Crash Memories

Note: In recent conversations it has come to my attention the photos in this blog post somehow got misplaced. I just found them (again) in the clutter of my office so I've re-scanned them and am re-publishing this post.

When you see car accidents in movies, everything goes totally silent and into slow motion. The movie makers do this because they've talked to accident survivors. I only assume this because if they were to interview me about being double t-boned in my Saturn, that's how I would describe it. Slower than life and quieter than silence.

It was in 2000, I think, that I was in this accident. Driving to meet friends for brunch, alone in my car. I didn't see the light, and ran a red. Two cars powered into both my front passenger and driver's side doors. There was no sound. There was no sensation. Everything went soft and quiet and slow.I don't remember the airbags detonating, though they did. I don't remember glass shattering, though it did. I do remember a sort of lazy twirling of the car that must have happened after the impact. A bit like sliding on snow where you've lost control of the car but it's no big deal because it's a slow slide/turn and nothing's in the way.

I remember seeing a group of people standing some feet away looking in the car window. I

remember the paramedics or police officers poking their heads in and telling me not to move. They used the "jaws of life" to get me out, but I have no memory of that. Someone asked me several times if I had been drinking. My response clearly confused them, "No, I haven't had

anything to drink, I'm an alcoholic." (I was trying to say it's been years.) I remember being in the ambulance, but not clearly. I thought I remembered it pretty well until Maya and I took a tour of our fire station where I learned that it would be very unlikely that I was head at the back of the truck like I thought.

My mobile phone was with me, and it rang when I was in the ambulance. It was Josh, surely

wondering where I was. "Hello, I'm in an ambulance" I think I said. I put the phone down and the paramedic took it from there.

At the hospital they had a hell of a time getting both my IV in and my catheter placed. I still am only vaguely clear on what happened, but I do remember thinking, hey, this sucks that I'm lying here all naked down there and open to this group of people trying to shove something up me.

I was awake when they did the laparoscopic check for internal bleeding, inserting the tube thing just under my belly button. I remember very vividly the POP feeling as they went through layers of me. I held someone's hand and squeezed it tight. They couldn't give me pain meds, I think I remember, because it would mess up their diagnosis of me.

And, oh, I remember Josh's terrified face when he arrived in the ER. He'll have to correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure I said to him, "I need need to not worry about you now." As if that's what he wanted, me worrying! He was scared, he was showing it, and I wanted to help him feel better. Sure, I'd just been in an accident of the type that is typically fatal for the driver. But I needed his permission to not worry about him.

This past weekend I found these old photographs of the car, and me, from the accident. About a week ago a pickup truck almost rear ended me. VERY fast and VERY close. I had a physical reaction, clearly shock, and it felt as if I was back in that quiet car. I was able to pull over and catch my breath, bring myself back to the moment. But, this accident has been the most concrete example for me of how fluid and changing memory is.
As bits keep coming back over the years, I have no idea what is real or what I'm imagining. Sometimes they feel so real but couldn't possibly be (the direction I was lying in the ambulance). Sometimes I'm surprised I didn't remember before. As poets have forever tried to describe love, I think I'll spend the rest of my life trying to capture the clear silence of that crash.

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TMI

When I posted photos of my ovarian cyst, my uterus, and my good ovary on Facebook, my Dad's only comment was, "WHY????" He knew my Mom wanted to see the photos, so that I'd scanned them for her wasn't a shocker. But posting them in public baffled him.

In the past year as I've become an official Facebook freak (checking it out several times a day, leaving myself logged on all the time as I do other things, etc.), the issue of "TMI" (Too Much Information) has been a recurrent theme. That is, I make comments or updates and friends reply, "that's TMI!"

Everyone has their own comfort level about sharing personal details of their life online. Some keep everything very safe and generic. Some share every detail of their lives in what I feel is tedious detail. There are loads of amateur porn sites out there with people *really* sharing a lot about themselves. And, there are thoughtful bloggers or social networkers who share intimate thoughts and opinions with what most would consider very tasteful boundaries.

What does it mean when someone responds with "that's TMI!" What are the underlying messages? My friend Stephanie H. recently wrote about this and summed up so much of what I've been thinking:

i think responding with "TMI" ("too much information") to anything is a really dismissive and inconsiderate thing to do, and is a passive-aggressive and indirect way of saying, "i'm not comfortable talking about this topic with you", which is what should be said instead of something that means "you're doing something rude/inappropriate/uncool by being kind enough to be willing to share your thoughts or experiences with me, and rather than being vulnerable and sharing my boundaries and comfort level with you, i think i'll just try to make this all about you and ridicule you into shutting your fucking mouth."

Beautiful, isn't it?

As someone who has been told frequently I offer TMI I do think there is a difference between being boundry-less and being open. I know this from experience.

In the 90s, I wrote personal things on a website (we'd call it a blog, now). I didn't just write my thoughts about abortion, or Jesus, or breastfeeding, or sex, but I wrote my innermost thoughts and feelings. Deepest insecurities and fears. I had no censor. It was freeing at the time because I learned a lot about myself. And, knowing other people were reading what I wrote (I had over 100 subscribers) also helped me process everything. But, that's it, I was using it as a sort of tool for therapy. Discussing things best left for close friends or professionals. I don't regret it, but when I see people online doing the same thing now I do cringe a little.

The difference for me is that I would never say "TMI" to someone. Like Stephanie, I hear people using the term and I feel they are being passive aggressive. I believe they are often reacting from a place of fear and judgment. I recognize people who like to label others as offering TMI mostly think they are being funny, teasing, or poking fun. But when I come across someone who I think maybe needs to reign it in, have some self-respect (privacy), and recognize there are appropriate places for sharing our most intimate details, I would never slam a door in their face for it. I may feel sorry for them, knowing what it's like to expose themselves (the true over-sharers come across as overtly lonely and afraid). But I see that they are doing what they need to do. They are even brave for doing it. As Stephanie said, just because you don't want to share as much of yourself as I do doesn't make it okay for you to label me as inappropriate or wrong.

One of the funniest things for me about being consciously a TMI person online is that in reality, I'm a very private person. Only my husband and a couple of my dearest friends know the real me. I certainly discuss my bodily functions freely (as another Stephanie, a "Facebook friend," points out, the more we talk about these things the less they are taboo) or what I'm feeling at any given moment. Whenever I choose to share something that seems ultra-personal to many people, I do so with an awareness that it may shock some, may entertain some, and very often may put some people off. I'm being me, but it's me online. Just a part of me. And, like both Stephanies, I see great value in being open about what are typically very private subjects. Sharing what might be considered too personal, or TMI, or controversial in an honest way opens the door to great opportunities for learning for the sharer and the reader alike.

So, accuse me of offering TMI all you want -- even MTMI (much too much...) as I got today -- I'm making good choices for myself. I'm drawn to others who do the same whether they end up sharing a lot or a very little in the public arena. I respect other people's choices and am pleased when they respect mine.

That said, I just can not believe how enormous my breasts are right now. My cleavage is several inches long, like the National Geographic indigenous people photos. It's ridiculous.

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Jesus Never Existed

What if there was no historical figure named Jesus? Set aside the question of the resurrection and just look at the rest of what we christians assume to be true. For example, I've always thought there was a firm consensus among scholars that there was a man name Jesus, from Nazareth, who was a great teacher and healer. While in a discussion with some hard core atheists, there was an insistence that there was no credible first-hand accounts of this man called Jesus.

My own christianity doesn't center around the idea of Jesus as God. I'm perfectly content with the idea, even, that the resurrection may be just another metaphor for everlasting life through self-sacrifice and faith in god. Growing up I learned Jesus' message was to love our neighbors, care for the poor, and center our lives around god. This message speaks to the core of my being and it's why I consider myself christian rather than, say, Buddhist or Unitarian. My religion also centers entirely around the notion that the stories the Bible tells (which are metaphors as far as I'm concerned, not literal history) can help us be kind to each other and make the world a more peaceful place.

What then if there really was no Jesus as I've always assumed there was? Can I have faith in a myth? Can the idea of the story sustain me even if there was no human being who was so spiritually connected with God that he believed love and peace were the purpose of life? I'm not sure.

My father-in-law, Joseph Denk, a former Catholic monk who currently teaches a class called "The Bible as Literature" notes, "the greatest of those who either are looking or have looked for the historical Jesus - Rudolph Bultman, Albert Schweitzer, Jesus Seminar in California – all of these have given up on the ability to find the specific person."

I set out to see if these arrogant know-it-all atheists from the newsgroup discussions were right. And it turns out they were. Even among the most Christian of historians, there are no solid claims of first-hand accounts of this man Jesus of Nazareth. Even the Romans who were serious record keepers probably only listed Jesus' crucifixion as just another executed poor carpenter. A handy resource for my few weeks of research was the Frontline series, "From Jesus to Christ." On this site there's a good article from TIKKUN Magazine by Claudia Setzer that summarizes the closest any historian I've found will come to claiming there was, without a doubt, this man name Jesus. In this article, Setzer writes:

"His followers, and even a non-believer like the Jewish historian Josephus, recall Jesus as a healer, exorcist, and miracle worker."

But going a bit deeper into the Josephus records I learned that even these are a bit sketchy. My father-in-law had this to say:

"In the first century ce, only one non-Christian source mentions Jesus, a citation from the Jewish historian Josephus. Not a direct proof it refers to him as Brother of James. (A second citation in Josephus is a Christian corruption of Josephus done three centuries later and has to be totally discounted.) No one can be sure that the first citation even refers to the same person that is in the gospels; there were very many Jesus’ in that period and a couple of them were revolutionaries."

His comments pretty much sum up what I found all over the Internet, save for some obviously skewed sites from fundamentalist Christians who clearly thought the Bible was real historical proof.

Personally, I don't find this troubling. I also don't find it anything close to proof that the man didn't exist. However, it does cause me to question what matters to me in my faith.

When I consider if Jesus was a real man who taught such important lessons, who washed the feet of the prostitutes and dined with lepers and tax collectors, I realize it really is that message that drives me. In fact, the earliest Christians seem most in tune with how I view christianity. While they did celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus (Christ) as their reason for being, their communities also centered around equality in societies where hierarchical social structures were the norm.

In my Dad's most recent book, Ritualizing Nature: Renewing Christian Liturgy in a Time of Crisis, he writes about the earliest Christians bringing together the bread and the wine. He writes:

"This was part of 'the work of the people.' But the very poor among those members typically could not afford to bring wine. So they brought water (which, according to cultural mores, was perfectly appropriate). That water they poured into the large, common chalice, mingling it with the wine from the others, so that, in the end, there was then only one offering. All social, political, and cultural distinctions were thereby countermanded and transfigured...Thus, for what Christians today is often merely a routine act of traditional symbolism--biblically rooted, to be sure, but not of major ritual importance--was for those early Christians a profound and revolutionary public acknowledgment of a new kind of egalitarian society and a new kind of hope for the whole world."

There are countless examples like this of the earliest Christians authentically living by Christ's example. Christianity got off track, in my relatively uninformed and humble opinion, when it moved beyond the countercultural activism through spiritual connection and adopted hierarchical power structures.

The focus on loving your neighbor as yourself, living as equals, and communing with God was driven away in many of the Christian communities. My father-in-law had this to say about that transformation:

"Too many movements in the first century involving many Jesus’ provide only an indirect contact with a figure (or more than one) we can never reach historically. Taking over the entire Roman Empire by the fourth century meant that the variety of religious activities called Christian coalesced into an institutional church under the heavy hand of the Roman Emperor, Constantine."

If we recall, though, the earliest Christians and the messages that people claim came from Jesus of Nazareth, we can find a powerful and inspirational message. Guidance for life.

I'll admit my world was a bit rattled when I confirmed the argumentative atheists were right about the absence of first-hand historical proof of Jesus' existence. I've questioned all sorts of aspects of Christianity, but always assumed there was no doubt that the man lived, taught, and healed. I don't feel any closer to knowing if he was an amalgamation of lots of good ideas or if he was truly a living human being. After these searches, however, I do feel closer to my commitment to the message. Love your neighbor. Help the needy. Care for the Earth. Commune with god. Strive for peace. These messages are why I still consider myself a christian person.



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