I Used to Be Smart.

If I ever want to write consistently, I think I have to get the point where I can write, even when I don’t necessarily have anything to “write about,” and I have to do that without telling you a story about what the cat did yesterday — because you don’t care about that. So that explains why this is here.

I cannot consistently move past the point where I have a desire to consume. Even though I have so little money right now that it is absolutely ridiculous, I still feel (strongly) the desire to spend money. No matter what I say, I STILL feel validated by my ability to spend money, and even when I do not have money, I have a desire to spend money. I can survive without all of the things on which I desire to spend money — new clothes, eating out, etc. Sadly, I am still so deeply rooted in this American consumption-ist lifestyle that I do not feel validated unless I’m spending money.

I know the pitfalls. I know that if I spend some money, that will not be enough, I will want to spend more money. So even by spending something, I am not validated. I am a product of the marketing machine that tells me that there is always one more thing that I must buy in order to make my life complete. Furthermore, I feel my spending must be in consumption. I spend a significant amount of money every month to pay off debts that I have incurred. That spending does not validate me because it is not rooted in consumption. I feel that spending, which is healthy, is a burden to me, and the spending that would be completely unhealthy is what I need.

My feeling is that I’m not the only one who feels this way. My feeling is that if anyone is reading this, then you have probably been subject to the same propoganda machine that has warped me, and you feel the same feelings that I do. We have already been taught what to think about how we relate to the world by forces that we cannot control.

That propoganda machine tells us that we have freedom. It tells us that we are free to choose Coke or Pepsi, Chevrolet or Ford, store brand or top shelf. What it does not tell us is this: we are free not to consume. Take that in. The advertising machine has enslaved us to consumption. The choices that we believe we make freely are not choices at all, but the product of a subtle slavery. To actually be free, we would be free from the need to consume.

That is what we (the church), must realize. We are not free because we can choose between two options. We are free because we can release ourselves from the unseen things that bind us. We are not free to consume as much as we are freed from the need to consume. We are not free to choose between party lines as we are freed from a political system that divides along party lines.

And that all makes all the difference in the world in this longing I feel (like Percy and the “malaise,” if you’ve read him), to know that I am freed from this need to consume that consumes me. The sad thing, all of that does not help very much. I still feel the need to spend the money I do not have, and I do not think that need will go away by any simple realization of the force that enslaves me. Years of learned habit can only be undone by years of unlearning habit. Years of listening to one set of voices can only be undone by years of listening to a better set of voices. None of that is easy. It is all like ripping a band-aid slowly off one of my hairy arms. It hurts like hell all the way across, but it certainly has to be done at some time or another — whether in this life or the next.

A few months ago, I wrote about The Myth of Redemptive Violence. That was all predicated on a book by Walter Wink.

I let Robert borrow Wink’s book, and this is a response to some comments he made about the book in our weekly Bible Study.

(And Robert, if you read this, and I misreprsent you, just let me know since we really didn’t have time to talk too much about the issue. More than anything, this is me thinking about the things that you said rather than trying to prove you wrong.)

The question is this: is Jesus an example of redemptive violence? It’s a really good question/observation, especially in light of historical teaching about atonement (and I think atonment is where all this lies). The historical reading of atonement has largely rested in the substitutionary model — it was necessary that Jesus died because blood was required to atone for sins. Jesus died in our place, and fulfilled a legal obligation, thus redeeming us all. With that reading of atonment, there is an example of violence that is ultimately redemptive.

However, it is not necessary to read the atonment in a way that makes violence necessary for redemption.

(In that sentence, I’m going to go against the majority opinion of Christian history, and perhaps even delve into thigs that have traditionally been labelled as heresy. I’m cool with that.)

There is no reason to dodge heavy questions, so I won’t (wrong and ignorant though I may be). Was violence the only what that God could absolve the world of its sin? Obviously, my answer is no. To say that God can only do things a certain way is, I think, completely out of line. It is taking a finite way of understanding things and iimposing it on a deity that is something far greater than human finity. God is not a slave to syllogisms and human understandings. To say that God can only do things one way is to make God terribly small, and to place terribly limiting shackles on a God who always finds ways to break free from the limitations of our understanding — even the way those understanding have shown up in the Bible.

It is my belief that God could forgive the sins of the world in any way that God chose. If God wanted to simply make a choice to forget about it all, God could have done just that, and we would have no grounds on which to argue with God.

None of that, however, gets us very far. A person could agree with all of me on the above points, and then believe that the subsitutionary route was still the route that God, on his own accord, chose. So everything I’ve said so far has really not gotten us anywhere. The question remains:

Who is responsible for the violence in the crucifixion — God, or angry mob who were threatened by Jesus’ message? That’s the big question, and I honestly do no know the answer. There is the way in which God is responsible for everything. However, I also believe there is a level on which God has given rational people free choice to do as they will. I am tempted to play the what if game, and wonder what would have happened if those rational agents had chosen differently. But the truth is that they didn’t. So I’ll play the what if game in a different way.

What if the substitutionary theory of atonement isn’t true? How do we read the crucifixion in light of that? The traditional reading paints Jesus as a reluctant martyr, approaching his death with the knowledge that it is what he must do to win some galactic chess game that has been raging in a level above human perception. It is something that Jesus does with a heavy sense of duty — because he must, because the shedding of his blood is the only way to take away the sins of the world. And I must be fair, I must say that there is a reading of this Jesus wherein Jesus loves all of the people that he is dying for intensely, intensely enough to die on their behalf, and therefore is willing to undergo the necessity of violence — an evil that he so clearly decries. Nonetheless, it still makes violence necesary. It pits a Jesus who declares violence to be an inappropriate redress against a God for whom violence is the only satisfactory answer for sins committed.

I propose an alternate reading. This is one of the few times I’ve ever tried to actually say something like this, so it’s probably going to have more problems than it offers solutions. I’m cool with that. In this reading Jesus is a figure trying to desperately to show the world how to live. He’s trying to reveal community to people who thrive on competition. He’s trying to show forgiveness to a people who hold grudges. He’s trying to show those who only live for cheap exterior actions that there is something important about the character of a person — something that both transcends their actions and is revealed by their actions. He’s trying to show an oppressed people that violence is not the proper response to those who enslave them. He tries desperately to show these people that, above everything, EVERYTHING, love is what is important — beyond self-perservation, beyond national interested, beyond even the rules and the religion that they have created, that a love for every person that they encounter, regardless of “worth” or not, that love is the way to live. It’s a difficult solution, because it creates a million more problems, but Jesus knows that loving each other in this fierce way that he has seen God’s love is the only way that humans can live as they were meant to live.

And this is threatening. It angers those who have so much staked in a religion that is threatened by Jesus new way of living life. It angers those who want to unite in violence to attempt to throw off the mantle of Roman oppression. It angers those in power who are trying to maintain the way things are (and therefore their own power). It is such a frustrating thing that they conspire to kill the radical man who is threatening the way that they have the world structured, and threatening to upend in the ways in which they gain and maintain power. So, in typical first century fashion, they turn to execution. It’s not an execution that appeases some galactice sentence. It’s an execution of a man who has seen so clearly the coming kingdom of God and understands so clearly the principles that he has articulated, that he will not meet the violence that is being inflicted on him with violence for anything. He absolutely will not break the commands he has given to people, because he HAS to show them that there is a better way to live life, and that death leads to a resurrection. And that resurrection shows people that not even death has the power to defeat the way that Jesus told them to live, and that they CAN live in this crazy way where they constantly give themselves away and totally abandon the need for self-preservation because it is clear that not even death has the ability to win. The violence isn’t necessary.

The violence isn’t redemptive. The violence is redeemed. That may seem semantical, but it makes all of the difference in the world!

Lately, I’ve been amazed at (what appears to be) a significant divide in Christianity. There are two distinct groups that are, in reality, pretty far apart. I’m fascinated by why this happens.

It’s difficult to enumerate the divide — to list what sorts of things make it up, to say who is on one side, or who is on the other, or even to say why it exists. I will, however give an example.

There are people who ferverently support George W. Bush and the vast majority of his political policies/ideology, and they do so because they are Christians. There are others (and far fewer) who disapprove of George W. Bush and the vast majority of his political policies/ideology, and they do so because they are Christians.

How does that work? How do some people believe in a war because they are Christians and others fiercly oppose the war because they’re Christians? How does that work?

In the deepest part of me there is something that knows that all of this is not right. There is something that knows that the way life is meant to be lived is different than the way that I live my life now.

But I am such an American. I believe that if I can just get something else, that my life would be complete. I think that if I could just find a girl, just find a different job, just be cool enough, then this deep discontent will dissolve. So I scramble around, attaching myself to all of these half-hearted solutions. I know better. I flail about, hoping I will find the solution to a problem that I cannot name.

None of the things that I have tried have any solution. All of the things I want to try will probably be no solution. That scares me. So I wonder — is this life? Is this thing that I’m feeling, is this the way my life must be? This knowledge that things aren’t right — that the way that I live my life is not right, and that the way that the world works is not right — and the knowledge that I cannot find what is needed to fix what is wrong always operating in constant tension?

I can’t believe that. I have to believe that there’s some different out there. That same slow train that’s been coming is still creeping up around the bend, and it’s chugging down the tracks is a promise that things do not alawys have to be like that, and there is a time coming when how it is is reconciled with how it should be, and these deep discontent is no longer a force in my life.

How do you develop self-discipline if you don’t have it?

How does a lazy person become NOT lazy?

He wandered into the coffee shop almost accidently. He hated these places. They had all become one big cliche, and he hated that. Regardless, he walked in anyway. Perhaps it was because he was bored. Perhaps it was because he thought that people like himself were supposed to go these places, and if it worked for all of them, then it might just work for him.

So he approached the counter and looked at the board hanging above it. It was an artsy mess of things that he was clueless about, written in some vocabulary that he was expected to understand. He didn’t feel like dealing with all of that today. The lady working there smiled at him. It was a foodservice smile, something that he had learned to do himself. It wasn’t genuine, but dammit, it looked like it.

He asked politely, “Can I get a large coffee, please?” The foodservice smile beamed at him.

“We have large, regular and extra-large, which would you like?”

He wanted to roll his eyes. The semantical game of starting your sizes with large was such a transparent piece of marketing that he was reluctant to even acknowledge it. However, he knew that it wasn’t Miranda’s (that’s what her nametag said) fault, she just worked there. She just wanted her $6.00 an hour and all of the free lattes she could drink. So he gave in. “Extra-large is fine.” He didn’t want that much coffee, and he certainly didn’t need that much coffee, but he knew that he had to have something to get through another day of more of the same.

He took the book that he had stuffed under his arm, his 24 ounces of coffee imported from some random Southeast Asian country and found a seat in the corner so he could blend in. So nobody would notice him. He didn’t realize that he was subtly sabotaging himself in ways that made him noticable. The way he shifted his weight constantly in his chair, the way that his eyes cosntantly darted around the room, the way he always tugged at his clothes and readjusted his posture — they all gave away the lack of confidence that was lurking right underneath the veneer. He tried hard, he really did. Some days, he even succeeded. But it was looking like today was not the best day.

His secret appeared to be safe. He and Miranda were the only ones in the coffee shop, and she was no more paying attention to him than were the people walking by outside. He was anonymous enough. It was all boring enough. Sipping coffee, turning pages. He really didn’t even life the coffee, but it was caffinated. It would do. He wasn’t thinking about the words that his eyes were gliding over. His mind was a million other places, wandering through thoughts that barely had any connection. The page numbers kept increasing, and he took little notice of the world around him.

—–

He burst into the coffe shop with an air that suggested that he expected to be noticed. He hated these places. They never got his order right. They were staffed with incompetent people who had no idea how to give him what he wanted. He tried to deal with them as little as possible. He had better things to do than to smile at the girl who was making his coffe. It wasn’t worth the effort.

So he swooped in and made his demand before Miranda could gather a smile. “Coffee. Large.” She gathered her $6.00 an hour smile and informed him, “We have large, regular and extra-large, which would you like?” He rolled his eyes.

“I don’t give a shit. The biggest one you’ve got.”

She didn’t know what to say. The foodservice smile wasn’t even a proper counter for this. So she poured his coffee. Twelve ounces into the cup, the urn sputtered, and the flow of coffee stopped. The cadence of his shoes tapping on the floor increased in speed.

“Dammit,” he said, “can’t you people ever do anything right? Some people have places to be. We can’t stand around for 10 minutes waiting for you to change the coffee.” He must have been quite important.

With the last 12 ounces finally poured, he threw a five dollar bill across the counter. As it was sliding off and falling to the floor, he turned to storm out of the door.

—-

He wasn’t sure why he was doing what he was doing. He didn’t know why he was closing his book. He didn’t know why he was standing up. He didn’t know why he was positioning himself right between the counter and the door. The whirlwind of a man in a pink tie jerked himself around. Shoulder met chest, hot coffee met a hand.

He still can’t figure out why any of this happened. If he would have been watching the whole scene unfold, he probably would’ve laughed at the whole thing — so misguided kid trying to be some chivalrous cowboy. And when the words came out of his mouth, he almost felt like was watching the whole thing unfold from far away.

“Apologize.”

The bump and the hot coffee had only cemented his resolve.

“I’m serious. Apologize to her.”

The pink tie didn’t know what to do.

“Turn around, right now.”

(What? Am I saying this?)

“And say that you are sorry for treating her like that.”

He turned around. Like a kind admonished by his parents, he mumbled, “Sorry.”

“I said apologize to her. I didn’t tell you to patronize her.” He stepped aside. “Leave.”

—-

The man in the pink tie hurried out the door. He noticed nothing between the door and his car, or at least he pretended not to notice anything. But he couldn’t help but wandering what that guy in the corner was thinking about, staring at the wall like that.

—-

(That’s whatever. I was bored. Take it or leave it.)

Completely unexpectedly, I found myself at the same place as Wendell Berry this weekend. He may be from Kentucky, and he may speak frequently, but I had never seen him before (except in a picture or two). So I wandered to the back of the bookstore where I knew he would be, and searched him out in a panel of people.

He was hard to find. He was the bald guy in an understated blazer who looked like my grandfather. So I hung around to hear him speak. He was soft-spoken. He wasn’t very exciting. A few people were bored and walked off. I couldn’t have been more impressed.

He didn’t say anything I hadn’t heard before. However, in an age where someone is always trying to sell me something, and where people are always way too polished to be honest, Berry was something completely different. He was completely honest. He was confident. He was sure about what he was saying. He was the complete opposite of the commercial gloss that has become sugary to the point of making us all sick. He wasn’t going to use slick rhetoric or emotional appeals. He was simply honest about what he believed. He didn’t cut down the opposing folks. He issued no invectives. He never would have made it on Fox News or CNN.

Often, when we meet the people that we admire, they let us down. Berry did nothing of the sort. He may have been boring and nondescript — but I didn’t expect anything less.

I’m going to blow my cover. I’m going to be honest about some stuff I’ve been thinking, and it my blow up in my face, leaving me looking the Chief after Inspector Gadge let a message self-destruct on him. (Or maybe nobody actually cares, and that’s fine too!)

I wrote a little bit last week about the big “u” word, and just kinda messed around (though not very succintly, and not in a very well organized way) about how universalism could be true without being cheap. I pretended that I wasn’t talking about anything I believed, but just going through som mental gymnastics. The truth of the matter is this: the more I think about it, the more I think that there is a really good chance that everyone finds their way to salvation. Yeah. I do.

It’s a foreign idea. It’s an offensive idea. It goes against everything I’ve been taught. It’s hard to justify using scripture alone. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of reflection to be able to even start to hold the idea. It’s true. It probably makes me a complete heretic. I realize that. I realize all of that, and more. But, dammit, I can’t get it out of my head. For years now, it’s rattled around in there, bugging the hell out of me, popping up when it gets a chance to nag at me, and make me think about it. Maybe, “It’s the devil. Or maybe it’s just something I ate.”

My thinking always centers on the character of God. That’s where it all starts. Maybe I’m just too one-sided. Maybe I read too much Brennan Manning, and too much Thomas Merton, and too much Henri Nouwen during an impressionable period of my life to ever be right again. But I can’t but help see God as a God of a love so insanely fierce that I can’t find any way to describe. I can’t help but see God as the God who IS love. There’s no exegeting around that, even in the Greek. It says what it says. God is love. That’s not piece of the puzzle — that’s what God IS. A God of love. And because God is love, God is a God of grace. I wish I could find a way to use words to talk about grace like Merton, and Nouwen and others have, but I can’t. All I can do is picture the silly grin on the face of a father who has been waiting too long as he runs down the length of the driveway to welcome home a prodigal that had defied everything he had ever held dear. That picture can’t be shaken, it can’t be thrown out.

And all I can see are all of these people. All of these people who are messed up before they even had a chance. All of these people dealing with circumstances beyond their control. All of them trying so hard for something. Running blindly. All of them buying what we’re selling them. I can’t blame them. As many times as the ads and the messages pound our brains, we’re all bound to give in at some point. I don’t think love points fingers and damns them for that. I don’t think grace says that their only chance got lost before they even knew they had it. Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I’m a heretic, but I just don’t believe that. I don’t believe that God gives up and washes his hands of people. Pilate was the hand washer, Jesus was forgiving the people who crucified him.

That’s crazy! That doesn’t make sense. It’s the “pazzo d’amore” — the madness of love that God has for God’s creation. I can’t understand it!

I still don’t think it’s cheap, and I still don’t think it happens overnight, and I still don’t think that this is our only chance. But I do think that we’re all on our way home. And that we’re all going to find that way. And I’ll be damned if that doesn’t change the way we think about EVERYTHING.

I love Men’s Health. It’s a great magazine. It’s helped me lose a lot of weight and become incredibly more healthy. So this month, I was excited to open my new one.

The ad on the first page looked interesting, because it was a ton of text, much different than other ads. So I started reading. I got hooked into this story about a guy with a great life and mediocre car who knew that something was amiss with his life. As the page of text dwindles, I became disappointed at the ad’s answer. The character in the story bought a Lexus, and his life was complete.

I could rail for hours on that ad. Instead, I’ll just share this.

There’s your Lexus.

(Picture thanks to DH, irony thanks to God alone.)

Must universalism be “free pass” theology?

That’s the question of the day, and there are a lot of issues with this question.

First of all, I’m not going to be gun shy. The truth is, I’m probably not a universalist (but I still won’t commit to any position). In my personal reflections, I’m probably something more like an inclusivist, but not exactly. However, I figure that if I’m going to go down this road, I might as well go all the way, and not let universalism just lurk over the whole thing, taunting, but never entering the picture.

Here’s the thing. Universalism is something like the great white elephant. It’s in the room, over in the corner, and EVERYBODY sees it, but NOBODY will say a word about it. We’re scared to death of it, and we’re scared to death of being accused of being a universalist.

See, that is the problem. The tone universalist is almost always accusatory. If you’re a universalist, you believe in cheap grace that doesn’t matter because everyone gets in anyway. There was certainly no need for Jesus and there is certainly no need to do anything that makes one’s life any better because you’re just going to go to heaven anyway. Those sorts of people do need to be accused, because what they believe is utterly useless to anyone. The problem is, most people that are accused of being universalists aren’t universalists at all.

That’s the issue. Can one be a universalist with being a universalist? Can one believe that, in the last days, that a great number of people will be saved without believing that grace, Christ, and Christianity are completely cheap and useless? I think so. Hopefully I can articulate why.

The first thing we have to admit is our ignorance about what happens after we die. It’s true. We can even use the Bible to bolster that example. In the beginning of the thing, there is pretty much no concept of a life after the Earthly one. It eventually involves into the place of Sheol — a shadowy Hades-like existance, and much further down the road, with the help of some Persian influence, it evolves into the heaven/hell dichotomy with which we are intimately familiar.

Even that language hard to deal with. When Jesus talks about Hell, we don’t know if he means some real place, or if he’s just talking about some garbage dump outside the city. Even Revelation is not as reliable as we have thought it to be, considering it is difficult to take the heaven/hell language of the book literally and not be arbitary about what is literal and what is poetic. The truth is, we just don’t know, and we’re not going to know.

After all this, we must admit the possibility that this is not our last chance. Granted, the Bible says that a person must die, and then be judged. Awesome. But when? But how? But after what process? It’s remarkably ambiguous! It could be a year after we die, it could be a million years after we die — is there any concrete way to tell the time frame? I see none!

C.S. Lewis thought that there might be chances after this life for redemption. I think I agree with him. Is Christ’s work defeatable by death? Do we have ANY idea what happens after we die? We don’t. And there seems to be a good chance that maybe something else is waiting, and that maybe God is finding a way to invite more people into the fold.

So far, everything I’ve said doesn’t seem to be that far off from the cheap brand of universalism that is a free pass. However, there is more to the puzzle.

Here’s what I’m thinking. I realize that I’m going to use some language in this next sentence that is severly lacking, but it’s the best I’ve got. In order to not cheapen God, I think there must be “standards” (yes, horrible word) to “get into heaven” (I know, I know).

Is it not possible that there is some process of purgation that brings people up to those standards? That there is not a constant, possibly intensely painful refinement process by which people are brought into an alignment with what God wants? A process that could take more time than what we have here on this Earth?

Would it be offensive if there was? Would it cheapen grace from God’s perspective, or just from ours? Would it throw off justice from God’s perpsective or just from ours? Does anything HAVE to be punished for justice to be true? Does anything HAVE to be damned for grace to be real?

It’s something to think about.

The strangest thing in the world to me is the kinds of things that can invoke a memory. And more than that, what kind of memories are invoked. Just listening to a song from a band you love has this unbelievable ability to bring back this flood of memories. But it’s fascinating, the way we remember, an image tied to a smell and a sound that floats by, all tacked on to a feeling that you can’t begin to name.

I’ve been listening to old Death Cab for Cutie/Ben Gibbard/The Postal Service songs tonight. The first time I ever heard them was last fall, when I was in Atlanta. And now that it’s fall here, and I’m listening to old songs that I haven’t heard before, it’s strange how it reminds me of hearing all the songs I love the first time, and how utterly indescribable those memories are. I guess that’s why we write these words, to put into the concrete what is utterly fleeting and indescribable.

That’s all I’ve got. Just listen to Death Cab/Postal Service/All Time Quarterback/Ben Gibbard (it’s all the same singer, Ben Gibbard), and describe things that you can’t describe.

“I want so badly to believe that there is truth that love is real.
And I want life in every word to the extent that its absurd.”
–The Postal Service.

Lately I’ve been listening to music that doesn’t get played on hardly any radio station. Lots of Woody Guthrie, lots of Bruce Springsteen, a bit of Bob Dylan. The thing I’ve discovered about these three (I need a name for them) is that there is an incredible honesty in their songs, and it’s an honesty I don’t find much elsewhere. I especially don’t find it on the radio. I’ll try to explain.

Lately, music has changed for me. I don’t hear in terms of genre anymore. When I listen to Woody Guthrie, I don’t hear old-timey, folk, or anything like that. I only hear those things when I started to wonder how other people would hear Woody. More and more, good music is just becoming good music, no matter what sort of conventions it’s wrapped up in.

Woody, Bruce, and Bob are like that. The honesty lies in this: the culture that surrounds me has “pretty white girl syndrome.” Natalie Holloway, Lacy Peterson, Jennifer Wilbanks. We love pretty white girls. Pretty while girls make the news. Pretty white girls sell records.

This is Springsteen:

This is Dylan:

And this is Woody:

None of the three are pretty white girls. They’re not even pretty. And that’s the thing. Not only are they NOT good looking (maybe The Boss is), but their songs aren’t about pretty white girls. Woody Guthrie sings songs about people displaced by dust storms and so poor they can’t afford to eat. Springsteen sings about illegal immigrants trying to get into the country to make a better life. Dylan is the prophet telling us that things are changing, and the world won’t always be as it is. It’s music that is honest with itself, and honest about the world. It’s music for its own sake. It’s not someone singing about “lovely lady lumps” to be catchy and to get you to buy records. It’s Truth. I’ll take that over pretty white girls ANY day.