Someday, I will write a brilliant post on the topic, but for now, I will leave a teaser. I was thinking about the Incarnation, Plato, and Dr. Who, and I love some of the correlations I have found. Plato's theory of the form combined with an understanding of the love of God sheds light on how God can both love me in all my sin from day to day while having a perfect image of who and what I was made to be, a part of his pure, spotless bride all at the same time. He knows my form, and he knows me. And being God, he can keep it all straight. God and Dr. Who. God is not a part of time, he is outside of time. So, as time is one sort of timey-wimey bubble thing, I can pray about events that happened twenty years ago and God can still act in that moment to both hear my prayer at present and act on my prayer at the recipients present. I love it when my head explodes. Dear Lord, please make seminary affordable so I can have it happen more often?

Back?

Hi Ho the Blog is Dead! Oh wait....there is a bit of a heartbeat! Or is there? Maybe its a vegetated blog? Veggi-blog? Maybe its a Vega-blog that talks in its sleep. Well, let's go with that. Its been almost a year since I last posted. Not much has changed really. I still face the eternality of the internet word with some severe misgivings. Just think, whatever you post, no matter what your security screenings are, some very bright moron out there can probably find it from anywhere. Except, fortunately, there are about 6 billion people out there all flooding cyber space with useless, important, vital, banal, hilarious, witty, erudite, senseless, and absolutely wizard verbage round the clock, which means the chances of any random stranger finding your words is rather less than .000001%. Anonymity is a beautiful thing.

Uselessness of Virtue

Someday, I will learn not to dislike people before I get to know them. I just finished reading “Gone with the Wind.” I’ve always had a comfortable dislike relationship with Scarlett O’Hara. She’s a selfish, hard, cruel, workaholic, man-eater. Her word means nothing, there is not promise she won’t make or break, and she treats her nearest and dearest like dirt. Oh, and she dislikes her own children. Not I wonderful sort of person. And, after reading the book, she really is all of the above. But, I’m beginning to see another side of her. She’s got energy and a strength. She is utterly loyal to the few people she does actually love. She is a protector, willing to give aid and shelter to people she hates through thick and thin. Unfortunately, these are the traits that destroy her. Her strength walls her away and makes it impossible for her to feel or find love. Here desire to protect and defend makes her ignore her family and her children as she fights to provide for their physical needs, her utter love and devotion to the few means that she will waste her life loving another woman’s husband and neglecting all three of hers.

She’s a woman who managed to make all the wrong decisions at all the wrong times. And her virtues, without the benefit or consolation of religion, became only ropes to strangle her. It’s a terrifying read—to see how little good “virtue” actually does. I am not sure how the Stoics did it, but virtue without an external guide means nothing and can make nothing, and a person forgets it at their peril.

Tangents

I’m having a birthday…and birthdays have this unfortunate tendency of making me look back at the last year and wonder things like, “what really have I done with my life?” Am I supposed to be here? Where else would I have been if I’d taken different roads?

Lessee…

If I’d followed plan one, I’d be evangelical, married, and probably have two or three children, Lord willing.

Plan two. I’d have finished my Associates degree, and gone on to get a degree in nursing. Probably living somewhere in the environs of D.C. Probably living alone somewhere in D.C.

As for Plan three, I would have stayed a government major, and be more than halfway through law school at the moment. Not sure if I’d be happy or not. I’d be working, probably still some stripe of evangelical, and probably alone.

Plan four? I’d be halfway to my Ph.D. in Medieval Literature. I’d be High Anglican or Catholic. I would be working frenetically hard, I would be busily burying any real world experience I’d ever had.

Can’t say I miss plan five. I would still be working for Smyrna, living out of the cottage. Trying to make life work, and generally wondering where I was going and what I was doing.

Plan six was just about as nebulous. Be a vet’s assistant, make good money, start working on an online degree in something.

And now the numbers are stacking up. Plan sever, work at Hobby Lobby until I got a teacher’s certificate, and then take a job in a high risk, under-funded and overloaded school system. Hard path, decent plan, but it would have been working long hours in a difficult arena for a “Something.”

I miss Plan eight. I want it back someday. Go to community college for the pre-reqs in psychology, and then start a distance learning program at some University or other, Wheaton or Liberty, for a degree in Christian counseling. It didn’t work out. But it sounded good. It would be an incredible amount of work for a tentative gain, and that is about it. Sometimes I worry that I am happy with so little.

Plan nine? Possibly the most hare-brained of them all, but I haven’t given it up yet, so, it is not technically part of the “dispensed past plans” list. Join the Army, pay off debt, work like I’ve never worked before. Study, fight, study, work, live quietly, keep my head down, and hope to get out in five years with a minimum of new scars and a debt free lease on life. I regret the motivation, but not so much that the plan is unappealing.

Not so bad where I am now. Hobby Lobby, no plan, crafts, doing things at church, keeping busy doing almost nothing of any quantifiable worth or long-term significance. At least I set the bar low for next year. 

It was so good...

I have been trying, since my thirteenth year, to pray. Sometimes it has gone well, sometimes not. But always my ability or nonability to pray has been directly related to my everyday life and to my knowledge of myself. When I begin to experience my difficulty in prayer, it is usually because I am refusing to let go of my present understanding of who I am and preventing a new understanding from emerging.

For example, if I have clung to some ideal picture of who I should be and have denied another part of myself that is struggling to be born, then I am inauthentic; and the God I have been praying to is no longer real, because he was fashioned from that idealizing part of me that is now dying. As my former self dies, so does the inadequate god who is fashioned out of the need to have a divinity who conforms to whom the self thinks it should be.

However, when I let go and let myself grow and emerge by embracing all sides of myself, God is again accessible, because the true God is he who loves and affirms and redeems who I really am and not just who I would like to be. In otherwords, the acecptance of the truthe about myself opens the way to the truth about God, and both truths are one at the prayerful center of the person.

True prayer demands honesty with myself, for it is only the real "I" who can talk with God. And I do not mean to imply here that only the integrated self can pray, but simply that honesty with myself enables me to pray correctly. If, for example, I need to be "worthy" or "perfect" or "holy" before I can pray, then I will probably not pray at all, or if I do, it will be a pseudo, self-satisfied self talking to itself rather than with God. We commune with God as we honestly are and not as we would like to be.

The idealized self is always dying in prayer, because it cannot bear the truth. And if we let it die and pray from who we are becoming, then our image of God changes as we understand more clearly who we are.

And our prayer changes accordingly. It may move from the adoration of the all-good God to bitter complaining and bickering with an unjust God who is letting me suffer or who is abandoning me for some reason. If I experience God as betraying me but say instead how wonderful and good he is, then I am praying a lie. God will only be who he is objectively if, while trying and wanting to believe that, I pray to him as I am experiencing him subjectively, for the good God redeems and corrects my honestly expressed but false understanding of who he is.

I believe this sincere wrestling with God is what Francis experienced during that torturous year in the cave at the beginning of his conversion and at other times through his life, culmination in the fifty days of darkness that preceded his singing of The Canticle of Brother Sun. He felt abandoned and betrayed by God; and because he let himself pray what he truly felt, God showed him that He is faithful to who He is and to His promises, even though at the time we might experience Him otherwise.

Because Francis was honest enough to acknowledge his doubt and despair and God's infidelity, as he experienced it, the true God at the center of his heart again rose to the surface of his consciousness to affirm the truth of Francis' perception: God had abandoned him, that he might once again give back to God the privilege of being God, independent of Francis, outside his control.

Whatever God deigns to give us of himself is pure gift and not something we earn or deserve by becoming that "perfect" person we think we should be. We are who we are, and any perfection, or completion, in us is the work of God responding freely to our honest prayer that he change in us what we previously thought we could change by ourselves.

Who we become in God is then his work and not our own success in conforming to some ideal. The self we become in true prayer is seldom the self we envisioned, but it is a new and marvelous self that God fashions out of the gradual redeeming of the false self we now acknowledge as the work of our own misguided idealism. We then know God in what he has done in us to enable us to discover our true face. And in that face only do we see the reflection of God as he really is."

Sleepless in the South

There really ought to be rules about this. Like, your reason is handicapped, your inhibitions are down, your faculties are impaired, and you definitely should not be allowed anywhere near a communication source of any sort. So, all that being said, the non-functioning, non-rational part of my brain says, “Meh! You’re totally sleepless and exhausted, so why not write a blog post!”
You know, cures for sleeplessness are sort of like cures for every other common ailment. They range from the disgusting to the absurd, to the boringly and quietly practical:
• Drink a glass of warm milk. This is only appealing if you are seriously pregnant, and not really then.
• Count sheep. My record is 1749….I had all sorts of psychedelic sheep but I never got a lick of sleep out of it.
• Write letters. I tried that once….my unfortunate correspondent wrote me back, “Um, how late at night did you write this? Did you know your handwriting gets illegible after a while?”
• Relax. Have you ever tried to consciously relax? Normally it makes me tense, but maybe that’s just me. It also tends to make every random thought that ever occurred to me all month decide to prance through my brain all at once and get tangled with each other. It’s a little weird to have your brain leap from “can I get away with bright yellow, bumblebee, pillowcases?” to “How come every time I have an insurance crises I can never get a human being on the phone?” Mostly it leads to very weird visions of local insurance agents harassing the local bee population for documents proving their estimated flight time for month or risking de-winging.
• Deep breathing. Last night I tried that as a cure for sleeplessness, I passed out from an overindulgence in oxygen. For the record, passing out and falling asleep are not the same thing. They are about as related as Loki and Thor.
• Take a walk. Walking is good…problem…my average walking speed is 3.5 mph, and once the heart gets pumping, sleep tends to run away.
• Drink a lot of vodka. It would probably work, but see point about passing out being fundamentally different than falling asleep.
• Get sleep meds. Never tried em’, probably should at some point. But, I just have an issue with forcibly inducing a natural reaction.
• Get totally exhausted. This is a terrible method, but unfortunately the one that tends to work best for me. Go sleepless, and in a night or two without good sleep, your body will be so tired out that you will eventually sleep.
• Do some simple, repetitive exercise. Knitting yourself to sleep! Good plan. Except, I don’t want to rip it all out the next day when I see what happens when I knit half asleep.

Okay, so the moral of the story is, if I get sleepless, I’m pretty much stuck. So all y’all get stuck with a blog post at 4 A.M. about nothing in particular.

Washed and Waiting

I just finished reading an excellent book. That is not especially shocking, what is surprising, is that the book is not several hundred years old. The book was published last year, it was written by a young man in his twenties, and it is going to sound incredibly controversial even though it isn’t.

The book is called Washed and Waiting and it is written by a young man named Wesley Hill. He is a homosexual divinity student who believes and affirms the biblical concept of marriage—one man with one woman, with no room for homosexual practice. So, being solely attracted to young man, he sees but one route for him…to continually resist temptation, and to live a completely celibate life.

He claims, and I believe him that there are a great many people in the conservative Christian church today who continually struggle with gay and lesbian desires, but affirm solely the biblical view of marriage. This book is written as an encouragement both to them and to the church at large in how to help them.

But, I found that the book has a wider application for heterosexuals as well. Or maybe it was just me. The book addresses everyone who is called to celibacy. That includes men and women who are heterosexual but have no yet found a spouse. That struck me is how very real he is about the depth and breadth of the burden of celibacy. It is not just abstaining from sex, though that can feel almost impossible some day in our sex-soaked and obsessed culture, it is the lose of the small intimacies, the lose of a person to build a home with, the constant reminders that you are missing out on the highest example of God’s love manifested in community. He is very real, and accurate about the loneliness, the struggle, and the despair. If you’ve ever struggled with your singleness, you need to read this book.

Another thing I appreciated about this book is his profound understanding of the theology of brokenness. It may seem odd that brokenness is consoling, but in showing the flaws, the beauty of redemption can become even more clear.

In all, this book is very simply and very powerfully written and provides a much-needed perspective on a set of very complicated issues. Y’all should read it. 