Once a Sane Calvinist

Once in a while I encounter an apparently sane Calvinist and try to get a grasp of it. There's a lot to overcome. Calvinists have been trying to scratch their way out of the left-brain hole they jumped into ever since they jumped into it. Many have set up stalls peddling hope pills in its bunker-like depths and await the end of life with patience and varying admixtures of despair. Escape is unthinkable.

The bottom line, I believe, is that irrepressibly sane people will find a way to be sane in spite of whatever layer of incomprehensible rubbish and bullshit they're buried under. Most of my exposure has been to the Calvinism of the Confederacy and that is uniquely sick. Being uniquely sick it has fled to Freudian depths of defensiveness, seldom expressing itself in anything as healthy as sublimation.

So I have my own hole to scratch myself out of to give Calvinism a fair shake. Does it have to be so fatalistic? I think it is sick and should be banned and obliterated but that isn't going to happen. And it would only turn the true believers loose like those well-armed members of the Ba'ath party the Bushies ignorantly unemployed in Iraq. I guess it sounded like a good idea at the time. "Ba'ath is bad." 

The then leaders of the free world operated at exactly this level of sophistication. I must be better. "Calvinism is not bad." Congregationalists made something reasonably endurable out of it in New England. In the Midwest many others did, leaning into the wind of man's depravity and living more honest, disciplined and accountable lives with this spiritual budget constraint to contend with. But were they happy?

In this Christmas Season I have to ask why. Why turn life into a depressing, nonsensical farce and then live it as a burden? Isn't the incarnation enough for us? There is no gulf between God and Man requiring an emotional arc of conversion or leap of faith, just a lot of distance. We are in His image. Creation is His accomplishment. Lighten up, God is saying. Don't be so fucking vain. Celebrate life. It's a gift. 

A strange-ass gift, I'll allow. I think original sin is the taking-of-life-for-granted. Eve lost perspective. Eve, you selfish nut, get over the apple. Ignore the snake. Tend to your man. You're the luckiest person in the world or second at worst. You lose what you take for granted, is the message. And, oh, are we taking a lot for granted these days and tempting fate with Trump, the scum-sucker.

I still think the Calvinist doctrines of determinism are responsible for this mess but I'll try to be more accepting. Meanwhile: flack-jackets and helmets on; heads down. Somehow we all ended up in the Calvinist bunker of arbitrary salvation, insurmountable injustice and an incomprehensible fatalism. It assumes that whatever happens, including Trump, has to be, by definition, the will of God.