Riddles

In the spirit of anticipating the Hobbit movies, Amber and I are rereading the book. Chapter 5 is titled Riddles in the Dark. In this chapter, two characters have a riddle contest.

This has led us to a realization of how fun guessing and making up riddles can be.

In this note I have first copied the riddles that appear in Tolkien’s chapter 5. (Careful reading these if you don’t want to spoil the chapter for yourself.) I have also included some riddles that Amber and I made up ourselves yesterday while we were walking at the Nature Center.

Answers follow at the end of each section.

Enjoy!

1)
What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees
Up, up it goes,
And yet it never grows?

2)
Thirty white horses on a red hill,
First they champ,
Then they stamp,
Then they stand still.

3)
Voiceless it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters.

4)
An eye in a blue face
Saw an eye in a green face.
“That eye is like to this eye”
Said the first eye,
“But in a low place,
Not in high lace.”

5)
It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter

6)
A box without hinges, key, or lid,
Yet golden treasure inside is hid.

7)
Alive without breath,
As cold as death;
Never thirsty, ever drinking,
All in mail never clinking.

8 )
No-leg lay on one-leg,
Two-legs sat near on three-legs,
Four-legs got some.

9)
This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

Answers-

1) Mountain
2) Teeth
3) Wind
4) sun on the daises
5) dark
6) eggs
7) fish
8 ) Fish on a little table, man at table sitting on a stool, the cat has the bones.
9) time

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

1)
I fall but never break
I run and never stop
I roar without a mouth
I pound the earth and break rocks.

2)
A cat that doesn’t chase mice
A cat without a body
A cat that likes water.

3)
I cover the earth
I’m in the deep ocean
I clothe flying dragons
The sky has nothing to do with me.

4)
You can walk on me and I won’t cry
You can throw me and I won’t break
But if you eat me you die.

5)
The blue wheel moves me
The yellow wheel drives me
Back and Forth I go.

6)
I nurture everything that lives
I bury everything that rots
I am a treacherous lover
I am the wife of God.

7)
I follow the rain like a rainbow
I look like a rainbow
But I’m not in the sky.

Answers-

1) Waterfall
2) cattails
3) the color green
4) rocks
5) the tide
6) Mother Nature
7) wildflowers
The principle behind making up a riddle is misdirection. You’ve got to decide what you want your riddle to be about first, obviously. Then try to flesh it out without giving it away. Also try to put yourself in the mindset of a guy from 1892 with a lot of time on his hands.

Lessons from a Stick Man

I flipped through my post-it notes today. I have a habit of drawing flipbooks on every pad of post-it notes I get my hands on. I started out animating simple lines, making dots move around the page, making a ball bounce, things like that. Now I draw rain falling, frogs crossing the street, epic tennis matches.

The pad of notes that I looked through was a particularly thick one. It has sat on my desk for ages, so I felt sure that I had already drawn something on it. But when I flipped through it, all the pages were blank. Expect one.

It turns out that, at one time or another, I had drawn a lone stick man on one of the pages near the middle. I don’t remember drawing it. For the life of me I can’t remember why I only drew one frame. When you flip through the stickypad/flipbook, you see: nothing, nothing, nothing, stick man! nothing, nothing. Not much of a flip book.

That stick man only had one day to live. He lived one of the middle ones. No history, no future, no story arc.

We don’t often think about the difference one day makes. Each day kind of blends in to the next one. We get caught up in the swing of things and before you know it, it’s tomorrow.

Life often has the characteristics of story. As with books, so with life: we like to feel that it’s going somewhere, that it’s worthwhile, that it will have a happy ending. We like it when some grand theme or moral is illustrated. When we feel as though we’re living a story—our own story—it gives us a sense of meaning and purpose.

That’s why it was such a shock to me when I realized that I had created a one-frame-flipbook. Had there been more than one frame they would have bended together, and no telling what my stick man would have done.

As it is, the isolated frame showed me how important one frame can be. That stick man only had one frame, and he seems to have made the most of it. In the same way, we must live each day well so that when they bend together it’ll be a good story.

Articles of Faith

PART I

“To the heights! To the heights!”
-Gregory Palamas

seekers

I am a participant in humanity’s rich spiritual heritage, seeking to bridge the gap between what is and what ought to be. I am a supporter of faith and a believer in belief. I love logic. I am a fan of mysticism. But I myself I am a seeker. The task of a seeker is to reconcile his or her vision of the divine with his or her vision of day-to-day reality. This reconciliation of mystery and mundane must be done simply. A tower to heaven is of no use if it floats above the ground using elaborate devices. If these two visions cannot be reconciled, seekers theoretically must recant their beliefs or else maintain them in the face of the realities to which their beliefs supposedly apply.

Sometimes we settle for a little of both recanting and maintaining; a compromise which humbly acknowledges our human limitations but works toward belief nonetheless. My thesis here is that people who experience God are justified in believing in God’s existence and in living for him a life demonstrative of certain values including love, justice and beauty, whether in concert with an established religion or not, and whether they have a perfect answer for every question or not.

What follows, then, is a description of a belief system that works for me. It is a personal theology. It is far from unique or original or complete, but I benefit from writing it down. It contributes little, if anything, to the conversation. But I hope that at the end of the day my contribution to the Great Conversation of Life is in the form of actions rather than words, anyway.

creation

In the beginning, before God created space and matter, space and matter did not exist. I find it easy to explain space and matter in terms of the Lord creating them. This is not to say that matter’s existence is proof of God’s existence, even though it seems absurd to me to suppose that matter itself is uncreated and eternal.

If we follow the regress of “where did that come from?” questions, we may eventually end with God. But some have pointed out that it is just as logical to stop one step before you get to God, or to go further and insist that God him/herself had an origin.

Personally, if these options are equally logical, I have no problem going with the one that makes sense to me, namely; God, who creates and is uncreated, is the First Cause. The problem is that any choice one makes between these options will be arbitrarily motivated if it is based solely on this kind of cosmological speculation.

So the existence of everything might suggest the existence of God in that everything was created by him in the beginning, but everything’s existence in no way proves that everything was created by him. And if it did, it would still prove nothing about what kind of God he is, which is a topic I will address hereafter.

religions

I believe God created humankind, and not the other way round. Humans did create religions, but religions are no more inherently profane than humans. Neither the Bible nor any other religious text was written directly by the hand of God.

If this is so, you may ask, how are we to know him? For Christian theology holds that God is unknowable apart from his own self-revelation. (Please forgive the use of the masculine pronoun for God throughout. I find “him or her,” “he or she” or “it” distracting.)

I agree with theology on this point. The reason I refuse to admit Christianity’s claims to absolute or exclusive status, or any religion’s claims to such, is precisely because there is more than one religion. If there were only one faith on the market, we would have less of a contest. As it is, the multiplicity of religions is a problem.

There are other problems specific to Christianity. (Feel free to skip this paragraph. It is hard for me to write.) First, if Jesus intended to save individuals from a certain eternity of hellfire and teeth-gnashing by sending his Spirit-filled disciples out to invite the lost into a personal relationship with himself, I have to believe he would have started much earlier in human history and would have sped the process up. The fact that Christianity offers no answer at all to the question of the unevangalized constitutes a problem for Christianity’s exclusivity, not to mention its validity. I also wonder, if our eternal fate is determined by a single decision made during our time on Earth, why the time our Creator saw fit to grant us is so very short. If our lifespan is less than the blink of an eye compared to eternity, why only give us the blink of an eye in which to stumble around and perhaps strike upon the Truth? Theology says we die because sin entered into the world through Adam. But then, why start us off in the world at all? Why not start us in heaven where God is, if he wants to be with us so badly?

But let us return to the question that was raised earlier. How can we know God? What kind of God is he? This can be a difficult question.

In my brief study of religion I have found that it is usually the mystics who concern themselves with this question the most. The reformers and preachers have insight into his will. The organizers and movers, the theologians and philosophers: they know God one and all. But the sole occupation of the mystic is simply to encounter the divine presence. It is this holy obsession that drives them to the ascetic wilderness of the desert and to become the old man on the mountaintop and the mysterious woman who lives in the hermitage and has her food given to her through a small hole near the base of the wall.

Muslim sufis, Christian monks, Buddhist monks. Every religion is home to some form of mysticism, however obscure it may be. I do not intend to dwell on the similarities or difference in their respective visions of the divine: whether they are theistic or not; whether love is their centerpiece; what forms their devotion takes.

I want to observe that, as a rule, all mystics are hyphenated. One literally cannot be simply a mystic. One is either a Christian mystic, or a Jewish mystic, or so on.

I think this fact points to why humans have created religions. The consensus is that God is worthy of devotion (notwithstanding the suffering he has to answer for) but we cannot devote ourselves to an abstraction. In other words, if God has no knowable attributes, we cannot follow him. Luckily, knowledge of his attributes has been supplied to humankind of old through the teachings of the religions. For example, Christians believe in the Trinity not because this doctrine is self evident in nature but because the Church teaches it.

spiritual experience

How does belief in God take root in people in the first place? As noted above, belief in God is shallow at best if he has no known attributes. Belief in an impersonal, distant God is unsustainable. (The kind of belief that has any kind of practical life application, that is.)

My theory is that people “know” God and then they believe in him, not vise versa. We experience him first, and then we consent to his existence in earnest. It should be pointed out importantly that if we say we experience something then we presuppose that we believe in it. For example, if I say, “that music is beautiful,” it is presupposed that I believe music is being played.

So the doctrines and tenets of a religion are not the source of God’s self-revelation. Personal spiritual experience is. Through a spiritual experience one can perceive many things about God: that he is the champion of the poor; the author of morality; the owner of the cattle on a thousand hills. All God’s primary attributes can be gathered through spiritual experience.

This, I think, accounts for the origins of religions. Culturally situated people have experiences, write them down or pass them down orally, attract followers, and presto! A religion. Thus, religions are the reservoirs of the knowledge of God, but not the source. And reservoirs can be added to haphazardly. Somewhere along the way, for example, Buddha, who was a non-theist, came to be revered as a god! And Jesus, who had a message to preach, somehow became the message itself.

I used to believe in the deity of Christ. One day during that part of my life, Mormons came to my door. Mormons come to everybody’s door eventually. I always listen to them politely, take their literature, and sometimes I ask them a question or two. Once, I asked them how we could know that the Book of Mormon was from God. Their reply disturbed me. “Read the book of Mormon,” they said, “then pray, and see if God doesn’t confirm its word in your spirit.”

“Wow,” I thought. “I’ll be darn if that isn’t the same thing Christians say about the Bible. . . . Good thing Mormons are wrong and Christians are right.”

Spiritual experiences can’t confirm the truth of any particular religion. If a nonreligious person wanders into a Christian church, we can hardly expect them to experience Nirvana. All the songs are about Jesus. Nor will a Buddhist who has never heard of Christianity spontaneously experience Jesus during mediation.

On the other hand, though, experience is what counts. For example, if someone has a spiritual experience of Jesus during worship or while reading the New Testament, I acknowledge that they are, in fact, justified in their belief that Jesus exists. Justified belief is different from knowledge. To use philosophical jargon; it has a less exalted epistemological status. I am not too perturbed by this. In an elementary Philosophy of Religion textbook you can find a discussion of all the arguments for the existence of God and the counterpoints, and all the arguments against his existence and the counterpoints. I tire of the debate and conclude that an “exalted” conclusion is pretty hard to come by. It is possible that God exists and it is possible that he does not. Philosophy as I understand it does not tell me a whole lot more about the question of the existence of God.

In any case, I have never read the book of Mormon and never gave God the chance to confirm its words in my spirit. I have read the Bible multiple times, but I have rarely had spiritual experiences through it. That is because books are not my gateway to such experiences. As it turns out, nature is.

Every human being is capable of spiritual experiences. Religions usually teach that we have to be in a certain state of mind or heart, as with the mystics described above, but there are, of course, exceptions to this. Sometimes God must be sought with “the whole heart.” Sometimes he is found of those who did not seek him. In both cases I believe God is behind any genuine spiritual experience.

No two people experience God in the same way. Some people’s pathway to spiritual experience is reading texts. Other pathways include nature, service, intellect, contemplation, and music. I should also note that what I am calling spiritual experience Christians tend to call worship. (The word “prayer” can also have some of the same connotations.)

belief

Why believe that God is behind such experiences? Why can’t such experiences be the fruit of complicated human psychology? Well, they certainly are the fruit of complicated human psychology, just as our existence is the fruit of complicated human evolution. The question really is, as always, why believe in God?

The nature and content of the experiences convinces me. I understand spiritual experiences as God’s self-revelation.

Let me return to the music example used above. If I have never heard of music before and I suddenly hear music being played then I will believe in music and I will be justified in my belief. But I will know nothing about music other than what I hear. In the same way, I know nothing about God other than what I can gather, but I am justified in my belief because of the experience.

Now, admittedly, this argument does not work for proving the existence of God. As we know, religious epistemology is a much-debated field. Experience can’t prove God, but it can indeed justify belief in him; so we are talking here about justified belief rather than knowledge. I perceive God to be a lover of justice, a lover of beauty, a lover of goodness, a lover of love, a lover of his creation, a lover of people, a lover of me. I believe in this God.

I have experienced him a number of times. For example, I have experienced him while sitting on a wooden bench in a field that had been specifically designated as a “sacred space.” I have experienced him while resting on the side of an Ozark mountain in a state forest. While watching a worm journey across a sidewalk. Singing a song. Accidentally stepping on a dead bird.

There is a limited range of things that can be legitimately discerned about God in this way—this limit is, I think, ethically important. I can’t go on TV and say God wants you to give me money. The reason I believe in God and not in Jesus, even though I have had spiritual experiences as a Christian, and despite Lewis’ correct understanding of the obstinacy of belief and the logic of personal relations, is my exposure to the work of skeptical scholars of religion. I do not think the historical record sufficiently validates the Christian narrative. For example, I think Jesus did not say all the things the gospels say he said.

faith

My system perhaps catches on a double standard here. Some may say that reason does not validate the exalted status I give to justified belief just as I do not think the historical record validates Christianity.

“Reason” does not confirm it, but when we say reason in this sense we really mean critique, and critique can’t determine what is true and good but only what is not true and not good. As I read recently in an academic journal, “…If the essay didn’t conclude that a discourse was faulty, the reviewers would try to make the essay say that. Only critique is acceptable academic practice, because only contradictions and omissions can be certainly demonstrated.”

I know we can gather no demonstrative “proof of God” through the arts or the sciences. But where these sorts of knowledge turns up inconclusive, not negative but inconclusive, spirituality is found to be a deep pool.

I contend that reason is to logical cognition as spiritual experience is to mystical awareness. In other words, “reason” and “spirituality” are analogous. In my experience, spirituality is as much a part of the human condition as any other cognition or sensation. So what is an individual to do when he or she feels God pressing in upon him or her? Are we to consider ourselves too sophisticated to believe in God? We could think ourselves too sophisticated, but there is no mandate of any kind that says we should. Instead, this can be where faith comes in. As Anne Lamott has said, the opposite of faith is not doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty.

For me, faith is not some sort of religious parody of reason. Nor is reason merely critique.

I think belief in God is very often a basic belief for people, not based on any deeper belief. (We have a number of such basic beliefs. For example, the belief that our physical senses are reliable, or that we are loved.) Faith is what we call it when we believe, and we can’t prove it, and we can’t reasonably be asked to.

I acknowledge that we cannot deduce through spiritual experience whether God is Yahweh or Allah or the Great Spirit. I am fully confident, though, that what we can know about God through experience, abstract or structured as it may be, is more than enough to occupy us. God as I have experienced him at times is both overpowering and intimate.

lord

Only when one experiences God will he or she perhaps be motivated to call him “Lord.” The term Lord indicates that a conceptual leap has taken place from an impersonal God to a personal one. This leap is fueled by an experience.

And it is a supremely intuitive leap. I know intuitively, for example, that this God who is disclosing himself to me is transcendent. And he must have some reason, some purpose for his dealing with me.

In fact, the term “Lord” indicates that he has a will, insofar as lords generally have a will for their people to accomplish. This will of his is evident from his perceived attributes. In short; if I call him Lord then I myself am to love justice, beauty, goodness, love, creation, and people just as he does. No command or commissioning ceremony is necessary. In this way, to believe in the Lord is to receive a mandate for action.

As discussed above, belief in an impersonal, unknowable God is unsustainable. Again, we can’t know him if he is unknowable; if he were just plain unknowable then claiming to “know him” in a justified way wouldn’t even be a matter of “faith,” but would plainly be impossible. I will now add that to believe in (that is, to experience and believe in) a personal God is to believe in Lord. The point is: either God is unknowable, or he ignites one’s life. (The third option is, I suppose, that he is knowable but that one doesn’t know him.)

Of course, one may observe quite rightly that people can live these values out without any help from God. I agree with this completely. We all act under our own volition. I think the Lord is happy with right actions no matter who performs them. And more than just actions—it is true that the Lord pondereth the heart.

prayer

So, religion is not properly conceptualized as a set of propositions to be understood, consented to and defended. Religion is a set of purposes to be lived out.

Purpose is a big theme. I can see why some people believe that humans have evolved too far for their own good and have sadly developed a need to look for purpose where there is none.

I do think that people expect a lot from the universe. We tend to optimistically assume that there is a way through every problem, an end to every maze. The religious especially think that if a Creator put everything in place for a purpose then there must be a way through every labyrinth. In short: we hope.

Prayer is an expression of hope. I cannot write a treatise on hope, nor on prayer. But I can think of nothing more reviled by popular atheists than hope, so I will put my two cents in. I love hope. I do not know if “intercessory prayer” “works.” But I believe in the prayer of petition, privately. I don’t argue about it. I won’t defend this belief against skeptics. I have experienced answered prayers. I pray. And I love it when people pray for me or with me. I pray to “the Lord.”

- – - – -

PART II

“The glory of God is man fully alive”
-Irenaeus

compendium

I would like to make a few other observations about God. These observations will perhaps be more devotional or overtly religious in nature than the preceding has been. I will elaborate (in a round about way) on the following statements. God delights in his creation like an artist enjoys his or her art. This delight requires no participation from the creation. But part of that delight does come from being known by his creation, and his delight is even more full when his creation acts according to his nature. I want to discuss these things. As I do, I will also discuss why God seems so hard to get.

otherness

Many people insist that if he exists at all, God is silent. The seeker looks around and justly asks why God is so hard to find. Many have ventured answers to this question, and none that I know of are completely satisfactory. I will here venture my best guess. This guess is informed by the Christian tradition I swim in (if you haven’t noticed), so be warned.

I do not know why God created us—or anything—at all. I believe God is “wholly other,” so whatever he might have had in the way of something we would identify as a motivation is certainly unfathomable. The most precise thing we can say is probably that he felt like it. Despite what Christian theology says about the perfectly self-contained nature of the community of the Trinity, I suspect that if God had a motivation it would be something like what we would call the longing of loneliness.

But he did not just set out to create humans. If that were the case, he largely overdid it by creating the cosmos so big and us so small. God surely delights in his entire creation and not just in Homo sapiens. God has a lot to delight in, especially if he is a lover of beauty. We have a responsibility therefore to preserve the little part of creation that God has put us on, because he undoubtedly loves butterflies, trees and the tide. Destroying any of it would be a shame.

I guess it is for butterflies to figure out why God created butterflies. Why they have to be worms before their glory is revealed. I bet they’re not even curious, really. I bet they know. Lucky for them. Maybe it is humankind’s unique curse to care about the whys. In any case, it is my own existence and relationship with God that I wonder about now. And I’m sure God knows that I wonder.

free will

The first thing God had to create was otherness. As I said in the very first paragraph, I believe God created space and matter. I don’t think God himself needs space to exist in. Space probably came before matter, or else they were created simultaneously. Otherwise, where would God put the physical objects he was making?

In order to create at all, that which God creates has to be other than himself. I am not among the panentheists. I think that our very createdness is what makes it possible for God to seem distant in the first place.

Besides our physical otherness from God (he is “other” than us locationally), we are also volitionally other. That is, he gave us the capacity to have a will of our own. It makes sense to me that he would do this. If he did not—if our wills were merely extensions of his—what would he have succeeded in creating? Just more fingers on his righteous right hand, and still nothing to hold in it.

So free will was a part of the plan. The fact that we have free will, and the observable results of it, is part of why I gather (through reverse engineering) that God was lonely-esque when he created us. If he wanted something, he could easily create it. If he wanted something from somebody, he would have to create something and somebody. And if he wanted something given to him spontaneously by somebody, that somebody would have to have free will to choose or not choose.

I can see someone scoffing at the vanity or selfishness of God. “He wants something given to him spontaneously indeed!” But isn’t our own human desire for companionship a perfect example of this? We all want somebody to like us. We wouldn’t force them to like us even if we could, because that would defeat the point. So if we have this deep desire for unconstrained love, and if God “created us in his image” at all (whatever that means in the face of God and humankind being “other”), then we can see that free will was a necessity.

The problem with free will is that it makes evil possible. For example, God loves justice, we are to love justice too, but we are not compelled by heaven to act justly. It is a central doctrine of Christianity, though, and of many religions in some form or another, that “sin separates us from God.”

I now want to address something I could not address until now. Earlier I said, “the consensus is that God is worthy of devotion (notwithstanding the suffering he has to answer for)…” I now want to say the few words I have to say about evil.

Lots of people have tried to address the problem of pain. There is no comprehensive answer that I know of to the theodicy problem. But to me it makes sense to say that suffering is, at least in small part, a side effect of free will. This does not explain why death happens. It doesn’t explain a lot of things. But to me it helps explain the existence of much of the evil in the world. And it is a fairly standard conclusion among contemporary Christians. It explains how ax murders can exist and persist in the construct of God’s good creation. I do not think it explains how hurricanes and tornadoes can exist, though. Those are not the result of human free will. They’re a result of the air we breathe. It seems to me that God created the world, not just humankind but the whole world, and then, to facilitate free will, he turned it loose. So I would not say, for example, that the world is on auto pilot heading toward a certain conclusion. It’s more like God let the reigns go, but we’re still caught in his gravitational pull and orbiting.

distance

All this also drives home for me the sense of distance that even the very faithful sometimes feel in relation to God. There is no literal hole in the sky that lets all people everywhere look up into the throne room of heaven. No call to prayer sounds three times a day from the clouds around the world. We and God are other.

But I think he likes being known. In some ways it is hard for humans to accomplish this knowledge. In some ways it is very easy.

It is hard because he is other. I got married less than a month ago. My wife is my best friend. Several months ago I asked a married friend of mine what marriage is like. He talked about how he sometimes forgot that his wife is another person. I didn’t understand what he meant until last week. My wife and I were leaving the art museum. I opened the car door for her while we were in the middle of a conversation so that she could get into the car. She got in and I shut the door and walked around to the other side, but I kept on talking as though she could still hear me. Only about half way around the car did I realize that our conversation was paused, so I stopped talking. That was strange.

My beautiful wife and I are one, but she is also “other” from me. We have known each other since middle school. We love each other very much. But I suspect that there are some things about me that she will never understand and some things about her that I will never get. Sometimes it feels like we are the same person. Sometimes it seems like we are from different worlds.

Even among two devoted humans, perfect knowledge of each other is not easy to achieve. How much more mysterious would the relationship between God and human be? I think that God knows us, and as some of our own poets have said, “we too are his offspring.” Even so, plugging into God can just be hard.

On the other hand, it can be really easy. I believe that God does not need religion to reach a person. Take a camping trip. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Take up yoga. Find your pathway to experiencing God. (If you have a mind to. If not, what the heck are you doing reading this?)

As for those of us who are religions: since God has not come down to set the record straight about which religion is the closest to the truth, I have drawn the conclusion that he is prepared to work with all of us. He is humble enough to be called by whatever name.

I know nothing about interfaith dialogue. I know that wars start over religions and that proselyzation is awkward. Let the Christian remain a Christian, I say. Let the Buddhist remain a Buddhist. Let the non-theist remain non-theistic. And let the convert-making religions keep trying to convert one another. Evangelization is a big part of many religions, and you can’t just change a religion because you want to (although I can think of a few people throughout history who might take issue with this statement…) Religions are more or less static in their essence and are slow to change in the way they are practiced (Though this could be argued). Still, I think the evangelization strategies and faith manifestoes held by religious establishments should be as up-to-date, informed and as open-minded as possible.

the last things

As for the theological problems that individuals (or even societies) sometimes find themselves presented with, the only rule of thumb is “to each his own.” I have found that what is troublesome to one person might not be troublesome to another. For example, some Christians may wonder whether God will deal kindly with those people whom the Church was not able to reach before they passed away. Some may not wonder about that at all. Moreover, different people are satisfied by different answers. We are not dealing with math questions, after all. One may say, “God will judge them righteously” and leave it at that. Some may say fine, but then why is evangelism necessary? Why the Great Commission? As many people may answer that it is God’s will to spread the kingdom of his Son.

Bottom line; if a theological quandary is a practical problem for you, deal with it. Read books and follow the rabbit hole. If it is not, don’t worry about it.

I say this because I realize that I pick and choose the problems I will really engage, too. For example, I believe in God even though people die. That’s something that some men and women greater than me have found they cannot do. I just say to myself, “wonderful things happen, too.” And that works for me. I’m sure many people would be frustrated with me for “refusing to face the facts.” I would like to have a conversation with those people. It is hard to find people who like talking religion around here.

Besides, I believe in mystery even as I believe in reason, as I think all seekers must. Some great truths are like huge boulders encrusted with precious stones. You want to run up to them, lift them up, and put them in your pocket. Some people try and get discouraged and worn out right away. But some people content themselves with gazing at the stones and examining their facets.

Speaking of mystery, I must close by wondering whether there is an afterlife. I hope there is. In fact, I even believe there is based on hope. If there is a bad afterlife I think it is ceasing to exist. The good afterlife will be characterized by increased closeness to the Lord and increased fullness of life. As for eschatology, I don’t know. If there is to be an end of the world then I’m sure it can come to pass without my say-so.

If so, haste the day. Until then, find us about thy business, oh Lord.

“To the heights, to the heights!”

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A Vision of Jesus

Which is more disturbing: an image of Jesus’ back, or an image of a faceless Jesus?

There is a stained glass window in a certain sanctuary. It is a picture of Jesus the Shepherd. I saw it first from the outside. I immediately noticed that he had no face. His head—framed with a circle of light as saintly peoples’ heads often are—was nothing but brown hair. From the inside, the face is visible. The face detail must have been inlayed onto the inside of the glass rather than incorporated into the windowpane itself. In any case, the result from the outside is striking. It’s like Jesus meets Cousin It.

I do not think it is intended to depict Jesus’ back, for I later noticed that you can see from the outside that Jesus is holding a lamb in his arms, as can be seen from the inside. I, however, find it altogether easier to conceptualize it as Jesus’ back. I do not know what to do with a faceless Jesus.

We have precedents in scripture for mortals seeing the back of God. I was not hidden in the cleft of the rock. I had just gotten out of the car and, boom! There he was on the wall. It was only his back, so I did not die.

Those sitting in the pews of the sanctuary behold the face of the Lord. But try to look on him from outside the church and you see a strange, faceless man. A man whose essence is in question, or at least is very mysterious.

The back of God is much safer: shaking the earth, rending the stones. But give me something to quake at. Give me someone to follow. I cannot find an identity in a faceless shepherd. I can’t abide the back of that window.

On the Playing of Many Board Games

The board game world is vast, and it saddens me that we are pressured into playing only certain ones.

For example; It is held as a virtue to be bad at Chess. “Oh, Chess?” someone will say. “I’m no good at that. What does the horsey do?” Everyone nods approvingly. But if you venture to ask, “Anybody want to play some chess?” You will no doubt be met with exaggerated scowls.

On the other end of the continuum, adults are strictly forbidden to play Candyland. This is a shame. Candyland is a simply delightful game. You never know if you will draw a Queen Frostine, a Grandma Nut, or that adorable little plum tree monster. I like Candyland almost as much as chess, and it affords as much social interaction as any other multi-player game. But only children must play it. No matter that it says “ages 3 and up” on the box.

If a person wishes to play a board game, he or she is forced to choose some game that falls safely in between chess and Candyland. This middle ground is occupied mainly by checkers and backgammon.

Now, nobody plays backgammon. It just fits on the back of the checkers board and uses the same pieces, so the two games got stuck together by a twist of fate. Checkers is a fine game, but I simply think it is high time to reclaim the full spectrum of board games. (Except I insist on having no interest in backgammon.)

We should examine our taboos. Neither neediness nor juvenileness makes a person unclean. Both can be used safely in doses. Besides, when we don’t take ourselves so seriously, we all benefit. When we don’t insist so strongly on forgetting our youth, we grow old better. And when we’re not afraid that people might think us smart, we sell ourselves short less often; it’s a knight, not a horsey, and it moves in an L.

Why did the earthworm cross the road?

I was riding my bike home from work last night when I noticed an earthworm on the sidewalk. I stopped, dismounted, and watched. The worm came from thick grass. It headed straight across the sidewalk. It eventually made its way to the other side. When I left, it was safely nestled in a curled-up leaf.

I’m sure it was a laborious journey. The act of watching the little guy patiently inch his way toward he-knew-not-where wore me out! The worm never stopped moving until it reached the other side and rested in its new-found leaf. It was a dangerous journey, too. I might very easily have accidentally squashed him.

It was also a long journey. The worm started out straight—its course was perpendicular to the edges of the sidewalk—but then it began to veer to the left. “Oh no,” I thought. “He’s lost!” I wanted to pick it up and set it down on the other side. Then I reconsidered. “He can do it.”

Before he reached the other side, he found the place in the sidewalk where two slabs of concrete meet. After discovering and sliding into this providentially-shaped avenue, he renewed his speed and made it safely to the other side.

“Nice going little guy,” I thought as I resumed my bike ride. “I hope I fair as well as you.”

Did the worm know where it was going? What was it planning on doing when it got there?

Did it get discouraged in mid-journey and almost decided to turn back?

All-in-all, the worm crossed the sidewalk pretty competently. But I could almost hear his troubled doubts along the way: “Now I’ve done it. I’m lost and I’m going to wander in this endless expanse of impermeable concrete forever! I’ll never get to dig another hole as long as I live!”

Or maybe he was a confident worm. “The end is just a few feet (miles) away, I know it! I have no discernible eyeballs, and probably no depth perception, but I’ll make it just the same, and then I’ll find a nice leaf to rest in before I get started on tonight’s to-do list.”

Who knows.

neoMonastic Reading List

Following is a list of books on my radar that pertain to New Monasticism. For a more extensive and detailed list, see the Simple Way’s bibliography.

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Schools for Conversion: Twelve Marks of a New Monasticism, Edited by the Rutba House Each chapter is written by a different author. Each mark is duly enumerated. Taken together, this is a book of practical theology. It’s a little bit hard to find in bookstores. I got it when I heard Shane Claiborne speak in Springfield, MO.

New Monasticism: What It Has to Say to Today’s Church, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove If you can only read one book about New Monasticism, this is the one. It is brief but insightful and informational. The author succulently ties many dimensions of the movement together. The author points out that all monasticism was new at one time or another.

Flirting with Monasticism, Karen Sloan Karen is a Presbyterian minister, a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary, and the Prior of Formation House in Pittsburgh, PA. The reader will join Karen in exploring the world of the Dominicans. An appendix contains the Rule of Saint Augustine.

The Irresistible Revolution, Shane Claiborne I used this book as the text for the CampusLife small group that I co-lead at Missouri State. Shane Claiborne was involved with the formation of the Simple Way. To understate; the book challenges Christian apathy toward the world. It contains several of the anecdotes that have become canonized in the community of communities.

The New Friars, Scott A. Bessenecker Strictly speaking, new friarism might be a more accurate term than new monasticism. As a rule, friars travel around and monastics stay put. It has been awhile since I read this book, but it seemed to me that it focused on missional communities overseas/outside of the United States.

The Way of the Heart, Henri J. M. Nouwen This book has three parts entitled Silence, Solitude, and Prayer. It is a great introduction to these three disciplines.

Rule of Saint Benedict Just read it.

The Little Flowers of Saint Francis The word “flowers” means “wonder-stories.” Go figure. Here you will find Francis’s sermon to the birds, the story of Francis taming the wild wolf, the story of how he received the stigmata, and every other conceivable story about Saint Francis. The Little Flowers make great devotional readings. Whether they stories are legendary or not, they make good points.

<This post is a work in progress.>

Living Faithfully in a Fragmented World, Jonathan R. Wilson

After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre

Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The Seven Story Mountain, Thomas Merton

The Monastic Journey, Thomas Merton

Simply Christian, N. T. Wright

Rule of Saint Augustine

Rule of Saint Francis

Biography of Saint Francis, G. K. Chesterton

Follow Me: A History of Christian Intentionality, Ivan Kauffman

Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism, Jon R. Stock, Tim Otto, Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, and Christine D. Pohl

Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices, Brian D. McLaren

Community of the Transfiguration: The Journey of a New Monastic Community, Paul R. Dekar

Thoughts on Being the Answer to Our Prayers

Claiborne and Wilson-Hartgrove have written a book called “A Call to Action: 50 Ways to Become the Answer to Our Prayers.”

They’re billing it as a “call to action for the National Day of Prayer (and every day)”. http://jonathanwilsonhartgrove.com/

For your perusal, I have attached the list of 50 ways.

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1. Fast for the 2 billion people who live on less than a dollar a day.

2. Contact your local crisis pregnancy center and invite a pregnant woman to live with your family.

3. Ask your pastor if someone on your church’s sick list would like a visit.

4. Join an open AA meeting and befriend someone there.

5. Adopt a child.

6. Mow your neighbor’s grass.

7. Volunteer to tutor a kid at your local elementary school. (Try to get to know the kid’s family.)

8. Grow your own tomatoes–and share them.

9. Ask a small group in your community to meet regularly for intercessory prayer.

10. Build a wheel chair ramp for someone who is homebound.

11. Read the newspaper to someone at your local nursing home.

12. Plant a tree.

13. Look up the closest registered sex offender in your neighborhood and try to befriend him.

14. Throw a birthday party for a prostitute.

15. When you pay your water bill, pay your neighbor’s too (they’ll let you… really).

16. Invest money in a micro-lending bank.

17. Ask the next person who asks you to spare some change to join you for dinner.

18. Leave a random tip for someone who’s cleaning the streets or a public restroom.

19. Write one CEO a month this year. Affirm or critique the ethics of their company (you may need to do a little research first).

20. Start tithing (giving 10%) of all your income directly to the poor.

21. Connect with a group of migrant workers or farmers who grow your food and visit their farm. Maybe even pick some veggies with them. Ask what they get paid.

22. Give your winter coat away to someone who is colder than you and go to a thrift store to get a new one.

23. Write only paper letters (by hand) for a month. Try writing someone who needs encouragement or who you should say “I’m sorry” to.

24. Go TV free for a year. Or turn your TV into a pot where flowers grow.

25. Laugh at advertisements, especially ones that teach you that you can by happiness.

26. Organize a prayer vigil for peace outside a weapons manufacturer such as Lockheed Martin. Read the Sermon on the Mount out loud. For extra credit, do it every week for a year.

27. Go down a line of parked cars and pay for the meters that are expired. Leave a little note of niceness.

28. Write to one social justice organizer or leader each month just to encourage them.

29. Go through a local thrift store and drop $1 bills in random pockets of the clothing being sold.

30. Experiment with creation-care by going fuel free for a week–ride a bike, carpool, or walk.

31. Try only reading books written by females or people of color for a year.

32. Go to an elderly home and get a list of folks who don´t get any visitors. Visit them each week and tell stories, read the bible together, or play board games.

33. Track to its source one item of food you eat regularly. Then, each time you eat that food, pray for those folks who helped make it possible for you to eat it.

34. Create a Jubilee fund in your Church congregation, matching dollar for dollar every dollar you spend internally with a dollar externally. If you have a building fund, create a fund to match it to give away and by mosquito nets or dig wells for folks dying in poverty.

35. Become a pen-pal with someone in prison.

36. Give your car away to a stranger.

37. Convert your car to run off waste vegetable oil.

38. Try recycling your water from the washer or sink to flush your toilet. Remember the 1.2 billion folks who don´t have clean water.

39. Wash your clothes by hand, or dry them by hanging to remember those without electricity or running water. Remember the 1.6 billion people who do not have electricity.

40. Buy only used clothes for a year.

41. Cover up all brand names, or at least the ones that do not reflect the upside-down economics of God’s Kingdom. Commit to only being branded by the cross.

42. Learn to sew or start making your own clothes to remember the invisible faces behind what we wear. Take your kids to pick cotton so they can see what that is like (and then read James).

43. Eat only a bowl of rice a day for a week to remember those who do that for most of their life (take a multivitamin). Remember the 30,000 people who die each day of poverty and malnutrition.

44. Begin creating a scholarship fund so that for every one of your own children you send to college you can create a scholarship for an at-risk youth. Get to know their family and learn from each other.

45. Visit a worship service where you will be a minority. Invite someone to dinner at your house or have dinner with someone there if they invite you.

46. Help your church congregation create a Peacemaker Scholarship and give it away to a young person trying to avoid the economic draft, who would like to go to college but sees no other way than the military.

47. Eat with someone who does not look like you. Learn from them.

48. Confess something you have done wrong to someone and ask them to pray for you.

49. Serve in a homeless shelter. For extra credit, go back and eat or sleep in the shelter and allow yourself to be served.

50. Join a Yokefellows ministry at a prison close to you. Remember that Jesus said he would meet you there (Matt. 25).

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Prayer never ceases to fascinate me. The pray-but-don’t-do-anything approach to prayer has received a lot of critique, and rightfully so. I’m sure it remains a popular approach. But what is the thought process behind the be-the-answer-to-your-prayers approach? Why pray if we do everything ourselves?

Theologically, there is no issue here. C. S. Lewis observed that God never does anything that he can possible delegate to his creatures. Nevertheless, the idea in Christianity is that Christians are partners with God in God’s cosmic renewal program.

Apart from the way prayer operates in the spiritual realm, I have observed that prayer, especially public, corporate prayer, has the function of unifying and galvanizing the praying community itself. It serves as a forum for stating and reinforcing held beliefs.

From here it is a short leap from prayer meetings serving as a basilica of belief to prayer meetings serving as a dispatch point for acting on those beliefs.

Thoughts?

The National Day of Prayer, by the way, is May 7, 2009.

What do you think about…

Contrary to the above sarcastic image, theology is very much alive today.

(Some examples: Theology in Africa, Oxford handbook of Systematic Theology, 2007, Alternative Seminary, the Journal of Modern Theology, and so on.)

Moreover; while we can’t all be John Calvin (pictured above), we do all have our own personal theologies.

What does yours look like? Where does it come from?

The following is a list of questions designed to get us thinking about what we think about faith. I received the list from a friend and found it very interesting. I wanted to pass it along to whoever else might be interested.

* * * * *

1. How did the world come into existence?

2. How did human beings come into existence?

3. What role do sacred texts play in our world?

4. What is the relationship between human beings and other animals on earth?

5. What is the relationship between human beings and plants on earth?

6. What is the relationship between human beings and the earth itself?

7. What happens to humans after death?

8. What is the value (or lack thereof) of human life?

9. Is there some form of life, power, force(s), intelligence, etc. beyond that which we see in the material, tangible phenomena of everyday life?

10. Do you adhere or listen to religious leaders or specialists?

11. Are natural disasters or diseases caused by divine intervention?

12. Is there something in human existence that is more important than humans themselves?

13. What is out there among the stars and other heavenly bodies?

14. What is good?

15. What is evil?

16. Is there any social, community, or survival value to religious questions?

17. Is there a reason to exist beyond living and reproducing the species?

18. What is the condition of people who do not view the world in the same way you believe it exists?

19. Can mankind achieve the acquisition of supernatural tendencies or abilities?

20. Should your beliefs about the nature of the world (and universe) affect the way you conduct your daily affairs and order your social behavior?

21. Should your beliefs about the nature of the world (and universe) affect the way you interpret the behavior of other people?

22. is there an emotional, psychological, social, economic, spiritual, physical function for ritual or ceremony? For the individual? For the group?

23. Is it possibly or reasonable to separate religious/belief issues from other issues of daily existence such as political power, economics, food procurement, etc.?

* * * * *

If you fancy writing your responses to any of these questions and posting them on the internet, well, you’re not alone.
Tyler’s essays
Anybody else playing along at home? Let me know!!

The “Pro-Life” Abolitionists

Found the following story about anti-human trafficking movements in USAToday yesterday, January 12.

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/01/life-movement-e.html

‘Life’ movement evolves
Christians have taken up a fight for global good, targeting human trafficking and the sex trade industry that tortures souls around the world. Consider this a new face of the “pro-life” movement.

By Tom Krattenmaker

Now that he knows the name of a young enslaved prostitute in Indonesia – it’s Eka, pronounced “Ecka” – Mike Mercer is all in. The human-trafficking resister from Oregon is committed not just to the reclamation of Eka’s freedom and her pre-slavery lot in life, but also to her enjoying life prospects far brighter than if she had never been trafficked and had never crossed his path.

“As a Christian, I can’t be satisfied knowing there are people living in such a condition,” says Mercer, 37, a onetime youth pastor at an evangelical church near Portland and the founder and director of a fledgling non-profit called Compassion First. “As a Christian, I’m a steward of the image of God. And every person on the face of the earth bears that image. I became responsible for Eka the day I met her.”

Mercer, as he befriends sex slaves such as Eka and works to establish a rehabilitation and education network for them, is showing what evangelical Christianity increasingly looks like in the new century, and in the new paradigm.

If you’re a Southeast Asian brothel keeper or an American retailer benefiting from slave labor – and, yes, slavery flourishes today in both forms – this face of Christianity is most inconvenient. These are the people who refuse to look away and keep their mouths shut.

A new script

Mercer and the younger generation of fervent Jesus followers pose a fascinating challenge to older-generation evangelical Christianity, too. This younger wave will not stick to the narrow old script – abortion, gays, the erosion of Christian prerogatives in the public square – that has governed publicly applied evangelicalism since the ’70s.

These modern-day abolitionists, along with growing ranks of faith-fueled activists in the fight against global poverty, disease and other forms of human degradation, might not see themselves as political. Even so, intentionally or not, they could end up changing the meaning of a political movement and idea – “pro life” – that has been at the center of one of the most rancorous political arguments of our time.

Not that religiously motivated people are the only ones waking up to present-day slavery in the world. But if you scan the landscape of anti-trafficking activists and advocates from this country, there’s a good chance you’ll spot Christians.

Mercer, who first got involved in uplifting the needy in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is just getting started on his mission to serve the enslaved. Already in the fray are groups such as International Justice Mission, which has been fighting slavery and sexual exploitation in Asia, Africa and Latin America since the late ’90s.

Christian pop culture is doing its part to raise awareness, too. Justin Dillon, onetime front man for the popular Christian rock band Dime Store Prophets, has combined documentary film and edgy rock music in the passionate anti-trafficking movie he released last fall, Call + Response. Dillon’s film makes little mention of the Bible or Jesus – yet absolutely pulses with religious fervor.

Still in its relatively infancy, the anti-trafficking movement is up against a slavery behemoth that has become the third-largest criminal enterprise in the world (behind only drugs and arms dealings). Advocacy groups estimate that about 27 million people are enslaved today in brothels, sweat-shop factories and private homes. The U.S. Justice Department reports that of the 800,000 humans trafficked across international borders each year, some 17,500 are sold into slavery in the USA. They work, mostly, in prostitution and domestic labor.

The Asian sex industry abuses girls and women in especially repulsive ways. As witnessed by Mercer on his repeated trips to Southeast Asia, false promises of education and a ticket out of poverty lure desperately poor girls into traffickers’ hands. Forced into paid sex at ages as young as 5, the girls and young women are exposed to beatings, disease and psychological trauma that can ruin someone for life. Not that they’ll have much “life” to worry about. Given customers’ preference for young flesh, the prostitutes are used up and dumped on the street well before they’re 30. Disease and poverty often bring swift ends to these sad lives.

Bible-based missions

As he goes about his work to restore their humanity, Mercer draws his inspiration from the New Testament’s parable of the loaves and fishes, in which Jesus’ radical sharing miraculously turns a meager supply of two fish and five loaves of bread into provisions for the multitude of 5,000 who have assembled to hear him speak.

Such acts of caring by Mercer and other slavery-fighting Christians deserve notice for the obvious reason: What is not to admire about Jesus followers devoting themselves to some of the most abused, forgotten and least powerful people on the planet? Also intriguing, though, is what Mercer and his type portend for the pro-life movement, which has lacked credibility in some circles for its tendency to appear disturbingly uninterested in the myriad ways life is devastated and diminished outside the womb.

Asked whether he views his work in Indonesia as “pro-life,” Mercer ponders the question for a moment. “I haven’t thought of it in those terms,” he says, “but, yes, I would think so.” Not that he has abandoned the anti-abortion beliefs that are such a part of evangelical politics. “As I became more engaged in this work, I actually became even more sensitive to the issue of abortion,” says Mercer, who describes his politics as center-right. “I see it all as an issue of human rights.”

Also finding room on a more broadly defined “pro-life” movement are poverty, torture, immigration, health care, disease prevention and climate change. With that has come more talk of respecting the humanity of gay men and lesbians and new interest in cooperating with progressives and non-evangelicals (including the new president) on strategies to reduce the incidence of abortion.

As suggested by popular evangelical leader Rick Warren, progressives who support abortion rights would be mistaken if they interpreted all this as a sign that evangelicals are dropping the abortion issue. “They’re not leaving pro-life,” Warren told Beliefnet recently. “I’m just trying to expand the agenda.”

Apparently, the Christian right’s tireless championing of the pro-life ethic has gotten through just not in a way that might have been anticipated by the culture warriors of previous generations. But if this evolving meaning of “pro-life” is seen as a loss by older Christian right adherents, it certainly stands as a victory for the many faith-respecting Americans troubled by the shoehorning of Christianity into a narrow right-wing political agenda. As it does for the multitudes who are benefiting as more Christians fan out to feed the poor, care for the sick, steward the earth and open their hearts to outcast populations.

As it does for sex slaves such as Eka, who, thanks to a fired-up Christian, now has a better shot at life than she could have ever imagined.

Tom Krattenmaker, who lives in Portland, Ore., specializes in religion in public life and is a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors. His book on Christianity in professional sports will be published in the spring.