God as a psychotherapist

It's been a lovely day.

I slept in a bit this morning, but eventually, I dragged my ass out of the house because the colors were just past their peak and the light was...well, decent. But it was an absolutely beautiful day out. Sunny, in the high fifties/low sixties, a light breeze, just gorgeous. So I wandered over to the county...um...left of us (I still don't have my north and south figured out around here), and shot for a half hour or so.



There's this little community out there called Fearington Village, which is just an adorable, faux-bucolic, peaceful little place. They pride themselves on these white-belted cows, which is somehow their signature.

Oddly enough, they're called "Belties."


Apparently they come in a goat, too.

(I still can't look at a goat without thinking, "cashmere." And then, goat cheese. I still cling to this fantasy of living semi-rurally someday, of maybe having a small coop of chickens and possibly a sheep or an alpaca. This fantasy suddenly has been amended to include a goat. Named Cashmere.)

So then I went to the grocery and came home and chatted with my folks and then went to Starbucks and finally went in to work, where Cleo and Matt and Sparrow and I spent a good deal of time fussing around the new work space/rec room ("relaxation area") for the interns (the administration stole the intern office for clinic space, and we got all cranky and demanded that they give the interns a place to be. And, to their credit, they did. So now we're going about making it all nice and homey. Because, after all, one tends to live at the hospital intern year...).

I stayed because I had work to do, which I got done, but not before I spent an hour in Matt's office talking music and theology. Which is always interesting to me; I always enjoy talking philosophy with thoughtful people.

Matt also invited me to come check out the church he attends, which is a little start-up under the ministry of a friend of his from his seminary days. And he directed me to their website, where you can listen to podcasts of the sermons each week. Which I did, after I got home.

It's interesting.

Religion has always been a difficult thing for me. My faith, however, is not. Which makes the two even harder to reconcile.

I identify myself as an Orthodox Christian, which is in many ways more a cultural issue than anything else. The Greek culture and the Greek Orthodox church are impossible to tease apart. I have some issues with the Church, as I've mentioned before. Mostly, I think, because I've always found a lot of judgment and hypocrisy there. The congregation I grew up in was headed up by one of the most wonderful and pious men I think I'll ever meet, and yet the much of the parish was very see-and-be-seen, judgmental, elitist...hypocritical. The one thing that always constantly amazed me was how people who claimed to be following the Church rule of "You are entering the house of God. Please dress appropriately" (the most relevant piece of this is, women can't wear pants) but would show up on Sunday morning looking like cheap (or not-so-cheap) whores. Who showed up to find a husband or wife, and then, once they'd found one, would show up to show off their undisciplined and poorly behaved children. I love the Liturgy. I love the sounds and smells and splendor of the Liturgy, I love the rich tradition, I love the feeling of being nearer to God. But I can't take the people. I feel like a religion should be about community, inclusion, acceptance.

But then, I think my God is a lot more accepting than some people's.

I think organized religion, by its very nature, encourages exclusion. But I see God as this...very tolerant parent. One who understand our strengths and shortcomings and knows that to learn to walk, we're going to have to fall down a lot. And who just keeps picking us back up, no matter how many times that is. I see God as having created everything in the universe, which to my mind means that nothing can be without merit. I think "sin" is a human interpretation of something of which we can't yet comprehend, because we see things in black and white and a limited palate thereof - God? Sees infinite shades of grey. I think that there is nothing my child could do such that I would stop loving them. How can I expect less of God than I expect of myself? And therefor, I can envision no reason that God would deny us and cast any of us out of heaven. Jews, Pagans, Protestants...Hitler and Hussein and the child molesters of the world...I think we all go on to the same afterlife.

Maybe I'm wrong. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Anyhow, so Matt's pastor was talking about anxiety last week. Which, apparently, is a sign of non-belief. I'm not so sure I can get behind that idea. Because I think conflict is the very point of our existence. But nonetheless, he was talking about Matthew 6, which I dug up and read, and it struck me that Jesus had some useful ideas on the issue. He brought up the parables of serving two masters (and why that doesn't work), about how God provides for all living things, and how it's useless to worry about distractors.

In Matthew 6:27, he says (this is obviously the NRSV translation), "Can all your worries add a single moment to your life? Of course not." He ends Matthew 6 with verse 34: "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

Jesus, it seems, was a mentalist.

I like those two passages. They're practical, pragmatic, and wise, without being berating, disparaging, or demoralizing. Much as I conceptualize Jesus.

Matt's pastor did make an interesting point, though - he said, "Our anxiety exposes that which we treasure...Worry exposes our focus." That, for some reason, I find especially salient. Because I do think that sometimes we get so wrapped up in our anxiety that we sometimes forget the significance of what we're even anxious about. What does it mean? What does it indicate? Is it really deflected from some other conflict? Last week in my PECC class we talked about Kernberg's idea that in the borderline personality construct, the affect that arises when conflict occurs is almost always not the real affect - it's the dyad, or relationship, that's employed to defend against the one that's really being threatened. How often do we get swept away worrying about something and don't ever stop to think about why we're worrying about it?

So I wonder why I get so anxious about religion?