The Ink Tank: Editorial cartoon roundup – Boston.com

The Ink Tank: Editorial cartoon roundup – Boston.com.

My Thoughts on Veteran’s Day

It’s an abomination to thank anybody for murder. Whether they are soldiers in this country or any other. Murder is murder. Our exalted rhetoric about the defense of freedom is an abomination, it’s horrific. I do not thank them, not as veterans of this nation, because more than words of thanks they need love from a community that hopes they shall be set free from their burden someday. As humans I stand with them enduring the weight of the evil that comes with killing in the name of a nation state, and its purported ideas of freedom, justice and free consumerism for all. They have fought for empty ideals, vanity and desolation. They are the ones who must live with blood on their hands, and we are responsible too for the blood which they shed. We are guilty of creating societies where bloodshed is praised as heroism, and where the murderous are exalted. We should not celebrate as much as weep. The taking of a single life does infinite damage to the psyche.

St. Mark the Monk

“Unless a man gives himself entirely to the Cross, in a spirit of humility and self-abasement; unless he casts himself down to be trampled underfoot by all and despised, accepting injustice, contempt and mockery; unless he undergoes all these things with joy for the sake of the Lord, not claiming any kind of human reward whatsoever – glory or honor or earthly pleasures – he cannot become a true Christian”

This is a quote by the Orthodox Father, St. Mark the Monk. I love this quote, and I think it rings true. Christianity is the process by which we learn to renounce all things save One, and to will this one thing is the purity which we all seek.

Take the Bible out of the Hands of Children

“Most North American Christians assume that they have a right, if not an obligation, to read the Bible. I challenge that assumption. No task is more important that for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North America. Let us no longer give the Bible to all children when they enter the third grade or whenever their assumed rise to Christian maturity is marked, such as eighth-grade commencements. Let us rather tell them and their parents that they are possessed by habits far too corrupt for them to be encouraged to read the Bible on their own.”
— Stanley Hauerwas

What do you think about this?

De Profundis

The darkness feels stifling, consuming the light of my eyes
Choking the frail hope i retain that you will be my deliverance
I am in the midst of great darkness, and no lights present themselves to guide me
I am lost beneath a great cloud of fog, and my direction is uncertain

They said you would be my light, They said that if I had enough faith you would always make everything work.  They said i could trust in you to make me normal. They spoke of your great glory, but it was only to serve the ends they thought appropriate. They told me not to be sad, to overcome by pretending to be happy. They told me to tell others I was blessed and not cursed, above only and not beneath, more than a conqueror. They told me to conquer and make violence against the devil and his forces, they told me to be a one man army, to have the faith of a prophet.

I was led into the place where my hands were stained with blood, I tried to fix myself
I was led to the place where malice was my accomplice and a altar was placed before me
I was led upon the dais to behold the altar, and I burned incense to myself.
I was led to the place where my discomfort was my enemy, and i had to atone for myself.
I was led into darkness.

I was told that what matters is me, that who I am, and MY story are way God is going to use me. And now I am in deep darkness. I was told to seek after the things of the world, just to do it in a way that appeased the mandates of cultural humility.

The darkness swallows everything. There is not one thing that escapes decay, not one thing that escapes corruption, and we are all fallen. I am in darkness, and I am unhappy. I am in pain, and I am discontent. I sometimes wish I was not acquainted with You, and Your gospel. I sometimes wish I was different, another. I sometimes desire to be forsaken but you will not leave me. You have called me to the cross, and it pains me, you have called me to death and it is not easy.

You have called me to a holy dread, and it will not give me the desires of my wicked heart. You have spoken to me by speaking to the world, and we tremble at the sign the cross is our mt. zion, and we have all seen the glory of the lord and been called to respond.

You have started a world in which there is no more pain, and that world is already-not yet
where there is joy, you are there, where there is suffering, you are there, where your church suffers, you suffer with us, where your church is crucified, you are too, where your people are beaten and scourged, this is already our glory, where your people are weeping and famished, you are starving among the weakest

You are the human, you are the objective humanity, you are the one who knows what it means to live before the Father as a man teach me my beloved and cross shattered Lord, what it means to suffer unto the shedding of blood
and reassure me that these sufferings are well to experience. The suffering of the world is not foreign to you, you are the suffering one, you are the ever suffering one, we remember the testament of your great sorrow, and we enjoin our suffering to yours. You are dead, but not atheistically, we do not proclaim your death because you have ceased to be
but we proclaim your death, because we know that without it, there could be no life, we proclaim your death because we know we have been found wanting, we proclaim your death because it shows us we are accepted, we are loveless sinners, beloved children

Death is our enemy, and we reject her power, we reject her sting, yet the suffering is our life, and our sweet promise, the darkness we pass through is for the sake of light, the darkness we endure is exhaustible, and we bear the fury of the world with courage, not because we are inexhaustible, but because you are, and as we bear the suffering of the whole world enjoined in you, we shall find that your inexhaustible love is what guides us through the night and gives us assurance in the midst of despair

it is not that we are happy, but that we have courage to endure our fears, it is not that we have power, but that you make possible a community which does not need it, it is not that we have blessings according to the world, but that we have one bread, and one cup which is the sweetest blessing of all it is not that we are the most miraculous, but that you yourself have given us the greatest miracle of all. It is not that we have the greater works which we we seek, there is truly no greater love, no greater act than to suffer and lay down one’s life. Teach me to suffer by the way of your son, that my life brings to you principalities and powers subjected and laid at your feet Holy King of Israel

From the depths we cry to you oh Lord, your unhappy, and suffering children
From the depths we cry to You, your beloved children

Spirit be my guide in darkness, that where I am in the midst of sheol you are there
Spirit be my purger, and let my purgatory be in this life
Jesus be my teacher, that i may follow even unto death
Father, be that which you are, self-emptying love

 

Bring that vengeance which we seek, peace that destroys the powers of war. bring the vengeance which makes peace out of chaos, which brings order out of nothing. bring the vengeance and the wrath which dissolves alienation and marginalization. bring the justice which overcomes corruption, and the various injustices of the world, bring about that which you promised, the reconciliation of all things and most of all, give us the patience to wait, with love and trust that you will not fail us.

The Christian Narrative and Psychology

-1The Christian Narrative and Psychology

The twentieth century marked the formalization of psychology as a way that the modern human could understand their own inner workings which had become important since the Enlightenment. It established itself as a discipline by applying what had developed into the “natural sciences” to humans as objects of inquiry. The ensuing developments created a very specific branch of discourse on human beings called psychology. Psychology and Christianity have had a past filled with various interactions, some positive, others negative.

This is a proposal towards a Christian psychology, which I hope to engage in more concretely as time passes. The reason for this proposal and not an inquiry on various possible integrations is that the Christian faith has a lot to learn but it also has a lot to offer and must remain distinctively itself. Because we believe that what modernity calls psychology will be inherently problematic at some points in its interaction with the Christian narrative, we must avoid syncretism and allow the tradition to speak to us from its own voice.

Contrary to some beliefs psychology did not start in the nineteenth century, it was and is an enterprise that is native to Christianity, and various thinkers in the ancient world. Augustine’s Confessions are a champion example of Christian thought regarding what could be considered psychology. Christianity has always been concerned with the human nature’s relation to God and the world and each other, and this has led to profound inquiries into human nature, and disposition. Furthermore, ours is a religion that has been challenged profoundly to answer questions about integrity, morality, development of persons, obstacles to that development, the structure of emotions, and behavior dispositions. The tradition has often found voices that were strongly concerned about the nature of persons, Augustine, in essence based his whole program of what human nature is on its call to worship God, and sought to define the moral life and the good within the context of that calling. Far from being non-psychological, Augustine’s work reflects some of the most profound inquiry into the human condition ever written.

Psychology as presented by the current establishment is at its heart an apologetic for modernity’s conception of human being. It has at least until very recently, been a way that modernists and secularists could make spiritual and ontological descriptions that we have been taught to implicitly accept as normative. “Psychology” can be a discursive formation among others when used to assert ideas against Christian truths. But Christianity must reject these assumptions and the limitations established in order to maintain her own assertions on what is human nature, and what constitutes a psychology. Psychology can be an instructive and beneficial science when used properly, and while the descriptions of the institution called psychology may be helpful, these are not things which are foreign to the Christian narrative.

So we can see that it is not the case that Christians do not already have a psychology, it is just that its discursive structure differs from the limitations that the current establishment of psychology has demarcated for itself, and it is very narrow in scope indeed. Ancient psychology had the freedom to ask ultimate questions and saw them as affective towards behavior and development, whereas most forms of psychology represented in the American psychological institution and major universities across the world tend to dismiss these questions as secondary to their own discourse, or of an unrelated field, or consider the questions objects of study, without asking the questions themselves. Christians believe that life is integrated and while there are many aspects of being human, the mind is not separable from the rest of life, because Christians believe that the mind is a gift from God. While it is helpful for psychology to have demarcations, it is only to show that a Christian psychology has a broader sweep, and is distinctive from modernity’s project. This distinction is always welcome.

What the twentieth century schools call psychology are not the only things that might have the ability to be justifiably called by that name. What this establishment has sought to claim as a new project unheard of before modernity is simply untrue. While we have to admit the exponential growth of data in the last 150 years, we do not have to assume that with this data comes the chronological superiority of the recent developments over against the past. Christians of all types have been concerned with Human nature, development, and behaviors, St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Gregory the Great, C.S. Lewis (in his Screwtape Letters), Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Eliot, and Leo Tolstoy are all Christian psychologists. The goal of a contemporary formation of Christian psychology seeks to retain their ideas our method will differ, at least mildly. I do not assert that Christian psychology only be an academic way of talking about Christian views on human nature, but that we remember that a lot of Christian psychology has been written as narrative. We should see these authors not as secondary to the main body of psychological work, but as Christians see their work through the lens of psychology and give them equal footing to the works of secular psychologists.

Notice how Christian psychology as cited above is narrative in character, it happens most often within the context of stories, it is the stories we tell and the overarching story that is our own that motivates us to inquiry and action as regards the human person. While we embrace empirical studies, we do not place on them a favor that dismisses as irrelevant the Christian tradition, or what its authors have said about the nature of humanity. We rather give preeminence to the tradition and propose questions that the tradition can answer on its own terms. We are not bound to empirical method, but rather use it as another tool among a multiplicity of others serving the purpose of the church which is to call all humans to recognize that their reality is only as intelligible as its worship to the God revealed in the life of Jesus Christ. Psychology does not have to be an apologetic for modernity’s definition of human kind. The Christian tradition has much to offer as its own discipline alternative to the secular modernist project especially in the areas of personality psychology and psychotherapy.

Christian psychology is an alternative type of psychology that starts with foundations based not in the “third language” of reason and universal perspectives, or individual autonomy, but within the assumptions of the Christian narrative. There are words and thought structures in the Christian story ready to answer, if not already answering the questions of psychology. These answers just need to be illuminated in the context of psychology though a certain hermeneutic lens and we shall see that all over the Christian narrative and history is a rich proliferation of material on various topics that could be grouped together as a Christian psychology.

It will be the task of a distinctively Christian psychology to read these texts for their answers that would be termed “psychological” and see these either presented in full quotations or reinterpreted so that they may form a body of work that could be recognized by our contemporaries as psychology. While we do not embrace their limitations on what constitutes a psychology, we should engage in psychology and its establishment as Christians.

We should seek to allow the Christian narrative to speak to psychological questions, but on it own terms and with its own particular answers. The tradition has many answers to offer about the nature of human persons, what the basic needs and tendencies of humans are, what their teleologies and directions are in regards to their psychic nature. Christian psychology is an alternative to the modern project and its assumptions that human beings are autonomous minds cut off from all other things, and living solely for themselves. The Christian alternative offers meaning in communion and community, development through acts of service, well being through being a peace maker, being willing to suffer for Jesus, and being poor in spirit.2 Modern psychology has proliferated the view that a human being is little more than a brain operating a body, or at best some sort of soul operated by a brain trapped within a body. In most psychological establishments, the mind and its health are detached from questions of being, and seen as programmable and purely physical. The Christian narrative offers another anthropology, and thus another psychology.

Our tradition has from the beginning had a stake in certain claims about human nature, development, motivations, character formations and how to go about achieving the proper character and correcting bad character, all things which modern psychology is about. It seems to me that it is not that Christian psychology does not as yet exist, it just does not exist in a form recognized by the current psychological establishment and many Christians as psychology. Yet it is there, waiting to be interacted with.

It is my concern that liberals, both political and theological will sell themselves short on what makes Christianity Christian in order to maintain a sense of being relevant to the outside world. However, the jettison of Christian convictions in favor of others is not only going against the tradition it is going against the very grain of the universe that Christians understand through the revelation of Jesus Christ. Christians have made a metaphysical claim about the universe, starting with the teachings of Jesus who said that to be blessed (makairos gr.) is to be among other things, poor in spirit, and to mourn, and to make peace. Doing well according to Jesus, and the New Testament witness is compatible with suffering. These claims are not only metaphysical, having a claim in the way we see reality, they are psychological. Jesus is claiming that the person who is well and doing well, is one who suffers for His sake and lives a life directed towards others, wellness according to Jesus is not a private affair, but one which is for the sake of others. People who are psychically whole can suffer, mourn, be meek, reviled, long for righteousness, be merciful, be pure in heart. These are all marks of the psychologically developed Christian.

The integration approach to Christian psychology seeks usually to marry one or another view of psychology with the established Christian tradition in a form of syncretism that leaves neither one the same. Some models are influencing the church towards assertiveness and personal empowerment. We reject this assertion, citing it as idolatry. Christians believe that the real power in the world is had not by people who carry crowns but crosses. Rather than agreeing with the world’s ideas we seek to read the tradition as it presents itself to us through the church and participation in the community, and ask questions that might help us answer the same questions being addressed by establishment psychology.

The only thing that integration between psychology and theology will do is establish a hybrid that is neither here nor there and is ultimately irrelevant because it is based in neither of the two traditions strong enough to maintain a historical presence. It will be modernity’s anthropology with questions about how to see Christians develop as such, which will render largely unintelligible work. This has already been the case in many places where Christianity has been used in the psychology of religion. It is not my aim to have Christians withdraw from psychology, but to engage in psychology as Christians, backed by the tradition to which they have sworn allegiance, informed by Christian anthropology and pastoral as well as spiritual considerations.

Christian psychology is not a matter of applying this or that theory offered by the establishment to the bible or Jesus or psychoanalyzing historical figures to get behind the text. Instead Christian psychology is a way of reading the text, a way of reading the bible the historical narrative and the church as answers to psychological questions. Christian psychology is at its heart a hermeneutic that will focus on reading Christian history, from Jesus through the saints to the world of today as part of a narrative, as part of a story able to answer our questions about ourselves and our development and nature from the convictions of our belief. Thus Christian psychology will look fundamentally different from the psychology offered to us from the establishment that has drawn its story from the Enlightenment.

There is a the question of what Christian psychology looks like in the 21st century, and I think that the answer lies in two fields. I think that Christian psychology should continue to be developed as narrative, in stories, plays, novels, and other forms of narrative that show to us the Christian life as a story we can participate in. These texts will continue to be inspirational to Christians of all levels if they are written as well told, well plotted, stories, not Christian books, but Christians writing books about everything else, including psychology. Dostoyevsky was a master of this, and I think that within the community, Christian psychology should continue to at least in part maintain itself as a storied discourse. If our theology is inherently narrative, then our psychology should be as well.

However, stories alone will not answer all possible questions and a body of work that looks like the psychology of the establishment should also be welcomed. A systematic formation of Christian answers to psychological questions is necessary. Yet this body of work might not be immediately recognizable as a psychology by established psychology because it is approaching with a different paradigm. It is a paradigm that says that The Triune God matters, it is also saying that the alternative psychology is devoid of true or ultimate meaning because it fails to realize this. We should welcome a systematic approach that would draw out a distinctive discourse we could call a psychology from our tradition and set the answers before us, and we should try to draft distinctively Christian answers to questions about behavior and development from within our anthropological commitments.

A Christian psychology must while rejecting the anthropology of the establishment continue to engage it, to assess questions about the two hemispheres of the brain, the cognitive abilities of newborns, the way in which eyewitnesses construct and reconstruct memories, the components of intelligence and many other things. The Christian story may not always have answers for these things nor do we seek proof texts of one or another part of the tradition, but that is why we have a narrative theology, it draws on developments, and sees our theology as developing towards a goal. There will be methodological conflicts, since assertions about the natural world will not lead the Christian psychology I am proposing to make judgments on the nature of God, since we see the created order as partially unknowable, since it is fallen, and mistrust natural theology as a way of reaching the God we see revealed in Jesus Christ.

A Christian psychology that rejects natural theology will be shaped very differently by these questions than a theology that makes every observable detail of ultimate importance in assessing the character and nature of God. We believe rather that only God reveals Himself to us, we cannot find Him, and He reveals Himself to us through the life, death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. To look at the world is to look at both a fallen order, and the birth of a new one, therefore a Christian psychology takes stock of the nature of things, but reserves ultimate judgment to her metaphysical claims, that the world in which we believe is a world where violence is passed, where disability, and personality fragmentation are at an end. A world where all things are made right. We reject the belief in inalienable rights, and the dignity of the human person, because we see these things not as inherent qualities of a person, but contingent upon the climax of our narrative, the cross. Thus our beliefs about the nature of disability, and suffering will differ greatly from those of our establishment counterparts, since our narrative shapes our interpretation of the evidence, as their narrative based in the Enlightenment shapes theirs.

Not only is a Christian psychology sourced differently from an academic perspective, drawing texts not normally considered psychology as sources, furthermore it is pastorally driven. The goal of a Christian psychology is not self-actualization or empowerment, nor is it personal autonomy, but is primarily concerned with the proper worship of God and pastoral developments towards that worship in the life of the individual and the community. Personal aims of a Christian psychology are solidarity with the poor, and the weak, a constructive correction of vices, and a mediation of the Christian narrative in intelligible ways as to make realizable by a wider audience the claims of the faith. For protestant churches, Christian psychology should function largely as catechesis does in Orthodox traditions. It is about the formation of Christians, and interactions with their teleological development, which stated exclusively is that human life is only as intelligible and proper as its worship of The Triune God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth, and all claims about the meaning of life and interpretations of data set forth are subject to inspection by this hermeneutic lens and required to be in coherence with it..

So, to be more specific, a Christian psychology should have a few key elements to make it a psychology in the first place.

I suppose this begins with an understanding of what we mean by human nature, and whether there is at all a human nature to be talked about. Karl Barth rejected the idea of human nature, saying that the only true human is Christ. I think Barth is right, but it does not answer the matter of we face as counselors, pastors and psychologists, so we can call it the fallen nature, or human tendency. But these questions are shaped by Christian teleological and eschatological beliefs, so that the goal is Christ, and human nature looks like Jesus himself. Christ is the source of human nature, and the true humanity, to be truly human one must be truly Christian. So, the goal of human nature is exemplifying what the church has claimed about Christ, historically, and at its heart, human nature is about the Christian virtue of charity. But we must ask specific questions within this framework about the motivations and needs of human persons, not only theologically, but theopragmatically, in terms of the Christian life, what are our needs, desires and behaviors? What in humans is necessary for them to function properly according to the purpose for which they were created?

A psychology should sketch if not at the very least make suggestions on what personality traits characterize a fully developed and mature person, keeping in mind a necessary gap between this side of the eschaton and the fullness of the resurrection. This question is really a development of the nature of pastoral care, by describing in detail what characterizes Christians as Christians in their behaviors. We recognize that modern psychologies have virtues as well, some of their virtues are merely incongruous with certain claims from within Christian orthodoxy. This is basically the work of the church anyways, describing person hood according to certain ideas that Jesus and the church have claimed, but maybe repopularizing them and presenting them in a way that liberal protestants as well as conservatives might understand. Seeing the Christian narrative and participation as part of that personhood, will help create not an autonomous individualized account, but help us ask the question, what sort of relations is a fully developed person engaged in?

When we ask that question a whole new set of ethics is being done that respects the communal nature of human being, and shares the Christian claim that all being is communal. Being itself is a type of communion, especially for Christians. So the propositions set forth should ask about what type of relations such a person is engaging in, and what type of virtues they show forth in those relations. This is the only way to undo modern psychology’s obsession with privatizing the individual. Further this leads to integrating questions about successful personhood with successful developments, especially if we open the bracket of relations to not only interpersonal ones, but questions of relation to their environment and agency.

I suppose the next thing necessary is what psychology calls neuroses, dysfunctions and disorders. In other words, a Christian psychology proposes vices or behaviors that are destructive towards the psychological formation and well being of the person and their relations. Again, this will map not only dysfunction but its effect on community life, studying the strain on relations as well as the strain on the individual, seeing both as in communion. Christian psychology maps dysfunctions and disorders carefully, developing a language about those destructive traits and relations. This again, is an exercise part theory, part pastoral care. It needs to develop a language within which to frame vices opposed to the Christian narrative and meet the needs of the individuals who suffer the vices. A Christian psychology can at this point be highly scientific by testing the responses of the tradition, or developing methods consistent with the Christian narrative and test them to see if they work. If we ever come to a place where a proposed solution does not work, or does not prove fruitful, we can reinterpret the tradition for other solutions, or innovate new methods that do so within the context of the overarching Christian narrative.

These things will help us create a psychotherapy, or in Christian terms, a set of relationships that will prevent or treat the unhealthy interactions and behaviors. Christian psychotherapy should develop itself as what the church is in its pastoral context. Thus Christian psychology will have effects on the way pastoral ministry is carried out, as well as ecclesiological considerations since, what we are talking about in discussing the behavior and well being of persons is really asking the church to consider the care and guidance she will provide to her members. It is grounded in the belief that the only thing that makes a real difference in these matters, is the incarnation, life, death, burial, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. Christian psychotherapy is at it’s heart reconciliation. This will take different forms on a case by case basis, but it should include the practices of confession, penance, and recognizing sin, while realizing the call of Jesus for us to conform to His call to be disciples as part of the solution to the problems we will face.

Christian psychotherapy does not ask us to face ourselves, it asks us to face Christ, and confront our sins with the call to being a disciple of Jesus. Christian psychology will be healing to us, but not by mediating us to ourselves, only in mediating Christ to us as the only possibility of a true self. A response to guilt will feature here, but the Christian task is the assumption of such guilt without having it mediated to us by conscience. It is acknowledging that we are judged not by ourselves, but by Christ. The only thing that conscience will give us is ourselves, and Christians must reject this since our teleology is shaped by our relation to Christ and participation in the people that He has called us to be. For Christians conscience is not the voice of virtue, but the voice of self-defense and excusability. For Christians our goal is not moral autonomy, but the recognition that all our wholeness and goodness comes from Christ and is mediated to us by the church. Conscience has no part in a Christian psychology, because it is a tool by which humans remove from themselves the responsibility of the voice of God by making themselves that voice, it is either self-righteousness or self-debasement neither of which recognizes the person of Christ as our judge and savior. For Christians the life that is whole and good is proper response to God’s commands, and necessarily include love of neighbor, proper methods of “treasuring” e.g. Matthew 6:19-24, and the necessity of communion, confession and prayer as ways in which the Christian life is lived truthfully.

In closing, Christian psychology is about living according to the life the church has seen exemplified in Christ and made possible by Him. Christian psychology is a pastoral endeavor shaped by sources outside those of 20th century considerations but should make these sources intelligible both to the outside world and ourselves as psychology through a hermeneutic lens. Christian psychology is a development from within Christianity that offers its own particular set of claims about what it means to be human, and Christian from the perspective that God matters. And Christian psychology must avoid most if not all of modernity’s concept of the human being since it is inherently opposed to the community that Christ has called to Himself. Christian psychology is at its heart a liturgical and pastoral act that is akin to a virtue ethics, but will place its pastoral emphasis on the proper worship of God, and the community which He has called to Himself as the final solutions to the problems persons face. There are methods and means of attaining these and the Christian psychologist is there mostly as an interpreter, showing the faith as a catechist, instructing pastorally, and mentoring with the truth that is Christ and His call in Love.

Criteria for healing

I just am thinking about the role of healing in our communities, and if they should be included in public liturgy, and if so, what is their role, and what are the determinative criteria for their acceptance as part of the liturgy?

What makes an unacceptable healing? is there such a thing?

How are we to be a community gathered around the Lord’s table with a concern for the charismata being a part of our worship Christianly?

Those are just some questions i’ve been asking.

Anyone have any thoughts?

Christian Reflection On Labor Day

A Christian Response to Labor Day:

I think we should be grateful for our particuar place, which we should feel is a part of our embodiment, and thus our vocation. But we must also critique our penchant for war as a country and the deification of patriots, labor unions and inalienable rights. We should remember that we are creatures, and that labor day is also a call to remember our labors unto God, to steward creation, and to take care of a world which is very good.

A christian engagement of labor day should i think also remember workers, in all countries and concern itself with remembering the struggles put forth to make the world we live in one that comes at sometimes no cost to us but high costs to them. We should remember that what we call labor here is in many cases built on the intensely difficult struggles of others and that our country has reached success through stepping on other countries along the way.

I think that a Chrisitan engagement of labor day remembers that this country we find ourselves in was built in part by slaves, and by the power of people breaking their backs for the institution called industry, by children in factories, and men starving during the great depression.

Further, it remembers that the place of that memory is not as an idealistic ancestor worship but sees labor as part of embodiment and what it means to be created as a human being. It remembers the Labor of God, both in Creation and the cross as labors of love and generosity.

Labor day for Christians means remembering that while we participate in the American narrative, and we do so as Americans, it is only secondarily to our lives as Christians. We are inescapably American, and while we love this country, it is a penultimate love, it cannot claim our total allegiance, not in its stories or its collective memory. We . I further think that labor day can help us reflect on our labors as a church body, while remembering that our lives as Christians are told by another story.

This year, Labor day falls on the monday after the 23rd sunday of ordinary time. And for the church the liturgical color is green, it is a reminder of growth, and for me a reminder of our expectation that a new day is rising and has already risen, and a new world is coming yet is already here. It is a reminder of the coming future and its already present place among us at the Lord’s table where we gather to meet new creation.

It is the feast day of St. Regina who was a martyr, according to what we know of her from some sources. According to these sources

“She was born in the 3rd century in Alise, the ancient Alesia where two hundred years earlier Vercingetorix had fought so valiantly against Caesar. Her mother died at her birth, and her father, a prominent pagan citizen, entrusted the child to a Christian nurse who baptized her…In 251, at the age of fifteen, she attracted the eye of a man called Olybrius, the prefect of Gaul, who determined to have her as his wife. He sent for the girl and discovered that she was of noble race and of the Christian Faith. Chagrined, he attempted to have her deny her faith, but the saintly maiden resolutely refused and also spurned his proposal of marriage. Thereupon, Olybrius had her thrown into prison.”

Her Symbols include: Shepherdesses, Against poverty, impoverishment,torture victims.

What we should do with these things in this particular year is remember where we are at as a country, and what her life can remind us of. While we are in recession, or coming out of one, whatever the case is, we can remember those who are less forutnate than we are. We can remember those who are oppressed, we can remember martyrs who like St. Regina have suffered for the faith. We can remember the internally displaced refugees, and those who are laboring to liberate them, we can remember the labors of those working for peace, and the labors of those who are our neighbors. We can remember the workers without jobs, the people who will not be celebrating today, the people who have no labor to set themselves to, the families concerned about their tomorrow.

We can remember them and pray for them, we can be Christians and offer them a better allegiance, a better society, and a better hope, the Christian hope that What God The Father has done for Jesus, He will do for all of us at the appointed time. That our hope and our labors towards that hope are not in vain but are worth the work which we put into them, because that work will be caught up into God and recreated to justify all things finally at the end of all things.

We can take this time to reflect as well, on the readings for today, and see what they mean, and how they challenge us to encounter Jesus Christ and give up ourselves and embrace Him and only Him.

Reading 1
Col 1:24–2:3

Brothers and sisters:
I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake,
and in my flesh I am filling up
what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ
on behalf of his Body, which is the Church,
of which I am a minister
in accordance with God’s stewardship given to me
to bring to completion for you the word of God,
the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.
But now it has been manifested to his holy ones,
to whom God chose to make known the riches of the glory
of this mystery among the Gentiles;
it is Christ in you, the hope for glory.
It is he whom we proclaim,
admonishing everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom,
that we may present everyone perfect in Christ.
For this I labor and struggle,
in accord with the exercise of his power working within me.

For I want you to know how great a struggle I am having for you
and for those in Laodicea
and all who have not seen me face to face,
that their hearts may be encouraged
as they are brought together in love,
to have all the richness of assured understanding,
for the knowledge of the mystery of God, Christ,
in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Responsorial Psalm
Ps 62:6-7, 9

R. (8) In God is my safety and my glory.
Only in God be at rest, my soul,
for from him comes my hope.
He only is my rock and my salvation,
my stronghold; I shall not be disturbed.
R. In God is my safety and my glory.
Trust in him at all times, O my people!
Pour out your hearts before him;
God is our refuge!
R. In God is my safety and my glory.

Gospel
Lk 6:6-11

On a certain sabbath Jesus went into the synagogue and taught,
and there was a man there whose right hand was withered.
The scribes and the Pharisees watched him closely
to see if he would cure on the sabbath
so that they might discover a reason to accuse him.
But he realized their intentions
and said to the man with the withered hand,
“Come up and stand before us.”
And he rose and stood there.
Then Jesus said to them,
“I ask you, is it lawful to do good on the sabbath
rather than to do evil,
to save life rather than to destroy it?”
Looking around at them all, he then said to him,
“Stretch out your hand.”
He did so and his hand was restored.
But they became enraged
and discussed together what they might do to Jesus.

Today’s Collect is:
Almighty God, every good thing comes from you. Fill our hearts with love for you, increase our faith, and by your constant care protect the good you have given us. We ask this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

-Quotes on St. Regina Taken from http://www.catholicculture.org/culture/liturgicalyear/calendar/day.cfm

The Apocrypha and the Protestant Life- What we may have missed

In the next week or so i’ll be starting a three to five post series on my reading of the apocypha and what it means to protestants.

I’ll be beginning the series with personal reflections on some of the books, and move towards an exegetical/ theological statement that the works can make as a whole towards us, and then draw on the series as a whole to see where the future of Charismatic theology might go, so subscribe to the blog and stay updated.

eli

On Impassibility and Classical Theism

The following is taken from a comment i made on a friend’s blog. Let’s hear some responses:

As a scion and proud heir of neo-orthodox theology I cannot help but feel that the yesterday today and forever is a statement about God’s faithfulness, not his ontological state. We cannot have an immutable God if He is to remain the God Jesus has revealed to us. The incarnation is an event not only in time and space but in the Trinity itself. The Crucifixion is another event in the Godhead and cannot be reduced to an ambiguous mystery that doesn’t fit in with our concept of God.

The life and times of Jesus Christ reveal God to us, he is the lens throguh which we read the bible, and our theology, and any patriology any word we wish to say about the Father will not be true unless mediated to us by the life of His son, for no one knows the Father except the Son.

An immutable God is in the worst case a monad who has no relation at all to the real world, and at best one who will ever remain static in the face of our love. Even if that static response is absolute and undying love, it is invalid, because it was a choice in the Godhead, a choice out of a dynamic love that chose the incarnation, a choice out of covenant faithfulness that forever altered the godhead from unknown to known. From otherworldly to our very neighbor, whose face we can see, whose wounds we can touch, whom we eat and eat with.

You cannot eat an immutable God. Case closed.

I need help, God, I need your help.

My mind is on fire, my heart aches.

I feel disconnected and broken. I feel hurt, and I’m asking for you to reach out to me. I can’t think straight, my breathing is racing, and my heart is bleeding within me.

I feel disconnected, and abandoned, like those near me have passed into a beyond I can’t go to. Tell me why these things happen, as my heart bleeds chaos into the universe.

You never have asked a greater thing of me, and I’m feeling forsaken.

The Trinity and the Encountered and thus Encountering Life

The inner life of the trinity as love can be recognized by us as love only through our participation in that life as it already is and draws us into it. To know the inner life of the Trinity requires that we participate already in the kenotic and self disclosing Other seeking love of the Trinity. There is no epistemology apart from participation. To believe otherwise is blasphemy. Only love understands itself, and only love can disclose itself, and it shall only disclose itself to love when speaking in the epistemological framework. Love is the truest reality that has been revealed to humanity, and it is inescapable. To be a Christian one must believe in and be shaped by their understanding of Absolute Love. In concrete reality love will overpower even non-love, but it will only do so by conforming non love into love through a Taboric experience, through a transfiguration that in the self disclosure draws non love into encounter and thus opens its eyes. Love is always the apriori, and it will always necessarily apprehend and invite the situation before releasing itself and its disclosure into the encounter with the Other. -Eli

Faith Hope and Love in Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic and personal light

Our holy night is defiled in this way, that we are broken by our own inadequate selfishness. Our erotic sentiment originally caught in the ever kenotic self-mutual union of eros and agape has become an introverted and destructive selfishness, destroying everything in its path for the sake of the idea of gratification.

 

Thick thoughts, thicker hopes, and fears coming to the front as sacred cloud music plays over the air between my headphones and my ears. I’m just another thought away from another moment, and I hold to hope. Though Zion is broken, and pain is our reality, the reality of pain becomes a form of presence in itself because we recognize the creation of presence in the midst of absence. Guide me as I close my eyes and walk this dark path, breathing solely in the rest of the dark night, this endless night of purgation, let me say with St. Thomas Moore, let my purgatory be in this life.

 

Love me. I know You do. Holy Mother, be my guidance in the dark night of despair, lead me to the feet of your Son through your fervent and gracious intercession. I will find peace in this darkness, hope in this despair, presence in this absence, and through the endless interlude of presence and absence, guide me in this respiration.

 

Let these interludes become to me as breathing and both giving and reception be unto me unitive parts of the same movement, cleanse my mind of my inadequate conceptualizations, and let this theology be from this heart of worship unto you O sacred Holy One. I receive your love as the primary foundation of my ability to love you, and ask that your love would shape this child’s heart, and that as I bring the little candle of my heart into the darkness that is all around, let this little candle absorb all this darkness and offer it up to you.

 

Throw onto me the pain and guilt of the whole world, for in doing so, with your grace in bearing it, I shall offer up to thee most gracious and holy Suffering Christ, a world transformed by our communion in this suffering. Let the love which you have poured out in my heart bear these burdens as a holy calling, set me apart for this. I ask your strength that I may not waver, and that I may trust in you with patience, hope and love.

 

This kenotic movement with which you have loved the Father and the world, let me be conformed to u-topic image that takes form in the immediate moment constantly rising to greet me, and let this kenotic movement shape me. Let this self-emptying lead me into the koinonia that is the foundation of community with the entire world in your perfect love and unity in which you restore order and agape to all reality in your gracious love. I believe in Absolute Love, even if all else fails.

 

I hold to thee, and holding fast, I will breathe deeply both presence and absence as the ebb and flow of faith and hope, which for the kenotic sake of each other travel perichoretically in consciousness, submitting to each other and to Love mutually. Thus ever expressing themselves anew in the immediate moment.

 

Let faith and hope attain to perichoresis united by that Love which empowers them to become the trinitarian union of eschatological/global consciousness in the present through to the future.

 

just some thoughts.

theological reflections at 3;29 AM

well, i was thinking about neo-orthodoxy and found the Christomonism disturbing, thus in setting up my own doctrine of God have decided that the Trinitarian approach is best as has been seen in recent theology, but i will ground my theological programme on the concrete revelations of Christ and the Spirit as the basis and foundation for the critique of and subsequent establishment follow through of the doctrine of God, just a thought.

slip across the streams of our pitter patter romance, drip, like rain across a letter box and carry on and on.

 

Windows, there, in the distance carry endless weight, the gravity of it all, suddenly shatters at the horizon break forth with new light another endless dawn

 

forever,

 

forever…

 

what is it about that word, that shapes us into more than mere mortals?

 

Lights, meander, searching in the depths of our hand in hand abyss, following after the footsteps just one step ahead in darkness, follow me into the dark, and I’ll show you where we are going, we will meet again, in the place where there is no darkness.

 

He says it, in hope. The other, hears it in blessed assurance, held with mighty contempt. And I, I say it, thinking upon the thoughts that grace these words. He gives a smart look at the two minutes hate, and it is only a flash of the eyes, something intelligent that catches between them, but, it’s broken in the end.

 

There is no strength to the human spirit, they say. They’re all dumb animals, and alone here I write these letters into this type writer with the flippers of a sea ox.

 

telling, that it is, it’s telling, revealing, smelling of death, destruction, there is a bit of hell in this heaven. There’s still a marriage happening here, and who would speak, when all graves forever hold their peace?

 

Dead men’s bones afterall tell no tales, or so we thought, then forensics blessed our televisions, and we were made aware that afterall, there are tales to be told in these bones.

 

It’s slipping now, the sudden urge, the endless plight, writing lifting herself from me like a rising wind that I cannot press down, though i wish to keep her, she will pass away

 

Anexamenos, worships, hisGOD! Anexamenos worships his god.

 

Oh, they ridicule, btu they have no right, either they will kill us all, or they should leave us alone. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem!? The Academy with the church!?

 

What has your hand to do with mine? or your eyes with my heart? Will you ever hold me again? Does it even matter in the end? Maybe I should light another cigarette and sit, and wait.

 

Will your soft, cold hands ever touch this face again? what have I done for you? nothing.

 

That’s the sad truth, si that there is nothing in me that can call to you, nothing in me that can ask anything of you. You blessed me, used me, broke me, and here I am, still unwittingly yours from moment to moment, still chained to this infernal emotional basket case that is my mind. But were I chained to any other basket case, i may as well have a picnic. For that is what one does with baskets, is it not?

 

Oh, here we are again, the end of the world, well, the end of the page at any rate, and thus concludes this brief foray into our mind’s eye, slip past me again, and let me hear the rain drops, as she sings, that bitter song.

 

It tastes like camphor, and violets, and violence. Like glory, and riches and blessing. And in the end it is vapor, evanescent on my chest.

just a thought

i will live, and if I do not, then i shall be dead, and shall have no cause for concern any longer

Numb

I’m feeling like I have returned to the terrible place of darkness, that insoluble shadow in which my heart chokes, in whihc my light has become the latern for bloodshed, and the deepest remains of light in me have gone.

 

My hands are covered in the blood and minds of martyrs, made by my own hand, brought underneath the great throne of my own judgment through my own workings.

 

Pitiless, endless chasm of hate, I became these things when I lost sight. I have hidden my light so deeply within me that I do not know where to find it. I have lost my way so thoroughly that I cannot begin to find myself.

 

And what am I doing? Having a moment with my conscience, that blasted thing that proves my own disunity with myself and with others, for were I a man of stronger devotion, I would leave the matter altogether and just go love. For that would be the Christian thing to do, instead I recite the Grand Inquisitor, straining against my inclination for the sake of my own heresies.I am not the man who founded a heresy and discovered it was orthdoxy.

 

I am the man who ran to orthdoxy, made  a mockery of it, of her, and of Him, and in the process debased with blood the very altars i thought to worship at. I have desecrated the very holy place i sought to carve out for Him, and in doing so feel myself beyond pardon. But there is the hook of vanity. Were I unable to forgive myself, he would no sooner let me condemn myself, for my vanity.

 

I thought myself a man going in the right direction, but beauty came to seek me out, and I found I was the most unlovely of all. Wretched and pitiful, I thought I would be the man who worshipped with a pure heart, instead I have made war, have discouraged myself in the throes of empty struggle and have given myself to the pursuit of vapor.

 

I have fallen to these empty works of the perishing world, these effervescent indulgences that have swayed my heart from truth. And I want to hate Him sometimes. Him in all his righteousness, but I can’t, not anymore.

 

I saw what he did, with his suffocating bleeding body, with his broken heart and great burden, and I remember, that He has been raised, and in doing so has initiated that holy harmony wihc we await. In Him, all things are being set to rights, even me. Even all my sins, all my injustices are being set to rights, and I choose Him. I choose to the best of my little depraved ability to serve this One, who with his gasping breaths asks for our forgiveness. I choose this one, who is more than a hero, more than a martyr, more than a revolutionary.

 

I dedicate myself to the darkest of moments, to the deepest of living hells, to the endless seas of torment that are following this bloodied man across the world. I choose to dedicate myself to this weeping savior, who seeing what we are has chosen not to destroy us, but to forgive us.

 

Forgive me, for my deviations, for my explanations, for my irreverence and blasphemy. My blasphemy has been to surrender my own freedom to that unthinking purpose, and I thought I did it in service of you, but I did nothing in your name. I lied to myself, to think that I could walk away from You, in your name. Forgive this blasphemy, I ask in earnest.

 

I have seen where I have been, have bloodied my hands in the feeble attempts to grasp the razor blades that are the contours of your will, there is only safety within, to be on the fringes is to choose life, which is death. So, here we are, and I will not make a commitment out of emotional self pity or vain imagination at perfection, I merely ask that in your grace and mercy you would have the grace to draw me out of this mess and into your purging fire.

 

I look at where I have come from, and realized that even this is not right, for anyone who sets his hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for the kingdom. Hopefully I have not even set my hand to the plow, for I have looked back all too often, and in spite of your grace chosen to go another way.

 

Somehow, I reduced You into something safe, something bearable, something less than what You are, so i could be safe, and not have to face You. I hated You. At least, I wanted to. maybe I did.

 

I wanted to be another, to be in another place, another life, and the only question that made sense was why me?

 

I didn’t expect to find you here so soon, so welcoming, so embracing. I don’t know where my hope went, but I’m asking you to help me find it again.

 

We all turned out so broken, so empty, so full of hurt, all of us, not one escaped. I look back, and think, wow, we have all been abandoned, left for dead, broken in various ways, and have been shamed. We were all children, and we all suffered as children, some less than others, but we all suffered, and how can our suffering be atoned for?

 

We depart from this table, from the community of our buried lives, from the places in which we suspended our hopes, we depart from this place in which our lives were walked away from, and we embraced becoming that thing which the pain makes us. I cannot speak for them, though I wish I could.

 

So, I depart from it. From letting the pain conform me to its own image. I cannot bear this broken heart alone, but I am trying to confide in you.

 

We were young once, but have since tasted the thing which we desired most, and it has brought our destruction with it. We are beautiful, and still young, still untested by the rigors of endless torment, though we have known pain.

 

Our eyes belie the simplicity of our empty hearts, we try to smile and glow. But we cannot.

 

Though she has passed through a thousand hands and will pass into a thousand more, she will never be satisfied. The ebauty she has in front of the camera, is just as wounded off screen, and it’s all in her eyes. Those eyes have known pain.

 

His eyes, I cannot speak for, but I can speak for myself.

 

I speak as one who has in these years since our youth been brought through many places, many names, many impressions. I have been savior and saved, and I have been tormentor, I know my eyes, they lie. They have known life, and have known death, and in these hands a beating heart still holds a promise, a whisper of redemption. And if the sun is truly rising, then tell me a story.

 

If there is love in these hands, let’s build for a kingdom, so that we can see inbreakings of heaven on earth. And if we are all utterly hopeless, then let me be tormented, and take from me this dire knowledge that destroys me.

 

I know that there is redemption here, I only do not know what form it takes. Other than to proceed in the path of our father Benedict, and in silence love the people.