Monakhos

I promised myself that to show my commitment to this blog and to start the habit of writing more again, that I would post an entry here every day for a week. Well today there is no post… yet. Unlike yesterday at this point, however, I have no idea what to write about. I have to admit that for the past two days I have been feeling rather “bleh.”

I’m not sure why this is. Maybe it is that I’m in the process of moving and have not yet adjusted to my new habitat. I suppose that’s it. Changes are happening and my mind isn’t used to them.

The bottom line is, I’m not sure what’s going on in my head. I’m not sure what’s going on anywhere. I’m dazed and confused. Hopefully tomorrow I can spend some time to reflect and adapt. And try to be more like water and less like a stone.

p.s. Thanks Jon for the plug!

Yesterday I was thinking about what I could write about in my blog and had the idea of asking the question “If Jesus came back to the church to give us status check on how we were doing, what would he say?” I had a few notes on things to write, but then I realized that he probably would not say all that much.

Man, you people still don’t get it! When I said the greatest commandments, the ones that really summed up everything, were love God and love others, I wasn’t kidding! Will it take you another two thousand years to figure this out!

I suppose he might have a few other things to say about how we treat others, how we forget the poor and the widows and persecute others, but aren’t these all wrapped up the two commandments?

I think that a good way to get my creativity going on this blog would be to write a little bit about myself and my influences.

I was born and raised in a Protestant Christian household. When I was young, my family went to a Baptist church led by my grandfather. Around when I was 10 or 11, we started going to a non-denominational church. I have been attending that church (Tabernacle Church of Norfolk) to varying degrees to this day.

I went to a private Christian school from kindergarten to twelfth grade. It was a very traditional, conservative school, and though I learned a lot there, around my senior year, I started questioning a lot of things. The religion that had been taught to me was dead. Some may say it is far from dead in their lives, but all I know is that it was dead to me.

My senior year I also read “The Stranger” by Albert Camus in English class (yes we read real books, even if it was a conservative school.) This was my first introduction to true existentialism. As I read the book I realized that I wanted to be free like Mersault. He had everything that appealed to me. Life was meaningless. He lived in the moment. I loved Mersault.

My first two years of college continued the progress I made in high school of distancing myself from Christianity. I avoided it wherever possible. It was completely dead to me, so what was the point of wasting my time with it? During the first semester of my sophomore year, things became more interesting. I found philosophy class.

I started out heavy with two classes: one in Marx and the Marxists and one in Chinese religion and philosophy. Marx influenced my political and social views heavily, pushing me away from the conservativism I had been raised with and moving towards more of a socialist/communist view that I still hold. In my Chinese class, we studied a smattering of views including Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. These classes drove me to study more and I quickly enrolled the next semester in a Japanese religion and philosophy class.

This class focused almost entirely on Buddhism. Though we studied various schools, we focused on Dogen. As it turns out, this was because Dogen was the center of my professor’s (Dr. David Putney) dissertation when he was studying at the University of Hawaii. Dogen and his Soto sect of Zen Buddhism. Buddhism seemed so simple and yet at the same time so complex. Why couldn’t Christianity be like that?

Around this time, I had an experience with God that brought me back to Christianity. I still am not entirely sure what it was, but one day it just clicked. This time, however, I brought with me a much more diverse worldview than I had the first time.

A few years later, religion became a chore again and I abandoned it partially. During this time, I met Jon Zuck who sparked a pre-existing interest in mysticism. I say a pre-existing interest because to some extent it was already there from my previous studies. I knew something like it had to exist, but wasn’t sure what it was. When I was ready, the teacher came. Though he isn’t my formal teacher, I have learned a lot from Jon. I have found what mysticism looks like and have been sparked to explore it more.

This is where I am now. I hope I explained where I am coming from well, so that you can understand my posts better.

I would like to say sorry to my readers for being away for so long with no notice. It takes a lot to blog about these sorts of things and recently I just have not been able to find the time. Eventually I got out of the habit altogether. Luckily, my friend Jon has been bugging me a lot lately to get back into the habit. So I’m promising my poor little blog right now, that I will post in it regularly from this day forward, ’til death parts us.