A Shiny, Resilient Hold

This will come as a surprise to pretty much everyone who didn't know me during my formative years, but from about the age of 13 to the age of 17, my sincere goal was to pursue a career in ministry. Raised in a Mennonite home with my father as a minister himself, I was exposed to, and encouraged to investigate intersectional faith relationships and teachings. Contrary to the image that many will conjure when picturing a ministers daughter, my experience of faith exploration was one of community, scholarship, and respect for the multiplicity of belief systems around the world. There was also an underlying thrumb of violence, which was so powerful that it put me off the pursuit of any sort of moral community for 17 years. I hesitate as I write this, because to be so bald faced with my experience continues to jar me. It feels like a threat to say aloud. But even in the fairly liberal reaches of the Mennonite church, violence was and is taking place against LGBTQ people, women,...

There is a common saying in the writing world, “write what you know”, which I think likely explains why in my teenage years, I was a prolific writer, and then as my rather “supreme” knowledge base mysteriously dropped off, so did the production of my work. Like many of my cohort, I've arrived in the younger bracket of middle age startled by the realisation that perhaps I just don't know very much at all. Startled and awed by the profound increase of shared knowledge and experience all around me, made available by the internet, our day to day existence, regardless of our efforts, can seem humblingly middling. I think many will relate when I say that it sometimes feels like other people are following a script, complete with permissions of behaviour, that I just didn't get. The fact that those who I have perceived as particularly well scripted, when interviewed, have revealed that they struggle with exactly the same looming sense of inadequacy, suggests otherwise. Bu...