Walk by Faith

American Idol judge Simon Cowell is also the creator of a show called Britain’s Got Talent. He wasn’t having a good day at auditions this past April. “God this is horrible.” He said before the show went to break. When it came back from commercial, Simon was greeted by a middle-aged lady who looked… well, like nothing special. Susan Boyle looked homely and she’s from nowhere special. Simon immediately dismissed her, but since he had to talk to her, he punctuated all his questions with eye rolls, shrugs, and a body-language that said “Oh please.”

How many of you have heard Susan Boyle sing? Was it what you were expecting? [Watch the video here]

Susan sang. The crowd went NUTS for her singing and the judges just stared at the song bird that landed on the stage. Simon… well not just Simon, everyone was expecting failure. It’s the oldest sin in the show-biz book, judging a book by its cover.

In today’s scripture we hear one of Paul’s greatest pieces of wisdom, “We live by faith, not by sight.” Susan Boyle is the embodiment of this phrase. She showed a sexist, ageist, fashion-concerned world what it means to live by faith. In her short 90 second performance, she offered a one woman antidote to all the cynicism that had engulfed the world during this recession. She wasn’t a greedy banker, or corrupt politician. She wasn’t in this for fame or fortune. She had no interest in being another celebrity or raking in piles of cash. She had spent her entire life dreaming of being a professional singer and she had faith that she could do it despite being the full-time care-taker of her mother, despite not looking the way the world expects, despite never going 60 miles from her hometown; Susan had a gift and she had confidence in this gift. She knew it would take her places beyond her wildest dreams. She walks by faith.



We’re steeped in a world that loves what it sees. We are in a world that lives almost exclusively by sight. My college degree was in advertising, so I was set to make my career selling things to you all by sight alone. Doctors Michael Brower and Warren Leon state that “The average American is exposed to about 3000 advertising messages a day, and globally corporations spend over $620 billion each year to make their products seem desirable and to get us to buy them.”

Living by sight means that you have to have the new product, wear the deodorant that gets you the girls, but make sure that you’re wearing the right clothes, driving the right car, and completely defining yourself by appearance. If the world was like advertising would have you believe, then one paper towel can hold a bowling ball. The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window in Paris. Household cleaning products hold the key to personal fulfillment. Medieval peasants would have perfectly straight teeth. And if you buy this SUV, you can take it off-road, it will never get dirty, and you’ll never drive in traffic, ever.

Living by sight is SO limited because we so often get it wrong. We misunderstand or misinterpret things which are right in front of us and get too concerned with just staying on the surface of what we know. Here are some examples:

In the year 100, Roman engineer Julius Sextus stated “Inventions have long since reached their limit and I see no hope for future developments.”

In 1893 a journalist wrote “Law will be simplified over the next century. Lawyers will have diminished and their fees will have vastly been curtailed.

In 1895, a teacher wrote to a father of one of his students that this student… this Albert Einstein “will never amount to anything.”

In 1949, a computer scientist stated that “It appears we have reached the limits of what is possible to achieve with computer technology.

The head of the patent office in the 1960s wanted to close up shop because everything had already been invented.

I could go on and on. The world is chock full of examples of living by sight.
So how does this concern you? When you pick up your paper or watch the news, it’s easy to fall into despair. Shootings at the holocaust museum, global warming, war, famine, bail outs, company layoffs, the list goes on and on. Paul is seeking to remind us of where we get our purpose and direction from. Sight, Paul argues, is the surface layer; faith is the insight that gets below the surface to goodness, truth, and love.

However, living by faith and sight can be done at the same time. Sight and insight operate together as they do in looking at a painting, where we see not only the forms and colors of the scene but also its beauty. To see beauty, it takes insight. It’s easy to see the beauty in the Hollywood actor or actress, much harder to see it in Susan Boyle or our neighbors. That takes insight. Beauty is something which cannot be measured or completely understood, but we know it when we see it through our insight, through our 6th sense which is our faith.

Walking by faith does not mean that we walk entirely in the dark by a kind of blind trust. It doesn’t mean taking what the bible says, what authorities say, what institutions say literally and unchallenged. A struggle takes place. An interested investigation launched. Remember Doubting Thomas?

There will be times when we have to walk by the light of our faith with only the memory of the insights that were once clear to us. Walking by faith doesn’t mean that once you have an insight, that’s the final and absolute truth… no. We as Christians believe in the Holy Spirit and the Spirit moves and guides and changes and challenges us and provides us with new insights… some of which contradict the old.

Walking by faith is asking questions and questioning the answers. This form of inquiry in many ways resembles the scientific method. But science fails to address such important human concerns as sorrow and joy, suffering and love.
Walking by faith doesn’t mean you’re standing still. Resting on old answers. When we walk by faith we follow the Spirit and Christ. Jesus walked the walk.
He was born out of wedlock. He hung out with the wrong crowd. He was from some backwoods town and couldn’t possibly amount to anything. He was put to death in his culture’s most shameful way and yet here we are 2,000 years later still talking about him, calling him the Son of God.

Walking by faith takes a lot of courage and effort and many just don’t want to do it. But there is power in it. It is a power that the world doesn’t really understand, not really, because there’s no guarantee. In fact, it actually looks like losing. The power of walking by faith is a paradox; it’s power that looks like weakness. More than that, it is not guaranteed to stop all evildoers. It might, of course, touch and soften their hearts. It enables you to recognize God’s power positively at work in the world.

This way of living comes at a price. It can leave us with the sense that we don’t know the answers after all, that we are much further from knowing than we’d ever realized before. This humble way of living shows us that there are many more angles by which to examine life than we ever imagined. As the ancient rabbis said, “Those who say they know are much further away from the answer than those who say that they don’t know.”

Take care to distinguish between externals and internals. Question your snap judgments and check to see if they hold water. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck externally, internally that duck may think it’s a flying tiger or a Tyrannosaurus Rex. That frog maybe a prince in disguise. Just like Susan Boyle who looks as plain as the day is long, but inside has the voice of an angel. Jesus, who looked like a backwoods carpenter well he’s divine. He’s the way, the truth, and the light. AMEN.

IDENTITY! (?)

I love seminary! i get to hang out and talk God-talk all day long and get a TON of views backed up with personal experience and denominational doctrine. it's pretty cool! i'd say darn near heaven for someone who loves talking. God is truly bigger than what i think and i'm considering a lot of things i never had to before. from my political views to my philosophical and theological views. it can be scary for some, but i just absolutely love it.

Chris Eden sent me a great article and we had a discussion about it. The article was called "Are You A Christian Hipster?" and at first glance i was all about it!

then Chris pointed out that we pretty much love to label and categorize things, but that is largely on what we NOTICE and THAT is an entirely subjective exercise. The article proves a framework and it's flawed. heavily in some places. but i think it responds to our human need to label & categorize in the hopes of finding identity. our basic need is to belong and be affirmed.

Like i loooove most of the authors listed, i definately don't like anything labeled "Christian" before my music and movies, and i'm idealistic. I LOVE thinking and acting Catholic but have no respect for the institution of the church (patriarchy on crack). i don't have any tattoos and i don't smoke. but i WANT TO belong.. i just don't fit the mold.

and here's the secret... none of us do perfectly. we're individuals who want to be a community. we are finding that we can only establish our identity only if we're comparing ourselves to something else... i don't think you can define yourself without using a relationship. and here's what it's all about:

IDENTITY! I am apart from all these other slobs! just look at how i fashionably blend goodwill with Lucky and Gap clothes and put that with some Adidas sneaks and my iPod with a collection of bands NO ONE ELSE HAS!

i am me. and the sooner you recognize this the better off we'll be.... never mind the fact that a whole bunch of other people are doing the exact same thing and listening to the same bands just not in the order i have... just never mind that!

it's our American INDIVIDUALITY! and reliance on self that keeps butting up against our need to be in relation with one another. and the only way to get individuals into a group is through good marketing. at least.. that's the answer the church is going for (whether be fundie or liberal settings). and this too will fail. but it's how we're trying to frame the situation now.

so what's the answer?

Why I don't like "Biblical" Anything

A while back, I gave my Thoughts on Biblical Maculinity in response to Brad over at Confessions of a Seminarian. I get really bothered anytime someone tries to label something "Biblical" like "I believe in Biblical masculinity/feminism/marriage/family values/ethics/etc."

I touched on this discomfort in that post, but it wasn't fully articulated. I will try to do that here.

ONe of the hardest problems is interpreting the Bible to our modern context. some will say "The Bible doesn't need interpreting, you just read what's written" advocating a literal interpretation. I will now say that the majority of the people who say this ARE NOT reading the bible literally, but traditionally. Just take Christmas for example... the innkeeper who tells Mary and Joe to hit up the manger, Mary remaining a virgin and not having any children OR sex, that there are 3 wisemen, and Jesus is raised to be a carpenter in Nazareth are NOT in the Bible! Those are traditions PLACED on the Bible... Sola Scriptura indeed.

Plus we need to look at the social structures assumed in the Bible and ask, are an essential part of God's revelation? We no longer live in a world of absolute monarchies, slavery, tribal and clan warfare, patriarchy nor animal sacrifice in their ancient Middle Eastern forms. Instead of an agrarian world we're urban, instead of assumed male superiority there is women's rights movements, instead of absolute monarchy democracy is a pervasive ideal, instead of an all-encompassing religious, economic, political and social legal system we have patchwork of laws that govern different aspects of life.

The story of God in the Bible is inseparable from an understanding of the kind of society Israel was meant to be nor can God not be removed from Israel's context and view of the world.

However, look at how progressive Israel despite the context! Within the context of slavery, Israel was to free all slaves and give them a nest egg every 7 years (Duet 15). within monarchy, they knew how this system would be a form of oppression (1 Sam 8) and there's no greater king than God (2 Sam 12). In an agricultural economy, Israel was to ensure everyone had a fair share of the wealth and resources (Lev 25). Within the context of patriarchy and polygamy, Israel was to protect the rights of women (Duet 21:10-14; 22:13-29).

How do we bridge the 2,000+ year gap? I would say the last thing we need to do is recreate the context of ancient Israel! We can't get out of our own symbols and cultural context and we read Israel's story and Jesus' story through our own cultural experience. We CAN'T apply the Bible literally because we'd ultimately being applying our own bias and prejudices. Our experience is not on a higher plain than the scriptures but it is our beginning and ending.

We cannot approach the Bible as a narrow rule book that sets out models of behavior for every single circumstance. What does the Bible say about a flat tire on the side of the highway? What does the Bible say about interacting with societies completely alien from your own? Some stuff, surely, but the application isn't exact. Every time we pick up the Bible there needs to be serious consideration of context, culture, and other communal structures.

Combining the story of the Bible with the story of our culture in such a way that our praxis becomes the product of wisdom. There is no easy way nor one way to accomplish this. There are aspects of the Bible in everything we do because we are a saturated culture, however, calling something like it's the authoritive BIBLICAL anything is just patently untrue and makes for bad marketing.

Victims Part II

A quote from Charles Swindoll

The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. Attitude, to me, is more important than facts. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say I do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill.

It will make or break a company... a church... a home. The remarkable thing is that we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for the day. We cannot change our past. We cannot change the fact people will act in a certain way. We cannont change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

I'm convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.

As my wife always says, "you can't change people, only how you react to them." Jesus had one heck of an attitude. To be able to sit with people he prolly wanted to shake and yell "SNAP OUT OF IT!" but he didn't. He met them where they were and changed their lives, our lives, and the course of human history.

may we see to be such beacons of positive attitude and loving empathy.

On Wisdom and Love

The Used sing on their song "Yellow and Blue" that
"...it's all in how you mix the two, And it starts just where the light exists.
It's a feeling that you cannot miss,
And it burns a hole,
Through everyone that feels it.

Well you're never gonna find it,
If you're looking for it,
Won't come your way,yeah
Well you'll never find it,
If your looking for it."

I love how diliberately vague the lyrics are. What is he mixing? Let's for a minute pretend that it's Wisdom and Love. It's all in how you mix the two!

These two things are such a paradox. Everyone is after them and constantly looking for them, but I never seem to find them when I look for them. These two things tend to blindside me in those 5 minutes I'm not looking for them. When I do get those "I-Thou" moments, i catch fire and want to tell everyone about my indescribable experience.

can you put into words what someone means to you exactly? how art, music, or an unexpected gesture can melt your heart? it burns a hole through everything it touches... and i keep looking for ways to get burnt. and you, dear reader, are both something that stokes the flames as well as the light itself.

you are light! you have both wisdom and love. share it, be it, and admire it when you come in contact with it.

RAWK!



As FreeStyleRoadTrip said in a recent comment

"If you never get outside of walls of your current philosophy of thought, then you have a really difficult time getting a new answer and collecting a bit more truth. I mean, if you are always asking questions within your Methodist/Islamic/Catholic/Atheistic/Universalistic/Scientific/Etc boundaries from your same old Methodist/Islamic/Catholic/Atheistic/Universalistic/Scientific/Etc friends then you will always get a Methodist/Islamic/Catholic/Atheistic/Universalistic/Scientific/Etc answer. You have to get outside those boundaries to get something truly new to you."

i absolutely agree with his boundaries analogy! gotta get out of the box! God is a God of change… we shouldn’t be wearing nice hats and respectable clothes to church, we should be wearing crash helmets and body armor! if God answers our prayers, we’re going to be flung far from home and into places and experiences where our old methods of thinking will only hinder us.

RAWK!

Calling All Saints

Thomas 3: Jesus said, "If your leaders say to you, 'Look, God’s kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the kingdom is within you and it is outside you.

Thomas 18: The disciples said to Jesus, "Tell us, how will our lives end? What is after?"

Jesus said, "Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end? You see, the end will be where the beginning is. Congratulations to the one who stands at the beginning: that one will know the end and will not taste death."

“All that is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine, and I have been glorified through them.” (John 17:10).

All things are yours. That means being a Christian isn’t waiting on heaven to come, it’s about working for it now! It’s not about cutting yourself off from real life, it is about entering into it more fully, now! Life for a Christian isn’t about living forever, it’s about creating something that does. Jesus created something that we’re still talking about it 2,000 years later. Characters like St. Francis, St. Teresa, St. Patrick, Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Teresa, and other saints. Being a “saint” is successfully creating something that goes on after you do. If we truly believed this, imagine how parents would treat their children. Talk about heaven on earth.

Today we honor those saints. You know saints in your own life. Let me tell you about one I know. My Grandma Bet is a saint. Every time I hear a country-western song --- NOT a country song, I’m talking Gene Autry “Don’t Fence me in” type stuff—every time I see a red bird, I think of Grandma Bet. When I see a deer along the side of the road, I remember how we’d drive around looking for deer back in Ohio.

I’m over-joyed at these memories and then I’m extremely saddened… not because I’m remembering Grandma Bet who has died, but because I remember that gas was under a dollar back then. I’m SO happy when I think of my grandma. How privileged I was to have her in my life. We all have these saints in our lives currently, living today amongst us. I bet if you look at your own life you can name a few. But today is about honoring those saints like Grandma Bet who know heaven from the inside and every now and then send us a red bird or a deer to remind us that we’ll all be re-united some day.

So let’s name those saints. Take a few moments and think of someone who has died that has impacted your life. Do you have one in mind?

POETRY SLAM!

Come if you're in the area! It's gonna be a RAWK'N good time!

Some New Heresy

My paper from last years educational ministries class entitled "Playing with Educational Ministry"

It seems paradoxical to think of playing with education. But that is the point! Without play of concepts and knowledge, can there ever be wisdom? For our current education model, we need a ‘call and response’ in order to operate. Play is restricted to gym class and recess. This duelist approach works great in theory, but only if it exists in a vacuum. Vacuums hold no wisdom. I propose that in education, we cannot afford to operate in a vacuum. We are dealing with real people who will respond to our theories in real ways. Real people tend bring things into or to step out of bounds in areas where vacuums can’t operate. We must find a way to educate can hold together in the real world. If we must keep the vacuum, let us then us a quantum vacuum. According to quantum mechanics, the vacuum state is not truly empty but instead contains fleeting electromagnetic waves and particles that pop into and out of existence (“Vacuum State”).

Wisdom then is noticing when waves and particles pop in and out of existence. Wisdom is noticing how the play of light in the floating dust of a room evokes feelings of home. Wisdom is hearing a song on the radio you haven’t heard in a decade and remembering with vivid clarity events forgotten. Wisdom happens when things you know blend into things you experience.

The problem with wisdom is that it is fleeting (Melchert and Profitt). The problem is that wisdom is incredibly hard to test. To compensate for this our education system has concetrated on testable knowledge. Indeed wrote memorization is important, but wisdom occurs in the face of incomplete facts. We may not have all the facts, but that shouldn’t keep us from moving forward. That shouldn’t keep us from trying to gather the facts and look for the interplay between subjects that we know. The education system has negletcted this. We have tilted too far into the realm of utilitarianism.

We are seeing the effects of this in our lagging performance in the world community. The US is producing far less highly techincal professionals (engineers, programmers, etc). and U.S. students do not lead in any assessment (Strauss). We see the same problem in our churches as well. We have many people running around claiming to be Christian and doing very unchristian things. The generations that include late teens to early 30-somethings believe Christians are judgmental, antihomosexual, hypocritical, too political and sheltered (Kinnaman and Lyons). Rather than simply try to do a PR face-lift, we need to develop a way to teach a faith that focuses on holiness but also loves, accepts and works to understand the world around it
This problem is not new. The Danish Philosopher Søren Kierkegaard commented on the state of Christianity when he said, people claim to be “Christian’ without knowing what it means to be Christian. It is also detrimental to the religion itself since it reduces Christianity to a mere fashionable tradition adhered to by unbelieving "believers", a "herd mentality" of the population, so to speak.”

I pains my soul to hear such things. But how do we fix it? I would take a post-modern, post-colonial, deconstructionist approach. What does this mean? It means I know a whole bunch of “university words” that sound impressive. What I’m actually saying in my “de-post” language is that I’m taking a stand to choose. The word for “choose” in Greek is “heresy.”People think heresy is a bad thing. I would argue it’s not. Why is it wrong to choose?! Mainly because the church has declared it so, as they have God nicely boxed and packaged, no need for thought. It’s all figured out. That view, is simply no fun.

Eastern religions and even our parent religion of Judaism has an immense sense of play built right in. Non-orthodox followers of these faiths do not accept things "just because." They must have room for debate. Jews wrestle at the core, in fact the name "Israel" means "to wrestle with God" (El being the word for God). Why wrestle? Well if you've every seen a Greco-Roman wrestling match, you'll note that wrestling is an intimate event. One must know how the opponent's body is positioned and what strategy that person is trying to use to get out of or put the other into a hold. Aside from sex, this is about as intimate as you're going to get.
There is no vacuum in wrestling. The world is sand, in constant flux. The Jewish tradition seems to get that. Plus how they look at the Bible is at a much more complex level than what I’m used to looking at. With this approach, the sense of awe returns. Within that awe, there is a willingness to live within the possibility of each word. The Rabbi's also have developed the midrash, which are collections of stories to help explain the Bible. This sounds like heresy to most Christians, as we tend just to think of what the Bible says but ignore what the Bible does not say. Midrash stories fill in the blanks in the bible. This sense of play and daily application make the stories much more meaningful and the Bible and faith more livable and flexible to the non-static world in which we live.

So the question then becomes how to instill wisdom into a system, which diametrically opposes wisdom. Task learning is a great step forward to recognizing that we live in a quantum vacuum. I certainly will use it within my future ministry. How do we go beyond my future congregation and into the U.S. education? I don’t have the answer for that. But one day, we will.

Works Cited
Kierkegaard, Søren. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Princeton University Press, 1992,

Kinnaman, David and Gabe Lyons. “UnChristian; What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity… and Why it Matters. Baker Books, 2007.

Melchert, Charles and Anabel Proffitt. “Playing in the Presence of God.”

Schramm, David, "The Big Bang Creation of the Universe", in Quarks, Quasars and Quandries, Ed. Gordon Aubrecht, Amer. Assoc of Physics Teachers, 1987. http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/Hbase/Astro/hydhel.html

Strauss, Valerie, A Snapshot of the State of U.S. Education. Tuesday, November 21, 2006 The Washington Post. 4 Apr 2008

"Vacuum state." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 8 Mar 2008, 05:52 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 4 Apr 2008 .

This Map on my Wall

I am no longer the axis on which
the world revolves.
I am not a genius or shaman but I realize
how a human evolves.

Maps no longer depict the things I've experienced
or the places I've been.
what matters more is what's between the lines
and the people under these pins.

(written in Leipzig Germany in 2003, but dedicated to the Leadership NOW class of Summer 2008)

PWNED by God (?)

SVS brought up the idea of "Does God hate?" i commented on this thread:

great question! my short answer is “no.” if you say “yes” then there’s too much argue’n over who gets to say what God hates and why. plus if you believe in an all powerful creator, if HE hates something, wouldn’t HE remove it? free will be buggered as HE is too powerful for that crap.

if answer is yes, then who gets to determine this… scripture? prayer? divine intervention? social darwinism? white hetero males?

this always brings into play the question of GOD'S WILL. Does everything happen in this world because of God's will, or due to free will? I don't see this as an either/or senario, rather a "both/and" dealie.

Process Theology states that the universe is characterized by process and change carried out by the agents of free will. Self-determination characterizes everything in the universe, not just human beings. God cannot totally control any series of events or any individual, but God influences the creaturely exercise of this universal free will by offering possibilities. To say it another way, God has a will in everything, but not everything that occurs is God's will.

So where am i heading with this, or what caused me to write this? well, our condo did. we tried to sell it for a year, didn't sell. that's understandable, cause we bought at the peak and are trying to sell in a valley. so we tried to rent... we had a perfect couple but due to a death in the family couldn't make the first lease signing. we put it off for a month, holding it specifically for them, only to get a voicemail message (on our home number none-the-less after we already drove 2.5 hours to g-town) saying that the couple broke up and will not be signing the lease today or ever.

seriously... WTF?! is this the will of God, to go around PWN'n peeps? infuriating them to an annoying level?! is this your idea of a good time God?

so i'm trying to see what the WILL of GOD is in all of this... then i realize something... this is like if i went up to you, dear reader, and socked you in the noodle. you'd be all like, "dude, why did you just punch my lights out" (after you woke up in a different zip code, cause i got mad ninja skills) and i'd say "you figure it out." if this is how God chooses to relay messages to our earthly selves, then i'm having no part and dropping out of seminary immediately. God is MUCH smarter than that and when God communicates, God communicates it so you get the message! you may choose to ignore it or not understand it fully, but it's swimming in your brain. i must now come to terms that sometimes shit happens. sometimes the world IS random. sometimes chaos wins over order. or following Oprah's THE SECRET, i've attracted this because i expected it.. which is a load of crap.

here are somethings i've learned besides that Due to Our Condo NOT Selling or Renting:
+ no one died or is suffering or will starve because of this
+ no one is oppressing or being oppressed
+ some people are homeless, we're blessed with an over-abundance
+ God is not in the real estate market.. God's son was a carpenter who (possibly) BUILT houses, not sold them.
+ life is annoying at times but blessed most all the time
+ patience is a virtue, but it's hell learning it

keep our housing woes in your prayers, but not too far up, there are other more deserving prayers that need attention before ours (natural disaster victims, people dealing with cancer treatments and recovering in ICU for a start) but just remember it towards the end.

thanks!

Created Reality

I love the TED talks. Amazing stuff over there. Run over there and check it out.. i've watched a TON of things but i would like to know what strikes your fancy. let me know!

here's my big rant for today based on two TED talks. How do we create?



Why am i this person? why am i not someone else? I would prefer to be a Japanese heiress, why am i a white American from Ohio?

what Amy Tan talks about around 11 minutes is that we "notice disturbing hints from the universe that were always there." this is what i was talking about in the last post about Serendipity and synchronicity. we strive to gain our focus on the question "Why am i here?"

I have not read A Purpose Driven Life.. so i can't comment on that.. but i do believe that we all have internal blueprints and we have to follow and we get in trouble if we stray too far from these blueprints. Joseph Campbell's simple "follow your bliss" helps but we must be mindful of our bliss and our pursuit and what effect that takes on others. the question then of "why am i here" becomes a problem of big sorts, esp. if the universe is telling us in such obvious fashion. how can we miss such obvious cues?

the Christian answer is because we're fallen. The science answer is that our brians are miswired. Either one points to the fact that humans are limited and flawed.



i'm not in the Sinner Theological World... so i don't really buy the "inherently and permanently no good" of the original sin doctrine. i think that once we gain our focus, we can overcome a lot of flaws inherently built. God is helping in this process the whole time, helping us to wake up and become who we are and who we're meant to be.

In the book, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Helath, Wealth, and Happiness Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein points out how weird our brains actually are. Humans are very illogical: we eat more from larger plates, care twice as much about losing money as about gaining it, fret over rare events like plane crashes instead of common ones like car crashes. We need what Thaler and Sunstein call a "libertarian paternalism" that lure us to make the right choice. our brains are really weird.

but what about trauma? what about those events that happen to us that are SO traumatic that we will never get over them? things like rape, abuse, oppression, dehumanization... what about those things? these are results of what is attached to our memory. what is memory then? a collection of protein chains.

Neuroscience has discovered how we remember events in our brains through protein chains. An NYU neuroscientist Joe LeDoux, who studies fear memories in rats, tells us how with a one shock, one tone, and one drug injection, you can bust up this piece of matter, and prevent a rat from every making a memory. LeDoux’s research goes sci-fi, when he and his colleague Karim Nader start trying to erase memories. And Nader applies this research to humans suffering from PTSD. We heard about this when we were at Rolex in Lexington KY on the radio. Listen to it here! IT'S AWESOME! check it out, as this is the basis this post revolves around.

Particularly traumatic memories appear to be captured by two separate parts of the brain: the hippocampus, the normal seat of memory, and the amygdala, one of the brain's emotional centers. People incapable of forming long-term memories thanks to hippocampal damage can nonetheless form subconscious memories of traumatic events if their amygdala is intact. Someone suffering from the Memento condition would likely have a feeling of general unease encountering a person or a situation that had caused them harm in the past, though they wouldn't be able to put their finger on what was making them uncomfortable. In Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, something like this happens. There are several instances in the movie where Clementine appears to have a trace emotional memory of an event that has been wiped from her waking mind.

Theoretically, if you could block protein synthesis in a human brain while triggering a memory, you could make a targeted erasure.

So not only does this show how we don't really remember who we are accurately, we don't preceive reality accurately, and we're generally in quite a state. once we realize this, maybe we won't be so hyper about disagrements. maybe the word HERETIC won't be a warcry anymore, but mean "to choose" like the greek implies.

this is post-modern thought. no memory is verifiably true. there is no objective reality only reality viewed from our context, with our prejudices and world view. or maybe there IS objective reality, but our brains can't handle it, misinterpret it, and ultimately misread it. so if there is objective reality, all we get from it are glimpses, small epiphanies. When we remember and view reality, it is an act of creation. Every thing we do is an act of creation. where then is God?

well Biblically this fulfills that we are active in God's creation that we are created in God's image (Genesis 1:27; Psalm 139:13-16). The apophatic tradition focuses on a spontaneous or cultivated individual experience of the divine reality beyond the realm of ordinary perception, an experience often unmediated by the structures of traditional organized religion or learned thought and behavior. so that place where words fail you.. that is God. can you describe what it was like the first time you saw the ocean? first time you fell in love? that indescribable part is where God lives.

The Divine is ineffable, an abstract experience that can only be recognized - that is, human beings cannot describe the essence of God, and therefore all descriptions if attempted will be ultimately false and conceptualization should be avoided (like using pronouns).

This is a super long post... with a lot of stuff in here for y'all to watch, listen to, and consider. so i'm gonna go on vaction here as i have to write my first sermon for my field education placement. so i'll let you catch up, please comment on what you think after you've listened and watched all this, and then we'll chat! i'll post next on July 1st.

BONSAI!

I'd like to think that patience and me go together about as well as an NRA sticker on a Prius. Which is to say we get along about as well as a peanut butter and plutonium sandwich and your digestive tract.

That's what i'd like to think.

Truth is i'm patient with some things and not others. I realized this when playing with my nieces and nephews two weekends ago. I just LOVE spending time with them and I don't worry about the time or how many times they ask questions. I love it! I do lose my patience when they keep jumping on me or hitting me with stuff, but they usually stop after asking them to stop.

I love following my youngest niece around and watching what she pays attention to. You can learn a lot about the world from a two-year-old's persepective. you notice the small things.

most of you know about our condo. we tried to sell it and couldn't. the bottom has fallen out of the market. we are trying to rent it, yet that was delayed. it's enough to make me think the condo is cursed. but that's superstitious. i need patiences here... or do i? somethings are good to be impatient with.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel states, "to be religious is to be impatient with injustices, a breathless impatience with injustice, a hysteria about injustices." The commentator Dresner states that "We ourselves witness continually acts of injustice... but we rarely get indignant or overly excited. To the prophets a minor, commonplace sort of injustice assumes almost cosmic proportions." (unless it's against women adds Kate, but that's another post.)

I do need to be more patient with people and esp. with my wife. Take time to communicate properly and fully. take time to listen to what they're saying.

So as a symbol of this, I've decided to grow a bonsai tree. So stay tuned for pix and more descriptions of the process. Right now the seeds are germinating in the refrigerator for 7 days. i can't say it's better than watching the NBA finals, but it's different.

Constant Small Epiphanies

I believe in synchronicity, that weird phenominon where a certain theme keeps popping up. The term was coined by Carl Jung (and defined by wiki) as "Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events which occur in a meaningful manner, but which are causally un-related."

This happens when you talk about someone with two separate friends and later that person calls you. Or you keep hearing, reading about, and watching some random event all day only to have someone mention it later.

You know what i'm saying?

For example: On friday in conversations with my wife, my ma, my sister, and a collegue here at the seminary, the theme of "common courtesy" came up--all in different conversations in different contexts. Later that night, i held the door for someone who mentioned that door holding should be a courtesy that more common.

Seriously. I notice these things all the time! Have i lost you? does this happen to you or am i crazy?

I can only guess that this is one way that God speaks to us... I always say that there's no such thing as coincidence. Sally coined the term "God-incidence" and i like that. Where did i learn this?

My cousin, Puppet Nuts, has a sense of humor that latches on an obscure phrase or theme and runs with it. He fits it into bizarre yet appropriate situations.

My Gma picked up on this as well. She'd notice these themes and relate things back to a friend's story, past experience, scripture passage, or celebrity (my Gma's touchstones).

My Ma really drove this point home when she made a Jungian out of me. I used to have really vivid and sometimes horrifying dreams and sometimes still do. Not night terros as I'd remember them the next day. My mom said to pay attention to these dreams and watch for them when you're awake. Deja Vu plays a big part in this as well... but i'd find that the Dream Themes would make an appearence throughout the day.

Am i alone here? Is it possible that this is a medium for God? Our native american brothers and sisters made a big deal out of dreams... so did the Persians and other Near East peoples who influenced the Jews... but today we Christians have lost this.. or have largely ignored it... or just don't talk about it in polite company. Do y'all even pay attention to this stuff?

If you do, I'd love to hear about it. IF not, try it for a week and let me know what small epiphanies you find.

Letter to a Future Seminarian

It's the end of my second semester. Wow has this new venture flown by! Who knows where the time has gone. We had to write a letter to a future seminarian and i think that's what sums up what i've learned here this second semester... here's what i learned the first in case you missed it.
Dear Discerning,

Let’s talk about grapes for a second. My wine loving friend here at LTS once told me a story about how good wine is made. There are a few spots where good grapes can be grown because the climate in America is too perfect.

“Too perfect?!” I asked, “Perfect grapes make bad wine?”

“Yes,” He responded, “For great wine to be made the grapes have to suffer. Suffering adds nuance and builds character.”

This is what seminary will do to your spiritual character. It adds nuance, character and depth. And you will suffer and wrestle with new concepts, methods of reading the Bible, and LOTS of papers to write. However, the community here will help you through it; faculty, staff and students alike.

Jesus said, “I am the vine…” (John 15:1) so that makes us grapes! So come to LTS! Fall is the perfect season for wine, I’ll see you then.


A fellow grape on the vine of Christ,


Toothface

Rolex 2008

We went down to good ol' Kentucky this past weekend to watch the Rolex Three Day Eventing. We went before in 2005 and I loved the weekend. I wrote about it twice, once here and another here... This year I went with Kate, my mom and sister. It was a change from last time as Puppet Nuts wasn't with us, although he was missed.

I really love Rolex. Lexington is a beautiful city, the land is breath taking, and the food is top notch. My sister lived down there as she went to UK. It's great driving in a city with someone who knows the in's and out's. we ate at Gumbo Ya-Ya and Warring Station... Cajun and awesome panini's delish!

Time with family is great. It is tense and hard sometimes as your dealing with ppl who've known you all of your life and have certain expectations of you to follow. When you break out of these expectations it can be traumatic and there will be some who will try to put those expectations back on to you... force you back into that box. My family has dealt with this and is still dealing with it on many levels i won't get into... but aren't all families having to deal with this? what junk does your family attach to you, dear reader? i'm sure you have plenty of examples.

i write this to say that not only am i the victim of this but also the perveyor as well. i wear both hats equally. what this weekend has shown is the dangers of this... of not really listening to one another, of just hearing what you expect to hear, not what is actually said. my family works to actively listen to one another, but it's a hard row to tow. it takes a lot of work.

what boxes are we being stuck with because of our gender, sexual identity, race, and ethnicity? we all get hit with this. as soon as i said KENTUCKY i bet some images popped into your head. even some that would say "of course he can go to Kentucky, he's a white, straight, middle-class male, he'd have no problem." that is boxing. so what boxes do you work to overcome? what challenges are you facing due to expectation?

i ask, and i really want to know, because i think what boxes we face have an affect on how we view God. i've been discussing with a fellow blogg'n seminarian about the pronouns we use for God. is it fair to God, that when i pray to God i picture a white male with a beard and call God "He"? How spiritually mature is this practice? I'm well aware that all the pronouns in the bible are "He" for God, but how fair is that? Are we boxing God? Are we putting labels on God that shouldn't be there in the first place?

I would say the answer is yes, we are. not only do we do it to ourselves and the ones we love... but we do it to our Creator as well. True love is seeing the other for what they are and responding to them out of compassion and empathy. expectations can be good as it's great to have goals... but they can be equally restraining. so just consider this... ask yourself what boxes are you using, and see if some of those would be better placed in your attic.

looking forward to your responses.

Life Lessons in a Flower Pot

thanks to all the pollsters who want to hear more personal experience... great suggestion! i'll have to start covering that more in my blog posts. now i shall begin my third post for this week, sorry if i'm overwhelming y'all out there...

i operate on the assumptions that there is no such thing as secular and there is no such thing as coincidence. i'm really into synchronisity. being attuned to the ever transmitting divine help you see the world as illuminated.

here's personal experience that highlights this: Last night someone stole a clay flower pot that i had decorated. i painted it and dremelled out a design in the clay and WOW was it awesome. i spent a lot of time on it and now it's gone. well such is life as well. you spend a lot of time in life only to have it be gone all too soon. i miss that pot. i storm off and pray and then start to feel strangely humbled that someone else saw the beauty in it! i'm sad that the person couldn't ask me to make them one but will be happy to offer that if i ever find out who took it.


a traditional route would be to declare that person a sinner and a thief and actively hunt them down for retributive violence.. directly ignoring the life and teachings of Jesus. this is mimetic theory in action, the retributive violence that only perpetuates and reciprocates, never solving anything.

now as i walk around i am looking for this pot. i'm noticing a lot of cool stuff too! the trees in bloom, the layout of garden'n, and other ppl's pots (OPP?). I'm out noticing God's good work, how people beautify their environment, and i'm considering the lilies. i also recognize that i had a pot to plant it in the first place (Just read Jessica's post about those who don't even have that!)

hope this rant is of some light and some coherence on how i see the world. i hope this helps you, dear reader, to recognize that the water in which we swim is divine.

;-) keep rawk'n out!