I Used to Be Smart.

Question of the day:

If there is a real, systemic problem with the way we do life in American consumer-culture, what does life outside that culture look like?

I’m not sure what to think of him.

I can’t decide if he’s a villain from some sci-fi B-movie or if he’s some sort of Wes Andersen manchild.

To be honest, words fail at an accurate description. A picture might get the job done, but mostly, I think you’d just have to see him.

He’s always dressed all in black. It’s a rule. The last time I saw him, it was quite an ensemble. A suit coat over a black turtleneck that was tucked into black jeans, which tapered down and tucked in to the shiniest black cowboy boots. He had some sort of back slung across his back like a bandolier. Perhaps it’s a bag filled with evil devices with which he plots world domination. Perhaps it’s a more discreetly stowed fanny pack. I never see him without his portable cd player on his hip. The silver headphones, bulky and over his entire ears are the only thing he wears that aren’t black. To describe his glasses as “coke bottle” would not be an inaccurate cliche.

(I don’t know. Just wanted to attempt a description.)

Writing is hard.

Sure, writing the symbols that represent the English language isn’t that hard. I could do it all day, without much effort.

But writing as an art (skill?)? That’s tough. What I’ve decided is that it requires a willingness to be silly. I don’t mean silly like Bozo the Clown silly. It’s something closer to ridiculous, or maybe absurd. A writer has to willing to be vulnerable enough to say things that could be ridiculed, because there’s no other way to say things that are True. Sure, she could write a list of “facts” — but nobody wants that kind of catalog. While they may all be true, that kind of cold reason reveals little about the human condition. It reveals little about what is most True about the world, and it has incredibly little power to move anyone.

I know that the things I’ve written lately have been — bad. I think maybe that’s why. I think maybe, because of several different things that have happened, I’ve shut down some capacity to be silly, ridiculous, absurd, vulnerable — especially in writing, which is a completely different kind of vulnerability. Of course, I could be wrong, I may have just lost any bit of skill that I ever had. Writing papers for school is starting to make me think that’s true, that’s for sure.

I’d love to make a promise that I’m going to try to write like I used — to attempt to vulnerable and have the same ridiculous idealism that I used to have — but I don’t know if that’s possible. It seems like something has…broken. I can’t really say if it’s broken, or just different, but something’s different than it used to be. I know that’s, to a large extent, life, but I would love for the writing to change with me, not to get left behind somewhere. But, between working 12 hour shifts of selling people what they don’t need, trying to please unpleasable managers, and reading impossibly difficult medieval poetry the time to be vulnerable and to find Truth just really doesn’t seem to be there like it used to be. I might just be done. I might have grown up and left all of that behind.

You know the great thing, though, is that change can be so constant you don’t even feel the difference until there is one. It can be so slow that you don’t even notice that your life is better or worse, until it is. Or it can just blow you away, make you something different in an instant. It happened to me.

How do people walk around with music in their ears and look completely unmoved?

Are they just listening to really, really bad music?

I can’t walk around like that. If I walk around (like on campus) with my iPod on, it seriously takes a massive amount of effort not to sing or to do some stupid little dance while I’m listening to music. Am I the weird one? I mean, isn’t that the point of music? Isn’t it supposed to move us? To make us feel something? If you just want noise to let you hide from people, you might as well listen to static. It’s better than some of the shit marketed as music!

Maybe they think they same thing to me, and maybe they’re all walking around fighting it just like I am. Maybe I just have amazing taste (I do.) and I just listen to much better music.

I don’t know. I’ve got no point. It just bugs me.

I know that my English professor doesn’t read my blog, but if he did, he would probably be proud that our reading of some crazy 14th century poem could inspire me to think about my actual life.

I know that if you’re reading my blog, you’re probably already disappointed that I’m going to talk about some crazy 14th century poem. Sorry.

The debate in the poem is simple enough. There is a character called “Meed.” Meed and mead are two different things. Meed is something like (though not entirely) profit-motive. Mead is something like (though not entirely) beer. So, this lady, Meed, is in the midst of an argument. Various other characters are attempting to usurp a marriage between Meed and Truth, and give Meed over to be married to False. Before you tune all of that out — there is an argument over whether profit should correctly be tied to truth (which, for the 14th century British folks would’ve been the truth as expressed by Christianity) or to falsehood. To frame the debate differently — who deserves to prosper? Those who do good, or those who do evil?

In the middle of the debate, a character named Conscience intervenes. In no uncertain terms, he utterly decries Meed. She is no bride for Truth, and her fickleness and manipulation mean that Truth should end his pursuit of her. (Which makes my head hurt. Was a character called Truth wrong?)

That’s a debate that has been around for as long as people could debate. On some level, it’s the “nice guys finish last” discussion. Don’t those who do good deserve to be rewarded? On another level, it’s the issue of whether true altruism exists. Does anyone do anything because it’s right? Or because it’s good? Or do people simply do things because there is, no matter how esoteric, profit?

(At this point, I connect a 14th century British poem with a 20th century British songwriter and with several hundred years of church history. What skill.)

Even Christianity has co-opted this view. The dominant Christian worldview for hundreds of years is a story that is familiar to many of us (and I know that I am oversimplifying this) — do the right things on Earth so that you may have great rewards after Earth. It is, simply enough, profit motive. The profit is not money, or anything temporal. It is far removed and a bit — ethereal, but it exists, nonetheless.

So, with John Lennon, I will, “Imagine there’s no Heaven.”

What if profit motive is utterly removed from the conversation? What if God were to intervene today and tell us that there is absolutely no Heaven, and then when we die, we just die?

What if God were to then say that everything that Jesus told us about the way we live is still true, and that God still fully expects us to live that way?

How would we react to that. It’s sort of the reverse of Plato’s Ring of Gyges story (if you could do evil without the threat of punishment, would you?). If you were expected to do good selflessly without the possibility of reward, would you? Would I? Would anyone?

That’s an EXTREMELY fascinating question. Sometimes questions reveal more than the answers, but I’m not sure what this one reveals. Is it a flaw inherent in the system? Is it a flaw with human nature? Are we so weak that we must be constantly tempted by carrots dangled on strings? Is it just a means to an end because we’re all idiots that need shiny things to make us do any good? Does that reduce faith to ridiculousness? Some well-designed method of control to get people to act as they should act?

What if Lennon is right? What if there were no heaven? How would people act? Would we basically be good? Would we protect each other and the Earth because we know that this is the only shot we have? Or would we be greedy bastards who would take down the whole ship?

If the promise of Heaven is enough to make people act better than they would act without such a promise, is it justified? Do the ends justify the means?

How would I act? Would I be basically good? Would I care for other people and the Earth, or would I be one of the selfish bastards?

Who knows?

(And who said an English degree was useless?)

I just finished reading Nick Hornby’s new book, “Slam.” If I were really trying to be clever, I would probably start this with something “Nick Hornby does it again!” or something cute like that.

I’m not going to do that. That makes it look way too much like I’m doing a “review.” I’m not doing a review. I sit in English classes all day. I’m not up for some exhaustive summary on all kinds of technical points. As much as I love all of that, sometimes it just gets old, and I have such an intense fear of being pretentious that I won’t even try it unless I’m getting a grade for it. So this is probably more of a reaction than a review.

I’m a terrible narcissist the books that I like the most are the books that remind me of myself. So, I like this book. Whether any of my English professors would like or not — who the hell knows. But I enjoy it on a very emotional level. So, even if it were complete rubbish, I would’ve enjoyed it because of the emotional impact it has on me.

Sorry. On with it.

I’m going to say that there one’s exchange that does a great job of summing up the book. However, to give my narcissism continuity, it’s probably just that this was the part I liked the best, so I’m projecting it back over the whole book.

The plot of the book is simple enough — boy meets girl, boy gets girl pregnant, boy has to deal with it. The book is the self-reflection of that boy. Near the end of the book, after all of the events of the plot are happening and it’s narrator is wrapping up a scant few of the loose ends (not that the loose ends are few, the ones that are wrapped up are few), that narrator (Sam) decides that he should rate the way he’s living his life on a scale of 1-10. His answer to himself is quite good. It does a great job of showing how his character has matured from the skater kid who opens the book to the young father who closes it. He answers that it’s much too simple to rate his life from 1-10. His observation is that he must make two separate rankings. If he rates his day to day life — how well he cares for his son, how he performs at college, at work — he can give himself an 8. There’s not much that he does badly on a daily basis. However, if were to step back and ask that question of his entire life, he can only give himself a 3 — he’s a teenage father who never intended to be in that position.

That’s the journey of the book — showing how life can, in the micro, be an 8, but in the macro be a 3. And this is where Nick Hornby does it again. His power isn’t so much in the great, riveting plot that he develops. In this book, it’s not even the character he develops. Sam is no Rob Gordon. Life all of his other books, what really sticks, long after you’ve finished reading the book, is Hornby’s unbelievable to say something that is [em]utterly[/em] true about life.

That’s not trivial. In a world where we are mostly lied to about life, anyone who has the power to say something true about life is valuable beyond measure. Hornby has this power, and it should be paid attention to.

Of course, maybe I just like this all because it reminds of me, and I want people to like me. Maybe I think Nick Hornby tells me something true about my life so that means he must be saying something true about everyone’s life. I’m open to that possibility.

That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t read it.

I updated the “monday’s child…” post from…Monday a bit. It’s the part after the little page break. Not a whole lot, but something. Read it.

(A work in progress. Started as being pissed of about Monday morning, decided to try and see if I could have a little fun with it. No clue what’s to come.)

Monday morning always does this. It sneaks right around when I’m not looking and it gives me a ridiculous punch right to the stomach. That’s the problem with Monday morning. Some days are bold enough to hit you right in the face. I’d rather have those days better. It smarts for a few minutes, and then it’s gone. You move on. I can handle a punch in the face. But I can’t Monday morning. It leaves me doubled over. Embarrassed and sore. Pissed off that Monday morning won’t even do me the courtesy of looking me in the eye. Monday morning doesn’t have that kind of character. It drills the breath out of you, and while you’re in a heap, just trying to catch your breath, it stands there. Daring you to make a move. Daring you to challenge it. That’s Monday morning. I used to think it was some particular problem, like a rainy day or a busy week, but now I’m convinced that it’s just Monday. That’s what it does. That’s how it operates. I’m powerless against it, and I should know better than to try and fight.

Monday morning is supremely capable. It is supremely capable of brining out every insecurity. It is supremely capable of shining a light on every place in my life that is stressful. It is supremely capable of stealing from me all of the things that make me happy and replacing them with all of the things that frustrate me.

I’ll be fine by Monday afternoon, there’s just no dealing with Monday morning. Everybody knows it. Even when I shuffle all 4,362 songs in my iTunes playlist, the first one that plays is titled “Monday.” It’s a song from a film called, “I Heart Huckabees.” It’s one of those movies where you’re pretty sure that nobody will get the movie except for people who spent hours in college reading Sartre and Camus, but then again, it might not even be that substantial.

That’s not the point. The point is that it’s Monday. Again. And it always happens like this. No matter what happened before, and no matter what happened after — it’s Monday, and we just have to deal with it for a slim 24 hours once every week. It shouldn’t be that hard, should it?

So here I am. Dealing with it. I got myself out of bed. Finally. It was one hell of a fight. I wasn’t tired. I had plenty of sleep. I was just trapped in the inertia of being in bed. Why should I invest the energy in breaking the inertia? What was the point? I was just going to up back there at some point anyway? But in the battle of boredom and inertia, I guess boredom won, and I pulled myself out of bed.

I snuck around the house, avoiding human contact. It was no morning for talking. There was nothing to talk about. Sure, there was listening to be done. There were a million sad songs to hear. Those would be fine. Those would do nicely. They all know how it feels. They all live in a perpetual Monday morning. They don’t ask why. They don’t need to know why Monday morning is so bad — they just know that it’s Monday morning, and they know how to sing on a Monday morning. I’m good with that. (Yeah, Mick. I will lean on you, buddy.)

I climbed out the window. It made the most sense. Monday morning isn’t a day for doors. Doors are much too loud. They announce me to the world. Walking out a door means that I’m giving legitimacy to the world outside the door. Doors are the world’s rules of entrance and exit, and if I defer to those rules, then I’m deferring to the rules of the world around me. I don’t defer.

So I climbed out the window, armed with headphones as insulation from a world that I didn’t really feel like engaging anyway.

———–
She was the kind of girl you only find in a Ben Folds song. She always looked like something was wrong — even when it wasn’t. Even when I made her smile, there was something else going on there that I wasn’t sure I would even figure out. Of course, I can only tell you that because of all of the things that hadn’t happened yet. Right now, she’s still just a girl in a Joy Division shirt with too much eyeliner. I wasn’t sure whether to fall in love with her or to laugh at her. She was right at the line between a cliche and a daydream.

You probably think I talked to her. You probably think that I was so enraptured that I removed my headphones and became this utterly engaging person who absolutely won her heart with my incredible sense of humor. You probably think I impressed her with nugget about some obscure hipster band and that we laughed about some joke that only 10 or 15 people in the world understand and that we were immediately and irrevocably bonded by our shared knowledge of minutia and obscurity.

You’d be wrong.

I didn’t do anything at all. I just spend way too much money on coffee, fumbled my money because I was trying to figure her out, hoped that I could convince her to notice me, and left.

I have a sticker on the back of my car. It says “You deserve love.”

I’ve always thought that was True. Not true in that it’s true in some unreachable, ethereal sense, but really true. Everyone deserves love.

But, increasingly, it’s been harder for me to live that out. It seems that, daily, I get worse and worse about making that a mantra of my life. Daily, I act like nobody deserves love — not even me.

Maybe I’ve got it all wrong. Maybe the belief that we deserve love is not the solution, but the problem.

What I’m starting to think is that we don’t deserve love. Not a damned one of us. We’re all idiots. We’ve done nothing to be worthy of love, and all of the things that we do that make it appear that we’re worthy of love? We’ve probably done all of those for all the wrong reasons, and we’ll probably do something more evil than any good we’ve done in the instant.

We’re messed up creatures who do more wrong than we can count. We’re self-absorbed, self-interested, self-aggrandizing bastards. We’re disgusting, profane, short-sighted, stupid. We’re unsympathetic, cold, impatient, rude.

We don’t deserve a damn bit of love. We’ve done nothing to deserve it.

So — if we are love? That changes everything. If God really loves us — then that changes everything. God doesn’t love us because we’re some great, lovable creatures that deserve love. God loves us in spite of what we are.

That’s something totally different. If we wrap our heads around that? Maybe we’ll start to understand who we really are.

Even as I’m writing this, I’m torn about whether it’s something I want to share or not. I feel like it’s one of those things that I’m going to put into this space that, honestly, I’m not sure if I want to become “real.” I want to write about it so that I can figure out my feelings, but sharing it changes it. Sharing it means that someone may force me to do something about it. I’m not sure I want that. However, in the name of honesty, I think I have to submit things like this to review…for better or for worse.

I’m still trying to puzzle out in my head what happened in church this Sunday. Honestly, it wasn’t anything very far out of the ordinary. At the end of what was a compelling sermon, there was a pretty standard fare “invitation” (what a weird word for me to be using now). It was the kind I used to make fun of. It was the “bow your head and close your eyes, raise your hands” variety. I’ve seen them more times than I can count. They’re great. They’re so easy. You can raise your hand and nobody even knows it. You can ease your guilt in secret and nobody is ever any wiser. They’re perfect fodder for a cynical jackass like me to doubt and discredit. That, however, is beside the point.

While the preacher (who I do really like) was praying through a pretty standard prayer, my usually distracted mind managed to stay on topic. Perhaps I was just able to focus, perhaps I was just the guy who was trying to find a way to prove the preacher wrong (because that’s what I do). At any rate, I was giving a thorough investigation to each part of his prayer.

Do I believe that I am a sinner who is utterly incapable of making myself right and finding God?

Of course I do. I’ve tried and failed enough times to know that is undeniably true about myself. I know without a doubt that I can’t do anything right, and that the things I seem to be doing right, I’m doing for all of the wrong reasons. That point isn’t even controversial to me. I believe it so thoroughly that I could write on it for hours. I have no issue admitting that I’ve messed up.

Unfortunately, that’s not the whole prayer. I was with the preacher on that point. The kid who grew up in church, who got a degree in Religion, the guy who work in churches and who made it through an entire semester of seminary knew exactly what was coming next. There was no stopping it.

Do you believe that God sent his only son, Jesus Christ, to die for your sins?

I’ve heard that a million times. It’s what I’ve always been told that this thing we call Christianity hinges on. Without this, there is nothing, right? This is it. This is the one thing.

I felt like I hit a wall. It was a wall that I couldn’t see around and that I wasn’t ready to climb. I had to stop and ask myself — do I? It was one of thew few times that I couldn’t shrug it off when an, “Of course I do.” I had stop. Do I?

Do I believe in Jesus Christ as a person who existed at a specific time in history? Of course I do. I think you would be silly not to. There’s too much evidence to think that it was all the work of some delusional conspiracy. There was a man named Jesus.

Do I think that Jesus had some special connection with God? I don’t doubt it for a second. The character that is recorded by the four gospels is utterly unique. There are things there that are nearly impossible to find anywhere else. There are things there that are crazy.

Do I agree with Jesus about how life is to be lived? Absolutely. There is no better way to live than to love every single person in the world as if that person is the same as our very self. There is no better principle than including those who have been excluded. Meeting violence with violence has never, even been then answer. We are not defined by the things we own.

So what’s the hang up?

What’s my problem?

Do I believe that Jesus died for my sins? That’s absolutely it. That’s the wall.

I want to make it clear that I’m not “that guy.” I’m not going to reduce this to theological quibbling and semantics. This is not about whether or not I believe in substitutionary atonement or some other obscure theory that doesn’t make much sense. I wish it were that easy. Rational assent to specific points isn’t a problem. I’m a smart guy. I can make sense of arguments and counter-arguments and the like. That’s not it at all. This doesn’t have anything to do with any of those things. I see the issue unpacking itself in a very, very different way.

This is where it gets muddy.

Behind my computer table there is a mess of wires and cables for every electronic gadget I own. It’s ridiculous. It’s tangled and it’s dusty, and if you want to find one cable, you have to tackle the whole mess and sort through every bit of it. Sometimes, you have to untangle three other cables just to find the one cable you need.

I hope the metaphor works.

What I’m discovering is that figuring out this one issue is really figuring out a whole set of issue, and they more I toss around the question in my brain, I come to a fork in the road.

You see, there are different ways to ask the question.

Do I believe that Jesus Christ “died for sins of the world?” (I don’t trust those words, but I’ll keep using them.) Do I believe that, because all people are basically corrupt and broken the historical figure of Jesus submitted himself to a public execution, aware of the grander implications of this execution? Yes. Very much. I do not doubt that Jesus died because of the sin condition that exists in the very core of each and every human being and that Jesus death makes it capable for us to begin (yes, I use this qualifier on purpose) to rectify that condition. To give it a nice (though) incomplete label, I do believe in the communal aspect of Jesus’ death (and subsequent resurrection).

That’s all fine. I can still say all of that without being very emotionally invested, or without revealing any tough truths about myself. However, narrowing the focus of the question finds such a tough tangle of knots that I don’t have a clue where to go. Or, if I do have a clue where I am going, I will surprise myself when I get there.

In American churches, the focus is utterly on the individual. That leads to the question — Do I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins. What I believe about everyone else in the world is great — but what about me? On an individual level? A great illustration of this is the way that pastors often take the collective found in John 3:16 and refine it into a singular. They ask me to believe that God so loved me that he sent his one and only son, so that if I will believe in him, I will not ever die. And the question becomes whether or not I actually believe that. Do I really believe that God loves me so much that he enacted the life and death of Jesus because of that intense love he has for me?

Maybe that question needs less qualification. Maybe I should simply ask, “Do I believe that God really loves me?” That question is a punch to the stomach. However — before I try to figure out why it is such a blow, there is another knot to untangle.

As much as that question has an emotional impact, there is another question behind it. Yes — there is a question about the question. In fact, I must question whether it is even appropriate to ask the question. (I don’t know? Third base.)

Our American sensibilities are rooted in the individual. We often (if not always) define ourselves in terms of the individual. Our lifestyle is increasingly pushing us toward the individual. Much of what we are is centered in our concept of the self, and that concept — the self — is revered as the most important concept. We spend more time alone in our cars, walled behind headphones. Our advertising appeals to notions of the self and the individual. We self-actualize and self-discover. The concept of the individual is utmost. When I start asking the question about whether I believe that I — me — my own personal self is loved (and not just loved, REALLY loved) by God, I wonder about that baggage. I wonder if I’m merely a product of my context. Perhaps the question is not really an appropriate question, and I remain hung up on an inappropriate question, I’m missing the point, and I’m investing all of this energy into finding the answer to a question that was wrong to begin with.

(Wow. There’s no way ANYBODY is reading this anymore.)

I will justify the asking of the question by saying this — how I feel about myself often translates into how I feel about other people. Much of the time, what I think about the individual is transferred into what I think about the collective, or even about other individuals. I think Jesus himself even acknowledges that when he relates our love for other people to our love for ourselves. There is a way that the two are connected.

So, perhaps in asking the question of whether God really loves me, I am, in turn, asking the question of whether God really loves everyone else in the world. And there may be a way in which the way I receive love directly impacts the way I am able to give love.

That’s a big deal. That’s a really big deal. That means I have to face the answer to a question that I would rather avoid.

Do I really believe that God really loves me?

No. Not really.

I don’t know where it happened, but at some point, I came to believe that God may really love other people, but I convinced myself that God doesn’t really love me. I don’t know why. I don’t know if it’s some sort of self-loathing that I’ve projected on to God, or what — I just know, than when I really look that question in the face, that, even though I absolutely hate admitting it, I have to admit that I really do not believe that God loves me.

I think I used to. I think that there was a time in my life when I did believe that, and I didn’t have any trouble believing that. That makes the whole thing more complicated. I don’t think it means that I was “better” then — I’m pretty sure that I was just naive. However, treading old ground does me no good. Going back is simply not an option. I must find ways to move forward.

I’m sure that if I admitted this to the people at church, I know how they would answer. They would answer that I must have never really “accepted Christ.” I never really understood what it meant to follow Christ, and that if I would join with them in that prayer, then we could erase all of that.

That sounds so great. I wish so deeply that a prayer could change my heart and that all of these things that are an issue could fade away.

However, I know me too well. I remember too many earnest prayers prayed too many times that didn’t change a damn thing. I know all too well that “what was so easy in the evening by the morning’s such a drag.” Nothing changes overnight. Especially not an issue like this. This is one of those that goes deep. Overcoming it isn’t something that can be done in an instant. It’s something that is done incredibly slowly, by sheer force of will, by battling to become something different. By being intense about changing what is true. I have no idea why I have marked myself like this — but I have. There’s no doubt that I have. (And I very much think that extends over into how I interact with other people too.)

Changing yourself is hard. The old person wins the fight so easily. The old person is so familiar. It is so comfortable. It is so much easier. Though it is killing you, it’s easier to give in than to find the will to fight.

I’m thinking of so many cliches right now — the one about how the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step — silly stuff like that — but I know that it’s true. I’ve changed myself. There are pictures to prove it. I know it’s possible, and I know how unbelievably hard it is, and that it takes time, time that often seems fruitless, but I’ve got one success story already.

I don’t know that I’m even ready to begin this transformation. I don’t even know that I can. I don’t know if this is even anything more than “words, words, words.”

I can’t think of anything else that I need to say at the moment. That’s probably quite enough anyway.

(The more I think about all of this, the more I find that my problem isn’t with what I thought it was at all. But I’ll leave this as it is anyway.)

Perhaps what I getting ready to write is completely pedantic and shows that I’m missing the point. However, I don’t think it is. It may seem like that at first, but I think that’s it’s more than just a question of a complicated theory that nobody has made sense of anyway. So, stick with me.

I have rediscovered a problem I have with a thing called Substitutionary Atonement. You can read that Wikipedia link, or trust me that the short definition is that Jesus came and died “for our sins” — that is, Jesus died in our place, and his death effectively and forever removed all of our sins.

For the vast majority of people — they don’t know anything else, and it’s hard for them to imagine that the event that was Jesus death operates in any other way or has any other meaning. I understand that. However, I’m going to take issue on a few different grounds.

First, I think that we have taken a metaphor, and we have misunderstood the metaphor to the point where we decide that the metaphor is what the thing really is. Understanding the events of Jesus’ death as a necessary sacrifice to atone for sins is an apt metaphor. The Biblical writers loved it. They understood it well, and their readers understood it well, so it is frequently employed to help all get their minds around an event that is difficult to describe. I do not think that substitutionary atonement is the thing itself — rather, it is a way of describing the thing. However, that is the part of the discussion that is mostly pedantic and doesn’t have any real impact on anyone’s life.

The second issue is this — I think that substitutionary atonement creates an inappropriate view of what life really is. As far as describing this goes, this is the hard part. However, instead of describing what life is not, I think I’ll describe what I think life is, and then perhaps I’ll have some room to contrast that with the kind of expectations for life that I think this overuse of substitutionary atonement creates.

Life is not a series of grand events. The grand events happen, and they stick in our memories, and they are important. They impact us emotionally, and we feel large things at those moments (whether good or bad). However, the grand moments aren’t the whole of life. Life is mostly the in-betweens. It is mostly waiting, living a slow day-to-day. If we were to create a timeline of our lives, life would not be the dots, it would be the spaces between the dots.

That’s not sad, that’s not tragic, that is simply life. And if life is like that, it impacts our faith severely. Faith, like life, is not something that is lived in the big events, it is something that is lived in the in-betweens. Huge, emotional moments resonate, and they stick in our memories. However, they are not our life and the are not our faith. Our faith is found in the times when those emotions have faded, and we’re living our simple day-to-day.

We, have, however, been sold something different. What we are led to believe is that life is the big events. It is the hallmark of the advertising that we consume. The advertising’s goal is this: we are led to believe that we are incomplete, and if we find this ONE thing, we can be complete. (And we are told that many, many times a day — no wonder depression statistics look like they do.) However — that’s a falsehood. There is no one thing. There is no magic formula. Life is this slow grind. It has many more moments of mundane existence that it has of startling clarity.

What does this have to do with anything?

I think that we have transformed Jesus, by way of substitutionary atonement, into another product that has been marketed.

That is our presentation of the gospel — it is a commercial. You are incomplete, and if you just will do this one thing, then you will be complete.

It doesn’t work like that. It never has, and if we’re selling people on that, then I believe we’re selling them on something that is not true. And while they may initially be buoyed by a significant emotional response, the clarity of that response will fade. We may attempt to constantly manipulate emotions so that initial experience never loses its “charge.” However, like a battery, the cells are eventually emptied, and emotional manipulation is not significant for sustaining this. There must be something else.

Instead of selling faith as a solution — perhaps we ought to be selling it as a story and a problem. Perhaps instead of asking people to buy a new product, we ought to be inviting them to share with us in a story and to join with us in the great problem that faith creates. Perhaps we ought to be asking them to join with us in the story of God’s desire to recreate his world (and how Jesus fits into that) and invite them to help us investigate just how it is that living in a world that needs to be recreated becomes an utter problem for us.

I think that changes everything. If we’re selling faith/Christianity/Jesus/whatever you want to call it as a solution, I think that we’re missing the point. More than that, I think that people are going to be utterly disappointed. Perhaps, for some folks, it is a solution. Perhaps they have some great moment and, from then on, their life is never the same. However, for most folks, I would guess that it is not.

In my own experience, it has been no grand solution. It has made life messier. More difficult. Decisions are more complicated. Everything is more nuanced. Most of life becomes an upstream swim. It’s constantly trading the easy way for a harder way. Most of the time it has nothing to do with grand epiphanies and a complete sense of grand truth. More often, it feels like running through mud, or staring into utter blackness. Perhaps that’s because I’ve gotten it all wrong, or perhaps that’s what it really is.

Rather than the answer to a trumped up emotional sales pitch, perhaps it is something deeper. Perhaps faith is more than just being buffeted from emotional wave to emotional wave. Rather, it may just be something that transcends all of our emotions. It may be something that comes from such a deep place that we do not need emotions to confirm it, and though it continually gets messier and messier, we have never been more sure that it is utterly true.

Otherwise — it’s cheap. Emotions are easily manipulated and easily won. When faith becomes something else — then it has actually been won.

That’s not an easy sell. (”It’s a hard sell, the ringing bell…”) But perhaps it’s something more like the truth.

I think I can feel it.

I think it’s coming back.

I think that I’m regaining the ability to be weird.

Something, for a long time, drained that part of me.

It takes a lot of energy to be weird. It’s fighting upstream.

And I do struggle with it. Sometimes I wonder if maybe I’m the one that’s wrong. After all, numbers are on side of “normal” — isn’t that all of the validation that “normal” needs.

However — I know too much. I’ve read too many history books. I’ve listened to too many dead guys. I’ve opened my heart too widely to people who think a little bit differently. Normal is a lie.

The way to the kind of life that I’m supposed to be leading doesn’t come through blending in to a normal crowd and accepting someone else’s version of what life should be. That’s the kind of life that leads to nothing. Ever. It leads to the emptiness, debt, and destruction that have come to be an utter part of our world.

The only people in the world who have done things worth remembering — all of those dead guys — they were constantly fighting upstream — Jesus, Gandhi, Merton, Dr. King (to quickly rattle off some cliches). They’re all fighting upstream. They all become aware that “normal” is a problem, and they were all utterly willing to be as weird as they needed to be in order to live the life they knew was right.

The destruction of the American dream is well documented. It doesn’t exist. It’s been hollowed out and destroyed. It’s this thinly painted facade that will utterly crumble at the smallest touch.

It’s all around us. Americans consistently spend more than they make. Everything we eat is killing us. The way we consume is raping and destroying our planet at a rate that is utterly unbelievable.

We cannot live the dream that has been sold to us, because we have bought (over and over and over again) a lie — an utter lie.

We absolutely must learn to live differently. We must learn to deny ourselves of things that we desperately want. We must learn to re-imagine ourselves and our role in the world. We must re-imagine the way we eat, the way we work. We must re-imagine who we are and we relate to the world in which we live.

in fact, as I think, I come to the conclusion that we don’t have the option of being normal. We must be weird. We must fight upstream. We must do something different than everyone else in our culture. We must not participate in the house of cards that we have built.

Being weird isn’t really being weird at all. No, what I’m labeling weird? It’s merely a rediscovery of what we are really supposed to be. It’s difficult. It’s difficult to find sustain a new paradigm of ourselves in the world. It’s nearly impossible to battle, every day, the voices that tell us that we are meant to be “normal”. It is difficult to battle the voice that tell us our consumption and our excess are what we are entitled to.

We have no choice. There is no option. Something MUST change. We have to be weird people who live close to where they work and shop. We must choose to eat boring, locally produced food instead of well advertised and well packaged good. We must consciously and consistently deny ourselves the things we want in favor of the things we know we need.

That seems to lie at the heart of it all. We must find ways to move from a culture of indulgence to a culture of self-denial. We have no choice.

Swimming upstream is difficult alone. It’s much easier when we do it together.

That may be at the heart of this all. We cannot exist but in community with each other. If we exist in that way, and if we are all committed to living in a new way (which is really a very old way), it becomes much easier. It becomes much easier to support each other, to validate each other, to help each other when we inevitably second guess all of the hard commitments we find necessary.

For this is a war of attrition. We will never lose because someone forces us to lose. We will lose because swimming upstream for so long just became too much to handle — and that would be the saddest loss of all.

Lately, I’ve encountered a theme over and over again.

That theme is this: often, the best thing for me (and I think this applies much more broadly than just to me) is for me to give up something that I want or enjoy very much.

I’ve tried it before, and rarely do I find a negative result. I may catch hell for it from people who don’t understand — but if we base our decisions on whether or not our friends will give us crap, we’ll never get much of anywhere.

I’ve been thinking about that theme for the past several days, and wondering what things in my life I can give up.

So, today, I’ve been putting my own feet to the fire.

Can I give up television?

At first I thought it would be incredibly easy. After all, it’s just television.

Then I remembered that it’s September. It’s football season.

I can’t get very far past that. It’s football season. Football is one of the things I enjoy most in the world. I love watching it. I love thinking about it. I love talking about it. Can I really give up football? Should I really give up football?

So, again, I put my feet to the fire. And, as any good sophist would do, I made the strongest possible argument to myself as to why I should be willing to give up football.

I’m not sure I like what I told myself.

What I started to realize is that sports are a grand distraction. (I may have been down this road before, I’m just too lazy to search my archive and check.) I (and I bet I’m not alone) have a terrible problem with assigning meaning to sports. I derive my self-image for sports. I think by knowing about sports and participating in dialogue about sports that I’m participating in something that matters. I have taken what should be a distraction and made it the focus. I invest most of my energy in something that does matter instead of having energy to invest in things that matter. The subject of my conversations has more to do with what men on a field are doing in a game than things that matter.

Sports is an easy distraction. We can form strong opinions and fierce allegiances. We can argue about those things as if those are the things that define us. We can create artificial divisions based on these arbitrary divisions (which, in America, is rarely that big of a deal). However — the fact remains. Sports don’t matter. Sports are a distraction. Sports are games that are meant to occupy free time and entertain children. However, we (and this goes even much further than America, as any international football fan can tell you) have institutionalized games. We’ve incorporated them. Sports teams have become powerful brands whose goal is to demand our attention and our money.

(There is, perhaps, a distinct way that our sports fascination and our celebrity fascination are part of the same animal.)

So — could it be that something I love so much as football is a problem? Could it be that I would be better off, not only giving up television, but also giving up sports? By giving up a distraction that is often my focus, could I have a good bit of my energy freed up to pursue things that matter?

I think so.

To be completely practical about it — that makes me weird as hell. What kind of person willingly gives up football? Some kind of freak who sits in his room and reads books and can’t have a conversation with anyone normal? Some snob who is unapproachable because he only wants to talk about obscure politics? I certainly hope not. Doing something as simple as giving up watching TV would put me in a vast minority. It would preclude me from having a great number of conversations that I would genuinely like to have. It would mean that I would have to give up things that I genuinely like and things that genuinely entertain me.

I think that may be what is best for people. I don’t want to sound like some unreasonable medieval ascetic who wishes for people to deprive themselves of everything that gives them enjoyment. That’s unreasonable. However, I think there has to be this process in life where, if we wish to grow, we must give things up — even if we really enjoy those things.

Perhaps it’s a matter of perspective. Some things are so worth having that they’re worth giving something up for. Perhaps this is one of things. Being the person I want to be, after all, should be more important to me than football. (Even Kentucky football.)

Is that true? Or am I crazy?

I almost wrecked on the way home.

Why?

Because I saw a campaign sign for our governor’s race.

What’s the issue?

Take a look for yourself.

That’s right. In a state with a stagnant economy, terrible education, and a well documented poverty problem, THIS is the central campaign issue.

Sadly, there’s not even someone seeking to move the dialogue elsewhere.

Wow.

I’d like to add something to what I posted about health care yesterday.

I thought of it today, and I thought it would clarify what I mean in the whole discussion.

I believe that health care is one of those things that, if we can do it, then we ought to do it. I think that’s at the heart of all of this. I think it’s pretty care that health care for every individual is a good thing. Additionally, I am sure that we do have the ability to provide health care for every individual. Thus, I believe that we ought to provide health care for every individual, and that we must be willing to give up what we have in order to be a part of that.

Lately I’ve been examining a lot of things in my life — fundamental things that I have said and written. I’ve been starting to wonder if I actually believe these things, and if I believe these things, what do they look like?

One of these things that I’ve been thinking about is the desire for justice. What does it mean to want justice? What does justice look like? I do not doubt for a second that I should place a priority on justice. It litters the consciousness of the people who wrote the Bible, and there is no doubt that it is deeply burned in our brains. What does it mean that all people, everywhere, should get what they deserve?

My mind turned to the battle that’s been going on American politics the last few days, particularly between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giulliani. Particularly, they have been arguing about the principle of “universal health care” provided by the government. Clinton is outlining a plan for that, Giulliani disagrees that it is necessary.

So — I began to think — what is justice in regard to health care?

I came to my answer pretty quickly. Justice is that every person has access to health care. Period. The mechanism that provides that health care is irrelevant (however, I don’t see anything in this country besides the government capable of providing it), but everyone should have access to health care. That is justice.

Justice is a difficult word. It doesn’t just mean that we get what we deserve. If we believe anything the Bible says about us — we know that we deserve nothing. Even the richest and most powerful among us deserve absolutely nothing. Justice has to be something richer. A better way to think of justice would be that each person gets an equal chance at life. Each person, regardless of ANYTHING, gets to have the same shot at living, at being healthy, of being well employed. If that is our concept of justice, then I think we have be in favor of some sort of universal health care.

In my head there is a talk radio host who rebuts all of my points, and he gets all red-faced and he screams at me, “But who is going to pay for it!?!?!”

I answer him, “We are.” We are all going to pay for it, and we should do so gladly.

If we believe anything that Jesus says, our money was never ours to begin with. This arbitrary system of currency in which we trade matters not. Having it is a nice thing, but it is not everything. If our money is more important to us than ensuring that justice is wrought in the world, then we have a serious, serious problem. Our paycheck is never more important than our fellow man. If we’re arguing against universal health care simply because of the impact on our paycheck, then we have a serious, serious problem. Whether they have done anything to earn it or not, whether the government can be responsible or not — those are not excuses. We must be doing everything possible to ensure that every person gets a fair chance at life — even if it means giving up our own comfort.

As upset as that makes the man in my head, I like to smile a little bit and make him even more upset. I like to tell him this, “Illegal immigrants should also be cared for.” I don’t even soften the blow by calling them “undocumented aliens.” Rather, I just tell him that, “You should want to give up your money so that people who are in this country against its own laws receive health care.” (If you’re wondering? He apoplectic at this point.)

See, Jesus didn’t exactly care about borders. National identity and an arbitrarily created country weren’t really things that he cared about. Jesus was about caring for people regardless of national identity and citizenship status. In fact, it goes back further than Jesus. The law of Moses is rife with passages on how to treat aliens — and it clear that they are treated no differently than everyone else. Justice is wide enough for all people.

So bring on universal health care. Tax the hell out of my tiny paycheck. It’s not about me, and it’s not about my money. It’s about insisting that justice is done in the world, whatever it may cost us.

If you’re truly and deeply a Christian, don’t you HAVE to be willing to go there?

They told me today that Mother Theresa wasn’t really sure that she ever believed at all.

That’s what they say. They she couldn’t hear the voice of God. They say her life was filled with some sort of great empty void.

So they think that Mother Theresa never believed at all. They think that she must have been a tragedy beyond words, this little lady.

They might be right. Maybe we should all be shaken. Maybe we should all be rattled to the core by this little lady who gave her whole live to destitute poverty and ended up so absorbed in silence that she could not hear the voice of God. Maybe we should think that we stand no chance. If the latter stages of her life were spent in a state of silence and void, what hope do we ever have? Should we despair completely? Should we abandon this whole project of believing? Should we be filled with pity? Lament a life spent wasted?

What do we do? Surely it is troubling. Do we relegate her to eternal torment because of symptoms that reveal a deeper disease of unbelief? Is that it? Has a sure saint, before our eyes, been transformed into a tragic figure? A pitiable clown whose life was wrecked by the inertia of things she did not really believe? Is that what we’re faced with?

Or have we gotten it all wrong? Have we missed the point? Do we not understand what the silence that Mother Theresa encountered really means? Could pity be a misplaced sentiment? Could our confusion be unfounded? Could despair be a naive sentiment?

When we hear the news of the profound silence that Mother Theresa encounters, should we instead break out in an uncontrollable smile? Even as she struggles with a silence whose meaning she has yet to learn, should we rejoice that she’s found such a void?

Could it be true that, rather than being found in a peculiar place of unbelief, that Mother Theresa had found herself in a unique state of belief that we could only hope to entertain? Could it be that Mother Theresa had encountered God in a way that few could start to comprehend?

Could she have entered the place that transcends belief? Could she have come to a place where her interactions with God became something that, “surpass all understanding?” Could she have come to a place where God was no set of cognitive proposition, no bracket of emotional responses? Could she be experience God on an irrational, incomprehensible level?

There is a long tradition that God is encountered most intensely in the silence, in the nothingness. Had she encountered there? Had she listened, and found God not in the whirlwind, but in the silence after? Had she searched and found God not in fickle endorphins moving through cells to produce fickle euphoria, but in a silence that was so indescribable it was troubling? Had she thought, and found God not in the fading electrical impulses that flicker across synapses, but in a place that mere words cannot possibly describe?

I cannot say. I can only listen.

(This parenthetical introduction has nothing to do with what I actually want to write. I’m sorry. Really, what I’m doing is, first of all, copying something that Dave Eggers would do. Sorry, Dave. Second, I’m entirely too self-aware, so instead of writing what I want to write, I’m writing this aside to tell you why I’m writing what I’m writing. That become, in itself, a task of writing. If you read anything that I write, you know that I haven’t written with any consistency for a while, so getting back into the habit of writing has been a little difficult. Everything feels a little rusty. To use a very silly metaphor, I’m the Tin Man and I need my oil can. So I’m trying. I’m trying to loosen all the stiff joints back up and rejoin some sort of already-happening creative process, but it is difficult. Creativity has been difficult, so I’ve mostly stuck to imitation. I’ve especially been imitating Bob Dylan, and his rambling “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie”. Bob’s poetry is better than my inane ramblings, so should read that so you can see what’s been in my crazy head lately. So, I say all of that to say this: I think the joints are getting loose again, I want to start doing some things with a different sort of creativity, so I’ll be trying — and I probably won’t do very well. I do hope that there are some folks out there who are still reading this, and that those folks will care enough to join in a renewed creative process with me. So, please do. Join in. Help me help me.)

You can find the soul of a company not in what it says, but in what it does.

The truth of a company’s intention are not found in any cleverly worded press-release or any sanitized press release. The heart of a company cannot be distilled into well-worded advertising or summed up in a glib slogan.

No, the real soul of a company is to be found in the way that company does business every day. The real heart of a company lies in how it treats those who consume its product and the means by which that company will seek its ends.

What is this monster called money that we have created? What is this abstraction that rules every one of our waking seconds? Is the currency the evil, or are those bills and those account balances merely the objectification of an evil hidden deeply within the human soul?

I know what it is like to be the cog in a machine. I know what it is like to become the predator of the money of those weaker than me. I know the shame of preying on the weak. I know the sly ways in which the truth can be conveniently altered or “innocently” forgotten. I know what it means to stare into the face of a machine that will eat you alive and spit you out if you do not play your part.

I have seen the hard choices that money forces people to make. I have seen the way it gets under our skin. I have seen all of the ways we turn to it for comfort. I have seen the ways we make it our solace. I have witnessed as we look to it for our validation. I have seen the ways in which we wear our bank accounts on our sleeves — just praying that someone will take notice. It’s all the ways we say, “Look at me. Look at what I have. Look at what I made. Look at what I can afford. Look at what makes me better than him. Look! Look! This makes me a man. This makes me good enough and this makes me strong enough and this makes me hard enough.” It’s all of the ways we preen and strut. It makes us animals. We’re all locking horns because we know the women are watching. We all have our tail-feathers on display because we never know who might be near. We’re all screaming from the tops of tress in hopes that someone who matters may here us. And on my way up, I’m planting my foot in your face, and using you for leverage — because that’s all you are. You are good to me insofar as I can gain from you. After that you are disposable.

And I bet those are all just symptoms. I bet it’s all just part of some disease. We’ve always had it. Sometimes we’re aware of it. Sometimes, in startling moments of clarity we become our doctors, almost capable of self-diagnosis.

But we stand no chance.

We are bowled over by the inertia of the disease. We are powerless to stop it. Our roots are tangled so deeply now that removing them from this ground would be more painful than we could possibly imagine. We do not even know where to stop digging, and the more shovel back the dirt, the more tangled the whole affair becomes. We never stood a chance. We have been marked for death before we even had any idea we were alive. Stood up against a wall, blindfolded and dumb, struggling against the ropes that bind us. By the time we have freed ourselves enough to lift a blindfold from any eye we may have time to see a flash from a muzzle before our untimely termination.

So we flail. We flail about, hoping to grab something that sticks. Praying that we grab something that lasts, but each thing we latch on to eventually breaks free. So we careen, appendages whipping wildly about us, hoping that we can find the next solid thing, and we cling even more tightly to the next thing, because we have no idea how long that one will last. And if we’re lucky enough to find a solid enough spot to stand, we become like children at “King of the Hill,” or, worse yet, like surly animals defending a bit of territory — pissing in corners and thumping our chests. “This hill is mine. This ground is mine. This thing to which I cling is mine and mine alone and you will not share in what I have found because I need this thing. I need this thing to prove something to someone. I need this thing to show you that I belong. I need this hill to show that I am important. I need this hill to show you I am good enough.”

And it’s all bullshit. It is.

(This is poorly written. I make no apologies. I just needed to say a few things before they got lost in the muck of my brain.)

We’ve all seen the stock footage on the news. Waddling down the street in some unnamed large city, Fat America is here. The statistics are all ridiculous. Americans are fat. There’s not a bit of doubt about that. Being in Kentucky, I live in one of the fattest states in America.

Why? Why are we so fat?

Most people blame the obese. It must be their fault. It must be their poor choices. It must be their lack of discipline. It must be their ignorance. They must be willfully fat.

I disagree. Something else is going on. The food system in America is very, very broken.

The bottom line is this: food is profitable. Food is very profitable. And we all know what is true — Big Food (like any of the Big businesses) exists for the sake of profit. Their goal is not our health. Their goal is their profit.

That all leads to a sick chain of events. You see — Big Food will aggressively sell two things — what people like and what is cheap. High volume + high margins = high profit.

Americans, it seems, have a strong response to two particular types of food — sugar and fat. It’s undeniable. Think of all your favorite foods. List all of your indulgences. They’re all either sugar, fat, or some combination of the two.

Big Food is well aware of this. Big Food knows the things you respond to. Big Food is well aware what we crave. Big Food knows exactly what I will shove into my face at an alarming rate.

However, big food, for many years, has had a problem. It’s a problem humans have known about for years. Sugar and fat are expensive. It’s labor intensive and expensive to process sugar from cane. Fat is in the same boat. Most of the fat we consume is derived from animal products. Animals are expensive and labor intensive to keep and process.

From a profit standpoint — that is a disaster. The things that people want the most are the hardest to obtain.

So, if you’re big food — what do you do? You find a way to increase the profit margins on the things that people want the most. You figure out a way to make it cheaper and easier to produce sugar and fat.

These things have invaded our diets. High Fructose Corn Syrup. Hydrogenated Oils. Trans Fats. They’re all a product of Big Food’s desire to make sugar and fat available more cheaply and readily.

Our bodies were not designed to have sugars and fats in such high quantities. There is a reason that those things are so hard to obtain. Our bodies simply were not designed to have easy access to large quantities of fat and sugar. Big Food, however, does not care. Big Food will never choose ethics over profits.

That will doom us to our fatness. As long as the powerful forces with aggressive marketing continue to push the things that will make us fat, we stand no chance. To eat well will require us to be incredibly well-informed, incredibly self-disciplined, and it will require a large amount of money. Most Americans are not willing to those things.

So it’s tough. The battle against Big Food for Good Food is an uphill battle. It requires diligence and patience, and it’s never, ever easy.

But, as a reformed fatty — it’s worth it.