Money

I want to be responsible with my money, and I want to live only within my means. I also want my "means" to be not "what I can afford" but to give as more than I can afford and live under those means. I don't want to be so tied to buying things and having things. I'm afraid of wrapping myself up in life's junk, when so many people don't have anything at all, and so many ministries need resources, and so many of God's servants need support. I don't want to wrap my heart around things.

But in my headlong, breakneck, out of control budgeting and giving and planning and saving... I've wrapped my heart more effectively around "money" than I ever could have just by spending. Trying to stop stuff from consuming me, I'm consumed by the act of stopping it. I think more about paychecks, hours, what I'm not buying, what I need to save, and where I should give, than I think about anything else. Stuff, and the lack of it, is taking over my mind and heart and life.

This is absurd! All I wanted to do was to live outside this ridiculous bubble of buying and buying and hoarding and needing, but instead I've buried myself deeper into it than any one I know.

I do want to use my money responsibly, and I do not want to buy things that I don't need or that are extravagant, and I don't want to waste the resources of a job and steady income that God has blessed me with, especially when so many people are without either. How do I use my money responsibly, though, without the responsibility itself consuming me? God doesn't want me to center my life around stuff, but he also doesn't want me to center my life around the avoidance of stuff.

To live within my means, but not to dwell on it - to give generously, without fear of running out - to work diligently, but without obsessing about paychecks - to buy only what I need, but once I've made the decision that I need it, to buy without guilt. Work hard, budget wisely, give radically, and then - forget about it! And live a real life that is about loving God and loving people, not defined by what I have - or do not have.

All in Your Head

More thoughts of work and sanctification.

When I work ten hours instead of six hours, the difference isn't working the actual four hours more, it's thinking about working the extra four hours. It's not hard to work from noon to four, but at nine there is a huge difference in my mind between staying for three more hours, and staying for seven more hours.

I guess that this is what makes Chinese water torture effective. It's not what's happening, it's what you think about what's happening.

So God says "whatever you do, whether you eat or drink, do it all for the glory of God," and "whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men." This eliminates the pain of thinking about work, and just leaves the work, which usually isn't that bad.

Bathrobe Meditations

I feel like I spend a lot of time praying that God will "use" me. I am always asking that I will be a light at my work, in my classes, and in my friendships, and praying that God will make me useful for His kingdom. It's easy for me to ask to be a helping hand or a word of encouragment when my friends are struggling. In classes, I want to show my professors that Christians not only think well, but also love well. I want to be ready when people ask for an explanation for the hope that they see in me.

I don't remember the last time I prayed that God would destroy me.

Could I ever walk into my job, and instead of looking for a place to be a light, look for a place to not exist - for a place to sacrifice myself and my ego and to live for others? Have I ever asked God to kill me when I go to school, that I will live not for my own accomplishments (including Christian ones) but be blind to my own self-interest and even identity? Could I ever ask God to annihilate my "self" and leave nothing behind but ashes? Have I ever asked to be crucified with Christ, so that I no longer live, but Christ lives in me?

It's so easy to ask for success! It's even easier when I hide a prayer for my success under a mask of "Your kingdom come." The mask doesn't last long, because as soon as I try to pray for death and failure - in the name of God's glory - I am not a "holy saint" any more, with only the best interests of my classmates and coworkers, but a shying, hiding, reluctant Pharisee who will do any job or any service so long as he gets the credit.

I have been crucified with Christ! And I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.

Have to Do

Life is full of things that we "have to do." Not just working, but brushing our teeth, washing dishes, taking showers, going food shopping, and sleeping. When I get out of work in the afternoon, I'm not any more "free" than I was when I was being paid to serve people coffee. I still "have" to do a lot of things. Life is just one "have to do" after another. But to do all of the "have to dos" joyfully and to the Lord is freedom. All actions become sanctified.

Not really.

"SECULAR MEDIA FOCUSES ON THOSE WHO TRY BUT FAIL"

"So Mel Gibson's getting flack for having an affair — something that never happens in Hollywood, but newsworthy because he's hardcore Catholic. Meanwhile, Carrie Prejean continues to be crucified — she's a Christian who posed topless to get work. And of course, there's Bristol Palin — unwed with a baby, talking abstinence."

This is a clip from an article I read this morning. The jist of the article you can get from the title. The secular media is busy destroying Christians, because we're trying and failing, while them ol' sinners in Hollywood never have to take this crap because they never even try to be good.

I disagree with that analysis. I think that the media focuses on people who judge others for crimes that they themselves commit. People don't hate Christians because we fail, they hate us because we pretend we aren't failing, and tell everyone around us what to do.

Christians say an awful lot that "we aren't perfect, just forgiven!" So stop pretending to be perfect, then, stop telling other people to be perfect (my old [slighty fire and brimstony] pastor used to say "the job of a Christian is not to make the world behave better on its way to hell"), and start extending the grace of he who has been forgiven much. 

Love

Thinking about love again. Been trying to do the "love your enemy" thing.  Loving people that are difficult to love. Loving people that don't love you back. Loving people that hurt you, or loving people that are bottomless pits of love, or loving people that you'd rather just bash into the ground.

My love doesn't change them. They don't notice my love, or they don't care, or they try to use it to take advantage of me, or it seems to just bounce off of them.

Love can turn into self-righteousness (if you think your love is "helping" someone), or turn into dependence (when what you call love is really neediness of your own) or become hurtful (when "love" becomes a word for "being nice" and niceness isn't what is best).

How do you love someone that doesn't love you? How do you love without it becoming false love?

You're left with a paradox. Maybe love doesn't change other people (or at least, doesn't guaranty a change). But loving other people definitely, and always, changes me. By loving others, I am transformed.

If I am loving because other people need to be loved, than it will turn into self-righteousness, and dependence, and emotional greed. I will let myself be abused in relationships because I need to "love" the person who is hurting me. I will let myself be obsessed with someone, because they "need" me to be "happy" as much as I need them. I will pat myself on the back, because I am lifting up the lonely and the hurt - I, I am their savior.

But if I am loving because God has called me to be a person who loves, then I center my eyes on God, and love away, regardless of the consequences, knowing that I will possibly never see "results" and it may not make anyone "happier", but I will absolutely become stronger, more compassionate, and more capable of love. My capacity for love will expand, and it will stop mattering if my love "changes" the people I meet.

Humanism, Deism, Jesusism?

Adapted from a reflection paper for my Nietzsche and Secularization class. Good stuff in that class.

No one wants to talk about Jesus!

This includes, to differing extents: Nietzsche, Taylor, my Christian friends, my Buddhist friends, my atheist friends, my favorite Christian rock band growing up, and... me. It’s always about God. Or maybe about “Jesus as Teacher.” Jesus as God is either awkwardly ignored (the theological elephant in the room) or outwardly dismissed.

But the central tenant of Christianity is that God became a human being, which is insane, and that this human being lived in time, under the constraints of time, was documented by historical sources (including secular sources such as Josephus, the non-Christian, Jewish historian of the time), died and was documented as such, and then, with grand mythological flare, came alive again and somehow because of this, humans are capable of being freed from being purely human and can be remade as something greater than human. WTF?!? What kind of an odd compilation of mythology, history, and enchantment is that? But it’s what every Christian church service rests on, what every Christian theology has to bend around, and what every Christian life acknowledges. So why does everyone – me included – want to keep the story to just God? Why, even amongst Christians, is it never about Jesus? Is it because it’s such an inherently awkward story, particularly for the 21st century? (“Yeah, so, like, this Jewish guy was God and he came back to life! Like, sweet, right?”). Instead, we talk about God, and when we talk about Jesus, he is stripped of his status as a God-man (if not in theology, than in casual discussion) and turned into a cross between Gandhi and Kant – wandering around Galilee spreading peace and wisdom.

But as awkward a concept as God becoming man, dying, and coming back to life is, it’s absolutely essential to Christianity. The loss of the divinity of Christ is absolutely the central turning point towards secularization.

Once Jesus loses his divinity, two things happen. First, Christianity becomes a moral system based around following a moral teacher. Moral systems are wonderful, but the loss of enchantment, grace, and the supernatural means that it is only one step more to eliminating God altogether (Charles Taylor is big on this - the loss of enchantment, post-Medieval life, is the beginning of the loss of all religion). Once religion is simply moral rules, then why have a God at all? Why can’t we be moral people, living a flourishing life, without God?  If Jesus is a teacher, and not a supernatural savior, then the focus is on rationality, on human ability to “follow rules,” and on human capability to achieve perfection apart from any outside help. All of these things are completely possible without a God-man.

The second thing that happens is that the moral rules that Jesus himself gave become irrelevant and impossible. How are the commands of Jesus to “give all you have to the poor and follow me,” his promises that his followers would have “no place to lay their heads,” that the poor are “blessed,” sustainable with the kind of Deism that reduces God's plan for humans to having them “ realize the order in their lives which he had planned for their happiness and well being”? (Some more Charles Taylor). When Jefferson removed the divinity of Jesus from him, what he did was make Jesus absurd (how could he make such radical and impossible demands on people?) and irrelevant (since his actual demands are so high, it is impossible that we follow them in reality, so we can admire Jesus from a distance while being entirely off the hook for any real life-change). Jesus’ actual teachings are so insane if taken literally that it seems that the only way to deal with him is to place him in a specific historical context, “mummify” him as a “good teacher” (even while we do not take his commandments literally) and proceed to live a life that “flourishes”.

 If Christianity is just deism and religious humanism, then its lifestyle demands are too radical. But if Jesus was divine, then his commands aren’t just “do this” into a void of human inability, but empowered by him. If Christianity is actually supernatural, then maybe we can become beings that are capable of immense sacrifice, immense love, and immense freedom. Without supernatural help, however, Jesus was a naive 1st century radical who failed to comprehend humanity. Charles Taylor talks a lot about “transcending flourishing": Living a life that's more than just "the good life." This sort of life is impossible without a reality of Jesus as divine.

Goddamn Existentialists

I am caught in an Enlightenment puzzle of predestination.

Charles Taylor, Catholic theologian, sums up the paradox of Christianity and sin nature: it is “why, in spite of knowing we are born to the highest, we sometimes not only inexplicably choose against it, but even feel that we cannot do otherwise. The symmetrical mystery is that God can act to overcome this incapacity – the doctrine of grace.”

“Double-mystery” – we are unable to save ourselves. Only God can save us. And yet some people remain unsaved.

Therefore...

God damns people to hell just because. He can chose to save everyone, and yet some people are not saved, so therefore those people are chosen arbitrarily by God to be damned.

It makes sense.
It also stands in direct opposition to all of our human inclinations and feelings.

Many Christians are okay with that. Armenianism, Calvinism, and Jonathan Edwards sacrificed human inclinations of fellowship to the alter of reason.

“If God says it is right, then it is right. My sympathy for my fellow man is sin, because I am unaligned with God’s Reason. I do not understand it, but it must be right, because it is rational. If God wants to damn anyone to hell, it is right that he should do so, and I will stifle my sympathy for souls damned to hell because reason dictates I must”.

God gave us reason, and Kant says that means that He is reasonable.

But God also gave us sympathy.

So why assume that our sympathy is tainted by sin (and must go) but our reason is untainted?

Why follow our logic at the expense of our sympathies, instead of following our sympathies at the expense of logic? Who says that reason must always win? What if our reason is corrupt, just like our sympathies? Is the decision to choose logic over sympathy simply... arbitrary?

What if there is logic that we cannot understand because it is God’s, and our sympathies are all we have to guide us at this standstill?

Taylor sees that Calvinists and Arminianists and Jonathan Edwards followed the “logic through to the most counter-intuitive.” Logic lead to a place that didn’t even make sense. The conclusion of Logic produced a God that was entirely different from the God of Logic’s premise.

Taylor’s solution – multiculturalism.

“This wasn’t the only way that the double mystery could be articulated. Eastern fathers, like Gregory of Nyssa, put things differently.”

The elevation of logic over sympathy may not be arbitrary – it may be cultural.

Western conceptions of “truth” – enlightenment conceptions of “reason” – vs. Eastern traditions.

Is the fact that “logic leads to truth” a Western bias?

Can something besides logic lead to truth?

Can our sympathy and logic conflict, and sympathy wins?

But... isn’t that a dangerous idea if one has immoral sympathies?

Why does that seem more dangerous than if one has immoral rationality?

If logic can be as corrupted as sympathy, how else can we reach Truth?

Enter existentialism.

Sheftu isn't coming?!?

I always used to ask, "is this it?" in a horrified, unbelieving tone - getting up, going to work, getting paid, buying what you need, going to church, making friends, shopping for clothes and on and on and on. I read Mara, Daughter of the Nile too many times and honestly could not believe that life would ever be anything other than an epic adventure story where not only does the girl save the day, but she gets the guy at the end.

Then I started to wonder - "is this it?" really? Can't we all go and be missionaries and die for Christ and do wild and wonderful things on the edge of a precipice? Can't I escape reality through my religion? Is this really it? Can't there be more?

And God's answer keeps being - until you do this, here, I will never entrust you with that, there. Until you are faithful with few, I will not give you many. Until you can go home graciously to your parents at night, until you can work industriously at writing papers that you hate, until you can keep your room clean, until you can learn what I want you to learn in this little universe that I have given you, I will never let you loose on to the large and grand and wonderful universe that perhaps one day I will let you play in. Be patient.

Is this it? Well... yeah. Today it is.

Existentialism Class

"Kierkegaard is widely considered to be the father of existentialism, and within Fear and Trembling we see him propounding a 'philosophy of existence', self-conscious thinking about human existence itself. He writes not dialectically, but personal, novelistically, and using pseudonyms..."

im tired. i cant believe its raining on my deerfield fair party. that kid looks like jess from gilmore girls - hes even got the wacky hair going. i hate this sweatshirt, why am i wearing it? nice dreads, i wish i

"... and so we begin to see the split in the five distinct ways of seeing philosophy: speculative vs. practical, objective vs. subjective, universal vs. particular, human nature vs. individuality, and cognition vs. will and emotion. What existentialism will do..."

i cant believe i didnt study for my german test yesterday. i cant believe that i actually forgot the feminine personal pronoun. actually, i should believe it because obviously i didnt study. i should study for my religion test today. i dont want to. why am i not studying for classes? is this just junioritis or

"...but Kierkegaard doesn't want us to 'hold the world at arms length in order to understand it." He is practical, subjective - what is it to experience human life rather than to examine it? Most particularly, is it our reason and cognition that makes us human or our will and emotions? Socrates, and down through Descartes and Kant, would all claim that...

oh god, i am so tired. 'i can't focus. 'how can a young person stay pure? by obeying your word'. what is purity? kierkegaard's book - 'purity of heart is to will one thing' -what does it mean to will one thing? purity beyond sexuality - to be fixated on just one thing - to not be distracted - intellectual purity and purity of focus and purity of soul before god - indistractability

"... Hegel's dialect implies that for every thesis and antithesis, there is a synthesis, and that this will continue until the Truth is reached - an examining, rejecting, moving forward pattern is established..."

not to be pure, not to get pure, to stay pure. to set up your tent there. no, a foundation, build a house. to stay - to be steady - becoming pure isnt the problem, finding purity isnt the problem, staying there is the problem

"... but here Kierkegaard is implying that a synthesis is impossible. The choice between ethical duty and the demands of God is paradoxical. You cannot synthesis the two because they are ultimately incompatible. The ethical can become..."

but this is silly, this doesn't make sense. the questions is how to stay pure, the answer is "by obeying your word" - that doesnt answer the question. the problem with staying pure is the inability to obey. hes given a definition, not a solution. "how do i stay pure? obey your word. what is obedience to your word? staying pure." its a circle, it never ends, there is no solution

"...so in this sense Kierkegaard is rejecting the tradition that says there is an ultimate compatibility between faith and reason and that faith and reason are two different ways of arriving at the same point. Faith, Kierkegaard claims, is a paradox and its requirements are not humanly possible. What is humanly possible? An ethical life, and aesthetic life, even a life of religious resignation. But true faith is an absurdity and therefore supernatural...."

i should be taking notes on this lecture, i'm writing a research paper on kierkegaard this is IMPORTANT purity how can a young person stay build a house live in the house not just today its not a hotel but live in tomorrow and forever staying there paradox faith as the absurd how can a young person build a house if

"... the religious duty cannot be reduced to the ethical duty..."

how can a young person

"... and if the absurdity of faith's requirements cannot be accomplished through human power..."

how? by

"...because it is often independent of reason, and Kierkegaard would claim, beyond reason..."

for it is by

"...faith..."

you have been saved, not through

"... the ethical demands..."

so that no one can boast.


[this is an "artistic compilation", if you will, of the actual notes (both kinds- academic and personal) that i took this morning during my existentialism class.]

Unanticipated Factors

It's so hard to plan for anything when the factors keep changing.

Which is the point, I guess.

There is no magic equation for "being good" or "doing good"  because no matter how well you plan, or no matter how many variables you factor in, everything can change in a second. I can't plan a "righteous day" out and make a roadmap of how I'll respond to every situation because I just can't possibly know what situations will throw themselves across my poorly lit, overgrown path.

But all this planning and preparation is just horribly misplaced anyway, because I'm just using it to try and be "good," not trying to get to know God.

Why can't I remember that the point is not to be good?!?!?