Quarantined Reflections

I wrote this last week, at a time of creative lull…it is sort of an overview of my life and outlook on the world and a bit of motivation before Easter.  Since then the spirit of creativity has been flourishing!  I don’t know who wants to read this, but here it is…

Sorry, if this feels like a long-winded affront to the quick fire, short attention-span, 280 characters or less, obscure minimalist twitter culture of posting on social media, but…

I’ve been watching “Dirty Money” on Netflix while we’re in the middle of an economic collapse amidst coronavirus where the structure of capitalism’s lack of humanity is being questioned…I’m remaining positive, not fearful, because honestly my situation is okay and I’m not in any immediate danger, but I know there are people who have lost their jobs or a large part of their retirement and are in real dire straits; can’t pay their rent, don’t know how they’re going to put food on the table.  This is a global pandemic and dilemma but also one that shines light on the burgeoning economic disparity of our nation.  I’ve got a deep reservoir of feelings about the structure of American society, having been from another country to contrast to, that I can usually repress or reconcile with my submissive optimistic belief in Christianity, and America as a vessel for God’s providence, and maybe that makes me willfully ignorant or blindly trustful of the democratic process playing itself out under God’s sovereignty, but I like to think it just makes me “American”.

I was born in Denmark, a free market economy with a democratic socialist government, and when I came here at a young age, I thought and was led to believe that America was the best country in the world and had the best system for me to succeed, mostly by my Dad, a native Californian, who had met a Danish woman, my mother, while working abroad, started a family and moved us here when I was still pretty young.  I always tried to fit in to American culture.  My Danish family loved America; my cousins would come over to visit and we always felt like we were pioneers in a way, my grandparents projected that love for America through their love for a charming, good looking son-in-law, who had enough charisma to learn Danish and confidence to take their daughter away to be the first and only one of the family to go off to America and try to make it there.  There was so much hope and optimism through our perfect little upbringing about the possibilities and potential of America that we were hardly aware that we were taking such a chance.  We were lower middle class growing up in one of the nicest suburbs of Minneapolis, apartment-dwellers living amongst quarter million dollar homes, all alone and centrally located but apart from my Dad’s family who were spread out on each coast, in New York and LA .  It was a little hard shaking off the embarrassment of my mom’s European accent around friends, or any of my inherited fey ways that proved as my cross to bear as much as any other straight, white male kids growing up, but we were well received and liked by mostly everyone, and I was always hopeful for the best life America could provide me.  I was always a little conflicted by the naive, liberal and care-free platitudes displayed by mom’s easily suggestible attitude towards American life that did not seem to mirror my dad’s hardened, conservative and cynical worldview (that was constantly exacerbated by or contributed to his alcoholism), but we existed in some form of a harmonious balance until that chaotic cohesion finally gave way and my parents divorced.  I never felt like I fit in anywhere after that and my short-lived rebellion after their divorce was seized by a major reality check in high school, getting into lots of fights causing me to revert back to the shy, studious kid with an artistic archetype I had become for most of my life.  I suffered immensely from depression over the falling apart of my family while searching for an identity, but eventually grew up and “found my own way” after attending art school, quitting medication and moving to the city where I began chasing drugs and alcohol and other colorful experiences with a circle of vagrants to varying degrees of debauchery, while being a serviceable proletariat in the work force.  Eventually, under pressure from my mom’s annoying good-ole-boy-from-a-large-family-of-Lutheran-missionaries new husband, after one particularly heinous summer spent partying in Milwaukee, I moved to Nebraska to go to college (it was either that or go to the drug rehab program teen challenge).  I met a wife, dropped out of college, got married, had a kid, got divorced, kept drinking, discovered Jesus, stumbled upon a career, got sober, got married again, got divorced again, discovered Jesus yet again…yeah, life; lather, rinse, repeat.  It’s not where I thought or planned I would be when I was 17, half a lifetime ago, that’s for sure, but I’ve become a survivor to adversity, numb to most pain and learned to roll with the punches.

Eventually, life happened to my mom too and she moved back to Denmark with her third husband (something I never thought would happen in my wildest dreams) after my grandmother passed away a little over five years ago.

When I went back to visit Denmark last summer, taking my son with me for the first time, all those feelings of inadequacy that were highlighted by a real sense of being “home” came flooding back, feelings about my search for meaning and belonging to a place, to a family, unconditionally, the pursuit of faith and self denial vs the pursuit of happiness, the breakdown and isolation of my immediate family in flyover country, the search for my identity in an American culture that I felt had forsaken me and didn’t represent my values, the eternal “what-if-we-had-never-moved-in-the-first-place” conundrum, and the God question, mainly, why Europeans (and particularly Danes) could be so apt to live with a disregard or disinterest for God in their life, (despite being in a historically Christian-converted land), and still be so steeped and rooted in the well-being of the community and neatly-organized social structures that allowed homogeneous traditionalism to thrive but also met a burgeoning immigrant population as an exemplary model of multiculturalism.  Meanwhile I had been struggling to barely get by with what I felt was nothing but my belief in God, and not much to show for it. It’s a liberating but also unsettling feeling to be reminded of that unique sense of the possible from a childhood identity when it’s starkly juxtaposed with your current reality.  I tried to explore and romanticize Denmark again, after such a wonderful trip, clinging to that feeling, by watching a few Lars von Trier movies, entertaining the idea of becoming chef at a new Danish restaurant, and sharing and encouraging my son’s new enamorment with the idea of his quarter ancestry to the same foreign land as me, (after all, maybe I could just move back to Denmark one day and reclaim my dual citizenship and get free schooling like I had always wanted and he could join me there one day and study abroad too) but I suppressed myself and the conflict within, again, turning and focusing more on the church, and on God, while getting swept up with the busyness and humdrum as “life goes on.”  I have always suppressed and denied myself to conform to what I thought God’s best version of me was to carry out His will and deny the self, always imitating some better thought out, least offensive, version of myself, rather than anything too authentic, ever since I’d moved to Nebraska, appropriately settling upon some milquetoast sense of nationalism (the kind you couldn’t really get away with growing up in Minnesota for some reason, where everybody questions everything).

Today, I talked to my mom who told me she’s lost her sense of beauty for life because she can’t reconcile how so many people can struggle, she said, while so many others are fine.  She even mused how death would actually be a “sweet release” for some people.  My life, my brother’s, and my dad’s have been…kind of a struggle…marred by addiction, alcoholism, disability, divorce, depression and isolation and my dad now faces the dire reality that he will lose his job of thirty years once this is all over and he has nothing to show for it.  Meanwhile, she tells me she has no worries about her future.  I mean she worries about taking an early retirement if she can’t go back to work (not worth risking her already compromised lungs), how that will affect her summer travel, but she’s certainly not worried about affording a house to live in or paying her bills. My friend from high school, living in Paris, will be completely fine because the government is paying for everything, his health care, his apartment, during the pandemic.  I’m sure my cousins are all fine too.

In this time of quarantine, I’ve had so much time to reflect.  The rhythm of life has been disrupted and in many ways my faith, in meshing my perceptions with reality.  I feel a dissonance in that I am in no way where I want to be in life or thought I’d be growing up.  It’s not really a unique existential crisis, I’ll admit.  I can always put the prism of my faith up to the looking glass and share a positive outlook or sentiment (because really, what else can I do? glass half-full here) but it’s starting to get to me.

This time off for lots of us has allowed for a resetting and repurposing of our direction in life.  For others, we have just fallen into idleness and the stillness has been met with paralysis.  I don’t play the victim anymore (not since my teenage years and early 20s) but I see that my life is so far off of what I ever imagined it would be.  Is it due to self-sabotage or is my struggle and pain all part of God’s plan? In many ways, I am blessed, (I realize my privilege) but in many ways I am a huge failure in my own eyes.  This is largely something I take personal responsibility for, because that is just what a man does (as he buries himself in an even deeper disconnect with the world around him).

It’s ironic to me, that so many of my peers have embraced a character like Bernie Sanders, a huge fan of the Danish model of government, who represents anti-corruption and the answer to all our problems but who has been chided and maligned as a socialist huckster and “un-American”, even by those within his own party.  He is perhaps the only candidate, people actually felt truly passionate about, represents them, as if he were the solution to all of our societal ills and was capable of spawning a revolution of change that would level the playing field for very American, make it affordable to go to college, and give us free health care.  He represents an ideal, really, a very noble one, but that’s not meant to fit within the paradigm of our currently reality.

I’ve had many ideals growing up, too, I look back on, what I thought God was, what I thought life would be.  I thought God didn’t want a lot of those ideals for me and I shook them off.  I finally read the Bible last year and surprise, it’s very boring and also very violent with many things taken out of context, I found.  That doesn’t mean I’m not a believer but sometimes I look at the modern church as pretty absurd.  The Holy Spirit guides my life and my relationship with Jesus as my Lord and Savior and that is all I really have to trust in this world, it’s what I have come back to and kept searching for and it gives me peace, comfort and a sense of meaning…but I can look at it objectively too).

Reality is different from what our belief of it would be when we took up an ideal and cast a vision for it.  Just like love for some of us, politics has left us high and dry.  Now we are left with Biden and Trump, both accused of sexual assault, one who seems to be slipping into dementia and the other who is, well, Trump.  Trump will win again and we will have four more years of this insane back and forth, but this is where we are, America.  This is reality.  God uses imperfect people to do his will.

What is the soul of our nation when we are pushed in a corner?  A corner like rebuilding from the economic calamity we are about to have to eventually face.  Maybe it’s very Trumpian, and the majority will model our leader and we’ll WILL and bully our way back on top…with GOD on our side, no matter what mistakes we make as a nation in the process.  But there will always be that dark cloud cast over those good, hard-working people who will have suffered needlessly, as they always do in times of crisis, the sacrificial goats of an unfortunate segment of our society.  Maybe they didn’t do enough to prepare and protect themselves and their families and it’s God’s will. I like to think that there’s good and charitable people out there, that balance the injustices out, that truly “shepherd the weak through the valley of darkness” as I have experienced in my own life.  Life is a delicate balance, good and evil in an epic dance, as the Mephistopheles says, when pressed on his identity in Goethe’s Faust, “I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and forever works good.”  Which also leads back to the rhetorical question, did God or the devil bring about this pandemic?

There is good, not the blinding good from one party that drowns out partisan dissent, but a universal good that is uniquely human (or humanist), and distinctly personal.  And then there is the collective good, for God and country that represents our collective corporate conscience that exists to raise leaders up and inevitably divides us on a stance, or an identity formed by religion or politics.

Where will all the pieces fall when this is over?  I don’t know.

Will I ever get over myself enough to be productive before this pandemic is over or am I a doomed narcissist, indelibly glued to the impulses of my own self-betrayal by willingly indulging in the constant news feed and conspiracy theories to keep me occupied in this “waiting season” of a linear timeline, that suspends my ability to do anything until all this is over?  I’ve hit the end of my metaphorical quarantine rope.  The creativity and joy that I inherently thought was always present within me before all this started, that I so longed to stake out when I “finally had the time” is constantly elusive.  I search for it, I literally stare at a canvas everyday, one I’ve already started and need to finish, a painting of my brother and his late girlfriend, but I just can’t seem to get paint on my brush.  Im paralyzed…I could learn to play the guitar better or read an actual book…but I lack the self discipline.  Mostly I just cook and clean and sleep and watch the news.  Surely this will all be over soon and we’ll be jolted back into the reality of…returning to a working economy, when the fear of spreading the virus will be outweighed by our Pavlovian desire to fix things…it seems so futile, even inhumane and pointless right now to an extent.  Maybe it won’t ever go back, and we’ll be faced with a brave new world, one of unforeseen challenges that will never make “working” feel normal again.

In all this, I need a hope.  And my hope is always floating above my circumstances, never in my measurable state of happiness, but in my contentment and peace in the eternal, everlasting son of God, Jesus Christ.  It’s the hope that springs from a pit of despair, (a desperation that nothing is right), but one act of love, more than just an ideal, (mired by the stark reality of this fallen world) that eventually leads to faith.  My faith may seem to be testable, but it’s really being grounded…into something deeper.  Not the imitation, but the real thing.  The fulfillment of promises that God will restore everything to its fullness before the end, that he is “working all things for the good of those that love Him and are called according to his purpose.”-Roman’s 8:28.  I will focus my eyes on Him, not on myself and my selfishness anymore.  I will praise and worship Him. Easter will be different this year.  But God is still God and this is still not our home.  Let’s get ready and cling to the only hope we really have.