On Podcasting and Chaplaincy.
When I was young, I briefly and quietly considered becoming a priest. I wasn’t serious about it. I liked the idea of a life of service and I thought that being a priest somehow meant that you had mastered temptation. I was always buried in books and I thought that a life divorced from temporal day to day dramas and gossip and bullshit would be a pretty ideal way to live.
Over time I became a sort of agnostic atheist. I was no longer sure that there was a God, or if there Gods, or if there was nothing at all. A bang, a flash, a chemical reaction. They all seemed equally viable and to some degree still do.
I’m really interested in the human condition and in my brain I was still searching for something. I studied politics as a way of studying human organization. Why do we come together in the ways we do? What pulls us apart? Where does hate originate, or envy, or compassion? Can love really be a guiding principle of any society or are humans too basic and beastly? I read Nietschze and understood the dangers of nihilism. Avoiding that was paramount and not just because nihilists might steal your rug (“It brought the room together,” said Jeff Lebowski).
Deep pain and suffering, the kind that leaves you hollowed out and bawling, inconsolable and lost, the kind that makes hard drugs seem like a completely reasonable choice, is unfathomable to the uninitiated. It opens up a chasm in your soul. It’s easy to live in that forever.
In the larger sense of it, while my suffering was very real, it merely peeled back the curtain enough for me to see inside. I’m still alive with all (most) of my faculties. What about people who lose everything? What about people in concentration camps who lost every member of their family? What about random acts of abuse, assault, torture, and murder? What about the 20 million Russians killed by Stalin, or the estimated 50 million Chinese who died during the long march?
To say nothing about Native Americans, who lost millions of people (maybe a lot more) and nearly their entire culture. Their history was washed away with a quick scrubbing that barely lasted a couple centuries. The inclination for humans to create atrocity is so astounding that most of us try to turn a blind eye to it. We pretend it doesn’t exist, or that it’s not that bad. We don’t raise our children in a way that prepares them at all because we are unprepared. Then it lands on our doorstep. It always lands on our doorstep.
Recovering from my pain is still sometimes a daily struggle for me, even this many years into it. Reminding myself that I’m not any individual action, but the total sum of my parts, helps console me on the tough days. On the even harder days I have to remind myself that’s a universal, not an individual rule. I have to remind myself to apply it to all people.
When I was deep in my own struggle I started thinking of the priesthood again for the first time in a long time. It sort of made me chuckle to be honest. I’m anything but pious and the version of me that exists today really can’t stand rules or being told what to do or nearly anything that limits my basic daily freedom. Still, I’ve read most of the Bible. I know the Gospels decently well, I remember the four noble truths of Buddhism and know that Hindus have something like 38,000 Gods. I’m well enough versed in the Ancient Greek myths and St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. I care deeply about people. You can’t stop anyone from suffering, but you can listen and give them the tools to put their experience in context. You can listen. We live in a lonely world, maybe sometimes people just need an ear.
I thought about social work, but these days it feels way too woke in all the wrong ways. I thought about becoming a counselor. A few years ago I stumbled upon a chaplaincy program. I really liked the idea. I enrolled in the program, but I do not have the deep patience that seems necessary for such a vocation. I was liked well enough, but my lack of patience for bullshit was not. I raised my hackles when we were given a test that proved we were all secret racists, even though that test had been discredited. We opened every class talking in a circle about our life that week. Nearly one entire class was dominated by a fellow student who told an incredibly long story about him and his new girlfriend and their trip to Vermont and how they came across a snake lying dead on the road and how he pulled over and gave it a proper funeral and could feel the snake’s spirt leave it’s body and he knew he gave it comfort.
Seriously, we had to hear about this for like an hour and a half. I really liked the guy, but life is short and that’s time I’ll never get back. I couldn’t get over the fact that I was paying real money to hear him talk about the damn snake. We weren’t learning anything, we certainly weren’t learning how to be chaplains. Maybe we were learning to patiently listen as people rattled off about nothingness just to hear themselves speak. Even Jesus wouldn’t have put up with that. He had feet to wash and sermons to give on mounts and temptations to thwart and a destiny to fulfill.
He had shit to do. So did I.
Then, in pretty quick order, there was a mother who needed a nurse as she healed from injuries. There were businesses that needed to be run and sold. There were expansion plans to be scrapped and buildings that needed to be sold and debt that needed to be managed. There was a farm to be bought, two homes to be packed, the consolidation of so many lives and people and dogs and kids and more pain and major marital issues and arguments to be had and cars that needed constant repair and and and and……
It’s life right? Life as an adult. Life as a real person living in the real world. Before the chaplaincy program I felt like I was on the correct path, that I was meant to spend the rest of my life helping people in deep and soulful ways. In the time since I’ve often felt internally off balance. I’ve felt myself drift from whatever spiritual zeitgeist had seized me. I’ve been floundering a little, without a driving internal purpose. I don’t do well in that place.
I hope all of you reading this take some time and listen to the MAINESPLAINER PODCAST. I’ve struggled to come up with an elevator pitch or a three sentence description of why I’m doing this. It feels like a living chaplaincy in a way. I feel like I’ve lived a pretty unique life thus far. I’ve had a chance to meet and befriend thousands of people from every walk of life. I’ve suffered and struggled, but I’ve also seen the sunrise from so many mountain tops and experienced profound joy and I’ve lived in the woods for months at a time and I once sang “Daylight come and me Wanna Go Home” with half a dozen friends while drunkenly wandering the dangerous back streets of New Brunswick, New Jersey at 3 a.m. I’ve eaten dinner on a yacht bathed in beautiful moonlight. I’ve slept on park benches and on beaches in Portugal. I’m pretty sure that I was cased by Russian intelligence and I a few years ago I stumbled into the middle of a CIA op at a hotel bar in New Orleans, but those are all different stories for a different day.
My point is that I’ve gotten to do so many things that have brought me insight and joy. I’ve gotten to know a lot of people who have profoundly changed me. Nearly everyone has suffered and struggled. Nearly every human alive has had moments of bliss. Most people in the world have experienced friendship and many have experienced love.
We have moved so far away from some of the core fundamental meaning behind so much of this in the past twenty years. Rates of anxiety and depression and isolation are through the roof. People feel alone. More importantly, they feel lonely, misunderstood, and unheard. When people feel that way, they are forced inward. If they turn too far inward, many of them turn a little crazy. Others find enlightenment. It’s often a thin line between the two.
The podcast is my attempt to shine some light into the dark corners. It’s my attempt to force feed you some deeper meaning. It’s my attempt to prove to all of you once and for all that when you peel back the covers it doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor, if you’re black or white, if you’re straight or gay. It doesn’t matter because at the end of the day we are all human. We are all on the same moral journey. Here we are, hanging out, temporarily inhabiting some decaying meat suits, stuck to a rock simply because it’s spinning at exactly the right speed. A rock that is chock full of an explosive that could extinguish nearly all life in the course of an hour. A rock that could fly into the forever abyss at any given time with very little warning.
We are united in our humanity.
There is a whole lot more that we have in common than many of us realize or want to admit. I fear that the time to really understand this is running short. There isn’t a lot left of our trust in each other my friends.
It’s time for you to dig in.
And it’s time for me to get to work.
Open you heart.
Open your eyes.
Open yourself.
And never forget that enlightened people should always aim for enlightenment.
Love,
Tim