Easter

Well now that everyone has officially entered into the season of Easter, I do not feel badly about writing an Easter post. (Well… to be perfectly honest, I completely forgot about my blog…. graduate studies and all.)  Anyway, if you happen to be in the Wheaton area next year, you are coming to Holy Week with me at Church of the Resurrection.  Don’t argue; it’s going to happen.

Its beautiful; its tumultuous; it is entirely enigmatic.  Imagine this scene.  For the past month you have given up something beneficial, something that is engraved into who you are.  Instead of filling yourself and being sustained, you replace this something with giving of yourself to others.  You give up sustenance and are doing more charitable deeds than before.  This is exhausting, and it is sobering; so much so you don’t dare let the word “Alleluia” pass from your lips.

Suddenly, you hear a wonderful rumor.  You hear that the Messiah is coming into the city.  You hear that he has come, that he will overthrow every injustice, that he will give you freedom from the oppression that has forever weighed you down.  You hear a distant sound, coming closer, closer all the while.  What started out as a still breeze is becoming louder, louder.  And you see! You see him!  The messiah!  The entire city has come out to greet him.  Everyone is shouting, singing, and laughing.  Hosanna! Hosanna indeed.  How can you help but join in the surging, dancing throng ascending up the hill, going up to worship.  Hosanna in the highest!…..except.  Except you know what is coming.  You know that however joyous this occasion is, you know that it is only a faint glimmer before the darkest night in history.  Hosanna, but not Alleluia.

And yet, it is joyous.  You are with family, those closer than your family.  It is because you care for them so much that you would do anything for them.  And so out of love and to honor them, you kneel down and wash their feet.  Yes, it is humbling, but here you realize that something is right.  Something tells you that this right here, this loving service is what your life is really about.  You weren’t created to be a consumer; you weren’t meant to endlessly fill yourself up with sustenance.  You were meant to give yourself away.  And just when you realize this, you hear the priest say one last time. “This is my body, broken for you.  This is my blood, poured out for you.”

And you realize that you were the one that handed over the Messiah in betrayal unto pain and death.  You were the one who forsook the joy of the hosanna for thirty pieces of silver.  You become confused and agitated.  You cannot think, cannot eat.  “Who is that man being tried for blasphemy?  I certainly don’t know him.” The rooster crows and you realize how utterly unworthy you are to be called his disciple.  You stumble around, barely listening to the subdued singing as you force yourself to follow Christ to Golgotha, and you watch him get crucified.  There, you realize what a fool you have been.  In the full knowledge of your culpability and in knowledge of Christ’s wishes, you reach out to your closest brother or sister, and you confess your part in helping to facilitate the feud between family members.  And together, you heart longs for the days when you both said alleluia…. but not today, never today.

As you sit there in the complete darkness, you hear a knocking sound.  A voice calls out, strong and true, “The light of Christ.”  And you join in with all the others “Thanks be to God.”  But why?  What is this light?  You saw the light be extinguished just a moment ago, and you know the abyss which swallowed the light.  Then God shows you this light.  You see a true story laid out before you.  You see how God created the heavens and the earth.  You see how your ancestors threw away the majesty of God for inferior fruit.  You see the flood and all its devastation.  You see how God was faithful to His promises to Abraham and all of Israel, and you hear how He has promised to deliver you still.  And as you are still trying to comprehend this story, something starts to happen.  You see people being asked if they believe and if they will serve.  And you have a glimmer of hope, because they say, “I believe in the resurrection.”   And suddenly the priest is before you, and he is shouting.  “Alleluia! Christ is Risen!” And pandemonium breaks loose.  Everyone is shouting at the top of their lungs Alleluia! Alleluia!  They are making as much noise as humanly and inhumanly possible.  Well over one thousand people are shouting “He is alive! He is alive.”  You see a one hundred foot banner of the risen Christ being lifted before the rejoicing throng.  Your feet cannot hold still; your hands will not keep from clapping.  Finally, after forty long days, you join the unending shout; you lift up your eyes to Christ, Alleluia!

Testimony of Jubilee

“The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, ‘You are  a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.'” (Psalm 110:4)

Right now Wheaton College is in Jubilee.  The community gathers together once a year to focus on the Spirituals disciplines so we might grow in the Lord as a community.  I went to a prayer meeting last night, and these few days could not have been better named.

Ancient Israel had a provision in their law called “The Year of Jubilee.”  Every fifty years, all debts would be forgiven, slaves would be freed, land would be returned to its original owners.  In short, everyone would receive what was rightfully theirs which the circumstances of life had taken away.

What a great idea!  There was one problem though; Israel never celebrated Jubilee.  Think about it.  If you were a wealthy land owner that bought the rights for a certain families land and they never would have had enough money to redeem that land, I doubt you would willingly hand the land back after fifty years.  By that time, you would have gotten used to it, probably thought of it as your own calculated your income based in part on that land.  Would you give away your land for free?  This is exactly what happened in Israel.  Things got so bad around the time of Jesus, that the priests would scam people out of their Jubilee rights.

Enter Melchizedek.  This mysterious figure from Genesis 14 was the recipient of many of the Jews’ unfulfilled hope.  At some point, Melchizedek had acquired the status of the priest who would announce the Year of Jubilee.  The messianic figure of Psalm 110 is not just a conqueror of his enemies, he is the one that will usher in the perpetual Year of Jubilee.

We now fast forward to the Messiah.  Jesus came, died, rose again, and ascended back to heaven without ushering in the Year of Jubilee.  No problem, he will bring it when he returns, right?  Well… yes.  But the truth is so much better than that.

You see, for years I was trapped. I was a slave to my conscious which kept reminding me of sin in my life.  I was not an effective Christian.  I knew what God was calling me to do, but I kept resisting.  “God you can’t ask me to do that, for I am a sinner. I wouldn’t be effective.”  The odd thing was that I knew all the answers to my questions.  I knew that God makes His power perfect through weakness.  I knew that as soon as I yielded to God and did what He required of me that He would begin to transform my life.  Yet my actions show that I did not believe these things.  But God has a plan for my life, and He will not be frustrated by anything, not even my own stubbornness.

For the past several weeks, God has slowly been revealing His truth.  I have come to believe that eternal life is not only found in heaven, but that it is available to us on earth.  That I only have to trust in God’s power, and the Spirit of God would overtake my life and live through me.  Yet I was still a sinner.  How could I accept God’s gift? My sin prevented me.

Then last night happened.  I was in the prayer meeting for Jubilee, and I was bamboozled by the love of God.  A brother I had not known until that very moment came up to me and spoke a word of encouragement.  He said, quite simply, “You are God’s son, and He is proud of you.”  You see, God does not see us as we see ourselves.  He sees us in Christ Jesus.  Our sin is dealt with; we stand justified before the Lord.  We receive from God the things we lost due to sin: righteousness, communication with God, being children of God.  These things aren’t relegated to the distant future, but very real realities right now.  Right now I am God’s son, one of which He is so proud.

This is the Jubilee of the Lord.  Whatever chains, whatever sins, whatever attitudes are holding you down… whatever it is let it go.  You are free from it; you were free from it the very moment Jesus announced the Year of Jubilee at the Resurrection.  You are a son or daughter of God, and He is so very very proud of you.

Let Us Be Pitiable

We at Wheaton have embraced the concept that Christians should not be judgmental but full of compassion.  Yet divisive issues will continue to present difficulties when our dear brothers and sisters embrace a position that we must view as morally wrong.  One such issue was highlighted in the past issue of the wheaton Record.  As I was reading the article, I came across a rather surprising quote by an alumni group advocating for the minority opinion. “… talk about ‘compassion’ often felt like pity at best and or at worst intolerance cloaked in the language of love.”

When I read this line, I did a double-take.  What is wrong with pity?  Isn’t pity a virtue, one that best shows our love and compassion?  I actually do understand these peoples feelings.  Modernism has tried to portray pity as contemptuous; unfortunately it has been successful, at least on the popular level.  Listen to some of Merriam-Webster’s definitions:  Pitiful – “exciting pitying contempt” Pitiable- “of a kind to evoke mingled pity and contempt especially because of inadequacy” Pathetic- “pitifully inferior or inadequate”.  In light of this equating of pitiful with pathetic, I wonder how many of you knew that pity was once viewed wholly good.

Pity comes from the Latin Pietas which is the same root as Pious.  Pity originally was a virtue describing a kind of compassionate holiness.  So how did modernism convert our thinking on pity from an emulation of God, whose supreme act of pity is the incarnation and death of Christ, into a contemptuous action?  Well, part of the fault lies with Christians.  We have used a monstrous transformed pity, a holier-than-thou attitude.  This demonic attitude, which only resembles pity, is one part despising and another pride.  This particular breed of contempt led the David Hume to postulate that there were two kinds of pity, the virtuous and the condescending.

Yet the blame is not solely ours, for even when we portray benevolent pity, it is accepted as contempt.  I propose that the disappearance of the benevolent pity in the eyes of the public is a result of modernist views on equality.  Inequality is a very misrepresented concept in the West.  Today, people think that any form of inequality is evil.  This informs our views on morality and pity.  If I pity you then I am implying that there is an inequality about our relationship, with you below me.  The first two lines of William Blake’s “The Human Abstract” read “Pity would be no more / If we did not make someone Poor”  Note the use of “make” here; we are artificially making someone worse than they really are.

But in reality, the world is full of inequalities, and they are never the object of ridicule except in certain realms (i.e. the government and morality).  If you are better at technical issues or childcare than I am, then I might enlist your help thus implying and benefiting from an inequality in our relationship.  Inequalities are not devils, but the catalyst for kindness, for compassion, for a beneficial pity.

And so I encourage you with the title of this post; let us be pitiable.  This is an encouragement on two levels.  First, let us recognize our own pitiful natures.  “There is no one righteous, not even one.”  “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Even the die-hard equalitists must agree that Christianity does not impose a sense of inequality but is one of the most equal systems in the world, albeit a terrible sort.  Praise be to God who saw fit to pity this world of sinners and send His Son for our salvation.  Second, let us be able to be pitied.  Let us not reject the compassion of others because we are affronted at the inequality of the situation.  Instead let us reap the full benefits of entering into the debt of love knowing that this debt is not enslaving but liberating.  We can never repay the good deeds of others, but we can in turn become God’s grace to others, we can pity.  To live in the best place of all, we must learn how to pity and be pitiable.

My Hermeneutic (Part 1)

I haven’t posted in a while.  Sorry.  There is a very good reason for this.  I am now settled in the lovely Chicago suburb of Wheaton, and have now begun graduate school.  It’s great.

Anyway, I have this class where I need to develop my own method of biblical interpretation, which is a very tall order.  My professor raises some interesting questions.  I have so many ideas in my head at the moment that I have to get some of them out there just to make sense of them.  Many of these are only half formed because my conclusions will change the foundations.  But you must know these (erroneous?) ideas in order to know why I ended where I did, much like you need to know the modern logic system to know why the other systems are preferred.  This is going to be way to much for one post; I’ll probably even write a book on the topic in the future.  You all are lucky; you get a sneak peak of the distant future in biblical scholarship. By the way, much of the various components of my theory are debated in theological, philosophical, historical, and literary circles, and I won’t give you my full reasoning for embracing one point over the other (I need to save a few things for that book).  So, you’ll just have to trust me that I have given these issues thought and my conclusions are reasoned.  But feel free to debate me; my conclusions need to be tested by others and not just myself.

Epistemology: Every theory must begin somewhere, and for me my hermeneutic begins with faith, not faith in God but faith that reason paints an accurate portrayal of how things really are.  This cannot be proven, but is essential for knowing anything at all.  That statement is really an amalgamation of two distinct theories.  1. Deductive reasoning works: The argument “If A then B is true / A is true / so B must be true” is a kind of reasoning really reflects the way humans know things about the world.  2. Inductive reasoning is reliable: the way in which the world works will not be fundamentally different in the future.

Now if, by faith, I take reason to be accurate, then it is reasonable to include faith in my epistemology.  I cannot reasonably say that faith is not a valid source of information if I use it to ground reason itself.  Another issue that must be dealt with in the beginning is the realities of the external world: Do things exist apart from my mind?  The great skeptic David Hume would say that there is no possible way of proving the existence of the external world but functionally we must live as if the external world was real.  I will go one farther and say that my five senses give me accurate (enough) information about how the world really is.

Now this might seem abstract to you, but I promise I am getting to the point.  Ontology: What kind of things actually exist.  If my five senses are accurate (reason and faith suggest that they are), then I observe physical objects.  I also observe that every physical thing has a cause.  And so I use my reasoning.  I take the observation that every effect is caused by something and apply it on a cosmic scale.  Every cause is in reality also an effect and cause by something else.  However, if we could trace every cause and effect back to the distant path there must be a beginning, an uncaused cause.  Scientists call this the big bang.  However, this is not the beginning as I know it for even the energy that caused the big bang and even the empty space that the big bang happened in must have been caused by something.  I call this uncaused cause God.  Now at this point the only thing I know about this entity is that it exists.  But I have never observed a natural object come into being by its own power.  So I must conclude that this entity is supernatural (or at the very least preternatural).  This kind of god is very close to what Paul Tillich would call “the ground of being”, the very thing in which all things owe their very existence.

Through my senses I also observe that the world is ordered.  In the microscopic and macroscopic, the universe is ordered.  Another observation is that order only comes through sentience.  Chance can provide an explanation of order, but order more often than not comes from an act of a sentient being.  In other words, order is far more likely to be the result of a design than random causes.  Since I know of no sentience with enough power to bring order in the vast scale of the universe (humans might be able to do so given enough time and technology) and since I have already admitted the existence of a preternatural being, I think it very likely that the entity that caused the world to be is similar to the the one that brought order.  If indeed they are in reality one entity, which I think is a reasonable leap of faith, then we notice that the uncaused cause must have sentience.  This god of mine is beginning to look a little like the Christian God, eh?

Now sorry for the blatantly philosophical issues here, but I am out of time for today.  Soon I will continue my arguments at a later time.  But in the meantime, please leave some response.  I can go into further detail and we can have some good, constructive dialogue.

The Moral of the Story

The little analytic philosopher in me was getting restless, so I decided to give him something to do.  And so I decided to do a little musing on the subject of stories.  A story is comprised of two objects: a series of actions (plot) and the people related to those actions (characters).  By combining these two elements you get a story.  Now all stories have a “point” to them; I call this the “the moral of the story.”  And of all the stories in all the world, there are three types of morals which I will explain in order from worst to best.

First, there is the entertainment moral.  These are the stories that the major emphasis is on the plot.  Pick out any Hollywood movie, and the odds are likely that it is this type of story.  Now, I say that this category is the worst of the three morals, but that does not mean that these stories are in bad.  If you haven’t already, go and read the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.  The focus is on the plot and makes for an enjoyable read.

The second is the character moral.  This is a little harder to define because it takes plot to develop characters well.  Chick flicks are usually examples of this kind of story, although many of those movies do character development so poorly they are not worth watching.  The movie Inception is a great example of a character focused story; plus it has great action for those who dislike characterization.  For the more literary minded, Stephen King’s main strength is his character explorations.

The last and best is the moral moral.  These stories are all about imparting some lasting life lesson.  In Hollywood, this is a rare story indeed.  I believe the most recent movie I have seen any type of intentional moral is the Men Who Stare at Goats, yet this also had an emphasis in plot so I can’t really count this.  But even though it is missing in Hollywood, it is not as uncommon in books.  The best author I have found at this is the great man himself, C.S. Lewis.  Even though his plots aren’t phenomenal and his characters aren’t the best, his stories have crystal clear morals which have made them endearing for the last three generations.

Every story contains all three types of morals; in some cases, the moral might be unintended.  That is why careful writers make sure that their stories match their worldview.  Beware.  Many times the moral moral is imperceptible; the life lesson is learned more through osmosis than active awareness.  The type of stories you choose to consume will determine the type of person you become.  And so I give you this advice: make sure the moral of the story is a good one.

Love of Language

The internet is the wild, untamed wilderness of literature.  Within the depths lies the undiscovered treasures of bloggers, great gems of knowledge.  Yet these priceless artifacts are hidden within a vast mire of mediocrity and baseness.  Searching for gold is a dirty task, one that leaves the explorer feeling desecrated.  And the expended effort is becoming disproportionately larger than the value of the nuggets gained.

Gone, perhaps forever, are the days when the beauty of the language mattered.  All that is left is stark efficiency.  Content is of the utmost importance in writing, but content is not everything.  Beauty matters; aesthetics add untold value to objects.  A piece of drywall and a few cinder blocks might make an effective TV stand, but the oak cabinet is worth more.

The language used online is stark.  Synonyms may as well be nonexistent; adjectives and adverbs are vanishing.  Why use a metaphor or simile to describe exactly what an idea should be when “very” can be inserted easily?  Phraseology is a forgotten science, forgotten and unmissed.  I am reminded of a scene in George Orwell’s 1984 where a character describes the malicious exercising of all the “dead weight” from the English language.

The situation is not as grim as I make it sound.  New words are being added, mostly nouns, but these nouns can in turn be transformed into verbs and adjectives.  And published authors employ versatile vocabularies for the most part.  Yet in the modern world, printed media is going by the wayside.  Everywhere newspapers are going out of print, and publishing houses are shutting down.  The internet is rapidly replacing printed media.  And so good writers are forced to become bloggers and hide amidst the mediocrity.

If this were the extent of the problem, I would not be raving.  Let’s face it, I am no John Milton.  From the beginning my writing has been efficient.  Academia discourages the use of “flowery” language; it muddles the issue, see?  No, I am not needed to describe the extremes of poor language on the internet.  What really gets under my skin is the fact that language experts seem to condone this process.

The English language, they argue, is a spoken language, and as such we should expect change all the time.  What I have mistaken for poor language, is really just the changes in speech.  I should get off my high horse and accept the beauty I find in language today.  One particular example roused my ire.  It was a video with the narrator’s word forming a collage of “LANGUAGE.”  The narrator described how what I judge to be bad language is just a dislike of what I find.  However, the man used proper grammar, he used better vocabulary than most, he even employed unusual phrasing that pleased the ear.  In short, the man wrote a beautiful piece that told me to accept the ugly as beautiful.

It was like being shown a Rembrandt and stick figures then being told that their beauty is equal.  It was like being given a four star meal and prepackaged meals and being informed that neither tastes better.  It was like hearing a symphony and an out of tune piano, and that both are pleasing to the ear.

Rubbish!  A change in language is not necessarily for the better; growth can be cancerous as well as beneficial.  I love the English language, and being asked to do away with various grammatical rules because this new generation is lazy is too much to bear.  I will not end a sentence with a preposition.  I will strive to find the word that is an exact fit to its context.  I will not sacrifice beautiful language with mere efficiency.  I will be a proper wordsmith.

Prayer Is

During my Spiritual Formation class at my undergrad, I was required to keep a journal on a specific spiritual discipline and at the end of the semester write a paper describing the journey.  I chose prayer and this was the result.  Note: I reference Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together which you should read immediately if you haven’t.  There are also some prayer practices I reference that my teacher would have been familiar with, but that might not be the case here.  I am open for questioning though.

Prayer is

 Prayer is through and in Jesus Christ.  Prayer cannot be properly defined as a what before it is defined as a who.  When learning to pray as a child, I was taught that the proper way to end a prayer is to use the phrase “in the name of Jesus.”  This is the very foundation of Christian prayer.  “If you remain in me, and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you” (John 15:7).  It is only through Jesus that our prayers our heard; it is only through his becoming a man, being obedient to death, and becoming our great heavenly high priest that we can “approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace in our time of need” (Hebrews 4: 16).  Bonhoeffer is certainly correct in saying that our prayers “are certainly heard and answered in Jesus Christ.”  Only when prayer is truly rooted in Jesus Christ and his work can prayer truly be called prayer.

Prayer is discovering and receiving God’s will.  This is the what of prayer.  Prayer is not our working in order to try to manipulate God.  Prayer is not simply communication with God, although that is a large part of prayer.  Prayer is finding the heart’s true calling.  Augustine famously stated that “our heart is restless until it rests in you.”  Our true purpose is found in the Garden of Eden.  Man and woman lived both in full communion with each other and full communion with God.  And they were fully obedient to God’s will.  Only when they chose to abandon that obedience did they lose their unity with God.  Only when sin entered the world did the human heart become restless.  Yet through Jesus’ obedience we can now live in God’s purposes again.  “We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may have life” (Romans 6:4).  This new life we have in Christ is one free from sin, a life that is rooted in replacing our own will with the Father’s.  In our states of imperfection, “We do not know what we ought to pray for” (Romans 8:26b).  In order that we may become one with the Father, Jesus teaches us the true meaning of prayer.

Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.

For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

Amen.

This prayer is rooted in the will of the Father.  Five out of the seven petitions found in the prayer are directly related to God’s supremacy and his will.  This prayer tells us that the foundation of prayer is the accepting of God’s will into our own lives.  This acceptance of God’s will require us to sacrifice our own will.  We must obey Jesus when he said “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34).

Prayer is rooted in the Scriptures. Since we know the what that is prayer, it is time to go back to the where.  Bonhoeffer is exactly right that prayer evolves out of the meditation on Scripture.  By praying based on the Scriptures, or even praying the Scriptures themselves, we can be sure that we be sure that our prayers are in accordance with God’s will.  And we know that are prayer is through Jesus Christ, “because God’s Word has found fulfillment in Jesus Christ.”  And the Scriptures are the most pure form of God’s will to which we have access.  Again Bonhoeffer can see the intimate connection of Prayer and scripture; “Prayer means nothing else but the readiness and willingness to receive and appropriate the Word, and what is more, to accept it in one’s personal situation, particular tasks, decisions, sins, and temptations.”  Praying the Scriptures is the heart of the Lectio Divina.  The meditation provides us with an understanding of God and his wills and purposes; the contemplation gives us a love and joyful obedience to the Scriptures.  By praying Scripture, we completely take our own selfishness out of the equation, and we come to the realization, as Bonhoeffer did, that it is no longer we who are praying but Christ.  This is not only because of the perfect submission to God’s will found in praying the Scriptures, but also because of the sheer scope of the prayers.  The Scriptures take us out of the selfish individualism in which we are entrapped and gives to us the impossibly broad concern of God’s will.  Since it is so impossible, it is impossible for humans to sincerely will what God wills without help; that help is to be found in letting Jesus pray through us in the Scriptures.  And so we come full circle; prayer should be through Jesus Christ, be a submission to the will of God, and be based in the Scripture which is actually a prayer through Jesus Christ.

Prayer is petitionary.  As shown through the Lord’s Prayer, prayer should be, in most instances, in the form of petition.  Petition comes out of true humbleness.  It is by humbleness that we realize that indeed we do not have what is truly needed in our lives.  It is humbleness that will protect us from the pride in trying to manipulate God to give us what we want.  This is not to say that we do not know the outcome of the prayer.  “Ask and it shall be given to you; seek and you will find; know and the door will be opened unto you” (Matthew 7:7).  We know that all of God’s promises are “‘Yes’ in Christ” (2 Corinthians 1:20), and so we can boldly make our petitions to God.  However, these petitions do not originate out of our own selfish desires.  For it is not everyone to whom God will give what they wish; it is those who are abiding in God’s will.  And so our petitions become all about God and his purposes.  Our petitions become those in the Lord’s Prayer.  Only then, when we petition for the conforming of our will to God’s, can we truly know what else to petition for; then, when it becomes clear what God’s will is in the situation, we can truly pray with the confidence that God will give us whatever we ask for.

Prayer is intercessory.  We are commanded to love our brothers, and the greatest service we can do for them is to petition God on behalf of them.  Intercession gives us accountability in the fact that we must pursue prayer for them in the right way.  As it is an act of goodwill, we pray for the other person’s sake and not our own.  This leads us away from the vain self-centered prayers of “change them, Lord” and leads us into the godly prayer of lifting up the other person into God’s will.  Selfless prayer is only possible when we see the other person and ourselves as they are in Christ’s eye, sinners in need of grace.  With the knowledge that we are sinful, it will kill off all the desire to be judgmental in our prayer life; with the knowledge that the other person is sinful in need of grace, we can joyfully lift them up into God’s loving embrace.

Prayer is regular.  The Benedictine Monks pray communally seven times a day.  The Divine Office prays specifically different things at traditionally important times of the day.  These ancient and tested methods of prayer bring out the importance of the rhythm of the day.  Prayer becomes most effective when prayed in accordance with this rhythm.  This is not to do with some magical quality that these hours have on our spirituality, but it has everything to do with humanity’s innate qualities.  These qualities dictate that we function better in cycles, and so our lives become governed by a great cycle of prayer.  And by positioning ourselves in this cycle, we live our life to the rhythm of submission to God’s will.

Prayer is continuous.  It is commanded that we “pray continually.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).  This command seems less impossible when we have a proper view of prayer.  When the prayer is the continual submission of our own will to God’s will, it is easy to see how this is possible, even necessary, in the Christian life.  With this attitude, everything we do becomes prayer.  Work becomes our calling where the will of God becomes acted out in living.  In this way there becomes no difference between the command of “pray continually” and the command of “be perfect” (Matthew 5:48).  Prayer is where we find the perfection of God.  The continual conforming to the will of God will necessarily become the perfection that is commanded of us.

Prayer is simple. Before, and still now, it has been easy for me to put off the reality and necessity of prayer by claiming the difficulty that comes with a disciplined prayer life. However, prayer’s simpleness makes it easy to begin praying. There is difficulty. We are humans; we probably will not pray as much as we should. However, when one has a rightly attitude about prayer, when one wants recognizes prayer as coming into the will of God, all excuses fall away and we are left with the conviction and need to pray.

New Site (not really)

Just an update to the decor.  The old one was kind of dark and small, so I decided to do a little feng shui.

The Farmer and the Dishwasher

I have decided that I rather like Jesus’ parables comparing God’s work with farming, the ones where the Gospel is seeds and the harvest is souls being saved.  I have decided this because that is exactly what it feels like working in a factory.  For over a year now, I have been that farmer sowing the seeds in the different soils.

A lot of these people show absolutely no interest in the things of God, and others show interest in my beliefs but are not anywhere near the place of commitment.  Nevertheless, I have been encouraged by their responses, even if they don’t yet have the one I really wish they would.  You see, even though these soils have not proven to be the good soil Jesus talked about I have discovered that it does not really matter.  The sower has many many seeds; he can afford to sow his seeds in soils that will bear no fruit.  Maybe, just maybe those soils, even though they look barren, will prove to be more fertile than the sower could possibly dream.

The sower has all the seeds he could wish for, but each one he plants is precious.  And the sower cares for all seeds he plants.  And by care, I mean that he tends the soil.  If the soil is hard packed dirt, he tills it.  If the soil is full of thorns, he clears the land.  And if the soil is rocky, well then he carefully removes each stone.  Until finally, that soil resembles the neat straight furrows of a farm.

It is this caring that often trips up Christians.  Sowing the seed is pretty easy, giving it the care it needs is harder.  Sometimes people’s thorns will thick from previous abuse; sometimes their stones will be buried deep within the soil.  And it takes work to remove these things.  You might spend your entire relationship carefully working on one stone, or rooting up one thistle.  That’s okay.  Because I am here to tell you something amazing happens.

The past few weeks, there seems to be more of an interest about my faith.  Figures, right?  I am leaving in a couple of weeks and now is when they begin to show an interest.  But one day when I was having one of these discussions, the little lady across the assembly from me chimes in with her two cents.  And let me tell you, these two cents were the best since the widow’s mite.  So after a year of patiently working on a particular stone, my sister comes along sits down in the dirt and begins to help dislodge the rocks.

The fields are white with the harvest, folks.  This is because the Gospel has been planted in the lives of people before we even arrive on the scene.  It is through their sweat and toil that the soil has become fertile.  We come and harvest those that they couldn’t, and begin the process with new fields.  You’ve go some farmin’ to do; it doesn’t matter who you are.  I have one theology degree under my belt with more on the way.  The other lady had no training excepting her life of faith.  Somehow, I am not afraid to leave the fields in her care.

Sustainable Democracy

People who have discussed political philosophy with me know I that I have a rather pessimistic view on democratic governmental systems.  But I have been thinking on the issue of democracy lately, and I might have thought of a system of democracy that does not make my head feel like it has been bludgeoned.

Democracy sounds really good on paper.  A land where men and women are free to live out their lives free from the tyrannical rule of fickle rulers, a land where only the ideals set forth by the majority are established, this is the land that democracy promises.  However good this might sound, one must ask a simple question.  Does a 51% majority have any right to force the other 49% to do something?

Despite my leading you along, the answer is quite simply yea.  That is the danger of a democracy, that sometimes your views won’t be held by the majority.  That majority, however small, gets to decide the course of a government.  But this question leads me to ask another question.  Does that same 51% majority still have the right to decide the fate of my local society even if the smaller society is overwhelmingly opposed to such a decision?  What should happen if 90% of all Ohioans would vote against a certain issue, only to see that same measure pass narrowly in all the other states?

You see every society is different.  And countries very rarely are made up of one society.  So why do we insist on giving the country as a whole more power over those smaller societies than the people living in the societies themselves?  In Congress, while all representatives strive for the good of the United States of America, the representatives from California will do so in a way that is in the best interests of California, the representatives from Iowa will do so in Iowa’s interest.  Should Californian interest be prioritized because it has the highest population?  I hold that the answer is a resounding no.

If your average political polls are accurate, then it would seem that the average Californian and the average Iowan have few political opinions in common.  And this is not a bad thing, because things work differently in different societies.  However, problems will emerge when the opinions of those in a Californian society are allowed to interfere with the workings of the Iowan society.  So democracy needs to be set up so that these smaller societies are freer to govern themselves.  In America, this would be done by making the national government much smaller in order to allow the state governments to be as large as they need to be.  Furthermore, the different state governments would need to be small enough, so that city governments could be as large as needed.

People should care more about their local governments than their national governments.  People are more likely to think through their political decisions if it is their community that is at stake.  So if any politician out there was to stumble upon this blog, my plea to you would be not more rules governing the entirety of this nation’s 300 million people but a reduction of those rules in order that democracy on a local level may rise to its deserved place in the minds of its citizens.

P.S.  I know that I am sometimes very critical of the United States, but today at work I was talking to a Chinese man.  And he really enjoys being here in a small town with clean air and freedoms he couldn’t get in China.  So for all those things that I think America is getting wrong, we must be getting a few right too.