There was once a basketball player who loved to practice, in fact, he loved practice so much that he neglected the games, just to practice.

There was once a student who loved to study, in fact, she loved studying so much that she neglected her tests, just to study.

There was once a man who loved his family, in fact, he loved his family so much that he neglected others outside of his family, just to love his family well.

We practice for the game. We study for taking tests. We love our families to learn how to love those around us.

Never put the means before the end!

Forcing things to make sense before walking into them is not, as I believed for so long, the only way that I am justifiably held accountable to move and act – in fact, sometimes it is precisely because we don’t understand why God would do something that it allows God to be given glory. I have become so predictable and explainable that God cannot be glorified through me!! Dear LORD forgive me.

If, in my youth, I had allowed my faithfulness and obedience to be paramount with unrestrained allegiance then perhaps this child would have changed the world, but now such futures have been dissolved into present concern. Now, will I continue to be explainable or will I move as I am prodded and guided? May my obedience come swiftly.

When the couple had set out to create the restaurant on their lot, there had been nothing but vast empty wasteland; rusted nails and rebar, deteriorated wooden boards, burned dry-wall from a gas station which had been razed by fire long before. During the day it was entirely covered by shadows of the heightened Babylonian-structured buildings surrounding the area, and at night not even the glow of the pavement’s street lamps reached the crabgrass, overrun with used syringes, ketchup-stained napkins, McDonald’s wrappers and empty plastic water bottles. It was a destitute haven for black market trade and criminal escape – infested with rodents, parasites and scavengers; even the homeless refused to spend the night on the land they referred to as The Bedlam.

Standing together with focusing eyes, looking onto shadowed land, the couple, together, surveyed in silence. The stench from deteriorating rodent carcasses and rotten food rushed towards them like stormy waters with regrettable potency. The pungent odor would routinely bring squinted eyes and curled lips to the faces of unsuspecting pedestrians walking by; yet in a moment of exceptional occasion, with sober countenance and unflinching stillness, the couple walked towards it with purpose. “This is where we’ll build it,” the woman softly confirmed with a clear voice spouting through a faint smile, which howled of audacious confidence, placing her left hand in her husband’s right while her right hand held a flashlight, illuminating the property.

They were younger in those days, hopeful – some might even say naïve – when they first set out to build upon the lot, and it came to pass that the many employees the couple had hired for what had not yet been built set out to warn them that the restaurant would inevitably fail – telling them that the first rule to real-estate is location and where they were wanting to build was a desolate place of no value. It was true; the property was like an economic black hole, sucking all value and prospect from even the locations around it. It seemed like economic suicide, yet there they stood, hand-in-hand standing in the very center of the wasteland shining their small flashlight against the dark corners and doing nothing more than imagining how it could be and declaring that it would be – and that was the first day.

While the couple listened to the warnings of their future employees with attentive ears, they were nonetheless set in their decision and responded to the popular concern with an open invitation to join them in cleaning the lot. Some, despite their doubt, did choose to help while others didn’t dare touch the disease-infested property. Those who chose to help clean and build disappeared into the darkness with the couple as their employees-to-be, yet those who squirmed at the thought of getting dirty, unable to walk into the degrading positions of throwing away dead rats and McDonalds wrappers, walked away. In fact there was one man, who was born in wealth and prestige and knew nothing else, who led the others away from the poverty-stricken area saying, “We will not be humiliated and brought so low as to be forgotten in the shadows of unknown decadence while you stand in your glory as the owners of a place that we build without honor,” and they called themselves The Nobility.

In the subsequent two days, the couple and their workers – those who had chosen to stay with them – cleared the lot, cleaned it well, and readied it for construction. On the fourth day, they arrayed the highest points of the darkened lot with patterns of illumination like the stars in the night sky, revealing with elegant splendor the flourishing green grass of a fresh front lawn, newly painted walls and contemporary art all throughout the rooms. After six days, the restaurant was built and ready for activity, so on the seventh day there was a great celebration. All who had worked with the couple, who had experienced the transformation of the land, rejoiced at what had been made.

Some of the employees became poets who stood in the corners of each room of the restaurant, filled with the joy of this new creation telling stories of the land’s redemption and the building’s construction; others were musicians who improvised on violins and guitars, jimbes and pianos, melodies which rang with a beat of similar rhythm to the poets’ tales. Some were teachers who reserved the corner booths for conversations in philosophy igniting the most despairing minds unto greater possibilities; others were story-tellers who read freshly written novels to the enraptured youth who sat on the edge of their seats, hanging on each word, worried that the dark lord would overcome, yet in the end, relieved that goodness did triumph. Some were cooks who prepared meals to feed those who were hungry and give drink to those who were thirsty, and some were primarily responsible for the upkeep of the place, to keep it clean, never forgetting that first day – refusing to allow the land to return to the entropic depravity of its origins. To each, empowerment unto potential dignity, and from each, artistic harmony with the principle of creation; that being, the quiet entrance of love into chaotic insanity and the subsequent birth of inspiration, transformation and redemption from within the formless void.

It was a grand compilation of people and professions, passions and beauty; yet, even in the early season not all was well in the restaurant. The employees who had not helped on that first day, or the second, or the third; those persons who did not understand the creative composition of dwelling in the dirty slums of their city but only remained in the high-class well-lit areas; they, like parasites, attached themselves to all that was beautiful in the restaurant, only to consume it, and sought its radiance that it would shine upon themselves. The Nobility integrated into the staff and slowly, like a poison, transformed co-operation into competitiveness and altruistic empowerment of the other into a shriveled self-glorification of an egocentric lust for honor. They became poets who believed in nothing, musicians who played to whatever beat brought them applause, teachers who played off the curiosity of their students leading them astray into vain sophistry, story-tellers who distorted the perspective of their audience by honoring those like themselves, and cooks who grew concerned with what they called “higher-class taste” and so reserved their meals for only those who could afford to honor them and their production with much wealth.

As time passed, the temptation of self-glorification infected the minds of even the other employees who had been originally faithful to the owners and so gradually the de facto leadership shifted from the original owners to the Nobility as more and more of the employees pledged allegiance to that arrangement of things. Their system of mutual self-glorification, birthed from an insecure clinging onto self-preservation, brought the once radiant dignity of a collective joy beneath the shadows of fractured individuals with inflated egos who stood as tall as they could above everyone else until each and every employee shared in the competitive struggle for the glorification and honoring of themselves and so their passions distorted their vision, perverting their ability to even recognize the condition of the collective order.

Many years passed by and there was much debate over which business model was best to create worker incentive – each being a direct rebellion to the intentions of original ownership and each a campaign to promote self-interest.

One group claimed to represent the intentions of the original owners, yet still, so severely misrepresented them that the owner’s vision and creation, once so beautiful and so compelling, had been entirely lost but for those accidental occasions of luck and coincidence which drew the eyes and imaginations of many into a nostalgia with absent memory.

Unfortunately, even in those moments when that original spark of creativity is perceived it is done so by blurred eyes and deafened ears, spoken of as mere spectacle of something at work too mysterious to unpack or even to take seriously and so tradition became to render those who did suggest a restructuring of the business, in accordance with those moments of undisputed beauty, as crazed idealists. Some of the older employees on staff would see these young men and women who think they have great ideas for how things ought to be and after laughing and quieting them – telling them to get a grip on life – would often remember themselves being that young and having had similar thoughts and say, “We were younger in those days, hopeful – some might even say naïve.”

“Desire reflects the focused interest in a goal object and the drive to obtain it. Happiness is an affective state linked to the appraisal that progress is being made. Pleasure, in comparison, is a positive response to obtaining the goal.” – Leyton, Marco

Our aim then is to desire one thing: to know the Father and the Son whom he sent.
The happy life is one which makes progress toward this desire.
And our highest pleasures are then eternally maximized in the constant obtaining of this goal, never completed, never ending as we come to know God more with each moment’s pass.

This is the deontological principle, by which, human flourishing ensues, producing an ever-increasing state of eternally maximized higher-ordered pleasure. In this, all theories of ethics find their fulfillment.

Our fundamental problem when it comes to practical ethics: “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” – C.S. Lewis

Life and death are at war within us. As soon as we are born, we begin at the same time to live and die.

Even though we may not be even slightly aware of it, this battle of life and death goes on in us inexorably and without mercy. If by chance we become fully conscious of it, not only in our flesh and in our emotions but above all in our spirit, we find ourselves involved in a terrible wrestling, an agonia not of questions and answers, but of being and nothingness, spirit and void. In this most terrible of all wars, fought on the brink of infinite despair, we come gradually to realize that life is more than the reward for him who correctly guesses a secret and spiritual “answer” to which he smilingly remains committed. This is more than a matter of “finding peace of mind,” or “settling religious problems.”

Indeed, for the man who enters into the black depths of the agonia, religious problems become and unthinkable luxury. He has no time for such indulgences. He is fighting for his life. His being itself is a founding ship, ready with each breath to plunge into nothingness and yet inexplicably remaining afloat on the void. Questions that have answers seem, at such a time, to be a cruel mockery of the helpless mind. Existence itself becomes an absurd question, like a Zen koan: and to find an answer to such a question is to be irrevocably lost. An absurd question can only have an absurd answer.

Religions do not, in fact, simply supply answers to questions. Or at least they do not confine themselves to this until they become degenerate. Salvation is more than the answer to a question. To emerge alive from a disaster is not just the answer to the question, “Shall I escape?”

Everything hangs on the final issue, in the battle of life and death. Nothing is assured beforehand. Nothing is definitely certain. The issue is left to our own choice. But that is what constitutes the dark terror of this agonia: we cannot be sure of our own choice. Are we strong enough to continue choosing life when to live means to go on and on with this absurd battle of entity and nonentity in our inmost self?

The roots of life remain immortal and invulnerable in us if we will continue to keep morally alive by hope. Yet hope in its full supernatural dimension is beyond our power. And when we try to keep ourselves in hope by sheer violent persistence in willing to live, we end if not in despair in what is worse – delusion. (For in reality such delusion is a despair that refuses to take cognizance of itself. It is the merciful form which cowards give to their despair.)
Hope then is a gift. Like life, it is a gift from God, total, unexpected, incomprehensible, undeserved. It springs out of nothingness, completely free. But to meet it, we have to descend into nothingness. And there we meet hope most perfectly, when we are stripped of our own confidence, our own strength, when we almost no longer exist. “A hope that is seen,” says St. Paul, “is no hope.” No hope. Therefore despair. To see your hope is to abandon hope.

The Christian hope that is “not seen” is a communion in the agony of Christ. It is the identification of our own agonia with the agonia of the God who has emptied Himself and become obedient unto death. It is the acceptance of life in the midst of death, not because we have courage, or light, or wisdom to accept, but because by some miracle the God of Life Himself accepts to live, in us, as the very moment when we descend into death.

All truly religious thought claims to arm man for his struggle with death with weapons that will ensure the victory of life over death.

This is the introduction to an essay I’m working on entitled “Worshipful Ostentation as a Theological Methodology”

“The Lord is my light and my salvation;
Whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life;
Of whom shall I be afraid?”
- Psalm 27: 1

It is in the contempletive vacancy of mind, ever-reaching into the infinite, never clenching or grasping, but always open and swimming deeper with religious impulse into the darkness of divine waters – where we are incapable of an idolatrous pollution of ideas because we cannot stain what we cannot reach – that there, amidst the formlessness and void of thought, the presence of God resides; for in the temple of our bodies, this, the rational absence of ideas, is our Holy of Holies. And it is as we lean into this region of our conscious experience where no idea has settled in and we reach into the vast expanse of the infinite that there we encounter in the ground of our being, Being itself, and in so doing, falling in awe of a “Beauty ever ancient, ever new,” not that we grasp God, but that we humbly become aware of being held by Him as we eternally rest in Him. This is how we come to know God; becoming aware of being held, receiving divine Grace, resting in Him, and leaning into the intimacy of His presence. This knowledge, however, is never the achievement of mere accurate theology but the consequence of a divine encounter mediated through the personal pressing into of empty conditions and deconstructed expectations, the stripping away of preconceived notions concerning the way things ought to be. In this way, speaking of God (in theology, preaching, prophecy, singing, etc.) is to be best understood, less in terms of the construction of a permanent and static theory about God and more in terms of the evolutionary and dynamic witnessing of God, and in this way, it is never that our words define God as much as they point towards Him by means of worshipful ostentation.

Live in community? Yes.
Share resources? Yes.
How?

I don’t think this means throw out our resources to the world to be wasted. I think it means, when you have a group of people on the same page, devoted to the same goal…you share your resources, to empower each other to collectively and mutually accomplish that end.

This requires good judgment in determining with whom to share our resources. It is not loving to empower or enable foolishness. If my brother/sister is squandering their money, I will not give them more – not because I don’t love them, on the contrary, it is because I love them that I do not want to enable them to continue living foolishly. Whence they grow wise, I will empower them with all the resources I have.

Outside Benefits – An agent may not receive profits unless the principal knows and approves
Confidential Information – Agents can neither disclose nor use for their own benefit any confidential information they acquire during their agency
Competition with Principal – Agents are not allowed to compete with their principal in any matter within the scope of the agency business
Conflict of Interest between Two Principals – Unless otherwise agreed, an agent may not act for two principals whose interests conflict
Secretly Dealing with the Principal – If a principal hires an agent to arrange a transaction, the agent may not become a party to the transaction without the principal’s permission
Appropriate Behavior – An agent may not engage in inappropriate behavior that reflects badly on the principal

Earlier today I was eating brunch in the dining commons (DC) with some friends. It wasn’t the most satisfying food, I must say – raisin bran, tuna, broccoli soup, grilled cheese on sourdough, a green apple and water (I’ll admit, I felt sick afterwards). So why didn’t I make a ham or turkey sandwich, you might ask, or grab my routinely enjoyed double grilled chicken breast on wheat – no cheese w/ bbq sauce (a meal I’ve had almost every day in the DC since freshman year)? The reason wasn’t because these meals weren’t available, but rather, because I had recently discovered something that had ignorantly (and naively) been completely unknown to me.

1. The majority of our pork, bacon, ham, turkey, chicken, beef, steak (all of it) are made available to us through mass production. How does one mass produce a living creature? Apparently, the same way one would mass produce a non-living product…

2. The blatant disregard for life disturbs me immensely. Living creatures spend their entire lives in two feet of cemented, caged space w/ food thrown on top of them, living in their own feces, without allowing for their biology to flourish as they were intended to, only to be let out for slaughter. Hundreds of thousands of healthy male chicks are merely thrown into trash barrels, (as seen below) until they suffocate and die. The list of callous treatment of animals goes on…

I’m not against eating meat as of yet. I am not disgusted by the concept of eating steak…far from it One of my favorite meals is a medium-rare filet mignon with rosemary potatoes and corn on the cob – I salivate at the image in my mind. However, the way in which we treat the animals we eat, while they do live, is entirely relevant because it declares how we are representing God on this earth.

Christ cooked up some fish for breakfast for his disciples after he resurrected. He was also the one who taught Peter how to catch more fish. Remember? The nets were breaking, there were so many fish. The God of life and creativity killed fish? What? Yes, and he also killed people (See Exodus 12:29-32, 14:26-30, 32:27, and much, much more) And not just in the Old Testament (See Acts 5). He also ordered the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of living creatures to be slaughtered in the name of sacrifice (or even simply to have their blood painted on a door – See Exodus 12:21-23). I think we have a perverted view of physical death…it’s not that big of a deal. Perhaps due to our “civilized” environment, so often raised under the illusion of some kind of entitlement to long life as if that’s the point to all this, we are overly sensitive to death. I hear mothers saying that they don’t want to expose their children to death at too young an age. Really? Because, all around the world there are three year olds whose grandparents die, their friends die and it’s understood as a part of this world. Crying over the death of a goldfish illuminates ignorance to the process of life. Life. Death. It is a cycle. It is not whether something lives or dies that matters, but how it lives and how it dies.

I’m not – at least for now – advocating against the slaughter of animals for food. I am advocating against relating with animals as nothing more than mere units of consumption – as an industrial supply for an obese, consumerist demand. It is not a repulsion against the physical death of an animal but a repulsion against a spiritual death in our relationship with creation that makes for a rather ugly view of humanity’s assumption of responsibility for creation.

In Spanish the way we would designate masculine and feminine nouns is usually with the suffix “-o” or “-a.” So, “un esposo” is a husband and “una esposa” is a wife. Hebrew is similar. To make a noun feminine one would add “-ah” to the end of the word. So for example, “ish” is “man/husband” and “ishah” is “woman/wife”. “Sus” is “horse” and “Susah” is “mare”.

אדמ “Adam” is “mankind/humanity” and אדמה “Adamah” is “ground/earth”.

Just as woman came from the rib of man, so אדמ came from the dust of אדמה. In creation, we – as humanity – have been made as the gendered counterpart to the earth. As a husband is to his wife, so humanity is to the earth. How have we been doing? What is the first job that God gives to man? “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

I do think that there is an argument to be made for straight vegetarianism as the utopian ideal since God then follows this command with saying essentially “and you have the plants for food”. But I’m putting this point for a later discussion, (especially since it’s hard to get around the fact that Christ seemed to have no problem with cooking fish for brunch) but at least for now let us agree that the delegated responsibility that we have to care for creation stems out of this command. To have dominion and to subdue does not mean to rape, to extort, to exploit, to abuse or to objectify creation as units of consumption. How does God have dominion over us? How does he subdue us? Let us do likewise.

This was both the letter Austin Crowder wrote to me and my response:
I just brought this up in theology class and a question in response to my statement had me at a loss for words. In our conversation in the DC. you had mentioned, which seems to me to be appropriate, that it is not our place to ask, what will allow us to go to heaven, who is going to heaven, ex) is babtism required to go to heaven? etc. its not the right question to ask is this or that going to heaven?
the question posed is, then what question do we ask?
just wondering your insight.
thanks so much bro!
Austin

Response: Hey Austin, I love your quest for truth…keep asking. Well what questions did Jesus ask? What seemed to be foremost on His mind? To me, I see him preeminently concerned with whether we are loving our enemies our neighbors, whether we are loving God; and thereby living in His Kingdom. The question I would ask is not whether my brother is going somewhere after he dies (an answer only God knows) as much as whether my brother is living in the Kingdom of God while he does live? Is he forgiving? Is he showing grace? Is he serving? Is his life open and turned outwards towards others? In other words, the question is whether someone is walking in life or death. Now, this is not to say that the purpose to life is reduced to virtue. The purpose to life is to glorify God, to love him and others. Christ taught, “this is eternal life, to know the Father and the Son whom He sent.” We come to know whether someone knows the Father by ourselves knowing the Father and seeing him in our brothers and sisters, what does he look like? He looks like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self-control. We must also be careful not to prejudge what these things look like. A smiling person is not necessarily full of joy. A bible-reading monk is not necessarily faithful. A nun is not necessarily good. A homeless shelter is not necessarily kind…we come to truly know the fruit of each other by coming to know each other more. Which means that the first question we ask when approaching someone we don’t know is not: “Are you going to heaven? Do you affirm Christian tenants?” but “Who are you and what do you love?” For through the latter question we come to know their spirit which is deeper than the appearance of their actions. To know someone’s deeds, it is not enough to see them or hear about them…we must know the doer of the deeds for what we do is an expression of who we are – and that is what is of ultimate concern.

Grace and Peace,
Austin