Process theology sensory experience free-write

In class today, we spent about 20 minutes outside having "follow the leader" sensory experiences -- shoes off in the grass, listen to a water pipe, feel the sunlight on your face, drag a hand over tree bark. And yet the most surprising sense was putting my bare feet back on the classroom carpet. I love bare feet. I loved my feet on the warm grass and on the sidewalk and on the cool, wet grass and on the rough brick. I live my best life barefoot. When you don't need to wear shoes, you are inseparable from the universe. You are home. You are on the front lawn or in the pool or at the beach or in the comfort of actual indoor home. The temperature is such that you need not cover your feet.

Separate from the feet feelings I loved the hearing the most. Listen to water rush through a pipe. Crinkle a plastic bag. Listen to the wind whip through a bright orange traffic cone. I was surprised to hear the water running so loudly through the pipe. I didn't want to put the cone down -- you know, the old "hear the ocean" thing. I enjoyed most all the things that remind me of homeness. If only there'd ben sand. Or water! There sort of was water. We ended  by gazing out over the bay. Every time I do that, I hear "we live in a beautiful world...yeah we do, yeah we do." As little as I dig Coldplay, that song has stayed with me since the video yearbook senior year.

Homeness.

Boy, you're gonna carry that weight a long time.

Yesterday, in Process Theology, which I think is going to be my favorite class ever, we talked about God as relational. And also that our feelings are not just our individual feelings, but they are the feelings between us and those with whom we are in relationship. And that it is our most intimate relationships in which we are our most real selves – including our ugliest selves, and most hurt selves. Our professor talked about how process thought has space for tragedy that is not found in other Christian theologies. And that it holds loss in a way that others fundamentally cannot. This is because losses are never seen as errors God could have avoided, but rather events in the relationship between us and God that we will carry with us on our way to becoming. And just as we are becoming, God is becoming. God is none of the “omnis” of our dogma. God is in process, just as we are in process.

And I really dug that. I really held on to the part about being our ugliest selves with those with whom we are most intimate. Because there are days when I am angry and hurt and know that I am wrong. And it is in those instances where I am just terrible that I just want to sit with the person who will look at me and get that. And when everything is shit with you and I can just feel it radiating from you that you hate everything and especially me, I am the one with whom you should sit.

I cannot do or say anything that will make it better. I cannot do or say anything that will make it right. I cannot do or say anything that will alleviate this, your deepest hurt. But of all people, I am the one who knows that. And who knows that you know that.

And in that same hurt, we can sit with God and not have to throw it at God or at each other anymore. We can just carry it with us on our way.

I carry you with me on my way, you know. At the same time that you carry me with you. Isn’t it nice to admit that?