Knowing

Wow. I haven't been a very good blogger, lately. It's not that there's nothing to say... it's just that I haven't had the words or creativity to say any of it. Something's coming, though, I can feel it brewing. Sometime in the next few months, I'll be writing about the Emergent Church, specifically reviewing what I remember of Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis and Brian McClaren's A New Kind of Christian. We had an incredible, incredible SIM women's retreat, this last weekend, and talked about it, a bit, so I'd like to articulate some thoughts. But I can't be bothered with all of that, just yet, because I'm into all of the end-of-the-school year jazz, end-of-Paraguay-jazz, preparing-for-the-next-step-jazz (i.e. grad school applications and car shopping), reading up on election news, and irresistible Skype calls. Did I mention irresistible Skype calls? And on top all that jazz, Joel Rosenberg's Dead Heat is consuming (ha!) every "spare" moment I have. But no worries. At the rate I'm going, I'll know how the world ends by tomorrow evening, at which point I may find time to blog. Until then, though, I just came across something I wrote back in March 2008 that may serve as a backdrop to the Emergent Church stuff that I post, later. Thanks for reading :)

Knowing

March 25, 2008

I used to know a lot more than I do, these days. I knew how to be a good Christian. I knew how to inductively study the Bible using the historical grammatical method. I knew the difference between inerrancy and infallibility, and how all scripture was God breathed and good for teaching, rebuking, and training in righteousness. I knew the difference between the civil, moral, and ceremonial codes of the Torah, and that we only have to follow the moral ones because we’re not a theocracy and because Jesus fulfilled the ceremonial part. I knew that God demanded the genocide of the Canaanites because of the cancerous affect their idolatry would have on the purity of Israel’s worship to YHWH. I knew that the conquest was a physical foreshadowing of God’s final judgment. I knew that Israel’s social injustice and spiritual idolatry ticked God off and sent them into exile. I knew that Ezekiel saw His glory depart and then return only with the incarnation of Jesus. I knew that the Sermon on the Mount was idealistic and impossible to keep. I knew that I was saved by grace through faith, because I had believed in my heart that God raised Jesus from the dead and confessed with my mouth that He is Lord. I knew how the Church sold out during the era of Constantine. I knew that I could never participate in such things as the Crusades. I knew that Martin Luther was a hypocrite and anti-Semite. I knew that Hitler used Luther’s speeches to in support of killing off the Jews. I knew how 1948 was a fulfillment of OT prophesy. I knew, though, that God was not pleased with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, and would certainly hold them accountable. I knew why the US trade laws needed to be changed. I knew why debts needed to be cancelled. I knew why Christians should never be Rich in an Age of Hunger. I knew that churches shouldn’t remove people from positions of leadership because they were going through a divorce. I knew that girls should never, ever get into the horizontal position with their boyfriends. I knew that Mormans and JWs were certainly not going to heaven, themselves, and were barring multitudes from entering. I knew that missionaries should never impose their home cultures upon indigenous churches. I knew that US Christians should give all their money to starting these churches, yet shouldn’t allow them to become dependant upon foreign money. I knew that missions was to be incarnational, meaning missionaries were supposed to be poor, yet missionary children should never have to actually suffer for their parents’ choices. I knew that God willed that family always comes first. Always. I knew that I, personally, was responsible to free sex slaves in Asia, sweat shop workers in India, Israel, Palestine, coffee growers in Africa, and child soldiers in South America. And I needed to save people from AIDS. I knew so much.

Except Jesus. Sure, He was my Savior. But I didn’t know Him. Since then, everything has changed. Now, I hardly know anything. Anything. Except Jesus. Somehow, I believe that He is merciful and loves me. Somehow, I believe that this love causes Him to point out things in me that are serving as a barrier between us. Somehow, I believe that this love knows my desire to do right and know Him. Somehow, I believe that He knows that I know that I don’t know and He’s ok with that. Somehow, I believe that He knows about my craving for Him and craving for my flesh, yet my desire to let it go, yet my fear of being without it. Somehow, I believe that He is my Shepherd and will unstop my ears so that I can hear and recognize His voice. Somehow, I know that He knows I am just dust and has mercy on me, this rich, spoiled, selfish, wimp of a white girl who is desperate for Him. Somehow, I hope that He won’t let me go to hell. Somehow.

I used to have so many beliefs that tethered me to God as ropes hold a boat close to the shore. I never strayed far, and everyone thought I was really close to God. And I was, geographically. And often times in content, too. But now most of them have been compromised. In their place, God has thrown me a single chord stronger than all the others. But it’s the only one. If I lose it, I’ve got nothing else. I’m scared. And yet comforted. Let us fix our eyes, then, upon Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith, who is surely able to do more than we can ask or imagine, and keep us from stumbling and present us before His glorious throne without fault and with great joy.

an ode to my sister

The following is actually something that I wrote in July '06, but in light of a few recent conversations with full-time moms, I thought I'd re-post it. You all are my heroes.

At the end of this year’s family vacation in California, I told my sister that the next blog I do would be called, An Ode to my Sister. Spending the entire week with her, her three little boys, and her husband, I was constantly awed by her selflessness. Good moms are nearly always on the clock. They don’t have the luxury of leaving their work at the office. They are always in charge. They are always Mom. Always. And the thing about my sister, is that she never ever complained. Her boys would never know they were wearing her down to the bone. She never made them feel like a burden. Never. She had amazing self-control. I can’t even begin to count the number of times my feelings of frustration and exhaustion would have gotten the best of me. But not Danielle. She always smiled. She always spoke kindly. Even on the plane ride home, after an entire week of running, she sat between her 3 and 4 year old and played with them the entire 4 hour plane ride home. She is my hero. I always talk about how I want to be more like Jesus. Well, for all of my reading, serving, presenting, and teaching, I pale in comparison to my sister, the stay-at-home-mom. And really, when I see the cost of completely giving up my comfort, time, goals, self, for the sake of others, I’m not sure I really want to be like Christ quite that badly. It’s one thing to talk about dying to Self when you know you always have the choice of whether or not you want to die. Danielle surrendered the right to chose the moment she had kids. Dying isn’t optional for her. She never just checks out and goes to her room when she needs some time alone. She’s always on the clock. Always. She is my hero.

more inspired by merton stuff

Hey, all. I just read an exciting article on BBC. In light of my last post, I thought it appropriate that I pass it on to you. Check it out and let's be sure to be lifting up the Synod, the Catholic Church, and the Italian people in prayer, this next week! Remember Isaiah 40:8- "The grass whithers and the flower fades, but the Word of the Lord stands forever."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7653456.stm

Also, here's the amazon.com link to Merton's book, should anybody be interested. But remember my warning- it's not for the faint at heart. It probably took my 5 years to get beyond the first 50 pages! :)

http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Storey-Mountain-Thomas-Merton/dp/0156010860/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1223254402&sr=8-1

merton quotes

Last week I finished a great book that I’ve been trying to find the motivation to read for several years, now. My uncle had recommended it and I’d bought it, probably back in 2002, but every time I picked it up it bored me to tears so I never made it very far. This time around, though, I couldn’t wait to read it, every night. So instead of giving a summary, which would be impossible to do, I’m just going to share a bunch of my favorite quotes. To give you a basic framework, though, this is a spiritual autobiography. Thomas Merton wrote it in his early 30s, 6 years after entering a Trappist monestary (a very strict order in the Catholic Church). Since I’m sharing so many and you may not want to read them all, I’ve put my favorites of my favorites in bold :) Now, for Merton, himself…

[Languedoc, France] was long wild with heresy, and with the fake mysticism that tore men away from the Church and from the Sacraments, and sent them into hiding to fight their way to some strange, suicidal nirvana (43).

And Catholics, thousands of Catholics everywhere, have the consummate audacity to weep and complain because God does not hear their prayers for peace, when they have neglected not only His will, but the ordinary dictates of natural reason and prudence, and let their children grow up according to the standards of a civilization of hyenas (56).

Who prayed for me? One day I shall know. But in the economy of God’s love, it is through the prayers of other men that these graces are given (109).

The love of pleasure is destined by its very nature to defeat itself and end in frustration (117).

I went into the dark, austere old church, and liked it. But I was scared to visit the monastery. I thought the monks were too busy sitting in their graves, beating themselves with disciplines (125).

But Providence, that is the love of God, is very wise in turning away from the self-will of men, and having nothing to do with them, and leaving them to their own devices, as long as they are intent on governing themselves, to show them to what depths of futility and sorrow their own helplessness is capable of dragging them (136).

I, whose chief trouble was that my soul and all its faculties were going to seed because there was nothing to control my appetites- and they were pouring themselves out in an incoherent riot of undirected passion- came to the conclusion that the cause of all my unhappiness was sex repression!... Day after day I read Freud, thinking myself to be very enlightened and scientific… I don’t know if I ever got close to needing a padded cell: but if I had ever gone crazy, I think psycho-analysis would have been the one thing chiefly responsible for it (137).

I don’t know how anybody who pretends to know anything about history can be so naïve as to suppose that after all these centuries of corrupt and imperfect social systems, there is eventually to evolve something perfect and pure out of them (150).

[I was] like so many others- a Communist in my own fancy- and I would become one of the hundreds of thousands of people living in America who are willing to buy an occasional Communist pamphlet and listen without rancor to a Communist orator, and to express open dislike of those who attack Communism, just because they are aware that there is a lot of injustice and suffering in the world, and somewhere got the idea that the Communists were the ones who were most sincerely trying to do something about it (150).

And that was the end of my days as a great revolutionary… The truth is that my inspiration to do something for the good of mankind had been pretty feeble and abstract from the start. I was still interested in doing good for only one person in the world- myself (164).

(in describing his cross country days at the university) Perhaps I would have been more of a success as a long distance runner if I had gone into training, and given up smoking and drinking, and kept regular hours (173).

The life of the soul is not knowledge, it is love, since love is the act of the supreme faculty, the will by which man is formally united to the final end of all his strivings- by which man becomes one with God (209).

How deluded we are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all. I remember how learnedly and enthusiastically I could talk for hours about mysticism and the experimental knowledge of God [note- academically/ theologically speaking, mysticism is that part of spirituality where the individual has a personal relationship/ experience with God. Merton is here referring to what is typically assumed to be commonplace in evangelical Christianity.] and all the while I was stoking the fires of the argument with Scotch and soda… all one night we sat… in a big dark road house outside of Philadelphia, arguing and arguing about mysticism, and smoking more and more cigarettes and gradually getting drunk. Eventually, filled with enthusiasm for the purity of heart which begets the vision of God, I went on with them into the city to a big speak-easy where we completed the work of getting plastered (224).

I had come, like the Jews, through the Red Sea of Baptism. I was entering into a desert- a terribly easy and convenient desert, with all the trials tempered to my weakness- where I would have a chance to give God great glory by simply trusting and obeying Him, and walking in faith, the way that was not according to my own nature and my own judgment. It would be a land that was not like the land of Egypt from which I had come out: the land of human nature blinded and fettered by perversity and sin. It would be a land in which the work of man’s hands and man’s ingenuity counted for little or nothing, but where God would direct all things, and where I would be expected to act so much and so closely under His guidance that it would be as if He thought with my mind, as if He willed with my will. It was to this that I was called. It was for this that I had been created. It was for this Christ had died on the Cross, and for this that I was now baptized, and had within me the living Christ, melting me into Himself in the fires of His love (248).*

The only answer to the problem is grace, grace, docility to grace (225).

If you don’t want the effect, do something to remove the causes. There is no use loving the cause and fearing the effect and being surprised when the effect inevitably follows the cause (255).

There is nothing wrong in being a writer or a poet- at least I hope there is not: but the harm lies in wanting to be one for the gratification of one’s own ambitions, and merely in order to bring oneself up to the level demanded by his own internal self-idolatry (258).

“I can’t be a saint,” I said, “I can’t be a saint.” And my mind darkened with a confusion of realities and unrealities: the knowledge of my own sins, and the false humility which makes men say that they cannot do the things that they must do, cannot reach the level that they must reach: the cowardice that says: “I am satisfied to save my soul, to keep out of mortal sin,” but which means, by those words: I do not want to give up my sins and my attachments (260).

America… is a country full of people who want to be kind and pleasant and happy and love good things and serve God, but do not know how. And they do not know where to turn to find out. They are surrounded by all kinds of sources of information which only conspire to bewilder them more and more (269).

I had accepted Lax’s principle about sanctity being possible to those who willed it, and filed it away in my head with all my other priniciples- and still did nothing about using it. What was this curse that was on me, that I could not translate belief into action, and my knowledge of God into a concrete campaign for possessing Him, whom I knew to be the only true good? No, I was content to speculate and argue (265).

… the world [of 1939] had now become a picture of what the majority of its individuals had already made of their own souls. We had given our minds and our wills up to be raped and defiled by sin, by hell itself; and now, for our inexhorable instruction and reward, the whole thing was to take place all over again before our very eyes, physically and morally, in the social order, so that some of us, at least, might have some conception of what we had done (271).

Once again, classes were beginning at the university. The pleasant fall winds played in the yellowing leaves of the poplars in front of the college dormitories and many young men came out of the subways and walked earnestly and rapidly about the campus with little blue catalogues of courses under their arms, and their hearts warm with the desire to buy books (283).

The monestary is a school- a school in which we learn from God how to be happy (409).

[on the virtue of Gregorian chant] Instead of drawing you out into the open field of feelings where your enemies, the devil, and your own imagination and the inherent vulgarity of your own corrupted nature can get at you with their blades and cut you to pieces, it draws you within, where you are lulled in peace and recollection and where you find God. You rest in Him, and He heals you with His secret wisdom (417).

There was, I could see, something of a difference between the community proper and the nocices. The monds and the professed brothers were more deeply absorbed in things that the novices had not yet discovered. And yet looking around at the novices there was a greater outward appearance of piety in them- but you could sense that it was nearer the surface. It can be said, as a general rule, that the greatest saints are seldom the ones whose piety is most evident in their expression when they are kneeling at prayer, and that the holiest men in a monestary are almost never the ones who get that exalted look, on feast days, in the choir. The people who gaze up at Our Lady’s statue with glistening eyes are very often the ones with the worst tempers (420).

*When I read things like this, or the writings of the saints, and then hear my fellow (non-Catholic) believers talk about how Catholicism is an impersonal works-based religion, I want to laugh, cry, and scream at the ignorance and smug pride of this assumption. I’m sorry. I know that I’m talking to many people that I dearly love and highly RESPECT in most areas. And know that I’m not judging YOU, but this part of evangelical, Protestant Christianity in which many of us have been raised. And I know that it's really not a Protestant issue, either, but a human nature issue. That's just the way we are. So if you’ve made these kinds of statements, I don’t think it’s a reflection of your heart, but of the Christian culture in which your beliefs about God have been formed. But really, you just don’t know what you’re talking about. I used to think the same thing when my beliefs about Catholicism were based upon what I'd learned from Protestants, as opposed to from Catholics, themselves. I know I’m idealistic. And yes, there are many, many, many Catholics who haven’t a clue as to the meaning behind what they’re doing, especially in areas like Paraguay, where the entire culture is “Catholic.” But the same can be found among Protestants. But if you would read the writings of the saints of old, or get to know the nuns and monks in your area, I think you’d be very surprised, humbled, and challenged by the depth of their faith in and Love of God.