Kingdom Come

A New Christian Blog

2009-09-22T03:31:00.004-05:00

This blog has always been a reasonably orthodox blog. Things have rapidly developed over the last couple weeks, however, to make me a non-orthodox Christian. This chain of events was primarily precipitated by one question:

Is the God of Moses the same God as Jesus' Father?

The God of Moses commanded Moses, and later Joshua, to undertake events which can only be described as crimes against humanity. Elsewhere in the Old Testament, God acts in much the same vein, sending a wild bear to maul and kill the children who taunted Elisha for being bald, for example. Torturing Job for the intellectual curiosity of Lucifer, who appears as God's employee not his enemy. I could quote chapter and verse on a whole litany of lies, genocide, murder and jealousy on the part of the Old Testament God, but I think anyone who knows the Old Testament can easily find the passages I refer to. I, like a number of Christians, have been content to ignore the Old Testament for the most part rather than really confront this question.

Well I am confronting it. It is apparent to me that the nature of the One True God as I know Him and as revealed by Jesus, and the god of Moses (who I call Mo'god, a contraction of 'Moses god') are completely incompatible. I know God, the Father, and know that He does not sin and His word is truth. He is full of love and mercy. Mo'god, assuming that I am right that he exists, is a fallen being much like us, a celestial being of some sort but not God.

Because of this radical new thinking, I have decided to create a new Christian blog, The Heavenly Father. My concerns over such things as social ethics remains unchanged, my understanding has been changed to reflect the God that I know and separate him from the ruler of this world.

http://heavenlyfatherabove.blogspot.com/

This is probably the end of posting on this blog, I will keep it around so that I can see where I have come from and as reference to help me to return to themes I have addressed in the past from time to time.

Peace and love to all of you in the name of the One True Father in heaven.

IMPORTANT NOTE:
----------------------------------

I no longer believe in the sharp dualism which was the point of departure for the new blog. My feeling at the time when I started the new blog was that the world was so evil that God cannot be involved in its origin.

I have since come to believe that God had to allow a certain amount of evil to exist for our own benefit. God does not coerce anyone (although He leads strongly at times) to follow Him, so there had to be a neutral place in which we could come to a decision about Him on our own. God wants us to freely decide to follow Him. Those who don't, don't get anything but what they chose. If they chose evil, they got evil. Everyone gets what they in fact want.

However, my thinking (including still disavowing Moses as nothing but a ruthless military leader who abused the name of God) is still sufficiently changed to merit its own blog.

Peace, Robert

The greatest of these

2009-09-18T15:33:00.003-05:00

My mind is full of many concerns and questions these days, so much so that it robs me of peace. Therefore I have decided to focus on only one thing, and forget the rest for now. This is the one thing:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not love, I gain nothing.

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

-1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Take up your OWN cross

2009-09-16T17:26:00.004-05:00

We have allowed our faith to become remote from us, and we have allowed ourselves to become remote from each other. We have delegated the business of being Christians to churches and organizations, and they have not used that delegation wisely nor should they have ever had it to begin with. It is time to decentralize the business of being a Christian. Time for the job of ministry to return to EVERY CHRISTIAN. Our shepherd is from above, we do not need other shepherds.

Like the synagogues of old, everyone who is a full member of a church and approved as being of sound understanding of the Gospel should be able, if they wish to, to take the podium and preach. Now it is usually only people in or heading for a career in ministry.

The church should be a face-to-face organization - megachurches are an excuse to be a spectator of Christianity not a doer of it.

The church must not have control by denominations, so that if a church falls from the true faith, it falls alone. If a denomination falls, its fall taints all its churches.

There should be no sole preacher or pastor of the church; but all are called to ministry in some form. Some to preach, some to give good council, some to tend the sick as their own gifts lend them. If there is a leader, let him be like the quartermaster of a ship: in charge of keeping everything in good order, but not the captain. We have only one captain.

We have a great enemy standing in our way. The spirit of this age, which listens to its master the devil, would like nothing more than for our communities to fade away, to be replaced by solitary persons who live out of community with others. The devil loves nothing better than a rugged individualist who regards himself as an island. Delegating Christianity to churches and ministry people facilitates this. You can pop in on Sunday, do your praying thing, put a buck in the plate and consider yourself a Christian, so you can go on to do exactly whatever you like the other six days. This is not what our Lord called us to.

We have to, all of us, make a sometimes herculean effort to break down this system that would keep us separated. A world in which Facebook stands in for community. I don't have any answers for how to do that, except to keep trying.

We must ALL minister in some form, do not leave it to priests and pastors. Take up your cross.

Christianity Without Denominations

2009-09-15T17:49:00.003-05:00

Or rather those who SAY they are your followers.

Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour

-1 Peter 5:8

There are two big problems with the existence of denominations. One, there are no denominations in heaven, no presbyterian and baptist sections. There is in truth only one Church and never has been more than one. That church is temporarily distinguished between those who are here on Earth and those on the other side, but even that distinction will fall in time.

The second problem is, when a denomination falls, when it surrenders the truth to expediency and lands in the hands of false teachers, all the myriad churches connected to it fall as well, because the individual church belongs, often in a very physical financial property sense, to the denomination. And denominations will fall, we have seen it time and again. Rome has had its Borgia popes and other misbehaving pontiffs through history; the Episcopalians have their Schori (not to mention evil king Henry who started it all), the other ones have already or easily could go the same way.

An individual church, when it falls, only takes that church with it. When a denomination falls, it takes every church of that denomination with it, even good churches, because the denomination sets and enforces doctrine.

Think of the Internet. If the Internet were to be vulnerable to the failure of one computer, the whole thing would have fallen in a heap long ago. The internet survives because it can route around a failed server. The connections between churches can be in the same manner. Church A is in communion with churches B and C, but if B becomes a bunch of dope-smoking neopagans, the link to C remains unharmed.

The main denominations will fade away rather in the manner of the Soviet Union, because nobody believes in them any more. Did the Soviet Union fall apart because of the military or economic threat from the West? Not at all, it fell because of Pepsi and blue jeans. Because nobody believed in their Leninism anymore and they wanted to be free to pursue their own materialistic ends. Had everyday Russians still believed in that Leninist junk, there would still be a Soviet Union.

They will also fade because God will take away His people from them and send them somewhere else.

It is also wrong to chop the church of God into pieces. Not that the church is in truth chopped, but it is chopped apart in our minds because we have all fallen away from the truth. We should be seeking the One and fellowship with His One Church, and not invent names for ourselves to distinguish ourselves from other Christians, some of whom may be closer to God than we are. To have different church BUILDINGS is unavoidable since we do not all live in the same place nor do we all accept the same kind of church service. But let the government of that congregation not be ruled by religious potentates from afar.

The devil is all about devouring churches where he can. There is no need to make it easy for him.

The Way and the Truth

2009-09-10T17:23:00.007-05:00

It is amazing to me that so many people, including Pope Benedict, apparently believe it is possible to reason to God. That through thought alone, you can become a Christian. Were that to be true, then anyone who can do math would be a Christian, and non-Christians would be as rare as those who believe that 2+2 do not equal 4. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Were it possible for anyone to reason to God, it would have been me. Educated in logical philosophy, I spent pretty much my whole life trying to reason out why we are here and what all this means. I got nowhere. Like one of the Upanishads, the early Hindu books of wisdom, the best I could do is say "it is not this, it is not that." Not this that or the other thing. Like physicists who are continually reminded that they do not understand the fundamental nature of the world, but yet they grope in vain for a precise formulation. General Relativity, classical quantum mechanics, string theory, membrane theory, 10 or 11 dimensional membrane theory, parallel universes, each theory falls before the next one, reinforcing the central mystery and truth that we have no clue what this existence is made of. The most basic thing, we have no real understanding of whatsoever, despite the decades of work by the most brilliant minds on Earth.

You cannot seize the truth in your talons of pure reason. Your hands will come up empty.

I did not become a Christian initially (the first three year period after which I turned my back on Christ) because I thought life through to that conclusion. There is only one thing which I reasoned, which is that I am fundamentally inherently unable to know the truth by myself. Had it been possible, I would have done it.

I did not come to God like Sherlock Holmes coming to the culprit. I came as a penitant, a beggar, and asked:

God, you are my last hope for finding a light in this darkness, the truth. I know I cannot find it myself, nor do I believe anyone else can. Please help!

In John 3 when talking to Nicodemus, Jesus lays out his mission. "For God so loved the world that he gave his own Son, that he who believes will not perish, but have eternal life." The logical response to this is "whaa??" "What in the world are you talking about, Jesus?" Knowing of course that this is a lot to take in, he prefaces it by saying this:

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."
-John 3:8

He says that it is the Spirit that gives birth to the Spirit, that you must have God's spirit implanted in you and like the wind, the Spirit is under no man's control but follows its own will. He then makes the curious reference to Moses holding up the bronze snake in the desert.

The story of the bronze snake in a nutshell is this: the Israelites were afflicted with poisonous snakebites because they were bad. Moses held up a bronze snake, which to start out with is bordering on the ban against graven images, and says all that come to the bronze snake will be healed. Well there is nothing more irrational and arbitrary than that. Trust the bronze snake. Yeah sure. That is for sure not a logical operation there. Jesus is saying, you can't trust your reason on this. You cannot reason, buy, steal, or otherwise obtain salvation on your own strength in any way. The very best you can do, is to realize that your reason is not helpful in this situation. You have to throw up your hands and throw yourself on God's mercy. Then HE not you, helps you out. He gives you the one thing which can help you, a thing which you never had and had no way of getting, a thing which comes from God alone and is dispensed according to God's will alone.

"I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion."
-Romans 9:15, Exodus 33:19

Many liberal Christians and also the Catholic Church have said, being a good person of whatever religion is all you need. Muslim Hindu Jain Daoist Buddhist Jewish, it is all okay so long as you are a good person. The problem is, you are not and never can be inherently good. God alone is good. Receiving His spirit is the only way you can be saved. What is the only way of doing that?

Jesus said:

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except by Me."

The Cleansing Of The Temple

2009-09-09T18:55:00.005-05:00

Oh Lord, I wish you would return and open up a can of Grade A whupass on these people.

I am just shaking spitting mad. It is not one thing or the other which has made me so, it is the whole thing. The most recent scandal in the Episcopal Church, the revelation that some priests in the Dallas diocese have been taking financial advantage of their parishioners (one of whom is my friend), is just the straw on the camels back, but there have been lots of straws. Its way bigger than that. It is as big as, virtually the whole state of Christianity in our age.

The cleansing of the temple was not just about the Jewish Temple. Jesus hardly ever did anything for just particular transitory reasons. It's about us, today. YOU CANNOT SERVE BOTH GOD AND MONEY, what part of that is hard to understand? At least one former Episcopal priest obviously didn't get that part.

And I am not just picking on the Episcopal Church here. You would think that the Catholics, since their priests have disavowed both sex AND money, would be better. But not only was there sex, not only sex of a most disturbing nature, but then their hierarchy tried to cover up for them. Just as there are no doubt people in the Dallas diocese right now who are attempting to do spin control on this newest debacle. None of these people apparently really put God first, as was supposedly their call to do.

And then there are the folks on TV, the Bob Tiltons and the Jimmy Swaggarts, whose conspicuous sin and consumption is only exceeded by their piteous moans if caught out. And there are thousands more ready to take their place.

The crucifixion of Christ was just an appetizer compared to the abuse hurled at His holy face since then. The Romans beat and crucified Him, but they never dragged him through the mud like this. To the people who do such things: mountains, whole planets, giant blue stars, the universe itself, won't be big enough to hide you when the time comes. God avenges.

The New Testament reminds us that in the final times, the true Way will be almost invisible amongst the false prophets and general climate of darkness that will prevail. The real Way will not be televised. You won't be able to find it in a church. So much mud will be thrown on the image of Christ that you won't be able to find Him at all, He must find you and against great odds bring you to the right way.

In a previous post in the comments I noted that the cleansing of the Temple was the only time in the Gospels where Jesus became violent. That should tell us something, tell us how much God despises mixing commerce and holiness. In my own church I have seen seminars on "financial security" advertised - no such thing should be taking place in a house of God. If you are really His, you have better than financial security, you have eternal security.

It is past time to take up the stick and start overturning the money changers. Throw down the church hierarchies that no longer follow God. Speak together loudly and unequivocally that anyone who calls himself a teacher must embrace the same poverty as our Teacher embraced. Priests driving BMW's and Mercedes are an abomination. Cast down the false shepherds. Be your own priest, you could hardly do worse than so many of the ordained priests do. Commit to your own ministry, do not rely on churches to do that for you.

To all those false priests and worthless shepherds, you are on notice. I say this to you:

THIS IS A HOUSE OF PRAYER. AND YOU HAVE TURNED IT INTO A DEN OF THIEVES.

Moral Education in Schools

2009-09-08T15:28:00.010-05:00

Imagine there's no ethics. Imagine if you can. Nothing you won't kill for. The holocaust of Man.

Since President Obama is ducking his tempest in a teacup over addressing youth in school, I figured this was a good time to address moral education in school. I think all the furor over Obama is way silly, but then the rabid right never needs a reason. Its funny that people think I am PART of the rabid right, when I am only rabidly religious. As far as economics go, if Obama wants to bring on the socialism it is okay with me. Jesus didn't have much use for the rich either. If Bush had chosen to address the schoolchildren I would have simply told any school child I was concerned about to "remember that Bush is a clueless nerf-herding puppet." I think they would have survived it okay with that advice. ;)

Anyway, I started out to address a more serious topic here. We seem to see all the time examples of a serious lapse of moral character. All the way from white-collar criminals like Madoff to the crack dealer around the corner. Recently it is revealed that Dallas Police purposely distorted crime figures in order to make themselves look good. There is a prevailing ethic that you do what you can get away with, and if you have to break the rules you break them. Empathy, honor, truthfulness, charity: these are nineteenth century concepts to a lot of people. They do not apply. We even see this among supposed church leaders and certainly televangelists, who are really out for themselves and the money. As I think Dostoyevski said, if God is dead, everything is permissible. Writer William Burroughs had his fictional character Hassan-i Sabbah say:

Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted

Well God is not dead. That way of living is dead. We see its wreckage all around us. You want to see death, look at what our amoral values bring about. Without morality: our economy fails, our social fabric fails, the physical and moral development of the young fails, WE FAIL.

If you want your children to grow up whole and strong, the ethical side of human development can no more be ignored than physical education, math or reading. And we cannot leave the schools out of it any more than we should tell people to turn off their morality in the office and only use it at home. SS concentration camp guards did that much. For the development of the youth, there cannot be two systems, an amoral one and a moral one, a home and church system and a school system. They have to all be on the same page, or indeed we teach our kids that ethics only matter in Sunday School, which is to say they don't really matter at all.

Our current way of living leads only to destruction. Look around yourself sometime in a public place, see all the weary lonely angry hopeless empty faces and all the bodies damaged by alcohol, drugs, a life led without purpose. We are dying, as a people. We are dying because we ignore the source of life.

Now I can imagine some cynic saying, "But Americans are predominately a religious people!" Yes they are, but which religion? They have taken their American religion to heart, individualism, and confess the god which suits their tastes. An "anything goes" god. A "don't worry be happy" god. Their god is not God. The ancient Israelites were predominantly a religious people too, but what did Jesus say about them? They were a people known for stoning prophets.

We do not need gods. We do not need a god construction kit, so we can make our own god in our own image. We need the ONE ETERNAL TRUE GOD. And we need His teaching, which is to be merciful, fair, truthful, courageous for what is right, and honorable.

Now we do have a problem in terms of bringing moral education to the schools, which is that there is such a thing as atheist parents. Even many non-atheist parents, or not avowedly atheist, do not want their children taught morality in school. I don't think Jesus ever used force on anyone, nor do I want to force them to do anything. It is also not enough for Christians to send their children to Christian schools, but we must make Christian education AVAILABLE TO EVERYONE who needs it. If a church is looking for a way to spend some of their money, I can't see a better use for it to be spent on. People who genuinely cannot afford a Christian education must be subsidized: indeed I cannot think of a more effective way of evangelism than this, educating children.

Christian education also has to abandon superstitions against scientific theory in order to be credible. In my mind, there is nothing inherently anti-Christian about the theory of evolution or the Big Bang Theory. Let science be science. Is the part of us made in God's image our bodies? No, our body comes from the Earth. Our spirit is what comes from God. When science genuinely intrudes on God's turf then we can be upset, but give to science what science does best.

Christian moral education alone will not stop the decay of our civilization because the majority will continue on its way. It is only a means of trying to protect what children we can. Unless the nation as a whole turns its heart toward God, which is unlikely, it will continue to decay. Perhaps if Christian schools become the only remaining way people can get a decent education, the public education system will eventually fall under its own weight. Like monasteries in the Dark Ages preserving knowledge for the future, we have to build our own institutions against our current age. Some people call that the "Christian ghetto" in disapproving terms, but we won't attract people unless they see that we have something different and better, a light in the darkness. We are different from the World: we have to show it. The apostle James didn't seem too concerned about the Christian ghetto:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

-James 1:27

But certainly whether other people will agree to moral education in schools or not, it is absolutely necessary, and if the public schools will not do it, Christian schools must, and must open their doors as wide as possible, so that as many children as possible can be saved from a failed system.

Quality as a Spiritual Value

2009-09-01T15:51:00.003-05:00

Would you like fries with that?

The words lust, desire and passion can all seem to be the same. They are all words for strong emotional motivating forces. In Christian belief, various forms of lust and desire are the motivating factors in all the sins in some form.

For from within, out of men's hearts, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly.

-Mark 7:21-22

However, we also use the word "passion" in a different, quite unrelated context. We say that someone has a "passion for his work" or "a passion to serve the poor." What we really mean, is care. Someone cares about something. He or she gives a damn. This is an altogether different thing.

I think we have all seen a very apt example of this in teenage fast food workers who obviously don't give a flip about what they do. They barely manage a grimace, they get your order wrong, when you ask for any variation from the routine they act like a broken computer: does not compute. This is sort of a meta-example of not caring, because their lack of care is a reflection of the lack of quality of their product and their purely money-motivated employers.

You might ask, why should they care? Their product is something that is unworthy of the classification "food". I guess that in the same way that road kill or human flesh have served as food for the desperate, it can be called food, but in no other way. What does that do to the time they spend dispensing such a product? If they aspire to be no better at being a worker than their product is at being food, then all they are doing is giving up hours of their God-given lives for money. Hours spent this way are empty painful hours. They can at least prove themselves better workers than their product.

But of course they are not alone to blame. The corporations don't care about their product or workers any more than the workers care about their work. All are there for money alone, while providing the most marginal possible product for their consumers. Work without care, without passion, is a terrible thing. Like a wasting spiritual disease.

An example at least purportedly of the opposite is presented in a Samuel Adams beer commercial that I am sure many of us have seen. The founder of SA had a job where he made a lot of money... and which he hated. So he decided to make beer. He likes good beer, other people like good beer, why not make good beer? So he made beer. He sold his beer door to door, in a manner of speaking. He gathered together other people who were passionate about beer. People liked their beer. They were happy. They were "successful", but in more than only monetary terms. They had a passion for their work.

The issue here is, what is the value of the life and time God gave you? If there is no other value than money, then you don't care about what you do. And other people don't care about what they do. Which means the quality of life as a whole decays. You make shitty things, you buy shitty things, everything goes to hell.

Care, concern, love: these are all part of the same thing. Love quite literally keeps the world from falling apart. It keeps your airplane from falling out of the sky when you travel. It keeps your teeth from falling out of your head from malnutrition. It keeps you alive when you are sick. It keeps your car from exploding on the road. It motivates teachers so that your children do not grow up to be ignoramuses. If you have love for something, even if that something is yourself, you care. If you care about your time, you do quality work. If you do quality work, that makes someone else's life better.

But there is a cautionary tale here, which is that more and more we do not live in a society that does not care about anything but money. In other words, it has lust but no care. We see it in the decay of our education system, in the shoddyness of American products, in the emptiness of American workers' lives, in the dumbing down of our society. This, is a philosophy and a culture of death. Of darkness. We can all point to the serial killers and terrorists and say, "this is evil", but one of the worst forms of evil is evil that we no longer recognize. Banal evil. Little petty evil. This is the form of evil that corrodes people, nations, and the whole world.

Make a statement for good. Give a damn. CARE.

High Noon in Old Jerusalem Town

2009-08-25T15:05:00.004-05:00

We have a tendency to condemn as utter villains the pharisees and sadducees who pronounced judgement on Jesus. Yes, they crucified the Only holy One. Many of us, even many Christians, would have done the very same in their position.

These are people who had spent their whole lives practicing and advocating their religion. Judaism was their life and work. Judaism stated that there is no God but God. No sons, no daughters, no holy ghost. Judaism also stated that when any prophet says things that God "could not have" told him to say, that prophet must die.

Therefore they did not really have any choice at all. They could either abandon the religion they had followed their whole lives. Or kill Christ. This should make it adamantly plain that Christianity is not Judaism - a Son of God according to Judaism is blasphemy.

The entire supposed revelation of God prior to Christ was at best a groping in the dark with occasional flashes of light. According to the Old Testament, God not only condoned but ordered what we would now call genocide and war crimes. How does this harmonize somehow with the teachings of Jesus? It doesn't at all. I dare to say Jesus was right and they were wrong, and they really were guilty of genocide. Moses and Joshua were war criminals.

Large chunks of the first books of the bible deal with such things as dietary laws. Did Jesus think these were important? No.

Did God change His mind? Does God contradict Himself? No. Moses and Aaron and the rest were wrong, Jesus was right.

So the Jewish religious authorities WERE following the tenets of THEIR religion. I am sure they were viewed as "good" men (as if any man is good), did all the requisite charities, obeyed all the requisite rituals. They were in fact obeying their religion. They obeyed their religion when they took Christ to Pilate to be crucified. They were pillars of their community. They kept Roman wrath at bay as best they could.

But everything which they had received was HUMAN religion. Moses and Joshua wanted to seize Palestine, so they said God told them to commit genocide. THEY wanted temple worship, so they told everyone God wanted them to bring sacrifices to the temple. Solomon even out loud said that the Temple was foolishness, but went ahead with it anyway ("Can God live in houses built by men? Highest heaven isn't big enough...) Real prophets who told them directly that God didn't care about any of those things, were often stoned. Jesus told the pharisees that they were the descendants of those who stoned the prophets.

The Parable of the Tenants (Matthew 21:33-46, Mark 12:1-12, Luke 20:9-19) is Jesus' direct commentary on this. The tenants (followers of Judaism) did what they wanted to with the vineyard of God. God sent messengers (the Prophets) to ask them, where is the people you were supposed to be raising up for Me? (the harvest). The tenants beat, harassed and killed those messengers. Finally the landlord (God) sent His own Son, who they also killed. The judgement? God is taking away the vineyard from them and giving it to someone else who will bear its fruit. But the tenants are those who are following Moses and Joshua, i.e. those who are following Judaism. Their book is our Old Testament. I don't doubt, considering the "kill first and ask questions after" outlook of much of that book, that they were sincere followers of it.

Only Jesus brought the true faith from heaven. Since the true faith was incompatible with their faith, they killed Jesus. That was the only thing they COULD have done, unless they wanted to give up their religion and the religion of their fathers. Most of us, if we were in the same position, would have done the same thing.

I come again and again to this same point, but I think it is an important one.

JESUS ALONE brought the true Way from God. No one else.

Which means that the Old Testament didn't bring it, Moses didn't bring it, the the best of the Prophets were mere message boys delivering a telegram from God. The Old Testament, aside from some genuine prophets like Jonah, was from humans, not God. Even prophets like Jonah or Isaiah had a very limited dispensation - to chide for lack of mercy, to call the people to account for hypocracy or particular evilness, to warn. They didn't see the whole plan any more than anyone else did.

As the religious authorities killed these limited messengers from God, even more did they have to kill the origin of these messages when He came Himself. Because He was contrary to their religion, their human religion. From Moses, not God.

Jesus' crucifixion was as certain the day He incarnated in a manger as it was the moment before the nail was driven. That "High Noon" on Good Friday between human religion and God was as inevitable as gravity.

The World and the Kingdom

2009-08-19T14:19:00.007-05:00

For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God, but God the One and Only, who is at the Father's side, has made him known.

-John 1:17-18

The organizing principle of all natural life on this planet is self-interest. Every living thing from monocellular life forms to us, is primarily involved in taking resources from the world and other creatures, often violently, and using it for ourselves. Using it to further our own survival or the propigation of our own genetic code. The strong, large or more complex usually take away from the small, weak and less complex.

Many forms of religion are guided by our overwhelming selfishness and these same natural principles. The Law, a principle dominant in Judaism and Islam, is basically a sort of negotiated treaty between selfish individuals. I agree to forgo depriving you of certain things near and dear to you, like your life and property, and in return I expect the same from you. I also expect that both of us will further the spread of this agreement to other people - the community as a whole - and punish anyone who violates the terms of this agreement. Indeed, we won't even associate with people who don't sign on to this treaty, and we may consider them to be enemies. Thus we gain security at the expense of losing opportunities to loot and pillage, and in a very insecure world a relative degree of security is a very nice thing indeed.

I agree not to be predatory towards you, you agree not to be predatory towards me, and in addition possibly our chances of being successfully predatory towards our mutual enemies improves.

This selfish orientation of existence starts to break down once we get to really BIG things. The Sun for instance, doesn't get anything from us but makes all life possible. The geology of the Earth doesn't benefit from our existence, but it makes our existence possible. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe itself came into existence from nothing: it did not take away anything from anything else in order to come into existence. We might say: God's Word brought the universe into existence and the making of the universe did not add to or take away from God.

Heaven's principles run exactly opposite from Earth's. The largest and greatest of all, God, does not feed on the small and weak (us): rather He feeds us. He guides us higher and higher. He acts selflessly and generously and also remakes us into His image. Heaven operates on principles of unification, not of division as is true on Earth. The ultimate expression of God's giving nature is the sacrifice of His Son to redeem us.

Why? God does not benefit at all, nor can anything be given to God. He lacks nothing. The benefit is all on our side. This is the nature of God. Gifts of grace pour down from above, bringing us upwards towards the unity of heaven. Christ is IN the Father, we are in Christ, we are also part of the unity of believers with each other. Religions of the Law are of the Earth: the gospel of Jesus Christ is of heaven, came from heaven, and brings us towards heaven. The Law cannot save us because it is part of the principles of the fallen world. Christ brings the Way of Heaven and is Himself that Way.

Again, we take away the carefully negotiated treaty of the Law - you are not contending with your brother but you ARE your brother. You are together with him in Christ.

You are not negotiating with God. Any religion or sect which involves us in a negotiated settlement with God is in error. If this is a treaty to end a war with God, you need to surrender unconditionally now. You have already lost.

God incorporates us whole into something resembling a blood relationship but which is more than mere biological relation. Christ says, "Remain IN me." Union. God has no use for a boundary agreement with you. That would be a boundary agreement with nothing, because you of yourself ARE nothing and become nothing without God. The world of the selfish individual is a black hole without a bottom in which nothingness sucks on itself.

The instruments of God are not laws. Laws can be useful if a person is too wild to understand any further, a means to an end. What does Jesus choose as one of His most important instruments on Earth? His blood and body. You are not entering into an intellectual understanding. You are partaking of His flesh and His blood.

This is also where faith comes in, you are not just giving God your rational assent. Some things may defy reason. Your hand does not argue with what your mind decides, it just does them. Unity. Your hand and your brain are two things but are united in you, just as the Father, Son and Ghost are three things but united as one thing.

So we should be wary of three things as Christians:
1. Legalism, trust in the Law in itself.
2. Rationalism, trust in your own mind; lack of faith.
3. Negotiation, the idea that we are bargaining with God or that parts of our lives are set aside for God and the rest is our own.

All three are based on principles of Earth, not principles of Heaven. The corresponding virtues to these vices would be:

1. Grace; God's guidance and uplifting power.
2. The mystery of God; faith.
3. Surrender, desiring to give ourselves to God altogether.

Visit to an ACNA church and reflections.

2009-08-17T09:43:00.008-05:00

As most regular visitors to my blog will know, I am... less than happy with my own nominal denomination, the Episcopal Church USA. Anglo-Catholic Anglicanism is a good fit (Episcopalians are part of the Anglican Communion... just barely), but Episcopalianism itself has become pretty problematic for me for reasons I need not get into now. So I decided to go church-shopping.

The church I visited is part of the Anglican Church of North America, the "Rebel Alliance" to the Episcopal Church's "Empire" to use a Star Wars analogy. They are dissidents from the Episcopal Church, or non-Episcopalian American Anglicans to put it another way.

Here is my review of sorts, sort of a checklist of things I perceived that they did right and not so well.

Theology A+:
Obviously my agreement with their theology was a main reason for my visit, and they did not show any signs of varying from that. An example of their orthodoxy is that I happened to attend on the feast day of the Assumption of Mary. The Assumption of Mary into Heaven is nowhere referred to in the Bible but has been taken as actuality in both the Catholic and Western and Eastern Orthodox Churches for around 15 centuries. It was a big deal at this church and the sermon was about it, whereas I doubt it would raise much of a ripple at my own church.

I was super happy with their degree of orthodoxy.

Physical Environment A-:
Nice sanctuary, obviously not very old but in a pretty classically Anglican style. No stained glass in the windows yet. Very lovely garden area behind sanctuary. Very super cool crucifix above altar (photo above), of some creamy-colored material accented with gold, with gold symbols of the four apostles at the four points of the cross. No votive candles, which is a minus in my book, but a very nice Mary altar which they used for part of their service because it was the feast of the Assumption of Mary.

Liturgy A:
Liturgy was from Rite I which I am less used to than Rite II, but certainly lacked nothing and in fact included certain things which I found very correct and appealing. Their prayers of the people were far better done than in my church - almost a chant. The Prayers of the People are at best a long boring rote recitation, so to handle them as basically chant worked very well. I even teared up a bit when my very favorite hymn was recited during the Eucharist. Copious incense was used, even a bit much for an incense-lover like me but I would rather have too much than too little.

Minor quibbles: the brand of incense was not I believe of the very best quality, and the eucharist wine was of a tawny port type, which is neither as visually nor as flavorfully appealing as ruby port. I don't really visualize Christ's blood as a tan-colored affair. Otherwise, everything was perfect.

Church Discipline A+:
At my church, you quite often hear people chatting DURING THE SERVICE, during the sermon, even during the height of the celebration of the Eucharist. On more than one occasion at my church, I have had to give someone a "I am going to slap your freaking head off if you don't shut tf up" look.

No such thing was even imaginable here. When the priests and music were quiet, you could hear a pin drop in the parking lot outside. When it was time for the people to come up for communion, they choreographed that all by themselves and came forward in an invisible, unspoken, but all too implicit order: priests/deacons/interns first, parents with children next, then in orderly fashion everyone else by rows. I mean, they were so well disciplined it was spooky. Like a science fiction movie.

The choir was like 2 people, but it didn't matter because it appeared that EVERYONE, and I mean EVERYONE, sang as if they were in the choir. Everyone sang as if it were their own individual responsibility to do so. In my own church, the choir is large and super-fantastic, which is great because the congregation either doesn't sing or sings like crap.

After the service, everyone waited patiently for like 15 minutes in a neat line to shake hands with the clerical folks, after which one could have one very lame donut and coffee.

In contrast, at my church you wave at the priest and head to the big table O food where on most days you can basically make yourself a very decent lunch if you want to. This church I visited would get a D- on food, despite apparently having a very nice kitchen.

A Franciscan (?) monk attended the service, which is always a nice thing to see. I saw two people wearing Franciscan tau crosses: the monk and a lady.

Sermon B+:
The sermon was by an intern, so probably not indicative of their general quality, but the intern did do a pretty darn good job of being convincing on why the Assumption (rather than the normal death and decay) of Mary made sense. Good solid sermon.

Evident Missionary Activity D:
There was no visible sign that the church participated in any missionary activity at all. Maybe they do... but it wasn't evident, they didn't seem interested in putting up any signs or brochures about their missionary activity if any. Churches that are involved in missionary activity usually don't make it a secret or hide it in a closet.

Evident Service to the Poor or Afflicted D:
Again, no sign that the church was involved in or interested in any sort of service aside from performing church services. No signs recruiting for soup kitchens or food banks, nada.

Racial/Ethnic/Cultural/Subcultural Diversity D:
Oh my GOODNESS these people were white. Not like that is a bad thing, I am white, but I mean ALL white. White as a Hitler Youth Book of the Month Club. There was one black mother and child, otherwise everyone was as white as Anita Bryant.

Welcoming/Sociability C:
No one who attends this church has to worry about being accosted by glaze-eyed enthusiasts of Christ who will invite you to Agape dinners. In fact, no one will acknowledge your existence unless you make yourself noticed. One person, one, went out of his way to acknowledge me as a visitor without me making a point of introducing myself as one and asking for information or assistance. I basically had to be very obvious with "I AM TEH VISITOR".

Supposedly you fill out your guest card and they give you a welcome bag with literature and goodies. Well I signed the guest book AND filled out the card, and it was only later when I was having a conversation with someone, which I started, about I AM A VISITOR HERE did she go, "Oh, did you get the welcome bag?" NO. She did finally get me one though.

VISITOR WELCOME FAIL.

At the Great Hall eating my lame donut (after waiting for it for 15 minutes), I actually felt extremely comfortable, like I fit in immediately. Like, I might as well have been in my chair in my room at home. I can honestly say I have never felt more comfortable in any church building in my life. I found myself in a room with a lot of people who were quite like me. White, probably reasonably well educated, and aloof. Perfect.

Not.

That is actually a bad thing for me, I naturally tend to be nonsociable and need to make myself be social and sometimes need people to prod me to be sociable.

This is not the model of what a Christian community should be. We should be willing to go out on the edge a bit, rub shoulders with people who ARE NOT like us and never will be. We must be willing to invite people into community even if its a bumpy lumpy sort of community, because Christianity is not a book written by Ayn Rand. It is not about individualism.

This church I visited was really a super-nice church, and I would probably consider joining it if I ever left St. Matthews. But we can begin to see the outlines of some of the problems with having a left-right divide in Christianity. Granted, this is a generalization, but a generalization that seems to hold generally true.

The "Christian Left":

tends towards heresy
lacks awe and reverance towards the holy
de-emphasises self-control
ignores ancient tradition
does not take liturgy seriously

does well with missionary activities, especially to poorer countries
does extremely well with ministry and service to the less fortunate
is welcoming and sociable, not too individualistic
is welcoming of diversity
does well with "ministry to the earth", encourages "green" behavior

The "Christian Right":

respects theological orthodoxy/takes the gospel seriously
has respect for the holy
practices self-control
respects ancient Christian tradition
takes liturgy seriously

does not do as well with missions, especially to poorer countries
does not do as well with service to the poor/sick/less fortunate
focuses on individual responsibility, not mutual social support
is less concerned or unconcerned about earth guardianship issues
is not welcoming of diversity, at least not to the extent of the left.

It is unfortunate that this split seems to be evident, because it is evident that Christ was neither calling us to correct theology without action nor to social action without God. He was calling us both to social action AND God. Sound theology AND compassion. I am not any happier with the combination of great liturgy and lousy compassion than I am with the combination of kindness towards men and lack of respect towards God. WE have made this split, God didn't.

If visiting this church has proven any one thing to me, it has proven the value of visiting other churches from time to time. I think I will continue every few months at least visiting other churches. Do I expect to find a "perfect church"out there? No, I don't. I am if anything more likely to stay in my current church as a result of this visit. But perhaps in seeing the varieties in people's attempts to live Christian, we come to better understand where we are and where we want to be.

The Color of Evil

2009-08-14T09:36:00.004-05:00

But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power.

2 Timothy 3:1-4

It is an unending wonder to me that some people are able to combine individualism, (American) nationalism, capitalism, and Christianity all at one go. Concepts more antithetical to Christianity would be hard to come by.

All capitalism is a form of usury, an activity condemned by the First Council of Nicea. The early Christians and Jesus Himself did not mince words concerning the condemnation of the rich.

Then Jesus said to his disciples, "I tell you the truth, it is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

-Matthew 19:23-24

Is Capitalism necessary given human weakness and a pluralistic secular society? Probably. Is it endorsed by Christ? Absolutely not.

The association between capitalist types (in current terms the Republican Right) and Christianity arose in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because capitalists rightly saw that Christian workers would be temperate, hard-working, humble, and self-controlled - in other words perfect workers to exploit. This trend either consciously or unconsciously continues today: you can readily find examples of Republican officials who preach to the masses while meanwhile personally pursuing every possible sin themselves. This is because they do not so much believe in Christianity as in the worldly benefit of Christianity or Christian voters to themselves. That they are not sincere is proved by how little they pursue a "Christian Agenda"when elected.

This variety of Christianity has not failed to filter down to the workers themselves. Many self-proclaimed Christians are not so much interested in reforming their own souls as forcing others to reform THEMselves, and in protecting their own interests. Social problems such as divorce and substance abuse continue apace in Christian America while they continue to poke fingers at the OTHERS who are having their own social problems. This isn't Christian.

If you are not prepared to view nation, race, money, sex, approval, and even self as all dross and filth compared to God and His gospel, you are not worthy of it and likely will not receive it, no matter how many times you mention the word "Christ."

"Capitalists" have no place in heaven.
"Individualists" have no place in heaven
"Nationalists" have no place in heaven.

Heaven is no respecter of nation, cash flow or individual rights. Individualism is straight out of the question - your only hope is to be "owned" by God, not to come to a negotiated agreement with Him.

Seek first God and His kingdom.

Pray for the persecuted church in Pakistan

2009-08-12T15:09:00.002-05:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8196013.stm

The Call of Peace

2009-08-11T12:05:00.007-05:00

This morning, half awake, I heard it. Like a bugle call to peace. A call to wake up, stop being asleep. A call to the peace which passes all understanding.

We, all of us, spend at least half our lives asleep to God's love and peace, his call leading us to the Way and the Life. At least I know I do. I find myself sharing the condition of those who in Romans 1:31 are called

senseless, faithless, heartless, ruthless

And then, as a call from another world, God breaks through. I confess my complete inability to be right without God. Without Him, I would fall straight through into eternal Death. For reasons unknown but to God, I am God's possession, and I am inexpressibly glad to be.

It is as if there are two beings within me: one dead in its sins, the other destined for Life. And between the two there is no dialogue. It is no use telling the dead one: "Do you not remember? Do you not recall all the good things God has done for us?" It does not and can not remember.

Again, we are ENTIRELY dependent on the grace of God, even to acknowledge God.

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

-John 3:8

I mentioned peace - the essence of peace and love is unity. Not in body or form, but in heart and will. This is why we say Jesus is one with the Father and the Spirit, but they are also three. This also relates to Jesus seemingly impossible call that his Church should "all be one". Impossible for Man, not impossible for God. Indeed, TRUE love and TRUE peace, are not possible outside of God.

"My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me."

-John 17:20-23

This kind of peace can be difficult to grasp: in fact we usually see it only dimly now, "through a glass, darkly." Dissention, competition and hate dominate this world, not peace. Not THAT kind of peace, certainly.

It is like a person who has always lived far in the country and comes to a major city for the first time: he doesn't know the full extent of the city, but he knows for certain that this is the biggest city he has ever seen or imagined. In the same way, when we get to the outskirts of The Peace Which Passeth Understanding, we really don't have any idea how big it is, just that it is way bigger than what we have known. If we are lucky in this life, every now and then we get to be that country bumpkin gaping with mouth open at the enormity of the City of Peace.

Calvinism

2009-07-30T02:32:00.004-05:00

John Calvin

I do not agree with all aspects of Calvinism, my otherwise Catholic sympathies are pretty clear. I would not feel comfortable with the Calvinist mode of worship, for starters. However, I do believe that the core realization of Calvinism is both true and more scripturally-based than the alternative.

I realize that it does go against tradition in the Church, what was traditionally taught was that individuals are solely responsible for whether or not they choose Christ. I regard tradition as very valuable, not infallible. If tradition goes against the clear intent of the gospels and epistles, it is tradition that must yield not the gospels.

There have been human teachers and prophets and philosophers since history was recorded: what distinguishes Jesus from them? He is bringing a teaching that does not come from the human mind, nor is He merely human. He is bringing a teaching that comes from heaven, not Earth, and the messenger is also the origin of the message as he also came from heaven, not Earth.

In this is an implicit criticism of human understanding: if human understanding had been sufficient, God would not need to send His own Son. It is not sufficient. In a key statement Jesus says:

"You are from below; I am from above. You are of this world; I am not of this world."
-John 8:23

The fact that humans cannot strictly speaking "reason to God" is implicit in this. Had human reason been sufficient, God's Son need not have come nor would sin have persisted. Moreover, not only could humans not strictly reason to God before Jesus came, they still cannot. If they could reason to God after Jesus, they could have reasoned to God before. They can do neither of these things.

This is because the truth of God is inherently not accessible to the human mind, but must come through the unhardening of the human heart by God. (Ezekiel 36:26)

The effort to make Christianity into a natural science was doomed from the start. And that is what advocates of "rational Christianity" are in essence trying to do. It is an effort that has been highly effectively destroyed by real scientists and real logical philosophers. Christianity as a rational proposition is laughable. And it is precisely to a rationally unsupportable religion that Christians have been called and we should recognize it as such, as the original disciples and apostles also did recognize it as such. (Acts 4:11, 1 Corinthians 1:18-19)

Man is completely sinful. (Rom 5:18-19)

He is therefore unable to do anything good. (Mark 10:18)

Or to come to God of himself. (John 6:44, John 10:25-26)

Or to understand about God. (John 14:16-17)

Man of himself always follows false prophets, even the elect would if God did not prevent it. (Matthew 24:24)

God elects those he has predestined to salvation (John 6:37, John 15:16, Acts 13:48)

Those He saves, he knew from the beginnings of the Universe He would save. (Romans 8:28-30, 1 Peter 1:1)

Salvation is a sovereign act of God alone, you can no more choose your own salvation than you can choose your own birth. (John 3:3-8, John 5:21)

Offers of grace will always be resisted by mankind of themselves because their inherent nature is sinful. (John 12:37-40, John 3:19)

Therefore God causes some to come to Him. (John 6:37-40, Romans 9:15)

So I have to say that I agree with the 5 tenets of Calvinism.

Total Depravity (humans are sinful by their nature)

Unconditional Election (Nothing you have done or can do will cause or earn salvation, salvation is a sovereign act of God alone.)

Limited Atonement (Since everything God purposes, God achieves, Christ died for those He will save, not for those who will never be saved.)

Irresistable Grace (When God purposes to save someone, that person will most certainly be saved.)

Perseverence of the Saints (Those God purposes to save, will remain saved.)

I do agree that Calvinism causes problems in some sense, not in terms of what it is but in terms of how it is perceived. People see this as an obstacle to evangelism, as a disincentive to action, and other things. This is a matter of how it is perceived, not what it is. We were called to evangelize: results are not in our control.

Epic Fail

2009-07-29T23:57:00.004-05:00

At the heart of the recent brouhaha within the Episcopal Church, and in similar situations going on throughout mainline denominations in the West, is a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of sin, our nature, and God's nature. And this lack of understanding began long ago, before the current debates had ever been conceived as possible.

I remember as a child being forced to go to an Episcopal church in the Sixties, that this thinking was in the atmosphere then. What thinking am I referring to? The idea that somehow sin was a deviation from normal human behavior, and that sinning (or at least being caught doing it) involved considerable loss of face. In other words, it is the idea that our normal state is a sort of proud sinlessness (a contradiction in terms) and that the alternative was shameful embarrassing sin which might cause people to avoid you or talk behind your back.

The whitebread suburban types I knew back then and the gay-bishop crowd now are manifestations of the same disease: the desire to appear sinless and thus avoid the risk of other people's disapproval.

Sin IS the normal human condition. NONE are sinless. If you want to shame the sinners, you better get a running start on shame now because you are one.

To paraphrase the old Palmolive dish detergent ad:

SIN. YOU'RE SOAKING IN IT.

To deny that we sin is in some ways the ultimate sin, because it directly opposes the process of redemption. Redemption is, we are fallen and cannot recover from that fallen state by ourselves. God is willing to lift us out of that state. God cannot lift us out of that state if we do not acknowledge that we are in it to begin with and thus need His help.

I am as big a sinner by nature as any sodomite. I am in the same sinful state by nature as a mass murderer, although the mass murderer may have worked on increasing his sinful state more. I am in it, I was born in it, I will not in this life altogether completely escape it.

What is more, the more you understand sin, the more you understand that it is pervasive and systematic. It affects our view of the world, our thoughts, our perceptions, our day to day existence. To use a troublesome quote from Jesus (which we more associate with Jimmy Carter), when you look on a woman with lust, you HAVE committed adultery in your heart. Sinning in your thoughts is still sin, perhaps not as severe, but it still is a symptom of your pervasively sinful state.

Of course nowadays, even adultery in your actions is considered no big deal. We want to feel justified, regardless of what we do. This is precisely the most wrong thing you could possibly do.

We have to start regarding sin as the current condition, of all of us. We also have to focus not on our sin but on God and what He wants for us, the things He wants us to do, the place He wants us to be. Only He can get us there, but we need to increase our understanding of where we are. And trust in God to increase our understanding of what holiness is.

Please Pray for Martyrs In North Korea

2009-07-24T17:25:00.004-05:00

Please pray for the martyrs that are being made in North Korea. Pray that their witness will bring many to the love of Christ. Pray that Christ's light will dawn in that darkened land where rulers demand to be worshipped as gods.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8167644.stm

"The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church"

-Tertullian

Lord Most High

2009-07-23T14:29:00.003-05:00

Plato said that the things we see here on earth are just a pale reflection of more perfect forms in the metaphysical world. In a sense, I agree with him. The difference is, for me the origin and most perfect being of which these created things are the pale reflection, is God.

Whenever I see something relatively perfect as a created thing, it makes me happy. Whenever I see something in the natural world that exhibits a high degree of perfection, I get this feeling. I adore perfect things. A flawless peach, a sunflower, more rarely a great work of art. An automobile that shows a high level of unity of form with performance. I love that feeling so much, I spend hours making artwork in a mostly vain attempt to capture that feeling. The feeling of perfection. For a moment, a created being seems to rise above the fallen world to a higher plane. I get that feeling during communion too, except in that case it is myself who is lifted.

I have a weird little hobby, paper airplanes. Not the kind you fold up into a triangle, fairly intricate flying machines made of paper and delicately applied glue. When I make one that is both beautiful, and fulfills its function of being a flying machine, it makes me happy. Its appearance and its function come together as one. A work both of art and engineering.

We love God for what He has done for us, and it is well that we should. Jesus on his time here on earth spoke a lot about what God is doing for us and what He wants for us. He spoke to our very flawed conception of God and called us to a higher understanding of what God wants us to do on this Earth. He taught us about sacrifice, and mercy. He taught us that the sole source of any kind of perfection we might ever have, is God who freely gives in abundance.

But don't miss the glory either:

"Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world."

God is beautiful, God is glorious. God is perfect. Know that the God who you love, is far more than someone who does good things to you. He is far more than you can ever understand. He is infinitely infinitely radiantly perfect. Worthy of adoration doesn't even seem to cover it.

And the truth of His perfection makes me very very happy, indeed. :)

Most Violently Disposed

2009-07-22T10:20:00.010-05:00

The awesomely powerful Rocketdyne F1 engine, used on the Saturn V.

Because it is the 40th anniversary of the moonwalk (no, not the Jackson thing, the real moon walk), I have been watching a lot of footage of the Saturn V blasting off. I would like to say that I find space exploration highly awesome. I don't bother rationalizing the huge expense by saying that it is our destiny to colonize space because I rather doubt that it IS our destiny. Anywhere on Earth is better than Mars or the Moon as far as a place to live is concerned.

I really cannot rationalize the expense of space exploration in the face of so much human need, in the face of schools failing and social decay and jobs lost. The money COULD be better spent on that, but really, if there was a united, true and dedicated will to face these problems honestly, don't you think we could anyway? Money isn't the real problem there. Scandinavian countries spend the same on their schools as we do, but their schools are way better. Face it: the decay facing our country isn't financial, it is moral and spiritual and social. It is a failure of faith.

So no, I can't rationalize space exploration for any particularly practical reason. What space exploration is, is a bad ass mega sized whopper of an adventure. And we don't get much REAL adventure these days, so I think we should write it off as an entertainment expense. Plus a little science gets done too.

I mean, how much does the human race spend on football and soccer and stupid sit-coms and reality television? Maybe we really COULD colonize space if all the money spent on such idiocy were spent on space instead. Not that space is anything like a nice place to live. Space is an unforgiving radioactive hard vacuum conspiring every second to kill you. But in any case, we could have some really cool adventures. What is life without cool adventures? I like the idea. Space is way freaking more bad-assed fun than watching overpaid sports figures throw spheroids around. We live in a world without much real adventure, all the Columbus or Magellan-type adventures on this world have been pretty much done. There's lots of adventures waiting in space though. Adventures and death, but adventures are always risky. Maybe we could sell season tickets to cover the cost? No space coverage for you unless you are a ticket holder? I would buy one. Or advertise on the next moon rockets to defray costs. Big banners on the side of the rockets advertising the iPhone or something. I would be totally cool with that.

That completely aside, I was watching this video of a Saturn V launch, and I was impressed by the sheer violence of the human species that had done this. In this case, not violent particularly to other humans, but just violent to the Earth. We are a really violent species.

All the metals and rare elements that had to be ripped up from the ground only to be burned up in the atmosphere; all the coal that had to be burned to separate hydrogen from oxygen to make the fuel, only to be violently recombined; all the plastics melted, air and water polluted, dioxins made, energy seized from coal and oil, carbon dumped in the atmosphere. All to send this disposable rocket on a brief trip to the moon.

We aren't just violent to ourselves. We are seriously violent to God's creation. We don't even think about how violent we are to it. Chainsaws ripping, huge machines digging and tearing the earth, machines grinding and ripping and digesting and extracting. Animals enslaved contrary to nature, confined, overfed, and then slaughtered and eaten. Virtually everything we do involves some form of gross exploitation of and violence towards the Creation.

Of course, Nature has violence that makes ours look positively trivial. Supernovas, galaxies collide, asteroids smash into planets, volcanoes explode. Nature's violence though is unconscious, undirected and amoral. We however are able to conceive of harmonious development but never able to actualize it. We are able to visualize peace on earth, just never able to achieve it. We imagine a sustainable peaceful just society, but cannot build it.

As I sit here typing, if nothing else, large quantities of coal have to be burned to keep my computer and fans and air conditioner running. Since some of the power is nuclear, a certain amount of nuclear waste is generated. Just by me sitting here typing.

We better hope that UFO's aren't really aliens from another star system. If they have the technology to cross vast distances of space, they're probably pretty violent mofos. How many planets did they have to eat in order to get over here?

I guess the point here is not that space exploration or nuclear power or air conditioning or eating beef or whatever, are things that we should necessarily stop doing or are bad. But be aware of how violent we are being to God's creation. We are exceedingly violent creatures, just in general. This is part of our fallen state. We should be aware of our violence to the Creation, as we are of our violence to each other.

Oh Great And Mighty Oz....

2009-07-17T00:51:00.003-05:00

Evil presiding bishop Schori

I apologize in advance for losing my temper, but I've had it. I figure God will sooner forgive my cursing than forgive turning a blind eye to our very own purple whore of freaking Babylon.

I cannot believe the things this antichrist is saying. She actually had the presumption, at the opening of the General Convention, to declare the idea of individual salvation a heresy. A heresy.

Not a philosophy she has disagreements with. Not something she is uncertain of the truth of. An outright old fashioned heresy.

Hello pot, this is kettle. Mother of all oozing abominations wants to start throwing the word heresy around now.

In other words, she is saying that God CAN NOT save an individual with a repentant heart who calls on God for salvation. God just can't do it. I guess now that Schori is the Fourth Person of the Trinity (henceforth to be called 'Mom God), she can make definitive statements on what God CAN NOT do.

What does salvation consist of, according to Ms. Antichrist? Some sort of nebulous community thing. She's not very specific, and I don't blame her. No doubt for her, salvation consists of long pointless meetings in which the fundaments of Christianity are tossed aside.

I am really done being tolerant about this. She's a freaking nightmare, a positive evil.

Now I am the first to say that Americans are far too individualistic. Had she said that, had she emphasized the great importance of community, I would be there 100%. That is not what she did. She said that God now cannot save you, the "community" somehow saves you.

I would say more about her, but my blood pressure would go up too far.

Here is an article dealing with the issue:
http://www.catholic.org/printer_friendly.php?id=34091&section=Cathcom

The Long End Times

2009-07-16T14:00:00.006-05:00

I found an interview with Rene Girard in which he mentions his belief that the End Times will be, or rather are, a slow inexorable soul-destroying grind rather than an apocalyptic frenzy:

CH: What about this quotation: “Except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened”?

RG: It means that the end times will be very long and monotonous—so mediocre and uneventful from a religious and spiritual standpoint that the danger of dying spirituality, even for the best of us, will be very great. This is a harsh lesson but one ultimately of hope rather than despair.

I happen to very much agree with that. The early Christians were expecting Apocalypse Soon, the End Times and the second coming of Christ in relatively short succession. What actually happened is a span of 2000 years leading up to now, to a despiritualized world where the enemy is not a Nero-like antichrist but our own lust for power and control. Perhaps there will be one antichrist or perhaps there will be many. In either case, what describes our current situation is one where soul, faith, and a certain cosmic humility are being squeezed out. In other words, it is not a sort of great bloody war (although there are plenty of those), but a situation where the spiritual "oxygen" is slowly being depleted from the environment until we asphyxiate to death.

The spiritual equivalent of global warming perhaps.

It won't overtly be an intrusion of forces from outside, demons and such. We will do it ourselves. Our lust for control over nature and people, our lust for money, our belief in our own infallibility, will do it. Our lack of humility, our lack of submission to God's ways, will do it. The violence in our souls will do it.

And it will be slow and tedious and undramatic, like slowly running out of air.

FANATIC

2009-07-15T13:43:00.006-05:00

God is still speaking, but His message is the same.

Fanatic. Zealot. Religious Nut.

No one really enjoys being called a fanatic. From an orthodox Christian point of view, it can be considered to be a compliment, but only a very left-handed one. Even the name "Christian" started out as an insult. Basically people said, "these people say 'Christ, Christ' every other word, so that is what we will call them, Christian." They might say this right before they pick up a blunt instrument. Many people are deathly afraid of being called a fanatic.

Many people define their relationship with God by how much distance they put between Him and them. Being vaguely religious is socially okay, the more vague the better. They consider militant atheism and extreme Christianity to be the undesirable extremes and their job is to keep to the happy, socially acceptable middle. Their goal, it would seem, is to be "religious" enough to appear ethical, and atheist enough to seem accommodating and tolerant of everything. In other words, it's about them and who they are. Not about God.

In reality, those who keep to the middle of the road are most likely to be run over. I have more respect for a hard-core atheist than a lukewarm Christian, because a hard-core atheist at least might care about reality. I used to be an atheist. They often think seriously about things. Too many lukewarm Christians just care about appearances, or self-image. Hate to tell ya, it's not about your image.

Social liberals have made great headway with the philosophy and slogan "let your freak flag fly." We orthodox Christians need to take a lesson from their success. Don't be afraid to be radical for Christ. Don't be afraid to be called a fanatic. In fact, Jesus Christ Himself says very clearly that YOU WILL BE if you are His. You will be unpopular. People will think you are the worst kind of radical. A nut. People will hate you.

Unless you are in essence a fanatic for God, you are wasting your time in church and really should do something more constructive on a Sunday morning. Like sleep late.

***

Some people who read this blog may be aware, the Episcopal Church USA has just in the last couple days taken a step which is a grievous breach with apostolic Christianity. This was very disturbing to me, but on the plus side it provoked me to spend some quality time with God today, which I do far too infrequently. One of the things I did was express my concern for my congregation and for the state of Christianity in the world. He told me something.

Now I do not hear God in a clear audible voice like the infamous Rev. Bob Tilton said he did. God does not speak in human languages, at least not to me. The Bible refers to "tongues of Angels", which I do not believe has anything to do with pentacostals babbling in churches. No human voice could speak this. It defies description. Defies human cognition, pretty much. In the Bible you see references both to the "breath" of God and the "word" of God, this breath and word is the same thing. In John, Jesus "breathes" on the disciples and they receive the holy spirit. This breath has very little to do with exhaled gasses. "Breath" is a convenient concretization for our sake.

Anyway, I was expressing my concerns, and I heard, "knit it together".

I was sort of like, 'how do you expect me to do that?'. I do good when I can knit myself together to get out of bed in the morning.

Again, "knit it together".

God was not saying, "knit the liberals and conservatives together". Those who are outside the church are outside the church, you can't knit Christians and heathens together. You are either part of the real invisible church, the Body of Christ, or you aren't.

"Knit it together."

So the actual Christians should knit together, and don't worry about the pseudo-Christians?

"Knit it together"

I realized He was saying far more than this. Yes of course orthodox Christians should knit together more closely, should do better at being the Body here on Earth, but there is more.

There is the real true Church which is known to God, and its members must each reach into it to knit into it "from within" as well as being the church with those who we can see with our physical eyes. Church as it is commonly understood. Knit into the Church from the "inside" out.

The Church Militant, the saved here on Earth, and the Church Triumphant, those who have gone before, the saints, are both the real Church. There isn't any other Church. There never has been.

We have to knit together spiritually with the saints in heaven and those living who we do not see, as well as with those we do see who are part of the Body, whatever their surface denomination. The Episcopal church isn't the Church, the Catholic Church isn't the Church, only the Church is the Church. The Body of Christ is the Church.

In other words, to put it more succinctly, worry about your life with God and the saints and your faithful brothers, and don't worry about a bunch of people dressed in robes who call themselves the Church while promoting every possible offense to God. They aren't the Church and never were. They can call themselves leaders in the church all day long, but God is not confused on the matter. It is like a man in the rain calling himself a duck.

Having a visible church and congregation to belong to is very important, and ever more difficult in this faithless age, but placing your root in the real invisible and eternal Church and deepening your relationship with God is vastly more important. Let God take care of the rest. Knit it together.

Doors Closing

2009-07-10T23:19:00.002-05:00

I am haunted tonight by the sound of doors closing

A cynic confirmed
A God denied
A relationship lost
A suicide

A soul embittered
A friend just lost
A marriage broken
your love won't defrost

Don't close that door
The test can be braved
You have to break through
And be mad to be saved

Ya gotta give it a chance
It's never too late
If you accept the door
You seal your fate

I am haunted tonight by the sound of doors closing

Sanctuary

2009-07-04T00:42:00.002-05:00

We human beings are weak creatures who need help even when our intentions to follow God are good. The World is full of plenty of distractions and temptations which can derail us. We want a place to help us, a sanctuary where we can get back on track. A pure place where we can be helped to be better. We want to throw ourselves at the doorstep of the holy and say "guide me, I am blind!"

The problem is, the World doesn't stop at the church door, or the monk's cell. Physical sanctuaries, whether a church building or a fellowship of believers, are prey to the same weaknesses as each of us individually. Being a shepherd of men is like walking a tightrope between two abysses. As many scandals have proven, priests and pastors are not any more perfect than the rest of us. The best of them find themselves in a situation that God has blessed, and they bend over backwards to try to not mess up what God has given.

The pillars of the Church are not necessarily always pastors, the primary job of the pastors is to keep the lights on and the water bill paid and the sacrament fed. The pillars of the Church are anyone and anything through which God acts, only for as long as God acts. Pastor or altarboy doesn't matter, God's action matters.

Sometimes you are lucky to find a sort of sanctuary, a place or a congregation that God has blessed. If you do, realize this: that God's will alone has made that place such, and that His will can and perhaps ultimately must move on to somewhere else. Sanctuaries in the World are temporary emanations from the only real sanctuary which is the embrace of God Himself. This is the uncomfortable truth: that other people can help and be supportive and God can minister to you through them, but ultimately finding that sanctuary is between you and God. No institution can give that to you. You either hear God's prompting, whether through the gospels or the Holy Spirit or the voices of your fellow worshipers, or not.

Some Christian institutions are well-intended but unblessed. God does not work through them, and without that, their work is infertile. It cannot succeed. A church is not a sanctuary just because men have said so. God's action is what is important. True sanctuaries cannot be sanctified by Man. Such unblessed institutions must inevitably decay towards the World because God does not live in them.

I am profoundly blessed that I pray in a church sanctuary that I consider an almost palpably holy place. By Dallas standards it is old, two generations prayed in that place before I was even born. I think of them, praying in these same walls, and the generations after them that prayed here before I did. Sometimes I feel the presence of that whole congregation, the living and the dead both.

This sanctuary however is only brick and mortar and people, there is no guarantee that the grace that God extends, He will continue to do so. I pray very much that He will. Our immediate leadership on the diocese level is good. The leadership on the national level however is not good. I worry that they will destroy the church. But ultimately the temple is not built of brick, it is the house of God, and the true temple cannot be destroyed by blind men and women. The true Church cannot be led astray by fallen shepherds, the true sanctuary is not built by men.

Sanctuary. That is a beautiful word, sanctuary. The word love can mean gushy emotion, the word compassion can mean empty pity, but the word sanctuary just means what it says. Sacred place. Place of refuge. Be glad of the sanctuaries you find, but know that in the final analysis there is only one sanctuary.

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.

I will say of the LORD, "He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust."

Surely he will save you from the fowler's snare
and from the deadly pestilence.

He will cover you with his feathers,
and under his wings you will find refuge

Psalm 91:1-4

Turn the World Upside Down

2009-06-23T09:50:00.004-05:00

Usually morning is not the best time of day for me. There is a long-standing saying in my house: don't bother talking to someone before they've had coffee. Eventually the morning fog lifts with the aid of warm caffeine and you are fit for human conversation again.

This morning however I woke up in a sunny mood with a strange and happy conviction. Might simply be the lingering half-consciousness after a nice dream, possibly. The conviction was, that most of the things we worry so much about in life do not matter. Inversely, things matter that we do not spend any time thinking about.

Jesus was a great inverter of attention. He shockingly and refreshingly told us that many of the things we are so wrapped up about are illusory and that consequently, we don't really have to spend a lot of time worrying about them. One example is the lilies, which many bible scholars think were probably actually chamomile flowers. They don't care one whit about how they look, they don't spin or weave, but God gave them greater spendor in their humble field than a rich king could ever achieve.

Who did Jesus say the blessed are? The blessed are poor, meek and oppressed. Blessed? Strong words that, most of us would not consider that a blessing. But consider what the Thessalonicans, in some translations of Acts 17, accuse the Christians of? They accuse them of "turning the world upside down".

Of course the most apparent interpretation of this world-upturning is to cause an uproar, be a disturbance. I like to think of it in terms of paradigm shift though. As Nietzche once said in very different and more cynical context, the revaluation of your values. Through the lens of Christ, the callous rich become cursed, the poor become blessed. The persecutors become cursed, the persecuted blessed. The esteemed are cursed, the humble are blessed. The powerful are cursed, the powerless are blessed. From a worldly viewpoint, this is nonsense. From Christ's viewpoint, it makes perfect sense. It makes perfect sense if and only if the centrality of God is the basis. If we can lift our eyes from a self-centered world to a God-centered world, it makes much more sense than the other way around.

It is like turning a new page in life, like getting a whole new life, when you can let go of false values. Most people fear pain and death. Why, when these things are certain to come anyway? God who clothed the flowers can clothe you with a new body too. Most people are concerned about status and the opinion of others. Why do you worry about the opinion of men and not God?

Even the best of us have a foot in two worlds though, we are all vain and silly, so it is not like we are ever going to completely stop worrying and completely look through Jesus' lens in this life. But if you NEVER stop worrying and never see from outside your illusory concerns, you are setting yourself up for a dark, nervous and narrow life. There is a bigger picture. Consider Jesus' lilies.

See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

-Matthew 6:28-34

God is Peace

2009-06-19T17:08:00.004-05:00

The only peace is God. The only unity is God. The only love is God.

Something that struck me at church last weekend is peace. Peace, unity and love are all analogous concepts - you cannot have peace without unity, you cannot have unity without love. When someone asks you, "what is Christianity?" you cannot tell them this peace, because this peace is not a concept. It is a reality beyond concept. So already we have one hand tied behind our backs. How can you tell someone what God's love feels like unless they already know? It is empty words unless they know for themselves.

All the theology wars Christians wage with each other these days, yes they are important, and no they are not important.

Yes, I think they are important, because God and sin are antithetical concepts, and every world-grasping behavior is sin because it is idolatry, usurping the rightful position of God in our lives.

No, they are not important, because they are not what we should be centered on. At some point, concern with sin and what is and isn't sinful becomes a sin itself. We are all sinners, each and every one. Old news. Bad news. You want good news? Peace. Peace is good news.

The peace which passeth all understanding is available to us every minute, and we cheat ourselves of it every day because we are of two minds and two worlds: sin and God. But this is the good news - not simply has God made peace with us in human terms, not simply has God ceased hostilities with us, but God has made PEACE with us. The peace which is love and unity beyond our ability to convey it.

I wish I could make it known to others, but sometimes I have a hard enough time making it known to myself, so I will focus on that. Peace.

Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Phillipians 4:4-7

I'm Okay, You're Okay?

2009-06-02T13:38:00.003-05:00

There is a philosophy floating out there in the Zeitgeist which started with Transactional Analysis in the 1960's, and whose influence can be seen far and wide today, even though the idea has waned a bit in academic psychology. It can be seen as a frequent theme on shows like Oprah. The catch-phrase of TA is, "I'm okay, you're okay".

Which sort of assumes that the goal is to move from feeling 'not-okay' to 'okay'. Now I don't like the idea of anyone feeling 'not-okay', but I do have a problem with 'okayness' as a goal. Additionally, there is the temptation to take a lot of behaviors that were formerly 'not-okay' and magically transform them into 'okayness'. Divorce is okay, adultery is okay, homosexuality is okay, okay okay okay. Because we don't want anyone feeling "not-okay."

I am really a little tired of the whole focus on struggling to be "okay". I am okay with being not-okay. I am over it. What I want, is something in life that rises above the mediocrity of okayness. I don't want to be 'okay'. I want to be lifted out of myself to something that is more than okay.

The reality check here is that we alone are infinitely mediocre. And I am over our worthlessness, it is not important. What is important is, that there is something beyond okay. Stop looking at yourself, because by yourself will never surpass the mediocrity of 'okayness'. I am mediocre. You are mediocre. Fortunately for us, Man is NOT the measure of all things, nor is he the center of the universe. God is. Lift your eyes above yourself, above 'okayness' and see God. The infinite perfect.

That which is a closed system is dead. Lakes that have no inlets or outlets dry up and become salt pans. If you put a living creature in a bottle, or even try to recreate a whole ecosystem in a bottle, sooner or later everything in the bottle will die. Because nothing from outside can reach it. That which is open is alive. That which is closed is dead.

And this describes most people - the walking dead. People obsessed with ourselves and sometimes with our 'okayness'. Our eyes are on our own navels, and I can tell you from personal experience that you will find no light emanating from there.

This was the fundamental epiphany of my heart attack. I was dead - not just during the heart attack, I was dead before the heart attack. I was walking and talking, but dead. And now had come alive. Just as Jesus said about the prodigal son - "You're brother was dead, and is alive again. He was lost... and is found." Of ourselves we were dead. God's breath can make the dead live.

Jesus said that most of us are the dead, not the living. Because our eyes are on justifying ourselves not on the only eternal and only good God.

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

Stop looking at yourself. Stop trying to defend your sins. Stop trying to defend your 'okayness'. Your personal mediocrity is not important. Instead fix your eyes on the only One who is good, who is holy, who is loving, who is merciful. Who is more than okay. Don't worry about justifying yourself anymore, you could not change your own self if you tried. Only God can change hearts. Focus always on God, and you will live. God is better than okay.

The Seasons of Faith

2009-06-01T15:50:00.002-05:00

From the book of hours created for the Duc de Berry

There are seasons to our faith just like there are seasons to everything else. In fact, you could say that faith is a season in contrast to faithfulness.

In a romantic relationship, there is the heady but unstable stage of falling in love, romantic love, which if it stands the test of time turns into the stable and enduring form of abiding love. Romantic love is a feeling. If your feelings change, the love changes. Abiding love is, you love someone even if you do not like them very much at the moment. Your love is permanent. It is not based on a feeling, it is based on standing in relation to someone. For instance, a family member is always a family member, even if you can't stand them half the time. They're blood, it's a relation not a feeling. It is of course better if you can like them, but if you only love someone when you can like them, your love is a very unstable and fragile thing. And not really worth very much.

For someone who comes to Christ suddenly instead of staying with the religion they were born into, there is the "born again" moment, full of emotion and new enthusiasm. Even for people who have been "cradle Christians" and never fell away from it, there is often a moment or several moments when you have an epiphany, the scales fall from your eyes, you resolve to live differently than you have. This is the springtime of the faith, which proceeds into the summer of good works, and hopefully the autumn of solid Christian life.

But winter always comes sooner or later. You feel dry, uninspired. Your feelings, once so exuberant, lose their sap and become wooden. You hit obstacles. You stumble.

It is possible that how you deal with these moments is more important than how you deal with the ones that went before. Before, God poured out His consolations on you. Now, He tests you. Before He gave. Now He takes away.

This is an exact parallel to what happens in the book of Job, except it happened more so to Job. Job had everything a man could want. Satan said, "of course Job praises You, You give him everything a man could want. But take all these things away, and see if he does not curse you." So God took him up on that bet. He took everything from Job except his life.

Job then demonstrates what love is when the feelings wane. He prays for death, but he will not curse God. He has gone beyond faith. He is faithful. He doesn't just have feelings toward God, he stands in relation to God, in nearness to God. True lasting loyalty, not emotions.

Don't get me wrong, I love the emotions of loving God. I love the consolations which God gives. I enjoy them in abundance. But if we want to love God like God loves us, we have to love Him even when we feel we are just zombies going through the motions. Even when we cannot like God, we must love Him. He probably doesn't like what we do a lot of the time, but He loves us just the same. Love that is unstable, isn't really love. This certainly isn't God's love for us.

That crassly materialistic ad on TV says, "diamonds are forever". No, they aren't. But God's love IS forever. How we deal with the bad times, the dry times, the times of backsliding, the times when we feel we are just going through the motions, is how we prove that we really do love God, not just what He can do for us.

Be Low

2009-05-26T13:50:00.003-05:00

Many Christians emphasize personal responsibility for one's actions, and that is a good thing. We should all aspire to be conscientious in every aspect of our lives.

How much evidence, however, is present in the Gospels for our modern idea of personal responsibility? Essentially none. My point here is not to diminish responsibility for the evildoer, although we should be merciful towards all, even those who are evil. I am making a larger point about our place in the world. A place of ignorance, torn by great powers of light and of darkness.

The Gospels relay the stories of many people who are under the sway of larger powers, mainly evil powers. There are people possessed by devils. Many modern people tend to diminish the very many stories of demon possession in the Gospels, I think this is profoundly unwise. If you assume that Christ Himself did not know the difference between a demon possession and a medical condition, you discredit His Messiahship and ultimately the whole thing. Christ was not administering lithium and St. John's Wort while muttering a few exorcist phrases to please the crowd. These people had devils, he exorcised the devils, end of story. Makes you wonder how many unexorcised devils are hanging around our homes and offices.

Those who are blind inherently cannot see where they are going. Those in darkness stumble at random. They cannot even see that they are blind, because they would have to have light with which to make such a comparison. There is no point in saying to a blind person, "watch where you are going!"

Jesus Himself is often compared to light, a light without which one cannot see at all. One of Jesus' first actions in Matthew after he leaves the desert is to preach in Capernaum, and Isaiah 9 is quoted in support of that action:

"the people living in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned."

In John 12, Jesus addresses a disbelieving crowd:

The crowd spoke up, "We have heard from the Law that the Christ will remain forever, so how can you say, 'The Son of Man must be lifted up'? Who is this 'Son of Man'?" Then Jesus told them, "You are going to have the light just a little while longer. Walk while you have the light, before darkness overtakes you. The man who walks in the dark does not know where he is going. Put your trust in the light while you have it, so that you may become sons of light."

It then says:

Even after Jesus had done all these miraculous signs in their presence, they still would not believe in him. This was to fulfill the word of Isaiah the prophet:

"Lord, who has believed our message
and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?" For this reason they could not believe, because, as Isaiah says elsewhere:
"He (God) has blinded their eyes
and deadened their hearts,
so they can neither see with their eyes,
nor understand with their hearts,
nor turn—and I would heal them."

-John 12:37-40 emphasis mine

In John 8, Jesus refers to a certain group of people, not as lost children of God, but as children of Satan:

"If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father's desire."

Jesus refers to some people as "His sheep" and others as not His sheep:

"How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly."

Jesus answered, "I did tell you, but you do not believe. The miracles I do in my Father's name speak for me, but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; no one can snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father's hand. I and the Father are one."

-John 10:24-30

Elsewhere the Gospel of John makes a peculiar reference to Moses holding up a snake in the desert. To make a long story short, this (bronze) snake was used as a sign when the Israelites were suffering from snake poison. Moses said that those who come to the sign of the snake will be healed, those who do not will not be healed and die. This strikes us as an extremely random test of faith, especially since graven images were forbidden in Judaism, and so technically Moses was breaking one of the ten commandments. Yet those who came to the snake did live, and those who did not did die.

Now at this point it may sound like I am strolling down the primrose path towards Calvinism. Be that as it may, that is not my point. My point is, that despite our proud assertions to the contrary, we are not responsible for the good we do, and we are not even responsible for the fact that we accepted Christ. We are not responsible for being saved, nor can we do anything at all good of ourselves. Any pride or honor in ourselves is completely baseless. God does what God does, and we can count ourselves infinitely fortunate if we are able at all to fit in with His action on this Earth. If, in other words, He can use us: not if we can do anything for Him. The action is all on His side.

Therefore of all the things that we can "aim to do" on this Earth, to be humble is the best of these things. Even then, we cannot "be" humble, we can only work on eroding our pride. God gives the gift of true humility. The best we can hope to do is oppose our own pride. We are randomly blessed without any merit to be Christians. Therefore pride should be right out the window. We did not make ourselves; we did not incline ourselves to be good; we cannot save ourselves and we do not now cling to God out of any power of our own. One of the few productive things we CAN do is, undermine our own pride. Destroy honor. Embrace our true position in the dust.

Woe to us, when all speak well of us. Woe to us, when we speak well of ourselves.

Saints, pray for us

2009-05-08T17:56:00.003-05:00

Mother Mary full of grace, who endured the unendurable, pray for us.

St. Peter who loved Christ, pray for us.

St. John the beloved, pray for us.

St. John the Baptist who lost his head for God, pray for us.

St. Thomas who saw Christ and believed, pray for us.

St. Francis, fool for God, pray for us.

St. Clare, poorest of the poor, pray for us

St. Becket, killed in the sanctuary, pray for us.

Blessed Father Pro, blessing his murderers, pray for us.

St. Lorenzo Ruiz, faithful unto death, pray for us

Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, pray for us.

All angels and archangels, pray for us

The Mystery

2009-05-07T16:51:00.003-05:00

People seem to have very little room in their lives for the mysterious these days. I don't mean Bigfoot or UFO's, there's probably enough of that to go around. The mysterious encounter with God.

Mysteries are at the core of our lives as Christians. What is the most common default explanation of the Trinity? It is a mystery. The Eucharist? It too is a mystery. God Himself is wrapped in mystery to our eyes, mystery and awe.

Back in the day, the day meaning the early medieval centuries, no saint would be complete without visions of God. If you didn't have visions, you probably weren't much of a saint. Perfectly ordinary people could have them, you didn't have to be notable in any way.

Well God hasn't changed since then, you can still have them. What people lack these days is openness to God, openness to mystery. They want their God to be foursquare and shipshape, to fit into both a thoroughly individual-centered world and a thoroughly practical one. That is never going to happen.

The modus operandi of the current age, which is modernism, is antithetically opposed to encounters with the mystery of God. I don't think I can say this any more strongly, modernism is anti-holy. Modernism is the belief that the individual is the measure of all things, whether in art or literature or religion. It is the proposition that there is no external guide, no objective truth, aside perhaps from the truths of science. Jesus had a reply for those who think there is no one way; He said "I am the Way."

Encounters with the mystery of God are simultaneously strange and warm, awe-inspiring and intimate. God comes closer to us, but also and perhaps more crucially, we are lifted out of ourselves towards God. We surrender ourselves. The everyday world and everyday consciousness peels off us like old clothes, and for a moment we are lifted towards heaven. We stand at the antechamber of Paradise. Your assumptions about what your life is, you can leave at the door. They don't have any place here. Take them away. This is the place of the Most Holy.

God CAN manifest His mystery to you at any time. The only thing lacking is, do you really want Him to? Are you really prepared to surrender completely to God? Do you want God, or only yourself?

Most Radiant Sun

2009-05-05T17:29:00.000-05:00

O most radiant Sun which enlightens the whole world
The people are soot
Only you are bright, you alone are right

Most brilliant, most pure, most good, most wise
Whiter than snow, purer than water, brighter than a billion suns

Invisible axis without which all being ceases
Who sustains all, feeds all, gives all

Only light of my life, have mercy upon us.
Do not do unto us as we deserve
but have pity on our ignorance

Your perfect sword has pieced my heart
and now I count all as loss
beside the infinite perfection of Your countenence

Forever King, Eternal God, Prince of Peace
who am I that you have considered me?
And who am I that you take thought of me?

But I have been created to Your design, not mine
Known before existence was, that I might gratefully submit
Despite my imperfection to the perfection of Your will

How should I love anyone but You?
How should I adore anything but You?
All things are dross beside You.

The greatest beauty is ugliness
The greatest wisdom is stupidity
beside Your immaculate splendor
The radiation of Your greatness

There is no honor, no gain, no achievement
You crumble these things in your hands like dried leaves
They become less than the ghost of things.

There is only The Eternal
And His Son, The Eternal

And His Children
Who once were grass and dust
Who are His Children
Who will be Eternal

The stars will die
Matter itself will fade into space
Space will dry up and blow away into nothing
The Eternal eternally Is.

Superlative Goodness, Majestic King
Angels praise you in words no human can comprehend
praise you in tones of pure love
brighter than supernovas

Infinite Beauty, Infinite Grace
We will praise you
as beings we do not now understand
eternally joyfully in Paradise

Out of the Desert

2009-05-02T00:08:00.004-05:00

Michael York made an awesome John - Jesus of Nazareth miniseries.

John wore clothing made of camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.

-Mark 1:6

Now this was John's testimony when the Jews of Jerusalem sent priests and Levites to ask him who he was. He did not fail to confess, but confessed freely, "I am not the Christ."

They asked him, "Then who are you? Are you Elijah?"
He said, "I am not."
"Are you the Prophet?"
He answered, "No."

Finally they said, "Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?"

John replied in the words of Isaiah the prophet, "I am the voice of one calling in the desert, 'Make straight the way for the Lord.'

-John 1:19-23

John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, "You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham as our father.' For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The axe is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."

-Luke 3:7-9

"I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire."

-Matthew 3:11-12

John came out of the desert. Like the Man With No Name in an Eastwood spaghetti western. Like a desert spirit. He spoke of wrath. He ate bugs. He wasn't what you would call a people person.

And yet what they named him for is forgiveness. John the Baptist. But the people of that time, just as today, are a bit hard of hearing, so we always think of him as a fire-and-brimstone sort. Prickly. Difficult.

But we have a more daunting wilderness today in one sense than what John faced. No I am not speaking of the Mojave or Alaska. The wilderness is all around us. It is a wilderness of hard ears and hard hearts. John at least had the Romans going for him, between the Roman soldiers and the Roman attempts to impose their religion and the Roman taxes, the people were pushed to the edge. In fact around 60 a.d. they had had enough and revolted, a revolt which the Romans crushed brutally. They were looking for a military commander, which neither John nor Jesus were, but they were at least willing to listen to a voice from the wilderness.

People in this society are too comfortable, too involved in material things, to listen to a John today. They are lost in a perfect trap, a perfect illusion. Satan is paying their price. Unless God humbles America, the best place to hear the Star Spangled Banner in eternity might well be hell. Because a lot of us are going.

I have been asking myself lately whether I want to continue to speak words that people do not want to hear, to tell of a God that people don't want to love. I expect that I have my answer now. I am not a people person either, I am prickly too. I am not user-friendly either. But barring any unfortunate encounters between my head and dinnerware, I continue.

Penance

2009-04-30T16:55:00.004-05:00

In the modern Christian churches, penance (to the extent it is practiced at all) is usually considered to be a means of repentance from sin. The exception to these would be the fasts, like lent or meatless Fridays for Catholics.

We should however consider penance as more than simply a sign that we have repented from particular sins. Penance is in fact a preventative to sin. The primary purpose of penance as an ongoing part of Christian life, is humiliation in the broadest sense: we commit penance to humble ourselves.

The Gospel in a nutshell could be considered to have three parts:

You have rebelled against God.
God gave His own son to atone, to do penance for your sin.
Through Christ you can be saved and reconciled to God.

The first one is, you rebelled against God. You have taken your soul, which rightly belongs to God not you, and arrogantly used it for your own purposes. Therefore an important part of our reconciliation is to remove (by God's grace) our arrogance. To place ourselves under God as is right, and even under our fellow man. Literally, we should be dishonored: we should remove the false honors we have taken to ourselves in our pride. Penance is a means to this end.

We should remember that Christ, who was in nature God, humbled Himself to come to earth as a peasant and a slave, and even to suffer humiliation, abuse and death, so that we unworthy ones could fall under God's grace and forgiveness and be saved. As He did, so we should do likewise.

Penance is a holy weapon against sin, not just repentance of sin. Through penance we can become more godly, not simply atone for the ways in which we have been ungodly. Penance is a positive action, not a negative reaction.

How should you practice penance? Well, how did our forebearers practice penance? How did the saints practice it? There are many ways.

The first rule of penance is, you must not do yourself lasting harm. You may and should fast, but not to the point where you are doing damage to yourself. Most of us would fast a long time before we reach that point, overfed as we are.

One means of penance is fasting. Now if you undertake fasting because you "should" do it, I can almost guarantee failure. You should fast because you want to do it, because you are as hungry for fasting as others are for food. You must desire fasting, truly from your heart, before it can do you any good.

Another method of penance is beating yourself in some manner. This is pretty controversial stuff, these days self-injury in any form for any purpose is considered pathological. Our ancestors in the faith, the saints, had no problem with this however, and you can hardly find any saint who did not practice it. Such a penance must be constrained in advance, you must not use any method which has any potential for lasting harm. I would advise a whip rather than other methods, a whip without any barbed ends. A suitable whip can be made of telephone cords. Constrain yourself in advance to a maximum number of lashes, say no more than 6.

Another penance might be to wear rough or scratchy clothing. Another might be to take only cold showers for a set period of time. Anything that mortifies the flesh is suitable as long as it has no potential for lasting damage.

One of the greatest penances is to invite ridicule and humiliation, to lose the favor of men. You must not however do this by any wrong means. Usually preaching the honest gospel is sufficient to invite ridicule from a lot of people. Being "excessively" concerned with the matters of God (which really means being concerned at all about them) is sufficient too. Ridicule and humiliation only count as penance if you do them in the furtherance of what is right and good, which is easy enough to do these days.

Now a lot of people are going to say I am going to extremes here: such people may have underestimated the vanity of the human mind and how much we should be humbling ourselves. Such people also may not be aware of the rewards and benefits of penance. Humble yourself and you will be exalted.

The Alien Francis

2009-04-30T01:42:00.003-05:00

Image from a work in progress - painting of St. Francis

Most people think of St. Francis as the patron saint of ecology, the happy-go-lucky proto-hippie smelling the flowers and composing poems to the Sun. This image of Francis is as pretty and harmless as it is shallow and untrue.

The more I read about Francis and begin to understand him, the more profoundly alien Francis appears. Not alien as in E.T., more alien than that if it were possible. Alien in the sense of, he was going places for God that most people today would find extreme, even dangerous. He really very seriously cut ties to this world in order to be an ambassador for the next one.

Francis was born to a rich cloth merchant, and in his teenage days he was a party animal, even more wild than most of his fellow-travelers in those circles. But it was also clear early on that he was having some kind of major existential crisis. He felt drawn by the Spirit to enter the ruined church of San Damiano near Assisi, and fell down to pray. He started to feel that something very profound had changed in him.

He was staring devotedly at a crucifix when the crucifix began to speak to him. Imagine someone coming into your church, all out of sorts, and saying "Jesus spoke to me through a crucifix." We would consider that a mental health problem, not a revelation. The medieval era is seen as a stereotypical era of ignorance and superstition, an attitude that casts as much light on our ignorance as on theirs.

Jesus told him through the crucifix that he should "rebuild my church." Francis took this instruction literally at first to mean rebuild church buildings.

Shortly after this, he went to a nearby town near Assisi to sell some cloth at the command of his father, a man as shrewd in business as he was heartless. Francis could be shrewd too, for another reason, and sold all the cloth and then sold his horse and started walking back to Assisi. The money was apparently like carrying hot coals to Francis, and he began to think of how the money could be gotten rid of. He came by the church of San Damiano and finding a poor priest inside, offered the priest the money. The priest was thoroughly perplexed that the notorious miscreant Francis was now offering the Church a sack of money, and fearing his father's anger the priest refused. Francis took the coins and threw them on a window sill, desiring to hold onto them no longer.

Francis' father confined Francis to the house, beat him, and finally brought him up before the Bishop. Standing before the bishop, Francis silently removed all his clothes, including his trousers, and threw them in the direction of his father. The bishop surprisingly understood this silent repudiation of all that Francis' father represented, and let him go.

Francis began rebuilding churches and quickly embraced TOTAL poverty. In other words, he did not disavow the ownership of frivolous things, but of all things altogether. He got rid of everything except a stinking rough tunic that scratched at his flesh and a cord around his waist. He gathered followers and permission from the Pope to form an order.

Francis believed in the mortification of the flesh. This doesn't mean going without red meat on Friday, he took it to levels that the modern era would consider pathological. Aside from the rough and scratchy tunic, he would throw himself into thorn bushes to tear his flesh. He and his brothers welcomed persecution, invited martyrdom, prayed while suspended by ropes, prayed while encased in an iron maiden of sorts or in wooden girdles, fasted for long periods, beat themselves, and they didn't hesitate to go naked in the snow and many other such privations. Francis was not a cuddly Al Gore by a long shot.

One of the more serious mortifications Francis had to endure in the beginning was the harsh humiliation by his former townspeople, who mocked him ruthlessly as a fool, a madman, a bum, or worse. He also forced himself to care for lepers, including washing their smelly decaying bodies. Lepers were often forced to wear a bell around their necks to warn people of their approach, so loathed were they by townspeople. Francis' various mortifications were not because he considered the body to be evil, he did not. But he considered the body to be the vehicle through which temptation could come, and as such it needed to be dominated by the spirit.

Francis also dressed like the lepers he cared for. Today we would have no problem in calling Francis a street person - covered in a filthy tunic, sleeping in the fields like an animal. Again, humiliation was considered a form of mortification too, and mortification was not only to resist temptation but to enforce humility. Francis was willing to go so far to humble himself that he did not hesitate to become an object of ridicule to the whole world, although he also began to gather many followers as well. We today might well think it sufficient to merely curb any prideful thoughts we might be having, but Francis was not someone who was going to compromise for his comfort or for the good opinions of others. He wanted to go all the freaking way. He wanted to be despised and ridiculed, an object of mockery. He wanted to experience what Jesus experienced when the Romans laughed at Him, slapped Him and spit on Him.

During the Crusades, Francis went to the Muslim sultan in Syria to try to convert him, not simply accepting but relishing the opportunity to be martyred. He begged the Pope to let him go to try to preach to the Sultan and the Pope finally allowed him. When he was captured by the Sultan's forces, they beat him and threatened to torture him, but finally the Sultan received him very graciously. The Sultan tried to sway Francis from his austerity by offering him gifts, but when Francis treated these things as he would dung, the Sultan was much impressed and did listen to him, but did not convert. Francis did not get the martyrdom he was seeking, God had a different martyrdom in mind.

Much has been said of Francis' love, communication with and sympathy towards animals, there is no need to rehash those here. Animals trusted Francis in a way that they do not trust other humans. Many miracles were attributed to Francis, but there is also no need to repeat them here. It wasn't long after Francis started forming his own disciples that St. Clare of Assisi came to him to join his order: he and she became the founders of the Poor Clares sisterhood which is also a story for another time.

Francis' severity towards his own body began to take its toll. When Francis' bones were dug up to move them to a shrine, scientists got the opportunity to examine his bones. Their findings? The bones were very small and porous, indicating serious malnutrition. Francis began to lose his sight. Towards the end of his life, he saw a vision of a seraph, a being mostly hidden by its 6 wings, nailed to a cross. He was very perplexed at this, his emotions both saddened and elated, grieving yet joyful. As he was pondering on what he had seen, holes appeared in his hands, side and feet. Francis recieved the stigmata. His clothes were at times completely soaked in blood. It also wasn't long before Francis became totally blind.

As he lay dying, he asked that he be stripped naked and lain on the cold floor of the Porziuncola, the little church of the Virgin Mary that he had rebuilt after San Damiano and which had become his home. He asked to be covered in a borrowed cloth, so that he could leave the world as poor as he came into it. That someone sick, nay dying, would asked to be stripped and put on a cold floor to die is almost beyond human understanding, but Francis wanted to leave this world completely and totally poor.

So I think we can see that Francis was not the fluffy-bunny saint that he is sometimes made out to be. Francis is indeed a deeply disconcerting figure, a deeply alien figure, a figure that has the potential to shake us deeply. He had no interest whatsoever in the things that virtually all of us would like for ourselves: comfort, regular meals, possessions, nice clothes, the approval of others, avoidance of pain, disease and death, financial security, longevity (he died at 45 years old), family (he was celibate), even personal hygiene. He is not simply otherworldly, he is shockingly otherworldly.

While I wouldn't want anyone to go through the severity that Francis put upon himself, it makes me question: to what degree have we sold out in order to have all the things that Francis despised? In the final analysis I cannot find fault with Francis although his zeal seems extreme to our modern minds. No one will accuse him of not taking Christ seriously. I find Francis admirable, though I do not see how I could ever be like him.

I can find fault, however, with us today. Are we slaves to all those things Francis treated as dung? If we are, should we be?

The Heaviness Of Grace

2009-04-30T00:26:00.003-05:00

Complicate this world you wrapped for me
I'm acquainted with your suffering

And all your weight
It falls on me
It brings me down
And all your weight
It falls on me
It falls on me

~Collective Soul, Heavy

I truly believe, that there are people and probably a good many people, who have never in their whole lives ever seen a drop of the light of God. They don't know anything about God, they don't love God because they don't know Him, and they never will. They live in complete darkness. As Jesus said on the cross: Father forgive them: they don't know what they are doing. And living in darkness, they sin.

Now turn that around. I do know and love God, and yet sometimes I do sin. Nothing major, I don't think they would qualify as mortal sins, and in fact many people might argue that the things I do don't even qualify as sin. I however do know better than that. I do sin. Every moment in which you are living for the World, is a sin. The people who are completely in the dark may sin more gravely, but their ignorance is greater too.

So how is it that I, who sin even though I do know better, can be considered any better off than those who sin and don't know better? My sin is more grievous in fact: I sin despite knowledge and God's abundant grace to me, they sin without knowledge and without grace.

I am a greater sinner than they are, because I sin despite knowledge and grace and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and they sin in ignorance and darkness. They may commit sins that are considered weightier, but they sin without knowledge. My sins though minor are heavier, because I should know better.

Can it be true, that those who are being saved are more guilty than those who are being damned? That those who are being damned are more evil but less culpable than those who are being saved? I feel certain that my lightest sin will weigh a ton. If I make it to that Eternal Kingdom, I do believe that it will be despite a battleship-weight of sin. Not because I have done anything particularly awful, but because I know God and His ways and yet sin. God has poured His grace on me, and yet I sin. The lost stumble in the dark, we stumble in the light. Their sin is less. We have nothing with which to excuse ourselves.

We who are "righteous" are greater debtors to God and in some sense more deserving of hell than the damned. Think about that for a minute.

If there is any difference between those who are being saved and those who are being damned, it is that the saved seek and receive grace. Forgiveness.

All we can do, is apologize and beg mercy, like people who keep running up a huge credit card bill we can never pay, so we ask for it to be written off.

Quia peccavi nimis cogitatione verbo, et opere: mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

(I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.)

~ Confession in the Roman Mass.

Zeitgeist

2009-04-26T12:04:00.003-05:00

Zeit⋅geist

[tsahyt-gahyst] -noun German. the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time.

Well so much for my vacation, lol. But the question that provoked it remains.

I have the great fortune, and the misfortune, to not be in step with my age. The things that I consider to be of the utmost importance, are considered by most people in my society as either being of lesser importance in their lives or else downright foolish.

We live in a profoundly unspiritual society. The forms of spirituality that are most popular are what I would call "human-centered" philosophies. Christianity too can be used as a "human-centered" religion - by which I mean, people's practice of Christianity can be that the Church fits in as an adjunct to a worldly-oriented life. People who go to church on Easter and Christmas only, often they are using the Church as an ornament to their self-centered existence. This is extremely common. It is also extremely ass-backward. God is the center of all things: not our individual lives, nor the institution of the Church.

While I am not always good at living God-first, I do believe in it. Being out of step with society in that regard, what should I do? Give up talking to people about things they clearly aren't that interested in? Keep my opinions to myself? Cast not my pearls among swine?

I think about how very much Jesus must be disappointed and vexed that so many do not accept the life He has freely given. The majority of people don't know and they don't care that they do not know. They are too busy being in bondage to listen. What should I do? Keep speaking or shut up? Worry about myself and let them do the same?

I still do not know the answer to these questions, but really by posting this I guess I have answered my own question as to what I will do. I am still here, I am still talking. But should I be?

WORSHIP RELOADED PART I: Altered State

2009-04-23T23:13:00.004-05:00

Worship, properly practiced, can be considered an altered state of consciousness. Now I use that term because people immediately know what I mean by that, whereas if I use the term "rectified state of consciousness" you might not. The normal mind, the normal state of consciousness, is a fallen consciousness. We call it normal because it is the one we are in most of the time, but it is far from being the highest state of consciousness. The highest state of consciousness is when you and God come into accord, become aligned as it were, reconciled, and God through this holy state can give you gifts and grace and peace.

I have been accustomed to experiencing altered states of consciousness basically my entire life, through natural and unfortunately at one time, through artificial means. In the 1980's I did hallucinogenic drugs more often than I care to recount. But the experiences of worship which I have encountered make LSD-25 look like a cheap carnival sideshow. Which it in fact is: not a higher state of consciousness, just a deformed one.

Is worship as an altered state a necessary condition of worship or a superfluous extra bonus? I cannot imagine experiencing worship in any other way, so I am not the best judge of that. I would say however that people who do not experience worship in this way, should be open or open themselves to it. If there is a mental wall between you and God that keeps you from communion with God, you should tear it down.

In worship there are three things that I would consider necessary conditions for experiencing this condition:

1. Radical humility and repentance
2. Radical reverence
3. (which God gives in response to our reverent humility), Radical grace

The key word in all three is radical. You cannot measure out your repentance like doses of medicine, you have to become aware of the real and true fact that you (and I and everyone) have fallen far short of God's glory and the glory of adopted sonship that He wants to give us if we are willing. If possible, you should not just be humble with your mind but your soul and body - kneel, get on the floor if possible, search your soul. Give and you will receive, what you get out of worship depends on what you put into it.

Now you may say, "I have already repented for all my sins!" That is almost certainly not true. Every single second of your life that you neglect God and do not put Him first, is in essence a sin. It is not possible for you to repent enough: fortunately God usually takes us at our best effort. The purpose of repentance is not simply to cover any mortal sins you may have committed lately so you don't go to hell, but in fact to reconcile us IN TOTALITY with God. Meaning that you repent of your ungodly state of mind, not just things you do or commandments you break. So the more you repent, the closer you can approach God. You have to get down low before you can approach the Highest.

Radical reverence - consider yourself in the real presence of the Only Holy and Almighty God. For priests, touch the things of God with reverence. Touch the Host in the Eucharist with reverence. Give and you will receive, what you get out of worship depends on what you put into it.

Radical grace - God's generous response to your genuine submission. Cleansing, love, peace. Other things. There are holy things that I do not feel comfortable talking about. The most wonderful things.

There are people who want a "measured" reconciliation to God or who don't worship in an altered state, and in most churches the services are mainly tailored to people who do not want to get face-down on the floor and do some sore repenting. That is perfectly fine. If the Church had to survive solely on weird religious freaks, their doors would probably be closed. ;) The other side of the coin is, those weird freaks can be a channel through which the Spirit sends refreshing and renewal to our sometimes-stale church institutions. Churches that can catch that breeze might benefit from it.

In Part II I consider the most important worship in the Church: the Eucharist.

The Narrow Gate Revisited

2009-04-23T13:24:00.003-05:00

"Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it."

Matthew 7:13-14

If we take this statement of Jesus at face value, and there doesn't seem to be any reason at all not to, how do we reconcile ourselves to it? How do we reconcile ourselves to the idea that the vast majority of people, and we ourselves could easily be included in that number, are not going to be inhabiting a good place in their post-mortal existence?

"If it is hard for the righteous to be saved,
what will become of the ungodly and the sinner?"

1 Peter 4:18

It somehow offends our sensibilities to think that the human species is somehow like low-grade ore and that most of it will wind up on the clinker pile in order to extract the few ounces of pure metal. The rest, the majority, winds up on a sort of waste pile. To modern sensibilities, this is an offense and heaven, if it exists, should be a universal entitlement like voting or the right to assemble or something. God however is not required to oblige modern sensibilities.

I do not know anything about hell except that I don't want to wind up there. Maybe its not so bad, sort of like Sodom meets Vegas. Certainly for the truly evil, whatever it is would be better than having to look at the holy face of God all the time and realize that you are an offense to the Eternal, anathema to everything right and good and holy. Heaven would be a worse hell for them than hell.

The usual impression that the statement on the broad and narrow roads gives is, OMG we're all doomed. ;) Let us turn that on its head for a minute though: what might our lives be like if we truly press in to that narrow road? We might neither know nor imagine what wonderful things God has for us who love Him. So we should not take from this despair that we or people we know might be on the broad road to hell, as much as we should take encouragement to press in to God.

The point of the broad/narrow roads is that you DO have to press in to God. You have to be devoted, committed, eager to do God's will. Just sliding along doing whatever you feel like is not a recipe for either holiness on Earth nor blessedness in Heaven.

A Stream Of Sacrifices

2009-04-17T12:04:00.002-05:00

Israel is in bondage and Moses comes along. Israel slides back into bondage, either physical or spiritual, and the next prophet comes along. And this pattern repeats, if prophets aren't leading them out of slavery physically, they are leading them out of bondage spiritually, and many are killed by the same people they came to liberate. And every time they slide right on back into slavery, spiritual or physical.

Then there is a long break. No prophets come. Not until John the Baptist, and he is just the warm up act for when God Himself comes to bring liberation by His own entrapment, weakness, helplessness and suffering in the material.

After Jesus there are a lot of leaders in the Church, it is like God is loosing the taps on the Prophet spigot, except now they are called apostles and church fathers and strange disquieting ascetics in the desert. Then again, it tapers off and now it is the Christians who are settling back into slavery, not physical but spiritual.

God said to Francis, "You see my church is falling apart? Rebuild my church."

There have been a few more since then, but now on to my main question:

Why do we continually need these sacrifices to get us back on track? These exceptional people come (exceptional only so because God made them so), and for a while a little piece of heaven falls on Earth, and then they go away, and everything is back the way it was. We keep going back into bondage, willingly apparently. The pig keeps going right back into the mud. Right now we are in there pretty deep. In the developed West at least, the faith has begun to decline, and I am not merely speaking of a decline in church attendance. It is not only or even mainly that the world outside has started to erode the church, the world is IN the church. We have a decay within as well as without us.

The people are like sheep who have lost their way, and they don't know how to get back by themselves. Just as history seems to need its Julius Caesars, Thomas Edisons, and Martin Luther Kings in order to move forward, so we need our prophets and saints.

The difference is, after Edison died, nobody forgot how to make a light bulb.

Continual Crucifixion

2009-04-09T12:12:00.002-05:00

Okay, I know I am on vacation figuratively speaking, but I just had to pass this on:

“The whole of Christ’s life was a continual passion; others die martyrs, but Christ was born a martyr. He found a Golgotha, where he was crucified, even in Bethlehem, where he was born; for to his tenderness then the straws were almost as sharp as the thorns after, and the manger as uneasy at first as the cross at last. His birth and his death were but one continual act, and his Christmas Day and his Good Friday are but the evening and the morning of one and the same day. From the creche to the cross is an inseparable line. Christmas only points forward to Good Friday and Easter. It can have no meaning apart from that, where the Son of God displayed his glory by his death."

~John Donne, Book of Uncommon Prayers

I Need A Vacation

2009-04-07T23:20:00.004-05:00

The question has occurred to me to question, why I am doing this blog? Is this blog not, in its own way, another worldly attachment which I would be just as well without?

Certainly in every place that has internet access, the Bible is accessible throughout the world, and missionaries have struggled and died to bring the Gospel to every corner of the Earth. For any corner that has not heard the Gospel, they still do a desperately needed service.

But every English-speaking nation on Earth has ready access to the Bible and the New Testament and many other resources besides. No one lacks a Bible who wants one. If people will not listen to Jesus Christ, why would they listen to me? If people will not read the Bible, why would they read me?

If people already do believe, well I am glad if I can ever be any use to them, but everything they need has already been written by better men than I. This blog itself can represent to me a kind of attachment to the World, another distraction from God. I want to serve God, but evangelizing to people who already probably have Bibles in their house and have already heard the Gospel may not be a very fruitful service or a very good use of my remaining time on Earth. Frankly, the best use of my limited time remaining may be to remove (with God's grace) from myself the snares of the world and focus myself on God.

I wish I could do more than that but I am not sure whether I can. God knows. But the hour is late.

"Therefore keep watch, because you do not know on what day your Lord will come. But understand this: If the owner of the house had known at what time of night the thief was coming, he would have kept watch and would not have let his house be broken into. So you also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him."

~Matthew 24:42-44

The Good News About The End Of Our Supposed "Christian America"

2009-04-06T21:07:00.005-05:00

Yes you heard that right, good news. First the news itself, via Newsweek:

The End Of Christian America

There are now twice as many athiests and agnostics as there are Episcopalians, and many other harbingers of the end of Christian dominance in America. Now you may be asking yourself, if you are a Christian, "How in the heck is that good news?"

Well it is. Why? Because the Church in the West as we have known it has become lukewarm, a theistic self-congratulation society, and has lost its moral and spiritual authority among people by pandering to the World, being a lapdog of the rich, and dabbling in politics. History has shown us that the surest way to suppress real Christianity, is to give it temporal power.

We have to admit to ourselves that a large number of those "in the Church" weren't going to be saved back in the pre-1960's "Christian America" and aren't going to be saved now. Because they were and are in church for some other reason than radical devotion to Christ. 20 million radical Christians are more important to the work of Christ in the world, than 200 million lukewarm ones. Pseudo-Christians do more harm to Christianity than twice their weight in athiests.

We frankly don't need a hundred million almost-nearly-Christians, we aren't doing them any good and they certainly aren't doing us any good. They need to go home for awhile and get their heads together. We need 50 million radically Christian shock troops, if you will excuse the military metaphor. We need hard-core Christians. And then we need to:

1. Educate them, whether or not they can afford it. Seminaries that only the rich can afford only ensures that the Church will remain in the pocket of the rich.

2. Start reaching over the Reformation divide in our Christian study. Learn from each other. This does not mean that Protestants, for instance, need to forget the errors of the Roman Catholic Church or vice versa: that means that we need to learn from ALL of Christian history, all the Christian saints and missionaries, whether they were before Luther or after.

3. Both Protestants and Catholics, admit the errors of our own ways before and after the Reformation and confess that whoever was more to blame for it, to break the Church of Christ in two was a grave sin. Which means that Protestants need to search their sins and errors resulting from the Reformation, and Catholics need to search their sins and errors that led to it, and both need to search their sins and errors in the present day. Preferably together. CONFESS. We Protestants. We Catholics, We all sinned against our brothers and God.

4. Renounce the covert idea that hovers around in our Church, that Christianity is somehow for our material benefit, for our benefit in this world. Our kingdom is not in this world. Regard instead sacrifice, suffering and even martyrdom as the ultimate benefit, because it benefits our souls. What good does it do you to have nice things, and lose your soul?? What do you plan on giving in exchange for your soul, your GM stock?? God doesn't take payments. Faith in Christ is indeed for our benefit, the whole creation was for our benefit, but for the benefit of our souls, to change us from the state of being foul sin stains on the Creation to make us adopted sons of the everlasting and only God.

5. Start confronting the World, not by trying to buy it's politicians, but by confronting it's sin, vanity, triviality, ugliness, brutality, godlessness, meaninglessness and inequality. We do this on a moral and spiritual plane, in the hopes of bringing their souls to God, not in the hopes of scoring a goal in the culture war. We lost the kulturkampf, we should have lost it, because we were trying to win votes and power not souls.

Physical churches may eventually crumble to the ground as a result of this decline, be sold and turned into parking lots, and that is sad. I know several churches that are just skidding by on the skin of their teeth, and I know their clergy is devout. But physical churches can be rebuilt. The thing we need to be worried about rebuilding however, is the soul of the Church. We need to get back to Jesus Christ and practicing what He taught. If we don't do that, it won't matter how many buildings and jobs in the clergy we have.

Advertisements From The Future #1

2009-04-03T17:59:00.007-05:00

Satire. Not intended to cast noodle companies in a negative light. I like noodles.

Well why not? The stem cell people are always saying we need to "use" all these leftover human embryos from abortions and other sources?

If you say, "No, this could never happen", well, why? Any thorough and consistent materialistic atheist will say, there is no material reality to moral law. Morality would therefore be a social tool. Social conditions can change from decade to decade. Therefore public morality would also be subject to change, would it not? And after all, those embryos need to be "used"according to the stem cell people.... Maybe they are tasty? Or maybe a small, um discriminating, clientele would pay heavily for a cannibalistic treat. In all likelihood, some small number of profoundly depraved deviants are eating aborted human embryos now, today. Hey, it's not like it's murder, right? Someone in a white jacket has already committed that act legally for you. What law exactly would it break? What is to keep it from becoming popular in the future?

Of course, we don't need new stem cell lines. For one, no actual treatment for human ailments has come of stem cell research. Secondly, stem cells have the property of reproducing themselves endlessly, so there would be no shortage of stem cells from existing lines. And all stem cells do pretty much the same thing, which is to turn into any kind of tissue in the body. Stem cells from the patient's own body, without involving abortion, may likely prove to be a more viable use anyway.

The stem cell debate of course is a sideshow compared to the main issue, which is the morality of abortion itself. The Lord, creator of all that exists, source of supernal goodness and mercy, begs to differ with the pro-abortionists: it is not moral, it's horrific. It's an abomination. May God have mercy on our darkened souls.

Do I think that abortion should be illegal? Government boots banging down doors and all that? People arrested, guns drawn? Bad mothers thrown in jail?

We Christians are not engaged in a political struggle. We are engaged in a spiritual one. Jesus never once in His time on earth had anyone sent to jail. We are here to bring souls to God, not to collaborate with institutions which are to some extent inherently evil. Meaning government. People become rulers because they love power, not God. The instrument of government is brute force, naked brute power. Socially, that is often necessary, but we should not consider ourselves as belonging to "society" but belonging to Christ. Jesus said, do not resist an evil person.

We Christians have spent much of our moral capital by getting in bed with politicians (sometimes literally) who do not have Christian objectives at heart and who use us and then break their promises to us. We have lost credibility by our collaboration with the World and our lack of fire for Christ. It is not a political problem it is a moral problem and requires moral authority. If we don't get our moral authority back, we will inevitably decline whatever political power we may temporarily gain.

We get our moral authority back by acting like the original Christians acted: everything for God. In action and not as a slogan. No compromise with the World and it's traps.

Abortion is evil and wrong and should never happen. If we try to make a political solution to that problem, we will both lose that battle and lose our moral authority by collaborating with the Caesars instead of serving God.

Who we are

2009-04-02T14:26:00.003-05:00

God alone holds us above the muck of sin and the flames of eternal darkness

I was undertaking the second Ignatian Exercise (I have moved forward to the exercises in a book, a little ahead of my supervised exercises with the Fr. in New York), and was extremely surprised and not a little disturbed by what happened. There is a saying about the Exercises: if you really knew what you were getting into, you wouldn't have the temerity to take them. :)

If you think you will undertake the Exercises at some point, which I cannot possibly recommend enough:

STOP READING NOW
This is because you should not read ahead in the exercises or read about what the exercises are ahead of time. Don't read this, do go get yourself a copy of the Exercises or attend an Ignatian retreat. After you finish Exercise 2 you can read this.

Anyway, the exercise was to bring to mind every sin you can recall from the day of your birth and repent of them. You are to imagine that you are there, where you were at the time. So if you were in a different house, imagine the house: if you were at school, imagine the school. Put yourself where you were, then. I had figured the exercise would be heavy on the repenting and sorrowing, and short on the spiritual warfare and struggle with temptation side. I was wrong.

I immediately found myself not only recalling what I did and where, but feeling the same anger, envy, wrath, jealousy, lust, greed, ect. that I had at the time. Now I have spent most of my life without God, even as an athiest, so I had quite a lot of all of this, and I was feeling all of this like I was back then. I felt the enormous lust that I had felt back when I was a porn addict. I felt the wrath I had felt when I was angry and hateful. The desire for drug and alcohol abuse. I felt it all, assailing me. I felt, in fact, that only a hair, only a thread, from God, was keeping me from doing it all again. I wanted to go online and look up such pornographic vileness as might even shame my old self. Only a hair, a thread, it seemed prevented me. I was dangling by a thread, from God.

I felt as though only a thread kept me from a morass and swamp of complete and total vileness. I was reminded of the famous sermon by the fire and brimstone preacher Jonathan Edwards:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.

When I completed the recall portion of the exercise, suddenly I was myself again, like a light switch had been switched off and then back on. I was able to see all these things as they are again, as vileness. The switch that was turned, was God's grace. God's hand alone holds me above the squirming quagmire. It isn't me that keeps me up, He does. Anything good in me isn't from me and I did not make it, God did.

The next part of the exercise was to imagine how small you are compared to the total of humanity, how small humanity is compared to the whole creation, how small and lowly the creation is compared to the glory and brilliance of all the Angels and Saints in Paradise, how lowly they are compared to God, and again how lowly you are compared to all of the above. In addition to which, how great the sins you have, every one against God Himself. How corrupt is your body, the internal organs thereof, and so on. How petty you are compared with God's generosity, how ugly you are compared to His beauty, how evil you are compared with His goodness. So ignorant are you, and he is wise. So weak are you, and He is strong.

In summation: you and I and everyone else, are a miniscule droplet of pus, bodily secretions, hate and corruption, floating in the immensity of the heavens like a miniscule pernicious plague virus.

We are all of us, worth nothing, actually less than nothing because we actively vex God. We are a waste of space. We are a waste of breath. We are a burden on creation. We are an ugly splotch of evil that should have been wiped out of existence long ago.

And there is no reason whatsoever why the earth has not swallowed any of us up heretofore, any reason why we should not be so obliterated now, no reason why we should not be crushed into a greasy spot as we might do to a scorpion crawling over our floor. Would it be so that we were merely a nothing, merely dirt of no value, but in fact we are an actual burden to God's creation.

And yet the entire Creation bends to serve our needs, God brings forth fruit on the trees and animals to eat and soft things to lie upon. Angels and Saints minister to us and pray for us. God's own grace continually and in ways we cannot even comprehend, pours upon us in an attempt to bring us closer to the glory of blessedness and to His happiness and perfection. He sent His own Holy Son to suffer in our place.

Who here below can speak of the unspeakable generosity, glory, wisdom, perfection, and beauty of God? We have no idea, we really do not. Glorify Your name, Father.

What should we be, in knowledge of this? Humble. Giving. Kind. Not selfish. And we should, it goes without saying, we should be one who seeks God. God, who is so kind to you and I who are so undeserving of it.

Thank you also Father for giving us your Saint, the blessed Ignatius of Loyola, who wrote for us this most helpful book using the wisdom You gave him.

Grappling with God

2009-04-02T11:01:00.003-05:00

Jacob wrestles the angel?? My money is on the angel

I have recently been impressed with the fact that we need to contemplatively peel back the meaning of some of the things Christians have been saying for a thousand plus years, so that their true significance becomes clearer. One example would be the saying "seeing the face of Christ in the face of the poor or oppressed".

Now it is clear that what you are actually looking at is a wretched created being like yourself, not Christ. They might not even be Christians, they might in fact (God forbid) be on a fast track to hell. But the compassion you show them should be directly connected to your love of God as the absolute and utmost. And He loves them.

It is a hard saying, but God is the only thing that is truly to be loved: you should love them because of and through your love of God. So in a real sense, you are not serving the created being in front of you (although you desire his union with God because God desires it). You are serving Christ.

"Grappling with God" is another phrase that I have been trying to peel back the meaning of.

Christianity is often seen and often practiced as a sort of passive religion - not passive in the sense of turn the other cheek. Passive in the sense of, you get your God card stamped, confess Christ, go to church, put some money in the kitty, and you are good to go in the God department. Thinking is sort of optional. Serious ongoing repentance and penance is sort of optional. Grappling with God is optional.

And I don't by any means want to diminish such people. Not everyone has been given the same grace, and for some people just being a Christian at all is infinitely preferable to the alternative. I don't want to trouble the conscience of people who really cannot do more than this. But surely this isn't all of us? We could do more, we just don't.

I wish that we were a people who grappled with God a little more. Now what do I mean by that? On it's face, wrestling with God is a fool's errand, lol. :) Who are we wrestling with? Not ourselves alone, otherwise where would God fit in? The objective after all is to know and love God more.

Does grappling with God imply doubt and skepticism about God? On the contrary, in the sense I mean it, it requires faith. More and more faith.

What is this grappling that I am grappling to refer to? The words are failing me a little bit. If I think about what I really mean by this, it is really more that I open myself to God's grappling with me, I invite God into my heart to wrestle with freeing up the parts of me that are tied down to the snares of Satan. I invite God in and say, "Mold me, shape me." In that process, our minds and souls often have to reason their way through the changes God wants to make in us, because He does not change us except through our will to be changed. So God points out the snakes in our house, as it were, and we have to go wrestle them down. Using repentance, penance, contemplation, and both rational and inspirational thinking.

And I wish I saw more fire to grapple, in the Church. We in America at least have been happy to sit in the shade of our temples and grow fat and lazy and dull. We wait for people to wander in to our churches and fit themselves into our pews. We need to light a fire under ourselves, we need to let God's fire in. We need to show God's fire to the world. And we aren't going to be able to do that, unless we begin to grapple with ourselves with God.

Lord I pray that you may release us from the traps of this world, teach us to accept the labor and humiliation of Christ, and change our hearts so that we will be devoted servants who will count no other gain in life, save the doing of Your will.

The World

2009-03-31T14:17:00.003-05:00

"As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you."

-John 15:19

"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son"

-John 3:16

One casualty of the Christian tendency to form schisms and reformations is, there is no really consistent body of Christian education going on. Sure all the basics are set out (although all sects do not exactly agree on all basics, lol), but if you want to really go deep on the Christian inquiry thing, you can find yourself relatively on your own. I mean, unless you go to seminary I suppose. And then which seminary? Which sect, for that matter?

This can be a problem if you want, in good faith, to really take this stuff seriously. Do I think that most Christians take Christ seriously enough? No. Do I think I take Christ seriously enough? No. In fact I know absolutely and without question that I don't take God as seriously as God should be taken. There is no doubt in my mind about it whatsoever.

The New Testament calls out for serious meditation not cursory examination. For instance, the quotes above. We are "called out of the world" and "God loves the world", both. Both are true. In the past, I have tended to more focus on the first quote than the second. Clearly, bad things are going on in the world. A world-denying outlook fits me pretty well at the moment. But there are two senses of the word "world" and they are not the same. One, the World that Satan has thoroughly corrupted and infiltrated. Second, the world that God created, and which He intended to be good.

The World of Satan, yes, we need to be called out of that. That is what God has been trying to do all along, He has been trying to call us to Himself. But really not us alone, although us most of all. Truly, He is calling the whole Creation to Himself. He is seeking to redeem it. It was not made for evil.

We have to call the enemy by his name, Satan. As a child of the modern world, the concept of Satan is a very alien one. Surely there is no real Satan, right? It's a fairy story to scare bad children. No, it isn't.

Satan's influence on the creation and especially on human structures of power (governments, institutions, yes sometimes churches) is huge. But the creation is not Satan, nor was it created for evil. I have tended myself to throw the entire creation in with the Satan camp, but in fact it is in a titanic struggle to be free from Satan. The work of God in the world does not always seem as apparent as the work of the other guys, but it is still there. God does win out at the end, we already know this (hey, He's God). The Creation is transformed ultimately into what it was always intended to be, and God willing we will see it when it happens. And what it will be then, no one knows but God, except that it will be more than we can now imagine.

God can transform evil to be used for His purposes sometimes and that is part of the whole thing we are going through here. The Fall of Creation was not unforeseen by God and God indeed is using it, although He did not make it happen. God is using the Fall of Man to do His will, even though we did it ourselves and freely chose to rebel (as Satan did).

So to love the "world" and to hate the "World" at the same time is not impossible. Our sense of the material, and of the Creation itself has become contaminated by evil. The World we hate, World in the sense of "Worldly", is not God's creation but Satan's contamination. Yes, we were called out of the World. From now, we are no longer of the World. But we were called to love the Creation and the things in it.

Make sense?

Ignatian Exercises

2009-03-30T21:30:00.003-05:00

I have embarked on the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, thanks to the auspices of a kind Catholic priest in New York who runs the exercises online. He was okay with helping me take the exercises even though I am an (Anglo-Catholic-oriented) Anglican and not a Catholic.

St. Ignatius was founder/cofounder of the Society of Jesus, more commonly called the Jesuits, around 1543. The Spiritual Exercises were and are intended to eliminate from a person those things which interfere with the enactment of God's will for them. The vow of the Jesuit order is one of total self-donation to God. To have no goal, no reward and no glory save the doing of God's will.

It is already clear from the introduction, what a wonderful and powerfully strange, thing these exercises are. I have only read the introductory notes provided by the priest thus far, you take the exercises one at a time as if there were to be no others. But already, just the introductory notes, have provoked some serious introspection in me.

Take this statement seriously for a moment: we are always in the sight and presence of God.

All Christians believe this as a matter of common doctrine - but do we really live that way? Do we actually bring that to our conscious minds on an ongoing basis? Speaking for myself, no I usually do not. Setting out to do that with serious intent, things start to change. Starting to do that, you start to question parts of yourself you have not questioned.

What appears to be a strong psychological emphasis seems strange for Christianity, I think that often Christian practice is not strong on self-examination - it has no major role in our practice. It almost seems Buddhistic, although of course with completely different aims in mind. Seems Buddhistic, but we should remember that once upon a time in Christianity, the best and brightest went to monasteries to try to effect the salvation of their souls through solitude, confession, penance and instruction, and the Exercises would seem far less alien.

I haven't gotten past the introduction, but even what I have seen so far in the preparatory materials leaves me thoroughly impressed and desireous of taking the exercises diligently. I will keep you informed.

Surely He took up our infirmities...

2009-03-30T09:55:00.004-05:00

“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted.”

- Isaiah 53:3-4

This passage (today's quote from biblegateway.com) is my passage for meditation upon today.

Very often, perhaps always, God gives us a foretaste of heaven in order to steel our resolve for new trials here on Earth. Lucky are those who are in the midst of the untroubled breezes of peace and delight from heaven. Most of those however must sooner or later come back down to tear at the chains of hell that fasten on themselves and others, especially themselves. God gives us a great promise, but does not promise that things will be necessarily very good here. The more of one's own sin one repents of, the more one understands how very much sin there is to repent of. The more aware one is of the holy, the more wretched one knows oneself to be. One sets to work; not so much that we work, but that we allow God more and more to work on us. And this work is not always pleasant, but it is always worthwhile, more so than anything else could be.

One of the works we may be called upon to do is, share the suffering of Christ. Be despised as He was despised. Be rejected, as He was rejected. Be sorrowful, as He was sorrowful. Be afflicted, as He was afflicted. When this happens to you, you may think that God has abandoned you. Indeed, it is more likely that God thinks you are strong enough to endure it now, whereas before you were too weak to endure it. It isn't pretty work, but it is work that Christ did and that we may be called upon to do. This world is the furnace, and God is the goldsmith, using the sufferings and indeed the evils of the world to smelt the base ore of ourselves into something precious. We have to look through the fire, and peer through the process of our repentance, to the everlasting good that is achieved by it.

If you are looking backwards, perhaps nostalgically, to the glorious revelations and happy forgiveness of God when you were first saved, and forward to the fires of purgation, sorrow, rejection and purification of the present day, be glad. God has found you worthy of making more perfect, strong enough to endure it. He would not give you a trial that was too much for you. God has mercy on the weak and the wavering. Those who are filled with joy and without trouble should be grateful and humble: God has spared you the burdens He gives others. Those who are in the process of purification, repentance, sorrow and suffering should be thankful: God is treating you as a true son. He did not spare His own holy Son either, but had Him take on the sins of the world.

The future's so bright, I could slit my wrists

2009-03-26T21:03:00.003-05:00

sell baby sell

Am I so wrong to think that we are heading for an increasingly technologically-bright, increasingly spiritually bleak, future? I do think it, in any case.

The archetype of the "modern era" was this: old authorities are dead, long live chaos. I say was, we've been "modern" for quite some time now. True, the old authorities, the old certainties, like Newton's physics, deserved their death in many ways. Old authorities and certainties have been dying for as long as there has been anyone around to record such a fall, although they didn't fall quite as fast and hard as they did with the advent of the modernist era.

The movie Blade Runner is sort of a taste of the era of Chaos writ large, or in other words, it is a left-handed revelation of what has already happened, what is happening now. Los Angeles is the most modern of cities: no past, a vast Euclidian grid of same-ish streets creating the only (arbitrary) order in what is otherwise formless chaos, soulless ennui. Meanwhile in this future image of our present centerlessness, our hero goes... cleaning up after the tendency of modern science to warp the human image into it's own image, or rather to make the human image blurry to the point where no definition of "human" is anymore possible. Fetuses are considered nonhuman today of course, and in Blade Runner's world, some folks who are otherwise indistinguishable from humans but aren't really, get hunted down when they neglect to turn themselves off by the sell-by date. Replicants, products of modern technology, just like humans but not really humans. Or are they? Who can say anymore.

The technology already exists to make not-quite-humans: they are called chimeras. Maybe you want a more loyal human or a more disposable employee - just splice a bit of dog DNA into a human embryo, and voila! A semi-human. The only thing stopping them is that it wouldn't be popular, but just wait. For all we know, it has already happened. And the further blurring of lines in a huge number of ways waits just around the corner. Want a clone standing by to supply you with replacement organs? Why not? Eventually, there won't be much standing in anyone's way. Crunchy dried human embryo noodles? The stem cell people keep saying, we have to use all those aborted embryos somehow. Maybe they are tasty? Why not, in a world without rules?

Without order. Without humanity. Without, in other words, all those things that the modernist revolution overthrew. Face it, modernists: you threw the baby out with the bathwater. It is a post-Einsteinian world, there is no center. There are no principles. There is only science, and it only matters because it gives us the newest technological goodie box. Virtual immortality for the rich, created by cloned organs and the latest in technological science? Sure. It's all for you, baby, if you have the dough to spend, don't mind the unconscious monsters from the Id floating around.

The next revolution, if it happens, will not be post-post-modernism. Post-post-modernism is modernism regurgitating on itself. It will be the return to order and harmony and humanity - but the next revolution may never happen. The modernist revolution shows every sign of being a permanent revolution: a permanent rejection of any moral value. Nietzsche would be so proud of us. The revaluation of all values, in favor of: no values. The omnipotent self. Truly, the poor boy would be giddy if he knew.

There is a second danger however. That the ultimate comeuppance for modernism will come so hard, that we will be thrust into a second Dark Age. Islamic Fundamentalism isn't showing any signs of slowing down, and it likes modernism not at all. In time, they could win.... or the world could be thrust into a permanent state of warfare between the Islamic underclass and the modernist elites, maybe within the same society. Europe, for example. Europe has a lot of muslims in it. Wouldn't be hard to visualize a permanent class warfare, with the diminishing modernist elite using their technology to keep down the burgeoning Muslim underclass by force. Democracy would be out the window, of course, since the extremists would win by popular vote. This again is maybe only a few decades from being a possibility in Europe. Same thing is happening more violently in Israel - if they don't come up with an agreement to partition Palestine, very soon the Palestinians in Israel will outnumber the Jews quite significantly. Then Israel will have to disenfranchise the Palestinians, or the Palestinians win the Mid-East conflict by default.

Think about it: a shrinking but long-lived techno-freaky modernist elite, new limbs perhaps sprouting from their artificially near-immortal bodies, ruling over a disenfranchised, short-lived swarming violent rapidly-reproducing mass of second-class citizens. Not a happy planet. Not a viable long-term situation.

So you might want to rethink this whole postmodernist thing. Find a happy compromise with some of the good things you tossed out in your bloodless coup. Like God. And a humanity in His image.

Anger and Outrage

2009-03-26T18:12:00.002-05:00

wfaa.com

I have an anger management problem. I am fully conscious of the fact. The thing that pushes my angry button more than anything else though, is to see those in authority abuse their power. That really really really pisses me off. Really very much.

Picture this: you are racing to the side of a loved one in their last few minutes of life. You have your hazard lights on, clearly declaring that there is an emergency. You slowly run a red light. A cop throws on his sirens, but you continue on the short distance to the hospital to try to get to your loved one's side before they die.

When you get to the emergency room, the cop who has been following you pulls his gun on you and starts harassing you, after you clearly explain the situation. This just happened in Dallas, much to the shame of every decent Dallasite.

My immediate response was extreme anger and indignation, a police officer throws away his responsibility to help and starts acting like a power mad cowboy. I felt that officer Robert Powell who acted in this manner, should be terminated from his position with all possible haste, with all possible dishonor. He isn't worthy to push a broom outside the Public Library, never mind wear a gun.

However, as part of my own self-improvement and self-remediation, I have to admit that anger, while an easy solution, isn't always the best or most constructive one. Much as my emotions would like to see officer Powell publicly stripped of all rank and position in the Dallas Police Department, such a solution leaves none of us the better off. Justice? Does seeing the man publicly humiliated and fired help the suffering family? Well I suppose it could, actually, but surely there is a better way. Anger is easy. I like anger, especially against a target who so richly deserves it. But we have all been there. We have all deserved it, in one way or another.

How about this, as a better option? Officer Powell stays in the force, is forbidden ever to wear a gun again, and works in the office, say dispatch or something. He is compelled as part of his job to take psychological counseling on his power issues, and courses on the proper role of a Dallas Police Officer. He stays in his job and out of a more dangerous role, like security guard at a Wal-Mart or something.

Everyone gets improvement. The bereaved family gets to be magnanimous and yet justice is served. Officer Powell gets the help he so obviously needs, and gets to keep his job. And he stays in the force where he can be a reminder to other officers of the price of abusing their power.

It's a win-win-win.

It's not good to be angry all the time, even for the best and most justified reasons. I have a heart condition, it is bad for my heart. It's bad for everyone's heart, to only think of revenge and punishment when someone commits an injustice, instead of healing. Healing even for the one who committed the wrong. Maybe especially for that one.

The Problem of Joshua

2009-03-25T11:13:00.003-05:00

I used to point to the Old Testament book of Joshua as an example of why the Old Testament was a very partial revelation - a mix of genuine revelation and insane Hebrew nationalism. Hebrew nationalism in this case justifying genocide in the name of God. I am not so sure now about the simplicity of my response however.

The book of Joshua in a nutshell is this:

1. The Israelites cross the Jordan and circumcise themselves (circumcision had not been carried on while the Israelites were in the desert).

2. Jericho is destroyed and every living thing in it, except Rehab and her family (exempted for helping the Israelites) is destroyed. All the treasures therein are dedicated to the building of the temple.

3. Joshua attempts to destroy Ai but initially cannot - and later finds that one of his people have kept some of the treasures of Jericho to themselves. The guilty party and his family are stoned/burned to death. Joshua goes on to destroy Ai and kill every living thing in it. The king of Ai is delivered to Joshua, where he is impaled on a stake for public display (nice guy that Joshua).

4. The Hivites trick the Israelites into not killing them and signing a non-aggression pact. Even when the Israelites discover the trick, they do honor the pact.

5. The Israelites make war against the 5 kings of the Amorites, manage to capture the kings and impale them for public display (did they sell cotton candy? Peanuts?), and they slaughter every living thing in the city of Hazom and burn it to the ground.

Now from this, you might say this Joshua was a really harsh dude, and in fact he was. Joshua committed..... genocide. Ethnic cleansing. Let's not pretty up the facts. Joshua was guilty of war crimes, according to our modern understanding of things. According to the ancient understanding of things, this sort of thing went on all the time.

Balance against this, however, the fact that the practices of the entire ancient world (and certainly of his enemies) were unspeakably evil. If God hadn't given let for Joshua to wipe out enough of these people to enable Israel to take root, there would be no Bible, there would have been no chosen people, and there would have been no society into which Jesus could be born. People today after 2000 years of the relatively civilizing effect of Christendom, do not realize how immeasurably barbaric and evil the ancient world was without the civilizing effect of Christianity. Just a few examples:

The Canaanites were ritual murderers of little children. The priests of Baal and Ashtoreth were professional slaughterers of little children. Immediately next to or underneath the ruins of the temples of Baal throughout this part of the world, there would be found innumerable little jars containing the charred remains of children who were burned alive as a sacrifice to Baal. When a house was built, a child would be sacrificed and built into the walls of the structure. The Carthaginians, who were related to the Canaanites and enemies of Rome, did this sort of thing on an epic scale. And this sort of barbarity was not limited to the Canaanites but was found in every ancient society.

The Romans who we consider civilized in a sense, killed innocent people in a variety of interesting ways for entertainment. They also existed on the backs of a huge underclass of beaten, abused, raped, and overworked slaves. The earliest Christians were put to death in a variety of interesting ways, for entertainment. Nero used the burning bodies of Christians to light his garden parties. They also considered what we would now call child rape to be completely acceptable, including fathers raping their young daughters.

The Gauls would litter their sacred oak groves with the entrails of their enemies, stack their headless bodies on racks to rot, and take their enemies heads home to display prominently. They additionally would build giant statues of men out of wood and vines and such, and burn people alive in them.

The Mesoamericans would rip the hearts out of captives at an alarming rate, sometimes tens of thousands of people sacrificed to consecrate one temple, and the hearts piled up stinking and rotting inside the temple at the top of the pyramid, the inside of the temple being completely smeared with blood. They would also sacrifice their own children by taking them to the tops of snow-capped mountains, getting them drunk so they would pass out, stripping off their clothes and leaving them to freeze to death. The Incas would also fatten up their children for many months so they would be nice and juicy when they sacrificed them to their gods in a similar manner, death by exposure.

Many ancient peoples would sacrifice the wives of kings, their slaves and their entire retinue upon the death of a king, and throw the bodies in with the king to serve him in the afterlife. The Chinese among others did this.

North American indians practiced ritual torture of captives, a process that could continue for days.

Ancient Greeks would throw babies they considered unfit off cliffs or left them in woods to be eaten by wolves. They also considered sexual relations between older men and young boys to be normal. Spartans would often beat children to death in the harsh process of their training to be warriors. They would graduate by murdering a slave. Among Greeks and Romans, pity and mercy were considered weaknesses and the exploitation of the weak was not considered bad but a good thing - they didn't invent the concept of social darwinism but they certainly practiced it.

Every ancient society we find, if we learn enough about them, we find similar barbarities. We once thought of the Maya as a peaceful civilized ancient society, but when we dug deeper we found that they were in fact partial originators of the kind of bloody cult of human sacrifice that the Aztecs later adopted.

Does this mean that God liked the idea of Joshua committing genocide in order to establish the Israelites as a nation? No. But God as He always does, works with us as we are, and this was the only way that a path to a more humane way could be made. Somewhat ironic that the road to mercy and humanity had to start with blood and death, but our corrupt human nature couldn't have it any other way.

So yes, God told Joshua to kill them. Barring God's forcible interference in human destiny, there wasn't any other way. We humans weren't going to have it any other way.

Here to Help

2009-03-24T16:51:00.003-05:00

It is very easy, and I am very guilty of it, to focus on what is wrong with the world. It is easy to lose sight of what is essentially Mission Number One of a Christian: to help.

Now many would say, that mission number one is to spread the gospel and they are not wrong - but the reason why we spread the gospel, is to help. To help reconcile Man to God. That is a very helpful thing. If we preach a different gospel that is more worldly and accomodating, we might think or others might think, that we are being even more helpful, but we are not at all. We can only help when we spread the same gospel that God wants us to spread. But the point of it's spread at all - is to save people. Which is helpful.

Being here to help is a much more difficult thing, however, than complaining about what is not helpful. This is not to say that criticizing what is not helpful can't be good, it can be. But we need to know, and I need to know, that just criticizing isn't our main job here.

Being here to help is very difficult. I confess that I am not really all that helpful, I am doing good to help myself most of the time. Not that I do not wish to help because I do. But it is hard, and it is also hard to be helped. That is sort of the second part of the difficulty, it is hard to help, and it is hard to be the one who is helped.

One of the nicest things about when I was making more money, is that I could throw money at the problem. Throw some money for some wells in Africa or for the church, it is nice to be able to do that. The problem is, that the need for help is all around us, even among people who don't immediately seem to need it, and just throwing some money at a problem far away isn't always what is needed. Sometimes more engagement is what is needed, to be more engaged with the people right in front of you, and that is sometimes very hard.

This nevertheless is our job, to help. I have posted some pretty angry posts here lately, and I don't think I was at all wrong in my anger against some of the darker realities I see - but anger is very easy, especially for me. Criticism is easy. It is harder to help, but that is what we need to do. What I need to do too.

PHARISEES

2009-03-24T00:01:00.002-05:00

Sorry Ted for singling you out, but somebody has to be the poster boy.

Let us look for a moment at who the main adversaries of Jesus were in His day. They were religious people. They were wealthy, religious people. They were very ready to exclude several groups of people as permanently "unclean": the poor, the diseased, and people who because of their occupation or way of life were not able to deny the fact that they were indeed sinners. They also were exceedingly legalistic and excluded people who did not or did not have the leisure to engage in their ritual behavior. They were snobs. They believed in the "right" kind of people and the "wrong" kind of people, not realizing that we are ALL the "wrong" kind of people in some way or another.

There were a couple different names used for the same basic group of people - scribes, teachers of the law, keepers of the temple, pharisees.

And these people were unambiguously not Jesus' friend. They unambiguously wanted him dead, in fact.

And many of them are alive and well and living in the United States of America, and call themselves Christians.

Certainly one of the most dominant forms of Christianity today, probably THE most dominant, the form that gave rise to the terms "Christian Right" and "Moral Majority", is essentially pharisaical Christianity - Christianity, in other words, that represents an adversary of Christ.

An enemy of Christ - in His name.

Lets take some examples -

- preachers that make more than a middle income wage and have homes worth half a million dollars and up - surprise, you are an anti-Christian. Jesus was very clear on the evils of the love of money.

- "Christians" who support wars for geopolitical gain, like the war in Iraq, or the war against Grenada. At least 60,000 Iraqis have died in the Iraq war, a war against a nation that was no credible threat to us and which we did not legally declare. I guess you missed the "thou shalt not kill" thing?? It's kinda important.

Christians in fact should not lend support to any war, but certainly not to a war of American aggression.

- Anyone who tries to use the power of government to force people to be Christian. It is reasonable to promote the use of taxpayer (our) money to do good, such as feeding the hungry. Building roads. Building schools. It is not legitimate to use the power of government to force people to adopt aspects of Christian belief. Anyone who uses the phrase "Christian Nation" goes way up on my pharisee meter. Government is held by those who love power, not God. The kingdom of God and the kingdom of Man are antithetical concepts. The kingdom of Man is the kingdom of Satan.

- "Christians" who seeks to cause suffering to the poor for personal gain. That includes people who want to persecute homeless people because homeless people bring down property values.

-"Christians" who calls themselves a Christian while not believing in what the New Testament actually clearly says. This unfortunately includes many liberal Christians.

-Those who say that all members of a particular Christian denomination are going to hell, such as Catholics or Presbyterians, by virtue of their denomination alone. Folks like Jack Chick would fall into this category.

- "Christians" who hold patriotism to be an extremely high value. As mentioned before, the kingdom of Man is the kingdom of Satan. There is nothing particularly Christian or holy about the government or territory of the United States - there may be many Christians in it and even a few holy, but the government and territory of the nation per se have nothing whatsoever to do with God. Worship of nationalism is contrary to the worship of God. You can love the dominion of God or the dominion of Washington, you cannot love both.

- "Christians" who do not take divorce seriously. Jesus was exceedingly serious about it. If you look at Jesus' discussions about divorce, it is clear that the pharisees were very concerned about their leeway to divorce their wives. Jesus said, it is basically never okay to divorce. Simon Peter was so shocked about this, that he said that it would be better not to marry, to which Jesus agreed although he certainly did not forbid marriage. This is another thing that most Christians choose to not acknowledge much: Jesus said that chastity was the preferable option to marriage, and that loyal, committed marriage was second-best to chastity.

I could go on but another time perhaps. My point is this: pharisaical Christianity is a very dominant and possibly THE dominant form of Christianity. It is, in other words, antichristian in the guise of being Christian.

We are all no doubt guilty from time to time of being a bit of the pharisee, but we should take warning: Christian phariseeism may be far more dominant in our churches than actual Christianity. By your fruit you will know them - are they more concerned with the cultural trappings of pharasiacal "Christianity", or with feeding the hungry and clothing the naked and following the clear teachings of Christ?

"Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them."

"Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!'

-Matthew 7:15-23

The New Lepers

2009-03-23T23:09:00.002-05:00

The major of Sacramento, California, a place where the homeless population has jumped 10 percent in the last year and which has one of the highest rate of home foreclosures in the nation, declared recently that he is going to demolish the tent city of the homeless that has developed there.

Prominent among the soundbites from Mr. Mayor Johnson are words of "tough love". Love, in fact, has nothing to do with it, and I would go so far as to call Mr. Johnson a lying sack of shit for even mentioning the word. He doesn't care about the people in the tent city, he cares about the property values in Sacramento and the remaining property owners who I am sure are among the forefront of those applauding his move.

Nor does he, I believe, have any intention of really helping the homeless once they have been cleared out - in fact I am sure he is hoping that they go be destitute in some other town. Who does he plan on foisting the homeless problem onto once he has obliterated their poor pathetic excuse for homes? Why, the same people who are burdened to the breaking point taking care of the homeless as it is - churches, homeless shelters and charities. How he plans on adding additional capacity to those places, he doesn't seem to be too specific about.

Being a part-time caretaker for someone who would surely be homeless herself if it were not for affluent parents, I really don't have a lot of patience for people who believe that most of the chronically homeless can somehow bootstrap themselves into a three-car-garage and pool in the back. They are poor, there has always been the poor, there will be poor in the future, and some of them will never be anything else but absolutely destitute. And they need to be shown compassion, food and rudimentary shelter and some sort of medical care, by those who are not wondering where their next meal is coming from.

It is not considered PC to hate lepers anymore. We don't have a problem with hating the homeless however. Lepers nowadays are too uncommon to affect property values anyway.

Maybe I am a little emotional about this issue, the relatively well-off persecuting the destitute rather than helping them. Maybe I am. But I think that Christians, real Christians, not the plastic-haired, synthetic, televangelist-loving, conservative self-protecting members of the upper and upper middle classes, ought to start telling Mayor Johnson and others like him what they really are. I think Jesus would.

Serpents! Brood of vipers! How can any of you escape damnation??

Followers and Disciples

2009-03-16T01:43:00.003-05:00

Jeremy Irons playing a soon-to-be martyred Jesuit in the movie "The Mission".

"...any of you who does not give up everything he has cannot be my disciple."

-Luke 14:33

Jesus focuses a great deal more on disciples than on followers because disciples are the ones who are going to carry His message and do His will. There is the story about the Rich Man who came to Jesus and said, "good teacher, how can I inherit Eternal Life"? And Jesus says things like, "Honor your mother and father, do not kill, do not steal, brush your teeth twice a week and don't forget to floss?" (I am joking about the brushing and flossing bit). To which the Rich Man says, I have been practicing these things my whole life, what next?

So Jesus looks at him and says something like, "Well, if you really want to be perfect, give up everything you own to the poor, everything whatsoever, and follow me." To which the rich man was aghast and went away unhappy.

Jesus has a lot of followers. If he were a rock band, everyone would want to wear his T-shirt. Churches are full of His adoring fans. He doesn't have so many disciples however. Not many are actually ready to play in the band, as it were.

And what did Jesus say about his disciples? The people who are willing to do whatever it takes? That they were to give up everything, EVERYTHING. Their whole being and all that they do must be at the total disposal of God. They no longer life for themselves, but for God.

Which brings me to what is sort of tonight's central topic. There is a lot of debate and disagreement in the Catholic church for the need of a celibate clergy. A lot of people want to abolish that, and others want not only to abolish that but allow female priests. Part of this is because of the popular notion that sex is like a human right and that the celibate clergy are being denied this right and even become perverted in some way because of their denial of that biological right. The second issue which I will address first, is that there is rapidly approaching a time when there will simply be not enough celibate clergy to give mass to everyone, and hence the celebration of the Mass would suffer as a result.

To this latter complaint, I think absolutely there should be a class of "priest lite" who should be able to marry and also preside over communion and such functions. Communion is from God, not men, so it should not matter too extremely whether properly trained substitutes fill in for the diminishing numbers of celibate priests. I myself in my Anglican church receive communion regularly from female priests. Do I think women should be priests? No. Is my communion therefore invalidated by having it be given by a female priest? No.

But a real priest must be a real disciple of Christ, as if being one of the Twelve, and that means giving up the lot. Giving up family. Giving up the prospect of a wife or husband. Giving up sex on the side. Living a life of poverty, chastity and obedience. Why?

YOU CANNOT SHARE YOUR LIFE BETWEEN THE WORLD AND GOD if you want to call yourself actually a disciple. God is not simply an occupation, for a disciple; not a lifestyle choice, not an ornament to a fulfilling life of your own. If you are a priest and true disciple, GOD OWNS YOU completely. Lock stock and barrel. You have no life of your own, the life you live, you live for God only. To please God only. If you have a wife, you have to serve your wife: if you have kids, you have to serve your kids. If you want to do that, fine, but the priesthood should no longer an option for you. The church has need of parishioners as well as priests.

Jesus had no wife, no car, no house, not a single stick of property. Those who are to be his disciples on Earth must do the same. Not everybody is cut out for that level of committment, which is fine, but lets acknowledge those who are, not try to cut them down to our level of disengagement.

A true priest, a true disciple, gives it all up for God; everything. This is not a happy sound in our day and age where self-fullfillment is the mantra of the day and everyone has their right to get their groove on. Most people cannot understand how that sort of life could be anything other than pure unhealthy masochism and self-repression. It is not. It is liberation. But it is not for everyone. I only ask that "everyone" not try to forcibly eliminate that kind of disciple from existence in the Church.

The day the Pope removes the celebacy rule from priests and monks, is the day that Oprah and Donahue and the popular zeitgeist have finally vanquished the ancient perfect way of discipleship, and the followers of that way will have to build another church to take it's place, because they are not going to go away, not even in this sex-and-self saturated world. Not going away quite yet, anyway. Soon perhaps, but not yet.

Never Alone

2009-03-15T14:51:00.002-05:00

When we first become Christians, we tend to be under the same illusion we had before we were Christians. We are alone. God, yes, is out there somewhere and has our back, but He's not quite exactly around here where I need him. We still feel as lonely as before. Even worse, sometimes we think God isn't looking and isn't seeing what we do. God, in other words, is there, but sorta far away in that heaven thing, waiting for His plans to all come about.

Jesus said He is our shepherd and we are his sheep, and no good shepherd lets his sheep wander out of sight. We just somehow don't feel Him present. We still feel like before, it is just us off on our little lonesome, alone and lost in the big world, with the Big J.C. far away there somewhere to bring in the cavalry at the last minute to save our souls when we die and whisk us off to His place. Before that, it is just us and the wild Apache indians of the world, and the natives are looking restless....

And then somehow the "Aha!" moment arrives when you know, you know, Jesus is right there with you. He isn't going to let you go. And you understand that you are His, you belong to Him, really truly His. He owns you, and you are happy He owns you. And He is in charge of things, and they are going to be okay. And you are never alone, not ever again.

And that is a good thing, a very good thing.

This Is For All The Match Girls

2009-03-13T00:20:00.004-05:00

I don't know the exact number for such a thing, but surely there are tens of thousands of people every day who are suffering and dying naked alone and unloved in the streets - in the cold, in the flood, without anyone who will even say his or her name. Then someone sticks you in a hole or gives you a quick char before dumping you in the Ganges.

A human being who lived and suffered and laughed and cried, abandoned like a used kleenex and then forgotten as if they had never been.

God however never forgets. We shouldn't either.

For all the unloved and abandoned people,
for all the homeless who are suffering and dying,
God does not forget.

May the Lord bless you and keep you
The Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you
The Lord lift His countenance upon you and give you peace.

The People Are Grass

2009-03-06T17:34:00.007-06:00

Birds talk a great deal, signifying... apparently very little. "Get off my piece of wire", mostly I guess.

A voice says, "Cry out."
And I said, "What shall I cry?"
"All men are like grass,
and all their glory is like the flowers of the field.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,
because the breath of the LORD blows on them.
Surely the people are grass.

The grass withers and the flowers fall,
but the word of our God stands forever."

-Isaiah 40:6-8

I recently walked into a restaurant, and it hit me so hard I had to lean against the wall to make sure I would stand upright. What had hit me, almost physically, was a wall of sound caused by the mindless chit-chat of a hundred restaurant customers and waitstaff, all chittering louder than the next person so as to be heard over the mindless chit-chat of their neighbors. The acoustics in the restaurant were apparently really bad. The sound just bounced off the walls back to the people who had to increase their volume as a result in order to be heard, and so on. Like a restaurant/amplifier.

No word was distinguishable in this cacaphony, only a sound like a million birds all talking to each other at once, except worse, and louder, nearing the level of the noise of an aircraft taking off. If OSHA had been there with a sound meter, I am pretty sure the place would have been shut down as damaging to hearing.

I didn't wonder what all these people were talking about because it was pretty clear: nothing much important. Just the idle chitterings of people trying to talk to their lunch companions about nothing over the noise of a hundred people all trying to do the same thing.

Now I like the quiet, so it was a bit difficult or even painful for me to try to eat with this going on. I could even hear the indiscriminate roar from the bathroom. Which brought the topic to mind of, "what in the world are all these people talking about?" There were no major news events going on, the Space Shuttle hadn't crashed or anything, it was just people trying to make themselves heard over other people, trying to make themselves heard. Heard saying what?

The TV comedy Seinfeld advertised itself as a "show about nothing". I think the "show about nothing" is life for most of us, and for all of us at one time or another. I know it was for me.

I felt that this was in fact a rather meaningful event, though I tend to think most people in the restaurant were focused more on the raviolis than the metaphysical at that moment. It was a metaphor for the human condition, and it wasn't very pretty. 6 billion egos, all trying to get their points across, talking more than listening. If you could hear us all at once, your eardrums would no doubt implode and your brain fry like an egg in an industrial microwave. We are self-impressed with very little reason. We have much talk but little to say.

My feelings of animosity towards the human species at that moment were tempered by the realization that I too, am a member of that species (some opinions of friends and relatives to the contrary notwithstanding :) ). I hated it. I hated us. Noisy selfish egotistical monsters, we are. Which brings up the interesting question of why God does not hate us but loves us, a question for which I have no answer except that God is love. I wish I had more of His love and forgiveness in me at that moment, but I didn't.

Now lest I be accused of being too hard on homo sapiens, what is the primary activity of the human being? Of all of us? Improving conditions for ourselves as individuals, usually to the exclusion of most/all else. Even if we are already rich by world standards, we always want more. This is an activity that is doomed to failure, since we are all sooner or later going to die. So for the most part, virtually every single human being on this planet is engaged in a project of absolute futility. The most you can say for it, is that such a philosophy might lead to a temporary decrease of pain and increase of pleasure, but only temporary. A heroin habit might do much the same.

Many religious authorities have tried to downplay the findings of psychology that the human being is an almost solely selfish entity, but I for one believe the psychologists. Human beings, in themselves, are essentially incapable of true altruism, which is almost the definition of "goodness". 1.1 billion people on this planet, about a sixth of the human population of Earth, lives under conditions defined by the World Bank as "extreme poverty" and another 2.7 billion lives under conditions of "moderate poverty" as defined by the World Bank, meaning someone who makes between $1 and $2 a day. Billions every day endure unimaginable suffering, while the rest of us live out the duration of our futile lives, oblivious. Not that we do not know, but we do not really care.

The writer of Isaiah was absolutely right: the people are grass. We are all grass. Here today, gone tomorrow, and the time in between spent in a futile search for happiness, which mostly is centered around pleasing one's self. Following one's self. As Jesus once said to the Pharisees, "blind guides!" No guide is blinder than one's own self. I have spent most of my life as my own blind guide, so I should know. All too often, I still am.

Religious authorities, particularly Catholic ones, often mention the "infinite value of a human life". This is often misunderstood. The intrinsic value of a human life in itself is about the same as a cubic inch of uncompressed air: nothing. Most people in some sense have an unconscious understanding of this, which is why you don't see people giving up their noisy ravioli dinner for people who are starving to death - or the sick - or any of the billions of afflicted on this Earth. Without God, human life has no meaning or value, and most people don't think too much about God's opinion on the matter.

The extrinsic value of human life is infinite, because God loves us. This is the only reason: God loved you so much that He sent His own Son, to reconcile Himself to us. God's love measures the value of a human life, based not on our merit but on His infinitely giving nature.

Since any thinking person should realize that a self-obsessed life is futile and only ends in ultimate defeat in the form of death, you would think that more of us would seek holy and God-centered lives, but people don't. Even those who believe, usually live almost indistinguishably from everyone else. Inside there is a difference, we ask God's grace for the miserable losers that we are and we do receive it, but externally not that much changes really. We do so little in the service of God, Who does so much for us. I am accusing myself as well as everybody else here. We are not worthy to be called servants.

· · ·

My non-Christian friends often ask me how I can rationalize hell? How I can hold that a loving God nevertheless allows the majority of the human population of the Earth to go to hell? My friends, we are in hell. This world, is hell. The only difference between Earth and Hell is that here, we have a chance to change. To accept God. To let God's grace work in our lives. In the real hell, you have made your decision for keeps.

This world is my hell, only you my non-Christian friends cannot see it, because you are wholly of it, as I was once wholly of it. Over time a shell develops over your soul, and you become blind to the World as it really is. As perhaps the denizens of hell are inured to the reality of hell as it really is. I would like to think so. I do not believe hell is punishment, any more than gravity is punishment when you fall. God does not want you there. You in fact want you there.

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For everything in the world—the cravings of sinful man, the lust of his eyes and the boasting of what he has and does—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.

-1 John 2:15-17

When I say that this world is my hell, I do not mean that I am downcast about it, I am usually not. God gives us grace and peace. But I do not like it here. I have things to do here, but I am not over eager to stick around when they are done. This is not home. God is home. I don't belong here any more. I do not like this place. I have asked to go home many times, to wrap up this dog and pony show, but the Lord in His wisdom has not yet agreed to that request. I know why, I haven't completed those things He wants me to do, so that is what I need to focus on. Being a better servant and doing what He wills. But my soul aches to go home.

O God, you are my God,
earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you,
my body longs for you,
in a dry and weary land
where there is no water.

-Psalm 63:1

I Am Second

2009-03-03T14:13:00.004-06:00

I think this is a brilliant and wonderful campaign. Someone or some group with a lot of money is buying billboards all across America with the simple words, "I Am Second" and a web address:
http://www.iamsecond.com/

The personal stories, like the one above (from Brian "Head" Welch, former lead guitarist of rock band Korn), that are featured on that website are moving and full of the evidence of the grace of God.

Trust

2009-03-03T13:04:00.004-06:00

Jesus heard that they had thrown him (the man born blind) out, and when he found him, he said, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?"

"Who is he, sir?" the man asked. "Tell me so that I may believe in him."

Jesus said, "You have now seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you."

Then the man said, "Lord, I believe," and he worshiped him.

-John 9:35-38

Back before I believed in Christ, I always thought that those little pamphlets you get from strange looking people on the streets was a little simplistic. They say at the back of them, "Just do this and you will be saved - say 'I know I am a sinner and that Jesus Christ died for my sins.....' "

But you know, in a way they were absolutely right. You don't know anything really about Christ beforehand, before you accept Him, you just say with the father of the demon-possessed child in Capernaum: "I believe, help my disbelief!" You go out on a limb. You say, "God if you are real, help me. Help me to believe in you, and help me with this mess I call my life."

When I first became a Christian, I only stayed a Christian for 3 years because I couldn't understand what God wanted of me, or for certain what God's message to me was. In fact, I was still being self-centered and trying to do things by my own strength, trying to "figure out" God. I realized that I was not capable of being altruistic and loving, that real love was something I was constitutionally incapable of. Rather than trusting God to change this for me, I decided to shoot the messenger instead, and for many years turned away from God.

God however did not turn away from me. At the appropriate time he seized me with a strong hand. He was not planning to turn loose of me either. When I had the heart attack and went into cardiac arrest twice and was in CPR for 45 minutes, He did something, because when I suddenly started to recover and came back to consciousness I began to understand things that I had never understood at all before. He had taken away my heart of stone, and given me a new heart.

Where did all that start? When I had first accepted him in ignorance and uncertainty. He did everything else. I could not, it was impossible for me to have understood the Gospel, except that God helped me. That is why I often say, nobody can truly come to God through rational argument. That is you trying to reach God, and it never works that way. You have to ask God to reach you, everything else will follow in time. You have to step out on that limb first.

· · ·

I find that often in prayer, it is not usually a matter of discussing things with God, as it is getting to a point where you understand that God is, and has always been, there for you. I start out asking questions, then questioning the questions. The things I ask about, start unknotting themselves for me. It is not so much a process of making requests of God, as it is of accepting that connection again, bringing to mind for myself what is always in mind for God. Bringing my trust to mind again.

Finally I sometimes just say: "You know all things, Lord. You know what is in my heart before I say anything. May Your name be glorified by what You do through me, and Your will done."

The Fire

2009-03-02T20:33:00.002-06:00

When bad things happen, you get sick, you get disabled, someone you love dies - there is an understandable tendency among people who do believe in God to say, God isn't taking care of me. "How could God let this happen?" I have known people who have taken these things as evidence that God does not exist, or does not care about us.

God does care about us, and that is why He allows us to suffer. We were born worldly creatures, saturated with the nature of a worldly creature. If everything goes along peachy keen with our creaturely nature, our spiritual nature that God gives us has no room to grow. Why should we become spiritual, if everything is fine with us as selfish carnal creatures? The process of God crafting us into spiritual beings, His children, has many difficulties. In order to learn to lean on Him, we have to stop leaning on ourselves. If our strength is sufficient, how will we ever learn to depend on His strength?

A person who never knows suffering, will never know compassion. A person who never is confronted with his fallibility, will never know humility. A person who never needs mercy, will never show mercy.

When the carnal person flourishes and prospers, the soul usually starves. When there is pain, illness, suffering, difficulty, obstacles: then can the soul grow wings. The New Testament is clear on this: Christ suffered for us, and we take up the cross and suffer with Him in the process of becoming more like Him. We are called to suffer in this body. It's not the greatest PR slogan for Christianity ever invented, but it's true.

But there are kinds of suffering, and some suffering is far worse than merely suffering physically. Count yourself blessed if you can leave behind other, less physical, maybe more terrible sufferings. There is peace in Christ, even in the midst of suffering. Our bodies may be tormented, but our souls can rest. It's better than the other way around.

If you are in suffering, suffer for Christ. Take up His wounds. Your suffering is not for nothing, you are being purified in the furnace of suffering. It will go away, even if it only goes away with death, but you are being prepared for a place where there is no pain, no crying, no torment anymore. You will be free.

In the meantime, if you are in physical pain, you need not passively endure it. Actively accept it as sharing the suffering of our Lord, and if you suffer with Him you will be glorified with Him.

Sometimes the pain that we may complain to God about, we perhaps should thank Him for. As the body withers, the soul sprouts leaves.

"Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us."

-Romans 5:1

"I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God."

-Romans 8:18-21

"For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows."

-1 Corinthians 1:5

"Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin."

-1 Peter 4:1

The Blues

2009-02-23T09:43:00.002-06:00

This guy knew real blues. Blind Willie Johnson was a black man born in 1897 in Brenham, Texas, his mother died soon thereafter, possibly inspiring the tune "motherless children". When he was 7 years old, his father and stepmother were having a fight since his father beat his stepmother. The stepmother in retaliation, threw lye not at Willie's father but at him, blinding him permanently.

Blind Willie had a desire from an early age to be a preacher, and apparently claimed to be one to some extent, at least an itinerant one. He made his living in one of the few ways open to a blind black man in the segregated South, which was a traveling musician. Most of his music however still referred strongly to his ministry aspirations. The rock band Led Zeppelin semi-stole his haunting "Nobody's Fault but Mine"and turned it into a rock classic. Led Zep's version is much more upbeat. ;)

"Nobody's fault but mine, nobody's fault but mine.
If I don't read it my soul be lost.

I have a Bible in my home, I have a Bible in my home.
If I don't read it my soul be lost.

Mmm, Father he taught me how to read, Father he taught me how to read.
If I don't read it my soul be lost, nobody's fault but mine.

Ah, Lord, Lord, nobody's fault but mine.
If I don't read it my soul be lost.

Ah, I have a Bible of my own, I have a Bible of my own.
If I don't read it my soul be lost.

Oh, Mother she taught me how to read, Mother she taught me how to read.
If I don't read it my soul be lost, nobody's fault but mine.

Ah, Lord, Lord, nobody's fault but mine.
If I don't read it my soul be lost.

And Sister she taught me how to read, Sister she taught me how to read.
If I don't read it my soul be lost, nobody's fault but mine.

Ah, mmmm, Lord, Lord, nobody's fault but mine.
If I don't read it my soul'd be lost, mmmm."

-Blind Willie Johnson, "Nobody's Fault"

In his own time in the '20's and '30's, he recorded some records for a "colored" audience (music being kind of segregated then too) for Columbia from 1927 to 1930, including several recorded in my home town of Dallas.

This hardly made him rich however, and he spent most of his time singing for quarters in his home town of Beaumont, Texas, barely scraping by. His death was as tragic as the rest of his life: his house burned down but he refused to leave it (having no where else to go). So he slept on a wet smoky bed in a burned house until he contracted pneumonia and died. Depending on who you ask, when he got sick either the ambulance refused to take him (because he was black or blind or something) or he refused to go.

The point of this litany of tragedy is this: I am part of a time, nation, and social class that has had an unparalleled degree of insulation from the sad facts of existence. The average life expectancy of a Galilean peasant at the time of Jesus was maybe 30 at best. The average life expectancy in the Roman Empire at the time that Christianity flourished was about 30. Until the middle of the 20th century, life expectancy in America was 40. People were often crippled and blind and diseased. These are the facts of life for the vast majority of all humans who have ever lived, and still the facts of life for the majority of humankind today.

If you don't know the blues, you might say, you don't know life. Jesus knew the blues, just look at Gethsemane.

Twilight of Days

2009-02-21T17:36:00.004-06:00

"The holy Fathers were making predictions about the last generation. They said 'What have we ourselves done?' One of them, the great abba Ischyrion replied, 'We ourselves have fulfilled the commandments of God.' The others replied, 'And those who come after us, what will they do?' He said, 'They will struggle to achieve half our works.' They said, 'And to those who come after them, what will happen?' He said, 'the men of that generation will not accomplish any works at all and temptation will come upon them, and those who will be approved in that day will be greater than either us or our fathers' "

-from the Paradise of the Desert Fathers, a collection of sayings

St. Paul stated that the reason why the Second Coming seemed to be delayed, according to the expectation of some of the early believers that it would be imminent, was that God wanted everyone in every part of the world to have the opportunity to turn to Christ. Assuming God's patience and forbearance, that would mean that the end of the world as we know it will occur when the true Way dwindles and there will be no more believers saved.

When I read this quote from the desert Fathers, I felt immediately convinced that what they were saying was a prophecy. The World becomes more and more hostile to God, not physically as in Roman times where they simply burned Christians (ah, simpler times :) ), but spiritually. The difficulty in turning to God increases. False forms of Christianity multiply, for as I said in a previous post, Satan likes nothing more than to take the guises of God. The money- and pleasure- orientation of society increases. Rudeness increases. Violence increases. Really psychopathic forms of violence increase. Other people are more and more considered to be enemies or obstacles or tools to be exploited, not your brothers or sisters.

God did not destroy Sodom so long as one righteous man was in it. God will not destroy the world as long as righteousness is not utterly extinct in it. As long as one soul in it is able to turn to Christ, the world continues: when that is no longer true, the world ends. That day is coming, whether 100 years from now or 1,000 I do not know, but it will come.

The material power of our modern world is unsurpassed in history. It seems to me however, that the world was never more spiritually bankrupt than it is today. And it will become more so. Once, most people worked at some occupation that was of benefit to the community as well as a living for themselves: now lots of people, including very rich people, make their entire livings off of shearing people from their money for no return value whatsoever (Bernard Madoff for instance), or for things positively harmful to them (drug dealers for instance). Human beings are sheep to be sheared, and many eagerly participate in the shearing in the hopes of shearing someone else. A vast number of the populace, in fact, is occupied in people-shearing of one form or another. Giving something of value for value received isn't profitable these days.

I won't even go into the industrial scale of the abortion industry, or how porn has gone mainstream, or how many people these days kill people they were supposed to love (their children, their wives or husbands, friends, schoolmates, teachers, relatives ect.) Employers squeeze their employees, Unions squeeze them back (while squeezing money from the overworked employees), and the economy, because it is not based on anything really of value, fluctuates like the mood swings of a disgruntled postal worker with PMS, throwing people out of work and out of their homes. I could go on.

One day in the not-terribly-remote future, much as we would like not to admit it, true Christianity will be extinct. The day after, the world as we have known it ends, and thanks be to God that it will, because I would not like to think of the horrors that mankind would perpetrate then.

Excerpt from the Didache

2009-02-21T15:02:00.002-06:00

© mandj98

"To put it simply: What the soul is in the body, that Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world. The soul dwells in the body, but does not belong to the body, and Christians dwell in the world, but do not belong to the world.

The soul, which is invisible, is kept under guard in the visible body; in the same way, Christians are recognized when they are in the world, but their religion remains unseen.

The flesh hates the soul and treats it as an enemy, even though it has suffered no wrong, because it is prevented from enjoying its pleasures; so too the world hates Christians, even though it suffers no wrong at their hands, because they range themselves against its pleasures.

The soul loves the flesh that hates it, and its members; in the same way, Christians love those who hate them. The soul is shut up in the body, and yet itself holds the body together; while Christians are restrained in the world as in a prison, and yet themselves hold the world together. The soul, which is immortal, is housed in a mortal dwelling; while Christians are settled among corruptible things, to wait for the incorruptibility that will be theirs in heaven. The soul, when faring badly as to food and drink, grows better; so too Christians, when punished, day by day increase more and more. It is to no less a post than this that God has ordered them, and they must not try to evade it."

- From the Didache, circa first century AD, from the so-called Letter to Diognetus, emphasis mine

Club Dead

2009-02-18T16:33:00.003-06:00

Père Lachaise cemetary in France, a tony address for very thin people.
You can't get much thinner than bones. ;)

I personally think that a serious thoughtful trip to a cemetary is a very valuable thing. One, you can pray for the dead, which is a very nice thing to do. Secondly, you can pray for yourself. Third, if it is a nice day, you can bring a picnic lunch or work on your suntan. :)

You can go down the rows of tombstones, and realize: this guy might have been obsessed about his mortgage or his girlfriend or his bad case of acne before he died, but it is certain that none of that matters now whatsoever. So what if the IRS was about to audit him? Even the IRS doesn't reach beyond the grave. Look at a grave from the 1860's. The guy might have been really upset that his wife cheated on him before he died, but he, his wife, her lover, and everyone he knew, are all dust today. Probably not even their descendents remember their names.

Most of the things we fret about day to day, are fleeting futile things. 100 years from now, none of them will matter. 100 years is a blink of the eye in human history, and the 6000 or so years of recorded human history itself is a blink of the eye in the 200,000-odd years modern humans have been here, and that is a blink of the eye compared to the age of the Earth itself. So we are a mote in a mote in a mote, in the 12 billion or so years of the Universe up to this point.

If you seriously meditate on the fact that most of our concerns are futile and silly in the face of our inevitable death, you can begin to focus on what is important. Most people go a long way out of their way to avoid visiting a cemetary, one reason being that cemetaries do a good job of disrupting our delusional values and avoidance of the unpleasant topic of our mortality. If you think something matters, think again. Only one thing matters. Where will you be when all this busy stuff called life is tidily summed up in a bronze plaque in the dirt with your name on it?

Go to a cemetary. Stay there until you soak up the futility of everything but God.

The Land of the Meek

2009-02-17T14:30:00.004-06:00

"Very many... were worthy to inherit the land of the meek"
- Palladius, The Lausiac History

It seems to me that God has put us on display at the end of the procession, like those condemned to die in the arena. We have been made a spectacle to the whole universe. To this very hour we go hungry and thirsty, we are in rags, we are brutally treated, we are homeless. Yet when we are cursed, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure it; when we are slandered, we answer kindly.

-1 Corinthians 4:9-13 NIV

The Lord, in disarming Peter, disarmed every soldier.

-Tertullian’s On Idolatry

There is absolutely no reasonable doubt in my mind, that the early Church endorsed and practiced what we now call pacifism. It was for the most part not until Constantine went to war "in the name of Christ" that the Church really sanctioned bloodshed in a big way. If you would like to see lots of quotes from members of the early Church to support this claim, I would be happy to oblige, or you could simply go here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_pacifism

Pacifism however is very hard. Contrary to popular belief, if you will excuse the expression, it takes real balls to be a pacifist. As Christianity became more a church "of the people", most of whom were not prepared to turn the other cheek, this started to slip away to the point that most Christians today do not have a problem with war per se, or with military service.

I am committed to Christian pacifism because I believe that is what Jesus taught. On the other hand, if someone actually slapped me in the face, I might be more likely to garrote them with a rusty coathanger than actually turn the other cheek. In short, I am a pacifist with anger management problems. No, those aren't a contradiction in terms.

For instance, today some woman cut in front of me in line at the pharmacy. The better angels of my nature would say, I don't know what that woman's situation is. She could have grave problems, either medical, psychological or spiritual. Forgive, if you want to be forgiven. The more fallen angels of my nature wanted to rearrange her makeup using sporting goods. I suppose the fact that I didn't accost her with a baseball bat is a good thing, but I wasn't exactly good natured about it either. Pacifism does not come naturally for me whatsoever. In fact, it doesn't come naturally to anybody. What comes naturally is a fight-or-flight response: run away or kick some ass. To stay there and take it: there is nothing natural about that.

Before I was a Christian, I wrongly believed Christianity was pretty easy. You admit you are a sinner, accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, and you're pretty much good to go. Easier than opening a checking account. Way easier than programming your DVD recorder. You gotta always read the fine print though. :) It is the hardest thing you can possibly do, the point of your existence on Earth in fact. Christians are reluctant to do the soft sell however, because we are eager for people to receive forgiveness, and the Lord is merciful, and they can read the fine print if there is time and they really want to. All that can come later, should you live so long. In the meantime, asking forgiveness is the first thing. Sometimes however you take all this Bible stuff seriously, and then watch out. You're in way deeper water than you thought. ;)

As the character Chef said in the movie "Apocalypse Now", "...never get off the boat..." Not unless you are really prepared to go all the way. Count the cost first, the cost is... everything. Everything whatsoever.

It's kind of like that Buddhist saying, nirvana is samsara. The Lord said his yoke is easy and his burden is light, and He was right. God is good. He also said you have to leave everything behind, sacrifice everything even your own life, even what is most precious to you, and He was also right. :) WE don't see the two as the same, because our hearts are not where they should be.

So if you reject Christian pacifism because it is damned hard and highly impractical in a worldly sense, that is a good reason. I agree with you absolutely. You might want to reconsider your religion. Choose something more practical.

If you reject Christian pacifism because you don't believe Christ preached it, look again. At like the entire New Testament. He did. Why not actually read the book for a change, people. Jesus was being about as metaphorical as a poke in the spleen. He meant every word He said.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."

-Matthew 5:38-45, NIV

What part of that, don't you understand?

It's easy to understand, just very hard to do. That doesn't mean that we get to edit the words of Christ. You either accept it, or you say Jesus was a liar, either one. If you say He is a liar, why do you say you follow Him?

Is it hard? Way hard. We are fallible beings with one foot in the World at the very least. Maybe two feet. That is what grace is for. :)

Jesus never claimed that being a Christian was a good thing for your practical affairs, quite the opposite. He said you would suffer a lot if you follow Him. People who are practicing a "wealth gospel" or "American Christianity" or "support the troops Christianity" or "family Christianity" or some such, get out while you still can, before you are doing your morning push-ups in Hades next to the lord of the flies, because our Lord never intended any such thing whatsoever.

If you want to see a Christian life, look at St. Valentine whose holiday we recently celebrated. Maybe you were out having a nice steak and wine with a loved one, maybe a little escargot? Yummy appetizers? Chocolates and steamy sex afterwards? St. Valentine, 1700 years ago, was getting beaten to death and then beheaded. And oh yeah, by the way, he was celibate. So he didn't have a date that day. Don't let all that blood and beatings and beheadings and suffering and such ruin your nice dinner, dears. Eat up.

I have a long way to go before I can ever be a pacifist in practice, I have too much anger in me. I am weak in many ways. But if we do not believe the Prince of Peace at His word, that will never change. I have a hard time doing what Jesus said. I do believe completely that He said it and He meant it, and many other things as well that are hard from a Worldly perspective. God is kind and long-suffering towards us. He knows that we are weak. That I am weak. But we will never really follow Jesus if we don't believe Jesus meant what He actually said.

Above all, Christians are not allowed to correct with violence.
- Clement of Alexandria

I do not wish to be a king; I am not anxious to be rich; I decline military command... Die to the world, repudiating the madness that is in it.
- Tatian’s Address to the Greeks

We who formerly used to murder one another now refrain from even making war upon our enemies.
-The First Apology of Justin Martyr

We have rejected such spectacles as the Coliseum. How then, when we do not even look on killing lest we should contract guilt and pollution, can we put people to death?
- Athenagoras of Athens’ A Plea for the Christians

Lap Dog Christians

2009-02-15T19:38:00.003-06:00

As he taught, Jesus said, "Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets."

Mark 12:38-39

Paul compared the Christian life to an athletic competition. Mostly, these days, it looks more like a country club luncheon. There are Christians, who I am sure are Christians nonetheless, who love to be prominently visible in their churches and like to be well regarded, and like their meat and cheese and wine and nice things and their place by the fireplace. They like to be greeted by name and given a big slap on the back. Comfy Christians. Lap Christians. They don't have any particularly vile sins, or none readily visible, and may truly have concern for the less fortunate.

I know, because I am tempted to become a lap dog Christian. I like being comfy. I like nice food (as can be told from my waistline) and the occasional wine and nice computer systems. We should however, if we are honest with ourselves, ask this question: is this way of life what God really wants for us? Or is this something God tolerates in us because of our weakness and lack of dedication? I think it's kinda the latter, really.

I have been poverty stricken and despised in my life, but generally before I became a Christian, so I can't claim much benefit from that. I do remember what it was like to feel like the dirt under everyone's boot, too poor to afford gas for my car if I even had one. I am not like that now, however; I am in fact in danger of becoming what I then hated most: comfortable. As the Australia tourism commercial says, "no worries mate, I'll put another shrimp on the barbie for you."

I am also tempted to rationalize it, saying to myself, "ah well, I have a serious heart condition, I probably won't live a real long time, so kick back, enjoy." I really think that is wrong, however, as most rationalizations are. When I was poor, I didn't think people should live like that. Self-centered and self-indulgent. I don't think I should live like that now.

I really can't agree with becoming comfortable, otherwise agreeable though it may be. Jesus wasn't comfy. Peter wasn't comfy. Mother Teresa wasn't comfy. They were living in poverty and danger all the time.

I have a job to do now that I am committed to doing for as long as I am needed, but it is an ongoing temptation to be comfy. Maybe that is one reason God put me here, as a test of my vulnerability to being comfy. It's ironic, almost humorous: after all the times I have railed at the comfortable from a position of poverty, I can't really do that anymore. I have met the enemy, and now he's me. :)

You sometimes become the thing you hate, and look at the world through your enemy's eyes, and realize that we have all fallen far short of the mark. Rich and poor, comfortable and uncomfortable alike.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.

Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever. Therefore I do not run like a man running aimlessly; I do not fight like a man beating the air. No, I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others, I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.

-1 Corinthians 9:24-27

Quotes from the Desert Fathers

2009-02-13T20:11:00.002-06:00

Monk's cell, Wadi Natrun desert, Egypt

On Humility:

An old man said, "The monk must purchase his stillness by being despised whenever the opportunity presents itself: and by bodily labor."

A brother questioned an old man, "Tell me something which I can do, so that I may live by it," and the old man said, "If you can bear to be despised, that is a great thing, more than all the other virtues."

An old man said, "In all trials do not blame others but only yourself, saying, "It is because of my sins that this has happened."

The old men used to say, "When we do not experience warfare (trouble), we ought so much the more to humiliate ourselves. For God, seeing our weakness, protects us; when we glorify ourselves, he withdraws his protection and we are lost."

The abbot Mathois said, "The nearer a man approaches to God, the greater sinner he sees himself to be. For the prophet Isaiah saw God, and said that he was unclean and undone."

On Discernment:

An old man said, "The life of the monk is obedience, meditation, not judging, not slandering, not complaining. In truth, it is written, "You who love the Lord, hate evil." (Ps. 97:10) The life of the monk is: not to take of him who is unjust; not to look at what is evil; not to interfere in everything, not to listen to irrelevant words; not to steal, but rather to give; not to be puffed up in his heart; not to have thought of fornication; not to be greedy; to do everything with discernment. The life of the monk consists in this."

One of the brethren asked the abbot Isidore, an old man in Scete, saying, "Wherefore do the devils fear thee so mightily?" And the old man said to him, "From the time that I was made a monk, I have striven not to suffer anger to mount as far as my throat."

Against the [thought of lust], another old man said, "Be like him who passes through the market place in front of an inn and breathes the smell of cooking and roasting. If he enjoys, he goes inside to eat some of it; if not, he only inhales the smell in passing and goes on his way. It is the same for you: avoid the bad smell. Wake up and pray, saying, ~`Son of God, help me.' Do this for other temptations also. For we do not have to uproot the passions, but resist them." As another abba said, "Passion liveth, but it is bound."

The abbot Daniel used to say, "Even as the body flourishes, so does the soul become withered: and when the body is withered, then does the soul put forth leaves."

On Obedience:

An old man was asked, "What is the straight and narrow way?" He replied "The straight way is this, to do violence to one's thought and to cut off one's own will. That is what this means: `Behold we have left all and followed Thee.' " (Mk 10:28).

On Stability:

The abbot Macarius the elder used to say to the brethren in Scete, "When mass is ended in the church, flee, my brothers." And one of the brethren said to him, "Father, whither in this solitude can we further flee?" And he laid his finger upon his mouth saying, "This is what I would have you flee." And so he would go into his cell and shut the door and there sit alone.

A brother who was weighed down with the temptation to leave the monastery informed his abba, who said to him, "Go, and sit in your cell and give your body in pledge to the walls of the cell, and do not come out of it. Let your imagination think what it likes, only do not let your body leave the cell."

The abbot Allois said, "Unless a man shall say in his heart, ~I alone and God are in this world," he shall not find quiet."

{I don't think Allois was preaching solipsism - do everything as if for or to God.}

On Charity:

An old man said, "When someone asks something of you, even if you do violence to yourself in giving it to him, your thought must take pleasure in the gift according to that which is written, "If someone asks you to go a mile, go two miles with him!" That is to say, if someone asks something of you, give it to him with the whole soul and spirit."

And old man was asked by a certain soldier if God received a penitent man. And after heartening him with many words, he said to him at the last, "Tell me, beloved, if thy cloak were torn, wouldst thou throw it away?" He said, "Nay, but I would patch it and wear it." The old man said to him, "If thou would spare thy garment, shall not God have mercy on His own image?"

They said of the abbot Macarius the elder, that even as God doth protect all the world and beareth the sins of men, so was he to the brethern as it might be an earthly God, for he coverd up their faults, and what things he saw or heard, it was as though he saw not and heard not.

· · ·

I think I quote these because they shame me. I really live a pretty indulgent life these days, in fact my job of caretaker consists mostly of accompanying Lindy on her shopping sprees and taking her out to eat and accounting for the money spent. My job definitely does not suck, and I make a pretty silly amount of money for doing it. After many years of poverty, I have it insanely easy now. Which is a very terrible temptation really.

I very much admire what the desert fathers did, and question it, both. There is a tension in my mind and in Christianity in some sense. Should we withdraw from the world to draw closer to God? Or should we engage the world more, even if doing so is damaging to our spiritual equilibrium? If we could truly emulate Christ in the world while engaging the world (as He often did), would the world even notice or care? Probably not, really. On the other hand, ascetic hermits don't exactly spread the gospel too well, I wouldn't think, or have many opportunities to practice the virtues of charity and love. More of this in another post.

The Seduction of Darkness

2009-02-05T01:01:00.007-06:00

The jazz band from the classic 1950 Noir "D.O.A"

I have to confess a weakness for classic Film Noir, and indeed for any movie that is saturated with shadows, neon, the haze of cigarettes, spilled drinks and dissipation. Even the more surrealistic and pastel-colored film "Naked Lunch" by Cronenberg fits for me in this category. The classic noir is typically a crime film, but the crime to me is less interesting than its milieu: despair, absurdity and decay. I love German Expressionist film for much the same reason, especially the wonderfully horrific "M" by Fritz Lang.

Peter Lorre's first great villain role, the child murderer in Fritz Lang's "M"

The reasons for my interest, I think, are twofold. One, I suppose that lives of active desperation are in a sense more likely to produce spiritual reform than lives of quiet desperation. If you are going to be a nihilist, at least be a nihilist out loud. There is nothing I have less time for, than a sort of stiff-upper-lip endurance of spiritual vacuum. If you think life sucks, at least act like it. If your soul is raw, be raw. It's more honest if nothing else.

My favorite band slogan in 2007

The more relevant reason, however, is that such a life of active despair was my life for a long period of time, before a heart attack brought me to my senses. For a time I was stuck in a job that I found actually morally and certainly personally objectionable, didn't believe in God and essentially believed life was pointless, so I would stay up all night drinking absinthe (then illegal, you can legally obtain it in the US now) and dreading the breaking of dawn. More fortunate people don't realize, there is a certain masochistic pleasure in dissipation beyond the obvious benefits of alcohol- or drug- fueled anesthesia. It is like the way some young people, particularly women, cut themselves: it is a sort of dismal pleasure in self-destruction. I wasn't precisely an alcoholic because I wouldn't drink every day or even every week, but when I did drink, I did it all night. Sometimes I would write all night, getting more and more drunk (drink is a common affliction of writers, the alcohol loosens up the words).

Those who will not take up the cross of Christ, will get their own cross nevertheless, but it is a cross of an absurd existence. Sartre and Camus were depicting a life without God quite accurately: life is absurd.

These days, my life is pretty good, thanks only to the mercy of God. I have work that is important and make decent money at it, I am active in my church and with charities, but I still feel that dark lure, that dark hook, in the back of my head. Watching film noir is sort of my surrogate for living a life of cynical dissipation, but that sickly demon is still hanging around, waiting for weakness. It is a temptation for me, it is THE temptation for me, more than anything else probably. "Eat, drink and make merry, for tomorrow we die", so the nihilist says. We would rather hold our despair close, cuddle it like a drunk cuddles his bottle, than to submit to God for Him to heal us.

If there is anyone out there who recognizes this dark, absurd existence, I am not preaching at you except to say, it does not have to be like that. There is light. Sometimes, the hardest thing is to really want it.

Falling Short of Acts

2009-01-27T13:05:00.002-06:00

It is clear from the New Testament and especially from the Book of Acts, that life among the early Christians was far more close-knit and social than life among their counterparts today. Part of that was sheer necessity: houses were expensive and people were poor, so people lived many to a house. People mostly worked in the fields or at small enterprises of various sorts, so they usually were pretty close to home. They probably knew everyone in their immediate environs, just as Americans usually did before the advent of mass entertainment. Our world is very different from 40ish AD Judea.

It would be very easy to just say, that was a completely different world. The question we should be asking however, is which kind of society is better from a Christian point of view. A society where perhaps your only continuing deep social interaction is with your family, if you are lucky, or a society where the believers gathered together in one area and lived together, interacted with each other every day and not only on Sundays and maybe Wednesdays. It is clear to me that the latter is a more Christian way and the former is a way made possible by a consumer society in which things can take the place of people, television take the place of personal interaction, the internet take the place of social contact.

Why is it important from a Christian perspective to move towards a more social and communal way of life? At the heart of the gospel is the reconciliation of man to God. Part of that is also the reconciliation of Man to Man. As the Gospel of John emphasizes, we are to live in unity with Christ and unity with each other, which is kinda hard if you never see each other. As the Book of Acts emphasizes, we should be continually supporting, exhorting and confessing to each other, which again isn't something that is easy to do if you never see one another. Nor does an hour of watching the game on TV together or going out for drinks really work well: it takes time.

A larger number of social events is not much help: if you must constantly commute from one event to another, you will eventually get pretty tired. I know that I get offers to attend social events that I simply cannot go to, because I am too tired to face Dallas traffic. This also doesn't help the elderly who cannot get very far from home, or the handicapped or sick. Our jobs don't help either - often at a great distance from our homes, requiring long commutes, and at times often not defined by the rising or setting of the sun but by the 24-hour workcycle of modern business.

No, in order to have the kind of church community depicted in the Book of Acts, the community must live together in one area and ideally work together. It is however not so easy to bridge the gap between then and now. Individualism is ingrained in the very structure of our society. However this individualism as I mentioned above, is augmented by a consumer society in which a large number of diversions from social interaction and spiritual introspection are possible. We ourselves cannot bridge this gap easily. People of that time also tended to have looser work commitments or worked for themselves; perhaps they worked more but the work was dictated by the seasons and their work itself was more communal. I know that I myself don't have the economic wherewithal to form some sort of Christian commune - for the time being I am tied down by my work, which I am lucky to have considering that I am still hampered by my heart condition.

There is a bright spot on the horizon, or a dark spot, or actually both. We may not live to see it, but our children might. Our current mode of life, which supports our asocial ways, is not sustainable. It is unsustainable in many dimensions: ecologically unsustainable, unsustainable in terms of the exhaustion of resources, socially unsustainable. Sooner or later, we will have to embrace the principles of permaculture, or a long-term-sustainable way of life. Long-term sustainable agriculture, social constructs and ways of living. Principles of permaculture will naturally bring us back towards the kind of community-centric way of life that we see in the Book of Acts, but not without a great deal of distress in the short term, so that it why I say it is a bad thing and a good thing both. People won't move towards permaculture without significant environmental stressors, such as a lot of joblessness, social unrest, and constantly lowering standard of living. But the majority of stress will be borne by those who have not yet made a transition to permaculture, which is why it is a good idea to start thinking about it now. We can expect real movement in this direction if the current world economic recession deepens.

I usually have a severe reluctance to mix Christianity and politics, but on the other hand we should not separate our Christianity from actual life. To me, beginning to consider a move to a more eco- and social- sustainable way of life isn't political, it's just necessity. For a long time, a good economy provided people with assurance that they could get along without others and without regard for the environmental consequences of their actions, but as the storm clouds gather on our economic and ecological and social scene, we must realize that if we do not come together we will all fall separately. I don't have the magic bullet to make this transition come about, but we better be thinking about it.

The Wind

2009-01-22T12:25:00.003-06:00

"The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit."

-John 3:8

"...do not worry about what to say or how to say it. At that time you will be given what to say, for it will not be you speaking, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you."

-Matthew 10:19-20

Looking back I realize, some of the things I did, I didn't do. Some things that have had marvelous outcomes, I could not have foreseen or planned. Many things I did plan, did not turn out as hoped. Most things perhaps.

What is obedience to God? What is serving God? We may define it as us doing what we think God wants us to do, and that is a certain level of obedience. I feel more and more, however, that it consists of getting our own selves out of the way and letting God do God's work through us.

Sometimes the Holy Spirit may whisper things to us. That is a wonderful thing, but it is possibly more wonderful to do God's will directly, without any immediate understanding beyond God's movement in us. When the Holy Spirit not only speaks, but acts. We cannot premeditate God's will in a particular situation, only God knows what it is from moment to moment. Of course there are principles behind what God does, God desires to lift us up to Him, God seeks to reconcile Man to Him and His ways, but in terms of what we do moment to moment, we cannot premeditate God's will. We must be open, not only to God speaking to us, but to God acting through us - immediately, without forethought. Without evaluation. We might only know afterwards, or as we are doing it, that it was God who did it. The wind of the Spirit blows wherever It wills.

Prayer and meditation is a preparation, for getting ourselves out of God's way. Reading the scriptures, practicing the things Jesus practiced, is a preparation for God acting through us. They cleanse the vessel of our being, but it is God which fills the empty temple of our bodies and acts through them. We of ourselves cannot do good, we are constitutionally unable to do so. God alone is good, and to God alone goes the praise for any good thing that might be done through us. Sometimes He doesn't consult us either, He just does them. We must allow Him. We are His.

I am reminded of my very first experience with God, or the first that I can recall. I was maybe 20 years old. I didn't fully believe that it was happening, or perhaps I would have lived my subsequent life differently. I was sitting in a car alone, waiting for someone, and I fell into a sort of trance while watching the wind blowing through the trees. The words of the 23rd Psalm came to me, and I started reciting them. I felt the presence of God, but I didn't want to acknowledge it, but He was there - saying "I am here" to an unbeliever - as the wind blew through the trees.

G R A C E

2009-01-20T15:55:00.002-06:00

Sooner or later, you may come to believe that your virtue is assured - that you can no longer be tempted, that you will no longer commit sin. If you come to believe that, you will be wrong. All can be tempted. All can sin. And sooner or later, you will. Less and less, one hopes, but nobody is truly immune. Virtue comes from God's strength not our strength, and sometimes we will fail to embrace God's strength.

It is an interesting tension in our faith, the idea of grace vs. works. It is of course a false dilemma. The one side believes that God alone saves, not the works of men, and they are of course right. The other side believes that faith is proved by works, and they are also of course right.

Virtue is a beautiful thing. Grace is more beautiful. Honor and truthfulness and righteousness are all very very beautiful things, and worthy, and we should all seek to practice them. God's love is more beautiful.

Who can visualize the love of God? Who can encompass it's vastness? What is there in all the universe so majestic as God's love? Vast suns whose girth would swallow a hundred thousand Jupiters, would dim in the presence of such a brightness.

Jesus taught us to give grace to each other, forgive one another, because that is what God does to us. Without the strength and love of God, we can do nothing and cannot be righteous. With God's help, we can practice God's ways, which are truthfulness and righteousness and all the rest. But the foundation of these things is grace. Grace is first. Inversely, if you do not practice these things, if you do not love your neighbor, it is proven that you have not embraced God's love and are still in darkness, whatever deity your lips profess. You cannot be God's and practice hate.

Love is the foundation of it all. Without love, there is no motive for righteousness. Without love, we have no capacity for righteousness. Without God's love, we are not truly capable of love. There are many "legalistic" rules which we can have for ourselves and each other, and they may be good ones: practice charity by giving to the poor, forgive others of their sins against you, refrain from sin yourself - but without love they have neither motive nor meaning. Outside of love, they are in vain.

Of all things we can be given by God, the greatest is love. God molds us into His image in love. God makes us His children in love. Without God's love, we can do nothing, be nothing.

God is love. God loves His children. All other things come from this.

God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

We love because he first loved us.

1 John 4:16-19

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

1 Corinthians 13:13

Context

2009-01-13T12:45:00.007-06:00

"Consider carefully what you hear," he continued. "With the measure you use, it will be measured to you"

Mark 4:24

Events by themselves, alone, don't have meaning. They take meaning from their context, from the larger world, from your own understanding, from the light you have been given to understand with, from the meaning God gives them. From things that happen before or after them.

A man on a cross means nothing - what man is he? Is he a criminal, a thief, an innocent victim? More than a man indeed? There have been innumerable thousands of human beings who have been executed by crucifixion, by the Roman Empire and by others. One of them is called Lord by 2 billion people.

We have been told that a picture is worth a thousand words, and in a sense this is true, but in another sense pictures too can be taken out of context. Pictures are an excellent propaganda tool. The Third Reich made movies glorifying fascism even when they diverted resources from more immediate needs, because they knew, that through pictures they could bring their populace in line with their thinking.

An event, a photograph: it is what is happening outside the event, outside the frame of the picture, that brings or reveals the meaning of it. And we as human beings cannot help but place a context, a meaning, on the events we experience. Everyone reads events big or small, through the lens of their own philosophy, they cannot help doing so. Depending on the meaning we understand, the events can appear in a completely different light. A materialistic nihilist and a Christian do not see the same events the same way.

A heart attack. Before my heart attack, I would have seen me having a heart attack as a very bad thing indeed, a tragedy in my life. That would be a sensible way to look at it, from the viewpoint of a World-oriented philosophy. But now I cannot imagine my life without it, and would not want under any circumstances for it to have not happened. Context. It was traumatic, yes. It was also the most valuable experience of my life, because through that experience I came back to God.

A man crucified. A bad thing, a horrific death. What if in so doing this man is saving the world? It is still terrible, but thank God for it. Through the eyes of faith, events are the same, but their significance can be completely different. A radical change of context in this way is not something that is possible to do by yourself because everyone believes their own context; if they did not, it would not be their context. The context of holiness comes from God. God gives you new eyes, God gives you new context.

Events are. They don't mean anything until they are connected to what is beyond them. What you understand about those things, that is up to you. With the measure you use, it will be measured to you.

An anonymous man nailed to wood? Or the Messiah suffering to set us free. What you think about it is up to you. How do you measure it?

The Baptism

2009-01-11T16:20:00.003-06:00

Matthew Mark and Luke all agree that the baptism of Jesus was important, placing it as Jesus' launch point for His ministry. Mark simply begins with the ministry of John and the baptism of Jesus, omitting the Virgin Birth and the visit to the Temple as a youngster. Why Jesus is baptized, and why the Synoptics at least agree that it is important, is a more difficult question.

Adoptionists say that Jesus was not the Messiah until the Baptism, which a Trinitarian would have to disagree with, but at least that is a clear explanation of what is going on. Adoptionists however have to explain why Jesus would say that He was with God in the beginning, and how an adopted human Son could say as Jesus did on several occasions, "I Am", an echo of "I Am That I Am", clearly identifying Himself with God, not an adopted member of the family like we are. John explicitly states, "He was in the beginning with God."

Dismissing the Adoptionist argument for the moment, why would He submit to be baptized by John, who himself says he isn't worthy to do that?

Whatever the purpose in Jesus' mission, one thing is absolutely clear: for us, the experience of baptism as described in the gospels, is the experience of being "saved". Of being adopted by God. We may wonder what relevance baptism had for Jesus, but the relevance for us is huge. In receiving the Spirit, we may not see the heavens open or descending doves, but we recieve God's love and Spirit in the same way. "This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." Through Christ we have the opportunity to have our corrupted nature covered and cleansed, so that God can truly say of us, "this is my son, I am your Father." Not because of anything we did, although hopefully we will do things in the future to show His love to others, but as a free gift of adoption from God.

To live up to that wonderful and terrifying phrase: "You are my beloved son"... What must we do, truly, and how must we live, in order to live up to such a phrase? Yet as Christians, we must both accept that phrase from God and live up to the consequences of it. You are my beloved son (or daughter).

And this may be the answer to what Jesus was doing with John on the Jordan. Not for Him, for us. To teach us, "this is how you seek forgiveness, this is what will happen if you truly seek forgiveness from your heart. This is how you are adopted, the Spirit descending upon you, the declaration of God that you are beloved." He was showing us how it happens. He said to John, "it is becoming to fulfill all righteousness" - it is desired, in other words, to model the salvation of a human being, so that Jesus would not only be our Messiah but our model, and walk the road that we must walk. Fully human as well as fully God. His baptism is not for Him, but for us.

The Garden

2009-01-06T09:28:00.003-06:00

In the first chapter of Genesis, Man was given the command to be fruitful and multiply, and "let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth..." A phrase that has justified countless strip malls and strip mines since then, no doubt.

When God says to Man, "rule over the Earth", what does He mean by that? Does He mean rape, pillage, destroy? Well, lets look at how God rules things first, and assume that He meant that as a model for us. When we went astray, when we were a garden run wild and teetering on chaos, did God wipe us all out and start over? No, He didn't. Did He come down and institute His ways by force? No. Through Jesus He came down in gentleness and forgiveness, not wrath.

If God gave us dominion over the Earth, did He give it to us to build up or to break? To nourish or to destroy? Surely to build up, not destroy. Our first job in Genesis was not to be mindless consumers but gardeners: not to merely subject Nature to ourselves but to make it prosper. And yet wherever we touch the land, we tend to make it more sterile.

This is the shoreline of the Mediterranean island of Crete. Was it always so bare and scrubby? By no means, this was once a lush island and the home of a great and advanced civilization, 4000 years ago. A civilization with baths and flush toilets before Paris, London or even Rome existed. But this is what happens to an island after 4000 years of human civilization.

We humans are so self-centered, we think of the Kingdom of Heaven as merely pertaining to us. Some Christians are mainly concerned with their own salvation, and well they should be, but what are they being saved to? What does the rulership of God, the Kingdom of Heaven, mean? When you give your brother your shirt, or turn the other cheek, what are you doing? Surely you are building up God's creation rather than destroying it: surely you are giving your brother a chance to be saved not to fall into chaos. Surely this mandate to build up rather than destroy, extends beyond humanity too. Surely we should be the gardeners of all creation, not forgetting the nurture of our brothers, but not being limited to only them.

This is our job, given to us by God. We are to be the nurturers of Creation, whether in the form of other human beings or other living things. Instead we do anything but this.

Yes, we must redeem human beings first, because they are the ones who are doing all the hating, killing and destroying. Once redeemed, we must redeem others but not purely for human selfish interests. Look away from your own navels, Christians, and outward towards God and His creation. Be in cooperation with God in His work in Creation. Submit yourself to God; and this also means submit yourself to what God wants you to do which is participate in the glory of what He made.

We were born to be gardeners with God. To build up the harmony of the cosmos with God.

Not A Symbol

2008-12-23T21:37:00.004-06:00

Before I get into my actual topic, I want to share this beautiful hymn. It is the Catholic Latin variant of my most favorite hymn. The Episcopalian hymn with the same theme is called Fraction Anthem: Christ Our Passover. It is actually sung immediately before the actual taking of the bread and wine.

The Episcopal version only includes part of the words used in the Catholic version. Both are beautiful. I tried recording the Episcopalian version but my voice needs improvement like an Italian supercar driven by an adolescent needs repairs. :-) I would love to have a good voice.

This gentleman, singing the Catholic version which is called Pascha Nostrum, has a very good voice indeed:

The Episcopal Fraction Anthem: COP, sung by a good choir, has been known to make a grown man cry in public. Like, um, me.

The mention of Christ as our passover leads us to my actual topic: what is the Eucharist, really? I mean we all know what it is in remembrance of, but what is it? Most Protestants tend to view the bread and wine as symbolic, in the same way that the word "Christ" is symbolic of the real Christ. This concept makes me extremely sad for most Protestants. Essentially, they are saying that Christ commanded us to do something, something that is the earliest recorded tradition of the Church, something that we know the Church did from day one, but this thing that Christ commanded us to do is essentially an empty ritual. That is not true.

The Catholics on the other hand have the right attitude towards the Eucharist, but a kind of strange explanation of it. This is a not uncommon Catholic attribute in my experience: they often do the right things, but sometimes have confused reasons why they do them. The Catholic interpretation is that the bread and wine are NOT symbolic but the literal physical flesh and blood of Christ. In other words, the Eucharist is literal cannibalism.

The Catholics are not as far off from the truth as some Protestants - we are Deovores in a way. We do "partake" of God. But not in a physical nutrient sense.

It is a shame in a certain way that the ritual of foot-washing never really caught on. It was started at the same passover and means in some ways the same thing. God who is above all, nevertheless takes on the role of a servant in order to heal and cleanse us. We ourselves should do the same thing to our brothers. We eat Christ's sacrifice for us, his death on the cross. He fed us in that way. He continues to do so. While we eat Christ, Christ in a sense "eats" our fallen nature, and replaces the nature of sin within us with the nature of a son of God.

So the physical transubstantiation into meat would be sort of irrelevant: the transaction here is not between ourselves and a symbol, or ourselves and a piece of human flesh, but between ourselves and God. The Eucharist is an event in which God works a miracle in us through our understanding and acceptance of what Christ did for us. We say, "yes I understand the price Christ had to pay in order to save me". This is exactly what the Eucharist is: a miracle. It is a place where Christ can work miracles in you because you accept what He has done on your behalf.

If you are not taking advantage of that miracle, that is a mistake IMHO. I need it, it is no exaggeration to say that I feel spiritually depleted if I don't come to the Lord's table twice a week. Going a week without is not an option, unless I am literally physically unable to receive it. If I were hospitalized and unable to move, I would call a lay Eucharistic minister. In fact I might ask for a monstrance too.

To finish this post, I looked all over Youtube for any really decent Anglican Eucharist celebration, in vain. Failing to find any, and despite my terrible singing voice, I went ahead and sung the Great Thanksgiving from the Anglican Eucharist Rite II and put it here. I don't think that any of the Priests I know have to worry about their jobs, lol.

It occurred to me that there are probably people who have never heard it who might come by this website: if so, please hear this as if it were properly sung, not as it is sung by me. :-)

"He Descended Into Hell"

2008-12-20T23:45:00.003-06:00

Heironymus Bosch was not a proto-surrealist, he was trying to depict the horror of sin and evil.

Not a very Christmas-y topic, but with what Christmas has become these days, maybe not so far wrong either.

After Christ was crucified, when He descended into Hell, it doesn't say much about what he did there. Many people tend to picture it as about as exciting as a hospital visit. He goes, preaches to the dead, maybe shakes his finger at the Devil, and goes on about His business.

I would like to suggest a much more important thing that He could have been doing down there. Facing the horror. The horror, blackness and despair, of evil.

Backing up a minute, what did Jesus say about His own in this world? What would the children of the Light experience in this world? Joy in God, to be sure, but it's not all sweetness and light, not by a long shot. I put it to you that He said that we would be actively vexed by evil. We would weep and mourn. Those whose hearts are hardened are dulled to the full horror of evil, but we have not that protection. The heart must be broken and scandalized into full awareness of evil. Inside and outside us.

Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh...

...Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.

Luke 6:21, 6:25

And,

Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted...

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.

Matthew 5:4, 5:6

What then would you think Jesus would say should be our reaction to evil in the world? "Oh gosh, that is too bad, geez." NO.

The world is a bad place and the people in it are often consumed by evil. If you are numb to evil, you cannot begin to see the world as Jesus sees it, and you probably will be hindered in confronting your own sin.

When we see evil, we should be grieved. Jesus was. We should weep. Jesus did.

Just recently they found the body of a precious little 2 year old girl who was intentionally murdered. Intentionally. Think of the demonic soul, that could do that. It's real. Evil is very very real.

Joseph Mengele was real.

Dachau was real.

Bhopal was real.

The nerve-gassing of the Kurds was real.

The Rwandan Genocide was real.

HELL is real. It's not just a place for the bad guys to go once they quit the terrestrial globe, hell is with us all the time. The Kingdom of Hell, as it were, is within all of us. It is as close as our inward idolatry of our own ego and will.

The Lord, the LORD Almighty,
called you on that day
to weep and to wail,
to tear out your hair and put on sackcloth.

But see, there is joy and revelry,
slaughtering of cattle and killing of sheep,
eating of meat and drinking of wine!

-Isaiah 22:12

We are ALL, all who are called Children of God anyway, called upon to put on the sackcloth of grief when confronted with the truth of the evil of humanity, and the evil within us all.

Tremble, you complacent women;
shudder, you daughters who feel secure!
Strip off your clothes,
put sackcloth around your waists.

-Isaiah 32:11

Rest assured, when you go to confront the horror, Jesus went there first. Weep. Lament. And let God change your heart. God will lift you up and dry your eyes when it is time.

"In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."

-John 16:33

The Core

2008-12-20T03:27:00.004-06:00

Rose superimposed on the Edgerton Gospel papyrus

One reason why there are multiple prophets in the Old Testament, is because human beings weren't capable of really digesting a lot of what God was telling them at one time. At first, God stuck to the ultra basics because people were complete savages. Do not kill, do not steal. Do these little things, like circumcision, as a token that you people really can be obedient in some way or other. Essentially, the message was, "you are the people who are going to be carrying my message in the future, so I am taking you under my wing. Do these things."

The Old Testament has to be taken with that in mind: there was only so much that these xenophobic racist bloodthirsty savages (as all humans were at the time, and many still are today) were going to be able to accept psychologically in one dose. The Old Testament was training exercises for the New Testament, so we have to take the OT with a dose of skepticism as a model for today. Certainly Joshua who conquered Palestine was not a model of anything except ruthless destruction and insane nationalism. The OT was a very partial revelation, mostly about "be faithful to Me and I will do good things through you". Some parts are more partial than others.

All of these partial revelations prepared people for the New Testament, which speaks of the final revelation. How God Really Is.

This progression from the OT to the NT is not a process of evolution in religious thinking, it is a gradual unfolding of the One Thing, the Word. If the Israelites reasoned their way from the OT to the NT and the words of Jesus are a product of human thought, they are therefore worthless. I repeat, if Jesus merely represents a progressive evolution of Jewish thought from more xenophobic and nationalistic terms to more universal terms, then we are all lost, we will not have Life, and there is no reason to put faith in Jesus because Jesus' words would then be purely a product of human thought processes.

In short, if the progression between the xenophobia and racism of parts of the Old Testament, and the encompassing forgiveness of the New Testament, is only the result of an evolution in human thought, then we are all still in our sins and our faith is in vain. Unfolding/unveiling, and evolution are two different things, even though they may appear similar to us in their effects.

Similarly, there are people who think that the Word evolves still, that the complete Word was not given by Jesus (i.e. is a product of human thought) and is therefore subject to amendment. It is not. We may not and do not in fact understand ALL of the Word, that is not to say that it changes. It does not.

Similarly with the unfolding of the Word from OT to NT, there is the unfolding of the Word in ourselves. The Word has not changed, our comprehension of it does and must, and continues to do so all the time. However, the key word there is progression. The continuation of understanding builds on what you understood before, it doesn't completely undermine and destroy it. The increase of your understanding of the Word should build progressively, not destructively. The old tale of the blind men and the elephant does not apply here, new understanding illuminates the old, it does not annihilate it:

The elephant is an animal
The elephant is a very large animal
The elephant is a very large animal with a proboscis-like trunk
The elephant is a very large animal with a trunk and a thin tail with a brushy bit at the end

...and so on.

If you deny parts of the Word for the sake of modernity, you deny the whole thing. If you treat the Word as a product of human thought and so subject to evolution, you deny the meaning of the whole thing.

Human Philosophy Cannot Save You.

Only God can save. Human philosophy cannot change our human nature to be more like God's nature. Only God Can.

If you accept that some parts of what clearly was Jesus' message are wrong, you invalidate the whole thing. This is the reason why many would-be reformers of Christianity are wrong from the get-go. You cannot undo part of Christ's message without undoing the whole. Jesus was either a human religious philosopher or the Word From God, there is no third option, and if Jesus is the Word, that Word is not subject to human revision.

The direction for reformation is to go deeper into the core of the Word, unfold it more to your mind, not revise it. The Word is not revealed to everyone alike, but the sign of understanding more is that what you understand illuminates and energizes what is understood first. It adds depth and meaning to the first things, it doesn't destroy them.

Jesus is not preaching a feel-good Gospel. He is calling us to radical holiness, a very difficult thing, an impossible thing by human effort. Do not commit adultery, do not divorce, do not engage in sexual immorality. Love your neighbor as your own self, not as a nice slogan, but as a practical living reality. These are supremely hard things, contrary to our human nature, which is why God gives us some of His nature. Don't be editing the Word, by so doing you show that your faith is in human reason and is therefore worthless. Press deeper into It. Let God open the flower of the Word in your soul and peer deeply into it.

Put simply, if your trust is in human reasoning not in God's revelation, your faith is in vain and you are as lost as you ever were. Human reasoning accounts for nothing.