Divine Plagiarism

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31 January 2007

'Child of the Americas'

A friend told me about this over coffee the other day. We had a really interesting discussion on race and ethnicity, which is what he did his graduate work in. (He's from the Island, and still goes back every once and a while.) One of the great things about friends is sharing things with them that they would enjoy. And it is one of the worst things about unreconciled relationships. I have run across more than a few things in the last year or so that I think would have been a blessing to C. I am sad that I was not able to share those things. Nonetheless, this is an awesome poem. Hope you guys like it.



Child of the Americas - Aurora Levins Morales

I am a child of the Americas,
a light-skinned mestiza of the Caribbean,
a child of many diaspora, born into this continent at a crossroads.
I am a U.S. Puerto Rican Jew,
a product of the ghettos of New York I have never known.
An immigrant and the daughter and granddaughter of immigrants.
I speak English with passion: it’s the tongue of my consciousness,
a flashing knife blade of cristal, my tool, my craft.

I am Caribeña, island grown. Spanish is my flesh,
Ripples from my tongue, lodges in my hips:
the language of garlic and mangoes,
the singing of poetry, the flying gestures of my hands.
I am of Latinoamerica, rooted in the history of my continent:
I speak from that body.

I am not African. Africa is in me, but I cannot return.
I am not taína. Taíno is in me, but there is no way back.
I am not European. Europe lives in me, but I have no home there.

I am new. History made me. My first language was spanglish.
I was born at the crossroads
and I am whole.

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30 January 2007

On Being Irreplaceable.

If you haven’t seen the series Firefly, watch it. It’s awesome. Imagine the Millennium Falcon in the Old West. The movie Serenity picks up the story where the series leaves off.

If you’ve seen the movie Serenity, then you remember the scene where River saves the entire crew, single-handedly fighting off an army of Reavers. This half-schizophrenic and completely misunderstood girl who has been a strain on the crew’s social networks and a threat to their continued existence, this girl who has caused tremendous frustration in those around her just by being who she is, in that one moment is absolutely irreplaceable. She finds in that moment the one place in the universe where she and only she can fill the role set before her. The moment she can say, ‘This is what I was made for.’

Something deep within us yearns for that moment. We find that yearning in our favorite chapters in books, in our favorite scenes, in the stories that strike deep chords in our hearts. We identify with the with all the Solos and Skywalkers of myth because part of them lives within us. Or perhaps, those parts of us live within them; they exist to express something deep inside of their viewers. So a storyteller is one who speaks of echoes, they give us a mirror that reminds us of the nobler parts of ourselves that we have forgotten in the name of practicality. So if there is an element of myth that moves us, it does so because it is already present somewhere deep in our hearts.

Frodo is the only one who can take the One Ring to Mount Doom. The fate of all in Middle-Earth hinges upon this mild-mannered Hobbit, whose gifts would have gone largely unappreciated otherwise. Luke is the only one who can stop the Empire So with Wedge Antilles on his wing, he finds his ‘one place’ in the Death Star trench run. (Begin Irrelevant Digression. Though, apparently, X-Wing Starfighter Pilot training takes approximately thirty minutes, provided you already have your land speeder rating. After all, flying couldn‘t be that hard… with a Cessna 172 checkout, Doug Masters managed to fly across the world and kill like five hundred MiGs in a magical F-16 which apparently had the ‘invincibility’ and the ‘unlimited fuel and ammo’ cheat codes enabled. I think it has something to do with playing Twisted Sister really loud instead of listening to the radios. Hey, it’s a cool movie when you‘re five and you don’t know any better. Anyways…) Beowulf is the only one who can slay Grendel. (That is, if he can manage to say anything in words that are actually understandable and don’t sound like ‘ansgeltenshmacht.’ I don’t read Old English. So sue me. Sorry… I‘ll stay on topic. I promise. Sort of.)

As the heroes of myth find their quest, they find themselves. They find their ’one place.’ This is no less true for the characters of the One True Myth. Queen Esther finds herself wedded to the most powerful man in the world ’for such a time as this.’ His throne room is her ‘one place.’ Samson, despite his failings, finds his chance for redemption between two pillars of the temple of his enemies. What is true for the minor characters is certainly true for the Hero. Jesus Christ is both Author and Character. He steps into a role of His own creation. The world does not script His story, yet His story scripts the world. His ’one place’ was on the hill of Calvary, and He spent each day in anticipation of that fact. He is the first of heroes. Heroes want to save the world. He actually did.

We are made in His image. So we want to be heroes. We want to save the world. We want to find our ‘one place.’ Our hearts tell us that there must be a story under these skies for us. There must be a role, somewhere in this world, that we and only we can play. Whether we become somewhat important to many or tremendously important to a few, there is a place in this world made specifically for us. Somewhere, there is a story that is waiting for a hero. Our yearning pushes us toward that moment of passionate belonging, where we become a part of that story as it becomes a part of us. This is a good desire. Like any other desire, though, it has been corrupted in the fall.

It is the slow blade that penetrates the shield. (Yes, it’s from Dune. Not the cracked-out rock opera movie. The book.) Our enemy subtly turns this desire into pride. The thought goes something like: If there is one place for me, one story where I am irreplaceable, then it is my obligation to fill that role. It is not wrong on the surface, for to whom much is given, much is expected. But it was the Pharisees that piled obligations upon people’s backs and would not lift a finger to help. We have been given destinies as a joy and a privilege. Using the weapon of obligation, our enemy turns the joy of destiny into a burden. So we toil toward our grim-faced martyrdoms. But we forget so easily. It was Socrates, not Stephen, whose face was stern and determined as he drank his bowl of hemlock. Stephen‘s his countenance burned with joy and eager anticipation as he looked upon the face of His Savior.

Consider the One True Hero. Paul tells us that Joy and Love held Christ to the cross. Jesus’ one place was worse than any other place, and yet He embraces His cross. It was no detached sense of duty that drove Him along the Via Dolorosa; cold obligation held him to the cross no more than nails did. And He was the only one who was truly irreplaceable. He was the only one who could ever play His part.

Duty is an approximation of what perfect love would do in a given situation. It teaches us to act rightly when our hearts desire the wrong. Duty trains us to act with wisdom, it safeguards us from many dangers. There are times, surely, when you must say ‘if I loved you, I would do this. Therefore that is exactly what I will do.’ But you cannot say that all the time. Duty is the autopilot of love, it makes sure you keep going in the right direction even when your heart isn‘t where it should be. You can’t fly the whole flight on autopilot. Duty is tremendously valuable, but it cannot be an end in and of itself. And it cannot last forever without love. Love keeps duty malleable, breakable, reachable. Without love, duty crystallizes. It hardens and becomes impenetrable. It becomes pride.

Imagine an actor recruited to play a role for which they are completely unprepared and unequipped. The director makes sure the actor gets the props, the costumes and the training to play the part. Now imagine that the actor begins to believe that the story hinges upon him and his inherent aptitude for the part. He begins to believe that he is doing the director a favor to participate in his movie, even more, he believes that he is entitled to respect and privileges from the director in accordance with his essentialness. What tremendous arrogance! Yet we do this. Jesus was irreplaceable. We are not. None of us have a destiny that is truly and inherently irreplaceable. Obligation is borne of need. Therefore, none of us truly merit the burdens that we place upon ourselves. God has been writing history quite well since long before any of us were born. I’m sure that He is more than capable of doing so without our help. Obligation is borne of another’s need. He doesn’t need us.

Yet He loves us. So perhaps we are irreplaceable after all. Not because we have a certain skill-set, but because we are loved by Him. We are irreplaceable in a far more important way than just being another widget in the machine of destiny. God loves each of us enough to die for us. He demonstrated that in no uncertain terms. We are each unique and amazing to Him. So in this, we are all irreplaceable. And in this, we move from obligation back to joy. He allows us to participate in His will. He gives each of us a role sculpted uniquely to our gifts and personality. He prepares us for that role, and makes sure it finds us in His time. So destiny is an honor and a privilege, rooted in His love for us.

Perhaps destiny is like the gift of a parent to a child. The parent does not have any particular need to give a child a gift, nor do they need anything that might result from the child playing with the gift. But they give the child a gift, one specially chosen to match the desires and gifts of the child, to see the joy on the child’s face. But remember the parable of the bridegroom. Just because a gift is made for you does not mean that it cannot be given to another.

Perhaps it is like a parent inviting their child to participate in an important task. A mechanic, fixing his car, has little need to have his son pass him tools. In fact, the job might go quicker if his son didn’t take part at all, handing him the wrong kind of wrenches and the like. But he enjoys the joy his son gets from taking part in the work. Just as important, he enjoys seeing his son become more like him. So we are the jars of clay that the Scriptures talk about.

So we are Ender Wiggins, the child going off to war. We are protected by our innocence, and strengthened by our joy. This was the plan all along… we were to have the innocence and the joy of the reclaimer. We were to be the ones who fight from love and love the fight. The girl playing light sabers with sticks does not fight from duty, but from love. She believes herself the heroine, the one who will save us all.

As Dashboard Confessional reminds us, Ender will save us all. Why? Because Orson Scott Card is writing the book. And because Mr. Card knows the ending he wants. So even if Ender somehow failed or refused his role, the author will still make the ending work. If a finite human storyteller is able to craft a story to accommodate his characters, how much more story crafting skill must the One True Author have? And in this, once again, is our true irreplacability. Ender is not irreplaceable in his role because the author is depending on him. He is irreplaceable because he is made by the author to enjoy that role. No one else could love doing what Ender ends up doing in quite the same way that Ender does.

We are made by the One True Author with a role in mind. He makes a story for each of us where we are irreplaceable. It is a beyond me whether those roles are set in stone or whether they are fluid. I do know this, though, we will never enter into the joy of those roles as long as we do them out of a sense of obligation. When we gain the humility to realize He does not need us, we will find how amazing it is that He still loves us. Lay your duties down at His feet. Pick them up again as labors of love. After all, we are reclaimers. Only when we walk in love can we reclaim this world for love. And that was our destiny all along.

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29 January 2007

Kievan Rus‘ and the Greeks.

I don’t know if this is supported by scholarly sources or archaeological evidence in any way. So by the same token, I don’t know is refuted by them either. I paid my dues looking through scholarly journals about Russian History in Undergrad. So there. Anyways, this is the result of some random conjecture between myself and Russian-American at a coffee shop. Lots o’ fun.

Around 800 AD, all the Eastern Slavs lived in was called the Kievan Rus’. They were basically a bunch of city-states in what is now Ukraine. The relationship between the city-states was somewhat akin to that of the ancient Greeks during the time of Thucidides. Around 1000 AD, the Mongols rolled through the area. Kiev was the strongest and richest city in all of Europe at the time. So the Mongols send their emissaries to demand tribute from Kiev, and the Kievans send back the Mongol emissaries without their heads. Genghis Khan doesn’t take rejection particularly well, so he kills almost everyone in Kiev. Game over, Kievan Rus’.

There is a pretty interesting historiographical question here. The Soviets described the Kievan Rus’ as a feudalistic culture, so that it would fit into their model of dialectical materialism. The Ukrainians describe the Kievan Rus’ as a pinnacle of governance and culture, and proceed to take all of its symbology as their own (hrybna, the currency, and trizub, the symbol of the Kyivan grand princes.) Both the Soviets and the Ukrainians have (had) agendas wrapped around their perspectives on the Kievan Rus’, and that influences their respective viewpoints. Of course.

So here is my uninformed and relatively insignificant argument. First, feudalistic economies are fundamentally agrarian. The Kievan Rus’ economy was based around taxing the trade routes coming out of Constantinople. A large amount of revenue was generated by a large number craftsmen and merchants, who capitalized on the trade routes, importing and exporting large numbers of goods. These craftsmen and merchants were decidedly bourgeoisie, and were not particularly beholden to any feudal lords. A trade based economy with a large middle class points far more to an advanced capitalistic economy than a feudal economy.

Second, the Kievan Rus’ system of governance could be described as ‘frontier Athenian.’ Three branches of government, for lack of a better term, came together to produce policy. Any two could trump the third, and when they did so, people generally died. There was an executive-type figure in the Grand Prince (Veliky Knyaz,) who was a hereditary monarch. There was a legislative-type body in the Veche, a council of landowners and merchants who discussed and voted on all laws. There was a judicial-type entity in the Boyars, hereditary wealthy nobles independent of the Grand Prince. Each city-state had a different mix of these three (Novgorod had most of its power with the Veche, for example,) and while far from the staid Greek philosophers (Impeachment was accomplished by decapitation, usually,) it was far less authoritarian than any other significant European systems of the time.

There is a line of argumentation that believes Russia to be the ‘Third Rome.’ While now mostly a symbolic feature embraced by the Russian Orthodox Church, there was once truth in it. I remember writing a paper comparing the Kievan Rus’ with the Greek city states. I think I had only cited the parallelism, and I neglected to look to lineage. The primary influence on the culture, economy and governance of the Kievan Rus’ was Constantinople. There was a conscious choice to model the society on the Eastern Seat of the Church, stunning in its splendor at that time. Constantinople, in turn, owed its model of society to both the Romans and the Greeks. So there was something decidedly Greek that flowed into Kiev through the rivers that were its trade routes. Cyrillic, after all, was based on Greek.

How did we get from there to here? Moscow is my guess. Sergei Eisenstein aside, Moscow gained its power by collecting taxes for the Mongol Golden Horde. Though rivers and forests played some role in its defense, Moscow profited greatly under the Mongol yoke, evolving from a small outpost into a powerful city. As the Golden Horde declined, the Muscovites eventually became strong enough to drive the Mongols out. In the process, though, Muscovite governance picked up a strong flavor of corruption and authoritarianism, whether from the Mongols or from what had become of the House of Rurik. The rise of Moscow was at about the same time as the decline of Constantinople. Moscow’s distance from Constantinople and the decay of Byzantine influence meant that the Greek flavor that shaped Kiev would have little influence on Moscow.

The synopsis of my argument is that 1) There was a continuity between the ancient Greeks and the Kievan Rus‘ by way of Byzantium and 2) That continuity was broken under the Mongol yoke and the rise of Moscow. This is doubtless controversial, and sides pretty strongly with the Ukrainian historiography on the subject (with the notable exception of affirming that the Ukrainians and the Russians came from the same Kievan stock.) So, in terms of ‘the past that never was,’ Democracy is actually quite Russian. But if it is Russian the way we understand Russian still remains to be seen. The unique thing about a ‘past that never was’ is that if you recover it, you get to make it your future.

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28 January 2007

Serving in a World of Structural Sin.

Ethicists talk a lot about the principle of ‘dirty hands.’ The principle of double effect and all that. It is a problem unique to a fallen world. The cords of death are wrapped around all things on this Earth. The life-giving oxygen we breathe ends up killing us, rusting our cells bit by bit over the course of a century. The taxes we pay go to as many ignoble causes as noble ones. Our labor is rarely pure, either. The farmer finances the landlord’s vices and predations with his rents. Farmers are not the only ones who have to pay the landlord. (Pilgrim’s Regress reference unintentional.)

The soldier picks up his weapon and heads off to war. He pays the landlord with his service. The professor picks up the approved textbook and teaches the core curriculum. Her words are her rent, the landlord gets his due. After all, it is hardly unexpected. The landlord owns the classroom, owns the weapons, and pays both the soldier and the professor. If they are going to work his land, he will certainly ask something in return. And here is the problem. It is his right to ask for recompense, but the recompense he asks for can be wrong.

We must ask ourselves: which is more deadly? The soldier who aims and fires his weapon in the course of duty, taking the life of his adversary, or the professor who teaches Nietzsche in the course of his philosophy survey class, introducing his students to the deadliest of drugs? To have your life snatched from you, or to have your soul stolen, either way you are dead. The soldier is directly and intentionally in a causal chain that leads to the death of another. Is he a murderer? The professor is just as directly and intentionally in a causal chain that leads to deception. Is he something worse? Our instincts tell us no. Let’s explore this.

Both the soldier and the professor serve in a fallen world. There is no place for weapons nor for Frederich Nietzsche’s philosophies in the New Jerusalem. This begs a pretty important question: is there a place for the soldier or the professor in the Heavenly City? Is there a perfected form of these professions? The answer in the latter case is the simpler one, clearly there will be learning and teaching in Heaven. In the former case, we must ask ourselves what it is that the soldier truly provides. The soldier’s purpose is no more to create war than the doctor’s purpose is to create incisions. Just as the doctor exists to create health, the soldier exists to create security. It just so happens that in a fallen world, that involves war, just as medicine has involved surgery ever since the curse. When the soldier sets aside the sword in the abolition of war, he will be no less a soldier than a doctor who has set aside the scalpel in the abolition of disease. For this reason, when the Scriptures say ‘the Lord is a warrior,’ it is said superficially. There is no verse that says ‘The Lord is a warrior (on this side of the fall, and only for a brief period of salvation history, and then He will stop being a warrior.)’ Long after the cross itself has turned to dust, the Lamb of God wears the scars from Calvary.

We are not yet granted license to practice our professions in perfection. We are still on this side of the fall, and there is still war and disease and false philosophy. Being in this world, there is no way to escape the taint of these things. But we still must manage to be not of this world. Stealing a page from Thomas Aquinas, let’s look to intentionality. Consider prostitution. There is no conception of a prostitute that does not involve intentional and willful sin. The very essence of the act is a betrayal of the laws of God. For this reason, Jesus and Luke both look upon women engaged in that horrific profession with compassion, but they instruct quite directly to go and change their line of work.

Now consider the scholar. Tremendous evil has been perpetrated in the name of academia and under the guise of scholarship in the course of human history. In the name of Peter Singer’s so-called ethics, much blood has been shed, and much blood will be doubtless continue to be shed. Or consider Comrade Gonzalo in Peru. It would be exceedingly difficult to keep you tenure at Professor Guzman’s university in Peru if you were teaching anything other than his virulent Sendero Luminoso philosophy. Peru reaped the bitter fruits of those ideas for the better part of two decades. We can hardly neglect to mention that it was the teachers of the Law and the scribes that orchestrated the crucifixion of Christ. So clearly, the scholar’s profession can be used for corrupt, terrible ends. This does not invalidate his profession. There is no condemnation of his profession by Christ, only condemnation of its abuses. The scholar’s pure intention is to provide knowledge of Truth. When his profession is used for less than that intended end, the results are catastrophic.

Our soldier’s pure intention is not death. He brings about death in the process of providing security, just as the doctor brings about wounds in the process of providing health. So his case is quite different from the scholar: in the process of the soldier doing his work, he must allow the consequences of systemic sin to manifest themselves. The philosophy professor may have to teach Nietzsche, but the physics professor does not. The soldier pursues death to bring about security when he goes to war. But the capacity for abuse is quite similar. Tremendous cruelty has been unleashed upon humanity under the reign of military dictatorships. Without the Panzers of the Wehrmacht, there would have been no Holocaust. Without the red-robed centurions of the Roman Legions, there would have been no crucifixion. When abused, the military has a tremendous capacity for destruction. Yet, neither John the Baptist, Christ, nor Paul, when asked directly about military service, provide any sort of prohibition. John tells soldiers to be content with their pay, and to use their power responsibly. He does not tell them to desert. He exhorts them to honorable conduct in the performance of their duties. So, clearly, there must be some conception of military service that is honorable in the eyes of Scripture. The abuses of the military profession invalidate it no more than academia’s abuses invalidate the profession of the scholar.

The question does not end here, though. If these professions have such a catastrophic capacity for abuse, then the Godly practitioners of these professions must have a way to safeguard themselves from the perversions of their callings. They must have a line. It is one thing to teach a core philosophy curriculum which requires teachers to explain the philosophies of Jean-Paul Sartre. It is quite a different thing when the core curriculum mandates that all faculty denounce any Christian philosophies. This would not be unheard of. Just ask any professor at MGU (Moscow State University) with more that 15 years of tenure. It is one thing for an OB-GYN to explain all the options to a mother with an unplanned pregnancy. It is quite a different thing when her hospital demands that she procure an abortion for her patient if she already has one child. Neither would this be unheard of. It is one thing to order a solider to strike high-value target in close proximity to civilians. It is quite a different thing to ask that soldier to attack those civilians. If we are to work the landlord’s fields, we must decide how much rent is too much.

There is a story about some Armenian soldiers in the Legions of Rome. I will not attempt to retell the story of the Thundering Legion, for my retelling would hardly do them justice. They had a line, though. Serving honorably under Marcus Aurelius, they carried out their duties with distinction. Note that those duties were basically invading and subduing free German lands. Nonetheless, they gained a reputation for bravery and honor. But a law was passed mandating that all soldiers worship the Emperor. This was their line. So, to a man, the Thundering Legion was martyred on the frozen surface of a lake.

We are never exempted from the consequences of our actions. There is little nobility in the college student raging against the machine with his placard while skipping class. It costs him very little to do so. Who knows, he might even end up with a few phone numbers of socially conscious girls. Not a bad exchange for missing a few hours of lectures. Rarely are the consequences of defying the landlord wrapped in so much vainglory. It may cost us our reputation, our jobs or our lives. Christians defied Roman law by not worshipping the Emperors, but they experienced the consequences in martyrdoms. They gave to Caesar what was Caesar’s, and in doing so, they overcame Caesar. The church lives on. Rome does not. They were vindicated by God.

Give to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Paul tells us that we should give what is due to the governing authorities, because they are placed there by God. Honor, taxes, or respect, as long as it does not contradict the laws of God. Taxes to the Caesars funded oppression and crucifixions. My taxes fund abortions. Yet I am not exempted from paying them, even though I believe with all my heart that abortions are directly against the will of God. After all, as a Jewish carpenter under the domination of Rome, Jesus paid taxes into the temple coffers and the Roman treasury that were later used to unjustly crucify Him. He who knew all things certainly knew what He came to do and how it would be financed, and He did not exempt Himself. If He did not, then we certainly have no right to claim that license.

This is not at all to say that we should not work to restructure institutions. But we would do well to retain a measure of humility as we do so. The Old Testament provided models for governance, and the intent is certainly still valid, but we need to understand that it was addressed to God’s Chosen People living in one nation set apart. It tells them how to live and manage their own affairs. It doesn’t tell them how to change Persia. Yet, when those Chosen People lived in Persia, they influenced it like salt and light, by their examples and their integrity. Joseph did not lecture Pharaoh on good governance. He just lived good governance where he was placed, and in doing so reshaped the governance of the country. Certainly there is a time and place for Hadassah, and she was used mightily by God. But we must remember that she risked her life for her hearing. How many of our complaints involve that degree of commitment? So where are we? We are not the nation of Israel. Neither are we the kingdom of Persia. We are the Church. We are somewhere between nation builders and exiles.

Systems interact. The actions of the soldier, Godly or not, will affect the doctor and the scholar. The scholar will affect the other two, as will the doctor. All of our actions are woven in threads of causality around each other. Given the brokenness of this world, many professions will find their interests opposed to each other. The actions the soldier performs in the execution of his duty will likely be found distasteful by many a scholar, just as the philosophies advocated by scholars will be distasteful to many a soldier. The factory worker and the factory owner will find themselves at odds, simply by virtue of what they do. There are legitimately broken issues that come about in a broken world that set us against each other. Philemon and Onesimus surely understood this, as did Paul. The glory of Christ was not in the elimination of those differences, for that will not be done on this side of the fall. Rather, the glory of His reconciliation was in fellowship in spite of those differences.

We are a church. Bricklayers and City Administrators have legitimate differences, they have real and significant issues between them. Yet Paul addresses his epistles to both of them, living together in unity. Through the power of Christ, these men were brothers. Onesimus and his master Philemon, divided by social injustice, were united in Christ. What allowed these men to love each other despite their differences? Humility. Humility is the parent of all love. Pride teaches us to pursue the good by fixing everyone else. Humility teaches us to look first to the plank in our own eye. If the scholar, the soldier and the doctor want to fight the sin inherent in this fallen world, the place they all should start is with themselves. The sin inside us is the sin we are most capable of affecting, it is the sin we are most responsible for. Once our own sin is undone, then let us speak to our brother about his sin. Knowing something about myself, I’m guessing it will take me quite some time before I’m in a position to lecture anyone else.

Humility will guide us both to righteousness and unity. Really, they are both the same. The more we are remade into the righteous image of Christ, the more we are at peace with each other. Pride always leads to disunity. As we lecture others about their problems, we blind ourselves to our own. We all live and work in a world of structural sin. Certainly there is more than enough brokenness to go around. But just as certainly, there is enough brokenness in ourselves to consume our time. The glory of the Church is unity. Scholars and bricklayers called each other brothers. I do not imagine that scholars were denouncing bricklayers nor telling them how to lay brick. Neither do I imagine that bricklayers were denouncing scholars and telling them how to do mathematics. They both had enough grace to let each other serve where they were placed, provided they weren’t doing anything that flew in the face of Scripture. Perhaps we should go and do likewise. Let us be salt and light where we are placed, and worry a little less about where others are placed.

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27 January 2007

American Syncretism.

When I think of syncretism, the worship of La Virgin de Guadalupe comes to mind. A fusing of old gods with the True God, a watering down of the Gospel, mixing it with old symbols of a world that refuses to pass away. It is a subtle trap, really. When a culture is transformed by the Gospel, the result is something that is distinctly transformed yet still distinctly of that culture. Syncretism grants the appearance of transformation without all the discomfort involved in actually going through with it. Instead of becoming something new, the culture gets to stay comfortably who they were. They just get a makeover.

All of us are in some way a mix of the sacred and the profane. Sinners saved by the grace of God. The law of sin and the law of grace are at war within us. In yielding to the will of God, He will ensure that the law of grace will win in the end. But until then, we will remain at war, for He gives no quarter to our rebellion. We should not try to negotiate a truce, not in the name of tolerance or moderation or any other name. ‘Stronghold’ is the name for any places in our lives where we have chosen coexistence and comfort over sanctification. Syncretism is simply a stronghold writ large; it is a place where the culture is unwilling to change, instead negotiating a truce between the profane and the holy. It can be reduced to a simple equation: True God plus cultural idol equals syncretism. So if each culture has different idols, each culture’s syncretism will be different.

Back to the Virgin of Guadalupe. I am not trying to argue the virtues or the vices of the veneration of Mary. I do know, though, that the Catechism of the Catholic Church does not condone many of the things that happen in the name of the Virgin of Guadalupe. So we look to that image, and the throngs worshipping it, and we point our fingers. You cannot mix old gods with the One True God. We reject out of hand any thoughts of mixing Christ and Krishna in order to reach India. Rightly so. Really though, it is not tremendously difficult for us to do so… to most Americans, the idea of worshipping gods with elephantine heads or large numbers of arms is quite foreign. It is quite easy to denounce the idols of another culture. It is much more difficult to cast down the idols of your own. Perhaps we should look to the plank in our own eye.

There is a fine line between a dream and a nightmare. Consider knowledge. A culture that values knowledge can use that cultural distinctive to bring great glory to God. All of that changes when they start to worship knowledge as an idol, even if it is an idol dressed in Christian garb. What, then, is our idol? We’ve all heard about the American Dream. ‘You will succeed if you keep trying and never give up.’ In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this dream, and blessedly it has come true for more than a few. But in our dream, we find our nightmare. Success. This is our idol. Success promises us safety, it tells us who we are, it demands to be worshipped.

Our syncretism, then, is a mixing of the Truth of God with the idol of success. After all, everybody loves a winner. So we want to win. We do what was forbidden to King David. We take censuses, over and over. We analyze trends in church growth, trends in giving, looking to percentages to tell us who we are. We make four-step programs, quick and convenient ways to move people into the ‘saved’ camp. Then we count that camp, we refine our techniques, we measure and measure and measure. ‘How many decisions were there?’ Anyone in any form of ministry has likely heard this question. This is, after all, how we measure success. Really, the question is ‘did we succeed?’ Because success is important. And it is, no doubt. Thinking about success is not a bad thing, really. That is, until it becomes a means by which we remain safe.

George MacDonald, in his ‘Unspoken Sermons,’ critiques the man who becomes ’saved’ and proceeds to become satisfied with less than perfection. Certainly, there is something amazing and beautiful that happens when someone joins the fold of Christ. Far too often, though, we stop there. ’How many decisions,’ we ask. This is our unit of measure, our currency of success as a church. If you can produce mass decisions, you are a success. Successes are to be honored and emulated. We have created a system where we can still worship success in the name of worshipping God. We are guilty of syncretism.

Use what you got. Of course. Americans are good at innovating and optimizing. It is not surprising that we should turn these skills to the service of God. Please do not think that I am anti-megachurch. Many have been reached by the ministries of Willow Creek, New Life, and Saddleback. Praise God for that. Once again, though, the line between a dream and a nightmare is a fine one. God asks for a broken heart and a contrite spirit. All men are proud (save One, of course.) People in ministry are no different. The more successful you become, the more of a temptation pride becomes. Many fall victim. I think to the ‘my way is God’s way’ line of thought tragically attached to several successful ministries. Challenges are answered with statistics on conversions and percentages of church growth. The trappings of success are hardly the contrition and broken-heartedness that God asks of us. They are transient, as we have seen far too often. The wounds left by pride and betrayal last far longer. These are the bitter fruits of our syncretism.

American Christianity uniquely American. This is not bad, and it is important that we understand that. God chooses to express Himself through persons, and each individual personality reflects a slightly different piece of God, a piece no one else is capable of reflecting. He also expresses Himself through cultures, and each culture expresses Him slightly differently. But each culture, just like each person, has places where they have chosen to compromise, to mix the sacred and the profane. These unholy truces provide the appearance of holiness while denying its true power. Our culture values success. We idolize it. There is no room for idolatry in the church. Certainly not an idolatry in Christian trappings.

Perhaps, at least for a time, we would be served well by the prohibition the Lord gave to King David. No more censuses. If we don’t know how to succeed anymore, maybe we’ll have to ask Him. Maybe, somewhere beyond the limits of our own strength, we will find the contrition and brokenness He desires. Through His strength in our weakness, I think we’ll find more success than we had ever imagined.

17:35 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this

26 January 2007

When Passion finds a Purpose.

We all know the story of the Starving Artist. The guy just trying to scrape by until he gets his big break, all the while his parents asking when he is going to grow up and become an accountant. There is something in us that admires the girl who throws everything away to chase her dream. The childlike heart of the dreamer reaches the younger parts of our own hearts. But dreams are never free, and their costs are often assessed against those in relationship with the dreamers.

John Boyd was a legendary fighter pilot, a man who shaped the world’s most powerful Air Force. He even has a building of the Fighter Weapons School named after him. Yet in pursuing his dream, he neglected his family. In the final accounting, his children resented him, and his marriage was a mess. B.F. Skinner, the renowned behavioral scientist, unleashed his dreams directly upon his family with horrific results. These are the successes, the ones who got their big break. Too often, the man who burns with passion will singe those closest to him. Passion must be tempered by something greater than itself.

The Greek philosophers saw passion as an impurity of the soul, a remnant of the animalistic drives within us. They despised it just as they despised the flesh. The Scriptures do not give us this option. King David dances in the streets before the Lord. The prophets tell of their consuming zeal for the Temple of God. Jesus Christ embodies that zeal, overturning tables and driving merchants from the Court of the Gentiles. So passion is a driving thing. It is as different for each of us as we are different from each other. And though it requires God’s discipline to keep it from running wild, passion is a gift of the Creator.

But like any other gift, passion is not license. It does not exempt you from your responsibilities. Nor from the consequences for your actions. There is something inspiring about the struggling guitarist crammed in with the other band members in the tour van, eating a three A.M. dinner at Waffle House after the show. (Superpowers by Five Iron Frenzy. Back in the day. Oh yeah.) There is nothing inspiring about the trust fund baby getting his fifth degree in performing arts because he doesn’t feel like leaving college. Even less inspiring (less than nothing is pretty bad) is the man who leaves his family to find ‘true love’ with a woman who is not his wife. In the name of ‘throwing it all away for love,’ men have abandoned the laws of God and of man. There is no glory in this, for these men only pursue the love of self.

Here we see the difference between passion as license and passion as service. Passion as license takes what rightfully belongs to others in the name of its self-centered dreams. It is the child of pride, and pride makes its demands immediately and constantly. Pride grasps, greedily closing its hands around dreams. Love holds dreams with an open hand before the Dreamgiver, trusting that He does not plant desire in vain. Passion as service is the daughter of love, and love is patient. She gives itself to others, first paying debts rightfully owed, then blessing others in the overflow. She counts the cost, and is content to wait if the price is too high right now.

Count the cost of your dreams. Not just the cost of getting there. The cost of being there. My dad told me once that over the lifetime of a car, the dealership makes more money on repairs than on the initial sale. Perhaps, in this regard, dreams have something in common with cars. We focus so much on getting there that we don’t really think much about what we’ll do once were there. Of course, you can’t really sort out repair costs until you are sure you can actually afford the car, and this is true with dreams as well. There really are very few NFL players, world class artists, neurosurgeons, astronauts, Broadway stars, or successful screenwriters, especially considering the pool of aspirants. You have to run the numbers with a sober eye to your gifts. If you’re six foot three, you probably won’t ever be the winning jockey in the Kentucky Derby. (You never know, though.) So you look at your chances, you consign yourself to eating Ramen for a while, and you take your shot. Say it works out. Now what?

We find ourselves at the intersection of passion and purpose when our dreams actually pan out. Yet the very mechanics of passion ensure that we cannot simply put down a lawn chair and camp out in that place. In the space between dreams and fulfillment, there is often an expectation of arrival; we think that when we get our big break, we’ll have finally have made it. We think that at some point we’ll be able to coast for a while. Passion just doesn’t work that way. Excellence happens once in a while when you pursue your passions for fun. If you’re lucky, it will happen when the right person is looking. Say that person gives you your dream shot, say he pays you to do what you love. He hired you because he saw excellence in you. Therefore, his expectation is excellence, and this is what he pays you for. The excellence you once celebrated is now demanded from you.

My friend R. is a fighter pilot. He flies one of the world’s most advanced aircraft in one of the world’s premier combat wings. By any objective measure, less than a thousand people worldwide could claim to have comparable aeronautical skills and training. (I really hate doing anything to further inflate fighter guys’ egos. I’m making an important point, though. Bear with me.) Really, a lot of luck and hard work came together to get him where he is. For the weekend flyer, flying is always fun. You shoot an excellent approach in a Cessna, and you feel good about it. If our weekend flyer scored a ride in my friends’ fighter, he would have an awesome time and would surely be telling his friends all about it for some time to come. So naturally, the weekend flyer expects that my friend’s life is one incredible day of aviation joy after another. Really, though, my friend’s life consists of 4 A.M. showtimes, constant studying, tedious five hour briefs, brutal two hour debriefs, continuous critiques, and the never-ending expectation to perform at a world-class level. He is always under demands to demonstrate his right to be counted as a fighter pilot. And you never really arrive. There is always another upgrade, another school, another qual you need to get. I imagine that it is little different for a world-class athlete or surgeon or academic. My friend R. tells me that sometimes you have to remind yourself that you love what you do.

Really, we register joy more in changes than in constancy. Perhaps it is because we have not learned to be content. Perhaps there is something about us that gets accustomed to things being a certain way. Regardless, you just get used to your life, it just becomes normal after a while. If all the people around you are movie stars, you just get used to hanging out with movie stars. Where normal people have friends from college on their cell phone contact list, you have names that make the covers of People magazine. A lot of things are far more cool from the outside looking in. Unless, of course, you buy into the hype and start believing that you are all the things that people think you are. Then you become an insufferable jerk, and that’s no good either. ‘Meaningless, all is meaningless, says the teacher.‘ Even in living your dreams, you cannot escape the Book of Ecclesiastes. After all, the book’s author was living every dream he ever had. Still, it is a blessing and a joy to do something you love. Passions are worth pursuing.

All blessings exist in context. Dreams are contextualized in time and space. The time for your dreams might not be now. The pieces may not all be in place, you may not be ready, or perhaps you may not yet completely understand your dream. Trying to pursue it though your own will ends in disaster. But this does not mean that you should leave your dreams behind. He does not give us dreams in vain; He uniquely gifts us so that we can gift others, so that we can give our gifts back to Him. So never give up on passions and dreams. Give them to Him instead. It may not yet be His time for your dreams, but He will work out your dreams in His time. Nothing comes back from Him void.

In the meantime, take care of your responsibilities. The man who is faithful with one city gets ten, the servant who invests a few talents gets many. Take care of the responsibilities incurred in the pursuit of current desires, and you will learn to be trustworthy with the greater responsibilities you will incur in the pursuit of your deeper dreams. If you do a good job with the things already in your hands, keeping them open before Him, you may find Him placing bigger and bigger things into those hands. He is faithful, and He promises that He will give us more than we can ask or imagine. Our dreams may not show up the way we expect, or even on this side of eternity, but they will show up. This is His promise: no eye has seen or ear heard of the things He has prepared for those who love Him. We will experience the fulfillment of that promise only in His presence.

Passion, like desire, will never fully arrive on this side of eternity. It is designed to bring us to God; only an impoverished desire will find itself content in this world. As the Spirit trains our passions, we will find that we feel those passions most strongly along the path that He sets out for us, a path that leads to Him. On that path, our dreams and our responsibilities can learn to coexist under His majesty. There, and only there, we will find the ultimate intersection of passion and purpose.

17:30 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this

25 January 2007

Things that Should Scare Us (But Don‘t.)

‘I’m not afraid,’ said Luke. ‘You will be…’ said Yoda. - Star Wars Episode V, The Empire Strikes Back.

When questioned about continuing to write fairytales and children’s books, C.S. Lewis responded that ‘When I became a man, I put away childish things. One of those things was the desire to appear grown up.’ A friend of mine tells me about sitting in a Williamsburg, NYC coffeeshop, watching two artist-types sipping lattes over, no kidding, a copy of Finnegan’s Wake. As they try to out-sophisticate each other with more and more disinterested and disdainful utterances, she thinks to herself, ‘I can’t believe this is isn‘t caricature.’ I do not mean to malign the goateed, Burning-Man-Festival-attending, James-Joyce-reading crowd. I have a number of artist (pronounced ar-teest) friends, and I am continually impressed by their creative faculties. Still, there is some truth in Lewis’ retort. We really do go to great lengths to look grown up, and it is generally ends up being pretty childish.

It is not the adult that starts smoking, but the child who wants to appear grown up. The adult rejects out of hand as foolish the concept of inhaling the fumes of burning leaves. When a child decides to become an adult, they put away the need to convince others of their worthiness of the title. You don’t need to pad the resume when you’ve already got the job. So the teenage girl wears high heels and makeup, not the forty year old woman. The girl is concerned with appearing as if she is a grown-up; the woman is too busy with the concerns of a grown-up to care about looking like one. It is the boy who sets out on the rites of passage; the man has long since passed those rites. The child is the one with something to prove; the adult has already come to peace with the idea that he has nothing to prove. Trying to prove one’s adulthood rarely does much to accomplish its intended end, and it usually has quite the opposite effect.

There is a theory that goes something like, ‘if I pretend like fascinating things are dull, then I can convince others that my life is much more interesting than it really is.’ Under the ‘cool by not caring’ plan, you must remain safely aloof from anything that could excite you to joy or fear, for this is the only way to convince everyone that you are above such concerns. Really, it doesn’t make much sense. You try to establish your identity by devaluing everything you encounter in the light of some mythical good you only claim to have. While trying to convince others of your value, you spit on everything of real value. Things that should be joyful, exciting, or scary all become passé in our self-invited pretentious leprosy. We cut ourselves off from the excitement that comes with a rightfully scary endeavor and the joy that comes with its accomplishment.

We treat love in this manner. We are like people who want to fly model aircraft, rather than step into cockpit. We remain safely aloof, feet planted firmly on the ground. We keep the excitement manageable, the fear manageable and the joy manageable. We never let them get the better of us. And we are the poorer for it. We conduct our actions through remote control, hearts safely guarded, safely disengaged. You cannot love from a distance. Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, passed from heaven to earth, through the very fires of hell for love. If the Almighty cannot love by remote control, surely we cannot either. So we must enter into love. I know of no one who has been truly terrified while flying model aircraft. Every pilot I know has scared themselves at some point. Love is no different. Love should be terrifying. If it is not, then we have not truly entered into it.

Consider the man’s role in a romantic relationship. By the rules of the dance, he must leave his safe world and chase after something well beyond his ability to analyze or control. Someone who can easily break his heart. He could remain safely in the well-ordered (though not well-cleaned) world of the bachelor, where all variables are safely under his control. The dance calls him outside of himself, demanding from him a courageous vulnerability in his pursuit of the woman. In this, there is the whisper of danger, the tingle of excitement, and the promise of joy. It should be scary.

The woman’s role is no less scary. She too has constructed a well-ordered world, one where she knows where everything is and why, where she is safely in control. She allows someone tremendously different to invade her world, to mess up the order of things, to leave the toilet seats up. Walking through her world, he changes things even as he is changed. The dance calls her outside of herself, demanding from her the same courageous vulnerability in a much different manner; she must allow herself to be pursued and to be caught by the man. Though her steps are quite different, the dance still carries the same danger, the same excitement, the same promise of joy. This, too, should be scary.

Feminist scholar Catherine McKinnon (sp?) makes some fairly unconventional observations on the interaction between men and women. She believes that sex, even in the context of marriage, is an act of assault. Her comments have understandably caused something of a stir. Still, there is little in this world that is all the way wrong. She is right, in a way. The whole thing is quite invasive. Not just the physical act, the intertwining of spirit and heart and mind as well. Just as in a dance, or a fight, the partners must interfere deeply in each other’s worlds. So she looks at the tangled mess that our culture makes out of sex, and she sees a fight. Understandably so: a dance where neither partner cares much for the steps or for each other looks much more like a rugby scrum than a salsa. The beauty of the dance has been lost in our disregard for each other, but that does not mean that we should discard the dance.

It means that we should relearn our steps. He overcomes his trepidation, and holds out his hand for her to take. She takes his hand, and he pulls her to himself. Trust grows as they learn to anticipate the steps of the other. Then a promise, and in that promise they become each others’. He is not a trespasser, but an adventurer. She invites him into her garden, that place that was uniquely hers, and chooses to share the depths of who she is with another. He gives himself to her in his way, and she receives him, yet she gives herself to him in her own way, and he receives her. They eat of each other’s fruit together. The lovers interfere deeply in each other’s worlds, to the point of losing themselves in the other. In doing so, they become someone more amazing, more beautiful, more complete than either of them were before. They lose their lives in each other to find them together.

We confuse symmetry with sameness. There are many things in this world that are quite different, yet quite complimentary. The land receives the ocean at the shore, but the land and the ocean are not the same. There would be no lapping waves for long seaside walks if there were just water meeting more water, or land meeting more land. The man and the woman both give up their worlds for each other. They go about it in very different ways. They both shape their new world together, though in greatly different ways. That world would be the poorer for any redundancies between them. They are the reconciliation of the land and the water, and together they make the shore.

In McKinnon’s universe, we never interfere in each others’ worlds. We harvest fruit until the trees become nameless, until the fruit becomes tasteless. We carry the fruit in bushels to the gates of our own heart, and there we exchange it with others to feed our hungers. But they are never allowed inside. Nor do we enter their world. There is no place for adventure, nor for invitations. Picking fruit is passé. You would have to content yourself with one flavor, and you would have to wait for it to grow. Why nurture one tree, when you can just uproot it and plant another when it gets old? This is the price for staying safe. And as we forget about outmoded concepts of finding and being found, we lose far more than we ever bargained.

Our gates are shattered. We have replaced our private gardens with de facto public parks. Now there are paved paths and signs, but we treat the trees with contempt, their fruit with contempt. The myth has been deconstructed until all of its life is completely lost. Where there once had been magic, wood nymphs and satyrs, now there are planters, pavement and urban planning. We have chased off the magic, and we are left with little more than friction and fluid exchange. And we are much poorer for it.

We think that we are so much more sophisticated, but really all we have done is made our worlds small so that we look large in comparison. If you want to prove that there are no deer in a forest, one way of going about that is to tear down every tree in the forest that a deer could hide behind. Most likely, after tearing down all the trees, you won’t find any deer. That doesn’t mean they were never there to start with. We see ourselves as enlightened, finally free from foolish superstitions. Tearing apart the fabric of myth, we find no magic. The thing about magic is that you have to respect it. It shows up when it feels like, and inhabits holy places. If you desecrate all the holy places, you will not find it. So we who are so sophisticated, we who are determined to rid ourselves of all myth, desecrate all the places where it used to hide. We then congratulate ourselves in our self-fulfilling prophecies, scaring off all magic as we perform our various sorts of vivisection. And of course, we who were bound and determined not to find magic, find no magic. That does not mean it was never there to begin with.

How do we work backwards? Respect for the magic was the first thing we lost. In regaining the respect, we regain the magic. And there is only one magic deeper in this world than intimacy between two immortals. All magic starts with the Author of magic. As we regain our respect for Him, we learn to respect each other. We learn to revere holy places once again. And as the desecration is undone, the magic begins to return. What once was just a tree in a public park becomes a sacred grove once again. It becomes exciting to walk there once more. But along with the excitement, there is a hint of danger. It is a little scary to explore the garden. But maybe, it always should have been scary.

17:34 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this

23 January 2007

Isaac and the Mountain.

I’m sure Abraham had some theory on how God was going to keep His promise when he set out toward the mountain with his son. I mean, you have a bunch of impossible variables all put together. You have the child of the promise, the son through whom God will make a great nation. You have an order to take that son up to a mountain to his death. You have no explanation at all, only instructions. Father Abraham is hardly a Soren Kirkegaard. I’m sure he had some scheme about how it would all work out.

God knew Abram’s heart. He was a leader, he understood command and control. That gift was equal parts strength and weakness. The same man that led a household of hundreds through a wasteland had schemed himself out of Pharaoh’s hands and into fathering Ishmael. As a patriarch and a military commander, he doubtless had some understanding of outcomes and courses of action. The child of promise was too important for all of that. There was no scheme that would bring about the promised miracle, no human hands would be credited with this thing God had wrought. None were. Abram and Sarah conceived a child to a barren womb. But we forget so quickly.

Once God answers a prayer, the temptation is to believe that the time for faith ended with that answer. ‘God, thanks for the son, but we’ve got it from here.’ We forget that having the thing takes at least as much faith as getting the thing. They waited expectantly on God to answer their prayer, keeping their hands open and raised. When He gave a son into their hands, they doubtless wanted to close their hands around him. This is why Abraham had to take Isaac to the mountain. Learning a faith of asking, he now had to learn the faith of having. This is the ability to have a gift without it having you; the strength to hold all the things you love in open hands before God.

So, about a month ago, I got two friends back. I considered it a Christmas present. In some ways, it was an answer to a prayer. Things had started to wrong between us. Felt like God had been leading me away from them. I heard from Him, ‘you know, you’re going to have to let them go.’ I didn’t understand at the time. Maybe I didn’t want to. I considered them deep friends, and I didn‘t want to let them go. I tried to hold on, and the relationship started to be more and more painful. ‘Compliant-Nonresponsive’ all over again. I’m not going to describe the details. Suffice it to say that I did end up letting them go four months ago. I felt like God forced my hand, but that it was something that had to be done. So when I heard back from them recently, I considered it a gift from Him. As if He had given me my friends back.

But even in this miracle, there must be a point where you take the relationship to the mountain. And I am there now. So be it. They are His first. May the relationship between us take whatever form He desires. I was absent in many ways before; I will be present now. This means that I stand up for myself, that I speak in all the flavors of love (not just the nice ones,) and that I learn to be cognizant of my proper place in their lives, and their proper place in mine. This means that boundaries must be drawn. This may not go well, I know. It is hard for people who have not had boundaries to draw and maintain effective ones. It is difficult for people who have not expressed hurt to each other to learn how to do so respectfully. But this is important. I will not risk the changes God has wrought in my heart for old times’ sake. So perhaps we figure out a ‘new wineskins’ friendship. I earnestly desire that. But however this ends, I know that I am placing them into God’s hands, certainly more than ever before. And however it turns out, I will love them.

In order to have something, you must be willing to give it up. To hold on too tight is to strangle the life from the gift. Love is this way. To love a friend, you must not love them so much that you will never risk the friendship. To do so is to ensure the death of the friendship, for there will be things that need to be talked about which will bring with them that risk. I recall a movie where a general remarks on the paradox of command. ‘A general must love the army, they must love their men. But at the same time, they must be willing to order the death of the thing that he loves. He must be willing to order an attack. If he does not, more of his men will die, and they will have died for nothing.’ This is true with friendship and romantic love, too. You must be willing to risk the relationship in order to save the relationship. The difference between work and fighting is the element of risk. Anything good on this side of the fall must be fought for.

There is an ordering of things. God must come first. If He does not, than all other things are doomed to failure. Perhaps this is why God engineered risk into love. If we only had to all the things in the right order, we would think that love was our own creation. Without risk, there is no surrender, and without surrender, there is no love. The first surrender must be to God. So there is no love without risk. Just ask Jesus. He knows this better than any of us could.

12:25 Posted in Thoughts | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Email this

18 January 2007

Finishing What Was Started.

I heard this at Urbana, while praying right before Communion. It was unexpected. The most beautiful thing that had ever been shared between C. and I was incomplete. When I interceded as those who had hurt her, I did not intercede against the girl who had called her devastating things. I saw it as an internal discussion, one I was not a party to. I gave quarter to an attack from the enemy, when I could have rebuked it. I was wrong not to fight for her in this.

I do not know how to say this thing. If God has given me these words, then may He give me a platform from which to say them in a language she can receive. I will wait, and pray for another miracle.

Here are those words.

‘Somewhere in your head, there is still the voice of a fourteen-year-old girl who has forgotten your name, whispering that you are still a white girl with a tan. I rebuke her. She was as wrong then as she is now. You are Latina, not because you have proved it or earned it, not because of your cross-cultural ministry or your academic work, not because of your words or your music or your clothes or anything else. You are Latina because Jesus saw fit to adorn His beautiful daughter with curly hair, tan skin, dark eyes, a passionate heart, feet that feel rhythm, and a hundred other things that bring glory to Him. You have nothing to prove. You are Latina because you are His and because that is how He loves you. Enter into the joy of the things you have done for your people, in the security that you are of your people. You are a woman who will set a people free. But that never was the price for admission. They were always your people, given to you by God, who also gave you to them, and no fourteen-year-old can ever, ever take that away.’

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17 January 2007

Apology Part Two.

Today, I finished my one year task of reading all of C.S. Lewis’ books. The last book was ‘That Hideous Strength.’ God spoke to me in a way I very much did not expect. Please grant me a degree of grace here. This is me at my most real.

‘He knew that he was going to meet Jane, and something was beginning to happen to him which ought to have happened to him far earlier. That same outlook upon love which had forestalled in Jane the humility of a wife, had equally forestalled in him, during what passed for courtship, the humility of a lover…

This time at last he thought of his own clumsy importunity. And the thought would not go away. Inch by inch, all the lout and clown and clod-hopper in him was revealed to his own reluctant inspection; the course, male boor with thorny hands and hobnailed shoes and beefsteak jaw, not rushing in - for that can be carried off - but blundering, sauntering, stumping in where great lovers, knights and poets would have dared to tread. An image of Jane’s skin, so smooth that a child’s skin might make a mark on it, floated before him. How had he dared? Her driven snow, her music, her sacrosanct, the very style of her movements… how had he dared? And dared too with no sense of daring, nonchalantly, in careless stupidity! The very thoughts that crossed her face from moment to moment, all of them beyond his reach, made (had he but had the wit to see it) a hedge about her which such as he should never have had the temerity to pass. Yes, yes - of course, it was she who had allowed him to pass it: perhaps in luckless, misunderstanding pity. And he had taken blackguardly advantage of that noble error in her judgment; had behaved as if here native to that fenced garden and even its natural professor.

All this, which should have been uneasy joy, was torment to him, for it came to late. He was discovering the hedge after he had plucked the rose, and not only plucked it but torn it all to pieces and crumpled it with hot, thumb-like, greedy fingers. How had he dared?’

God, forgive me. I tried, over and over, to pick the lock on the hedge you built to protect your beloved daughter. How had I dared? How could I have thought that through some strength, or cleverness, or sleight of hand that I could trespass in that garden that You created and You have guarded? You were right to keep me out. Forgive me, Lord. Her heart is yours. Forgive me for my clumsy attempts at burglary. I will try to pick locks no more. I will ask You for the key. She is Yours first and always.

‘What could he do in such a place- where his very admiration could only be insult, his best attempts to be either grave or gay could only reveal unbridgeable misunderstanding? What he had called her coldness seemed now to be patience. Whereof the memory scalded. For he loved her now. But it was all spoiled: too late to mend matters.

Suddenly the diffused light brightened and flushed. He looked up and perceived a great lady standing by a doorway in a wall. It was not Jane, not like Jane. It was larger, almost gigantic. It was not human, though it was like a woman divinely tall, part naked, part wrapped in a flame-colored robe. Light came from it. The face was enigmatic, ruthless he thought, inhumanly beautiful. It was opening the door for him. He dare not disobey (‘surely’ he thought, ‘I must have died,’) and he went in: found himself in some place of sweet smells and bright fires, with food and wine and a rich bed.’

Jesus, if you would honor me by placing Your daughter into my hands, please teach me to love her the way You do. May I tread with reverence, respecting your artistry, yet with daring, with such valor as would fit entering into such a hallowed and mysterious and dangerous place as her heart. May I honor her with my heart, worship her with my body, and love her with my life. May I protect her and challenge her. May I love her enough to give her new life, for love brings life, and gives birth to new life. May I surround her with children, and grand-children. If You give her to me, may I give her back to You each day, for she is Yours first and always. Just as I am Yours first. This is my heart, placed in Your hands.

‘Go in obedience and you will find love. You will have no more dreams. Have children instead. Urendi Maleldil.’

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16 January 2007

Apology.

When facing an in-flight emergency, the least useful question is ‘who is more to blame.’ The entire crew is bound together in their fates, regardless of who caused the problem or why. They either save the aircraft together, or they die together. If it is saved, the question of blame ceases to be important after a safe landing (except insofar as answering it can prevent future emergencies.) If the aircraft crashes, the safety board will have plenty of time to figure out who was more to blame, most likely without the assistance of the crew. Raising the question of blame in flight all but ensures that the safety board will close the question well after the answer is of any use to the crew.

Relationships are no different. ‘Who is more to blame’ is a question for divorce courts, not for a marriage. Even if the other person is 99% wrong, you are still 1% wrong. Which means that you are wrong. The wrongness of the other does nothing to mitigate your own. Anything that goes wrong in a relationship involves both people in the relationship. If we break things together, then the only way to fix them is together. I spent so much time arguing about who was more wrong. That was never the question.

The reality is that we both hurt each other. Not Proverb’s ‘honest wounds from a friend.’ Cruel, vicious wounds. Two people who value loyalty and honor above all things (save One) attacked those very things in each other. She and I both accused each other of disloyalty, dishonesty and dishonor; we named each other as lacking in courage and integrity. It is one thing to misunderstand each other. Surely there was some of that. That could be excused; two people can be well-intentioned and well-meaning and still crash into each other as their words ricochet off the walls. But it is one thing to find yourself in the crossfire between crooked souls trying to stand up straight. It is a quite different thing to fashion words into weapons and aim them at the heart of the other. Something in both of us wanted to hurt the other the way we had been hurt. Instead of being found naked and defenseless in a moment of vulnerability, we did what we had always done to keep ourselves safe. We attacked.

In a way, it was a perfect trap. Take two Christians whose spiritual resumes looked quite good on paper; two Christians who loved God as best as they could, but were both deeply proud and deeply scared. Set up a dissonance between them, where they are equally attracted to and repelled by each other. Convince each to try to fix that dissonance through their own power. Make sure that fear keeps both of them from really being honest with themselves about their own hearts. Watch as the tension grows until the situation finally explodes.

I never respected her will, when it really came down to it. I thought I had, I convinced myself that I had, I forced myself to act as if I had, but I never really had. Somewhere in the depths of my heart, I never considered her ‘no’ valid. And even if I wasn’t willing to see it, she saw it. And resented me for it. She was not wrong to do so. This was my contribution to the brokenness.

She never respected my heart. I think she thought that she did. I think she thought as if she was acting as if she did. But she never did. Somewhere in the depths of her heart, she always resented my feelings for her. She was always wrong to do so. Just as she had the right to her will, I had a right to my heart. I don’t think she was willing to see it, but somewhere deep I saw it. And I resented her for it. I was not wrong to do so. This was her contribution to the brokenness.

My disrespect and her disrespect fed off each other. She blamed my heart for my disrespect of her will, just as I blamed her will for her disrespect of my heart. The more I resented her will for disrespecting my heart, the more I disrespected her will. And the more she resented my heart for disrespecting her will. The broken chord was complete. The only resolution I could see was a change in her will, and I think perhaps that was why I tried so hard to be friends with her. The only resolution she could see was a change in my heart, which is why she preconditioned our friendship on my not being attracted to her. So I killed my heart in the insane hope that in doing so she would learn not to resent it. But my heart did not stay dead. Two months into waiting for a phone call that was promised but never came, it returned with a vengeance. All the pain, the heartache, and the resentment that I had been burying for months, years really, declared thatit would be buried no longer. All the words that should have been said long ago were said all at once, and the already tenuous relationship shattered into a million pieces. Her counter-attack came months later. The first time she was truly honest with herself, and with me, she told me in no uncertain terms the depths of her resentment toward me. The trap had worked perfectly. Two Christians in very good standing went for each other’s throats. What could have been a mockery of disunity had become a case study in it.

Pride seems to be the enemy’s weapon of choice against those in Christian leadership. Few in ministry will risk their influence or livelihood through open rebellion. Self-will provides us the appearance of righteousness so important to public perceptions, while leaving us wide open to temptation. It is a root sin; a gateway sin leading to all kinds of unrighteousness. Unless God lances the wound, it will burst at a time of the enemy’s choosing, usually one disastrous to our witness and our ministry. This is a lesson we should be all too familiar with.

Pride has a special seduction for those who are highly gifted and for those who have been deeply wounded. It whispers ‘you can be safe if you trust in your own power.’ Those who have been hurt desire safety more than most, those who are gifted trust their own power more than most. It tells you that you can fix things if you try hard enough. I have found that I have no power to work miracles; a miracle is what it would have taken to fix things between her and I. Pride cut me off from the source of miracles. Not only that, it blinded me to my contribution to the problem. Pride always looks outside for problems, never inwards. I tried so hard to fix her, but I never fixed myself. I never started with the plank in my own eye. Just as the Spirit is the guarantor of salvation, pride is the guarantor of brokenness. The Spirit promises that He will complete the work started in us. Pride ensures that no work is done in us. Under its watch, all the things that are broken will stay broken. And so it was with us.

We both tried to convince ourselves to feel the way we knew we should feel. I knew that I should respect her will, but simultaneously I refused to believe that two Christians could not manage to have some sort of positive interaction. So through my own strength and my own mind, I set out to do both. I felt as if she was saying ‘I will resent you if you like me. You must kill your heart if you want to talk to me.’ I accepted that rule, ostensibly in the hope of being friends. I found the topics of relationships, marriage, children, and love unappetizing. But I was never honest with myself. I killed my heart, over and over, but it kept coming back up and poisoning the interaction. And it kept hoping that she would change her mind, that she would magically figure out I was a good guy if I kept putting up with abuse. So the tension built.

Perhaps it was the same from her side. Perhaps she knew that there wasn’t a good reason to resent my heart, but something in her heart kept pushing her to hating mine. So she decided to fix it through her own power, to choose to feel the way toward me that she decided she should feel. Perhaps, just as it was with me, whatever it is in her heart kept bubbling back up and poisoning the relationship. During the best conversation we ever had, she promised that she would call soon about the dynamics between her and I. She told me that she still wanted to be friends. I think she may have had the intention of keeping that promise, but it was a promise borne of duty, not Phileos. Perhaps she knew that was what she was supposed to do in that circumstance, what she would have wanted to do if her heart was doing what she told it that it should do. But it came back up, convincing her not to call, to avoid, to run. And the tension built.

Humility is the constant companion of love. It tells us that we need love, that we owe love to others, it teaches us to be open to love. In the same way, fear is the constant companion of pride. Fear whispers that we cannot need anything from anyone, that we cannot owe them anything, it teaches us to close ourselves off from love. Humility teaches us to be broken. Fear prevents us from being broken. In order to dismantle pride, you must destroy the fear that drives it. In order to do that, you must find the courage to face your own heart.

Both of us were afraid to face ourselves. For me, I was terrified to face my heart, because I was terrified of being hurt. I knew that if I faced my heart, it would tell me that I loved her. And if it told me that, then she would hate me for it, and I would be deeply wounded again. She had never carried that well, never done anything to be gentle or to honor my heart. To love her was to be told that my heart was disgusting and hateful, so I decided not to love. I decided to hide my heart, bury it because I was afraid.

I think she may have been afraid too. I don’t believe that things were entirely simple for her. It seemed there was a part of her who liked me, and another part that hated that part for liking me. Something in her knew that it was illegitimate to hate me for that, so she made the rule that I could never like her. Therefore, her hating my heart would then be my fault, and hence legitimate. If she were to face her heart, she would have to face two terrifying things: she was neither in total control of the situation nor in total control of her own feelings. So it was safer to run, to hide and to bury. But fears do not stay peacefully in the grave. They haunt our waking lives. The only way to undo them is to exhume them. Both her and I were terrified to face ourselves, so we never really faced each other. I wonder if either of us really had faces to begin with.

We were cruel to each other over and over. God mourns for that; He mourns for the way His son treated His daughter, He mourns for the way His daughter treated His son. There is no balance in brokenness, no balance in the fall. We are hurt, and we hurt others, over and over again. We are the slaves and the slave owners, both at once. Brokenness cannot be balanced. It must be overthrown.

I am a part of the brokenness. I was the son of God who hurt His beloved daughter. The fact that she hurt me does nothing at all to mitigate my guilt. So I will own it, and I will lay it down at the foot of the Cross. I ask Him to forgive me for hurting His beloved daughter. I ask His forgiveness for my disrespect toward her, for the way that I resented the will He gave her. I ask His forgiveness for my failure to confront her lovingly when she treated me with disrespect. I ask His forgiveness for responding to her with rage. I ask forgiveness for my tremendous pride, for my tremendous fear, for my unwillingness to yield her into His hands. I was so concerned with outcomes. Jesus, teach me obedience instead. God, teach me to love her the way that You do. Whether or not I ever get to express it on this side of eternity.

May His grace and mercy flow over this. Where there was disrespect, may He sow honor; where there was resentment, compassion; where there was pride, brokenness; where there was fear, love. May what is a case study in disunity become a mockery of disunity. May we both find our faces, so that we can be real with God and with others. May the God who does the impossible work a miracle here. May the God who reconciles the irreconcilable reconcile the two of us. I ask all of these things in the Name of Jesus Christ, the Name above all Names, the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. May that same sacred Blood that flows through her veins and mine cover all of our sins toward each other.

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14 January 2007

Refugees.

It is not really fair, I am realizing, to resent someone for failing to provide something that they were never capable of providing in the first place. Even if they did promise it. I am beginning to understand the depths of bitterness in my own heart. Remarkably, I am finding much of my driven-ness wrapped around that bitterness. Alexander goes to Asia to find his home. Finding none, he drives harder and further. When counseled to return to Macedonia, he unleashes his rage on those who advise him to return ‘home.’ These men truly consider themselves to have a home. He does not. For them to ask him to return to a place named home is an invitation to a mockery.

‘We’re all the home that’s offered here.’ As much as I hate to quote a Sarah McLachlan song, it seems to fit. There was something deep, something that was never at peace with the campus ministry I was involved during grad school. I think I have finally found words to wrap around it. There has always been a sense somewhere of the accusation ‘we all fit, why can’t you?’ Like there was some set of rules in a given place, and others knew them instinctively. Not just that. There was a perception of a sense of belonging, a sense others had that I could not really ever find. Like they had finally found what they were looking for. Like they were home.

There was always a mad passion in my journey. One that told me in every new place that I haven’t quite found the object of my search, one that pushed me over the every next mountain range to find it. (I know that I’m supposed to like Bono, being a young, socially conscious, IV-trained Christian and all, but I really couldn’t bring myself to say ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.’ Oops. I guess I just did.)
That search drove me to my undergraduate institution (emphasis on institution,) to grad school, to pilot training, and to my current job. Don’t get me wrong, I do not regret any of those things. They are all tremendous blessings and God used those places to shape who I am in Him. But it’s hard to understand a quest when you never quite understood the question.

There is something about humanity that causes our heart and our head to constantly miscommunicate. Our hearts drive us on, and we think we know what it wants. We try to get that thing, but our heart rejects it. Perhaps this is why we always want what we can’t have. A part of us believes that the answer to that driving question must be in that place that is just beyond our reach. After all, we have found that it is not in any of the things within reach. The author of Ecclesiastes can tell us that much. But he is no Gautama. He does not tell us to give up on desire. Lewis tells us that desire will lead us home, if we follow it where it leads. He is right, both about the journey and its object. Home is what we really want.

There is no home to be found here. There was once a home here, once. We chose exile, and exiles we have been ever since. But we are still royalty in exile. We were meant for so much more, and our heart remembers. Hope is a hard place, though. Comfort and desire rarely co-exist. To want at all is to sacrifice safety and stability. You must move in order to find the object of your desire, and very often, to move is to fail or to get hurt. But the alternative is worse. Consider Eldridge’s beached sea lion, making his home in a mud hole. We can end the exile by setting here, but if we are exiled royalty, we end our claim to royalty when we end our exile.

Refugee camps are as good as it gets on this side of eternity. We sojourn with others on their way home. The camps are not home, but they are very different from the slums we built in the wasteland. While without many of the amenities of those slums, the camps are populated by those who will populate the Heavenly city. But we aren’t there yet.

Sometimes you get frustrated with each other in the refugee camps. Tent flaps do little to keep out the snoring coming from the next tent. You get annoyed with the people in line for the latrine. You may not all even see eye to eye on which direction move the camp. But we should not expect these tents to be home. Our desire would be impoverished if we were satisfied in this place. So that mad driving passion wasn’t necessarily bad. It was just confused as to what it really wanted.

Perhaps there were other places where I was looking for a home, other people I asked for something they could never provide. There was a part of me, I believe, that was looking for a woman who would be home. I think I saw it very wrong. I will not find what I am looking for in a person here any more than I will find it in a tent in a refugee camp. But I can provide a tent for a family, and I can keep that tent secure. She can make that tent more like the home that we are returning to. And together we can return to our real home.

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13 January 2007

Reflection.

‘As Christ Loves the Church.’ This is the way that a man is supposed to love a woman. I think I understand this far better than I ever had. It ended up being far more true than I expected. If one wants to stay safe, I suppose they should not choose a faith whose founder dies a horrible death and then invites us to follow.

There once was a story of transposition between C. and I. What happened there was significant, too important to be shared on-line. Suffice it to say that I became the people who hurt her. At least some of them.

I understand why she hated me so much. I understand the depths of her capacity to hate. I became those people, the people who had hurt her so deeply. Who had denied her a home. So she hurt me, intentionally and cruelly. The same way she had been hurt. I’m sure she found reasons. She may have even believed it was for my own good. I don’t know. All I know is that I fought for her, I became the people that hurt her, and she hurt me the way that they hurt her.

So perhaps this is a reflection of the One True Myth. Like seasons or birth or gods of corn. Like anything else. I’m not sure how it ends.

I hope with all my heart that it ends like that One True Myth. In resurrection, freedom and spring. Where everything will be made new again. Whatever that looks like. I will forget what I knew of old C. I hope with all my heart I get to meet new C. Again for the first time.

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12 January 2007

There are No Sides.

The funny thing about an undeclared war is that people end up on sides without even knowing it. Without choosing or even being informed of it, the friends of the combatants find themselves drafted into the conflict. I recall something my friend S. said about C. ‘You know, I really don’t like her. I don’t think she’s a good person.’ My response was something to the effect of ‘that’s because you’re my friend. If you were her friend I imagine you’d think those things about me.’ So the enemy of my friend is my enemy. And the friend of my enemy is my enemy.

I think I now understand something about the rage that Pastor’s Kids feel toward God. Your father, the pastor, is far from perfect. In the bloody wars of adolescence, he hurts you badly. Perhaps rightly or wrongly from some fictional objective viewpoint, but certainly wrongly from your perspective. So the battle lines are drawn. You see how deeply your parent wounds you, but everyone in the church keeps talking about how great he is. The friend of my enemy is my enemy. They all side with him, whether or not they are aware of the war. And if the people of God side with your dad, then God sides with your dad. There is nowhere that you can go. So Tory Amos and Nietzsche and however many others set out on their war to tear the whole thing down around them.

The friend of my enemy is my enemy. Unless there is a deeper loyalty than friendship. If there were such a thing, then the friend of my enemy could be my friend. They could be a friend to both of us at once. A friend to one side would cheer for their side as the blows were exchanged. A friend to both sides would mourn as their friends continued to wound each other. They would desire an end to the war.

Joshua was preparing to attack Jericho, when he sees a man with sword drawn. He asks him, ‘whose side are you on?’ The man answers ‘I am on the Lord’s side.’ If God does not pick sides as His Chosen People set out to conquer the promised land on His orders, than how could I have imagined that He would have chosen sides in a conflict between two of His beloved children? He never did. He mourned for what she and I did to each other. He recognized my pain, legitimated it, and He heals it. He desires an end to the war.

Here at Urbana, I am surrounded by a distinct impression of her diffused influence. This is her world, these are her friends, these are her ministries. This is her legacy. I am certain that the stock of C. in this place is quite higher than my own. I have to say that is not the most comfortable of experiences. The friend of my enemy is my enemy, and her accusations echo off the walls of this place. All twenty thousand pointing fingers tell me to leave it alone. There are two sides, and I know which one they will choose. Maybe, though, there is a better side to choose than hers or mine.

It was another function of my pride, I think, when I chose not to talk to mutual friends about the story. She accused me of using her friends against her. I was so determined to disprove that accusation through my own strength that I determined that no mutual friend who did not already know about the story would find out about it. Doing so, I cut myself off from much wise council. This was foolish. I reject her accusation wholeheartedly. It was entirely appropriate to discuss this with my mentors. The fact that they know her does nothing to change that.

I didn’t want a trial by friends. I stopped wanting that months ago. I didn’t want to be right, I didn’t care about being right. I didn’t want them to choose my side, I didn’t want them to side with me against her, I didn’t need to hear that I was a great guy and she was cruel to me. Being right is cold solace for one who desires reconciliation. In telling the story, I saw something far more valuable in my friends’ eyes. I found that I was okay. That it was understandable to feel the way I did. That I wasn’t crazy to feel what I felt.

I guess that I had always thought that her para-church ministry sided with her. They didn’t. There were never any sides. I think back to the mistake of Palm Sunday. The city of Jerusalem asks God to side with them against the Romans. On that day, Hosanna meant ‘God, take my side,’ not ’Lord, save.’ When He fails to do so, they have no further use for Him. They were more wrong than they could have imagined. His side was better than their own, better than the Roman side, better than all sides. I want to be Joshua at Jericho. I am tired of my side. I want to be on the Lord’s side.

Really, they wanted what I wanted. Not all of it, I guess. But part of it. They wanted reconciliation. I wanted reconciliation. Whatever other stories are happening here, whatever God is or is not doing, I know with all my heart that He desires reconciliation between His children. So, in prayer and accountability, I pursued reconciliation. Never heard anything back. Still, my prayers go with her. May we be reconciled. I believe with all my heart that the Blood of Christ can take enemies and turn them into family. Amongst all the miracles that I am praying for, I believe that one is the closest to the center of His will.

[Note: Before writing this post, I sent an email to someone from undergrad who I would have once considered an enemy. It seems like forever ago, and it was almost a decade, but I don’t think I would have ever called that person a friend. God put it on my heart to make things right with them. I sent them an email, asking for reconciliation, and apologizing if I had hurt them. I just got an email back from them, saying the same things back. Praise God. I do not think that I could have imagined being reconciled to that person eight years ago. But I was quite a different person eight years ago. There were never any sides. Praise God that through His Blood enemies can become family. May He bless my sibling greatly.]

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11 January 2007

Pensacola Redux.

Learning to fly is one of the most fascinating experiences I know of. Imagine being transported back to infancy while keeping your mind and will intact. Knowing what you know now, think of how it would feel to learn to walk all over again. Pilot training, of course, is hardly the only professional school out there. Law School is hard, I have no doubt. But it is different. You can take your pre-law degree and apply it directly to Torts class. Though much more intense, in some way it is still more of the same. It is not that degrees or academic work cannot be applied to pilot training. Take our class of eager, well-educated aspiring walkers. One man has a degree in developmental psych. He understands something of the mechanics of his own brain as he learns to walk; he gains a unique perspective on the endeavor, but learning to walk is still fundamentally different from reading a textbook on cognition. So the Aeronautical Engineer understands something about why he needs to add more power as he flies slower and the Art major understands something about making the landing picture ‘look right.’ In order to learn to fly, though, both the engineer and the artist have to step entirely outside of their comfort zone when they strap themselves into an aircraft.

The uniqueness of pilot training is captured in the Initial Solo. After flying six or seven rides with an instructor, the student pilot takes the aircraft up on their own. It is a tremendously significant ride, but you really don’t learn much airmanship on your solo. Instead, you discover how much you already know. And how much you still don’t know. It has something to do with the learning process, I think. You try something. It doesn’t work out. You think about what went wrong, your instructor demonstrates how do to it right, and you try it again until your instructor is satisfied. He knows you know how to perform the maneuver, and he signs you off on it. So you know how to do it, but you don’t really know that you know until you go and do it yourself. This is why we solo. Your instructor knows you can fly, but you don’t really know yourself