Secret Blog from 2007

In an attempt to be even more transparent in my writing, I may have signed up for a private blog on Wordpress. So tonight, feeling particularly vulnerable and under-the-weather in my soul, I tried various user names and passwords to log in (who can remember them all?) so I could emotionally vomit not on my kind readers. But in a divine twist of fate, I discovered that I had actually started a private Wordpress blog two years ago under my spam email account.

Context: When my hard drive crashed this summer I lost two years of my not-backed-up journal to which I had extreme emotional attachment. The document was over a hundred pages long. It hurt. But I tried/try to celebrate the loss, knowing that the experiences and opinions I wrote about are still my life... even if I don't have written proof. This is easier than facing and grieving the loss. Think positively, right?

Therefore, finding this humble 3-post blog was such a gift. Like replaying an old conversation shared with a friend who had recently died. When I wrote this blog, I was going through a shaky faith time. I was very troubled about God & life & purpose & truth. I wish I had more reflections on that period to look back on. But it seems 3 posts will have to do, and I am grateful that they revealed themselves to me.

This is an excerpt by John Updike that made it onto this blog- it is about a priest who suddenly lost his faith. It's from In The Beauty of the Lillies:

“At the moment Mary Pickford fainted… Reverend Clarence… felt the last particles of his faith leave him. The sensation was distinct– a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward… He was standing at the moment of the ruinous pang, on the first floor of the manse, wondering if in view of the heat he might remove his black serge jacket, since no visitor was scheduled to call until dinnertime…. his thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition, which he had long withstood, that Ingersoll was quite right: the God of the Pentateuch was an absurd bully, barbarically thundering through a cosmos entirely misconceived. There is no such God, nor should there be. Clarence’s mind was like a many-legged, wingless insect that had long and tedeiously been struggling to climb up the walls of a slick-walled porcelain basin; and now a sudden impationt wash of water swept it down into the drain. There is no God…. It was a ghastly moment, a silent sounding of bottomlessness…. Life’s sounds all rang with a curious lightness and flatness, as if a resonating base beneath them had been removed. They told Clarence Wilmot what he had long suspected, that the universe was utterly indifferent to his states of mind, and as empty of divine content as a corroded kettle. All it’s metaphysical content had leaked away, but for creulty and death, which without the hypothesis of God became unmetaphysical, they became simply facts, which oblivion would in time obliviously erase. Oblivion became a singular comforter. The clifflike riddle of predestination… simply evaporated; an immense strain of justification was at a blow lifted. The former believer’s habitual mental contortions decisively relaxed. And yet the depths of vacancy revealed were appalling. In the purifying sweep of atheism human beings lost all special value…. Yet would he call it back, his shaky faith, with its burden of falsity and equivocation, even if he could?” (5-11)