Sectarianism and an Octogenarian

When I want to feel young - as I do on the eve of my birthday - I merely think of the old. The old trails and tribulations. The things I've struggled through in my short 19 years and one always seems to come to mind; Religion. I now like to refer to this sticky subject as spirituality but in the wake, I guess preceding the wake, of what I'm about to discuss, religion is the correct term.



I read a book over the last few days that sparked my reinvestigation of faith. It revolved around the notion of the Templars, Vatican secrets, Jesus Christ's existing bloodline, and multitudinous events of murder. To put it simply, the book raised the age-old question of Jesus's mortality.



Now I'm not sure if this question does indeed transcend the passage of time. Is it possible that people who witnessed the preachings of Jesus worried about his lineage? Or is it more likely that they latched onto His ideas - not the divine parentage - so frequently uttered throughout the annals of enlightened history. Brotherhood. Fraternity. Dare I say it; Communism....



Jesus is a communist.



But I'm getting off track. The ideologue in me stuck to this notion of Jesus's mortality. Who can really believe, without an enormous leap of faith, that he performed miracles and was resurrected? This one time I can answer my own question. Millions. And so I'm struck by another question; would His teachings hold any clout without the whole "son of God" business?



I believe that those preachings, the ones that give us our current - albeit slightly corrupted - moral code, would remain immortalized regardless of their speaker's own mortality. However, when I look to more recent postulators of goodwill to all men I see a startling trend. They all have spiritual ties. Oh holy of hollies. I should be crucifying my own words. Clearly I am at an impasse stuck between my fervent beliefs and the unequivocal examples devout's like Ghandi present.



So I diverge and discuss what any of this has to do with old people, specifically, someone over the age of 80 and under the age of 90. Well, it sounded good in the title. But this age group also represents the most avid contention towards change. And so I wonder; could an octogenarian's views of faith (a veritably ingrained tradition) be changed?

Yes, I hope so.

In fact, I have an example. My grandmother recently underwent surgery. In the moments during recovery, when her blood pressure fluctuations were most dangerous, she experienced something. First, I should explain my grandmothers take on faith. That is, she has none. She lives for the present.

So, when I say she experienced something, this is truly the insurmountable evidence I was looking for. Her experience wasn't angles and divine light. Instead, it was more down to earth. She recounted working on a puzzle. The pieces were all the important things she had discovered and valued throughout her life; family, friends, experiences.....But she was missing one piece. And the most amazing thing; that piece was love.

And everything comes full circle. It all seems to be about love. That's what Jesus preached and that's what my grandmother found when she discovered spirituality.

So, yes. I do hope religion can be more flexible. The message of love is still clear without all of the hate.

A Little Pain

Few things in life have truly hurt. There was the time when I broke my collar bone. I played the last ten minutes of the soccer game it happened in and sat through the ensuing penalty kicks before succumbing to tears during our reception of bronze medals. Then there was the time I broke my collar bone again. That one didn't hurt quite so bad; more mentally then anything. I hobbled off the field and, knowing what had happened, went to dope myself up on painkillers.

It's strange but in both of these incidents I didn't really feel the pain. Of course shattering a bone leaves you in a considerable state of shock masking some of the ache. However, as I discovered in that fateful summer (where I broke my collar bone twice) I do have a high pain tolerance.

Those two breaks happened about two months apart. Plenty of time to recover and plenty of time for any pain to fade to a dull ache. Now however, I face a new assault on my blessed and generally pain free life. Strangely, it's all self inflicted.

First, I competed in an Ironman 70.3. Holy shit. That hurt. It hurt more than breaking my collar bone. It's kind of an indescribable feeling. Nevertheless I will try. The bike felt like sitting on a bed of needles. My butt felt like it was being sent through a meat grinder. My legs (and this is my own fault for lack of nutrition) felt like they were in vices. About three times during the 94km ride I was nearly reduced to tears; tears I assumed were akin to ones displayed when suffering a traumatic event. And then the run. Every part of my body below the waist felt like it was being pressed though a too small rubber tube. Every step hurt. It felt like someone was jabbing red hot branding irons into the backs of my calves.

But I survived. I finished and I no longer feel like dying when I have to walk across the room to change the channel on the t.v.

Now, I am going through a different kind of pain. I got my wisdom teeth out. It hurts. But after the Ironman it feels far more bearable.

And I find this skewed perception of pain very interesting. Pain manifests itself both physically and mentally. Sometimes it assaults our mind and body at the same time. But always it tests us. The ways in which people deal with pain speaks to their nature:

The quiet brooder; the one who sits quietly save for raged breath issuing through their clenched jaw. Most often they wish to be left alone. They deal with their pain by internalizing it and using it to fuel their recovery. They will be seen as strong.

The noisy sobber; the one who relishes in the company of others and wears their emotions on their sleeve. They deal with their pain by letting it out. Nothing is kept inside and the pain flows from the body with the tears that flow from their face.

Of course there are people who fall in between these two extremes but for the most part we have these two categories; the stereotypical woman and man. I can hear the cries of outrage but I'm not finished yet. I feel that as much as pain is a physiological idea the ways in which we express pain is a sociological one.

I believe that we are raised to express pain in a certain way. Society determines whether we'll be teary eyed or stiff upper-lipped. In fact, the expression of pain differs culturally as well. But in our increasingly medicated world this diversity may soon disappear into one category; doped up ambivalence...