Edited out of an email, because I thought it wasn't necessary or appropriate. (Or: Publicizing My Disillusionment, Possible Retractions To Come)

All the dorm shenanigans I’ve heard of aren’t nice. Long-term-disillusionment-prompting. Drop-out inducing. Lots of people getting stomped on, and the people who do the stomping bite their lips and willfully-don’t/claim-not-to care. Little enclaves of hurting humans in their communities of trauma, each a tornado agitating and worsening the tornadoes around them. Life is messy. Nobody promised us a rose garden. I wish I remembered that book better. I read it at a very anxious time in my life. Does that ever happen to you? Where you read a book during a phase when you’re fraught with anxiety, and there’s a moment of, well...my eyes were -directed- toward the page...

I digress enormously.

It’s nice to think that not everyone has that dorm experience. Or at least doesn’t let those experiences color the whole time they lived in such a place.

I’m not Hagar, of course, but I think if I were Hagar, I’d be excruciatingly tempted to say, “I served my purpose. I let those people violate my body. Now please let me go somewhere else. Who died and made you God anyway?” (Then again, I’m the kind of person who digresses into whole paragraphs of scathing sentence fragments regarding dormitories.) To which, in the spirit of anachronism (a word which here only applies depending on who you ask), Jesus might interject, “I died, and I was already God.” You could illustrate different understandings of the divinity of Jesus with how he might answer that question. Docetism: “I died. But I’m not God, God just used me as a vessel. And forsook me.* If I lived, I’d take a time machine, join Hagar and bail to somewhere where the gay bars are better and it’s not illegal to smoke.”

Of course, this is nothing I’d include in a blogpost. Wouldn’t want people to get The Wrong Idea.


* Joke’s on me. I’m pretty sure this isn’t Docetism. I forgot the name of this particular strain of theology as well as the people who believe(d) it. And if it does turn out to be some strain of Docetism after all, the joke is dually on me, and I owe you a soda for my shoddy and semi-shameless scholarship.

(see post title)