I will be good and I will be happy

Hooray! Internet! I can write things and then they will be there so that the people can read them!
Yes, I did just get back from a (wonderful) two-week holiday, bursting with things to blog, to find that my internet's down and I don't know why. There's no point ringing the company - I tried that once before and it made Centrelink look gloriously efficient and accomodating. But I'm in a library with free WiFi and I've got a bit of time! 

Ahem. Late last night I got to wondering why all those years ago when I gave up on Christianity it was because I found it disappointing, almost heart-breakingly so. Why not that frustrating or plain wrong?

I think what happened for me is that Christianity seemed to be making me promises. "Be a Christian and you will experience the joy of knowing God, and singing praises to him will be your heart's desire. Hold to these beliefs, live this way and you will experience the assurance of knowing you are a good person, you will live with your head held high." The whole thing was clearly important and obviously Right and Good, so I think I guessed it might also be good.

But that was not my reality. I had a go at holding to my beliefs and moral views and living uprightly and all I felt was mortification. I saw zero examples I wished to emulate and zero acceptance of the Christian way. There was no place for abstaining from sex (the key issue for me). In my world this simply did not occur. So all I felt was that living was being denied me, my options and opportunity to enjoy life shut out. My faith's demands relentlessly severe in their near-impossibility. I was being asked to follow a path when I could hardly see how and to be mocked as I did it.

And the consolations I was implicitly promised brought me no actual comfort. So with heavy spirit I began to walk another path, bearing the guilt of knowing I was doing wrong but anticipating the solace of living alive, free, grasping the opportunities offered me.

My original disappointment came because I thought in being moral you would gain dignity and joy. I didn't see that not having sex and being opposed to homosexuality and abortion were hardly enough to make me moral. I didn't notice the myriad ways in which I lived my days cloaked in sin. I thought it a simple thing to be rid of. There is certainly dignity and joy to be found in purity, but that purity is only found in Jesus' death where I should die, in his twin-gift of forgiveness and righteousness.

It came because I thought that in knowing you were right you would gain peace and satisfaction. But I hardly knew the right and what I did know I did not love. I failed to grasp the beauty of things being as they should be; I did not see the goodness there is in truth, in reality, in living well. I had not learned to love the things of God. I had not learned to love him.

Whereas now I see that first to come to him with messed-up thinking and actions no better, and are forgiven. Only then do you begin to follow him and learn his ways, his truth. And in that ordering of things, you know from the very beginning the awfulness and ugliness of the wrong that sent your Saviour to the cross, and the beauty and blessing of right he has given you, and you learn to hate the one and love the other. That's the way of it. You can't force yourself to love what is right and so feel the dignity and joy of it while you are still scrabbling about in your sin. I had to learn that, and thank God I did.

I/the heat

On very hot days, I think I'd almost prefer Santiago's weather to be humid. The heat here presses heavily down, apart from you, like some giant oppressive master and there's no recourse but to continue on your shuffling way. In Sydney and in Asian countries the heat remakes you in its image, a watery being with a solid centre and a slippery outer. A lot of people hate it but I have this mind-trick where I chose to accept the heat and enjoy the earthy sweatiness of my bodily existence, like swimming or playing in the dirt. You might say that the heat and myself become one. And now I wonder if it is humidity that bears responsibility for pantheism and Buddhism's not-self.

DUMB

I suck at writing SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timely). I always have. They drove me particularly crazy in the years I worked as a Speech Pathologist and it wasn't until my exit interview that I worked out why. I don't feel capable of predicting a patient's progress. I treated people who'd had strokes or head injuries and whose brains were damaged, and while it is possible to make general predictions, I think that we who do not yet properly understand recovery's process should hardly be expected to place a figure on its accleration over the course of a week or two. Goal-setting ends up no more than a reflection of past professional experience or the positivity, or otherwise, of the individual therapist. At my exit interview, it seemed to me that efficacy would be better measured according to whether treatment had been fitting and whether the professional had worked hard. It is possible to have input of the highest standard and yet only see minimal improvement because of personal factors (the person is a quitter or has despaired) or because their impairment is simply far too grave.*

But I also suck at writing SMART goals for me and you would hope that I would have a better chance of gauging what might reasonably be expected there. They feel so foreignly masculine, cold. I don't know what I'm aiming for in life, for the next two or three years. I mean I do have some plans of what I wish to do, sometimes quite concrete ones, and I could certainly tell you all about the philosophy behind my plans, and even, with a little pushing, what my desired outcomes would be - but to have to lay down individual steps and dates by which the steps will be done, something in me balks and bad.

The problem with SMART goals is that they bring a too-weighty responsibility, an end to romance, an abridging of how life is lived and they are sometimes simply unnecessary. I'm not sure I have the maturity, wisdom or creativity to plan out my years and I feel like in the doing of it I would be making a commitment to that path and that is no small deal for me. Nor do I particularly want to have it all mapped out - there's a romance to reactivity and heat-of-the-moment decisions that I don't wish to lose. What's more, like tests at school, I feel goals often fail to do a very good job of capturing and describing life's successes and failures. Life's more nuanced, more context-bound than something you can place a tick or cross against. And oftentimes I don't actually need a goal - I'm already well aware of how I'm doing at something. I don't need to think up some way of measuring my progress in Spanish - I'm speaking it all the time, noticing my mistakes and triumphs, and I can tell you exactly how I'm going anytime you want to ask.

Yet I did write myself goals for last year and at my pastor's urging, made them SMARTer, and many of them served me well. They worked well when I:

• wrote down what I was already doing and later reviewed the list to see if any had slipped; 
• wrote down the things that I hoped to make part of my life's routine; 
• was forced to think about what less intuitive or obvious success would actually look like (so for example, if I wasn't feeling like I was really part of my new church yet was ticking off the steps, then I knew I was doing okay); 
• had to include things I wasn't pumped for, difficult things; 
• got the satisfaction of ticking off concrete achievements.

The moral of the story is: write goals, write SMART goals if the steps or timing matter and write 'dumb' goals if you only need a memory jog. And don't include unrealistic goals because they'll only look accusingly at you and make you hate the whole thing . . . and yet, you might just want to include one or two because perhaps the writing of them will turn them into a mental possibility, and, you never know, the guilt or glimmering hope of them may just get the better of you.



*Of course, at this point - and before - the professional will also consider how to make their client's life functionally helpful, whatever their impairment, and goals are certainly a little easier to set here, but, even so, the social context brings its own complications which can equally well confound the meaningful setting of goals.