The Lion and the Bull - Thoughts on an Intelligent Life of Faith

Please Stop Speaking for Me

2011-12-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

Cross-posted from Wicked Smaht Thoughts:

I don't generally talk about politics, for the same reason that I don't rest my hand on a hot skillet, but I've had enough.

Rick Perry opens his "Strong" campaign spot by saying, “I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a Christian,” then spends the next 28 seconds making me ashamed to be called one. I have a simple request for the Republican presidential candidates, Fox News, Pat Robertson, and anyone with an ax to grind with everyone who doesn't agree with them: please stop calling yourself "Christians." You're entitled to your opinions and your beliefs, and you're just as welcome to list the people you hate and who you think are attacking you and your way of life as the separatist holed up in his Montana bunker, but to cover your intolerance, bigotry, and racism with the label of "Christianity" is simply grotesque.

I'd also like to say something to my non-Christian friends out there: please don't be fooled. These opinions don't represent the mainstream of Christianity any more than when a Congressman tells the news what "The American People" want. For every intolerant bigot shooting his mouth off on television, there are thousands of Christians quietly serving the poor, caring for the sick, and generally showing the love of Christ to their fellow man, simply because they actually read their Bible and that's what it told them to do. You don't hear about them because they don't make a big deal about it: they just do it. They aren't seeking power or recognition, and the only change they want to make in people's lives is to make them better. They want people to know that they are loved, regardless of what they've done. That's what being a Christian means to them, and to me.

When I see these talking heads on TV, I cringe every time they open their mouths to talk about their "Christian values," since none of them seem to actually have much value at all. When they self-righteously point at some other group and say, "They're morally decrepit because they don't do what I want them to do," I have to join my friend Handy the Hand-Puppet, and say, "You're making us look like jerks!"

For just a moment, let's go to the source, shall we? Since "Christians" originally meant "Little Christs," let's see what Jesus has to say about what he wants his followers to do:

One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”

“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these.”

“Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

When Jesus saw that he had answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on no one dared ask him any more questions.

What, only two commandments? That seems too simple. At least Moses got 10.

"Love God with all your heart?" What about "Cynically use God's name to cover your intolerance and fear-mongering to trick people into doing what you want?" That must be what he meant.

"Love your neighbor as yourself?" That sounds hard. I'm sure that what he really meant was, "Set up standards of moral living for your neighbors and make sure that they live up to them at all costs. If they don't, point it out with regularity and let them know that God hates them. Make stuff up if you have to. Oh, and don't worry about living up to these standards yourselves. Since you tell people that you're my followers, that's enough. You're exempt."

Interestingly, during Jesus' ministry -- a ministry marked by kindness for the poor and partying with the people that the established authorities deemed "morally decrepit," by the way -- he consistently targeted only one group for criticism. These were the people who had established themselves as the arbiters of who was good and who was bad, and who used religious authority as a means to gain wealth and power. I suspect he'd say something similar to our conservative figureheads today:

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples, “The teachers of religious law and the Pharisees are the official interpreters of the law of Moses. So practice and obey whatever they tell you, but don’t follow their example. For they don’t practice what they teach. They crush people with unbearable religious demands and never lift a finger to ease the burden.

“Everything they do is for show... they love to sit at the head table at banquets and in the seats of honor in the synagogues. They love to receive respectful greetings as they walk in the marketplaces, and to be called ‘Rabbi.’

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you shut the door of the Kingdom of Heaven in people’s faces. You won’t go in yourselves, and you don’t let others enter either.

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you cross land and sea to make one convert, and then you turn that person into twice the child of hell you yourselves are!

“...What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are careful to tithe even the tiniest income from your herb gardens, but you ignore the more important aspects of the law—justice, mercy, and faith....

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are so careful to clean the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside you are filthy—full of greed and self-indulgence! You blind Pharisee! First wash the inside of the cup and the dish, and then the outside will become clean, too.

“What sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees. Hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs—beautiful on the outside but filled on the inside with dead people’s bones and all sorts of impurity. Outwardly you look like righteous people, but inwardly your hearts are filled with hypocrisy and lawlessness.

"Whitewashed tombs." Couldn't have said it better myself.

Going Out With a Bang

2011-11-14T21:11:00.001-07:00

Over the last few years, I've become really interested in history and I recently noticed something interesting: in every era, in fact in nearly every generation, a significant portion of the population was convinced that the world was going to end within their lifetimes. So convinced, in fact, that they took action either to prepare for the end or to hasten its arrival. Looking around, I can see that the trend continues. Whether it's a cult in California waiting for the aliens to come and take them up into heaven or a media personality declaring that this global economy/natural disaster/climate change pattern is the worst that the world has ever seen, doomsayers abound. Not to mention the annual declaration that the Rapture will occur sometime in the fall, signalling the beginning of a 7-year tribulation.

Why do we do this? At first, I was inclined to think that extreme pessimism was an evolutionary advantage. After all, the hunter who thinks there's a lion behind every bush is bound to be right eventually, and now who's laughing? But then I realized that, in the long run, this kind of doom and gloom tends to be self-defeating, since millenarians generally don't see the point in having chidren and have a habit of doing things to take themselves out of the gene pool altogether. So it had to be something else.

I think that people who seek signs of the end of the world, either literally or figuratively, simply want to feel special. They take comfort in the fact that, if they're miserable, at least their misery is spectacularly unprecedented. No one has ever had it as bad as they do, and since the world is ending soon, they'll go out holding the record. There is something deep in the human psyche that fills us with the need to feel unique, not just among our peers, but among the entirety of human history. Declaring the end of the world clearly meets that need, even if it just means that no one else has ever looked as foolish as you do when it doesn't happen.

I don't know when or how the world will end, nor do I particularly care. For all I know, the world could end while I'm still typing thi---

Had you going, didn't I? Yeah, I know, not really. I keep myself entertained, though.

My point, dear reader, is that we don't need the world to end to make our time on Earth both special and unique. We have that opportunity every day. In fact, for each person on this planet, there is no time more special than right now, because this is the only time that we have to make a difference in the lives of those around us and those who will come after us.

One of my favorite Hebrew prayers is the Shehecheyanu:
Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha'olam shecheyanu v'kiy'manu v'higyanu lazman hazeh

Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, who has granted us life, sustained us, and enabled us to reach this occasion.

This prayer is said near the beginning of most holidays and is used to mark a special occasion or a new beginning. In our family, we look for “Shehecheyanu Moments,” unique experiences or times when we realize that we’re particularly grateful to be doing what we’re doing right at that moment. When we realize that we’re having a Shehecheyanu Moment, we’ll stop and say the prayer or, since my lovely wife also happens to be an accomplished musician, we’ll more likely sing the pop worship song she wrote using this prayer as the lyrics.

For a long time, I just thought of this prayer as a way of saying, “Thank you, God, for this new experience.” But one day I really paid attention to the words. It’s not really about new experiences at all, though it’s certainly a nice way to recognize them. This prayer is about life, about thanking God for the very experience of being alive and, more importantly, staying alive:

Thank you for this life.
Thank you for keeping me alive until now.
Thank you for adding this moment to my extensive catalog of wonderful and unique experiences.

Now that is a life-affirming statement.

What the end-of-the-world crowd misses is that every breath we take makes our lives special. Every moment that our life continues adds another note to a unique and precious melody that is itself part of an incredibly beautiful and complex symphony. Why on earth would you look forward to some cataclysmic event that cuts that short?

Making your life special starts with realizing that, no matter how wonderful or terrible the individual moments are, each of them is a note in this amazing melody, composed by the one Person who knows how they all fit together. And just as you can’t know the symphony based on the single tuning note that the orchestra plays before the conductor raises his baton, you can’t know how your melody will turn out unless you play it through to the end.

We can make our lives matter. We can go out with a bang without taking the world with us. We can make our existence about creation instead of destruction. We simply need to make the most of each moment, each opportunity, each tiny interaction. We need to play the notes that we are given to the best of our ability, and trust that the composition itself will fill the silence in between. If we do that, it doesn’t matter when the world ends, whether it’s tomorrow or a thousand thousand years from now. We will have made our own time truly special and brought about a world that couldn't have existed without us.

There's an interesting phrase that occurs throughout the Bible whenever God talks to someone. The transliteration of the Hebrew is "hineni" (hee-nay nee), and it means "I am here." It's the response that Abraham gives to God when he is called to leave his family's lands and go "to a place that I will show you," when he receives the promise that he will be a father of nations, and when he is asked to sacrifice the living embodiment of that promise, his son. It's Moses' response when God calls to him from the burning bush and asks him to go and lead his people out of slavery. When God asks, "Whom shall I send?" the prophet Isaiah responds, "Here am I. Send me!"

The interesting thing about this phrase is that it talks about more than just geographic location. The speaker isn't looking around and saying, "Huh, I guess I'm right here, standing next to this big rock." The language is reflexive: it almost repeats itself, as though to say, "I'm here, really, truly, and fully here!" It seems that, to clearly hear the voice of God, we need to be fully present.

How often are we really, truly, and fully "here?" When was the last time that you were so engrossed in something that the world slipped away, time disappeared as a relevant concept, and you just... were? I'll answer for myself: it's been a while.

It's hard to commit to something so fully that you willingly let go of all other distractions, and not just because we have so many more distractions to choose from today. It's no coincidence that most close encounters of the godly kind took place in the wilderness: anything can be a distraction, so the easiest way to focus is to get away from everything. I don't need an iPhone, 600 channels on the TV, and a library of highly enjoyable video games to keep me from hearing God's voice. My family provides enough distractions for a lifetime without even trying.

To be honest, though, no matter what I'm doing, it always seems that something else wants my attention. If I'm at home with my family, those problems from work keep nagging at the back of my mind, demanding an answer even when I know good and well that no answer will be good enough. When I'm in a meeting at work, there are three people lined up outside the door who need my help with their problems as soon as I come out. When I'm out on my bike, I should be mowing the lawn, and when I'm mowing the lawn I should be pulling those weeds or dealing with that funny-looking growth under the gutter. No matter what I do, the next thing (or the last thing) is always there, waiting to seize an untended moment. How can I possibly be here when over there needs me so much more?

I'm starting to think that this is why Moses had to live in the wilderness for 40 years before he noticed that burning bush. For all we know, the bush may have been burning the entire time, but he was too busy mentally arguing with his relatives back in Egypt or wondering whether Zipporah was going to make that awful goat stew for dinner again, and never noticed it. It wasn't until he had quieted his mind enough to notice his surroundings that he said, "Huh, that's odd," and wandered over to have a look. Only then was he ready to say, "Hineni" and receive the charge of a lifetime.

So, are these our choices: live in the wilderness for forty years or just bumble along on our own with no guidance? Is it impossible to be "here" without physically removing every single distraction for miles around? For some people, perhaps, but for the most of us I think that there's some room to maneuver between these extremes. We just have to find ways to cultivate that "wilderness mentality" in the midst of our busy lives. Here are a few ideas that I'm going to try to incorporate into my own life this year:

Make space for silence
Have you ever been out in a wilderness area? The first thing that strikes you is the silence. It isn't a complete lack of sound -- the wind blows, rocks move, small creatures scuttle away -- but the activity level, the noise, is gone. In its place is an acoustic emptiness, a space filled only by the wind. We need this space if we're going to hear that still, small voice that speaks to our hearts and tells us about our future, but we have to make it. We also have to protect it, since nature abhors a vacuum and the voices that demand our attention every day will see that space and try to claim it for their own.

So if you want to be here and to hear, then make a reservation in your schedule to do so. Don't call it anything fancy like "devotional time" or "my meditation hour," because that will be like painting a red target on your calendar for all of your favorite distractions to attack. Just call it "quiet time," like we did when we were kids, and slip away before anyone notices you've left.

Find your quiet place
The other thing about that strikes me about the wilderness is that it's empty. It's not just that there aren't any buildings around: there's nothing. When I was in Death Valley a few years ago with my Dad and my brother, we got excited when we saw a foot-high cactus. Unless you get excited about rocks, this is the epitome of "no distractions," and this is the mental landscape we should aim for when we try "be here." Clearing that ground takes a while, which is why you need to reserve the time to do it, but it can be done. For me, this is both a physical and mental effort: I need to get outside and move while I sort through the things in my head that are screaming for my attention, so I walk, bike, or hike. I instinctively seek out quiet places when I do this, whether it's a park, a mountain, or an untraveled road. I need to move without having to give too much attention to my surroundings or worrying about talking to anyone. Then, once my mind is quiet, I can either keep moving or find a place to settle while I listen.

In the past few years, I've also discovered that my "quiet place" can be an activity that draws me closer to the present moment, that can hold me in a place where time is irrelevant until I suddenly look up and realize that I should have gone to bed hours ago. Writing does that for me, and I find that when I take the time to capture my thoughts, sometimes I get a few of God's as well. The other activity that makes time disappear, playing video games, rarely has as beneficial an effect.

Choose a direction, or just wander
The times that I have actually done this -- made time, cleared a space, and listened for guidance -- have almost always been times of high stress for me, when I needed to make a decision and really wanted to make the right one. Rarely have I done it just because it's good for me: even though I think about my physical health every day, I seem to expect my mental and spiritual health to take care of themselves. When I needed to make those decisions, though, I went after them. I spent hours walking, hiking, and biking, and I gnawed on these issues like a dog with its favorite bone. I turned them around, I looked at them from all sides, and I talked them over with God. And I got answers, the right ones. It worked.

This has always been the most effective approach for me, but I've always been impressed by the people who don't need a major life decision or crisis to drive them "into the wilderness." They just seem to be able to launch into a conversation with God, talking about their day and learning what he thinks. These are the ones who get surprising new direction from their conversations and discover a new purpose or meaning for their lives. While my big decisions have made an impact in the direction of my life (and my family's), I have never been surprised by the outcomes. I never went for a walk to decide whether I should take Job A or Job B and come back saying, "I think we should start a foundation that will save thousands of lives." Sometimes, it pays to wander.

Today is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, so not only am I fasting, but I'm also looking at the things I want to do differently in the year to come. And while by this time of day being "here" mostly means hearing my brain repeating "food... food... food..." over and over, I also know that this is something that I need to do for my health this year. I need to make space, to be quiet, and to wander through the wilderness, listening to my heart and hoping to hear the still, small voice of Wisdom whispering in my ear. I look forward to hearing what he has to say.

Blessings and Curses

2010-03-08T23:50:00.000-07:00

See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse - the blessing if you obey the commands of the LORD your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the LORD your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known.

Deuteronomy 11:26-28

I've been thinking a lot about blessings lately, and about curses. It's fitting, I suppose, because I gave a talk at Ignite Boulder a couple of months ago about the greatest curse in modern times -- the Curse of the Bambino, of course -- and because God has blessed my family so richly since we moved to Boulder last summer. We moved here because we felt like this was where God wanted us to be, and so far everything we have seen has confirmed that. I have a new job, a beautiful new house, and I get to soak in the majesty of the Rocky Mountains every morning. Who could ask for more than that? Did I mention that we average 300 days of sun a year?

And yet, the last month or so has probably been one of the hardest of my life. My wife broke her foot at the beginning of February, so suddenly I found myself with two full-time jobs: head of development for a growing software company and full-time chauffeur, cook, counselor, and medic for an active family. Oh, and we also moved into our new house one week after my wife's accident. The rest of the details are neither important nor pretty, but suffice it to say that I've put a lot of miles on the car and my family has eaten a lot of takeout in the past six weeks.

There have been moments recently when I've wondered if I could make it, days when I didn't want to get out of bed in the morning because of the list of tasks waiting to pounce on me as soon as I stepped out of the shower, and nights when I wanted nothing more than to collapse on the couch and let the TV lull me to sleep. And through it all was this nagging sense that I should be happier, that I was blessed with this great big house, with a (mostly) healthy family, and with the job that I came here to find. What right did I have to be grumpy? And beneath that, another thought: Some blessings! All they're doing right now is making my life harder!

This is the conundrum of the blessing: in a moment it can become a curse. The big house becomes the massive mortgage payment that limits your freedom to follow your dreams. The great job consumes your time, creativity, and energy so that you have nothing left for your family. The children become your identity, crushing you with fear that your shortcomings will become their downfall and leaving an echoing shell when they leave home. In the blink of an eye, Cinderella's happy ending turns into Home for the Holidays.

Now I'm not saying that my life is horrible. In fact, it's still pretty amazing. But I've seen the dark side of the coin and I realized how very little it takes to flip it over. And it I learned one thing from living in Boston, it's this:

Curses are Real
For 86 years, the city of Boston lived under a curse: they were losers, not just in baseball but in everything. It permeated the soul of that city: you could feel it in the air, in the way people talked about themselves, and especially in the way they talked about their neighbors to the south: New York. The rivalry between those two cities was bitter, and it extended far beyond baseball. These cities didn't just want to do well: they wanted to do well at the expense of the other. As the saying goes, "I have two favorite teams: the Red Sox and whoever's playing the Yankees."

Sometimes a curse is external: it's placed upon us by someone else, with or without ill intent. Sometimes it's the spiteful cry of an enemy, sometimes the worried murmurings of a mother who's too afraid of her own life to allow her child to fully experience his. Sometimes the curse is internal: we speak our own destiny into every moment with oaths of what we will or won't be:

"I'll never find another job."
"I don't deserve to be loved."
"I will never treat my children the way my parents treated me!"

Either way, these curses permeate every moment of our existence, weighting every decision with dark portents and marking every victory as temporary. When good things happen, we're lucky. When bad things happen, it's only to be expected. These curses are easy to make and hard to break.

After careful consideration, I've decided that I want blessings, not curses. So I did some digging, and here's what I found:

You have to choose blessings over curses
Look at the verse above. God makes it pretty clear: we have a choice in this matter. Both blessings and curses are available to us and we have the power to decide which ones have the power in our lives. If we recognize the blessings in life, whether big or small, and savor them, then we open ourselves up to more and greater opportunities for giving and receiving blessings. If we take every good thing, no matter how great, and find the darkness in it, then we open ourselves up to more darkness. You become what you seek.

God puts it this way:

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Deuteronomy 30:19-20

Interestingly, he adds this addition to my thoughts: you can't just seek the blessing for the sake of being blessed. You need something (or Someone) else. Which brings me to my next thought:

It's not about the blessing
Hey, nice things are nice. So are financial security, health, and a fulfilling. But they aren't enough to make you happy. True blessings aren't material: they're relational. Joy comes not from getting more stuff but from knowing what you're supposed to do with the stuff you have, and I would propose that only God can tell you that. Sure, you can make your best guess: support your favorite charities, recycle your used Diet Coke cans, and try to be nice to people at work. It's a bit random, though, like shooting a shotgun into a field in the dark and hoping to catch dinner. You might get something, but who knows how filling it will be?

A happy life -- the ultimate blessing -- seems to be more about joining God in the Great Story that he's writing, a story of hope, of healing, and, ultimately, of reconciliation. He says, "Love me, listen to me, and hold fast to me when life tries to tear you away." He's got blessings to spare, and while some of them are very practical -- I need a job and an income if I'm going to "live happily in the land" with my family -- many of them are what we in the business world call "soft revenue." They're dividends paid on a life well lived: a happy family, healthy friendships, people rescued from a dark future. You can't measure those, you can't store them in your basement (well, not if you don't want the cops knocking on your door), and you can't use them to score your life against your neighbor's. You can feel the difference, though, and see it in the lives around you. And the funny thing about living this way? The happier the people around you are, the more blessed you feel. It's strange, it's counterintuitive, and it works.

So I've decided that, no matter how tired I may be, I'm still blessed. I've also decided to stop monkeying with my blessings. The sun will rise tomorrow and shine on those beautiful mountains, and if I lean into the bedroom window at just the right angle I'll be able to see them past my neighbor's house. And as I drive my kids to school, I plan to enjoy the sunshine that, statistically speaking, is likely to be shining brightly, and I will drop them off with the same admonishment they receive every day: "Be a blessing!"

Then I'll go to work and follow my own advice.

God loves diversity, why don't we?

2009-03-05T19:31:00.000-07:00

While reading a bible study from the Greater Boston Vineyard recently, I came across this idea:

God loves diversity.

According to the story in Genesis, when God made the earth he filled it with an abundance of different things:

"Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land
that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds."

"Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the
earth across the expanse of the sky."

"Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock,
creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its
kind."

He could have filled the world with one kind of tree, or even with the one tree in each region that was best suited for the climate. He could have color-coded the world: evergreens for the northern and southern reaches, a soothing yellow poplar for the medians, brown sage for the hot parts in the middle. Instead, he flung color all over the place, like a hyperactive four-year-old with a new box of markers. "Plants! Trees! All different kinds! Now birds, fish, animals! And now a few tweeners! We'll call that one a platypus and that one a flying fish! More, more!" There's no sense of optimization here, no quest for the perfect answer to each question. Rather, God says, "Go to it," and lets the world figure it out.

Even when God singles out one man, one family, he still has the rest of the world in mind. He promises Abram, "Through you all nations will be blessed." God, like the sower in the parable, casts his seed widely, letting it take root where it may. He doesn't plant it in the ground in nice straight rows, three seeds to a hole; he flings it.

People, on the other hand, seem drawn to homogeneity. We want one truth, one way, one team. Everyone else is wrong. Look at the tower of Babel. Not long -- in story terms -- after God splashes diversity all over the land, people are already banding together to squelch it.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people
moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that
reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be
scattered over the face of the whole earth."

One speech, one place, one religion. "Whatever else happens, we have to stick together and build a name for ourselves." Oh, and by the way, did I mention that this happened in Babylon? And if we look a little farther back, we see whose in charge there:

Cush was the father of Nimrod, who grew to be a mighty warrior on the earth. He was a mighty hunter before the LORD; that is why it is said, "Like Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the LORD." The first centers of his kingdom were Babylon, Erech, Akkad and Calneh, in Shinar. From that land he went to Assyria, where he built Nineveh, Rehoboth Ir, Calah and Resen, which is between Nineveh and Calah; that is the great city.

So really, the whole tower thing was Nimrod's idea. He drew everyone together, told them to start making bricks, and then built a monument to his religion. Sound familiar? Here, I'll give you a few hints:

Pharoah: big fan of the bricks, forced the Israelites to build his cities, thought he was a god.
Nebuchadnezzar: built a gold statue of himself, ordered everyone to worship it, then threw three dissidents into a furnace when they refused
Antiochus Epiphanes: declared himself god, forbade Jewish worship in the temple, and brutally murdered anyone who disobeyed him
Hitler: declared Aryans the master race and set out to systematically erase inferior people from the earth

Et cetera. Throughout history, this spirit keeps popping up in mankind, a desire to replace God with a man (or an idealized image of one) and then brutally suppress differences. God loves diversity, but we -- collectively and repeatedly -- despise it.

Now here's the kicker: throughout history -- and perhaps today more than ever -- people have used God as their excuse to squash diversity at every turn. The same God who threw millions of species across the planet is now used to throw people out of church because they disagree over the interpretation of a line of scripture. "Be fruitful and multiply" has become "be exactly alike or you're going to hell." We argue, picket, hate, and even kill over whose practice is most pleasing to God, and whose is abominable. God loves diversity, but apparently only if it's our kind of diversity.

I get it: unity is comforting, and conformity is safe. When you're living in the wilderness the outsider is a threat. These instincts run deep and, like our sweet tooth, they served an evolutionary purpose at one time. But why do you have to bring God into this? He made the stranger, the nonconformist, and even the atheist (whether they like it or not). Are you the only one pleasing in his sight? Did he look around at the world he had made, with all of its potential, and say, "The Baptist church is good. Everything else? Well, it was late and I was tired. Maybe those guys can straighten the rest of them out."

No, he said, "It is good. It is all very good."

Who are we to argue?

Take a Flying Leap!

2008-05-27T19:12:00.001-06:00

I know a lot of people who base their lives upon science and knowledge. For them, empirical fact is everything. If you can't see it, touch it, and measure it, then it doesn't exist. They are, essentially, empiricists. To an empiricist, the whole concept of an intangible God who can, generally speaking, only be perceived in the mind or heart is pure foolishness. "Give me a world I can measure," the empricist says, "and let me concentrate on the problems I can see, rather than inventing new ones."

These are generally the people who, along with Steven Jay Gould, argue for keeping faith and science (or church and state) separate, with a Chinese Wall of "mutual respect" between them. "You can have your God and your wishful prayers, your emotional frenzies and hysterical healings. We'll take modern medicine, thank you, along with a healthy dose of research funding to unlock whatever secrets remain in the universe. We won't tell you whether or not God exists -- at least until we can prove it beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt -- and you don't tell us how he made the world in six days or how he wants us to live our lives. Deal?"

Not only can I sympathize with this view, but it's my default state of mind. I am very focused on the here and now, on solving the problems that life has put before me today. If I weren't, I wouldn't be very good at my job, nor would I find myself particularly useful in general. I start with what is right in front of me, and I extrapolate from there.

You don't have to go very far from the here and now, however, before the certainty of measurement and observation start to fail you. No matter how much we learn, what we don't know still outweighs what we do by a factor of approximately a bazillion to one. Every new discovery leads to a thousand new questions. We mapped the human genome! Do we know what makes humans tick now? Can you tell me why I prefer vanilla ice cream as the base in my Blizzard, while my wife prefers chocolate? How about all of those genetic diseases: do we know what causes them now? Are the cures right around the corner? Of course not. Only foolish people (and television journalists) expect one discovery -- or one lifetime of research, for that matter -- to provide answers to the smallest questions. More often than not, we're happy just to learn how something in the universe works, never mind why.

You see, eventually all human knowledge comes to an end. We may push the boundaries -- and in this era we are expanding them faster than at any other time in human history -- but we will never erase them. At some point you will come to a place where the facts end but life continues. At that point you are left with faith, which is nothing more than reasoning in the absence of facts. Now you have a decision to make:

Where will you place your faith: in yourself, or in something bigger than yourself? In people, or in God? In what you can see, or in what remains unseen?

This decision is unavoidable, but it is not always consciously made. Some people, in an attempt to be reasonable, limit themselves to the facts. This feels like the rational, intelligent choice: if we can't see it, then we should wait and trust that someday we will. We don't need to get all weird and turn off our brains in favor of "faith" in some Man Upstairs. We can simply keep doing our research, and eventually we'll get there.

This choice is rational, it is defensible, and it is, indeed, a choice. It is not the only possible conclusion, because we have reached the end of logic. There are no more facts to point the way. There is only a vast, uncharted wilderness before us. To choose to wait for the facts is to place your faith in Science and Intellect, with all their acknowledged limitations, and to limit yourself to The Known. The Unknown remains over the horizon, and always will.

The other choice is to open yourself up to the possibility that there is something bigger than human existence, that the yearning we feel to keep searching, keep discovering, was placed into us by Someone who, like a toddler giggling in a cupboard, is hiding but wants to be found. This doesn't mean that you must renounce all intellect and empirical evidence in favor of a false religious certainty, or that the rest of life's questions must be "taken on faith." It simply means that you occasionally lift your eyes up toward the horizon and seek what is unseen. It means that, when you don't know why something happens, you are free to say, "I don't know the reason, but someday I will. In the meantime, I am content knowing that there is a reason."

Of course, this also means admitting that there is something bigger than me, which is where a lot of people get stuck. If my entire life up to this point has been based upon furthering my own existence, it's kind of scary to put that quest into a larger context. Suddenly, my needs don't seem so great after all, and it's tempting to go back to looking at the ground and pretending that the horizon isn't there. It takes a certain humility, a level of honest self-appraisal, to realize that it's probably a good thing if we aren't the ones who are ultimately in charge.

So here we stand, on the precipice at the edge of the Plateau of Knowledge, our toes dangling out over the hazy Unknown. Which way will you leap?

This isn't practice - it's the real thing

2008-05-13T19:23:00.000-06:00

I read Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell a little while ago, and it really made me think. I like that in a book (or in a person, for that matter). He paints an interesting picture of the evolution of religion from a disparate collection of "wild memes," or folk beliefs that went through a winnowing process that only the fittest practices survived. Those practices eventually merged, according to Dennett, into the world religions that we see today, changing over time to accommodate new fads and intellectual structures and eventually forming a symbiotic relationship with the "host" civilizations that contained them. In Dennett's view, religion is a parasite embedded in the brainstem of civilization, and it's not entirely clear whether it's a benign symbiote or a cancer. I get the feeling that his opinion on that question changes based upon the latest headlines in the paper, but he clearly seems relieved to have inoculated himself against this particular disease.

I'm not going to tackle Dennett's "Evolution of Religion" theory right now, though I have a few thoughts about the bedrock assumptions behind the theory that, if changed, could lead one to a completely different conclusion than he reached. Instead, I want to address an image that came to my mind while reading his thoughts on religious practices.

Dennett divides religious practices into two categories: private and public. Private practices are things like prayer, family traditions, good luck charms, and superstitions. Public practices are communal gatherings, services, sacrifices, and other ways that a community of religious adherents demonstrate their faith or commitment to their deity. These practices can range from benign (daily prayer, chanting a rosary) to the bizarre (walking on coals, dancing with snakes) to the objectionable (human sacrifice, calls for holy war), as long as they are done in the name of a "god."

Interestingly enough, though all religious practices are carried out in the name of God (or at least, some god), Dennett leaves the actual existence of God as an open question. Since God's existence cannot be empirically proven, he says, we will leave him out of the equation. That leaves us with this picture:

I think that most agnostics would agree with this view of religion: "We don't know what's at the center, so let's just look at what happens in the church/temple/mosque and decide whether it looks like a good thing or not." And to be honest, their impression of those practices is generally pretty dim. Seen from the outside, most religious practices are either impenetrable or absurd, and the little bit that makes any sense vacillates between happy talk and condemnation. To the agnostic or atheist (or, to use Dennett's preferred nomenclature, the "bright") peering in through the stained glass window, your average religious gathering looks like a bunch of people trying to convince themselves that they're better than everyone else.

So how does it look from the inside? Well, that depends upon what's in that center circle.

For many religious people, those circles look something like this:

If you were to ask them why they do what they do, why they go to church, pay their tithes, and sing their hymns, they'd shrug and say, "It's how I was raised." They might go so far as to say, "Because it makes me feel better about my life." The reality, though, is that they see no more empirical proof of the existence of God than Mr. D, but they're hedging their bets, just in case they're missing something. For someone in this position, the practice is all there is. They say grace before dinner, they bargain with God when things get tough ("If you get me through this, I swear I'll go to church every Sunday..."), and they participate in public observances when they think that they should.

For some people, that means that they go to their religious gathering of choice on the holidays, marking the turning of the seasons with the bare minimum of obeisance to the Divine. Others, attempting to create certainty where they can't find it, pour their efforts into proving that, not only is their religion the best one on the planet, but that they are the best at carrying it out. They purchase sanctity with their public sacrifices, hoping that it will be enough, but secretly fearing that it is pointless.

And still that black hole remains. Without a solid core, the structure cannot hold so, slowly or quickly, the private practices erode. The desire for affirmation and the fear of disapproval generally keep the public practices in place for longer, but over time they too lose their meaning. The black hole feeds, the outer shell thins and cracks, and eventually it crumbles. Some people may hold out longer than others, but eventually the purpose for the practice is lost. It either fades away or turns inward upon itself, becoming its own reason for existence. Either way, it no longer does anyone any good.

So what are we left with? If this is all there is, then I'm with Captain Dennett: let's sail on into the Big Nothing and rage against the darkness as we go, but let's at least be polite enough not to try to take anyone else down with us.

But what if there's a third option? What if there actually is something at the center?

Join me in a thought experiment, if you would. Let's pretend for a moment, despite the lack of empirical evidence, that God exists. Let's pretend, also, that he's a Person and that it's possible to have a relationship with him.

Stay with me: it's only pretend, you won't get hurt...

Let's pretend one more thing. Let's pretend that this Person, this ultimate expression of being, actually likes us and wants to have a relationship with us, and has opened a pathway of some kind through the fabric of existence, a communication channel that we can use whenever we want.

What would that look like?

Suddenly, that black hole is replaced by a solid core of energy, and the structure not only holds, but it grows. Now, we have a source of energy, of purpose, that transforms a life from the inside out and extends to our relationships with others, to our community. Where before we had external practices to provide meaning and a measure for "goodness," now we have a relationship, a two-way conversation, that defines our actions and guides us toward the greater good. This kind of relationship could drive Mother Teresa to care for the world's castoffs. This energy would lead people to leave their homes and their comforts to teach in third world countries. This connection, this inside-out transformation, might even cure an alcoholic or enliven that cheerful worker who goes to his job every day and quietly tries to bring a little light and joy into his coworkers' lives. It isn't showy and it doesn't demand your attention. It just is, and that is enough.

It seems to me that, following this thought experiment to its conclusion, the defining characteristic of this setup would be peace. With this sort of connection, you would no longer need to prove yourself to anyone, because, frankly, whose opinion could compare to God's? Without that striving, people could find contentment and joy in any walk of life, could do their best simply because it was what they were meant to do, and could enjoy others' successes as much as their own. How you talked to God would become significantly less important than whether you talked to him, and what you heard would be addressed to you first and others later. We wouldn't need to tell other people what they were doing wrong; we could leave that to God, in his own good time.

It seems to me that this approach would have a lot to recommend it, if it were true. If you can hear God, then you don't need to practice; you can simply live.

I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me. May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.
- John 17:22-23

Why are we here?

2008-04-28T19:15:00.000-06:00

Well, that's a big question to start with, isn't it? Rather vague, too. Let's try something a little more specific:

Why are we here, on this page together, right now? What's the purpose of this particular piece of virtual real estate?

That's better; I can answer that one.

This blog is here to explore what happens when you bring your mind into your faith. It's my humble attempt to explore the mysteries of life, relationship with God, and the vagaries of religion without getting too wrapped up in which religion, in particular, we're talking about. It's an extension of my own explorations into the landscape of the mind and the heart over recent years, as well as a response to two trends that I have noticed in recent years:

1. Religion, in general, appears to be getting progressively dumber
In recent years, most of the world's major religions seem to have ceded the intellectual high ground in favor of an all-out assault on the next hill over, the Moral High Ground.Unfortunately, they all seem to have different ideas about whose flag to plant there, and they are all utterly convinced that no one else has a right to that patch of land. In an effort to boost their forces, they have also formed an uneasy alliance with Politics and Nationalism, two partners who have never had any qualms about driving right over their opponents when necessary. The result is a crescendoing screech of strident voices, all bellowing that their way, and only their way, is the right one, and that all other religions, nationalities, and ideas are doomed to their particular vision of damnation. What a fun group.

As is often the case, critical thinking was one of the first casualties of this charge, since stopping to think about a weak argument has the unpleasant effect of making it look rather silly. So the leaders of the charge toward the moral high ground shout louder, crying, "Don't think, just follow! If you're not with us, you're against us!" That worked for those people whose hearts speak louder than their heads, or whose need to belong, to be "right," outweighed their desire to understand.

Unfortunately, it also excluded a whole group of people who like to know why something makes sense before they do it. As a result...

2. All of the smart people seem to have chosen the other side
Now, obviously this is a generalization, as there are some highly intelligent people of faith in the world. They just seem to be drowned out by the "Aw, shucks, God told me so" crowd. On the other hand, a recent upsurge in highly intelligent, well thought out, and in many cases, poisonously vituperative writing has brought the general condemnation of all religion to the international consciousness. When I see God is Not Great and The God Illusion on the book racks at Costco, I know that something has changed.

Who can blame them? When intelligent thinkers are pushed out of every church and mosque and told, "Your kind aren't welcome here any more," what else can you expect them to do? They put those great big brains to work and say, "You don't want me? Well, I don't need you either, or that big God fellow! If all he wants are unthinking drones, then he's welcome to them! I spend enough time with people like that at work. I don't need to spend my weekends with them as well."

And so the debate has formed, with unthinking pharisaism on the right and intellectual snobbery on the left. What's a thinking man -- who just happens to have a fairly healthy working relationship with God -- to do?

Write a blog, obviously.

So here we are. I'm going to write about faith, about thought, about a working relationship with a God who not only gave me a brain, but expects me to use it. All you have to do is read. If you like what you see, let me know. If you think I'm full of hot air, join the club, and then let me know that, too.

Let's explore together and see what we discover.

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
- Proverbs 9:10