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.

Can I just get this off my chest?

 

I dunno, going to the monastery this break really really fucked with me, head and body, mind and spirit. I feel like i’ve had a few too many screwdrivers and none of it was worth the drinking.

 

But I also feel like I got drunk on something substantial, and am inebriated with longing to return to the simple and unburdened life of the monastic way. Forsaking all things, and living a life in service to God and the world through prayer.

 

It was a challenging experience and I’m not sure I was able to really appreciate it fully because of the emotional baggage I carried with me there that i needed to sort through before i could find any semblance of rest. I haven’t slept well since that first night there. I did all my crying on the way over there, and was just exhausted by the end of the first night.

 

I feel like a shell of a person some nights, and i feel as if since i returned i’ve been living half aware and half exhausted, and fully guilty.

 

I don’t feel like I’m at all present in or even really observing my life. I feel as if all my energy is going towards incessant worrying and all i can do is sit back and wait until my whole world comes crashing down around me. I am honestly afraid, i’m afraid of what I’ll do with myself. Afraid of what she means to me. Afraid of what I mean to myself. Afraid that I’m falling too comfortably into orthodoxy and receding into mother church for the comforts of her ability to supply those answers which I need without being brave enough to seek them on my own. Afraid that I’m not devoted enough to Mary, and simultanesouly afraid I’m too devoted.

 

I’m afraid i’m too flirtatious, but not manly enough. I’m afraid that i am a shell of what it means to be a man even though i love it when she touches my beard.

 

I am restless and in awe at my own ability to choose failure and defeat when sometimes i’ve so clearly reached after success and managed to grasp it. I feel i have fallen in some inexplicable way and become disoriented in the midst of my sudden lucidity about myself and the world.

 

I’m not at all sure what to do with myself, and my once glorious intents have fallen to the wayside as I consider what i mean, and what my existence means.

 

I’m afraid to reach out and just be, i’m afraid to move on, afraid to hold on. I don’t know what the hell to do and i’m everywhere surrounded by fears, and undergoing the sufferings of love, those tender sufferings that wound most truly.

 

My eyes are swollen with restlessness, and my mind is awake in ever increasing streams of inaccessible consciousness.

 

What am I?

 

Who am I?

 

I am not sure how i would even begin to address these questions, or make satisfactory expiation for the blood they require in seeking an answer.

 

I am not as adventurous as I once thought myself to be, and feel as if I carry this unpronounceable weight of duty and devotion.

 

And I feel the part of the unloved child in the midst of all this. This is not a plea for attention, just the reality of me. I feel as if whether i am present or absent makes no difference to most. I feel like I am unlovely and awkward, the boy who wants to be beautiful, the man who longs to be told he is special to someone, somewhere.

 

My relationship with my mom has fallen into a deadening ritual of hellos and goodbyes that are interspersed with short polite withdrawn conversations. She can feel the change in me, i feel it in myself, and I am not aware of if there is a way to make peace. I am questioning my draw towards orthodoxy and wondering if it is out of childish fear, or out of an acknowledgement of truth in fullness that is drawing me.

 

I feel my own death impending, looming, but simultaneously endlessly distant.

 

I hate being the accomplished student. I feel as if I’m nothing else. I wish that Eli was more than just a paper writer, more than a name on the lips of the inquisitive or the disgusted. I wish Eli was the name on the lips of a lover, of a friend calling to check up on me, a name in the back of a mind, at the heart of a pleasant memory. I feel like everywhere i go i leave death and tragedy in my wake, and where it’s not there yet, it will be.

 

I feel overcommitted and under-appreciated, overtaxed and underpaid, mostly aloof even though I long so badly to be connected.

 

As I sit here I make a plea to have a simple life, i wish i could walk away from all of this, say fuck the world and go back to the monastery, back to the simple life.

 

I wish that was my calling. I’m tired of feeling like i’m part of something bigger than myself. I get this feeling like i’m being moved towards something tangible, solid, practical, all-encompassing and “destined” for me. But I hate that feeling sometimes.

 

It’s a wonderful excitement that helps me taste adventure, but I hate feeling this inevitable pull towards something I’d rather walk away from. I would rather just be empty, free of all commitments, devotions, positions, titles.

 

I hate this uncertainty.

 

I wish I was the whispered blessing on a lover’s lips, instead i’m the bane of a middle aged republican history teacher. 

 

I am not what I once was, i’m not an artist anymore. I’m barely a theologian. It all feels like pretend, and I don’t know where the fuck i lost myself, but I feel like i’m barely present here and now.

 

I am hurt and frustrated by unspeakable things that I wish I could take back, change, undo, avoid involvement in, and just never have been a part of. I wish that I could dump all the exteriors and retreat into a life of private faith, just the simple piety of a man trying to live a life as best he can for himself and maybe a family. Farm life in Ireland or something, just raw, and connected to the earth.
For more that I try to be a man, i feel like academics strip that from me. I want simplicity, but the academic circles force me into the realm of speculation on language and definitions, i just want to eat a steak with my hands.

 

Fuck me….

 

I don’t know what i want i’m uncertain on almost every level and feel wretched and terribly lost.

 

I feel like a little boy who doesn’t know how to begin to address coming out of his mother’s skirt and into the world at large.

 

I may be a pillar of boldness on the surface, but my shyness lurks underneath, and I feel the implications of my reservations, of the dignities that I hold onto.

 

I try to let them go, but I feel as if when i do they might be misinterpreted as romantic endeavors. I’m not trying to start anything with anyone. These dignities, these wants, these reservations and self restrictions, these ascetic choices that aren’t beneficial to anyone, these empty formalities that are further away from self actualized manhood than anything else. But I feel as if i look a certain way to the world.

 

I am not trying to fill some sort of empty gap with mockeries and jesting, I wish I had a connection. I wish i could bear my whole heart, and that someone would care enough to listen, to open up too.

 

I’ve hurt too many people along the way, ridiculed too many innocents, broken too many hearts, and confounded too many hopes and aspirations. I am the dark mirror which reflects back only the past, only broken hearts and weeping faces, bleeding eyes and broken places.

 

I am wandering the world in silence and I feel as if I need to scream. No night has ever been this dark, and for some reason though I feel this is one of the darkest nights of my life, I feel simultaneously that this is not the worst i’ve faced though it certainly feels like it in an indirect way. See, I don’t have a manifest panic,it’s more like a resignation to the darkness, that just treats the darkness as a trite formality.

 

i don’t know why that is, because I feel totally abandoned, and maybe this is me being able to meet God in the situation, maybe it’s just numbness, 

 

I can’t be sure.

 

So I wait, and wrestle with these questions in my mind, and let them sweep over me in over growing concentric circles of consciousness.

 

I guess that is all I really have to say, not a pretty poem, or a well crafted internal monologue, just a blurt, with a feeling of emptiness still not sated in the end.

This Broken Child

I just feel so torn. caught between two things, wondering, waiting, feeling exhausted as i sit here another night, contemplating my life, thinking of what could have been. I was ready to embrace what should have been, but in the end nothing is really as it seems, and so i’m on my way with empty dreams.

I thought it would get better over time, and came to find myself in line for just another lame excuse, now i feel i wear a noose, and tonight i am broken. Tonight, you win. I don’t know if that’s your aim or not but you have reached it.

Screw bad poetry, you fuck with me. End of story.

I’m just tired, and I don’t know what the hell you want from me.

Is it faith? Is it piety? Is it love thy neighbor?

Whatever. I’m done. Holy blessed Trinity, forgive me my arrogance and malice, bless this tender child who beats his fist against his chest and cries “Injustice!”

Forgive the scandal I make, for I know that you alone embrace this broken child.

the mystery of grace

I just feel so afraid, today I’m so alone. And no, this is not a poem, this is my life. Hopeful and ever looking forward, i still find myself pausing, regretting, wasting away in the torture of my own possibilities, things that make me happy torture me with their enjoyability, and i seem to only find rest in misery.

 

I hate myself today. I want to strangle myself today, for how vain i feel. like a fucking insolent prick bastard, conceited and self indulgent, working my way into everything  only to spoil it by touching it. I feel like those thigns which i would gladly preach against, hate, vanity, greed, lust, envy.

 

I feel unkind, unlovely and dirty. I have crossed boundaries, been unfaithful to God and myself, and forsaken the person i thought i was. I have lived life to the fullest, emptied my heart on street corners and sold my body for love. Nothing ever changes. New humanity…where the hell do we get these things?

 

forgive my bitter pessimism, if it disturbs you, well, i’m just tired, i can’t seem to catch a breath and I fear that animal which seems to have become me. even as i approach that person i want to be, find happiness, fulfillment, inner peace, these things drive me to insanity. I can’t just allow myself to catch a moment of peace and absorb the meaning of life set before me, no….i have to complicate thigns, make them painful, difficult and selfish, i have to make them real, because any shred of frivolous pleasure would be too much for a holier than thou good lutheran like me. fuck it all.

 

fuck

 

it

 

all.

 

to hell with charades and bitter tears. to hell with these feelings, this guilt. this elephant in the room, this dying agony that tears at me everytime i have a minute to think.

 

I am a person, and i am hurting. i am a person, and for the first time in my life, i am treated as such, unconditionally, without regret, without remorse, without second guessing.

 

fuck you.

 

today, i am treated like a someone, beautiful, accepted, discipled, welcomed, lovely, today i am transformed rather than beat down, and in that acceptance i find my biggest threat. The thing i have always longed for, that unconditional love we’re all chasing after, it’s at my doorstep, it’s knocking, it’s here it’s upon me tearing at my chains, loving me without regrets, and today i shut my bible. Today i feel like God spoke to me, and it hurt worse than having a broom broken over my flesh, it hurt worse than the betrayal of infidelity, it jurt worse than the separation of death, and it welcomed me into a holy foresight, a peace that lies beyond the fringes of the mind, that comes to dwell in the center.

 

can you understand that?

 

I can’t comprehend this thing….this unconditional love thing. we all say we believe it, but go out and slap someone in the face, see if they love you then. go out and steal someone’s car and bank account numbers, see if they wake up to go find you and embrace you. go out and show someone your flaws, and see if they can accept you, tell someone you’re in love with them and that the world beats at a more painful pace when they’re not around, see if they feel the same.

 

they don’t.

 

not usually.

 

can you believe it? I can’t. I’m beyond words for this thing, this love that just accepts and never condemns, that’s fucking sacred. beyond words, spaces, times, this is the ineffable made into experience. God truly encounters humanity in time, because moments are sacred, spaces are transitory. moments are forever.

 

and as I go on exploring this journey that leads me down twists and turns tugging between holiness and absolute fear, loathing and loving, I feel angered, loved to anger by too beneficial a love, too forgiving a grace, too compassionate a mercy. I feel too accepted by something i could never accept back the way it deserves.

 

that’s frustrating as shit. how the heck are you supposed to deal with a realization like that and be sane?

 

I can never love and accept the love that God has given. it’s too overwhelming, too sacred, too present a reality, far more substantial and real than I can be.

 

I feel like a ghost next to it, hollow, and in pain due to the reality around, and looking at the beauty everywhere, I feel naked, cheated, bare, exposed, torn to bits and hatred spews out of me like an ocean, pouring out onto sacred ground, frothing at the mouth i’m trying to taint it, make it more bearable, make it more mundane, and it just refuses to change.

 

It’s still sacred, it just absorbs all my evil, it just cleanses all my dirt. it just transforms all my guilt and makes me scream on the inside because I can’t be anything base near it. It ust changes my filth, transforms my anger, redeems my sludge.

 

I hate it. oh….i have really come to hate that love of God which I also praise so highly. it’s too accepting, it’s shockingly overpowering, even when i wish to do evil and taint myself, i can’t. inescapable.

 

inescapable.

 

tragically holy. the grace of God is tragically holy, so sacred that facing it draws tears of blood from the beholder. It wasn’t God’s decision that Jesus faced in the garden, it was the power of his own forgiveness. The power of a grace so otherworldly it hurts to look at.

 

It’s made me cry today, made me angry, happy, frustrated, solemn, bitter and accepted.

 

How do you face a love so solid it makes you feel ashamed?

 

How can you reject a love so powerful it hurts when it acts as a mirror showing you how insubstantial your heart really is?

 

It hurts to behold, oh it hurts worse than any physical pain I’ve ever experienced, and yet it’s necessary, and in staring directly into it, i feel like my flesh could melt off my bones, and I feel like every cell on my body is bursting with new life.

 

this is just so incomprehensible to me.

 

fuck…

 

it’s a mystery.

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,

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.