12:11 a.m.||||2001-12-18
I don't know why but I feel like crying.
When that stuff happened in the previous entry I was 28, not living in a permanent place, I had no car, I was afraid to face thirty, I couldn't finish out a semester in college, and I had the beginnings of abdominal pain in my upper right quadrant, which has plagued me ever since. At the time when I walked home from bars on a regular basis, I was utterly convinced I would not live to see thirty.
And life went on, and I did. When I worked at the Crack Pipe - excuse me, the Cracker Barrel - I got insurance and saw a lengthy list of doctors and specialists and underwent tests ranging from ultrasounds to gallbladder tests, to two separate endoscopies. I never got a diagnosis.
When I was pregnant, the pain went away for nine months, and I nearly forgot about it. It returned shortly after he was born. Sometimes when I move to suddenly it feels like I have a sock full of tacks stuck up under my right rib cage. Right where the liver, gall bladder, and pancreas intersect in the biliary duct system. On a bad day, I get spasms in my back under the ribs there. A long time ago I would occasionally have a wheezing sensation, well, gurgling also, because it felt as if there was fluid build-up too.
The thing I'm driving at is I'm not this overly dramatic person. I really repress the lion's share of terrible, horrifying worries that plague me. But I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes because I do feel a sense of foreboding and I am still feeling so guilty about things I have failed to do and achieve in my life and I am feeling so - soulless, lately.
I had a horrible conversation with my Christian friend Julio today that sprang out of nowhere and I don't what is wrong with me, and why I can't feel things the way certain other people do but I wound up attacking him...because I have a big problem with Christianty and yet I have prayed for truth almost every night of the past two years and every time I think I get a glimmer, the whole thing falls apart and the same gaping hole im my heart opens and I am so lost.
Have I mentioned that Dave is also a Christian and so is his mom and his sister? I feel so alienated from everyone in my life, except my mother, who is agnostic. I am surrounded by Christians.
Anyway. What bothers me is this, and since I attacked Julio as if we were part of a debate team, he wasn't able to answer in a way that was producitve for either of us.
My biggest issue is this.
That no man shall come to God but through Christ.
Today I was worried about, as Julio put it, everyone else.
Five minutes into it I realized I was arguing from a political/cultural perspective, not a personal one. (What's the goddamned difference, I'd like to know). I wanted him to tell me why a culture - any culture - that has sustained itself with its own religion/worship for thousands of years would ever convert.
First, if a culture had never been exposed, he said, than God doesn't hold them accountable. But He is a God of "hearts and minds", and when a people are given that chance he has the opportunity to live in their hearts.
So, what if they are exposed and say, why thank you very much,(oh, colonising missionaries! Who help to spread white man's diseases!) but my heart is here, where it has always been, with Judaism, Buddhism, with tiny discreet religions thriving on the edge of civilisation, what have you. They have been exposed, and if they turn from it, they are lost.
Right?
And we tossed and turned these quips about and I asked...
Why is someone who is raised in a religion outside of Christianity, who is devout and spiritual, who has reached a religious ecstasy, who has every reason to believe that his is the right path, going to listen to the platform that because he isn't Christian, he hasn't: experienced true freedom, had God work through him, held a covenant with God, paved his way into heaven? What if, in the terms of his time and belief he has?
So, it's real late and the last hour has been the best of my day so far because I stopped writing this for a while to have a chat with someone really very soothing.
And so, while I will continue to work through this spiritual abyss, I have to tell you, it can't be tonight.
Peace be with you, however.