Little Schmutzie Had A Christ Complex

There was an extended period of my childhood during which I was certain I was a prophet — at least a prophet — if not the son of God returned.



That I was a girl was of little consequence to me. My male body would arrive on time as assuredly as my female friends had started to get their periods. The beloved prophet or son of God could not be forgotten.

No matter how much I tried, though, I simply had no confidence in a higher, conscious god. I believed in belief, sure enough, having been taught that my existence would be deprived of meaning without it. I believed in the power of it enough to know that my lack of it contained the possiblity of my condemnation for all eternity, but I had no sense, no feeling whatsoever, no matter how much I read or tried to wrap myself in the wonder of His supposed creation, that a conscious entity responsible for the existence of all things was out there. To me, it was an impossible prospect. In my heart, I felt nothing.

I made a ritual of keeping my prayers in little boxes next to the bed, because I was afraid that my whispered conversations into the ether lacked enough substance to last the night. My empty heart meant they might never reach the ears of God. I pinned my hopes on the written word to have the power my spirit couldn't muster.

It was during one of these fits of desperation that I concluded it was my lack of faith that meant I was to be a chosen prophet. I would be saved, and I might even ascend if I were to believe the biblical reports, and that possibility was harboured within the deficiency of my spiritual commitment. God was using me like some kind of divine covert operative, you see. I was simply in a sleeper state waiting for my awakening.

I decided that my future role as a beacon of God's light must be so great, so global and stunning in its outreach, that even I could not have it revealed to me until the appointed time. What I potentially held within me could have the influence to topple the very structures that underpinned our governments and economies, and they would very likely be perceived as dangerous by the powers that be. It was because of my import that my true purpose needed to remain hidden, even from myself, until the time was right. God would know me, and then I would know God.

That all fell apart, of course. I grew out of my earlier childhood into a female puberty that wouldn't give me back. My male body never came, and God never reclaimed his son or even bothered to reveal me as a lesser prophet. I never took this as a rejection, though. I resigned myself to the fact that I really had no more belief in belief than I did in the religion that started it all.

I feel so much sympathy now when I look back and see that little kid who pinned her entire understanding of her place in the universe not on belief but on the idea that she would one day believe. It was all I had known, though. The world had been described to me through church services and Sunday school classes, during supper devotionals and family gatherings, and I didn't know how to tell the story of a universe without a conscious progenitor. To me, a lack of a godhead intimated that I lived in a universe without a story, a universe with no compelling narrative.

In a world without a maker, and I without anything in place to guide me, all of human existence felt futile and rudderless, so I called upon a God I wanted to believe in, and I became a soon-to-be prophet, His divine child in waiting, praying under full moons and over smouldering altars built in secret, pleading for salvation from a universe whose story gave up nothing for an eleven-year-old girl.

Sex: The Devil's Instrument That Leads To Dancing

I come from Mennonite ancestry on both sides of my family, and it's definitely not a culture known for its fun factor. When I was growing up within a church community, we ate a lot and we sang a lot — I could pick out my alto line in a four-part harmony by the time I was seven — but we had very little in the way of physical expression. Outside of the staunch ethic of hard work — be strong like bull! — physical expression was largely frowned upon.

Sex was fine as a concept within the bond of marriage, but it was so bound up with intellectual issues of morality and social unacceptability that understanding it as an expression of anything other than slutty or parental and, therefore, kind of disgusting, was beyond me until my twenties.

Sports were an acceptable outlet, if you were interested. I was not. The all-capsed rule with three exclamation marks that was posted in the gym at my Mennonite boarding school was AND NO DANCING!!! Want to pick up a quick game of basketball? Fine. Want to wiggle your butt to Pour Some Sugar On Me? You'll hear about the pressure from school donors and the fate of the school.

Dancing was definitely verboten. I was allowed to go to school dances, although I know my mother struggled with letting me go, if only out of angst over tradition rather than concern about the corruption of my soul, but it was not considered generally acceptable among everyone in my church community. I learned not to mention dancing in polite company.

My physically conservative background is why I love this video, and it is why it makes me tear up when I watch it.



I never got to see physical joy from my older relatives when I was growing up. They were all trained into relatively physically sedate lives. We ate heavy food, and we sang Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow, and we would go so far as to whoop at a curling bonspiel or a hockey game, but no one ever danced aside from stamping out the rhythm to keep the choir in line.

To this day, when I am at a show or some other kind of music-related event, I feel like the aging aunt with the thin lips that you catch wiggling her elbow to a tune when she thinks no one's looking, because you know why Mennonites don't have sex standing up, don't you? IT MIGHT LEAD TO DANCING.

Wallowing, Gordon, Shoe, Bathing In The Stream, And Dust

When the Fiery One goes away on these work trips, I end up living like an eighty-year old man who refuses to move into a home. The apartment looks worse than I have ever seen it. Gordon, the rabbit, has kicked wood shavings all over the floor, which instead of sweeping up, I have chosen to track throughout the apartment. I haven't washed a single dish in three weeks, except for that knife that I had to clean when all the others were too gross to consider re-using. So, I'm spending this evening doing dishes and cleaning up in the computer area, and tomorrow it's the living room, bathroom, and laundry. When the Fiery One gets back, he will never see the level of unwashedness to which I am willing to descend. He knows that I do this, but at least he will never have to experience my dirt-wallowing first-hand.

Gordon had not been out of his cage for a couple of days, so I let him run around the kitchen for a couple of hours this afternoon. I usually block off the kitchen entrance with a couple of collapsed cardboard boxes so that he doesn't get out and end up electrocuting himself by chewing on cords or some such thing. This had proved to be effective in the past, but I now doubt its future abilities. I was in the middle of a long distance telephone call when I heard this loud scrabbling of bunny feet on cardboard. I leapt up and ran to see what was up. There was Gordon, hanging on to the top of the wall with his little front feet and kicking up a storm in an effort to make it over. He is only about three-and-a-half months old, but the jackrabbit in him means that he is already about a foot long, so this wall-vaulting episode is not all that surprising. There will be no more unsupervised bunny playtime. At some point, he will be allowed to run around the living room and whatnot, but he is still figuring out what he can and cannot chew on. I do value some of our furniture.

Watch the Urban Shoe video, which you will find under "Shoe Features." It reminds me of a much smaller, indoor game I used to play with Starcat called Table. (I think I got the name of the game all wrong, but Starcat will surely correct me).

Last night after work, I dropped by my favourite watering hole to see what it looked like, because it was closed for a month for remodelling. I only intended to stay for a couple of pints while I read Corpse: Nature, Forensics, and the Struggle to Pinpoint the Time of Death by Jessica Snyder Sachs. (A fabulous read, by the way. I recommend it very highly). I ended up staying for most of the evening, because I ran into this woman I run into now and again there, and we were eventually joined by a friend of hers and some girl that the friend bumped into on the street and decided to bring along. StreetGirl seemed really nice and intelligent, and I was beginning to think that maybe I really could be making a female friend, which is almost unheard of in the life of Schmutzie. You can probably hear the "but" in there. Just before I decided that it would be best for me to leave, StreetGirl asked me if I was a Christian. I told her that I wasn't, and she started telling me about this zealous religious group she has been a part of for three weeks. Apparently, they have this ritual called "Bathing in the Stream" that is repeated over a period of several weeks to initiate new members into the faith. She said that these people play a video of some kind of leader, and everyone sits quietly and opens their minds to him. StreetGirl said that it gave her an amazing feeling. I warned her about the dangers of a group like that, because having been raised by Christians, I never came across this Bathing-in-the-Stream business. I knew at that point that it was best for me to leave, and I think my exit was quite abrupt. Why must the women who try to befriend me always be crazy or overzealously Christian?

Dust Facts and Links:
* The major cause of allergic reactivity to dust is dust mite waste and not the dust itself.
* The primary cause of lead poisoning is tiny particles of lead dust from deteriorated paint or from painted surfaces disturbed during remodelling, repair, or renovation. Lead dust is invisible and is so tiny in that it passes through most masks and filters.
* Get your own dust mite detector kit today!
* Read The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things by Hannah Holmes. I haven't read it, but it actually looks pretty good.
* Crawling infants can ingest 10 grams of dust per day in a dusty home. Visit this link for more "Key Facts About Dust and Cleaning."
* Shelley Long, the actress, is allergic to household dust.
* Why is the dust on your television radioactive?
* One-third of the weight of a ten-year-old pillow is dust mite carcasses and faeces.
* A dust mite molts several times during its life, producing two hundred times its weight in waste. Each mite produces forty to one hundred faeces pellets a day. Their droppings are coated in an enzymatic substance, which after drying become mixed with other particles to create household dust.
* Dead skin cells make up approximately 90% of household dust.
* Check out "The Microbiophobic Household." Hee hee.

Gay Marriage And The Lovely Jains

I really have a bone to pick with the Christian right. I was watching “100 Huntley Street” this morning, and I would have been yelling at the television if not for my cement-block lungs and wretched throat. (No, it is not a part of my regular television viewing, but I do indulge when I am ill. That show is one of the best places to find out where the Christian right stands on things). I had read somewhere a while ago that David Mainse, the “100 Huntley Street” host for twenty-six years, was retiring from the show and leaving his son to take over. Mr. Mainse Sr. was leaving the show in order to pursue his evangelical ministry across the country, because he has become very concerned about our native peoples and also wants to represent the “...Canadian clergy’s concerns regarding the redefinition of marriage at the federal level and within the public sphere.” What this actually means, as he was stating as a guest on today’s episode, is that including room in our laws for gays to be able to declare their unions on a public and legal level like everyone else is “evil” and against the safety of our children. Then Mr. Mainse Sr. suddenly launched into how a police officer he knows called the internet “a window of evil.” With barely a breath taken, he held up what he called a “resource sheet” called “The Fight Against Child Pornography.” Without bothering to explain the links he was making between these topics, he attempted to tie them up together neatly by what he assumed were the obvious connections his audience would make, be they uneducated and emotional responses or not. It is absurd. Homosexuals in long-term, committed relationships who want to get married are somehow deeply connected to the “window of evil” that is the internet and so are obviously the controlling major force behind child pornography. He managed to find time to hold up and mention this "resource sheet" three times while talking about his church's stance on gay marriage, marrying the two ideas in the viewers' minds. This is not out of hate, mind you, because Christians can feel anger and still love, he assured us, the listening audience.

Why does this bother me so much? It bothers me, in part, because these people appeal to a lot of other people’s knee-jerk reactions on the subject, and so have the ability hold a good deal of political sway if they play their cards right. It also bothers me, because they do not seem to see the difference between their religious culture and government law. These are two different things. The Canadian government has no intention of forcing churches to marry homosexuals against their church body's beliefs. The church has hardly made a stink about the fact that the government started marrying people non-religiously. They do not seem to mind much at all that the government saw fit to move such a holy union partially out of the church's grasp and to give itself the right to unite man and woman in a legal union by the same name the church gave it. There is a distinct difference between church and state marriages – one is done under the eyes of God and one is done under the eyes of the law, one is religious and one is secular. So why do some Christian groups feel that they have the right to lobby the government to change its standpoint because these views go against their religious beliefs and practices? Our government should not be an extension or a representative of any particular religious organization, and as the Bible says: “‘Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s’” (Matthew 22:21). Church and state are separate matters, folks. No matter what decision our government comes to on this matter, although I am hoping it falls on the side of allowing all who want to marry to do so, it does not bear on the spiritual values of any church body. Marriage, as it is known by the state, is not about making us holy, but is about a legal definition and the social rights it affords to those who have entered into such a commitment. Honestly, I can’t figure out why they are so up in arms about this issue. Christians can still continue to hand out or take back whatever rights they see fit amongst their church members no matter what the state says.

The third thing that truly gets my goat, (and I promise I will stop after this point): certain Christian groups feel that they have the right to lobby a non-religious organization, the government, on a religious basis in order to limit what I, as a non-religious member of this society, believe in whole-heartedly and see as a great leap forward for humankind. Honestly! The nerve! Wouldn’t we all be super pissed off if particularly puritanical Jains came along and insisted on strict vegetarianism (this means no beer!), covering our mouths to avoid inhaling any life forms, and sweeping the ground before us as we walked to avoid crushing bitty creatures? Those of us who are not Jains would be incensed, because we are not Jains, and no beer is no fun. (I mean no offense to Jains, because they are not the imposing kind whatsoever). So, to all Christians who are being politically vocal about stopping gay marriage from a religious standpoint, shut the fuck up! Maybe you haven’t noticed, but this is not a solely Christian country with a Christian government. There are many of us here who would prefer not to be under a religious group's political leadership. Religious arguments have no place in a secular government's decision-making when it affects a great number of citizens who cannot abide by that rationale.

Jainism Facts and Links:
* If you are into religious texts here are some sacred Jain texts.
* I have always loved cartoons based on religion.
* Listen to the different “Obeisances.” They are short and not very loud, so you won’t have to worry about alerting too much attention.
* Check out "Saroj’s Cookbook" for Jain recipes.
* A brief introduction to Jainism.
* Somehow, reading about great ascetics and the lengths to which they will go is almost pornographic, or am I alone in this? (Again, no offense meant to Jains. This is only a personal feeling).

Lord Mahavira was a Jain monk, and Jain monks may often take a vow to accept food only when it is possible to observe a set of pre-determined special conditions. The practice originates with Mahavira himself. A few months before he attained Keval Jnan, continuously fast until offered food by only that individual who met 10 untold and seemingly impossible conditions. He would accept (1)only urad lentils,(2) offered in a winnowing basket, (3) given by a person standing sideways with one foot on the threshold of a dwelling place and the other foot outside, (4) who was a princess turned in to a slave, (5) who had a shaven head, and (6) whose legs were bound by chains. She had to be (7) a chaste woman, (8) at the time performing the penances of attham (3 days’s fast), and would serve him (9) only after all other mendicants had rejected her food offering, (10) with tears in her eyes.

* And last but definitely not least, a jam-packed Jainism site that will keep you busy for hours if you so desire. I did not.