*

What a charming note in this study Bible!

"The disciples miss the point: complete reliance upon God..."

The Gospels summarized with relation to the disciples: "the disciples miss the point."

The Gospels summarized with relation to Christians: "the Christians miss the point."

The Gospels summarized with relation to the clergy: "the clergy miss the point."

Is there a child here, anywhere? For heaven's sake, show me a child and I will prove us all wrong!

Even Heresy Holds Truth

If you bring forth what is within you,
what you have will save you.
If you do not have that within you,
what you do not have within you will
kill you.
-- Gospel of Thomas, 70

"Guiltmas" (or, American Christmas)

It's easy enough to prove: when you live in a Christian culture and Christ is the last thing on your mind, Christmas means everything in the world. Suddenly an ethos spots to light that never would have before: you can't watch that on Christmas, give gifts to others, try to tolerate their presence, try to be a good person, and tomorrow the ghost of today flies away.

I fear the gift-giving scene the most. Anxiety tears me, because I'm wary of limiting my love to a gift, and this is how so many interpret it -- it has to be good, thought out, or else there's something wrong with your relationship with them; something is spoiled, and now everything has come to light.

These times, though, the gift has become expected, therefore the gift loses its value. Criteria are set up: if a good gift, then a good relationship; if bad, then bad. What determines "good" here could be how much money one spends on the gift, or how thought out it appeared to be. The backwards blessing of the former is that expensive stuff always looks expensive, and even if it isn't, the appearance still counts; something can be thought out for days and still fail to appear thought out.

Christmas is, for most of America, the same 'ol materialistic struggle; a gift as an implication means nothing anymore, and this is the foundational point for every gift: it is not simply to add something physical to another's library of physical things, but to reveal to another one's underlying love in giving it. A gift is meant to signify a preexistent love from the giver. Insofar as love is revealed, it isn't the gift that reveals it, but the act of giving -- the act of going out of one's way, spontaneously, to give something to another person. The moment you want the thing rather than what it signifies from the person who loves you, there is something wrong relationally. The irony, though, is that a relational malfunction is assumed if the gift isn't shiny enough, or doesn't appear thought out enough. Everything has to be unendurably perfect. At heart, the goal is to shut the expectations of our relatives up. If love had really been present, none of this would be necessary.

So I'm down for an abolition of gift-giving. Yes, no gifts. Only cards that have our hearts on paper. The greed will be exposed, and perhaps our spiritual hearts will be revealed: how much, after all, do we consider Christmas the gift-giving aspect, rather than an interaction with the Christ who seems so much more mystically intermingled with the very air at this time of year? A clever gift of the devil, yes, to place the hunger for stuff where spiritual satiation is supposed to be.

I only want for Christmas: the love of those I love, the love of those who love me. Not too much to ask for.

*

Some books we read for edification, others for wisdom, others for an uncovering of how the world works, whether with regard to principles or facts. Others we read to read the author and his readers. As anthropologists.

Silly Danglers

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.
-- Dallas Willard

Scream, Chubby Lady

Dear God, these blood curdling gameshow screams from money, winning money, no more troubles, prop up your feet. If people would only scream that joyfully when life announced itself from the hallways of existence, how much more vibrant would the world be?

Worldly Hope

Science, in spite of its conflict with theological prejudice, has been accepted because it gave power. Belief that the course of nature is regular also gives a sense of security; it enables us, up to a point, to foresee the future and to prevent unpleasant occurrences.
-- Bertrand Russell, Religion and Science

Aha, finally a concession. But could this be true not only of scientific knowledge, but all knowledge? All knowledge as a tacking down, an attempt to find security in the world through a special patterning of neurons.

What is the danger? Hope in the world -- in your intelligence, your spouse, your clothes, your car, you job, ad infinitum -- is dependence on the world. Dependence on the world is potential death through the letdown the world inexorably throws at us. Slavery would be a more appropriate term. You are a slave if you place your hope in anything in this world.

What can be done? Is it possible to sustain hope beyond the world? Well, yes, that's the task of believing in God -- but who can prove God? The only solution is a madman's infinite leap into the unsubstantiated hands of an unsubstantiated deity -- but who wants to be mad, irrational, floating outside the comforting boundaries of the sensate? Happiness, it seems, is never pure, perpetually mixed with either potential heartbreak or ostensible madness.

But you must make a leap. A leap must be made.

Love

Love, romantic love, erotic love, "the wisdom of the fool and the folly of the wise" (Samuel Johnson), is basically this: The art of planting seeds in the heart of another. This seed aids her in becoming the person she is, her essential self, unhinged by the black points the world grinds into her mind. To love is to work with God, through God, in building the other person into who she really is. If you plant and she doesn't grow, well then, plant again. Time will tell you when it's off to find another spot of soil. If you are her gardener, and she is yours, then you are both eternally one.

Note well. Nota bene, as they say in Latin.

Philosophical Interlude

I don't understand nonexistence. So I'm wary of any sly atheist who self-justifies his rejection of God by saying that when we die, we are no more. What does "no more" mean here? It is nonsensical. We know the negation of something in the world, because we observe its negation. I see a soap bubble, oop, and I see it no more. But the negation of something in the world is infinitely different than the negation of that which makes somethings (and negations) possible -- namely, ourselves, consciousness.

Unlike the negation of objects, which we've known since consciousness first sparked into the universe, we've never known or experienced a negation of subjectivity. You can't experience nonexperience. You can say that we've all been unconscious, and very clearly we all have. It happens every night (unless you're an insomniac or in college). But this use of unconsciousness is to conflate neurobiological existence with consciousness existence, and is therefore misleading. I do not ("I" does not) exist without consciousness; therefore in the realm of sleep, we do not exist, save in timeless snippets afforded by a dreamworld.

But if we haven't experienced unconsciousness, if we know the negating of objects but not the negation of consciousness, then does it make any sense to say that when we die, we shall be "no more"? No, it doesn't. We know this intuitively; we know that nonexistence makes absolutely no ontological sense when speaking of the subject, but through a few words tied together we've come to an elusive conclusion that we do.

I'll go further. We don't fear death because we're secret sinners who haven't plucked out the correct divinity-appeasing formula and made amends with our conscience. We fear death because death makes absolutely no sense, as it should; because nonexistence is an empty concept -- a concept the mind oscillates between thinking it understands and correcting this misunderstanding through a return to intuition, frustratingly, painfully.

Two cures: one, a stubborn rationalistic delusion that thinks nonexistence is intelligible because it confuses objective and subjective existence. Already covered, not that interesting, fallacious. Two, the belief in everlasting life. Unsubstantiated, scientifically irrational, philosophically possible.

Well then, where does that leave us? You can't fear an absurdity, can you?

Glimmer

After hours of being ground by despair, alone, tragically isolated, hedged in with searing psychic pain and a deep, dark deadness -- I speak words of prayer through the florescently lit silence of my disorganized room, and a peace encloses me which transcends all understanding. If this is based in illusion, my dear atheists, I'm happy to be a hallucinating fool.

*

In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
-- Neruda

Grow Up

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd." -- Flannery O'Conner

What does it mean: to grow up?

To grow up means to cease to be a child; to fly past childhood, to the next level, the “next step.” Well, then what does it mean to be a child? A child is a person who is provided for, who doesn’t know his way, who is blooming into himself.

You are an adult, in worldly terms, if you provide, whether for yourself or for others. You are an adult if you make money, because money is the great provider. It doesn’t really matter how you make it, so long as you do make it; irrelevant if you put all of your being into acquiring money, relevant if you just reach it, even if it’s provided for you. So long as you keep the appearance of providing: that’s what matters.

So then: an adult isn’t one who provides, per se, but is one who has the means of providing -- who has money. Because this money can be the result of no real work -- chalking out routine, doing your job out of conditioning rather than authentic intending, thinking, suffering -- it isn’t necessary that the one who has it is responsible for having it. You are an adult only maybe if you have money.

So it goes.

The world reasons backwards: money, therefore he must be a hard worker, a decision maker, a diligent person, a worthy citizen; no money, therefore he must either be lazy or lost, time to get in line.

The Christian understanding of adulthood eschews appearance and dives inward: you are an adult if you -- really you -- make choices, if you struggle to be the person God has in mind for you. You are not an adult if you provide, you see, but if you yield to God as the provider, if you do His will, which is more than sufficient in providing. The problem, of course, is that to the world letting God provide is indistinguishable from not giving a damn.

There comes a time in every life -- many, many times for some -- where the choice between adulthood in the worldly sense and adulthood in the spiritual sense come into conflict. This choice is essentially one of appearance: whether to appear like you’re making choices and cashing in, or appear like you’re childishly aloof and really being authentically you.

I’m at this time in my life. Virtually everyone I know, most of whom I make an attempt to hide from, either explicitly or implicitly point out: be an adult, it’s time to grow up, time to make decisions. Stop screwing around and make money. Plan ahead, think of a family. Stop being aloof. Stop reading so much. Get back into society. Pick out a career; pick something and run with it. Stop wasting so much damn time.

But the outer isn’t the inner. I read a lot, in order that I might be who I am, that I might actually learn the layers of life instead of just greedily, passively passing by; in order that I might one day have the fuel to be a decent enough writer, transcending the excremental prose and sensationalistic plots of contemporary writing; in order that I might actually have something to say to someone, to teach them -- “what arrogance!” -- what it means to live. The world leaves no room for an individual’s in order that, unless it’s making money. Pure and simple.

Take a moment to observe the grownups. They have inner rings with small circumferences. They know routine, whether sports, television, gossip, church (without spirit), or anything you can think of. They claim to know decisions, but few of them ever make decisions, which is why routine is so pervasive. They know work, even intellectual work, but be it externalized, sweat-drenched, muscle-pumping work or internalized, intellectualized, brain-burdening work, it’s all analogous to an ox pulling a cart: on and on, go where routine compels you, don’t question why, enjoy your cheap rewards.

We speak of adults as ones who make decisions, who are independent, who provide, but really they don’t make decisions, they aren’t independent, and they don’t in the deepest sense provide. They pull the cart and call it decision making. They annul their independence by shacking themselves up in routine; take away the routine, throw them into a completely new situation, and they would die from despair. They provide in the sense that a falling stone thinks it’s providing its own fall. A child closes its eyes and thinks the big bad world is no longer there. An adult closes his eyes and calls it sight. Adults, see, are worse than children.

This rambling diatribe might simply be a warning. I warn you, reader: if you meet me in the outside world and I seem a little strange, uninspired, squandering possibilities, it’s probably because I’m interested in things like truth, meaning, and other moneyless routes. Should you try these things?

Well, do you want to grow up?