What can I do? I offer my vague outline of a self to the Lover of Souls. Whether to define me or to leave me muddled and confused, I will accept it either way.

I suspect my issue is that no model feels applicable and desirable right now, so I flit between them, and in between them I am like an amorphous monster, a hungry ghost. It would be nice to fall in love with, like, Avalokiteśvara or St. Francis; that would be a nice mimesis.

Tangential but when I have thoughts like "oh no my autism is making people embarrassed of me," I will often think about how in receiving the Eucharist, Christ is in me (and with him all the saints) and shares in my condition, and then I feel vastly better. Thank you to all saints for being autistic.

I sorta presume that because all prayer is ultimately Christ's to answer, and all the saints are the body of Christ, none of them are left out regardless of how popular they are, and so there is no need for originality.

I have also never played a Paradox game but man... the obscure church stuff is incredibly tempting...

Did you make him bishop and create the two-Sabbath weekend?

At some point I was saying a prayer that referenced my patron saint and I just decided it meant the penitent thief and I've run with that since then.

I'm sorry if you did not have this patronage in mind, Dismas, I just really really like you.

It's not just that my behaviour toward non-human animals echoes onto humans, or vice versa. It's that, while these appear as two separate provinces, I glimpse at times that they are two governments whose populations and territories are one. But this is extremely idiosyncratic.

This also hits me very hard in the Book of Jonah where you have animals fasting and donning sackcloth and crying to God for mercy. The role of the human is occupied also by the non-human, just as, in Jesus, the role of the non-human is occupied also by the human.

Jesus incarnates as a human and lives a human life, and this means being the Lamb of God and standing in the place of a "non-human" animal sacrifice. This assures me that the place of the non-human is the place of the human and vice versa, and the image of God cannot be clearly delimited.

I got kinda mad about this today actually because someone said, "I don't wanna be visibly queer around Catholics because they don't like that stuff." To which my reply was, "Well that would be a stupid thing for them to go to Hell for."

It seems unthinkable that charity requires making everyone comfortable with your presence. If that is the case then charity incarnate was and is not charitable, and his followers were not and are not.

I was thinking about this a lot very recently and it moved me quite deeply. There is no substitute for the Crucified and Risen Lord. And also, I think people are too willing to take the homogeneous, empty time of the Fall and implicitly apply it to God and to his acts to make sense of them.

I contain extreme impulses both toward and against propriety, because I am quite intensely neurotic but I also am convinced that paramount love, mercy, justice, and truth are sovereign over, and unbind, such violent neuroticism. This leads to a fairly erratic relationship with "proper Christianity."

Like, I would rather be an invalid Christian than to tear the seamless garment with anathemas and curses and hatreds for that which is not Christian. I love Christ forever but in a situation where "being a Christian" means dividing the substance in which all modes inhere, I will opt not to be one.

I engaged with Christianity before I was Christian and was deeply moved by it, but opting to "become a Christian" was in large part because I was baptized as an infant, allowing me to remain apathetic about my in-group membership rather than enthusiastically justifying my valid convert status.

But I felt that way before I was a Christian, from Spinoza or from reading the Hebrew Bible or from weirder things. Becoming a member of the Christian in-group was a different question, because I love God but I am very ambivalent and distrustful about in-groups.

There's two aspects of this for me... There is God and then there is being Christian. None of my experiences with God have felt like choices: it has felt like being transformed by a light which finds me and a love which pulls the knife out of my heart.

Having spent a few years on the fediverse, the fact that said neighbourhood has to be constantly on guard for neighbouring Nazi rallies and child porn conventions, and also you're enlisted into a kind of feudal war based on inscrutable offences you had nothing to do with, makes it less appealing.