Bunny’s Babblings

Some excerpts from another e-mail to my pastor (who refers to himself sometimes as “lead learner” – don’t you love that?) …. lots of God talk, so if that turns ya off, skip this one Posting partly as an exercise in letting go of what I fear (ie I fear what others would think if I revealed my real thoughts & ideas), and partly cuz I think there’s some good stuff in there that may help others see things a little differently. I would love to hear feedback on whether these thoughts are remotely interesting to anyone or if this is self-indulgence at it’s finest/worst

how do you deal with the reality that people DO hurt others? How do you make it NOT be personal … because people ARE fallible, are carrying around their own crap & baggage and it’s not generally human nature to be able to love unconditionally & truly for a length of time

.. and, derailing for a moment; this idea about unconditional love segues into what i REALLY think is meant by marriage and relationships taking work … the idea that we touched on yesterday about people being able to be in a condition of complete, unconditional love for periods of time whether or not the spirit is present .. but STAYING there …. *that’s* what takes work, right? It’s so easy for insecurities to take over …. and for me, it’s so difficult to comprehend being able to feel loved and cared for without there being people in my life to do the loving & caring …. IS that possible? are we humans truly capable of feeling & experiencing God’s love and care and concern?

It feels like He’s so remote … I can believe in His existence .. but believing in a personal love? I just haven’t been able to …. I haven’t been able to let go of all my assumptions …. built on (details snipped) built on looking out at the hurting world through *those* eyes … it’s strange to think about how different the world might look to someone with a different set of circumstances and assumptions …. but how to lose those? that’s what surrender is partly about, right?

aaaaagggg …..

what I want is more touch, to be held, to be told I am lovable, to be cared for, to be listened to, accepted just the way I am and not IN SPITE of the crap. I’ve been trying to love myself in spite of & it definitely doesn’t work .. because that’s still condemnation …. I want so badly to be loved, cherished, held, touched, heard, trusted, spoken to …

is there such a thing as wholeness? in this life? I’ve held onto that idea for a long time & lately I’ve been feeling like maybe that’s the wrong idea .. that it’s not needing to get to a place of wholeness and not-brokenness, but a place of being OK with the brokenness ….

sometimes I wonder if hedonists don’t have it more “right’ than some self-proclaimed Christians. So many Christians seem to think life is meant to be a denial of pleasures .. but I think we all desire love and touch and pleasure and well LIFE .. and I think it’s closer to what God wants for us .. why create us with these desires and abilities to experience so deeply only to deny those experiences and feelings .. I think it matters about attitude and approach … I think there’s a difference between approaching it selfishly in a experience as much pleasure and happiness as *I* can versus experiencing the world and the gifts God has given us .. not expressing that right ….

you talked about the idea that either God loves everyone or He doesn’t .. I feel like I need to understand that better, unwrap that one more …. I feel like I am *supposed* to look to the cross for proof that God loves us all …. and I don’t understand why I am struggling so much with my beliefs in Jesus. Growing up, I approached the bible as a collection of bedtime stories with morals. In my teens, I *thought* I understood about who Jesus was and what he did, and prayed “The prayer”. I believed in Him, in what He’d done but in a very selfish way. I saw Christianity as a “way out” of hell, the entrance to heaven and only partly understood about it transforming, but not how much *I* needed to do the work. Legalism and hypocrisy caused me to turn away from the church and as more crap in my life happened I somehow assumed it meant that God wasn’t really paying attention, didn’t really care, that it was all a crock of shit. I didn’t exactly stop believing in Him, just was angry & didn’t want to have anything to do with Him.

Somewhere in the last year or two as I started challenging my various beliefs I feel like I started losing my belief in Jesus. Searching for meaning, purpose and so on I’ve done a fair bit of reading on different religions & beliefs and I’ve come to a point of being *very* confused about just who Jesus was .. I’ve had the sense of being unable to take the bible at face-value … the stuff I mentioned yesterday about it feels like there’s things in there that say if you pray hard enough, in the right way, have enough faith, everything will be hunky-dory …

I’ve heard & read people make arguments about why Jesus couldn’t have existed in the way I’ve been taught he did … and I wonder if it matters? One of the arguments I’ve heard is how there are similar saviour stories in various beliefs, at various times …. could it be that it doesn’t matter what name we give to God’s method of salvation? The book I mentioned (…) talks about the idea of the universe as information . .it’s sort of the idea of The Matrix but bigger .. and the author describes Jesus as God “inserting himself into the program” .. fascinating .. anyways, I just wonder if it matters what name we give him or when it happened … if we can take some of that stuff away, it seems to me it might be easier to be able to have that faith .. if it’s an IDEA then how can it be proved or disproved? What if all that matters is that God DID become “part of creation” and that he did create a way of forgiveness …..

I still don’t understand how to have a personal relationship with Him though …

phew .. ok, there’s no good “stopping point” in any of this .. I have NO idea what you may be able to say to ANY of it …. or just what i’m trying to accomplish … but i’m sending it anyways :/