Love & Marriage

Unificationists have arranged marriages. This has become increasingly flexible in recent years but even now anything remotely romantic or sexual is still a martial topic. Growing up, while sexuality within marriage was greatly celebrated, absolutely any romantic contact before you got married was nothing short of adultery. Dating before you got married was being unfaithful to your future spouse. That was literal, without a shred of exaggeration. And getting into another relationship if your spouse died? That's still a bit iffy. Marriage is eternal and while it may be understandable to re-marry if your spouse dies young, it's probably going to cause some problems in the afterlife and should be avoided if at all possible.

The only redeeming thing I can say about it is that it applied equally to both boys and girls, but that still isn't much comfort when trying to date for the first time in your mid to late 20s. I can also attest that it does work for some people. My parents have had a pretty good marriage and by brother and his wife are good together and there are many couples it has worked out for. It just sure as hell didn't work for me.

I never actually got married but was engaged three times. My first kiss was when I was about 24 and was with the second guy I was engaged to. Later on when I started dating I had my second first kiss. He apologized for being too timid to kiss me on the first date. I told him not to worry about it and neglected to mention that his definition of 'timid' was a truly alien concept to me. I also spent the rest of the evening wondering if I had remembered to close my eyes. It seemed ridiculous that you could forget to do that but I think I did. 

Dating isn't a completely alien culture. Unificationists aren't raised out in the desert somewhere where we churn our own butter and crochet bible quotes for fun. I grew up with TV and movies and went to public school and had "secular" friends but being around it and actually doing it yourself are very different experiences. I was nervous and it took a while to get over the awkward initial forays into the dating world and start dating in earnest. But I've always had a snarky sense of humor and been very comfortable hearing and making 'inappropriate' jokes so I don't think a lot of guys picked up on the total lack of dating history. I think I successfully pulled off just coming across as a little weird. 

At least, it works that way in the beginning. But then there's that transition point from going out to actually dating. I suck at that transition point, and it took a while for me to even realize it. The main reason? Sex. Being a virgin in your mid/late 20s is not something guys expect and it wasn't information I was dying to share. I don't know why I avoided even talking about it so much. I guess I thought I'd bring it up when things got further along but I now realize I probably missed the signals that he was trying to move things further along and he just thought I was ignoring him. Looking back, given the fact that I'm not religious and have pretty liberal stances on most things, I can't imagine how else they could have interpreted it without outright guessing at the truth. My first attempts at dating had a tendency to start out well and just fizzle away and that probably has a lot to do with it. 

I still don't know how to correct for it though, the first relationship that actually made it into the relationship phase did so in part because the guy did just guess. He had a very forward personality and he just flat out asked when he thought I was responding strangely. The relationship ended a while later for other reasons but, as painful as that was, I was actually a little excited to have something go badly for reasons totally unrelated to my Moonie awkwardness. 

Bottom line, this transition still sucks a lot and I feel like by the time I catch up to a normal place in the learning curve I'll be a shriveled old woman with facial hair. I know that's largely irrational and I'm an intelligent person who's well adjusted by just about any standard. I just happen to lack experience in this particular area of life. Unfortunately, just lacking experience in this particular are of life happens to fucking suck. But as a rational human being I know that complaining about something like that makes it suck more rather than less and I just need to suck it up and keep going if I want it to be any better.

On the other hand, venting online can also be a healthy outlet on occasion so I'm just going to say that this sucks a few more times and then go so something else. This sucks, Sucks, SUCKS, sucks, Sucks, SUCKS, sucks, Sucks, SUCKS, suuuuuuuuuuuuuucks!!!! Not the most grown up paragraph of my life but whatever. 

Happy Retirement

My dad has always been a bit quirky and anxious. Late 2010 and early 2011 were somewhat stressful for him and the family and he seemed a little off. The government contract with the company my dad worked for had run out and he had been let go. He had found another job but was let go from that as well, though he never fully explained why. He was more distant and nervous and his little coping quirks were showing up a lot more.

As it went on, it got worse and more difficult to explain and after my sister-in-law's birthday party we became seriously concerned. He wasn't able to figure some basic things out and his mannerisms seemed very off. A friend of the family had recently suffered a stroke and my mother wondered if he could have had a mini-stroke of some kind that was affecting him. That was the worse case scenario in our minds and we hoped it was just anxiety due to starting yet another new job and that some medication would help.

The doctor he went to see was fairly concerned and he was referred to a neurologist who would eventually refer him to another specialist. During these weeks he was let go from his job again and this time it was clearly because he could not pick up on how to do things. We were getting more and more nervous about what kind of answer we were going to get from the doctor. But as worried as she was, my mother still didn't seem to grasp the reality of the situation. She began helping him update his resume again and look for work. When she told me that I sat down with her and told her it had to stop. He clearly couldn't work and it was time to sit down and look at how to deal with that financially, but not matter what, she needed to tell him it was okay to retire. It should happen now before it came from the doctor. That was the first time I saw a look on her face that I was going to end up seeing a lot of. It's a look someone gets when you point out something painfully obvious and there's a moment of surprise before it silently blends into clarity without any further discussion. So we got some balloons, a cake, some 'happy retirement' cards and party favors and the family went out to dinner and had a little celebration. Shortly after he was diagnosed with Frontotemporal Dimentia.


 More on Frontotemporal Dimentia 

A Former Moonie

I grew up as a Unificationist and remained a pretty devout one into my mid 20s. I'll turn 30 this December so the truth is I haven't spent much time not being a Moonie and I'm not yet entirely sure who I am without it. All I know, is that it's part of my past. It will always be part of who I am but I can no longer define myself by it. The many changes in my life that have occurred in the past couple years have already left me asking a lot of questions about life and the world and, now that Father Moon is dying, I've been reflecting on these things even more. No one is sure how long he has left but it is unlikely he will last more than a few months and may die at any time.

My family members are all still members and are having a range of reactions to this. None of them ever really had the 'personality driven' relationship with the faith. Who Father Moon is has (of course) been important but their relationship to the religion but it was always centered more on it's philosophy and community rather than the man himself. I was on the extreme end of that. I was an active member, a youth minister, and even went to Korea to allow Father Moon to choose a spouse for me. But I never had a type of faith where I saw him as so amazing as to be connected to the divine. I certainly never saw the man as infallible.  But I did all of it anyway. I did it because of my belief in the values the Church had taught me and because of the meaning the religious philosophy had to me. I believed in the faith- the ideas and ideals it was made of, and therefore I was willing to believe in him. I think people outside the Church would undoubtedly be surprised how common that is for members. They cannot imagine adhering to such a strange religion without an unquestioning belief in the man at the center of it. But I did, and the stereotypical doting star-struck member is not as common as one would think. 

I also did not 'break' with the Church as many would assume. There was not fighting, no accusations, no condemning, no renouncing. None of that. My schedule and my ideas simply became less centered on the Church over time and eventually reached a point where I had to ask myself if I was still a member. The answer was no. I don't reject all the Church stands for but I no longer agreed with enough of it to be a believer. I think it has potential to do good in the world but not much more than any other faith or organization. There are aspects of it I am comfortable supporting and aspects I cannot reconcile with my intellect or my conscience.  

I have a fondness for the faith I could never have for any other, but I have an equally deep frustration with it. It was a massive influence on my childhood and nothing brought me more peace or more pain. 

My mother holding me in her lap (Right Side) attending a meeting with Father and Mother Moon (Left Side)

Time

I have a decent self esteem when I look at my personal attributes and potential, and a devastating sense of loss when I look at my level of accomplishment. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the decisions I've made in my past and how my life would have turned out differently. I run countless scenarios in my head about how things would have gone if I had just done this or not done that. I also spend a lot of time thinking about how I will be different in the future, when my circumstances change. I will be able to get my life going when thing X in my life is gone or when thing Y comes along. I run the simulations in my head and prepare for those days and those decisions. 

And then..... then I sit back and look at what those two things have in common. What do different choices in the past and preparing for hypotheticals in the future have in common that lets them be such a huge difference between boundless success and obscure mediocrity? Neither of them happens now. They are the past and the future and have little to do with my choices today. They are somehow special and different than the drudgery of the common moment I live in. 

It seems that I have tremendous power over life at any time other than today. I can have amazing influence on my own life and others when I'm not here, not now. At least that's how I perceive it, and if you really think about it, it's total nonsense. All that exists is now. The past was just a different now you made mediocre choices in and the future will feel no different than today, because it will just be another unremarkable today when it arrives. 

You notice the same pattern in thinking in all people about all things- not just personal issues. Some people look to the past as a glittering paradise lost to us somehow and at risk of slipping away forever. Others lament being born in this time and would give anything to see the wonders of the future. Both the past and the future (whether you are optimistic or pessimistic about them) seem infinitely more exciting and powerful. But if we are rational, if we are realistic, we must begrudgingly acknowledge that neither conception is likely to be true. When we dig around the past we find cracks in the facade and if we examine a single moment of history as we would examine a current moment (without the benefit of hindsight), it is just as jumbled and can feel just as stagnant as the now. 

And if we look at the future realistically? No matter what set of ideas become the new norm, no matter what progress is made, human nature will remain much the same. We may become better or worse as a whole but if we're being truly honest with ourselves, the overall condition of humanity is not what gets in the way of our personal progress in the now. We are frustrated because everything is so damn complicated and everything and everyone seems to be going a thousand different directions and will not cooperate with the goals we are trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, there will always be a huge diversity of ideas and conflicting goals. Humans are, above all, social creatures and we will always be doomed to the frustrations of our mutual dependence on each other - these strange creatures that have their own minds and feelings and desires that are too complex to fit neatly together. If they did, if our minds became so similar, our goals so one directional, and our feelings so uniform that cooperation was not supremely frustrating then we would have lost much of our value as a species. If either humanity or the world becomes simple enough to fit into the concerns and goals of one person then we are totally screwed. 

The world will always be bigger than us and too complex for everyone to focus on what we are focused on. Life will never be simple enough for everyone to be concerned with only a small agreed on set of goals or to fit their differing priorities neatly together. I don't say this out of pessimism. It is just an acknowledgement of a trick our brain plays on us constantly. In everything from movies to the state of society our brains are almost designed for past and future idealization and frustration with the present. The reason for this is the following perception:

The problem with that perception?

Slightly closer to accurate perception:














The problem is, in many ways, the human brain has only one scale and we stretch or compress things to fit it. We perceive the now, the past, and the future to be things that can be compared side by side. The problem is that even if you are only looking at a tiny portion of the past it is still HUGE. The same goes for the future. The present is an amazingly finite thing, but it also everything that currently exists.  The past and the future are enormous and composed of many many presents. Our brain is not good at perceiving things on scales so large and so small so it just picks a size. As we stand back to look at another time and take in the whole picture the detail is lost. The details and "irrelevant" data that fills any current moment blend together into something much simpler and grand.

When we look at the big picture of the past, or our vision of the future we see something epic and exciting. Something full of meaning. What we see when we look at the present is an endless sea of meaningless details. I becomes easy to idealize the past and future. And then we can imagine that our impact on either would be greater than anything we could do in the stagnant chaos around us now.

Even when looking at something so small as our own lifespan we do this. We see our youth as a whole, comparable to our present, but holding much more power over our life. Even our own past is composed of many many 'current' moments and it is rare that any one of them really had more power than the one we inhabit now. Of course that one moment could have changed the course of events and lead to a vastly different present, but we tend to think of JUST that moment and not all of the ones after it we would have had to make different choices. To make different choices now and in the next 'now' and the next would add up to just as much influence. We can't take back the past but our control on our present is no weaker than it was in the past and it won't get any stronger in the future.

Religion and all that jazz

I really don't understand religion a lot of the time. Not because I believe that suffering in the world precludes the possibility of a loving God but because of the incomprehensible way many religious people combine those two factors in their personal belief system. So much of what I see of Christianity especially has to do with God being a personal guardian and caretaker of sorts. I am constantly seeing the attitude of "if God closes a door He opens a window" or "It will be okay in the end, if it's not okay it's not the end" or constant references to trusting that what appears to be pain and suffering is really just part of a plan where you will be happy in the end.

However, it seems impossible to deny that this is not the case for many many people. There are undeniably  devout people who suffer miserable circumstances all of their lives, people who never lost faith in God who die alone and in misery. There are so many cases where there is clearly no window for the door that closed and the end came when things were clearly not okay.

There are two different reactions to this from the faithful. One is that it is all part of God's plan. The second option is that those injustices are due to the failure of human beings and that God could not prevent such things without robbing us of free will. Both can be rational explanations and do not defy logic in and of themselves, but the behavior of those that believe in those explanations confuses me to no end.

If you are a follower of the first explanation (that unspeakable, permanent suffering can be part of God's plan) then I do not understand the quotes and sayings about trusting that your life will get better. Perhaps God's plan will involve you becoming happy in the end, but perhaps not. There seems to be a thick level of denial that God's plan could ever be bad for you personally. But if God loves everyone equally and if many faithful have never received happiness on earth then that may very well be your fate too. This explanation strips faith of almost all comfort and sense of safety. God is not a caretaker, but a force trying to bring the universe to some divine end, sometimes at the expense of all earthly happiness for some of His children. Given the possibility of heavenly comfort and reward and the greater good assumed to be accomplished by that earthly suffering I can accept that this could be compatible with a loving and just God. I just don't understand His follower's attitude and behavior if that is indeed the case. I could understand this explanation if adherents did not seem to equate absolute faith if God with absolute faith that their life will turn out for the better. With this type of belief, absolute faith in God would mean the very real possibility that your life will turn out terribly no matter how you live your life or how much you believe. It will be for a greater purpose you don't understand, but it may still be horrible. Believers are behaving in a very contradictory way every time they assure someone that a situation will end well if they have faith and let God work in their lives.

The other explanation for extreme suffering is that it is not part of God's plan, but is rather caused by human failings. Here again, faith is stripped of it's comfort and safety because if God could not prevent others from suffering due to human created conditions, you are no different. There may be ways God can help but there may not be. Again, the saying that God will open a window or that it will turn out okay in the end if you just have faith is rendered a truth only true for some. Again, this does not preclude the possibility of a loving God, but it again makes the behavior of many believers nonsensical. You cannot just "let go and let God" and trust in him as they advocate. You certainly can maintain faith of God and in His love for you, but much of the outcome becomes the responsibility of human beings and of yourself. Also, if the unspeakable suffering of others is not God's plan then the lack of attention to fighting such conditions in the world is inexcusable. If God's children are suffering and dying in ways he never intended, how man one prioritize anything over the pursuit of social justice in the world?

What I see is the subconscious belief that we are special. That those that suffer are somehow different than yourself and those you are close to. God's plans are different for those types of people or that the human caused suffering they endure just isn't that bad somehow. It's out of your control but not God's fault either.

I can understand believing in God, but I simply do not understand most religions and most of their followers. There are some within those religions who show the sobered attitude and sense of urgency one would expect given the world view they adhere to, but they seem so rare and there seem to be just as many non-Christian or non-religious people with their dedication to the world.

I don't think religion is a bad thing and I don't think a belief in God is irrational. But when I hear someone say that everything will be okay or that I need to keep faith and in God's plan for my life, I simply cannot take them seriously, not even by measuring their advice against their own beliefs rather than my own.

And we're back....

Relationships and jobs have come and gone but I'm going to try once more. Promises have been made and I need a change so blog I shall again. I wish I'd kept it up during all that time because the times we're too busy for this kind of thing are the times that are actually interesting. I must remember that.