Dreamform Three: Zombie Apocalypse and the Doctrine of Providence

I never watch horror movies.  (I only watched Cabin in the Woods because it was written by Joss Whedon and I knew it would be a satire or critique of some kind.)  The closest I get to horror is the X-Files, and probably nothing on network television should count as horror.  I have never particularly liked vampires or zombies or ghost stories.  I have either found them unbelievable, or or too gory, or fixated on death and fear--and who wants to be fixated on death or fear?  Not only are they unbelievable, they are also undesirable--who wants anything in horror movies to actually happen?  I am perfectly reconciled to the fact that part of my love of superheros, science-fiction, and fantasy is wish-fulfillment.  But there is no wish being fulfilled for me in the genre of horror.

As such, I was rather surprised when I had a dream that was more or less about a zombie-apocalypse (even though that's the in-thing right now).  Now, my imagination tends to be apocalyptic, but it doesn't tend to be full of zombies, so I thought it was unusual when I first woke up.  But I will get on with telling the dream.

In the dream, I found myself at a fancy party on the top-floor of a fancy building.  It was a large room, with low-lighting and candles.  Later, I would notice the sun-setting, so apparently it was early evening.  There were all sorts of important-looking people milling around--it was clearly a professional-class event of some kind.  There were small tables dotting the room, bedecked with candles and wine-glasses.  There were high-to-do buffet tables of some kind lining the far walls, perhaps just with hors d'oeuvre.  People were busy talking, but despite the evening attire, it was all the talk of academics and professionals going about their business.  No small talk.  A current of anxiety was sweeping through the room--people were talking in small groups and they were problem-solving.

At some point, I wandered out of the room with my companion for the evening, into a front-room of some kind, the western wall of which was entirely made of slanting glass.  I went out in the room to look for a mirror--something was wrong with my dress.  But when I went outside, I could see out the windows over the western part of the city, and I saw the whole horizon of buildings aflame. Los Angeles, I think, was burning.  And then I knew--the plague that had swept the world in a matter of days was finally here.  It was here sooner than we had expected or hoped, and things did not look good.

My companion said something to me about the city burning, and I remember looking in the mirror. My eyes were starting to change color--one of the initial signs of the plague.  Soon--perhaps in 24 hours--they would turn entirely red, and in the course of that 24 hours, I, too, would be turned by the plague into one of the raging, pillaging, burning maniacs out there trying to destroy the world.  I remember praying in the dream for help--saying to God that surely if the 21st century ever needed divine intervention, it was now.  I was met with a curious kind of silence--the kind of silence that feels like you're being deliberately ignored because you're asking the wrong question.  I remember the feeling distinctly--and I've certainly had that sensation in waking life--but thinking how odd it was to have that impression under the circumstances.

I hurried back inside to find a group of professor-scientists talking.  Everyone knew now--and knew because we were also changing--we could tell by eye color and by other signs.  One woman, who was a biologist or medical doctor of some kind, was talking.  "I have the cure," she said.  She waved a vial in her hands.  "I have it, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I have it.  Now all we have to do is get the military to deploy it.  We're going to have to do it in the water--in the oceans, but we have it, it will work."

Whatever the woman said, whatever her position was--we all believed and trusted her instantly.  She was one of the few people in the dream I recognized--in real life, she's one of the most intelligent women I've ever met, an Indian woman and PhD I met at the University of Pittsburgh.  But  in the real world, she doesn't study life sciences--far from it.  Here, she was playing a medical doctor, but I think she was a useful dream construct--because I believed her and believed she knew what she was talking about.

But by that time, we had another problem: Though we purportedly had a cure, no one wanted to use it anymore.  The change had already begun, and even with the initial symptoms came a sort of giddy confidence and intense thirst for the rage, madness, and power that one could sense coming.  I don't remember feeling that way myself--I more felt numb or neutral.  I knew we had to stop the plague, but I didn't really care which way what happened.  But the others were wavering.  They had the cure, but they were no longer interested in using it.

At this point, our building was attacked by the front wave of the victims of the zombie plague.  I remember the group of us heading outside on the roof--although no one wanted to stop the change, no one wanted to killed by the fully changed either.  But outside on the rooftop I stopped everyone and got their attention.

"I know you don't want to stop this, but we have to do it anyway.  We have to.  Not wanting it to stop is part of the disease, but we just have to stop it no matter what we feel."  I remember pausing for words, searching for something elegant or persuasive to say and coming up short.  But to my surprise, they listened.  They all listened.  They listened and agreed, and then we were off to save the human race somehow.

Saving the planet involved going down to the Navy shipyards or the docks.  I remember thinking the entire time that there was no way for this plan to work.  It simply wasn't.  The military personnel were waiting for us.  Our doctor had the cure, and there were another few vials in existence, but basically our next few hours were spent preparing hundreds or maybe thousands of decoy units--so the zombies wouldn't be able to distinguish the real vial from the fake ones.

Finally, we suited up and went underwater.  I remember diving underwater in deep-water diving gear with a  metallic cylinder tucked under my arm.  And there were hundreds of us divers and thousands of zombies following.  I still didn't think this was going to work.  I thought we were all going to die and the world was going to go out in a way I had least expected it to.  I think there were some underwater fights of some kinds, and some of the fake capsules were destroyed.  And maybe a couple of the real ones.  But it didn't matter.  By the time I surfaced, the sky and the water were already turning green--and green was good.  Green was the sign that everything had worked according to our doctor's plans.

Before my eyes, things were turning back to normal.  The change was stopping in me and my companions, and the zombies were turning back to normal.  I think maybe I shook my head as the sky changed color and the world return to normal and Los Angeles stopped burning.  It took less than 24 hours, and all was restored.  I promptly woke up.


This dream was primarily about two things I have discerned thus far.  The first is about the genre of horror itself, and the second is about the curiously unanswered or curiously answered prayer in the middle of my dream.  First things first: horror, etc.  As I said in my introduction, I don't really like horror that much and I really don't like fear.  I'm probably one of those counter-phobic persons you hear about:  I detest being afraid so much I usually try to run out and both meet and master my fears before they can get the better of me.  The sooner confronted, the sooner conquered, and then you can go back to your peace of mind.  But I don't normally go courting superfluous stress or anxiety or fear, especially in my leisure life of reading or t.v. and the movies.  So I've always looked down on horror as the one obviously pointless and irredeemable aspect of contemporary human entertainment.  God can meet people anywhere but here, I thought.  Surely God is not interested in the imaginations of those preoccupied with enlarging our fears and bringing them to life.

But he is.  Or at least, he is interested in meeting and engaging every aspect of human experience, and what humans do with fear is certainly an important aspect of human experience that God will engage.  I never expected my imagination to engage with fear very much, and I especially never expected God to engage with me there in a very imaginative way.

The truth is, I suppose, the further one goes in acknowledging the darkness in human life, the more things appear monstrously or supernaturally bad.  Evil disfigures the human psyche and deep down inside most of us are afraid of some aspect of the mystery of iniquity--but what if that evil and disfigurement were made physical--the opposite of sublimation, which is deposition.  (In chemistry, sublimation means moving from a solid to a gas without stopping over in the liquid phase of matter.  Deposition means going the other way.)  In any case, for the first time I felt in my flesh and bones how the genre of horror is capable of speaking to or about our fears by embodying them.  This is something worth doing.

But there was also the issue of my curiously answered prayer.  As I said before, when I prayed in the midst of my dream for a supernatural deliverance from the zombie horde, I had a curious sense that God was smiling wryly at me, letting me know with a glance that my prayers had already been answered, had already been provided for through normal means.  What I thought needed supernatural attention, God had already attended to naturally.  Sure enough, through the gifts and talents of our medical doctor, a cure was given though hope had seemed like folly.

This was a helpful reminder to me.  In our age of complex problems, where difficulties that surround human life seem on the surface to be such complicated jangles that they can hardly be solved through normal human effort (I think of international conflicts, ecological difficulties, fossil fuels, the national budget, cancer, AIDS, etc), things are not quite so impossible as they seem.  So often we hear anxious reports, or reports so anxiously given, that this or that issue or calamity is of such and such a difficulty level that we can hardly have hope of solutions to problems.  No doubt some of this is reactionary against the optimism (at least in the United States) of the 50s and 60s.  Technology did not solve all ills nor even the ills it promised to resolve (since it promised time-saving, making life simpler, making life "easier"), so there is some pessimism in response.  There is a greater pessimism, though, from the collapse of the cheerful Enlightenment ideologies of clear and distinct ideas paving the way for universal peace and concord among human beings, and a complete mastery of nature.  Having realized our goal to be untenable, we despair of it, and despair not only of a sure and certain victory, but also of our own competence to vie with our difficulties at all.  We have come of age in the cosmos, and found ourselves unequal to the challenges of adulthood, and thus we dither in anxiety and fear and security-mongering and despair.

But I think there is a middle way, or at least, a third option of how we ought to conceive of human fitness and capacity to deal with what comes our way.  Hubris and cynicism are both false paths and false idols that lead to the shipwrecking of cultural wisdom and identity.  A Christian, I think, ought to be properly confident that human beings were made by God to fit well with the universe around us.  It is neither too big nor too small for us, with God's help.  But his help doesn't have to be what we generally think of as supernatural.  God doesn't actually need to rescue us from every skinned knee--or even from global epidemics.  He will provide, as he always has, and the human race will go on, and he will provide, most of the time, through natural means--through the natural application of human intellect and wisdom to the problems of the world that confront us.  This does not mean that God is not active.  Rather, it means that most of God's activity is providential rather than miraculous.  (Which in turn is why double agency matters as a theory of causality, but I'll write about that some other time.  Hopefully.)  Recognizing the power of God's providential care is just as important as recognizing when God acts miraculously, and if you aren't grateful and attuned to the former, you won't be spiritually prepared for the latter--which is the story of Israel and the story of the human race in general.  The example par excellence of this occurs in Moses's admonitions to the Israelites concerning gratitude in the early chapters of Deuteronomy.  When Israel segues from miraculous provision (manna in the desert) to general provision (normal food from the Promised Land), he warns them not to take the latter for granted or think of it as something they had earned for themselves, rather than a gift given to them from God.

Naturally, this is all complicated by the presence of sin and death in the cosmos, which makes the universe a much more difficult place to live in.  (This essay, of course, is not at all an attempt at theodicy).  But this isn't because human beings' natural capacities are not fit to take on the universe--of course they are, they were built to be--but rather because these capacities are warped and distorted by sin.  So, instead of a "comfortable fit" with the cosmos, we have an uneasy, toilsome fit--our work in the world is marred by hardship and tragedy that need not have been there.  But we were meant to be reconciled to the cosmos as well as to God, and wisdom and knowledge concerning the natural world can do a lot to bridge the gap.  But it is not that the world is too big for us, it is that we are at odds with it, and it with us, and all of us now subject to futility and loss.

So my prayer was answered, and had been anticipated by God's provision.  And so much of our prayers are both answered and anticipated by God's provision.  We don't always have to look for miracles or what we think of as divine intervention, but we can expect to see the hand of God everywhere.

A Little "Cosmological Mystery"

If you're an avid Scientific American reader like me, you may have stumbled across the recent article (reprinted from Nature) about an experiment that actually had scientists bringing a bit of gas below absolute zero.  At first glance, one might think this absolute rubbish--or as the article itself says--"It may sound less likely than hell freezing over, but physicists have created an atomic gas with a sub-absolute-zero temperature for the first time. Their technique opens the door to generating negative-Kelvin materials and new quantum devices, and it could even help to solve a cosmological mystery."  The "cosmological mystery" this technique may or may not help solve is the question of "dark energy" and the exciting new idea (though nowhere near ready to be a real hypothesis yet) of the scientists in question is something like this, "Matter acts quite a bit differently than you would ever expect in negative-Kelvin temperatures, if matter somehow is under the same conditions, maybe it just acts differently than we expected and dark energy really just is normal energy under some incredibly unexpected conditions . . . ."
    I liked that idea, and not just because it satisfies the part of me that wants to slash the imagination of science down to size with Occam's Razor, though it does do that.  And not also because it puts a "face" on dark energy for me--makes it look like something more than a place-holding name for a phenomenon for which scientists have observed, but in reality haven't come remotely close to cracking.  Granted the connection between negative-Kelvin gas and dark energy is probably just a clever connection in spe but not in re, but I like clever connections, so why don't we run with this clever connection for a moment or two?
      When I read about Supersymmtery "failing" a few months ago, I was strangely pleased about it.  It was a nice vindication of the fact that at its best science seeks the truth, and sometimes that means finding out that the thing you've been searching for probably doesn't exist.  It's still possible that it's too soon to tell about Supersymmetry.  But the evidence is mounting that's she's a goner or Supersymmetry is going to look quite different than most expected.
    I have some affection for the unexpected, and perhaps the connection between both of these articles is the reality of science stumbling while breaking ground on new frontiers.  I don't mean that at all pejoratively--if you don't stumble while breaking new ground . . . well, I don't have a metaphor for it--you're either God or you're stumbling.  It's the most human enterprise, and stumbling (or "meandering" as one SciAm writer put it) toward truth is also the best human enterprise.
     In this case, the "stumbling" is made all the more interesting because the stumbling seems to end in resting against the firm foundation of some firmly established ideas.  In the case of the apparent failure of Supersymmetry, it comes on the heels of a most profound victory for the Standard Model.  Supersymmetry may have failed, but the Standard Model has, simply, worked.  It is not a grand unifying theory, but we're clearly getting quite a bit right here.  No dark matter yet, no singular theory of the fundamental forces, but we can account for the minute in a very detailed fashion.
       On the other hand, this new article on negative-Kelvin gas sparks some ideas--maybe (and it's such a maybe) dark energy really can be accounted for by the matter/energy in the universe that exists already.  Maybe there's no such thing as dark energy--or that it is the far side of the moon, the Janus-face of matter we're just not used to seeing--and there isn't anything else out there to be looking for.  Which doesn't mean there isn't anything left to discover, on the contrary, it means that we don't know what we do know quite so well as we thought.  If--and it's a huge hypothetical if--dark energy is just normal energy in an extreme state . . . it would mean that the answer to the question has been here the whole time, we just have yet to be able to even imagine the right questions.  It would be akin to another Einsteinian revolution: Newton (and co.) had a really great explanation for what we commonly observe in nature, but Einstein's crazy-complicated ideas that completely revolutionized our entire thinking about time, space, and light, was the right one.  What Newton did was remarkable, but what Einstein did was absolutely revolutionary on the cultural and psychological level--he rewrote the book on everything we thought we knew and could experience with the most common of senses.  For the scientific community, what we knew about the universe had already been problematized, and he found the solution in the place only genius thought to look.  But for everyone, he revolutionized the way we think about space and time and even "relativity".  For our purposes now, the reference is analogical: if dark energy is just energy, and not another "kind" of energy filled with exotic particles in far-flung corners of time and space, then we have no idea of what energy is capable.  We already know the energy contained in just an atom is remarkable--perhaps we have only glimpsed the beginning of the potential of matter/energy to do incredible things and simply to be incredible.
   In any case, I imagine we'll find out someday, and I imagine we'll do better than the current Wikipedia page on dark energy which makes me scowl a little because it sounds like science doing a "god-of-the-gaps" hypothesis as bad as the luminferous ether ever was.  Perhaps I'm supposed to be hearing, "We have no idea how to account for the disparity needed for the expanding universe model (when the universe is flat), and we're calling the potential solution for this problem "dark energy"?"  Being a Thomist and generally supportive of coherent metaphysical systems, I really don't like god-of-the-gaps hypotheses . . . but more on that in another article.

Creative Writing and the Spirit of Celebration

I suppose that many writers write for many reasons and out of many motivations.  I imagine one could spend a great deal of time cataloging those reasons, and could come up with a fantastic array of vices and virtues, healthy and abnormal psychological conditions.  I used to wonder what sort of mood fed my times of most intense creative writing--especially the reams and reams of ink on works of fiction (each ream having 500 or so pages, quite literally).  At some point in time, I called it "joy", but I think it is more verbal than that--I think I write fiction especially when I am in times of celebration, and find it difficult to write when I lose touch with that sense of celebration.

I originally entitled my blog "sublimation" because the bits of non-fiction writing I've been most happy with lately (because they've been the most creative) have been bits of sublimation: things I have written to process that have been caught up in something a little bit better than my confusing whirl of thought and emotion about them.  In the past, my fiction creative writing has been much different--it has been an almost aggressive pursuit and delight in aspects of God's creation (all of it--physical, spiritual, personal), God's own self, and God's interaction with us.  There's something about writing fiction and I think fantasy/science-fiction in particular that lets one really grasp creation--createdness--by two hands and shake it in joyous enthusiasm.  Tolkien and Lewis had their conception of "sub-creation" by which an artist of some kind enters into the similar (analogously so) kind of work that God does in creation.  In writing a story, I get to celebrate all of God's marvelous creativity by demonstrating the creation's awesome contingency: the fact that it could be, it has been, and it will be other than it is right now, and that is a good thing!  No where else is God's generosity and plenitude on display than in the vastness of the cosmos . . . and the sci-fi/fantasy section at Barnes and Nobles!  This is a part of God's own mind and character that we get to see and imitate whenever we do art, and especially when we imagine alternate worlds and histories and species and persons.  Paradoxically, we illuminate what is and call to mind what could be by celebrating what is not.

Question 44 of the Summa Theologica is the first "question" that Thomas Aquinas puts to exploring the creation and it goes like this: "The procession of creatures from God, and of the first cause of all things."  (As you can see, the question isn't exactly in question form . . . this probably isn't a case of allofunctional implicature, but I will bring it up anyway.)  I love this "question" and especially the grand use of the term "procession" almost as much as I love Boethius' definition of eternity.  Aquinas uses the term "procession" somewhat loosely.  God has both internal processions and external processions.  The internal ones are nothing less than the Personal processions of Son and Spirit and the external procession is the creation as a whole.  Procession simply refers to God as source, but it gives such a richness to the imagery!  When I think of the creation "processing" from God (though not from his being and substance, of course), I think of everything God has made marching before his throne in humble but joyous celebration of the goodness of God and the goodness of the gift of their own creation and existence.  That, perhaps, is why celebration is the key to my creative writing.  When I write, I celebrate the goodness of the created order and my own creation: I celebrate everything particular to that order, it's richness, its giftedness, its contingency, its fleetingness, the fact that it must begin and end.

Which is also why I'm not always in the mood to celebrate the createdness of the creation.  Oftentimes, I am more frightened than joyous at the fact that neither creation nor myself are necessary beings.  Oftentimes, I want to be a determinist because I want to be able to figure out all things before hand.  Or, I want to be a panentheist and be merged with God such that I am just as necessary to exist as God.  In short, I often either want to make an idol of myself or of the world in order to bring false comfort to myself that all is safe and sturdy and secure.  Contingency and giftedness displace us from occupying a too central role even in our own estimation because it displaces us ontologically, at the very root of our existence and our being.  But all false comfort is ultimately poison, and when I try to make myself too necessary (logically, ontologically, relationally) I end up making a burden for myself that I cannot possibly bear and web myself in with anxieties.    When I really trust God enough to relinquish control to him and accept my existence and my life and my being as the contingent, unneccesary, but beloved gift that I am, I can start opening my heart and hands to embrace createdness and creation again.  Otherwise, I close my heart and resent everything I don't know and don't understand.  I would rather have the spirit of adventure, but the spirit is willing while the flesh is weak.

There's something that happens in the transition from childhood to adulthood that makes most of us have to learn how to accept again.  (In many childhoods, anyway.)  Both my childhood and adolescence were fairly undisturbed and thus free to be filled with wonder. But when I ran off to college I found myself confronted with crises after crises of different sorts (some personal, some epistemological, some in matters of faith) that made trusting God and myself and the basic goodness of the world quite a bit more of a challenge!  I imagine some people never experience basic trust of the world in that way, and some people never have that trust shaken.  But I wonder whether the majority of people have a hiccup or two at the beginning or end of adolescence and have to learn again what it means to be a child.  I also imagine that many of us spend a great deal of time flubbing this lesson and having to be taken through it again and again until we really learn how to be led to Jesus like little children.

There's something childlike about joy and celebration--which makes it harder for those of us who feel the need to be sober-minded adults much of the time.  I don't have anything against genuine adulthood--in fact, praise Jesus if you actually manage to become a self-respecting, contributing adult.  But not if it makes you boring and self-protective and think you are the one who must be in control and in charge of your life.  That pose sometimes makes me feel more secure or more adult, but it also makes me curl up in on myself and have less to give and less to celebrate.

Art is one of the closest things we have to pure gift on this side of the veil.  Ultimately we engage in art for the sake of beauty and not for the sake of utility.  We know that beauty makes life better, but only because it appears that human beings are made for beauty, not because of any "practical" gain or reason.  The thing that refreshes us about the imagination-in-act is that it awakens us to our true nature--to our true identity as beings given an identity for no other reason that we were thought by One to be lovely, to be worthy, to be gift.  In life we are receivers before we are ever givers, and what we receive is as deep as our own bodies, souls, and minds.

The "War of Art" and the War of Life in Contrariety

Today I happened to be reminded of a book I ran across in high school: Steven Pressfield's The War of Art. The premise of the book goes something like this: Art--the creative process--is the battle of waging war against all the factors that militate against you in order to quench your creative potential and output. You have to fight yourself and the powers that be--the everyday distractions and the karmic energies that all seem to conspire against you to keep you from writing. He describes how the daily battle against all these forces must be waged in order to safeguard one's muse--one's openness and ability to act creatively. It is a fascinating read that is helpful for any writer or artist and does contain some of the most heartfelt and apt profanity I have ever read. And when I was 16 and read that book I was quite the moral crusader against cursing. I still thought it was apt.

However, my musings as of late have steered my thoughts in quite another direction: what a tricky, evil little monster discouragement about one's voice can be. I remember reading (also in high school) an article by Carol Gilligan called "In a Different Voice" that was about how young women's process of moral decision-making tends to be different than men's and tends to be overlooked or dismissed. The use of "voice" in this manner has certainly been abused, trivialized, and made cliched and deathly boring in a multitude of ways . . . and yet "abuse does not negate proper-use". I was forced to begin to rethink my dismissal of this concept (or at least, the phrasing of this concept) some months ago when I began to have a rather peculiar experience in prayer.

A moment of explanation: inner healing has been one of the most important ways Jesus has shown me that he is real and has power over absolutely everything and that he knows me and knows what he is doing with me. He has healed me from stuff that I never expected to be healed from and didn't even think was broken. One of the ways in which He sometimes shows me what He's up to (He doesn't always and that's His prerogative) is by giving me a very particular physical sensation that localizes what is wrong and what he is doing about it. For example, a few years ago I heard a sermon on the parable of the sower and was challenged to discover what things in my life were falling on good soil and what was falling on rocky soil or being choked out by thorns, etc. In the weeks that followed, when I prayed I had the recurring sensation that there were these huge boulders in my soul that Jesus wanted to take out and deal with. That should have been my first clue to go to counseling! But alas, 21 year-olds are often proud and stubborn and naive about their ability to handle everything and I was no different. Jesus certainly dealt with that rocky soil and those "stones" are now gone. But it wasn't pretty because I tried to do too much by myself.

In this case, the sense I had was of vocal constriction. When I prayed sometimes, my vocal cords felt tense and tight and when I was praying about certain things the feeling worsened. And I knew instantly what it meant: I knew that it meant that I was having trouble speaking--that I was compromised in my ability to speak the truth about myself of all things. In short, I knew Jesus was revealing to me that I was having trouble with my voice--and as a singer, that meant something doubly significant to me: it struck home as a metaphor dramatically for me because I have spent years working to make something beautiful come out of my mouth when I open it. The meaning here was inescapably obvious to me: I was having trouble with voice, I was having trouble with myself and that this was a problem Jesus wanted to address.

Address it he did: The first thing Jesus had to tell me was that he actually liked what I will call "the prophetic personality". The truth is, there is no such thing as a prophetic personality and that all Christians are called to embrace the call and sacrifice of a prophetic to one degree or another when we do everything we can to proclaim Christ's good news to the world and are hated and rejected for the sake of His name and His word. (It goes without saying--though I will say it anyway--that when we are hated and rejected because we do hateful things, that certainly has nothing to do with prophetic suffering.) However, it is also true that Jesus makes us all different and He makes some of us much more comfortable with external conflict, external resistance, going against the grain, going against the status quo, resisting the system and ignoring the crowd. There are many different definitions of what it means to be a "contrarian". I am a purist on the subject. Some people think being a contrarian means simply "doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing". I have always thought the true art of contrariety consists in refusing to be moved by the crowd--meaning, if the crowd is right, you engage with it, if it is wrong, you resist it. Contrariety is about being full engaged and being fully alive and not resting on your laurels and waiting for someone else to tell you what to do or how to think. It is about embracing one's responsibility to find the whole truth not just the part of it that we are partial to or comfortable with.

Yet, the contrarian lifestyle has its drawbacks. People really resist being made uncomfortable and they will do everything in their power to create space for themselves to be wooed back into dogmatic slumber. And they will call you names and if you are a Christian they will tell you that you aren't meek enough or humble enough or gentle enough (and if you are a woman) submissive enough . . . just to get you off their back and to get themselves back to their comfty-cozy nap they were taking when they were undisturbed by your rabble-rousing after the truth. What's worse is that they will undoubtedly be at least partially correct--if you are a true contrarian (or any sort of human being at all) you will have your virtues and your vices and your weaknesses and some of them will be that you aren't extraordinarily gifted with meekness and gentleness. Regardless as to whether you are passionately devoted to loving your neighbor, it may not look like the kind of love that someone who is invested in their own comfort wants to receive. We are so picky, after all. Its not good enough that love be love--it has to look the way I want it to for me to acknowledge it or receive it or heavens help us--appreciate it. We are very fragile creatures.

C. S. Lewis once said something about the lot of us not being strong enough for heaven--how the joy in heaven with God is much too powerful for us to bear. That is why we must be changed into God's own image and participate in His own life--so that in Him we do have enough strength to bear all the goodness of God. Without becoming partakers of His divine life, we wouldn't have a chance. Instead of being the bush that burns but is not consumed by the fire (which is the destiny of Israel in the Exodus story and our destiny in Christ), we would be consumed. This is why we are so often threatened by the virtues of those who are different from us. We are not strong enough to bear them yet. Moreover, if someone--like a prophet--has the power and Spirit of Christ in them, they don't just have virtue, they have supernatural virtue, they have "spiritual superpowers". Spiritual superpowers are hard to bear--which is exactly why the people who hated Jesus when they saw him make the lame walk or the blind see or wipe away the tears of the grieving--that's exactly why they hated him as much as they did. Jesus had all the power of God to do good in the world, to do supernatural good--and it was too much for their feeble flesh to bear. They had a choice: they could either let the fire invade and consume all their dross and stubble and be saved only by the power of God working in them or they could resist and close themselves off to it and save their lives only to lose them. We are confronted with these choices nearly every moment of our lives and are oftentimes tragically oblivious to this.

All to say, there is something about trying to be the kind of contrarian that Jesus himself was. Some of us don't have a choice. Some of us are like Paul--we are a fiery, driven, dangerous mess of wrong until Jesus gets a hold of us and turns us in the right direction. Then we are on our way to being a fiery, driven mess of the Holy Spirit dangerous only to the powers and principalities of this world and this age, though that transformation is the work of a lifetime. Jesus takes us each on different journeys to become like Him. Who can say what that will be until you walk down the path after Him? And we ought to stay close behind: there are twists and turns that we cannot possibly anticipate from the beginning.

In the beginning of this post I mentioned that discouragement from one's voice is a "tricky, evil little monster". Until sometime after college, I was a happy little contrarian, oblivious to the world of self-doubt and discouragement until something happened that sent me spiraling downward into Cartesian-grade skepticism about who I was as a person and what I had to offer to the church, to the world, to my friends and family, and to God. Looking back, it is a real shame that I got bamboozled into that kind of radical skepticism about myself. Not only was it a real waste of time, its just a shame to doubt God like that. But the kicker for me is for much of that time I was questioning and doubting some of my best qualities and refusing to engage with them because I was scared it would be fruitless or that I would hurt someone. Some of my friends and family members tried to talk me out of it, but I was committed to my Cartesian methodology.

One of my favorite things that the Lord ever said to me about this that helped shake me out of it was (and this is for the philosophers out there), "You are a figment of my imagination. If I had not loved this idea, I would not have have reified it." (Reify=to make an idea concrete or real.) Granted, God does not love my sin. But he does love and delight in all my feistiness and in every gift that he breathed into existence in me, from the smallest bit to the largest. And He will save and redeem every aspect of my personality that he made and turn it to His use and for the glory of His name. So he will do with all of us. This is also the reason we must seek to love the good in our neighbor without qualification, no matter how tempting it may be to be threatened by it or indifferent to it.

We have to fight for this perspective, I think. A friend of mine has a thing about "magnanimity"--"great-souledness": the call of us all to love and serve our neighbor so they can be the greatest and best creature under God that they can be. I have a thing about absolute freedom: to learn how to so embrace the freedom of Christ that we fear nothing and are set free to be and to do absolutely everything Christ has for us. But this is war, peeps. Spiritual warfare, in fact--of a more intense variety than even The War of Art. The last thing that those spiritual powers that fight against God want is for God's creatures to rise up in the full power of Christ knowing who they are and how they can be Christ for the world with everything they have. So they will take advantage--if that means getting you lost in fear or self-doubt or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, the enemy takes every advantage.

Now the question is, do I have my voice back? The answer to that: Jesus is working on it. Every once in a while, I feel something in my throat that reminds me of ways I need to learn how to speak again. And I say to myself: "I can't do that, how on earth is Jesus going to do that?" He manages--even through my cowardice and sloth and weakness, he miraculously manages to lead me to a better way of doing things, to being stronger and whole and not so ruled by fear. "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." There are many "yokes of slavery". Galatians 5:1 was talking about the slavery of the law. Fear is another yoke, and so is thinking that change is up to me or that one can set oneself free. We don't fight the spiritual battle with our own power and we don't have to know or understand how God is going to change and heal and save us. We just have to trust that He can because of what He has already done and ask so that we may receive.