Waking up: The shift from one point of view to the another

My Facebook set of friends is one of the more diverse bunch of people I've run across online. That's because suddenly my past and present have collided in conversation in ways that would never happen if we limited our relationships to in-person contact. So what's happened is that my high school friends, who knew me mostly as a short, a-political, theater student without much of a religious agenda, are interacting with my college friends who knew me as this zealot who shared the Four Spiritual Laws with anyone stuck in a bank line with me. My missionary and Vineyard friends are interacting with my liberal theological graduate school buddies. My homeschool momma friends are talking to my business networking friends here in Cincy. And of course, my Obama campaign colleagues are talking to my rightwing radio pals from bygone years.

And like me, many of my friends have gone through significant shifts (either a deepening of loyalty to their original commitments, or a radical reassessment which led to a new, changed point of view).

I respect all of you (even when we disagree). I wouldn't keep you around on my FB if I didn't! In fact, I have kicked a few off my list when they've crossed that invisible line called "Coerce Julie back to what is good for her and tell her she is going to hell if she doesn't listen."

So here's the thing. For years (over 20), I adopted a point of view both politically and theologically that was rooted in a set of assumptions (these assumptions were handed to me with care and conviction, and they were based on the core doctrines of evangelicalism at the time). I remember once saying to Don Carson (some of you will remember him), the head of our Campus Crusade chapter at UCLA, "Why are you telling me that predestination as a theological tenet has to be believed in order to be a Christian? I haven't even had time to think about it yet." I had the same reaction to inerrancy (Is this really necessary to be a Christian? Can I think about it a bit?), to the doctrines of heaven and hell. I still remember saying at my first Bible Study at Kappa Kappa Gamma that I didn't like the idea of hell, after all, that would mean all my Jewish friends from high school and step relatives were going there... and I couldn't quite *get* that. I mean, it was one thing to believe in heaven and hell when you grew up in La Canada or Pasadena, where everyone you knew was Protestant. But what happened when you had to include people you loved, A LOT, in that number?

I found myself suddenly in conflict: to belong meant to adopt (uncritically, really) the values and doctrines that enabled me to remain a part of the community (this new, great group of people who were so much fun to be with), or I could reject those tenets and not be in the group, not have the love, worship, prayer, moral values, and community Christianity offered. So adopt I did (and worked to learn the apologetics for these tenets) and from then on, made it my chief aim in life to save those I loved and those I hadn't yet met from hell.

But time has a way of tugging at the tangled threads. The intellectual conflicts, the theological discrepancies, the arguments online with people I genuinely grew to love about splitting hair differences... how did these show the compassion of Jesus or the relevance of spirituality in a globalized world of diverse expressions of reality? It hurt to think Christians couldn't even agree on very basic ideas and would be cruel and critical of each other arguing over what amount to technicalities, many times.

The rightwing vision of politics has also walked in lockstep with the evangelical vision. Since we grew up knowing we couldn't criticize theology (who could ask if Jesus really rose from the dead with a physical body or if the Bible has mistakes, and stay in an evangelical church?), we are also equally beholden to rightwing politics as naturally right, clear. If someone speaks with conviction, we tend to adopt that point of view as long as it leads us back to reinforcing those original tenets we were told to adopt (our membership in the community is at stake if we challenge those tenets - ask me how I know this).

To inhabit someone else's point of view, to give it weight, to care about its interior logic is not one of the values of evangelicalism. We are taught to convert people to our point of view and to understand theirs only enough to change their minds. We spend countless hours reinforcing our own beliefs in community contexts, privately, listening to sermons and tapes, reading books, listening to music. We adopt these views as our own, but from within the safe protected context of like-minded people (and we elevate those with more education as leaders as a way to tell us that we are thinking critically, to help us navigate the pesky incongruity or penetrating question of someone from the outside). We suppress our own questions. We avoid The Jesus Seminar or Richard Dawkins, because they are dangerous.

This is not to say that there aren't brilliant men and women on the right or in the conservative evangelical movement who have dug deep and have spent time drawing conclusions that they feel are both intellectually sound and honest. There are. I've read them, met some of them. What I reject today is that so many people have adopted their thinking second-hand. (To be fair: on both left and right, though I am less versed in how this happens on the left - what I have seen is much more arguing over nuances on the left - a chief value of theirs is dissent!)

If you haven't sat inside the point of view (letting it be "right" for awhile, looking for its logic, how it hangs together, how it creates a worldview that coheres and supports a vision of life and happiness for the one who holds it), you can't actually know if yours is true (or at least, "true enough" for your life). It's one reason I attend a black church. I was sick of secondhand reports about what black leaders are doing and saying or not doing and saying. I was sick of the myopia of white church that thinks reconciliation means having a sister church that is black, or getting more blacks to attend your white church. I wondered what the black community had to say about it. I wondered how they experienced America, and the church, and "truth" from their experiences.

I spent two years reading pro-choice literature, getting inside the mindset that saw being "pro-choice" as the higher morality (yes, they do feel that way!), as the obvious right belief system that is more compassionate and ethical than the alternative. I did this after we had been actively involved in Operation Rescue. I also wish pro-choice people would spend time understanding the radical commitment of those engaged in civil disobedience to stop abortion, too.

What's happened to me, then, is that I got tired of secondhand news, theology, sociological commentary. I stopped buying into the scripts I'd been handed and became unwilling to defend something just because it had always been "true" in the community I loved. If I had one piece of advice for those who can't quite grasp what it is that's happened to me, I'd say pick the thing you are most afraid of (the thing you most don't want to be true) and go read about it. Meet someone who holds that viewpoint and let that person influence you. Invite their ideas into your living room, care to understand the world from inside someone else's mind. If you do that for a little while, yes, you will change. But your compassion will also grow, and your insights will be yours, and your spirituality will deepen.

I'm also conscious of the fact that there is so much I can't possibly know well enough to make adequate judgments (how could I ever say if global warming is real or not? I'm not a scientist, have no training or tools to evaluate the arguments, can't come close to making a real case that isn't some watered down version of someone else's). So I hold my current "positions" with some guardedness, knowing that I'm a few arguments away from another shift. But I'm no longer afraid of getting it right or wrong. I love the process, and I feel privileged/relieved/blessed to have been able to leave behind the need to vilify "the other" in order to protect my point of view. (That doesn't mean I won't criticize the other, but I hope I do it knowing that I could again shift my point of view if the facts that I understand warrant it.)

Peace.

Rick Neuheisel can exhale now

Gary A. Vasquez/US PRESSWIRE

Bruins beat Vols 27-24 in OT

What a game... er, 4th quarter and OT. The Bruins' brand-spanking new QB, Kevin Craft, sent groans through the Rose Bowl after an atrocious first half wherein he tossed up four miserable interceptions. Boos followed him to the locker room.

Somehow, someway as a result of Neuheisel's commitment to relentless optimism, his reminder that he threw four interceptions in his first game as a college QB (I couldn't help but wonder which sports investigative journalist is going to track down that fact - is it mythology or rooted in reality?), Craft got back in the driver's seat, demonstrated that he has the essential, magic quality of a great QB (amnesia!), and led that team to two TDs (one drive flawless with 6 for 6 completed passes).

The two minute drill looked masterful! This is not Dorrell's Bruins who managed to squander 3rd and long every damned time they were confronted with one. This time Norm Chow created the tricks, the spin, the fun that made Bruin football a pleasure to watch and now to anticipate.

Gene Wojciechowski gets it right.

Don't ask how -- I'm not sure Craft even knows -- but the first half from hell turned into the second half from heaven. Craft began throwing completions, this time to his own teammates. And by the end of UCLA's 27-24 overtime win, Craft had become part of gutty little Bruin football lore...

Craft's second-half total: 18 of 25 for 193 yards, one touchdown, zero interceptions. By game's end he had completed passes to nine different Bruins receivers. He also had withstood everything Tennessee and the crowd could heave his way.

When you forgive....

I remember when my parents got divorced, people used to tell me, "Time will heal your pain." I hated that rhetoric. Why should my dad and his new wife get away with wrecking our family by virtue of time's ability to heal, to make us forget, to help us move on? So I vowed that time would not heal, that I would not forget, that, in fact, the pain would last.

I knew then that a vow like that was supposed to be dangerous to my own soul. I wasn't quite sure why, though. It just seemed like the universe was letting my parents get away with selfishness, 1970s style, and since the law, religion, and our tennis club friends all seemed perfectly content to overlook my pain when they moved along and accepted the devastation to our family, I decided to take it on myself to mete out justice. I did it by holding onto resentment and an unwillingness to ever forget that my dad, his new wife and my mother made terrible choices.

I didn't know then that these adults were choosing a path for their lives and I was merely collateral damage. No one told me I didn't have to adopt a posture of judgment and anger as a way to cope. It would have been startling to have someone suggest to me that I could simply focus on the pain they caused and work to create a better life for myself, without also focusing on how to make them pay. In fact, I felt I'd be betraying the moral fiber of the universe to love them, to find likable qualities in my dad or his wife, to forgive my mom for her abandonment. So I held them all at this "I love you, but that's in spite of..." arm's length distance.

To move on without judgment—that just didn't seem like the right thing to do. I would be aiding and abetting the cosmos in its indifference to what was clearly unjust! I didn't want to accept the idea of yin-yang, of pain leading to growth, or good and bad coexisting. I didn't want to believe that good could come from evil.

I've been more about linear progress, getting it right, not making mistakes, paying big attention to your impact on your loved ones, and so on. The idea that you could "move on" from making such powerful mistakes deeply troubled me... so I didn't.

The night of the Gilbert-Lamott evening at UCLA, I found myself jarred loose from my usual thought processes. I had already spent half the day in panicked arousal. Now I found myself unraveling my past while sitting in the place where my identity had been formed, for better or worse.

As a college student, I spent plenty of energy adjusting to the new reality that my family home no longer existed for me, that Christmas vacations would be spent on a pull-out couch at my mom's apartment where she lived with her boyfriend. I rarely, if ever, saw either my brother or sister (who lived with my dad). I spent summers in my apartments, not at home visiting high school friends or hanging around my siblings. In many ways, my college years were characterized by an unacknowledged loneliness. I had loads of friends, I participated in Campus Crusade, I belonged to a sorority. But at the end of the day, I had lost my family and had forgiven no one.

Sitting alone, writing in my little blue notebook, these memories swamped me. So unexpected. My young adult self walked right into my pencil and journaled herself onto paper.

The next morning, I went out to breakfast with an online girlfriend. We talked about midlife and marriage, painful choices and taking ownership of one's soul, one's life. Her honesty in revealing her journey to me led me to find new compassion for my dad (something I have not allowed myself to ever feel). I wondered what it might have felt like to be my dad, making choices or allowing them to be made for him. I thought about how he violated his own self-image in having an affair... what it must have taken for him to reconstruct a self he could be proud of and how I've been unwilling to let him ever do that.

I imagined each of my parents not wanting to create a mess in our lives, yet making a huge one as they fumbled forward into their truths and lies, not aware of what the long term consequences would be to us, but certain that the status quo had to be upended; that no matter what, they both were going to reclaim happiness and companionship because They. Had. To.

I joined Campus Crusade in the usual way: within minutes, I was sharing the Four Spiritual Laws with unbelievers. I had determined in college that I'd do it all differently, all rightly, all better. My Bible study leaders taught us about sin. I wanted truth. They tried to get me to see my own sin. All I could see were the sins of others against me.

It would have been incredibly helpful, in looking back, if someone had simply mentioned that Jesus died not just for my sins (sins I couldn't see, identify or feel), but that he died for the sins against - for those sins committed against victims. It would have been even more helpful if I hadn't been admonished to forgive my parents, but had rather been told how important my pain was to God, how proud God was of me for caring that much about truth, justice and suffering... and had then shown me a way to use that pain to create a more just and compassionate world (not just a tiny, in-grown sense of personal revenge-as-justice that I had adopted).

I don't blame anyone for this oversight. It's taken me twenty-five years to tease apart all the threads that make me who I am today.

Later in the afternoon after I said goodbye to Westwood, I drove to my dad's to watch UCLA beat Xavier in the NCAA basketball tournament. My dad and I have always connected around sports. We rarely ever get time alone together. We sat, side-by-side on the couch, hardly sure of who to root for; after all, it was like watching me play me, since I'm an alumnus of both schools. I wanted UCLA to win theoretically, but I was attached to the Xavier seniors who we've watched play here in Cinci. When Xavier lost, I felt I had lost too, even though my team, the one I was rooting for, had won.

My life has been a similar emotional tug of war. I love my parents, both of them. I'm proud of them for all kinds of accomplishments and gifts they've given to me, for the ways they have created stability in spite of the chaos of those earlier years. But I also really loved my family of origin, that original formulation of the five of us that I lost, forever. It's been hard to know which team to root for - the first family that holds my dearest childhood memories, or this new, reconstituted one, born in pain and violation.

After twenty-eight years, after all this time, while sitting with my dad in the home he and his wife have made together, I finally let it go. I'm going to accept, love and root for the family I have. I started that afternoon.

Panicked

I got off the plane in Los Angeles and clutched my purse and laptop. It's home, but it's also hostile. I feel less safe in LAX than I do in any other airport in the world, including Kinshasa where we were told they do actually sometimes steal your suitcase.

Once I walked past Wolfgang Puck's cafe and caught my first glimpse of a palm tree through the tall sunny windows, I felt better. I picked up my red bag, headed to the rental car station and snagged a set of keys to a white PT Cruiser. I did do the LA walk-around where you surreptitiously glance in the back windows of your car for lurking rapists before climbing into the front seat. The car was cool. I hopped in, stripped off my sweater down to the cami and drove.

I know LA. I love knowing it.

I exited at Wilshire Blvd. and turned right heading toward UCLA. My hotel, the Claremont, was (and still is) situated on Tiverton, right in Westwood. It's an old place without TVs or parking. I knew that going in. Its advantage to my stay: walking distance from UCLA and 60 bucks a night.

I liked the look of the place from the outside. I pulled up, hauled my bags out of the back, dragged them up the sidewalk steps and then up an entire flight of stairs (apparently no elevators either!) and dumped them in my clean, spare room.

My next mission: parking. Finding parking in Westwood is a test of the gods. You have to know which one is in charge of that day. Otherwise, forget about it. But my real concern this time had to do with finding parking that would allow me to drive to the UCLA event that night and return my car to a safe, lighted parking space that was within an easy walk from the hotel.

No such place exists. The paid parking was around the corner, on a hill, with no attendant and no re-entry. That left street parking which is, as I said, a crap shoot or a miracle depending on who you tell your parking stories to. As I sat in my car, halfway up the curb deciding where to put this rented vehicle, twinge. Like shots of tequila through my veins.

I glanced in my rear view mirror. Street sign: 2 hour parking between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. It was now 3:30. Perfect. Parking until morning. I suppressed the surge of panic, hauled that puppy into reverse and did my parallel parking thing, which being from LA means I'm a beast at it.

I walked back to the hotel, working my way into what would become a paranoid thought obsession: How will I get home from the Anne Lamott/Elizabeth Gilbert event tonight without getting assaulted, raped, shot, burgled, jumped, spit at, or flipped off?

It didn't help that I began this cycle of panic in the old hotel. My little second story room had windows that were open with tiny little latches. The door had one twist lock in the handle and that's it. No deadbolt, no little chain. Thousands of dollars of electronics, my all-by-myself body and a lock I could pick with a bobbypin!

The room went hot and airless.

I paced and panted. Every bad decision about safety I had ever made came back to me in waves - the times I jogged in college right by the rapists hiding in bushes at 1 in the morning with my 5' 2" roommate without blinking; the time I got into a car with an Italian guy at midnight in Zurich because I didn't have a hotel lined up, then he felt up my knee, so I heroically jumped into another car with another guy, and still wound up in the red light district alone; the alley in France I walked down as a shortcut to the movies where a North African male hand grabbed me in the wrong place, and my friend and I leaped three feet in the air, screamed and fled... I could, unfortunately, go on.

Now at 46, those memories, 25 years of news stories, this squalid half-locked room all bundled themselves together to beat and cripple me. I wrenched open my laptop and logged onto the Grand Wilshire hotel website. For $300 per night: parking! two blocks away! rooms with triple locks!

Full.

An anvil smashed my chest. I had hit full panic mode, the kind where every nerve ending thrashes my skin and my thoughts turn irrational but the whole time I'm in awe of their rationality. I couldn't imagine any way to safely make it through the next 24 hours.

I called Jon. The hotel can't exist if people get raped and burgled. You can always call a cab after the event. You will be fine. I dropped to my knees, accepted Jon into my life and adopted his Gospel message. But I still felt sick to my stomach.

After we hung up, a strange sound wafted to me from behind the barely locked door. Ce qu'il y a ici est... French? Outside my door? I could not believe my bon chance!

This hotel must be on the list of cheap places to stay for Europeans who come to America. No French person would ever steal my iPod! They won't fight wars! They love the Dali Lama! They drink wine till they have a cigarette, not so they can jump unsuspecting middle-aged women! I'm saved!

My breathing returned to normal. My stomach, not so much. I still had to figure out how I'd get home from the event. I inquired at the desk which held a barrel chested man who would be watching the front double bolted glass door all night. Is this a, um, safe neighborhood to walk in at, say, oh, 10:30 p.m. all by myself after an event at UCLA? I squeaked.

Funny how I walked it as a nubile 20-something without ever thinking twice. At 46, really, what do I have to recommend me?

He replied: Safe enough. But why go through all that? You can just get the UCLA escort service to walk you back to our hotel.

Salvation! Choirs of angels burst through the clouds... Well actually, they didn't. And this is where it gets interesting.

I heard him with my ears, I believed him with my head, but my body said, "No way. There's a flaw in this plan. You will surely die, after you've surely been burgled, and raped." For the next 24 hours, even after I had been safely escorted home by a nice Vietnamese ROTC student, every nerve-ending continued to fire, zing, and say "You're in danger!" In fact, I didn't eat well for nearly half my ten day trip. My body didn't recover or forget or believe.

I sat, parked, in the "let the trucks go by" lane of the San Marcos pass, shaking, though it was two days later.

Jon says it's midlife: the sense of vulnerability, mortality, danger sensed and narrowly averted, the weird out-of-context alone feelings that overtook me.

On many more levels than one it turns out. A foreshadowing of internal work to come.

Campaigning for Rick Neuheisel for Bruin Coach!

Remember when?

My slogan (feel free to add to your own blog):

Gamble on Rick! Best Bet for Bruins!

Go Bruins!

Bruins take on Trojans today

Chanting: Do it again!! If we win and Arizona loses, there's a teensy chance the Bruins can get to that Rose Bowl.

Edited to add: Unless Karl Dorrell is your coach. Unbelievable!! Let's ask all our sports fans out there - if your D stops the Trojans on third down at the 2 (that means three downs they've used their muscles and stopped the Trojans from scoring), but there's a holding call against the Trojans and they could repeat third down from around the 10-15, what would you do?

Naturally. You decline the penalty and force Pete Carroll to decide whether or not to kick a field goal. You *dont'* give John David Booty space to throw a pass into the endzone, you don't force your defense to have to hold up for potentially two more plays...

And so, yes, on the next play, SC scored. Who didn't see that coming? KD, of course.

His head on a platter.... that's what Bruin Nation is calling for.

Notre Lame v. UCLA (misspelling intentional)

So the Irish are proud of winning are they? Proud of their Jimmy Clausen from Oaks Christian High School in Thousand Oaks who came to his home in southern California to "win" against UCLA...my dad's virtual neighbor in yesteryear now carrying the Irish torch. Oh Jimmy, how nice for you, croons the LA Times, to get a win in your home town.

Well, yeah, sure. But let's not forget who he was playing to get that win:

This time, Notre Dame (1-5) knocked UCLA quarterback Ben Olson out with a knee injury late in the first quarter, then hounded freshman redshirt McLeod Bethel-Thompson into a string of mistakes.

A walk-on pressed into the backup role for UCLA (4-2, 3-0 Pac-10) because of an injury to Patrick Cowan, Bethel-Thompson had not thrown a pass in a college game.

The Irish picked off four of his throws, with Crum getting two of them. He also recovered the quarterback's fumble and ran it in for a touchdown.

Even I know that third string QBs who haven't ever thrown a pass in a college game are likely to be easier to overcome than University of Michigan's back up for Henne. So yeah. Every time the Bruins fumbled or Bethel-Thompson threw an interception, sure the ND squad got a chance.

And they might as well feel good about finally converting those into points. But let's not crown Clausen king just yet. ND still has a long way to go to be anything worth more than a chuckle.

The Bruins, however, look pathetic and shouldn't. They were supposed to be a top 25 team this season. They have to face the rest of the fall with a third string QB whose first game was appallingly bad. Or in the words of Colin Cowherd, "Unwatchable."

Actually, we witnessed utterly unwatchable football on both sides of the ball. I have not watched a worse game of football that I can remember. The pee wee Trojans and Bruins at halftime (made up of 7-8 year old boys) injected more excitement into the stadium than all four quarters combined of the big game.

My buddy Steve Norris (who hosted me on the first night of the trip to LA) sat in the opposing end zone. What kept both of us in quasi-good moods? Texting. We leveled creative critiques at our beloved Bruins for 3/4 of the game.

It might have been tolerable to be at the worst game of the season if I hadn't been seated in the Notre Dame section. Oh the pathos! I used to root for ND before my undergraduate days. And there I was again, with my dad and two Erins (my sister and step-sister have the same name - the cruel irony). The Erins are not football fans. They asked questions like, "If the Irish are in the lead halfway through the fourth quarter, can we leave early?" Are you kidding me? How far is Ohio from LA? Why did I come?

Still, they were thrilled with the Irish victory and enthused, "We were your good luck charms!" to my Dad. They turned to me, "It's much better that Dad's team won. He deserves it and you won't mind as much." What the $#**%&#$@? Can I just admit here to my intimate crowd of cyber friends: Of course I minded! A dagger to the heart. Come on. I was outnumbered in every conceivable calculation (fans, family and first string quarterbacks). Was there no designated Bruin fan assigned to me in my misery?

Apparently not.

And for the first time in my adult life, I felt what my dad has modeled for lo these forty-five years - surly disgruntled resentment against the opposing fans following the loss of a beloved team (particularly one that was supposed to win). I glowered, unable to rebound and join in the family post-game chatter.

And that's why it's taken me three days to write about it.

Other than that, I had a great time in LA. Thanks for asking.

When Notre Dame went ahead

When Notre Dame went ahead, originally uploaded by juliecinci.

My sister, step-sister and Dad are all smiling so big their lips are strained. I am not smiling, nor am I in the photo.

One footnote: the moment of unity between UCLA and Notre Dame fans occurred when the commentator announced that USC had lost to Stanford. For 30 blissful seconds, the entire stadium erupted into a deafening roar. Yeah, we hate SC together. Family bonding redefined.

While we still believed...

While we still believed..., originally uploaded by juliecinci.

We raised our fists.

The fan

The fan, originally uploaded by juliecinci.

This is how I felt before the game started... proud to be seen in Bruin schwag.

UCLA before the defeat

UCLA before the defeat, originally uploaded by juliecinci.

This is a photo of how it all looked while the sun was shining and the skies were Bruin blue.

What am I in for? Steve, come to my aid!

So Jacob has taken to saxophone like weeds have taken to my garden. And weeds really are the appropriate metaphor here. Growing up around me in the form of musical notes is, I kid you not, argh, can I even bring myself to type it? the USC fight song pouring forth from Jacob's brand new sax. I had completely forgotten that our high school uses that song as its own fight song and now that Jacob is joining the marching band, he must not only learn to play it, but must play it regularly, with passion, enthusiastic for its nails-to-the-blackboard tones.

Calling all Bruins - come to my aid! What should I do to protect myself from noise-pollution over the next three years?