Welcome

I don’t know how to begin this, but I suppose that’s fitting, as this is largely a blog about what I don’t know. I subtitled this “Mixed-up Musings,” because I’m hoping to puzzle out some of the many questions I have, and maybe contribute to the greater dialogue along the way.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’m beginning this blog as part of my high school senior project. My first love, what I intend to pursue for my career, is linguistics (hence the name of this blog), but at this stage in my life, on the verge of so much change, what I need to write about is religion and faith. I write to figure out things I don’t understand, and much of my writing lately, both fiction and nonfiction, deals with religion. I started Babel Scattered as a way to organize these thoughts and writings and see what comes of it.  

What am I trying to get out of this experiment? Not wisdom or enlightenment or fame or fortune. Nothing spectacular. I have no agenda, no thesis. Only a search. I’m seeking two things: nuance and context. Two very small things, two vastly important things. Two things lacking in current popular religious thought, because nuance and context take away from click-bait and sensationalism, from panaceas and hot-button issues. Context takes all the fun out of dramatic interpretations; nuance prevents the arising of villains and heroes. Nuance and context complicate, while religion seeks simplicity. Yet nuance and context may be exactly what we need.

I came to religion late and I came sideways. I met God, through a series of extraordinary circumstances, at the age of fifteen, but the God I met then was an evangelical God who demanded more blind faith than I was able to give. I could accept believing in something I couldn’t see; that wasn’t the problem. What I could not do was believe in something that didn’t make sense. My sophomore and junior years of high school were a repetitive cycle between belief and disbelief as I was unable to corroborate the many varied perspectives I was hearing. Because I lacked nuance, I couldn’t reconcile the gory, contradictory Bible with the proposed book of life and love. Because I lacked context, I couldn’t translate faith into my everyday life. My faith woke up on Sunday and went to sleep on Monday.  

Yet God doesn’t let you cave in easily. I didn’t want to let go of this seedling faith, but I recognized I needed some new way to nurture it. So I got to work. I learned to approach religion the way I approach everything I care about: with research. I read and I googled and I debated until I knew God well enough to believe in Him 24/7.

I came across Red Letter Christians, Sojourners, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Benjamin L. Corey, and other fantastic writers and groups who approached religion the way I wanted to, and I came across others who approached religion the opposite of how I wanted to, but who wrote thoughtfully and cleverly and made me think. Right now, I’m taking Comparative Religions through my local junior college, and I love it. We read primary sources and study the context surrounding religions’ origins and principles. I often find myself sitting awake at midnight, surrounded by my textbook and homework, just in awe of how much sense it all makes. Conceptualizing God as the idea traced and slowly revealed across all that I read and study brings Him so much closer to my understanding. Does it make Him less supreme, to learn that the mystery cults popular in the first century B.C.E also embraced the death and resurrection of a deity? Yes, a little. But it makes Him more real, more potent, at least to me.

At least to me…that’s the key. The core concept I keep seeing throughout all my study is something I’ve termed “the theology of the individual,” and this is most of all what I hope to explore here on Babel Scattered. What I have found is a very nuanced God. A multifaceted, immensely complex and complicated God. A personal relationship with God, the ultimate goal, especially in the Evangelical church, is made possible by this multifacetivity; God connects to each of us in a way we can understand, because an omnipotent God can. The job of the Christian community, then, is to guide its members toward the way in which God can meet them. This means embracing the individual as a complex human being who exists before, after, inside, and outside of the church – contextualizing their life. This means growing beyond one-size-fits-all evangelism, beyond plugging church members into the appropriate ministry and leaving it at that. And this can mean stronger, deeper communities of believers, found at the crossroads of their many walks with God.

This is the context in which I am writing. The spiritual growth I’m undergoing is exactly why I cannot make any claims here. Everything I think and believe is constantly changing; this post has been in the works for a month because I can’t decide where to start. Even as I type this, I am realizing new things about my spiritual convictions. That’s the point, though. I graduate high school in three months. Everything in my life is either ending or beginning. The idea of anything being static scares me.

I hope, at the least and the most, that what you’ll read here makes you think. Please comment, if it does. We are all storytellers and scholars, but only by sharing our stories and our ideas can we be storytellers and scholars together. I recognize the naïveté in saying this on the internet, home of trolls and vitriol. But the internet is the defining feature of my generation, our unprecedented way to engage with each other. It is therefore here that I am learning to engage.  

On that note, welcome to Babel Scattered.