God Went To Beauty School.

It rained today, so I wasn’t able to go to the sculpture park. Sad.

My life (without going into too much detail) is pretty chaotic right now, but in the past few days things have started coming together in an all-too-perfect way. Like things have turned out better than I could have ever hoped, and it seems almost too good to be true. I was telling one of my friends about it today, and he asked “Has it made you start believing in God?”

And in some way, it sort of has. But how belittling is it to God that I can only manage to believe in God’s existence when things are going right for me? I think that happens to me a lot, and I’m not sure why. I feel like I should be able to see God in everything, in the good and the bad and the ordinary, and appreciate God’s role in all things. I’m not in that place yet. But I read a poem the other day that made me want to be. It’s by Cynthia Rylant, and I think it’s beautiful.

God Went To Beauty School
He went there to learn how
to give a good perm
and ended up just crazy
about nails
so He opened up His own shop.
“Nails by Jim” He called it.
He was afraid to call it
Nails by God.
He was sure people would
think He was being
disrespectful and using
His own name in vain
and nobody would tip.
He got into nails, of course,
because He’d always loved
hands—
hands were some of the best things
He’d ever done
and this way He could just
hold one in His
and admire those delicate
bones just above the knuckles,
delicate as birds’ wings,
and after He’d done that
awhile,
He could paint all the nails
any color He wanted,
then say,
“Beautiful,”
and mean it.

a proclamation of love.

i love bette davis.

i love her because she was gorgeous and sassy in her youth, and because she was scary and creepy in her older years. i watched whatever happened to baby jane? last night and was torn between feeling utterly awed and utterly frightened by bette davis’ psychotic character, baby jane.

sometimes the scariest types of people are the ones who don’t know how to transition from childhood to adulthood. which creates a strategic segue-way for this thought:

capstone was incredibly intense tonight because this professor, who has always seemed to me very serious and stoic, completely poured out his heart to us. apparently he had a really awful relationship with his father, and that affected his faith because, as he said, people tend to superimpose the image of their biological father over what they imagine (or expect) their heavenly father to be like. which is something i’ve found to be tragically true. it seems that it would be almost impossible for people who have dysfunctional relationships with their fathers to embark on a functional relationship with god, or to even be attracted to such a thing; and it is, i suppose, a sad fact of psychology that someone looking to find solace or peace in a spiritual being can be thwarted by their past, arrested by it even, to where they can’t grow, but remain stuck in a conditioned state of sadness or self-deprecation because that’s all they’ve known, and all they think they deserve. i guess my thought is: is this an unfair (albeit completely arbitrary) advantage?

heaven.

i really enjoyed reading this essay about experiencing the divine through music.

i can certainly relate, as i hardly ever feel a divine presence inside the walls of a church, and almost always experience it in particular and fleeting atmospheres and isolated instances, and through people instead of the bible. i think that is the best part of humanity: the individuality and transience of experience, and the value that attaches itself to these moments.

and i would not mind at all if listening to sigur ros for all of eternity was what heaven was like.

love.

tonight i met grant’s parents. it was so amazing to see the mother and father of a gay son who don’t want to try to fix him, but who want him to be who he is, and who love him for exactly who he is, without precondition. they were talking about when grant first came out to them, and they both said that the first thing they thought when he told them was that they wished he had told them sooner, so that he didn’t have to carry such a heavy weight on his own and keep a part of himself secret. i wish everyone thought more like they do.

it’s moments like tonight when i am certain that i believe in god. i don’t understand very much about god, but i really believe that god is love. i felt so much love pour out of them that i felt damp with the presence of god. i always get this feeling when i’m in contact with someone gay, or with a group of people who are gay, and i rarely experience it otherwise. how can it be that i see/hear/feel god in these people, and they are called an abomination by god’s followers? it’s an enigma to me.

thank you, mr. and mrs. rehnberg, for your beautiful son and your unconditional love for him.

oh my god, whatever, etc.

so i went to church with my mom tonight, and her pastor told a little anecdote about how he had just returned from seattle, and that seattle is the u.s. city that has the least amount of people who attend church.

this makes sense to me… maybe because i’m one of those people that live in seattle and don’t attend church. i know a lot of spiritual/spiritually-minded people that live in seattle, but none of them seem too keen on going to church… not that they deny that church is important or necessary, just that they don’t want to go themselves. in theory, church is good. people ruin it. this is a generalization probably, but seattle-ites appear to me to be very intuitive when it comes to human interaction, and very sensitive to insincerity. and to make another broad generalization, there are a lot of “christians” who are performers, and who give genuine christians a bad name and leave a bad taste in non-christians’ mouths. in my recent church-going experiences, it all just feels pretty fake to me, like a show is being put on to disguise things/people that aren’t palatable. and singing worship songs is empty for me because the words are not real to me, even though every time i’m in a church i pray to God that the words will be real to me. maybe i’m just a pessimist.

i also read somewhere that seattle has the highest percentage of people who hold advanced degrees, making it the smartest city in the u.s.

maybe there’s a correlation between these two statistics?