Deep Value And Truth From An Odd Source

I have never posted a link to another article before. I am doing it now because this deserves it. I read this and think, with tears at the back of my eyes, "What have I actually accomplished?" Then I realize it's not too late.

We have a world to build, lets actually do it.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/

Widows, Orphans, AND Aliens

My wife is writing a terrific series of Advent Meditations for Kids. This evening she read me the one she just put up on How To Treat The Poor. The readings from Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus reminded me of a thorn in my side. There are three classes of people consistently mentioned in conjunction as the lynchpins of God-like behavior: widows, orphans, and aliens. According to scripture how Israel treated these people determined whether the people of God were truly the people of God or not. Moreover, it is clear that God's blessing is contingent on how these classes of people are treated.

There is much talk in Christian circles as to how we in America are doing things that repudiate the blessing of God. I will not enumerate them as they are such hot button issues as will completely sidetrack what I am attempting to say. However, if we are truly serious and biblical about placing this nation in the blessing of God then these three classes should be foremost in our actions. We talk about caring for widows and orphans. Yet very few churches actively engage in substantive care for single mothers nor does hardly anyone adopt children from the foster care system. But further still, the aliens are consistently left out of the "widows and orphans" formula. The aliens include those guys down in the Home Depot parking lot, all those people who are here illegally and are the subject of great political dispute.

Biblically, the blessing of God hinges on how we treat the foreigners who have come here legally or otherwise and not on whether we are allowed to pray in schools or whether the Ten Commandments are written on some wall or even on whether gay people are allowed to get married.

Many will say, and have said to me, "I am ok with legal immigrants, but the illegals must go and should be excluded from society, etc." It comes down to legality. There are legal ways to enter this country. Anyone who doesn't come by these means is a pariah. Now, the same people make heroes of the kids who stand up and pray, illegally, in assembly, stating that they are obeying a higher law. Where is that higher law when it comes to the alien?

I tend to be a conservative and toward limiting the rights of citizens to citizens. However, God doesn't seem to care about what I think about this and hinges his blessing on how we treat the one who is not a citizen.

I am fully in favor of inviting the blessing of God. I wonder what he is in favor of?

Mystical Union And Sneezing: A Brief Hermenutic Of Mysticism

Recently on a discussion thread I am involved in someone wondered about the difference between mysticism and prophecy. I started to reply but that reply quickly got out of hand. What follows is characteristically dense. Each paragraph could relatively simply be expanded into a chapter with full citations and completely fleshed out reasoning; something I may do sometime if I have nothing better going on. I here speak more about mysticism than prophecy because that was more pertinent in the discussion this came out of and not because I think that prophecy is a settled matter. Rather, there is a huge amount of goofy thinking about prophecy as well but it is of a different sort.

I should note that I define mysticism as a separate entity to contemplation. Contemplation treats an object, text, or activity Iconically. To treat something Iconically (that is in the same manner as the Eastern Christian tradition treats Icons) is to take that thing as pointing to something beyond itself rather than as an object taken in itself and to pursue or contemplate the thing beyond. Great value as well as great foolishness can come from this approach to things. Simultaneously, the same value and foolishness is manifestly true of the non-Iconic treatment of the same things.

Mysticism pursues union, the sense of being fully taken up, a sense of direct connection.

My deep thinking on this began when I was living in India and Nepal. Naturally I was exposed directly to a wide variety of traditions and understandings of reality. Something that caught my attention was the striking similarity in the form of experience described my the mystical branches of the various religious traditions. Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Christian, all these traditions have mystical branches. Each use language and images from their conceptual universe to describe their mystical experience. But, they all describe an experience that involves a loss of distinct selfness where the practitioner feels as though their existence ceases to be distinctly separate from anything else in space or time, they feel as though they absorb into the infinite. Muslims will use Muslim words to describe the experience. Christians will use Christian words. Hindus will use Hindu words. And so on. But, they are all describing exactly the same experience.

I then found that I was not the first to observe this. I discovered that there have been many voices within the mystical paths of the various religions that have observed this striking similarity of experience across traditions and took that to indicate that all paths lead to the same place. They take the common mystical experience as evidence of the truly unified ultimate foundation all the religious traditions.

I became more curious about what this experience is. I noted the strong similarities of practices among the different traditions. Looking past what the traditions said their techniques meant they all had the same form. All the traditions engage in some collection of repetitive action, extreme treatment of the body, practices of focus/centering/meditation. I started to get familiar with the neuroscience research on mystical experience. There is quite a bit. What it shows is that the similar practices lead to the same effects in the brain. In particular they affect the sections of the brain that produce our sense of self. Either by deprivation or over-stimulation those sections of the brain lose the ability to clearly define our selfness to our consciousness. This results in the sense of release and union with something beyond our self. Mystical union is a brain state. It is a physical response to the techniques used my those earnestly seeking that experience just like a sneeze is a physical response to irritation in the nasal passage.

Some have linked the beliefs of the "all paths" school I just mentioned to this neurological research to say that all religion is a response to this brain-state. I don't think that this is the case, and dealing with this is not my purpose here.

What I find interesting is the way in which the mystical experience takes on meaning. The experience takes on the meaning attributed to it by the person working to achieve it. When a Christian engages in the mystic disciplines they are seeking a union with Christ. When they achieve the brain-state they experience it as union with Christ. When a Zen Buddhist achieves the same state they experience satori as that is the meaning they brought to it with them.

Now, it would appear that the experience itself can better be understood as an Icon. This would place mysticism as a sub-set of contemplation where the thing in itself is the brain-state and what is important or truly meaningful is the thing beyond that it is taken to point to. The difficulty is that the thing in itself is an internal physical state rather than a painting on a board so it is far more difficult to make the separation between it and the thing it points to. This is why the meaning brought to the experience has historically been conflated with the experience itself.

This conflation has given rise to theological problems in Christian mysticsm. There is a consistently Gnostic flavor to it. Thinking about it has been directed toward escaping the mundane physicality of this world to experience a more purely spiritual reality. This has significant theological problems. Primarily, we were created as bodies with Spirit put into us to make us alive and not as spirits trapped in bodies thus it denies the absolute goodness of our bodyness. It is a force that relativizes our presence in this world that we were created to live in and bring to completion. It takes away from the true experience of union with Christ through participation in his redeeming work in the blood and dirt of this world.

However, I do not reject the disciplines that lead to the brain-state. If for no other reason than that they are demonstrably therapeutic, bringing a calmness of mind, having beneficial effects on blood pressure, as well as on several other body systems. Moreover, when taken Iconically the experience can function as a deep heuristic for internalizing the reality of the union already established in the incarnation and of the full loving adoption by our Heavenly Father.

The difference between prophecy and mysticism is pretty clear to me. Prophecy is the concrete calling of the people of God to God by God with specificity. Mysticism is founded on a particular feeling of spatiotemporally disconnected floatyness that is produced by a specifically identifiable neuro-chemical brain-state that is caused by particular intentional practices. Prophecy must in itself have positive truth content, and must be effectively specific even if it is not entirely lucid. Mysticism is, strictly speaking, neither true nor false but is meaning-absorbing while prophecy is meaning-excreting. Mysticism takes on whatever meaning or content is given to it while prophecy looks you in the face with it's own meaning. While prophecy, if it is true, is always valuable, the value of mysticism lies in what we bring to it.

Start Of An Incarnational Theology Of Worship Based In The Imago Dei

Worship, whatever else it is, is proclaiming the glory of God. It is telling the truth of the greatness of the creator.

My understanding of what the image of God is is somewhat different from a more dominant understanding. The more dominant understanding that I grew up with and most are likely familiar with takes image language to refer to something like the reflection in a mirror as if we are a sort of reflection of God. This in turn is understood in terms of  human attributes that match divine attributes: creativity, rationality, freedom, etc. Though I believe there is some merit to this it misses the main thrust. The image language in genesis has more to do with idols than reflections. This becomes clear when we read about God’s making of man in genesis against its contemporary cultural background. In that cultural context we need to remember that idols are not inherently evil rather they were understood as the very presence of the god they represent. That is what it is to be the image of God. It is to be the very presence of God in this world. The indwelling of the breath of God whereby the man became a living being produces this existence as presence.

In the fall we died. We lost that which made us living beings. We lost the spirit of the living creator that made us his presence in the world.

To be what we were created to be is the foundation of worship. As the actual presence of God in the world we inherently manifest God. We proclaim the creator. It is to naturally participate in God’s own self-proclamation through us. Our true being is to effectively demonstrate the greatness of God in the world.

This is only possible if we are the living beings we were created to be. Thanks be to God that he has redeemed us from death and sent his Spirit again to again create us as his presence in the world.
This is the foundation of all worship. Truly, we are to live lives of worship. We, being filled with the breath of God, live as his presence in this world. We proclaim the glory of God by walking by the spirit that makes us his presence. God’s own glory shines as he is present in the world through us who are living beings by the quickening of his breath. Our entire life is worship.

Nepali, Lahu/Shan, Burmese, working the tunes

The specific case of music is special. God created us as humans. With the indwelling of the Spirit we are living beings, truly human in the original sense. All that he created us to be is good and proper. It is absolutely not the case that the physical and that which essentially comes from it are inferior to the spiritual. God created us physical and said it was good. Who are we to disagree? This is important to recognize in all of life but it is particularly important in understanding worship in terms of music. We are complex beings with a huge range of capacities, physical, mental, etc. Music, more than anything else we do, has the capacity to engage and activate the full spectrum of those capacities. Good music engages more of these capacities more effectively and more integratively than bad music. Now it should be noted that I am making a quality distinction and not a moral distinction. You can have morally acceptable music that is crap. You can also have morally damaging music that is powerful and well done. The quality of music is a function of its ability to integrate and activate the full spectrum of human capacities.

So music as worship has the potential to activate and integrate the fullness of the human presence of God, more so than any other activity. Intellect, skill, emotions, aesthetics, physicality, the better the music the more fully the fullness is expressed. That is to say that the quality of music as worship is judged by the degree to which it activates and integrates the fullness of this truly human expression of the glory of God.

The Difficult Power Of Love

Here is a special treat. A guest post by my brother Wayland. He is a co-founder of The Charis Project, an officer in the United States Marine Corps, and one of the more spiritually aware people I know. A heads up: he prefers to work in shocking and uncomfortable imagery.

I spend a lot of time working through the choices thrust upon me be the sex and violence of day to day existence. Things like, what do I do now that I know the reason I don't see my students anymore is because they got sold to people who gang raped them? How do I keep the other kids I try to protect from having the same thing happen to them? Or, and this is much more banal, how do I keep the people I'm in charge of from doing something really stupid like marrying the stripper they met this weekend? Or how do I deal with my friend having killed himself after coming back from war? Or how come after doing everything I possibly can for this girl, in the most uncreepy, honest, and open way I could, it still seems like I have to use an ice pick to chisel my way through bitch mountain to get through to her?

We all face hardship and suffering, and for those of you who wish to change the world, you know who you are, the biggest sources of suffering come from the dissonance between the way things should be, which is obviously not the way things are, and the way things actually are. (Just admit it. Sh..y.) Now just try and follow the same path of self sacrifice and selfless giving up of yourself to change this and see how long it takes to, either end up drinking every night and generally feeling depressed, or, and I would argue that in this economy with gas prices the way they are this is the worse choice, becoming super conservative religious and trying to shut out all that pain with yet more small groups, even more volunteering and yet ever more advice from spiritual teachers. Not that there is anything wrong with any of this IN IT'S PROPER CONTEXT. That goes for the drinking every night also by the way. But the reason I, we, engage in these types of self destructive behavior is because we have taken our sacrifice and the love behind it and bent it out of it's proper context. Actually we have taken ourselves out of the proper context because we have fallen into the all too easy and most banally evil path of defining ourselves in opposition to what we oppose and in so doing become less than what we are.

When you really care about something, it gets really easy to define yourself in terms of opposing what is bad for it.

On a scale of twisted to perfect, that leaves us twisted, just like everything else that's wrong, including Lucifer, but I'll get to that at a later and undisclosed point. And don't think for a minute I'm about to say something about just embracing universal love and there is good in all. Find out about the girls you spent your time and effort looking after getting gang raped and see how long it takes for you to come up with new and exciting ways to dismember someone unto death and be absolutely right to feel that way.

I'm actually going to take this in a whole other direction. I'm really more interested in penetrating to the guts of the problem, and splitting it wide open to the point that it turns inside out and becomes something new. In doing so, I had to go looking for inspiration. I still find it strange that such would come from my work, which is really a lot more boring than people give it credit for. There is this concept we have called maneuver warfare, by which we seek not to kill off the enemy, but to destroy the enemy's system in key ways that cause him to collapse with as little real destruction as possible. It turns out God does the same thing.

Which means I'm about to go off in yet another direction. Those of you who know or, better yet, are mothers know what real selfless sacrifice actually is. Consider that God describes himself as a mother. He also calls himself love. Now, that word has been corrupted in the modern context to mean something more along the lines of, I love you, but…

I love you but you need to be more open.
I love you but you need to not not push me away.
I love you, but change or I can't do this anymore.

WEAK.

Or, "I care about poverty/love poor people, but we will always have the poor." Read: "I can't deal with this right now".

(What does that even mean? )

In other words the modern context of love has become hugely self centered and ends up leading us into defining ourselves and what we care about in opposition to what we don't like. Mothers, or at least good ones, know better. I'm not, nor will ever be one, but I am aware enough to see that waking up at all hours of the night to let a screaming, completely self centered little mammal literally suck nutrients out of you demands something else to be going on. Something very unselfish and rather embracing of the way things actually are and addressing them as they are, i.e. a screaming little mammal that needs to be fed.

Now, tying this back to maneuver warfare, I'm going to have to make an all too tantalizing jump into the mystical world of ideas. Ideas like, love is actually more than an emotion (it is that too, and that's totally fine) it's a choice you make. In fact it's one of those choices you make when confronted with the sex and violence of everyday existence.

This means I'm going to have to get to the point, which is that there is nothing wrong with pouring yourself out in self sacrifice for what, and who, you care about. And to make sure you don't end up being selfish about it you destroy the system that leads to that outcome. I have found the fastest way to totally overcome it all is to decide to be a slut about it. Love everything. The brokeness, the twistedness, the retrograde behavior. Try turning it on yourself if you want to get real kinky. Forgive and love everything about yourself. I know this feels strange at first, but we have to learn to take care of ourselves, you know. This works because love isn't a two way exchange between something or someone you are trying to get something from. It is a one way transformative (read redemptive) force that changes the twisted, broken things to what they, we, were meant to be. Destroy the system by embracing it and thus causing it to adapt to you, to the light that lives in you.

What better way to damage an agenda of damage than by applying a transformative and redemptive force to it. Instead of pushing away that which we are revolted by, and thus bringing it's existence into more clear relief, why don't we get right up next to it, assume that everything we hear about us being bigger, better, and more powerful is true and thus compel the that which is weaker to adapt to that which is stronger. It's a law of biology that the larger organism absorbs the smaller. It seems to work in all of life as well.

This makes dealing with your former students, if you can ever find them again, a lot easier because you can love their brokenness, and thus have any hope of changing it. You can love your friend who killed himself and leave it at that. You can love the people you are in charge of, and for that matter who are in charge of you, do your job and leave it at that. And you can love the passivity and sadness of the girl making you use an ice pick to chisel you way closer to her, which has a dramatic effect on determining how committed you are and how much you really care and actually produces positive changes. At least that is how it all works for me.

As for Lucifer? God loves him.......                                               

On My Father's Shoulders

I grew up saturated in the belief that the ultimate source of the universe is actively loving and that our highest notions of love reflect that ultimate source*. That is to say that God really loves us perfectly and his love is recognizable to us through our experience of it's reflection. Even more simply: God loves us completely in a way that makes sense to us.

My father did not grow up in this. Rather, he has had to fight for it. This fight has been most clear in his longstanding and often controversial teaching on the grace of God, speaking in defense of it for thousands of hours, all his writings, outworkings of defending the grace of God. The grace of God needs defending because it is and has been for much of history under attack.

To be more accurate, the grace of God does not need defense. It is quite secure in itself. Rather people are in need of being released from bondage to false notions of God that see him as vindictive, judgmental, irritable, distant, etc.

My father has worked at this for most of his life, pulling and pulling  because he needed the truth he knew to train his own heart. He has needed release from the same bondage he fought for for others. This understanding of God is something he has defended. This understanding of God is where I start. I grew up in this environment, starting with a radical notion of the grace of God, early saturation deeply setting the way I think and feel about the world and my life and my place in both. This deeply rooted understanding that reality has such a bright truth at its core grounds freedom and joy at the foundation of my life and work, but at the same time, not having to work for it, impedes my ability to articulate that very grace to people who do not yet truly know it.

The grace of God is not an "issue" for me. That God really loves us and this world he has created is where I start. The difficulty that arises from this is if other people do not start from the this same place, especially on such a fundamentally vital point, what I say can be very horribly misunderstood. Especially since I talk a lot about our responsibilities and the work we have to do in the world. One could very easily think that I am teaching that we in some way earn, by these works, our position with God. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Nothing I say has anything to do with securing a better position with God. Everything I say is predicated on the foundation that we are all already completely secure in the love and acceptance of God.

We are all fully loved and accepted by God, right now exactly as we are. That is bombproof. That is true whether we feel like it or not. That is just as true for the person across the street and across the ocean as it is for you and me. Jesus has already taken up all of humanity into the embrace of the Trinity. The Spirit is always already present in every place and person, ready to be honored and embraced. The Father has, from the very beginning, chosen each and all of us to be adopted as his true children.

That is my foundation. There is nothing I need to do to "get right with God." There are no hoops I need to jump through, no manual I need to read, no cross I need to nail myself to. All is grace. It is by  the grace of God that I do right and by the grace of God that I sin. My very existence is a gift. I have nothing and yet by the adoption of the Most High everything is mine.

Given the radical depth and power of the grace of God and his complete acceptance of us all the only thing that is left to us is to get down to work. There is nothing for us to earn so we might as well work at life and that more fully. That is where I go. Given the total love and acceptance of our Father lets get to work. We have been given a creation to complete.

I also talk about my father here.

*For a good primer on what I grew up with see: The Gospel Uncensored

Only You Can Renounce Your Right to Do Good

 
You can tell you’ve hit some sort of nerve when a post gets responses ranging from, “Now this looks more like what one would expect of someone who claims to love God and imitate Jesus” to, “Woe to them who call evil good and good evil." You can imagine the spectrum in between. There have been so many conversations, in so many places.

We have been accused of taking our theology too seriously because we have asserted that for Christians, politics is simply one small aspect of how we fight for justice and good and to bring the kingdom of God, and that there are other more powerfully fundamental means of transformation at our disposal. This leaves us wondering if some of the people who take politics so desperately seriously, some of the people who believe it a sin to disentangle their political involvement from their faith long enough to ask if the way they are going about their politics is harming or helping the goals of their faith, don’t take their theology seriously enough. Or maybe they just have a screwy theology that they take too seriously.

Imagine for a moment if we all actually believed that the gospel was the power of God. You know, unto salvation, the salvation of lives and communities from broken futility at their deepest roots. What if we actually believed that we are the fully adopted heirs of the Most High God, that our action in this world actually is in the power of our Father and is taking possession of our rightful inheritance. We are not on enemy territory, there is no enemy territory, we are in our own backyard. The life of faith, service to others, love for our neighbor, compassion and mercy, etc. is participating in the complete redemption and completion of creation. If we all believed that, what would we do?

Would we elevate our political ideology above the real human beings around us? Which is more valuable, our doctrines or the people we assault with them?

Would we pay lip service to the power of prayer and the testimony of our lives and then spend money and energy grasping at manufactured power in a man made arena? Look at where you put your money and time to see what you in fact love.

Would we spend more time fighting for laws in order to punish behavior or would we fight to do something directly helpful and loving that will change people?

Would we claw at our friends and family on facebook when we disagree with their political positions?

Would we yell at people we don’t know on their blogs because we disagree with their political positions. (We’re not talking about discussion or expressing an opinion in a respectful and well thought out manner. We’re talking about that other thing I know you all have seen people doing.) What is more important, to win the argument, or to transform the person?

Would we make dire predictions about the coming apocalypse and God’s judgement on a sinful nation, or would we get on our knees and pray to be shown what we can do to heal the brokenness all around us? Is it better to yell and scream about some coming judgement or is it better to repent and work to bring wholeness to broken people in order to avert the judgement?

It isn't people we are really opposing anyway. Our fight is against the evil and destructive chaos that tears at the heart, chaos that deforms and stunts human life and community, destroying our capacity to thrive. Unable to remedy this chaos, external legislation lays a blanket of judgement over a festering infection, pushing it out of sight so it can kill us in the shadows. This truth shapes how we raise our kids now. “How much pain must that person be in to act like that. I wonder if he has anyone who really loves him at home. Let’s pray for him that he will know Jesus love. Let’s be as kind as we can to him when possible. Don’t let him be mean to you, but don’t be mean back. Choose to be kind.” Not, “They are bad and need to be punished for that. Their mom and dad are stupid failures of parents. They need to be cut from assistance so that they get their act together.” The actual ways that we are given to fight evil are so much more effective at healing the infection than the ways we fight with each other, in the name of fighting evil.

It is life changing to listen to someone, to see them clearly, and to honor their humanity. For both of you.

No matter who is president, we are never powerless.

No matter what happens, only you can renounce your right to do good.

If you want to do something to prevent abortion, do something to prevent abortion. Listen to a teenager. Care about them. Talk to the girls about their value as women. Talk to the guys about their value as men, as someone who cares enough about them to listen and invest time in them. Try and figure out how you can do this in the communities where the demographics show the incidences of unwanted pregnancies are especially high. These are easy to find because they are usually the poorer neighborhoods. Take care of a mother who wasn’t planning on being pregnant. Give her somewhere to stay if she needs it. I have friends who did exactly that with a little suite on their house. Do something to help your local economy. Start a business that creates jobs. Offer to help pay for health insurance for an impoverished mother. Go through the process to adopt a child. And don’t be picky about the race. Or something else. How could you make a difference in the situation of an actual woman who might be considering abortion? Start there.

If you don’t like the way Planned Parenthood does it’s sex education, do something better. Make a video, or 10. Talk to the kids you know, starting with your own. And make sure your talk isn’t, sex is bad, and kissing on the mouth causes babies. Because that’s not educating. (Though it’s very cute when my 5 year old thinks it. “That’s what you and daddy do and now you have babies!”)

Organize your city to care for aids patients in Lesotho. Live your family life such that it is a beacon of hope to many who are hungry and lonely.


This is the last post we intend to write on the subject of Christianity and politics, and least, for now. It’s time for us to get back to the real work now of actually working to bring justice and mercy, rather than just talking about it.

I believe that we can make a difference, and that there is nothing stopping us from doing so.

What is in front of you to do?

It doesn't have to be big. Mother Theresa said if you want world peace, go home and learn to love your family.

Your home, your life, your family, your conduct is a witness. Start today by doing your best with what you already have to do, and loving well the people you are already given to love, and leave your heart prayerfully wide open to accept more people into it. You have no idea where that might take you. 


Carrien and Aaron (Look, we write stuff together too!)

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You might find this post written today by Aaron's brother interesting as well. It comes at this topic from yet another perspective.  

The Immorality of Mass Charity  "We have the same opportunity we have always had. Will we love God and our neighbors, thereby making government irrelevant, or will we find peace in statements of "should" and the justification of intent? Will we be known by the way we love, or by our ideology? Neither is wrong, but one is useless without the other."