Anxiety, Healing and the God of Provision

These are thoughts inspired by a wonderful sermon I heard by Luke Powery of Duke Divinity School.  I appreciated everything about his sermon, but I was left thinking that there were still some unaswered questions.  Listen to the sermon first, if you like:   Calvin College Symposium on Worship--Luke Powery Sermon, Saturday.

Succinctly put, my internal response to Powery's sermon was, "There's a deeper aspect to this that I'm not quite hearing."  Powery masterfully demonstates how anxiety is an enemy to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love.  The more anxiety, the less room for faith, hope, and love.  The less room for God, and the less room for love of neighbor.  He also talks about the "contagious" aspect of anxiety, how anxiety can spread from person to person if you aren't careful.  In addition, he menions the addictive side of anxiety--how anxiety can become so all-consuming and central to one's life that it actually becomes idolatrous--that it displaces God at the center, and people actually go out of their way to maintain their high level of anxiety.  Why?  Because they've become so accustomed to it, they don't know how to live without it.

To me, that's not terribly shocking.  Most of us, when doing significant psychological and spiritual work that entails a major change of life, both interiorly and exteriorly experience the jarring cognative dissonance of adjusting to a "new normal".  Sometimes this "new normal" is so foreign it feels wrong for a while, or in some cases, people feel a loss of identity--they are so used to thinking of x dysfunctional or broken aspect of themselves as being a part of who they really are, they don't know what to do when that aspect disappears, changes, or becomes healed.  There is a period of time in which you have to fumble around until you adjust to the "new you" who is actually just a "more healed you".  In any case, I think I've seen lots of people "worship at the altar of anxiety" as Powery says, sometimes in more or less superficial ways.  He says this can ruin your relationship with God because it really is idolatry and you can't serve two masters.  I have seen it take over personalities and compromise one's sense of identity because x person cannot imagine not living without being the one in control of the cosmos (and I've seen that in myself).  His is the more serious point, though--he's describing one who has really lost the battle of idolatry and is in some serious need of rescuing.
   
Powery goes on to contrast the picture of the anxious soul with the picture of the Providing God.  God is the one who has given himself to us in eucharistic gift and eucharistic sacrifice--he has given us himself, he has guarded us against the tyranny of the devil.  So why don't we believe him?  Why do we have such little faith in the presence of such a great God?  Why do we end up having "theological amnesia", as Powery puts it?  That, by the way, is a great way of describing what happens to someone who is truly consumed by anxiety--the anxiety is just so overwhelming it swallows up the knowledge of God and annhilates it in the anxious soul.  We just don't and can't remember anymore who God said he is and what he is like when we're drowning in anxiety.
 
But why the drowning aspect?  It is one thing to be embroiled in conflict with anxiety, and quite another thing to be overwhelmed to the point of drowing in it.  (This isn't an altogether inaccurate description of what some composes some forms of depression.)  Yet another, perhaps, to give up and just fall down and worship the false god.
 
I am sure there are any number of explanations and some of them are probably just fairly cut-and-dry theological accounts of both idolatry and pride.  When we are at the center of our own cosmos and self-reliance is our default mode, frankly, anxiety is just realism.  Fearfulness and anxiety are normal responses to a chaotic and unfriendly world . . . if human beings are the ones with the most chance of having control over the world.  It takes a lot of work to root out this idea and replace it with a lived doctrine of creation, where God is the God of order and the origin of all things--such that he is in control by virtue of being the Creator, and by virtue of the world being ontologically dependent on him for existence.  (I will explain that more in another post sometime.)
 
But there's also a side to this that is both about formation and development, and is also relational, and for that I speak out of my own experience of reflecting on God's provision for several years.  I've known for a very long time that I've had issues with God's provision.  When I was younger--say in my early college years--I used to have this invisible roller-coaster ride with God that it took me a long time to see properly, and then begin to understand.  It would go something like this: I would find myself drifting away from God (in the emotional sense) and becoming angry with him.  I would avoid prayer and Scripture reading until it made me miserable.  At some point, perhaps a few weeks later, I would inevitably find myself at Psalm 104, weeping, with little understanding as to why.  And the cycle would repeat itself, and did repeat itself about twice a year for two years or so as I slowly began to realize that I didn't really believe in God's provision.

In my heart, what I really believed is that I was left on my own to cope with all the craziness of life.  While most of the time I had enough optimism and naivety and natural resilence to find this exciting and adventuresome . . . deep down inside, my soul was suffering because God never made it to cruise about the cosmos on it's own.  We are made for God, and we are made to live with God, from the deepest and most inward and invisible parts of our hearts to the most external and visible parts of our lives.  Every moment is suppose to be caught up in both dependence on and partnership with God, and while I didn't understand either very well, I was especially clueless about the former.

At some point after college, I went to a parish retreat that was a real step forward in healing in this area.  Unbeknownst to me, there was a real blockage in my ability to understand God's love for me and his provision because "deep down inside" I thought he was unwilling to help me and resented my dependence on him.  I had picked that up from some unfortunate family dynamics, which brings me to my point about development and formation.  From an early age, we all learn what "love" is from our families of origins--and sometimes those families of origins have either broken or wicked definitions of love, which we absorb in childhood without the ability to reflect on what we absorb.  We carry that into adulthood and oftentimes we project these definitions onto God--and sometimes even, we hate God because we imagine he is like the earthly people who failed to love us in the ways that we needed to be loved, or failed to provide for us in the ways that we needed to be provided for.  Oftentimes, we don't even know this is going on, and we certainly don't understand the maelstorm of anxiety and anger that rises from needs being unmet and for generally being maladjusted to the world around us.

The answer to this I think is both theological and experiential--like most healing.  Central to this is genuine reconciliation with the True God, which involves renouncing all the idols and all the lies that consume our imagination about our Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who love us very much.  That task really is theological, because it is only the study of theology that can correct our ideas about him.  But this is also relational--for obvious reasons.  If you've been "friends" with someone who you thought was a jerk for years, and the friendship was equal parts tolerance and affection, only to find out after ages and ages that the person wasn't the jerk you thought he was and was in reality a great deal better and nice than you had imagined . . . well, that would change the nature of your relationship with that person.  It would open up things because you'd be able to trust that person more.

One could sum up my supplementum to Powery in this way.  There is an element to combating anxiety that is the cognitive side of faith: we are all in need of theological therapy at one point or another, and "believing the right thing" can make a difference.  But we also need a deeper change of heart, a deeper reconciliation with God, and a deeper experience of God's provision: it is these things that result in true healing for those who are drowning in anxiety, and this is a costly transformation that is the work of years in relationship with the Lord.  And we don't talk enough about the spiritual work that takes years to accomplish.

Iron Man and the Quandary of Self-Love

"You're tiptoeing, big man. You need to strut."

Tony Stark (Iron Man) to Bruce Banner (Hulk)


Rewatching The Avengers the other day, this snippet of a conversation caught my eye.  When I first encountered Tony Stark and the Iron Man movies, I wasn't a terribly huge fan of Stark's "text-book narcissism" as Black Widow put it in her report to Nick Fury.  But he's starting to grow on me.  One of the reasons he's starting to grow on me is because his very narcissism presents a challenge and a question to the audience: what exactly is the difference between narcissism and proper self-love?  And given a good definition, how do we actually go about recognizing that difference in the field, per se?   

One of the challenges of Tony Stark's case is that he is an exceptionally skilled individual who believes that he is an exceptionally skilled individual.  That's not the problem, and it certainly isn't the part that makes him vulnerable to the charge of narcissism.  In recognizing his own genius and achievement, he's just being honest.  Being honest--at least in good moral psychology, Christian and pagan--is one of the things that leads you to self-knowledge.  In acknowledging that, Stark is just being a realist.

The real reason people say Stark is a narcissist is because he is a) thoroughly devoted to self-pleasure and feeding his own interests without proper courtesy and attention to others and b) because "the rules don't apply to him."  But that isn't the thing I'm most interested in.  The thing I am interested in is the way in which Stark's advice to Banner was actually hitting on something good.  The following conversation gets at the heart of things a bit more.  When Tony Stark suggests that Banner will be "suiting up" with the rest of the Avengers, Banner replies:

"Ah, see. I don't get a suit of armor. I'm exposed, like a nerve. It's a nightmare."

"You know, I've got a cluster of shrapnel, trying every second to crawl its way into my heart.  This stops it. This little circle of light. It's part of me now, not just armor. It's a terrible privilege."

Banner responds: "But you can control it."

"Because I learned how."

"It's different."

Stark says, "Hey, I've read all about your accident. That much gamma exposure should have killed you."

Banner replies: "So you're saying that the Hulk, the other guy, saved my life? That's nice. It's a nice sentiment. Saved it for what?"

Stark: "I guess we'll find out."

With a wry smile from the resident Hulk, "You may not enjoy that."

Tony Stark: "You just might."

It may be true that Stark's enjoyment of the Hulk's destructive tendencies isn't terribly wise or constructive.  But the movie goes on to prove his perspective to be the right one.  Whatever burden the Hulk side of Banner might be, he's also a terribly effective asset equal to the task of taking on Loki single-handedly and dealing some serious damage to the Leviathans.  

What struck me, however, was more the enjoyment side of Stark's remarks.  Stark's not just egging Banner on to higher heights of self-esteem--he wants Banner to let go and enjoy himself.  He wants him to enjoy the destructive power of the Hulk, and see the power and hope for a more constructive use of the Hulk, even if it seems unlikely that the Hulk be fully trained to saddle.

Aside from the exaggerations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there's some very good advice there.  We spend a lot of time not enjoying ourselves.  We spend a lot of time berating, criticizing, and finding fault with ourselves.  We spend a lot of time in self-hatred and we don't spend a lot of time in appreciation and delight and even in glorying in ourselves.  But proper self-love is difficult to think about well.  How do I love and really celebrate and enjoy and even glory in the part of me that is good and wonderful and fearfully made by God without being a narcissist?  How do I love myself because God has loved me and wonderfully made me and destined me for glory rather than loving myself simply out of a false sense of ownership?  How do I balance the call for self-denial and proper abandonment of one's self and the call to the celebrate one's own goodness?

We are all faced with the quandary of reconciling loves--love for self, love for God, love for other created things, and we only succeed in reconciling loves when we know, understand and have been converted to the true purposes for which we love.  When I love myself and God for my own sake, I may not do wrong, but I haven't done much good either.  Self love, when it is the beginning of loves, is not a bad beginning.  It, however, is a terrible end for love--love of self and God for one's own sake must mature into something else or it will turn into narcissism.  (Narcissism is real life is much less attractive than narcissism enacted by Robert Downey, Jr.)  

When the world becomes contracted such that I--myself--am the only reason and purpose for which I love, my world becomes a false and ugly alternate reality.  Self-love is meant to be a natural tutor and example which shows us how it is we might love others.  The instinct for self-love does not have to be taught, though the maturation of it does, and self-love matures as the love of self is submitted to the love of God and the love of others.  It requires having our ideas about love submitted, transformed, and joined to the will, wisdom, and love of God.  And it requires a lot of obedience and renunciation and suffering--in many ways, we seem to lose much of ourselves before we find ourselves again, secure in God.

But during and after all of this transformation, when our loves change and are matured into ripeness--when we begin to see ourselves in God's light, purpose, and love, a wonderful thing happens.  We are freed, as Teresa of Avila told us so many years ago, to love ourselves for God's sake.  Having learned already to love God for his own sake, having seen God at the center of the cosmos and not ourselves, we begin to see ourselves again.  We perhaps catch a glimpse of ourselves out of the corner of our eyes and find that we are wonderfully and beautifully made.  And we begin to find out why God was so interested in the first place--we see what he sees, we find beautiful what he finds beautiful, and we find those things in ourselves.

As Bernard Lonergan and Henri de Lubac taught me, the first and most precious gift that God gives to us is ourselves.  We are meant to accept our lives as occassions for joy and goodness and to understand that there is more to the Creation than what is broken and damaged and harmful.  For some of us skeptics, joy and delight and acceptance of what is good in ourselves is most difficult because we think the most honest or the most rigorous or the most intellectual thing to do is to identify what is wrong rather than what is right.  But no matter what darkness exists in the human soul, it cannot overcome the brightness of creation, for the beauty of Creation is upheld by the hand of God, redeemed in the Resurrection of the Son, and preserved and guarded until the end by the work of the Spirit.

But we are called to a holy joy in ourselves.  We are called to take the same joy in ourselves that God does.  It isn't the only joy we have, and it isn't the most important joy we have.  But it is the very first gift God gives us and we are meant to come full circle in loving ourselves for his sake.

Dreamform Two: Gold Leaf Scrolls and Red Writing

(Note:  These dreams are in no particular chronological order.  I had this dream sometime in January, 2013.)

In my dream, I found myself ushered through rooms lit by torches clustered at the intersections of rounded arches.  The torchlight was warm and bright, and had the effect of coloring the walls reddish-gold.   The upper sections of the walls may have been plaster or stone, though the lower sections were definitely of a more textured and less reflective material, stone or wood.  The almost oval archways connecting various rooms were neither very high nor very wide, though I did not feel that the spaces were crabbed together in anyway.  Some of the archways slunk away into darkness, but I found myself in long, rectangular rooms filled with tables, light, and with robed men hard at work.  I had the impression of being underground, being very secure, and being in a place not my own.  The setting was familiar to me, yet I have never been in any place like it.  It was simple and beautiful, and reminds me most of Neogothic Anglican-style cathedrals and churches (say built in the late 19th, early 20th century).
   I did not stop to talk with anyone, and although I felt led to a very particular place in the bowels of this place, I did not see who was leading me.  After ducking through a few different rooms, and winding around tables and people, I found myself in another workroom, with a large, well-lit table in the center of the room.
    At some point, someone handed me a set of very large, honest-to-goodness scrolls.  The only time I have seen actual scrolls in waking life (in person, anyway) was ceremonial Torah scrolls in a Conservative Jewish synagogue on one of the High Holy Days.  Those were lavishly decorated.
    These were too.  First of all, they were enormous--probably they were two-and-a-half feet tall, and there were two sets of them.  The rollers were made of gold, or a material that looked like gold, and were stylized, though not elaborately so.  I unfurled--or someone else did--both sets of scrolls and laid them down the whole length of the table--maybe 10 feet or so?  I don't know: waking or sleeping I am a terrible measurer of distance or length or quanitity of any kind, really.  In any case, I am fairly certain I could have easily laid down on the table and not come to the end of it--and I'm about 5 and a half feet tall.  When both scrolls were unrolled the full length of the table, I am not sure that they were opened all the way.  Now that I think of it, I think they were not, but what I could see was this.
   The paper itself was covered over entirely in gold.  Rich, sparkling, deep gold.  And written on the gold, in the reddest, most perfect letters you can imagine, in a language entirely unfamiliar to me, in an alphabet entirely unfamiliar to me.  The letters were whole and perfect--perhaps a little raised from the text, either done by a typeset or the best calligrapher in the world.  The language looked a little like the Cree language, which I have only seen once while visiting The Forks in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and I had absolutely no hope of ever reading it.  Yet, I knew absolutely that the scrolls were mine.  The person who was showing them to me was showing them to me precisely because they were mine, and indeed, the Someone showing them to me, was really showing them to me becuase the scrolls were me.   And at some point after that, I woke up.
   As a student theologian, I am well aware that human beings are made in the image of God.  (Hey, that's what I wrote my graduate thesis on!)  And as made in the imagine of God, human beings are the parodox of parodoxes: we are finite pictures of the Infinite One.  As such, human being really are a living mystery.  You think particle physics is hard to fathom?  The human person more.  You contemplate the workings of a cell and think it profound?  The human person more.  And not the human person reduced to biology or chemistry or math or physics.  No, the human person who is biological, chemical, physical, and also much more than that--God-breathed, God-touched, God-crafted, and God-imaging.  Calvin said that the universe was the "mirror of God's work" (and I'm totally going to steal that for a book title someday), but the human person more.  No matter how deep how wide how unfathomable any part or even the whole of Creation is, in some mysterious sense, the human person--your neighbor, your enemy, your friend, your loved one--more, because while God has touched all of his creation and left traces of his presence there, he has left something more with human beings, His Very Image.
   But that's all well and good and not even all that difficult to say.  What is much more difficult is figuring out what that really means in the sometimes not so bright light of every-day life.  C. S. Lewis brings this to life brilliantly in the "Weight of Glory" when he talks of the hidden and potential glory alive in every human being.  He was inviting us to regard our neighbor as a holy and dreadfully important subject, worthy of considering, love, and something close to reverence . . . because the destiny which God has in mind for us is so great.       This dream was more about the noetic side of the equation, whereas Lewis' sermon was more about the ontic.  "Noetic" is philosopher-speak for "pertaining to knowledge or knowing."  So when I say the dream was noetic or epistemological, I mean that God was trying to show me something about how I am to know myself in light of the mystery of the human being made in the image of God.
     The thing he was communicating was this:  "You [and potentially anyone and everyone human] are priceless and beautiful.  Your soul is priceless and beautiful.  You can't even see your soul--meaning the invisible aspect of human life--all the time, but it really is there and it really is beautiful.  And you have no idea what's in there.  You have no idea what you are or who you are because what you are and you who are is absolutely too wonderful, too deep, too fantastically complicated for you to know.  You aren't going to know everything there is to know about yourself precisely because you are made in My image.  It is too much for you.  It is beyond you.  You don't speak the language, and you certainly can't read it.  But I know.  And I will tell you.  I will tell you what the writing says--what I have written--and I will tell you over time and I will tell you what you need to know.  But don't worry about it too much, because the thing is in my hand and there's nothing you can do about it apart from what I am doing and what I am saying to you.  So don't worry.  I will be there and I will speak."
      This was all very comforting to me.  Partly, it was comforting to me because I am indebted to the Spanish Mystics for a lot of their teaching on the spiritual life, and Christian discipline and virtue, and they, especially Teresa of Avila, have much to say about self-knowledge as a virtue.  One of my undergraduate professors said that only Christianity made self-knowledge a virtue.  I haven't researched that much myself, but it would be interesting to see the ways in which that is true.  In any case, Christianity certainly takes self-knowledge very seriously--you see it especially in Augustine and Calvin.  For you Reformed peeps out there, perhaps you remember how The Institutes tie together knowledge of God and knowledge of self?  For such diverse Christians as John Calvin and Teresa of Avila, these two things are intertwined and inseperable.  And for both, self-knowledge is both a duty and a gift.  Self-knowledge is revelation from God just as knowledge of God is revelation from God.   The word "revelation" speaks for itself here: God reveals himself and is revealed to human beings--in Christianity, you can't come to the knowledge of God by yourself, it has to be a gift from God.  If you think you've come to the knowledge of God by yourself, what you've actually come to (as Calvin nicely puts it) is the knowledge of an idol--something you've made up in your own mind that may resemble God in some ways, but won't in other ways.  And it won't be him, and you won't have drawn closer to him with that knowledge, so the project is pretty much moot at that point.
   But things that are both gifts and duties are tricky to keep in proper balance and proper dependence on God.  If you are prone to having an overactive sense of responsibility as I am, it is easy to confuse the boundaries between responding to God's initiative and gifting in gratitude and obedience and taking on burdens to do things it is impossible for human beings to do in their own power.  For me, I tend to get so wrapped up in my quest for knowledge that I forget that knowledge is revelation, knowledge of God and self especially so.  I am much more inclined to view self-knowledge as a project for me to complete, and a project that I am responsible to complete.  And in my worse moments, to judge other people for not knowing themselves--for doing so poorly on this project, or for failing in their duties to self-knowledge.
   In this particular case, I woke from this dream with a sense of relief.  Lately, I had had the feeling (though I wasn't quite aware of it) that I was epically failing in knowing myself.  There were parts of myself I just didn't understand and frankly that I had not the time, energy, skill or wisdom to address.  They weren't necessarily problematic parts of myself--just parts of myself that I either hadn't seen in a why or were new to me.  I didn't know what they meant or what I was going to do about it, and while I had decided to accept those parts of myself, I didn't understand them and that made me a bit nervous.  I kept wondering, am I doing the right thing here by just accepting myself and moving forward?
   The answer I recieved was "yes" and helps free a facet of my personality that I do know isn't the most helpful: getting stuck locking things down with enough certainty to get Descartes to at least grudgingly nod his head at me.  Oftentimes, that's a waste of time or an impossible enterprise, but it often doesn't look that way to me: it seems more like a moral responsibility to pursue that kind of certainty--and what more important place to start than the knowledge of who I am as a person?
   Now, and particularly with the help of a dream, I can see what a rabbit-hole that is.  If all our theology is right and humans are these gloriously complex, weighty, and deep creatures . . . my intellectual and moral enterprise didn't stand a chance.  I actually can't achieve what I'm hoping to achieve.  In my humanity, I'm actually not capable of fully understanding my humanity.  But God already understands it, and he's going to help me see and know and understand in the ways that are proper to do so.  Through this dream, I was freed from my over-active sense of responsibility, which was telling me I had to know myself perfectly, on my own, with little or no help from God.  That's generally a bad combination of assumptions, and this was no exception.
    Well, that's it.  Except for two more things.  I was thinking that I know why the scrolls were gold and the writing was read.  Gold is a useful symbol because it is precious metal that is beautiful and does not rust.  That's why it symbolizes things that are supposed to last forever: like human beings, like love, like our most important promises.  Red is the color of blood and can symbolize life, which is the function it served here.

The Spirit of Martyrdom

        Is this a slender proof of the impotence of death, do you think? Or is it a slight indication 

        of the Savior's victory over it, when boys and young girls who are in Christ look beyond            

        this present life and train themselves to die? Every one is by nature afraid of death and 

        of bodily dissolution; the marvel of marvels is that he who is enfolded in the faith of the cross                 

        despises this natural fear and for the sake of the cross is no longer cowardly in face of it.

              ---Athanasius, On the Incarnation, ch. 5 "The Resurrection"

This post is written as something of a reflection on the killing of Jordan Davis in Jacksonville, Florida this past November.  After learning that the shooter was pleading self-defense, claiming that the teenagers were armed and that his life was in danger, although there is at the moment no evidence that this is the case, I began the principle parts of this reflection.  A few other elements of the killing also got my attention.  (1) The killer Michael Dunn was 46, well-employed, apparently a collector of guns, while the victim was a 17 year old.  (2) Michael Dunn was also white and the victim (and possibly his friends?) were black.  (3) Dunn fired 8 rounds total--there is no evidence of return fire from the alleged-armed victims.  (4)  Dunn was under the influence of some amount of alcohol, though whether enough to impair his reasoning is unclear. (5)  The shooting happened at night, in the dark.

I claim no particular insight or knowledge "about what really happened that night", but as an outsider, it is easy to imagine what could have happened, and what I suspect did happen, though I freely admit that my personal suspicions are not very valuable and do not really matter in this particular case.  But for the sake of my reflection, let us for the moment assume that my imaginative suspicions about "what really happened" is correct.  

I imagine the following:  I imagine that Dunn was slightly intoxicated--enough to make him suggestible, perhaps a bit sleepy, perhaps careless, perhaps more prone to anger because of whatever amount of alcohol he consumed.  I imagine that he was in a strange place (in Jacksonville, not his home town), and going to a liquor store and came across a car full of black teenagers listening to loud (rap) music and that he became unduly apprehensive and perhaps even paranoid because of all these factors.  I imagine he thought he had a right and a duty to defend himself and use lethal force if necessary (because who carries a handgun who doesn't believe that's true?).  I imagine he had a nasty altercation that involved lots of yelling and anger and curses from both parties, and that in his anger and partly racially motivated fear, and in the dark in a strange place . . . I imagine that Dunn heard Jordan Davis and his friends threatening him, and took them literally, and that Dunn imagined that Davis had a gun and was going to try to kill him.  So Dunn does what is necessary of course, shoots and kills Davis, and pops off eight rounds total just to make sure he had vanquished his foe, whose status as a deadly enemy was almost entirely fabricated by emotion and imagination.  That is what I imagine.

But regardless as to what I imagine, what I see is fear: fear of death.  Fear of losing one's life to someone else.  Fear of being robbed of what one deserves, fear of dying in a worthless altercation (better make sure--I'll get him before he gets me!  I won't let them take me that way!)  I also see a judgment made--better to kill than to be killed.  Better to protect one's own.  Better to exercise one's power where one can and fight for one's rights.  Better to be a killer than a coward or a fool.  I see the world's perspective on life and death.

What I suspect in Dunn, I've heard right out in other people in other ways: a self-protectiveness and devotion to self-love (incurvatus in se, perhaps) that chills me.  What chills me more is when I hear it in Christians, for it is the warning bell of a love of God and neighbor that has grown cold.  I hear it in the obnoxious birth-certificate "controversy" with Obama.  People absurdly hate him both for his liberal policies and accuse him of being a Muslim at the same time--don't they know that if he were a Muslim fundamentalist, he would not be a liberal in any sense?  But they are so ignorant that all they can do is fuse ignorant fear with ignorant fear--they have the now socially incorrect fear of black people and the socially ambiguous fear of fundamentalist Islam--and the masses to which this fear appeals know next to nothing about these things and no one who is either black or Muslim.  Thus, they join them both together into one great fear.

I hear it in the fearful bigoted speech of people who are "afraid" of black people or more often now, "afraid" of people from the Middle East.  I imagine if I lived in a different part of the United States, I would also hear about "immigrants", but thankfully I don't hear about that.  But the fact of the matter is, if I am afraid of someone else and have not conquered that fear with love and courage, I am going to treat someone or a class of people very badly.  History bears that out, though I am not presently going to prove my case by history.

What most of these small, fearful bigoted people (and heavens, perhaps I am one of them at times?!) have in common is that they want security in life: they want to secure what is theirs, secure what they have.  They want to secure their rights, their protection, their prosperity, their well-being before "those people" take it away.  What a miser or a miserably selfish person seeks to pursue for herself alone, a bigot pursues for "us" and "ours".  A selfish person only loves himself enough to act, a bigot has got far enough in love of neighbor to love their nearest kin alone.  A selfish person will sacrifice for no one but herself, but a bigot will sacrifice for his kind and not for what is not perceived to be his kind.  Thus, a very imperfect love has the capacity for terrible vice and sometimes terrible evil.  

My family particularly is prone to "tribalism"--they love their own and extend to their own every grace, courtesy, kindness, generosity--but little of this can be seen outside the family unit.  In fact, given the charity shown to insiders, it is really shocking to see how "outsiders" are treated.  It is rarely natural for us to extend this self-giving, other-preferring  love to the full extent to which Christ meant for it to be extended.  And by chance we learn to love all our neighbors, all the kindreds of the earth very well for Christ's sake, noticing and taking note and regard for his likeness in them all . . . Jesus has still asked from us a step further: we also must love our enemies.  It is this love that Christ exemplifies most fully in the Gospel--he loves those who betray him and those who put him to death.  Having loved his own, he loves them to the end, even if still they walk away from him or stab him in the back for 30 pieces of silver, or personally see to it that he dies in shame on a tree in agony as a criminal.

   

But back to bigotry.  It is this preference for the things that belong to "us" and "ours", and especially the security that we feel we are owed or entitled to by life or by the government or by the moral law or by whatever justification we seek and find that helps us justify some of our least Christ-like behaviors.  Because security under the perception of threat from a group that is "other" will make people do all sorts of crazy things that they ought not do.  It is the combination of "threat" and "other" ("not-me") that lets either a lone person or a nation think about preemptive strikes and "getting him before he gets me".  And the conviction that I (or we) deserve my own life and security is what makes self-defense necessary.  The one who deserves his life and his rights naturally feels that he must cling to it, and that it is only right to defend it.  If one is so thoughtlessly devoted to oneself and one's own good and one's own deserts and consumed with oneself, how is one to put one's own self aside to love one's neighbor, or more importantly, one's enemy? 

The Christian has been made free from self-defense.  We are not required to defend ourselves.  My life was once given to me in Creation by a gift.  Robbed from me by an enemy, and restored to me by a Friend.  But in restoring my life to me, my Friend did it in such a way that I need never cling to it again.  Jesus gives us Life Eternal that cannot be taken from us by anything or anyone, and thus we are freed to hold on to our own lives very lightly.  I don't have to cling to my life and protect my rights, because my true life is hidden with Christ on high and will one day be revealed in splendor.  What we see now isn't everything that is to be seen.

Tertullian once said that the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church.  It is my prayer that the spirit of the martyrs would fill the Church, so that it would be very obvious that we don't need to cling to our lives and our security like the world and our flesh tell us we must.  Athanasius was once able to use the lives of the martyrs as proof that Christ's Resurrection had truly taken place, and that the power of death had truly been beaten.  The saints, the people in the Church, were martyred so often and showed such disdain for dying (which normal people are afraid of) the only logical explanation, says Athanasius, is that something has truly changed.  That with Christ there is something truly different, and that difference is freedom from fear of death and being set free to truly live.  Athanasius (contra mundum!) writes,

        Even so, if anyone still doubts the conquest of death, after so many proofs and so many martyrdoms in      

        Christ and such daily scorn of death by His truest servants, he certainly does well to marvel at so great 

        a thing, but he must not be obstinate in unbelief and disregard of plain facts. No, he must be like the 

        man who wants to prove the property of the asbestos, and like him who enters the conqueror's 

        dominions to see the tyrant bound. He must embrace the faith of Christ, this disbeliever in the conquest

        of death, and come to His teaching. Then he will see how impotent death is and how completely 

        conquered. Indeed, there have been many former unbelievers and deriders who, after they became 

        believers, so scorned death as even themselves to become martyrs for Christ's sake.

        

        (29) If, then, it is by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ that death is trampled underfoot, it is 

        clear that it is Christ Himself and none other Who is the Archvictor over death and has robbed it of its 

        power. Death used to be strong and terrible, but now, since the sojourn of the Savior and the death and 

        resurrection of His body, it is despised; and obviously it is by the very Christ Who mounted on the 

        cross that it has been destroyed and vanquished finally. When the sun rises after the night and the whole 

        world is lit up by it, nobody doubts that it is the sun which has thus shed its light everywhere and driven 

        away the dark. Equally clear is it, since this utter scorning and trampling down of death has ensued

        upon the Savior's manifestation in the body and His death on the cross, that it is He Himself

        Who brought death to nought and daily raises monuments to His victory in His own disciples . . . .

        If you see with your own eyes men and women and children, even, thus welcoming death for the sake 
        of Christ's religion, how can you be so utterly silly and incredulous and maimed in your mind as not to 

        realize that Christ, to Whom these all bear witness, Himself gives the victory to each, making death

        completely powerless for those who hold His faith and bear the sign of the cross? No one in his senses 

        doubts that a snake is dead when he sees it trampled underfoot, especially when he knows how savage      
        it used to be; nor, if he sees boys making fun of a lion, does he doubt that the brute is either dead or 

        completely bereft of strength. These things can be seen with our own eyes, and it is the same with the 

        conquest of death. Doubt no longer, then, when you see death mocked and scorned by those who 

        believe in Christ, that by Christ death was destroyed, and the corruption that goes with it resolved and 

        brought to end.

I pray, not for the martyrdom of blood (though this happens today so much in our Church, albeit not so much in the United States), but for the "white martyrdom", the bloodless martyrdom, that the monastics went out in the desert to seek.  That the people of God would be joined to Christ in a death like his, so that they also may join in his Resurrection and shine the light of God's glory and freedom and power over the world and over death.  May our freedom and our life in Christ be so powerful that death and the world and the flesh are seen to be scorned and mocked by our people.  May the light of the glory of God shine in our faces as we are changed into the likeness of Christ's own face and image.

"The Mystery of Iniquity" a Reflection on the Events on December 14th, 2012

After reading a little bit about the Connecticut shooting today and trying to find a way to pray about it, I ran across this article in The Onion: "Fuck Everything, Nation Reports". As long as profanity isn't something that gets you terribly upset, I think it is worth the read. One of the most interesting parts of the article to me is the following excerpt:

"“Seriously, what the hell is this? What’s even going on anymore? Why do things like this keep happening?”
Continued McEllis, before covering her face with her hands, “Why?”
Despairing sources confirmed that the gunman, armed with a semiautomatic assault rifle—a fucking combat rifle, Jesus—walked into a classroom full of goddamned children where his mother was a teacher and, good God, if this is what the world is becoming, then how about we just pack it in and fucking give up, because this is no way to live.
I mean, honestly, all 315 million Americans confirmed."

I can't really blame anyone for feeling this way. When I was driving to work today, I heard about the shooting in Connecticut about the same time as I heard about another shooting in Florida (which, as one might expect, ended up being interracial again) . . . but I didn't hear any of the details of the former case. It wasn't until I talked with my mom after dinner this evening that she told me 20 children had died. 20 children. And this after the gunman killed his own mother at her house, and then went off to her workplace to kill her coworkers and students.

I don't know why any of this happened. Frankly, even if we ever are to learn exactly why Adam Lanza did any of those things, it won't really matter. God knows, I am sure, but I don't think knowledge will really mitigate any of the horror of what happened. Either he was insane, or he was demon-possessed, or he was evil of his own choosing. Does it really matter which one? When the facts of the matter are that the world really is this broken by evil and malice and madness, and things like this keep happening in relatively prosperous America as they have always happened in other times and places . . . does it matter why so and so did thus and such? I don't think so. And I doubt it is a real comfort to the families of the victims for them to know why. They don't care why right now--they just want their children back.

This is why Paul described the prevalent forces of evil in the world as the "mystery of iniquity" and this is why God included the book of Job in the Canon of Scripture. We rarely know why, the "reasons why" are themselves irrational and full of hate, malice, envy, rage that make no sense. The "why" does not help us. Wisdom has its limits. Sometimes you just need miracle.

Discovering the roots of evil is no real comfort to us. Even if we, as readers of Job and readers of the story of Scripture and readers of the story of the history of the world that unfolds before us, even if we readers know as God knows that there is a supernatural Enemy behind all of these things that eggs on evil in the world, that pursues us with malice, that is ever and always out to destroy us . . . well, that's not a comfort, is it? It might help us a little with perspective, but if anything, that knowledge that tempt us to despair--as Theoden King said in The Two Towers, "So much death. What can men do against such reckless hate?"

The answer for Theoden was "get rescued out of it". He and all his men would have died if it weren't for Gandalf and the aide that he brought with it. And the real lesson of the book of Job is that people absolutely need divine intervention. Although it did not appear so to Job, God had actually put a limit on the activities of the accuser. In this case, he would not let the enemy destroy Job's life--and apparently God would not let the enemy touch Job's wife either. Finally, in the end, God personally appears to Job, speaks to him, and overturns all the evil that Job had suffered with blessing: "And the Lord restored the fortunes of Job . . . and after this Job lived 140 years, and Job died, an old man, full of days."

I guess it would have taken at least 50 years to get over the tragic loss of his first family. Perhaps 140 years of blessing would have healed the devastation of Job's heart. 140 years of the Lord's love and favor and comfort lavished upon him.

I imagine the griefs I have suffered in my own life have been very small. I have never lost anyone close to me through death, much less a tragic death. I have loved a lot of different people and it seems like I am forever having to let go of someone or grieving the grief of a friend or loved one lost to this or that thing, though physical death has yet to be the cause. Love hurts and loving people who are bent on destroying themselves hurts, but I imagine death hurts more. I have however, got to watch and listen a little bit to people who have suffered. I have listened to some of my African brothers talk about the horrible losses endured in war-torn homelands. I have listened to the stories of women in prison who have lost everything and possess nothing except little shreds of hope in God. I have probably seen God more clearly present in jail and among the addicted than anywhere except the community gathered by and united in the Eucharistic meal and worship. God is with those who suffer and those who have nothing except hope in him.

The Onion said, "fuck everything" because, it isn't "as if the same fucking bullshit isn't going to keep happening again and again and fucking again before people finally decide it's time to change the way we live, so what's the point? What the hell is the goddamned point?" The authors concluded the article by saying that they had nothing to say. The latter is certainly appropriate: Job's comforters could have improved some by remaining silent, as difficult as that is to do. But I say, though not to those whose own loss it was, but to all the rest of us who look on their grief and try a little bit to grieve with them. Instead of "fuck everything", how about, "Love one another, as Christ has loved you." We can't stop all the madness right now. We don't have the power. But God does, and he has promised that he will bring an end to this madness. He will bring an end to this madness and then there will be such joy undiminished by sorrow for endless ages upon endless ages that we won't remember such horrible things as this.

I always used to cringe a little at the end of Job because I thought it was a fairy-tale ending stuck on the end of a tragic story. It only made sense to me as a picture of what the Gospel story is all about. It only made sense if Job was a little story that foreshadowed the real story about Jesus defeating death, ushering in the Resurrected life, and promising his children that he would be coming back for them, and coming back to do away with evil once and for all. And then telling those same children to tell this message to all the world, and to prove that this message is true by how they loved. We do need to change the way we live . . . but not because we have power in ourselves to overturn all the evil in the world--but rather that our witness is powerful to the One who does have the power to overturn all the evil in the world. (If we had the power to tackle evil by ourselves, we would have beaten it by now.) Our Gospel is pretty useless without Jesus coming back to set things right once and for all. He is often about the business of setting right smaller things, but one day he will come and set to right all things.

And what do we say to the people who are intimately suffering such horrible things as the shooting in Connecticut right now? Probably, you say nothing. Probably, you remain silent and love them in your presence and not by your speech. Probably you do everything in your power to love them by your service and by your presence and by your devotion to them and you let God speak to them. Probably you just suffer alongside them and maybe a day will come down the road where they will want to hear something, where they will want hope and encouragement, and want to hear a story about Somebody who loved them enough to taste and suffer death so that it might be sanctified for us, and one day banished altogether, and who is coming back as a Conquering King to set things right forever.  But that day, the day to speak, is not always today.

Quasars and Super-symmetry: Proof that Science Works

When I was a kid, none of the science textbooks could tell you what a quasar was.  I don't even think they had good guesses.  I heard something about "quasi-stellar radio sources" and from thenceforth always got quasars and pulsars confused.  The best explanation at the time was that quasars were "proto-galaxies" that were so far away they were still in some mysterious stage of development.  (Pulsars are neutron stars that rotate so quickly they give off bursts of energy, some in the form of radio waves--it was the radio connection that got me confused).  I don't know what made me decide to check out quasars in my latest Wikipedia science binge, but I did.

I found out something new!  We now have a pretty good guess that quasars are supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies that have such amazing amounts of energy pouring into them that it causes incredible friction around the accretion disk.  The "accretion disk" is the whirlpool of energy being collected and draining into the black hole.  For whatever reason (still unknown) all that energy in the accretion disk explodes outward along the north and south poles of these huge black holes--so, ironically, these black holes are some of the brightest (absolute magnitude) objects in the universe!  I read somewhere else--if I recall correctly, that if the Milky Way had a quasar as the supermassive black hole at its center, then that quasar would shine in the heavens as brightly as the Sun now does, even though its 26,000 light years, not 96 million miles away (light year=6 trillion miles, and it takes 8 minutes, not 26,000 years for light to get from the Sun to the Earth).  I love learning something new about the glorious cosmos--science for the win and for the glory of God!  (On the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, check out the article on Sagittarius A on Wikipedia.)

I also learned last week that super-symmetry has all but failed the test of scientific rigor.  I don't know about you, but I read Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe back in the day--I read all the exciting things about how some form of super-symmetry (linked to string theory somewhere) was bound to emerge as the poetic completion of the current Standard Model of Particle Physics.  But, thanks to the new Hadron Collider, the scientific community is starting to throw in the towel.  (Read about it more here at Scientific American.)  It will be another couple of years before they have really finished the tests in order to be more certain, but hopes are dim that super-symmetry will be able to make a come-back, and whether they'll find the "super-partner-particles" of the already known particles that would have validated their theories.  (And so much for a quick solution to dark matter, I imagine, though that may be conflating things.)  Now everyone is back to the drawing board, and scratching their heads as to whether they can reasonable expect to find anything beyond the Standard Model.  Personally, right now I'm excited about relativistic chemistry--which no one told me about in school--and want to know when we're going to solve that quantum theory of gravity!

When I read about the tests for super-symmetry failing, I (oddly) felt an immense degree of satisfaction--about the same feeling of satisfaction when they found (we think) the Higgs-boson particle.  In both cases, I was immensely pleased because the hard work and years of labor had paid off--in the first case, it finally paid off with a discovery--scientists found more or less exactly what they wanted to find: how wonderful.  In the second case, scientists are about to prove that they are never going to find what they wanted to find: equally wonderful.  That is the point of science, after all--to devise methods and conditions of discovery and then to put those methods and conditions to the test with ever-increasing rigor until some little bit of the universe has been exegeted properly.   Lovely.  I love science.  It reminds me that life (in general) is really worth all the effort and uncertainty, disappointment and ambiguity for long road of the progress of knowledge and the contemplation of beautiful and wonderful things.

When it comes to the history of civilizations, I am not a big believer in "progressivism":  I don't really think the nations of the world are necessarily better or worse now than they were 500 years ago.  I think we are better in some ways and worse in other ways to which we are mostly blind.  But I do think every human being has the option before them of being better today than they were yesterday.  I think we have the option, with God's help, of contributing to goodness each and every day, though that work is sometimes painstaking and difficult and tedious and it seems that not much comes of it except profound moral failure.  But even accepting that failure and learning to live with it and with God and to move forward in the strength and grace of God and leave failure behind . . . that's what life is about in nearly every dimension.  Science reminds me that some types of failure are just as important as success and sometimes just as helpful and meaningful and instructive.  And living life well means being a good student of it as one learns to be a good student of the physical universe in science.

Some day, after years of striving, you discover the Higgs boson particle.  On another, after years of striving, you discover that super-symmetry has failed.  Both days can be worth the having.  I want to pray more for the grace to move forward in a spirit of discovery and wonder.

**(You can take a quiz about your knowledge of black holes here at http://www.space.com/15906-black-hole-quiz-facts.html.  I got 7/9 correct, and I gave you one of the answers that I originally got wrong in this post.  I think they said Einstein and Eddington would be proud, or something like that.)

Anger and Forgiveness

A thought inspired by reading a friend's blog post.  But I didn't want to write the world's longest comment, so I thought I would re-post my thoughts here.

      I'm not sure if anger and forgiveness are mutually exclusive.  Being angry with someone doesn't have to mean that you are unwilling to forgive them, though sometimes that kind of anger can be resentment--the holding grudges kind of anger.  I once read a definition of resentment that I found terribly helpful and terribly convicting: resentment is the desire for revenge that you somehow feel that you are not able to take.  (Hence Nietzsche on resentment in Genealogy of Morals . . . oops, interject philosophy ramble!)  I do think believing in the justice of God and especially the final justice of God is important for resolving resentment and desire for revenge and deep anger.
     
     Sometimes other people crush us and there is nothing we can do about it because we just aren't strong enough to stop them.  That's not our fault.  It's also true that God just doesn't intervene every time (though sometimes) something goes wrong.  But he does promise that there will be ultimate justice and things will be put right in the end.  For me, the process of forgiving someone who has crushed me involves turning someone over to God in my heart--turning them over to him both for their judgment and their salvation because the cross both judges our sin and forgives it.  For me it has also involved seeing myself as a sinner as well who has also done wrong and also stands as one who has received a lot of mercy and grace from God, who has received my whole life from God.  So, if I know that I have received my life from God as a gracious gift, and that he has rescued me from my own brokenness, weakness, and my own sin (or that he has promised to rescue me) I also want to hope that he can do that for someone else who doesn't deserve it.

       Maybe one of the best but also one of the most repulsive doctrines of Christianity is the fact that Jesus really wants to save people who have done really bad things.  He wanted to save the people who murdered him and he wants to save the "bad guys" who hurt us.  And he wants to save us even when we are the bad guys.  And if we let him, he will.  But God wanted to save Cain as well as Abel, but Cain wouldn't repent.  I think the more we have suffered at the hands of other people the more this becomes real to us and we struggle to accept the cross.  I think, though, the only reason why the cross is ultimately palatable is because of the Resurrection.  If there weren't a Resurrection, the cross isn't good news.  And if there isn't healing for our hurts now, the gospel isn't good news.  But I do think God has shown us in his Word particularly and in good communities where his Word is faithfully lived and preached, that he does want to heal us.  Forgiveness comes from God in that he gives us healing and gives us Jesus and makes us truly able to forgive.  I think it is a mistake to treat forgiveness as if it were not a thing of mercy and grace and therefore a gift from God.

    Some people speak as if forgiveness were merely an action or an act from the will that one can obey because commanded to by God.  I don't believe that is true or helpful.  God also commands, "Love me with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength" and "Love your neighbor as yourself".  We are utterly unable to do those things without the help and transforming work of God, why would we be able to forgive without his help and transformation?

Dreamform One: Jesus Walks Into a Dream

The first dream that I can remember that ever really mattered to me was one in which Jesus actually showed up in person.  I have never had another dream like it and it certainly made me pay attention at the time.

In the dream, I was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee.   I remember looking at the row of ships on docks off to my left, and to my right was nothing much beside sand.  At some point, I remember peering down onto the deck flooring of a ship that was curiously clear--I could see straight down into the water.  That was a moment of fun outside of the dream and wonder within the dream.  At some point--I had no sense of being in a hurry--I wandered up to where Jesus was.  He was working on mending some nets and seemed also in no particular hurry.

If I was surprised to see him there, I wasn't very much surprised: it was the sort of surprise you have when you're not exactly expecting to see a friend to show up in a place where he or she might very well naturally show up, but you like your friend so much you are excited to see him or her anyway.  So I was a little excited to see Jesus, but not crazy excited to see him as I would be if I turned around in my living room now and saw him standing there.

I knew very clearly in the dream that I could ask Jesus anything at all that I wanted to, although I had no particular sense of anxiety or nervousness about it.  So, naturally, I asked him some wandering and convoluted question about how one should interpret some complicated problem of "authorial voice" in Scripture.  My question had something to do with both epistemology and ontology and I think had some relevance to some modernist quibbling about the inspiration of Scripture.  Honestly, I don't quite remember exactly what I asked, but since Jesus never quite got around to answering my question, I suppose that didn't matter too much.  What did matter and what was remarkable and what was the lesson for me was how he responded to my question.

The first thing Jesus did was actually think about my question.  He mulled over my question for a moment, asked me a clarifying question that went along the lines of, "So what you're really asking is x because of y and z?"  In turn, I thought about it for a little while and rephrased my question with his question in mind.  All the while, I noticed this sort of scrawny, mopey looking young man with quite the bush of thick brown hair sort of skulking around the edges of our conversation.  At some point he wandered off down a pier, looking remarkably sad and forlorn.  Jesus and I were still talking, but I remember watching the guy and feeling sort of sorry for him and distressed for him at the same time.  (I got the impression this was the Apostle John of all people.)  Both my eyes and Jesus' eyes followed the young man down the pier.

Jesus then interrupted our conversation by saying that he needed to go and talk to him.  Then he put down whatever he was working with in his hands, followed John down the pier, and put his arm around his shoulders.  I remember watching that and wondering whether I should feel put off because Jesus ditched me to go talk to someone else.  Oddly, I didn't really feel ditched.  I milled around the pier for a few minutes, not sure what I was going to do next, and then I woke up.

At first, I was rather puzzled by the dream.  Why have a dream with Jesus in it, in which he didn't really say anything to me that was informative?  Why get a chance to ask any question, but not have the question answered?  I puzzled over it for a moment or two, but then I went off to do my daily morning routine of Morning Prayer plus hymn singing.  The hymn I opened to, unplanned, happened to be: "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy" by Frederick Faber.  After I sang through especially verse 3, I knew exactly why I had dreamed the dream.  The meaning of the dream was threefold: One, that Jesus is far more human than I believe him to be,  two, that Jesus is far kinder than I believe him to be, and three, that Jesus "speaks my language".

The dream was meant to be corrective of the kind of "gnostic" or overly-spiritualized intuition I had about Jesus--that he was "god in a bod" (Apollinarian heresy)--God's mind in a human body.  The Jesus I spoke to actually had to think about my questions and process them and respond to me in a human and therefore limited way.  What I was really surprised about in the dream was how sharp and incisive Jesus' question was: the way he began to consider my question showed that he could more than keep up with me intellectually, and I've always been a little paranoid about the fact that the Jesus in the gospels doesn't seem to be a nerd, so how could he really relate to me.  (More on that in another post.)  I was being myself and Jesus seemed to be being himself when he asked a nerd question about my nerd question.  Fascinating.

But the dream was also corrective in that I tend to think of God the Father and the Son as strict disciplinarians, partly because of my own upbringing.  It genuinely hadn't occurred to me that the first thing Jesus would do with John was just give him a hug instead of, say, scolding him for acting like a baby.  In the dream, I felt some degree of compassion for John, but I didn't expect Jesus to.  I expected him to demand that John grow up and behave more sensibly.  That Jesus is so naturally and casually compassionate and kind  . . . that really hadn't been a part of my image of God.

The Jesus "speaking my language" bit now reminds me quite a bit of the Luke 5 text wherein Jesus goes fishing with Simon and basically says, "You think I don't know how fishing works?  I know how fish work so well they just do what I want."  When I read that text, I see Simon confronted with the fact that he's honored by this rabbi's interest in him, but he really doesn't know what Jesus has to do with his life.  But then Jesus says through his actions, "I own this, I own fishing, I know how it all works, I know and have mastered your livelihood--so why don't you trust me, and moreover, why don't you just come follow me already?"  In my dream, Jesus was telling me, "You know, I really get the life of the mind.  I really have that down.  You don't actually have to worry that I won't understand you or we'll run out of things to talk about or I won't be interested in you or your life.  Actually, I own all this, and I made it all up and it's all beautiful and fascinating--so why don't you stop dithering and come, follow me?"

Anyway, that's the impression I get about the dream and one of the reasons I rather like dreams, and rather like when Jesus walks into one.


"For the love of God is broader
than the measure of man's mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more faithful,
we should take him at his word;
and our life would be thanksgiving
for the goodness of the Lord."


~Third stanza of Faber's "There's a Wideness in God's Mercy"

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.

Dreamform

In my second year of seminary, I went to a conference at the Falls Church on dreams and healing prayer.  It was led by one Russ Parker, who is something of an Anglican guru on dreams and healing prayer.  Healing prayer has always been an interest of mine, as emotional healing and contemplative prayer has always been a   substantive way in which God has shown himself to be Lord to me.  I had always been curious about dreams, as is probably anyone with half a mole of imagination, but I had not had any particular reason to take them seriously or believe that dream interpretation was anything more than a gift sometimes but not frequently given by God to help his people.  At that conference, I was persuaded otherwise and have come to believe that dreams are a valuable source of spiritual insight and that they are more often "written" (as Russ Parker says) by our own minds than by the Holy Spirit.  Sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks to us in special visions, but more often God speaks to us through our own imagination and the normal processing of dream work.

Since then, I have had an unusually rich dream life.  Partly that comes out of concerted effort to remember my dreams--I've spent a few weeks here or there writing down every bit of every dream I can remember, mostly as an exercise to develop my skill at remembering dreams.  (I'm told one only remembers dreams if one wakes up during a dream.)  I've also spent a fair chunk of time praying through dreams and have found that it is one of the most reliable ways I hear God speaking to me.  If I am having trouble hearing God's voice because of my own anxiety or distress or doubt, I oftentimes ask him to tell me something in a dream.  I find--not surprisingly--that the medium of narrative is a medium I understand well.  It is easy for me (and I imagine, for lots of people) to understand the point or morale or even the nuances of a story I read.

I find there are two or three kinds of dreams I have that are valuable.  There are "normal" dreams in which I normally pray about how the emotional resonances of a dream match up with strong emotion in my life, and discover what that has to tell me.  Sometimes this is as simple as, "Gee, I didn't know I was anxious about that!"  Or, "I had no idea I was feeling resentment toward this."  There are also dreams that are heavily "plot-driven" in which I generally do pray about the emotional resonance, but the plot of the dream itself mirrors something that has happened in my life, but not in a way that is immediately obvious to me.  (Partly, that's because I dream mostly in science-fiction as a language of metaphor--space ships, other planets, apocalypse, unidentified bizarre objects I assume are alien . . . so far none of these things have shown up in my waking life.)  Sometimes when I pray about those dreams, it isn't long before an "Aha" moment occurs.  I often have plot-oriented dreams after I have prayed for discernment for something specifically, and also prayed to have my answer come in dream form.   A third type of dream--or perhaps it is a subset of plot-oriented dreams--are dreams that are plot-oriented with strong enough emotional resonance that they bother me or continue to bother me as I have prayed through them.  At that point, I have either been prompted or decided to take Russ Parker's advice and invite Jesus into the dream and imagine him there.  His actions are always surprising!

I will be writing a few synopsis or descriptions of some dreams I have had.  Partly I do this because some dreams I have had are so vivid and creative they might as well be stories, and partly because I think this is an overlooked part of our humanity that God has always intended to integrate into our life with him.  Enjoy!

See also Russ Parker's website for more information.  I do believe he is leading a conference in Eastern PA this October on healing prayer.

"Hollow Men", Part 2

There are reasons why such hollowness exists, of course.  One reason is ignorance, the second and more significant one is sloth.
   Being a "swiss cheese" person is more of a remnant of paganism or life before or  without Christ than it is a "spiritual problem" per se.  Without Christ as the founder of life, wisdom, and virtue, how would you know what real virtue, strength, grace looks like?  It's impossible.  So people do the best they can and get some things right, others wrong, and don't even know that others exist.  It's a problem in that failures of character and life without God always lead to death, but it isn't the same kind of tricky spiritual morass that sloth is.
   I think the chief cause of hollowness is sloth (a second cause might be anxiety).  Christians are superficial hollow men and women because it is much easier to live that way, to invest in appearance or not invest in a real life with God, and a thoughtful, obedient life, than it is to really love God and love your neighbor.  But as the epistles of John say, we are fooling ourselves if we imagine that we love God, but we have not spent ourselves in learning how to deeply love our neighbor.  But deeply loving our neighbor requires depth and transformation and honesty and perseverance and courage and the acquisition of real wisdom.  It requires plodding down a particular path that is difficult to walk down, and in walking along we often feel as though we fumble about taking steps backwards as often as we go forward.  As many a spiritual master has said, spiritual change is the slowest kind of change.   But if we're not on that path on spiritual life and change, we aren't on a path worth walking down.  And things that don't change, die.
  I was reading a book by Gabriel Bunge called Despondency which was about Sloth or acedia.  Reading that book helped me see anew how much the real spiritual danger for most Christians isn't really unbelief, it's sloth.  The new Christian and the Christian owning their faith for the first time might genuinely have long and hard struggles with really deciding and believing that God exists.  I imagine for a few people, that may be their continual struggle.  There might be periods in one's life where believing or not believing is the question that occupies one's attentions.  But I would take bets on sloth being the vice that attacks the Christian more solidly attached to the pew bench.  Sloth is the great minimizer, the one that says, Does it really matter that I pray today?  Or read my bible?  Or try to listen carefully to the sermon?  Or really focus on the liturgy?  Or treat my husband with respect when he's annoying? Or do that thing that ought to be good for me?  It won't really hurt, it won't really matter.  How could it really make a difference that I did this or that or a thousand different things?  What difference does it make if I care?  If I put effort into this?  Someone else will do it, or at least, my contribution will not be missed, since it couldn't possibly be that important.
  And how could this little sin matter all that much to my prayer life?  How could it hurt anyone?  No one will notice, no one will care.  And if they do, they are probably just being anxious and making a big deal out of it.  I could do something here, I could do the smart thing and invest in x thing .. . but that takes work and I'm not good at this work and I don't really want to do it anyway . . . .  What Jesus said here is hard, so I will just ignore it for now--it can't be that important.  If it were that important, I would be good at it--it certainly wouldn't be as difficult as it seems to be.  What difference does it make whether I am honest with my friends, or obey what Jesus says, or invest in my life with Christ, or refrain from doing what I know to be wrong, and try hard to do what I know to be right?  Maybe I will try tomorrow . . . and it probably doesn't matter too much anyway.
   For my undergraduate thesis, I wrote on sloth as a simulacrum of despair--it was something that looked like despair and could be confused with it.  If I were writing such a paper again, I think I would write on the simulacra of sloth and various virtues like humility or modesty or submissiveness or being easily pleased.  I would write on our endless human capacity for self-deception--how we think we are doing something good, in this case, we could fool ourselves into thinking we are appropriately appreciating our own smallness when really we are failing to walk in love as Christ loved us.
  Gabriel Bunge didn't say that sloth is full of shit (possibly because he's an Orthodox monk-priest), but he did describe it as the "noonday demon" and a liar.  He did describe our contest with sloth as a battle that has to be fought.  He did describe this incredibly important struggle as one waged in every-day life.  I wonder if that is part of what separates real people from hollow men--real people know that every day character is the only sort of character you get--no exceptions, what you sow, you reap.  If you spend 8 years telling the truth to your friends the way my friend did (that I mentioned in the last post), you end up with some real solidity at the end.  If you spend 8 years telling little lies to yourself and your friends to excuse your behavior and to avoid confronting yourself, you end up with a void.  If you are incredibly unlucky, no one will get in your face enough to stop you and you will persist in wasting years of your life on your own personal bridge to nowhere.  If you allow yourself to be convicted and to change, you have a chance to become a real human being.
  I wish it were possible to convince every single person I know that everything they do actually matters.  I do not know whether it is difficult for most people to see that the decisions they make are rarely if ever morally neutral.  I could also wish that everyone spent an hour or two playing a particular Star Wars game for PC--Knights of the Old Republic.  In that game (and others, I imagine), one has an option of making various kinds of decisions throughout the game at different juncture points (sometimes that decision can be to do nothing), most of which either contribute to "light side points" or "dark side points."  In real life, sloth gets you dark side points because it is indifference and callousness to goodness.  When there was good to be done, you passed your turn.
   God never meant for anyone of his children to be hollow, without real substance and lacking real inward strength born of walking with God.  He never meant for us to wander around, doing "good" for all the wrong reasons, wasting our time seeking after prestige or honor or trying to earn acceptance or approval or even love.  God has no use for such dead works and intends for us to receive much more from him than that.  He has love without measure, and he has Jesus Christ, the wisdom and power of God who was born to make us free for something very solid and very real and very strong.