Signposts

The end of Signposts

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Ecclesiastes 3:1

Signposts has come to an end. The passion I felt for expressing Christian musings here has been transmuted into a desire to interact in person with my fellow believers.

In other words, I wish to teach in the Church.

This is far different, and far more demanding, than throwing a few eccentric Christian thoughts onto the Web and hoping for a response.

For one thing, in the flesh, I get grilled, and grilling is good for a would-be teacher of the faith.

If I go overboard with my theology of suffering, somebody is likely to bring me up short and say, “Hey, doesn’t the Heidelberg Catechism say the purpose of humankind is to know God and enjoy Him forever?”

This forum has for me become too egocentric, to0 self-concious, too much of an attempt to sound brilliant so that my readers will be hungry for more.

In short, I have been secretly coveting guru status.

This is the antithesis of good Christian teaching.

Sure, I’ve got a lot of thoughts floating around in my head, but if I don’t constantly direct people to Christ and away from myself, then I will no longer be teaching the gospel.

I am no avatar of Christian life. I am a fellow traveller, a partner pilgrim on this long and mysterious journey of faith.

If I can do some effective teaching, help others to continue walking, then I will be happy.

But if God wishes me to do something else in the Body of Christ, I’m sure he will show me what that is.

I have enjoyed hearing from all of you: The believers, the waverers, the skeptics (all of us at one time or another),  and the out-and-out atheists.

You have sharpened me, corrected me, challenged me and inspired me.

My hope is that this blog has kindled in you a desire to know more about this faith that has sustained me and so many others on their earthly pilgrimage.

Christianity has done this by proposing the most radical kind of hope, i. e. the renewal of the entire world, and us with it.

Christianity pulls out all the stops. It is no crutch; it is either a full blown rejuvination or it is nothing.

“If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all men most to be pitied,” said St. Paul in a famous passage.

If you think of religion as a coping strategy to get through our present condition, then you must rethink the category “religion” in relation to what Christians proclaim.

They do not propose a coping strategy, a psychology, a psychic system that gives a more fulfilling life, more happiness, etc.

They propose an event that is the utter upsetting of every thought, concept, idea, attitude and scheme on the planet.

If you have any desire at all to understand just what it is that Christians have been saying from the beginning, I can recommend no better teacher than N. T. Wright.

He is a fellow traveller too, but a far more learned and experienced expositor of the faith  than I.

So fare thee well, my online (and sometimes face-to-face) compatriots.

May you know the truth, and may the truth set you free.

The deed

It’s mid-Lent, so here goes with a Lenten observation:

What Jesus said sputters away into well-intentioned meaninglessness unless you understand what he did.

Richard John Neuhaus helped me figure this out.

Let this blog post be a requiem of sorts to the man, who died Jan. 8.

Neuhaus wrote a gem of a book called, “Death on a Friday Afternoon” in which he meditated on the seven last words of Christ on the cross.

By “words,” he meant utterances, as in, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

I wonder what was Neuhaus’ disposition as he himself approached death, that “undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.”

Jesus was not celebrating his own death as it approached. It seemed to fly in the face of all that he had taught.

The kingdom of God come to Earth? I’m about to be despicably betrayed by a close friend and crucified.

For nothing. The monumental injustice of it must have weighed on him.

Can anyone think of a greater travesty? Here was a brilliant, wise, compassionate man that healed people, inspired them, gave them hope, and what was his end?

To suffocate to death between two criminals in a public place.

Where is the kingdom of God now? A lot of hogwash.

As so Jesus uttered those searing words, said to be spoken on a grim Friday afternoon from the cross:

“My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

Indeed.

If this isn’t affirmation for every Christian stumbling and staggering through periods of doubt and depression, what is?

How to understand this?

For Neuhaus, Christ’s suffering and death was literally a cosmic battle against all the evil infecting the world.

The infection was raging. The human race was sore afflicted. Even creation itself was groaning.

Somebody had to suck out all the pain, take it on himself, exhaust it.

Justice demanded it.

But for it to work, the person taking the evil onto himself had to be pure and blameless. Had to be free of the infection.

And had to be God, in order to take ALL the evil out of the world.

A simple human being, like Sydney Carton at the end of Charles Dicken’s “A Tale of Two Cities,” could take a man’s place at the gallows and thereby redeem on a small scale.

Maximilian Kolbe, a Catholic priest in Auschwitz, could die of starvation with several Jews in an act of solidarity, thus giving them hope in their final anguished hours.

But to shoulder the whole wretched mountain of sin in the world?

Who else but God himself could do this?

Who else but God himself would do this?

As the Easter Vigil approaches, we Catholic Christians will relive the suffering of Christ. We will hear his lament.

And we will hear the summation in the “It is finished.”

“Into thy hands I commit my spirit.”

To be a Christian is to believe that the world changed radically at that moment, and that nothing – nothing at all – has been the same since.

Joy vs. happiness

What is the difference between joy and happiness?

I have pondered this question half my life. And a clear definition always slips my grasp.

A close friend asked me to clarify this recently, and off I went into the same meditation.

What, indeed, is the difference?

The word “happiness” isn’t used in Scripture, but the word “joy” appears often in the New Testament.

And in the strangest juxtapositions, as in “Consider it pure joy when you face trials of many kinds.”

By definition, you cannot be happy when you are suffering.

How then can you be joyful?

Here is an unscientific, halting, unacademic, non-expert definition.

Joy is the foretaste of God, a preview of the full renewal of the world, of the consummation of all things in Christ.

Occasionally, it bursts out in the present as indicated in the verse, “This is my commandment, that you love one another, that your joy be made full.”

Jesus gave this commandment to his followers because they were to manifest that love which is a breaking into the present of the total fulfillment which God has yet to complete in Christ.

Christians are to be the advance guard, if you will, of the full-blown kingdom of God come to earth.

Joy is the signpost which reads, “It is coming. In fact, it’s already happening.”

This, I think, is something that happiness doesn’t possess. Happiness is purely temporal. Here one minute, gone the next.

There is, of course,  a deeper way to define happiness that takes it beyond mere happenstance, and that is to tie it to the ethical nature of humankind.

Victor Frankl wisely said that if you pursue happiness directly, it will constantly evade you. But if you pursue a life of meaning first, without caring particularly about being upbeat, then happiness often arrives as a byproduct.

Think of the deep satisfaction of raising children, which involves all kinds of situations that aren’t happy in the least, but which, for those who love their children, are mostly transformed into a deep sense of satisfaction.

Even at its best, however, happiness is yet again still not joy.

Joy is greater, it is higher, it is stronger and it is quicker.

Joy is a momentary glimpse of the glory of God to come. Joy is anticipatory.

Here is a crucial difference: Joy is fully cognizant of all the suffering, fallenness and sadness of the world.

There are many references in the NT to idea that if you do not suffer with Christ, you cannot rejoice when he comes again.

The difference between joy and happiness is like the difference between putting everything you have into a race and merely jogging it.

It is like the difference between savoring a truly amazing wine and gulping down a mediocre one.

It is like the difference between yearning to see your beloved face-to-face and being satisfied with e-mailing them.

Joy is hard won. Hard purchased. Joy leaves you aching for more. It is filled with longing, yearning, reaching.

It is connected with refusing to be consoled with halfway pleasures, momentary stimulation, conditional comforts.

It brazenly dares to look for the renewal of the world, the arrival of a time when there will be no suffering, pain, evil or death.

Joy is an alien concept, I think, to those who have become “well adjusted.”

It is possible, as the Message bible says, to trade the “glory of God who holds the whole world in his hands for cheap figurines you can buy at any roadside stand.”

It is possible, and even tempting, to be satisfied with something less than joy, because joy challenges evil and spits it its face.

Christians stake their joy on some brazen claims.

As St. Paul said, if life as it presently exists is the end of the game, if Christ simply perished on a Roman cross, then Christians, with their joyful expectations of goodness thoroughly triumphant, are to be treated like the delusional lunatics they are.

When I think of happiness, I think of that soothing feeling you get after a good meal, a great glass of wine and good company.

It’s good, but it’s not good enough. The stomach will perish, and food along with it.

There are higher things, Paul said.

And as Jesus said to Martha, “Only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

If you can understand what Jesus is saying here, I think you are on the path to joy.

Which is to say that you are on the path to fulfillment and completion.

Dirty laundry under the sun

It’s tough to survive 4 o’clock on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon.

You know, that feeling of blankness and lostness that comes over you, and you wonder, who am I and what the hell am I doing here?

The real trick of life is to survive the mundane.

Go out of town for three weekends in  a row. One weekend, you see the new Griffith Observatory and marvel at the exhibits with a group call ChristiansHikingfortheLord.com. Fantastic.

The next weekend you spend in Bakersfield listening to bluegrass jams. Cool.

The third weekend you go snowcamping with the Sierra Club, a singular experience. What a blast.

Meanwhile, you are running from the mundane. You know it’s out there. Ordinary time. Chores and duties that simply must be done. They have no special stimulation. They aren’t wonderful, transcendent experiences.

They demand to be done.

You become aware of time: Inexorable, undramatic. Simply passing.

And you think: The majestic, transcendent freedom I experienced yesterday in Yosemite has evaporated into forced labor.

Is there a book called “How to be a slave and Love It”? And if you read it and followed it assiduously, would it  make you a happy, content slave?

Because we have all come to believe that there is a proper way to live every moment of life. I’m not talking about morality here.

This is not on the level of ethics.

This is on the level of aesthetics. How do I have a meaningful, life affirming experience all the time?

Is there a meaninful, life affirming way to do your laundry? I haven’t found it yet. Throw the damn clothes in the machine, slop in some soap, jam some quarters in the slot and get it done.

It’s a hell of a long way from going to the latest exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, or taking a class in Balkan dancing at the Ashkenaz in Berkeley, or camping on the rim of Yosemite Valley in the snow with El Capitan looming across from  you.

Dramatic. Iconic. Awesome. Stupendous. (A slightly weary search for superlatives)

But try to have the same experience doing laundry. It simply must be done, unless you want to descend into the misery of reeking homelessness.

You are enslaved to the need for clean clothes. It has you by the balls.

And yet, what if you saw somebody doing laundry in a movie?

Well, then, here we may have the correct way to do it. Notice the facial expressions. The studied carelessness. The contemplative stare. The smooth insertion of quarters. Or not- let’s say the angry insertion of quarters, the screamed obscenities as the actor flings his clothes violently about it a fit of petulant rage (though always done self-consciously)

Then you go do your laundry, and you think about every move you are making: Are you doing it well, like said actor?

Everything must be done well. You must laugh well, cry well, talk well, think well, suffer well.

It’s the tyranny of well.

True freedom would be to do your laundry unselfconsciously. Or better yet, do it with a bunch of other people who are doing theirs at the same time.

Then, the stupidity of trying to do everything in an aesthetically approved manner would probably explode.

Which is why when I do laundry, I’d much rather do it in a laundromat or a communal situation, because then I am absolved of the lone solitary pressure of doing it just so.

I can see that my fellow man hates doing laundry as much as I do.

And they see me. Without speaking, we comfort one another.

I might even enjoy doing my laundry, God forbid.

Or not. There really is no “approved” way of doing  laundry, just as there really is no aesthetically approved way of muddling through a thousand and one situations in life that we have to deal with.

You suck it up and get through it.

If you can survive 4 p.m. on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon without blowing your brains out, you can survive anything.

Renunciation

Embrace the possibilities! Experiment! Boldly go where no man has gone before!

So says the prevailing spirit of postmodernism. We’re in a dangerous time people tend to constantly be at the intersection of several possibilities.

It’s getting so hard to will one thing.

Like Snoop Dogg: Porn producer and dedicated father …

Or the writer for “Californication.” Wonderful parent, spares no love for his kid, makes his living writing about a society awash in whoredom.

The spirit of the era says: I can be whoever I want to be. I can generate my own designer persona.

I can screw somebody on Saturday night at then go to church without a twinge of guilt or contradiction.

Virtually every spiritual discipline I know, from yoga to Christianity, teaches that some things should be renounced.

Back to Jesus, the man I am reading about to learn more about how to be a man.

What did Jesus renounce? Well, a happy family life, for one. He knew what was going to happen to him. His whole life was leading to his death.

Why not just catch Mary Magdalene’s eye, get married, have some kids?

Jesus renounced all kinds of things. He repeatedly went off alone to pray. Other times, he renounced privacy and allowed people to literally keep him from eating so he could heal them.

He renounced a peaceful life when he took on the Pharisees is some of the most scathing critiques you’ll ever see in print.

I just read a great book by N.T. Wright that mentioned that without renunciation of certain things, one cannot be open to the Holy Spirit and the truly joyous things He wants to do in a person’s life.

There’s a huge different between limping  and running.

If you want to limp, sure you can, dragging the old man and all its bad habits with you.

If you want to run, well then – as the writer of Hebrews said – you have to throw off everything that hinders.

One of these encumbrances is premarital sex.

I can’t think of anything that seems crazier from a general cultural perspective.

That’s like renouncing breathing and drinking! “Sex” – the avatar of the age says – “is a human need.”

Me so horny, and me must satisfy my desires when they burn within me.

Here is Jesus: “If your right eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.”

Any doubt about what Jesus meant?

But you reach a point in Christianty where you leave the general wisdom of renunciation and go off into different territory.

Yoga teaches that you should be indifferent to your desires, even indifferent to good and evil.

You are to pass beyond a certain point where you are one with all things, including what we term “evil, suffering, sin, death.”

Ahh, but while Jesus renounced, he embraced.

He embraced fully the Jewish vision of justice, where the world would be set to rights.

Evil is real. It is not a chimera of desire. It cuts, it hurts and it bleeds people.

Jesus embraced love. He was enraged by the religious authorities who professed their allegiance to God but had no love.

Thinking themselves wise, they were condemned. Their darkness was the worst of all, Jesus said, because they thought that their darkness was light.

Jesus embraced emotion. He was angry, he was moved, he wept, he marvelled, he exclaimed, he chided.

Above all, Jesus embraced God. And not some designer God that you create like a Build-a-Bear.

The God who interacted with the Jews. The God who gave the law, signaling that the world is screwed up, humans are screwed up, and God is doing something about it.

One of the most pernicious developments in religion is an amorphous, generalized view of God.

It’s pure speculation. Clearly, the only way we can know something about God is if he actually reveals himself in history. Which is exactly what Judaism and Christianity claim.

Think of Judaism and Christianity as the confirmation of the h0pes and aspirations of millions around the world who want to believe that there is a God, there human destiny is linked to God, and that the world as it is is not the final story.

Close encounters of the Jesus kind

I’ve decided to re-read the New Testament.

For those who haven’t heard the term, it simply refers to the re-imagination of Jewish salvation history through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ.

This re-visioning takes place over several written texts: Four written accounts of Jesus’ life and death attributed to his disciples, a bunch of letters written by St. Paul to some of the earliest Christian communities, a few other letters, and a wildly fantastic series of visions called Revelation.

I got the re-reading idea from my friend and fellow reporter Joe Johnson, whose blog – “sex, lies and videotape” – provides a nice counterpoint to the lugubrious asseverations of Signposts.

Joe read the NT several years ago, and the result was that he vowed never to go to church again.

Yet for him, I think, Jesus remains an attractive and sympathetic figure.

I grew curious. What is it about this Jesus that is so compelling?

The problem for cradle Christians like me is that the story of Jesus has been so repeated, so mythologized, so romanticized, that it is like white noise nobody notices anymore.

An object in the house that is so assumed, so familiar, that it becomes virtually invisible. Worn out from sheer use.

What would it be like to encounter Jesus afresh, to break through the centuries of accumulated meaning that have turned the extraordinary into the mundane, kind of like chipping the black lacquer off the Maltese Falcon to reveal the golden, jewel-encrusted bird beneath?

So here we go.

Progress so far: Matthew Chap. 24.

Some early, unscientific reactions to the text:

Jesus makes you uncomfortable. One minute, he is incredibly reassuring “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest.”

The next, “I did not come to bring peace but a sword.”

Forget the nonsense about Jesus being a great moral teacher, a kind of genial swami who preaches a Beatles style message of love, brotherhood and peace.

That comes from people who have never really grappled with the text.

This Jesus, in the words of Soren Kierkegaard, gives the possibility of offense.

“Blessed is he who is not offended at me,” Christ says to John the Baptist, when John starts to doubt that he is the Christ.

Where does this possibility of being offended come from?

Heres a stab at it.

Jesus insisted that the kingdom of God – with all the specific promises made by God to the Jewish people that he would end suffering and evil in the world – were being fulfilled in him.

And yet, such a lowly man! People said, “This fellow is a carpenter from Nazareth. He is the son of Joseph – not exactly a standout character.”

And yet the extraordinary things he was saying and doing …

The way Kierkegaard describes it, there are two essential ways to be offended by Jesus.

One is to be offended in relation to his lowliness. How could a simple carpenter’s son be making these claims, healing people, saying that the kingdom of God was being fulfilled in his own person?

The religious authorities of the day, I think, tended to think this way. This was beneath God. The messiah should come in glory and triumph, eliminate the hated Roman oppressors and establish Israel and the temple system forever.

The other possibility is to be offended by Jesus’ claims about himself. People who want to see Jesus as another great moral teacher like the Buddha fall into this category.

Such folks don’t want to hear anything about God actually doing things in history, intervening in their comfortable lives. A few nice teachings, apply them as you choose, and get on with your life.

There are hordes who fit into this category.

Perhaps we all fit into one of these niches at one time or another, shifting back and forth as our mood oscillates between transcendance and immanence.

“Blessed is he who is not offended at me,” Jesus said.

If you take away the possibility of offense, Kierkegaard said, then you will never come to faith in Christ.

Give me your thoughts on this topic.

More unscientific observations to come.

Back pain

Life can go from comfortable to terrifying in a split second. Security? An illusion we create so we don’t have to think too much about what we all know but don’t speak: Death is that visitor who is coming no matter what.

Ah, so you think I’m back to my default suffering mode.

Not at all. I’ve been feeling calm, cool and confident lately – a departure from the tragiphiliac musings that have become second nature.

Nope, this time the pain and the misery was my brother in law’s – somewhat of a departure for him, a genial hedonist whose motto has been something along the lines of  “If it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it.”

Has been.

I spent the weekend with my sister trying to help him get through awful back spasms.

Awe-ful as in, “Lord, this is bad.”

I stayed up half the night listening to him screaming in agony.

People sometimes say “scream in agony” as a bit of colorful hyperbole to liven up a story.

This was screaming in agony – sweat pouring off his body, his arms shaking as he clung to a walker, his right leg useless as the perverse back muscle pulled his foot to the side.

Image a charley horse, but buried deep in your body with immobilizing pain that brings you to an excruciating standstill.

It was like intermittent demonic possession. The demons would enter him, torment him with pain, then leave. But standing only a short distance off, laughing.

Then they would return, torment him again, leave off.

Repeat the process.

It was like interrogation techniques designed to break him down.

And break him down they were, after four hours of attacking.

There was nothing we could do to stop it.

I rubbed in Icy Hot. No luck. I kneaded away with a vibrating massager. Nothing. Hand massages, heat pads, lumber pads, microwave heat packs, different positions.

There was nothing we could do.

Finally, we got him seated in a wooden chair, cushions propping him up, a walker in front.

We put a board across the walker, put a pillow on top of that, and he fell forward, exhausted, his body reeking after four days without a shower.

We covered him with blankets front a back. He looked like a man in an iron lung.

What brought all this on was his trying to lie down several hours earlier.

He didn’t lie down the rest of the weekend. Three days of hobbling around with a walker and sleeping fitfully on a hardwood chair that benumbed his ass.

By Sunday, we were all exhausted. He picked up a guitar and started strumming. A very good sign. My nephew brought out his violin out and the bluegrass began.

I danced a jig. My brother-in-law smiled like he hadn’t smiled in a week.

But he lost some of his self-sufficiency, his easy-going hedonism. And I lost some of my self-focus, trying to ease his pain.

In one weekend, I got to know him like I hadn’t before.

You can’t really know somebody unless you know them in their misery as well as their joy.

It’s no different with Christ.

If we are buried with Him, shall we not also be raised with Him?

Snow job

One frequent reader of this blog suggested that it should be subtitled “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” — presumably a reference to his feeling that Signposts has become a descent into Nidever’s Inferno.

But lest readers think that I want to be eternally baptized in excrement as harpies pluck chunks of flesh out of my face, this post is about something entirely funny and fun.

I went snow camping with the Sierra Club this weekend.

This means that while you were grabbing a bag of chips and some beer on Saturday, I was at 8,000 feet hacking at the snow with a shovel in an attempt to build a shelter before the sun went down.

When you were sitting at home watching Saturday’s Super Bowl previews on ESPN, I was staring at an hour’s worth of digging that produced a hole resembling a bomb crater more than a snow shelter.

The cussing would have flowed out like a torrent, but for two factors: My dear friend Adrienne Klein knows that I am a Christian, and she was standing right next to me, so I felt obligated to show self-control.

The other factor is that I didn’t want to perturb her or anyone else with my frustration.

Wait. This post is supposed to be positive.

It will be. Really. Stay with me. Frustration won’t get the last word.

Snow camping was a spectacularly enjoyable experience.

Forget the digging – I abandoned my abortion of a “trench” and slept in a demonstration model dug out by one of the leaders, who slept in a hammock.

Trenches are just that – coffin shaped holes in the snow, covered by a tarp, that warm the air up inside when outside temps drop well below freezing.

There are a lot of things about snow camping that put it in a category of its own.

One of the best and most distinctive traits: The eating.

The eating begins as the sun is going down and the temperature begins to drop.

Layers are added. Balaclavas are donned. And the orgy begins.

Appetizers. Bowl after bowl of hot soup. Tea. Hot chocolate. Chicken. Shrimp. Homemade Dessert by Adrienne better than you can possibly imagine.

The eating keeps you alive. And it provides a shameless excuse for fellowship.

Which, by the way, increases in direct relation to the cold.

Bodies clump together. Souls conglomerate. The contrast between the warmth of the camaraderie and the bitter, uncaring environment around you is powerful.

You let your Western individualism relax a little bit, and you enter into the tribe, banding together, working together, to survive the elements.

I felt the age old burden, the struggle, melt into my hot chocolate, Adrienne’s company, the warmth of my fellow snow campers.

Peace descended as the stars came out brighter than bright and the cold tightened its grip.

Happiness, that rare and delightful visitor, came calling.

Sunday, while you were putting the final preparations on your Super Bowl plans, we were packing up, demolishing our snow shelters, strapping on snowshoes and tromping through the crystalline whiteness back to our vehicles.

A gift of a weekend. A gift of a friend in Adrienne. A gift of a world at once terrifying and awe-inspiring.

Ha!

Soothing sounds

Am I the only one who wasn’t impressed by Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, or were you also unmoved?

I mean, I sat down, I furrowed my brow and I listened intently to almost the whole thing.

Ordinary listening is difficult. Listening to an inauguration speech is excruciating.

It takes enormous effort to keep the mind focused.

I began to think about how intently I was listening. This is bad.

You can’t listen to somebody while you are thinking about how hard you are listening.

Try it.

Anyway, I brushed off this second self and returned to the presidential mouth as it moved to produce sounds intended to stir.

And what I found was this.

The gravitas Obama sought eluded him. The calls for service and sacrifice that he issued were, I think, lost in the celebrity worship.

Here’s an analogy: People on Dr. Phil’s TV show always end up nodding their heads and saying, “Yes, Dr. Phil. You are right. I am a hopeless loser who had no idea how to live until you told me what to do.”

Dr. Phil might be right on some things. But I swear, the rabbits on the show would jump into a blender if he told them to.

And I swear that the Obamaphiliacs do the same with their man.

This is hardly the kind of clear-headedness people need to deal with their malaise.

And do you remember Obama talking about how we must return to traditional American values of hard work, honesty, fair play and the like?

Since when are these traditional American values?

In the last 20 years, traditional American values have been to overspend, go into massive debt and pursue the easy life, by whatever means necessary.

Maybe the values Obama described were true of an earlier time, but do they still signify?

I don’t think Obama really comprehends the devaluation that has taken place.

As the speech neared its end, Obama kicked up his rhetoric several notches until he began to preach.

This was my cue to notice the ant crawling by my shoe.

I noted the peculiar nasal snuffle of a certain co-worker in the cubicle next to me.

My brain went into Frankenstein mode.

“Hard work.” Yes. hard work good. Must hard work. “Fair play.” Yes. fair play good. Like fairness. Fairness wonderful. ” “Tolerance.” Yes. Must tolerate. Cannot not tolerate. No tolerate bad, very bad!

Rhetoric doesn’t soar anymore. I fancy Obama thought he was George Washington or something, delivering a stirring speech in a time when speeches really stirred.

The term “stirring speech” has lost its meaning. As have words like “fair play, honesty, hard work”, etc.

They are strange syllables, sounds which you suspect ought to carry a certain meaning, but it slips your grasp.

Perhaps these linguistic husks can be revivified. Perhaps they are beyond recovery and must be scrapped.

I get the sense that Obama doesn’t really understand the true predicament Americans are in.

Nor do they.

Kierkegaard said that the true nature of despair is not to be aware that you are in despair.

Sure, we know we’ve got economic troubles, but do we understand that were are living in the middle of a jumbled heap of cultural ruins? That so many trustingly look to experts to fix their problems?

I’m afraid that people are going to turn the Obama administration into the governmental version of the Dr. Phil Show.

Obama good. Like Obama. Obama gooooood, heh heh! Obama friend. Obama rescue. Need Obama. Want Obama.

I hope I’m wrong.

Because if I’m right, were in deep doodoo.

Seeking liberation

“In the Lord I take refuge; how can you say to me, ‘Flee like a bird to the mountains?’ For lo, the wicked bend the bow, they  have fitted the arrow to the string, to shoot in the dark at the upright of heart.”

Thus, David, in the biting opening to Psalm 11, cuts through so much utopian nonsense I’ve been fed throughout the course of my American life.

I take refuge in the Lord.

Don’t tell my that if I can achieve a certain state, that if I can live in America, and have great material wealth, and have clean streets, and freedom of speech, and peaceful transitions of power, that the pain of existence is removed.

Don’t tell me, and I have been told this, that Americans have banished the falleness of man, that evil and death and violence and suffering are reserved for dark countries in Africa that nobody’s ever been too.

I can go to Florida when I’m old, live in Sunset Acres on hole number nine, the weather fantastic all the time, and the falleness will hound me (actually, perhaps with a greater vengeance, since I’ve done everything within my power to banish it.)

Don’t tell me that if I move to this city, change to this job, marry this woman, have these kids, take this medication, that the lonely pilgrim way of the Christian wayfarer has been abolished.

Even in America, even in the midst of great prosperity, the Christian is still a wanderer, still a discomfited pilgrim, searching for his true home.

In the Lord I take refuge.

It is becoming ever clearer that there is no real refuge in the American Way.

The American Way has been one of overspending and overconsumption and utopian materialism that has gotten a lot of people into a lot of debt and a lot of related trouble.

This is a good time to be a Christian, because,  if our priorities are right, we can show people where we’ve hopefully been all along – with one foot in the kingdow of God, not worried about prosperity per se.

Would that we could all be like the Apostle Paul right now! Remember how he said it did not really matter to him whether he had nothing or was drowning in wealth?

If we are wealthy, then we are wealthy with the abundance of Christ.

If we are suffering, then we are drawing into the fellowship of Christ’s suffering.

Either way, our time, resources, money, energy, is Christ’s.

But we are not so naive as to shut our eyes to the evil and suffering around us.

In fact, like Christ, we are asked to bear the burdens, to “make up what is lacking” in Christ’s suffering on behalf of the world.

So the American Christian is called to be discontent, all the more so because of his general prosperity.

And we believe that – even as we work for good – the ultimate victory over evil can only come from God.

After all, he created the world, he affirmed it as good.

And, after it fell into sin and evil, he promised to redeem it.

So, without self-deception, without BS positive thinking, the Psalmist boldly proclaims that God has not given up on his creation.

That he still loves it, especially his most glorious creation man, and that he will redeem it.

The writer of Psalm 11 affirms this almost defiantly, in the face of persistent evil.

Here’s the glorious ending to a Psalm that started with faith, passed through sorrow and returned again to faith:

“For the Lord is righteous, he loves righteous deeds.”

And then the joyful kicker, the thing that Christians yearn for with a yearning so intense it hurts:

“The upright shall behold his face.”