Proposal for Autobiographical Essay

Proposal: A spiritual journey using vignettes from my year of national youth ministry, written in the form of a day. Covering topics of Obedience, Depression, Faith, Love and Hope. Entitled: Caught in the NET of my own making; A spiritual journey.

We wake before dawn, beating even the newspapers to the front steps. Before I realized I was out of my bed, I had already showered, and was stepping out into the cold Indiana Air. I like Indiana, it’s more urban than some of the places I’ve been, where two cars on a road constitutes severe congestion and a traffic jam. But I’m not happy here… in fact, unbeknownst to me, I’m about to make a decision that will affect the rest of my life.

The chill air is nothing new, but touching my hair I realize it’s frozen. A cold brittleness that seems apt. I’ve been struggling with my team leaders. Though really its only one that leads and she astonishes me. Last week we were in St. Louis on our way here and she yelled “My authority comes from God.” Hoping to cow me into submission. I don’t cow. Earlier that night she approached a dialogue with me by these words “Lets talk about this [problem] so I can hear your concerns.” What she really meant became evident in her next breath. “We’ve already decided your punishment.” She didn’t want to hear my concerns, I knew that. She didn’t care. The authority structure on Net is defective. Pretenses about caring. They listen and have already decided. No one cares. They just like to feel as if they did.

Orange County Crucifix.

We didn’t have a retreat today. Instead we got to do spring cleaning on the church… a cavernous affair with stained glass streaming light upon the color treated cement floor. We divided into groups, cleaning pews, windows, confessionals, floors and various accoutrements. I decided to work the ladders cleaning the windows, as everyone else was scared of climbing them. I hate ladders. They wobble and I’m sure I’ll die falling off one; I’ve always had dreams of that. Javy and I would move the ladder around he’d clean the bottom of the windows, I’d clean the top, 2 to three stories higher than the slick cement below. The walls braced the ladder well, and I wasn’t too scared after the first few.

We were done, and I looked at the Crucifix hanging mid air above the altar, it was dusty, and I asked the overseer if we could clean it. She agreed, and we moved the tall ladder precariously through the aisle, a few times almost toppling over.

The corpus was a beautiful bronze casting, 2 times the size of a normal body, perhaps more, majestic, silent, beautiful. I almost cried as I cleaned it. I took care of the hands, as a medic would, I daubed the feet, with soft cotton, embracing them in my hands, and kissing the memorial wounds. I cleaned down one side and then up the other. I cleaned His chest, wondering what it would have felt like in real life, strong, proud, to the very end or clammy and suffocating, fragile as a real human. I cleaned the broken arch of His back, ripped by whips into swatches of hanging flesh. I cleaned his crown, getting pricked and stabbed by the intermeshed five inch thorns sharpened to conical points. My thin hands couldn’t even fit through to clean his hair, the thorns so dense, so painful.

I wish I would have been alone. I wish I could have poured torrents from my eyes. Been overcome by the sorrow and joy. I wish the bronze of my memory was in front of me now. I wish the Bronze was the clammy flesh.