVCF staff worker, used to get with me my sophomore year in college.  I had decided to get involved in IVCF leadership that year and had taken a position on the chapter’s executive board.  It quickly became apparent that I was not well suited or that kind of leadership.  My outlook was simply more relational.

The scene played out several times, varying only in details.  The day of a meeting would roll around, and I’d be talking to someone.  The conversation would be deep and personal, as I was never good at small talk and people tend to spill their guts around me anyway.  I’d note the time and decide that continuing the conversation was important than getting to my meeting on time.  Often, I wouldn’t make it to the meeting at all.  This would frustrate Diane to no end, adn she’d try to get me to understand that while relationships were important, always breaking my other commitments for the sake of a conversation wasn’t entirely right either.  I don’t think she ever got very far with me on that score.  Eventualy, we agreed to muddle through the rest of the year.  We also agreed that I’d take a role the following year that would be better suited to my nature.

I’ve grown a lot in the fifteen years that have passed since then.  As a more mature person, I can now more readily see Diane’s point more clearly.  And I’m more likely to judge a relational need more carefully these days, taking into account how immediate the need is, how serious my other commitments are, and other such factors.  Today, there’s a real possibility that I’ll say, “This is important.  I care and I want to be there for you.  But can we talk about it in a couple of hours?”

But I’m still mainly relationally oriented.  I’ll keep my commitments to activities like meetings to a minimum.  The difference, however, is that I’m less likely to take on sucha  commitment in the first place, rather than taking it on and then breakign it later.  Because I’d rather have my time free so I can listen to people.  I understand that now.  And I allow for that preference reponsibly.

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Geeky, Memories

Confessions of a Reformed Command Line Snob

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The box art of Windows 1.0, the first version ...

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Adam Gonnerman wrote an insightful post about how showing the average user the Linux command line (or the DOS command shell on a Windows box, for that matter) can create a sense of fear and intimidation.  It’s an interesting piece and I highly recommend reading it as well as the conversation in comments.

As I look at my own comments in that discussion, I’m reminded of how much my thinking about computers has changed over the years.  When I was in college, I was a total command line snob.  I looked down at GUI’s in general and thought they were the road to making every computer user stupid.

I think this was a common mentality for a lot of us who were into computers back when I was in college and before.  After all, when I first started college in the Fall of 1992, Windows was still something you started from the DOS command line after you booted the machine.  And the computers in the college’s computer labs were set up under Novell.  You’d enter your login credentials, get dumped to the DOS prompt, and type “win” if you wanted to start that stupid GUI.

Even Linux distributions tended to treat XWindows as an afterthought at the time.  That same freshman year, I loaded Slackware Linux onto my IBM XT clone (I will admit that I was nowhere near the cutting edge in terms of the computer I personally owned).  It involved downloading a couple dozen images and burning them onto 3.5″ floppies and then using a special boot disk to install the system on the computer.  XFree86 was an optional install and the distribution was — again — set up to have you log into a command prompt and then start XWindows from there.  And since trying to get XWindows to work on your particular configuration was no easy task back then, it struck me as mostly a waste of time.

So I came through a time when using a computer meant you had to be a wizard with a command prompt.  It wasn’t optional.  You learned all the magic commands and you lerned how to use them extremely well or you were hopelessly lost.  It was a glorious time, especially for those of us who loved the challenge.  So to me at the time, the growing popularity of GUI’s (by my senior year, all the computers in the lab were running NT 3.5) and the ease of access they offered was destroying the challenge.  It was making computers something useful for anyone rather than the playground of the geeky elite.  And I was just enough of a snob (and had just enough of my self-worth invested in my geekiness) that this upset me.

So what changed?  To be honest, I changed.  I quit keeping up to date on computers.  I became the average computer user myself, and I found that I liked being an average computer user.  So I let go of my elitism.

I suppose a few readers may be surprised to hear me refer to myself as an average computer user.  After all, how can a software engineer — someone who is well versed in programming computers — be merely an average computer user?  Well, the answer to that is that I’m an embedded software engineer.  And that’s a rather different kind of computer programming.

I’m currently developing the software for a very unusual device.  It’s a computer, but you won’t see it sitting on anyone’s desk.  It has no keyboard, mouse or monitor.  In fact, if you look at it, all you see is a big metal box with a bunch of cables coming out of it.

Inside, there is a bunch of analog-to-digital converters and I/O expanders that allow the processor to read or assert logic levels on various signals on the circuit boards inside that box.  My job is to develop the software that accesses those ADC’s and those I/O expanders with all the signals, do stuff with the data read, and assert certain signals based on that data.  I spent most of this afternoon making sure I could communicate with the ADC’s and I/O expanders.  Tomorrow, I’ll spend a significant amount of my time making sure that the readings I’m getting from the ADC’s are valid and mean what I think they mean.  I’ll also spend time making sure that I can read and control the logic signals from the I/O expanders as I expected.

This is a typical programming project for me.  I spend most of my time looking over data sheets for devices like ADC’s, I/O expanders, microprocessors/microcontrollers, EEPROM’s, and power management chips.  I also read schematics and hardware design specifications that explain how these devices are configured and are supposed to work on the system I’m currently working with.  I’ve learned to write assembly code for PowerPC‘s, ARM processors, Blackfin processors, and a few others I’ve probably forgotten about.

Quite frankly, after I’ve spent all that time learning about the stuff I need to know to work with the devices I program, I don’t want to learn about the computer sitting on my desk anymore.  I just want it to work and work relatively well.  I’ll let someone else worry about making sure all my programs work correctly and that my computer is secure and safe from viruses.  After all, the computer on my desktop is just a tool to me now, and tools are good if they’re easy to use.  It gives me more time to focus on all that embedded stuff that’s part of my job.

So I quit being a command line snob.