#i need to be given approval for my own autonomy i am NOT beating the reincarnation allegations today lads

[autistic-shaiapouf]

I really do need people to greenlight behavior for me huh

[youknow-i-loveit]

Why I Still Feel Like I Need To Ask Permission Before I Do Anything Ever

Randomly hit with the realization that my parents are still holding me back because they never taught me how to act with autonomy.

They never taught me how to be assertive or how to tell people things.

(They also wrecked my self-esteem, which was pretty horrible to begin with.)

My parents were very “do this because I told you to” authoritarian types who didn’t like to answer questions, and especially hated it when you questioned them. Questioning other authority figures was okay sometimes, depending on who the authority figure was, but my parents wanted to reign over their children with absolute power.

They generally had issues with needing to feel in-control. They didn’t have great role models for what it means to be an authority figure- my mom was the youngest, doted upon and spoiled for being the only girly-girl in the family, and by the time her parents had her (the eighth child), they were exhausted and distant, permissive, laissez-faire parents- and my dad grew up under an abusive military man who routinely beat his children, who used his voice as a weapon, and when he was at work, his wife ruled through manipulation, primarily guilt-tripping. Since my dad was the second of his six brothers, he was considered to have a better idea about how to deal with children, so my mom generally deferred to him, partly because of that, and partly because if my dad didn’t feel like he was in charge, he would make sure everybody felt miserable.

And as they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. My dad very much took after his father. He thought he was being toned-down and “gentle,” and bragged all the time about how he had it worse, making it sound like he was going easy on us. He often threatened to act more like his dad. But while I feel bad for him and his brothers and the abuse they endured, that gave him no excuse to abuse us the ways he did.

I could go on and on, but the point is, my parents didn’t know how to be in charge, but they felt that it was their god-given right to be in charge-- literally, they kept throwing “Honor Your Mother And Father” at us from the Ten Commandments.

My parents never admitted to being wrong. In fact, my dad hammered it in that being wrong was shameful and something that none of us should ever, ever do- ignorance was considered shameful, and if we ever dared utter the sentence “I didn’t know,” he would mock us, roar at us, and quite often, make references to that moment for the rest of the day, if not the rest of the week. It took me years to be okay with admitting that I don’t know things. To teach myself that learning should be fun and exciting, and that teaching others new information should be seen as an opportunity, not as a burden.

So my parents are proudly ignorant control freaks with an abusive streak, who want to rule with absolute authority; so far so great right?

My parents were strict Catholics who wanted us to follow their faith. They took us to church every Sunday. They enrolled all of us in Catholic school until they couldn’t afford the tuition anymore. They insulted anyone non-Catholic- even other Christians- calling them stupid and sinners and sometimes even “evil,” and considered anyone who attended Catholic church but didn’t adhere to their beliefs “not true Catholics,” so they were lumped in with the rest of the riffraff who were apparently going to hell.

We were allowed to question authority figures that didn’t adhere to their strict beliefs, and even encouraged to make fun of them, but if we ever dared to question someone who did, my parents informed us with cold, cutting certainty that we were making the wrong choice and were in danger of going to hell ourselves.

We grew up pretty sheltered. Our parents wouldn’t let us participate in most of the fads that swept up everyone else in our peer groups. It didn’t even matter when those peers were all Catholic kids attending our same Catholic school- my parents still thought their parents were making the wrong decisions, and we were effectively isolated from socializing with our peers. For a window into this, consider that I was forbidden from watching or playing Pokemon during the late 1990s. At recess, literally everyone else in my class would “play Pokemon,” whether that meant they were actually playing the trading-card game or whether they were pretending to be characters from the show. Since I wasn’t allowed to participate, I was left alone on the swings, accompanied only by one of the lunch moms who took pity on me. (Her name was Mrs. Stevenson. She was funny. I liked her. For Halloween, she wore an ugly holiday sweater with Froot Loops glued all over it and said she was a ‘cereal killer.’)

We weren’t allowed to watch Sailor Moon, or Rugrats, or Dragon Ball Z. We weren’t allowed to play with Furbies. We were allowed to accept Beanie Babies as gifts, but our parents were too poor to buy us any, so I think the most I had was about six.

We were also (wrongly) informed that people different from us were all stupid. I questioned this from a young age, asking why people were different, but instead of actually answering me, my mom would go “Exactly!” as though that settled that.

So when I asked why African Americans spoke differently or dressed differently or said things like “black pride,” I was told it was because they were entitled and because they thought they were special, but that they were foolish and wrong. It was only later, on my own, that I learned they don’t do these things to set themselves apart from the rest of society out of some weird petty desire to be special and different, but because we stole their culture from them, and they need to reclaim an identity that they can be proud of. The system is stacked against them, so every act of embracing their blackness is an act of rebellion against the system that tries to crush them every day. They speak differently because of where they live, because of history and culture that have shaped their words that way, and if their grammar is improper, that’s most likely due to underfunded school districts, but it could also be code-switching so they fit in with their peers.

And when I asked why anyone would be anything other than Christian if the Bible really was the word of God, and God was real, I was told it was because they’re too stupid or jaded to see the truth. So when my uncle came out as Muslim when I was a teenager, our family ostracized him, berated him, and made fun of him relentlessly behind his back, because we all thought he was stupid. It was years later that I became an atheist and I realized the questioning process he must have gone through, the philosophy he must have studied, the books upon books he must have read, the agonizing introspection he must have endured, all while living under his parents’ roof... 

We were told that we were smart. That we were important and special. 

But we were also taught that we were constantly on the razor’s edge of being undeserving of love or redemption.

Naturally, this caused me to form strong attachments to characters like Loki, Bucky, and the Beast from Beauty and the Beast- characters who others saw as monstrous, but who seemed worthy of redemption, who didn’t seem to deserve everything that was done to them, even as much as they blamed themselves or got down on themselves sometimes.

The constant messages of “you need to be perfect or else” and “you are a disappointment,” accompanied by my dad’s ridiculously high standards, made me desperate for approval. 

I sought favor with my parents nearly every day, but was so often disappointed- especially by my dad. Even when I’d done something I was really proud of, he’d find ways to poke holes in it, talk down to me, call me stupid, and ask something to the effect of why I’d made such a horrible decision.

So I started looking elsewhere.

Friends. Partners. Teachers. Professors. Therapists. Co-workers. Bosses. Other people’s moms. Members of groups I joined. Anywhere I could get it, I was (and still am) constantly thirsty for validation, praise, and approval.

My parents probably weren’t trying to do this, but they taught me to constantly second-guess myself. They taught me that I needed to ask for permission to exist.

One of the things that was brought up over and over again whenever one of us would upset Mom was that “she gave birth to you.” On one memorable occasion, my dad went into graphic detail about how exactly the birthing process worked. He made it sound like some sort of accomplishment, or personal favor, that I should be forever grateful and reverent towards. But I never asked for this. Giving birth was something she couldn’t avoid. I should have never been guilt tripped into feeling like I owed her something for it.

Whenever my dad was a certain flavor of upset, he’d bark “Get out of my sight!” We would flee to some far corner of the house, behind some closed door, and cry where no one could see. In that moment, he had ceased to give permission to exist in his presence.

So when I first came out as trans, I struggled a lot, because I felt like I constantly had to ask everyone around me for permission to be myself.

It’s tragic that, in retrospect, everyone would have respected me a lot more if instead of asking, I had simply told them who I am and then been myself. I should never have felt so timid, so cowed. I should never have felt like I owed anyone an apology for asking them to use my name and my pronouns.

I should have been free to be me.

But when I lived under my parents’ roof, I wasn’t free. I was forced to hide, to pretend. I was forced to let them deadname and misgender me. I was still forced to attend church until I moved out-- I got out of attending weekly mass by pleading that it was detrimental to my mental health, after being forced to attend masses as an atheist for over a year. But in order to keep a roof over my head, I was still forced to attend Christmas and Easter mass every year, and badgered to attend more masses at nearly every opportunity.

I had to lie about who I was dating too. I had to hide all the ups and downs- the euphoria of new crushes and new relationships, the agony and heartbreak of breakups or bumps in the road. I couldn’t ask my parents for advice navigating this extremely important part of my life. Instead I had to figure it all out on my own, and lie, and pretend they were my “friends.”

My parents made me feel as though I couldn’t do anything on my own.

So to this day, I still often feel like I have to ask for help or for moral support in order to get things done. Not everything, but anything that my partner could feasibly be involved in or have any opinion on whatsoever. Filling out forms, looking things up, buying food, scheduling our week.

And anything that I’m not 1000% sure my friends would invite me to, or anything I’m not 1000% sure they want me to do, I’ll hang back on or stay silent. Any sort of physical affection that I’m not 1000% sure is welcome, I’ll hold back on or I won’t even offer, because I’m so scared of rejection or retaliation. Any complaints that I have, I’ll run by someone else first, and sit on for often weeks or months before I bring it up, if I ever bring it up, because I’m so worried that someone’s temper will flare, or that they will grow cold and distant and cut me off from their affection/ attention/ presence.

My parents never taught me how to ask for things.

They never taught me how to tell people things, simple things, like “I’m going to the store,” or “I’m a guy actually,” or say “Oh, you’re going to meet up with a bunch of people I know? Can I come?”

I’m self-taught in a lot of things, but socializing is one of them.

And as I’m sitting here typing this, I’m waiting for my partner, because we have to get through a lot of paperwork and beaurocratic nonsense this week, and even though not all of it strictly needs to involve her, I still feel like I can’t do it on my own.

It’s okay to ask for help. That’s something I’ve had to get used to too.

But sometimes I worry if I ask for too much help. >_<

[hope-and-soap]

“Cover it up”: Ragnarok and the scars of history (2/2)

Find part 1 here

“It is I! Your saviour!”

So: hands up, those of us who were shocked/thrilled/horrifically excited etc when we were first presented with the prospect of seeing Loki on Asgard’s throne.

And now: hands up, those of us who were expecting what he actually did with it.

Loki’s a difficult character to deal with, largely because his motivations seem to be all over the place. In The Avengers he wants world domination and to not be killed by Thanos. In The Dark World he wants revenge for his mother and, in some small way, to get on a little better with Thor. These things, they don’t really line up, do they? And that leaves us, after all these films, still asking that question: what does Loki want?

When Loki took over Asgard, he didn’t take its armies on a campaign of conquest through the galaxy. He didn’t hunt down his enemies or murder his brother or invade Earth. He sat on a sofa and ate grapes and commissioned art in honour of himself – in honour of Loki, hero of Asgard, beloved of his father, forgiven of his crimes. Loki took over his country and then he took what he wanted: the love of Asgard’s people, his place in its history. Given the chance to have anything he wanted, this is what he chose. To be loved. To be accepted. To be remembered as one of them.

This, then, is what Loki wants: to be a hero of Asgard, rather than an outcast from it. To be someone they accept, not out of force, but out of love. This is, really, what he’s wanted ever since his first appearance – his villainous turn in Thor, after all, began as an attempt to win his father’s approval, and a large part of his snarling bitterness at his country and his family comes from the trauma of realising that neither is really his. Loki is haunted by the feeling of being other; what he wants, more than anything, is to be rid of that feeling.  

Read in this light, the appearance of the little blue kid at the end of The Tragedy of Loki of Asgard goes from being just a cute joke to something more significant: a reminder of where Loki comes from, and who he is. Not just an outsider, or an immigrant, but a hostage from a conquered race. If Hela represents the dark, violent imperialism of Asgard’s past, Loki represents the continuing reality of this imperialism in Asgard’s present. The Jotun were not victims of Hela’s violence, but they were victims of an impulse nearly identical to the one which Hela embodies – the impulse to fight, to conquer, to rule.

When I was sixteen I wanted to move to London. I wanted to write for the BBC; I wanted to be the next Steven Moffat. These are all reasonable dreams, when you are sixteen and a Doctor Who fan; to be honest, I still want to be Steven Moffat. But when I was sixteen I wanted more than that – I wanted to move to London and become British, to prove that I spoke English as well as any Englishwoman, to take the accent and the airs and dye my hair and change my passport and get an OBE from the Queen and forget where I came from and have everyone forget about that, too. To be a Singaporean who made good. To go to the people who’d conquered my people and make my place there, as one as good as them, as one of them.

I got older. I got better. I go to university in England now. Now and then I catch myself speaking with my accent from home and I rub it out before anyone else notices. I take the odd slang term and I hide it away. I work hard because I love my degree and I respect my tutors and I never learned how to not work hard when it comes to academia, and I work hard because one day I’m going to get a first and beat all my white brit friends and I’ll prove that I’m as good as them even though I’m Chinese. It kills me that there are cultural jokes my friends share with each other that I will never understand. It kills me that there is a form of humour over there that I was not raised to appreciate. I go to university in England now and I love that land and I love this land, here, where I came from, but it’s hard being home in two places, it’s hard being made in one and living in another, and sometimes that kills me too.

The place where I live during term time has been standing for a thousand years and it has a library with every book in the world in it and it is a beautiful city full of beautiful people who speak the language I love perfectly, it is a place of poetry, and home is a city full of squat practical buildings built in the last fifty years and advertisements on buses which have grammatical errors in and every now and then I think to myself if I had to pick one, if I had to pick one…

I am older, now. I am better. I tell myself I love my country. I tell myself I do not need to prove myself to anyone, especially not because they’re white, especially not because they would have been my masters, in another life. I am aggressively Singaporean now, aggressively Chinese, aggressively myself. I am no longer sixteen. Sometimes I catch myself wishing I had been born English. The very idea disgusts me. It’s still true.

When Loki takes over Asgard, he turns himself into Odin to do it. And if you’re anything like me, you thought that would’ve lasted for about as long as it would’ve taken him to quash all dissent, exile the strong and the loyal, and reveal his true self to the quivering, subjugated masses left with no other option than to submit to him. But here he is, years later, and he’s still Odin. He would, it seems, be happy to stay Odin for the rest of his life. Loki, remember, wants to rule, but more than that he wants to be loved. And if he can’t have both as himself, he’s willing to become a person who can. Odin, the symbol of every Asgardian ideal, the man who crushed Loki’s people, the man whose approval he was willing to destroy a world for – why wouldn’t he want to be him? Why wouldn’t he want to stay that way?

The tragedy of Loki of Asgard is this: that he becomes his own oppressor, just like I have become mine. We are the ones who set standards that we are never going to reach. We are the ones who are ashamed of where we come from, who we were, who we are now. We are the ones who look at a race of people we secretly resent and tell ourselves they are superior, that we will never be anything unless we can gain their approval, be like them, be them; we are the ones who will destroy ourselves trying. This is, you see, our own fault. Our own fault. We do this to ourselves.  

It’s no surprise, then, that Loki looks a lot like Hela – Hela, the conqueror, the colonialist, creator of empires. They are both tall, thin, pale-skinned; dark-eyed, dark-haired. Both wear horns. Their hairstyles are even similar, and their colour schemes – black and green, almost the same shade. The similarities don’t end there; both share a love of conquest, a desire for power, even certain turns of phrase – in ordering her brothers to kneel, after all, Hela is clearly stealing Loki’s line.

Loki is not just the victim of a history of violence and oppression. He is the inheritor of that history. He’s internalised it, let it take him over; let it dictate who he wants to be and who he is becoming – a creature of conquest, the embodiment of the very thing that did him damage. He becomes both his own oppressor and a symbol of his own oppression – both the victim and the villain of his own story. He takes on both sides of that history. He is scarred by both.

It is Loki, of all of Odin’s children, who has the best claim to Asgard’s history.

Which is, of course, why he gets to be the one to burn it all down.

“Get up. You’re in my seat.”

I just want to say two things about Thor.

The first is this: that Marvel’s filmmakers have finally found, in Thor’s arc in Ragnarok, the one storyline for which the protagonist needs to be a white man. Because Thor is the ultimate child of privilege – raised as royalty, heir to a throne, physically indestructible, with Aryan looks and a traditionally masculine personality. He is, both in-universe and out of it, the white-masculine ideal – the man’s man who oozes physical strength and (hetero)sexual appeal, a man with rank and status and money, handed power and authority on a silver platter. Thor is the one person who never had to fear all the things that Hela represents, because he is not the sort of person she conquers – he is the sort of person she conquers for.

And in this film, he comes to understand what it’s like being on the other side of that picture. This is not, of course, to say that Thor has never suffered before, or that he has never before been capable of compassion for those who are suffering – but he has never, till this point, been the victim of this particular form of violence. Before, he had always been a person with unquestioned agency, the hero of his own story, sometimes hurt but never at another’s mercy. He has been beaten; he has never been exploited. Until now.

In Ragnarok, Thor is enslaved, subjugated, kept in line by thinly-disguised torture. He has his throne stolen from him, his legitimacy questioned. He is used, abused, imprisoned not because he is recognised – as SHIELD recognised him in his first film – as a threat, but because he is property that must be kept in its proper place. He sees his people attacked. He loses his hammer and his agency and his hair – a loss which, though played for laughs, represents the violation of a body that has to this point been presented as absolutely inviolate and inviolable.

In this film, Thor goes from being a child of privilege to being a slave, a member of a victimised community, a sexualised object, a person without bodily autonomy. And because of this, he finally understands what it is to be these things. To be the victim of a system of power over which you have no control. To be the victim of violence which you are unable to fight. To be beaten and pressed down and thumbed under. To be powerless.

This is, ultimately, what makes his defeat of Hela powerful, and meaningful, and possible. Because Thor, as he was before, would never have been able to fight a system of oppression – he would barely have been able to comprehend it. Thor, the Mighty Thor, has no power in a world like this. We do not need mighty invincible champions who reach down from the heavens to save the oppressed. We do not need the child of privilege, given everything, lacking nothing. We need someone who will fight with us. Who feels this pain too. We need someone who understands.

The second thing I want to say is this: Thor is not the firstborn of Odin. Hela is. Thor is not the heir to Asgard’s throne. Hela is. In nations built on violence and cruelty it is not the children of privilege who inherit. It is history. It is violence. It is cruelty itself.

When Hela tells Thor that he is in her chair, she isn’t lying – she’s correct. The throne is hers, and so is the power, and so is the land. She owns it. It is hers. And none of them may remember, but it has always been hers.

And so Thor tells Loki to burn it down. He burns down his home, his life, everything he has ever known. But in the end, he loses nothing, because none of it was ever his, really. It is not his inheritance that he burns. It is hers.

Who really has your power? Who really owns your land? Can you let it live, knowing it feeds something darker and bloodier than you care to remember? Can you really cling to your gilded thrones, knowing you are usurpers, knowing that one day history will rise up to claim its inheritance?

Do you dare to burn it down?

What will you really lose?    

[bibleteachingbyolga]

I woke up on November 1, 1973, a happy 23-year-old within the Communist Party. I had entered the University of Michigan graduate school after reporting for The Boston Globe, along with travel on a Soviet freighter and the Trans-Siberian Railway. A comfortable fellowship let me have my cake and advocate eating the cake of others. Professors complimented me on my Marxist analysis. Free love beckoned.

I had just received a visit from two leaders of the Michigan Communist Party. They admired not only my volumes of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, but my three volumes by Bulgarian communist boss Georgi Dimitrov. I told them of my just-approved plan to create, with university funds, a mini-course featuring Soviet scholar Georgy Arkadyevich Arbatov. He had just published in English (translated from Russian) a book with a best-seller title: The War of Ideas in Contemporary International Relations: The Imperialist Doctrine, Methods, and Organization of Foreign Political Propaganda. Great stuff, as I considered it at the time.

Plus, everything was coming up red roses around the world. At a meeting of the Young Workers Liberation League in a University of Michigan seminar room, we heard good reports about the coming North Vietnamese victory over US forces, and progress in key targets for communist activity over the next decade: Afghanistan, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Nicaragua. In Washington, Vice President Spiro Agnew had just resigned in the face of bribery allegations, and Attorney General Elliot Richardson had resigned during the Watergate “Saturday night massacre.”

As an undergraduate at Yale, I had gained exposure to the best and the brightest that “bourgeois culture” could put forward, and found them wanting. Marx and Lenin taught me that the crucial determinant in human history is economic and social class, and I concluded that the bourgeois class had swung and missed: war in Vietnam, poverty at home, corruption in Washington. Time for the working class to take over, under the leadership of the vanguard of the working class, the Communist Party, those willing to do whatever it takes to take over the Capitol and eliminate the betrayers in power.

Frozen in My Chair

At 3 in the afternoon on November 1, I was in my room and sitting in my red chair, rereading Lenin’s famous essay “Socialism and Religion.” In it he wrote, “We must combat religion — this is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently Marxism.” Following Marx, Lenin called religion “opium for the people . . . spiritual booze in which the slaves of capital drown their human image.”

Nothing new. I had abandoned Judaism and declared myself an atheist when I was 14. But suddenly the strangest experience of my life began. Since I had never taken LSD or had a concussion, hallucination, or near-death experience, I can rule out those possible explanations for why I sat in that chair for eight hours, looking at the clock each hour with surprise that I still hadn’t moved.

During those hours, over and over, I saw myself as walking in darkness, but invited to push open a door into a room of brilliant brightness. Meanwhile, questions battered my brain: What if Lenin is wrong? What if God does exist? What is my relationship to this God, if he’s there? Why, when he is kind to me, do I offer evil in return? Why goodness in, garbage out?

Then I started thinking about my journalistic attitudes: Is America really Amerikkka? If not, why am I turning my back on it? Mixing theology and ideology, I started wondering why capitalist desire for money and power is worse than communist desire? Why had I embraced treasonous ideas? Why?

From where were these thoughts emanating? In my brain, Marxism was settled social science. Lenin’s hatred for the “figment of man’s imagination” called “God” was not new to me. It’s hard for me to convey the strangeness, the otherness, of this experience. I have trouble sitting still during lectures. I like to walk while thinking. Yet here I was sitting in the chair, hour after hour, suddenly believing I had done something very wrong by embracing Marx and Lenin.

At 3 in the afternoon, I was an atheist and a communist. When I arose eight hours later, I was not. I had no new data, but suddenly, through some strange intervention, I had a new way of processing data. Over and over, the same beat resonated: I’m wrong. There’s more in heaven and earth than I previously recognized.

Hound of Heaven

It seems mystical, and I can’t even describe well the experience, but it reversed the course of my life.

At 11 that evening, I stood up and spent the next two hours wandering around the cold and dark University of Michigan campus. To borrow an image from nineties basketball, I bounced past the Michigan Union, off the Literature, Science, and Arts building, past Angell Hall, off the Hatcher Graduate Library, nothing but nyet: a firm No to the atheist and Marxist weeds that had grown in me for ten years.

During the next three weeks, I resigned from the Communist Party and read criticisms of the Soviet Union: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Whittaker Chambers, The God That Failed. I felt I should pursue the question of God’s existence, but disciplined myself to spend the following three weeks writing term papers.

By then the initial glow had faded. I escaped all-encompassing questions by joining the board of the Cinema Guild, a student movie-showing group, and thus gained two free tickets to any of the four or five movies shown on campus each night, with resultant dating opportunities.

But the Holy Spirit wasn’t finished with me. While I ran from reality, God pursued, in a process described by Francis Thompson’s powerful poem “The Hound of Heaven”:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the arches of the years; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways.

God came after me “with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace.” He turned each of my attempts to escape into new encounters.

Russian Gospel

God came after me. First, I had studied Russian to speak with my Soviet big brothers and had to continue with that to fulfill a PhD language requirement. One night in my room, I picked up the only unread Russian-language work in my bookcase, a New Testament given me as a travel souvenir and retained because it seemed exotic and might be useful for reading practice. With a Russian-English dictionary in front of me, I dived into the Gospel According to Matthew. I was delighted to find chapter 1 easy going: in the second verse Abraham begets Isaac, and other begats lope down the page.

Then came the Christmas story I had never read, followed by a massacre of babies and John the Baptist’s hard-hitting words: “You brood of vipers” (Matthew 3:7). It held my attention, and after a while I didn’t punctuate the verses with sneers. Needing to read slowly and think about the words was helpful. The Sermon on the Mount impressed me. All the Marxists I knew were pro-anger, devoted to fanning proletarian hatred of The Rich. Jesus, though, was not only anti-murder but anti-anger: “Everyone who is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment” (Matthew 5:22). Marxists held to a two-eyes-for-an-eye kind of justice, but Jesus spoke of loving enemies and turning the other cheek.

Reading the Puritans

My next push to faith came in 1974 when, as a graduate student, I had to teach a course in early American literature: it was in the course catalogue, but none of the professors wanted to teach something they saw as dull and reactionary. I had to prepare by reading Puritan sermons, including those of Increase Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Since the Holy Spirit had prepared me, those dead white males made sense to me. Some love Puritan arguments and others hate them, but my childhood prejudice that Christians were stupid people who worshiped Christmas trees faded fast.

The little I knew of Christian thought came largely from my observation of Boston Catholicism, heavy on ritual. The Puritans were different: they believed God is the agent of conversion and regeneration, with humans responsive yet not leading the process. God does not ticket for heaven those with good social conduct: God saves those he chooses to save, regardless of their acts. Salvation then leads to better conduct, sometimes slowly.

That was good news for me. I had broken each of the Ten Commandments, except literally the prohibition of murder (but Jesus called anger a form of murder, Matthew 5:21–22). I certainly was glad that God, if he were anything like the Puritans described him, would not judge me by my works. I assigned to students Thomas Hooker’s sermon on “A True Sight of Sin,” in which Hooker describes our insistence on autonomy: “I will be swayed by mine own will and led by mine own deluded reason.” That was my history, and Hooker seemed to be preaching to me.

Unstoppable Spirit

I was slow. In 1975, instead of visiting a church to find out what flesh-and-blood Christians believe, I started reading about Christianity in the University of Michigan library. I headed down a rabbit trail with Gabriel Marcel and other Christian existentialists, as well as neoorthodox theologians who said they had wedded Christ without much concern for whether the Bridegroom actually existed. I was also in no hurry to leave behind some of the transient pleasures of atheistic immorality.

But I had not left communism merely to believe in pleasant myths or flings. The question was and is truth: as the apostle Paul put it, “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:17–19) So, the Holy Spirit worked on me, and in 1976 I finally made a profession of faith. I relished and still love Psalm 73:24–25: “You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you?”

That sums it up. God offers wisdom now and heaven later — and what good alternative do we have? I had relied on my deluded reason. I was a fanatic who, apart from God’s mysterious intervention, could not be reasoned with. Happily, the Holy Spirit, while not unreasonable, is unstoppable.

[touchmyhobi]

Professor Kwon: Chapter III

Genre: Teacher AU, Smut, Fluff, Angst.

Word Count: 3,460

Chapter: 3/?

Pairing: G-Dragon x Reader

Warnings: Once again, there won’t be any until like the 4th chapter ;)) Please hold on until then bbs.

“You know Y/N, I must admit you’re improving. It appears my warning has gotten through that dull head of yours”, Mr. Kwon paced back and forth slowly in front of my desk as he spoke.

“With all due respect sir, I do believe my head is not dull and that I am improving at my own will. Not because you told me to do so,” I bit back.

Bang!

Suddenly, Mr. Kwon’s hands slammed down on the surface of the wooden desk. His body lurched forward slightly and his gaze captured my own.

“What? Just because you wrote one decent paper, you think you have the power to question my authority?” he glowered at me and I shivered with a sickening mixture of anger and annoyance. “You will have to do a lot more than whine about your autonomy before I think of you as anything more than a subpar student”.

Beep! Beep!

My eyes shot open to find Mr. Kwon was not actually towering before me but rather my alarm was flashing in my face. I grumbled and smacked the dismiss button. That same combination of emotion from my nightmare brewing within me as I stomped through my bedroom to get ready for the day I was simultaneously dreading and anticipating.

Will he approve of my writing or will he tear me apart?

A dark, stormy cloud loomed large over my brain, casting lightning bolts throughout my body as the day wore on. Thunder rumbled in the pit of my stomach and a thick fog of worry choked my awareness. I had no choice but to continue my day in a trance, moving through the motions but not truly noticing any detail. Time seemed to pass like a high speed wind. One that dragged me right to the door that opened to the greatest storm of all, Professor Kwon’s Introductory Literature class.

Mere minutes before the class was to begin, I promptly found a seat in the center of the room. Which was a surprise in itself given that everyone files into this class like fans at a concert rushing to get the best view of the beautiful lead singer. However, as the class began I noticed the lead singer was looking a little odd.

Normally Professor Kwon would greet the class with a cordial welcome and an award-winning smile. But today, his approachable demeanor was nowhere to be found.

“Uh,” he cleared his throat as he glowered at the class from behind his yellow tinted glasses, “Let’s just get right into it…” he trailed off before diving into his most lacklustre lecture to date.

As he dragged on about proper sentence transitions and paragraph structures, he paid more attention to the dormant chalkboard than the devoted students. Not to mention, his naturally soft voice had taken on a gritty quality that made his aura much less approachable.

“That’s it for today. Also, this is the last time I’ll remind you all that your papers are due tomorrow. Good luck,” with that, we were ambiguously dismissed.

I gathered my things in confusion, falling into a state of anxiety as my brain began jumping from conclusion to conclusion.

Just as I was about to escape past Mr. Kwon’s desk, his voice deadpanned.

“Ms. Y/L/N, please sit down”.

Here we go, I thought to myself as I proceeded to sit down, let the nightmare commence.

"I'd like to speak with you about your paper," Professor Kwon spoke in a stern tone as he slowly approached the desk.

This is it. I failed my first essay. I cannot believe I screwed it up already, my inner dialogue began to spiral into a panic.

The paper slammed down in front of me and I squeezed my eyes shut, far too afraid to see the result.

"How did you do it?"

Suddenly I opened my eyes to see Professor Kwon staring down at me with an undecipherable expression.

"Do what?" I responded, shooting my gaze down towards the essay before me. My eyes went wide as I noticed the mark, 100%. “How is this possible? I’ve never received 100% in my life”.

“And I’ve never given out a 100% in the entirety of my teaching career. Which is exactly why I am wondering, how did you do it?” Professor Kwon leaned over the desk and stared deep into my eyes. I could tell he was serious.

“There must be some kind of mistake. I don’t deserve such a high mark!” I began to quiver with the fear of being in trouble. “Are you sure this is my paper?”

“Well, why don’t you read it? Are those your words?”

I nodded timidly.

“I’ve ran it through the school’s plagiarism system and it’s completely original,” his voice had calmed down to a more resigned tone at this point. “I just don’t understand how a first year student could write something of this caliber”.

Professor Kwon was now running a hand through his parted, black hair as he paced back and forth in front of the desk.

“I’m s-sorry, I don’t know what to say,” I responded, beyond intimidated by his actions.

Suddenly, his gaze shifted towards me as he released an exasperated sigh and approached the desk. He pulled out a chair and sat in front of me. His eyes promptly fell to his lap, leading me to notice the way he rubbed his hands together.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” he appeared to be struggling to find the right words. “I just want to understand your talent. It isn’t often I come across a student with such immense potential. With that being said, I’d like to run something by you?” he asked cautiously.

I nodded in response, my stomach still lurching from the situation’s uncertainty.

“I’ve already spoken with the headmaster about your talents. He and I feel it would be beneficial to begin one on one classes with you after school hours. Which means I will be your mentor. Would you like that?”

After he finished speaking, Professor Kwon’s gaze reached mine again. However, this time there was a glint in his eye and it sent a shiver down my spine.

“O-Of course I would! That would be such a great opportunity,” I rambled slightly, completely taken aback by the offer. “Thank you so much”.

The moment I babbled out my response, a huge grin fought its way onto my Professor’s lips causing him to look down once again.

“Don’t mention it. It’s an honour to mentor someone with such great potential”.

I just stared at him in disbelief. I had always known that I excelled in literature but I would never have guessed I was good enough to garner such attention.

“So how does every Wednesday and Thursday, 4-5 sound?” his question shocked me out of my trance.

“Oh, sounds good to me!” I responded with an anxious smile.

“Perfect!” he suddenly stood up and made his way to his desk before reaching down to grab a thin stack of papers. “I made up a short course outline for you. Basically just covering what this extra class entails as well as a schedule of topics for the next few weeks”.

His slender legs brought him back across the room to the front of my desk as he handed me the papers. Before I could even grab them, he was speaking again.

“Also, try not to get overwhelmed. I want to help you as much as I want you to enjoy yourself”.

“I’ve got to get to home now but thank you again Professor Kwon,” I stood from my seat with a gentle smile, before reaching down to grab my backpack. Only to discover he had already beat me to it.

“No problem. See you tomorrow,” he spoke in a sticky sweet tone, that undecipherable gaze returning once again.

As I reached out to grab the backpack, my hand brushed his and for a moment I could have sworn a fire had ignited beneath the skin of my cheeks. I bowed quickly before rushing out of the room. For some reason, Professor Kwon had me on my toes. The emotions I was feeling for him in a day ranged from being smitten to wanting to have control over him and quite frankly, these ever changing feelings were giving me whiplash. I shook my head in an effort to clear my mind as I shut the classroom door behind me.

Before I could even make it to the front doors of the school, someone grabbed my shoulders causing me to collapse with fear. My books hit the floor with a thud and a gasp left my body along with my soul.

“Oh my God, I’m so sorry!” the stranger exclaimed before dramatically dropping to the floor as well to help me retrieve my books before offering me a hand as if he wasn’t the one who caused me to fall in the first place. “I didn’t mean to scare you that much. You must be rather faint of heart,” he crossed his arms and scoffed at me as I dusted myself off.

“As a matter of fact I am. You know you shouldn’t jump people like that. What if I had a heart problem, you could have killed me,” I scolded the man.

“Oh come on, don’t be so dramatic. Besides is that any way to greet your new best friend?”

“Oh and I’m dramatic? What type of person introduces themselves to a stranger as their best friend?” I asked as the annoying man followed me down the hallway. “Who are you anyways?”

“The name is Seungri and trust me, it's an honour for you to be chosen as my best friend”.

“Oh really? And why’s that?” I raised an eyebrow as an amused smirk took over my face.

“Sweetheart I am what you call the eyes and the ears of this school. I know everything you need to survive your four years in this stuffy hell hole,” he had quite the theatrical way of speaking. I had to admit he was entertaining but annoying nonetheless.

“Is that so?”

“I would hope so, considering I’ve already spent my four years here,” he admitted and I assumed he just had a longer program than I.

I opened the front doors to a brisk autumn breeze as I questioned him further, seeing as he showed no signs of leaving my side. “So, what do you want with me?”

He stopped in his tracks and rested a hand on his chin as if he was contemplating the meaning of life.

“Hmm…well, you have a piece of information that I do not have but I desperately want. Thus, I need to befriend you to obtain said information,” he admitted.

“What information are you talking about?”

“I want to know what business you have with Professor Kwon. Why did he ask you to stay behind after class?”

“Wait why are you in a first-year Literature course? I thought this was your fifth year?”

“Literature isn’t one of my many strengths. It’s the only class I need to pass to get out of this place,” I looked at him in understanding. “Well? I told you my secret, now tell me yours!” he exclaimed impatiently.

“Professor Kwon just wanted me to stay behind so that he could ask me about my paper because I received 100%. He was just making sure I didn’t cheat, that’s all,” Seungri looked at me with suspicious eyes but accepted my answer regardless. As we approached the train platform, I looked at him questioningly. “Are you taking this train as well?”

“Don’t worry I’m not stalking you…” he trailed off, silently asking my name.

“Y/N,” I informed him.

“Yeah Y/N, this is my train home as well. Isn’t that great? We can spend so much time together since we’re best friends now!” his annoying, pushy demeanor resurfaced.

I gave him little but a grin and a nod, my lips pressed anxiously together as I silently begged he had the wrong train. But, much to my dismay, he boarded the car and sat next to me. We made small talk but it didn’t achieve much as my short answers gave his eccentric mind little to work with. His destination quickly approached. Unfortunately, mine was only a stop after his. Which meant we lived in the same neighbourhood. Great.

“See you tomorrow, Y/N!” he exclaimed as he shuffled off the bus and I cringed at the thought of having to deal with such a draining man more than once.

I stepped onto the platform and made my way down the secluded city street toward my shared apartment. Making my way up and through the building, I longed for the comfort of my bed and awaited the moment I could lay my head upon the pillow. The day had taken too much out of me. Between Mr. Kwon falsely accusing me of plagiarism and my strange encounter with the so-called Seungri, I was more than ready to shut my brain off for a while. I just hoped Ji Soo wasn’t waiting to grill me about day two with Professor Kwon.

As I pushed the door open I began to speak. “Listen Ji Soo, before you question me about anything, can I please take a nap. I’m exhaus-” I cut myself off when my cousin failed to obnoxiously attack me with hugs. “Ji Soo?”

Suddenly I noticed a pink sticky note attached to the fridge that was addressed to me.

Y/N. I went out for the night and I’ll be staying out. So, don’t wait up. There’s some leftovers in the fridge. I hope your day with Mr. Kwon went well. I’ll be there tomorrow to discuss. Love, Ji Soo.

I silently thanked her for choosing tonight of all nights to stay out and wandered into my bedroom. As soon as my head hit the pillow, I pulled the blankets up to my chin and succumbed to sleep.

“When writing a strong paragraph, it is not enough to use transition words such as ‘thus’ and ‘furthermore’. Think your sentences through and craft transitions that are specific and grammatically correct,” suddenly the bell rang and cut Mr. Kwon’s rant on effective paragraphs short. “I see my time is up. Don’t forget to hand in your papers before you leave. Have a good evening everyone”.

After undergoing a 12 hour sleep the night before, I felt rejuvenated and completely unfazed by the impending one-on-one lesson with my professor. Today I managed to find a seat at the front of the class so I could just stay put once everyone had left the classroom. Not even the breathtakingly classic suit the man standing before me wore could cause my breath to hitch. I finally have my control back, I thought to myself as I watched him retrieve some papers from his bag.

“Y/N! Are you excited for your lesson?” he asked with a genuine grin on his face as his bright eyes shifted to meet mine.

I nodded confidently as I returned the smile.

“That’s good to hear. I was afraid I might have scared you away yesterday,” he voiced his concerns and I noticed how honest his facial expressions were.

“Oh no, you’ll have to do a lot more than that to scare me away,” I reassured him and for a split second, those honest expressions took a shift in a direction that didn’t lie but didn’t tell the truth either.

“Yes, I see,” he had to clear his throat before the smile could return. “Shall we get started with your lesson then?”

I nodded once more and much to my surprise, he pulled a chair up to my desk and sat directly in front of me. Suddenly, my heart tripped and missed a beat as his face came so close to mine.

“I want these lessons to feel more informal, like a collaboration instead of a lecture. I hope that’s okay?”

“Yeah,” I responded timidly after clearing my throat.

“Perfect. Here are my notes for this lesson, like I said this will not be a lecture so, I will prepare notes for you and we will discuss them. The assignment details will always be at the end of the note,” he directed me through the papers and I tried my best to focus given his proximity. “You have already proven to me how well you can write a formal essay but I’m curious to see how creative you can get. So, I’ve prepared a poetry unit. How are you with poetry?”

Given that his words had sent me into an entranced state, I had to wake myself up to respond.

“I’ve dabbled in poetry, but I can only seem to do it on my own accord when I’m experiencing some emotional upheaval of sorts,” I explained.

“That’s very common among writers actually. What was your last poem inspired by?”

His personal question caught me off guard but I knew I had to answer honestly.

“Well, I uh, there was this friend. He and I had grown very close and he made me believe we shared mutual feelings. But after we became…involved…he told me he only saw me as a friend,” I explained, giving as little detail as possible.

“That’s great!” he said enthusiastically and was greeted by my shocked expression. “I mean, that’s a great experience to draw inspiration from. Not that it’s great that he did that to you, no one deserves that, especially such an intelligent, young woman like you,” he smiled shyly before continuing. “For your first assignment, you will write me a sonnet. Have you ever written one before Y/N?”

“Once or twice during a brief unit in high school,” I informed him.

“Well to refresh your memory, a sonnet traditionally consists of fourteen-lines and is written in iambic pentameter. However, there are many types of sonnets,” he continued but my mind was wandering too far for me to concentrate.

I’ve lost control, that little voice in my mind reminded me of my ongoing struggle yet again. Professor Kwon had an intoxicating presence. A presence that I could cautiously observe from a comfortable distance but any closer was far too lethal of a dose. Each time he leaned forward to point to a sentence on my page, I would subconsciously draw in a hissed breath, praying to every perceived deity that he didn’t notice. My eyes monitored his gentle movements before tracing the gentle lines of his eyes, nose, lips…

“Do you understand that Y/N?”

Instinctively I nodded, knowing damn well I didn’t hear a word he said.

“Lastly, a sonnet tends to deal with big ideas. Approach it as if you are a philosopher pondering one of life’s largest mysteries for the first time. Be curious of anything and everything pertaining to the topic at hand,” he instructed oh-so-eloquently.

“What types of topics should I consider then?”

“Topics such as love, loss, death, lust,” he looked me in the eye and I choked on my own breath for a split second. “Just make sure it’s something you struggle to comprehend. Do you understand now, or do you need more examples?”

“No, no!” I shook my hands nervously as I spoke. “Those examples were perfect. Thank you!”

Professor Kwon stared at me with an incredulous expression before chuckling dismissively.

“You’re cu-” he began to speak but immediately stopped himself, the lighthearted expression he once held shifting to one of concern. “You’re, uh, free to go. We actually went over by a few minutes,” he suddenly stood up and walked back to his desk leaving me in shock.

What was he going to say? Did I do something wrong? I thought to myself before that little voice chastised me. Stop overthinking it and get up already! He probably just has somewhere to be.

“Oh, I see,” a slight tinge of disappointment tainted my voice as I got up and gathered my books, shoving them into my bag. When I looked up again, his back was facing me as he took his time cleaning the blackboard. “I’ll see you tomorrow Mr. Kwon. Thank you for the first lesson”.

I waited patiently for a response but all I received was an unsatisfying “see you Y/N”. The sudden tense atmosphere between us caused me to take the hint and escape the now freezing room.

As I wandered down the empty hallway, my heart sank as I tried to wrap my head around how things went so wrong. Once again I was left lacking control and struggling to understand where I stood with Professor Kwon.