Lazy Creek Homeschool

Art and Photo Blog | Unschooling Portfolio | Country Life | This Mom Writes

wild (but not uncultivated) musings of a Canadian unschool mom

Home | Archives | contact

Born and Raised For It

5:35 PM - Jul. 6, 2006 - Wild Thoughts {0} - Add to the Wildness

I was taught to think critically about the world by my parents. The only rule was: Question Everything.

I remember my mother often asking me questions that forced me to evaluate not just words, but what people really meant and what their motives were. Rather than be controlled by someone else’s religious ideas, my parents directed me to explore and discover my own beliefs. However, that method was not without its pitfalls.

The problem with applying critical thinking to the spiritual realm is that you can't see it. You can't evaluate it using your five senses in a lab experiment. There are huge limitations to the amount and type of data that can be collected. People recognize the benefits of holding some sort of higher belief. But belief in what? Does it matter?

I was taught that beliefs are a personal choice. Right on, Mom and Dad. That is a liberty I still espouse today.

The thing is, within that overriding liberty, it's very easy for a culture to put limitations on the personal choices of people. The simplest way is to render certain types of information irrelevant. To place more assumed value on some types of information than others.

This is done with presuppositions. Rather than teaching just facts, society teaches you to assume what the nature of a fact is. It teaches you to assume certain parameters that exclude some information from the realm of "factual" or "useful." It even teaches you to place some types of information in the category of "hateful," "negative" or "dangerous."

Very, very few people ever stop to ask whether society is right. It's too painful an examination, and it does indeed make you feel slightly insane. That's because, generally, it also means questioning the teachings of the people you love most. It's not a matter of their agenda; it's a matter of their existence within the same fabric as the one you question.

We all go through this as we grow up. We find we disagree with our parents on deep things, like our philosophy of gender roles. We find we disagree on career choices and the wise use of money. We disagree on religion, politics and lifestyle.

Society has tried to resolve these transitions with the introduction of post-modern thinking. All truth is relative; my truth is my truth, and yours is yours.

So, wait. In other words, truth doesn't exist objectively.

Well, I found out differently. -Radical statement! Full of religious presupposition!

Actually, I found out differently before I ever had a religion. So hold on a minute before your presuppositions jump all over mine.

Random Searches For Meaning

9:23 AM - Jul. 5, 2006 - Wild Thoughts {0} - Add to the Wildness

I began by listening as a child to my grandmother’s accounts of how she and Granddad explored the world of mediums and psychics. They were hoping for contact with the spirit of Granddad's dead brother, who passed away at a relatively early age.

Grandma chose specific parameters for what she would consider evidence: Spontaneous revelation of personal details no one else could know. The psychic would have to tell her the name of the person they were looking for, what the relationship was, and other minutiae that couldn't be commonly known.

She and Granddad made a point of not reacting to the psychic’s probing or comments so as not to give anything away. At the same time, they watched how others in the audience did give away a lot of information through "tells." Their conclusion was that the whole thing was a hoax. They never did encounter a genuine medium. In this, I disagree with them. What was the reason for their lack of success in making contact with the occult, I can only speculate. It was relatively easy for me.

Grandma's approach to spirituality taught me that these matters can be subjected to critical examination. I suspect she set the tone for all my later searching. However, the other thing I learned unanimously from my family members was that the Christian religion - particularly in evangelical form - was outside the bounds of acceptable evidence.

This was learned as a presupposition. It was learned along with a smattering of data about the "church's" (i.e. Roman Catholicism's) political power and abuses of it; I learned it by the scepticism and reluctance my mother had at getting involved with the local United Church, an extreme liberal denomination.

But the stories weren't completely removed from my family - it's just that they were children's fables. My mother told me the story of Jesus, Joseph and Mary when I was very young. This resulted in me naming one of my dolls after baby Jesus - and my mother's chagrin when a visiting neighbour overheard me struggling to dress the doll. ("Jesus Christ, get your clothes on!")

Other than that, I knew very little about anything related to Christianity. I recall feeling the need to search for a spiritual identity from an early age as I learned about multiculturalism and ethnic faiths. I badgered my mother to know whether we were Christians. This question didn't sit well with her. "I don't know. I suppose we are, since we're not anything else."

However, my family has never been one to identify itself hypocritically. My mother wasn't comfortable with that designation, and I'm glad. She is not the sort of person to allow herself to be led thoughtlessly. That's probably the greatest gift my parents gave me in my unschooled early education. It was to serve me well as I went through my teen years.

The Loss of Innocence

12:29 AM - Jul. 5, 2006 - Wild Thoughts {1} - Add to the Wildness

In my early teens, I experimented in paganism and occultism. I also tried reading the Bible, but it didn’t make much sense to me. From the Gideons’ list of “Christian Virtues” in the front, all I got out of it was a whole lot of behavioural rules.I recall, with the incomparable logic of of a child, checking off those on the list I thought I could do. Somewhat, anyway. One of the ones that ate at me was "Obedience." Not a chance, baby.

In the local United Church, I also heard about how sinful we are, but there was no solution offered for the alleged guilt. I tried praying, influenced by an Anglican family we homeschooled with for a short time. I really was interested in God. I was interested in the Trinity, though I didn't understand it. I would pray and look for signs of answers to my prayers, but after awhile, I forced myself to admit that I was just making up what I wanted the answers to be.

The Christian God seemed less and less real. I concluded my mother must be right about the religious-guilt-trips-earn-money thing. I don't recall when exactly I got fed up with listening to it, but it might have been somewhere around the time a local warlock, just two years older than me, coerced me out of my virginity with extreme psychological pressure. I've struggled with that ever since on several levels, knowing it was my choice - and yet I still felt completely violated. So much so that I lay in bed that night and convinced myself the whole thing was a bad dream. I literally forgot about that boy until I encountered him again a year and a half later when I moved up to the regional high school. I remember seeing him in the hall and thinking, "He looks familiar. Do I know him?" And then it hit me.

I say all this for two reasons: Number one, teenaged girls need to know that the popular conception of losing your virginity to someone who says they really love you is horse hockey. It doesn't matter if he's kind and gentle and spiritual (in whatever way, Christian included). Even if it's not particularly traumatic, you're going to lose a piece of yourself you can never get back. The world will tell you that internal shattering is just "coming of age," "losing innocence," "growing up." Yeah, it's all that. Look at the words even the world chooses to describe it. Losing something, not gaining anything.

Number two, I strongly suspect there are a lot of women - teenaged and otherwise - who have no validation for their feelings about how they gave away their virginity. I am here to tell you, it's okay to grieve. You were made to feel that way in God's perfect design. That is the part of you that knows, deep down, that you were created for something better. To be loved with a higher love, to be honoured and cherished so much more than you were.

You may have made a bad choice, but just because you chose doesn't mean you don't get to grieve. You are allowed to feel violated. That is a right heart before God. It shows that deep within, you understand His perfect plan that one man should marry and cherish one woman for life.

I have a little experience with these things, and I'll be getting into it even more as I go on. For now, let me just say that God will give it all back to you. Place the broken pieces in His hands. Don't try to pretend to yourself or to Him that it's not really broken, or that it's only a few cracks in the finish. Let it be what it is. He loves you with the highest love.

        "A bruised reed He will not break,
        And a dimly burning wick He will not extinguish;
        He will faithfully bring forth justice.
        He will not be disheartened or crushed,
        Until He has established justice in the earth;
        And the coastlands will wait expectantly for His law."

        Thus says God the Lord,
        Who created the heavens and stretched them out,
        Who spread out the earth and its offspring,
        Who gives breath to the people on it,
        And spirit to those who walk in it,
        "I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
        I will also hold you by the hand and watch over you,
        And I will appoint you as a covenant to the people,
        As a light to the nations,
        To open blind eyes,
        To bring out prisoners from the dungeon,
        And those who dwell in darkness from the prison.

        ~Isaiah 42:3-7 (NASB)

© Copyright 2005, 2006 Lazy Creek Online. This blog content is not authorized for reproduction outside of the HomeschoolBlogger.com hosting site. Violations may be reported to Cathi-Lyn Dyck at: www.homeschoolblogger.com/Lazycreek/

Last Page Next Page