Aug. 6th, 2018 11:22 am
Who ya gonna call?
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muckefuckIf I were superstitious, I might suspect the house was haunted. A couple nights running, the cat has done that curious thing where he suddenly tenses up and stares out the door of the bedroom as if there's a potential threat. Since we've actually had rats invade before, I've been leaping up to check it out but there's never anything there. Once I even circled around and looked between his ears because I read in a book when I was a child that you can see ghosts that way. (It never worked when I was a child either.)
Ghosts are on my mind because it seems like my widows' support groups are full of chatter about them again. Probably it's no more than usual but it's just annoying me more because I've been mopey lately. I'm beginning to acknowledge that, despite what I say, my annoyance may be motivated less by concern and more by spite. Yes, I have seen some ugly examples of grieving widows upset by what supposed mediums have or haven't told them, but my approach in general to spirituality is still, "Whatever gets you through the day."
So I think my animus is more selfish than that. I think it's really, "Why should you get this potential comfort when I don't?" One of the spacier starchildren recently commented, "You just have to believe!" In the parlance of our age, "That's not how any of this works." You can't will belief. And once it's been sufficiently undermined, it's never impossible to go back to it. I can't ever imagine believing in a personal god again, let alone returning to the naïve faith of my childhood. Once I left the milieu where it was simply taken as a given by everyone around me, it quickly became unsustainable--and I wouldn't return to that milieu even if it existed.
Ghosts are on my mind because it seems like my widows' support groups are full of chatter about them again. Probably it's no more than usual but it's just annoying me more because I've been mopey lately. I'm beginning to acknowledge that, despite what I say, my annoyance may be motivated less by concern and more by spite. Yes, I have seen some ugly examples of grieving widows upset by what supposed mediums have or haven't told them, but my approach in general to spirituality is still, "Whatever gets you through the day."
So I think my animus is more selfish than that. I think it's really, "Why should you get this potential comfort when I don't?" One of the spacier starchildren recently commented, "You just have to believe!" In the parlance of our age, "That's not how any of this works." You can't will belief. And once it's been sufficiently undermined, it's never impossible to go back to it. I can't ever imagine believing in a personal god again, let alone returning to the naïve faith of my childhood. Once I left the milieu where it was simply taken as a given by everyone around me, it quickly became unsustainable--and I wouldn't return to that milieu even if it existed.
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