Journal

“God’s sign is the baby in need of help and in poverty.  Exactly the same sign has been given to us … God’s sign is simplicity … God’s sign is that he makes himself small for us.  This is how he reigns.  He does not come with power and outward splendor.  He comes  as a baby – defenseless and in need of our help.  He does not want to overwhelm us with his strength.  He takes away our fear of his greatness.  He asks for our love:  so he makes himself a child.  He wants nothing other from us than our love, through which we spontaneously learn to enter into his feelings, his thoughts, and his will – we learn to live with him and to practice with him that humility of renunciation that belongs to the very essence of love.  God made himself small so that we could understand him, welcome him, and love him … Christmas has become the Feast of gifts in imitation of God who has given himself to us.  Let us allow our heart, our soul, and our mind to be touched by this fact!” (Pope Benedict XVI)

“Why shouldn’t Christ be able to rise from the dead? When I myself determine what is allowed to exist, and what isn’t, I define the boundaries of possibility…It is an act of intellectual arrogance for us to declare that [resurrection] is absurd…It is not our business to declare how many possibilities are latent in the cosmos…God wanted to enter this world. God didn’t want us to have only a distant inkling of him through physics and mathematics. He wanted to show himself…so he created a new dimension of existence in the resurrection.” (Pope Benedict XVI)

Quote from The SEAL Sensibility, by Lt. Cmdr Eric Greitens

“What kind of man makes it through Hell Week? That’s hard to say. But I do know—generally—who won’t make it. There are a dozen types that fail: the weight-lifting meatheads who think that the size of their biceps is an indication of their strength, the kids covered in tattoos announcing to the world how tough they are, the preening leaders who don’t want to get dirty, and the look-at-me former athletes who have always been told they are stars but have never have been pushed beyond the envelope of their talent to the core of their character. In short, those who fail are the ones who focus on show. The vicious beauty of Hell Week is that you either survive or fail, you endure or you quit, you do—or you do not.

Some men who seemed impossibly weak at the beginning of SEAL training—men who puked on runs and had trouble with pull-ups—made it. Some men who were skinny and short and whose teeth chattered just looking at the ocean also made it. Some men who were visibly afraid, sometimes to the point of shaking, made it too.

Almost all the men who survived possessed one common quality. Even in great pain, faced with the test of their lives, they had the ability to step outside of their own pain, put aside their own fear and ask: How can I help the guy next to me?”

I’ve had occasion to spend time visiting others in hospitals lately. While spending a week with my father during his heart surgery recently I was given to reflect on the nature of greatness. “That is a great person,” said of one. “Please meet my daughter – she is a great woman,” said another. What makes a person great? I think most anyone, if asked if they would like to be known as great at some point in their life, would respond in the affirmative.

I believe everyone has had, or will have, moments of greatness. Not greatness in athletic endeavors or greatness in personal achievements, but greatness where it matters most – in the eyes of another person, perhaps I should say for another person. Because I believe greatness is simply this: achieving self-transcendence through the gift of self. In modern parlance: giving yourself so completely to others that you attain self-forgetfulness. This is the path to freedom.

I believe we instinctively search for experiences which seem to offer self-forgetfulness: alcohol (’to forget about life for awhile’), drugs, immoderate time in the helping professions, sex. Sex, the most natural way humans achieve an experience of self-transcendence, is perverted if what is sought is self-gratification with little or no interest in the other (if there even is another). Liberation cannot be achieved through gratification, only selflessness. This doesn’t make gratification wrong, it simply isn’t the vehicle for achieving freedom from self since it doesn’t take us outside ourselves. Only another person can effect that.

I was standing on a corner sidewalk with my bicycle recently. A driver honked their horn at me and gave me the bird with an angry glare. I have no idea what caused that, it was a random act of hate. I had been on the sidewalk the entire time and in no way interfered with that man. My instinct of course was to respond in kind, but I didn’t. Instead I thought about greatness. Odds are, to someone somewhere that man has been or will be great. There will likely be a time when he performs some act and a stranger, friend or family member will think of him: “this is a great man.” I thought about that and it put that foolish act of hatred in perspective. And I found myself thinking “good for him. He has, or will have, a moment when he loves completely.” I didn’t see the sum of who he was in that angry act toward me – far from it.

If there is a God, and I believe there is, he must by definition be great. And if he is great, he is perpetually great, for he does not change. Therefore he is continually outwardly considerate (but by doctrine cannot transcend himself). “Not a sparrow falls to the ground without God noticing.” (Matthew 10.29) And of course to paraphrase, “God was so recklessly loving that he sent his only son to us.” (John 3.16) He also washed our feet.  What kind of God notes the death of every bird, sends his son to us even though he knew we’d murder him, and bends down and washes our feet? One which requires a childlike heart to accept. One so scandalous in his selflessness that the proud must turn elsewhere to find a god which matches their image of what a god should be. Sadly, they are plentiful.

“Limited but good evidence for specific probiotics” – a 1995 report finds that some probiotics can help with some conditions

The penchant to do our own will, to have things our own way, to follow our own designs, is our inherited disorder. In various places in the scriptures this is called stubbornness.

It is interesting to note that what was once seen as punishment – being left alone by God to follow one’s own wishes – is today seen as desirable. We are like the Gadarene townspeople who begged Jesus to leave their neighborhood. He was bringing change and the revelation of the kingdom of God but they only wanted to be left alone. (Matthew 8.34) God respects our desire to keep him shut out. He even respects our desire to find the light on our own, without him. But trying to find life without possessing life is an impossibility. Jesus, in what seems to be patently obvious but in practice is existentially terrifying, says that to follow him we must stop following ourselves. (Matthew 16.24-26)

There are many historical metaphors related to trusting our own thoughts about things instead of obeying God. One of the best is when the Israelites were in the desert after their departure from Egypt. They were given manna to eat and told to gather only enough for that day. They welcomed the manna but mistrusted the provider of it and stored some up for the next day. It bred worms, became foul and incurred the anger of Moses. Then on the sabbath they were told there would be none since they were given a double helping the day before so they might rest on the sabbath. They searched for it anyway, this time incurring the anger of God. (Exodus 16.16-29) The next time you tell someone it’s a sunny day outside and they go check for themselves anyway, consider how God feels. And he is far more trustworthy than you.

Gathering Manna

Another historical example is that of King Saul. When he was facing the approaching might of the Philistine army he offered up the sacrifice himself instead of waiting for Samuel as he was told. But prophets offer sacrifices, not kings. When Samuel arrived he told Saul that because of that act of stubbornness God would take his throne and give it to one after His own heart. Saul followed Saul’s heart, not God’s. No man can have two masters. (1 Samuel 13.8-14)

Centuries later men sought to follow Jesus but they first wanted to conclude business transactions, attend funerals and tidy up their life. He sent them home. Moses was told to strike a rock with his staff and water would come out for the people. He struck it. Then in a mistrusting move that would cost him his own entrance into the promised land, he struck it again just to make sure. He was dearly loved by God, with whom he spoke face to face, so his punishment probably ought to be seen more as a warning to us than as a vindictive act by God. It will be impossible to enter into life by following one’s own methods of proceeding.

A mind habituated to stubbornness is a mind which accepts only those realities which it can explain through its own powers of reasoning. All else is chalked up as extraordinary but inexplicable and therefore largely irrelevant. We see an example of this in Luke chapter five. Jesus’ forgiveness of a paralyzed man’s sins is met with shock by the onlookers, for only God can forgive sins. To help them understand whom they were encountering Jesus then healed the man in front of their very eyes. They were astonished but never got beyond the effect to the cause. After all, their natural reasoning told them God is not man, so no matter how miraculous the act they witnessed they stopped at astonishment instead of proceeding through it to belief. This was but one of many instances where Jesus was not accepted for who he was regardless of what he did. Behind every episode were stubborn minds, refusing to accept the transcedent, that which was greater than the measure of their own minds.

"though they be dead..."

When Jesus returned to his hometown of Nazareth the people were astounded at his wisdom and deeds of power. Yet they ultimately rejected him; “took offense” at him. We take offense at that which runs contrary to our view of how things should be. They knew that Jesus was the son of Joseph and Mary and grew up a carpenter. They could not get to the truth of the mystery because knowledge was in their way. Or at least they ended with knowledge and did not get to the truth beyond it because knowledge lies in the realm of our own mind while truth requires the humility to accept the transcendent. It is interesting that the Gentiles, who did not “know” the origins of Jesus, accepted him more readily. One might consider those who do not know that evolution is the origin of the diversity of species as more apt to penetrate the mystery behind the beginnings of life. “God has confused the proud in their inmost thoughts,” said the humble maiden who was destined to give birth to the one who named himself “Truth.”

In their book “The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century,” authors Jacqueline Olds and Richard Schwartz, a husband and wife psychiatrist team, offer a thought provoking commentary on the increasing state of isolation experienced by a rapidly growing number of persons in this country.  Studies from evolutionary biology, social and neuro psychology are piling up and serving up the same story: we are far more social creatures than we realize; it is built into our brain’s circuitry (not to mention our reproductive biology).  The more one reads about and meditates on these realities of our nature the more one can conclude that the ultimate bliss for us as human persons is a state of profound, permanent communion with one another. We seek this level of communion regardless of our beliefs. For those adhering to a religion it is found in the liturgical celebration.  Others find it in the ecstasy of a U2 concert when everyone is singing in unison “We are One..not the same, but One.”  One.

If ultimate bliss is profound, permanent communion then hell is permanent exclusion.  Again in “The Lonely American,” the authors explore the childhood terror that every human person has experienced at some level: being left out by the group. But what we’re finding is that the fear of exclusion never really goes away, in fact it is behind and informs much of the extraordinary complexity of social interactions, especially in small groups.  A great deal of our brain’s neocortex is dedicated to the exceptionally complicated task of deciphering the myriad ways in which another person’s face is reacting to ours as we speak. (This critical function, incidentally, is thwarted when face to face interactions are supplanted by other means of communication) “Do you get me? Am I accepted by you? Are we understanding each other?”  Humans made it off the African plains because of our ability to unite together in small, tightly knit bands, so the reward for growing in social intelligence is survival and acceptance by the group while the cost of refusing to do so is, ultimately, death alone. The mere thought is deeply troubling.

There is a Gospel passage which talks about heaven as permanent communion and hell as permanent exclusion. It is Luke 13.22-35. “The door will be shut.”  The finality of those words bring either comfort, uncertainty or disbelief, depending on the person.  It is passages like this which seal the deal for many.  “I don’t believe in a God that would do that to others,” as though it is God’s choice instead of theirs. God’s choice is to let us know ahead of time.  Our choice is to accept, ignore, or construct a kinder, gentler version of God in our minds – one who will let us pursue whatever life we want on earth and then reward us for it at the end.  That would be quite a sweet deal if it weren’t pure fantasy.  I’m sure children would like that kind of deal from their parents.  (Isn’t it interesting that the deal we’d like from God is not one we view as healthy for our children?)  Or perhaps the over-used image of souls baking in the flames while being stuck with forks has become so comical as to suggest there isn’t even the possibility of something other than heaven. But if the promise of bliss through union is so sweetly compelling there has to exist an alternative, in fact our free will demands it.  Permanent communion or eternal dissolution.

The drama critic Terry Teachout recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal a piece entitled “Denying Shakespeare.” It talks about James Shapiro’s book “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?” which discusses the obsession in some circles throughout history with the contestation of the authorship of the literary genius’s canon. Teachout writes: “It doesn’t surprise me that such lunacy has grown so popular in recent years. To deny that Shakespeare’s plays could have been written by a man of relatively humble background is, after all, to deny the very possibility of genius itself – a sentiment increasingly attractive in a democratic culture where few harsh realities are so unpalatable as that of human inequality. The mere existence of a Shakespeare is a mortal blow to the pride of those who prefer to suppose that everybody is just as good as everybody else.”

This idea of the dilution of inequality has parallels in contemporary Christian thought as well. After all, everyone knows that “God’s sun shines on the just and the unjust.” What is the point, then, of diligence? The problem lies in the confusion of reception and responsibility. The parable of the talents clears it up: all receive in differing amounts and all are responsible according to what was received (and, it should be noted for those who have an inclination to anxiety stemming from performance expectation, what is given is strictly according to the abilities of the receiver – we are not responsible for what we have not received. Remembering this, the mandate to not judge another becomes easier).

When Jesus invited the Samaritan woman to seek his “life giving water,” she responded enthusiastically – “Please give it!” He then invited her to return to the well with her husband, knowing that she had none currently and the man she was living with was not her husband. One of many messages here is this: deeper union with the divine, and ultimately eternal salvation, implies responsibility and repentance on our part. When the ten lepers who asked for healing in Luke 17 received it, they went off rejoicing. Only one returned to give praise to God – a foreigner. Jesus rewards the man with a spiritual healing of faith exceeding the physical miracle. There are temporal graces and eternal graces, and some of them presuppose action on our part.

We could stop here if we believed divine munificence lasted straight through death and into eternity. And stop we will if we have constructed an idea of god in our mind, contrasted with that given in revelation history (thus relieving mankind of the burden of the subjective ideas of billions of well meaning souls) . But for those who are interested in the external reality of what will face them after this prologue of life on earth, a continued reading is in order. The giver of the talents seeks a reckoning. Why do we Christians tend to skip over these less savory parts of revelation? Perhaps it is just too hard to reconcile our inner idea of an infinitely loving God with the God who said he would kick out of his banquet those who did not come prepared, that is, all those who came because they assumed the King rewarded all, regardless of personal behavior. On this point, if God is to be believed, some will be terribly, dreadfully, wrong.

We can look to revelation itself for an explanation of this mystery of why we expect all good to come to us now and after death, regardless of personal comportment. For one thing, we are commanded to take an entire day each week for the express purpose of remembering who we are, where we came from, and our ultimate destiny. (Deuteronomy 5.15) This precept to rest and recollect is essential to the Christian, who, like the Israelites being settled in the promised land, are continually warned by God that the customs and ideas of the indigenous people will rub off on them. Without frequent recollection we won’t have a chance to hear in our hearts God’s constant warning: “The pleasures, riches and worries of life drown out my word” (Luke 8.14) and “What I say to you I say to all – Stay awake!” (Mark 13)  In large part we have not stayed alert and we have let pleasures and temporal distractions displace our faith. We have transformed the fourth commandment into a mandate to seek amusements, pleasures and entertainment before returning once again to our workaday world. To be frank, we simply don’t like being told what to do. This hardness of heart extends back to our earliest ancestors in the faith.

Once we hear this word of warning, however, we are responsible for it. On the last day, it will be this word which rises up to condemn the one who heard but refused to act. (John 12.48) Some will get to stay at the banquet, others will be kicked out. Who those will be depends entirely upon our faith and obedience. (John 3.36)

Belief ranks high among the mysteries of what it means to be human. This is such a murky topic that we have to start with a definition, and the one which I will use is “Confidence and reliance without evidence or proof; acceptance based on testimony or authority.”

An atheist friend of mine once told me, “I would believe in God if he appeared right now, in front of me.”  He made this declaration as both a promise and a challenge to God.  God did not see fit to comply, so his unbelief persists.  I quietly laughed to myself.  A visual appearance is no guarantee of anything, as some of the disciples discovered for themselves when Christ rose from the dead and appeared to them.  Jesus accepted the difficulty of the matter, eating fish in their presence to show them he was not a ghost.  Another persisted in his unbelief: “I don’t believe my eyes, so I won’t believe until I touch his wounds with my own hands.”  Christ said, “come and touch them; don’t persist in your unbelief but believe.”  He touched them and declared “my God!”  Still others continued in their unbelief after all this.  Even when they witnessed Christ ascend into heaven some of the disciples “still doubted.”  Seeing, touching, hearing – a complete reliance upon the senses is certainly no guarantee of belief.

Of course we can disbelieve that any of those events even transpired at all.  But even atheists are faced with the challenge of disbelief on a regular basis.  Many atheists think of themselves as highly intelligent and enlightened, certainly much more enlightened than the silly fools who would accept the testimony of a group of folks from two thousand years ago.  Yet there is something about being human which makes it difficult to cast off the need for myth, ritual and belief.  Many atheists have their own religion – science, and the priests of their religion are scientists.  And so the revelation of science becomes their dogma.  Even so, I have encountered the mystery of unbelief here, too.  I have presented the results of scientific studies to them which conflict with their own thoughts of things.  “Well, I don’t believe that,” they have told me.  “Believe what?” I ask, “the scientists who conducted the research?  The data which they gathered?”  What exactly are you not “believing” when you disbelieve what your priests and your religion are serving up for you?  The result can only be a profoundly narcissistic retreat into the prison of one’s own mind, where one can only accept one’s own thoughts, which are generated not from external reality, or from the testimony and witness of others, but from a simple, fantastical wish of how one wants things to be.

If there were a God, you’d think he would be most interested in revealing himself to help save man from himself. For the believing Christian, two thousand years of a Judaic revelation history of covenants, prophets, judges and kings culminating in the fullness of time by the incarnation of God as a human person, followed by another two thousand years of salvation history expressed as testimony and authority, offer more than enough substance for an engaged, active belief. But it comes at the cost of a certain kind of violence against the lower nature of man which, for the astute, is itself a sign of authenticity.

“We are giving our testimony to what we have seen, heard and touched with our own hands – the Word of life, so that you may share our life.”  (1 John 1.1-2)

I’ve been wondering why I didn’t get as many this year as in the past.