The Obama Project@WindonWater.net

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Maybe this is adulthood finally arriving a little late: the knowledge that everything is flawed and you just need to get on with it. But a church perpetrating the rape and abuse of children through the power of its moral authority is not a flaw; it’s a self-refutation. A movement betraying its core principles in office and then parading as a parody of purists is a form of anti-conservatism as I understand it. And a democratic country using torture to procure intelligence it can use to justify more torture, and prosecuting a war that never ends against an enemy that can never surrender: this, whatever else it is, is not America as its founders saw it. Again, it is a kind of self-refutation.

Where to go? What to do?

Like Andrew, I’ve been in a shifting place within my own spirit for years. My earliest such shift came when I was 19 years old, and realized that neither all the churching in the world, nor all the political consciousness in the world prevented my parents from becoming drug addicts. Again, years later, and after converting, perhaps with aggressive defiance, to Islam, I found my world shook up when two African Nationalists I’d known and loved as family while in college divorced. People can talk about how divorce is something kids adapt to, and in some respects this must be true – my parents divorced when I was young and while it was a painful time for me – by the time I was a teenager, I was accustomed to my parents divorced status, and very good friends with my stepmother. And yet, when these two people – not family, just friends, divorced, my confidence in the ability of marriage to survive at all was shook in a way that has had lasting repercussions.

And of course, 9/11, and the realization that even in the most enlightened practice of Islam, my rights as a woman were highly suspect, shook me at core on the subject of Islam. I limped along with the faith, arguing vigorously that the perversions of Islam as witnessed in so many news articles were not the true face of Islam. I believe that till today. But my hold on Islam became more tenuous than I ever realized, until I discovered the Baha’i Faith.

Unlike perhaps anyone that I know, I find myself willing to journey. Joseph Campbell talks about the Hero’s journey – there is always some calamitous affair that sets the hero on his or her journey. The boat capsizes. The tornado uproots the house. Etc. And the hero, thus unsettled, sets out. There is always a homecoming – but first, the journey.

If it be of any comfort to Andrew – I think blogging is like a journey. May we all journey successfully, and arrive home again, safely.

QT

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