Many years ago, I read Madeleine l’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. I was fascinated by the idea of the tesseract and identified with Charles Wallace's empathy and intuition. I was terrified by IT, ruler of the planet on which their father had been held for so long. At the time, I interpreted the enforced order on that planet, Camazotz by name, as a metaphor for the Communist regimes like the Soviet Union or East Germany that I was taught threatened the American way of life. It was the 1980’s after all, the era of Reagan and renewed flag waving and the last big run of the nuclear arms race. It was only as I got older and pondered on the novel that I saw it as the epitome of any repressive system that squashed individuality and stifled personal liberty. Those systems are everywhere, especially in places that say they grant freedom. Who wants to live like that?
Apparently these days, I do. I’m finding myself longing to live on Camazotz.
This recent realization of a longing for order shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I’ve always thought I believed in individuality and championed the cause of liberty. I’ve always stood for the oppressed and the marginalized. I’ve always fought for people to be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do...up to a point.
Being raised LDS, there’s liberty and then there’s liberty. What I thought was liberty as a child seems much less so when viewed through more experienced eyes. And yet, reality is subjective, and within that youthful reality, there was a lot of room to breathe as long as one didn’t push past the limits, the boundaries explicit and implicit. In so many ways, I flourished in that structure. It allowed parts of me to grow straight, tall, and upright. But, as anyone who has read this blog knows, I was also severely bruised by that structure. Why would I crave it again?
This is a time of political and personal turmoil, when people steal books from libraries and cheese doodles sporting bad hair are in serious contention for the presidency of the United States, when All Lives Matter even though they don’t really seem to. This is a time when people steal your kidneys in public parks, when men are becoming women and vice versa and other people are taking advantage of the uncertainty this has caused society to push their own agendas. This is a time where people don’t push in their chairs and don’t ask if you’re available before they start barraging you with demands. They don’t say “please” and “thank you”, or “excuse me, do you have a moment?” Breaking “the rules” is now the norm. Whatever happened to everyone following the rules instead of being the exception? (Was there really ever such a time?) Where are the unquestionably good cowboys, the ones with the white hats that Paula Cole sang about in the ‘90’s? Where is the freakin’ Lone Ranger?
I think my own rule breaking has something to do with this longing. This summer, I married Chris, breaking one of the biggest rules taught me about life. I permanently put myself outside the protective ideological circle that once supported me and I’ve never felt more vulnerable, more precarious. It permanently altered my relationships with people I care deeply about. My entire world has changed and now I’m looking to find any vestiges of the order I knew. When they don’t materialize, I get angry, sometimes even hostile. I become the tyrant I say I despise. I think mean things about people, straying far from the Christian ideals I endeavor to espouse. It’s harder than ever to let people be who they are and to love them regardless. I should be grateful for the spiritual exercise, but I’m just tired. Tired of difference and division. Tired of discussion. Tired of variation and diversity. I want us all to walk lock step according to the stride I set forth.
I guess you could say I’m the devil.
I hope to come through this with an increased ability to love unconditionally. I also hope the world will wake up and realize we need both liberty and liege, freedom and restraint, if we are to cohere as a society of siblings, children of whatever lord of light we choose to acknowledge. Because really, who wants a giant, pulsating brain taking the choice away from us? Or my mediocre, sometimes active one calling everyone names when it doesn’t have its way?
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