Truth is not something we can appropriate easily or quickly. We certainly cannot sleep or dream ourselves into the truth. No, we must be tried, do battle and suffer if we are to acquire truth for ourselves. It is just an illusion to think that there is an abridgment, a short cut that dispenses with the necessity of struggling for it. With respect to acquiring truth to live by, every generation and every person must essentially start from the beginning.
What is truth, and in what sense what Christ the truth? The first question, as most recall, was asked by Pilate [John 18:38], and it is doubtful that he ever really cared to even have his question answered. Pilate asked Christ, "What is truth?" That it did not even occur to Pilate that Christ WAS the truth demonstrated precisely that he had no eye for truth at all. Christ's life was the truth [John 14:6]. It was to this very end that Christ was born, and for this purpose did He come into the world, that He should bear witness to the truth. What, then, is the fundamentally fallacy in Pilate's question? It is primarily that it even occurred to him to question Christ in this way; for in questioning Christ he is actually damning himself as he reveals that Christ's life has not illuminated him. How could Christ possibly enlighten Pilate with mere words when Pilate could not seen through Christ's own life what truth is!?
Pilate's question is extremely foolish. Not that he asks, "What is truth?" but that he questions Christ, whose very life is the truth and who at every moment demonstrates more powerfully by His life what truth is than all the most profound lectures by the world's wisest thinkers. Though it may make perfect sense to ask any other person, thinker, philosopher, teacher, pastor, whoever, "What is truth?" to ask this of Christ is the greatest possible faux pas. Obviously, Pilate is of the opinion that Christ was just a man, like everyone else. Poor Pilate! His question is the most foolish and misguided ever asked by any man. It is almost as if I were to ask someone standing right beside me, "Do you exist?" How can one possibly reply to this? So it is with Christ in relation to Pilate. Christ is the truth. "If my life," He might say, "cannot open your eyes to the truth, then what can I possibly say? For I am the truth."
As with Pilate, in our day Christ as the truth has also been abolished: we may accept Christ's teaching -- but abolish the very concept of Christ. We want truth the easy way. This is to abolish truth, for Christ the teacher is more important than His teaching. Just as Christ's life, the very fact that He lived here on the earth, is vastly more important than all the results of His life, so also is Christ infinitely more important than His teaching.
Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only genuine explanation of it; the only bona fide way of acquiring it. Truth is not the sum of statements, not a definition, not a system of concepts, but, instead, a life. Truth is not a way of thinking ... no truth is as Kierkegaard would say "a reduplication of truth within ourselves and within Him. Your life, my life, His life expresses the truth in its striving." Just as the truth was a life in Christ, so too, for us the truth must be lived.
Therefore, truth is not so much a matter of knowing this or that, but of being in the truth. Despite our modern philosophy, there is an infinite difference here, as is best seen in Christ's response to Pilate. Christ did not so much know the truth but was the truth. Not that He did not know what the truth was, but when one is the truth and when the requirement is to be in the truth, to merely "know" the truth is insufficient -- it is even an untruth in comparison. For knowing the truth is something that follows as a matter of course from being in the truth, not the other way around. No one knows more of the truth than what he is of the truth. To properly know the truth is to be the truth; it is to have the truth for one's life. This always requires a struggle. Any other kind of knowledge is a falsification. In short, the truth, if it is really there, is a being, a life. The Gospel says that this is eternal life, to know the only true God and the One whom He sent, the truth [John 17:3]. At the end of the day this means that we only know the truth when it becomes life in us.
Friday, September 30, 2011
Sunday, September 25, 2011
The Power of One
As I noted in my last posting: the one matters to God.
Steven Spielberg has explored this theme of the one in several of his films. From E.T. to A.I. to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Schindler's List to Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg seems almost obsessesed with the journey of the solitary individual. In Saving Private Ryan we find the true story of how a troop of men literally marched through a world war to find and secure the safe return of one soldier. This movie raises such important questions as: What is the value of one human being? and To what extreme should we go to save a single person?
Until I met my current pastor, Erik Braun, eleven years ago, I used to think that I was desperately searching for God during my latter teenage years. Looking back, I now realize that God was desperately searching for me. I used to wonder why my soul ached and God wouldn't do anything about it. Now I perceive that it was that very pain that drove me to God. A life lived without God starves the soul. I thought for a while that God could meet my needs and stop the cravings of my soul. Now I know that isn't really the case. My soul doesn't crave something FROM God; my soul CRAVES God. And by the way, so does yours.
That is why everything else leaves us unsatisfied in the end. But we should not let this frustrate us; we should, instead, let it fuel us. All the evidence we need to prove God is waiting to be discovered within us. As we have traveled together for now twenty-eight postings over the past three months, I just want to say that our journey does not end here. We are not at the final destination, but instead, at a crossroad. There are decisions that we must consider, choices that perhaps we must make, steps that we must take. Maybe we should stop and take a moment to turn our heads and look back. We have journeyed farther than we may know.
If you are still tracking along with me then you are very much the kind of person that Jesus spoke very highly of in the gospels. He calls people like you seekers [or perhaps you may already be one of His believers] and He assures you that if you seek, you will find. He also promises that if you knock, the door will be opened to you, and if you ask, it will be given to you. Please know, however, that He isn't so much speaking about material possessions here as much as He is about meeting the deepest longings of your soul. So continue to seek, knock, ask and don't stop until you find, enter in and come to know the answer your soul has been searching for all along.
Our souls crave, and it's God that we are longing for. So we should listen carefully to the conversations going on inside our heads. We shouldn't worry ... we aren't really going crazy. We are not talking to ourselves. God is trying to get our attention and to bring us into relationship with Him. If we will pay attention to our souls, they will guide us to God.
If God is real and we are created by Him, our souls already know this. We may be in denial or even genuinely unaware of it, but if we would take the time to explore nowhere else except deep within ourselves, undoubtedly we would come face-to-face with God.
In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster asks the question, "Do you think there's life out there?" The theme of the movie, of course, was that if there wasn't, then it would be a terrible waste of space. I say that there is more unexplored space within us than there is in this ever-expanding universe. If we will take the time to journey to the depths of our souls, we will not leave there disappointed, and perhaps to our surprise and astonishment, we will find God there.
Then what do we do? If we find ourselves face-to-face with the God of the universe and feel His presence touch our souls like gentle breezes against our face, how will we respond to Him? To trust in God, we have to truly know that He loves us without condition. This is the beauty of Jesus' death on the cross. It is literally God's celebration of His love for us. His love embraces us wherever we happen to be in our journeys, and He refuses to leave us there. Instead, He launches us on a quest to pursue the lives we were created to live. Our souls know that there is a greater purpose for our lives, a God-sized dream waiting to unfold and become our futures.
We are all on a quest for intimacy, for meaning, for our destinies. Our souls crave love and faith and hope. We are all searching for what it is that our souls long for, and we will be satisfied only in God. My guess is that it will never be easy, but at least Jesus has made it possible. We don't have to be afraid to commit our lives to someone who gives His life for us.
Maybe you are different than I am, but my guess is that we are probably a lot alike in this. Your soul, too, craves to believe. You may have been burned, you may have even been deceived, but deep in your gut, somewhere deep inside, there is a voice telling you that God can be trusted with your life, that you can trust someone like Jesus. His love is pure and your soul thirsts for Him like water is needed by a crusted desert. That there is more to life than you can know without God. Jesus walked among us so that we could get close enough to hear Him, to see Him, to touch Him, to know Him. To know Him, this is what our souls crave.
Steven Spielberg has explored this theme of the one in several of his films. From E.T. to A.I. to Close Encounters of the Third Kind to Schindler's List to Saving Private Ryan, Spielberg seems almost obsessesed with the journey of the solitary individual. In Saving Private Ryan we find the true story of how a troop of men literally marched through a world war to find and secure the safe return of one soldier. This movie raises such important questions as: What is the value of one human being? and To what extreme should we go to save a single person?
Until I met my current pastor, Erik Braun, eleven years ago, I used to think that I was desperately searching for God during my latter teenage years. Looking back, I now realize that God was desperately searching for me. I used to wonder why my soul ached and God wouldn't do anything about it. Now I perceive that it was that very pain that drove me to God. A life lived without God starves the soul. I thought for a while that God could meet my needs and stop the cravings of my soul. Now I know that isn't really the case. My soul doesn't crave something FROM God; my soul CRAVES God. And by the way, so does yours.
That is why everything else leaves us unsatisfied in the end. But we should not let this frustrate us; we should, instead, let it fuel us. All the evidence we need to prove God is waiting to be discovered within us. As we have traveled together for now twenty-eight postings over the past three months, I just want to say that our journey does not end here. We are not at the final destination, but instead, at a crossroad. There are decisions that we must consider, choices that perhaps we must make, steps that we must take. Maybe we should stop and take a moment to turn our heads and look back. We have journeyed farther than we may know.
If you are still tracking along with me then you are very much the kind of person that Jesus spoke very highly of in the gospels. He calls people like you seekers [or perhaps you may already be one of His believers] and He assures you that if you seek, you will find. He also promises that if you knock, the door will be opened to you, and if you ask, it will be given to you. Please know, however, that He isn't so much speaking about material possessions here as much as He is about meeting the deepest longings of your soul. So continue to seek, knock, ask and don't stop until you find, enter in and come to know the answer your soul has been searching for all along.
Our souls crave, and it's God that we are longing for. So we should listen carefully to the conversations going on inside our heads. We shouldn't worry ... we aren't really going crazy. We are not talking to ourselves. God is trying to get our attention and to bring us into relationship with Him. If we will pay attention to our souls, they will guide us to God.
If God is real and we are created by Him, our souls already know this. We may be in denial or even genuinely unaware of it, but if we would take the time to explore nowhere else except deep within ourselves, undoubtedly we would come face-to-face with God.
In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster asks the question, "Do you think there's life out there?" The theme of the movie, of course, was that if there wasn't, then it would be a terrible waste of space. I say that there is more unexplored space within us than there is in this ever-expanding universe. If we will take the time to journey to the depths of our souls, we will not leave there disappointed, and perhaps to our surprise and astonishment, we will find God there.
Then what do we do? If we find ourselves face-to-face with the God of the universe and feel His presence touch our souls like gentle breezes against our face, how will we respond to Him? To trust in God, we have to truly know that He loves us without condition. This is the beauty of Jesus' death on the cross. It is literally God's celebration of His love for us. His love embraces us wherever we happen to be in our journeys, and He refuses to leave us there. Instead, He launches us on a quest to pursue the lives we were created to live. Our souls know that there is a greater purpose for our lives, a God-sized dream waiting to unfold and become our futures.
We are all on a quest for intimacy, for meaning, for our destinies. Our souls crave love and faith and hope. We are all searching for what it is that our souls long for, and we will be satisfied only in God. My guess is that it will never be easy, but at least Jesus has made it possible. We don't have to be afraid to commit our lives to someone who gives His life for us.
Maybe you are different than I am, but my guess is that we are probably a lot alike in this. Your soul, too, craves to believe. You may have been burned, you may have even been deceived, but deep in your gut, somewhere deep inside, there is a voice telling you that God can be trusted with your life, that you can trust someone like Jesus. His love is pure and your soul thirsts for Him like water is needed by a crusted desert. That there is more to life than you can know without God. Jesus walked among us so that we could get close enough to hear Him, to see Him, to touch Him, to know Him. To know Him, this is what our souls crave.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
Hide and Seek
Solomon once wrote that God has set eternity in the hearts of men, but that in the end we cannot seem to make any sense of it. He somehow knew that deep within us is both our greatest evidence for God and our greatest connection to God. Jesus said that the kingdom of God was within, yet for the past two thousand years we have kept looking outward for this kingdom rather than inside us. I am absolutely convinced of one thing: God has placed cravings within our souls that will either drive us insane or drive us to Him. Our souls long for God; we just may not know it yet.
I lose things all the time [and as it turns out, so does my wife ... perhaps even more than I do ... so at all times there is a fairly good chance that there is a hunt going on at the Currieo hacienda]. I have literally spent untold hours of my life looking for lost items. This goes back to childhood, and when I was a kid, I used to think God was punishing me by hiding whatever object was missing. A bit of magical thinking I must admit now:) I was certain that I had committed some heinous crime against both God and humanity, and now God was punishing me by hiding my wallet, keys, ticket, fill in the blank. My parents would be exasperated saying things like "a place for everything and everything in its place." The past few years I must admit that I have done better in the keeping things in their place department ... but it is forty years too late.
Losing things drove me to prayer [and it really drives Janna to prayer even more than me]. I would spend virtually every minute of my search begging God to help me find whatever I had lost [or He had hidden]. I, of course, would also make untold promises to God about ways in which I could be more holy if He would just show me where the missing item was. Not that I was so good about keeping those promises mind you. I would wrack my mind for anything I could have possibly done wrong to cause said item to go missing and then do whatever I could to make it right ... frantically trying to find the one thing God was holding against me so that I could get Him to give back what was missing.
Most people, I am sure, might think this was a ridiculous thought process, but frankly it seemed to work pretty well [maybe that is why I kept doing it ... after all, a behavior reinforced is a behavior repeated as the psychologists tell us]. Most of the time I was able to get God off my back, repair whatever breach in the cosmos I had created, and find the missing watch, wallet, keys, radio or whatever happened to be lost at the time. Looking back now, I realize that the one thing that seemed to be lost all the time was me. I kept looking for me. Or really for who I was. Somewhere along the way from grade school to adolescence I had become lost.
We try to fill ourselves with everything we can grab [remember the Schlitz beer commercials in the 70s ... you only go around once in life so grab all the gusto you can?]. And yet there always seemed to remain an inescapable emptiness within. Even when we have looked everywhere else, even when there is seemingly no where else to even look, we still somehow fail to consider the possibility that what our souls long for is God. We cannot take enough [gusto, money, things, whatever] or make enough to fill the hollowness within us. No matter what we try to do we cannot seem to avoid the void.
Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus meant when He said, "What is it worth to gain the whole world, but to lose your soul?" Could He have been describing someone like me or you? We can spend our entire lives as slaves to our desires, determined to somehow satisfy the deepest longings of our souls. We can take everything that we get our hands on; we can keep everything that we grab a hold of; we can, in the end, become human versions of a black hole.
Yet there remains something deep inside us that pulls us toward God, something our souls long for that we cannot fully understand or comprehend. Doesn't it make sense that if we were created for relationship with the God of the universe, that He would leverage everything within us so that we would search for Him, to reach out for Him, and perhaps just end up finding Him?
So at the end of the day, we are back to our cosmic game of hide-and-seek. At this point, we might be asking ourselves, If God wants me to find Him and my soul craves to do so, then why doesn't He make it easier than this? How many of us have gone searching for God? I have. And frankly, I didn't feel much like He was cooperating at all [while now looking back I can see that He was there all the time]. And then when my propensity for losing things was factored in, it is a miracle that I ever ended up finding Him again at all.
When we lose something, we have to backtrack. Don't you just hate the question we always get asked whenever we lose something, "Where did you last have it?" If we knew that, then it wouldn't be lost, now would it? But like an investigator from Scotland Yard, we go retracing every step. When that doesn't work, sadly I too quickly move to Plan B ... blaming others. "Who lost my _____ [fill in the blank]?" Oh, that's right, we're talking about God. "Who moved my God?" Or worse yet, "My God, where did God go?"
Now I'll say it right here and now. It is a very bad thing to misplace the Creator of the universe. He could be just about anywhere [think of the infinite possibilities as to where this search might take us]. Or maybe in this case, everywhere. Sometimes hide-and-seek isn't a game.
So I asked around and I looked for God in the last place someone saw Him -- in religion. After all, millions of people around the world go to see God every week unless, of course, you were to interview them and then you might realize that they didn't see Him either. They were just there looking for Him, hoping that they could find Him. There may be nothing more frustrating or confusing than having tried God and then walking away with the bad taste of "religion" in our mouths.
So many of us spend our lives worrying that God is going to punish us or hoping that God is going to help us, but neither of these things ever seems to happen. For all the activity that there is in the world trying to get God's attention, it can leave us wondering whether it's all just a horrible waste of time. I couldn't really blame God, though. I never really got too mad at Him [except perhaps after my mother's suicide ... why couldn't I have a normal family like everyone else?]. I just figured that He was too busy with more important stuff or maybe more important people. So much of my life felt invisible. It seemed pretty arrogant and presumptuous of me to think God would actually notice me. Probably God was more of a big picture kind of guy. Maybe He just wasn't that into details. Or maybe, just maybe, there was more going on than I knew.
Over and over again, Jesus taught the value of the one to God. He described God as the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to find the one that is lost; the woman who searches for the one coin that is missing till she finds it; the father who waits patiently for his wayward son to return home to him. The one matters to God.
... To be continued ...
I lose things all the time [and as it turns out, so does my wife ... perhaps even more than I do ... so at all times there is a fairly good chance that there is a hunt going on at the Currieo hacienda]. I have literally spent untold hours of my life looking for lost items. This goes back to childhood, and when I was a kid, I used to think God was punishing me by hiding whatever object was missing. A bit of magical thinking I must admit now:) I was certain that I had committed some heinous crime against both God and humanity, and now God was punishing me by hiding my wallet, keys, ticket, fill in the blank. My parents would be exasperated saying things like "a place for everything and everything in its place." The past few years I must admit that I have done better in the keeping things in their place department ... but it is forty years too late.
Losing things drove me to prayer [and it really drives Janna to prayer even more than me]. I would spend virtually every minute of my search begging God to help me find whatever I had lost [or He had hidden]. I, of course, would also make untold promises to God about ways in which I could be more holy if He would just show me where the missing item was. Not that I was so good about keeping those promises mind you. I would wrack my mind for anything I could have possibly done wrong to cause said item to go missing and then do whatever I could to make it right ... frantically trying to find the one thing God was holding against me so that I could get Him to give back what was missing.
Most people, I am sure, might think this was a ridiculous thought process, but frankly it seemed to work pretty well [maybe that is why I kept doing it ... after all, a behavior reinforced is a behavior repeated as the psychologists tell us]. Most of the time I was able to get God off my back, repair whatever breach in the cosmos I had created, and find the missing watch, wallet, keys, radio or whatever happened to be lost at the time. Looking back now, I realize that the one thing that seemed to be lost all the time was me. I kept looking for me. Or really for who I was. Somewhere along the way from grade school to adolescence I had become lost.
We try to fill ourselves with everything we can grab [remember the Schlitz beer commercials in the 70s ... you only go around once in life so grab all the gusto you can?]. And yet there always seemed to remain an inescapable emptiness within. Even when we have looked everywhere else, even when there is seemingly no where else to even look, we still somehow fail to consider the possibility that what our souls long for is God. We cannot take enough [gusto, money, things, whatever] or make enough to fill the hollowness within us. No matter what we try to do we cannot seem to avoid the void.
Perhaps this is exactly what Jesus meant when He said, "What is it worth to gain the whole world, but to lose your soul?" Could He have been describing someone like me or you? We can spend our entire lives as slaves to our desires, determined to somehow satisfy the deepest longings of our souls. We can take everything that we get our hands on; we can keep everything that we grab a hold of; we can, in the end, become human versions of a black hole.
Yet there remains something deep inside us that pulls us toward God, something our souls long for that we cannot fully understand or comprehend. Doesn't it make sense that if we were created for relationship with the God of the universe, that He would leverage everything within us so that we would search for Him, to reach out for Him, and perhaps just end up finding Him?
So at the end of the day, we are back to our cosmic game of hide-and-seek. At this point, we might be asking ourselves, If God wants me to find Him and my soul craves to do so, then why doesn't He make it easier than this? How many of us have gone searching for God? I have. And frankly, I didn't feel much like He was cooperating at all [while now looking back I can see that He was there all the time]. And then when my propensity for losing things was factored in, it is a miracle that I ever ended up finding Him again at all.
When we lose something, we have to backtrack. Don't you just hate the question we always get asked whenever we lose something, "Where did you last have it?" If we knew that, then it wouldn't be lost, now would it? But like an investigator from Scotland Yard, we go retracing every step. When that doesn't work, sadly I too quickly move to Plan B ... blaming others. "Who lost my _____ [fill in the blank]?" Oh, that's right, we're talking about God. "Who moved my God?" Or worse yet, "My God, where did God go?"
Now I'll say it right here and now. It is a very bad thing to misplace the Creator of the universe. He could be just about anywhere [think of the infinite possibilities as to where this search might take us]. Or maybe in this case, everywhere. Sometimes hide-and-seek isn't a game.
So I asked around and I looked for God in the last place someone saw Him -- in religion. After all, millions of people around the world go to see God every week unless, of course, you were to interview them and then you might realize that they didn't see Him either. They were just there looking for Him, hoping that they could find Him. There may be nothing more frustrating or confusing than having tried God and then walking away with the bad taste of "religion" in our mouths.
So many of us spend our lives worrying that God is going to punish us or hoping that God is going to help us, but neither of these things ever seems to happen. For all the activity that there is in the world trying to get God's attention, it can leave us wondering whether it's all just a horrible waste of time. I couldn't really blame God, though. I never really got too mad at Him [except perhaps after my mother's suicide ... why couldn't I have a normal family like everyone else?]. I just figured that He was too busy with more important stuff or maybe more important people. So much of my life felt invisible. It seemed pretty arrogant and presumptuous of me to think God would actually notice me. Probably God was more of a big picture kind of guy. Maybe He just wasn't that into details. Or maybe, just maybe, there was more going on than I knew.
Over and over again, Jesus taught the value of the one to God. He described God as the shepherd who leaves the 99 sheep to find the one that is lost; the woman who searches for the one coin that is missing till she finds it; the father who waits patiently for his wayward son to return home to him. The one matters to God.
... To be continued ...
Dreams ... the Art Form of Hope
Dreams [aspirations] are the art form of hope. They paint a picture of the life we desire. It is impossible to enjoy life to the fullest without dreams. And I believe we were certainly created to enjoy life. We don't have to teach children to laugh. Joy, celebration, and even happiness are the natural environments for the human spirit. Have you ever considered just how difficult it is to fake a real laugh? The imitation is easy to spot. We might have faith in the wrong things and we might later discover our true love to be only of the puppy variety, but we are never confused about whether something is funny.
This can be downright depressing if we think about it long enough. I would rather be right about what I believe or about who I love than have a discerning sense of comedy. At the end of our lives what really is the evolutionary value of laughter? Yet, as it has often been said, it is somehow strangely true that laughter is the best medicine.
When you study any life form, we can discover its proper environment by what brings it health and makes it thrive. Some plants require shade; others direct sunlight; still others only partial sunlight. Some species are designed to thrive in deserts while others can only exist in tropical rain forests. Move a plant out of its natural habitat and it will quickly deteriorate in both health and vitality.
People are no different. Put them in an environment filled with bitterness, despair or detachment and it doesn't take too long to see the resulting negative effect. Despite perhaps seeming superficial, the human spirit thrives where there is laughter. Perhaps we should take happiness more seriously. Somehow we live in a world where those societies who have the highest concentration of human wealth also have the highest percentage of people medicated for depression. I guess it just goes to show that we can't buy happiness. But somehow that doesn't seem to keep us from trying.
I remember laughing when I was a young boy ... I also remember when the laughter stopped after my mother's suicide. Nothing much seemed funny in my adolescent years [maybe that is just par for the course ... but then again maybe not]. My girls' teenage years, on the other hand, seemed to be a barrel of laughs. For me, I was in pretty sad shape. Trapped in a universe that I couldn't get out of or worse yet even understand, I was quickly losing hope. I didn't realize at the time just how essential hope was to getting out of bed in the morning ... yet still somehow I got out of bed every day at 3:00 AM to deliver the morning newspaper [perhaps it was because I didn't really have the choice to stay in bed].
Our souls get into trouble when we stop believing in hope. Still I had dreams of a different life ... one where I would graduate from college and move into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and somehow find myself in the solitude. It would seem that no matter how difficult our lives are, if we can imagine better ones, that can somehow pull us through. My biggest confusion during my high school years involved figuring out just who God was and why, or better yet how, He could love me. Add my intrigue with the French existentialist philosophers to the mix and hopelessness became almost a given.
Yet I learned that our souls crave truth, beauty, wonder and love. Our souls yearn to dream, to imagine, and simply just to understand who we are and why we are here. Our souls crave to connect, to commune, and to create. And should we become convinced that all these things are merely illusions to be dispensed of [as part of my soul did during my high school years] then our souls become sick.
One ink blot I saw during my college psychology class clearly gave me a choice between a bat and a butterfly. I saw them both, and I fully understood the implications. Which would I choose? Seriously, how does one choose what to do when our souls want butterflies but the world keeps sending us bats? Perhaps we become Batman ... taking our worst fears and making them our strengths. But really ... how do we do that? I never really got answers to those questions but I became convinced at least that asking the questions was a good thing.
And during my college years I began to realize that all of us have a common struggle. While there may be an endless number of philosophies and religions in the world and while we may all disagree on the answers, all of us have the same questions, the same longings, the same cravings.
When I was just a small child, I believed in God, in love and in laughter -- and then I didn't. I think love went first, then laughter. And then since God couldn't help me with the first two, I went ahead and threw Him out with everything else you need to get rid of when you are no longer a child [these were my high school years]. But before you get shocked and think too badly of me, please know that almost immediately I wanted them all back. I just didn't realize how intimately they were all connected together. Imagine my surprise when I began to discover that the things that came so naturally to me as a child were the very things my soul was craving.
I think I gave away my soul at a very young age. By this I mean I gave up on myself. My mom, dad and even step-mom never did and were always saying I "could do anything I set my mind on." I just never believed them ... at least not until my fourth semester of college when it was put up or shut up time. I had just dropped a Physics class that I had a D in and just barely passed my Thermodynamics class the previous semester. I had serious doubts as to whether I should even be in college and really had no idea at all as to why I was there, except that it was what came next after high school.
When we give up on ourselves, we start throwing out things like our dreams, our optimism [we become pessimists who just call themselves "realists"], our hope, intimacy, love, trust, truth, meaning, and even our faith. Looking back now, I realize that I was just paralyzed by fear. I was terrified that I was nothing and would never amount to anything. Deep inside this ever-expanding universe known as my soul, I was drowning in a quickly rising ocean of self-doubt and despair. And I know from experience that is isn't enough just to survive.
... To be continued ...
This can be downright depressing if we think about it long enough. I would rather be right about what I believe or about who I love than have a discerning sense of comedy. At the end of our lives what really is the evolutionary value of laughter? Yet, as it has often been said, it is somehow strangely true that laughter is the best medicine.
When you study any life form, we can discover its proper environment by what brings it health and makes it thrive. Some plants require shade; others direct sunlight; still others only partial sunlight. Some species are designed to thrive in deserts while others can only exist in tropical rain forests. Move a plant out of its natural habitat and it will quickly deteriorate in both health and vitality.
People are no different. Put them in an environment filled with bitterness, despair or detachment and it doesn't take too long to see the resulting negative effect. Despite perhaps seeming superficial, the human spirit thrives where there is laughter. Perhaps we should take happiness more seriously. Somehow we live in a world where those societies who have the highest concentration of human wealth also have the highest percentage of people medicated for depression. I guess it just goes to show that we can't buy happiness. But somehow that doesn't seem to keep us from trying.
I remember laughing when I was a young boy ... I also remember when the laughter stopped after my mother's suicide. Nothing much seemed funny in my adolescent years [maybe that is just par for the course ... but then again maybe not]. My girls' teenage years, on the other hand, seemed to be a barrel of laughs. For me, I was in pretty sad shape. Trapped in a universe that I couldn't get out of or worse yet even understand, I was quickly losing hope. I didn't realize at the time just how essential hope was to getting out of bed in the morning ... yet still somehow I got out of bed every day at 3:00 AM to deliver the morning newspaper [perhaps it was because I didn't really have the choice to stay in bed].
Our souls get into trouble when we stop believing in hope. Still I had dreams of a different life ... one where I would graduate from college and move into the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and somehow find myself in the solitude. It would seem that no matter how difficult our lives are, if we can imagine better ones, that can somehow pull us through. My biggest confusion during my high school years involved figuring out just who God was and why, or better yet how, He could love me. Add my intrigue with the French existentialist philosophers to the mix and hopelessness became almost a given.
Yet I learned that our souls crave truth, beauty, wonder and love. Our souls yearn to dream, to imagine, and simply just to understand who we are and why we are here. Our souls crave to connect, to commune, and to create. And should we become convinced that all these things are merely illusions to be dispensed of [as part of my soul did during my high school years] then our souls become sick.
One ink blot I saw during my college psychology class clearly gave me a choice between a bat and a butterfly. I saw them both, and I fully understood the implications. Which would I choose? Seriously, how does one choose what to do when our souls want butterflies but the world keeps sending us bats? Perhaps we become Batman ... taking our worst fears and making them our strengths. But really ... how do we do that? I never really got answers to those questions but I became convinced at least that asking the questions was a good thing.
And during my college years I began to realize that all of us have a common struggle. While there may be an endless number of philosophies and religions in the world and while we may all disagree on the answers, all of us have the same questions, the same longings, the same cravings.
When I was just a small child, I believed in God, in love and in laughter -- and then I didn't. I think love went first, then laughter. And then since God couldn't help me with the first two, I went ahead and threw Him out with everything else you need to get rid of when you are no longer a child [these were my high school years]. But before you get shocked and think too badly of me, please know that almost immediately I wanted them all back. I just didn't realize how intimately they were all connected together. Imagine my surprise when I began to discover that the things that came so naturally to me as a child were the very things my soul was craving.
I think I gave away my soul at a very young age. By this I mean I gave up on myself. My mom, dad and even step-mom never did and were always saying I "could do anything I set my mind on." I just never believed them ... at least not until my fourth semester of college when it was put up or shut up time. I had just dropped a Physics class that I had a D in and just barely passed my Thermodynamics class the previous semester. I had serious doubts as to whether I should even be in college and really had no idea at all as to why I was there, except that it was what came next after high school.
When we give up on ourselves, we start throwing out things like our dreams, our optimism [we become pessimists who just call themselves "realists"], our hope, intimacy, love, trust, truth, meaning, and even our faith. Looking back now, I realize that I was just paralyzed by fear. I was terrified that I was nothing and would never amount to anything. Deep inside this ever-expanding universe known as my soul, I was drowning in a quickly rising ocean of self-doubt and despair. And I know from experience that is isn't enough just to survive.
... To be continued ...
Thursday, September 22, 2011
So What About Love?
So then there is love.
Some people who do not believe in God are consistent and do not believe in love either. Basically they lack primary evidence. In fact, I would assert that there is a direct correlation between losing faith in love and losing faith in God. Yet for many people it is at this point that they live with the inconsistency. We cannot see God; we cannot prove God in the laboratory. They find that to believe in God is a stretch, but they believe in love. Yet we cannot see love. We cannot prove love. The only available evidence is secondary. Again, like God, there is no primary evidence. However, when we love someone, we are more certain of this than virtually anything else.
It is love that reminds us that there is a knowing beyond reason.
Moreover, I would assert that we are born to love. Children love unconditionally. We can beat the love out of a person, but it is impossible to beat it into someone. Just like faith, love is intrinsic. It is not taught or transferred ... it just is. We cannot make a person love us. God only knows how many of us have tried to. There might be nothing more painful than loving someone who does not love us in return.
For love to exist it does not even require reciprocation.
We can, in fact, live in a loveless environment and still love. Children typically still love their parents when tragically their parents do not love them. If love was something that developed over time, it would not be so. It is certainly not the result of becoming a mature adult. In fact, frequently it seems to be the opposite, where adulthood becomes the enemy of love. I am not saying that love does not deepen with maturity but what I am saying is that the impetus for love is within us from the start. We are all born with both faith and love -- not to mention hope.
Some people who do not believe in God are consistent and do not believe in love either. Basically they lack primary evidence. In fact, I would assert that there is a direct correlation between losing faith in love and losing faith in God. Yet for many people it is at this point that they live with the inconsistency. We cannot see God; we cannot prove God in the laboratory. They find that to believe in God is a stretch, but they believe in love. Yet we cannot see love. We cannot prove love. The only available evidence is secondary. Again, like God, there is no primary evidence. However, when we love someone, we are more certain of this than virtually anything else.
It is love that reminds us that there is a knowing beyond reason.
Moreover, I would assert that we are born to love. Children love unconditionally. We can beat the love out of a person, but it is impossible to beat it into someone. Just like faith, love is intrinsic. It is not taught or transferred ... it just is. We cannot make a person love us. God only knows how many of us have tried to. There might be nothing more painful than loving someone who does not love us in return.
For love to exist it does not even require reciprocation.
We can, in fact, live in a loveless environment and still love. Children typically still love their parents when tragically their parents do not love them. If love was something that developed over time, it would not be so. It is certainly not the result of becoming a mature adult. In fact, frequently it seems to be the opposite, where adulthood becomes the enemy of love. I am not saying that love does not deepen with maturity but what I am saying is that the impetus for love is within us from the start. We are all born with both faith and love -- not to mention hope.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
The Faith of a Child v. the Doubt of the Adult
We seem destined to be tormented by cravings that we cannot satisfy or to live dissatisfied lives dead to our deepest longings.
We tend to think of childhood as that period in our lives when we are preparing for life. But the truth of the matter is that life for the most part comes right at us from the very beginning. No warm-ups; no pre-game; no do-overs or mulligans. It's the real thing from our first breaths.
Sadly, I don't really remember much from my birthday ... the best I can do is pick up the trail of memories beginning several years afterward. It is humbling to realize that my earliest memories are not really independent thoughts but more what I've been told about the first few years of my life with memories filled in from pictures, stories in my baby book or home videos. All of us are shaped by people and events that we may not even vaguely remember. I have just a handful of memories of my biological mother who committed suicide just before my tenth birthday. Yet whether I care to admit it or not, she still affects me decades later. So I know that my earliest thoughts were not shaped in a vacuum, but I also know that they did not simply come from the outside.
When I was only a small child, I believed in God, in love, and in laughter. To believe in these things is natural to the human spirit. For a child, more is unknown than is known. To believe in God, in mystery, in the unseen, is not difficult for a child. Children are pretty much born to believe. They are the perfect candidates for myths, fables and fairy tales. Adults, on the other hand, see this as a weakness, as proof of the naivete of childhood.
As we grow older, we come to know better. I find it odd how as adults, we struggle with faith. We need evidence to justify our belief in the invisible. We attempt to build faith systems constructed with our logic and reason. As children, we just believed. Faith was so natural. Yes, our innocence left us vulnerable to believing things that were not true, but is it also possible that this same innocence exists so that we may find that which is most true? We seem to be created with an inherent inclination to believe. So perhaps the truth is that we don't grow into faith; we grow out of it.
We have within us both the ability and the disposition to look beyond the material world and to search for the eternal. If God exists and we were created to know him and faith is the means by which that happens, doesn't it make sense that we would be born with such an inclination? For others, to believe in God is far too great a stretch. They even consider such to be an insult to their intelligence. For them believing in something they cannot empirically see or test is absurd. And if we were to speak of the effects of God on the lives of his people, they will insist that secondary evidence is not enough. If it is not primary then it is unreal.
Then there is love.
... To be continued ...
We tend to think of childhood as that period in our lives when we are preparing for life. But the truth of the matter is that life for the most part comes right at us from the very beginning. No warm-ups; no pre-game; no do-overs or mulligans. It's the real thing from our first breaths.
Sadly, I don't really remember much from my birthday ... the best I can do is pick up the trail of memories beginning several years afterward. It is humbling to realize that my earliest memories are not really independent thoughts but more what I've been told about the first few years of my life with memories filled in from pictures, stories in my baby book or home videos. All of us are shaped by people and events that we may not even vaguely remember. I have just a handful of memories of my biological mother who committed suicide just before my tenth birthday. Yet whether I care to admit it or not, she still affects me decades later. So I know that my earliest thoughts were not shaped in a vacuum, but I also know that they did not simply come from the outside.
When I was only a small child, I believed in God, in love, and in laughter. To believe in these things is natural to the human spirit. For a child, more is unknown than is known. To believe in God, in mystery, in the unseen, is not difficult for a child. Children are pretty much born to believe. They are the perfect candidates for myths, fables and fairy tales. Adults, on the other hand, see this as a weakness, as proof of the naivete of childhood.
As we grow older, we come to know better. I find it odd how as adults, we struggle with faith. We need evidence to justify our belief in the invisible. We attempt to build faith systems constructed with our logic and reason. As children, we just believed. Faith was so natural. Yes, our innocence left us vulnerable to believing things that were not true, but is it also possible that this same innocence exists so that we may find that which is most true? We seem to be created with an inherent inclination to believe. So perhaps the truth is that we don't grow into faith; we grow out of it.
We have within us both the ability and the disposition to look beyond the material world and to search for the eternal. If God exists and we were created to know him and faith is the means by which that happens, doesn't it make sense that we would be born with such an inclination? For others, to believe in God is far too great a stretch. They even consider such to be an insult to their intelligence. For them believing in something they cannot empirically see or test is absurd. And if we were to speak of the effects of God on the lives of his people, they will insist that secondary evidence is not enough. If it is not primary then it is unreal.
Then there is love.
... To be continued ...
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
To Be or Not To Be ... a Model T
All of us begin our lives fueled by curiosity, yet far too many of us replace it with conformity. We are born unique but often die standardized. Henry Ford offered his Model T in any color his customers wanted ... so long as it was black. He was the master of standardization. This turned out not to be a sustainable idea for cars, much less for people. We are not supposed to look like or act like and certainly not live like we are the products of an assembly line.
It is far too easy to live our lives by default. And if we are not careful, we can easily become the sum total of all the expectations others impose on our lives. Too often we allow ourselves to become generic, standardized, homogenized. We too frequently just maintain the status quo ... conform to the expectation of others ... suppress our curiosity ... stop questioning ... refrain from stirring things up. We line up and march in single file. We just get in line all to often never even thinking to ask WHY WE ARE EVEN STANDING THERE AT ALL.
I think this begins way back in kindergarten. Janna and I spent a week in my daughter's [Alli] kindergarten class in Caracas, VZ this past March. One of the striking thing the kids learn and do in kindergarten is to line up for everything ... even to go to the bathroom. They line up for recess, for lunch, for snack, to change classes, literally everything. The highest honor a kid gets in kindergarten is the rotating task of being the "line leader" for the day. Heck it is even a fun task to be the "line caboose" for the day. And it is the line leader's and line caboose's job to keep all the other kids "in line." Somehow this becomes a pattern for our lives even to the subconscious level.
I sometimes notice this phenomenon at the movie theater when there is an extraordinarily long line for the sole ticket window even in the rain and then there is another window open and no one there in line. I will ask the worker manning the booth if he is open and he will say "yes" and then I will ask why no one is in his line and he will often answer with a sheepish look on his face that he "has no idea." After I have safely secured my tickets I have tried to free those in the long line to come on over and come out of the rain and receive the most distrusting looks from so many reluctant to believe. Why is it that we are more likely to get in line behind someone else than we are to start our own? Can it really go back to our kindergarten days and then just be socially reinforced through the decades that follow?
Eventually we find ourselves a part of a human assembly line surrounded by standardization, routine and predictability. We find ourselves miserable in the mundane. One day we end up finding ourselves looking at our image in the mirror and wondering who we are and why we are. Is life arbitrary? Or is there meaning behind it? Are we unique or are we incidental? Screen writer and actor Zach Braff captures this struggle to find uniqueness while wallowing in the blandness of everyday existence masterfully in the movie, Garden State.
This film follows the lives of a group of people who seem to be going absolutely nowhere and then the death of Andrew Largeman's [Braff] mother and the intervention of one person [Sam, Natalie Portman] who refuses to give up on her own uniqueness awakens him out of his lithium-induced slumber. The story reminds us that it is easy to become an echo instead of a voice. Yet we discover even one meaningless act that stands alone as unique can give us hope that our lives can, in fact, be different. It is ironic that we can be absolutely uncertain about what it is that we are looking for and yet be absolutely certain that we haven't found it. Still we know that we are searching for something; we just don't know for what or even why.
From our first breaths we have been on a journey. There are things our souls long for, and whether we have yet recognized it or not, our lives are shaped by our search for them. We are on a quest to discover our own uniqueness ... who we are, why we are here, and where we are going.
If we find ourselves endlessly thwarted in our search for our uniqueness, we may choose to end our quests and settle for sterile lives of empty existence. We must be careful not to mistake our surrender for rest.
... To be continued ...
It is far too easy to live our lives by default. And if we are not careful, we can easily become the sum total of all the expectations others impose on our lives. Too often we allow ourselves to become generic, standardized, homogenized. We too frequently just maintain the status quo ... conform to the expectation of others ... suppress our curiosity ... stop questioning ... refrain from stirring things up. We line up and march in single file. We just get in line all to often never even thinking to ask WHY WE ARE EVEN STANDING THERE AT ALL.
I think this begins way back in kindergarten. Janna and I spent a week in my daughter's [Alli] kindergarten class in Caracas, VZ this past March. One of the striking thing the kids learn and do in kindergarten is to line up for everything ... even to go to the bathroom. They line up for recess, for lunch, for snack, to change classes, literally everything. The highest honor a kid gets in kindergarten is the rotating task of being the "line leader" for the day. Heck it is even a fun task to be the "line caboose" for the day. And it is the line leader's and line caboose's job to keep all the other kids "in line." Somehow this becomes a pattern for our lives even to the subconscious level.
I sometimes notice this phenomenon at the movie theater when there is an extraordinarily long line for the sole ticket window even in the rain and then there is another window open and no one there in line. I will ask the worker manning the booth if he is open and he will say "yes" and then I will ask why no one is in his line and he will often answer with a sheepish look on his face that he "has no idea." After I have safely secured my tickets I have tried to free those in the long line to come on over and come out of the rain and receive the most distrusting looks from so many reluctant to believe. Why is it that we are more likely to get in line behind someone else than we are to start our own? Can it really go back to our kindergarten days and then just be socially reinforced through the decades that follow?
Eventually we find ourselves a part of a human assembly line surrounded by standardization, routine and predictability. We find ourselves miserable in the mundane. One day we end up finding ourselves looking at our image in the mirror and wondering who we are and why we are. Is life arbitrary? Or is there meaning behind it? Are we unique or are we incidental? Screen writer and actor Zach Braff captures this struggle to find uniqueness while wallowing in the blandness of everyday existence masterfully in the movie, Garden State.
This film follows the lives of a group of people who seem to be going absolutely nowhere and then the death of Andrew Largeman's [Braff] mother and the intervention of one person [Sam, Natalie Portman] who refuses to give up on her own uniqueness awakens him out of his lithium-induced slumber. The story reminds us that it is easy to become an echo instead of a voice. Yet we discover even one meaningless act that stands alone as unique can give us hope that our lives can, in fact, be different. It is ironic that we can be absolutely uncertain about what it is that we are looking for and yet be absolutely certain that we haven't found it. Still we know that we are searching for something; we just don't know for what or even why.
From our first breaths we have been on a journey. There are things our souls long for, and whether we have yet recognized it or not, our lives are shaped by our search for them. We are on a quest to discover our own uniqueness ... who we are, why we are here, and where we are going.
If we find ourselves endlessly thwarted in our search for our uniqueness, we may choose to end our quests and settle for sterile lives of empty existence. We must be careful not to mistake our surrender for rest.
... To be continued ...
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Black Holes and Luminaries
Science tells us that the cosmos is ever expanding ... that it is a virtual infinite space waiting to be both discovered and explored. I find that this pretty much sums up the human spirit as well. There seems to be no end to how far we can travel within ourselves. With every breath we take, with every day we live and with every new experience we have, our souls expand. We are all on the journey of the human spirit.
There is as much mystery inside us as there is outside ... and maybe more. We've spent almost a trillion dollars in search of what is out there and yet it seems that most of us won't even give the time of day to discover what is going on inside us. If we were to carefully observe people from the inside out, we would find both black holes and luminaries. And if we choose to walk with someone for a lifetime, we will find that no matter how well we may know him or her, there remains much that we have still yet to discover.
I have been married to Janna for almost 29 years now and I can attest that she is an ever-expanding universe. The more I get to know her, the deeper I realize that she has become. I will never know her completely because she's essentially a moving target and not a stagnant one. We cannot completely know someone who is always growing, always changing, always expanding. That is what I most love about Janna ... she is not the same woman I married almost 29 years ago. She has become far more than that.
I wish I could say this was true for everyone, but sadly, I am not so sure that it is. Some people seem to live in very small universes. Their worlds have room only for themselves. While their souls have the potential to be ever expanding, they instead seem to be at the center of a collapsing universe ... no room for dreams, for hope, for laughter, for love, for others ... room really only for themselves. They find themselves very much alone, and they are very lonely. Strangely enough, most of them do not even know why. Their souls crave also. And the way that they have "gained the whole world and lost their souls" is that they have made themselves into their whole world. They have sold out.
Most of us do not actually sell our souls to the devil; we just give them away. We can choose to play it safe, to hide behind indifference, to choose the path of mediocrity. The truth is that we can swallow just about anything. But the question is, can we keep it down? We live in a world filled with indifference, apathy, detachment, conformity, compliance and acquiescing to the status quo. We may swallow, but it doesn't settle well. The human spirit has no appetite for the bland, the mundane, or even the passionless. When we stop believing that we are each something unique, something begins to die within us.
What exactly is it within the human spirit that insists on its uniqueness??? It is not enough for us to simply exist. That each of us has a unique fingerprint, a unique DNA sequence, means more to us than simply improvement in forensic science. We are nothing less than driven to find our own paths, to make our own way, to be our own persons. While we may love to have things in common with others, we desperately need to believe that we are in some way unique. We want to be both the same as and different from those around us. We want to have things in common, but we don't want to be common.
We are made up of nothing but ordinary material ... primarily carbon and water. Yet something inside us cries out that there is more to us than meets the eye. We are like a cloth made of both burlap and cashmere. We are without question on our way to becoming dust. Our souls cry out, "Is this all it means to be human, or is there more?"
Even as I write this and perhaps as you read this, there is a voice coming not from our heads but from our gut, screaming that we are more than just water, carbon and calcium. So much of our life journeys can be explained by the cravings of our souls. Our souls know their uniqueness. And a voice from somewhere deep inside us longs for us to discover it. It calls us out and beckons us to pursue it.
There is something out there to be found, and our souls are restless to find it ....
To be continued ...
There is as much mystery inside us as there is outside ... and maybe more. We've spent almost a trillion dollars in search of what is out there and yet it seems that most of us won't even give the time of day to discover what is going on inside us. If we were to carefully observe people from the inside out, we would find both black holes and luminaries. And if we choose to walk with someone for a lifetime, we will find that no matter how well we may know him or her, there remains much that we have still yet to discover.
I have been married to Janna for almost 29 years now and I can attest that she is an ever-expanding universe. The more I get to know her, the deeper I realize that she has become. I will never know her completely because she's essentially a moving target and not a stagnant one. We cannot completely know someone who is always growing, always changing, always expanding. That is what I most love about Janna ... she is not the same woman I married almost 29 years ago. She has become far more than that.
I wish I could say this was true for everyone, but sadly, I am not so sure that it is. Some people seem to live in very small universes. Their worlds have room only for themselves. While their souls have the potential to be ever expanding, they instead seem to be at the center of a collapsing universe ... no room for dreams, for hope, for laughter, for love, for others ... room really only for themselves. They find themselves very much alone, and they are very lonely. Strangely enough, most of them do not even know why. Their souls crave also. And the way that they have "gained the whole world and lost their souls" is that they have made themselves into their whole world. They have sold out.
Most of us do not actually sell our souls to the devil; we just give them away. We can choose to play it safe, to hide behind indifference, to choose the path of mediocrity. The truth is that we can swallow just about anything. But the question is, can we keep it down? We live in a world filled with indifference, apathy, detachment, conformity, compliance and acquiescing to the status quo. We may swallow, but it doesn't settle well. The human spirit has no appetite for the bland, the mundane, or even the passionless. When we stop believing that we are each something unique, something begins to die within us.
What exactly is it within the human spirit that insists on its uniqueness??? It is not enough for us to simply exist. That each of us has a unique fingerprint, a unique DNA sequence, means more to us than simply improvement in forensic science. We are nothing less than driven to find our own paths, to make our own way, to be our own persons. While we may love to have things in common with others, we desperately need to believe that we are in some way unique. We want to be both the same as and different from those around us. We want to have things in common, but we don't want to be common.
We are made up of nothing but ordinary material ... primarily carbon and water. Yet something inside us cries out that there is more to us than meets the eye. We are like a cloth made of both burlap and cashmere. We are without question on our way to becoming dust. Our souls cry out, "Is this all it means to be human, or is there more?"
Even as I write this and perhaps as you read this, there is a voice coming not from our heads but from our gut, screaming that we are more than just water, carbon and calcium. So much of our life journeys can be explained by the cravings of our souls. Our souls know their uniqueness. And a voice from somewhere deep inside us longs for us to discover it. It calls us out and beckons us to pursue it.
There is something out there to be found, and our souls are restless to find it ....
To be continued ...
Sunday, September 11, 2011
When Our Souls Need a Plumber
Sometimes I feel like my soul is nothing more than a leaky faucet ... the kind that drips all night long. It doesn't really make a loud sound but more of an incessant one. Yet after hours of drip, drip, drip the sound not only echoes but progressively intensifies. The more silent the room, the louder the drips become. And before I know it, the sound consumes the room. And I would give anything to be able to shut it off ... this is when it would be especially good to know something about plumbing. I wonder if plumbers ever have faucets that drip ... you know like cobblers whose kids have shoes that always need mending. But I digress.
After a while, if the water continues to drip for long enough, the sound moves from deafening to silence. We just can't hear it anymore. It becomes what scientists call "white noise" or background noise. The noise is still there, it is still calling out to us, but we become almost numb to it. It goes from thunder to silence and, then when we least expect it, back to thunder.
I have found soul cravings to be like that. They scream in our heads until your "ears" almost hurt but then after a while they become almost like a silent scream. We can't hear them any longer and we can almost deny that they remain at all except for the echo down deep in the hollowness of our souls. We don't really know what it is that our souls want and we seem to have struck out looking for what it is that our souls need. So as a result, we begin losing our souls ... and we try to ignore incessant dripping and just move on.
Perhaps our souls are bit like us as kids waiting tireless day after day for the ice cream truck to drive down our streets. I remember back in the day wishing that I could own my very own ice cream truck and just eat dessert all day long. That to me is a picture of what feeding my soul is like. It keeps confusing what it wants with what it needs. Or maybe my soul just isn't convinced until I am physically sick to my stomach that the former is not the latter.
Buddha may have been right when he spoke against desires: they really can make us sick. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to us is to get what we want ... consider all those lottery winners whose lives are literally destroyed by their prizes. Desires and passion can lead us down some very dark paths. Buddha must have experienced some of the same frustrations as I have and decided the only way to solve this problem was to rid ourselves of all our desires.
Now millions of his followers pursue this goal to eliminate all their desires. For him it was pretty simple: if his desires keep making his soul sick, get rid of them -- all of them. Personally, I have found this to be impossible, but I can understand the sentiment. I am not even Buddha [though some may say I am beginning to look like him ... maybe I can at least keep a few hairs on my head] but I have figured out that what my head, heart and body desire is not necessarily what my soul needs.
We can get lost in our desires and never truly find out what it is that our souls long for. Instead of facing the hard reality that what we are pursuing is not what our souls crave, we tend to just try to solve the problem by getting more -- more toys, more money, more power, more prestige, more sex, more stuff. We literally spend our lives trying to satisfy our souls. Yet some things are only a facade. Some things satisfy but for just a moment. Some things actually deaden our souls. It's kind of weird when we think about it -- to gain the whole world and lose our souls. Jesus, of course, warned us about this way back in the day.
After a while, if the water continues to drip for long enough, the sound moves from deafening to silence. We just can't hear it anymore. It becomes what scientists call "white noise" or background noise. The noise is still there, it is still calling out to us, but we become almost numb to it. It goes from thunder to silence and, then when we least expect it, back to thunder.
I have found soul cravings to be like that. They scream in our heads until your "ears" almost hurt but then after a while they become almost like a silent scream. We can't hear them any longer and we can almost deny that they remain at all except for the echo down deep in the hollowness of our souls. We don't really know what it is that our souls want and we seem to have struck out looking for what it is that our souls need. So as a result, we begin losing our souls ... and we try to ignore incessant dripping and just move on.
Perhaps our souls are bit like us as kids waiting tireless day after day for the ice cream truck to drive down our streets. I remember back in the day wishing that I could own my very own ice cream truck and just eat dessert all day long. That to me is a picture of what feeding my soul is like. It keeps confusing what it wants with what it needs. Or maybe my soul just isn't convinced until I am physically sick to my stomach that the former is not the latter.
Buddha may have been right when he spoke against desires: they really can make us sick. Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to us is to get what we want ... consider all those lottery winners whose lives are literally destroyed by their prizes. Desires and passion can lead us down some very dark paths. Buddha must have experienced some of the same frustrations as I have and decided the only way to solve this problem was to rid ourselves of all our desires.
Now millions of his followers pursue this goal to eliminate all their desires. For him it was pretty simple: if his desires keep making his soul sick, get rid of them -- all of them. Personally, I have found this to be impossible, but I can understand the sentiment. I am not even Buddha [though some may say I am beginning to look like him ... maybe I can at least keep a few hairs on my head] but I have figured out that what my head, heart and body desire is not necessarily what my soul needs.
We can get lost in our desires and never truly find out what it is that our souls long for. Instead of facing the hard reality that what we are pursuing is not what our souls crave, we tend to just try to solve the problem by getting more -- more toys, more money, more power, more prestige, more sex, more stuff. We literally spend our lives trying to satisfy our souls. Yet some things are only a facade. Some things satisfy but for just a moment. Some things actually deaden our souls. It's kind of weird when we think about it -- to gain the whole world and lose our souls. Jesus, of course, warned us about this way back in the day.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
If No One Knows the Answer, Does Anyone Know the Way?
As a corollary to my posting yesterday, the world will get better when we get better. With all the progress we've made since the Enlightenment, we've got to be honest with ourselves and admit that we're not getting better, and if anything, we're only getting worse. This is the primary reason we are quickly losing our confidence in science to save us. There was a time when science held out the promise of a better world. We thought we could outgrow our primal instincts. This was in large part the hope of the Enlightenment, that we could educate and elevate ourselves out of the cycle of violence.
We thought we were the masters of progress and that one day we would no longer hate each other, abuse the powerless, instigate wars or be in any way inhumane. Such was promise of science's progress. We had essentially outgrown our need for God. We no longer needed Him to make us good. We could not only be good without God, but through the achievements of science, we could actually perpetually make ourselves better.
Then came the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if we in United States found ourselves on the winning side, something in our souls told us that we were all losers in this. Science was not creating for us a better world, only a more dangerous one. It seems as if we can improve on everything except ourselves. So if science and God are enemies, then why do we tend to blame God for what science corrupts? Hmmm.
Even Einstein acknowledged the problem was within us: "The release of the atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking. The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." Probably no more damning words were ever spoken. He said basically it is better for us to remain stupid if we cannot become good. The less technology we have, the less damage we can do.
So now it has been 65 plus years since we learned that all the technology in the world would not create for us the paradise that has been lost. Maybe it was right to conclude that we cannot trust religion or philosophy or history or government or institutions, but one thing we know for sure is that we cannot trust science [this coming from a vocational applied scientist], and for all the same reasons. They are all connected to people, which ultimately brings us to the inseparable relationship between truth and trust.
I remember back to my senior year in high school, in Mrs. McDougal's Honors English class when I first learned of the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sarte and Albert Camus as well as the Dutch Christian existentialist Soren Kirkegaard and devoured each of their writings. For the first time in my life I was found myself seriously questioning my beliefs for both accuracy as well as for why I believed them. Suddenly everything I believed to be true in my life was scrupulously challenged. I was struck by how each writer [and their peers] and each belief system had something within in that was strangely compelling.
But eventually it also became clear that each system of thought had gaping holes and shortcomings. During these days I became quite the Socratic [and my posse had running jokes about both the Socratic way of life as well as the Aristotlean way ... the life of questioning v. the life of balance and which was superior] but even then I could see at the end it all comes down to faith. I found myself moving from one belief system to another and then to another. And I had all the passion of youth to back it up. Yet after a while I began to see these different beliefs as fluid, interchangeable and thus disposable. I couldn't help but wonder if John Locke or David Hume or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Rene Descartes before them really knew any better than I did. No doubt they were all smarter than me, but I wondered if behind closed doors they were just as uncertain. Perhaps we were all wanderers in the same forest trying to find a fresh trail to truth.
Some believed God was just down the road. Others were convinced that it was just a dead end. Still others thought we had nothing in common except that we were all lost and trying to find our way. It is hard to be a guide when we don't know where we're going. So in the midst of all the uncertainty we made a shift from looking for the answers to looking at the questions ... which is the primary reason I liked Socrates so much [never mind that he was willing to die for his convictions].
Even when we don't know what is ultimately true, most of us would follow someone whom we absolutely trust. There seems to be an inseparable relationship between truth and trust, and God, it seems, is lost in between the two. Accuracy seems to be less important than authenticity. So if no one knows the answer, does anyone know the way?
It was in those days that I started to look for truth in an entirely new way. I stopped being so interested in finding the best idea but more the best life. Whatever I would come to believe in, it had to change more than just my mind; it had to change my life. Was any truth out there not simply worth believing in but worth becoming? What does an idea look like when it is "fleshed out" so to speak? And that is where Jesus came into the picture. His words were straight to the point. His was more than a claim to know the truth; He claimed that He WAS the truth! There really is no way to overemphasize the potential implications of this point. Could it be possible that truth is more than just an idea and that it is found only in God? What Jesus was telling us is that truth exists in God and comes only from God.
When we search for truth, we search for God. Our souls crave the One who is true.
We thought we were the masters of progress and that one day we would no longer hate each other, abuse the powerless, instigate wars or be in any way inhumane. Such was promise of science's progress. We had essentially outgrown our need for God. We no longer needed Him to make us good. We could not only be good without God, but through the achievements of science, we could actually perpetually make ourselves better.
Then came the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Even if we in United States found ourselves on the winning side, something in our souls told us that we were all losers in this. Science was not creating for us a better world, only a more dangerous one. It seems as if we can improve on everything except ourselves. So if science and God are enemies, then why do we tend to blame God for what science corrupts? Hmmm.
Even Einstein acknowledged the problem was within us: "The release of the atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking. The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker." Probably no more damning words were ever spoken. He said basically it is better for us to remain stupid if we cannot become good. The less technology we have, the less damage we can do.
So now it has been 65 plus years since we learned that all the technology in the world would not create for us the paradise that has been lost. Maybe it was right to conclude that we cannot trust religion or philosophy or history or government or institutions, but one thing we know for sure is that we cannot trust science [this coming from a vocational applied scientist], and for all the same reasons. They are all connected to people, which ultimately brings us to the inseparable relationship between truth and trust.
I remember back to my senior year in high school, in Mrs. McDougal's Honors English class when I first learned of the French existentialists Jean-Paul Sarte and Albert Camus as well as the Dutch Christian existentialist Soren Kirkegaard and devoured each of their writings. For the first time in my life I was found myself seriously questioning my beliefs for both accuracy as well as for why I believed them. Suddenly everything I believed to be true in my life was scrupulously challenged. I was struck by how each writer [and their peers] and each belief system had something within in that was strangely compelling.
But eventually it also became clear that each system of thought had gaping holes and shortcomings. During these days I became quite the Socratic [and my posse had running jokes about both the Socratic way of life as well as the Aristotlean way ... the life of questioning v. the life of balance and which was superior] but even then I could see at the end it all comes down to faith. I found myself moving from one belief system to another and then to another. And I had all the passion of youth to back it up. Yet after a while I began to see these different beliefs as fluid, interchangeable and thus disposable. I couldn't help but wonder if John Locke or David Hume or Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Rene Descartes before them really knew any better than I did. No doubt they were all smarter than me, but I wondered if behind closed doors they were just as uncertain. Perhaps we were all wanderers in the same forest trying to find a fresh trail to truth.
Some believed God was just down the road. Others were convinced that it was just a dead end. Still others thought we had nothing in common except that we were all lost and trying to find our way. It is hard to be a guide when we don't know where we're going. So in the midst of all the uncertainty we made a shift from looking for the answers to looking at the questions ... which is the primary reason I liked Socrates so much [never mind that he was willing to die for his convictions].
Even when we don't know what is ultimately true, most of us would follow someone whom we absolutely trust. There seems to be an inseparable relationship between truth and trust, and God, it seems, is lost in between the two. Accuracy seems to be less important than authenticity. So if no one knows the answer, does anyone know the way?
It was in those days that I started to look for truth in an entirely new way. I stopped being so interested in finding the best idea but more the best life. Whatever I would come to believe in, it had to change more than just my mind; it had to change my life. Was any truth out there not simply worth believing in but worth becoming? What does an idea look like when it is "fleshed out" so to speak? And that is where Jesus came into the picture. His words were straight to the point. His was more than a claim to know the truth; He claimed that He WAS the truth! There really is no way to overemphasize the potential implications of this point. Could it be possible that truth is more than just an idea and that it is found only in God? What Jesus was telling us is that truth exists in God and comes only from God.
When we search for truth, we search for God. Our souls crave the One who is true.
Monday, September 5, 2011
Who's to Blame?
Without a doubt the recurring question I get most from people who struggle to believe in the existence of God concerns the issue of evil and human suffering. They have a problem believing in a God who who has let us screw up the world this badly. On some level, who can blame them? It is like the kids wreaking havoc because they have been left at home alone. I know, the kids should have been more responsible, but the parents, we should have known better. Or were we totally oblivious as to what the kids were capable of?
The short version of this argument goes like this: "If there is a God, why does He allow such horrible things to happen?"
My response to this question usually goes like this ... so let's say there is no God. Is there still evil in the world? Are we not still living on a planet filled with violence? Is not our history still marred by murder, oppression, destruction and corruption? Are there not millions still dying of want while we in the west callously throw away our leftovers? If there is no God, is there still not evil? The answer, of course, is yes!
Well then, if there is no God and we still have a problem with evil, who should we hold responsible? Now this begs the question of one of the good things about there being a God is that we can blame him for everything. But say there is no God, the question remains: Who's to blame?
Who's to blame for the millions of people dying of AIDS and starvation in Africa? For the women set afire in India so that their husbands can be free to marry another woman and collect another dowry? For the millions buried in the killing fields of Cambodia? For those being hunted down and killed in Syria for opposing the government? For the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust? For the millions of children living in urban garbage dumps in Central America, homeless and alone? Remember there is no God so we can't blame him. Who's left to blame?
Oh yeah, all we have left is us.
Part of the problem we have in making sense of this life is that we cannot really even make sense of ourselves. We tend to blame God because we don't want to take responsibility for the mess we've made. Then we stop believing in God because He won't change it. Is it possible that God does, in fact, exist, and we are still fully responsible for the human condition? Hmmm.
Is it possible that God created us with the power to create the world of our own choosing???
The truth of the matter is ... it is not so much we that have a right to be mad at God so much as it is God who has a right to be mad at us! Still human nature being what it is, we still want to blame God for not fixing our problems. But exactly how would He do this? Let's consider the options.
For God to create a perfect world, there seems to be just a limited number of scenarios possible. First, He could just get rid of all of us. That would pretty much solve all of the problems right away. But ... I am personally not so much for this option ... so let's move on to the next.
He could control our every thought, our every emotion, our every motive, our every action. And since he is God, he could do this in such a way as to make us feel as if we have free will. We would all be the products of a divinely created illusion, a utopia ... a planet-wide version of the Stepford Wives ... a place where everything is perfect because we cannot truly choose for ourselves. But again, I am not to keen on this illusory solution either and I am personally grateful that God has created us as thinking creatures with the capacity to choose.
For God to create us in such a way that we can choose that which is good, true and beautiful, he must also allow us the freedom to choose that which is corrupt, false and destructive. Most of us want God to fix every wrong choice we make without taking from us our right to choose wrongly. We want to transform God into our personal "pooper-scoopers" following along behind us to clean up our messes. God, however, usually lets us make our beds and then makes us lie down in them.
There is one last option that we should also consider. Given that there is a God and that He cares about humanity and that He is deeply troubled by the human condition, how could He proceed to actively engage the human condition? If God refuses to take from us our free will and He refuses to leave the world in its present condition, what then can He do?
Here is an interesting possibility ... He could change our hearts. He could take us through a process that would move us from greed to altruism, that would move us from indifference to compassion, that would move us from hate to love, that would move us from apathy to activism. If He could change us then He could change the world. Call me crazy but this simple truth seems to be key ... the world will change when we change.
The short version of this argument goes like this: "If there is a God, why does He allow such horrible things to happen?"
My response to this question usually goes like this ... so let's say there is no God. Is there still evil in the world? Are we not still living on a planet filled with violence? Is not our history still marred by murder, oppression, destruction and corruption? Are there not millions still dying of want while we in the west callously throw away our leftovers? If there is no God, is there still not evil? The answer, of course, is yes!
Well then, if there is no God and we still have a problem with evil, who should we hold responsible? Now this begs the question of one of the good things about there being a God is that we can blame him for everything. But say there is no God, the question remains: Who's to blame?
Who's to blame for the millions of people dying of AIDS and starvation in Africa? For the women set afire in India so that their husbands can be free to marry another woman and collect another dowry? For the millions buried in the killing fields of Cambodia? For those being hunted down and killed in Syria for opposing the government? For the extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust? For the millions of children living in urban garbage dumps in Central America, homeless and alone? Remember there is no God so we can't blame him. Who's left to blame?
Oh yeah, all we have left is us.
Part of the problem we have in making sense of this life is that we cannot really even make sense of ourselves. We tend to blame God because we don't want to take responsibility for the mess we've made. Then we stop believing in God because He won't change it. Is it possible that God does, in fact, exist, and we are still fully responsible for the human condition? Hmmm.
Is it possible that God created us with the power to create the world of our own choosing???
The truth of the matter is ... it is not so much we that have a right to be mad at God so much as it is God who has a right to be mad at us! Still human nature being what it is, we still want to blame God for not fixing our problems. But exactly how would He do this? Let's consider the options.
For God to create a perfect world, there seems to be just a limited number of scenarios possible. First, He could just get rid of all of us. That would pretty much solve all of the problems right away. But ... I am personally not so much for this option ... so let's move on to the next.
He could control our every thought, our every emotion, our every motive, our every action. And since he is God, he could do this in such a way as to make us feel as if we have free will. We would all be the products of a divinely created illusion, a utopia ... a planet-wide version of the Stepford Wives ... a place where everything is perfect because we cannot truly choose for ourselves. But again, I am not to keen on this illusory solution either and I am personally grateful that God has created us as thinking creatures with the capacity to choose.
For God to create us in such a way that we can choose that which is good, true and beautiful, he must also allow us the freedom to choose that which is corrupt, false and destructive. Most of us want God to fix every wrong choice we make without taking from us our right to choose wrongly. We want to transform God into our personal "pooper-scoopers" following along behind us to clean up our messes. God, however, usually lets us make our beds and then makes us lie down in them.
There is one last option that we should also consider. Given that there is a God and that He cares about humanity and that He is deeply troubled by the human condition, how could He proceed to actively engage the human condition? If God refuses to take from us our free will and He refuses to leave the world in its present condition, what then can He do?
Here is an interesting possibility ... He could change our hearts. He could take us through a process that would move us from greed to altruism, that would move us from indifference to compassion, that would move us from hate to love, that would move us from apathy to activism. If He could change us then He could change the world. Call me crazy but this simple truth seems to be key ... the world will change when we change.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
Swallowing With Open Eyes
How are we to figure out what is real in this life? What is authentic? What is trustworthy? It's hard enough already but when we bring faith into the picture then it suddenly gets all the more difficult. How many religions are there in this world to choose from? This list seems almost endless. And they all claim to have the truth.
Well, at the risk of seeming intolerant and insensitive, somebody's wrong! And others would insist that everyone's wrong. At least it would seem so when it comes to finding answers.
Someone way back in the day must have decided to try to make sense of this life ... perhaps ostensibly to even help his fellow man make sense of this life. Maybe he was trying to be helpful. He may not have had all the pieces or all the answers and there were still blanks that needed to be filled in so he just filled them in wherever needed. After a while what was true and what was just "filler" became indistinguishable and both became equally "sacred" and "true." And it helped people cope. Life is difficult enough as it is and its almost impossible when nothing makes sense.
We create our own versions of truth. Perhaps we do so by accident but what if there is something more sinister going on? Call me jaded, but someone at the very beginning of a religion has to know that he is just making stuff up. I know that virtually all religions are filled with sincere people and in each religion there had to be that first genuine convert. But the guy just before him ... he knew! He knew it wasn't all real. At best he had to know that it was a hopeful guess.
I remember learning back in my college days [I was a reluctant biology major after all] that frogs cannot swallow with their eyes open. Sadly, I find that many of the people I run into have a lot in common with frogs. This is especially true in the nutritional supplement world and Christians seem especially gullible in this regard ... but I digress. There is a lot of stuff out there in the faith department that we would have to have our eyes closed to swallow ... but this extends beyond the typical boundaries of "faith" to include such things as global warming, evolution, and the other stretches of science where it has become almost a religion unto itself. Me -- I would rather swallow with my eyes wide open.
So maybe the guys who invented their religions were sincere and perhaps delusional ... L. Ron Hubbard comes to mind. Now that is so much more comforting. To their credit, though, perhaps they knew that everyone was on a search for meaning. Or maybe they were just sinister people and created belief systems to control people. Or maybe they were just reacting against a greater falsehood, a greater deception. Maybe that is what motivated people like Buddha, Confucius, Gandhi, and even Nietzsche.
Perhaps they were just sick and tired of watching people being manipulated by the prevailing false view of reality. As a reaction to it, they ended up creating a new way of thinking, a new way of believing, a new way of living. The truth of the matter is that Col. Nathan R. Jessup [played by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men] was exactly wrong. It is not so much that we can't handle the truth but that we can't live without it.
Well, at the risk of seeming intolerant and insensitive, somebody's wrong! And others would insist that everyone's wrong. At least it would seem so when it comes to finding answers.
Someone way back in the day must have decided to try to make sense of this life ... perhaps ostensibly to even help his fellow man make sense of this life. Maybe he was trying to be helpful. He may not have had all the pieces or all the answers and there were still blanks that needed to be filled in so he just filled them in wherever needed. After a while what was true and what was just "filler" became indistinguishable and both became equally "sacred" and "true." And it helped people cope. Life is difficult enough as it is and its almost impossible when nothing makes sense.
We create our own versions of truth. Perhaps we do so by accident but what if there is something more sinister going on? Call me jaded, but someone at the very beginning of a religion has to know that he is just making stuff up. I know that virtually all religions are filled with sincere people and in each religion there had to be that first genuine convert. But the guy just before him ... he knew! He knew it wasn't all real. At best he had to know that it was a hopeful guess.
I remember learning back in my college days [I was a reluctant biology major after all] that frogs cannot swallow with their eyes open. Sadly, I find that many of the people I run into have a lot in common with frogs. This is especially true in the nutritional supplement world and Christians seem especially gullible in this regard ... but I digress. There is a lot of stuff out there in the faith department that we would have to have our eyes closed to swallow ... but this extends beyond the typical boundaries of "faith" to include such things as global warming, evolution, and the other stretches of science where it has become almost a religion unto itself. Me -- I would rather swallow with my eyes wide open.
So maybe the guys who invented their religions were sincere and perhaps delusional ... L. Ron Hubbard comes to mind. Now that is so much more comforting. To their credit, though, perhaps they knew that everyone was on a search for meaning. Or maybe they were just sinister people and created belief systems to control people. Or maybe they were just reacting against a greater falsehood, a greater deception. Maybe that is what motivated people like Buddha, Confucius, Gandhi, and even Nietzsche.
Perhaps they were just sick and tired of watching people being manipulated by the prevailing false view of reality. As a reaction to it, they ended up creating a new way of thinking, a new way of believing, a new way of living. The truth of the matter is that Col. Nathan R. Jessup [played by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men] was exactly wrong. It is not so much that we can't handle the truth but that we can't live without it.
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