I've been getting these headaches. Sometimes they're accompanied with nausea; lately they've been more and more frequent.

I don't know what to blame them on. Job stress? Home stress? Bad food? Caffeine addiction? All of the above? And eliminating any one of those factors is, to say the least, challenging. I haven't been to a doctor in years, but it's gotten bad enough that I did break down and go see our family doctor about these headaches a few weeks ago.

He thinks they're a sort of low-level migraine, and handed me a couple of samples of Imitrex. I just took the last of these; we'll see, I guess. Last time it seemed to help (after a while), but I washed it down with Coke, so maybe it was just the caffeine and sugar rush...

I wonder what it would be like to have an "integrated personality", to be a "single-minded" person.

I was reading over my last entry and realized that nobody knows I visited a religious bookstore, let alone an Eastern Orthodox bookstore, on this past trip. The exception is my wife, and I probably wouldn't have told her except that I didn't want her to find out about my expenditures by looking at a credit card statement rather than hearing it from me. People have asked me about the trip; I give them a report on the restaurants I ate at. The most interesting thing I did, I keep to myself, because I don't want to be "scary".

I hide a lot of stuff from just about everybody. My light, if I have one, is decidedly under a bushel.

So why am I underground, psychologically and spiritually? Give Mrs. VoW credit: she's trying to get me to let her in. I'm not able to begin to do so without becoming snarky and harsh. I wonder if I've become one of those people who just can't stand that somebody else's beliefs might differ from theirs. Plus I don't know how to let her in:

VoW: "Hey honey, would you like to read the Bible with me?"
Mrs. VoW: "Mmmm, no, not really."
VoW: "Please? It might be interesting from a cultural or literary standpoint."
Mrs. VoW: "Are you reading it as literature?"
VoW: "No, more as the Word of God, really."
Mrs. VoW: "So you're hoping I'll see it as the Word of God, too?"
VoW: "Well... yeah!"
Mrs. VoW: "So you want to convert me?"
VoW: "Ummm... yes?"
Mrs. VoW: "So you don't respect my beliefs?"
VoW: "Sure I do! I just think that you're wrong on a few little points."
Mrs. VoW: "Like what?"
VoW: "Well... the divinity of Jesus. The definition of morality. The purpose of human life. Little stuff."

It invariably gets worse from here.

Getting back to the Austin trip: while I was out there, I found an Eastern Orthodox bookstore. This struck me as a truly rare thing to find in Texas (or anywhere else in the south, for that matter). I walked around in there for an hour or more, picking at this and that, until the Reader who ran the bookstore realized I was something of a curiosity seeker and offered me a tour of the adjoining church. I accepted gratefully.

It was very odd to see all the shameless visual depiction of Jesus and company. To my unschooled western eye, traditional icons will probably always look gaudy and cartoonish, but I tried to see with the same eyes as the people who worship there. More difficult for me to stomach than the icons (and relics-- they actually had some bits of bone from two saints discreetly stored in the sanctuary) was the setup of the altar. I was raised in a tradition that feared "priestcraft" profoundly and nominally eschewed all authority that didn't live between the covers of the sixty-six-book Bible. So knowing that the elements of the Eucharist were being kept behind a veil in a sort of holy-of-holies that only an ordained priest could enter gave me serious heebie-jeebies. But I was grateful for the tour, and the Reader was very kind in answering all my ignorant Protestant questions without rancor or judgment, so my overall impression was fairly positive.

I walked out with a book on the Orthodox doctrine of the Church, another book about the composer John Tavener, a small pamphlet giving a fire-breathing born-again Orthodox take on sola scriptura, and a crucifix for the rosary I was making. (Yes, I pray the rosary. Send complaints about idolatry to /dev/null-- I've been over this territory, and I've decided that I'm prepared to pray to anyone or anything that might help me act decent and/or Figure Things Out. Also, in case the name of the blog doesn't make it clear, I figure I'm probably Eternally Screwed anyway. What's a little extra pious idolatry to someone like me?) Anyway, I doubt Eastern Orthodoxy will ever be my cup of tea, but it was quite a highlight to an otherwise pretty mundane business trip. Moreover, reading some of this material has given me some food for thought on the subject of "authority". I'll probably to try to work some of that out here over the next day or two.

It's been a long, but reasonably good, week.

I went out to Austin, Texas this week for my job. I told people it was a worthwhile trip, job-wise, but I'm not entirely sure.

My job is weird, or seems so to me. The priorities aren't clear. I'm probably overpaid for my capabilities, inasmuch as I'm supposed to be figuring out what the priorities are. Daily I have to figure out who I'm going to risk ticking off. I'm about the least confrontational person I know, so it's not a happy situation for me in this respect. It's really kind of funny: I've always thought of myself as a bit of a loner, but when it gets right down to it I'm desperate for approval.

I've been working through G. I. Williamson's study guide for the Heidelberg Catechism, trying to read the suggested scriptures and think honestly about the study questions he puts at the end of each section. My little substitute for Sunday school, I guess.

Anyway, reading one of the scripture references today (in Colossians 1), something hit me so hard it nearly knocked me off of my seat: "All things were created through him and for him." For him. Jesus.

If Paul is to be believed, everything that's ever happened and ever will happen has ultimately been about Jesus. He was The Point of the whole show. Dinosaurs, the Roman Empire, the American Revolution, rings around Saturn, the Horsehead Nebula: all exist as they do in order that a particular Galilean peasant could be born, live, die on a cross, and be resurrected in just exactly the way he did.

I've heard this sort of thing said before; I must have read this very passage in Colossians twenty times if I've read it once. But I've never grokked the underlying idea like I did this morning.

Everything, all things, all particular events in this universe: they find their center, their "reason for being", in Jesus of Nazareth. The implications are staggering. If Paul is right, denying the "Lordship" (pale word!) of Christ is something like denying gravity or electromagnetism.

I'm not sure that I really believe this deep down. Even assuming it's true, I'm not sure what to do about it. But the idea does have quite an impact, doesn't it?

So, to continue yesterday's rant...

I've tried on a lot of different versions of Christianity since my initial "conversion" at the age of nine in a Southern Baptist Church. I'm now in my mid-thirties, and I've tried to make myself a Presbyterian (of, alternately, the liberal or orthodox stripe), a Lutheran, a "non-denominational Christian" (whatever that means), a unitarian, a universalist, a Catholic, and an Episcopalian. Those are in no particular order and are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. The unity across all of these flirtations is that, in every one of them, with respect to my most important human relationship, I've been alone.

This sucks, not to put too fine a point on it, and I'm so tired of it.

As I said yesterday, I need some buy-in from my spousal unit here. Some serious Holy Spirit action on the home front. I can't find a tradition (or "doctrine" if "tradition" gives you the willies) that I really trust-- trust, that is, to the point that I would seek spiritual and marital advice from their representative clergy. Or maybe it's less a problem for me to trust someone than for me to keep my wife's trust. If I turn to a solidly Reformed pastor, or a Roman Catholic priest, I know roughly what I will get: instruction to come to church and obey the church (or Scripture) and contend for the teachings of the church (or Scripture) at home and let the chips fall where they may; and if I follow that advice, indeed if I seek it from those quarters, I'm a traitor to my marriage, or at least perceived as such.

Of course, it's not new to me to wonder whether Scripture actually teaches what orthodox Reformed pastors would tell me it teaches. Yes, I've read the Bible myself. And I find that it is interpreted by somebody, living or historical, in even the most Protestant of Protestant traditions. Moreover, there is a school of interpretation out there that doesn't, well, side against my wife in the "culture war".

The trouble with that current of thought is that it drifts toward a naturalized vision of Jesus and God. People in the denominations I'm thinking of start to allow a separation between "the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith". And maybe it's small-minded of me, but if these aren't the same Person, I'm not sure what all the fuss has been about this whole time. Anyone can make up stories or metaphors. Only one Person in all of history, so far as I know, has actually been a metaphor, straight from the pen of God, if you will. I'm probably not expressing this well, or in an acceptably orthodox way, but there it is: Jesus is the hero of fantasy, living in history; too good to be allowed to live, too righteous to remain dead. Anything less than this is not worth wasting a bright Sunday morning on.

I moan and groan about my wife, but it's not just her doubts that trip me up. The "inerrancy" of Scripture seems to me to be poorly defended, even by Scripture itself. "Useful", "God-breathed", "cannot be broken", etc.-- I don't see that any of these imply "inerrancy" in the sense that strict Protestants mean it. Can't God breathe a piece of edifying historical fiction? A myth that expresses something important about human nature?

And then I remember that there are 25,000 people buried alive in China and I'm shocked at how I find the time to feel so sorry for myself.

I keep coming back to this blog because I want to talk to somebody, I guess.

I'm working through some spiritual issues, and find myself unsure of which set of clergy to trust; or which set I could talk to without betraying my wife, the liberal humanist.

Let me talk about her a bit, actually. She's great. I mean it. I am so in love with her. Have been for these seventeen years. She loves Justice, and Mercy, and Goodness; but she refuses to spell them with capital letters. She lives and speaks in a way that makes it clear she's aware of a real right and wrong out there, but she stops short of placing their source in a personal God.

This worked for me, sort of, when we started up. I was a sorta kinda liberal Protestant without much use for the organized church. I made efforts now and again over the years to seek out a church we could attend; it didn't really take, until four or five years ago when we tried a Unitarian Universalist fellowship.

The trouble is, I'm a Trinitarian. No, really. And while my soteriology might be a little more mamsy-pamsy than most evangelicals or Catholics could tolerate, I'm hardly a universalist. Yet every Sunday we were driving past the Presbyterian Church of the Savior and the Luthern Church of the Redeemer to get to the UU Chuch of the Dubious Historicity. My choice of church had become a witness against my beliefs. And that didn't work for me. It really stopped working when our first child was born.

I decided, to my wife's horror, that I was an Orthodox Presbyterian. I tried to take Sola Scriptura seriously. In my experience, most people who do this-- the people whose spiritual lead I was looking to follow-- walk around with some ideas and values that clash pretty seriously with humanism (as humanism is understood in the western world). My wife saw this as an about-face and a turning against what had hitherto been our shared values, our shared definitions of justice, mercy, goodness. I changed sides in the culture war, if you like.

This did not last. We couldn't sleep in the same bed. We couldn't relax in each others' company. I had joined the ranks of the Enemy. She wondered desperately what kind of small-minded judgmental superstition I would impress upon our little daughter.

And part of me agreed with her, the whole time. It's mean to exclude gay couples from the same protections heterosexual couples enjoy. It's mean to stand out in front of an abortion clinic and call a vulnerable, struggling young woman a murderer. I realize now, better than I ever did before, what people who do these things are trying to achieve-- the higher mercy that they're struggling to serve-- but I lacked whatever quality I needed to stand with them, even rhetorically in conversation. Fortitude? Faith? Whatever it is, I didn't have it. After a few months, I reconverted (or apostatized, depending on your point of view) and declared myself a "liberal", for lack (fear?) of a more descriptive term. I'd like to say it was about mercy. But I'm afraid it had at least as much to do with sleepless nights and loneliness and sexual frustration and watching my wife-- my wonderful, big-hearted, loving wife, for God's sake!-- crying, again and again, night after night, because the friend and companion of her life had chosen to trash what we used to hold sacred.

What can I say? She's the Saint Monica of secular humanism. It was impossible that the husband of so many tears should "perish".

I tried going to a mainline Protestant church, settling for a while on an Episcopal church. She won't go with me. She won't let me baptize my daughters (did I mention we're expecting a second one?) and raise them in the faith. (Why should she? If I'm her example, a love for Jesus doesn't do much to improve a person.) It's gotten harder and harder for me to go. Not my wife's fault, this: she's happy to watch our daughter while I go to church. She sees it as the moral and spiritual equivalent of a round of golf; Daddy has to take care of himself, too, you see; so I'm to feel free to go to whatever church I like on Sunday morning. But then I'd go and hear a sermon about how the church was not just about what happened on Sunday morning, the importance of being in a community of believers, blah blah blah. So now I'm looking at fellowship dinners or choir practice, and it's as if I'm trying to get to the golf course two or three times a week. Responsible fathers/husbands don't do that.

And even the Sunday morning service itself, with its Youth Sundays and anniversary commemorations and greetings between old friends, usually rings hollow to me.

Frankly, I've reached a place in my life where I need my wife's buy-in on this whole Christianity thing. Yes, I've read Luke 14; honestly, if those are the conditions, I've already failed. My wife, and our mutual love, is the most holy thing God has ever placed in my hands. I can't, and won't, let go of it. If necessary, and God forgive me for saying so, I fully intend to clutch it all the way down into the pit of hell if it comes to that.

But I don't believe that's what God wants. I think He wants us both, husband and wife, to love Him, and serve Him. So why doesn't that seem to be happening? Why can't I be loving enough, tolerant enough, holy enough to show her Christ convincingly? Or if it's as the Calvinists say, that God and nothing but God opens people's eyes, why won't He open hers (and mine, if they're closed)? I ask Him to, all the time. I ask as sincerely as I know how. I ask him now, here: God, purify my prayers, show me how to ask. Are You trying to teach me patience? Humility? Go ahead. Teach me. But open my wife's eyes, please, sweet Jesus. I don't understand what you want from me and I have no one I can ask. I need my wife here with me, God, I need her, please help!