23rd
Unplugged
Cross applied from facebook.
***EPIC NOTE WARNING***
…I’m pretty sure that this one might be longer than even my L.I.G.H.T. note o.0
And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.
Colossians 3:17
Yes, I just opened a note with a bible verse. One of the verses of many that stood out to me this weekend.
I’ve recently tried to limit my blogs because I imagine it is irritating for people to constantly here my complaining. However, this weekend simply merits a note for all to see. I lament my inability to properly organize and cut my rants, but it is something that I will work on.
Sometimes you just have to let it all pour out.
I have been on countless retreats. All of them have been amazing in their own way. After you’ve been on so many of them, you begin to understand a pattern. This retreat followed the pattern that I have become used to. However, this retreat has changed me unlike any other.
I say this not as a typical “I feel better now that I’ve cried and removed myself from the world for a little while”. This is not the typical retreat high that comes and fades. I know this because I am still crying and I am so frustrated that I can’t properly word how impactful this weekend has been for me. It really has changed my life…I’m still a little shaken up and I am not sure why. It is a very foreign feeling for me.
I have so much to thankful for. I have been going to St. Thomas More since I was in grade school. The people there know my family, they know me, and they love me, and I love them. I feel like things have finally clicked. I just want to thank all the people there who have been patient with me and haven’t given up. I have faith that they never will. This of course includes all the Core, the other YD’s, and my spoons.
I can’t really tell you how long I’ve been fighting fully commiting to God. I’ve been debating and rebelling and refusing to listen and refusing to commit for so long. I was absoultely determined that there was an alternative way to do things and that I didn’t necessarily need religion.
Now, I would like to temper all this by saying that I do not believe any one faith “better” than the other. Catholicism is what I have grown with and it is what makes sense to me. I think that all of humanity would benefit from a deeper connection with God, not matter what they call it.
Anyway, the past year in particular has been my “do whatever I very damn well please” year. I haven’t been doing heavy drugs and having sex or anything that extreme, but my behavior has been far enough from what I feel is right that I don’t feel so great anymore.
So if you would allow me to build a contrast.
I was at a party with some unamed friends and their friends. Yes people are drinking, yes we’re not being smart. I look around. Everyone is laughing, but I feel like no one is happy. I feel bad. I look over at my friend. His eyes are pretty hollow too. He’s smiling, but he’s not happy. We are just here. You’re body moves with such weight. You can’t see. You don’t understand anymore. It’s not fun. It’s like being strapped with weights…it’s sort of hard to breathe. He sighs and takes your hand because that is what he feels like he has to do. This is, after all a party and we are after all having fun. You wake up the next morning with a terrible head ache and you blush and you feel tired. You’ve sobered up and you look around at the mess. You go home and take a shower. That is the end.
I was at this retreat up in the mountains. It is freezing. My hair is down and everyone is just so real. We laugh and we dance and we pray and we hold eachother and we are happy. You are smiling because you are happy and you are crying because you are sad. You embrace someone because you truly love them. He reaches out and holds your hand with not alterior motives and you hold his back without any need for anything else. You are feeling and thinking at a level completely opposite of the party. You are hypersensitive to all that is going on around you. Your are connected (plugged in?) to the people around you (their joy is yours and you can feel the weight of the baggage they carry), you feel the cold snow on your face and you breathe and your body doesn’t feel heavy…you can breathe…breathe of nature…breathe of God, you feel close to God. You can think and you can feel. You’re not ashamed. You don’t hurt, you are not sad, you are not embarrassed. Life is simple. You can be happy.
I’ve resented the notion of evangelizing for a long time and I have been irritated in the past when people drag people to church. I suppose that is because I didn’t fully feel how happy I could be with God. After all, if you truly love someone, you would do everything you can to make them happy. I wish so badly that I could just pick up everyone who was hurting and lost at that party and show them that they are meant for so much more.
Plato talked about how we all lived in a cave. The world is a cave. We are chained to the back of this cave with our backs to the mouth of the cave. There is however a fire behind us, and we see the world in shadows. One day a man breaks his chains and manages to climb out of the cave. He gets outside and the light hurts his eyes really bad and he doesn’t understand what he is seeing. In time his eyes become used to the light and he realizes that all he had known was shadows.
None of all this garbage around us has to be real. We don’t have to live with these distorted images of who we are and what is fun and what is right. You have to break those chains and make it to the light. You have to relearn that the shadows aren’t reality and there is a great and beautiful world beyond what we are all trapped in. It’s hard and you have to claw and climb and tear…but I belive we can do it because we have eachother.
“Set me free of the chains holding me. Is anybody out there hearing me? Set me free!”
I can’t tell you over the past year how I have felt myself become increasingly self-centered. This weekend after I let it all off my chest I felt like I could just love and comfort others. I have faith that all people are good if you dig down deep enough. There’s just so much bullshit that we get covered in and burried under. I feel like all the mess that was covering me was stripped off for just a little bit and I went back to who I really am. I really am a loving person. I was made to take care of others and I feel like this retreat has brought that part of me back. I don’t know about everyone else, but I feel like this retreat stripped all of the crap from our past to our commitments to our struggles to whatever.
“the reds are redder after the rain and the greens greener”
This retreat sort of washed me down and brought me back to who I am…and I feel like I had been losing a lot of that.
While I’m on the subject of love…I did manage to scratch down in my journal that the world would be better off if we were more concerend with giving love than being lovers. I need to have faith that God will bring me someone to love entirely and grant me the strength to provide those who really need it with love and not have any expectations. I’m pretty sure love doesn’t make you feel guilty or hurt or make you feel terrible and I’m sure it isn’t used to cover up what’s really going on and perpetuate lies.
I’ve just become really numb. I’ve always considered myself a relatively thoughtful and introspective person. In time I’ve been increasingly confused. I’ve just been criticising myself and my thoughts have not led to any real conclusion in quite a while. There was a point at which I was constantly thinking about ways to improve myself, but recently I’ve been so stagnant. This retreat has really made me THINK. I don’t know what it was, but this retreat just shook me and revived my mind. Commitments & priorities seem like things that a person who is “introspective” would think about often, but I really haven’t.
My priorities have been:
1)Friends/Family
2)Myself
3)God
My priorities really need to be:
1)God
2)Family/Friends
3)Myself
So yes, Mrs. Kim, if you were wondering if you made a difference or touched someone, you touched me. I wanted to say thank you.
Prayer is also something that I really haven’t been doing. I guess because I associate things like saying the rosary with my mother, I don’t necessarily enjoy doing them. I’ve been doing other forms of meditation and prayer…even some from other religions. However, I just wanted to thank Geraldine for saying the rosary with us on Saturday morning. Her faith was just enough to break my heart. She is such a beautiful, wonderful woman and I wish that I could just have the same faith as her and pray with such trust that God would hear. I found myself praying a lot for calm in stressful/upsetting points in the retreat. I’ve decided that I want to make prayer a more integral part of my life, especially praying the rosary.
If you are one who thinks prayer is ridiculous, I challenge you to a)prove that it is ineffective b) prove that it doesn’t make people feel better and c) that there is never a situation in which all you CAN do is pray.
That’s another thing…I’m really sick of getting shit for being religious. I try and respect all faiths and not be too ignorant. However…I am no longer going to deny my faith.
Intellect. What a joke. That’s another reason why I have sort of distanced myself from the church in the past year. There is a bible verse that says that we can not live our lives by our wisdom alone. By this weekends end, I am reassured that religion is the side of the intelligent. Although there are many in the world who have blind faith, my faith is not. It is based upon what I FEEL and SEE and EXPERIENCE. It is tangible, it is provable, it is real. THERE IS A GOD. RELIGION DOES HELP PEOPLE. There are things in the world and beyond it that we can never comprehend. I will never buy the argument that God doesn’t exist because as far as I am concerned, the fact that you are here and capable of reasoing why GOD doesn’t exist is proof enough that It does. There is never a point at which human intellect can excede the divine. Everything we can think or do is ENTIRELY CONTAINED within God. You can not think or reason above it because you are confined to reason within it.
My goal is to “show I am Christian by my love”. I’m not big on the whole handing out bibles and wearing purity rings thing…probably because I realize it’s ineffective nonsense. However, I would hope that no one would ever be surprised when I tell them I go to church. I hope that people will ask me why I am so kind or why I am so happy and I can have the opprotunity to tell them that it has nothing to do with me, but with an indescribable love that I feel from God. I do not what to be a hypocrite, I don’t want to be obnoxious, I don’t want to be overbearing. I just want to be able to love people because God loves them too. I want to show them that my faith isn’t about fire and brimstone. I want to show them that it isn’t about people picking who is just and who is not. I want to show them that my religion is based entirely on love and the hope that all people can be unified and find peace. I pray that I never forget that I suck and that God and my family and friends are there to hold me up.
As for the actual idea of the retreat…unplugging. There is so much in my life that I need to unplug from, but the greatest thing was the past. For this I thank Mary Lou and Foley. That speech hit home so hard I was sobbing until the end of the next speech. SOBBING. Into Erlantz’s speech about a pure heart. The two in my mind are relativly interconnected. The past…how much baggage do I have?! I didn’t realize it until I actually looked at it. I have miffed up so much in the past…so much. As for the clean heart there are so many people that I HATE…hate, hate, hate, because of what they did to me. I am so angry and sad over all of this that it has/is messing up some of the realtionships that I have in present.
I stepped back and realized that these people do not deserve to have any control over me in any respect. They have hurt me terribly in the past, but that does not mean they can control my present or my future. They DO NOT get that. I will be damned if their decicisions/my mistakes will prevent me from having happy and fullfilling relationships with others. I can’t do that to people, especially considering how the very same thing is being done to me. I have to unplug myself. Forgive. Let go. I’m never going to forget, but I have to just lay it down. It’s a pain that I can’t heal, but I don’t have to carry it anymore.
The past is the past. Honestly. What the hell can I do about the fact that Brian hurt me or Leilani isn’t a great person or I didn’t try in high school. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. So why would I sit and deny someone a relationship, quit debate, or decide not to try in college? How the hell are they linked? They aren’t. Unless I choose to link them. I can’t just get mired in all these failures…I have to move on. I have to be free and light and strip it away.
If you are so concerned with being bitter and hateful, you can’t love…and that’s what the world needs more than anything.
Mary Lou said that sometimes you have to forgive people more than once. I’ve been getting on myself for that…I have never really looked at forgivness as something you do more than once, but obviously it needs to be done.
I pray for faith that the future will be okay. I pray for the wisdom to understand that I can only take it day by day. I pray for the serenity to let go of the past, especially when it interferes with my present. After all, living for today is the most pragmatic thing to do, because it is all we actually have. The future is not guaranteed to us and the past has been spent. The present is the only thing you can hold onto and I suppose it’s the only thing worth living in.
“Life is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans.” -John Lennon
Technology. Just unplugging stuff in the literal physical sense. I need to get over waiting to text messages. I need to engage in actual conversations with people. I need to act as if what I am typing is what I am saying. I need to be able to sit in silence. I need to use music for inspiration and not as a means to avoid thinking the thoughts that are in my head. I need to be able to walk away from the computer. I need to be able to prioritize. I should be conducting myself in what I say and do online as if others were there because they are. I feel like as a generation we’ve become so detatched from the weight of our words and actions due to techonology. I want to be able to unplug and be at peace with what I hear in my head and feel in my heart.
This note is so epic. Lord. I guess I am going to stop now because I feel like no one is actually going to read all this. I feel so much better. I can’t even…it is indescribable.
I was sitting and listening to the song Scot played this morning. I lament my inability to paint/sketch, becuase the image was so vivid. I just pictured myself sitting on top of a mountain. The snow was falling so gently and the trees were a striking dark green. The snow was falling in my hair and the contrast between the black and white was poetic…it was on my eyelashes too. The amazing this is that I wasn’t cold…I just felt so warm and safe and beautiful and clean. There was a bible verse about having a heart as white as snow…that’s what I want.
I just want to BE on the mountain.
This retreat just brought me full circle. I’ve realized that I personally can not be truly happy (maybe everyone) unless I feel like I am connected to God. There is no other way to this. If you are not plugged in with God, you are detachched from all that is God’s. You are removed from nature, from others, and from yourself.
I have a lot of plugs to unplug. I have plugs to plug into other places.
Anyway. I just wanted to thank everyone that put on the retreat and attended it. I am so so so thankful that I went on this retreat instead of going to state.
So hopefully, you took something out of this rehashing of events.
Sleep well everyone.
