Jots and Tittles

I don't know whether I'm even coherent at this point. I watched "Chicken Chicken Chicken" on YouTube today and giggled for at least 20 minutes at the thought of doing it for my thesis presentation. It's not THAT funny... except it really is, in a completely ridiculous way. Actually, at this point, I could probably listen to freakin' "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" and understand the deep and profound meaning behind the lyrics. And I'm not even on any mind-altering substances, unless you count a severe lack of sleep and several weeks' worth of school-induced stress. So maybe I'm not the best authority.

Anyway, considering that, the following sounds pretty darn good to me. Perhaps I will view it in a month and realize that I might have unknowingly inhaled any number of mind-altering substances, because the only other explanation for my current state of mind is multiple alien abductions, and as much as I love the X-Files I don't really believe in alien abductions.  ...Most days.

But I'm going to turn it in to my GR teacher tomorrow as my second-to-last journal entry, and it's going to be freaking sweet. Especially the part about abortion. I think I toned it down a bit, especially toward the beginning when I thought I might still care, but by the time I got to the abortion bit I pretty much decided, you know what, screw it, I'm right anyway so who cares what she thinks. And then I realized what I'd done and backed off toward the end. But still.

Well, maybe you should read it for yourself.

I suppose, since we didn't have any reading for this week and since I've read Twain's Diaries and was somewhat underwhelmed – much as I love Twain's sense of humor, I found it ran toward the tedious for my tastes in this particular piece, but that's purely a matter of my own preferences – I'll talk about my thoughts on completing the research paper.

 

One of the drawbacks to an academic paper is that it requires such a level of formality that I think some things which ought to be said, especially in the context of religion, are left unsaid. Religion is such a personal thing that it is very difficult to discuss without bringing into consideration the individuals whose lives are shaped by it, and when academia tries to do so it often winds up sounding stilted and dry. I was very afraid that my Sophia paper wound up sounding this way, but how can I fix that without making it entirely un-academic?

Part of my problem is that the way I process things is writing about them. In my psychology class we recently had to do a memory exercise that involved remembering all we could about the first day of class, first without our notes and then with them. My memory was rather dismal, honestly (which doesn't bode well for my future, but that's another story), but one of the things that I remember is sitting there before class started and writing about whether or not I was going to give up on the honors program and not mess with the whole thesis thing. I only sort of had an idea of what to do, I had a tentative adviser but nothing definite, and no committee member, and honestly I wanted absolutely nothing to do with the whole mess. Obviously, I stuck with it, or I would not have been doing this class as an honors option, but at the time I was seriously considering just dropping it and moving on. But the way I worked my way to a decision was through writing. Not always writing on a computer – sometimes a pen moving across a page is just a better way of processing things than sitting at a keyboard pressing buttons. But writing is the way I process the things that are happening to me, so I have scraps of paper and bits of files scattered around my room and my computer that are all me, processing whatever is going on in my life by writing it out. My boyfriend can attest to this, and I think it drives him bonkers, because he is very verbal and he would much rather talk about something whereas I would rather write it out. We also have an email record of all the difficult times in our relationship, thanks to me and my need to express myself through writing.

Anyway, the point is, because I use writing to process everything, it is difficult for me to do the processing before I do the writing so that when I do write, it expresses exactly what I want it to say. You'd think that, after four years as an English major, I'd have figured out how to do that, but actually I think it's worse now than it was when I started. Which made this paper a really interesting exercise, because on the one hand I found it incredibly easy. I've been researching this stuff for about 2 years now, because it interests me that much, so the only problems I had with length were deciding what really needed to be said, and what didn't fit in. But so much of this is personal. And as I looked into who Sophia was and her history in the church, my faith underwent one of its biggest and most defining changes. But that isn't the sort of thing you put in an academic paper. You don't say that you spent nights in tears wondering whether you'd been wrong all your life or why, when you had already been an outsider in that church, you discovered something that sent your family skidding out of the thinly-defined outer circle of acceptability into which it had finally been allowed. And you definitely don't mention that your entire future has been changed by that chance encounter with Sophia in the context of the church, that your world had been turned upside-down by one forgotten goddess.

And after all this research, and all the soul-searching and questioning that came along with it, the cap of it all is a very clean, neat, sterile paper. No wonder the divine, however it was perceived, has always been worshipped through song, poetry, and story! What academic paper could possibly capture my experience with Sophia and the new understanding of God that came to me as a result of it? Its very nature forbids such a thing, and it's ridiculous to try. I suppose it's not fair to call this paper the cap, because I am very certain that I'm not done with Sophia, but still, it does seem rather anticlimactic in a very unanticipated sort of way. The final product represents the tiniest portion of what I went through to get to it.

The biggest portion of what I gained is also missing from my paper. Sophia's history is one thing, but the way she is worshipped today, while it is interesting, seems like it's kind of missing the point of God. There is something very self-centered about the way people today view and relate to Sophia. Certainly, my idea of the divine is very obviously Christian, but it seems to me that the point of worshipping a divinity is to take part in something bigger than oneself. Yet that is exactly the opposite of what Sophia has come to be in modern worship. What was once divine wisdom is now someone you can tell that “with nectar between our thighs we invite a lover, we birth a child” as the prayer goes on the tape of excerpts from the 1993 Re-Imagining Conference. Sophia is not about being part of something greater than yourself anymore, but about being greater, yourself. Selflessness is entirely missing from the picture, which I think reflects our culture better than it reflects what Christianity in ANY form is meant to teach. I agree with Jesus' statement that “greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13, ESV) – and while I think most people today would give lip service to the idea, I don't think that many would live it. I guess not many people actually lived it during any time, really, but then I think this is the most self-centered culture the world has ever seen. As if I have any way of knowing that. But from what I've read, that's the way it seems. Even the idea of laying down your life for someone else is not as valuable as it once was, or else abortion wouldn't be so popular as it is, because that's only laying down nine months of your life (or longer if you choose the not-adoption route but that's your call) and it's not like you're dying, you're just kind of inconvenienced for a little while, though even at that I think most moms would tell you that the benefits outweigh the inconveniences. If we (and by “we” I realize that I am making a huge generalization that cannot possibly be accurate, but I think it does give a representative image of those I have met who fit the category) can't even give up that much for our own kids, there's absolutely no way we can lay down our whole lives for anyone else.

That's not the sort of thing that one can really express in a formal paper. But what I learned from Sophia – the part that I'm going to take with me – is not that she was the low deity who created the God of the Old Testament without a consort and then had to work with the Father to create Jesus to fix the problem, like the Gnostic texts say. The part I will take with me is the reminder that Sophia – Wisdom – used to be a link from this world to the divine, and that is the Wisdom to be sought, not the “nectar between my thighs” or whatever other self-centered worship I might encounter.

So, there you have it.  I'd like to say that it's pretty good but I'm really in no position to judge.  When I first wrote it I thought, "Wow! That's really amazing!  I'm going to post it on the LJ for all to see!" and now that I've posted it I'm thinking, "Hmm, maybe this was a bad idea..." but it's 2:30 in the morning and I still have reading to do before I can sleep.  So I'm going to go ahead and post it, and we'll hash out the details of whether that was a good idea some other time, eh?  All righty then. 

Peace out.

-Jaya-