God can no more than an earthly parent be content to have only children: he must have sons and daughters — children of his soul, of his spirit, of his love — not merely in the sense that he loves them, or even that they love him, but in the sense that they love like he loves. For this he does not adopt them; he dies to give them himself, thereby to his own to his heart; he gives them a birth from above; they are born again out of himself and into himself — for he is the one and the all. His children are not his real, true sons and daughters until they think like him, feel with him, judge as he judges, are at home with him, and without fear before him because he and they mean the same thing, love the same things, seek the same ends. For this we are created; it is the one end of our being, and includes all other ends whatever.

-----George MacDonald, Commenting upon Galatians 4:1-7

A little food for thought during this war on terror, as we debate Presidential power and its potential infringement on our civil liberties.

"The Constitution is not, in its application, in all respects the same, in case of rebellion or invasion involving the public safety, as it is in time of profound peace and public security. The constitution itself makes the distinction; and I can no more be persuaded that the Government can take no strong measure in time of rebellion, because it can be shown that the same could not be lawfully taken in time of peace, than I can be persuaded that a particular drug is not good medicine for a sick man, because it can be shown not to be good food for a well one. Nor am I able to appreciate the danger apprehended by the meeting that the American people will, by means of military arrests during the Rebellion, lose the right of Public Discussion, the Liberty of Speech and the Press, the Law of Evidence, Trial by jury and Habeas Corpus, throughout the indefinite peaceful future, which I trust lies before them, any more than I am able to believe that a man could contract so strange an appetite for emetics during temporary illness as to persist in feeding upon them during the remainder of his healthful life."

-----Abraham Lincoln, on his claimed right to suspend Habeas Corpus during the Civil War


"No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of the Constitution's provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false, for the government, within the constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence."

-----The Supreme Court in response to Lincoln


"Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself to go to pieces, lest that one be violated?"

-----Lincoln's response to the Supreme Court

"In the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain French. . . "
-----Montaigne

I don't think I ever really understood, at a gut level, what Christianity was about. In fact, for most of my life I've had it horribly wrong. What I've learned over the last couple years, via the help of counseling and with the love of good family and friends, is that it's a much more freeing state of affairs than I was brought up to believe.

You see, the bottom line is, we're broken. And I don't mean broken in that candy-ass Sunday school way of speaking, as if brokenness were some humiliated inclination of the affections that you kept trying to foster in your mind. I mean broken like an engine that's blown a rod. I mean broken as part of the definition of who we are, in all the Augustinian sense of the word. Irreparable.

When I was growing up, I internalized the Christian faith as something that made me better, or said differently, as a key to making myself better. I thought you accepted Jesus and all the tumblers just fell into place. I thought that by accepting Jesus one was magically given the ability to have actual victory over one's brokenness. That "you" could in essence make yourself perfect. I honestly thought this is what it meant to be a Christian. This is no doubt due in part to my own narcissistic tendencies, my own desires to master myself and others and to be in control. But I think it's also fair to say that the church instilled a great deal of this bogus thinking in me (because I still hear it preached). I'm not here to point fingers though. You take what you've been given and you learn as you go. What I want to say is this: Pascal was right. The beauty of Christianity is that it at once shows man's greatness and his depravity. In doing so it answers the riddle of the world. We are broken, and our prime worthiness comes in that we are looked upon favorably by God.

The thing that I didn't understand when I was younger was that sin is a part of us. I can no more remove it or make myself better than a frog can fashion wings for flight. I sin like I breathe air. The mystery of faith in Christ is not that you accept Christ and then work harder to be holy. The mystery is that Christ's love is given for you in spite of your constant failure. It is this acceptance, and only this accecptance, that motivates and moves us to love one another, to do as He said (however lamely), and to be at peace. It is our humility in accepting this that makes us perfect. Anything else is just background noise of our own making.

"[People] are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, 'If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?' When you have found the answer, go and do it."

Mere Christianity

Brando Is Dead

"I am myself," he once declared, "and if I have to hit my head against a brick wall to remain true to myself, I will do it."

I think he did that quite a lot.

Jon Krakauer's book, "Under the Banner of Heaven," appears straightforward enough. On the surface it's the story of two men who commit a gruesome murder of a mother and child in the name of Fundamentalist Mormonism. Why? Because "God told them to." (Fundamentalist Mormonism {henceforth FM}; that wacky religious aberration that condones polygamy and relies on the seemingly contradictory staples of "personal revelation" and cult-like ecclesiastical hierarchy).

But this is not nearly the whole story. As you start to delve deeper into the book you begin to realize that this is about much more than FM's; it's about you and I. It's about the religious mindset and how we often have the tendency to confuse "our" voices for the voice of God. The fact that this book is about Mormons is, in the end, inconsequential because it could very well apply to some Christians, Muslims and Jews.

Make no mistake; this book is troubling. Troubling because I know people who believe in God like the FM's do, and troubling because I was once one of those people. This is what makes it a good book. Reading it is like clapping dried-mud boots together. It clears away the debris of human religious hubris and forces you to look again at some things long since left behind, and some things you may still desperately cling to.

The book traces the Mormon religion from its early days to the present. From the discovery of the tablets by Joseph Smith, to the defining moments of the religion where it almost sank into oblivion but didn't. It looks at the charisma of Smith and his successors, the fights with the US government, the eventual settling of the church in Utah, and the fundamentalist schisms of the 19th/20th centuries.

I don’t want to go into why I think Mormonism is a seriously flawed religion. You can find that out for yourself. What I want to talk about is how this book made me think about Fundamentalist Christianity and the religious mindset in general. This book didn’t give me answers. All it gave me were questions. Questions like. . ..if Mormons feel the same way about their religious experience as I do, could I possibly be wrong? I think we all take some creative license in religion don't we? To a greater or lesser degree all of us make ourselves into little gods in one way or another. We confuse ourselves with God. Let me give you some examples. Someone might say the following: “If I'm depressed, it's the devil who's tempting me.” When who knows if the devil has anything to do with it or not? Or “If I don't feel happy while singing praise songs it's because I don't love God enough, or I'm not good enough.” Or “If I keep sinning, God must not exist.” Or “If I can't be perfect, God can't accept me.” Or “If I hear voices in my head telling me to kill my wife, God must be telling me to kill my wife.” How do we distinguish our voice from the voice of God, especially when that voice is mediated through other people? How do we ever get one inch outside our proper skin? How do we adjudicate between various religious revelations?

As I sat back and thought about the problems this book raised, I came to only one conclusion. We are on our own in our search for truth and God, and many of us are deceiving ourselves. This is not a comforting thought.

Aloha everyone. John and I are back from Hawaii. We had a great time! Here's a shot of John with some Jelly Fish at the Maui Ocean Center.


John

Also, if you want to view a few more pics, you can go HERE

I finished "Under the Banner of Heaven" and most of "The Diary of a Country Priest" while on the trip. Stay tuned for some interesting reviews on those two books. .. at least I hope they'll be interesting to you. ;)

It's 4:06am. . .wicked case of insomnia. Am I excited about leaving for Hawaii on Friday? Maybe. Am I stressed from a really tough week of work and pre-trip prep? Maybe. Am I nervous because my new boss seems hell bent on catching me doing something wrong by constantly accusing me of things I didn't do correctly? Maybe. Do I think too much? You betcha. Anyway, I've decided to teach myself how this whole photoblog thing works with my freetime. So here is a pic for your viewing pleasure.


You gotta love Yesteryears. It's a nice place to kick up your spurs and get a cold one during a Glass House show.

Thanks to Blake for the photo.

Before you go see Michael Moore's new film about W and 9/11, Farenheit 9/11, read what Christopher Hitchens has to say about it.

Go to Slate Magazine Review

Anyone caught speaking Esperanto
Is thought crazy or headed for jail
There's peace in the wilds of west Texas
Where the sun and the sky prevail

Take no notice of the rising waters
Take no notice where rivers run dry
They'll be digging through the landfills
To find evidence of our great demise

There's a changing pattern before us
And the past tells a story quite well
By the time we make it to Barstow
We'll be more than halfway to hell

Waves of adverts that promise revival
And trinketware that batters the brain
The devil bought the key to Branson
Drives a backho and wears a gold chain

Now we're living in the inane time frame
Bets in Reno are on the human race
Woke up in another test market
With a new headache filter in place

There's a changing pattern before us
And the past tells a story quite well
By the time we make it to Barstow
We'll be more than halfway to hell

-----Jay Farrar, "Barstow"

"We could describe our situation like this: we must trust and obey in order to rise to the full stature of sons and daughters, to mature into the image of God, to grow into adult roles in the drama of redeeming the world. God has in mind not just what we should be but also what, one day, we could be. God wants not slaves but intelligent children. God wants from us not numb obedience but devoted freedom, creativity, and energy. That's what the grace of God is for---not simply to balance a ledger but to stimulate the spurts of growth in zeal, in enthusiasm for shalom, in good hard work, in sheer delicious gratitude for the gift of life in all its pain and all its wonder. In short, we are to become responsible beings: people to whom God can entrust deep and worthy assignments, expecting us to make something significant of them---expecting us to make something significant of our lives . None of us simply finds herself here in the world. None of our lives is an accident. We have been called into existence, expected, awaited, equipped and assigned."

-----Cornelius Plantinga Jr., "Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin"

"These walls are kind of funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, gets so you depend on them. That's institutionalized. They send you here for life, that's exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyways."

-----Red, "Shawshank Redemption"

Little Gidding V

We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for 
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always--
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

-----T.S. Eliot

I've been reading through the Psalms for the last few months. A couple things have struck me that never really struck me before. 1) People in old testament times lived externally. They lived among the particulars of life and when they asked God for something it usually had nothing to do with their internal landscape or their psychology. Their prayers are more about concrete things like real enemies, war, natural disasters, money, love from other people, etc. 2) They have an incredible sense of wonder about the physical world and God's role in it. They are freightened by billowing storm clouds, perplexed by the wind, scared of the limitless sea, etc.

I've been thinking quite a bit about what this should mean for me living as a Christian in the 21st century, and I've come up with a few things I'd like to share. The first and foremost is that I think we're guilty of internalizing our faith too much (see the Son Volt lyrics below). As moderns we live in our heads and tinker with our psychology until we're almost unable to act. Admittedly this is because we're quite fractured in this day and age, and I don't mean to discount therapy or anything like that (Lord knows it helps me). But I don't get the impression from the Psalmists that they struggled with these sort of things in their daily lives, and certainly not in their spiritual lives (you won't find Niehbur's serenity prayer in the Psalms). People in ancient times lived amidst their necessities, not their wants or their egos.

The second thing is that we've largely lost our sense of wonder at the world. We think that because we can describe or explain how something works that we've divested it of mystery and meaning. We look at the moon and it's small because we've been there. We watch the weather man describe a hurricane and we're not afraid any more. We look at religious people and we psychoanalyze their belief away reducing their thoughts of God to mere wish fulfillment. The Psalmists don't do this. They see the hand of God everywhere in nature. They don't spend too much time trying to divine why things happen, they just believe that God is in control, and that he's powerful and majestic beyond our wildest dreams. That he's something to be worshipped, something not to be trifled with.

Most importantly what I take away from the Psalms is something I heard Johnny Cash say a few years back, "There are many aspects of God, as He revealed Himself to many, but to bring it back down to earth and to keep it simple for all of us, God is a God to sing to or to sing about. Songs of praise, songs of wonder, songs of worship."

I can think of no other more fitting description of the Psalms.

Windfall

Now and then it keeps you running
It never seems to die
The trail's spent with fear
Not enough living on the outside
Never seem to get far enough
Staying in between the lines
Hold on to what you can
Waiting for the end
Not knowing when
May the wind take your troubles away
May the wind take your troubles away
Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel,
May the wind take your troubles away
Trying to make it far enough, to the next time zone
Few and far between past the midnight hour
You never feel alone, you're really not alone...
Switching it over to AM
Searching for a truer sound
Can't recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down
Catching an all-night station somewhere in Louisiana
It sounds like 1963, but for now it sounds like heaven
May the wind take your troubles away
May the wind take your troubles away
Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel,
May the wind take your troubles away.


-----Jay Farrar

"It is yearning that makes the heart deep."

-----Augustine

"But why doesn't the heart want God, trust God, look childlike to God for life's joys and securities? Why doesn't the heart seek final good where it can actually be found? Why turn again and again, in small matters and large, to satisfactions that are mutable, damaging, and imperiled?....Because the heart wants what it wants. That's as far as we get. That's the conversation stopper. The imperial self overrules all. Inquiring into the causes of sin takes us back, again and again, to the intractable human will and to the heart's desire that stiffens the will against all competing considerations. Like a neurotic and therapeutically shelf-worn little god, the human heart keeps ending discussions by insisting that it wants what it wants....The trouble is that this is only a redescriptioin of human sin, not an explanation of it----let alone a defense of it. Our core problem, says St. Augustine, is that the human heart, ignoring God, turns in on itself, tries to lift itself, wants to please itself, and ends up debasing itself. The person who reaches toward God and wants to please God gets, so to speak, stretched by this move, and ennobled by the transcendence of its object. But the person who curves in on himself, who wants God's gifts without God, who wants to satisfy the deires of a divided heart, ends up sagging and contracting into a little wad. His desires are provincial. 'There is something in humilty which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.' (Augustine, City of God)"

-----Cornelius Plantiga Jr., "Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin"

"Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations."

-----Seneca

"It is also notorious how self-deceiving we are about our needs. By definition, a person must know that he desires something. It is quite possible, on the other hand, to be in need of something and not know that one is. Just as we often desire what we do not need, so we often need what we do not consciously desire."

-----Michael Ignatieff, "The Needs of Strangers"

I love this chapter of Acts. Check out Festus and Agrippa's response to Paul at the end.. . .

Acts 26

1Then Agrippa said to Paul, "You have permission to speak for yourself." So Paul motioned with his hand and began his defense: 2"King Agrippa, I consider myself fortunate to stand before you today as I make my defense against all the accusations of the Jews, 3and especially so because you are well acquainted with all the Jewish customs and controversies. Therefore, I beg you to listen to me patiently.
4"The Jews all know the way I have lived ever since I was a child, from the beginning of my life in my own country, and also in Jerusalem. 5They have known me for a long time and can testify, if they are willing, that according to the strictest sect of our religion, I lived as a Pharisee. 6And now it is because of my hope in what God has promised our fathers that I am on trial today. 7This is the promise our twelve tribes are hoping to see fulfilled as they earnestly serve God day and night. O king, it is because of this hope that the Jews are accusing me. 8Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?
9"I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. 10And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the saints in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. 11Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. In my obsession against them, I even went to foreign cities to persecute them.
12"On one of these journeys I was going to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. 13About noon, O king, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions. 14We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic,[1] 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.'
15"Then I asked, 'Who are you, Lord?'
16" 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,' the Lord replied. 'Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. 17I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them 18to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.'
19"So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. 20First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and to the Gentiles also, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds. 21That is why the Jews seized me in the temple courts and tried to kill me. 22But I have had God's help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen-- 23that the Christ[2] would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles."
24At this point Festus interrupted Paul's defense. "You are out of your mind, Paul!" he shouted. "Your great learning is driving you insane."
25"I am not insane, most excellent Festus," Paul replied. "What I am saying is true and reasonable. 26The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner. 27King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know you do."
28Then Agrippa said to Paul, "Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?"
29Paul replied, "Short time or long--I pray God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains."
30The king rose, and with him the governor and Bernice and those sitting with them. 31They left the room, and while talking with one another, they said, "This man is not doing anything that deserves death or imprisonment."
32Agrippa said to Festus, "This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar."