Letter to a Friend, Pt. 2

__________,

I appreciate your concerns. I'm not sure how to classify my drinking problem. The e-mail I wrote was a bit too dramatic but it stems from the fact that I was still pretty drunk and embarrassed about my actions that night. I am a person that deals in extremes. I'm unhappy if I feel that I'm doing anything halfway. If I make up my mind about something I want to squeeze as much as I possibly can out of that aspect of life, whether or not it is societally considered a "vice", "fanatical", "bat-shit crazy", what have you. I don't know if that's right or wrong, but it is who I am. Drinking is simply one area of my life in which this dominant aspect of my personality is manifested. A man needs to constantly take stock of where he is, and what he is doing with his life, as he is defined by the decisions he makes and the things he dedicates his time too. I don't have a problem with drinking per se, but I have a problem with me drinking. In light of the past year, I'm pretty comfortable saying that drinking, smoking, and other such compulsive behaviors are destructive and detrimental to me as a person. They seem to consume me in a way that they do not for most people. That being said, I want to clear up a few things you said about religion.

I know faith is something that is foreign to you, that you have struggled to understand. I do not in any way think you are being offensive, nor am I offended in any way, but I guess I'd like to take an opportunity to clarify what "religion" means to me, because it permeates every aspect of my life and as someone whom I admire and respect and consider to be a close friend, I think I owe it to you to do the best I can to explain something that defines me and illuminates my character. I hope you take the time to read this, though it may be a bit wordy. I know that neither you nor I like to get too serious about anything, because life is hilarious. But this is something that I don't deal with trivially.

There is a popular conception of "religion" that many people subscribe to. Part of it is based in desperation, part of its based in intellectual laziness, maybe other parts of it are based in something more sinister, I'm not really sure. But it goes something like, "Accept Jesus and everything will be OK. The church is your friend. You won't have to think except what we tell you to think, you won't have to feel except what we tell you to feel, and you won't have to act except how we tell you to act." This is not faith, this is simply a free pass out of having to deal with the ups and downs of life, a slow suicide. This is what happens when you see pastors on television asking for alms so that they may become rich in the process of assuaging the guilty consciences of their parishoners. The sad thing is that the only thing they are guilty of is giving up on life, and these pangs of doubt come from rare moments of clarity, not from so-called sinful behavior. This is the cultural, American Jesus. The Prozac Jesus. Say a prayer and excuse yourself from the rigors of being a freethinking individual.

There seems to be an implication in your e-mail that this is what you understand the Christian faith to be all about. You use words like "helpful", and "useful" in reference to it. This is a popular view, but it is shallow and inaccurate. (I'm not accusing you of being shallow, just misinformed). There is little to no correlation between my drinking habits and my faith in God. You may think I'm blowing smoke, and you're entitled to that opinion, but for the most part I think you're right; except I'll say that it's more like 100% of the time that religion won't fix your problems. I beleive in God, and more specifically the Christian God, because the worldview of the Bible presents the most effective working model for what makes the world run and why it's so fucked up. It doesn't solve any problems, but it explains why there are problems and illuminates a spiritual source for all of the worlds evils. I don't beleive you can contend with shit on either a personal or public level if you don't understand it's source.

The heart of the gospel is that people are fucked up; they are fucked up because from the first they want to make Gods of themselves and created objects. They trade permanence and power (God) for something less (anything else) and worship it by making it the center of their lives. For me, I tend to make an idol of appetitive things; sex, drugs, (and rock n' roll). For others it's money, vanity, power, fame, laziness, what have you...they trade a full conception of the world, a world in line with how it was created to exist for transitory, fleeting, powerless things. And this is our nature. We fall out of harmony with our Creatorat and his greatest creation (humanity) by chasing after and accepting less than than that which was intended for us. So, thus, the Bible is not a moral code; it explains the order of things as God intends them, what life will look like as the product of our faith. And these things bring joy, although to acheive them is often hard and incurs some trials and pain and all that shit. I am not a Christian because I do or don't drink, or curse, or fuck strange women, but these are things that I desire less and less as I desire God more and more, and He conforms my heart to His will, so that I may be all that I am and all that I can possibly. In essence, I am not Steven Waye as I was intended to be without faith, apart from God...I am a betrayal to my own created potential.

This may seem foolish and be meaningless to you, but this is what I believe. I have a rational basis for my beliefs, and evidence to back up my belief that jesus existed and said the things that he said. I don't mean to preach to you; my goal isn't to convert you. It is simply to give you and those I love and am close to a more correct picture of what I beleive and what makes me who I am.

-sw

A Gift

To be loved, because I am
The same as you
Is to inherit the love
We were born into.

Watch it descend, like a dove,
A holy gift.
As I grasp at tar-filled straws,
Walk on painted stilts.

Make me be with silver claws
Wrap me up in golden gauze
I'll never leave
Cause at your side
I'm taken as I AM.

If you knew how much I love you, just the thought of you, I think that you would let me hold your hands, so small in mine like a child's.
Your feet on my feet, laughing, giddy with your newfound competence and power.

Dear God, how I must break Your Heart every day of my life.

So hold me, I beg You.
I offer nothing but my own innocent, starry-eyed wonder.

And, my dearest, when you know my heart, we'll both understand love as completely as we children ever could. When you put away your fear, you'll see that every secret corner of your body has been mine from the start. I own you with my eyes, my lips, and every step you've ever taken on the sidewalks we both tread.

I'm not sure about what weight to lend to sentimentality. Because, I swear, sometimes life feels so beautiful and weighty that I just want to cling to it and never let go and sink to the bottom and be eaten by whatever strange fishes gnash at my frail body. And that makes little to no sense. To acheive the ideal of pure untarnished reason is to miss out on the intrinsic gift. To love without being captive to love, to hate without being destructive or destroyed, to reserve exaltation for that which deserves to be exalted, is the only way I can choose to live.

I love you dearly, all the shards of glass that I see between the cracks of every broken mirror. I hope you can see that too. My heart is breaking.

Be

Allusions;
Literary middlemen,
Crutches for adolescent reason.

Just cut to the fucking chase.

Tell your own story,
Don't be an echochamber
Reverberating with words you don't own.
It's no use standing on the shoulders of giants
If you're conversing with clouds.

To love
Is to live,
Giving others permission
To do the same.
To own,
To say "I",
To take what's yours ,
So that others can see,
More plainly
What is theirs,
And own it too;
To make it visible
To you.