Did I mention that sometimes I feel stuck. Stuck in my habits and distractions. I’m writing this on a fast Sunday. It’s 1pm now, I haven’t eaten since yesterday evening. I rarely make it to 24 hours, the time allotted for fasting, in fact I can’t remember the last time I did it – on my mission? I really like eating. Giving up food is difficult.

I have a phone in my pocket and 20 tabs open on my browser, two of them open to Facebook. I’m a member of a few different Facebook groups and I literally just posted something in one of the groups, and I see there’s a notification up. It’s taking all of the will power I have not to interrupt this post to check it.

In my church, we are asked to give up food and drink for a 24 hour period the first Sunday in the month. We give what we would have spent on food to the poor as a fast offering. We are encouraged to give even more generously as we have means to do so. Linking feelings of hunger to donations to the poor is no accident. There are people hungry because they have no food to eat. Once a month, we are asked to voluntarily come to know what that feels like. We are also asked to pray and direct our fast toward a specific purpose. This time around I’m asking for help with my addictions.

Now, I’m not all that interested in the technical definition of addiction. There’s a debate going on in communities I’m not a part of about whether sex addiction even exists, for example. I’m assuming there’s a debate about other types as well. Can I be clinically addicted to food? Exercise? Work? Again, not interested. I’m talking about addiction in the broadest sense of the word, in a way that likely includes most everyone. Because I think we live in the age of addiction and distraction. And I think it’s keeping me, individually, and all of us collectively, from really experiencing life, reaching our potential, and accomplishing what we could otherwise accomplish.

Or maybe the one thing we actually need to accomplish while we have our bodies is to learn how to really live in them.

I’m making my way through a collections of essays written by an author whose ideas have become somewhat of an obsession of mine, Adam Miller’s, The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace. From his chapter, Watching:

The ease and user-friendliness of TV comes with real costs. TV offers an existential loan that is riddled with hidden fees and backloaded with balloon payments. “As a Treat, my escape from the limits of genuine experience is neato. As a steady diet, though, it can’t help but render my own reality less attractive (because in it I’m just one Dave, with limits and restrictions all over the place), render me less fit to make the most of it (because I spend all my time pretending I’m not in it) and render me ever more dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasent.” (Quote from “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll never Do Again: Essays and Arguments: New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1997.)

Wallace was at his peak writing in the 1990’s, and at the time, the average American was watching on average six hours of TV per day. I’m sure, the number of hours of actually watching our furniture has dropped since then, but only because we’ve replaced it with different virtual experience pouring in at us from the web.

From the chapter, titled “Assassins”:

An addiction moves from benign to malignant when, like a cancer, the addiction starts to spread and repurpose life for its own sake rather than being one part of that life. When the addiction acquires an entrenched, institutional, bureaucratic aspect that displaces the self and cares for little more than its own preservation and extension, then the head has begun to metastasize. The key moment is when the addiction becomes circular, when the addiction starts offering itself as a solution to the very problems it’s causing. If you drink because you’re angry and disappointed and drinking in turn makes you even more angry and disappointed, then the circle has closed. “What looks like the cage’s exit is actually the bars of the cage.” The addiction is ramping up. Your pursuit of transcendence is robbing you of transcendence. “In a case such as this,” Marathe warns, “you become the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage.”  (Quotes From Infinite Jest)

So what do we do about our addictions and distractions? How can we learn to live with our bodies. Here are some changes I want to make.

First I want to get enough sleep, at least eight hours. There is so much institutional and societal pressure not to do so. Not only must we succeed, we must succeed at everything and we need to do everything. I have my kids, I want to be a good father. I have my job, I want to do well at that. And to do well at that, I need to be continuously learning on my own time, and of course be working on my own projects outside of work. I have my church. 6:30 AM meetings on Sunday that extend right through the block and beyond. The list continues. Much of this comes at the expense of sleep as activities get pushed into the late hours of night even as my morning obligations stay firmly fixed.

If I don’t get enough sleep, I’m not as sharp or engaged. I find myself sleeping during church services rather than really listening to the speaker, with an open heart. I’m not as focused on my job, more prone to distractions. I’m not as smart. My brain is not working through the abstract thought required to program a computer at a high level. Getting enough sleep makes me smarter, less prone to distractions and a better human being. Going through life sleepy is like voluntarily signing up for a handicap.

Second, when I am working, I want to find more time for really focused, distraction-free work. I love the pomodoro technique and I want to do it more consistently. I set the timer for 25 minutes and do nothing but focused work in one area, eliminating distractions as much as possible. After the timer goes off, I take a 3-5 minute break before staring another. After four, I take a 15-30 minute break. Rather than staring at the vast expanse of an entire day,it’s so much easier to really dig in at 25 minute increments with regular breaks. I’ve tried it and it works. I’m more accomplished with less time.

Third, I want to practice listening, to my kids, my wife, other people, even strangers. This can be difficult. I’m in my head all the time. Listening forces you out of your head and into the life of another. Some people are easier to listen to than others. But those hardest to listen to gives me the opportunity to practice really listening. My mom gives me this kind of practice.

There are other things I can do. But here’s my thought. If I really want to “cure” my addictions, the answer is greater engagement with the world. Addiction, I think happens because we want to escape from it. Addiction keeps us in our heads and out of our body. In the chapter, Heads:

Hal’s problem is extreme but not unusual. Heads float free from bodies all the time, especially when they lack focus that connects them. Heads come loose when we get distracted. They come loose when we lose the ability to pay attention. Given the critical importance of such focus, it should be no surprise that for most us, Wallace says, ‘the whole ballgame [is] perspective filtering, the choice of perception’s objects’. Filtered connection is the key. Focused attention is what threads a head back onto a body. (Quote from the Pale King).

The goal is to get out of our heads and into our body. Engaging in the world. This is difficult, because the world is difficult, it’s not user friendly. It’s filled with awkward conversations, difficult encounters with others who may not notice or care about our lives and our difficulties. It’s easier to live in our heads.

I have so many painful experiences in my past where I preferred to stay in my head rather than connect with someone else. I remember, specifically, a church dance, my freshman year in college. Too shy to ask anyone to dance, I stood muted on the sidelines. Someone eventually asked me but I said no. She wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, which was ridiculous really. My expectations were too high, my confidence too low. I soon left the dance room, preferring to spend most of the evening with myself, out of the dance room, and in my head.

Older now, obviously more capable, not as shy, more engaged. But still struggling to get there more consistently, more fully. There are more distractions now than there were back then. More ways to stay away from the world.

The answer is not to kick out every distraction. I shouldn’t have to shun the internet, facebook, and sugar. The internet is an incredibly valuable, essential tool. I love my virtual communities, I love food, movies and television. In their place they can enrich my life, make it better. I just need to not let them be an excuse to avoid the challenges in my actual life.

They say you should not talk about religion or politics in polite conversation. I’m sorry but these are the two topics I just can’t seem to stop thinking, talking and reading about. And this isn’t a recent phenomenon; I cannot remember a time when I wasn’t doing this. Growing up in a conservative church with conservative parents got me started down a pretty conservative path. But for a variety of reasons, I made a leftward transition down the political spectrum while still maintaining faith in a conservative church.

But as soon as you become a liberal in a conservative church, you start to grapple with those issues where  politics and church contradict. Because what happens when you join a political party? You start swimming in its ideology. And because I feel there’s goodness, depth and breadth in both conservatism and liberalism and the best ideas come when the two work in tension with each other, I start to see all of the good in liberalism – not just politically but religiously as well.  And seeing the world with this perspective can, at times, put me in tension with church policy, theology, doctrine or I think most commonly the  culture within a conservative church.

So how can one go about reconciling personal faith with theological disagreement?

Ross Douthat has this beautiful and far too short essay on this subject that I keep coming back to. There are liberal Catholic reformers who do want to reform Catholic doctrine. Surprisingly though there are some who just want the space to be Catholic without always living up to every belief.

Linker is putting his finger on a real tension within liberal Christianity today — or, if you prefer, a real fork in the road, with one path leading in the direction that he assumed dissenting Catholics wanted to take (which seeks to alter church teaching precisely because it still believes that teaching really matters), and the other leading toward a kind of Emersonian, therapeutic, basically post-ecclesiastical form of faith, in which “Roman Catholicism” just happens to be the name of the stage on which your purely individual spiritual drama is taking place. The Commonweal-reading wing of liberal Catholicism would certainly reject the latter idea, but the kind of “post-Catholic Catholicism” Linker describes is clearly more of a force in our culture today than it was during the early days of the American Church’s post-Vatican II civil war (it’s hard to understand the controversy over American nuns, for instance, without recognizing its impact), and the Trishes of the culture have a strong wind at their back in a way that would-be reformers of the old, 1960s-era school of liberal Catholicism arguably do not.

I went to a Sunstone conference a few weeks ago, my first one ever. It’s not an indulgence I can often partake in, but circumstances aligned exactly right to make it possible for me this year. There were two presentations that stood out for me above the rest, one of them was John Hamer‘s entitled, “Stepping Back from the Dead-End Belief/Disbelief Dichotomy and Recovering the Path to Meaningful Spirituality”. A simplistic summary of his point, as far as I understood it and with plenty of my own personal biases and interpretations mixed in, is that our relationships, with ourselves, with those around us and ultimately with God is more important than any specific belief system. His point was more sophisticated than that, I believe, and his argument for it was also fairly complex. He spent time showing the commonality between religions across sects throughout history; how our shared history is more complicated and nuanced than perhaps we realize; and that we should grant our ancestors access to more sophisticated thought, realizing how squarely upon their shoulders we currently stand.

But this thesis, that our individual spiritual journey should matter more than belief in specific theological claims is certainly one way to manage cognitive dissonance. Ross Douthat offers another:

But Gordis is actually making a more subtle point, which is that Modern Orthodoxy has held the line while also allowing space for the cognitive dissonance of the sabbath drivers and non-kosher-eating vacationers to persist — and that dissonance, that tension, has often been a spur toward spiritual growth and more serious practice, rather than curdling into either an outraged critique or a Trish-esque indifference.

Now for a variety of reasons this may be an easier wire for Judaism to walk than Catholicism. But Gordis is raising an issue that any tradition-minded religious body needs to think through: Namely, how to make its hardest rules seem like aspirations rather than just judgments, and how to deal with the many fine personal gradations that can exist between orthodoxy and apostasy, fidelity and dissent. And I suspect there are many Catholics who would be classified as “liberal” who want something like what he’s describing in Modern Orthodoxy from their church. That is, they want room to dissent from a teaching or fail to live up to it in practice, but they don’t necessarily want the church to change that teaching so that the dissonance or tension they feel simply goes away. Hence their positive reaction to Francis’s rhetorical shift and their lack of urgency about actual doctrinal change. They aren’t necessarily all Trishes who have decided that they don’t care about what the Catechism says. Some of them, at least, might be more like the Orthodox Jews who parked their cars around the corner without demanding that the rabbi be okay with it, and whose children turned out to be more observant, rather than less.

That cognitive dissonance, then, is the point of belonging to an institutional church. It’s through the practice of dealing with this tension that one finds spiritual growth. There’s a lot to like about this point of view. For one, if we fall in line with every single teaching we hear over the pulpit each and every Sunday, we probably aren’t thinking, feeling, praying and living our religion hard enough. Our lives should be a wrestle. Now I get that this isn’t for everyone. In the real world, each of us struggle with real-world difficulties: disease, poverty, addiction, abuse. At times, these struggles can take every ounce out of us that we simply have no mental energy to think through doctrinal minutia. It’s enough to go to church, find strength in the community and then return to your life to struggle through another day with as much grace that we can muster. I am sympathetic to that point of view, and feel it in my own life, really. I’m forever grateful for the strength of a community.

But at other times, a person has no choice but to face this reality square in the face. My last post talked about a specific example in fact, gay marriage. Mormonism is nearly impossible and getting more difficult to manage as a gay person, but I’m fascinated by the stories of those who have found a way to make it work. I don’t think there are many, but John Gustav Wrathall is a rather remarkable example. He left the church, embraced his identity as a gay man, married but then after several years of marriage and because of strong, spiritual urgings, returned to Mormonism as a happily gay, married man. Listening to his story, I can’t imagine someone navigating a spiritual journey with as much cognitive dissonance as that. His story is important.

I guess the claim I’m trying to make here is that for me one’s personal spiritual, individual journey is important. We should claim it with all of the sincerity and authenticity that we can muster. We should claim responsibility for and a willingness to work through our struggles, to wrestle with our doubts and to claim our faith as our own. But I also believe in the value and importance of doing so within the structure of an institutional church. We don’t need to nor should we even have complete and total agreement with every piece of doctrine or policy. We recognize our church leaders at times make mistakes. I still believe in modern day revelation and that doctrinal decisions are not final. We are still growing as a church.

But I also believe Joseph Smith did something significant, important and inspired. I believe in his prophetic mission. The institution is important, I sustain it. My own individual, spiritual journey is also important, and I sustain it as well. At times they come in conflict. I think that is by design. I think there’s room for it, I think there’s spiritual growth that can be gained by it and through it.