I honestly don't know if I'm completely in Denial or if my life really is just that good or if other people's lives are really just that Fucked.
I came online looking for things that I wasn't finding in real life. I didn't know I was looking for them, but I was. Geekiness, passion about creative endeavours, answers to questions I couldn't ask in my conservative upbringing and conservative church circles, and which I wasn't comfortable asking of my uni social group who always treated me like I was broken simply for coming from those circles.
I have never seen myself as broken. I just needed to know more than my circles were comfortable questioning. I like knowing what's circumscribed, the proscribed places, but then I want to see the proscribed places for myself.
Sometimes it feels like this isn't something that people understand - either online or offline. The people I know in 'meatspace' are happy where they are, okay not questioning, content with what they have, okay to presume that this is the way things should be for everyone because it works for them. The people I know online are discontented, frustrated, ground down - and with good reason to be so when you walk in their shoes.
And here I am, in the middle.
Okay with the system for me, not okay with it for the people who don't fit.
I'm way outside the comfort zone of my church friends in RL. Because if it works for us, then it should work for everyone! Don't you want it to work for everyone? (Yes, but it's not working for everyone, and a civic governance that can allow for difference - for diversity beyond traditional norms - makes society stronger. And, too, I think that in the absence of perceived cultural influence over our society, Christians seem to be reaching for political power in any form, even if it comes to them in a Christian guise and with Christian promises.
I'm way beyond the comprehension of people in fandom. Because don't I hate myself, what made me, the system, the situation? Don't I want to just escape it all by being something else? No. I don't want to be something else; I like what I am. And while it wasn't comfortable to get to where I am in many ways and I probably wouldn't do it willingly again, that experience is part of me.
But yes, I want to change the system so the people who didn't have the luck - yes, luck - to have the openings available that I could capitalise on (yes, I did work those opportunities when they came but the opportunities were available for me in the first place, which they aren't for so many others).
It's a difficult night tonight; a lot of job cuts, a lot of Murdochian lies, and a lot of casual and thoughtless cruelty, churches who seem to blindly praise and follow a leader who claims to be Christian and yet whose concern seems to be not about the poor or the widow or the fatherless, but about the glory of his government and the economic state of the country. Christians who are more concerned with love of Christian culture than they are with helping those whom no-one else will help.
It's not the valley of the shadow of death because I don't fear death.
I fear the hardening of our compassion, the closing of Christian hearts against 'the world' and the condemnation of everyone who doesn't agree precisely with us, and the society that has lost out as Christians greedily cling to political and temporal power to make up for our loss of cultural influence.
What does it help Christ's church to gain the whole world in politics and power but lose our tenderness of soul for those whom God loves?
No comments:
Post a Comment