A Young Lee Strobel?

Quote

"God is not only a Father of all good things, as being their First Cause and Creator, but He is also their Mother, since He remains with the creatures which have from Him their being and existence, and maintains them continually in their being. If God did not abide with and in the creatures, they must necessarily have fallen back, so soon as they were created, into the nothingness out of which they were created." -- Meister Eckhart

Oop

"Paying taxes is like going to the zoo. Admission's 20 bucks. You can't walk in and go, 'here's $18.50, I don't like zebras.'" -- Jon Stewart

Thoughts of Depravity

Tell me,
When the day of death hits
And at last I'm floating free,
Far from clustered worries,
Far from wounded pride,
And the desperation of daily life,
Manic sighs of overgripped goodbyes,
And the perpetual fear of the leap
Into love, laughter, happiness, song,
Sadness, nakedness, loss, wonder.
When all these futile ruminations,
All these transferences of fear,
That shatter me in so many ways,
Like the death of once-vibrant hope
Shatters in so many ways human hearts,
When these are over with,
Tell me:

Who will I be?

Thanks, Roethke

For when within the gentle ride
Of life, and sour sin begins to glide
Down my tethered spine, broken
And half-awoken, past the chagrin
nerves, past the open eyes
That are mine, I try,
I try (I do) to bend the breeze
Before it tests me,
Before my soul is lost,
Before the glittering seas
Are gone, and all my glee
Handcuffed, for that's the cost --
Leap and pause, reflect, dear Faust --
That is the blatant, bloody, beaten cost.

That's Why

Because I suffer endlessly from the shivering uncertainty of indecision. Because I wish to hold the key and blueprint to every essential angle of my little languid life. Because I want to the point of unbeing.

For Stanley (After Eyes Wide Shut)

Watching Kubrick leaves me shattered in a foreign haze,
Shedding shadowed skin of my former knowing days,
When all unity of lulling lovely life came playing forward,
And every thought had a name, and every name a smiling gaze.
(Thank you for existing, now to sleep and dreams to hoard.)

Question and Answer (and The Power of Concision)

What distinguishes us from animals?

Being aware of being aware of being. In other words, if I not only know that I am but also know that I know it, then I belong to the human species. All the rest follows -- the glory of thought, poetry, a vision of the universe. In that respect, the gap between ape and man is immeasurably greater than the one between amoeba and ape. The difference between an ape's memory and human memory is the difference between an ampersand and the British Museum library.

-- Nabokov

Note

Xenophilia.

You should try it, Christians.

+1

"God made man in his own image, and man returned the compliment." -- Pascal

1,2,3

Problem: I'm on a perpetual quest to vindicate myself, to correct fictitious perceptions (nothing ever big enough, nothing ever fightworthy) as they haggle by the hundreds.

Solution: an extra dose of not-give-a-damn. Turn the trade away from self, toward the needful others.

Moral: to be misunderstood is to be human, and the false flutter by the millions, grasping for that impossible light, trading depth for the coolness of a comprehending crowd.

Concisely: let chaos be.

Pwnd

Couldn't resist this quintessential Chomsky rebuff. As usual, the genius floods his questioner with an abundance of historical information to the point of near absurdity in order to defend an intuitively accessible point (outside of the bewildered brains of the lasseiz-faire ideologues). That's fine and Chomsky. But what makes me laugh -- harder than anything this week so far -- is just how he shuts this ignorant college chit down within twenty seconds, between :40 and 1:00.



"It's a terrible argument, you know?"

A Quick Thought

I love the lush chase of an intellectual adventure -- the self-negating rush to the next point that contains the auspicious crawlings of evereternal truth. Time forgets me, hand in hand with my shady self, off to a foreign landing -- somewhere, no doubt, where suffering mounts, where dreams break and the bad blood of reality comes leaking through.

The feeling is an analog to going in for the kill. The animal in me is sublimated to a starry shore of abstractions. After all, we also think through blood, and thought is incorporeal killing -- of lies, untruth, and all other fads society consumes.

And commitment to truth -- beyond the partisan pandering, beyond the extrinsic rewards -- is justice toward God. Let me be just, oh God, and let the rush run. But let it not slide from my mind that justice without love is a dance without movement.

Yes

Wish me welcome, my brothers, from a strange silence choked with school and other useless negations. One word from the darkness, brothers:

The universe is freaking huge.

Horror!

To think that we're responsible for our happiness. Better to close this thought and go on with the deterministic scheme and be hit by transitory rarities of joy interspersed with long dark nights of pain. The one who wags his finger at God with a condemnatory curse for not providing has a parallel sigh reflected back on him. What is harder in the whole system of space and matter than to break the weight of passivity and push toward that shining euphoric shore?

Could the transition to happiness be a pathway of stubbornness?

You

You, oh you, are not another shade
Among selves who overcrowd this place.
Not another disposable smile,
Cellophane wrapped, emitting fumes
Of popular artificiality,
With monophonic ways that terrorize
This God-breathed world that's meant
To be a safehaven for uniqueness.
Oh no, for you are mine, and my taste
Is more than refined, so take note.
Any spotlight that doesn't reveal you
Has its punishment sealed in with the act.
For you are a labyrinth of resplendent songs,
Each one a feast for my appreciative soul,
The echoes alone reason enough to smile.

On Life (Versified)

I want to taste the fullness of life,
Bottom to top, all angles covered,
To scrape the roots
Of poverty, and thank God
For a single shabby bed
While I drink an elegant wine
And Tchaikovsky
Paints the auricular landscape
With solemn stubborn joy.
I’d like the fears of a murderer
Juxtaposed with the sunshine
Laziness of bourgeoisie yawns.
I want the victory mixed
With defeat, and defeat
Victorious over victory.
The stars I’d prefer to dance
With the crystal tops
Of mountains, as I sing
Praises to the Creator
Who knows the same as me.
For the singular is a disease,
A foreign language of existence,
And if I say yes, then I say yes
To all: with open arms,
No worries or complaints,
No doubt or self-swallowing misery,
For to breathe is our sole victory,
And despair our only wretched enemy.

Wow

Dallas Willard on his intellectual biography: "My Journey to and Beyond Tenure in a Secular University."


Sort of makes you want to, like, resign your ego.

Yes, That Must

Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife, catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me pa
That must be what it's all about

Criticism

Meaning is more often negative than positive, fleshing itself out as ideological parasitism. Few live for something, but instead live for the (oftentimes cynical) destruction of an idea.

Fanatical politics lives for criticism of the other side. The same with religion, which constantly attacks dissenters -- religiously, politically, sexually, etc. -- as a substitute for fulfilling the (unknown, unattended to, uncared for) will of God. The same even with counter-religious non-theistic movements, which have their being in murdering what they see as the irrationality of faith. To be human is to destroy.

The worst thing conceivable to the critical religious-minded is a world where everyone believes what they do. No one to condemn (while secretly thanking that they are condemnable, for reasons of power), nothing to disagree with, now what? And if everyone divorced themselves from the so-called silliness of faith and embraced a post-enlightenment enthusiasm for reason and science, well, it's off to a heavier focus on the disagreements within humanistic ideas.

The easy way out is to bitch and complain.

SK

In the beginning there was no Christian at all.

Then everyone became a Christian -- and that's why once again there is no Christian.

That was the end. Now we are at the beginning again.

God and Fairy Tales

Underappreciated Oxford theologian Alister McGrath asks very bluntly if atheism is not in fact a delusion about God. This came at an appropriate place: the concluding sentence to his anti-Dawkins manifesto, The Dawkins Delusion? The book isn't spectacular, but this point is decidedly pertinent. Too many non-theists who criticize religion have skewed concepts about God, even if their attacks on religion are warranted. My favorite infamous example: well, there may be no evidence against the existence of God, but neither is there evidence against unicorns or leprechauns, so what's the point, man? The pulse behind this claim isn't rational, but purely rhetorical. And you'd be surprised at how prevalent this opinion is, almost always in the hands of non-philosophers, and that's good enough reason to investigate further.

The problem is that unicorns and leprechauns, and all other make believe fantasies, carry with them emotional tags that lead one toward incredulity to begin with. They're invented entities, and that's why. Nobody believes in leprechauns not because there is no evidence for them, but because they're fairy tales to begin with, and nobody sane juxtaposes fairy tales with serious metaphysical possibilities. Without secretly begging the question, of course. Substituting fairy tales with purely possible phenomena that haven't been validated but don't evoke incredulity is more appropriate. There is no proof for extraterrestrials, but the expansiveness of the cosmos provides plausible ground for its possibility. Not surprisingly, folk like Dawkins et al. hold this very position.

Analogously with God. There is no proof for Him, but the metaphysical conditions of existence make Him fair play as a possibility. What matters is fittedness, or how well a claim explains an overall picture of reality. And so far as this is the case, God is as good or better a claim than an eternal universe without Him. There is no evidence, correct, but metaphysical claims don't coincide with evidence. They look before evidence. They constitute the ground on which sensory conclusions rest. To ask for evidence for God carries no better substance than asking for evidence of evidence.

The real problem is religious presuppositions, and given that religion deals to a degree with falsifiable claims, any claim it makes that is knocked down by science should be knocked down. Part of the reason why God is in eclipse (as Buber claimed) is because too many religious individuals are ignorant of where science stands and how strong its claims on certain subjects are (including their own falsifiable ones), and they childishly confuse a religious experience as proof of God that they think legitimizes their contempt for non-religious worldviews.

So the unicorn-based rhetorical hogwash is somewhat appropriate, even if it's ultimately fallacious. It's just as fallacious to say that God exists because there is no proof against Him. All the same, non-theistic counterarguments need to keep the ground free from hidden question begging with imaginatively constructed examples. The most logically feasible approach to any theistic standing is silence. When presented with the question "why" in view of God's existence as a metaphysical starting point, the only ground to tread is personal experience, which itself entails assumptions as well (notably the validity of intuition). Grace, if there is such a thing, draws through a reflection off of the heart, not the insatiable intellect.

Faith and Misunderstanding

I've come to learn that there's no end in atheistic dismissive complacency when it comes to faith -- an epistemic bugaboo from popular atheistic standing that needs to end, that is a disease to us and our world, that in the words of the eloquent ferocity of Christopher Hitchens "poisons everything". However, the way to end something you don't like that has an emotional attachment by living, breathing human beings isn't to botch your terms, thereby giving even the ignorant of the faithful a chance to rile up their emotions in claiming that faith is nothing of the kind. I found another atheist misunderstanding the theistic worldview, this time by a chap named Massimo Pigliucci, a professor with three -- yes, three -- doctorates, one of which is in philosophy. His most recent subject is "faith and reason", and not once does he reference Aquinas, James, or any other theistic superhero in unrutting a working definition for faith. No, his hands are enough in fashioning his own understanding.

According to Pigliucci, faith "means that one believes something regardless or even in spite of the evidence." Right away I'm left involuntarily recalling Dawkins' ill-suited definition from The Selfish Gene over thirty years ago: where faith means "blind trust, in the absence of evidence, even in the teeth of evidence." The fact that Pigliucci has such a clear Dawkinsian aftertaste only points out pedestrian stolidness on his part. Faith is not defined by its ability to deny. Only scientists with question begging tendencies or those who conflate a word's connotative meaning with its historical associations would ever define faith in such a way as Dawkins and Pigliucci do.

He then goes on to dismiss himself from any association with faith in secular contexts. Faith in your wife, Dr. Pigliucci? "No, I trust her because I know her and know that she loves me." Then what on earth is faith if it isn't trust-based? Twenty seconds perusing through a Greek lexicon with the Greek term for faith (pistis) will lead to the conclusion that its morphological root is the exact same as the Greek term for belief (pisteuo), and that both of these words heavily imply trust or (closely related to this) commitment. And belief is exactly what Pigliucci claims faith isn't, with his example regarding his belief in evolution, which he claims is legit given that it coincides with evidence.

Well, as it stands, and much to the contrary of sloppy theological rambling, belief as we understand it as a synonym for faith is decidedly not belief in at least the Judaeo-Christian tradition. Belief for the Jews and early Christians was existential, ours intellectual; theirs was the trust associated with a person rather than an idea or system of thought, while ours was precisely this. Still, belief (in the contemporary, intellectual sense), Pigliucci says, can be held "in proportion to the available evidence and reasons in their favor." Yes, it can. But this just isn't how the word is used. Alan Watts went as far to understand belief as "the insistence that the truth is what one would "lief" or wish it to be." There's an element of uncertainty in belief that fails the scientific thirst for certainty, and is all the more emphatic with regard to acceptance and agnosticism.

Even the age-old question of the existence of an external world to our senses isn't a matter of faith for Pigliucci. That's an assumption taken up for pragmatic reasons, he says -- namely, the reason that one would be no better off than insanity without accepting it. This is a point that glimmers, much to his credit, and few without philosophical training would ever put it this way. As far as pragmatism and assumptions go, he's absolutely right. But assumption is the heart of faith, and faith (as generic trust) itself is the working out of assumption. Faith in the deepest sense, not as generic trust (which could include trust in metaphysical assumptions) but as existential trust also involves the working out of a philosophical assumption: namely that one's intuition is sufficient in mediating religious experience as valid, and if intuition is thrown out, reason itself, which is continually validated by it, would be out the door as well. It's not so much a matter of doctrine, and anyone who limits faith to objectivity rather than existential encounter is only waiting for a rational or scientific whipping, and it's no shock that so many religious individuals coil up in aggressive fear when their belief systems are barraged by scientific thought. What they love is being ruined. Lay not up for yourselves treasures on earth.

Now, I'm not at all going to deny that religion is in eclipse, or that God to the Western mind is drifting to a doze, what with more people than ever coming out of a cognitive closet in confessing a downright unbelief in anything related to religiosity. More power to them. In line with where Hitchens stands, unbelief has historically been forced to the closet because of the madness and fulminating intolerance of the religious faithful who idolize their ideas rather than ascertain God through conscience, and given this unbelief might not have been as much a minority position that bloomed into the world so recently as one would like to think. I don't doubt it.

When people don't have the freedom to think on the side of the antithesis of faith, they usually end up becoming the nasty believers that people like Hitchens justly and contemptuously attack. It's not so much faith that's the criminal, as if human beings were so passive as to be corrupted by scribbles in an antiquated book (though the matter is different when flesh and blood authorities enforce their views on the innocent). It's the inability of the brain to breathe that's to blame. Feeble faith -- which so notoriously limits itself to faith in dogma, rather than faith in God, pre-rationally but by no means absolutely anti-rationally -- deserves to have the freedom to be rebelled against, and one of the main reasons for so much sour-faced repugnance for the religion of one's youth these days is that there is too often no freedom to rebel against what a collection of intolerant God-touters foment without severe stigmatic consequences.

Let the rebels rebel. My favorite thought tacked to this relates to a pack of bloodthirsty Calvinists (a modification, not a characterization; not all Calvinists are bloodthirsty) I was speaking with a while back. As usual, they were phenomenally ticked that a "heretic" they were speaking of could dare to rebel against God by believing in something like free will or, tee, objective scriptural criticism, and they were becoming more and more inconsolably angry over God's "truth" being rejected the more they thought of him. As if God couldn't fend for Himself. If religion would only learn to shut up when people choose what it views as perdition and let God be God according to its own damnable dogma, things would be a million times better. The sword dropped in the name of Christ is done not from authentic, existentially trust-based faith (which is necessarily conscience-driven), but from the most brutal unfaith in one's comprehension-sponsored, pathetic scriptural worship so ridiculously confused with faith. It's like the "believers" can't even keep to their own rules. Or they don't really believe them to begin with.

Of course, if instead of wasting away on theological rabbit trails they actually did such blindingly evident commandments first like loving their enemies, praying for the lost, and in all things eschewing grumbling and disputation, being perpetually patient and dovelike in the spirit of Christ, and, oh, well, I can see that now I'm losing even the choir.

Two Truths

Two ideas to salvage for comfort if ever I'm stranded on a metaphysical island.

"God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him" (1 John 4:16)
"Our nature is founded in movement; absolute stillness is death" (Pascal).

*Possible Greek lexicon for the term "love".

Loss

So seductively easy to lose myself in real glowing moments of blistering happiness, God-given moments of happiness, blessings in the truest sense of the word -- over my clarified life meaning, over the ones I love, over my abilities, over even my spiritual maturation -- and lose God completely, and not even think about Him until the end of the day when silence inevitably catches me. Then I know why these moments of happiness have spaces, why there is even an abiding sense of anxiety that underlies all of it, why I can't enjoy them as fully as I can. You can be happy and in elated awe at the polyphonic goodness of life, and yet still not have any real engagement with it, still not have a deeply spiritual, will-based love of it. She dances with you, scintillating in her glory, but are you really taking your turn to share the lead?

On Relating

A real psychologist, who has the skill to understand the mountains and valleys of others in the moment, is almost antithetical to the psychologist on paper -- the researcher, the professor. A lot of people make this mistake. You're good at reading people, you have a knack for personality theories, you love the sacred interaction between two souls, and you love being the healer in person's history that has had little else but tormentors and microstessors -- well then, I'm going to study psychology. But you'd be surprised. This intuitive, caring compass for others gets buried away in latency, or at the very least severely mediated, by statistical analyses, hours of research, experimental and control groups, speculation with experts, main effect or no main effect, type type type your twenty-eight pages, prayers for publication.

This is all vital, but a therapist needs warm bodies, as much as the selves who own these bodies need him. The therapist contains the remnants of the archetypal sage. There's something terribly sacred here. All other life is hustle and bustle, self annihilation in worries and work, kids and spouses, love and loss. The therapist genuinely smiles as she opens the door for her client, and even though the sheer insanity of society pours through, the moment the lock clicks all these poisonous fumes dissolve away. Now we're alone. Now we can talk. Now there's intimacy, and with it the lucidity of pure relation and the beginnings of the God-only-knows power of being born again to wholeness. Oh, clients are rarely ever that collaborative, but that's the direction, contrary to all other directions the world prefers -- directions that lead to looking beyond, to self concealment, to the loss of really feeling others in the moment, to fear of loving and being loved, to fear of living. Simply walking this sanctified direction is the right way, towards listening to yourself, towards the salvation of personal meaning. It's the contagious world that's broken first. And it's the simple act of being there that convinces the needful that they're not as lost as they believe. This being there, this listening and carefully responding, this value of the other beyond his constituents of personality -- that's really love, isn't it? Therapists are professional lovers.

Ridiculous

All this week I've been looking beyond a concrete beyond, into the sheer insanity of possibilities. It's not, as it should be, "what will I emphasize as a therapist for the next two years, what will my thesis be, how will I develop my skills before practicum?" but rather a complete bypass of this flesh carrying future into plans for doctoral work in what and where, plans for licensure in psychology, plans for research in preferred areas. And then I come back to myself in bewilderment, smiling ironically at how much the child element still sticks around no matter how many rungs up the latter of maturity I've climbed, and find God smiling too as an eternal word benevolently sears my soul: you're a fiction writer first, you know.

What did I lack in all this baseless planning? Not intelligence, prudence, modesty, calculation, resignation, but one very basic, all-important thing. Myself. All this long-term, far-sighted planning is an escape from becoming who we're meant to be. We're cowards and so we clamber towards a cold but clear futurity, away from the healing embers of sacrificial selfhood.

Therapy; or, Wisdom in Movement

Once, an elderly general practitioner consulted me because of his severe depression. He could not overcome the loss of his wife who had died two years before and whom he had loved above all else. Now how could I help him? What should I tell him? I refrained from telling him anything, but instead confronted him with a question, "What would have happened, Doctor, if you had died first, and your wife would have had to survive you?:" "Oh," he said, "for her this would have been terrible; how she would have suffered!" Whereupon I replied, "You see, Doctor, such a suffering has been spared her, and it is you who have spared her this suffering; but now, you have to pay for it by surviving and mourning her." He said no word but shook my hand and calmly left the office.
-- Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

Cont.

And what is the pulse behind this doubt? That I am eclectic to the core, a mastermind, and my intellectual curiosity has spoiled me. Yet the world thrives on the singular. Try Pascal again: it is better to learn a little of everything than a lot of one thing. Not these days! My curse: I know a modest amount of everything, and everything tantalizes me to a potential career. But I must choose one thing or two, because the world thrives on the singular. I am a rainbow in a monochrome world.

But the devil of the crowd mocks back, filling the cracks of semivictorious silence: the world thrives on the singular.

Doubt

This is my year of doubt. More than any other time in my life uncertainty, trepidation, insecurity, and all associated psychosomatic bedfellows have harassed my footsteps like a starving stray dog. And yet, so very interestingly, this has been my year of signs, in the purest divine sense.

Let me tell you about signs, ye contemplative theists. Signs do nothing to crystallize faith. At their most useful, signs satisfy the insatiable hunger pangs of doubt, but only if this doubt has a glimmer of faith to save it. They've pulled me out of an extrinsic depression, where my center was sanctified through faith and I still had a hope that couldn't reach the periphery of myself, at very important times. I doubted to the point where I was choked with my thoughts; then a sigh became my prayer, and lo, an impossible coincidence drifted from the world and saved me. Euphoria was reborn, and everything seemed right.

But only for a season. I find myself looking back on signs as coincidences, like a crestfallen lover looking back on his moments of passion while bitterly labeling them empty, even though they truly were earth shattering moments of life unrutting itself to smile at him. I know they weren't just coincidences. But that doesn't matter: I need a cure now, and if I had faith at the moment of thoughts like these, thoughts like these would be entirely superfluous. Faith provides its own inner proof. The heart has its reasons which the heart knows not, as Pascal scintillatingly said.

Signs dance with doubt because -- it has to be -- I am being pressed to my limit, because this is the crucial time that determines the outcome. Yet if I had a faith that pervaded every second of who I am, I wouldn't even need signs, would I? I need signs because I overvalue the finite, and this only because I'm not moving toward eternity. Once again I have to catch myself and backhand the flaccid fear that tags me: off to hell, world. What comes, comes, and I'm doing the only thing I can.

Leap before you look, child. It's all Maya anyways.

Forgetting

What is a quality of God that we as human beings find hardest to imitate?

Forgetting. We forget the power of forgetting, of how liberating it is to let not the past of ourselves go, but to let the regret and guilt over our past go, and this is the heart of forgiveness. The one who forgets can look to his darkest moments of personal history without mistaking a speck of his own self with what he remembers. That's the fallacy in keeping our guilt over past mistakes: we assume we are the person we once were. And we're not. I am not the same comprehensive self of twenty seconds ago, though the clothing of my personality would fool me into thinking otherwise. I am my freedom, and my freedom is my I.

Woe unto the man who cannot forget his bloodstained past. The thought of that hassles him mercilessly, and so he spends his time in endless distractions, cluttered up in beer bottles and the miasma of captivating television, snatching every chance he has to hide his fearful past with friends or work or money or things . He is torn between running and letting his exhaustion find rest by quitting and staring the demon in its face. One day, dredged out in the cold misery of melancholy, enveloped by the night and the radiating sound of a fearless cricket singing to the outer world, he does just this. He quits. He comes to find, to his shock, that standing firmly on his feet and digesting all angles of his now remote past allows him to -- breathe. He no longer fears what he did in running from it. In resignation he realizes that there is a future. He takes a step on the path of futurity while simultaneously slapping away his past, and suddenly the demon is stolen by a breeze just weak enough to caress his hair.

Forgetting takes a life of discipline in the face of divine grace. The reason we don't forget our past is because we're too regretfully enmeshed with it to even realize that it needs to be let go, and that our refusal to confront what haunts our steps prevents us from grasping who we are to become through the future. Our power to forget is shrouded with moments of forgetting that we contain the ability to forget.

God is capable of forgetting the sins of our past without forgetting our past. What is it to seek forgiveness but to seek to forget our past? It isn't so much that we need to ask God for forgiveness in order for Him to do so. Turn it around. We need to ask God's forgiveness to be fully capable of forgiving ourselves, of realizing that heavenly forgetting is already one step ahead of us. God needs no words as a formulaic condition in order to act in forgiveness; He only needs repentance, your prodigal turning away from the negation of sin back to the shimmering destiny God has in mind for you. The moment you have prayed for repentance with a sincere heart you already have forgiveness, for God hears your heart in immediacy, and your words are always working, sweat-drenched with acid lungs, to catch up.

Sign

I saw the dead spirit of humanity on a minute market window today. Bold, ominous red letters brightened by the sun: NO SMOKING. Not even a full inch below it: a smoking advertisement. Moral: don't do this here, but kill yourself elsewhere, chop chop, off you go, leave me alone.

On Fallen Preachers

Ah, Ted Haggard. Mammoth prosperity as a preacher of the nondenominational New Life Church in Colorado Springs. I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't happily sit down and have coffee with him. Personality warm enough for the half-lookers. Funny, by all accounts paid real attention to his individual listeners, intelligent, kind, with a masterful preaching style and exegetical skills. He was also stone cold anti-homosexuality in the lawbook of his teachings. Nothing new; see the religious right (with a few exceptions).


We'll ignore for the moment that there's no explicit support for condemnation of homosexuality in either Old or New Testaments, and that's putting the case very generously. Leviticus with its arbitrary laws ideal for a community at a particular place and time: homosexuality warnings juxtaposed with prohibitions for haircuts (Lev. 19:28) and polyester (v. 19). The story of Sodom and Gomorrah and Lot in Genesis 19, which has absolutely no negative value stance toward homosexuality in the story, though the ignored or unlooked-at Ezekiel 16:49-50 points out the sins of Sodom in a list sharp enough to cut glass: pride, gluttony, "prosperous ease", refusal to aid the poor and needy. They were depraved, yes, and rape -- homosexual or not -- is a spiritual and ethical no-no. As Gordon Atkinson (aka Real Live Preacher) would have it, "let's all say it together, 'God doesn't like rape.' You could have listened to your heart and learned that, Christian. Move on." Yes, move on. Romans 1? Well, homosexuality is mentioned there as a subset of a deeper problem: paganistic sensuality. That's different, I'm afraid, than condemning homosexuality itself. And I'm also afraid that I didn't keep my promise to ignore.

But Haggard. Well. He didn't like homosexuality. He wanted the positive breaths of his clique against his back as he condemned the world. And what happened? Why, it turns out he's not simply a homosexual, but an adulterous methamphetamine user who solicited sex from a male prostitute. He had sex with his wife while drugged up. His church attempted a cover-up. He was a good guy with an otherwise harmless secret that he could have been open to accepting, but instead turned out pretty bad. I don't like muckraking unless there's a point to be applied, so we'll stick to the story.

What's the driving force behind the conspiratorial walk that Haggard once cleverly concealed? He isn't alone. Jimmy Swaggart walked the route with solicited sex toward a prostitute in a pornography decked-out hotel room. Jim Bakker walked through allegations of rape and financial exploitation and came out blood red at the end. They're all preachers who preached well -- respected, talented, apparently ideal. They all fell because the law was loved before love itself. And there are millions upon millions of others, preachers or not, Christians by name, who carry the same inward decay clothed with immaculate whitewashed walls.

People like Haggard have flesh. He occupies space. Imagine him sitting in his recliner in his living room the day after his church was told, trance-like, trembling inwardly over his humiliation. Imagine him constrained with anxiety over what to say to his wife and children, and how fearful he must have felt as he thought of the barbs his friends he once shared a sparkling ideology with would throw at him, the coldest of all indifference and unconcern. Imagine the deathly old age that painted his middle-aged face as he carried the world on his shoulders. There's always a second scandal with every scandal: that all of humanity holds dark secrets and only a handful of individuals get dropped into the morbid spotlight, bewailed and destroyed by a world just as inwardly thrilled over the stimulation a secret like this brings as it is externally paternal in its culprit rage. When scandals happen, I loathe the hot-trot lookers more than the emasculated looked-at. That's what Jesus did, but I would feel this way in a world without a Christ-contained history.

Haggard's former spirit hovers over every denomination flirting on the continuum whose extreme is Pharisaism. Every preacher whose highest value is less than love, who preaches love in the abstract, or not at all, who relies on the relative intelligence of the mind over the universal bathing power of the heart in choosing verses to support spiritual murder. Perhaps he is learning love at this very moment, even if his mind is sledding away from God. I hope.

You see, people like Haggard have the last judgment on earth. The true human beings (and Christians among them) never changed their inner love for him, before or after the fact. They, the amiable minority, are the innocent, and the rest of the world is in for bad times. I exult in a last judgment, not because I want the wicked or weak to be unveiled, but because I want the ill-treated to fit back into the universally human. Guilt plagues our past but the future holds our innocence, and she is always there, smiling brightly at our side. Blessed are the uncovered, for with them eternity is downhill. "Nothing is covered up that will not be uncovered, and nothing secret that will not become known" (Matthew 10:26). Lord, let it be.

Life, def.

[lahyf], noun, plural lives [lahyvz], adjective, verb

-noun

1. biology. The condition that distinguishes organisms from inorganic objects and dead organisms, being manifested by growth through metabolism, reproduction, and the power of adaptation to environment through changes originating internally.
2. movement, change, becoming; goal-oriented clusters of atomic material.
3. anthropology. Spirit applied to flesh. See "freedom", "pain", "overcoming".
4. pseudoHeideggerian. Unlostness, unfloatedness, authenticity; untrammeled, intimate relation to being.
5. mysticism. The state of not giving a damn, and in not giving, receiving: Abraham believed God, and so Isaac became his life, even at the crucial time.
   
6. unbridled, tear-blessed, exuberant, unspeakable thankfulness: "If the only prayer you say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough" (Meister Eckhart).
7. a person or thing that enlivens, animates. See "woman", "madness", "Lindsey", etc.
   
8. metaphor. State of electricity; becoming towards electricity.

-adjective

1. eclectic, broad, unconfined, without limit.
2. the quality of lasting: he had a life-fueled love.
3. of or pertaining to animate existence.
   

-verb

1. to backhand one's trials for the sake of a higher iridescent victory: he lived [past tense].
   
2. to leave love in one's footsteps, transcend the worry for others' eyes, to take what is given to you, to love even what causes you to stumble. See "exuberance", "God", the emanating stranger across your apartment lawn.
3. to be; I mean really, truly to be.
   
4. ______________ (insert yourself here)

Love

The only way to value fully the person we love: in losing them. In having them we cannot value them fully: we are too busy consuming them.

A Prayer For You

Take it coldly as it stands:
The world is dark and broken
When loves are ripped in half
And goodness unawoken.
Though sadness kills and drains,
A hidden Father's warmth remains.
Where silence dwells, attend,
For quiet whispers lie within.

Ignorance

None of us knows what we have. The human, all too human, the base, everything from sickness, wars, greed, wrath, disappointment, despair, pessimism -- every single darkness on the horizon of existence -- thrives on this ignorance. We have everything, for all life blazes with originality and wonder. We have paradise, but none of us realize it. We are tragedians. We deserve death from pity.

The excommunicated are those who realize what we have. The landscape of humanity is deathly cold; you have only God for a durative friend, and God might not even exist. You have silence, but the world distracts with echoes. You have the truth, but only a handful of souls to share it with. This truth is not a doctrine, not a dance between abstractions, but truth in the Heideggerian sense: truth as unconcealment of being, as the mystical revelation of what really is there. We find truth by experience, but the world sucks on words.

How can we communicate? Love is our only weapon, and warmth our only invitation. Happiness trails in our footsteps, and blessed are those who take the time to notice. For our clothes are bedraggled, but our hearts are overflowing.

Well Well Well Well Well

William Zantzinger dies on January 3rd. By all accounts no better than Dylan's dark poetic portrayal over forty years ago. Exhibit:

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll -- Bob Dylan

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger
At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.
And the cops were called in and his weapon took from him
As they rode him in custody down to the station
And booked William Zanzinger for first-degree murder.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

William Zanzinger, who at twenty-four years
Owns a tobacco farm of six hundred acres
With rich wealthy parents who provide and protect him
And high office relations in the politics of Maryland,
Reacted to his deed with a shrug of his shoulders
And swear words and sneering, and his tongue it was snarling,
In a matter of minutes on bail was out walking.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchen.
She was fifty-one years old and gave birth to ten children
Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn't even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level,
Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room,
Doomed and determined to destroy all the gentle.
And she never done nothing to William Zanzinger.
But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom,
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin' that way without warnin'.
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished,
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence.
Oh, but you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.

Problem

I have a problem. I am interested in everything, passionate for a million things, and good enough at half a million. Why is this a problem? Because the vast majority of things in the world are useless from the vantage of society, and the few useful things float to the top like chips of pretty wood in water. I like the few but prefer the collection, and the most precious metals hide at the base.

The average Joe is propelled to fit social orthodoxy: get a job, marriage, children, debt. He would be too miserable, swimming in his boredom, without this bourgeois ideal. He is propelled to what society calls success because, quite simply, he doesn't know how to use his time. His is a state of perpetual becoming without footing, like a ghost who floats across the ground. He is not happy in all things, but abstracts happiness to hand-me-down social standards. He can't live in the moment, for to him the moment is purely a state of fortune, of what happens to him, and he has no training in perception to see every bit of the world as it is.

What if you're interested in everything? Then there is no longer that abstracted becoming. You can be happy, blessedly happy, by becoming absorbed in the duties of the instant. But objectively, from the perspective of everyone else caught in the disease of bourgeois living, you are a heretic or a lazy ass. You need to make money, because money is a form of power and security, which are in turn based in a serious desire to be accepted and find one's place in the good regards of the collection of others that form of a society. If you don't want to make money, you are in effect saying that you don't need the world, and what greater secular blasphemy is that?

The self sufficient individual is always a bit of a riddle, even if he claims God to be on his side.

On Gardening

If I have one essential word to speak to intellectuals, it is this: You are not your own.

All greatness of thought, all imperviousness of depth, all incalculable height of imagination -- these are initial seeds planted not by yourself. They are givens, effects of the shared chromosomes of parents you couldn't choose, that dance between fortune and the contingency of choice involved with their meeting. You have the glory of gardening these planted mounds of personality, of asserting your freedom and nurturing these seeds into a graded existence, whether immaculate or halfhearted or some infinitesimal point inbetween. But you cannot take responsibility for what is planted. You are only a gardener, and as gardeners we are all equal. From the least and most neglected, to the greatest founts of admiration.

Humility is not a choice, but a realization.

Dylanologists, Be Proud

You try to tell her what to do
and all she does is stare at you
her stare is louder than your voice
because truth doesn't make a noise
-- The White Stripes

[Not a Religious Poem]

Lionized by ways the world uncurls,
In coldness kept by darkness bloomed,
We huddle up, our warmth unfurled,
And dream the wonder of the moon.
Men and women of the secret,
Ever pitched with focused eyes,
Fully conscious of the skit
The world incessantly retries --
So we are and so we stay
With love and laughter, unafraid,
Until the breaking of the day,
And night brings angels to our aid.

The Pastor Said It Rightly

Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.
-- Richard J. Foster

Escape

What to do with all this time? The spaces between are what we escape from or create from. And you can never really escape, because the escape always lies dormant, clandestine, hidden in your eyes, there for the world to see. Thankfully the world is too busy hiding to see.

Thankfully, that is, tragically.