were we to all drop those masks, all-at-once in a you show me yours, i’ll show you mine scenario, would there be any love left in the world of man? or would we be so repulsed by the reflection of our own shame in one another that we would be driven into solitude? if there is to be any hope left it would be in the love of Christ, but the masks of christians are even the more delicate and intricate, covering a myriad of sins with deceit rather than love. meanwhile, in the shadows behind the mask the darkness remains, and grows.

of course my perception isn’t perfect but there is a sense – sometimes manifested as an intuition just under the surface and other times a present as the crack of a hammer on your thumb or a bite into a jalapeno – that the world isn’t right. and eventually we start to realize that the reason the world seems to be off-kilter from what it should be is because it is. the whole world is living in an episode of the twilight zone and in this version of the story we only have the faintest knowledge somewhere in the back of our primitive mammalian brains that there is the possibility of a better option.

and the tragedy of the whole situation is in our complete inability to grasp this – we can barely come to terms with the death, broken relationships, and hurting people right around us. how much more impossible is it for us to perceive the suffering in the darkest places of the world: in the ghetto, or the middle east or sub-saharan africa? there’s a whole broken world out there and we are ourselves but just a tiny little broken shard in the midst of it.

so we do what we must to survive: we set it aside and we pile our bills on top of it like a birthday card from our distant uncle; we know we ought to respond but so many other things will come first. there’s no way we can deal with it right now, but maybe later. tomorrow perhaps?

but in the end you still can’t get away from the idea that this is not how it was meant to be.

I, the LORD, have called you for the victory of justice, I have grasped you by the hand; I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness. I am the LORD, this is my name; my glory I give to no other, nor my praise to idols. See, the earlier things have come to pass, new ones I now foretell; before they spring into being, I announce them to you. Sing to the LORD a new song, his praise from the end of the earth: let the sea and what fills it resound, the coastlands, and those who dwell in them.

saturday my mom came up to have a look at it, i satisified her curiousity that i was in fact not going to keel over dead any time soon. after that i went down to arick’s bachelor party and got some beer on. quite a bit really, but it was a good time. the whole thing is still surprisingly surreal to me though.

i felt it a bit on sunday but after church went to the third place pub to check out their pub philosophy series “shepherd and the knucklehead”. we had some pretty good conversation with jason and richard on the topic of “who is my neighbor?” and what does neighborliness mean in the modern context. it was insightful and good conversation, and spurred me to figure out how to get to know my new neighbors. i think andrew and susan know them a bit already, so perhaps inviting them to a little bbq or something would not be amiss? it also inspired me to finish up this article i’ve been working on for cranked. pressure!

the one bad piece of news in all this is that i won’t do the multnomah county bike fair this weekend, since i’m not really back to full rideability. i had been so looking forward to that as well.

i discussed the idea of the disciplines of silence and solitude with a few folks earlier in the week, and it has really been resonating with me that with busy-ness and bikey adventures over the past year i have really been leaving less and less simple space in my life.

in that same vein, i really enjoyed this past weekend, after a busy friday evening i scarcely left the house. sure some folks came over and there was much wine consumed and bbqing, but for the most part i was free to just busy my hands with building a wheel or playing video games. it was fantastic to not be feeling pressured to do anything in particular, just to be.

i am reminded of how jesus would always go off away from everyone to pray, and how i too used to feel able to just ride my bike away somewhere and hang out with god. it seems like anymore i’m too busy getting to some event or needing to meet some obligation, or just frankly trying to avoid thinking about anything, much less spending time praying or reflecting. how do i get that time back?

“…it would seem that our lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. we are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. we are far too easily pleased.”

- c.s. lewis, the weight of glory

i had a disturbing realization this morning. for various morbid reasons i was pondering how i would feel if i learned i had a few months to live, and i concluded that it wouldn’t be that terrible.

i mean, frankly, i’ve got no girlfriend, wife, or kids – not even a pet. very few things in this world depend on me being around. true, it’d be hard on my poor mother. and i would hope at least a few of my friends would be a bit shaken up but such things happen. not to mention, i’m sure there are folks out there who would be plenty glad to see me gone. so what am i sticking around for?

now, this is not intended to be angsty; that’s not the right emotional paradigm for understanding this. it’s in fact a bit of melodrama that gets at an underlying discontentment in my heart. it’s not a present sadness, in fact i have a life that is legitimately quite full and generally contented in the moment. but in that there is a lack of longing, a death of desire for something more than what i have before me now.

i feel like i no longer get excited about things without qualifications. my hopes have been smashed by reality around me and my own failings enough times that my desire has adapted accordingly. the past three years in particular i’ve watched the crumbling of numerous things in which i had such high hopes, such excitement and now i’m hesitant to say i ever cared anyhow. i’ve come to a point of cynicism, of preemptively quashing tiny bits of excitement in my own heart before they become another source of pain or regret.

i want to be free to hope abundantly, to love ridiculously, and to reach out to people with a depth and honesty that frankly i’m just afraid to right now. i want to go beyond attendance and into engagement with the life around me. but those desires seem so nebulous, so likely to fail that it’s hard for me to hope that i’ll ever accomplish them.

so what am i left with but hoping in something else?

theologically i don’t have a strong concept of heaven. i’ve gone beyond the simple understanding of physical realm of clouds and angels and whatnot, but i don’t know what i understand of it. this i follow: in Christ, in the end, we are all brought together for eternity. i’m not sure exactly what that means, but as best i can conceive of it is this: those tiny pieces of heart that touch one another most intimately are but a foreshadowing of what Christ’s unity looks like. and i guess that’s what i’m hoping in, because i don’t know what else there is for me?

frankly, i think it’s bullshit.

i don’t deny God’s agency in the creation of the universe. i’m on board with that. definitely. unfortunately for many creationists and intelligent design supporters, i don’t think God is trying to somehow trick us. God has provided us with deductive faculties and a world that is so immeasurably complex and yet beautiful that we can appreciate his hand in it without having a concrete grasp on how he has manipulated it. somehow, we miss that. if the arrogance of the academy in holding fast to evolution and speciation is an overestimation of their knowledge of the world, how much more so are our simplistic interpretations of genesis an overestimation of our knowledge of God? why can’t the universe be enormous, the tale of history before the coming of Christ storied, and the processes shaping our world much larger than we can conceive of? from where i sit, it looks like bad theology.

what’s worse though is that as far as i can tell, intelligent design doesn’t even pretend to be science either. other than talking about it and writing pseudoscientific books, intelligent designers seem to have little to say about actual methods or processes by which things are designed intelligently. apparently, they simply look for what evolutionary theory can’t explain and shout out “ha! and that’s what God must have done! there he is!” then they look smug as the scientists try to explain that though they don’t know now, perhaps they’ll know later.

of course, much like with heliocentricity, it tends to turn out that science is capable of discovering very elegant explanations. then Christians look like morons for trying to trick the people around us into thinking we understand the universe completely, right now. ultimately what can this do other than make us out to be some of the most simple-minded and self-interested people on earth? we are far better to say we do not know.

kevin was wondering whether people had been taught anything critical of evolution in high school. i’m not sure whether that’s relevant. are there actually people who reject Christ based on their inability to reconcile him with evolutionary theory? that’s not a difficult task. who is out on the streets ministering to the poor, the lost, and the broken while Christians are busy fighting these phantom enemies?

if Jesus walked among us today, would we be the ones loving people, or would we be the pharisees trying to trick him into saying something contradictory to our tiny theology?

it probably seems that way because i have been, sort of. certainly i’ve been active, out doing things and running around, but i’ve also had plenty of free time in the evenings and mornings where i’m not inspired to do anything, but i’m also not luxuriating in the time to do nothing. i’m rarely relaxing. i find myself semi-compulsively hitting up my email and websurfing even in my freetime – a bad habit i prefer to leave at the office.

so that’s how i end up spending my free time, and while it’s not particularly unenjoyable, i definitely notice that it puts me in a certain mindset, it makes it difficult for me to simply relax – not so much vegetate as ruminate on things. instead i find myself spazzing around and unable to focus on any particular train of thought for more than a few minutes. this is not good.

i think this fact of modern life is an even better argument for the sabbath. of all the spiritual disciplines i have engaged in, the practice of setting aside a day (or a half-day, even) for the Lord is at once the largest commitment but also the one with which i had the greatest success. i formerly took half-sabbaths on thursday, leaving work at 1pm to go home and just hang out with God for the rest of the day. i’d read some scripture, ponder my life, engage in prayer, even just listen to worship music. i was relatively free of distractions since most of my friends were still at work – occasionally we’d grab a lunch or something – but i didn’t seek to fill that day with things to do. it was never especially structured time, but it was my time with God and i tried to make sure to respect that. one aspect of that is that i set aside my digital world, leaving the computer off and figuring if anyone needed me urgently they could call me. or find me.

it was good, and i look at how busy i’ve become and can’t even rightly remember when i stopped. i want to get back into it, but even now i’m fighting with myself as to when to set that time aside, but in the end i pray that i will find the strength to do so.

huh. i guess that’s my new year’s resolution, then.

there have been times in my life where i’ve thought i had God figured out. not even in that hubris-laden way of ‘completely figured out’ but even in relatively small ways. ways where i looked at my faith, theology, practices and was quite convinced that i had put together a solid religion with my ducks in a row. those are the times when i stopped wrestling with God, stopped fighting with the world around me and acquiesced to a shallow road of simple beliefs.

the first time i did this was as a nonchristian, looking at the world around me and knowing there was more but refusing to engage with it, desiring only to be left alone and to live out my days. surprising only myself, i again faced that same error years later as a young christian; convinced that i had arrived, i achieved my salvation and now needed only continue on as i was and happy to preach conversion and teach scripture to those around me. i was insufferable.

God disabused me of that notion right quick.

that brings me to where i am today. down in the trenches, fighting. doing battle with my own beliefs and wrestling with God as revealed to me through scripture and through relationships. trying to understand in tiny ways the church, the community of broken people around me and what is it all worth? this tension is the only thing that keeps me moving forward, bumbling in ways to try to understand just what the hell i am doing with my days on this planet.

i have to recognize that even in this simplistic look at the world – this recognition of tension and questioning – there lies the seeds of trying to be ‘arrived’, to be done with it and able to focus on other things.

to which gabrielle responded:

What is the point of all this struggle anyway? Can we really be assured that there IS a point? Is HOPING that there’s a point enough? Every time I think I’ve survived some major turning point in my life and come out ahead, I wonder how much God had to do with it and how much I just hit the right combination of blind luck elements and came out ahead. I am terrified of losing my love. I am terrified of losing my freedom. I am terrified of losing my sobriety. If I have to start being terrified of losing my salvation as well, what is the fucking point? I’m sorry, but there it is. Why can’t we feel assured in God? Is there NOTHING that gives us a sense of calm anymore? Are we to even doubt our very faith and salvation and existence until the end of our days because struggle is the only religion there is of value?

I can’t accept that. We might as well die then.

a response to which i am pretty much dumbfounded. in a sense it forms another experience to support my point that every time i think i have something understood i’m brought to a place where new information causes me to have to rethink my theology and worldview. this is one of those questions i don’t know how to answer. i don’t want to have a gospel of “suffering” – nor for that matter one of “prosperity”, “easy answers”, “power”, or any other single aspect of our life and faith.

of course the sunday school (or bible study!) platitude might be to say i want a gospel of jesus christ, but even to say that is burdened with imagery and associations that are inherently flawed. so am i becoming completely postmodernist, tearing apart my beliefs until i have nothing left and trying to reconstruct reality as a discursive framework?

i hope not.

still, what assurance do i have and where do i get it from? why don’t i just give up? is it all just a fool’s hope, a child’s self-centered expectation of safety?