Today’s post is well worth a quick visit.  Here are a few of my favourites:

I’ve got the attention-span of a mayfly.  That’s why I pray: to upgrade to a gnat.

In his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened of, Julian Barnes says, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.”  Shoot, I believe in God because I miss him.

Hastening and waiting are the two poles of Christian existence.  Waiting prevents hastening from becoming hurrying; hastening prevents waiting from becoming loitering.

It has often been observed that Milton’s God in Paradise Lost is insipid, his Satan grand and dynamic.  And that, of course, is because it’s much harder to draw enthralling virtuous characters than wicked ones.  Compare the main problem that pacifists face: namely, convincing people that nonviolence is more noble and compelling than the inferno of war.

The tragedy of much Christian witness is that the accused seem to think they are the Judge.

The demons recognise Christ when they see him.  Which can’t always be said of Christians.

And what would a post of theological doodlings be without a bit of commentary on social media?

If posts are getting longer, that might be because bloggers are spending less time writing them.

What is Facebook but a form of mass electronic cosmetic surgery?

And finally, a few on the life of a minister (one taken from past doodlings):

When I was young, I thought that one day I would grow up. Yeah, and when I was a young minister, I thought that one day I would know what I was doing.

Any preacher who doesn’t think he’s a fraud is—a fraud.

See the rest of Kim’s most recent doodlings here.

——

The preceding found its way to my inbox courtesy of a young child this week.   At first, I just sat and stared blankly at the words in front of me with a combination of sadness and wonder at the unadorned honest longing of these few short lines.  I felt sadness for this little person, and a bit of anger, if I’m honest.  I wished that these big questions wouldn’t rudely barge into a happy childhood uninvited—that they would wait at least a little longer before invading this precious little heart and mind.  I wished they would just go find an adult to torment.

Of course, it’s not altogether surprising that children should be thinking about these questions.  Jesus seemed to think quite highly of the capacity of children, after all.  And I know that my own children have spoken words that were true and good and provocative and instructive to me, even when they were very young.  Perhaps we don’t give kids enough credit.  Perhaps we just assume that they are happy with their snacks and video games and friends and the latest offering from Disney or Pixar.  Perhaps there are unplumbed depths to their souls that we are unwilling to explore with them because we think they aren’t ready or can’t comprehend or aren’t interested.

Or maybe we don’t go to these places with children because we’re afraid of what it might reveal about our own hopes and fears and doubts and struggles and assumptions about the way the world is and what, if anything, it all means. Maybe the similarities hit too close to home.  Maybe we just sail through our moments and our days, assuming that the grownups around us are mostly fine, that their lives are well-ordered, that their jobs are fulfilling, their relationships satisfying, their children well-adjusted and “normal,” their beliefs about God and faith and good and evil mostly settled and secure.  Maybe we are too easily satisfied with (anesthetized by?) food and drink and movies and sports and church and whatever else we fill our days with.  Maybe during the rare moments when we are quiet and receptive, when we unplug and disconnect, the same unsettling questions occur to us:

Why can’t I hear you?

Are you listening to me?

Why can’t I find you?

I started reading Eric Weiner’s Man Seeks God yesterday—another account of an older someone seeking a God who seems stubbornly to recede from view.  In the Introduction, he quotes a few lines from a poem by Stephen Dunn:

you can’t teach disbelief

to a child,

only wonderful stories 

Yes, wonderful stories.  That is what we need, whether we are three or ninety-three or anywhere in between.

I continued to sit and stare at these words on the page—these tokens of longing from a little person wondering about the God who can’t be seen.  And, in the end, I did what I should do far more frequently.  I prayed.

I prayed that this child would be open to wonder—open to the unexpected ways that God speaks.  I prayed that they would not feel alone, and that their curiosity and love for God would not be snuffed out.

I prayed that the people in their life would hug them often, that they would be willing to sit and talk with them, to honour their questions, that they would not silence them too quickly, that they would remind them that the touch and the voice of God very often comes through the touch and voice of one another.

I prayed that they would be told wonderful stories by people who love them.  I prayed that this child’s imagination would be captured by these stories, and that these stories would invade their heart and mind with beauty and hope.  I prayed that the deus absconditus—the hidden God—would be found by this little seeker… That he would come out to play.

Our local library recently acquired a bunch of stock from a movie rental store that went out of business, so my wife and I have been watching movies a bit more often than usual lately. I still feel pretty out of touch with what is good and/or popular out there, but being able to watch movies for free is giving me a chance to do a bit of risk-free exploration .

One of the movies we enjoyed last week was Contagion, the story of the global outbreak of a deadly disease, and all of the social chaos that ensues as the race to find the cure begins. It’s not a comedy, but one of the lines that stood out to me from the film is pretty funny (at least in my opinion). Jude Law plays Alan Krumwiede, a journalist who is spreading (mis)information about the disease and how to treat it via his blog. At one point, Dr. Ian Sussman (played by Elliot Gould) angrily denounces Krumwiede’a online activity and his protestations that he is just doing his job as a “writer,” thus:

Blogging is not writing. It’s just graffiti with punctuation!

Ouch!

[Trying to think of something clever and witty to say in defense of blogging but so far failing quite miserably...]

Ah well… I suppose if no brilliant refutations are forthcoming, one might as well play along.  The quote from the movie brought to mind one of my favourite “demotivators” from Despair, Inc (I’ve posted this before, but perhaps there are some who aren’t familiar with this little gem)….

Although there has to be something to be said for blogging… even for pastors.  Phil Rushton thinks so, and I found myself nodding and mm-hmming along with his reflections on the matter today.

And finally, should anyone be interested in tracking any of my “graffiti” elsewhere, my latest contribution to Wondering Fair called ”Man Seeks (Straightforward) God” went up today.  It’s about atheism, agnosticism, the nature of faith and truth, and all kinds of other fun stuff.

It’s got punctuation and everything.

As I’ve been preparing for these sermons, the following post from my brother Gil Dueck has helped to sharpen a few concepts for me.  A couple of things stood out to me as I re-read this post.  1) The gospel of sin-management seems to produce a faith that is easy to lose (especially for young adults?); 2) The gospel of sin-management struggles to provide a coherent account of why God made a world and why he made people.  These are pretty significant weaknesses, in my view.  We need better news.

——

One of the greatest benefits of owning books is reading them again.  In my life this has proved helpful because I  have often bought books and read them before I understood or even cared about the questions that animated the author.  One such book is Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy.  I’ve had this book for a number of years.  I think I’ve even read it once before.  But in rereading it I’m finding so much that resonates with what I’ve experienced in teaching theology over the past six years.

In particular, Willard has a memorable and often quoted chapter entitled “Gospels of Sin Management.”  The point here is relatively simple.  The majority of Christians, from across the theological spectrum, believe in a gospel that “manages” sin but leaves their lives virtually untouched.

Christians on the right believe in a gospel that is basically concerned with sin as a barrier to entrance into heaven.  Willard quotes Charles Ryrie’s summary,

The issue is, How can my sins be forgiven?  What is it that bars me from heaven?  What is it that prevents my having eternal life?  The answer is sin.  Therefore I need some way to resolve that problem.  And God declares that the death of His son provides forgiveness of my sin… Through faith I receive Him and His forgiveness.  Then the sin problem is solved, and I can be fully assured of going to heaven.

The concern that animates Willard is that this kind of gospel is irrelevant to most of our lives.  It might deal with our present existential guilt and it might give us the assurance of heaven after we die, but it has virtually nothing to say to the long years in between.  In Willard’s words, “It is left unexplained how it is possible that one can rely on Christ for the next life without doing so for this one.”

This is the gospel I grew up with.  This is the gospel that many of the students I work with have believed or inherited.  And it’s not entirely wrong.  It’s just incomplete.  It’s too small.  It presents a God who “for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us.”

This gospel ignores the central biblical theology of creation, that is, it ignores the question of why God made a world and why God made people.  At best it implies that this world is a temporary kind of “testing ground” where we get a few years to make a really important decision about Jesus’ death, after which the real business of heaven and hell can take over.

And, according to my observation, this kind of gospel can produce a faith that is very easy to lose.  Because as human beings we have more problems than guilt and death.  We long for a sense of purpose and meaning in what we do and who we become.  We grieve over a world that seems to be at war with itself.  We experience moments of transcendence and beauty that cry out for a home, for a “location” within which to understand them.  We long for reconciliation, both with God and within all the fractured communities around us.  And if the gospel has nothing to say to these realities of life, then it can easily be perceived as irrelevant and it can easily be ignored.

Does our sin need to be managed?  Of course it does.  But so do our lives.  Thank God that the gospel, in all its fullness, speak to both.

Half-empty… Always, half-empty.  Sigh.

Later this morning, mere minutes from the above conversation where I yet again dumped cold water on someone’s optimism, I came across a wonderful article by Kelly Foster over at Good Letters: The Image Blog called “Reckoning the Marvellous” that beautifully expresses much of my own experience and aspirations as a “pessimist-who-really-wants-to-more-optimistic-or-at-least-realistic-enough-to-unreservedly-embrace-some-goodness-now-and-then.” It’s a meditation on “straightening up,” shifting perspective, and changing the posture one takes in a world containing both darkness and light.

You should read the whole article, but here are a few passages that really stood out to—and rebuked!—me this morning.  First, Foster quotes a magnificent passage from a 1995 Nobel Prize acceptance speech by Seamus Heaney called “Crediting Poetry“:

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir…. As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note…. Which is why for years I was bowed to the desk like some monk over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world, knowing himself incapable of heroic virtue or redemptive effect, but constrained by his obedience to his rule to repeat the effort and the posture. Blowing up sparks for meagre heat…. Then finally and happily, and not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place, but in despite of them, I straightened up. I began a few years ago to try to make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvelous as well as the murderous.

What a wonderful way to put it—making space in our reckoning and in our imaginations for the marvelous!  Not merely reacting, not simply responding to the people and events and words and actions that come at us each day, but making space for the extraordinary and the extraordinarily good.

And then this, in the context of a story about desperately praying for a happy ending in the case of an adoption:

I could even see myself clinging desperately to my own vigilant anxieties as if they could buoy me or conversely, as if remaining anxious and vigilant would somehow communicate to God, as if he was unaware, my utter seriousness and desperation for the need for a happy ending in this case.

I could almost see myself physically holding the tension, grasping after it, squeezing it in my hands, clutching it to my chest. I could almost envisage my anxiety as a pulsating cloud, a more powerful force for good or for a solid outcome than God.

My boyfriend, who is about as gracious and empathetic a human as you will ever meet, made a simple but profound point when I confessed my panicked visions to him.

“Maybe we have to make space in prayer for the belief that good things happen too,” he said, kindly, kissing my forehead and putting his arm around my shoulder.

Maybe we do. Maybe we have to surrender to that which is infinitely higher, better, and wiser than us.

Maybe we will do it kicking and screaming.

But I wonder what it would be like to surrender to love like that, to trust it fully and finally, to find the energy in swimming with that stronger current rather than always against it, to be always looking back, second-guessing, doubtful and unsure—to dive into rivers of mercy confident of being carried, thriving as they split the land ahead, overflowing their banks, making fertile space for all the marvelous yet to be reckoned.

I wonder too.  What a beautiful constellation of images—overflowing rivers of mercy, fertile spaces, swimming along, being carried with confidence, anticipating “the marvelous yet to be reckoned.”  Surrender, trust, straightening up, making space—maybe even kicking and screaming.

Who knows, perhaps the marvelous in some sense requires our reckoning.  Maybe it waits for us to make the first move.

——

Image courtesy of Russell Berg at Seeing Berg.  On a bone-chilling prairie winter morning that has many grumbling and complaining, I am choosing to “make space” for the marvelous .

The internet (!) has obviously been abuzz about this topic, often in conjunction with two recent articles: Pico Iyer’s very popular piece in the New York Times called “The Joy of Quiet,” which speaks of, among other things, the growing attraction of “unplugged resorts,” and Slate’s “Can We Unplug?” on the illusion of internet freedom.  Both articles touch, in different ways, on the pitiable state of affairs we have gotten ourselves into—we are distracted, addicted, inattentive, hyper-connected people, who now find ourselves going to almost laughable lengths in our desperate attempts to unplug.

For my part, James K.A. Smith’s analysis of this situation is among the most insightful I’ve come across.  For Smith, the issue is the absence of virtue—we have habituated ourselves poorly:

[T]he material rhythms of an “online” life have inculcated in us patterns of behavior—and hence internal dispositions—to seek distraction. It’s not that we lack habits; it’s that we have acquired habits of distraction.

Yes, yes, yes.  I think that many of us have simply failed to cultivate the sorts of virtues that would allow us to navigate the contours of the technological landscape with skill, discernment, and virtue.  We have become addicted to the endless status updates and cross-posts and links and tweets and hits and stats and ratings and news aggregators and real-time scores and God only knows what other manner of cyber-noise.  The online world, for many, provides a narrative of meaning and purpose.  We flood online, reflexively and reactively.  We want to be “in the know.”  We want to be “connected.”  We want to be a part of the conversation, even if the conversation turns out to be superficial and meaningless.  We don’t always (often?) know what we are looking for, but we’re pretty sure we know where to find it: online.

I spent a bit of time this morning reading Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island.  This passage, in particular, stood out:

Now anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity.  It is the fruit of unanswered questions.  But questions cannot go unanswered unless they first be asked.  And there is a far worse anxiety, a far worse insecurity, which comes from being afraid to ask the right questions—because they might turn out to have no answer.  One of the moral diseases we communicate to one another in society comes from huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask.

Merton obviously did not have our current technological predicament in mind when he wrote these words in 1955, but I’ve been thinking about what they might have to say to us today nonetheless.  I wonder: does our collective addiction to the internet represent a kind of “huddling together in the pale light of an insufficient answer to a question we are afraid to ask?”  Do our suspicions about what the “material rhythms of our online lives” are doing to us point to deeper questions that we are afraid to ask?  Questions about who we are, what we are doing, and why?  What does the distracted anxiety of our culture betray about the narratives we have adopted to give our lives meaning?  About the answers our lives are providing to the implicit and explicit questions we are asking?  I wonder…

I’m mostly just in musing mode today.  I don’t have perfectly-formulated responses to any of these questions (and would welcome any thoughts you might have on the matter).  But I do worry about where we are headed.  I worry about the kinds of habits we are cultivating, the kind of people we are becoming.   I envy Merton his cloister and his calm quiet.  I hope and pray that we will continue to pay heed to voices like his, which urge us to have the courage to ask the right questions for the right reasons.

As I reflected upon themes from Sunday’s sermon and on subsequent conversations, I was struck by the words of a prayer from  Stanley Hauerwas’s Prayers Plainly Spoken:

Holy Lord, we have come before you fragmented people. Our lives are divided into pieces and we are unsure if the pieces when added up make up a life. What we do here, with one part of our life, seems undone there, with another part of our life. Who am I, Lord, who prays to you in this prayer? Where are we, Lord, when we so pray to you.  Augustine has taught us we are restless until we find our rest in you, but this does not feel like such divine “restlessness”—it just feels confusing.

Holy Lord, make us one with ourselves and one another. Form the scattered bits of our lives, the fragments of desires, into lives capable of saying “From the beginning you, dear God, were with me.” Help us be capable of truthful memory and fervent hope so that our lives will reflect the purposefulness of your kingdom. So reflected, may our lives manifest for one another your holiness and the world may say, “They are God’s people. See how they love one another.” Amen.

Yes.  From the beginning, you were with us.  Give us this truthful memory, this fervent hope, this love that anchors and reconstitutes our fragmented lives.

I probably also don’t like the word because I was never very interested in or good at it—at least as I understood the term.  For me, it was an inescapably confrontative, obnoxious, and self-righteous activity that I wanted no part of.  I hated going to churchy events and coming away feeling guilty that I hadn’t “shared my faith” with anyone that week.  I had precisely zero desire to manipulate conversations with friends in order to bring Jesus into the picture.  I didn’t really want to convert anyone, truth be told.  I probably wasn’t sure or confident enough in what I believed to want to share it, and I certainly didn’t need the perceived weight of failing to do my religious duty piled on to what was, perhaps, a rather wobbly worldview-in-formation.

However justified or unjustified my apprehensions and insecurities around the term might be, I appreciated Thiessen’s book for, among other things, challenging my gut-level reaction against the word “proselytism.”  I like it that he roots the practice of proselytism in the dignity of human beings and in their unquenchable thirst for and pursuit of truth.  To attempt to persuade our neighbours of anything is to pay them the compliment of considering them worth “converting.”  It is to participate in the basic reality that as human beings we are social creatures whose beliefs and practices are negotiated together. It is also to assume that our neighbours are free, rational, and moral creatures, who are capable of understanding and embracing what we are convinced is true, good, and beautiful (even if it turns out that we are mistaken about this) and that we, in turn, have the same capacities and obligations to be open to their conceptions of the same.  It is to be convinced that the shared pursuit of what is true is good for us as a collective whole.

This is well illustrated, I think, in a passage from Thiessen’s book which borrows from the thought of John Stuart Mill:

The institution of proselytizing is of benefit to humankind, says Mill, because without such proselytizing, human beings may be deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth.  To silence the proselytizer because he or she may be in error is to make the very questionable assumption of infallibility, according to Mill.  Even if the proselytizer is propagating false beliefs, society as a whole still has much to gain by allowing such propagation, because the propagation of error stimulates thought and discussion , without which individuals and society as a whole are in danger of falling into “the deep slumber of a decided opinion.”

Society as a whole has something to gain by allowing proselytism!  Imagine that…

Whatever we may think of the word “proselytism” and the benefits it may or may not entail, we simply can’t avoid the practice of persuasion.  Whether in advertising or politics or conversation at the coffee shop or the medium of blogging (!), we are often either trying persuade others or are ourselves the objects of others’ attempts at persuasion.  We are all proselytizers, in a sense, no matter how uncomfortable we may be with the term.

It was an eventful year for our family as we moved back home to southern Alberta after six years in Vancouver and Nanaimo, BC.  It was a year of difficult decisions, painful goodbyes, warm hellos, happy reintroductions, and all of the other mixed emotions and experiences that come along with major life transitions.  It was a year of new chapters, new things to learn, new ways of being stretched and challenged, sometimes in ways awkward and unappreciated, sometimes in ways delightful and refreshing.  It was a big year in the life of our family, full of experiences for which I am very grateful, and experiences that I do not wish to repeat for a long, long time.

Theoretically, I suppose one should learn from significant experiences—especially if said significant experiences have happened three times in the last six years.  So in addition to thinking about the year just past, I am reflecting on the last half-decade or so—the years in which we left home and then returned again.  What have I learned?  How have these six years shaped me?  What themes stand out, here at the cusp of 2012?

This morning, in a comment on another post, Dora speaks of adopting a “word for the year” instead of the more familiar list of impossible New Years Resolutions.  It’s a good idea, I think.  A single word to anchor and orient and give shape and perspective to our various activities and relationships, our experiences and ideas, and conversations.  One word to to challenge and convict and lead us on in another spin around the sun.

So, this morning, I’ve been thinking of a word for 2012.  There are many good words, of course, but as I think back on 2011 and, indeed, the last six years, the word that stands out is “grace.”  It is a word that I have been on the receiving end of so frequently—a word that I have experienced and enjoyed in such a diverse set of circumstances over this past season.  It is a word that, as I have a glance in the rearview mirror, quite obviously winds its way throughout the past six years, however poorly I was able to detect and acknowledge its presence at the time.

It is a word that has come to meet me on the road during uncertain times and unfamiliar places, a word that has surprised and sustained me during moments of confusion and times when I felt overwhelmed and incapable.  It is a word that appeared in the words and actions of good and kind people whose care and concern for me far exceeded mine for them.  It is a word that has consistently manifested itself in the love of my wife and my kids, often when it was least deserved.  It is a word that expresses the very character of the God who came and lived and died and rose from the dead to grace the graceless with new life, strength, and hope.

It is also a word that I anticipate meeting on the road ahead, in the unexpected and surprising and delightful ways that it has shown up in the past.  Perhaps more importantly, though, it is a word that is meant to be extended, not just received.  Grace is for sharing—in 2012 and beyond.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been sporadically dipping into a book called Willpower by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney.  Among the topics addressed by the authors are our (in)ability to control ourselves, the source of willpower, how to maximize it, and why it is such an elusive commodity.

One of the interesting things that research into this “greatest human strength” is showing is that willpower is a resource that we have in very finite quantities, and that rather than screwing up our determination to just control ourselves, a more suitable approach would be to manage and distribute it wisely.  As is the case with any expenditure of energy, our willpower reserves are depleted with use.  So, if you’ve spent the morning heroically resisting that piece of chocolate cake or cigarette, chances are you’re not going to have as much in the tank to hit the treadmill in the afternoon or tackle that disciplined reading program in the evening.  When it comes to willpower, the general message of this book seems to be that you’ve only got so much of it, so decide how you’re going to use it.

By contrast, biblical injunctions to self-control seem downright simplistic.  Hopelessly naive, even!  Over and over, in the Apostle Paul’s letters, the stark command rings out: “be self-controlled.”  ”Put off what is evil and destructive.”  ”Put on the new (better) self!”  ”Just do it!”  Paul clearly knows little about such things as “ego-depletion” and the crucial contrast between “short-term and long-term payoffs.”  Paul obviously has a minimal understanding of the limited nature of our willpower reservoirs and the complexities of managing them for maximal personal/social benefit.  ”Be self-controlled?!”  As if things were that simple.

And yet… The Bible’s portrayal of human nature is also accurate, if in different ways from the picture painted by the behavioural scientists.  The language employed in describing the problem is somewhat different, as are the resources offered for addressing it and the ends to which willpower is thought to be best employed.  But both bear witness to the basic truth that is poetically expressed by the wisdom writers: “Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control” (Proverbs 25:28).  Both agree that an undisciplined life is foolish, dangerous, and destructive.  Both agree that exercising the muscles of self-control is a crucial part of what it means to flourish as human beings.

Ultimately, of course, self-control is a gift.  And, like all of God’s good gifts, it is a gift that we can live into.  Like all of God’s gifts, self-control is something we can work into our lives and do what we can to make it an expression of who we are as God’s children.  We can employ the helpful resources and insights yielded by scientific research to bear the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-24).  Perhaps more importantly, though, as followers of Jesus we can live according to our conviction that, whatever it might feel like at any given moment, we are always in the process of putting on our new selves—selves that are “being renewed” in the knowledge and image of our Creator (Colossians 3:9-11).

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