Monthly Archives: February 2015

It’s been more than ten years now since I walked away from Christianity, with fewer and fewer backwards glances as time has rolled on. But even so, the season of Lent still resonates with something deep in me. In fact, the very first post of this blog was written on the night of the first Easter Vigil I spent apart from the church when I still wasn’t sure if I had the guts to live a life apart from the thing that had defined it so thoroughly up to that point. The last several years of my Christian engagement had been deeply entrenched in the Anglican liturgical traditions, where Easter and her celebrations are paramount. And I embraced them wholeheartedly. I loved the dark, brooding Ash Wednesday services with their physical manifestation on the foreheads of the faithful. I embraced the lenten fast and self-reflection born out of abstention in the physical world. I reveled in the build up to Holy Week, moving eagerly into the emotional cycle of grief at Christ’s betrayal and death and joy at his resurrection.

I hate to define myself as anything now, but when pressed I tend to fall back on the catch-all of agnostic and certainly find myself well within the broad confines of secular humanism. I believe in science, in facts and in the redemptive power of skepticism, rational inquiry and respectful discourse. And despite having eschewed Christianity along with all of her festivals and traditions, I still find that there is a place in life for abstention and reflection. Because, as is intoned in services across the world tonight, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The phrase, credited to God as he threw Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden, and used today to remind believers of their fallen state before the perfection of their creator, ironically rings particularly true to those of us who believe neither in the first story or the second framework.

I believe that this life is all we have. We have one chance to make of it what we will, to find and give kindness, and joy, and hope to ourselves and those around us. We have one chance to make the world around us a better place, and fight against the things that make it a bad one. And when our chance is used up, to dust we shall return.

One of the first major hesitations I felt regarding a whole-hearted embrace of Christian theology came when I was confronted with the Pauline idea that all humans are, when left to themselves, depraved creatures, repositories of evil, destitute of anything good. A significant proportion of Christian thought hinges on the belief that God is the only good, and ultimately the only possible source of good in the world. All good comes from God, and can come from nowhere else. I believe that this is a dangerous way to see the world, and in particular a dangerous way to view the people in it. I firmly believe that each person has a capacity for good and a capacity for evil and that finding the balance is a fundamental piece of what it means to be human. And that learning to live with the dichotomy of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (which are problematic terms themselves) within oneself is part of the adventure and challenge of a life well lived. But this life is all we’ve got to figure out the balance, before we return to our composite elements.

For, as the venerable Carl Sagan reminded us, we are each made up of stardust, after all.

Two weeks into graduate school. Two weeks into a sudden onslaught of reading, papers, projects, assessments and stress. Some moments feel like a dive off a cliff in the dark. I’m enjoying the feeling of my heart in my throat, and the challenge ahead. I’m also terrified. The thing I’m realizing as I plunge in is that I am scared in a way I have never been scared before. Specifically, I am terrified of failing. I think it’s something akin to the realization, as an adult, that you are mortal. That you can be hurt. It’s born of a loss of that youthful certainty (despite even a rational knowledge of the truth) that you are invincible, immortal. During my undergraduate studies, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that I wouldn’t do well. Granted, I often didn’t do well, but even reality didn’t seem to phase me much. Things have changed, now, and I am finding that my inner monologue these days is one of fear, not confidence.  I am afraid of failing, and I have found myself seeing each new quiz, test, paper and project as an opportunity to let myself down rather than a chance to shine, or at least progress relentlessly forward through what is going to be plenty of challenge in the coming months and years.

Although some of this is just first-week jitters, to be sure, it is also a way of approaching the world that has been settling in, of late. It comes from dropping out of graduate school once already. It comes of not living up to the high expectations I had for myself and my life as an starry-eyed idealist over a decade ago, now.

When I started writing about running sled dogs, I decided to call the blog Overflow because overflow was something I was initially terrified to encounter on the trail, and running a dog team nearly every day was a way to force myself to face very concrete fears in a kind of metaphysical and yet very physical exercise in personal courage. And just as, when I finally ran through overflow alone and miles from home and not only survived but had a fantastic run despite being soaked and cold, I hope that this new exercise in forced fear confrontation turns into a graduate course in learning to meet every challenge, even the unwelcome ones, not with fear and anxiety, but with excitement and with hope.