The New Year

I haven't posted in some time. I've been busy with CPE and Facebook. Also I felt that I'd become repetitive. So here is a new post.
When I was a teenager, 14 or so, I read Paul's letter to the Galatians and I was ecstatic. What good news. My mom immediately said that you have to be careful how you read that and it's easy to misinterpret. I had the experience of just as I was beginning to feel free of the law, the accuser, that there was a real joy to faith, I was slammed back into prison. Who was I to interpret Paul's "we know a person is justified not by works of the Law but through faith in Jesus Christ?" There must be some way that the Law continues to stand between us and Christ - Paul's just not very clear about it here. Otherwise I would not be made guilty by sermons leading to altar calls. And where would I be without guilt? Would I do anything but because of guilt and the sense that only by being obliged (and the very sense that I was obliged and not doing a good work simply qua selfless good work condemed even the "good" work that I might do with the taint of my own shoddy motives).
Only years later did I discover that Paul meant exactly what I thought he'd meant: Quit letting the law beat you up; quit letting the law keep you from a relationship with God.
In Christ I disovered that my hangup about God was entirely my own. God's like, "really you thought that?" Actually I had projected onto God the thoughts of my own super ego - that function of the subconscious that gets its energy from acting as a moral governor - although frequently its governance goes unexamined and expands its territory well beyond the bounds of its portfolio.
The odd thing is that as I've understood Grace I haven't lived in it. What's hampered me? mostly the good work of the super ego - that constant dripping "you don't really deserve it" that moves through my days like an ancient river.
What joy each day now when I realize that I'm living in grace and the sound on the super ego can go ignored, like a distant radio narrating a game I don't care about.

I missed carnival and went straight into lent

I was looking forward to carnival this year - after reading Rabelais and Bakhtin, I was all worked up. Then this influenza hit me. The word Influenza is a medieval diagnosis - an influence in the air, that affected a person when their humors were out of balance, brought about this condition. It's an influence just like the Moon's influence on tides or the Sun's on gold or Venus on copper. The ancients had a notion that everything exerted an influence on everything else - that the cosmos was in a quest for balance - but a balance of motion - since the only thing that doesn't move is God: everything revolved around the primium mobile, and the motion that moved the cosmos was love.
So I missed carnival and now I'm immersed in lent. I missed the imposition of ashes. I missed the deposition of sashes. I'm left without a sense of deciding to give up anything. One year I gave up despair - and that worked pretty well. With influenza has come a significant loss of appetite, so I've already given up significant consumption. In the protestant tradition, you'd think we would have reversed carnival and lent - and that now we'd be eating all kinds of cow and pig and chicken: just to stick it to the Roman church. Aside from Luther though, the reformation was begun by some real spoil sports. Calvin probably could have done with a decade of lent - all of life should be lent.
But I could be wrong. Calvin could have been for free love and feasting: probably not.
I miss being a gadfly. Back in Decatur I carried my Kierkegaard with me and settled down at various desks: the bar at Twains, the reference desk at the library - where I was welcome to put in my hours. Here in Durham, I've mostly been sick; and of a truth, a gadfly needs a certain audience and a certain ambiance of local culture, in order to perform his best.
Yesterday Jami played me a thisamericanlife podcast about puzzle solvers and listening to it I heard a clue as to why I garner certain reactions from some people. One of the puzzle contestants, a very smart guy, says that it dawned on him: he was informing people against their will. I thought, "there's my last cpe experience in a nutshell." I believe my last cpe did occur in a nutshell.
It's great to be free again.
But what does that mean for me in the future? Don't I have to sacrifice some of that freedom for stability?
I consider it only to be the freedom most people require: freedom to be and to be without being made to feel guilty about who I am; and freedom to work, to not be bothered with micro-managers, but to actually do my job without looking over my shoulder.
So I am free.
Carnival and lent have that goal as well: to free the individual. The goal of every doctrine in Christianity is to free the individual; if it is used otherwise, it becomes a cramped and jejune thing.