Slaying Dragons

THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?

2012-02-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

“All around me are familiar faces
Worn out places, worn out faces
Bright and early for the daily races
Going nowhere, going nowhere

Their tears are filling up their glasses
No expression, no expression
Hide my head I wanna drown my sorrow
No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad
The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had
I find it hard to tell you, I find it hard to take
When people run in circles it’s a very, very
Mad world, mad world.”

~Tears for Fears, “Mad World”

“Rocky: Here they are again, folks! These wonderful, wonderful kids! Still struggling! Still hoping! As the clock of fate ticks away, the dance of destiny continues! The marathon goes on, and on, and on! HOW LONG CAN THEY LAST?”

~They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969)

“I’ll blow these people away like wind-blown leaves. You have it coming to you. I’ve measured it out precisely. God’s Decree. It’s because you forgot Me and embraced the Big Lie, that so-called god Baal…Your obsessions with gods, gods, and more gods, your goddess affairs, your god-adulteries. Gods on the hills, gods in the fields- every time I look you’re off with another god. O Jerusalem, what a sordid life! Is there any hope for you?”

~Jeremiah 13:24ff, The Message

Ed Tom Bell: “The crime you see now, it's hard to even take its measure. It's not that I'm afraid of it. I always knew you had to be willing to die to even do this job [law enforcement]. But, I don't want to push my chips forward and go out and meet something I don't understand. A man would have to put his soul at hazard. He'd have to say, "O.K., I'll be part of this world."

~No Country for Old Men

“The only verdict is vengeance, a vendetta, held as a votive not in vain.”

~V for Vendetta

For anyone who knows me, they would know that I find most philosophy terribly lacking in the pre-20^th century eras. Sure, I find the thoughts of men like Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, and Aristotle a bit fascinating, for they were obviously brilliant men with keen insight into the processes of thought, but I am always struck by how far removed their philosophies were from the emotional or subjective arena of life. This is not to say that philosophy should be purely subjective. I am no relativist. But it should not be purely objective either. Don’t worry, I’ll elaborate.

20^th century philosophy was built upon the revolutionary ideas of skeptics and rationalists like Hume and Kant, but post-modernism, as it is manifested now, is both the logical conclusion and the necessary ending point of the evolution of human thought. If you were to visualize a spectrum of philosophy, you should be able to discern Theism on one end and Nihilism on the other. The one admits purpose, order, cosmos, and unity. The other admits chaos, disorder, and disunity. Postmodernism, depending on the variation, is disguised Nihilism, disguised only because Nihilism without dress is despair without compromise. The way I see it, postmodernism attempts desperately to hang on to remnants of meaning and purpose. In Nihilism, life simply makes no sense whatsoever. In Postmodernism, or Nihilism-in-disguise, sense is something you “create” out of life. Good luck with that.

The Christian response to Postmodernism is just as inconsistent and troubling. I have read many Christian authors who fully engage with it, and yet I have also read Christian authors who are either ignorant of the postmodern problem by choice or just plain afraid of it. Funny enough, our unwillingness to engage postmodern thought mirrors our unwillingness to engage with popularly misunderstood books of the Bible like Ecclesiastes and Job, books that absolutely baffle you with raw human emotion in the face of life’s pleasures and sorrows. Books that also make you reconsider the common notion that a Christian is required to be vacuously impassionate and boring, a zombie in a suit and tie. I read one Christian who remarked, “Ultimately people will find that postmodernism doesn't work. It neither describes the world and how it works, nor does it offer a workable solution to the problems of man. Hence, in time people will give up on their failing theory and move on to something else.”

Is this completely true? Or is it a cop-out? I am tempted to say the latter. In fact, I would argue that postmodern thought is the end of the line when it comes to philosophical inquiry. What can possibly come after Nihilism? Realistically and rationally speaking, you cannot move on after postmodernism because postmodernism is the most consistent and most needed conclusion of atheism and existentialism combined (which is really what postmodernism comes down to). I disagree with the statement above primarily because postmodernism does describe how the world works or at least how it appears to humanity. I am not saying that postmodernism is correct; the world must first posses order and unity before we can accept such notions as dis-order and dis-unity. I am only saying that it is radically in tune with the perennial existential questions of life that plague us without fail: What is the meaning of life? Can meaning endure without a God? Can men create meaning? Can men live without meaning? What can bestow meaning?

Popular culture in 2012 is absolutely inundated with this baffling question, particularly in the arts, as much as the book of Ecclesiastes is. Modernism was a colossal failure because rationalism does nothing to alleviate the pain of life that comes in the form of existential angst and despair. Let’s face it: life just doesn’t make sense on the best of days. One world war follows another. One more fraud, one more murder, one more genocide, one more rejection, one more natural disaster. Perhaps it is because human sin, with its deep marring of the image of God in man and its demonic self-destructive tendencies, cannot be “solved” by anything less than radical subjective redemption, yet we are tempted to think otherwise. It is from without the walls of human capacity that the white beams of salvation must shine. But when Christianity becomes naïve as modernism- with its roots in rationalism and empiricism- is naïve, then postmodernism will prevail at the end of the day. I am not trying to be pessimistic or depressing by any stretch of the imagination. I am merely arguing along the lines of Solomon that human nature is as impervious to simplistic solutions as the leopard’s spots are to the white-washing procedures of psychological quacks and charlatans, both within secular culture as well as within church walls. Secularist thinkers can be naïve in thinking man innately good. How many Holocausts will it take to prove to the most convinced scientific and empirical community that human perfectibility is the worst myth of them all? Christians can be naïve in thinking that conversion is the immediate panacea to existential pain. How many more critics will it take before the church realizes that Christianity does not require the death of humanity?

For a culture so entirely and politically obsessed with tolerance and justice, it is ironic that we should arrive at a "position" (kinda inconsistent, right?) of such bland “neutrality.” Facts are raw, data is decontextualized, and meaning is what you make of it. We all suffer under the blow of information overload. Every now and then you get the honest and reasonable postmodern who isn’t afraid to confess that you can’t have meaning without accountability; in fact, you can’t have humanity without accountability. Life is a marathon or a “dance of destiny”…it just goes round and round and round. For the honest postmodern, unafraid to face the undesirable consequences of the death of meaning, there is one final question, one final “solution” to the problem of human life: To be or not to be.

I have never seen the Jane Fonda movie, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, straight through. I have seen the ending, however, and it expresses perfectly the postmodern answer to the amoral dilemma of life. The character Fonda plays is so literally and psychologically exhausted with the “marathon” of life that she arrives at the conclusion that most thoughtful existentialist philosophers, such as Nietzsche and Camus, arrived at- the question of suicide.

Whereas Hamlet hesitated because of eternal consequence, the existentialist’s decision is one of pure choice in a void of no-consequence and no-eternality. If there is no afterlife, then suicide is meaningless as well. The character in the movie who ends up pulling the trigger for her tells the policemen afterwards, when they ask him why he did it; “They shoot horses, don’t they?” A consistent evolutionist should nod his head at this one! If we are the descendants of apes and fish, then euthanasia and suicide are a-moral acts in an impersonal a-moral universe. Unfortunately, consistency of this magnitude is rarely to be expected from either the existentialist or the evolutionist. Both prefer to live as if life had meaning even if life is meaningless in their abstract laboratory theories.

To quote Hamlet, here’s the rub. I am convinced that postmodernism has nailed the right questions. What is the meaning of life? is as relevant to the pope as it is to the rock star. Postmodernism is full of opportunity, opportunity not waiting for Sunday-school answers that are pithy and cliché, but opportunity awaiting honest fulfillment and satisfaction with authentic pursuit of truth in an age of anti-truth. There is nothing people want more than purpose in life. We sing songs about it, write scripts about it, paint pictures about it, and have lectures about it. Without a doubt, man is obsessed with meaning whether he thinks it is possible or not. If we cannot recognize that human desire, acknowledging it wherever it manifests, then we won’t be able to provide the satisfying answer. As well-intentioned as the Christian above was, I don’t think that postmodernism is just another philosophy that will be taken over by another. It is the end of the line, the ultimate consequence of ideas flowing and evolving out of denial of God. Denial of God always has meant the replacement of God….and modernism replaced God with Science….but postmodernism replaces God with anything a man chooses and precludes the possibility of objective meaning. We really have exhausted all of our religious options: worship of God…worship of Reason….worship of Emotion….worship of Self. Nihilism is the end of the line. I am tempted to think that the only pursuit man has left in this world is the pursuit of self-fulfillment by whatever means possible. The rage that develops from postmodern despair is like the rage of the “hero” of V for Vendetta. Vengeance is the “votive not in vain.”The final verdict is self-creation and self-fulfillment, a vain endeavor that embraces the absurdity of it all without reserve. It is the pursuit of Justice for self that dominates the postmodern spirit, with all of our “power games” and “semantic battles.” In essence, might will make right because all men abuse power, so let’s just play the game and beat the odds. I am, however, reminded of Quoheleth’s final warning in Ecclesiastes. As it is lyricized in a song called “In the End”: Safety is not for sale. You cannot buy peace at night. Earthly defenses fail. Nothing new under the sky. Build your kingdom all your life. And say goodbye. In the end. In the end.

We must speak honestly with the postmodern. Staring boldly at the consequences of your worldview is one of the most effective ways to examine the legitimacy of your beliefs in comparison with your lifestyle. It is pity that we need most of all, a pity born out of commonality in our human condition. Pity the man that lives without meaning and buys drink after drink to fill a void that every single human being must experience without exception. Pity the self-righteous who fill the void with good deeds. Pity the arrogant who live casually and successfully to mock the void. Pity the wealthy and the famous who overdose and party away the emptiness. Pity the poor who look to wealth to open the doors to Happiness. Pity the vindictive who believe that justice can only be accomplished at their hands. Pity the oppressed who are tempted to believe that life is a barbaric joke.

As a Christian, I recognize that the world is indeed very mad. But it is one thing to say that it is upside-down mad, and another to say that it is meaningless and irredeemable. Postmodernists recognize the problem, and in this arena we can welcome their perceptions and existential angst with sympathetic souls, unless, of course, we want to play half-hearted moral games and pretend that Christianity is a bed of roses, which, I’m sorry- it ain’t! I don’t care what Mr. Osteen says. In my experience, half the battle of being a Christian is continuing to believe in meaning and purpose when confronted with the topsy-turvy insanity of life. There are far too many days when one is tempted to question this seemingly inane idea of a “meta-narrative” wherein even evil serves good purposes, wherein even our worst mistakes as human beings can be pardoned and forgotten, wherein what seems too good to be true is true nonetheless. No wonder Christ said we must be like little children, implicitly trusting and believing that a fairy-tale ending must necessarily come after grim and soul-stretching events which push us to the limits of endurance. It is through darkness, I am convinced, we must travel to the light, through difficulties to the stars. As the character (the only noble one, that is) in No Country for Old Men implies, we must put our souls “at hazard.” To be a part of the world is to necessitate understanding what the world is made of- great good and hazardous evil combined. “Either life is holy with meaning, or life doesn’t mean a damn thing. You pay your money and you take your choice,” writes Buechner. If you’re going to continue with postmodern thought to its necessary payoff, you might as well model yourself after Anton (the very, very, very disturbing villain in the aforementioned movie). Anton kills via a coin toss. Chance, in his mind, determines life or death. Either way, it is meaningless. “I didn't put nothin' up,” says the man whom he gives the chance to toss a coin to determine his fate. “Yes, you did. You've been putting it up your whole life you just didn't know it,” replies Anton. Yep…we gamble with life as if life were insignificant enough to gamble with, and most of the time we’re not even aware of it. Neutrality is a myth. We put our cards on the table and make our choice. From the Christian perspective, we all stand to lose or gain everything. Infinite consequence is nothing to gamble with. But if life is meaningless, as the unabashed postmodern must relent, then you can never win no matter what hand you are dealt, because the game is meaningless to begin with. Turn over the tables and shoot the dealer without qualm. After all, they shoot horses, don’t they?

THE CENTRE CANNOT HOLD

2012-02-11T18:10:00.001-07:00

"You cannot make men good by law; and without good men, you cannot have a good society."

~C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies."

~God in the Dock

"Theologically, this country is at present in a state of utter chaos, established in the name of religious toleration, and rapidly degenerating into the flight from reason and the death of hope."

~Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church

Since the native Coloradan-snow demon did not consult my well-anticipated Saturday agenda, I have been barred inside and ruthlessly kept from my grocery duties. However, there’s nothing quite like a snowy day with hot chocolate next to one’s laptop and plenty of random thoughts ready to precipitate from mind to paper.

The thoughts that are ready for the transfer are by no means completely random, though they may initially appear so. My topics for writing usually come from daily encounters, and such encounters are the circumstantial galvanizers of thought, unless, of course, I am more inclined to shut off my mind than use it, which I would have- had the snow demon not intruded upon my Saturday. In any case, the topic I’m writing about today should be no stranger to anyone in America who has ever watched a contemporary (i.e. post-50s) movie from Hollywood, a modern television show, or anyone who has a casual knowledge of politics or popular social issues. The issue goes by many names, but one label trumps the others by far, though historically speaking it is a far cry from its original definition: it is called Tolerance.

I am painfully aware that the issue of Tolerance, particularly with modern crowds, is an intensely complicated one, replete with easily triggered sensitivities and heated emotions. Defining terms is of paramount importance in this case, but I’m afraid that once the term is defined, more complications are created than destroyed. I personally believe that the issue should be addressed with great care and concern, and the Christian community- especially- should not shrug it off with simplistic or glib answers that fail to grasp the full width and breadth of a deeply relevant social issue that involves a fundamental virtue that has undergone such historical transformation that it is but a shadow of its former self.

There are two ways to look at this popularly misunderstood noun. One is the traditional perspective. Tolerance, from this perspective, is “allowance or sufferance of beliefs or conduct with which one is not in accord.” Take note that this perspective involves endurance with disagreement. This is taken directly from Webster’s Dictionary. The other is the contemporary perspective, of which there are a few variants, but the most common stance is simply “acceptance.” Now, somewhere along the timeline, tolerance dropped that essential involvement of disagreement or the “not in accord” lexical additive. Tolerance in modern parlance (at its most extreme, yet consistent form) is embracing all views and their subsequent conducts as equally acceptable. After all, who are we to judge? This is the age of enlightenment; we have evolved long enough. Tolerance is the rallying cry of a democratic society which- under the banner of “democracy”- is “expanding freedom” by obliterating all boundaries- moral included- that are deemed unfair and driven by bigotry.

Now if you’re going to subscribe to the second perspective, then you might as well jump out the closet and proclaim yourself a relativist because that is exactly what this type of tolerance is attempting to disguise, perhaps in order to avoid the negative fallout of philosophically trying to be consistent with something that is inherently inconsistent. If all views and all lifestyles are equally acceptable, then no one can make any claim on absolute truth. To do so would be arrogant, narrow-minded, and biased. We Christians of the old-tolerance order may be willing to put up with those with whom we disagree, but if we continue to stake a claim in real Truth, then we are still Neanderthal Neo-Nazis. ‘Tolerate all!’ says the modern prophet…but….not those who are intolerant. Consistent indeed.

I happen to be a Neanderthal Neo-Nazi, if that is the case, because I am willing to grant people the respect and value they deserve as human beings made in God’s image, but I still will admit that there is a wrong and a right, error and truth, light and dark. I am reminded of the character in C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce who expresses that life is made up of inescapable antithesis: “I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road…Evil can be undone, but it cannot ‘develop’ into good. Time does not heal it.”

Now many could mistake such a philosophy as extremely anti-democratic and bigoted. Let me say this: democracy carries with it its own curse; or, in other words, it holds the seeds of its own destruction. As an abstract system, it is faultless, as much as any political system, but a system never self-destructs of its own accord; it is destroyed by the men and women of which it is constituted, for government is dangerous because people are dangerous. America’s founding fathers were not dumb. They perceived, as Plato did way back in ancient Greece, that inalienable rights are quickly eroded and superseded by morally dubious rights which are demanded by the masses in the course of the deterioration of a nation in response to a growing concern for a twisted notion of “equality.”

One of the reasons I chose this topic is that I constantly feel bombarded by 21^st century egalitarianism on an exponentially rising level, a philosophy which looks spectacular as a theory, but is implacably flawed in application. For instance, the USA Network on television recently had a week entitled “Characters Unite.” Besides giving patrons of the channel warm fuzzy feelings, the real motive behind the theme-based week is “to address social injustices and cultural divides still prevalent in our society.” First note the “still prevalent.” The implication? Simply that the bias of the 1960s variety is an illness that persists to the present day and is in need of direct confrontation (which is a forte of the arts). In addition, we must battle prejudice until has been rooted up from our midst.

Now, forgive me, if this seems incredibly naïve and of an obvious propaganda variety. Makes me want to start humming Dylan’s “Peace Train” or Lennon’s “Imagine.”The immediately discernible assumption is that if only we could educate people about racism, sexism, and homophobia, the hatred would go pop! Oh- I know! Let’s manufacture gay people into our television shows and reveal their burdens. Let’s have quotas for black people and strong women leaders so that bias can disappear overnight. Let’s campaign against school bullies. Let’s inform people about discrimination against women that takes the sinister form of the pro-life initiative. Let’s mobilize for religious tolerance. Let’s imprison those guilty of hate crimes. And on and on and on and on. More organizations, more acronyms, more education, more billboards, more brochures, more bracelets, more incorporated minority characters, more awareness = THE SALVATION OF AMERICA THAT IS TOLERANCE.

At what point, we are forced to ask, did America become so naïve? And, please tell me, when did we start a classification such as “hate crime”? Uhhh….wouldn’t we all be put in jail for that one? (Grimace). Good thing there’s no “lie crime.” Wouldn’t be any jail space left. According to “Characters Unite” pledge, we should “pledge to stand against intolerance, prejudice, discrimination, and hate, and to promote greater understanding and acceptance.” Ok…this sounds noble. I, like most people, do not believe in harassment or cruelty against people in any context (outside just war or just punishment). I would like to see understanding and acceptance, but please tell where do you draw the line? You see, people of this sort not only operate like relativists, they are inconsistent like relativists. The relativist says, “There is no absolute truth.” Hmmm….there’s a flaw somewhere in that. The tolerance advocate says, “We should accept everyone who is different than us.” Oh, wait…we can’t really tolerate the intolerant ones. Oh, and for that matter, we really can’t tolerate murderers, rapists, terrorists, thieves, corrupt politicians, maniacal tyrants, genocidal dictators, or disturbers of the peace. If you draw the line at these types, then that means that what they do is wrong. Dang…that means that some things are right. Double dang….that means that some things are absolute. And the worst fact to face? Morality of an absolute type is absolutely, positively essential for the survival of a healthy democracy.

I think “superficial” and “artificial” are the best ways to describe the modern attempt to deal with injustice and hatred. Hatred will not disappear with awareness. It doesn’t matter how many programs public education creates in its pursuit of a solution for the problem that it has initiated. In any case, I think we are all too aware that hatred is as close to human nature as lying is to the corrupt politician. In the long history of political philosophy, notions of man’s innate goodness have been bandied about with great zeal and vigor, including Communism, Socialism, and Social Contract Theory (the true undercurrent of America), but the deterioration of a political system can be predicted merely by the deterioration of a society’s ethics. Permissiveness in not to blame, for the real issue is what we permit. Liberality is not to blame, for it is what we accept as good that defines what we will become in the future. As Plato and our founding fathers would concede, democracy can degenerate into tyranny once man has forgotten who he is. Tyrants are born when the subjects are a convenient combination of naivete and gullibility. Don’t believe me? Look at Nazi Germany and tell me that Hitler didn’t come to power at the most opportune time. Democracy is not foolproof where clay-feet citizens are involved.

Before concluding, I’d like to bring up Plato again…not to sound profound, but because I think that Plato nailed the theory of a democracy’s demise. In The Republic, Plato explores the primary forms of government- timocracy (don’t ask), democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. Each form has pros and cons, and each has a trigger point at which the letters are spelled out before reality hits in: F.A.L.L. Democracy, says Plato, is “probably the most beautiful of all constitutions.” Praising its nobility, Plato mentions “The tolerance in such a city!....distributing a kind of equality to the equal and unequal alike.” After singing its praises, Plato is obligated to discern its flaws. That one flaw that brings about its collapse? Ready for a shock? Liberty. Yep, the resounding bell of liberty is also democracy’s death knell.

How? You may ask. Simple, actually. I’ll let Plato speak for me:

Insatiability regarding this [liberty], and neglect of other things because of it, is the thing which changes this government too, and puts it in a condition in which it needs dictatorship….the rulers, unless they are very accommodating and give plenty of liberty, are punished by the city and accused of being foul oligarchs….liberty makes its way into private households and in the end it breeds anarchy even among the animals….excessive action in one direction usually sets up a reaction in the opposite direction…So excessive liberty, whether in the individual or the state, is likely to change to excessive servitude and nothing else.

Need I broach the very recent debate about Obama and the Catholic church? With changing ethical attitudes comes changing legislation. Religious freedom becomes collateral damage when woman’s rights are at stake. It does appear that the rights of the group in connection with the bureaucracy of the State have begun to trample on the freedom of the land in an ironic, yet tragic, reversal of fate: liberty to tyranny. The State- with its far-reaching tentacles in the media and in education- is becoming the dictator under the façade of being the liberator. This would not be the first time servitude has masqueraded beneath the masque of liberty. Hail the Dictatorship of the State which advances under the sacred banner of Tolerance! One can indeed separate church from state, but not without the subtle metamorphosis of the state into the church. In the place of crucifixes and incense we have substituted our own symbols of contemporary secularist religion, all of which exhibit a horrific slippery slope that history is all too resonant of. For democracy on the downward slope has two equally undesirable destinations which are related to ethical upheaval: anarchy or tyranny. It is not a matter of ‘if,’ it is a matter of ‘when.’

To conclude this crazy business, I must mention in passing the poem of William Butler Yeats that goes by the name “The Second Coming.” This poem is somewhat esoteric and ambiguous, but not ambiguous enough for author Chinua Achebe to use in the title of her 1958 novel Things Fall Apart. Having been forced to read this in college, I have a new appreciation for the poem and its relevancy to the modern predicament. Achebe borrowed the title from the poem’s first stanza:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Yeats is apparently speaking in apocalyptic terms of the world’s demise, an apropos subject considering he wrote it in the post-WWI era, a time when American optimism was at an all-time low. The verse that stands out to me is that last couplet: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” Now if anything describes American culture in 2012, it is lack of conviction. We might as well jump on Pilate’s bandwagon: What the heck is Truth anyhow? The century began with hope and deteriorated with despair. Naivete fosters disappointment. War induces depression. Where there is lack of conviction and failure of optimistic expectations, there is bound to be anarchy, if not in literal reality, then in the spiritual dimensions of human life. The centre upon which we founded our hope for the future simply cannot hold. Things must fall apart. Our modern proclivity for tolerance is just another stab in the dark at human redemption. We want mutual understanding and peace on earth, but tolerance is meaningless unless there is meaning to begin with. What makes tolerance a virtue is not that everything is permissible, but that some things are not. Hitler’s treatment of the Jews was intolerable. At some point we must draw a line and decide in favor of a course of action. Passivity in the face of evil (and yes, I claim abortion in that camp) is one of the signposts that determines our potential destination. It was the German people’s tolerance that permitted their dictator’s reign. I do not advocate inquisitions or boycotts or moral majority rallies; I only hope to, at the very least, remind a period that is caught back up in groundless optimism that the centre cannot hold if the only virtue we have left to espouse as a community is a “virtue” that can accept everything, but believe in nothing. It comes down to our ability to be able to define our terms and accept our convictions. Bloody is the history of the Inquisition, whose leaders led by a misguided notion of Christ’s exclusivity. Bloodier still is the history of Rome which tolerated all beliefs but those which claimed exclusivity.

"The Collar" by George Herbert

2012-02-06T18:09:00.000-07:00

I would write a long, super exciting post, but time eludes me this evening. So I'm going to post a touching poem I read this morning by Metaphysical poet/rector George Herbert. If you have ever felt like George Bailey or Huckleberry Finn- ruthlessly tied down by your responsibilities and absolutely confounded by your present circumstances- then you should most likely understand the following sentiments. The poem is called "The Collar" in reference to the shackles of the slave.

I struck the board, and cried: 'No more.
      I will abroad.
What? Shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the road,
Loose as the wind, as large as store,
             Shall I still be in suit?

Have I no harvest but a thorn
To let me blood, and not restore
What I have lost with cordial fruit?
     Sure there was wine
Before my sighs did dry it; there was corn
Before my tears did drown it.

Is the year only lost to me?
   Have I no bays to crown it?
No flowers, no garlands gay? All blasted?
    All wasted?
Not so, my heart; but there is fruit
And thou hast hands.

Recover all thy sigh-blown age
On double pleasures; leave thy cold dispute
Of what is fit, and not. Forsake thy cage,
   Thy rope of sands,
Which petty thoughts have made, and made to thee
Good cable, to enforce and draw,
    And be thy law,
While thou dost wink and wouldst not see.
Away! Take heed;
     I will abroad.

Call in thy death's head there; tie up thy fears.
   He that forbears
To suit and serve his need,
Deserves his load.'

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wild
At every word,
Methought I heard one calling, 'Child!'
And I replied, 'My Lord.'

THE PLATONIC CHURCH

2012-01-26T14:53:00.003-07:00

“Sin is a parasite, an uninvited guest that keeps tapping its host for sustenance. Nothing about sin is its own; all its power, persistence, and plausibility are stolen goods…Sin does not build shalom; it vandalizes it.”

~Cornelius Plantigna, Jr.

Never in our lives are we more freer, more active, and more responsible than when we act on the decision to put our faith in God and set out on the journey home to Him. Never are we more ourselves.”

~Os Guinness

“The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example.”

~Mark Twain

So now that I have ventured into the tumultuous, yet exciting, seas of philosophy, I’ve been thinking more about just how much skewed foreign philosophies have infiltrated the undergirding philosophy or assumptions of the typical American evangelical church. The more I think about it and research, the more I am inclined to conclude that Aristotle has had a great deal to do with contemporary society’s empirical and purely scientific bent and that we have Aristotle’s famous tutor, Plato, to thank for the Protestant Church’s anti-world, anti-physical bent. Let me explain.

Plato and Aristotle are two sides of a coin. Plato believed that physicality is the great hindrance to our “spiritual” comprehension. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that spirituality and physicality are inseparable elements of all existence; in other words, Aristotle called Plato out on his blatant dualistic philosophy that divides life into a superior spiritual realm and an inferior physical realm. Plato saw the human body as a veritable prison-house of the soul. Reality is thus a struggle for transcendence of the physical to the upper realm of Ideals and Pure Being. Aristotle strongly disagreed (as I do). Every entity on this planet, Aristotle concluded, has matter and form; in contemporary terms, everything has a soul (form) and body (matter). Separating the two only creates further problems both philosophically and practically.

Now I can definitely see why the Church would, by default, side more with Plato on this debate. Plato appears to be confirming the idea that physicality is weak as the Bible says the flesh is weak. The fundamental problem with Platonism, however, is that, whereas the Bible will always incriminate man as the source of perversion and distortion, a Platonist will blame the body, or the glass of alcohol, or the beat and rhythm of a song, or the tattoo, or the nose-ring as evil in and of itself. The body thus becomes evil and the soul in need of desperate release from this restrictive cesspool of evil. If this is your perception of Christianity, then I am happy to inform you that nothing is farther from the truth.

I cannot count how many people I have met who have this terrifically caricatured view of Christianity. Christianity is a game of boring rules, rules which tend to suck the joy out of life and leave you wondering why you didn’t pick a religion like Wicca (where you can at least wear a large pointy hat; sounds like fun, right?) Granted, treating Christianity like a game is easy to do, and surely all of us have done it and we can slip complacently back into the “game” without consciousness of it. There is nothing more revolting than the triviality of moral checklists which operate like stringent bureaucratic governmental regulations: judgment without wisdom, Bible verses without context, counseling without compassion, rules without meaning, boundaries without liberty. At the end of the day, this game always ends with defeat. Even if you think, like Benjamin Franklin, that you have checked off at least 75% of your moral requirements in the last 24 hours, you have played games with God, and God is never the loser. When it comes to being holy, checklists are a monumental waste of time and effort.

The effects of Platonism on the church are the distorted perpetuation of human ambition and zeal to self-resurrect, and consequently the ineffectual message of the Church at large. I often feel that the mark of a church that is really preaching the gospel to our culture is that those who attend never have to deal with the pressure that they are not “good enough.” Vacant would be all the church buildings if top-notch morality, perfection, and bland conformity were the prerequisites for attendance. Any religion that denies the goodness of the physical world has, in turn, revolted all those who have experientially come to see that a glass of wine does the heart good or that there’s something about flowers and poetry that make them long for a distant home. So much of human brokenness is the hard-to-comprehend reality of our frustrating inability to love without worshiping, to enjoy without idolizing, to desire without mistaking a shadow for a reality. We were indeed created to love beauty, to love each other, and to revel in the complexities and mysteries of existence, but we were not created to manufacture god-ness out of them. Our insanity is like a man bowing down in gratitude and worship to the boxed present that his friend just handed him. Far from asceticism or Platonism, Christianity is an encouragement to return to real and lasting love and gratitude. To love God’s gifts is true love and gratitude. To worship them is, as the British say, “mental.” Sin is not just self-mutilation; it is lunacy. Think of The Matrix. Being redeemed is like waking up and realizing that everything you thought about life was wrong.

I just finished reading a segment from Dostoevsky’s ridiculously good novel Brothers Karamazov.The segment is very well-known; it is called “The Grand Inquisitor.” In this brief short, Dostoevsky reminds the reader that humanity’s greatest sin stems from humanity’s greatest longing. Humans desire above all one thing- freedom. Such a noble desire is tainted and complicated by man’s imperfections, namely man’s incurable religiosity. In other words, man desires freedom so much that he will lay it at the feet of anyone and anything to “gain” it. Dostoevsky calls it the “fundamental secret of human nature…So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship…this craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time.” Man wants to simply hand over his freedom to something or someone he considers worthy of his time and devotion (which is how we define worship). “For the secret of man’s being,” continues Dostoevsky, “is not only to live but to have something to live for.”

Now the things to which we can hand over our freedom are countless, but I know of only one person to whom we can hand over our freedom and not receive bondage in return. Addictions of any sort stem from this very natural human longing to worship and discover meaning in what we worship, but these things are slave traders in disguise. Ask any meth user. Ask any alcoholic or prostitute. They are addicted to what they do because they are deceived into thinking that meaning can be found nowhere else. But if a platonic Church comes along and gives a simplistic and judgmental message that meth and alcohol are of the devil and should be shunned in order to obtain salvation, they are forgetting that abuse stems from a heart aching for salvation, an empty soul agonizing for fullness. What we need to hear as human beings is not the evil of physicality but the redemption of physicality. Drink your alcohol under Christ’s Lordship. If He is your Lord, you will find it easier to resist the temptation to keep drinking to fill the emptiness. Dance unto the Lord. Sing unto the Lord. Laugh unto the Lord. Embrace God’s gifts because they are always to be loved because of our love for the Giver. Rather than bowing to the wrapped present, open it and enjoy it. Our joy for God’s gifts is the fundamental response by which man glorifies Him. External obedience to a check-list is yet another game of futility by which we fill a God-sized ocean with particles of sand. As Dostoevsky writes, Christ’s intention was not to put us into a small cage where we stare out the bars with sad, longing eyes upon all the pagans enjoying life. “Thou didst desire man’s free love, that he should follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee.”

Redemption is a word we may often use but rarely remember. Redemption is to “buy or bring back; to restore.” Our restoration as human beings is not dependent upon our rejection of physical reality, as Platonism would have it. Our redemption is our being brought back to our senses, our deliverance from the insane asylum. Now we will worship the Giver and not the gift (Rom 1), and we will find that enjoyment of the gift is now completely possible and does not end in utter dejection as anything will that does not fulfill our desire for divinity. This is Christianity, and this is the Messiah that we speak of. It is not a religion, unless you want to continue to play games with the Creator. It is a reality, and if redemption is real, then even our worst perversions of reality can be corrected when the vacuum in our souls is filled with that for which it was designed.

CAUSALITY, UNIVERSAL NEGATIVES, AND CONTRADICTION, OH MY!!

2012-01-19T17:05:00.005-07:00

"A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny and an obedience which is not slavery."

~C.S. Lewis (Abolition of Man)

"Sometimes the questions are complicated...

and the answers are simple."

~Dr. Seuss

After a rather long break from blogging, I finally found myself so overwhelmed by relentless notions and ideas turning the wheels in my head (which is dangerous) that I decided to blog. Yes, I admit it; I am very philosophically inclined and would rather discuss metaphysics than politics or fashion on most days. And I’d rather discuss philosophy than science any day, despite science’s inextricable connection to the problems of metaphysics and epistemology. Yet, let’s face the facts of knowledge: everything has a philosophical foundation, and if we theists were consistent, we would not fail to recognize that theology and philosophy are interchangeable. Both ask and attempt to answer the major questions of life, and if God exists, and if He is who He says He is, then philosophy involves nothing less than the study of Him and His revelation. Separate God from knowledge and you might as well separate hydrogen from water; the one simply can’t exist without the other. But, then again, you must be working with the assumption of God’s prior existence. It is exactly this particular question- does God exist?- that I find to be the most asked and debated question of the 21^st century. Fear not: I am not going to Bible-thump here. I know how much Bible-thumping annoys me even as a Christian. The Bible presupposes the existence of God. The Bible also presupposes the sufficiency of the evidence for God’s existence apart from the Bible. It is this apartness, this super-Scriptural evidence that I want to explore.

Now, one of the arguments that I’ve come across many a time to refute the existence of God is the argument of causality. The argument proceeds as thus: if we are to work consistently with the logical principle of cause and effect, then God simply cannot exist. The premises of the argument? A: Every effect must have a cause. B: God does not have a cause. C: Therefore, God cannot exist. However, it can be said that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Premise A is perfectly correct in any case. According to the law of causality, every effect must have a cause and every cause must have an effect. Premise A passes the test. Premise B is where the flow of logic goes sour. God does not have a cause. Ok, all true and good. Orthodox Christianity has always postulated that God is self-derived, self-existent, and infinite. God does not have a cause. But, hold the phone. If we are to work soundly with premise A, you must be assuming absolutely that God is an effect, not a Cause. Every effect must have a cause; God (an effect) does not have a cause. Therefore, God does not exist. You cannot switch the meanings of terms mid-argument. If and only if you were presupposing God as an effect would this argument be logically sound. However, the doctrine of God’s self-existence is entirely dependent upon God as the First Cause, not the First Effect. Therefore, according to the principle of causality, this specific atheistic argument holds absolutely no water. To argue that God exists as the First Cause does not violate the logic of causality, for every cause must have an effect; the law is not that every cause must have a cause.

Frequently, I also come across the old “you cannot empirically prove the existence of God” argument. Now I’m not going to go into the old trap of actually going the distance to manufacture physical evidence for the existence of God. Granted, the moral argument, the teleological argument, and the cosmological argument are all fantastic, but I actually think it is apropos to think logically in these cases by starting with the nature of empirical verification itself. Think about it: how do you go about proving the existence of something? Simple, you hold it up for observation by the five senses. If I say that there is such a thing as a dog, all I really have to do is find a dog and show it to you. Piece of cake. No problem. Empirical verification by affirmation is the easy part. But what if I wanted to prove the non-existence of something? What if I wanted to prove to you that there is no such thing as a purple cockroach? First, you would have to confirm the limitations. Let’s say that I wanted to prove to you that there is no such thing as a purple cockroach in the state of Colorado. What would be required of me? Well, I would have to conduct an intensive search of every inch of land in the entire state of Colorado. Not only is this really, really difficult, it is really, actually impossible. What if I wanted to prove that there is no such thing as a purple cockroach in the entire universe? But- think about it- this is exactly what atheists are doing when they say the simple statement, “There is no God.” Now there may very well be no such thing as a purple cockroach, and in my limited experience, I have never seen one; but neither have I seen the state of Hawaii, but I believe in it because I trust in the authority of those who physically have been there. Christians say they believe in God, not because they have seen Him, but because they believe in an authority on Him (in addition to a personal relationship with Him). A universal negative is a terrifically difficult thing to prove. All universal negatives when it comes to the problem of existence take the form of “No A is an existent being.” Substitute A with whatever: unicorns, ghosts, vampires, Loch Ness Monster. Unless you are God yourself, an omniscient Being, you cannot prove the non-existence of these things conclusively. You can give a good argument that offers a probable conclusion, but no one can prove the non-existence of something conclusively. Such arguments will always be left open with either a wide or not-so-wide gap of possibility. A universal negative that abides by logical definition, however, can be proven conclusively. For instance, “There is no such thing as a two-sided triangle.” This can be proven conclusively because the definition of triangle is a “three-sided object.” But this is vastly different from saying “There is no God.” Empirically speaking, the modern atheist stance is stymied.

The last argument I find very common, in fact the most common of all today, is the old relativistic stance. In other words, there is no absolute Truth, there is no absolute Religion. Religions need only “coexist” (preach it, bumper stickers of America) for there to be final peace in the world. Relativism is really the most absurd of all the alternatives in contemporary society. The argument is doomed from the start because it is self-refuting. For there to be no absolutes, there must be just that initial absolute, which is an inherent contradiction. You might as well be hanging onto a branch of a loner tree with binoculars in a barren wasteland proclaiming, “There are no trees.” Relativism begins and ends in absurdity, which is probably why postmodern thought has finally just embraced irrationality as a necessary conclusion. Relativism attempts to demolish the law of contradiction, but try living for one second of any day without the law of contradiction and you’ll surely end up in the asylum or in the morgue. If I were a relativist, I would just run every red light I wanted because perception drives the reality and my perception is that red does not mean stop. As much fun as that sounds, I’m sure that my life would be over by the end of the day because, at the end of the day, reality has no regard whatsoever for the manipulation of subjective perception; its objectivity is what makes reality real. Ironically, what we do instead of this insanity is make up our own exceptions for truth and reality. For instance, many people believe that murder is wrong, absolutely. Yet at the same time these people believe that God is dead. So if God has not set down this law, then you have, for most people I know of don’t believe that murder is wrong because our government declares it is wrong; they think it is actually absolutely and universally wrong. But if God is simultaneously dead, then this law against murder is yours alone, a law which others need not obey unless you believe that your conscience should dictate the consciences of others as well. If it is true that you think others should not murder either, then you have made yourself the absolute standard. If you think that others may murder as they will, then you have embraced the darkness of relativistic chaos that will backfire when someone murders your friend or family member. Humans are either open absolutists or confused absolutists. We either accept an objective authority or become an objective authority. If you know of an alternative, please tell me about it. I'm all ears.

If there are any other really pressing questions or possible refutations of Christianity or God's existence, please let me know! Or, if you have any problem with the above refutations let me know. Please direct hate mail to PO Box 1275, Alaska. I will not receive it.

The AUDIENCE OF ONE

2011-12-20T13:20:00.000-07:00

“I live before the Audience of One. Before others I have nothing to prove, nothing to gain, nothing to lose.”

~Os Guiness

“You doubt your value. Don’t run from who you are.”

~Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader

“‘I don’t smoke or drink, you know,’ he said irrelevantly, ‘because I think they’re drugs. And yet I fancy all hobbies are drugs too…Drugging myself with speed, and sunshine, and fatigue, and fresh air. Pedaling the machine so fast that I turn into a machine myself. That’s the matter with all of us. We’re too busy to wake up.’ “

~Manalive, G.K. Chesterton

One of my favorite bands is the Goo Goo Dolls. Despite their funny name, I find their lyrics to be quite intriguing; sometimes you just have to stop and listen to a song’s lyrics, even if the clanging metal disturbs you. I can very much identify with one of their more popular songs entitled “I’m Still Here.” The verses are full of postmodern angst and rebellion, but the type of rebellion that scoffs at and belittles a perplexing world where each and every one of us is trying to “figure” the other out and failing miserably. And in our aimless floundering, we end up utterly misunderstanding each other, thoroughly dehumanizing one another, and failing to come to grips with a common bond of humanity that is constructed of so many diverse threads. It is, after all, the basic philosophical problem of life that plagued even the Greeks back in a day when quizzical philosophers spent their time in academies debating the seeming irreconcilability of The One and The Many. How do we reconcile diversity and unity? How do we understand one another when we often can’t even understand ourselves? Did God create man to embrace the diversity of our personalities, or does He want us to conform without thought to a prototypical standard that has no room for color and vibrancy? In other words, as most philosophical questions can be reduced to: what does it mean to be human?

I am a question to the world, not an answer to be heard….goes the song. And within that single metaphorical statement, we should be able to identify a significant problem that all human beings struggle with. While each and every one of us has a PhD in judging one another, we all in the core of our beings hate to be misunderstood or treated like something that must be “solved.” Rather be treated like a question without an answer than to be approached as something that is an answer. You don't know me, and I'll never be what you want me to be…continues the song. Yes, I can hear the parental confusion already. Pure rebellion, parents might be tempted to conclude. But…wait a minute. It is not possible that rebellion is often born out of being misunderstood, and being misunderstood or judged falsely is often the product of not taking the time to understand or get to know another? Why else would the musician choose those words: you don’t know me? False judgment is the foul offspring of ignorance.

The chorus of the song reads: And I want a moment to be real, Wanna touch things I don't feel, Wanna hold on and feel I belong. And how can the world want me to change? They're the ones that stay the same; they don't know me; because I'm not here. These lines are the most revealing of the whole song, for you cannot mistake the intense human longing for community and belonging. We all know what it’s like to feel misplaced at times- like we don’t belong- but that does not mean that we still don’t’ desire to “fit in” even in the face of the great struggle. In fact, our desire to have a place in the world is one of the most fundamental driving influences in our life, as any high-school teenager or insecure adult will tell you. We want, we desire, we long for a place of belonging. The angst, however, or the budding resentment, is that so often we feel we must change for the world. The world stays the same and bids us conform to its image, bids us, in other words, to forsake our unique God-given personality, tastes, and gifts to become like everyone else. But again, the resentment- and authentic rebellion for that matter- is the offspring of ignorance. If people don’t know you, you will never feel that you belong. In our few moments of forthright honesty in this crazy world, we recognize that our social lives are, for the most part, acts of grand pretension…while we are left longing for that moment that is real. Or, as the character in Chesterton’s Manalive puts it: we start “Pedaling the machine so fast that I turn into a machine myself…We’re too busy to wake up.”

The song is not so entirely depressing. The concluding verses seem to imply that belonging is not so much a futile dream as it is an authentic expression of a desire to connect with people based on mutual understanding and respect. And I want to tell you who I am. Can you help me be a man? They can't break me, as long as I know who I am. But, if we are too busy to wake up, too focused on following the crowd in order to become the crowd, belonging and intimacy of this sort may indeed be futile pursuits.

In any case, the point of this brief discursion into a modern musician’s soul is not to identify a pat solution such as: all you need is love or all we need is to understand each other better. The song also declares an almost messianic search for belonging; can relationships and community make us into humans? Love is important, don’t get me wrong, but the thing about human relationships is that we put far too much stock in them. Surely relationships can be a drug and an idol that dictate our lives as much as wine and entertainment can. If we begin to allow other people’s opinions and judgments – positive or negative-identify who we are, then we have actually made such people into false gods. People do not define us, and the audience that we should live for is not a collective collage of good and bad perceptions and accurate and inaccurate opinions. If it were so, then we should have to cater to every whim and desire of the masses. We should have to fully and thoroughly submit to the requisites of peer pressure. As a result, we should be burdened by the loss of our individuality. I can think of few things worse in life then losing yourself on that erroneous quest of trying to find yourself in all the wrong places.

Peer pressure is a powerful force to be reckoned with, and, more often than not, a force that can strip away individuality rather than encourage it. We are frequently in the position of Lucy in the Voyage of the Dawn Treader, doubting our value and wishing that we were what we are not. But as Aslan reveals to her, we can’t truly wish ourselves away. It may not always appear so at first glance, but the greatest happiness in life is finding your purpose as God has so graciously defined it. Inordinate joy and satisfaction are the rewards of embracing that purpose, that destiny so-to-speak, and living with the authority figures in your life in proper order- God first, man second. If God is the author of our beings, then His pleasure of us should be the primary pursuit of our lives and actions. He is the Audience of One, the ultimate standard, the epitome of purpose and humanity. The European leader of the Chinese army called the “Ever Victorious Army,” General Charles Gordon, understood the concept: “Never pay attention to the favors or smiles of man; if He smiles on you, neither the smile or frown of men can affect you.”

God’s opinion trumps the opinions of man; this should be no shock to us, but we do so often live our lives as if the opinions and judgments of men were far superior. We have a name for this flaw and we call it “people-pleasing.” If you ask me, people-pleasing is no fun. It is, in fact, a chore of monumental proportions. You can absolutely drown in the conglomeration of opinions and convictions, to the point of having no convictions of your own, nothing to stand up for when everyone else is sitting down. There used to be a poster in my mom’s high-school classroom and it had the silhouette of a lone stick figure standing on a hill. The inscription was: Stand up, even if you’re standing alone. I always thought that was inspiring because I knew it meant that life is full of sacrifices and individual choices that are the consequence of being responsible human beings made in the image of God. God did not make us to live our lives in the images of each other. He created us to follow Him even when it comes at the cost of a dent in our popularity or a flaw in our resume. I do believe that our lives are most real and authentic- most human- when our audience consists of the One that truly counts.

Os Guiness draws out the implications of living for an Audience of One. First, it means that we do not have to live our lives in a severe captivity to people-pleasing. We do not have to prove ourselves to anyone but our Creator. Of course, we are not to gad about seeking a bad reputation, for a good reputation among people is a good thing (as the Proverbs would say). However, God alone knows the deepest recesses of our hearts and He is not fooled by pretension. Second, before others, we have absolutely nothing to gain and nothing to lose. If people do not define us, then a healthy relationship will be built on the pursuit of God’s good opinion together, not on a relationship built upon trying to seek identity in each other. Metaphorically speaking, we are all actors on the same stage performing this drama called life before the drama’s author and director- God Himself. He is the only Judge whose opinion trumps all others.

I don’t believe that any of us actually want to be machines or automatons or conformists. Each of us really desires to embrace our individuality and find that we fit snuggly into the great puzzle of human unity without losing our identity as purposeful pieces of the puzzle. Running from who we are turns out to be an undesirable extinguishment of the personality that we desperately desired to begin with. In addition, living before an audience of thousands upon thousands of peers whose opinions are terribly skewed and whose perceptions are flawed and lacking is a taxing and exhausting affair. You’ll completely lose yourself until you phase out all the other voices shouting at you and direct your energy towards pleasing the One who knows who you are and knows what you should be. For only the Lord can judge the heart.

“Christianity is concerned with the fulfillment of personality, not its negation,” wrote Chad Walsh. I’m convinced that the illusion floating around is that Christianity is both de-humanizing and anti-individuality. Christianity is the killer of joy and the negation of personality; however, none of these lies are true, despite the flaws of the Church over the ages. Yes, churches sometimes make morality into an issue of external conformity, and, yes, the Church has contributed to the negative images of Christianity as a club for holy and sober saints. But where the Church has messed up, there should never be an argument made to dismiss Christ, the only true human to have ever graced our planet. It is into His image we are being conformed, not into the image of each other as we vie over who has more Awana badges or who has a better track record. If we want to do ourselves harm, we can do so by letting others dictate who we are and by allowing ourselves to be a slave to perceptions that are based only on externals. If, however, we want to find humanity in the midst of our inhumanity, we should remember that no human being has the power to wield judgment over us. Keep that in mind while retaining in your memory the exhortation of Ecclesiastes 12: “Rejoice, o young man, in your youth, and let your heart cheer you in the days of your youth. Walk in the ways of your heart and the sight of your eyes. But know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.” Thus, we perform on the stage of life for the one who will Judge us hereafter, and no other reward will compare with His commendation, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Turning a Blind Eye

2011-12-12T15:00:00.000-07:00

"You know, Foley, I have only one eye - and I have a right to be blind sometimes... I really do not see the signal."

~Admiral Horatio Nelson

“To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intricately interwoven that there can be no peace for any of us until there is peace for all of us.”

~Frederick Buechner

“Rescue the perishing;
don't hesitate to step in and help.
If you say, "Hey, that's none of my business,"
will that get you off the hook?
Someone is watching you closely, you know—
Someone not impressed with weak excuses.”

~Proverbs 24:11-12, The Message

“I never thought your mortal edicts had such force they nullified the laws of heaven..."

~Antigone

The phrase “to turn a blind eye” allegedly originated in 1801 when British naval commander Admiral Horatio Nelson chose to ignore a signal flag which was a discretionary command to withdraw forces and retreat. The story goes that Nelson, who was blinded in one eye, lifted the telescope to his blind eye and casually commented, “I really do not see the signal.”

Did you know that there is a legal term which refers to a defendant’s ploy to avoid criminal responsibility by claiming ignorance of those facts which would render him liable to punishment? The term is often called “willful blindness” or “ignorance of the law,” but it has also been called “Nelsonian knowledge” in honor of the story related above. In other words, when a defendant pleads ignorance in these legal terms, he is basically claiming that, like Nelson, he has a “right to be blind sometimes.” Thus, as it often happens, when a drug smuggler is caught and brought to court, he will often claim ignorance of the packages’ content in a desperate attempt to shirk criminal liability. It is for this reason that the phenomenon is also frequently called “contrived ignorance.”

Surely, however, there is a legitimate difference between contrived ignorance and actual ignorance. To abide 100% of the time by the rule that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” is to blur the boundary between that which is manufactured as an excuse and that which is genuinely pardonable. For instance, I remember reading one of the Redwall stories by Brian Jacques, and there was one story where the main character was thrown into jail for bearing a weapon in a territory where weapons were forbidden. The offense of the character, at least from my perspective, was pardonable because he was a foreigner and was not acquainted with the law of the land, which-by the way- was under the rule of some pretty nasty tyrants. Of course, an excuse of this sort also depends on the law that is broken. The law, in this case, was positive (i.e. not inherently moral and created by the society) and not moral (i.e. inherently moral such as laws against murder or theft).

In any case, it is pertinent to note that the issue of ignorance is one which extends beyond the walls of the courtroom and one that creeps into each of our lives with astounding relevance. For ignorance is not always an excuse, and sometimes our so-called excuses are weaker than we’d like to admit. I have always remembered a little wall plaque in my kitchen that my mom inherited from her mother. The writing is in Spanish, which is a language forever foreign to me, but I did manage one day to figure out its meaning. The plaque, it turned out, was the Spanish translation of the popular prayer attributed to theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and it has since been called “The Serenity Prayer”:

Of course, nowadays, the prayer is all too frequently found in Christian bookstores on cute little “Christian” statues or on stone tablets with flowers and cherubs and as slogans on jewelry or mottoes on coffee mugs. Sometimes we just become so familiar with something and that something becomes so commercialized and understated that we forget the true meaning of it, much in the manner in which we paint Noah’s ark with cute little animals on nursery walls but fail to forget that all the people died. I even wonder why we call the prayer the “Serenity Prayer.” Why not the “Courage Prayer” or the “Wisdom Prayer”? Perhaps “serenity” just gives us nice, cozy feelings.

The first part of the prayer is certainly important because there is much in our lives that cannot be changed. Serenity is a battle in and of itself. Yet the following parts are just as important because we cannot always justifiably use excuses such as “I didn’t know” or “It can’t be changed.” Courage is necessary to change things, and wisdom is absolutely required to differentiate between what can’t be changed and what can. Proverbs 24:11-12 is one of the best verses you can find on this issue. “Rescue captives condemned to death, and spare those staggering towards their slaughter. When you say, ‘We did not know this,’ won’t the one who weighs the heart take note of it? Won’t the one who guards your soul know it?” This verse is a bit confusing at first glance. For instance, is this passage denouncing capital punishment? Is this verse recommending that we defend the guilty? No to both. Since Scripture verses must always be taken in context, we could skip back a few chapters and see that only the innocent should be saved. “He who justifies the wicked, and he who condemns the just, both of them alike are an abomination to the Lord” (Prov 17:15).

So what does this verse actually tell us? Simply this: some things in life can be changed, some injustices made right, and some innocent people saved. We could easily sit back in our sofa chairs and live lives of complete and uninterrupted serenity, letting false accusations go, letting the innocent get condemned, letting falsehoods and injustices thrive- and we can do it all in the name of “keeping the peace.” With the flip of our hands, we can compound evils committed by a casual, yet careless response: “Hey, that’s none of my business.” The character in the movie The Boondock Saints makes a good point when he says: “Now we must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most. And that is the indifference of good men.”

Now, I know that this issue is not clear-cut. For one, it would be a travesty to use this logic to build up an argument that we should be busybodies or nose our ways into other people’s business. That is most definitely not what this Scripture verse is saying! Remember courage and wisdom must feed each other. The real rebuke behind this verse is that we human beings, comfortable for the most part with serenity, are generally unwilling to address injustices when it threatens our comfort and when contrived ignorance is an easy escape. Most English people were entirely tolerant of the slave trade system in England and claimed ignorance as their excuse when its horrors were exposed by the likes of William Wilberforce. Wilberforce was indignant. “We can no longer plead ignorance,” he said. In the same way, Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned his fellow Germans that Christianity is not incompatible with action toward social justice. ““We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

We are all too aware that the world we live in abounds with injustice. Lies, scandals, rumors, and petty grievances fill most of our workplaces to the point where we become absolutely apathetic about change and thus pessimistic about life in general. Indifference is like a stagnant pond: it sits and breeds foul things. Indifference, I believe, is one of easiest flaws to succumb to because it begins with a mere acceptance of the status quo. All you have to do is go with the flow. Easy, right? It is especially easy in a day and age that values conformity above all and propagates conformity in the schools like the pastor preaches from his pulpit. Indifference takes foul forms but initiates with small, but popular convictions, such as Jews and blacks are sub-human (Nazi Germany and pre-Civil War America), women are inferior to men (Islamic culture), youth is superior to old age (contemporary America), business and humanity are incompatible (contemporary America), male children are more valuable than female children (China), abortion is not murder (contemporary America), and creativity and Christianity are irreconcilable (contemporary culture).

If you’ve ever read Sophocles drama Antigone, you should be able to identify the primary theme as the priority of divine law above human law. Antigone loses her life for following the “edict of Heaven” rather than obeying her uncle the King. Christians are really called to nothing less. Yes, there are times when change is impossible. For these times we need serenity, as much as the early Christians needed serenity under the rule of Nero. But for the times where we can neither plead ignorance nor remain impassive and indifferent, we are called to wisely discern how we might effect change. We are called to rescue the perishing, and many Christians have bravely perished in the rescue. When Wilberforce was confronted with the horror of the slave trade for the first time, he was torn between his new-found desire to live as a monk like John Newton and his talent for the political arena. This is the false dichotomy which often renders the Church an impassive and withdrawn force. Wilberforce had made a dichotomy between Christian ministry and political involvement. We do the same. Shall I engage in “full-time ministry” or become a Senator? The problem is this: there is no such thing as “full-time ministry.” When Matthew was called by Jesus Christ in the New Testament, he was a tax-collector and he remained a tax-collector. Ministry is not something you “take on” like a cub scout who pins on a badge. We are each and every one of us created for a purpose and a calling that defines who we are and who God made us to be. Not all of us are called to politics to fight social injustice. Not all of us are called like Paul to be a missionary. Not all of us are called to be pastors. Ministry is simply being who God created you to be; that includes using your talents and fighting the good fight in whichever sphere God places you, be it Starbucks, Target, or Washington D.C.

The worst response we can take in the face of problems that are demanding confrontation is a half-hearted detachment because “God is Sovereign.” If you saw a man hanging off a cliff, would you refuse to help him because God is Sovereign? The mystery of life is the compatibility of God’s control and our responsibility. God is thoroughly and exhaustively in control, but man is thoroughly and exhaustively responsible. Skeptics love to use the example of dropping an object. “If God is Sovereign, did he cause me to do that?” they jeer. Truth is, you cannot breathe without God’s power. None of us has any power over our next breath. But we are not automatons or pawns, and both truths must be held simultaneously, even if they seem to be in tension. Nowhere in Scripture, however, will you find God’s Sovereignty being any sort of “reason” or excuse for the indifference of His people. The best advice ever given on this question was given by Gandalf the wizard when Frodo is lamenting his current events. Gandalf admits that he wishes things were not the way they were too, but “All you have to decide is what to do with the time given you.” Gandalf realizes that circumstances cannot be controlled but humans have the responsibility to respond appropriately, and that is the etymology of the word “responsibility” in a nutshell. To be “responsible” is simply to respond. From Latin respondere, it has the connotations of being “answerable to” and “morally accountable for one’s actions.” If we refuse to respond because of weak excuses rather than impassible obstacles, it is then that our indifference takes shape.

The temptation for all of us is to be purposefully blind. We are easily tempted to follow in the footsteps of Nelson and feign ignorance. Thank God that Wilberforce embraced his calling and took on the slave trade with a vigor that the world has rarely witnessed. The edicts of our presidents and of all our authority figures do not have precedence over the edicts of Heaven. To effect change begins with wisdom and becomes active with courage. Neither do you have to be a pastor or a missionary to effect change. Change is not something that we have to leave in the laps of the wealthy and the prestigious. It is a weak excuse to argue that we are too small and insignificant. God, after all, uses the small things of this world to shame the strong. Indifference is a failure that the Church must steer clear of if it wishes to engage the world with its message of redemption. There is nothing surrounding us that we must not actively and redemptively engage- the arts, politics, academia, television, Internet, subcultures, pop culture. Despite popular perception, our gospel is entirely relevant, and half the struggle today is just waking up to the reality that Christianity addresses all areas of life with remarkable applicability and offers the answers to man’s most critical questions. Too often we shut our ears because we mistake Christianity as either a private affair or as a restriction upon a full life. If the Church withdraws from life, life will withdraw from the Church. Likewise, if the Church turns a blind eye to injustice, our culture will turn a blind eye to the Church's message.

Why are Reformed Christians so mean??

2011-12-09T17:43:00.001-07:00

I am currently working on a new post, but a dreadful headache has prevented me from finishing it. So, in place of a new post, I wanted to share an article that I thought was both painfully true and yet much needed. Let me state that I believe in the tenets of "Reformed theology," but I have also come to see a great number of flaws in the way that Reformed churches operate. Doctrine is, after all, not God. The words TULIP and Calvinism were the creation of men and should not be the be all and end all of a church. In fact, some of the meanest people I have come across know Scripture very well, but your knowledge of Scripture is hardly the litmus test for your "spirituality."This article should not offend anyone if we can accept constructive criticism, and I say that as one who still believes in Reformed teaching despite the horrid things I have seen. Remember: "he cannot laugh who cannot laugh at himself." No denomination and no church is perfect. Jesus Christ is perfect, however, and He can still save you whether or not you believe in TULIP ;)

http://www.act3online.com/ArticlesDetail.asp?id=77

Mugged By Reality

2011-12-05T19:42:00.001-07:00

"Same old song, just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do crumbles to the ground though we refuse to see
Dust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind."

~Kansas

Irving Kristol was the “godfather of neo-conservatism.” If you aren’t sure what neo-conservatism is, don’t worry. I wasn’t quite sure what it was all about either until recently when I became acquainted with Kristol. In short, neo-conservatism was the name used in 1973 to describe those who criticized both the typical American liberal and the traditional conservative. Neo-conservatism comes closer in theory to libertarianism, but it is nearer on the political spectrum to conservatism than it is to liberalism. It was neo-conservatism that paved the way for the era of Reagan politics.

However, the intention of this post is not to wax political or give a treatise on neo-conservatism. As much fun as that sounds (please note the sarcasm), I would rather dwell on the famous statement attributed to Irving Kristol, a statement that seems to have much in common with the ordinary life of the common man. Before the neo-conservative movement, Kristol was what we would probably call a “flaming liberal.” If we were to sum up what makes a person into a “flaming liberal,” I guess we could say that such a person is an ardent advocate of the welfare state. A New Deal Democrat to begin with, Kristol experienced an incredible change of heart during the turbulent 60s. Noting that welfare programs fostered an unhealthy level of dependency upon an expanding government and that the reforms of the 60s and 70s were creating more problems than solutions, men such as Kristol began to question their political allegiances. The doubts and speculations of these thoughtful Democrats were the first seeds of the neo-conservative movement. When Kristol’s change of heart finally arrived, he reevaluated the stance of the liberal Democrat and declared the birth of the neo-conservative. The neo-conservative, he stated, is nothing more than a “liberal mugged by reality.”

Here’s the clincher: what Irving Kristol declared of this former political Democrat is true of us all. Usually it happens during the long transition from youth into maturity, but it is a certifiable guarantee of life. At some point in time, usually when we least expect it, all of us realize that we can’t control our surroundings, that the attempt to control our lives is like trying to lasso the wind, pointless and taxing. We certainly try, but we fail and fail and fail. The irony of our optimism is that we generally have very little rationale for it. They called World War I the "war to end all wars."Can wars be ended? WWII proved the optimism completely unfounded. All our attempts to make the world better and all our striving to bring peace and good-will upon a deeply troubled world are endeavors that begin with an effervescent burst of fervency of hope and idealism but finish with a sudden collapse of despair and cynicism. We begin our lives with the odd notion that reality will serve our vision and fulfill our agenda, but reality sneaks up from behind and turns our worlds upside down. Reality turns out to be not a servant, but a master. Reality reveals itself not as a kind friend, but as a harsh enemy. In the dark alleys of our lives, we are jumped and mugged by reality.

Yes, reality is a downer, and control is an illusion. Believe me, I am not going out of my way to make anyone feel depressed and distressed about life. On the contrary, I am merely pointing out the rough road to wisdom that Solomon advised both young and old in Ecclesiastes. Since I have been reading Ecclesiastes, it has been on my mind, and when I came across Kristol’s political “conversion experience,” I was struck by how apropos the epithet “mugged by reality” is to the book of Ecclesiastes. In fact, if I were to write a summary of Ecclesiastes, I would write this: “Ecclesiastes is a book of wisdom literature that describes how humans are mugged by reality and rescued by deity.” Being mugged by reality is not so depressing when one considers that reality, as it stands in a Fallen world, is no match for Deity.

Almost everyone is familiar with the hallmark words of Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities!”Does this mean that all the pleasures that life grants us are futile and worldly? No, that is just a common misconception rooted in a misinterpretation of Solomon's argument in Ecclesiastes. I have been reading from the Good News Translation of the Bible and I was surprised to find that the translation uses the word “useless” in place of “vanity.” The first chapter thus opens with, “It is useless, useless, said the Philosopher. Life is useless, all useless. You spend your life working, laboring, and what do you have to show for it? Generations come and generations go, but the world stays just the same.”

The world stays just the same. Surely that was how the American generation felt when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. In fact, they must have been convinced that the world was going to hell in a handbasket when Americans liberated the concentration camps in 1945. Yes, Ecclesiastes is pervaded with this sobering message that, from birth to death, we are persistently and relentlessly mugged by reality. “You can’t straighten out what is crooked,” writes Solomon. “You can’t count things that aren’t there.” Being mugged by reality is frustrating. Surely Irving Kristol understood. Flaming liberals are known for being bleeding hearts, the type of people who believe that the world can change if only we gave peace a chance. But surely men like Kristol also arrived at a rather frustrating conclusion, one that mirrors the Philosopher’s conclusions in Ecclesiastes: our ideals of peace, love, and good-will, as well-intentioned as they are, are unachievable and hallucinatory apart from Deity. Man cannot achieve universal concord and satisfaction because we cannot conquer the enemy when it is ourselves. The most frustrating experience of life is to put your hope in the thing that is the source of your hopelessness. “I have seen everything done in this world,” Solomon apparently boasts. “And I tell you,” he adds, “it is all useless. It is like chasing the wind.”

Chasing the wind. Being mugged by reality. Ecclesiastes, at first glance, paints a bleak picture. If life is indeed useless, if all is vain, then why even bother to write about it? Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die! Carpe Diem! We are trapped in an eternal cycle of search and denial; in other words, we all know what the Rolling Stones are talking about when they repeat the well-known chorus, “I can’t get no satisfaction. But I try and I try and I try.” We try, but reality dogs our tracks and unleashes itself as harsh, cruel, and that which, like a long sharp pin, bursts the bubbles of our most cherished dreams and ideals. Solomon certainly tried. Chapter 2 of Ecclesiastes reveals that he tried by means of wine, women, and entertainment. His conclusion after these things? Still bleak. “So life came to mean nothing to me, because everything in it had brought me nothing but trouble. It had all been useless; I had been chasing the wind.”

Is there any hope? Are our ideals and dreams just hallucinations of people who desire a crutch or of people who need opium to dull the pain of life? If you think that Ecclesiastes is a hopeless book which the church fathers might have been mistaken about to include in the canon, then think again. The real and final conclusion of Ecclesiastes is that, even though reality ruthlessly mugs us, man is not left in the dark. Living is not an act of vanity because God has not abandoned human beings to the consequences of their own self-worship and pursuit of meaning outside Himself. Solomon does not use the premises in Ecclesiastes to draw a conclusion that man is a featherless biped whose doom is sealed and whose perennial fate is to desire satisfaction without getting satisfaction. God indeed could justly give us the punishment of Tantalus. Like Tantalus, we could be eternally condemned to reach for the fruit of a tree only for the fruit to be jerked out of reach each time our hands extend up to it. Is not this the very definition of Hell? To be condemned to eternal dissatisfaction is truly the most tortuous and hellish punishment that man could invite upon himself.

TANTALUS

What is satisfaction? How do we get it? Well, says Solomon, no one finds satisfaction. Rather, satisfaction finds man. Since man is inclined to search for satisfaction in wine, people, and entertainment, there is no way in heaven or hell that man will be satisfied until that which he has rejected decides to give to man that which he needs most desperately. Satisfaction is a gift. “Go ahead- eat your food and be happy; drink your wine and be cheerful. It’s all right with God. Always look happy and cheerful. Enjoy life with the one you love, as long as you live the useless life that God has given you in this world.” It seems like an ironic and contradictory twist but, life, says Solomon, is to be cherished and enjoyed. Sure, every man will die and he will take absolutely nothing with him to the grave, but if you have been sought out by the Satisfier, then everything which is vain and useless is put back into its proper place (see Ch. 3 of Ecclesiastes). Wine is not the Satisfier. Relationships are not the Satisfier. Distraction and entertainment are not the Satisfier. To put your hope in them to satisfy you and save you is to render them vain and useless. For their “use” was never to save, and thus, in our pursuit of them as saviors, we make them “useless.” Their purpose was never to fill the deep cavern of man’s soul, thus, in our pursuit of them as satisfiers, we make them “vain” and empty. Ecclesiastes, remember, is a book about being mugged by reality. Being mugged by reality occurs the moment we wake up to the shocking fact of fallen life that what we thought could satisfy us is not satisfactory. It is useless and vain to seek satisfaction where it is not to be found. You might as well go chase the wind.

Suppose you get locked out of your car. You’re frustrated. You have appointments to catch, meetings to be at, and errands to run. In your frustration and desire to be punctual, you run into your house and grab a banana. You run back out and try to stuff the banana into the key-hole. Nope, not working. Your neighbor glances at you through the window and opens the door. “What are you doing with that banana?” he yells. “Trying to unlock my car,” you reply. “You moron!” your neighbor cries in disbelief. “Use a key for crying out loud!”

Trying to find satisfaction apart from God is like trying to unlock the car door with a banana. The endeavor is vain and hopeless. The banana is useless. The banana was not made to open car doors; it was made to accompany your breakfast and to satisfy your physical hunger. When it serves its true purpose, it is good and satisfactory. When it is used for other purposes, it fails you and you feel unsatisfied. Our attempts to find satisfaction in life apart from God are truly the acts of such a moron. It is insanity to deify the God-given pleasures in our lives because there is simply no replacement for God. A banana will not do. Only a key, with its specifically designed grooves, will fit and open the door. “So I realized that all we can do is be happy and do the best we can while we are still alive. All of us should eat and drink and enjoy what we have worked for. It is God’s gift.” Satisfaction is a gift. For morons like us, being mugged by reality is only the beginning of the journey towards Joy and satisfaction. Being rescued by deity is the key.

Oppressions of Power

2011-11-29T22:51:00.001-07:00

“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power.”

~Abraham Lincoln

The sound of background music in the food court is matched only by the hustle and bustle of shoppers as they prepare for Christmas. It is a day like any other on which friends meet with friends and family with family. Like any other day of the year, thoughts are most likely consumed by the day's agenda, presents to be bought, schedules to be planned, and meetings to catch. In the blink of an eye, the various lunch conversations are interrupted by a loud chord and a familiar theme. A woman stands up and starts singing. "Hallelujah!" she sings, and, one by one, others follow suit...."For the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth."

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” wrote Lord Acton in 1887. One wonders what it was exactly that led Acton to make this comment- whether he expressed it merely as theoretical moral commentary on the nature of man or if he had witnessed first-hand the absolute corruption that inhabits the thrones and positions of power. Then there is the question of whether man is corrupted by power because power brings out the worst in man or whether power itself has an external corrupting force? Whatever the case, and whatever you might personally think about man and power, it is an undeniable fact of life- an irreversible cause and effect demonstrable endlessly by history- that when power is placed into the lap of man, whether by birth or by achievement, terrible things are likely to happen. As much as we would like to see only the best in humankind, none of us in the common bond of humanity are immune to such corruption. Those who believe they are immune are most likely to fall. Those who let the power get to their heads are the most likely to become completely blind to themselves.

I believe that we must never underestimate the capacity of man to abuse even the best gifts which God gives him, yet power and authority are never to blame for the abuses which man chooses to commit, for, indeed, man chooses to abuse power; neither power nor God induce him to make such poor and subhuman choices. Far be it from us to attribute corruption to the Creator or to His blessings bestowed upon men. Fact is, only that which is personal can be evil, and power is not personal as man is. Power is found in many aspects of life- position, authority, title, inheritance, and calling. It is a good thing, like all of God’s gifts, but evil is an active and malignant twister, a distorter, and a perverter. It can take the most pure and delightful things in life and recreate them into forms thoroughly malicious, intentionally malevolent, and utterly corrupt. If viewed in this light, power does not really corrupt man, as Lord Acton wrote. More accurately, man corrupts power. It is the habitual plight of man to take very good things- alcohol, sex, money, entertainment, technology, etc. - and attempt to render them such things which they can never be in their created and finite status. Power, like money, happens to be one of the more perilous gifts of God because it lures man into the web of his own inherent twisted desires to rule, to control, and to play God. As Abraham Lincoln noticed, adversity is endurable. It tests man’s mettle and endurance. Power, however, is the ultimate secret-sharer. It reveals man’s character. It is usually only a matter of time before the curtain is torn and the old man playing a great wizard is revealed. Even the leaders in our history books whom we esteem and idolize were men with clay feet. You want to know a man? Give him power and authority and see what he does with them.

Like all good gifts, however, power and authority are blessed things when they are used purposefully for good. All human beings want leaders- whether pastors, or bosses, or presidents, or kings, or parents- whom they can look up to with respect and love. These are the types of leaders to whom you could say- as the knights of Camelot said to King Arthur or the disciples to Jesus Christ- “we will follow you to the death.” Such leadership is difficult because it is so demanding in its sacrificial and redemptive qualities. It is a leadership that does not dwell in ivory towers, far removed from the people and from their troubles. It is the type of leadership that is characterized by humility, by concern, by descending from the throne of position and title to walk amongst the followers as one of them, in order to sympathize with their cares and understand their needs.

One does not need to be a history scholar to realize that this ideal of leadership, this example of power used rightly, is terrifyingly absent. In fact, a perfect leader who has not, in some sense or other, misused his power is all but non-existent, except for one man who claimed to be a King and yet washed his friends’ feet, rode into town on a donkey, dissuaded the use of force and violence, ignored the mockery of the masses, drank and had dinner with tax collectors and prostitutes, rebuked the moral-majority teachers of the law, remained silent to ridiculously unjust accusations, and embraced a criminal’s death in the place of those who accused him. This type of man you will not find in any of the corporate leadership books of all the American CEOs.This type of man you will not find in books in line with “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” This type of man you will not find exalted to the status of the academic gurus with their PhDs and doctorates. No, this type of man you will find ridiculed as weak, passive, wimpy, and forever removed from self-actualization. Ironic, isn’t it? The one man in the vast and blood-filled history of our planet who actually used power as it was meant to be used was branded with the names of charlatan and rebel-rouser. His power and authority used well revealed His character. And yet we esteemed Him not.

The great difficulty that attends any amount of power and leadership is that same great struggle of conscience that attends any human activity. For it is not power which changes us; power or authority or leadership offer us the chance to make yet another great moral decision in the epic battle of life. Shall we, like King Richard III, abuse power to gain our own interests, our own ends, our own goals, and our own self-glory? For once we have made that choice, the outcome will always be bloody in so many unanticipated ways. Even Richard III was clever enough to understand his own foul intentions: “I must be married to my brother's daughter, or else my kingdom stands on brittle glass. Murder her brothers, and then marry her! Uncertain way of gain! But I am in so far in blood that sin will pluck on sin.Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.” For once we have made that decision, frequently without full consciousness of it, to pursue our own goals, we must, in no uncertain sense, turn our heads and shut our eyes to the consequences. We must become blind to the ramifications of trampling people in that pursuit since obstacles in the way of power are dispensable and peripheral to our vision. And, no, this is not a medieval phenomenon only in the days when kings killed willy-nilly, and neither does it refer only to the great tyrants of history who committed genocide as if they were ordering a dinner-party. Power can be abused by us all, and we must all make the choice to either put humanity before self-pursuit, or else self-pursuit must and will discard humanity along the way.

The most disturbing thing I find about modern society is that we have fallen prey to the lies of “business.” Business seemingly makes an exception to the rule when it treats power as a skill and a commodity that some possess to rule and control others as resources and commodities themselves. This has created a trickle effect which has in turn infiltrated church ministries and “businesses.” Trampling people in the pursuit of advancement and promotion is like the law of gravity nowadays. It’s just the “way it is.” It’s like natural selection; might makes right and the fittest alone will survive.

Now, here’s the thing, such an approach to power is typical of man’s nature. However, if anything, I am disturbed by how common it is in Christian businesses and organizations. I wonder if not only have we succumbed to cultural ideas, but we have allowed it by keeping silent. There is a reason why so many journalists jump at the chance of exposing the corruption of revered church leaders. To expose hypocrisy and the corruption of power is one of the morbid delights of a postmodern society that believes in nothing and doubts everything. Most injustices are committed under the thin disguise of it being business, not personal. From all these experiences I have learned one horrendous fact- power and authority reveal that humans are truly monsters at heart. In addition, I have come to conclude that only, only, only Jesus Christ can save such monsters as we all are at heart. I have also learned, and I hope to keep it near to my heart as I grow older, that power is never, never worth that which must be sacrificed in its pursuit. Human beings are worth more than all the positions, promotions, accolades, and riches that the world can provide. To trample them in pursuit of our twisted desires is to trample yourself, to kill part of your humanity, and to invite misery into your life as a sure and unwelcome hitch-hiking ghost. Power is a good thing, but power and humanity are never mutually exclusive, and I believe that the closer we are to humanity, the more blessings God will bestow upon our roles of leadership.

I love Christmas more than all the other holidays of the calendar year. Here’s why: in the blood-soaked, wretched, disgusting, and sorrow-filled pages of our history as human beings there have been leaders of every color, caliber, and capacity. Each leader has proven with predictability and to exhaustion the chronic disease of mankind. In the words of Solomon that disease is man’s oppression of man. “Then I looked again at all the injustice that goes on in this world. The oppressed were crying, and no one would help them. No one would help them, because their oppressors had power on their side.I envy those who are dead and gone; they are better off than those who are still alive. But better off than either are those who have never been born, who have never seen the injustice that goes on in this world.” Injustice and corruption follow mankind like flies gather on dead corpses. Leaders come and go like fads and fashions; each of them, as we in America would know, promising deliverance and prosperity. Change. Hope. Progress. And yet….these words echo off the barren walls of the world with as much substance as shadows which the Sun casts on fruitless gardens. It seems that for 364 days of the year we put our hope in shadows and echoes, each and every one of them revealing man’s deep and conscious need to be rescued from our incurable addiction to our own destruction.

But on the days of the Christmas season we hear songs in the white-washed aisles of Walmart and the bustling corridors of the mega-mall with lyrics of bold hope and certain salvation. In the blink of an eye, we have songs and carols that remind us that a perfect King has truly arrived, a King who is omnipotent and One who will reign forever and ever. Yes, the leaders of our society have failed us. Yes, poverty and crime are still rampant. Yes, distraction and drugs wane with time. Yes, alcoholics return to drink and drug-addicts to injections. Yet the bold hope speaks with confidence that a Messiah was born on a real date and with real intention to attack the root of man’s problem- man himself. Such a leader has never existed before, because all the leaders we are accustomed with have done much to alleviate man’s external problems- poverty, crime, injustice- but none have ever claimed to have the power to change man himself or the power to crush man’s oppression of man by changing that which makes man oppressive- his heart. Extraordinary and thrilling is the news of Christmas: a Leader was born to excel all leaders in terms of compassion, mercy, power, and integrity. The news is so good that I believe we are all tempted to think it too good to be true. Sometimes it takes a flash mob to remind us that Christmas is about celebrating a King who is pure of heart and powerful enough to redeem. The faith that permeates Christmas is just that: the belief that the news is both good and true. Jesus Christ is the King Arthur of history and fact; He is the “once and future King.” In the oppressive and corrupt history of humankind, we set aside one day of the year to give special focus to the reality that there is only One in “whose Name all oppression shall cease.” This Leader we should be glad to follow to the death because man was created for no other King.

The Grand Adventure of Being Good

2011-11-17T16:50:00.001-07:00

“Before I can live with other folks I’ve got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”

~Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“The road must be trod, but it will be very hard. And neither strength nor wisdom will carry us far upon it. This quest may be attempted by the weak with as much hope as the strong. Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of this world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.”

~J.R.R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring

“God grant me the courage not to give up what I think is right even though I think it is hopeless.”

~Chester W. Nimitz

The military career of Admiral Chester W. Nimitz is a fascinating one. Nimitz lived through and fought in both World Wars and commanded many prestigious cruisers and submarines. He took on the rank of Admiral only ten days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and was a crucial part of stopping the Japanese advance on the seas. In both the Battle of the Coral Sea and the Battle of Midway in 1942, Nimitz successfully defeated the Japanese navy by means of carefully strategized offensives. In 1945, at the war’s conclusion, Nimitz was nominated as the Chief of Naval Operations. Amidst the moral chaos and profuse bloodshed that was WWII, Chester W. Nimitz was proof that the active force of good is a formidable opponent.

“Today we rule Germany, tomorrow, the world.” Yes, these words sound like they issued from a dark-cloaked, red-eyed, devil-horned stereotypical arch-villain from a B movie, but they are nonetheless the actual words of a very real man, Adolph Hitler. Hitler seems to represent to the modern eye the epitome of evil, the apex of depravity, the clearest and most empirical proof that modernity has not yet cured man of his capacity for cruelty, and yet we must all acknowledge that unspeakable evil is hardly exclusive to this one mortal man. If psychologists are correct, then evil is either a nebulous concept that defies rational explanation or a symptom of a disturbed mind. “How could they…?” we constantly hear TV newscasters repeat, their voices redolent with confusion and unbelief. What could have possibly happened to them in their childhood? Were they abused? How could they denigrate to such a state? What was their motivation?

Evil truly has no motivation but self. Evil is active in the same way that cancer metastasizes. It is intent upon total domination, which is why men such as Winston Churchill were wise as well as realistic to oppose appeasement. It is never benign and it is never satisfied with anything less than expansion and occupation. Proof of humanity’s proclivity for hatred and violence is, as G.K. Chesterton once said, a fact of life for which no man requires the Bible. However, man’s denial of an innate sense of perversion within mankind in toto is as pervasive as is the evil of man itself. This is why it is in the modern/post-modern interest to signal the death of “sin” with the advent of “syndromes.” For example, in a playful mood, I once got on a psychiatric counseling site and asked verbatim “Why do I feel so much hatred?” The answer, in my opinion, was less than helpful. “What have you been taking for it?” Anti-hatred pills?

Is hatred a disease? And, if it is, what does that make us? Well, for one, it radically destroys the notions and traditional concepts of humanity when it comes to value, significance, responsibility, and free will. If man is not responsible, then Hitler must be condoned, along with the Ted Bundys, the Charles Mansons, and the Jack the Rippers that have uncomfortably intruded into our consciousness as clear signals that not all is well with the universe. W.H. Auden used to believe that truth was relative, until the age of Hitler arrived and he was forced to a life of fear and secrecy as a Jew under the force of blind rage and active hatred. It is then that Auden penned these lines: “Either we serve the Unconditional/ Or some Hitlerian monster will supply/ An iron convention to do evil by.” This is a legitimate dichotomy: either we accept that truth is absolute and condemn evil as an agent of willful human choice or we champion the relativity of truth and become enslaved to the concept that “might is right.” Either truth and morality are absolute, or they are not.

Atticus Finch is one of the most shining examples of a common hero in all of American literature. It is he who said that a person’s conscience “doesn’t abide by majority rule.” For conscience is what every human being must live with 24 hours a day, despite the manifold ways of numbing it and silencing it via drink or sex or entertainment-distraction. Conscience is what motivated so many of the men in service during WWII to take up arms and lay down their lives. Conscience is what influenced Nimitz to declare, as a variation on the traditional “Serenity Prayer,” that doing what is right is more important than doing what is expedient, or self-aggrandizing, or safe, or apathetic, or expected. Sometimes conscience even tells us to do things that seem utterly hopeless. Conscience is what tells each and every one of us that what is true, good, and beautiful is of more weight and significance than all the wealth and riches of Las of Las Vegas and Wall Street combined. As Tolkien wisely observed, it is often the small and the seemingly worthless who have such priorities straight in life, while the eyes of the “great” are on the things that will promise much but deliver little. One of the reasons why Neville Chamberlain has gone down in history with such a tainted reputation is that most of us realize- at some point in our lives- that sometimes doing what is right is an act of war.Si vis pacem, para bellum. If you want peace, prepare for war. If evil is active and on the offense, then we should expect nothing less of good. A character from the movie The Boondock Saints says it well: “Now we must all fear evil men. But there is another kind of evil that we must fear most. And that is the indifference of good men.”

Modern society has gotten an odd idea ramrodded into its religion that being “good” is a stale and trite act of people who don’t drink wine, who don’t go to the cinema, who don’t watch TV, and who don’t engage in intellectual conversation. In fact, sometimes the Church has contributed to this wing-tipped perception of saintliness. As the movie Pleasantville portrays, the life of the saint is not only black-and-white, it is the consummate killjoy and the ultimate bore. To be good is to be naïve. To be good is to be apathetic. To be good is to discourage spontaneous expressions of joy and humor. To be good is to hate Harry Potter and shut the radio off when Lady Gaga airwaves come on. To be good is to paint pictures of Noah’s Ark on our nursery walls and name our children Job, and Hezekiah, and Patience. To be good is to live a life that has fenced itself in from culture and conversation and art. We might as well come out and say it: To be good is to be boring.

First let me say that these are false perceptions at best and partially-true flaws at worst. If it is difficult to comprehend evil, it is likewise difficult to comprehend good, and in our quest to understand what holiness is, we often reduce it to something containable, and nothing is more containable than a catalogue of do’s and don’ts. It may make the approach easier on a superficial level, but it does no more to make a person good than painting stripes on a horse makes it into a zebra. Being good is never quite easy, but neither is it impossible. I’ve always appreciated the way in which C.S. Lewis describes good: “There is but one good- That is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” I think there is nothing more marvelous, nothing more shocking, and nothing more overwhelming than the goodness that we find in God. It is of such a nature, so insanely awesome, that to look upon God is to invite certain death. Is it not a little bit intriguing that we cannot even handle the nature of true goodness? What then has led us to believe that goodness is so containable and tame?

To make goodness into a containable system of needless boundaries and predictable actions is to defy the infinite goodness of the Creator in such a way that transforms the human life as a journey into the human life as a concentration camp, with ourselves as the jailers. Chesterton called this form of manipulated and corrosive goodness a form of madness. Madness which does not develop by “breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.” There is evil in such a distortion because evil is just that: predictable, repetitive, destructive, and imprisoning. When the character in the movie Pleasantville plucks an apple from the tree- in an obvious reflection of Eden- the world starts to turn from black-and-white into multi-color. The message? Evil is interesting and enlightening. Defying God is “breaking out.” But I fear that the writers of this movie have got it all wrong. Committing adultery, for instance, as one of the characters in the movie does, is never beautiful and never satisfying. It is blandly predictable in its destructiveness, and it is indelibly confining in its circle of misery. The problem is not that we have “tried on” goodness like a coat and found it lacking; the problem is that we have “tried on” goodness and found the price-tag to be far too expensive for our meager budgets. We are not willing to give up our money even for something so alluring. We refuse to step out of the door because life is full of risks and demands, and to be good is a tremendously impractical and trouble-arousing thing.

In his book Finding God in Lord of the Rings, Jim Ware sums up one of the major themes of the trilogy: “The call to follow Christ is a call to adventure- inconvenient, imperious, and irresistible.” Many of us do not think of the Christian life in terms of fairy tale; we’d rather see it as something practical, blasé, and factual; again, something containable, as if the reading of one’s Bible or the scheduling of one’s prayers are the litmus test for a person’s goodness quotient. However, one of the reasons why we have so many misconceptions about goodness is that we have stripped Christianity of its inherent fairy tale qualities. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were adamant believers in Christianity as the only fairy tale, or the only myth, to become history or fact. Or, in the words of Buechner: “That is the fairy tale of the Gospel with, of course, the one crucial difference from all other fairy-tales, which is that the claim made for it is that it is true, that it not only happened once upon a time, but has kept on happening ever since and is happening still.” Christianity is not a system of piety; it is a priceless invitation to the most grand and significant adventure that any human being could ever imagine, although artists and poets and authors certainly do a remarkable job at mirroring its poignant realities. The Bible is not a textbook or an answer book, because the story of redemption is not about practical solutions to our problems; rather, it is infinitely vaster: the solution to our lost-ness, the panacea for our dead-ness, for we will wander aimlessly in the wilderness until Christ makes us apart of the greatest story ever told. It is like Gandalf forcefully pushing Bilbo outside of his cozy hobbit hole, assuring him that Providence has chosen him for greater deeds than eating and smoking pipe weed. It is full of peril and sadness like a tragedy and yet drenched with joy and hope like a comedy; it is the ultimate, factual tragi-comedy, or, as Dante would have it, the Divine Comedy. It is totally unexpected, totally magical, totally inspiring, and totally true.

One of the best pieces of advice anyone could ever give me is the simple exhortation: “Do what’s right.” Do what’s right and let the chips fall where they fall. And that begs the question: why is being good so incredibly hard? We all know it can be demanding, so why is it so demanding? Are we just that awful that we can’t even begin to be good people? Being bad just comes so naturally because it so intertwined with the expectations we humans have to serve and honor ourselves first of all. It is easy to sit on the throne and dictate. It is, on the other hand, taxing to take a day’s journey outside your kingdom to examine the conditions of the impoverished in your city. Selflessness and charity may be the hardest things in the world, but we are still aware that they are also some of the most beautiful things in the world. That is one thing that is so striking about the nature of good: it is a relentless pursuit of what is right in the face of all obstacles. Doing what’s right when everyone else is doing what’s wrong. Doing what’s right when people think you’re nuts. Doing what’s right when you must step outside the circle of popularity. Doing what’s right when you will be forced to put yourself and what you love in peril. Doing what’s right when your job or reputation is on the line. Doing what’s right when it means sacrificing what you want. Doing what’s right when everything and everyone surrounding you is telling you to do otherwise. That is why being good is the quintessential adventure of a lifetime. One cannot just sit and idle his time away on a golden throne, being fanned and eating grapes. It would make for an utterly dull story in any case. You have peasants to tend to, criminals to catch, policies to create, and a kingdom of human beings that require your dedication and your active pursuit of good; lest apathy and indifference make idle tyrants of us all.

Christianity is indeed the grand adventure of being good. Being good is the transformative work of the magic of that King who will return again like King Arthur to restore peace and prosperity. The adventure is never a matter of when; it is ever a matter of if. If you accept the invitation and have counted the cost, then you will begin an adventure-laden highway to Heaven. It won’t be easy, but the journey is not the destination, and, as we all know, every fairy tale ends with a joyous wedding. As Proverbs says, Wisdom beckons earnestly on street corners, crying out to fools that no evil that man can commit is comparable with infinite goodness. When the wicked draw their bows, God laughs. God knows that, although powerful, seductive, and destructive, evil is a pointless endeavor and a futile attempt at writing one’s story without being able to live it. Even when things seem hopeless, we can still cling to the truth that what is right has within itself the seeds of its own reward, while evil conceals the seeds of its own destruction. Might does not make right; right will eventually prove itself mightier still. It is courage that we need, and that Jesus Christ can supply in spades. Tossed upon tumultuous and stormy seas of adventure with the Captain of wind and weather at helm, what have we to fear? Christ beckons us all: welcome to the Comedy; join the adventure.

“A Christian does not think God will love us because we are good,

But that God will make us good because He loves us.”

~C.S.L.

Fairy Tale Truths: The Nightingale

2011-11-15T08:29:00.016-07:00

" 'The little singing bird flies far and wide, to the poor fisherman, and the peasant's home, to numbers who are far from you and your court. I love your heart more than your crown, and yet there is an odour of sanctity round the crown!' "

~Hans Christian Anderson, The Nightingale

“Listen! Whoever is thirsty, come to the water!
Whoever has no money can come, buy, and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk. You don’t have to pay; it's free!
Why do you spend money on what cannot nourish you
and your wages on what does not satisfy you?
Listen carefully to me:
Eat what is good, and enjoy the best foods.
Open your ears, and come to me!
Listen so that you may live!"

~Isaiah 55:1-3, GWtrns.

I just finished reading a Hans Christian Anderson fairy story entitled “The Nightingale.” Next to the “Snow Queen,” I believe that this sweet, short little vignette is one of Anderson’s very finest. Like the “Snow Queen,” the story is able to express great truth through a small vehicle. Fairy tales excel at that. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Sometimes the greatest of things come in the smallest of packages- like a wedding ring, like a get-well card, like an aphorism, like a stable. Forget the Walt Disney movies; they are far too censored in any case. Oh, and don’t get me started on the “Circle of Life.” I hate it when that song gets stuck inside my head.

If you would like to try the original fairy tales- whether from Hans Christian Anderson or La Fontaine or the Grimm Brothers- be prepared to be a little startled. A good fairy tale is abundant with peril and the lurking possibility of defeat; we hyper-realistic moderns tend to think that children can’t “handle” the dark side of life. That is nonsense. What a child needs most of all is a fairy tale that confronts the dark side head-on, embodied by all the dragons, witches, ogres, and monsters necessary. If there is one thing I have learned about children- especially from my own experience as one- is that they really do not appreciate condescension or deceit in any way. If you are going to make “children’s literature,” then do not make commercial fiction that is primarily focused on ridiculous and exaggerated issues such as school-yard bullying, usually only because it is “National Anti-Bullying Week.” Sure, they will confront these things in real life, but how boring and humiliating for a child to have to listen at night to his mother or father reading a monotonous and propaganda-filled treatise which instructs how to be a “good child” and how to both discourage bullies and conquer his “inner bully.” No, these things fail to be art because they are too socially and commercially aware, too consciously polemical and condescending. Children deserve better.

The desire of a child is for adventure, pirates, ogres, princesses, sword fights, and the final conflict. These are healthy, human urges that really ought not to dissipate as we get older, if it were not for the fact that cynicism grows in proportion to one’s age. Fairy-tales are the most spectacular vehicle for profound truths. If we were wise like children, we might be able to see that. Of course, Disney did a terrific job of ripping the initial fairy-tales of all that made them weighty and inspiring. There are still truths left, for the magic of a fairy tale is difficult to squelch, but sometimes I do believe- in our insane psychological proclivity for social issues- we have not made even fairy tales in our culture into mediums for political correctness and social conformity. A good fairy tale catches in its net an absolute truth, not a transient cultural doctrine or fad. Which is why I can say with confidence that all movies in line with Avatar, as imaginative as they may be with all their spectacle and fame, will forever remain colossal failures. When you can see right through a story, like looking through a window, and can determine how every character and every plot line is being manipulated to support without opposition or complexity a single belief, then you have encountered bad art. However, if you can eventually see how the threads of a story, how the characters involved, and how the emergent themes converge into a climactic conclusion like the completion of a beautiful tapestry, then you most likely have encountered good art. No matter what the message or however true and beautiful, you can still mess up when it comes to the translation of a message through its medium. A good message can have a bad medium, which is why I often cringe when it comes to well-meaning Christian art.

In fact, I believe that fairy-tales, when they are successful in capturing absolute truths which apply to every generation of men, are one of the best vehicles for a Christian artist. In a sense, Jesus told fairy tales. They were always purposeful and intentional, but they never denigrated into propaganda or condescension. In fact, most of the stories were so well-told with such delicate complexity and intentional nuances of meaning that most of the disciples were left dumb-founded. They were left in the state which I like to call “the literalist trap.” A literalist is stuck in a box of literal meaning. Parables operate on a level of meaning that transcends literality: figurative language. Simile and metaphor are difficult for the literalist to comprehend because he is stuck on one level of meaning and generally unwilling to ascend to the next. The literalist will thus view fairy-tales with that abhorrent suspicious, cynical adult eye- they are just fun little stories that entertain children on a superficial level. Nothing is farther from the truth. In fact, the child who cherishes fairy-stories is comprehending truth on a level that an adult has either long forgotten or is stolidly incapable of. Kids, humans for that matter, want to be shown a sensible world that is no less realistic for all of its magical and surrealistic trappings. Stories are not about fact; they are about Truth. Get a science textbook if you want raw facts; grab a fiction story if you want Truth. Fictional stories are about an intimate encounter with Truth in such a way that Truth becomes more and more comprehensible. Jesus knew this, and that is why his responses were in the form of stories.

Ok, enough “preaching” on my part. Now for a demonstration. While I was reading “The Nightingale,” I was struck by the sheer creativity and beauty of the theme and how incredibly interweaved it was within the plot. According to Flannery O’Connor, “The meaning of the story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it.” Anderson did a phenomenal job of creating a magical story that has much to say about the nature of faith and the nature of man.

Here’s a brief summary of the story: Once upon a time, a Chinese Emperor owned a lush, beautiful, and extensive garden. Unbeknownst to the Emperor, a nightingale with a mellifluous voice dwelt on the garden grounds. Whenever the nightingale sang, the tourists were enthralled by the beauty of its melody. One day the Emperor became aware of the existence of this notorious bird. The kitchen maid, per the Emperor’s request, sought out and discovered the famous nightingale and brought him to the court to sing in the Emperor’s presence. The nightingale sang so sweetly that tears fell from his eyes. The Emperor then required the nightingale to stay in a special cage inside the court, with only the ability to have an outing once a day on a ribbon leash. However, one day a special parcel arrived at the court from the Emperor of Japan. Inside was an artificial replica of the nightingale with the addition of glittering bracelets and breast-pins. Soon after, the artificial bird- which could sing by being wound up- was the new marvel of the kingdom. The real nightingale lost his place within the court and was banished from the kingdom. The artificial bird began to break down over the next five years, and in the course of that time, the Emperor of China became very sick and was lying on his deathbed. The Emperor was so distraught that he yelled at the artificial bird to sing for him, but the bird remained quiet. Just as the Emperor began to think that his struggle with death was over, the real nightingale turned up on the window-sill and began to sing, driving Death from his perch over the Emperor. The Emperor asked the nightingale how he could ever repay him, but the nightingale said that the tears the Emperor shed listening to his music were reward enough. The Emperor asked the nightingale to stay with him in the court, but the nightingale said that he would only ever sing if he could retain his freedom and sing from the branches. The Emperor conceded and his health was restored while the nightingale returned to his windowsill every morning.

The most wonderful thing about fiction is that there are an incredibly diverse range of applications, but I will demonstrate with the one that was foremost in my mind while reading the story. The Emperor is a fantastic representation of man. In fact, the Emperor is so much like the man who encounters the gospel of Christ and, in his enthusiasm and zeal, he believes that he can “capture” Christ and “tame” Him. “Is there such a bird in my kingdom, and in my own garden into the bargain, and I have never heard of it?” says the Emperor. Bring him inside and put him in a cage. Tell all the world to marvel at Him, but make sure that He stays within your parameters. Let the beauty of His message be confined to your courts so that you can attain further glory for yourself. And once you have confined Him to your courts…what happens? Out of nowhere, an artificial bird arrives. “When the bird was wound up, it could sing one of the songs the real one sang, and it wagged its tail which glittered with silver and gold.” Without realizing it, we have created an artificial Christ to suit our needs and advance our positions. We can “wind” Him up and listen when we choose. He will sing what we want him to sing and He will sing when we want him to sing. The Emperor even attempted to have the artificial bird sing with the real nightingale, but as Anderson relates, “They did not get on very well, for the real nightingale sang in its own way, and the artificial one could only sing waltzes.”

After the real nightingale has been banished, the artificial one begins to break down at a critical time in the Emperor’s life. Isn’t that also true with man? When we have banished the real Christ, whether we realize it or not, we invite into our lives something that is utterly mechanical, predictable, and totally soul-less. The Christ we think we have invited into our lives is actually a replica, and a sorry one at that, for it cannot even “work” for you when your life is slipping away. When Death enters into the Emperor’s chambers, he brings with him the memories of all the Emperor’s bad deeds. “‘Do you remember that?’ whispered one after another. ‘Do you remember this?’ and they told him so many things that perspiration poured down his face.’” Without the real Christ, these terrifying bad deeds stand to condemn us while the artificial Christ, the Christ of our imaginations, is an automaton of powerlessness. “’Music, music!’ shrieked the emperor. ‘You precious little golden bird, sing, sing! I have loaded you with precious stones, and even hung my golden slipper round your neck, sing, I tell you, sing!’ But the bird stood silent, there was nobody to wind it up, so of course it could not go.”

Not all the precious gold in his kingdom could make the bird sing. Not all the good deeds lavished upon the replica we make out of Christ can save us from a final condemnation. We have banished that which would save from its own accord freely and embraced that which is artificial and incapable of salvation. The Emperor “saw it was Death sitting upon his chest, wearing his golden crown.” But, as every fairy tale will ultimately reveal, redemption will draw near. “Suddenly, close to the window, there was a burst of lovely song; it was the living nightingale, perched on a branch outside. It had heard of the emperor’s need, and had come to bring comfort and hope to him.”

The real Savior is ready to save; He asks only that we do not invite Him into our kingdom, but that we enter into His. He asks that we not put him on a leash and set down the conditions, but that we find our freedom and redemption in His freedom and His willingness to save without cost. As the real nightingale sang, all the specters of the Emperor’s past faded and dissipated, along with Death with the emperor’s golden crown. Our response is much similar to the Emperor’s: “’Thanks, thanks!’ said the emperor; ‘you heavenly little bird, I know you! I banished you from my kingdom, and yet you have charmed the evil visions away from my bed by your song, and even Death away from my heart! How can I ever repay you?’” In light of the real Savior’s act of sacrifice, our natural response is to automatically inquire as to how we can repay in light of our inexusable betrayal. After our willful act of banishment, we inquire as to what we can do to make up for it. Yet the nightingale asks for nothing in terms of repayment, for “I brought the tears to your eyes, the very first time I sang to you, and I shall never forget it! Those are the jewels that gladden the heart of a singer.” The nightingale does not covet jewels or a position in the court. He will not be confined to the courts of a man nor accept man's riches in return for His favor. It was sufficient that the Emperor’s initial response to his song was a genuine one, emotionally overflowing with humility and gratitude. Likewise, the Savior does not require our deeds or our futile acts of obeisance for our repayment; He wants to see a sincere acceptance of infinite beauty and infinite mercy without cost, for it dawned even upon the Emperor that repayment was beyond anything that he could accomplish. So with us. We have lavished our jewels upon artificial gods, and yet the real God has deigned to offer His song of redemption even at death’s door. We have tried to capture Him for our purposes and tame Him for our comfort, but He alone is able to save when the artificial gods are mute and passive throughout our time of dire need. The nightingale, like the Savior, is telling us “I love your heart more than your crown.” Christ does not want our “riches”- whether it be our acts of duty or our acts of atonement; He wants to move us to tears, tears shed out of absolute and unadulterated wonder, amazement, and captivation. He wants us to forsake what is artificial for that which is real. And as the Emperor became a changed man, we can become a changed humanity. For it is a sincere response of acceptance, freely welcoming what we do not deserve, that gladdens the heart of the Singer.

The Modern Fairy Tale

2011-11-11T17:24:00.002-07:00

"Although the world may stifle every sense,

Enthralled, man deeply

Senses the Immense."

~Goethe

I was recently listening to an interview by the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking. To see this man using a computer to synthesize his voice and so dependent on the charity of those around him and yet still such a dedicated and convinced proponent of atheism and Darwinism is truly pitiful. I feel sorry for Stephen Hawking, truly sorry. He has all the evidence he needs for God’s existence right out in front of his eyes, but his eyes are blinded by his automatic and default dismissal of the evidence. In Hawking’s world, a personal God of infinite dimensions is impossible. The “facts” according to Darwinism do not permit it. Possibility has been excluded, and science has been cut off from its traditional presuppositions. Heaven is a “fairy story,” Hawking believes. There is absolutely no afterlife, just immediate elimination. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Hawking has also compared men and women to computers; only people who are “afraid of the dark” believe in an afterlife. When a computer breaks down, there is nothing left. but the useless wreckage. When men die, they are gone forever. The statements of Hawking are frequently as disturbing- in my opinion- as they are forthright: “The universe is governed by science. But science tells us that we can't solve the equations, directly in the abstract. We need to use the effective theory of Darwinian natural selection of those societies most likely to survive. We assign them higher value.”

Many interviewers have asked Hawking what is the meaning of life, if indeed man has no immortal soul. Hawking never really gives a direct answer, but he has been cited for saying, “We should seek the greatest value of our action.” Now, if I were the interviewer, I would shoot back with a quick “Why?” One of the most striking things about the interview that I watched was that, a mere segment after his discourse on the non-existence of God and the fairy-tale qualities of religion, the interviewer chooses to ask Hawking for advice about fatherhood. If my memory serves me right, Hawking talks about being a role model and being a source of inspiration for his children. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but if we are all computers, then whence the love of a father? Whence inspiration? Whence moral standards? In short, how can we retain personal qualities and values if a personal God is non-existent and man is a short-lived enigmatic chance-induced jumble of electrons and DNA??? I am almost surprised that someone as intellectual as Hawking (or Richard Dawkins, for that matter) should realize what most existentialist philosophers are forced to concede as the only sequitur of their philosophical premises: take away God, and you have taken away all that makes life on this insignificant little planet worthwhile- including the love of a father for his children, the love of a husband for his wife, or the sacrifices of a leader for his people. Hawking claims to find inspiration in science, but, if he is correct, science is raw data, information and facts that are absorbed objectively like a computer inputted with programming language. A man must have soul to be inspired.

Is religion a crutch? Is Christianity a form of opium? Are we church-goers and God-worshippers really half-baked nutcases that are trembling in the dark? Is religion the choice of bigots and irrational, medieval monks? To be honest, I think the real fairy-tale of modern society has been so imbibed into social consciousness that we have stopped thinking about how truly ridiculous it is. Modern public education- in its arrogance and dogmatic adherence to the secularist religion- is its main proponent, and millions of children are being brainwashed with a patent lie, for,truth is, that what is conceived of as a fairy tale (Christianity) is far more logical and consistent than what is conceived of as empirical truth (evolution) will ever be. Yes, scientists want evidence, but I wonder how many of them realize that when they go home at night and kiss their children in their beds that they have just found adequate evidence for refutation of the entire Darwinist, anti-God perspective. They want evidence, yet they jockey ever so loudly in civil squares for social justice, for fairness, for tolerance, for abstract ideas that are no less real because they are invisible. They want evidence, and yet they study the universe as if it were truth were absolute, discoverable, and coherent. They want evidence, and yet they decry Christianity for being unobservable when evolution can never be replicated or observed. They want evidence and yet they deny it on a daily basis. The evidence is not lacking; the ability to see it is. God is not hiding from man; man is hiding from God.

One of the most honest movies I have ever watched that confronts the question of meaning and purpose in connection with a materialistic/Darwinistic worldview is Contact. As a scientist, Ellie Arroway is obviously inspired by science and mathematics, but absolutely confounded as to how life has meaning when science has excluded space for it. “For as long as I can remember, I've been searching for something, some reason why we're here. What are we doing here? Who are we? If this is a chance to find out even just a little part of that answer.” There is also a religious character in the movie who seems to be portrayed in a positive manner (rare for movies actually). At one point in the story, he says this: “Is the world fundamentally a better place because of science and technology? We shop at home, we surf the Web... at the same time, we feel emptier, lonelier and more cut off from each other than at any other time in human history.” At the end of the movie, Ellie is on trial and has no physical proof to support what she saw on her short astronautic journey. Defending herself, she admits:

“I... had an experience... I can't prove it, I can't even explain it, but everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real! I was given something wonderful, something that changed me forever... A vision... of the universe, that tells us, undeniably, how tiny, and insignificant and how... rare, and precious we all are! A vision that tells us that we belong to something that is greater than ourselves, that we are *not*, that none of us are alone! I wish... I... could share that... I wish, that everyone, if only for one... moment, could feel... that awe, and humility, and hope. But... that continues to be my wish.”

This is the materialistic scientist’s ultimate dilemma: how can you "prove" the things in life that everyone assumes by default- human love and compassion, human inspiration, human significance, the sanctity of life? Are they less real because they are intangible? If you accept their existence, then there is a gaping hole in the empirical model. I know most scientists are smart enough to realize that abstracts such as love and courage are demonstrated in action and character. The unknowable becomes knowable in the flesh; the un-seeable becomes see-able. Yet, to concede this is to open a portal to infinite possibility- is God less real because He is invisible? If He is the Creator, then does existence itself hold the secret? Does conscience prove Him? Do design and order and personality and creativity evidence anything at all? These are consistent questions, and legitimately relevant. The failure to confront them is a form of denial and intellectual cowardice. Consistency with Darwinism would be a truly terrifying, anarchic experience, one that, as long as man holds on to some small part of his humanity, he will be able to counter. Hawkins thinks that religious people are afraid of the dark; well, perhaps people are wise who realize that the darkness is real, and being real, is frightening. Scientists must truly be ignorant of the darkness who have not reckoned with the implications of an absolutely human-denying perspective on life. I do not think that God is playing dice with the universe; Darwinists are playing dice with God, trying to trap Him into a neatly-constructed corner where they can dump clergymen and creationists and evangelists and label them with such terms as they find demeaning enough. There is no happy ending to the Darwinist fairy-tale, unless, of course, you find the ending “And they all smiled before they evaporated into thin air” somehow romantic and inspiring. I, for one, would rather marry the Prince and live happily ever after.

Duty, Desire, & JOY

2011-11-10T19:44:00.001-07:00

“Joy, rather than happiness, is the goal of life, for Joy is the emotion which accompanies our fulfilling our natures as human beings. It is based on the experience of one’s identity as a being of worth and dignity.”

~Rolo May

“Joy is never in our power.”

~C.S. Lewis

For any of you wondering what my email address (gaudete77) is all about, now’s the time to share. Gaudete is a Latin imperative; that is, it is a command. The command is taken from a liturgical line from a 16^th century Christmas carol that goes as follows: “Gaudete, gaudete! Christus est natus, Ex Maria virgine, gaudete!” In English: “Rejoice, rejoice! Christ is born of the Virgin Mary, rejoice!” For those of you who thought gaudete was a neat word I conjured up with my creative imagination…sorry, you’re wrong. I usually have a reason for my choices…usually.

One of the reasons why I am so enthused with this injunction, which you find so often repeated in the Psalms in particular, is that somehow- in our crazed and obsessive pursuit of superficial piety- we have forgotten to follow it. Funny, right? We are so intent on obedience that we have forgotten to obey? Most people I talk to on a daily basis have this perception of the Christian faith as dour, puritanical, inhibiting, constraining, dogmatic, life-draining, and judgmental. Has the church contributed to this perception? Perhaps…not as much as critics would like to believe however. As I have said in a previous post, perception drives the reality. If your perception of Christianity is that it is the ultimate killjoy, then you most likely have not encountered Christ in all of His mercy and love; rather, you have probably just encountered that timeless caricature, that smirking straw-man, that many have had the misfortune of carrying to their death beds. Christianity is not joy-less.

If someone were to ask me what I think the ultimate pursuit and desire of life is, I know exactly what my answer would be. In one word: Joy. I would not say “happiness” because happiness is too superficial and abused a word to convey the depths of thrill and excitement and satisfaction that the word “Joy” conveys. Happiness implicates puppies and sunny skies and Christmas parties, all good things of course, but not yet quite weighty or substantial enough to fill that sinking void in man’s nature. Joy is a word that implicates satisfaction, fulfillment, beauty, and peril. It is not something that depends on circumstance, and it is not something that you can procure of your own accord, as if there were neon billboards along Las-Vegas highways advertising for Joy. You can’t buy Joy nor can you stake it out like a bounty hunter. It is simultaneously evasive and ever present. It is beautiful and dangerous. It is weighty and light. It is fulfilling and yet nostalgic.

Just as you cannot peg Jesus Christ, you cannot peg Joy. The definitions and quotes on Joy that I have discovered are always lacking in some regard. I believe that the closer we get to Joy, the more mysterious it is. It is quite natural to feel that painful void within, but when that void has something substantial fill it like a drink of water fills the stomach of a thirsty man, you cannot so much explain the Joy as you can only experience it and delight in it. It is an overwhelming experience of pure satisfaction. It is a fundamental experience of finally finding and living your purpose in life. It is the Samaritan-woman experience of finally finding water that doesn’t run out, water that doesn’t so much merely quench your thirst as it does eliminate your thirst altogether.

Many church-raised children are acquainted with that familiar catechism question drilled into them by a booming, deep, and reverent voice from the pulpit- “What is the chief end of man?” “To glorify God and enjoy Him forever,” says the proud child. I do believe, with John Piper, that glorifying God and enjoying Him are inextricably entwined. In glorifying God, you enjoy Him. In enjoying God, you glorify Him. Separate the two and you will be left with either the rigid and cruel imposition of duty or with the libertine pursuit of selfish pleasure. Christianity is indeed about God’s glory, but God’s glory and man’s joy are such that the pursuit of God’s glory is the pursuit of man’s joy. The worst perception you can have of Christianity is that it is a life of duty. If you want a life of duty, pursue the Catholic faith, or the Mormon faith, or every other faith on the face of this planet; for duty is a cruel task-master that operates in utter defiance of man’s heart and in utter contradiction to man’s desire for joy.

Duty is in direct confrontation with that which Christianity claims to produce- desire. The debate between religion and Christianity is just that- the debate between duty and desire. Do I do good out of duty? Or do I do good out of desire? I find the etymology of “duty” fascinating. It originates from the Old French noun deu and the Latin verb debere, both of which mean “to owe,” and the word was actually used in regards to taxes imposed on imports and exports. The word “desire,” on the other hand, is from the Latin desiderare, “to long for or wish for.” A false perception of Christianity is mired in this confusion of duty with desire. Christianity is not “owing” God. Christianity is “longing for” God. The former is indeed a joy-less existence; the latter is truly a full existence.

What is the chief end of man? Simply this: To find Joy where it was meant to be found. To gain fulfillment by that which was meant to fulfill. To desire that which was meant to be desired. To be satisfied by that which alone can satisfy. Duty tells us-falsely- that we “owe” God. Honestly, what have we to offer God? What can we give Him that is not already His? Where in His Word does it mention in fine print or as an additive clause that God has imposed taxes on us? Here’s the thing: obedience in the Christian life is important; however, obedience that proceeds out of duty is like paying taxes to the government. We would not do so if there were no law. Yet obedience that proceeds out of desire is not only an act of joy, it is an act of free will. You obey Christ because you love Him, because you desire Him, because you have found that God’s way is the jackpot, the happy ending, the summum bonum, the meaning of life. Why did Christ endure the cross? For the Joy set before Him.

“Joy is the serious business of Heaven,” C.S. Lewis said. It is the “joy of the happy ending…the joy of deliverance…beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote. Joy is the “serenity of Heaven,” said John Donne. “The prospect of the righteous is joy,” writes Solomon in Proverbs.

Obedience, when perceived aright, should be defined as “an act of joy and desire.” Unfortunately, all of us are in need of infinite grace and help when it comes to desiring what is good, true, and beautiful. After all, we are all "works in progress" this side of Heaven. It is, actually, far easier humanly speaking, be it ever so pretentious, to live a life of duty and think that we are paying off our debts when God actually desires that we desire Life and not try to buy it like a commodity. It’s a bit like being offered a million dollars for free and declining it on the grounds that you must earn it before you can take it. Pride gets in our way. Duty maliciously transforms obedience into yet another act of vain self-atonement. The way I see the gospel is this: God offers us a million dollars for free. If we take it and live a life of gratefulness and obedience from desire, then He is glorified and delighted in. Man’s chief end is fulfilled. Joy is the meaning of life.

Christianity is not an inclusive club for prigs. Self-righteousness does not even have enough capacity for Joy. Duty can never pay off the debt and earn the Joy that every human so desperately wishes for. Why does the Psalmist ask us so often to rejoice? Because Joy is the appropriate response to God’s free offer of grace and forgiveness. Joy is the purpose of man and man’s greatest desire. It may not be within our power, as Lewis writes, but it is not beyond our reach. The claim of the gospel is the gratis offer of infinite Joy. As old Lorenz Lowenhielm says in the movie Babett’s Feast: “There comes a time when our eyes are opened and we come to realize that mercy is infinite. We need only await it with confidence and receive it with gratitude. Mercy imposes no conditions. And lo! Everything we have chosen has been granted to us. And everything we rejected has also been granted. Yes, we even get back what we rejected. For mercy and truth have met together, and righteousness and bliss shall kiss one another.”

We often grumble- in light of our modern culture’s pervasive sense of false advertisement and mercenary business- that nothing in life is ever really free. There’s always a catch, we remind the telemarketer on the phone. There’s always fine print somewhere. What if one day you were called out of the blue on your cellphone and a mysterious voice said that all the debts you owe in your life have been paid off? And not only that, but you are being given a mansion without cost? In a very small way, this is a picture of the gospel. Christ offers everything- pardon, life, joy- for no cost. And there are no catches. What man desires most in this universe has no price-tag, but you must desire it and desire it so badly that all the other distractions and pleasures of life are placed secondary to your pursuit of Joy. And once you have your priorities straight, all those pleasures become more satisfying and more pleasurable because the void which they could never fill has been filled by the Thing which was meant to fill it. This is the chief end of man. “Do not abandon yourselves to despair,” said Pope John Paul II, “We are the Easter people, and hallelujah is our song.” So, rejoice! Our joy will echo with the universe and beyond, for His mercy is infinite, and so too will be our joy.

Watch these 2 amazing movies scenes, from Les Miserables and Babett's Feast:

Waiting for Godot

2011-11-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

“Faith is a way of waiting- never quite knowing, never quite hearing or seeing because in the darkness we are all but a little lost…faith waits even so, delivered at least from that final despair which gives up waiting altogether because it sees nothing worth waiting for.”

~Frederick Buechner

“Estragon: Let’s go.

Vladimir: We can’t.

Estragon: Why not?

Vladimir: We’re waiting for Godot.”

~Samuel Becket

“Gott ist tot. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it.”

~Friedrich Nietzsche

“Michael Sullivan: He murdered Annie and Peter!
John Rooney: There are only murderers in this room! Michael! Open your eyes! This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see heaven.”

~Road to Perdition

The scene is a barren country road with a single tree dominating the landscape. It is evening. One man, by the name of Estragon, is sitting next to the tree when another man, by the name of Vladimir, enters stage left. Vladimir approaches Estragon, and the two begin an immediate dialogue that reveals to the audience that these two men are already familiar with one another. During the course of this nonsensical dialogue that follows, no rules of logic or chronology appear to connect each sentence to next; however, a single theme emerges like a red thread in a white-woven sweater. The two men are waiting for someone. Someone by the name of Godot.

At one point in their bizarre conversation, there is the slightest rustling of wind. The two men’s ears perk up simultaneously. “Listen!” says Vladimir. “I hear nothing,” responds Estragon. “I thought it was he,” whispers Vladimir. “Who?” “Godot,” Vladimir admits.

The author of this 1954 play is Samuel Beckett. Considered an extremely provocative seminal work of minimalism and post-WWII existentialism, the play encapsulates the morbid despair of a society wherein echoes the poignant confession that Gott ist dot. God is dead, and, Nietzsche says, we have killed him. We are murderers with permanent scarlet blood on our hands, and modern society as a whole must pay with an intensity of guilt and angst unknown before. “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

Beckett’s play is also a capstone work of the French idea of the “theatre of the absurd.” Ironically, even dramas of the theatre of the absurd result in gritty statements about modern culture: “somber summation(s) of mankind’s inexhaustible search for meaning.” The absurd dialogue between Estragon and Vladimir is bizarre indeed, but not without echoes of that aching human search. Who is Godot? Why are they waiting for him? And, most importantly, why does he not make an appearance?

One of the most fascinating things about the theatre of the absurd is the statement that it makes philosophically while still trying to maintain an attitude of nonsense and absurdity. Like T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland, Beckett’s drama uses nonsense to make sense, or uses disturbing plots to make a point that man has never really given up on the search for meaning. Significantly, within the history of art and literature, postmodernism is at a dead-end both literarily and spiritually because it has recognized that art is indeed a search for meaning, but if God is truly murdered by our own hands, then the search is all that is left. Waiting or looking are ends in themselves because no matter how intense the desire for a deus ex machina, Godot is not coming.

Godot stands for meaning, for purpose, for significance, for the absolute (i.e. God Himself). He is that which never comes. At the end of the play, Vladimir and Estragon nearly leave the barren stage out of exhaustion and frustration. “Well, shall we go?” asks Vladimir. “Yes, let’s go,” concedes Estragon. Before the curtains are pulled, however, there is written a bleak 4-word stage instruction in the script: They do not move.

They do not move because, beyond postmodernism with its characteristic angst, despair, and emptiness, there is nowhere else to go. You cannot expect what you have murdered to come waltzing back onto the stage of life. Waiting with anxiety becomes the sum total of mankind’s life on this planet. In the apt words of John Rooney, the mob boss in Road to Perdition, “There are only murderers in this room…This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see Heaven.”

Sad? Depressing? Hopeless? Yes, it is all of these, for every man, woman, and child would likely give up on a search for something that doesn’t exist. Would we not even search for a needle in a haystack if we knew that the needle was real? Would we not journey to the ends of the world if we knew there was a final destination? Yet Beckett realized a very vital truth, perhaps without even realizing it: the search for truth and meaning are truly outside the hands of man. If meaning is to be found, it must come to us. If Godot is going to make an appearance, we must wait for him.

Before the twentieth century, drama still operated on a Greek or Shakespearean type of aesthetic. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. Character and dialogue, for the most part, made sense and contributed to the outcome of the plot. Such drama generally incorporated literary elements such as the tragic hero, the hamartia, the rising action, the foil, the antagonist, the climax, and the denouement. In this sense, the dramatic piece differed only in medium from that of literature. These elements are the essence of story, and every story is essentially the same with this superficial structure.

With the advent of modernism and postmodernism in the 20^th century arts, the resolution of the story, aka the denouement, became virtually erased. The arts reflect society, so modern society’s change of heart in regard to life (Gott ist dot) has become reflected in its arts. The story still incorporates a problem, or a conflict, but the conflict typically both begins and ends the story. Granted, even the most self-professed “modern person” is inconsistent and still favors the moral hero and the happy ending (why do you think we have so many super-hero movies?); the avant-garde of arts today are absolutely preoccupied by the postmodern way of doing art. While traditional arts, which modern scholars deem as merely the works of dead white European males, are both search and discovery of meaning, the non-traditional arts of today- at least 50% of today’s arts- are mere searches for meaning. Just step into a museum of contemporary art. I do for the pure thrill of just standing in front of these bizarre (and frankly, not very talented) concoctions and wondering, “What does it mean?” What does it mean? is the chronic disease of modern art. Simply because there is no answer, and if there is, it has to be one of your own creation and imagination. Nietzsche was right: If we have killed God, an absolute standard for truth, goodness, and beauty, then we must be bold and god-like enough to usurp his throne. Meaning is what you think it is. This is our only act of atonement.

It seems to me that even though the 21^st century is rife with spiritual abandonment and materialistic thought, God is dead in mind, not necessarily in desire. We are, as Flannery O’Connor would say, “God-haunted” people. Like Lady MacBeth, we may just be walking around with the guilt of blood on our hands- from the most uneducated layperson to the most educated professor. “Here’s the smell of blood still;” Lady MacBeth rants in her sleep, “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.” It also seems to me that the man or woman who will not search for God out of conviction that He is really dead will search for meaning in anything and everything else- political action, family and friends, fame and fortune, organizations of charity, academic or material renown, etc. We are radically obsessed with self-atonement, for modernity is just another word for the natural human inclination to kill Godot even when He resurrects from the dead. The deus ex machina of Greek drama awaits to come down and bring salvation to the story, but there is neither Heaven nor God in the modern outlook, therefore rescue and atonement outside oneself is impossible. It is the life we chose. The life we lead.

“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick,” Vladimir quotes from Proverbs. And that is truly man’s overwhelming problem without God. It is not that God has not appeared to modern man, it is that modern man has killed Him in mind and recognizes with Lady Macbeth that “What’s done cannot be undone.” This hopelessness is what convinces man that the highway to hell is the only route to heaven on earth. To be God on this earth becomes the ultimate obsession and the ultimate despair. What Rooney realizes is what most men hate to confess with words what they know deep within: “None of us will see Heaven.” It is not our fate that condemns us humans; it is our choice. The life we choose, the life we lead.

To end on a positive note, I will say this: modern despair is truly a choice, not a destiny imposed by cruel fate. Estragon and Vladimir do not move from the stage for only one reason- waiting for God is an exercise of fervent hope, however crushed by the idea that God is dead. Have we killed God? This is not the right question to be asking. Is God able to be killed? That is the right question. I believe the dawn of hope arrives when men begin to wonder whether the death of God is as much a hallucination as is the birth of meaninglessness. Does Godot not arrive because he does not exist? Or does he not arrive because he knows that even if he did, the two men would not acknowledge him? Is unbelief a reaction to reality, or is unbelief a state of heart and mind? Would Vladimir and Estragon respond with hope and acceptance, “You do exist!”? Or would they respond with doubt and denial, “We killed you. You cannot exist”? The final despair, Buechner says, is foregoing waiting because there is nothing worth waiting for. What’s done can never be undone.

Christianity should absolutely blow our minds. For not only does it remind us that we have killed God, it tells us that God is ultimately greater and more powerful than death and more merciful and gracious than a kinsman who would bring the culprit to justice. What does it mean? It means that salvation can never be an act of self-atonement. It means that even the murder of God is a pardonable offense. It means that significance and meaning in life are as possible in the history of mankind as the resolution or denouement is in the outcome of a fairytale. It means that life makes sense, even if we have days when we are sitting by a tree in a barren wilderness wondering if God is ever going to arrive. For He has arrived, and yet we killed Him. Yet you cannot kill Resurrection. You cannot kill Life. The greatest drama, as echoed and reflected by the dramas that human minds conjure, is that the death of God was necessary for the birth of man. As the currency of redemption, blood was shed so that ours would not have to be. And this “desire fulfilled is a tree of life,” to complete that passage which Vladmir quotes from Proverbs. The 21^st century would benefit from such a reminder- the death of God is both pardonable and reversible. None of us will see Heaven who has not first found Heaven in Him.

Why I Am a Rebel

2011-11-07T16:09:00.000-07:00

This post is going to be shocking, so prepare yourselves. I am not only going to expose myself as a consummate rebel, I am going to encourage everyone to embrace their dark side and rebel with me. So come on, comrade, join the resistance!

Did you know that the word “rebel” is from the Latin reballare, which means “to wage war against”? Yep, if you Latin scholars haven’t noticed, the root word is bellum, that wonderful Roman-favored word which means “war.” It’s true; the etymological history of “rebel” is tied in historically with war and conquest, the word originally referring to an “insurgent.” Despite popular opinion, the word does not necessarily mean “troublemaker” or “authority-hater”, although contemporary dictionaries will paint a pretty bleak picture, especially if they’re written by clergymen or traditionalists. Somewhere along the line we just picked up a whole lot of unwarranted negative connotations, and I have a feeling that it has something to do with the advent of psychedelic buses, Woodstock, and James Dean.

Did you also know that if you were alive in 1776, being called a “rebel” would have been the greatest of honors? Yes…the English thought that we crazy hooligan Americans clamoring for independence were worthy of the honor of such an epithet. We were, after all, waging a war against the English for our independence, and we thought that the act of rebellion, in such a context, was not only necessary, but noble.

In its original context, rebellion was an activity of virtue, dependent on that which was being rebelled against. Americans were proud to be called rebels because they thought that they were rebelling for all the right reasons; in their eyes, it was a “just war.” Nowadays, however, rebellion is primarily associated with resistance against authority, control, or tradition. And while this is true of rebellion, it is not true that this activity is inherently negative. As it was deemed in its original context, the virtue of rebellion lies in that which is worthy of being defied. For instance, a case of rebellion gone awry would be running a red light or refusing to pay taxes. A case of rebellion for good purposes would be refusing to support government laws in favor of abortion or euthanasia. Both cases are cases of rebellion, but the difference of both means and ends are enormous.

Now, I argue in favor of good rebellion. Yeah, I was actually kidding about that “dark side” stuff. After all, blowing up the Death Star is much more fun than living on it. I want to encourage you to join the resistance of unjust laws, of ridiculous or immoral traditions, of parochial thinking. Fight the just war!

The arena in which more rebellion is needed, I believe, is in the arena of paideia. This is probably Greek to you, unless you’re a Greek scholar, so let me translate. In short, paideia is enculturation, “the process whereby individuals learn their group's culture, through experience, observation, and instruction”. It is the schooling we get outside the school walls. It may conform to the formal school’s teaching, or it may not. For instance, you may be taught by your family and church that life is sacred. However, when you walk outside your home onto everyday streets, you are confronted head-on with ardent advocates of Planned Parenthood or fierce believers in Darwinian evolution. In this case, however, the obvious contrasts between the two philosophies of life make resistance a bit easier. Most Christians make strong stands for the sanctity of life. This is one area where we have waged war with passion.

But what about the more subtle presuppositions? The things we take for granted? The views of life that, although in contradiction to our own, we swallow hook, line, and sinker? Examine some of these:

· Public School: public education, I believe, has largely gone unchallenged because we assume that it has always been this way and that there is no harm in subjecting our kids to false worldviews. In fact, many of us fall into the trap of the “myth of neutrality.” Facts are neutral; they are not interpreted. Are facts neutral? Is God irrelevant to knowledge? Is free education worth the risk of giving your kid a fragmented worldview? Are sports programs the sum worth of a school? Need a child be thrown into the deep end before he can swim?

· The Liberal Arts: I always wonder why people think it strange that I am getting my degree in English. The assumption behind the modern dislike for the traditional liberal arts (e.g. English, history, philosophy, fine arts, etc) is that the degree is all about getting a job and getting money. Is this why we should be getting a degree? Is a job about the money, or is it about becoming who God made you to be and fulfilling your purpose in life? Are subjects intended to elicit our humanity or only to give pragmatic skills? Does a piece of paper, aka the degree, establish someone’s IQ or abilities? Does a PhD make you really smart? Is reality only confirmed by quantitative data? Can quality be quantified?

· The Scientific Method: This one really frustrates me, and not just because I am passionate about the arts. Have you ever noticed that modern society is obsessively, I mean obsessively, dependent on the scientific method? Everything must be quantified and tangible to be real or significant. Everything must be objective.

· Individualism: Ok, so all of us Americans are a bit guilty of this one. We are excessively individualistic. By the age of 18 or 19, most kids are dying to get out of the house and leave their parents in the dust. Ok…now some parents might warrant that, but I assure you that many parents have mutual feelings. Did you realize that both the nuclear and extended family are ten times more important in a person’s life in the East as they are in the West? Yep…a lot of extended families occupy the same home for the rest of their lives in the East. Family is important, but I’m afraid that, in America, our individualism has choked out our value in family, and to our own detriment. Who’s to say that our way is better? Who’s to say that our undervaluing of family has not contributed to our decay as a society? Where is community in America- at the movie theatres, in Starbucks, at our potlucks?

· Psychological Disorders: There are so many disorders and syndromes nowadays that I am beginning to think that humans really must be biological automatons after all. Symptoms of psychological disorders range from promiscuity to defiance to poor attention skills. Please, don’t confuse psychology with neurology. Psychology is the “study of the soul”; neurology is the study of the brain. The former has to do with behavior, the latter with the physical function of a physical organ. Now, I know that God made us body and soul, and that the body affects the soul and the soul affects the body. I would know; my low blood-sugars as a diabetic make me irritable sometimes. We are psychosomatic. However, behavior, as treated by the psychiatrist, actually denies this psychosomatic nature because it treats what proceeds from the soul (e.g. anger, lust, defiance) as merely physical. You’re being promiscuous? Well, that’s a physical symptom of a physical syndrome. Not very flattering to know that you’re a mere mesh of molecules and particles that are “misbehaving.” I think the problem is so much deeper, and that which is deeper than the body is the soul. When I’m in any sort of funk or depression, my body does respond with malaise. But my body is not the only factor for sure. So here are some questions to consider: has the religion of secularism supplanted the religion of Christianity when it comes to human behavior? Can behavior problems be fixed by mere physical remedies? Are drugs effective remedies or band aids for cancer? Is God’s explanation of human behavior sufficient or insufficient? Is the gospel sufficient or insufficient?

These are some of the major issues in our culture that demand both our close attention and, depending on our conclusions, our rebellion. So much of what was listed above is taken for granted in the 21^st century, so much so that to disbelieve in them is to become a rebel. You must stand out. You must be a non-conformist. You must wage war. This is not being James Dean’s “rebel without a cause.” This is actually being a “rebel with a cause.” Big difference, you know.

So you have to ask yourself: are you willing to be a rebel in this sense, or do you want to continue to submit yourself to modern culture paideia without any quibble at all? Are these just wars or are they futile ones? Someone once told me that I “think outside the box.” Funny, I wasn’t aware there was a box. If there is a box, who put it there? If there’s any box that I can perceive, it is not Christianity. Sometimes Christians do a phenomenal job of constructing the box without realizing it, while modern culture intrudes with its own box. Sometimes even our worldviews turn into a muddled mess of Christian doctrines and modern biases. Do you know what the Greeks used to teach in their paideia-oriented approach to education? Know Thyself.

So do we know ourselves? Do we know what we believe? Do we live what we believe? These are not trivial questions by any means. You can be a rebel with a cause, someone who knows what he believes in and sticks to his guns, waging war against false ideas. You can be a rebel without a cause, a leather-jacketed anti-traditionalist who joins the greasers and jocks for only the sake of popularity and nonconformity. Or you can be an Englishman who wants nothing but tradition and nothing but conformity, sneering at the James Deans and Marlon Brandos in this world and labeling them as anti-authority figures,“rebels,” with little regard as to what are the reasons for their rebellion. In any case, all of us must wage war. Life is indeed a battleground of competing ideas of reality, of presuppositions, of consequences, of implications. Which way we swim in this river of life does make a difference, both now and hereafter. As Chesterton so aptly puts it, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” This is why I consider myself a rebel- most days anyhow. How about you?

"What is a rebel? A man who says no."

~Albert Camus

The Healing Wounded: When the Church Lets You Down

2011-11-05T16:47:00.003-06:00

Long-time church goers are most likely acquainted with a phenomenon within the church that has been described in many ways at many times. In fact the phenomenon has contributed to many long-time church-goers forsaking church all together and turning their back on fellow believers. It has led to divisions, to heartache, to questioning, to doubting, to weeping, to despair.

What is this phenomenon? It has been described in metaphorical terms as the church being the “only army that shoots its wounded.” If it isn’t enough that atheists and agnostics guffaw at the church for its hypocrisy on display, it is insult added to injury to frequently encounter those walking wounded amongst Christians who have witnessed church split after church split, politicking after politicking, and are much the worse for wear. After all, what sort of army shoots its wounded?

Not every Christian has been through a church split or division within a Christian organization. It is often the case that the fallout is swept neatly under a rug wherein centuries of time can erase the stain, but for those wounded, they continue to tread the familiar paths where no one acknowledges what has occurred. Take a test drive on the Internet searching for articles, commentary, and books on the subject of the “walking wounded.” You might be surprised to find just how wide-spread the issue is. The experiences of being wounded are as varied as the consequences: some have abandoned the faith, others have taken sabbaticals from church, and others have bitten the bullet and regularly attend church with internal bleeding in their souls.

It may be asked, how does the church shoot its wounded? To be wounded is easy enough when it comes to human nature, even amongst the being-redeemed, but to shoot one’s wounded? How is that even possible? From the significant sample I have witnessed of people wounded by the church in various manners, I have discovered this: such people are wounded by (1) lack of compassion and concern, (2) futile attempts at reconciliation, and (3) judgmental attitudes.

Now as nasty as these things are, I believe that most of us have experienced them or committed them. Frankly, all of us have committed them. None of us is perfect by any means. However, the unique struggle with the walking wounded is that betrayal is often at the very heart of their pain. Those who wounded them were close friends- spiritual family. How could they do such a thing? In her novel Romola, George Eliot wrote, “No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.”

Now this post is not necessarily intended to explain how the walking wounded are wounded. No one needs to prove that there are many Christians out there who would consider themselves a walking wounded. They’re out there; even if you are not aware. Sometimes they are merely afraid to talk about their church experiences lest they encounter the judgmental and thoughtless attitudes that we are all so inclined to in our narrow life experiences. What you have not experienced is often what you cannot fully understand. But you certainly can try.

So how do we respond as those on the outside? In two words: patient compassion. Even if we have not experienced hurt from other church members, it is incumbent upon us all to express compassion even if we do not fully comprehend their pain. The only way that the walking wounded can be healed is if he/she is not shot at. Sympathize with their pain, join in with their tears, encourage them with hope, be patient with their process of healing. Healing takes time, God knows. In Buechner’s apt words, “If you want to know what loving your neighbor is all about, look at them with more than just your eyes.” Betrayal is truly like being pierced by a dagger; the bleeding and pain will never disappear in a night.

What about those on the inside? Those who have been traumatized by former close friends and trusted companions? I know there is no advice that will make the trauma much easier. It is difficult and a pain-staking process, but there is truth in the old adage that time heals, but we must be patient with both time and the God who is using that time for good. “God doesn’t reveal His grand design. He reveals Himself. He doesn’t show why things are as they are. He shows His face” (Buechner). The fact of being wounded always poses the dilemma of forgiveness: will we or won’t we? If anything, I believe that forgiveness is the most difficult part of being wounded. One can survive the pain, but can one forgive the inflicter?

An unhealthy way to go about the process of forgiveness is to force it, like when a child mutters that he is sorry to his sibling in order to avoid the switch hanging in the kitchen. Forced forgiveness is no better than pretend forgiveness because we all know that which is forced is not real. I truly believe that forgiveness is a package deal; it comes during the healing process and may take some time to be metamorphosed from manufactured feelings to sincere feelings. Have you ever watched a flower grow? It starts with a seed and blooms only in proportion to the amount of sunshine and rain it receives from the heavens. Forgiveness is like that: it starts small, but just give it some time and encouragement, and it will mature ‘til that which is manufactured is a dead seed lying in its dirt-covered tomb. I’ll never forget what Corie Ten Boom said about forgiveness: “Didn't he [a Nazi soldier} and I stand together before an all seeing God convicted of the same murder? For I had murdered him with my heart and my tongue… perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God's power alone be free to work.”

Ultimately, it is God’s power that heals, God’s power that forgives, and God’s power that restores. Many of us are in the place where we are complacently and most likely ignorant of our power to shoot those who are wounded. Our inability to understand other people’s pain is a great hindrance to our capacity for compassion. Some of us have a default button that produces untimely citations of Scripture or quick assumptions of blame. Others desire to ignore such unpleasant truths of church-goers and will continue the time-tested tradition of sweeping dirt under the rug. But if we can listen to their story and sympathize with their pain, I do believe that the walking wounded will travel an easier road to recovery.

Many of us are also in the place where we are stuck in the Castle of Despair, that prison of doubt and bitterness. We have only traveled so far on this path of recovery and yet still Forgiveness and Healing seem like the glitter from a light that is really thousands and thousands of miles away. Is there ever an end to the tunnel? How can you stop the hemorrhaging? First of all, there are no immediate remedies. Pain of every human sort takes time. Secondly, forgiveness is as much a process as healing. Sometimes there is reconciliation; sometimes there is none, but forgiveness remains the only outlet to our liberation from the past and our ability to embrace the future. You cannot realistically reach the mountain of peace until you have crossed the plateau of forgiveness, and the journey to that mountain is only a tiny shadow of the suffering that one Man had to endure to forgive the iniquities of us all.

God is good. Even if His people are a royal mess. This quote has always stuck with me (though I have forgotten its author): “If it were not for the storm without, I would not be able to stand the stench within.” The church is by no means a museum for saints; it is, however, a hospital for sinners. The church is like Noah’s ark afloat on tumultuous seas, but no one can survive who has not submitted to the insanity of Noah: believe or die. The Devil may certainly delight in causing riots and rifts inside the Ark, but he cannot cause the Ark to drift from its final destination. Our quarrels, our betrayals, our gossip, our politicking- all of these things are mere drops in the bucket of Grace. I do truly believe that in Paradise all our grievances with our brethren will be awash in the sacrifice of the Messiah. For whose act of betrayal could rival man’s betrayal of the Creator? Whose act of forgiveness could compare with the Savior’s forgiveness of mankind?

So I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world's healing hinges, but on His. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives along with the command, the love itself.

~Corie Ten Boom

The Impracticality of Leadership

2011-11-02T17:53:00.000-06:00

“A tender heart is a marvelously impractical thing."
~Jim Ware

Did you know that good leadership is one of the most desired qualities in modern times, and one of the most lacking? Thanks to the beloved philosophies of scientism and psychology, we have officially made leadership into yet another science, another branch of behavior studies. The “Science of Leadership.” As any other science, leadership has been treated literally like a suit you can simply don in the morning. Much like values-clarification classes, leadership has become more about what you do than about who you are. Apparently, there are multiple types: laissez faire, autocratic, participative, delegative, authoritarian, etc. The style depends primarily upon the desired results. What style works best for me and my organization? What gets results? As any other science, practicality is the name of the game.

Practicality, in my honest opinion, is overrated. Not just overrated, absolutely deified. What will get us results? What will increase our income? What will boost our sales? What will get people to have a better perception of us? Quality of service, quality of leadership, and quality of character have no part in the pursuit of this sort of bland practicality, for practicality of this caliber often only sees the end goal (e.g. image, money, reputation) as worth the sacrifice and impersonality of the means. What works? What is useful? More income and better image are often practical pursuits without human consideration. Ever heard the phrase “It’s not personal, it’s business”? Wall Street is not the only guilty party; everyone is capable of this practical cruelty, from big-name corporations to the entrepreneur business to the church ministries. What has made us into such monsters that we separate the world of business from the world of personality? What do they tell people when they hire them? “Hey, leave your personality at home on Monday through Friday. You can have the weekends for being yourself and engaging your humanity”?

What is it that truly makes a leader? Someone who has command of business principles and management? Or someone who has integrity and commands respect? Someone who as a MA in Business Management? Or someone who considers human beings of greater value than the demands of the business? One of the reasons why Winston Churchill has gone down in history as such a model leader is that he commanded respect and genuinely loved his nation. Churchill is the one that promised his nation- not a bed of roses-but a difficult path through suffering to glory. Churchill is the one who encouraged his people, who were in the cold vice of fear and doubt, to never ever give up. Churchill is the one who said, “The price of greatness is responsibility.”

If a tender heart is a marvelously impractical thing, then so is good leadership, for the good leader is a man with as much heart as he has mind. He treats his employees and coworkers with mercy and sensitivity, putting their humanity before the demands of the workplace. “True leaders endure their lot for the sake of others” (Ware). A leader is sacrificial, considerate, and personal. He need not be authoritarian nor the type of leader that lets his employees run the game. He need not be a Simon Legree who inspires fear and intimidation nor should he be the buddy-boy or the charismatic charmer. We do not require leadership classes to be able to discern the true qualities of the great leader: integrity, compassion, and conviction. But since these are virtues, not skills to be memorized, you cannot realistically expect to “educate” virtue into potential leaders. Multiple-choice questions are inadequate, for character is something that is fostered and nurtured, not imposed or manufactured. There may be degrees in Business Management, but there are no degrees in leadership character.

Consider two types of men: one who is greedy, inconsiderate, and arrogant; the other who is humble, reluctant, and sacrificial. Which leader would you gladly follow: Mr. Potter or Aragorn?

There are two quotes on leadership that I think best say what needs to be said about leadership. They are from vastly divergent sources: Napoleon Bonaparte (who, by the way, was not the greatest leader in the world, but was he a good military strategist!) and the Bible. Bonaparte said, “A leader is a dealer in hope.” At first glance, this may seem strange. How is a leader a dealer in hope? Simple, a leader is, from the core of his being, an encourager and a visionary. This is where Proverbs 29:18 comes in: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” Without vision, without direction, without encouragement and inspiration, literally, the people will perish…a civilization will come crumbling down, whether in a month or in a decade. Without vision, the people perish. Without hope, the nation crumbles.

A leader deals in hope, not in business principles. A leader guides with vision, not with marketing statistics. While these things may be necessary to business survival, they should not be the cornerstone of leadership. A leader is- first and foremost- a human being with convictions and passions, and he ought not to be someone who views those under him as tools or chess pieces. The man or woman who does not see the humanity in others is a man or woman who has already begun to lose part of his/her own humanity. The business world, in particular, is rife with this abhorrent type of inhumanity, and let us all beware lest it creep into our worlds as well.

We can believe in a leadership of integrity or we can believe with Stephen Covey that “Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective leadership.” If leadership is essentially putting yourself in the vanguard, then a leader must expect an element of self-sacrifice to be involved in the call of genuine leadership. Despite contemporary opinion, leadership is an extremely demanding and sacrificial calling. It is not easy by any means because a tender heart is marvelously impractical. It is also marvelously beautiful, for hope is a beautiful thing, and it may be surprising to find that beautiful things are often impractical in the eyes of a business, results-driven world. The word “inspire” is from the Latin in + spiro: to “put hope into.” A leader puts hope into his people. He sacrifices for his people. He guides his people. Without this type of leadership, especially in a day and age that is based so much on selfish gain and tangible outcomes, people will inevitably wander and nations will stumble. Who could have thought that a man who rode into the city in rags and on a donkey could be the King of Kings and Lord of Lords? Who would have imagined that the man who would wash the feet of his friends could be the One who would forgive the sins of men?

The Thrill of Halloween

2011-11-01T10:28:00.002-06:00

“If the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.”

~Fyodor Dostoevsky

I am fascinated by modern culture’s fascination with Halloween. This year more than any other, I have seen dozens and dozens of houses decked out with cheap cobwebs, not-so-scary scarecrows (seriously, why are they all smiling like precious moments figurines?) , RIP gravestones, dangling orange lights, roped-up skeletons, not-so-realistic blood-stains, and creepy manikins that look like they were stolen from the set of The Bride of Frankenstein. Then there’s beautiful Manitou Springs where oddly-costumed participants are racing down the streets in make-shift coffins, and then there’s the haunted mines up north where you can pay a few bucks to run and scream insanely for an hour and, overall, give your nerves a good jolt. While walking in the evening, I see women with witch hats and pumpkin purses. While at the movie theater, I give my ticket to the taker who has great big splotches of red on his torn shirt. While walking down-town streets, I encounter men in pirate costumes with real-live parrots on their shoulders. While passing by the wine shop, I am startled by some huge black ravens sitting on the window bars, only to find out that they are, in fact, fake.

Is it safe to say that our culture indulges itself in the supernatural for at least one day out of the 365 in the year? Would it be logical to conclude that the supernatural is still apart of collective belief, even when it is denied consciously or unconsciously during the mundane workweek? Here’s a worthy experiment: ask anyone who celebrates Halloween if they actually believe in ghosts and monsters or the Devil himself. They may or they may not. So is Halloween, like Christmas, just a fanciful indulgence in what man can no longer accept either on the basis of science or logic? Is Halloween wish-fulfillment?

There are two things that fascinate me about Halloween. One is that, if Halloween is wish-fulfillment, then it makes me wonder why people in general have any sort of “desire” for that which- in reality- would be absolutely abhorrent. Would you really want to encounter a monster? Would you really like to commune with a demon? Would you really like to have a ghost haunt your home? If we’re honest, I don’t really think our “desire” per se is for the things that we typically associate with Halloween: demons, witches, black cats, bats, Frankenstein, Dracula, etc. I think our “desire” is for that which is beyond sight and beyond what we call “natural.” We are simply not content with things as they are; sometimes we wish there could be more.

Have you ever wondered what it is that induces humans to get onto steel contraptions that exceed 70 mph and go loop over loop and free-fall and go up and down? Yep…I’m talking about amusement parks. The basic thought behind both Halloween and amusement parks is that the artificial manufacture of human fear, pure and simple, gives men and women the “thrill” that is lacking in normal-day life. It is this desire for “thrill” that motivates people who jump out of planes with parachutes and people who bungee jump from bridges and people who go swimming with crocodiles and people who walk on a tight-rope from skyscraper to skyscraper. This thrill is a form of high, like the man who must inject heroine into his arm in order to experience euphoria. I’m not saying that Halloween and amusement-parks are drug habits; I’m only saying that man seeks thrills in a similar way to the drug-addict. It fulfills a natural need deep within the human psyche- the need for excitement and adventure, the need to see significance in life, even if that means having a close encounter with death. Human beings, by nature, want meaning, some sort of experience that will put on some sort of grand display the cosmic significance of life on this planet. And since Monday mornings at the work office rarely offer that type of insight, it is on holidays that we often witness the deepest needs of man on display.

The second thing that fascinates me about Halloween is the incredible irony. The majority of modern men deny the existence of God. So in a day and age that declares God’s death, it is interesting to note that, if God is dead, then how can the Devil be so alive? Granted, Halloween has done a great job at making evil seem innocuous. Cute little kids in their cute little costumes hit the streets to gather up one of their most desired treasures- candy. This is just a pure and innocent fun activity. But I have always wondered what it is, especially in myself, that wants to be scared for the sake of being scared. The only conclusion I have been able to reach is that we are not interested in ghosts and monsters and the paranormal in and of themselves. We are more interested in the idea of the paranormal, for the idea supports the philosophy that life is not simply what we see. It is much more. To encounter the Devil would hardly be fun, but to confess that the Devil is real provides that satisfaction deep within the human soul that life is more than what it appears to be. We are not alone after all.

Materialism is a flop when it comes to the holidays. It seems to me that, on Halloween, we celebrate the existence of evil (not necessarily evil itself). On Christmas, we celebrate the existence of good. Without Halloween, we could forget that evil is real, potent, and walking the streets of this world. Without Christmas, we could easily forget that a more potent force, the force of good, is transforming the streets of this world. We have watered both down without a doubt. True evil is not cute or innocent or naïve. It is active, pervasive, and self-destructive. Neither is true good cute or naïve or simple. It is sacrificial, demanding, and complex. And the war between the two wages on come November 1^st, come December 26^th. Holidays, I believe, are not “holy days,” they are days instituted to remind us ridiculously forgetful people that life is holy even when what is in front of our eyes appears so bleak that it is far too easy to conclude that sanctity and excitement have been literally soaked out of life.

“What the soul cries out for,” C.S. Lewis said, “is the resurrection of the senses.” In my opinion, I think we allow ourselves far too little time and far too little devotion to the pursuit of this end. I believe that even the most committed skeptic and the most impassioned atheist desires for life to be holy, in other words, for life to have a point. We want edge. We want to feel the utter, unadulterated thrill of being alive. But when what you see is what you get, the thrill is vaporized. Evil becomes impersonal and associated only with psychos like Adolph Hitler. Likewise, good becomes just as impersonal and associated with bores and holier-than-thou people like Santa Claus. It is far too easy to render both good and evil innocuous when you have stripped life, at least in theory, of its supernatural qualities. As Dostoevsky has said, if the devil is non-existent, then he is a creation of man’s imagination in man’s image. And if God is indeed dead, then not even the existence of the devil could restore meaning to man’s existence.

For the most part, I believe Halloween can serve as a helpful reminder in life’s inexplicable mystery. We need not celebrate evil, but we can celebrate the fact that even modernity has not forgotten that evil exists. Let the kids have some fun and gather some candy; there is no harm in that. I think it pertinent to remember in the coming darker days of winter that another day is swiftly coming to remind us that not even the shadows of Nero, or Hitler, or Lenin and Stalin, or Mao, or the serial killer, or the genocide, or the pogroms, or the true monsters that populate the streets of our cities can obscure the blinding star of goodness that shone in all its brilliance over an insignificant little stable full of farm animals. It’s been said that when you encounter evil- whether externally or internally- you do not forget it. It is also true that when you encounter true good, not only do you not forget it, you somehow become so overwhelmed by the mystery of it that the existence of evil becomes a shadow and an echo in a cave of wonders. “Bad is so bad that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained” (Chesterton).

There was one episode in the BBC Sherlock Holmes series (the older one) that really left the audience hanging with the question of the meaning of evil. Shouldn’t Sherlock Holmes of all people be able to rationalize it? “What is the meaning of it?” he ponders, “What is the object of this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must have a purpose. For then our universe has no meaning, and that is unthinkable.” I think everyone thinks along these lines; if evil does not have a purpose, then the universe has no purpose. Justice becomes something we pitifully clamor for in the deafening tragedies of life. “But what purpose?” Holmes continues. “That is humanity’s great problem…to which reason so far has no answer.” And he is right; you cannot rationalize away evil. Neither can you rationalize good. Both have their reasons, but both transcend finite reason’s limits. So life comes down to a cosmic struggle and man’s cosmic choice: do we discover that thrill in evil or is it to be found in good? For a man may be able to experience thrill every time he throws himself from the plane, but the transitory nature of such thrills is a source of incredible frustration to man. If you’re like me, you’ve experienced these transitory thrills, yet are left longing for greater and better things. A thrill that lasts. Let me tell you, you can search the world over for that lasting thrill, but I have never come as close to it as when I am viewing a beautiful sunset, or when I am giving my time to another, or when I am wrapping presents for others, or when I am dancing and singing to music…in other words, when the Kingdom of Me is shattered into a million pieces and I find that I become more of a human being than I had ever been before. Yes, such moments are yet transitory because life is a jumbled mess of broken people in a cursed land. But the taste of that thrill is like the taste of Heaven, since when your eyes are turned from yourself to the Creator, you find that the thrill you have been seeking all your life is not in alcohol, or in relationships, or in drugs, or in parties, or in daring schemes, or in career success…it is in fulfilling your purpose and being who you were created to be.

When you have grasped that truth, all the thrills of amusement parks, of Halloween and Christmas, of parties and drinking….fulfill their natures as pointers and signposts. And if there were to be literal signposts for these things, I believe they would say something like this: “Do this for your enjoyment and for the glory of God.” In our joy of God’s gifts, if and only if that joy does not mutate to worship, we glorify the Giver. And the “thrill that lasts” is yet to come.