I’ve got a request

I think one of the greatest injustices to date is the lack of education. There are so many people with so many abilities to bring life into our society who are disillusioned and confused and demotivated – paralyzed by ignorance. (I have currently been one of those people). We need to be coached, honed and given vision. Isn’t this the great commission? To go, make disciples of all kinds of people and to teach them all that he’s commanded us to do? So let’s teach each other this Way.

I think our religion has become dry because our conception of his commands have become dry. They are held superficially and allowed to remain static in that superficiality. “Love your neighbor as yourself” “Forgive as you have been forgiven” “Sell all your possessions, come and follow me” “You cannot serve both God and mammon” “The first shall be last in the Kingdom of God” “Let him who wishes to be great become your servant” “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains”

I think that for many of us, we hear these things as sometimes just grow very confused because, we don’t know what they mean in very important situations in life. For example, “Love your neighbor as myself?” a) who is my “neighbor”? b) what does it mean to “love” them? Do I need to like them? Do I need to smile when I see them? Can I never yell or be angry?

Or how about “Forgive as you have been forgiven” a) how many times do I forgive someone for wronging me? What if my brother annoys me, and he knows that it annoys me, and I forgive him twice for it and he keeps doing it? Okay 5 times? Okay 7 times?! b) Do I forgive my uncle who raped me when I was four years old? c) what does it mean to forgive?

Or how about “Sell all your possessions and give to the poor and come follow me” a) but isn’t that impractical? b) but if the rich man allocated his money, selling 70% of it and held onto 30% couldn’t he use that to generate more money and be a “faithful steward” with his money? Do I really need to go without money? c) Why was Jesus homeless? Why were his disciples homeless? d) Wouldn’t their parents be frustrated with their children just getting up and leaving? What does Jesus mean by not coming to bring peace but a sword, setting father against son and mother against daughter?

The list goes on, but this is our problem isn’t it? We are half-hearted Christians that don’t really even know the way of Jesus and yet profess that we “believe” in it. Haha! How can we believe in something we don’t even understand?

I don’t have all the answers, but I think that if we worked together and just asked each other to honestly engage these kinds of questions, we’d come up with something much more profound than the whitewashed Jesus pictured in $70 frames in houses in Irvine, depicting images of soft sheep and blue beauty pageant sashes. Perhaps we’d learn what it means to have childlike faith in a world so damn serious all the time about such empty goals and objectives. Maybe we could have some fun and treat this life like a game, maybe we could make it competitive, maybe we could help those of us who are a bit slower, those who are stronger could help out those who are a bit weaker. And please, those of you who have been thinking about this stuff…don’t keep it bottled up, share it with us.

Thanks.

America: A game and the rules of Capitalism

America:
A game whose purpose is to use whatever resources you have to empower the weak, to dignify the ignored, to motivate the paralyzed, to bring vision to the blind, to forgive those who have wronged us and restore relationships, to bring reconciliation to divided peoples and to teach others to do the same. Winning is determined, not by man, but by God alone – in fact, if you seek honor by men, then you have your reward right there, but if you do good in secret, then your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

Game on!

Knowing God – The Laughing Sponge

I think that humanity is very much a kind of cognitive sponge. We soak in sensations and then we process those sensations and then we respond. Human flourishing would seem to be, then, a way of soaking in those sensations, a way of processing them, and a way of responding. We choose how we do each of these things.

The way of soaking in sensations: Faith.
The way of processing them: Reason.
The way of responding: Creativity.

To know something, in the Hebrew sense, is to take something into one’s emotional structure, making it a part of one’s own being. Knowing God, then, becomes the structuring of each of these aspects of our humanity. Faith in God (a resolution unto Beauty) focuses and guides what we look at through anthropomorphic divine compassion and optimism. Reason (a resolution unto Truth) helps us to understand this faith by rejecting contradiction, embracing paradox and seeking distinctions and connections between ideas. Creativity (a resolution unto Goodness) helps us to actively respond to our experience by joining with the creative force of/to the universe by augmenting life everywhere.

This is what it means to be human. Faith in God renders life ultimately a divine comedy. In the words of Claiborne, “So we dance and dance until they kill us. And then we dance some more. That seems to be the way this thing goes.” It directs us towards injustice, attunes our ears to the cry of the oppressed, filling all with the hope that life doesn’t need to be this way and guides our reason unto a noble creativity which seeks to liberate the enslaved, bring sight to the blind and heal the brokenhearted.

It behooves us to reorient our being so as to enjoy what is good, and then, with resolve and good humor, do what we enjoy!

So we soak things in, to wash things clean. Kinda like a sponge that laughs every time the water is squeezed out.

Christianity – the Antichrist?

The point of being a disciple of Christ is to be like him. To do the things that he did.

Jesus said things like, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you can move mountains.” And when Peter asked Christ to call him out on the water to walk, tradition holds that Peter stepped out for some time, it was when Peter ceased to have faith that he was able that he began to sink and Christ asked him, why he did not have faith? Jesus, told his disciples that after he left they would do greater things than what he had done, he sent his disciples two by two throughout the countryside and they came back with great joy for they had been healing people of their ailments. Surely, the point is not merely to close wounds and open blind eyes, but these are signs of something much more profound. Following Christ leads to a mystical encounter with reality and an empowering authority over things. Following Christianity seems to do something very different for most people. I do not witness, in this country of 80% Christians, much authority at all, nor do I see anything very mystical about our activity. I see the coveting of political power, the closed-minded ignorance of insecure beliefs, the frustration of failed objectives and the hypocrisy of vicious teachers who preach about virtues they don’t know.

We are often so quick to disregard the ways of other people, but if there are others who understand Christ differently than we do and who seem to be mystically encountering reality and exhibiting a kind of spiritual authority through that way, then perhaps we need to open our minds to more than we currently believe.

Be Still

The moment you feel anxious, restless, unsettled, stop. It is precisely when you find it difficult or painful to sit in stillness and silence that you must do so. Ask yourself why you are restless and be still, be quiet. Sleep if that’s what you must do to quiet your mind. Eventually you will learn how to utilize the energy into prayer. If the prayer is reduced to mere thought processes to an imaginary friend called “god” then it is meaningless; however if you believe that this prayer and the energy you use to shape these thoughts are actually changing reality at its core, then you are speaking to God and there is little else as powerful and profound as this event.

one thought

Reality is deeply subjective.

Brush or Towel (part II)

I just thought of something. But what about those of us who cannot be authors or painters? What about those of us who do not have the skill of preaching or computer graphics? I was thinking, should this bring me immediately into the pulpit? Does such a life bar me from being an attorney? No, I don’t think so.

This is my message for the wealthy:
Take your skill, take your profession and (1) do not identify yourself by your trade (Moses was a shepherd before he was called by God to lead the Hebrews out from Egypt the through the wilderness and Amos was a dresser of Sycamores before he was called to be a prophet of God and David was a shepherd before he was called to be King of Israel) and (2) may your life and all that you do, move and burn people (and may it move and burn yourself) unto justice and righteousness – may it be that if we were to all see you when you didn’t think anyone was watching, we would be deeply moved in spirit (as Mary was when Jesus was young); whether we are disgusted or enchanted, repulsed or in awe, may your life communicate the gospel and may those who fear God, fear you and those who despise God, despise you.

Brush or Towel

Peter Rollins wrote a parable (I posted many months ago) about a man who painted pretty pictures of better worlds and beautiful kingdoms but never got up off his ass to make it happen. This is the question about our work as Christians, we can talk and talk about the Kingdom of God and allow our religion and church attendance and bible reading and devotionals and prayers, etc. to serve as mere brushes which enable complacent paralysis or we can “set down the brush” and live in a christlike manner to better this world. As we have found, however, in this age, there are non-material needs that people have which run much deeper than material needs and are the very source of motivation for material activity. In this way, we can transform the brush into a towel, bringing hope to the hopeless and dignifying the undignified. It is when people can enjoy our artwork and remain unmoved that we know we have failed – worse still, when we can enjoy our own artwork and remain unmoved (in this, we have become compromised). So long as our brushes remain brushes, we are weak and irrelevant – but whence we use our brushes to burn and motivate the complacent fattened wealthy unto de-centered, mal-adjusted soldiers for good, such work becomes itself a towel, washing the feet of the poor and oppressed.

May the art that I create, move people, may it burn…may it move and burn me.

Christmas Reminiscing

This Christmas I’ve received many gifts. I received an macbook pro, a portable laptop desk/case, two pairs of shoes, shirts, pants, gift cards, cash, and other odds and ends. I come from so much privilege I literally don’t know what to do with it. I receive this with a sick feeling in my stomach and a kind of embarrassment. My impulse is to reject it all, but how can I? These were gifts of love by my family and friends. To reject the gift would be to reject the givers. (and to be entirely honest, my laptop was broken and my shoes were worn and rather smelly, so these gifts were meeting needs) but still I feel a kind of deadness in my mind with these things. But then I stop and I realize that these gifts are not intrinsically bad or corrupting – it is if I hoard them that they become corrupting, and it is at this moment that I realize that my frustration is not a frustration with things or my parents or materialism or society…my frustration is with my lack of creativity to use the wealth, gifts and privilege I’ve been given, well. How did Christ use the gold, frankincense and myrrh he was given? I’m going to guess it was creative and good and he didn’t build for himself a more comfortable bed.

My brothers and sisters of privilege, we are not spoiled by receiving these things, we are spoiled by keeping them, by hoarding them AND by thinking that these are the only ways God can use us. We must hold all of our material possessions loosely. Life is more than food (and macbooks) and the body more than clothes, keep first the Kingdom and all that is necessary for the Kingdom (including potentially, poverty and death) will be added unto you. Let us use what we have creatively and without addiction.

Father, never let us grow addicted. Forgive us for our consumerism, but may we redeem consumerism unto productivity. Let us transform a stultifying spoiled dullness into a dynamic and organic creativity with all that we have been given – always willing to sell all that we have and follow you if you lead us out from Egypt and into the wilderness, unto the Promised Land.

A Hermeneutic of Beauty

It is not a matter of reading the right books, but reading (whatever you read) rightly. A text is relevant, if you make it relevant; it is profound, if you make it profound. As we read a text, we do so as a subject and our subjectivity provides a context for that act of reading – and the context within which a text is read, determines the wealth of its meaning. Therefore the quality of our subject-hood determines the wealth of existential meaning we impose upon a text. There is no “objective” meaning, there is only the meaning you bring to a text. Does the context of your perspective bring beauty to texts or depravity, depth or shallowness?

Now notice that most of us interpret things by means of convention, and it is precisely the one who interprets reality devoid of convention that we call exceptional – this may mean that they are exceptionally brilliant or exceptionally mad. They say that the line between genius and insanity is thin, indeed each has this in common: both the mad man and the genius interpret the reality around them apart from the conventions of their culture. We praise Nobel Laureates and pity those in the Asylum, indeed there is an astronomical difference between the two. One walks in the heavens while the other crams the heavens into their head and goes mad. One is part of something larger than themselves, inviting others to join them while the other shrivels the world to the smallness of their rationality.

As we come to identify the meta-narrative of our Being, let us come to choose one that is larger than ourselves, not contained or closed by the systems of our rationality and thereby allowing ourselves to move towards a beauty that inspires and a faith that demands holistic allegiance.

I welcome paradox, but never contradiction. I welcome peculiarity, but never exclusivity. I welcome law, but never legalism. I welcome beauty, but never fad. I welcome encouragement, but never flattery. I welcome love, but never objectification. I welcome criticism, but never foolish ranting. I welcome difference, but never destructiveness. I welcome God, but never god.