A Broken Hope- A Weak People (Interlude)

“Will you now restore the Kingdom to Israel?” Is today the day you’re going to fix everything, cut the powers that be down to size and show them that Love and Mercy are the true powers and that Love itself is You?

I think not…and for that very reason I am angry with you. I don’t understand your choices, I don’t understand how you claim to Love so powerfully yet allow us to continue in our foolishness and idolatry day after day. Sure you’re self-emptying and all-loving, but this makes no sense. If you loved us, wouldn’t you rather set all things right as soon as possible?

What reason for the delay? Is it some divinely ordained plan to just wait until we’re so exhausted that we can no longer continue? What majesty is there in silence, in weakness, and in being trampled upon? What power can there be in allowing the world to fall ever increasingly into chaos? What justice is there in a world where money rules and corporations decide the events of our lives?

What justice can there be in a world where those who bear your name don’t bear your likeness? What justice can there be in a world where we are persecuted, abandoned and destitute? We are forgotten, just like you.

Men sing your praises with their lips and women clap their hands in exultation, people rejoice at your magnificence, but there are starving people down the street, abandoned buildings in our midst, and suffering children’s cries in our ears.

And yet, you sit in perfect passivity. You contemplate your own glory, and your perfection is unceasing. Maybe we should praise you for being the most contented narcissistic being ever. Mayhap we should be content that everything that happens is in your divine will, and that you’re just a beneficial dictator. Maybe you’re the all-loving Hitler in the sky, at least that’s the way that they paint you. They show you to us as a cloud of glory, an all powerful yet wholly apathetic and unsentimental being, so unmoved that we might burst for the compassion you’ve given us that you seem to lack, because everything is in your plan.

Your words do not rage in the hearts of the prophets, instead, they are drowned out by hushings and sighings. Your cries for justice on the lips of the autistic child are silenced or put out, your cries of love reach deaf ears when they come from the hungry and the poor. The woman in that pew is not sure how she will feed her children tonight, and the couple next to her is sated beyond their ability to spend, what manner of family is this? What honor can be had among a people mighty and sated with their own power?

Your “prophets”, your “apostles”, they ask us to believe that we too should be empowered, powerful, mighty, successful, monetarily wealthy. They tell us to seek these things, and as an afterthought mention that we might want to seek the kingdom first, because these things are irrelevant in so many ways. Your prophets maintain the status quo, they hold fast the barriers, and they’ve made a mockery of you. They’ve cast lots for your garments, but only to exchange them with an american flag. They no longer clothe you in purple, they clothe you in the seamless garment of patriotism. They crown you with lady liberty, and place the declaration of independence as a sign above you. They give you the sword, and nail it to your beaten hands, they take your beaten teeth out of your mouth and replace them with bullets, they take your wounds and fill them with the ichor of bitterness and pride. They give you to drink hypocrisy and mix it with the blood of their enemies. They lay you in the tombs of their great heroes, they inscribe your name on their war memorials and fail to see that you undo their idols. You yourself are the weakened voice that in its very weakness and suffering destroys all idols.

You do not raise your voice, you do not defend yourself against these abusers, these pilates, these caesars.

NOTHING makes me angrier than the words “It must be the will of God”. As if you haven’t clearly shown us that which you desire. I am angered, furious at your lack of standing up for yourself at times. You just sit there on your beaten tree, breathing, gasping, blood in your eyes, and you ask for our forgiveness. Let me join you, in praying for this broken world, for I cannot bear to stand outside it another moment, and at least in joining you, i may find life and hope. If all I see is darkness, at least I know you gave your life that they might have life, and that your will is life, over against the chaos of death that has usurped your good creation.

Teach me to forget my anger and forgive, that we might have heaven on earth.

Let us bear this together, for your body is life, let me be found in your wounds, and let your wounds be found in my body. Teach us to rightly stand with you, not in power, but in weakness. Teach us to surrender our power, frustrate all our plans, show us we’re all pretentious, that we might experience the joy of being dependent children, utterly lost without you.

Glossolalia and the Charismatic Life

I’ve been spending a decent amount of time reconnecting to my charismatic roots, in a more constructive way, and trying to draw out some work from myself that could help to form a charismatic theology that is from the movement and for the movement. Recently, I’ve been thinking about the glossolalia, and the place of spiritual gifts in the Christian life, often certain parts of the Charismatic/Pentecostal movement has seen it as a concrete sign of a baptism of the Holy Spirit, an ontological shift that is evidenced by the gift, the words often used being ‘initial evidence’.

Yet when we look at the earliest Christian traditions, baptism itself was baptism in the Holy Spirit. When we are baptized we are baptized in the name of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. I think our movement has done a disservice to the Triunity of God by making the baptism of the Holy Spirit a secondary evidence, and has largely missed the point of what it means to speak in other tongues whether of men or of angels. Paul nowhere says that the Corinthians, who are seemingly the most charismatic among the early churches, have been sealed with a second evidence. Nor does he rejoice at this display of tongues but goes about correcting abuses and speaking to them about the worth of prophecy and love. If there were any evidence of the tongues being an ontological distinction or the evidence of a special blessing, I think Paul might have at least mentioned it in his address to the Corinthian church.

To discuss glossolalia or for that matter any spiritual gift is to speak of the Spirit Himself, as active in our experience, and to speak of Christ as manifest through the Spirit. When we speak of the Spirit we are being drawn to discuss not one member of the godhead in isolation, but must remember that the Trinity is always at work in a unity in otherness, and that this will reflect in the way the Spirit works in us as well.

When we speak of the gifts of the Spirit, we are speaking of the Spirit’s nature in how He affects the gifts in us and has effect through us in their application in the community which is the fellowship of his sufferings. The spirit testifies to the kenotic self effacement of Christ and it is through this that we recognize the divine act as love. The spirit also fulfills this kenotic movement by being the fullness of love which descends into our midst to draw us up into love, and to show the way by making clear the sign of the cross. Further this fulfillment takes place by bringing us into the same motion of kenotic self effacement, bringing its completion not only in the Son of God, but in the community which is His body. Further by emptying himself to be among us, He continues the work of Christ. The Spirit does not cease to testify to the kenotic self effacement of the Son, but continues to testify in and through us, by our own kenotic movement which is an embodied sign of this continued act and should be expressed most concretely in the charisms of the community which the life and suffering of Christ has made possible in the Spirit.

The Spirit as a member of the godhead suffers and leads us to suffering as a primary way of uniting us with Christ, Paul even goes on to call the church a fellowship of suffering. He also mentions elsewhere that His sufferings are the signs of his apostleship, it seems strange in a culture that puts credentials in other areas of merit than suffering. The Christian gifts and life are going to be drawn from the depths of suffering with Christ, our life as Christians is always a receiving of God’s revelation, and that revelation culminates in the divine glory that is the cross. Thus the cross should be ever before us, if we are to be in the constant reception of revelation. If it is ever before us, the cross will always invite us to participate in it, and thus draw closer to Christ. The cross is the act of Divine love, and its objectivity as revelation will make the cross take form in our lives. The suffering of the Christian is a mark of love, a sign of dedication to the One whom they have responded to showing forth unity. Christ himself makes possible for his disciples to follow Him by giving them gifts, “he ascended, he led captivity captive and gave gifts to men.” He that descended to the lowest depths was raised with a new vitality that allowed Him to bestow gifts upon us, and of those gifts one is the grace(charis) not only to believe but also to suffer. It has been (charismata) gifted to us to suffer.

God wishes to speak to the world and he does this through His theo-pragmatic self-revelation. It is the act of God in Christ that speaks to us. The God-Act is always God’s primary means of communication. God speaks to us through the absolute divine act of crucifixion and resurrection, this deed always interprets itself to us, and will not be subsumed as completely intelligible or available to us because it is absolute. It is always opening itself up more, but it will never cease opening, its self-emptying is eternal, and its message is Omni-temporal. The charisma of the Spirit relate to this in the following manner:
Our acts in the Spirit are manifestations of the continued act of God in Christ and are a participation in the divine narrative of God’s liberation of the world through His suffering.
Where the charisms truly are, there is Christ at work in the world, really He Himself, not just a spiritual presence, but in some way He himself is present where the Spirit is. If this is so, then the charismata are very similar to the sacraments of the church, highlighting the inter-dependability of both. Further these actions are already in some provisional way participating in the victory of God, it is not that miracles and the manifestation of gifts are themselves the kingdom, but they are signs of the kingdom, and announcing to us the coming of God.
Our actions in the spirit should take on the form of crucifixion/resurrection, for it is by the Spirit that Christ is able to be crucified. IT is also by the Spirit that Christ is raised. So too the church can only be charismatic if she is led along the path of Christ to enjoin the fellowship of His sufferings and show forth both the suffering of God and His resurrection. Charisms are about both our suffering and our joy, our burdens as well as our celebrations.
The charisms we experience are limitless because the Spirit is always interpreting the act of God on our behalf in new ways due to His infinite ability to create and diversify. There is no number to the spiritual gifts, but rather, the Spirit is always finding creative ways to speak in and through and to the church at all times. Further, it seems counter-intuitive to the biblical narrative to limit the gifts to a certain number or kind, rather we should allow the work of the Spirit in anything that builds the church in such a way that Christ is present to be considered a gift.
God speaks to the world through the church and her charisms, but only insofar as these charisms serve God and neighbor in a unified motion, the charisms of the church are never private, but for the sake of the world and the building up of the church.
Because the deed of God is self-interpreting as Love, our charisms must flow from this love, and will manifest according to our ability for solidarity and perception of the needs of our brothers and sisters. The deed of God among His people will manifest as love, self-interpreting through the actions of a crucified-glorified body gathered at His table. Our deeds in God necessarily correspond with and answer to the deed of God and thus the cross is the criterion of our charisms.
The charisms are always pointing to the absolute which is the cross, as the manifestation of divine love, and must embody this message in such a manner that their manifestation is personal (i.e. they are for the sake of our neighbor, and must participate in the love that is had between persons) liturgical, (i.e. they are always for the sake of God and the true worship of Him, including the establishment of justice and the manifestation of mercy as part of our worship of God) political, (i.e. a calling of the world to repentance) ecclesial, (i.e. a manifestation for the sake of the community and the enjoining of the one body in unity under the one sign which is the meal we gather at) and self-emptying (i.e. the charisms should lead us away from self awareness and into God/neighbor awareness, if they do not do this, then they are subject to our suspicion). Thus through these acts the charisms are manifestations of the self-interpretation of the act of divine love.

The life of Christ as a whole points to the cross and becomes intelligible only from this point, we cannot separate the teachings of Christ from the fact that they too point to the cross. Every word of teaching and the whole life of Christ is united by what Von Balthasar has termed a “Logos of the Cross” (Love Alone is Credible 85). That same logos is the center point for our discussion of Christian gifts, we cannot separate the gifts from what they signify, they are signs of the suffering Christ, who still redeems the world through the one act to which we enjoin ourselves at baptism and in a continual offering up of our bodies as living sacrifice, including our gifts.

To be gifted means to be crucified with Him in order to point to the center of the reality we as Christians witness to, which is the self-glorification of divine love in the Cross of Christ. The life of Christ is the fullness of the manifestation of the power and wisdom of God precisely in its impotence by the standards of the world, and so too our charisms are signs of this manifestation. Our charisms are just as equally about our union with God as they are about our abandonment by God, the two sides represent the life of Christ, crucifixion-resurrection, both are indissoluble for the act of revelation. The act which still takes place among us for the sake of the world. And the Christian life is the reception of revelation and thus must take upon itself this dialectical form if it is to truly embrace the whole of Christian existence, for it must show forth both sides of the coin if it is to truly reveal the sign of God in the world. It is thus in short that the crucifixion is inseparable from the resurrection, the darkness we undergo for the sake of light, the suffering for the sake of love.

This means that in order to properly show the crucifixion-resurrection dynamic, they church must be gathered around a concrete manifestation. Namely we must be a people gathered around the Eucharist. In order to properly discern the way in which the crucifixion-resurrection dynamic is carried out we need the sign of Christ’s body as the concrete manifestation able to guide us and interpret itself to us. In order to do so, the church needs to be deeply sacramental and confessional. The sacraments, and especially baptism and the eucharist show the dynamic tension of death and new life, and the whole life of discipleship is only intelligible from the standpoint of death and resurrection. “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” In order to properly discern the nature of the charisms the church must be gathered around the meal at which the crucifixion and resurrection are Omni-temporal, the eucharist. The reason for this is that the eucharist transcends time, coming to us from the future of God, the only way that the body of Christ can be present to us today as a means of grace is from that time in which God’s will is made perfect. The table at which we gather is the Lord’s and the bread which we eat is His body, the community gathered around it is His, and He must take form in them that would gather at His table. The eucharist is the crucifixion, resurrection and eschaton present at once in a single event which challenges us with the whole life of Christ and its significance as a remembered and continued sacrifice and a present as well as future victory. Further it serves to show us the past, present and future of the community who gathers around it. It is the means by which we remember the distinctive nature of our community, and the creeds likewise are a verbal confession of that to which we bear witness. If we are to be a community that can discern properly between evil and false spirits and the Spirit of the Lord, we will need to maintain that which the Lord has given us as gifts for our discernment. Both eucharist and creeds are tangible reminders of the nature of our community not by pointing to the specifics of the persons in the community or their gifts, but to the God which is worshipped. Without being confessional and sacramental the charismatic church descends into spiritualism and personality cult which becomes indistinguishable from the virtues of the outside world. Conversely, without a properly Charismatic presence Christianity becomes a way of thought or a system of theses, not a way of living that is objective.

Christ has shown us that love is not something light or carried out by emotional disposition, it is something suffered. Love is the act of God’s reconciling the world to Himself, our love derives from the divine love. It is something borne, and so too our charisms since they flow from love, must bear the burdens of love and manifest the scars and markings which validate our identity in the fellowship of love. Love is not our own but comes to us from the outside inviting our participation in itself. Love is objective, and bears in itself both something wholly other and something disclosed to us, it transcends immanence and escapes expression in its full reality. Yet it comes to us from above and makes itself known among us, becoming an object giving itself over to us, and thus inviting us to be subject to it. The Divine Love suffers the world, and in our participation in that, through our charisms we too must suffer the world for the charisms are our participation in the divine life of the Trinity which is a suffering. The Spirit continues to intercede in our behalf with labor pains and groans and uttering too deep for words. So the church that is charismatic must be a suffering church, one laden with the burdens of love if there is to be known among her the love of God. If she is to be truly enjoined to her lord she must join him at his cross, which makes the way for her resurrection. It is only in sharing the divine death that we can part take in the divine life, we see this in Paul’s theology of baptism.

To be gifted is to part take in God’s love, and every Christian life and every human life do so, every life is gifted life. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7 RSV). Yet these charisms are eschatological, they are signs of the love of God from below. They are the manifestation of the love of God among us which sigh for the coming of God, and the fullness of the love of God from above. The charisms while working for the common good of the church, as all manifestations of the Spirit are, work also in tandem with the final good, which for us is that final reconciliation of all things. Our charisms are pointers to the fullness of God’s love from above, they bear in themselves the manifestation of longing for the fullness of all things. The gifts we bear are the sufferings of love which long for the completion of all things, which groans for their wholeness and the coming of God. In discussing gifts, Paul also goes on to talk about the members working together and where one member suffers, all suffer together. This seems to imply that while the charismata work for the common good they also have an aspect of unifying solidarity, where if one is suffering by grace as a gift, all suffer, and if one member is honored all rejoice together (1 Cor. 12:26).

In all the aforementioned ways, the charismata are ultimately a sign, pointing to the reality of the divine love, and thus calling into question the world’s self understanding and showing forth that reality is only intelligible from the logos of the cross, such that the signs of our charisms show the world the possibility of love. The manifestation of our gifts are signs to the world of the guilt which it bears, calling into question idolatries and corruptions and placing before them the objective divine love which is a consuming fire. The credibility of the charismata are in relation to their correspondence in relation to the divine love, this is where they become authoritative among us and distinct from other actions. The charismata of the church are prophetic, they serve the community calling it to true faith by witnessing to the love of God in a theo-drama, acts of God for the people drawing all reality towards the center that is Christ Himself.

All Christian spiritual gifts have nuptial and thus eschatological meaning. The gifts, like our embodiment are for the sake of our union with the Christ and with each other. They have meaning for the sake of our union, and our marriage in the body of Christ. The whole purpose of the gifts as with human sexuality is not happiness, pleasure or empowerment, but theosis. The gifts are for the intimacy of the fellowship which is ours and are sacred for the up building of the intimate life that we share in as a community gathered around body and blood. They are gifts that we present to others and to the world, as a sign of union. Our gifts are signs of our union with each other and with Christ, thus they serve as gifts not for ourselves, but for one another and in serving one another they all serve the One Lord. Our gifts are for our self-disclosure to receive our being from the church and Christ and in doing so, are marks of the being which we are developing into, which is God’s call to us. The gifts are ultimately about our development into the likeness of God, and where the charismata are not developing a community that looks like the crucified-glorified Christ, their use and validity is in question.

Now we proceed to the second half of this essay the construction of a doctrine of glossolalia from the logos of the cross. We must undermine many word-faith and Pentecostal uses of the glossolalia as a form of individual piety and development, and propose alternately what is truly going on and what the gift of the glossolalia is for. First off, let me distinguish between glossolalia and xenoglossia, for the sake of not ignoring completely the other. Glossolalia is ecstatic speech, and xenoglossia is the speaking of a language previously unknown to the speaker. I see both as valid, though the glossolalia in particular has need of reappropriation within the logos of the cross if it is to cease to be a form of individualistic pietism of the most perverse and idolatrous kind. I think that the glossolalia can be a meaningful and powerful form of prayer but it must be appropriated properly in order to have this validity.

If our experience of the Spirit is not the experience of something wholly other that modifies the self, then there is really no experience at all (Spirit of Life, 30). Human being means being-in-relationship and without an otherness or a draw towards otherness in our charismatic life we suffer the loss of humanity especially in the midst of our attempt to have greater spiritual experience. So my attempt will be to draft a glossolalia that is in, with and for the other, and thus truly gives us to ourselves properly by reminding us that even we are mediated to ourselves by Christ, and His otherness draws us towards Him, transforming us through real experience in encounter. Without that experience of the other, it is questionable whether we have had experience at all, and if we cannot give expression to it, then the experience lacks depth and will pass from us. Charismatic theology needs to find expression that liberates it from the throes of imperialism and post-enlightenment rationalism. The glossolalia need not have a “scientific” validity in order to be affirmed. Pragmatism is not afterall the criterion of the church’s judgment on matters, but the true worship of Christ is, and so too, our glossolalic experience is about the expressing of Christ among us.

The glossolalia placed within a logos of the cross realizes that it is not for our own sake that we bear such a gift but for sake of the world, its purpose should be to serve God and neighbor as is the purpose of all spiritual gifts. While it seems slightly unthinkable from within certain traditions of the use of glossolalia, I think it is necessarily going to have to develop beyond focusing on self-edification if the glossolalia will retain Christian meaning in our lives.

For some, this gift is all about personal edification, but I think that this is an erroneous starting point. Contextually if we look at the passage Paul is talking about the order of service and I agree with Paul that it is highly unproductive for one person to speak in tongues at the front of a service or to take control of a service and not be able to utter intelligible words. This obviously can only serve to edify themselves, and I think that at this point is making a pointed statement about their use of tongues, not saying that it should be used for personal edification but rather that it does no good to stand up and claim a center of attention while being self-serving and not serving others. I think that a proper reading of this passage sees Paul telling congregants to stop claiming attention with manifestations that do not benefit the whole and build up the entire church. I don’t think that Paul is saying that the self-edification is a purely negative thing either, but is rather calling it what it is, an act of pride among the Corinthians. It is not to say that all acts of self-edification are such, but rather that we should approach them with the realization that they are a secondary function, and subject to suspicion. Self-edification done Christianly is the edification of my neighbor and my God, the only way to edify myself is to attend to God and neighbor and find the contours of myself in the process. The purpose of the gifts is the up building of the church, and the unification of the One Body. In truth the manifestations of the Spirit will come when the people seek to build up the church (1 Cor. 14:12).

I think that the glossolalia, if we were to look at it cohering with Paul’s general theology of the church as a fellowship of Christ’s sufferings will have to be coming out of a recognition of our weakness. That is not to say our sinfulness, but our limitations in areas of compassion, in knowledge, in ability to pray properly and in our ability to speak to God as we ought to. The glossolalia are an admission of weakness, and we need a recognition that this gift is not our own, but an expression of the Spirit’s utterings which are sometimes too deep for words. The charism of tongues is not something we turn on and off, despite the experience of many charismatic/Pentecostals it is rather something that presents itself to us and invites us into itself. The glossolalia is not a possession of ours, but is possesses us, and draws us into awareness of the world. It is a form of intercession which we do not initiate, but rather are drawn up into. We must speak of it this way if it is to have any significance at all as a true experience of the wholly other, for if the glossolalia becomes our possession then we are claiming to have become able to control God.

We do not possess the Spirit, but rather are called to self-disclosure by which we come to know God, it is in our vulnerability that we see that it was God who first made Himself vulnerable to us. The glossolalia is an invitation to the realization that even we will be at a loss for words and will not be able to express fully the depths of human suffering, or the heights of human joy, and for that, there are utterings which embrace the whole of life and draw us into their work. God draws us into the work of His praying for us by allowing us to speak with and for Him, making us part of the inner life of the Trinity and allowing our voice to be heard in His, and His voice to be heard in our own. But what these voices are saying together is not for the benefit of the one praying alone, it is an enjoining with the Spirit to groan for the whole creation. Glossolalia is about the fellowship with Christ, which is a fellowship of His sufferings,. This is truly the manifestation and fulfillment of the self-emptying of the Son, for He emptied Himself and continues to do so by the Spirit. His Spirit is drawing us into Himself by giving Himself to us and through us, as well as with us emptying Himself to pray for the whole creation.

The spirit gives utterance, when we speak of the personal dimension of the experience of the glossolalia we must remember that we are weak, and that God is made strong in our weakness. Our experience does not always have utterance, there are things which simply escape words, and cannot be brought down into them no matter how hard we might try. This is where our limitations begin and the glossolalia’s power comes to be known to us in our weakness. When we cannot find expression for things, either life in general or words in particular, the Spirit grants us power to stand before God and pray and communicate and confess as we should. But glossolalia is not merely a matter of the ecstatic function of the mouth, though this is the primary expression, I believe that glossolalia is an expression of the entire body as a communicative language. Body language can be glossolalic, meaning the movement of our bodies, in dance or prayer can be expressions of yearnings and utterings in behalf of the creation. The glossolalia is about the weakness of our lives to express the fullness of reality when we are at a lack for words.

God is the justifier of our experience by drawing it into Himself and expressing it through things we cannot utter, through the expression of our mouths as well as our bodies. The gift of tongues is about embodiment, it is about our bodies as able to speak with and in God for God and for our neighbor. The body in this charism becomes embraced in the intercessory work of the spirit, as both an ecstatic praise or an ecstatic lament. The point of its ability to be both a praise or a lament is highly important for this charism because historical evidence shows both, and we must remember as I mentioned above that our charisms as a whole should reflect both the crucifixion and the resurrection.

The glossolalia is meaningful, and is a part of the overall whole of Christian devotion, but does not take precedence as an initial sign of an ontological change. I remember as a newly converted Charismatic wondering why not everyone spoke in tongues, and being taught that not everyone had been “enlightened” to the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and that I was among those lucky enough to have received some sort of extra special grace. Contrary to this, I think it’s important that spiritual gifts are not signs of an extra special work of God that sets someone above or beneath us. We cannot adduce that someone is very spiritual or not spiritual based on the gifts they manifest, we are to know each other by the supreme gift and the center of the Christian life, which is love. The glossolalia do not create a special class of spiritual people who enjoy an access to God’s presence and Spirit that others do not know. Let’s call that idea what it is, cultural imperialism, the tongue-speaking have fashioned themselves as the ecclesiastical elite, and regard those who do not speak in tongues as in some ways not experiencing God in the fullness that they enjoy. It is forcing a culture of “us” the tongue speaking to try to make “them,” the non tongue-speaking, to become like “us” and in agreeing with this idea we are actually alienating, and hindering the work of the Spirit.

The rule of Christ is not hegemonic, but an invitation to embrace, it is a self-disclosure, and if enjoining the church means opening ourselves to a community that has opened itself to us, then we cannot have a doctrine of tongues that cannot square with the Gospel’s. It is a sign of the work of the Spirit towards the end, it is one among various gifts being used by God to intercede for and with the community, it is up building the church and can be used as a meaningful form of prayer that acknowledges weakness, and realizes our own fallibility. Looking to the cross we find our challenge and we see our own weakness, looking along the cross we see what shall become true of all reality because of this great love. Modifying G.K. Chesterton, I think that Christians should be radically engaged in celebration, but also radically committed to suffering, seeing both as necessary and essential to the true life of faith. Our charismata allow us to enjoin the fellowship of His sufferings. The fellowship of His sufferings though, is also the fellowship of the life giving Spirit, and both sides must be retained as viable and necessary, ecstatic celebration and ecstatic lament are both sides of the one Christian way which stands in the shadow of the cross, witnessing to the reconciliation of all things that is happening and has already happened.

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.

Sex Changes and The Light of Humanity

Quirky title. thought so. But anyways, don’t let it throw you.

What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.
- John 1

In Him was life…and that life was the light of humanity, that light shines on….

I’m not going to go into a super deep reflection or anything, I just, i think that as I go through my day, I’m trying to remind myself of the significance of all of this, and what God means for reality as a unified whole.

In Christ is life, that life is our light, I can’t give a commentary that decrypts the message, other than, He has brought life into being. My own life, redeemed, as I’ve been talking to my friends from years ago this week, I realize that in Him I have found life. That life has brought me out of suffering in the past, has brought me suffering in the present, has changed me, has given me light.

There is darkness. . .screw the darkness. The light for humanity that is found in the life manifested in Christ shines on. There is no reason to allow depression to choke out hope, no reason to let doubt steal my sanity, to let fear steal my humanity.

I’m thinking that while it’s easy to doubt, it’s not mine. It doesn’t belong to me.

It leaves you feeling pretty hollow
It might be nice to look at
Don’t forget you’re stuck with it tomorrow

- Dresden Dolls “Sex Changes”

It’s ok to struggle, St. Peter says that we all shall, and we do. Life is composed of interludes of suffering and rest. But to give up, as they say it leaves you feeling pretty hollow. And there’s everything that comes with that tomorrow.

There is love in this beating heart, there is hope in these tired hands, and they are weary, but determined, to look to Christ for strength.

Thanks For Tuning In,

Thanks to:

- The Dresden Dolls

The True Sufi

THE TRUE SUFI

What makes the Sufi? Purity of heart;
Not the patched mantle and the lust perverse
Of those vile earth-bound men who steal his name.
He in all dregs discerns the essence pure:
In hardship ease, in tribulation joy.
The phantom sentries, who with batons drawn
Guard Beauty’s place-gate and curtained bower,
Give way before him, unafraid he passes,
And showing the King’s arrow, enters in.

R. A. Nicholson

‘Persian Poems‘, an Anthology of verse translations
edited by A.J.Arberry, Everyman’s Library, 1972

Think about it.

Thanks for Tuning In

Resurrection and Beauty

Do you ever just stop and wonder at the beauty of the world? Catching if even for a moment a glimpse of something truly beautiful? Do you ever just get the feeling that somehow things are going to work out alright? This is not to paint a wondrously idealist picture of reality, but sometimes, standing in the light of the sunset, I can look over my shoulder, and feel a sense of comfort, like everything that was created will be put in place. I can hold my girlfriend’s hand and appreciate the heavens, knowing that something beyond her, or me is coming. Standing there in the sunset, I can catch a glimpse of the eschaton, enveloping my heart.

That feeling, that endless comfort tinged with longing, I would argue, is the resurrection. Today, I sit at rest, and know that the world is being set to rights and I am an irreducible part of the reconciliation of all things, because God made it that way. That sense of beauty, of wonder, I feel to be the knowledge within me about the coming goal of the universe. Just like if you’ve lived in the south, or anywhere where it rains a lot, you can feel a shift coming. I think that beauty does the same thing. We can feel the grace of God in His creation, and can feel a need to develop the beauty that we have a sense of.

God created us and began the work of creation in us, and will carry on our createdness, until its completion. There are brief moments, when we stop and pause and think “I think the universe is good.” Or “Is everything really ok underneath it all?” Resurrection says that these glimpses of the beauty and rightness of things is what we’re really really waiting for.

Resurrection is the belief that while we are wanderers in the current age, traveling across endless landscapes of deserts. We are faced with things that are sometimes dark, leaving us weary and hopeless we take step after step in seemingly aimless direction at times. Resurrection answers that wandering with the belief that we are steadily approaching something new on the horizon, a new city, a new mode of bodily existence ,a new beauty which awaits us as we travel. Resurrection answers the desperation of our hope with a solemn assurance about our longing, no we are not yet perfect, no the world is not yet perfect, but it shall be. The God Man sit bodily upon the throne of grace, steering the world from the hearts of his saints, claiming from within creation a place for himself that will spread into all things.

This is the resurrection of our God, this world is loved and has been rescued, and will not be abandoned. I see something so beautiful that I want to approach it steadily. No matter how long the night gets, even if at the end of the journey my faith is fragile and weak, in the light of the resurrection I can find strength, by looking to it, i have hope.

The “progress” I’m talking about is personal, not political. It will not be found in the deification of leaders, or have an answer in politics. It is when the I and thou relationship between human and God adopts a face, the thou becomes the “You” becomes the “Jesus” as a person and not an idea. The approach is not just to declare the Lordship of God, nor merely his love. But when we look to that Great Savior, we see resurrection, beauty, life, and from those flourish all other things, that is when we have a taste of home upon our lips, and a prayer in our hearts.

“Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done, On Earth as it is in Heaven” is the cry of this beating heart, and as I pause today to think, I remember the way in which that kingdom first reached me. In the arms of my mother, tenderly holding me and overflowing with divine love, she embraced me, and in those arms was a sacrament, a symbol of the love of God, conveying grace to the little child, who would grow up and turn away, only to be forgiven time and again. Parenting is a sacrament. As I close this thought, I would like to reiterate that God loves this world, and refuses to leave it, as we can see in the love we share, in the people we love, in the less fortunate we care for.

Resurrection, is about surprises, and I know that what awaits at the end of those glimpses is more surprising, more shocking and more beautiful than even I can imagine.

Thanks for Tuning in,

To My Mother

In honor of the up and coming Mother’s Day 2008, I would like to write a special thank you to my own mother, a woman of faith whose life illuminates my own. I am grateful for the love evidenced in her life, and the beauty of her person, and since I am far, I keep you near in my heart. I feel as if your love and dedication to being a good mother has helped form me into the man I continue developing into. I dedicate this page to you, and honor you.

In honor of a wonderful woman, within whose love everything has place to become itself, as in CS Lewis’ The Great Divorce, mother, you cultivate and nurture into life even those things which are dead. Your love gives place for all things to flourish, may you continue to live such a wonderful expression of the sacred heart of Our Lord.

Blessed are you mother, from whom love flows in abundance,

Blessed are you woman, giver of life, expression of Our Lady unto Christ,

Blessed are you mother, from which I drew my life,

I honor the life I have been given as a sacrifice unto Our Lord,

May you live Forever in His Presence

May you be honored greatly for your unseen, unknown works,

Blessed are you, Woman of God, for your heart is bountiful in mercy

Thank you for your forgiveness,

Thank you for your endless love

Such as only a mother can give

May you be Blessed, not only today, but forever

Such as is the will of the Triune Lord

In the Name of The Father, The Son, and The Holy Spirit

Amen.

Evangelicalism and Politics: Beginning of the End?

Many people that I have been around recently say that politics is too closely tied to Christianity to the detriment of both, because the Church becomes a political institution and politics becomes muddled in religious wars and cultural wars. A ray of hope may be breaking forth on the horizon.

First of All, I’d like to thank my lovely girlfriend for drawing my attention to the article in the first place. Seen here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080503/ap_on_re/evangelical_manifesto;_ylt=At4QSytfrvEuUD7Ujn10xIE7Xs8F

I think that the downfall of Evangelicalism has been to conserve enlightenment ideals alongside traditionally Christian ethical practices. This marriage between Christianity and politics has proved to be detrimental to Evangelical culture, since the faith was watered down to primarily political collectivism rather than a dynamic faith community. Christianity is not about becoming a collective body of angry people united as a massive superorganism of political activism without being informed by faith. The downfall of the evangelical model of Western Christian Culture has been in being politically active at the expense of dialogue with faith.

The Christian conception of culture needs to be informed by faith, and what today are labeled “liberal”
concerns as far as social issues go. The Christian faith should not have a single political party, that’s absurd, what we need is careful evaluation of the direction of culture as issues arise. It seems ridiculous to me that the “Christian” political party is more concerned with keeping people out of America than with helping devise a new method of economic wealth for the planet, than with espousing a positive view that would empower minorities and women to run for president, that would be concerned with protecting and cultivating the environment.

It’s sad that the conservation is not of the teachings of Jesus but Enlightenment superiority of the white race, conservation of capitalist economics without social concern, conservation of oppression rather than liberation, biblicism rather than biblically informed dynamic life within scripture. It strikes me as odd that Christians are largely the beneficial idiots to either party rather than being actively engaged in culture.

We are an eschatological faith that looks to the end of time when all things will be reconciled to God, and in that faith we seek out the end, but it should not cost us our awareness of the present reality as unimportant. We need to look to the end as the source of the final hope, but that should nto remove us from culture or politics today. Republicans pander to Christians telling them what they wish to hear in order to easily win votes, and the recent trend to incorporate faith into Democratic politics is no better. Both sides are pandering to a culture that is dry, dominated by old money, and seeks to retain that money. We should be actively concerned with human rights, not torture, and taxes.

As a Christianity, we need to be Christianity, not a political body, but a faith community first. Everything else is secondary. It’s sad that Christianity is not known for its spirituality or personal connection to faith, but to politics. On the popular level, we are a civic religion, conceived of as a political party with a tax exemption.

Faith is always independent of culture, and it should be. This does NOT mean cut off from. They need interrelation, dialogue, and dynamic life as expressed in the idea of perichoresis, or interpenetration that is dynamic and alive. Culture and Christianity are not to be opposed to each other or removed form each other, but as Christians in culture, we have to meet the judgments of both God and culture in out advance forward.

The way to do this is not to retreat as is the case of many fundamentalists, or to accept cultural virtue as the highest virtue as is the case with theologically liberal people. We need an Evangelicalism that supports itself by being a faith community first, then engages in politics, perhaps as a whole, but still actively and dynamically weighs the issues, not with cursory glances and ignorance, pandering to the soundbyte culture that is so prevalent, but really researches the country we should be.

I find that my professor was right in saying, “If you salute the American flag in your church, I doubt your salvation.” We are not the state, the state is not the church, it was exactly that mentality that led to Hitler’s Germany. If we follow down the path that Evangelicalism has seemed to be on, I doubt we can live actively without becoming another military state in the long line of civic religion nation states that have manifested themselves since the Enlightenment.

As a country, our greatest weakness is our belief in our own innocence, someone once said. If we are to advance in cultural engagement, it is not as Americans, but as Christians first.

I am in full favor of the idea of the manifesto. It’s high time we got ourselves out of our mess and back to being a religion. I will hope to read the document and publish a review once it is signed and published.

Thanks For Reading,

Eli

Dogma and the Imagination: Architecture

What is faith? Faith is that by which we are called to live out in awareness of something at times beyond immediate perception.

We live in a beautiful world, a world of wonder and amazement, you can feel it in the waves. It echoes in the wind, passes through the mountain peaks and into the valleys, fills the earth with life and green fields endless beauty on every side. We live in a world of color and inspiration, a world of music and sound and light, and warmth. We live in a world full of God’s glory. We can feel it at times, looking at the sunset, listening to the world around us at peace and rest. We find ourselves being in it, captured by it, alive through it, and reacting to it.

We live in a world full of chaos and greed. Full of vicious cycles of violence, where reason out strips beauty or ethics, where efficiency is king. We live in a world full of money, and slavery. Bloodshed is on every hand and the taste of blood on every lip. All are responsible. Nature is a competition and war zone for survival. Predators hunt prey daily and all nature itself knows is violence, terror. Politics rage around our heads as nations fling themselves at other nations and the threat of nuclear war shows us how much our own state of mind is fallen in the world today. We live in a world where people kill people for pocket change, where disaster lurks around the corner, and chaos is on our breath. We have bullet shaped teeth a penchant for violence, oppression in our every step, our institutions enslave us, we enslave others, and no one is free. We are a fallen world. Our planet decays under our cities, our strip mines destroy landscapes and our landfills hide our disasters.

The world is hideous. The world is beautiful.

Both of the above statements are true.

So what do we do about it? What are you and I supposed to do about a world that’s out of whack and thirsty for violence? It takes a move beyond the cursory glance into the news to do something about it. We live in a society where everything needs a microwaved, ready packed, do-it-yourself-in-seconds, prepackaged answer. But you cannot do that with life’s big issues. It takes moving out beyond the 30second attention span and into a meaningful reflection on what it means to be in the world.

So, what is the answer to our problem? I believe it is The Creative Imagination.

Art has the ability to bring with it presence, to create presence between the observer and the object being viewed. I think we can all agree that when we find a truly beautiful piece of art, we move beyond our everyday into something peaceful, serene, soothing, and tranquil. This does not mean all art is this way, but at the same time we can find those works that inspire us with their great beauty. Now, art is not just a frivolous and empty experience that makes us feel good about ourselves for a few moments. I believe that art is an integral part of humanity, and subsequently of Christianity. Why? Because through art, we experience the presence of something beyond ourselves, it takes us to a reality outside ourselves where we can admire our world with the beauty that it has. Furthermore, as a creation of beauty it glorifies the Creator God, who is the Triune Lord that we confess.

It would seem to me that art is going to play a central role in God’s reconciliation of all things. Because art is a means by which we can create beauty, observe the world, and celebrate what we see. This is not the only type of art though, nor does it need to be. While it is beautiful to paint a natural setting, there are other beauties, shapes, and forms, colors, shadows. Art can also show us darkness, the horrors of things past, nightmares from the minds of others, sadism, and death. But this is not the way art has been done before. Where modernity would seek to tell us to move along and be functional, rational and effiecient about the world, we must say ‘No.’ Where modernity would tell us that art is purely political, purely forms or minimalism, we cannot agree.

Art teaches us to stop, to breathe, to appreciate. It inspires us to see the world through different eyes, through another mind, through another perspective, through another heart. Art is not an aside to the Christian gospel, nor does it stem from scant and scattered verses about the arts in the Bible, rather it is integral to God’s plan to set things to rights within the created order. Art is the creation of repose, maybe secondarily, but how many of you have ever painted or taken a picture and found a rest and peace in that moment? The arts inspire us, bless us and heal us, they are a reminder of a world beyond modernity, beyond efficiency and offices.

Not just art alone though, because art can be done by anyone with talent. What it takes is Creative Imagination, inspired by the Creator.

The imagination is not a frivolous empty place where imaginary things hide in our closets and scare our children, the imagination is an active participant in the nature of human being. The imagination is an integral locus of what it means to be human. The imagination needs freedom to express itself and create beauty in our lives, without it we lose a pillar of our existence. The modernist pursuit of function actually served to our detriment, because the buildings of the era, like the thought of the era homogenize and reduce, alienate and divide. This is not supposed to be, created spaces should cultivate relationships and human interaction rather than divide people and separate them. The Creative Imagination can create these spaces.

For an assertion on the nature of Imagination, I briefly turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose work and reflection on the imagination serve a great good in society, and whose voice and contemplation point to something higher than himself. For Coleridge, the Imagination mediates between a world of real objects and a real presence, an “I am,” if you will. But the imagination does not create reality, it creates poetry. It creates a willed experience of the real. It is consciously willed creative control of the potentials within something that characterizes and signifies what the imagination is to Coleridge. It is a conscious mediation between the real world and something other, through the exercise of creative control that allows the mind to create something new and beautiful between the real world and the mind perceiving it.

As Christians, we should call for architecture that speaks meaning, and as Christians in architecture, spaces need to be functional but should also capture relationality between people and the space, should inspire imagination and create a place of reflection and interaction. We need to exercise willed creative control of a space in order to properly imagine all that space could be. Art is not divorced from life but is part of it, creating the environments we live in, and the places we have our interactions. If In Him we live and move and have our being, should not the spaces where that living moving and being reflect the glorious splendor of the creator and inspire something within us?

Have you ever considered what the architecture of our age says about us? We have no open spaces, we have symmetrical monstrosities that make us feel crowded in and insignificant. Our architecture worships our intellect and the feats of humanity’s vertical achievement, but reduce horizontal space to a trivial necessity in order to go higher and higher. I’m not an architect, not a philosopher of architecture, but we cannot let industry create our world, so that there is “a coca-cola advertisement in every village” [1] and a megalithic apartment complex every three blocks. This is not they things should be, buildings have voices, and symmetrical anonymous, identical, faceless buildings impose conformity and oppression. An age that promised enlightened thinking has stripped us of our freedom, an age that sought to create the ultimate humans has alienated their individuality, and stripped them of their power.

Have you as an architect or building design engineer considered that function is important but buildings can be used to point to something greater? To God Himself? Not as an empty sort of homogenization of architecture into cathedrals or religious buildings everywhere, but each space as its own voice and way of expressing the glory of God. Each space should be cultivated to the full extent of what it can be in itself, not as a universal style of distinction, but within each space a maximization of space, utility and relationality creates the Christian vision of what architecture means to us. Colin Gunton claims that one of the chief failures of modernity is the lack of reconciliation between universality and particularity. What this means for architecture is simple, either our buildings all look the same or they are disjointed and fragmented spaces juxtaposed over each other in a struggle for supremacy. What culture, what architecture needs is unified diversity.

Postmodernism is attempting to restore to particularity those things which belong to it, such as individual significance and importance, however, we cannot allow postmodernity to flatten our sense of space, place and being so that all things are equally valid. When all things are equally leveled out, they are all equally reduced into identical categories, none can be more beautiful, more special, or even individual anymore, and thus they all become boring. It’s like school uniforms, even in the uniformity of everything, it’s the people with the accessories that stand out.

Art and its mediation of presence to us through a created reality draws out the beauty within our own imaginations and inspires us to do something more with ourselves than merely be functional. Functionality is death if it is all that we do. We cannot possibly attempt to have any meaning beyond our bank statements and credit history if we do not actively engage in something beyond functionality. What is the purpose of life?

Certainly it is not to edify and construct institutions at the expense of our identity, to be functional at the expense of ourselves. It is something above and beyond that, and mediating between the horrors of the world and what can be done requires imagination. It requires the creation of beauty in the world, yes in art galleries and on sidewalks and in the streets, on the highways, and byways, in the villages and towns, among the lower classes as well as the socially privileged. The horrors and evil in the world requires us to actively engage the world with imagination, to take control of the situation and create beauty where there was none. Not in the sense of buildings alone, or paintings and inanimate objects, rather the imagination should be used in every aspect of life, actively engaging the world and discovering ways to beautify and cultivate a richer experience from things for the individual as well as the community.
At the core of the imagination is not an arbitrary idea, nor an idealism that is fragile, for Christians the core of the imagination should be the dogmas that inspire us, for the sake of active engagement in the world while not being of the world. The Christian Imagination, that creative force of the will that resides within us and inspires us should look to God’s affirmations of what it means to be in the world for guidance. Christ came to redeem, restore and reconcile all things to himself. He will someday reconcile and redeem all things, and it has already begun in his disciples, the Church, this is a core dogma of our faith. What this means for our artistic merit is that we are called to reconcile all things to God actively, by the Holy Spirit and the active imagination we can participate in. Not that this should reduce art to paintings of Jesus and the disciples, or make everything about looking religious, but really, it’s a celebration not just of spiritual things but the entire creation. Everything has the potential to be beautiful, or redeemed into beauty.

Recently reading an article by N.T. Wright, he mentioned a sculpture of the tree of life, made entirely out of decommissioned weapons.[2]

The world is good, and was created to be so. In acknowledging this we don’t need a specific apologetic for aesthetics, other than ‘for the glory of God.’ We can celebrate the goodness we already see within the world. We have the right to glorify God who created the beauty we do see. We have an imagination that can envision the way things should be, and point us to that reality.

The horrors of the world are real, but in the midst of them we can find peace in the One who is already Lord, and who will continue to bring reconciliation to all things by His Spirit. Christianity is calling…and is asking us to imagine what the world, redeemed and filled with God’s love looks like, and to do our part in making that happen, to create beauty that reflects the glory of God in what we do, the space we live in, the places and ways we exist.

Practically, we can say this: At the center of all the ugliness in the world is a sacrifice that calls us to change the way we think about things. There is for us a man on a cross, who shows us where God has entered into our pain, our suffering our emotional state, and said “enough.” There is a man who has entered into the heart of where the world feels pain, and he is calling us to go there too.

Imagination is not about feeling peppy, but rather is an active engagement in thinking creatively about reconciliation. The Christian Imagination calls us to enter into that same place where the world feels pain, and actively imagine what the love of God looks like there and to set about the task of expressing and ushering in that love, be it in architecture, music, art, sculpture, painting, reflection, philosophy, theology, conversation, ecology, and everything else.

Echoes, Memory and Individualism In Focus

Echoes, echoes are an amalgam of voices, they enshroud us, surround us, and draw us into themselves. Echoes invite us to enter into another realm, into some faraway and distant place that is simultaneously closer to us than we ourselves. Echoes are expressed in the genetics that we carry, they are memories of everyone who has contributed to our identity. Echoes are expressed in the stories we carry in memory, they beckon us beyond self awareness into a reflection of our composite nature. We are individual, but our individuality is not detached from the places we come from, the genes that make us, and the stories we carry in our hearts. Echoes when they happen in real time, are a manifestation of memory, an awareness of the ‘us’ that is inside every ‘me.’

Echoes are an awareness of memory, a remembering of everything that makes up our being. We are composite systems of relations, our relations are unified into a single consciousness, but we are nevertheless a system of relations. Another way of saying this is that, we have emerged out of something, never, ex nihilo. To believe otherwise is to displace community and heritage for a self created meaning that stands over against the truth of what identity really is. We are not conscious in the universe alone as floating arbitrary beings that define ourselves and refine ourselves by ourselves. We have come from somewhere, and that somewhere is in our skins, in our hair, in our eyes, in our smiles, in our memories and pasts, in our futures, in the things we hope for, and the disappointments we share among one another. We have ideas that were not born in a vacuum, but are the product of observation, genetics, inclination and intuition. Our individual consciousness depends on the interactions we have between ourselves and others, between the past and the present, between our bodies and the world around it, between imagination and reason, between language and the divine, between the spoken, and the ineffable.

Whispers in the essence of who we are make up some of the quirks and choices that we make and being aware of those whispers is how we will find our true individual consciousness. Individual consciousness is a composite dialogue between several varying awarenesses that indwell our entire “selves,” wholistically. To be aware of the past is to look to those things which contribute to an awareness of place, an awareness of where it is we come from, an anchor from which we set out in search of bringing new things back to where we came from. But it is also necessary to be conscious of the present, by realizing the present as a means of self expression and as an opportunity to give and receive freedom amid others. The present calls us to an awareness of the reality and particularity of ourselves, in which we live aware of the past but allow it to act as a voice amid the consciousness of our whole, not the determined end of it. Individual Consciousness necessarily depends on the awareness of the past as a guide to which we are anchored, and an intimacy with the present through which we acknowledge the need to become a self through choices we make and our reactions to the relations that we encounter.

In relation to the lives of others, our consciousness and being depend on being aware of others as relationally in need of interaction as we are. In the church there are times of solitude, contemplations, meditations, solaces and individual yearnings after God, but in the larger context of life our being depends on our relations to others. Our being depends on our being able to connect with others and be their liberators.

Our freedom in self-awareness is not a call to detachment but instead provides us the opportunity to interact with others in mutual relations that ask us to identify between one another using our getting to know others as a means of coming to know ourselves, as well as with one one another working together to find mutual identity amidst each other, and finally to identify ourselves as individuals indwelling one another, realizing that as Christians, we are dwelling within one another as one body, not to say that we are all the same, or share a hive mentality, but that in our individual expressions there is a single spirit that unites us.

That same Spirit which is The Spirit of Christ, seeks to bestow upon us unity as well as diversity, so that being happens in relation to others but individually as well as we discern what we are and what we are not in relation to other things. For a short analogy, being would occur as we dialogue with our relations, we learn what we are, as if by looking within another we see the contrasts and comparisons between ourselves and the others. So that when we look we are given a picture of those things which we are or wish to become as well as those things which are not part of our being and thus show us the boundaries of that which we would call our self.

God has united us by one spirit and that same spirit calls us to remember the echoes, the communal memory of those who have gone before us, those who live on in our bodies through our genes, those whose stories we carry in our hearts, whose lives shape parts of the direction of our own.

Our own individual memory serves us as well. Not just the echoes. Echoes, are in fact only a mere part of the memory we seek for ourselves. Memory grounds us in our identity, remembering is something beautiful. Memory is our grounding as beings, it is in memory that we have an awareness of who we wish to be through seeing who we have been. Memory in the context of a single being has an infinite value which can be associated with it, in that it is the only intangible thing which has a real presence outside of God. Memories can haunt, comfort, speak, even echo, or resonate.

In memory we find an obligation, the need to recall, to respect, that which has been and to look forward with an awareness of that past. We have an obligation to commemoration, by this I mean we have a duty to remember as a community, as a communion, to co-remember, but also to call forth that past into our present through an awareness of it. By this I simply mean, we as individuals must remember the nature of our relations in searching for being, and as communities, we must remember to listen to the voices that echo within us, to the other memory, the voices of a thousand ancestors past, and remember the places we have been through them, the evils we have faced as well as the victories we have had, the gravities of despair, as well as the heights of triumph.

Memory helps shape individual consciousness, and develop us into communal awareness. There is a necessary tension between relation and alienation, individualism tends to make the individual being of such importance that anything other, including friends and family are seen as infringements upon the freedom of the one. But in seeking freedom for oneself, one must also realize that without balance, anything that is other will necessarily be subordinate to our one.

Nietzsche was right to describe the will to power, without a conception of things that are other as having value for their relations to us, and without a value for any relations between self and things that are other, one necessarily creates a system where only the self matters. Where only aesthetic nihilism can flourish. Individualism with the goal of asserting a pure individual self will always suppress the role of anything that is other, so that in the end that assertion ends in power struggle after power struggle, failure or success alone.

In terms of God, individualism can strip us of God because it takes from us an awareness of the echoes, of the memories, of the many, the others in our lives, the communities we participate in, as well as our ability to relate to anything outside ourselves. This can become dangerous when we lose our ability to find a God that is wholly other yet relatable, in our striving to relate to ourselves and fit God in that picture, we can misrepresent and even destroy a working positive image of God before us. We can skew the voice of God and interpret it through radical subjectivity so that there is no God, in the end only interpretation based on the assertion of self over anything else. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard were right to say that was a possible outcome of modernity, only one of two things can happen in the face of a society that is modern.

Either we become part of the crowd and join untruth, part of the herd that makes us passive and disinterested, or we become power striving totalitarians, out of a necessity to meet the ideals of pure self subsistence.

So what do we do with all this? In short, we need a dual awareness of ourselves as united, many relations, with a single consciousness, as individuals. Furthermore we must remember the power with which we can recall those who have gone before, and those who are presently with us. We must be aware of our individuality in terms of relations, and how we are all interconnected, and made up of interconnections.

Memory/Echoes, Awareness, Existence, these three are one, and find one consciousness in those who unite them into one being. These are parts of consciousness, again not an end all say all, just an idea.

We are the relations we dwell in. Our being takes place in between the objects of self and other. The self, still remains fully self, the other still remains fully other, but there is meaning in the middle, and that meaning, that interaction is what makes our being a being at all, the dialogue between relations.

We are the relations we care for, and cultivate. Our being will be shown in the spaces between ourselves and others, the life of the spirit is found in our selves, but is most evident in the spaces between ourselves and others. Why else would they have an inherently social nature, one has never needed to be patient without some outside force requiring it. The spirit can guide us, giving us an awareness of the space between ourselves and others, showing us ourselves in the relations we have. Those relations are our mirror.

We are the relations we dwell in. Our being, both as individuals and communities will expose itself most strongly in our relations to the other, to memory, to echoes, to breathing in memories, and breathing out wisdom.

Breathe in, absorb your past, Open your eyes, and flooded with the light of awareness, become that which you are called to become.

On the Church, The Individual, and Free Will in Fresh Perspective

On the Church, The Individual, and Free Will in Fresh Perspective

The Will of God: Organic Questions to Static Answers

What is the will of God for my life? Am I following God’s plan for me?

These questions are often the way we think about the will of God in our own lives. We stop to think of a static previously written book, even some Arminians may feel as tough the Lord has called them to a slightly pre-chosen destination for their own lives, that God has written the book or is in the process of writing and needs them to cooperate to the statically set will. We should be conformed to the image of Christ, and we should seek to honor God with our members, but this does not mean that we must have been set on a static one way track that requires of us absolute conformity.

The will of God is not a predetermined essence that requires of us absolute adherence to a book that has been prewritten, but rather, it can be thought of as organic and fluid. How often do we forget that among spiritual gifts are listed, helps and service as well as love. These things are not necessarily predetermined or prewritten essences of us, especially in context of our using such things for the benefit of the church. I think that what the New Testament apostles were doing was not to establish the spiritual gifts for all time in writing, even the ones charismatics tend to forget, such as giving, helps, service, teaching and several others. I think that what was going on is that the New Testament writers saw that people’s natural predispositions were being given over to the spirit for cultivation and this was producing incredible acts of charity, of teaching, of giving, evangelism, compassion and love.

The will of God was and is that the kingdom should come to the earth as it is in heaven, and this is met by us as we become the new humanity in our ability to embrace our dispositions to different things that we enjoy as we turn them over to God.

What I think was going on was the new testament writers observed people being empowered and energized by the spirit to do things that were amazing, but inexplicably natural, such as just giving, may be seen as a natural act of kindness, but they discerned a spiritual power in that giving. They saw in the people a spiritual empowerment unnatural to things as they previously were.

Ultimately the will of God is this, offer your member, faculties, intentions, disciplines, purposes, talents, abilities personality quirks and even tastes to God. By offer, I do not mean sacrifice, but rather, allow them to develop by the spirit into an expression that serves the living God.

There are times when things are necessary and we must necessarily surrender something good for a time so that we can live unto God. But these things are exceptions, not necessarily the rule. We cannot be deceived into thinking that it is more spiritual or more holy to stop doing those things which we love in order to serve God. The will of God is not a book, He is open and willing, and if he has truly given us free will then it is evident in that we can choose to offer up our members to him and they will be empowered by the spirit for the good of all people.

Our lives are commonly preached by our elders and more conservative generations as inconsistent, or incomplete, without stability, to and fro, double minded, sometimes inadequate. I do not believe this to be the case, not at all. I think that rather, we are seeing people become more aware of their loves and trying to empower those loves in service to God. God’s plan for our lives is the eventual conformity of us into the image of his son, but if humans were originally created in the image of God, then why the diversity of races, ideas, passions and intellects?

I find that I myself don’t often take this into account when thinking about the will of God. Rather than thinking of the conformity to the image of Christ as a cumulative loss of identity, we should think of the trinity, and realize that God is diverse in action but unified in purpose, revealed as the community of three in one.

Cannot the living God do the same in those whom He loves? Cannot then this God diversify our actions but unite us in the spirit. The New Testament gives us glimpses into early church life, and i think what we see is variegated and wholly differing churches and gifts, and services and evangelisms, and ideas, yet all are united by one faith, one hope, one baptism, one Lord, one body, one spirit.

Paul goes on to say that there is one God that unites everything, and is through everything, the everything in everything. This does not preach the gospel of modernism, the contentment with the herd mentality, it does not ask for conformity in our idea of the word, it does not ask us to be another brick in the wall, but another conduit for intuitive and organic work of the spirit to flourish individually, for each according to their members.

We are they who are one in many, many in one, and everything everywhere, we are in the air, we are in the sea, you can feel us in the wind, hear us in the trees, we are the one and the many, we are united in diversity and by our difference we expand through awakening others to their own potential, we are the manifold chorus of symphonic voices reverberating, resonating, everything, everywhere, different, unique, unrepeatable, ineffable, we are the sacred, the holy, the united, we are the arts themselves, creating arts and spreading light, igniting in all a passion for individual expressions of light for unity amidst the diversity of the many, you can feel us in a raindrop and hear us in the roar of the oceans.

Free will serves to allow us to diversify our gifts to God by choice, the more we acquire, the more it is that we can offer, and again not in giving them up, but by inviting them to be empowered by the spirit. So to offer a corrective to myself, the more we acquire and engage in, the more dwellings we can invite the spirit to fill, empower, and enlarge.

Destiny is simply this, that we would invite the spirit of Christ to inhabit our dwellings, our members, our faculties, our intentions passions, habits, creative expressions, careers and concepts. Their being flooded with light is what is truly predestined, for it is the will of God to fill and empower those diverse expressions which are found in ourselves.

This is not to say that everything is up to choice as “the spirit” (we don’t always know which spirit it is in some cases) leads.There are necessary events, necessary things that take place as well.

To use a rather limited metaphor, think of the will of god and us in it as the water in a stream or a river. There are stones we will come up against that will alter our paths, and necessarily shift our directions. There are times when God will ask us to surrender that which is good, so that which he desires may be done. There are times when we surrender the good, when God calls us to sacrifice, but there are times when we are free to explore, to develop and to cultivate.

This is the true investment of the talents, to explore and cultivate a variety of interests and use them for the kingdom. The one servant who was given one talent necessarily rejected the need to interact with the world, forgot to take into account a risk of being in the world, but being able to cultivate something out of it.

The parable of the talents to me asks us to cultivate something out of our experiences in the world and to bring back with us, more than we left with. What I mean in short, is that the parable teaches us to want to acquire more, but not at the risk of empty colonization, but rather, through interaction with risk and the possibility of failure, we see that we are empowered to take chances, to explore different avenues of bringing back more to ourselves and to our God than we left with.

Thus free will empowers us to choose our interactions and what we wish to bring back to ourselves, but as we bring things back to ourselves, we invite the spirit to help us choose, or to help us by inhabiting what we have already acquired.

This by no means is an end all, say all, but can be a good starting point for fresh discussions. I hope that this begins to open new doors for fresh insights, in my own life personally, as well as those who would read this.