The Curse of a Godless Man…
“The curse of a godless man can sound more pleasant in God’s ears than the Hallelujah of the pious” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together).
“When I write that my own situation in those months of pain and decision can be described as prayer, I do not only recall that during that time I sometimes read the Psalms and they became my psalms, or that, as I have also mentioned, I occasionally cried ‘Jesus’ and that name was my prayer, but I mean that I also at times would shout ‘Fuck!’ and that was no obscenity, but a most earnest prayerful utterance” (William Stringfellow, A Second Birthday).
“Barth did not want merely to preach to his audience (in the prison). In order to preach to them properly he also wanted to get to know them personally, and so he often went to visit them in their cells. For instance, he once reported that ‘this morning I listened at length to three murderers, two confidence tricksters and one adulterer, added the odd remark here and there and gave each a fat cigar.’ On another occasion he asked in amazement, ‘Am I really something of an optimist or a walking embodiment of the heresy of the restoration of all things? I found it impossible to be despondent or disturbed over these men. Instead, I thought that I had seen something encouraging and cheering in each of them’” (Busch, Barth, p. 415).
I was talking with friends last night over some wine as the sun set. I said I feel very connected to people who do not consider themselves Christians, aren’t church-goers, and may not believe in God at all. I get the impression that some of these people I feel connected to are more in the game than those who assume they are playing center field.
faith, the poor, & Farmer
I’m going to post this because I found it provocative. They are a series of quotes from my Journal that contains quotes from Tracy Kidder’s Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest for Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House, 2004):
While in Haiti, Farmer became interested in Liberation Theology. He himself is Roman Catholic, but had never came across this kind of Catholicism:
“The Marxists Farmer had read, and many of the intellectuals he knew, disdained religion, and it was true that some versions of Christianity, and more than a few missionaries, invited impoverished Haitians into what Pere Lafontante called ‘the cult of resignation’, into accepting their lot patiently, anticipating the afterlife…
“But the Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor: ‘the shrewd conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps even omniscient, was keeping score” (p. 78).
Tracy writes: “And if the landless peasants of Cange needed to believe that someone omniscient was keeping score, by now Farmer felt the need to believe something like that himself. In the peasant phrase, an unnecessary death was ‘a stupid death,’ and he was seeing a lot of those. ‘Surely someone is witnessing this horror show?’ he’d say to himself. ‘I know it sounds shallow, the opiate thing, needing to believe, palliating pain, but it didn’t feel shallow. It was more profound than the other sentiments I’d known, and I was taken with the idea that in an ostensibly godless world that worshiped money and power or, more seductively, a sense of personal efficacy and advancement, like at Duke and Harvard, there was still a place to look for God, and that was in the suffering of the poor. You want to talk crucifixion? I’ll show you crucifixion, you bastards’” (p. 84).
Farmer continues: “The fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor—not just in Haiti but elsewhere, too—made me even more convinced that faith must be something good” (p. 85).
What do you think?
Broken Arms & Compassion
Here’s a Journal entry from Saturday, April 30, 2006:
“I remember as a young boy, in Smiths Falls, Ontario, watching another boy about my age climbing a tree next to a large field. Behind the tree, on the edge of a small bluff, stood a bagpiper playing a mournful dirge on his pipes, dressed in kilt and all, while the sun set. The scene is so beautiful and surreal, that it has an almost dream-like feel to it, but I know it really happened. As I was watching the boy climb the tree, I saw him slip and fall to the ground. I heard a snap. His arm broke, with a bone actually protruding out of the flesh of his forearm. In extreme pain, the boy banged on the door of a house near the tree. When the woman opened the door, she was so visibly filled with disgust and horror, that she slammed the door in the boy’s face. The bagpiper finally noticed what was happening and intervened.
“She was unable to help the boy, not because she was mean or indifferent or cruel, but because she was so terrified by the visible wound and pain. She was unable to show compassion, which means she was unable to enter into his suffering with him (com= with; passion= suffering). Which leads me to conclude that often it isn’t because we are cruel, but because we are afraid of the tangibility and reality of suffering, that we are unable to bear it in others.
“Therefore, we distance ourselves from pain in others. Basically, at the core, we are afraid of our own vulnerability, susceptibility to suffering, and further, we are terrified of our own mortality and death.
“So the key is for each of us is to overcome our own fear of death. That is the ruling master and lord over our lives until we fight it and vanquish it. The solution isn’t to try to drum up a feeling of compassion, but to eliminate the fear of death. True love casts out fear. Fear and love cannot cohabitate.”
Suffering, Humility & Integrity
“God’s work… is accomplished most incisively through suffering” (Athanasiadis, George Grant and the Theology of the Cross, p. 44).
Here’s another quote that I think is SO important in any kind of community, especially a Christian one:
“… a direct connection is seen between suffering and the maintenance of religious integrity” (“Humility”, International Dictionary of the Bible).
I believe this is true. I’ve seen it over and over again: those who suffer are more likely the ones with true spiritual integrity. Those who live a life of denial and escape from suffering, usually couched in the religious language of triumphalism, positivism and prosperity doctrines, often lack that integrity. Living through the suffering, not without it, is the Christian call.
The Middle Path & the Mind of Christ
Read this quote, then what I have to say about it:
The Christian “knows that God’s Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him guilty, even when he does not feel his guilt, and God’s Word in Jesus Christ pronounces him not guilty and righteous, even when he does not feel that he is righteous at all” (Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 22).
This is what I wrote about that quote in my journal on Saturday, April 1, 2006:
“If what Bonhoeffer says is true, then these two truths cancel each other out. Do we have the courage to live in between these two truths, or actually, the courage to live in them both? The middle path is acknowledging the truth of both of these and to accept God’s love unconditionally, even without awareness. Do I have the courage to live freely within this tension without conscious concern or fear, to live in complete freedom without self-condemnation, analysis, or judgment? This is the realm for the new man, the new woman.”
If we have the mind of Christ, then we stop thinking about the mind of Christ and think with the mind of Christ. The above is how the mind of Christ would think, I think.
Religion and Freedom
I love this passage from Bono in Conversation with Michka Assayas:
“… the children of Israel are wandering through the desert. They’ve just been delivered from captivity by Moses, but they’re straight back to worshipping the Golden Calf. It’s business as usual, they have forgotten the God who delivered them. They keep getting warnings, and finally God just has enough and says to Moses: ‘Get out of the way, I’m gonna destroy my people. Then I’m gonna start again. This experiment has just run out of gas, and this freedom thing is really not working out. (laughs) So get away from the midst of these people, because I’m gonna vaporize them. I can, I made them, after all.’ Of course, Michka, you’ll realize I’m paraphrasing there. And then the Scriptures record that ‘Moses, knowing the heart of God’—this is an amazing line—instead of running away, runs into the center of the people and says: ‘If you take them, take me.’ God presumably smiles. It was the gospels in action, people laying down their life for their brother. You know, it’s a great line from the Holy Book—sorry to get all religious on your ass this morning: ‘No greater love has a man than he lays his life down for his brother.’” (pp. 206f).
When I read this passage yesterday, I knew this was what I was about, what Lisa (my wife) and I are about, and what my church is about! This freedom, in my opinion, is so much more important than anything else. I believe in it, fight for it, defend it, encourage it, and demonstrate it as best I can. I often fail, but I aim for this and always encourage others to do the same. It has come under plenty of criticism, but I still know this is right! God was right: “this freedom thing is really not working out”. I get that! I’ve often raised that very comment myself when I look at the lives of people who’ve been informed of their freedom. But there was something more important at work and at stake, and that is freedom and the love that creates and defends it.
Religion and Rigor
“… people who are open spiritually are open to being manipulated more easily, are very vulnerable. The religious instinct is a very pure one in my opinion. But unless it’s met with a lot of rigor, it’s very hard to control” (Bono, in Bono in Conversation with Michka Assayas, p. 221).
May I suggest what might be meant by “rigor”? In my case: critical self-awareness; critical search for the revelation of God (truth); and these two tested against how well I love others unconditionally. Am I free? Do I free others? Or am I manipulated and manipulate others?
kicking the darkness
I preached today. I don’t know… there’s often a lingering sense that I was far from adequate. I still haven’t preached my best. I preached on Psalm 37. My basic 3 points were:
1. depart from evil
2. do good
3. and you won’t regret it.
Simple. Verse 27 summarizes the whole psalm this way:
“Depart from evil, and do good;
So you shall abide forever.”
I feel there is something so solidly true about this, even in spite of the obvious denials of it, the physical proofs that it ain’t so. I have to believe that God is our refuge, bottom line. That justice will prevail. So I preach on. I’ll “kick at the darkness ‘til it bleeds daylight” (Bruce Cockburn).
Bono, Sheep, and Leadership
“… I do love the image of sheep. You’ve got to hand it to Jesus. (laughs) That is a great one, sheep, isn’t it? Because there’s something like: pigs are intelligent, they’re useful farm animals as they wallow in the muck. But sheep! They’re useful for making jumpers, of course, but they really are pretty dumb. The great image of mankind. And they move in packs as well. They all head off the wrong direction together. There’s no particular leader, anyone can become a leader, and anyone can be right for a particular stampede. They’re so frightened, and not even aware that they’re of great use for making woolly jumpers, or when they’re dead making sheepskin coats for secondhand car dealers. (laughs)” (Bono, in Bono in Conversation with Michka Assayas, Riverhead Books, pp. 72f).
‘Nuf said!
Elie Wiesel and Faith
Here’s a shocking quote from Elie Wiesel’s book, Night, that MUST be heard:
“In the beginning there was faith—which is childish; trust—which is vain; and illusion—which is dangerous…
“We believed in God, trusted in man, and lived with the illusion that every one of us has been entrusted with a sacred spark from the Shekkinah’s flame; that every one of us carries in his eyes and in his soul a reflection of God’s image.
“THAT was the source if not the cause of all our ordeals” (pp. x f.).
At the end of the book, he includes his Nobel Prize acceptance speech from December 10, 1986. In it he says:
“… I have faith. Faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and even in His creation. Without it no action would be possible” (p. 120).
Here’s a man who suffered at the hands of extreme violence. He explores the causes. He discerns the solution. May we have such courage! For only then can we do right action.
