I was recently struck by something that may seem obvious to you, but stay with me. God does a lot of renaming in the Bible. People come up in the narrative and God decides to rename them. This is puzzling and somewhat ironic since God’s first marching orders to man was to name everything. Man must have done okay in naming the animals, but apparently we’ve botched the process of naming ourselves.
You see this all over the place. Abraham is the first and clearest example. Abram was not polysyllabic enough, it seems. Not to be left out, Sarai becomes Sarah. It skipped a generation, but then Jacob gets a new handle too: Israel. Funny that the name of the country was originally the name of the scheming, lace-panty grandson of Father Abraham, whose name meant “swindler, cheat, liar” appropriately enough. It even happens in the New Testament, when Jesus dubs Simon “Peter”. Later, Saul of Tarsus becomes Paul, wishing to avoid any unpleasant associations with the first king of Israel who was a bit off in the head. At least, until his head came off. But Paul, in his attempt to pursue humility, took a name meaning “little”, which may have also referenced his stature. Physically at least; in the annals of God, it’s another matter.
All very uninteresting, you might muse. Ever the cynic. Allow me another observation before a possible application. I’ve always enjoyed how names meant something in olden days. You never really get that very much nowadays except for Muslim names or African names with fifty letters and some weird punctuation like apostrophes and hyphens thrown in for color. What does “Tom” mean? Or “Phil”? “Jessica”? “Heather”? But “Abraham” means “Father of many” and “Sarah” means "princess," though the rename seems to imply that she would be mother of nations and kings (Genesis 17:15-16). Isaac means “He laughs” because of Sarah’s incredulous chuckle gave way to joyful giggling. We noted Jacob’s name, and it was changed to Israel since he struggled with God. Heck, even his brother Esau got into the act, thanks to his bountiful hair. “Peter” means “rock” and Jesus gives the meaning for this name change, explaining that the Church would be founded in some way upon Peter’s ministry and service. The point being, here, that the names said something about the person; they spoke of the person’s identity. Abraham became the father of a great nation, and spiritually the father of the Christians since his lineage included Christ, the Father of the new covenant. Peter became the rock of the early church, acting as a leader and apostle, dedicated until his death.
I have a name that originates in the Bible, which means “Beloved”, but by and large our names mean nothing to us anymore. They don’t speak about us or describe who we are; they’re just devices for differentiation. But names used to not only tell us what we were to call the person, they told us about the person as well, which is probably why people were given their final names later in life, not at birth. Which leads me to my final Scriptural references.
Revelation 2: 17. “He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To him who overcomes, I will…give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.”
God’s not done renaming people. When we stand before Him and are shriven of our earthly flesh, purified in Jesus’ holy presence and burnt clean of imperfection, to each of us will He give a new name. And based on His naming practices in the past, the name He will give will describe us. This passage leapt off the page when I first encountered it; I have always fancied that the name He’ll bestow will be related to my unique relationship with Him. For each of us will have our entirely original relationship with God. He does not intend to subsume our personalities, to eradicate our individuality, but rather to perfect it by uniting it with the Source of meaning and life and personality Himself. Each of us will express our relationship with Him in our own way, in Heaven as we do on earth.
I also like that the new name is private. No one else will know but Him and me. No one else will impinge upon our intimacy, our connection. Like lovers have a pet name for each other that only emerge during their private times, I and God will share our private joy even in the midst of the fellowship of the saints.
Because I’m looking for a new name. Not that my old name doesn’t suit me, but I associate it with my past, the failings and sins that haunt me to this moment, that dog my steps, thoughts, and words and shall until my life is over. If I were to answer the question God asked Jacob, when He wanted to hear Jacob confess who he was, what he had done, my name(s) would be different but equally hopeless and shameful. God wants to change our name, but we have to acknowledge our name first. We have to realize that our identity as we have managed it is hopeless, and allow God to rename us, change our identity.
So I eagerly await the day when I’ll turn over the white stone and read the name God wants to know me by, who He thinks I am and who He’s making me to be. The name will be an identity unique and united with Jesus with unadulterated harmony and perfection.
What’s in a name, the Bard once queried. Who you are and who you will be is the answer. So what’s your name?
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Lessons from Spackle
It occurred to me today that I have achieved expertise at mudding a wall with spackle. I know this because it fell to me to put the second coat of spackle on. The first coat is usually done with a quick-drying compound that must be mixed many times and immediately applied to the cracks and joints between pieces of drywall. I also did this, preparing the room for a second coat. The first coat is literally filling in the cracks, getting the major joints and separations covered, so that the second coat, and third if necessary, will create a smooth, seamless transition from one drywall board to another. Then it will be time to paint.
Now, I did a decent job at the first coat. There were a lot of rough edges and iffy mud jobs, but again, the goal isn’t purity, it’s practicality. The subsequent coats require the more seasoned hand, feathering the spackle out to where it fades into nothing, a seamless transition to the drywall. And I put up the slower drying spackle that constitutes the finished coats. My uncle, who is “supervising” this home improvement project, stood in general approval of the progress of the room, but he failed to compliment me for (to my mind) the fine execution of the second coat. Don’t misunderstand; ever since I did a great deal of spackling for the upstairs rooms in which I now abide, I have been teasingly referred to as an “expert” in mudding walls. That is to say, I know the techniques well enough to need no instruction or oversight to put up the initial and subsequent coats. I’ve done a lot of first coats, and been plied with compliments by my uncle who is quick to praise and bolster my self-esteem in matters handyman.
So the lack of his praise in this case struck me as an even higher praise than the explicit acknowledgment usually rendered. In essence, my expertise in spackling has become so accepted that it is now expected, and hence unremarkable. When you are truly proficient at something, others tend to notice it less. Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it certainly leads towards complacency. This we find even if the familiarity is with excellence.
Allow me to illustrate this further with my favorite activity, golf. (Note: it is not only possible, but distinctly likely, that I am wildly overrating my abilities in spackling. Which, by the way, is a delightfully absurd statement in and of itself. Be aware that my uncle’s indifference might not have sprung from familiarity with excellence, but plain oversight, and the lengthy discourse you just suffered through was nothing more than me stroking my ego.)
As my elder sister could tell you from taking Theory of Coaching Basketball, there are four accepted stages of progression in mastering a skill: Unconscious Incompetent (where the novice is doing the motion required by the sport or activity wrong and doesn’t know it); Conscious Incompetent (where the novice realizes his/her inadequacies and struggles to correct them); Conscious Competent (where the practitioner begins to perform the motion correctly through diligent practice and conscious effort); and finally Unconscious Competent (also known as “being in the zone,” where the practitioner is performing the activity correctly without thinking about the motion and theory; highly desired by athletes professional and amateur alike). This usually applies to the athlete shooting a basketball, throwing a baseball, or swinging a golf club. The progression of knowledge and mastery is only to be gained by repetition and mental focus. And as I have discovered to my chagrin of late, even the physical action can be superseded by the mental element. It is of paramount importance that the golfer maintains a proper mental attitude, attempting to focus lightly on the golf swing during a round, allowing the practice to flow freely.
How does this relate? Well, if the golfer is dedicated (read: obsessed) enough to practice, study, and be deliberate in building his swing, then the results should produce an improved swing. Where once the irons sprayed all over the place, or the driver produced a banana slice shot, the wild vacillations and inconsistencies should diminish to the point where the golfer is hitting a consistent fade of ten yards every tee shot, or knows that his nine-iron will travel 145 yards every time. And less and less will the golfer focus on the swing mechanics of the driver or nine-iron, turning his attention increasingly to aiming the ball and controlling the distance properly. The swing can become unconsciously competent.
And here we finally see the correlation to my spackling expertise. Because if someone is familiar enough with the golfer’s game, they will no longer exclaim in the precise judgment and control of the drive, or the precision of the nine iron shot, because they expect nothing less. They have seen the golfer execute the shot enough times that the result is no longer surprising; indeed, the surprise comes only when the golfer fails to execute the proper shot. My uncle still remarks on my “gorgeous” driver shots, but only as a response to his inability to hit consistent drives. He witnessed my recent woes and repeatedly expressed shock and amazement at the futility of my shotmaking, so used was he to a higher caliber of play from me.
So take it from me that if you’re doing something exceedingly well and no one seems to notice or applaud, it probably springs from the fact that they expect excellence from you and we never marvel at the fulfillment of our expectations, only at their thwarting. Which is more satisfying? Is it better to hear the praise or to understand that the lack of praise denotes a respect and faith in one’s ability and proficiency? That is too great a question for me to answer for anyone other than myself. And here we delve into the murky waters of psychology and the machinations of people’s minds.
I must confess that for myself, I luxuriate in the praises of men, which should tell you something about me. The man who is truly confident in himself needs no other validation or confirmation.
One final point. Is there any application from this discussion concerning our life with God? I have often marveled at the parallels between life and golf, and the analogies of golf to the Christian walk are no less striking. The main lesson or moral that might apply here takes a slight twist on the notion of the unconscious competency that is the highest level of proficiency. For the progression of faith-walking is similar to the mastery of a skill. We begin in blissful ignorance, unaware of our need for salvation and deliverance from sin. The carnal mind is not subject to the laws of God, neither indeed can be, for he is hostile towards God. Once the good news has been revealed to us, once the Spirit begins to work on our hearts, we become conscious of our need, our depravity, and ultimately become saved. The line between conscious incompetent and competent need not be salvation, for even after we are saved we are still learning to know the will and mind of God, and we still make horrendous mistakes and grieve Him. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that most Christians never actually progress from the second to the third phase; I myself often feel like I am hopelessly incompetent in living the Christian life and obeying God’s mandates.
And here we must differentiate between worldly endeavors and the ordinances of God. For we do not progress in closer fellowship with Jesus by dint of our efforts, our study, our practice of rituals, even rituals like reading the Bible or attending church. If you doubt this, you need only read of the Pharisees of Jesus’ and his disciples’ day, whose job it was to be preachers and teachers and students of the Scriptures, yet who could look on the physical face of God and shout for his execution. The efforts of man do not avail in the context of God. This is what Paul meant when he chastised the Galatians in chapter 3 of his epistle, reasoning with (and railing a little at) those believers who were trying to continue in the life of Christ in a completely different manner than that which led to their salvation. We are not saved by our own efforts, but through God’s provision; as we have been saved, so should we walk, relying not on ourselves to fulfill the requirements of Jesus, but again allowing God to have His way in us, to provide for our life even as He provided for our salvation.
And this is the difference between the stages, because we never become consciously competent in walking with God. We never become proficient in living the Christian life through our own verve and mastery. We become competent in living the Christian life to the extent that we focus our attention and will towards God, away from ourselves. So we must delete the Conscious Competent phase and skip to the Unconscious Competent phase, in which we are not oblivious to God, but rather we are oblivious to ourselves, our efforts to please Him and live for Him. He wants to live for us, not the reverse; to live through us, to accomplish His will His way, and use us as His hands and feet. The hands don’t decide what to do; they obey the head.
In fact, true Christ-likeness involves the recognition in us of our complete and utter inadequacy to live the Christian life. We don’t ever make it past the Incompetent stage! Our competency comes from surrender of our lives to God. This is the good news of living the Christian life: the pressure’s off! You don’t have to sweat it! Just let go and let God, to use an old cliché.
So who then gets the praise, the glory? Well, if we’re unequal to the task and God’s the one doing the work, bringing souls to Him, performing miracles, then who should get the glory? And this is the crux of the matter, because as long as we delude ourselves that we can live for God, do His work our way, be Consciously Competent for Him, then we can claim credit for the successes and bask in the glory. If we relinquish our foolish dreams of adequacy for God, He receives all the glory. And despite the countless hymns and songs and sermons the Church enjoys every Sunday that claim to espouse this attitude, it is all too rare nowadays to see in everyday Christian behavior.
So you must choose in your Christian walk: would you rather go it alone, take up the yoke and burden of evangelism and purity and observance of God’s perfection, and so claim the glory (what little there will be) for yourself? Or will you allow God to be your competency, to live and work through you, and so surrender both your life and the glory to Him?
Now, I did a decent job at the first coat. There were a lot of rough edges and iffy mud jobs, but again, the goal isn’t purity, it’s practicality. The subsequent coats require the more seasoned hand, feathering the spackle out to where it fades into nothing, a seamless transition to the drywall. And I put up the slower drying spackle that constitutes the finished coats. My uncle, who is “supervising” this home improvement project, stood in general approval of the progress of the room, but he failed to compliment me for (to my mind) the fine execution of the second coat. Don’t misunderstand; ever since I did a great deal of spackling for the upstairs rooms in which I now abide, I have been teasingly referred to as an “expert” in mudding walls. That is to say, I know the techniques well enough to need no instruction or oversight to put up the initial and subsequent coats. I’ve done a lot of first coats, and been plied with compliments by my uncle who is quick to praise and bolster my self-esteem in matters handyman.
So the lack of his praise in this case struck me as an even higher praise than the explicit acknowledgment usually rendered. In essence, my expertise in spackling has become so accepted that it is now expected, and hence unremarkable. When you are truly proficient at something, others tend to notice it less. Familiarity may not breed contempt, but it certainly leads towards complacency. This we find even if the familiarity is with excellence.
Allow me to illustrate this further with my favorite activity, golf. (Note: it is not only possible, but distinctly likely, that I am wildly overrating my abilities in spackling. Which, by the way, is a delightfully absurd statement in and of itself. Be aware that my uncle’s indifference might not have sprung from familiarity with excellence, but plain oversight, and the lengthy discourse you just suffered through was nothing more than me stroking my ego.)
As my elder sister could tell you from taking Theory of Coaching Basketball, there are four accepted stages of progression in mastering a skill: Unconscious Incompetent (where the novice is doing the motion required by the sport or activity wrong and doesn’t know it); Conscious Incompetent (where the novice realizes his/her inadequacies and struggles to correct them); Conscious Competent (where the practitioner begins to perform the motion correctly through diligent practice and conscious effort); and finally Unconscious Competent (also known as “being in the zone,” where the practitioner is performing the activity correctly without thinking about the motion and theory; highly desired by athletes professional and amateur alike). This usually applies to the athlete shooting a basketball, throwing a baseball, or swinging a golf club. The progression of knowledge and mastery is only to be gained by repetition and mental focus. And as I have discovered to my chagrin of late, even the physical action can be superseded by the mental element. It is of paramount importance that the golfer maintains a proper mental attitude, attempting to focus lightly on the golf swing during a round, allowing the practice to flow freely.
How does this relate? Well, if the golfer is dedicated (read: obsessed) enough to practice, study, and be deliberate in building his swing, then the results should produce an improved swing. Where once the irons sprayed all over the place, or the driver produced a banana slice shot, the wild vacillations and inconsistencies should diminish to the point where the golfer is hitting a consistent fade of ten yards every tee shot, or knows that his nine-iron will travel 145 yards every time. And less and less will the golfer focus on the swing mechanics of the driver or nine-iron, turning his attention increasingly to aiming the ball and controlling the distance properly. The swing can become unconsciously competent.
And here we finally see the correlation to my spackling expertise. Because if someone is familiar enough with the golfer’s game, they will no longer exclaim in the precise judgment and control of the drive, or the precision of the nine iron shot, because they expect nothing less. They have seen the golfer execute the shot enough times that the result is no longer surprising; indeed, the surprise comes only when the golfer fails to execute the proper shot. My uncle still remarks on my “gorgeous” driver shots, but only as a response to his inability to hit consistent drives. He witnessed my recent woes and repeatedly expressed shock and amazement at the futility of my shotmaking, so used was he to a higher caliber of play from me.
So take it from me that if you’re doing something exceedingly well and no one seems to notice or applaud, it probably springs from the fact that they expect excellence from you and we never marvel at the fulfillment of our expectations, only at their thwarting. Which is more satisfying? Is it better to hear the praise or to understand that the lack of praise denotes a respect and faith in one’s ability and proficiency? That is too great a question for me to answer for anyone other than myself. And here we delve into the murky waters of psychology and the machinations of people’s minds.
I must confess that for myself, I luxuriate in the praises of men, which should tell you something about me. The man who is truly confident in himself needs no other validation or confirmation.
One final point. Is there any application from this discussion concerning our life with God? I have often marveled at the parallels between life and golf, and the analogies of golf to the Christian walk are no less striking. The main lesson or moral that might apply here takes a slight twist on the notion of the unconscious competency that is the highest level of proficiency. For the progression of faith-walking is similar to the mastery of a skill. We begin in blissful ignorance, unaware of our need for salvation and deliverance from sin. The carnal mind is not subject to the laws of God, neither indeed can be, for he is hostile towards God. Once the good news has been revealed to us, once the Spirit begins to work on our hearts, we become conscious of our need, our depravity, and ultimately become saved. The line between conscious incompetent and competent need not be salvation, for even after we are saved we are still learning to know the will and mind of God, and we still make horrendous mistakes and grieve Him. In fact, it sometimes seems to me that most Christians never actually progress from the second to the third phase; I myself often feel like I am hopelessly incompetent in living the Christian life and obeying God’s mandates.
And here we must differentiate between worldly endeavors and the ordinances of God. For we do not progress in closer fellowship with Jesus by dint of our efforts, our study, our practice of rituals, even rituals like reading the Bible or attending church. If you doubt this, you need only read of the Pharisees of Jesus’ and his disciples’ day, whose job it was to be preachers and teachers and students of the Scriptures, yet who could look on the physical face of God and shout for his execution. The efforts of man do not avail in the context of God. This is what Paul meant when he chastised the Galatians in chapter 3 of his epistle, reasoning with (and railing a little at) those believers who were trying to continue in the life of Christ in a completely different manner than that which led to their salvation. We are not saved by our own efforts, but through God’s provision; as we have been saved, so should we walk, relying not on ourselves to fulfill the requirements of Jesus, but again allowing God to have His way in us, to provide for our life even as He provided for our salvation.
And this is the difference between the stages, because we never become consciously competent in walking with God. We never become proficient in living the Christian life through our own verve and mastery. We become competent in living the Christian life to the extent that we focus our attention and will towards God, away from ourselves. So we must delete the Conscious Competent phase and skip to the Unconscious Competent phase, in which we are not oblivious to God, but rather we are oblivious to ourselves, our efforts to please Him and live for Him. He wants to live for us, not the reverse; to live through us, to accomplish His will His way, and use us as His hands and feet. The hands don’t decide what to do; they obey the head.
In fact, true Christ-likeness involves the recognition in us of our complete and utter inadequacy to live the Christian life. We don’t ever make it past the Incompetent stage! Our competency comes from surrender of our lives to God. This is the good news of living the Christian life: the pressure’s off! You don’t have to sweat it! Just let go and let God, to use an old cliché.
So who then gets the praise, the glory? Well, if we’re unequal to the task and God’s the one doing the work, bringing souls to Him, performing miracles, then who should get the glory? And this is the crux of the matter, because as long as we delude ourselves that we can live for God, do His work our way, be Consciously Competent for Him, then we can claim credit for the successes and bask in the glory. If we relinquish our foolish dreams of adequacy for God, He receives all the glory. And despite the countless hymns and songs and sermons the Church enjoys every Sunday that claim to espouse this attitude, it is all too rare nowadays to see in everyday Christian behavior.
So you must choose in your Christian walk: would you rather go it alone, take up the yoke and burden of evangelism and purity and observance of God’s perfection, and so claim the glory (what little there will be) for yourself? Or will you allow God to be your competency, to live and work through you, and so surrender both your life and the glory to Him?
Friday, September 3, 2010
What the Foolish Heart Feels
I wonder if loneliness can develop a hardened crust, a scab on the heart, a tough kernel that fulfills the prophecy it first believed long ago when the prophecy was untrue. Can it be that someone who thinks of themselves as worthless and unbecoming to the fairer sex will in fact truly become such because they've walked in that belief for so long? Or does the belief immediately render that person undesirable? And for that matter, how many times can someone be overlooked or rejected before such a self-opinion cannot help but form?
It's frustrating to think that I would be hung up on the opinion of other people when I claim to believe that God's opinion of me is of infinitely greater worth. And yet, I can't help it. I feel so unattractive, so crippled and bilious, so awkward and lonely, that even if a girl showed a hint of interest, would I even notice, or recognize it for what it was? Would I ever believe something contrary to my worldview? Or has my self-esteem been warped to the point where I can no longer believe a woman would find me desirable?
And that's not even the worst part! Because I have a sinking feeling that my pervasive and twisted view of my desirability for women may be tainting my view of God's love for me. After all, the feeling goes, if that species of humans specifically designed to find blokes like me desirable uniformly rejects me, with an imperfect understanding of who I am, then how much more can God, who knows my flaws and foibles with perfect clarity, who knows my divided and double-minded heart, who has felt my every betrayal, even stand to look at me?
You may be thinking to yourself, "Wow, what a monument to self-pity." And you wouldn't be wrong. It's all a lie, I know that with my head. But the lie fits so well in the wounds of my heart, like puzzle pieces designed to coincide, that they seem legitimate. "Well, that's silly," you might counter. "As if the fact that knife wounds fit the knife that makes them indicates that the wounds were justly given! The King of Liars knows where the wounds are, and can tailor the lie so well that they seem indistinguishable from the wound itself." All well and good; that doesn't help dispel the lie very much.
What combats a lie? Truth, obviously. I can receive the truth from the Lord, and from other books that discuss His Word. I can recite the truth to myself based on my study and my experience of God's love. If I'm feeling particularly vulnerable or pitiable, I can appeal to family for validation. And yet, if I'm being honest, when all the other parts of the lie have been dispelled, that kernel still remains. And will until a girl, of her own free will, decides that I am more than just a nice guy, a brother in Christ, a smart teacher or funny classmate, an avid golfer or clever wordsmith, whatever else I clothe myself in, and wants me for me. "God wants you for you," you retort. I can't disagree, but I can't see that affection in God's face. I can't feel that warmth of embrace, or the way His face lights up when He sees me or hears my voice. All these things may be true, but the heart is foolish and instinctive; it needs tangible affirmation.
Does that make me a fool? Then I guess I'm a fool.
It's frustrating to think that I would be hung up on the opinion of other people when I claim to believe that God's opinion of me is of infinitely greater worth. And yet, I can't help it. I feel so unattractive, so crippled and bilious, so awkward and lonely, that even if a girl showed a hint of interest, would I even notice, or recognize it for what it was? Would I ever believe something contrary to my worldview? Or has my self-esteem been warped to the point where I can no longer believe a woman would find me desirable?
And that's not even the worst part! Because I have a sinking feeling that my pervasive and twisted view of my desirability for women may be tainting my view of God's love for me. After all, the feeling goes, if that species of humans specifically designed to find blokes like me desirable uniformly rejects me, with an imperfect understanding of who I am, then how much more can God, who knows my flaws and foibles with perfect clarity, who knows my divided and double-minded heart, who has felt my every betrayal, even stand to look at me?
You may be thinking to yourself, "Wow, what a monument to self-pity." And you wouldn't be wrong. It's all a lie, I know that with my head. But the lie fits so well in the wounds of my heart, like puzzle pieces designed to coincide, that they seem legitimate. "Well, that's silly," you might counter. "As if the fact that knife wounds fit the knife that makes them indicates that the wounds were justly given! The King of Liars knows where the wounds are, and can tailor the lie so well that they seem indistinguishable from the wound itself." All well and good; that doesn't help dispel the lie very much.
What combats a lie? Truth, obviously. I can receive the truth from the Lord, and from other books that discuss His Word. I can recite the truth to myself based on my study and my experience of God's love. If I'm feeling particularly vulnerable or pitiable, I can appeal to family for validation. And yet, if I'm being honest, when all the other parts of the lie have been dispelled, that kernel still remains. And will until a girl, of her own free will, decides that I am more than just a nice guy, a brother in Christ, a smart teacher or funny classmate, an avid golfer or clever wordsmith, whatever else I clothe myself in, and wants me for me. "God wants you for you," you retort. I can't disagree, but I can't see that affection in God's face. I can't feel that warmth of embrace, or the way His face lights up when He sees me or hears my voice. All these things may be true, but the heart is foolish and instinctive; it needs tangible affirmation.
Does that make me a fool? Then I guess I'm a fool.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Mirth Without Measure
Have you ever laughed uncontrollably? Not at a funny movie or TV show tickling your funny bone, but just lost in hilarity? I met a girl the other day, whom I shall describe as, say, a flibbertigibbet, a scatterbrain, perhaps. Not ditzy, because I don’t think she’s stupid, but flighty. You know those people who get entirely lost and then breeze in cheerfully an hour after they promised to arrive, yet who are so compellingly attractive in personality that your immediate reaction is fondness. My twin has done her best impression of this sort of person on occasion. Anyway, this girl comes in, of whom we have been privy to much debate in the form of a running commentary by her cousin who is attempting to navigate her to the proper destination. I’m sitting next to a young rascal still ripening to full maturity, shall we say; barely legal to vote and smoke, not to drink. And after a few desultory comments from her, he and I exchange glances and start to bust a gut, as the saying goes. Just doubled over in laughter. My face is as red as a candy apple and I’m finding it difficult to breathe. Nonplussed, the girl inquires as to the source of our hilarity, which only serves to exacerbate the matter. Did she or the other people in the room say anything astoundingly amusing? No, not particularly. Were I pressed to give a reason for our uncontrolled laughter I might reference her blasé attitude coupled with her apparent woeful sense of direction. Grounds for a chuckle, a chortle perhaps, but hardly for the gales of laughter that issued from our lips.
Get to the point, you might well request. (Though if you’re a regular reader of mine you should know better than to demand clarity and simplicity in my writing.) Well, my point, again if pressed, would be something about the nature of laughter, the nature of mirth. G. K. Chesterton’s famous quote that concludes his treatise Orthodoxy is as follows: “There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.” This has always struck me profoundly as I am quick to laugh and eager to find humor in situations. Yet this was not the first time when I was overwhelmed with laughter without a great cause. Several years ago, (golly, it must be over ten at this point; how time flies), my sister and I were in my dad’s office and were talking about innocuous things, not remotely amusing. My sister then lifted her hand and said in a puzzled voice, “is this my left hand?” Nothing more, yet she and I promptly dissolved into fits of laughter similar to the episode I alluded to above.
Why should this be? Did we tap into some deep, vast reservoir of mirth that bubbles merrily below the conscious surface of humanity? Sure, we can laugh at a humorous movie or play; I was rebuked by my twin once for laughing too raucously in a movie theatre. I’ve seen movies that left me pounding the floor, breathless and teary with delight. But that’s not the sort of thing I’m discussing here. I speak of a mirth without any apparent direct cause. It borders on exultation in sharing experiences with others, in observing the minutiae of human behavior, the eccentricities and peculiarities that each human possesses, the gentle acknowledgment of the absurdity of ourselves. I’ve found that these experiences, of a preternatural hilarity, occur after seeing the complete and utter uniqueness of a human expression of intelligence and will. I shall give you a final example.
My dad and I used to play ping-pong at church on random evenings. We would have rousing and hotly contested battles in the foyer of the building, which also served as a temporary supply room for extra folding chairs. On one occasion, the ball scuttled under a pile of chairs and my dad lay prone to reach under and retrieve the errant ball. Finding himself not close enough to reach, he squirmed and wriggled a bit, looking to all eyes (mine) like a floundering fish. Unbidden and unpremeditated I gasped, “Free Willy!” And we both started laughing. For a good solid five minutes we guffawed and roared alternately, especially whenever we looked at each other. One of my fondest memories.
Now, to be sure, this involved a humorous stimulus, but again the inspired analogy that sprang to my lips hardly merited the unbridled euphoria and hilarity that resulted. Again, two people seemed almost to transcend the immediate situation, swept up to a plane of experience not directly related to the surroundings, there to partake of a mirth that, in my case, proved too potent to resist. In each case, I was helpless to arrest my laughter; even as my ribcage and my lungs protested, I could not stop laughing! An amazing phenomenon.
“To the point!” you cry. It is this: like C. S. Lewis’ description and pursuit of joy in his quasi-autobiography Surprised By Joy, have I, and those who have had similar experiences, tapped into a holy laughter, the mirth of God? In infinitesimal measure, sure, but a faint hint of it nonetheless? We like to imagine and revere the Father as holy, just, wise, and sovereign: the supreme Lord of Creation, the Judge of mankind, the noble Sacrificial Lamb and triumphant Redeemer, the Captain of the Hosts of Heaven. And He/They are all these things and immeasurably more. But isn’t it strange that for all the human emotions and behaviors that people experience, the one wholly absent from the Bible is mirth? There is no laughter in the Scriptures, no frivolity or humor. Even bizarre events like Balaam’s talking donkey, which presents possible puns, has a holy purpose and application. Any sarcasm or irony in Paul’s epistles are incidental and aimed more at puncturing puffed-up Pharisees than procuring a chuckle. If God did indeed create man in His own image, then whence comes the laughter? Is this a by-product of the Fall? Shall we never laugh again after the End of Days, even as we enjoy paradise for eternity? I do not see any inherent evil in laughter; like all other earthly things it can and has been perverted, but in essence it remains innocent.
I venture to say that the reason God might have omitted humor from His communiqués to humanity might be to avoid a certain inconsequentiality and irreverence that often accompanies laughter. After all, the court jester’s job was to poke fun at the king, to pull back the somber dignity of authority ever so slightly. And the redemption of man is no laughing matter. The ultimate depravity of man without God must be treated seriously; it cannot be dismissed or downplayed, and even the hint of humor might give grounds for skeptics to discount the entire Bible as fancy. As it stands, one cannot dismiss the Bible as frivolous; either it is deadly serious or it is fantasy. It cannot be funny. Moreover, as fallen humans we are too quick to wish to dull the shine of the majestic and noble, if for no other reason than the reminder they provide of our own shortcomings. God gives us no reason to do so, and the blasphemous inventions of those hostile to the Gospel come from their own imaginations and the human depictions and representations throughout the ages, not from divine Scripture.
But I wonder. I wonder sometimes when, during a frustrating round of golf, I hit a great shot or chip in from a ways away, if God’s not giggling just a little. I feel like He’s playful sometimes, when I’ve been musing on weighty issues for a while, and then I come to myself with a shake of the head and a sensation of wry amusement. I wonder if, after the glorious uniting of the saints with Him, the overthrow of the Devil (that humorless mongrel), the establishment of a new Heaven and Earth, the full realization of who God is and who we are in Him, I wonder if He might not rub His metaphysical hands together gleefully and say:
“Now for the fun part.”
Get to the point, you might well request. (Though if you’re a regular reader of mine you should know better than to demand clarity and simplicity in my writing.) Well, my point, again if pressed, would be something about the nature of laughter, the nature of mirth. G. K. Chesterton’s famous quote that concludes his treatise Orthodoxy is as follows: “There was some one thing that was too great for God to show us when He walked upon our earth; and I have sometimes fancied that it was His mirth.” This has always struck me profoundly as I am quick to laugh and eager to find humor in situations. Yet this was not the first time when I was overwhelmed with laughter without a great cause. Several years ago, (golly, it must be over ten at this point; how time flies), my sister and I were in my dad’s office and were talking about innocuous things, not remotely amusing. My sister then lifted her hand and said in a puzzled voice, “is this my left hand?” Nothing more, yet she and I promptly dissolved into fits of laughter similar to the episode I alluded to above.
Why should this be? Did we tap into some deep, vast reservoir of mirth that bubbles merrily below the conscious surface of humanity? Sure, we can laugh at a humorous movie or play; I was rebuked by my twin once for laughing too raucously in a movie theatre. I’ve seen movies that left me pounding the floor, breathless and teary with delight. But that’s not the sort of thing I’m discussing here. I speak of a mirth without any apparent direct cause. It borders on exultation in sharing experiences with others, in observing the minutiae of human behavior, the eccentricities and peculiarities that each human possesses, the gentle acknowledgment of the absurdity of ourselves. I’ve found that these experiences, of a preternatural hilarity, occur after seeing the complete and utter uniqueness of a human expression of intelligence and will. I shall give you a final example.
My dad and I used to play ping-pong at church on random evenings. We would have rousing and hotly contested battles in the foyer of the building, which also served as a temporary supply room for extra folding chairs. On one occasion, the ball scuttled under a pile of chairs and my dad lay prone to reach under and retrieve the errant ball. Finding himself not close enough to reach, he squirmed and wriggled a bit, looking to all eyes (mine) like a floundering fish. Unbidden and unpremeditated I gasped, “Free Willy!” And we both started laughing. For a good solid five minutes we guffawed and roared alternately, especially whenever we looked at each other. One of my fondest memories.
Now, to be sure, this involved a humorous stimulus, but again the inspired analogy that sprang to my lips hardly merited the unbridled euphoria and hilarity that resulted. Again, two people seemed almost to transcend the immediate situation, swept up to a plane of experience not directly related to the surroundings, there to partake of a mirth that, in my case, proved too potent to resist. In each case, I was helpless to arrest my laughter; even as my ribcage and my lungs protested, I could not stop laughing! An amazing phenomenon.
“To the point!” you cry. It is this: like C. S. Lewis’ description and pursuit of joy in his quasi-autobiography Surprised By Joy, have I, and those who have had similar experiences, tapped into a holy laughter, the mirth of God? In infinitesimal measure, sure, but a faint hint of it nonetheless? We like to imagine and revere the Father as holy, just, wise, and sovereign: the supreme Lord of Creation, the Judge of mankind, the noble Sacrificial Lamb and triumphant Redeemer, the Captain of the Hosts of Heaven. And He/They are all these things and immeasurably more. But isn’t it strange that for all the human emotions and behaviors that people experience, the one wholly absent from the Bible is mirth? There is no laughter in the Scriptures, no frivolity or humor. Even bizarre events like Balaam’s talking donkey, which presents possible puns, has a holy purpose and application. Any sarcasm or irony in Paul’s epistles are incidental and aimed more at puncturing puffed-up Pharisees than procuring a chuckle. If God did indeed create man in His own image, then whence comes the laughter? Is this a by-product of the Fall? Shall we never laugh again after the End of Days, even as we enjoy paradise for eternity? I do not see any inherent evil in laughter; like all other earthly things it can and has been perverted, but in essence it remains innocent.
I venture to say that the reason God might have omitted humor from His communiqués to humanity might be to avoid a certain inconsequentiality and irreverence that often accompanies laughter. After all, the court jester’s job was to poke fun at the king, to pull back the somber dignity of authority ever so slightly. And the redemption of man is no laughing matter. The ultimate depravity of man without God must be treated seriously; it cannot be dismissed or downplayed, and even the hint of humor might give grounds for skeptics to discount the entire Bible as fancy. As it stands, one cannot dismiss the Bible as frivolous; either it is deadly serious or it is fantasy. It cannot be funny. Moreover, as fallen humans we are too quick to wish to dull the shine of the majestic and noble, if for no other reason than the reminder they provide of our own shortcomings. God gives us no reason to do so, and the blasphemous inventions of those hostile to the Gospel come from their own imaginations and the human depictions and representations throughout the ages, not from divine Scripture.
But I wonder. I wonder sometimes when, during a frustrating round of golf, I hit a great shot or chip in from a ways away, if God’s not giggling just a little. I feel like He’s playful sometimes, when I’ve been musing on weighty issues for a while, and then I come to myself with a shake of the head and a sensation of wry amusement. I wonder if, after the glorious uniting of the saints with Him, the overthrow of the Devil (that humorless mongrel), the establishment of a new Heaven and Earth, the full realization of who God is and who we are in Him, I wonder if He might not rub His metaphysical hands together gleefully and say:
“Now for the fun part.”
Thursday, April 22, 2010
The Pride of a Teacher
It strikes me that being a teacher, instructor, or professor of any kind in any subject is one of the most conducive professions to pride in the world, short of political leaders. Teachers face an unending stream of other people who are less informed, less accomplished, and less educated than themselves. The very existence of students is a constant boost of the ego of teachers, an ever-new reminder that they are superior.
As if this constant reminder was not sufficient reason for vanity, the actual task appointed to teachers reinforces this attitude. The teacher’s job, after all, lies in bringing up the students to their supposed level of intelligence, education, and sophistication. They are always pointing out things the students miss, informing them of facts or theories the students were ignorant of, and evaluating students’ work for errors, a tacit acknowledgment that the teachers are more expert in their discipline than the students. It’s a vicious cycle. I begin to understand the attraction of teacher, especially on the college level, the level I myself am most interested in.
The modern format of English classes, at least where I attended school, was supposed to counter this dynamic by having the class form in a circle, no one person at the “front” of the class depositing information to those listening and taking notes. In true Arthurian fashion, no one person is elevated above another. Yet even this equality is fundamentally flawed, because even when a student offers an opinion or several engage in a debate over the interpretation of a text, the final authority and arbiter of the dissension always ends up being the teacher. They are the “expert” on the text (they must be; they’re teaching it, after all, right?). And at the end of the day, or more accurately, the term, the students are submitting work and the teacher is evaluating it and assigning grades, as clear a delineation of roles as you will find nearly anywhere.
Now, this is not to say that all students are passive receptacles, empty vessels that consume and accept everything their teachers say. The very purpose of most composition and literature classes are directed toward the development of the individual voice of the student, a definite ability and opinion when it comes to textual analysis and aesthetic appreciation. And I have found that students who were challenged in high school English classes come prepared to offer very definite opinions on texts. This is commonly referenced by egalitarians as evidence that teachers don’t consider themselves better than students: “See, we allow diverse and opposing voices to be heard. Even if we know they’re wrong or uninformed we permit it.” But the very fact that teachers permit “dissension” relates the true attitude they hold, namely, that if they chose the students would not be allowed to render alternative readings or interpretations to the teacher’s.
Is this situation absolute and unequivocal? By no means. There are a great many teachers who understand that no matter how long and how thoroughly they study and ponder and teach texts and techniques, there will always be more to learn. I was reminded just the other day the thrill of introducing a text one has read and taught numerous times, and hearing an entirely new theory or interpretation from a student. It’s like discovering the text for the first time all over again, and that is the greatest satisfaction a truly humble teacher can ever enjoy. This is enhanced because it comes from a student, which shows that the student is actually engaging with the text to the point of coming up with readings that vary from the conventional. For there are always traditional and well-worn ways to interpret and comment about a text which the teacher is familiar with, so a truly unique and radical theory must necessarily be apart from the norm.
We have discovered the surest way of combating egotism in teachers, namely the learner’s spirit. As long as a teacher holds the attitude that they are thoroughly versed and entirely cogent concerning a text, their pedagogical manner will be condescending and elitist. If, however, they approach the text and the teaching with a desire to see something new, to hear a different take on it, with genuine interest in learning from their students as much as possible, they will avoid the pitfall of pride and will be truly open to an idea that they never considered. By a happy accident, they will also find that their own teaching of texts will improve overall, even if no revelatory theories are posited. The students can tell when the teacher cares about hearing their thoughts and when he’s just waiting to give his final reading. A true attitude of humility will produce more adventurous students and foster a free exchange of interpretations in the classroom far better than contrived or well-meaning strategies like a round-table discussion.
God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. So do students.
As if this constant reminder was not sufficient reason for vanity, the actual task appointed to teachers reinforces this attitude. The teacher’s job, after all, lies in bringing up the students to their supposed level of intelligence, education, and sophistication. They are always pointing out things the students miss, informing them of facts or theories the students were ignorant of, and evaluating students’ work for errors, a tacit acknowledgment that the teachers are more expert in their discipline than the students. It’s a vicious cycle. I begin to understand the attraction of teacher, especially on the college level, the level I myself am most interested in.
The modern format of English classes, at least where I attended school, was supposed to counter this dynamic by having the class form in a circle, no one person at the “front” of the class depositing information to those listening and taking notes. In true Arthurian fashion, no one person is elevated above another. Yet even this equality is fundamentally flawed, because even when a student offers an opinion or several engage in a debate over the interpretation of a text, the final authority and arbiter of the dissension always ends up being the teacher. They are the “expert” on the text (they must be; they’re teaching it, after all, right?). And at the end of the day, or more accurately, the term, the students are submitting work and the teacher is evaluating it and assigning grades, as clear a delineation of roles as you will find nearly anywhere.
Now, this is not to say that all students are passive receptacles, empty vessels that consume and accept everything their teachers say. The very purpose of most composition and literature classes are directed toward the development of the individual voice of the student, a definite ability and opinion when it comes to textual analysis and aesthetic appreciation. And I have found that students who were challenged in high school English classes come prepared to offer very definite opinions on texts. This is commonly referenced by egalitarians as evidence that teachers don’t consider themselves better than students: “See, we allow diverse and opposing voices to be heard. Even if we know they’re wrong or uninformed we permit it.” But the very fact that teachers permit “dissension” relates the true attitude they hold, namely, that if they chose the students would not be allowed to render alternative readings or interpretations to the teacher’s.
Is this situation absolute and unequivocal? By no means. There are a great many teachers who understand that no matter how long and how thoroughly they study and ponder and teach texts and techniques, there will always be more to learn. I was reminded just the other day the thrill of introducing a text one has read and taught numerous times, and hearing an entirely new theory or interpretation from a student. It’s like discovering the text for the first time all over again, and that is the greatest satisfaction a truly humble teacher can ever enjoy. This is enhanced because it comes from a student, which shows that the student is actually engaging with the text to the point of coming up with readings that vary from the conventional. For there are always traditional and well-worn ways to interpret and comment about a text which the teacher is familiar with, so a truly unique and radical theory must necessarily be apart from the norm.
We have discovered the surest way of combating egotism in teachers, namely the learner’s spirit. As long as a teacher holds the attitude that they are thoroughly versed and entirely cogent concerning a text, their pedagogical manner will be condescending and elitist. If, however, they approach the text and the teaching with a desire to see something new, to hear a different take on it, with genuine interest in learning from their students as much as possible, they will avoid the pitfall of pride and will be truly open to an idea that they never considered. By a happy accident, they will also find that their own teaching of texts will improve overall, even if no revelatory theories are posited. The students can tell when the teacher cares about hearing their thoughts and when he’s just waiting to give his final reading. A true attitude of humility will produce more adventurous students and foster a free exchange of interpretations in the classroom far better than contrived or well-meaning strategies like a round-table discussion.
God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble. So do students.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Meditations of Existence and 1984
Anything could be true. The so-called laws of nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. “If I wished,” O’Brien had said, “I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.” Winston worked it out. “If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.” Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: “It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.” He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a “real” world where “real” things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.
This is a passage from George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which a distopian world has evolved from rampant and radical socialism taken to an extreme. The state controls everything, and alters history to bolster the infallibility of its figurehead, Big Brother. A permanent hierarchy has been established, with the proletariats at the bottom and the Inner Party members at the top. Capitalism is non-existent, as is the free exchange of ideas. The central government tells people what to think, what to say, what to feel, what to do. And to ensure this, “Big Brother is Watching.” A pervasive, ubiquitous monitoring of humanity ensures the enslavement of people, as well as the compliance with Party philosophy and mantras. The most essential element of maintaining their iron grip on humans is the practice of doublethink, which means in essence to hold two contradictory statements in one’s mind at the same time, and believe both to be true. It requires the destruction of critical thinking and logic, the denial of objective reality, and the complete relativism that whatever the Party says is true must be true even when it contradicts observable phenomena.
“Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.” In other words, only events identically reproduced in a mind other than one’s own can be defined as “real.” Now, this is an ultimately fallacious viewpoint. True, no person ever experiences events exactly the same as another person, but that does not render the event irrelevant and meaningless. It merely underlines the fact that while there is a fundamental reality, no person can ever experience the absolute truth of it since each person views reality through the lens of their own personality, as educated by experiences, schooling, psychological influences, and beliefs. As hideous as this perspective is, there is a grain of truth in the maelstrom of deceit and despair. In this life, we can never share ourselves with anyone else, and thus never truly experience reality. And this may be a depressing thought, though not to the extent that a nihilist would feel. For there is a remedy. And here again we find the fundamental uniqueness of Christianity.
Christianity holds that in order to be saved one must be united with the Spirit of God; not merely in a metaphorical sense, or moral sense, but in actual fact. The Spirit of God, once invited, comes to abide within the human frame of the convert and, if given free reign, will animate the person’s body and soul to accomplish the will of God through the vehicle of the convert’s humanity. As uncomfortable as that may seem at first blush, this is actually quite a paradigm shift. For humans are no longer “on our own,” in the sense that each individual has a separate perspective on reality. The phrase “to be alone with one’s thoughts” when considered rationally is utterly redundant, for no human being has ever been anything other than alone with one’s thoughts, at least as far as other people are concerned. I can never “get into another man’s head,” “walk a mile in his shoes” as the sayings go. And we have such sayings precisely because it’s a sheer impossibility to express with total accuracy the inner workings of someone’s brain. This, incidentally, is why we revere the writers and poets who, to some extent, bridge the gap between their thoughts and ourselves. We are thrilled to catch a glimpse into the mind of others. “Every man is an island,” and so whenever we can find a bottle floating in the tide that gives insight into another island, it’s a slight lessening of the interminable loneliness that thoughtful people feel.
How does Christianity factor in? Simply by uniting our thoughts, our souls, our emotions, with God. And God, if He exists, created Existence. Therefore, He exists outside of the physical universe in which we find ourselves trapped. And since He created us to be like Him in some way, and He Himself consists of multiple persons which share an unbroken communion of thoughts and will, then several conclusions may be drawn. First, that if there were any way of uniting the thoughts and emotions of two separate persons, God would have the knowledge and ability to do so. Second, that if one person could be united with Him, and another person could be united with Him, than in a way those two people are united with each other. Imperfectly, to be sure; not because God is imperfect, but merely because their union with Him is imperfect. At least, while they exist in the universe. But here we see that we are no longer “alone with our thoughts.” We have company inside our heads and hearts.
Now this can be distressing in one sense because, having lived by ourselves for our whole lives, and having a predisposition to “look out for No. 1,” the idea that we no longer have sole claim to our souls is unsettling and difficult to come to grips with. Herein lays the bedrock struggle of living the Christian life. Because God, when He sends His Spirit, is not interested primarily in entering the house of our lives and settling in to watch us live from inside instead of outside. No, His intentions are to take over, to take the reins, to take the wheel, that He who gave His life for us to give His life to us should now live His life through us. Our thoughts are to be His thoughts, our words, His, our actions, His. We are no longer islands alone in a sea of existence; there’s a bridge built on us that connects our island with innumerable other islands, and communication with other islands is now possible.
Which brings us back to our original topic, the shared experience of life. And here is where the actual practical living out of the ideas we’ve been discussing becomes important. Imagine that all Christians comprise a body. This is not only a helpful metaphor, but a Biblical one. (As always, the Bible is the best commentary on all things Christian. Makes sense, doesn’t it?) The body is communicating with itself as it obeys the directions of the head. I tell my fingers to type, and voila! The fingers move and words appear on the page. So the mind is communicating with the language center which is communicating with the nervous system which is communicating with the muscles in the hand and fingers, which then produce the desired result of typing words. All this cooperation begins as each part of the body is in complete and immediate submission to the head.
Now, suppose one part of the body is malfunctioning; say, the arm is broken. The head may command the arm to move, to type as fluently and speedily as the uninjured one, but no amount of mental impetus will override the damaged body part, the body part that cannot obey. Much the same way, if a Christian is not submitting to the Head orders, the body cannot function properly; most certainly the cooperation between different parts of the body will be thwarted. Now, the analogy breaks down in supposing that the Head of the body Christian can be thwarted by a member of the body. The Head is able to accomplish His goals regardless of the body’s willingness to participate; otherwise, we must begin to question and doubt the omnipotence of God. However, the unwilling or unusable body part will not be participating in the Head’s use of the body, and as a consequence will not be able to cooperate with other body parts, or Christians as the case may be. So the Christian unwilling to let God have His head in the Christian’s life is doubly the loser: they do not experience the activity of God in their own lives, nor do they share the communion and fellowship with other believers in the deepest and truest sense, at the level of God’s Spirit moving among and uniting them.
There is another aspect of this ability to unite separate humans’ minds and hearts which finds its sole opportunity through a relationship and submission to the Spirit of God: marriage. “The two become one” is the famous phrase used to describe the marriage union, and this not only applies to physical and material union, but spiritual as well. Well, if the marriage is based upon both member’s devotion and submission to God, then a union of heart and mind can become a reality and not merely a symbolic aphorism.
This is a passage from George Orwell’s novel 1984, in which a distopian world has evolved from rampant and radical socialism taken to an extreme. The state controls everything, and alters history to bolster the infallibility of its figurehead, Big Brother. A permanent hierarchy has been established, with the proletariats at the bottom and the Inner Party members at the top. Capitalism is non-existent, as is the free exchange of ideas. The central government tells people what to think, what to say, what to feel, what to do. And to ensure this, “Big Brother is Watching.” A pervasive, ubiquitous monitoring of humanity ensures the enslavement of people, as well as the compliance with Party philosophy and mantras. The most essential element of maintaining their iron grip on humans is the practice of doublethink, which means in essence to hold two contradictory statements in one’s mind at the same time, and believe both to be true. It requires the destruction of critical thinking and logic, the denial of objective reality, and the complete relativism that whatever the Party says is true must be true even when it contradicts observable phenomena.
“Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.” In other words, only events identically reproduced in a mind other than one’s own can be defined as “real.” Now, this is an ultimately fallacious viewpoint. True, no person ever experiences events exactly the same as another person, but that does not render the event irrelevant and meaningless. It merely underlines the fact that while there is a fundamental reality, no person can ever experience the absolute truth of it since each person views reality through the lens of their own personality, as educated by experiences, schooling, psychological influences, and beliefs. As hideous as this perspective is, there is a grain of truth in the maelstrom of deceit and despair. In this life, we can never share ourselves with anyone else, and thus never truly experience reality. And this may be a depressing thought, though not to the extent that a nihilist would feel. For there is a remedy. And here again we find the fundamental uniqueness of Christianity.
Christianity holds that in order to be saved one must be united with the Spirit of God; not merely in a metaphorical sense, or moral sense, but in actual fact. The Spirit of God, once invited, comes to abide within the human frame of the convert and, if given free reign, will animate the person’s body and soul to accomplish the will of God through the vehicle of the convert’s humanity. As uncomfortable as that may seem at first blush, this is actually quite a paradigm shift. For humans are no longer “on our own,” in the sense that each individual has a separate perspective on reality. The phrase “to be alone with one’s thoughts” when considered rationally is utterly redundant, for no human being has ever been anything other than alone with one’s thoughts, at least as far as other people are concerned. I can never “get into another man’s head,” “walk a mile in his shoes” as the sayings go. And we have such sayings precisely because it’s a sheer impossibility to express with total accuracy the inner workings of someone’s brain. This, incidentally, is why we revere the writers and poets who, to some extent, bridge the gap between their thoughts and ourselves. We are thrilled to catch a glimpse into the mind of others. “Every man is an island,” and so whenever we can find a bottle floating in the tide that gives insight into another island, it’s a slight lessening of the interminable loneliness that thoughtful people feel.
How does Christianity factor in? Simply by uniting our thoughts, our souls, our emotions, with God. And God, if He exists, created Existence. Therefore, He exists outside of the physical universe in which we find ourselves trapped. And since He created us to be like Him in some way, and He Himself consists of multiple persons which share an unbroken communion of thoughts and will, then several conclusions may be drawn. First, that if there were any way of uniting the thoughts and emotions of two separate persons, God would have the knowledge and ability to do so. Second, that if one person could be united with Him, and another person could be united with Him, than in a way those two people are united with each other. Imperfectly, to be sure; not because God is imperfect, but merely because their union with Him is imperfect. At least, while they exist in the universe. But here we see that we are no longer “alone with our thoughts.” We have company inside our heads and hearts.
Now this can be distressing in one sense because, having lived by ourselves for our whole lives, and having a predisposition to “look out for No. 1,” the idea that we no longer have sole claim to our souls is unsettling and difficult to come to grips with. Herein lays the bedrock struggle of living the Christian life. Because God, when He sends His Spirit, is not interested primarily in entering the house of our lives and settling in to watch us live from inside instead of outside. No, His intentions are to take over, to take the reins, to take the wheel, that He who gave His life for us to give His life to us should now live His life through us. Our thoughts are to be His thoughts, our words, His, our actions, His. We are no longer islands alone in a sea of existence; there’s a bridge built on us that connects our island with innumerable other islands, and communication with other islands is now possible.
Which brings us back to our original topic, the shared experience of life. And here is where the actual practical living out of the ideas we’ve been discussing becomes important. Imagine that all Christians comprise a body. This is not only a helpful metaphor, but a Biblical one. (As always, the Bible is the best commentary on all things Christian. Makes sense, doesn’t it?) The body is communicating with itself as it obeys the directions of the head. I tell my fingers to type, and voila! The fingers move and words appear on the page. So the mind is communicating with the language center which is communicating with the nervous system which is communicating with the muscles in the hand and fingers, which then produce the desired result of typing words. All this cooperation begins as each part of the body is in complete and immediate submission to the head.
Now, suppose one part of the body is malfunctioning; say, the arm is broken. The head may command the arm to move, to type as fluently and speedily as the uninjured one, but no amount of mental impetus will override the damaged body part, the body part that cannot obey. Much the same way, if a Christian is not submitting to the Head orders, the body cannot function properly; most certainly the cooperation between different parts of the body will be thwarted. Now, the analogy breaks down in supposing that the Head of the body Christian can be thwarted by a member of the body. The Head is able to accomplish His goals regardless of the body’s willingness to participate; otherwise, we must begin to question and doubt the omnipotence of God. However, the unwilling or unusable body part will not be participating in the Head’s use of the body, and as a consequence will not be able to cooperate with other body parts, or Christians as the case may be. So the Christian unwilling to let God have His head in the Christian’s life is doubly the loser: they do not experience the activity of God in their own lives, nor do they share the communion and fellowship with other believers in the deepest and truest sense, at the level of God’s Spirit moving among and uniting them.
There is another aspect of this ability to unite separate humans’ minds and hearts which finds its sole opportunity through a relationship and submission to the Spirit of God: marriage. “The two become one” is the famous phrase used to describe the marriage union, and this not only applies to physical and material union, but spiritual as well. Well, if the marriage is based upon both member’s devotion and submission to God, then a union of heart and mind can become a reality and not merely a symbolic aphorism.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Becoming a Christian has been equated with joining an army, entering into service. What many people fail to understand, however, is that being a soldier, like being a Christian, is much more than attaching a rank to your name and donning a uniform.
When you become a Christian, you are saved from your sins, you are counted as righteous, even as righteous as Jesus Christ. You are brought back to life from your prior condition of spiritual death through the imparting of the Spirit of God in your self. Who you are has been changed, what you call yourself has been changed; you are a new person, a new creature. And naturally what you do should change as well, right? So people, once they become Christians, set about changing their behavior, usually by themselves. Christendom puts great stock in eschewing sin, in the behavior that the Bible seems to say accompanies reconciliation and regeneration.
I myself spent most of my life, and all of my life as a Christian, attempting to avoid sin, both in the world and in myself. I have not been successful; in fact, I’ve been a colossal, sometimes, spectacular failure, and done damage to others as well as to myself, though by the grace of God the majority of damage has been self-inflicted. Nevertheless, I have been rather discouraged at times about my inability to crucify the flesh, to eschew the world, and resist the powers of darkness and sin. Understandably so; for as a new creature in Christ, I now posses the Spirit of God within me, who cannot abide sin.
Now, my soul is pure and righteous, covered and united with the life and blood of Christ. So all the sin does is bounce off my soul and rebound through my body and my surroundings. But it still has an impact, and the Spirit still gets front row seats to my own particular brand of depravity as the old flesh wars with the new creature. For all my devotion and genuine desire to be conformed to the likeness of Jesus, my behavior has not fallen into line with my intentions. No truer verse in the Bible bespeaks of my dilemma that that famous passage in Romans 7:14-24, ending with “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of sin and death?”
If we compare conversion with joining of an army, a valuable lesson appears. For the initial stage of joining an army involves a commitment, a solemn oath to do certain things in a certain way, one of which involves following orders promptly and thoroughly. Once that is accomplished the training begins. You are assigned a rank (the lowest rank), and given a new uniform to wear that demonstrates your new identity as a soldier. Are you a soldier? Yes. Can you call yourself a soldier? Yes. Can you fight like a soldier? No. That’s what basic training is for, to give you the knowledge, the skills, the ability to behave like a soldier. If you get handed a uniform and a rank and then told to go out and fight the enemy, you’ll be pretty useless for the brief period of time that you survive. Or, if you don’t get killed, you’ll start learning pretty quickly how to survive, the techniques and practices, the tricks of the trade, the drills and weaponry that all soldiers need to know in order to survive as a soldier. And usually you need to be taught these things from someone else. That’s where Basic Training comes in. Its function is to prepare you to fight, to move, to think, to use the tools needed in order to behave like a soldier.
Now, it’s important to understand that as soon as you took the oath and were awarded a rank and donned a uniform, you were a soldier. Your identity was confirmed immediately, and you are as much a soldier as a grizzled veteran or a four-star general. But can you behave as one? Does your behavior match your identity? No. Because simply obtaining a new identity isn’t enough to enable you to change your behavior.
And part of the training all soldiers go through is learning to follow orders. Perhaps the hardest part, since it’s so counter-intuitive to our regular, civilian behavior, it’s such a big adjustment. But following orders is as much a part of being a soldier as the ability to strip a weapon apart for cleaning, or learning how to take a hill, or anticipating an ambush, or learning how to plant an explosive device. In fact, following orders is the very thing that separates a soldier from just a mercenary, a killer, or someone who knows how to do those other things.
Following orders is the essence of being a soldier; you place your confidence and faith in your superiors that when they tell you where to go or what to do, you will go and do secure in your faith that their orders are for the best. Not necessarily your best, but the best in terms of the battle you are fighting or the war you are waging.
Too many Christians have taken the oath to become a Christian. They’ve received their rank as one of God’s people, and been clothed in the righteousness of Christ. But they don’t follow orders. They’re not effective Christians in the sense that their identity doesn’t match their behavior. (And as I alluded to before, I must include myself foremost among these ranks.) Now, some may have some training: they’ve read their Bibles front to back many times, they’ve been to church every Sunday, they’ve led Bible studies and Sunday School classes, they may even be evangelists, preachers, or missionaries. But do they follow orders? Again, that’s the essence of being a soldier, and it’s infinitely more imperative in a Christian, to follow the orders of God. They may be deadly with apologetics, have much education or great stories full of pathos that they use to tug on peoples’ heartstrings. They may be skilled in debate or evangelism. They’ve got the tools of the trade down. But if they’re not operating on the basis of waiting for orders, listening to orders, and following orders, then they’re not really going to be effective soldiers in God’s war.
The importance of following orders is rather obvious, but for the sake of space I’ll elaborate. In a battle or overall war, there are strategic objectives, goals that encompass the entire effort among all fronts. In WWII, the global strategy was to push back Germany from the Atlantic coast. On the tactical level is where the strategy is enacted and accomplished, and that involved pitched battles, gunfights and devastation, small groups of men pushing back the Nazi forces. When you’re on the ground, when you can see only a small part of the battle, you know only a little part of the overall strategy. It is the role of the generals and top brass to formulate a strategy that will win the war, and they are best able to do so because they can view things in a global sense. They can see the entire front, multiple battles at the same time. And so they give the orders that are communicated down through the colonels, lieutenants, captains, and sergeants down to the corporals and privates who are the lowest rank, who actually do the fighting and killing and retaking of territory.
Now, if the top brass can see everything clearly, then they will know what best to do to win the war, not just the individual battles. So their orders may not make much sense to those who can’t see the entire picture of the war, who are mired in a single engagement. But the best soldiers are those who, when given an order, follow it precisely and immediately, because then the higher levels can implement strategies that will win not just one battle or two, but all battles and ultimately, the war. So the importance of obedience grows with the stakes.
The analogy is clear. God is the top brass and sees the entire battlefield, all the fronts of human hearts, and has formulated a strategy that will win as many as possible. (He won’t win all, because of free will; that’s a whole other can of worms, but it’s not because He’s unable to. The terms of the war don’t allow for absolute victory.) So when He gives us an order, even if it may be utterly incomprehensible to us in our individual struggles and opportunities, we can rest assured that He knows how best to wage His holy war for men’s hearts. And the better our obedience, the more effective and efficient soldiers in His service we become.
Lastly let me point out the role of the soldier in all this. His first duty is to make the choice, to become a soldier. If you’re not a soldier then you won’t have gone through training; your officers won’t be able to count upon your general basis of knowledge, and more important, your obedience to follow orders. So the identity comes first. After that, your second duty is to follow orders during training. Some training methods and content may seem unimportant or objectionable, but the good soldier trusts that his instructors and trainers know what a soldier needs to learn and be able to do to accomplish his duty, and so complies with even the most baffling or boring of drills. Even now the primacy of obedience shines through. And once training is over, the real war begins and the soldier now makes use of his training to accomplish his orders, which of course is the third duty of the soldier: to follow orders on the field of battle.
You may notice that at every stage of the soldier’s progression, his main role involves a certain amount of passivity. He accepts his rank and identity upon enlistment; he learns from instructors and completes the courses during training; and he follows orders when carrying out his duty in battle. He doesn’t charge into the fray half-cocked; he doesn’t try to create his own courses of study and devise a training regimen himself; and he doesn’t decide which battles to fight in and when, where, and how to fight. His is an active duty but based on a passive acceptance, obedience, and faith in his superiors. The obedience and faith must come before the activity.
So it is with Christians. If we are to be the hands and feet, the very body, of God on earth, then that means we will be doing things. We’ll be active in His war, we’ll be participating in reaching people He wants to reach. But before we can do that, we must accept that He’s calling the shots, that our role is to obey not initiate, that we walk in faith and not in self-actualization.
Are you a soldier? Have you taken the oaths and put on the uniform? Have you gone through training and developed the skills? And most importantly, are you following orders? Are you quick to listen and quicker to obey? Or are you attempting to order the battle yourself? Are you charging in without training and without orders?
When you become a Christian, you are saved from your sins, you are counted as righteous, even as righteous as Jesus Christ. You are brought back to life from your prior condition of spiritual death through the imparting of the Spirit of God in your self. Who you are has been changed, what you call yourself has been changed; you are a new person, a new creature. And naturally what you do should change as well, right? So people, once they become Christians, set about changing their behavior, usually by themselves. Christendom puts great stock in eschewing sin, in the behavior that the Bible seems to say accompanies reconciliation and regeneration.
I myself spent most of my life, and all of my life as a Christian, attempting to avoid sin, both in the world and in myself. I have not been successful; in fact, I’ve been a colossal, sometimes, spectacular failure, and done damage to others as well as to myself, though by the grace of God the majority of damage has been self-inflicted. Nevertheless, I have been rather discouraged at times about my inability to crucify the flesh, to eschew the world, and resist the powers of darkness and sin. Understandably so; for as a new creature in Christ, I now posses the Spirit of God within me, who cannot abide sin.
Now, my soul is pure and righteous, covered and united with the life and blood of Christ. So all the sin does is bounce off my soul and rebound through my body and my surroundings. But it still has an impact, and the Spirit still gets front row seats to my own particular brand of depravity as the old flesh wars with the new creature. For all my devotion and genuine desire to be conformed to the likeness of Jesus, my behavior has not fallen into line with my intentions. No truer verse in the Bible bespeaks of my dilemma that that famous passage in Romans 7:14-24, ending with “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of sin and death?”
If we compare conversion with joining of an army, a valuable lesson appears. For the initial stage of joining an army involves a commitment, a solemn oath to do certain things in a certain way, one of which involves following orders promptly and thoroughly. Once that is accomplished the training begins. You are assigned a rank (the lowest rank), and given a new uniform to wear that demonstrates your new identity as a soldier. Are you a soldier? Yes. Can you call yourself a soldier? Yes. Can you fight like a soldier? No. That’s what basic training is for, to give you the knowledge, the skills, the ability to behave like a soldier. If you get handed a uniform and a rank and then told to go out and fight the enemy, you’ll be pretty useless for the brief period of time that you survive. Or, if you don’t get killed, you’ll start learning pretty quickly how to survive, the techniques and practices, the tricks of the trade, the drills and weaponry that all soldiers need to know in order to survive as a soldier. And usually you need to be taught these things from someone else. That’s where Basic Training comes in. Its function is to prepare you to fight, to move, to think, to use the tools needed in order to behave like a soldier.
Now, it’s important to understand that as soon as you took the oath and were awarded a rank and donned a uniform, you were a soldier. Your identity was confirmed immediately, and you are as much a soldier as a grizzled veteran or a four-star general. But can you behave as one? Does your behavior match your identity? No. Because simply obtaining a new identity isn’t enough to enable you to change your behavior.
And part of the training all soldiers go through is learning to follow orders. Perhaps the hardest part, since it’s so counter-intuitive to our regular, civilian behavior, it’s such a big adjustment. But following orders is as much a part of being a soldier as the ability to strip a weapon apart for cleaning, or learning how to take a hill, or anticipating an ambush, or learning how to plant an explosive device. In fact, following orders is the very thing that separates a soldier from just a mercenary, a killer, or someone who knows how to do those other things.
Following orders is the essence of being a soldier; you place your confidence and faith in your superiors that when they tell you where to go or what to do, you will go and do secure in your faith that their orders are for the best. Not necessarily your best, but the best in terms of the battle you are fighting or the war you are waging.
Too many Christians have taken the oath to become a Christian. They’ve received their rank as one of God’s people, and been clothed in the righteousness of Christ. But they don’t follow orders. They’re not effective Christians in the sense that their identity doesn’t match their behavior. (And as I alluded to before, I must include myself foremost among these ranks.) Now, some may have some training: they’ve read their Bibles front to back many times, they’ve been to church every Sunday, they’ve led Bible studies and Sunday School classes, they may even be evangelists, preachers, or missionaries. But do they follow orders? Again, that’s the essence of being a soldier, and it’s infinitely more imperative in a Christian, to follow the orders of God. They may be deadly with apologetics, have much education or great stories full of pathos that they use to tug on peoples’ heartstrings. They may be skilled in debate or evangelism. They’ve got the tools of the trade down. But if they’re not operating on the basis of waiting for orders, listening to orders, and following orders, then they’re not really going to be effective soldiers in God’s war.
The importance of following orders is rather obvious, but for the sake of space I’ll elaborate. In a battle or overall war, there are strategic objectives, goals that encompass the entire effort among all fronts. In WWII, the global strategy was to push back Germany from the Atlantic coast. On the tactical level is where the strategy is enacted and accomplished, and that involved pitched battles, gunfights and devastation, small groups of men pushing back the Nazi forces. When you’re on the ground, when you can see only a small part of the battle, you know only a little part of the overall strategy. It is the role of the generals and top brass to formulate a strategy that will win the war, and they are best able to do so because they can view things in a global sense. They can see the entire front, multiple battles at the same time. And so they give the orders that are communicated down through the colonels, lieutenants, captains, and sergeants down to the corporals and privates who are the lowest rank, who actually do the fighting and killing and retaking of territory.
Now, if the top brass can see everything clearly, then they will know what best to do to win the war, not just the individual battles. So their orders may not make much sense to those who can’t see the entire picture of the war, who are mired in a single engagement. But the best soldiers are those who, when given an order, follow it precisely and immediately, because then the higher levels can implement strategies that will win not just one battle or two, but all battles and ultimately, the war. So the importance of obedience grows with the stakes.
The analogy is clear. God is the top brass and sees the entire battlefield, all the fronts of human hearts, and has formulated a strategy that will win as many as possible. (He won’t win all, because of free will; that’s a whole other can of worms, but it’s not because He’s unable to. The terms of the war don’t allow for absolute victory.) So when He gives us an order, even if it may be utterly incomprehensible to us in our individual struggles and opportunities, we can rest assured that He knows how best to wage His holy war for men’s hearts. And the better our obedience, the more effective and efficient soldiers in His service we become.
Lastly let me point out the role of the soldier in all this. His first duty is to make the choice, to become a soldier. If you’re not a soldier then you won’t have gone through training; your officers won’t be able to count upon your general basis of knowledge, and more important, your obedience to follow orders. So the identity comes first. After that, your second duty is to follow orders during training. Some training methods and content may seem unimportant or objectionable, but the good soldier trusts that his instructors and trainers know what a soldier needs to learn and be able to do to accomplish his duty, and so complies with even the most baffling or boring of drills. Even now the primacy of obedience shines through. And once training is over, the real war begins and the soldier now makes use of his training to accomplish his orders, which of course is the third duty of the soldier: to follow orders on the field of battle.
You may notice that at every stage of the soldier’s progression, his main role involves a certain amount of passivity. He accepts his rank and identity upon enlistment; he learns from instructors and completes the courses during training; and he follows orders when carrying out his duty in battle. He doesn’t charge into the fray half-cocked; he doesn’t try to create his own courses of study and devise a training regimen himself; and he doesn’t decide which battles to fight in and when, where, and how to fight. His is an active duty but based on a passive acceptance, obedience, and faith in his superiors. The obedience and faith must come before the activity.
So it is with Christians. If we are to be the hands and feet, the very body, of God on earth, then that means we will be doing things. We’ll be active in His war, we’ll be participating in reaching people He wants to reach. But before we can do that, we must accept that He’s calling the shots, that our role is to obey not initiate, that we walk in faith and not in self-actualization.
Are you a soldier? Have you taken the oaths and put on the uniform? Have you gone through training and developed the skills? And most importantly, are you following orders? Are you quick to listen and quicker to obey? Or are you attempting to order the battle yourself? Are you charging in without training and without orders?
Monday, January 11, 2010
The Marriage of Heaven and Earth
I am not, by natural inclination, given to letting my emotions rule me. I joke with my cousin that I am “dead inside,” which always elicits a reproving look from her. She feels that such is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if I think of myself as dead inside, then I shall truly be dead inside because I will behave as if I am dead inside, so it won’t make a difference whether or not I truly am dead inside because for all practical intents and purposes, I will be dead inside. Confused? Good. Let’s press on.
I say this as a preface to a recent realization. As with many things that flit about in my mind, it involves God. And Sex. Not that I constantly associate God with Sex; quite the contrary. Usually the things of Sex appear in direct conflict with the things of God. But, in thinking about my relationship with God as a marriage, I was struck by the analogy of Sex as a climactic experience, a visceral rapture, an emotional high that adds an exclamation point to the sentence of marriage.
I enjoy experiences. Should I ever have the chance, I will no doubt enjoy sex a great deal. It is easy to understand why humans pursue sex so ardently, why they place such a premium on the associations with sex: physical beauty, stamina, etc. The easier and more pleasurable sex is to enjoy, the more fruitful and successful one’s life will be deemed to be.
And I think that often times Christians have a similar attitude toward God. We want a transcendent experience of God, a burning in the bosom; the “mountaintop experience” as it has become known in church parlance. We want such an experience because it reasserts our conviction that a) God exists, b) He loves us, and c) we are progressing in our relationship with Him.
This seems awfully similar to sex in the context of a relationship, doesn’t it? The quantity and quality of sex serves as a benchmark for their connection to each other, how much they love each other, and how well their relationship is going.
In this context the skyrocketing divorce rate becomes much more understandable, since part of the allure and pleasure of sex is the exotic discovery of something new, something hitherto unexperienced. And as the newness fades, so too must the conviction on each part of the other’s love and devotion, as well as their assessment of the relationship. “You’ve lost that loving feeling,” the Righteous Brothers crooned, and that becomes the excuse for jumping ship on marriage; the sex isn’t good, thus the relationship is floundering, and "I’ve grown accustomed to her face” (to complete the bizarre cultural references). I keep returning to Lewis’ essay “We Have No Right To Happiness,” but it continues to offer relevant commentary upon not only daily life but spiritual matters as well, and this is one of the main themes he outlines. Familiarity breeds boredom, and this spurs the search for the new experience, unavailable within the confines (a telling designation, is it not?) of the marriage.
Not incidentally, the “divorce” rate of Christians from a transformed, vital, and impacting effect upon the world directly relates to their divorce from a true understanding of their relationship with God. They want the mountaintop, and if they don’t experience it they think their relationship is flawed and needs to be fixed.
Once you experience that mountain top experience, the natural tendency is to reproduce it. But real marriage doesn’t work that way. As we established, sexual attraction fades over time. But in true marriage, it is replaced by a comfortable affection, a deep love and appreciation for the other person, an ever-increasing wonderment and humility as you understand more and more the other person, and as you are revealed more and more to them. That is the heady draught that a truly rich relationship graduates to: love that is patient, kind, long-suffering, faithful, never remembers wrongs, never stops hoping and forgiving, never fails. This draught doesn’t dazzle the taste buds like the first drink of experience did, but it satisfies and endures in ways the other could not.
But if the relationship is built upon the experience of sex, then when the sex disappears, usually one or both go looking for it elsewhere and doom the relationship most of the time. And here’s the kicker, fellow Christians. Get ready.
God doesn’t want to base His relationship with you on spiritual Sex. It’s okay for a towering experience early in the relationship, at the consummation of His Spirit entering your heart, the glory of salvation and redemption being applied to your spirit. It’s good, it’s holy, and it helps you to appreciate the wonders and promise of joy and pleasure that the relationship you enter into brings and will bring. But just as a marriage has to progress beyond sex, so the relationship between God’s heart and yours has to progress beyond that first experience, that anointing of the Spirit, that “mountaintop.”
The term “mountain top experience” refers to the passage in Matthew 17 where Jesus and the 3 closest to him ascend on a mountain and Jesus is transfigured into a glorified being. Peter is astonished and enraptured and wants to prolong the experience, to stay on the mountaintop with a transcendent Jesus and the specters of Moses and Elijah. But Jesus never meant to stay on the mountaintop; if he had, he wouldn’t have fulfilled his mission on earth and brought about salvation.
That first rush, that rapture of new birth seems so foreign and joyful that we want to hold on to it, to prolong it, to preserve it. In the river of life we want to stop the flow, to freeze the experience and dwell in it perpetually. But if you freeze a river, you have a block of ice; you have stasis, not life. Suspended animation.
On the contrary, the successful marriage consists of a daily exploration and deepening of the relationship between the couple as they travel the rest of their lives together. They come to know the other’s habits, faults, strengths, insecurities, arrogances, and desires. They know the best and worst of them, as much as is possible for one person to know the heart and mind of another. But it’s a process, a journey only accomplished by continuous experience, a daily, unspectacular (for a large part) existence. You don’t learn everything about them all at once, and you can’t learn everything about them ultimately. But your covenant with them keeps you together, keeps you coming back and plumbing new depths of self-sacrifice, patience, cooperation, honesty, and humility. But from this comes an intimacy that surpasses anything on earth. When you experience nothing as constantly and as deeply as your spouse, you reach a level of understanding and acceptance that is impossible in any other way. It’s a product of time, given the right circumstances from the beginning.
This is what God desires from His relationship with us. He may include a few spectacular and tremendous experiences, like the occasional sex of a couple in later years, but the relationship has shifted away from experiences that transcend to experiences that unite and create intimacy. As you go through your daily walk and include the Lord in everything, every decision and thought and word, you gain a deeper understanding of who He is as you see His impact upon you and upon the world through you. And as your interactions with your spouse reveal aspects of yourself that you were unaware of, so too does your walk with the Lord allow you to see yourself more clearly, to recognize areas in your life that still must be rendered unto Him, to celebrate victories and new life in areas of spiritual bondage and death. And as the peaceful comfort and deep intimacy of the successful marriage replaces the ecstasy of sex as the pinnacle of the relationship, the benchmark by which you measure the health and progress of the relationship, so to the increasing surrender and understanding of the true meaning of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” in your daily routine becomes the most precious and indicative aspect of your life with God.
I say this as a preface to a recent realization. As with many things that flit about in my mind, it involves God. And Sex. Not that I constantly associate God with Sex; quite the contrary. Usually the things of Sex appear in direct conflict with the things of God. But, in thinking about my relationship with God as a marriage, I was struck by the analogy of Sex as a climactic experience, a visceral rapture, an emotional high that adds an exclamation point to the sentence of marriage.
I enjoy experiences. Should I ever have the chance, I will no doubt enjoy sex a great deal. It is easy to understand why humans pursue sex so ardently, why they place such a premium on the associations with sex: physical beauty, stamina, etc. The easier and more pleasurable sex is to enjoy, the more fruitful and successful one’s life will be deemed to be.
And I think that often times Christians have a similar attitude toward God. We want a transcendent experience of God, a burning in the bosom; the “mountaintop experience” as it has become known in church parlance. We want such an experience because it reasserts our conviction that a) God exists, b) He loves us, and c) we are progressing in our relationship with Him.
This seems awfully similar to sex in the context of a relationship, doesn’t it? The quantity and quality of sex serves as a benchmark for their connection to each other, how much they love each other, and how well their relationship is going.
In this context the skyrocketing divorce rate becomes much more understandable, since part of the allure and pleasure of sex is the exotic discovery of something new, something hitherto unexperienced. And as the newness fades, so too must the conviction on each part of the other’s love and devotion, as well as their assessment of the relationship. “You’ve lost that loving feeling,” the Righteous Brothers crooned, and that becomes the excuse for jumping ship on marriage; the sex isn’t good, thus the relationship is floundering, and "I’ve grown accustomed to her face” (to complete the bizarre cultural references). I keep returning to Lewis’ essay “We Have No Right To Happiness,” but it continues to offer relevant commentary upon not only daily life but spiritual matters as well, and this is one of the main themes he outlines. Familiarity breeds boredom, and this spurs the search for the new experience, unavailable within the confines (a telling designation, is it not?) of the marriage.
Not incidentally, the “divorce” rate of Christians from a transformed, vital, and impacting effect upon the world directly relates to their divorce from a true understanding of their relationship with God. They want the mountaintop, and if they don’t experience it they think their relationship is flawed and needs to be fixed.
Once you experience that mountain top experience, the natural tendency is to reproduce it. But real marriage doesn’t work that way. As we established, sexual attraction fades over time. But in true marriage, it is replaced by a comfortable affection, a deep love and appreciation for the other person, an ever-increasing wonderment and humility as you understand more and more the other person, and as you are revealed more and more to them. That is the heady draught that a truly rich relationship graduates to: love that is patient, kind, long-suffering, faithful, never remembers wrongs, never stops hoping and forgiving, never fails. This draught doesn’t dazzle the taste buds like the first drink of experience did, but it satisfies and endures in ways the other could not.
But if the relationship is built upon the experience of sex, then when the sex disappears, usually one or both go looking for it elsewhere and doom the relationship most of the time. And here’s the kicker, fellow Christians. Get ready.
God doesn’t want to base His relationship with you on spiritual Sex. It’s okay for a towering experience early in the relationship, at the consummation of His Spirit entering your heart, the glory of salvation and redemption being applied to your spirit. It’s good, it’s holy, and it helps you to appreciate the wonders and promise of joy and pleasure that the relationship you enter into brings and will bring. But just as a marriage has to progress beyond sex, so the relationship between God’s heart and yours has to progress beyond that first experience, that anointing of the Spirit, that “mountaintop.”
The term “mountain top experience” refers to the passage in Matthew 17 where Jesus and the 3 closest to him ascend on a mountain and Jesus is transfigured into a glorified being. Peter is astonished and enraptured and wants to prolong the experience, to stay on the mountaintop with a transcendent Jesus and the specters of Moses and Elijah. But Jesus never meant to stay on the mountaintop; if he had, he wouldn’t have fulfilled his mission on earth and brought about salvation.
That first rush, that rapture of new birth seems so foreign and joyful that we want to hold on to it, to prolong it, to preserve it. In the river of life we want to stop the flow, to freeze the experience and dwell in it perpetually. But if you freeze a river, you have a block of ice; you have stasis, not life. Suspended animation.
On the contrary, the successful marriage consists of a daily exploration and deepening of the relationship between the couple as they travel the rest of their lives together. They come to know the other’s habits, faults, strengths, insecurities, arrogances, and desires. They know the best and worst of them, as much as is possible for one person to know the heart and mind of another. But it’s a process, a journey only accomplished by continuous experience, a daily, unspectacular (for a large part) existence. You don’t learn everything about them all at once, and you can’t learn everything about them ultimately. But your covenant with them keeps you together, keeps you coming back and plumbing new depths of self-sacrifice, patience, cooperation, honesty, and humility. But from this comes an intimacy that surpasses anything on earth. When you experience nothing as constantly and as deeply as your spouse, you reach a level of understanding and acceptance that is impossible in any other way. It’s a product of time, given the right circumstances from the beginning.
This is what God desires from His relationship with us. He may include a few spectacular and tremendous experiences, like the occasional sex of a couple in later years, but the relationship has shifted away from experiences that transcend to experiences that unite and create intimacy. As you go through your daily walk and include the Lord in everything, every decision and thought and word, you gain a deeper understanding of who He is as you see His impact upon you and upon the world through you. And as your interactions with your spouse reveal aspects of yourself that you were unaware of, so too does your walk with the Lord allow you to see yourself more clearly, to recognize areas in your life that still must be rendered unto Him, to celebrate victories and new life in areas of spiritual bondage and death. And as the peaceful comfort and deep intimacy of the successful marriage replaces the ecstasy of sex as the pinnacle of the relationship, the benchmark by which you measure the health and progress of the relationship, so to the increasing surrender and understanding of the true meaning of “Christ in you, the hope of glory” in your daily routine becomes the most precious and indicative aspect of your life with God.
Old Farmhouses
I have always been fascinated by
farmhouses, old abandoned wrecks that huddle
along the sides of backroads,
stare mutely as progress flashes by
on fresh Goodyears.
Like the skeletons of long-
dead animals
the ramshackle memorials hearken back decades
to when they were filled with life and activity,
when they mattered. Windows edged
with broken glass peer out at me,
seeming to cry a warning:
“enjoy your life while it is yours, take every opportunity
that comes your way,
sink your teeth into the succulent rind of experience,
savor the flavors that run down your chin, the blood of joy. Once
we were as you are, vibrant and young,
clear-skinned and well-groomed, home to
families and friends, center of commerce and communion.
Now we rest in repose, gray-hued and gaunt, a decrepit memory
that fades from relevance and hovers on the edge of
oblivion, only
flashes of the past in the windows of time flying by
on fresh Goodyears.”
farmhouses, old abandoned wrecks that huddle
along the sides of backroads,
stare mutely as progress flashes by
on fresh Goodyears.
Like the skeletons of long-
dead animals
the ramshackle memorials hearken back decades
to when they were filled with life and activity,
when they mattered. Windows edged
with broken glass peer out at me,
seeming to cry a warning:
“enjoy your life while it is yours, take every opportunity
that comes your way,
sink your teeth into the succulent rind of experience,
savor the flavors that run down your chin, the blood of joy. Once
we were as you are, vibrant and young,
clear-skinned and well-groomed, home to
families and friends, center of commerce and communion.
Now we rest in repose, gray-hued and gaunt, a decrepit memory
that fades from relevance and hovers on the edge of
oblivion, only
flashes of the past in the windows of time flying by
on fresh Goodyears.”
Saturday, January 2, 2010
1.1.10
Well, here we are, the end of a decade, the end of a year. The new annual opens before us like a virgin field of snow, full of white possibilities and the certainty of cold, wet disappointments. But that’s the pessimist in me talking. New Years Day is the moment for renewal, a resolve to do better, to be better. Reform bad habits, revise prejudices, revamp your expectations and insecurities for what the future holds. It’s a cliché to say so, but how long does this ever last? The dedication to lose weight, to eat right and exercise carries us through a few weeks, a month tops, but even the largest wave eventually succumbs to the land. The workout clothes and diet plans slowly or suddenly sink into lackadaisicality and the old man (or woman) pushes back to the forefront of our lives from whence it patiently waited for our resolve to falter and our dreams to fade.
Why? Why is change so hard to sustain? What is the catalyst for real, fundamental alterations in the fabric of our lives? Well, usually it comes with a tear, a rip in our life fabric, a crisis or a tragedy. We suffer a heart attack or hear a dire diagnosis, and suddenly the impetus to eat right and lose weight that eluded us for years comes as easy as breathing. We careen into a fence post or spend a night in jail, and that nasty habit of one too many drinks suddenly gets revealed for the danger it always was. We sunder a relationship with a friend or significant other, and all the things we took for granted or that we refused to change about our personality and practices become a priority to address. The change is in the mending, repairing the damage done.
But does it have to be? Do we have to suffer a loss or an arrhythmia to jolt us out of complacency? Can change happen because we want to change?
On the face of it, no. I’ve been trying to change for many years now. What exactly I wanted to change has, well, changed over the years (not much of it, but some). The fact that most of what I’d like to change hasn’t changed tells you just how much change has changed. That is, very little. Many people genuinely want to change, to be different people, to look different, act different, eat different, relate to others differently, without ever succeeding unless acted upon by an outside event. Some people are gifted with an iron will and self-discipline, and can change themselves by dint of desire. They are the exceptions, or exceptional perhaps. Maybe I and those like me who cannot change through will alone are the exceptions, and they are the standard. Either way, I am not among them. I enjoy some things too much to stop doing them by a simple act of will, and even if I could, the habits are too deeply set.
Which brings me to a ray of hope. For me, and for those like me who find themselves desperate to change but unable to accomplish this change without some help, some force greater than themselves lending a hand: the hand of God.
The hand of God is me. And you, if you are submitted to His will. I mean truly submitted, not with lip service or an intellectual agreement, but actual, literal, visceral submission to His will in your life. We are the bodyparts of God. When Jesus walked the earth, he walked in perfect submission to his Father’s will. The will of God was perfectly expressed through the Son, through the Son’s perfect submission. When Jesus rubbed mud in a blindman’s eyes, God was rubbing the mud using Jesus’ hands. When Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb, God was using Jesus’ voice to call out Mary and Martha’s brother. Jesus was the perfect Body of God: Hands, Feet, Lips, Eyes, Mind, Will, Emotion, Faith. And now, right now, this very instant, Jesus lives in us.
Remember that we accepted Jesus into our hearts. That wasn’t a metaphor; it was a spiritual reality. Jesus lives in our earthly tabernacles. And as Jesus was the Hand of God through his perfect submission to the Father’s will, so too are we the hands of Jesus through our submission to him.
Paul calls us part of the Body of Christ, and what he means is that as God used Jesus’ body to do His will, so Jesus will use our bodies to do his will. Depending, of course, on how well we submit to his direction in our lives. Jesus submitted perfectly to God’s will, but he doesn’t expect that of us. He asks it, he holds it up as the goal to aspire to, but he doesn’t reject us when we fail to do it. The only consequence we suffer for imperfect submission is that we don’t get to participate in the body of Christ. If a man was playing the piano, and one of his fingers decided not to participate, not to be a willing and submissive part of the man’s body, then that finger misses out on playing that particular piece of music the man was trying to play. The man still plays the piano even if his finger refuses to cooperate. You may rightly object, “if a man’s finger rebelled against his will, how could he play the piano?” All analogies break down at a point, and since the man in this analogy is God, and God can’t be thwarted, His will still shall be accomplished with or without our help. But we as his body parts on earth miss an opportunity to be a part of the music He is about here on earth.
This is one of the major revelations that the ministry of Ian Thomas emphasized, and there is adequate Scriptural support to back it up. But more to the point, it dovetails with the character of God. God never seems to do things the way we expect Him to, and He takes great pains to wean us from the attitude of our self-sufficiency and pride in doing things on our own adequacy. He didn’t give us a list of instructions to carry out to get saved; He outlined the standard and when no one could meet it He fixed the problem in such a way that all we had to do, and all we could do, was to accept what He did through His Son, and trust that He is able and faithful to do that which He promised to do. Likewise, when He tells us to live like Jesus did, to participate in the new life, to be new creatures, to preach the gospel to all the world and make apostles of all people, what He’s asking of us isn’t difficult—it’s impossible! It can’t be done by any means man can devise! It’s a sheer and utter impossibility, completely beyond our capacity. And again, He did this on purpose, and provided a way to do it that requires from us nothing more than faith in Him and surrender to Him that allows His will to be expressed through His Son and His Spirit.
And I don’t know about you, but what I’d like to accomplish in the new year, I’ve decided, is impossible for me to accomplish. I can’t do it. Jehovah, You will have to do it. Amen.
I said He did this on purpose, and that wasn’t an idle comment. He did it on purpose, like He accomplished the salvation from Hell and death and sin in a particular and peculiar way on purpose. See, man, left to his natural predilections, wants to do things his way. That way, the glory and credit for success goes solely to him when things turn out well. And what does this do to the man but make him ever confident that he doesn't need help? That he can do “it” on his own capacity? Well, if God wants to save man, and man is unable to save himself, then before God can save man He has to break man of his delusion that man can save himself, can do anything of worth to God through his own abilities. So God does things that takes all the opportunities for man’s pride to kick in out of the equation: He sets standards impossible for man to follow perfectly; He engineers salvation so that man’s only option is humility and accepting a gift without any merit on his part; and then He bestows a new life to man that requires man live on the resources and ability of God, and not himself. Why, you may ask? Because God wants our hearts. He wants our dedication and love. That's why He created Creation in the first place, why He bestowed a likeness of deity upon man, and why He went through such pains to bring man back to Him after everything went wrong. He wants to share His life and love with man, and if someone doesn’t need you, and you don’t need them, then it’s that much harder to gain and keep their attention in any meaningful way.
God wants our dependence upon Him to be constant, unwavering, and absolute. He wants us looking to Him for our daily bread, the clothes on our backs, the shelter over our heads, the money in our wallets, the people in our lives, all of it. He wants to walk with us day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. He wants a true relationship with us. Did you ever stop to consider the full import of the words “I will never leave you nor forsake you”? It’s not only to encourage us in our salvation; it’s an expression of God’s undying devotion to us, His desire to ever and always be with us and in us. He is sharing His life with us, and that means not only does He impart His Spirit to us to give us spiritual life and resurrection, but also that He wants to share each moment with us. What an awesome and humbling thing this is, that God wants to hang out with us forever! What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
“God needs to get a life,” the cynic might jest. “No,” you answer. “We need to get God’s life,” And here’s the conclusion to this, which brings us to our original point. If God is with us and in us constantly, if we are walking in faith and submission to Him and His leading, then what possible stronghold on our lives could ever conquer us? What trials that buffet us could ever defeat us? What minions of Hell could ever deceive and destroy us? Can a habit of overeating withstand the presence of the Spirit of God? It is so laughable as to be insane! Can a lack of job or prospects depress one who has the Inexhaustible living in his heart? Can loneliness or heartache overwhelm one who has the Comforter and Lover of his soul?
Turn your eyes upon Jesus…look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. Amen.
Why? Why is change so hard to sustain? What is the catalyst for real, fundamental alterations in the fabric of our lives? Well, usually it comes with a tear, a rip in our life fabric, a crisis or a tragedy. We suffer a heart attack or hear a dire diagnosis, and suddenly the impetus to eat right and lose weight that eluded us for years comes as easy as breathing. We careen into a fence post or spend a night in jail, and that nasty habit of one too many drinks suddenly gets revealed for the danger it always was. We sunder a relationship with a friend or significant other, and all the things we took for granted or that we refused to change about our personality and practices become a priority to address. The change is in the mending, repairing the damage done.
But does it have to be? Do we have to suffer a loss or an arrhythmia to jolt us out of complacency? Can change happen because we want to change?
On the face of it, no. I’ve been trying to change for many years now. What exactly I wanted to change has, well, changed over the years (not much of it, but some). The fact that most of what I’d like to change hasn’t changed tells you just how much change has changed. That is, very little. Many people genuinely want to change, to be different people, to look different, act different, eat different, relate to others differently, without ever succeeding unless acted upon by an outside event. Some people are gifted with an iron will and self-discipline, and can change themselves by dint of desire. They are the exceptions, or exceptional perhaps. Maybe I and those like me who cannot change through will alone are the exceptions, and they are the standard. Either way, I am not among them. I enjoy some things too much to stop doing them by a simple act of will, and even if I could, the habits are too deeply set.
Which brings me to a ray of hope. For me, and for those like me who find themselves desperate to change but unable to accomplish this change without some help, some force greater than themselves lending a hand: the hand of God.
The hand of God is me. And you, if you are submitted to His will. I mean truly submitted, not with lip service or an intellectual agreement, but actual, literal, visceral submission to His will in your life. We are the bodyparts of God. When Jesus walked the earth, he walked in perfect submission to his Father’s will. The will of God was perfectly expressed through the Son, through the Son’s perfect submission. When Jesus rubbed mud in a blindman’s eyes, God was rubbing the mud using Jesus’ hands. When Jesus called Lazarus out of the tomb, God was using Jesus’ voice to call out Mary and Martha’s brother. Jesus was the perfect Body of God: Hands, Feet, Lips, Eyes, Mind, Will, Emotion, Faith. And now, right now, this very instant, Jesus lives in us.
Remember that we accepted Jesus into our hearts. That wasn’t a metaphor; it was a spiritual reality. Jesus lives in our earthly tabernacles. And as Jesus was the Hand of God through his perfect submission to the Father’s will, so too are we the hands of Jesus through our submission to him.
Paul calls us part of the Body of Christ, and what he means is that as God used Jesus’ body to do His will, so Jesus will use our bodies to do his will. Depending, of course, on how well we submit to his direction in our lives. Jesus submitted perfectly to God’s will, but he doesn’t expect that of us. He asks it, he holds it up as the goal to aspire to, but he doesn’t reject us when we fail to do it. The only consequence we suffer for imperfect submission is that we don’t get to participate in the body of Christ. If a man was playing the piano, and one of his fingers decided not to participate, not to be a willing and submissive part of the man’s body, then that finger misses out on playing that particular piece of music the man was trying to play. The man still plays the piano even if his finger refuses to cooperate. You may rightly object, “if a man’s finger rebelled against his will, how could he play the piano?” All analogies break down at a point, and since the man in this analogy is God, and God can’t be thwarted, His will still shall be accomplished with or without our help. But we as his body parts on earth miss an opportunity to be a part of the music He is about here on earth.
This is one of the major revelations that the ministry of Ian Thomas emphasized, and there is adequate Scriptural support to back it up. But more to the point, it dovetails with the character of God. God never seems to do things the way we expect Him to, and He takes great pains to wean us from the attitude of our self-sufficiency and pride in doing things on our own adequacy. He didn’t give us a list of instructions to carry out to get saved; He outlined the standard and when no one could meet it He fixed the problem in such a way that all we had to do, and all we could do, was to accept what He did through His Son, and trust that He is able and faithful to do that which He promised to do. Likewise, when He tells us to live like Jesus did, to participate in the new life, to be new creatures, to preach the gospel to all the world and make apostles of all people, what He’s asking of us isn’t difficult—it’s impossible! It can’t be done by any means man can devise! It’s a sheer and utter impossibility, completely beyond our capacity. And again, He did this on purpose, and provided a way to do it that requires from us nothing more than faith in Him and surrender to Him that allows His will to be expressed through His Son and His Spirit.
And I don’t know about you, but what I’d like to accomplish in the new year, I’ve decided, is impossible for me to accomplish. I can’t do it. Jehovah, You will have to do it. Amen.
I said He did this on purpose, and that wasn’t an idle comment. He did it on purpose, like He accomplished the salvation from Hell and death and sin in a particular and peculiar way on purpose. See, man, left to his natural predilections, wants to do things his way. That way, the glory and credit for success goes solely to him when things turn out well. And what does this do to the man but make him ever confident that he doesn't need help? That he can do “it” on his own capacity? Well, if God wants to save man, and man is unable to save himself, then before God can save man He has to break man of his delusion that man can save himself, can do anything of worth to God through his own abilities. So God does things that takes all the opportunities for man’s pride to kick in out of the equation: He sets standards impossible for man to follow perfectly; He engineers salvation so that man’s only option is humility and accepting a gift without any merit on his part; and then He bestows a new life to man that requires man live on the resources and ability of God, and not himself. Why, you may ask? Because God wants our hearts. He wants our dedication and love. That's why He created Creation in the first place, why He bestowed a likeness of deity upon man, and why He went through such pains to bring man back to Him after everything went wrong. He wants to share His life and love with man, and if someone doesn’t need you, and you don’t need them, then it’s that much harder to gain and keep their attention in any meaningful way.
God wants our dependence upon Him to be constant, unwavering, and absolute. He wants us looking to Him for our daily bread, the clothes on our backs, the shelter over our heads, the money in our wallets, the people in our lives, all of it. He wants to walk with us day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second. He wants a true relationship with us. Did you ever stop to consider the full import of the words “I will never leave you nor forsake you”? It’s not only to encourage us in our salvation; it’s an expression of God’s undying devotion to us, His desire to ever and always be with us and in us. He is sharing His life with us, and that means not only does He impart His Spirit to us to give us spiritual life and resurrection, but also that He wants to share each moment with us. What an awesome and humbling thing this is, that God wants to hang out with us forever! What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
“God needs to get a life,” the cynic might jest. “No,” you answer. “We need to get God’s life,” And here’s the conclusion to this, which brings us to our original point. If God is with us and in us constantly, if we are walking in faith and submission to Him and His leading, then what possible stronghold on our lives could ever conquer us? What trials that buffet us could ever defeat us? What minions of Hell could ever deceive and destroy us? Can a habit of overeating withstand the presence of the Spirit of God? It is so laughable as to be insane! Can a lack of job or prospects depress one who has the Inexhaustible living in his heart? Can loneliness or heartache overwhelm one who has the Comforter and Lover of his soul?
Turn your eyes upon Jesus…look full in his wonderful face. And the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. Amen.
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