Pagan Drift

I am such a pagan. This is the hardest thing for me to swallow right now. I really don’t think that it would be worth stopping my usual activity, mental spinning, arranging, organising, cataloguing, gratifying…
Its frightening to see my idols of power, fertility, pleasure all around me…and the God who is love waiting further back in the queue.

Ultimately, it is a trust and fear issue. I am afraid that I will not have enough: enough time, enough money, enough opportunities. And so, I must grab every single minute I have to do every single little thing I can possibly do with all the little things that I have – instead of receiving the time that He is giving me with open hands, for Him to do His work in me through all the wonderful components of his great creation.

I am essentially, an existentialist. Like Sartre, the sense of my abandoned and free state and my own sense of responsibility for my own creation crowds my world and fills it with cowardly and heroic despair and freedom. I know that God is there, and accessible, and available. But I feel that I am alone, I must sort out my own little bits and pieces and God is just nearby, waiting and watching and even cheering me on.

Part of this existentialism is my obsession with the present. The past is in another universe. The future is also a distant alternate reality. But where I am now, is the knife edge of the present. And I find that I tend to fixate on this experience of the present. Hence, I am in awe of the diverse experiences captured by my physical senses, my emotions, my intellectual processing my spiritual awareness. I draw some meagre snese of security from being able to record these. Reflect on these. Catalog and understand these. And it is precisely this egocentricity that crowds out any room for God. I’m too busy sorting myself out – I don’t have any time or space – I don’t dare stop all my darting around lest there be any time or space when I listen to God…


Of course, these issues disappear once I am brought out of my private self into public interaction. Community life forces me to listen, to stop, to wait with others, to worship. It gives me strength to do all the things that I know I want to do. Or rather, it creates an environment where I am no longer fully responsible for my own existential choices. There are people around me who impose upon me and hence, thankfully, force me out of my own existential tendencies.

Through Christ and His Body on earth, we are saved from our own sin...