Friends

Escaping childhood constraints

I struggle to find ways to mesh with my sister, who is a devout Christian.

I grew up in the same rabid southern baptist family, but the fear training just didn’t stick in my case. As we are pulled in opposing directions, poles apart and shrinking to one another, I wonder at the lenses that we use to clarify what we are receiving.

We all do this. Data comes in, and immediately (with no intervening time/mediation occurring) the prefrontal starts shuttling the information according to density and truthiness. We screen our incoming experiences with the sieve of our awareness, weighted by value that we assign each bit. Only later can we consider the sorted and judged information as to it’s position in your belief structure.

I’ve seen eyes glaze over when someone is detailing an experience that another can’t fathom, be it angels discussing what school one should attend, or suddenly grasping that all is one and we are all responsible for what happens next; if you can’t ‘put yourself’ in that situation and ‘feel’ what the other person is saying is ‘real’ (not just some fairy tale or movie plot) then you will discount the experience - believe it is being presented as ‘invalid’ or ‘useless trivia’ and relegated to that place they put all the nonsense they’ve had to endure in the past.

The patronizing effect - that someone can not suspend disbelief sufficiently to empathize or even grasp the intent of the conversation, and so must nod politely while not looking bemused or horrified - where we tolerate the misgivings of others while avoiding getting any of it on us. Perhaps a necessary part of societal etiquette, a shuffle we must all do to ‘save face’ of the other we are interacting with.

Back in my burgeoning adolescence I did have a (rather myopic) view strained through a biblical lens. This made everything so simple. Like dicing potatoes with a veg-o-matic - CHOMP!

I like to think that we all start out with very simple models of existence that are gradually expanded and refined to more closely resemble reality as we progress. I don’t want this to turn into a screed about religion but I have struggled to expand my awareness beyond the singular focus of a book written a few millennia ago.

Now I find that whenever I attempt to have a conversation that expands beyond biblical concepts, there is such a pull to bring everything back to that seminal work so that anything not taken into account by that ancient tome is disregarded. I remember trying to explain my fascination with quantum entanglement to my mom (who was also a devout Christian) and she just shrugged and said “Well, God can do anything, so it doesn’t surprise me.’ I realized then that there would be giant swaths of territory that would never be explored realistically, and it turned our conversations into anemic, enfeebled journeys around biblical aspects of the internet, the pope, the banking system, the Russian tensions, etc. It was taxing, but at the same time, it felt like a crash course into what fanatics defended and believed.

Or course, at the time, I didn’t realize it was a course in the biblical lens (I would have taken more notes). Alas, it is only in retrospect that I realized that there would always only be corridors of acceptable thought between those who already knew what the truth was and those who were interested in exploring exactly what might be going on - a theoretical framework that attempts to make even more sense of the world (beyond “well, that’s just the way God made it!”).

But I now seek the company of those who I do not have to chart a path between the shoals and cliffs of their singularly restrictive paradigms. Those few who exude authenticity, whose deep blue waters indicate no razor ripples of hull-splitting dangers, that I can freely meander with, sails full, tacking with the wind in our hair. Those few I call friends.