Maggie's Farm

I think that the religious faith of most average Christians waxes and wanes over time, sometimes even in the course of a day. I do know people whose faith seems to be 100% and rock solid. In the end, I don't find thinking about the topic of strength of faith particularly useful or productive. God is a mystery to me, as is existence itself (and most other things too), but I believe that in prayer and in practice one can come into relationship with God - or at least with Jesus.

Ron Rosenbaum speaks up for the Enlightenment agnostic in everyone: An Agnostic Manifesto - At least we know what we don't know. One quote:

Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved. And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation "ex nihilo" (from nothing). His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of "uncaused causation" to be created in the first place.

This is—or should be—grade-school stuff, but many of the New Atheists seemed to have stopped thinking since their early grade-school science-fair triumphs.

Right, sort-of (I don't think we even know what we don't know). Science is not a religion. It's just a formalized, rigorous mode of inquiry from which most of the data and facts and theories are inevitably replaced over time. It is incapable of handling the Big Questions and Big Truth, but it sure can be useful. For example, we currently believe that "gravity" doesn't exist as a "force," but it's a handy concept anyway. Someday, our talk of "forces" wil be viewed as little more than 18th century gods.

Chesterton: ""If there were no God, there would be no atheists."

"Abba," the Aramaic word for "father," was sometimes used by Christ as a term for his true Father in heaven.

Jesus spoke Aramaic, almost certainly knew enough Hebrew to study the texts, and may have known some Greek too. Greeks, like the Romans, were all over the place. Must have been like that multicultural bar scene in Star Wars.

His use of "Dad" for God was transformational.

I do not view God as having any gender, but I love the way Christ spoke of God as his Dad. Real Dads, however much they may aspire to be role models and to be strong and reliable supports for their kids, are only human and thus always deeply flawed.

Yes, I greatly enjoyed Bruce's Father's Day post early this morning, especially the music. Jew, Christian, Moslem - whatever. If that song doesn't bring a tear, you have a problem. "Only you created tears, and only you can wipe them away forever."

I like the idea of "truth without value." How come it took me this long to find that concept? AVI's final paragraph of The Morality of Nonbelievers:

The Christian answer, as I have suggested, may be no truer than the others. It may be just one more variation of photosynthesis. I offer here no defense of that. Perhaps there is some other explanation outside of mankind – no, it would have to be outside of life itself – no wait, it would have to be outside of this accidental planet and even the accidental universe – that would make something in morality real, and true, and valuable. But absent any such, there isn’t anything that qualifies as morality – and there is simply no meaning beyond the masturbatory for a nonbeliever to give himself any credit for having one equal to the believer’s.

I agree with everything AVI says, and I feel motivated to think harder about things which affect me which have truth but little value.

Lux et Veritas, as they say in Rome. They used to say it in New Haven, too.

John Wesley (1703-1791), founder of what we now call Methodism (the term was originally used as an insult but was eventually adopted by Wesley), and his brother Charles spent some time in Savannah, GA. I lost a bet about that at a dinner party last year, which cost me a bottle of good Montrachet.

Methodism was the ultimate source of our 12-step programs: the Wesleyans liked to have methods for spiritual discipline. John Wesley was an evangelist, and liked to preach outdoors. He tried to convert the Georgia Indians.

He was a "by faith alone" preacher.

He got in a bit of a problem with a Georgia lady, and eventually returned to England. Here's a piece on Wesley in Georgia, and here's a Wesley bio.

The hymns written by John and Charles Welsey are among my favorites. Charles wrote 6000 hymns. John even produced a hymnal but, as this site notes,

Today people are much more familiar with some of Charles Wesley's hymns than with John Wesley's sermons.

Image of John Wesley above, Charles Wesley below:

from Anchoress:

A paradox of faith is that only by giving away (our) judgments and notions can we attain anything like Godly wisdom. Only by saying, “I surrender my notions of what would make me happy, to wholly accept yours,” can we hope to find true happiness and that peace “which defies all understanding.” Jesus went through an awful lot to demonstrate the power (and value) of “thy will be done,” and yet, we still struggle with it; we still resist, and want our own way.

Anne LaMott likes to quote a priest-friend of hers: “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Or, taken another way, “you can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that the plan God has for the world is, by happy coincidence, precisely aligned with your positions.”

When I need a dash of perspective and feel open to a new thought, I check out One Cosmos to see what Gagdad has been thinking about. He reads books that I would not get around to reading.

(I wish he would leave the politics alone - not that I disagree with his - but I find the combination grating and disconcerting.)

A sample of Gagdad's recent musings:

 ...it is hopeless to defer to biology as to the nature of Life as such. As I mentioned in the book, a biologist knows no more about the nature of life than a watchmaker does about the nature of time. As I have noted before, although it is obvious to me that the cosmos manifests intelligent design, I do not rely on this to inductively leap the conclusion that God therefore exists. This is like proving the existence of time by studying watches.

Or something like this, from a more recent post:

Truth must be sufferered... Why is that? Because to know a truth -- i.e., genuine objectivity -- is death to the ego. But once the ego is out of the way, it doesn't hurt at all. In fact, it kind of tickles.

Image: A Hubble photo of a star nursery

Quote from a post at One Cosmos:

...to be a secular extremist is to be a fully horizontal man, and thus, to commit not only spiritual, but intellectual, suicide. It is the ultimate cosmic inversion, for it is to elevate our fallen state to the highest virtue. It is "to love only terrestrial life, to the detriment of the ascending and celestial path," to be "exteriorized," and to "love only outer things, to the detriment of moral and spiritual values." Ultimately it is "to sin against transcendence, thus it is to forget God and consequently the meaning of life; and outwardness is to sin against immanence, thus to forget our immortal soul and consequently its vocation" (Schuon)

Read the whole thing, and be tolerant of Gagdad's rambling and his idiosyncracies. I like the parts about Truth, and about intelligence. 

We often reflect here on what our secular, pop-culture horizontal gods are today: ideologies, Gaia, science, self, governments, etc., even orgasms. When I consider the things that help me locate myself on a point above the x axis, "to fly like an eagle while being chained to the floor," I come up with poetry, song, prayer, moments of communion with others, and random moments of self-oblivious immersion in some aspect of Creation. My links to the vertical and to the things that cannot be touched. It's the job of preachers to assist that link too, isn't it? Alas for me, much of Scripture tends to speak more to my mind than to my soul, and True Beauty only blinds me. Working on those things, though.

Hubble photo is Messier 101

I attended the funeral of a colleague and pal of 20+ years early this afternoon. Jewish funeral, very short notice. Just took him and his wife to dinner ten days ago. Massive stroke. Second close death for me in one week. They played Louis Armstrong. The last year of his life was probably the best he had ever had. Recently retired (wife still working), biking through Asia with his lovely Mrs - who is a doctor, a month in Cabo, visiting kids in Lake Como and in California. Loved four things the most: deep thinking, bicycling long distances, his family - and good meals with good wines. Always cheerful, except when stupidity or dishonesty pissed him off. So modest, I never knew he was a Harvard grad til today at the funeral. Full scholarship, worked as a janitor for spending money. Tough for me to lose two special pals who loved life so much, in one week: I am not old yet. It connects to this "passing through" theme for me right now:

The issues around being a Christian in the real world are a regular topic for Bible study groups - and likely for students and followers of any religious discipline. "In the world, but not of it" is the way a part of John 17 is often paraphrased, viewing this life as a swift passage to another version of existence.

Anchoress posted this well-known (but new to me) second century letter to Diognetus, presenting an ideal version of A Christian In The World, in her Paradoxes of Christianity:

Christians in the World

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign. 

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.  

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven.

A reader recently reminded us that the Puritans had two kinds of "callings", the "general calling" to God and a secondary calling to labor.

Thus work was not seen as being about ethics, but as somewhat - or very much - sanctified. All honest work, after all, is a form of service.

The pop view of our Puritan ancestors is distorted, and a bit of a straw man. Grace Baptist has a good post on Puritans and work. He refers to what looks like an interesting book: Worldly Saints: The Puritans as They Really Were.

"We are fools for Christ's sake, but ye are wise in Christ; we are weak, but ye are strong; ye are honourable, but we are despised." (KJV).

"For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness." (1 Corinthians 3:19)

"For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." (1 Corinthians 1:18)

"For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe." (1 Corinthians 1:21)

My men's study/confessional group has been reading the Letter to the Hebrews for a couple of months. One of the topics we stumbled into this week was a discussion of obedience to God, and dutifulness. (Here's a recent post on obedience via Vanderleun.)

While we guys all seem to acknowledge the need for discipline for spiritual growth, many of us confessed our tendency to lazily and self-congratulatingly replace a life in the spirit with "Christian" dutifulness and "doing good." We more or less ended up thinking of moral and religious dutifulness, if lacking the Holy Spirit and the direction of God, as clanging cymbals - empty noise. Of course, that was one of Christ's teachings.

From a Christian standpoint, pride in one's Christian dutifulness and righteousness is a devil's snare - as is pride in one's humility. From Screwtape's Letter #14 with his advice to his apprentice Wormwood:

Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is especially true of humility. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, “By jove! I’m being humble”, and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages as you please.

One Cosmos comments in On Recovering the Point of Your Filmography Before it's Too Late:

"I once abided in the infinite, and all I got was this lousy belly button."

Our umbilicus, he says, is our reminder that we have already passed from one mode of being to another. One quote:

...just as our physical body bears the scar of its incompleteness and separation, so too does our soul bear its own version of this. For it also has a "hole" at its center that we may spend our lives trying to deny or fill in inappropriate and ultimately fruitless ways. But the hole is there for a reason. It is actually a theomorphic and theocentric hole, and there is no way to fill it unless one is properly oriented to the source of one's being. We are connected to the source of our being by a vertical channel, or OMbilicus, through which energies pass up and down, in and out -- we call these energies aspiration (?) and grace (?) (the latter of which must be in-spired to become operative).

He does not mention the term "re-birth," but that's part of what his post is about. I know that some of our readers think Gagdad Bob is an annoying nut, but I have found plenty of his transcendental imagery to be useful to me (including his metaphor of "verticality").

It is an affliction of middle age, especially if one has spent much time and effort in life preoccupied with the daily, practical, dutiful, material, and mundane - as what Gagdad calls a "Flatlander" - to find oneself asking "Is that all there is?" ...and to do all sorts of wacky and reckless things to deal with that question and with that emptiness, which things, indeed, bear no soul-nourishing fruit but are only empty distractions of the "How many holes does it take to fill the Albert Hall" sort.

Yet what a crazy question that is for me or anybody to ask - "Is that all there is?" - in the midst of this buzzing, blooming miraculous and frightening cosmos which is packed with road signs of all sorts (including our humble belly buttons), pointing to God.

OK, that's enough preaching and platitudes for one day at Maggie's.

Here's a real question: Is God female?

The medical/spiritual image of a human belly button is h/t Theo. That "Nexus" shirt is right on the button, as it were, isn't it?

Our friend Anchoress emailed me this piece from a Lutheran, The dictatorship of relativism strikes back—and goes nuclear. It begins:

The secular press has had it in for Joseph Ratzinger for going on three decades. Before his election as Pope in the spring of 2005, he was routinely derided in his homeland as the Panzerkardinal (“tank cardinal”) and caricatured in North America as the “Enforcer” or even the “Rottweiler.” The roots of this negative reputation stretch back at least as far as the book-length interview he granted to the Italian journalist Vittorio Messori that catapulted him to global fame when published as The Ratzinger Report in 1985. Prior to that juncture, as a heavyweight German academic who had leapfrogged over a major episcopal see (Munich-Freising) to become a leading official in the Roman curia (as cardinal prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith) under the still new John Paul II, Ratzinger’s was hardly a household name.

- Deacon Kevin McCormack, on Religion on the Line (radio): "If there were no Easter, there would be no Christmas."

- My Pastor in church this morning (paraphrased): "If we cannot believe that Christ rose from the dead, or are on the path to believing it, then we're wasting our time here." (I think that is debatable, but I like totally get his point. - the illumination comes from stepping into the light. Many things in life are like that. Maybe most things.)

One never knows where Lent will take you. A month or two ago, I was fairly certain that I knew what painful, self-flagellating things I needed this Lent for, but it has led me in another direction entirely, and a direction which offers more joy than pain.

It has led me to another level of the relational aspect of faith, as my posts during this Lent have indicated. It crystallized in my mind when I was contemplating my relationship with dogs during a recent night-time post-prandial dog-walk with my pal with ceegars. I generally connect with dogs pretty well, and think I have a good idea of how much of the bond is real and how much is imaginary.

Everything we experience in life is relational, in a sense - including to inanimate things and abstract things. It's how we are constructed. If I can delight in the slobbering kisses of a dog, what is it in me that prevents me from fully delighting in the (not-slobbering) kisses of God?

I won't go on with this because it's too personal and probably boring for anybody who isn't exactly where I am, but maybe you can get my drift. I am a work in progress.

When Christ rode into Jerusalem down from the Mount of Olives on a colt (or small horse, or donkey - whatever) on Palm Sunday, he was greeted with Hosannas by excited crowds who believed him to be the Messiah.

His teachings and his miracles had become famous. People threw their cloaks on the road and, presumably, palm leaves, for his horse to walk on.

Much of their enthusiasm was unwarranted, however: the Jews were hoping for a political messiah (using the word "king"), more than they were hoping for the messiah who came to tell them that much of what they believed about being in relationship with God was wrong - and claiming that he had the authority to say so.

"Salvation," for the crowds, meant salvation from the Romans, and "the kingdom of God," in the Hebrew Bible, referred to the literal restoration of a nation of Israel under God, as had been promised to David. There was no concept at the time, I believe, of the now-Christian idea of salvation or the Christian idea of "the kingdom of God." Furthermore, Jesus had no interest I am aware of in politics or governance and had no beef with the Romans.

A radical for sure, in his apparent renunciation of the ordinary world.

There is plenty of discussion about what is understood by the kingdom of God.

My own view is that it refers to God's domain, ie the universe of those souls who seek relationship with God - not any literal kingdom but a "spiritual" (I hate that word), unworldly kingdom. Maybe "transcendent" is a better word.

I suspect that the Jews who welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem were deeply disappointed to discover that Jesus' mission was not worldly, but other-worldly: only a few handfuls of people remained to constitute what the scholars term the "Christ cult" after the crucifixion. It took Paul's inspired work to rebuild on the foundation.

(That's just my amateur take on it all. I am no expert.)

Image: Fra Angelico's Entry into Jerusalem

Luke 19: 29-40

²⁹When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples,
³⁰saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here.
³¹If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’”
³²So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them.
³³As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?”
³⁴They said, “The Lord needs it.”
³⁵Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it.
³⁶As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road.
³⁷As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen,
³⁸saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”
³⁹Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.”
⁴⁰He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

Our sermon today was one of the ones I would have liked to have taught/preached myself, had I the ability and the calling.

(It followed one of our missions updates about the prison ministry we support (good stuff indeed, but as a friend said in our Lenten Lunch study group afterwards, "Can we be as sharing of Christ's love to our next-door neighbor with the BMW as we can to the sick, the despairing, and the folks in prison?")

The sermon seemed unusual to me in being a preaching against religion. Our Pastor, instead, held up the vision of the primacy of a personal relationship with God through Christ, bypassing much of what is often referred to as "religion." I suppose it was, in part, a preaching about the sins of piety, spiritual pride, righteousness, pro-forma ritual, and self-righteousness but I cannot do justice to the message.

A personal relationship with God through Christ...that sounds kind of ordinary, but I suppose I was ready to hear the "relationship" part in a new way. Less abstract; more felt. I understand how the "religion" part is meant to be a help in building, guiding, and maintaining the relationship, but it can be a hindrance too. Religion can easily become idolatry.

He spoke about how he has learned to tell when he is out of relationship with God by his reactions to life and people, and mentioned, interestingly, that having been raised and lived all his life as a Christian was a handicap to him as a Christian because he feels that he has never had the experience of being entirely out of relationship.

He was speaking on Luke 18:9:

He spoke also this parable to certain people who were convinced of their own righteousness, and who despised all others.
 

"Two men went up into the temple to pray;
one was a Pharisee, and the other was a tax collector.
The Pharisee stood and prayed to himself like this:
 

‘God, I thank you, that I am not like the rest of men, extortioners, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.
I fast twice a week. I give tithes of all that I get.’

But the tax collector, standing far away, wouldn’t even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying,
 

‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’

I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted."

Re-posted from just one month ago -

"Jesus tells us that everything we had ever thought about how to approach God is wrong."

After church yesterday, my Lenten study group listened to a DVD of Tim Keller, Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, teach on the prodigal son. (We are using Keller's Prodigal God as our guide this Lent.)

Among other fascinating points, Keller observes that Jesus used the parable to depict two kinds of lost sons - the seemingly-"good" kind and the obviously-"bad" kind. The elder "good" son is crippled with the sins of spiritual pride and self-righteousness, and the younger is just an everyday rotten kid. However, Keller's main point in this regard is that neither son loved the father - they both focus on what they can get from the father (the inheritance in the elder's case, and a job in the prodigal's case) rather than on loving the father. They are lost because neither is in a loving relationship with the father.

Keller holds up a vision of a Christianity which consists of a transformative relationship of love and communion with Christ and God which is, as he puts it, "beyond morality and beyond religion." He invites us to be reborn in a loving relationship with the Father. The fruits of that - the "fruits of the Spirit" - may emerge after and be more than the "clanging cymbals" of empty, dutiful, or self-validating virtue.

I like this message because I have never directly associated Christianity as being centrally about doing "good" or being "good." Indeed, I sometimes think a good church sign might be "Sinners only, please." Good character and behavior are damn important in life and important to the people we are involved with, but not basic to Christianity. Being respectable, honest, dutiful, responsible, self-controlled, reliable people are primarily secular and/or psychological issues, despite Calvin.

In Christ's time, the Pharisees (represented by the elder brother) were scrupulous about doing the right thing but lost track of their relationship with God during their search for goodness and correctness. Christ gave them hell for their pursuit of rightousness and, famously and scandalously, chose to hang out with lepers, whores, tax-collectors and the like (the sinful younger brother who might, someday, have to recognize a need for redemption).

One of my comments in our group was in this vein:

"Seems to me that there are many rational, practical, mature caring adult, legal, narcissitic, relational, and emotional reasons to be a good and upright person in this world and to live a life of decency and honor, but getting on the Father's good side and getting the Father to do what we want is not one of them."

As one reviewer of Keller's book asks, "Which brother am I?" My private answer: "A bit of both and, I hope, a bit of loving son."

There's a trailer of Keller's DVD here.

We recently posted a link to a homey discussion about how God speaks to us. But here's Gagdad Bob:

God's speech (happily) shatters all human containers for the same reason that a three dimensional sphere shatters a piece of paper.