Signposts

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.

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.

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?

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!