on The Mountain Goats song ezekiel 7.

I have been doing godwork, formally, for a few months now--and i am finding some important things about myself. I do not have a missional realtionship to christ. I am most likely not a christian. I do not feel called to ministry, to an intense and personal relationship with God. My queerness, my autism, my depression, my prickly/spiny nature in addition to the above as made the communal work that godtalk entails almost impossible and profoundly lonely. This loneliness is compounded with a never ending quest for completeness, for holiness, for purity, that if i am devout enough or together enough, or even if i do nothing, God in her infinte mercy would make me whole. I do not believe in the Divine, and I want her to make me whole. This album, and esp this song, is the best expression of that profound/postmodern paradox. I could talk about it musically, but the mystery of grace is foundaitonal to the push me/pull me tale of the fallen and the redeemed. Darinelle is CAtholic, he is not Protestant, and my move from the Catholics to the Protestants is one of seeking Grace--Here is Luther (another fallen Catholic) on Grace: It is like the case of a man who is ill, who trusts the doctor who promises him a certain recovery and in the meantime obeys the doctor’s instructions, abstaining from what has been forbidden to him, in the hope of the promised recovery (in spe promissae sanitatis), so that he does not do anything to hinder this promised recovery...Now this man who is ill, is he healthy?.

I feel as if Christ, or the narratology of Christianity has been forbidden to me, that I have had to abstain from it. This song, the album that this song comes from, has broken the hobble, I feel healthier listening to it, I feel less ill.

I feel like sometimes that the confusion, the narrative stumbling, the devotion to brokenness that Darnielle enages in, is a post-Catholic pushing around the history of his childhood, hoping that under that Sisyphian stone, there will be grace, that to make stories about it will make us healthier.

I have my doubts it will, but i like the hope.