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“Because sometimes you need a biologist,

and sometimes you need a poet.

Sometimes you need a scientist,

and sometimes you need a song.”

“You, me, love, quarks, sex, chocolate, the speed of light— it’s all miraculous, and it always has been.”

“It’s one thing to stand there in a lab coat with a clipboard, recording data about lips. It’s another thing to be kissed.”

 

 

 

Did any of that get your attention?

 

I've just spent the morning reading a short book I downloaded from the Amazon Kindle bookstore: “What we talk about when we talk about God” by Rob Bell. You can do that sort of thing when you're retired; one of the reasons I enjoy my life out of the workforce.

 

I'm not usually intererested in books on this subject as they are mostly a big yawn. Neither do I often find myself glued to a book, unwilling to put it down (well, actually I was using an ipad, but you know what I mean). Rob Bell has a special gift. He can articulate spiritual stuff like no one else I remember. I kept saying things to myself like: “yep” and “ah hah” as he painted a picture using common life experiences of a God we might be aware of deep inside ourselves, but whom is rarely spoken of.

 

This is not your standard apologetic book arguing for the existence of God. No way. Not even close. For a start it's not even the slightest bit dogmatic (ok, maybe it's there but I didn't see it).

 

Bell doesn't pretend that he has all the answers. He begins from a place of doubt and acknowledges the power of science, the paradox of human beings, and the incongruity of the miraculous, to present a God I can accept. More than that, he presents a God I recognise.

 

He doesn't avoid or undermine science. He celebrates it, along with the wonder and uncertainty of existence. To paraphrase him, science is a powerful tool, but is no arbiter of reality. He points out that we are all 'people of faith', whether we are religious believers, atheists, believers in the supremacy of science, or in the supernatural. He does not attack atheists. He reminds them, gently, of what they have in common with 'believers':

 

“Sometimes people who believe in God are referred to as “people of faith.” Which isn’t the whole truth, because everybody has faith. To believe in God requires faith. To experience this world and its endless surprise and mystery and depth and then emphatically declare that is has no common source, it is not headed somewhere, and it ultimately has no meaning— that takes faith as well.”

Bell is also no usual defender of the status quo, and I kind of like that. I feel a deep resonance between my faith and his ideas:

 

“you can be very religious and invoke the name of God and be able to quote lots of verses and be well versed in complicated theological systems and yet not be a person who sees . It’s one thing to sing about God and recite quotes about God and invoke God’s name; it’s another be aware of the presence in every taste, touch, sound, and embrace.”

How good is that?

 

I have long been a bit of a rebel, uncomfortable with the pietism of a few church people. It's nice to come across a writer who expresses that better than I can.

 

“So when we talk about God, we’re talking about our brushes with spirit, our awareness of the reverence humming within us, our sense of the nearness and the farness, that which we know and that which is unknown, that which we can talk about and that which eludes the grasp of our words, that which is crystal- clear and that which is more mysterious than ever. And sometimes language helps, and sometimes language fails.”

Absolutely! He's talking about the God I have faith in. How come I never thought to say that myself?

Bell goes on to explain the essence of the Christian Gospel as clearly as anyone, and more so than most:

 

“. . as advanced and intelligent and educated as we are, there are some things about the human condition that have not changed in thousands of years. It’s very important that we are honest about this glaring reality. We have progressed so incredibly far, invented so many things, found an endless array of new ways to process and share and communicate information, and yet the human heart has remained significantly unchanged, in that it still possesses the tremendous capacity to produce extraordinary ignorance, evil, and destruction. We need help.”

“. . the counterintuitive power of gospel: When you come to the end of yourself, you are at that exact moment in the kind of place where you can fully experience the God who is for you.”

So, take it or leave it I guess. Believe that you are in control or understand intuitively, as I do, that you are not. Bell would argue that as long as people believe they are in control, God is inaccessible to them. Pretty harsh stuff, no? Probably not what many want to hear. I must confess I have been a slow learner on this issue, having learned what little I have learned after bitter experience.

 

I loved this:

“We’re all, in one way or another, addicts, aren’t we? Some are addicted to the praise of others, some to working all the time, some to winning, others to worrying, some to perfection, some to being right, strong, beautiful, thin . . . perhaps you are enslaved to your own self- sufficiency, or drugs or alcohol or sex or money or food. “

Sort of puts an interesting spin on things, no? Do you think of yourself as an addict? Or do you (unlike me) have it all under control?

 

And this:

“And so we come to the table exactly as we are, some days on top of the world, other days barely getting by. Some days we feel like a number, like a machine, like a mere cog in a machine, severed and separated from the depth of things, this day feeling like all the others. Other days we come feeling tuned in to the song, fully alive, hyperaware of the God who is all in all. The point of the experience isn’t to create special space where God is, over and against the rest of life where God isn’t. The power is in the striking ability of this experience to open our eyes all over again (and again and again) to the holiness and sacred nature of all of life, from family to friends to neighbors to money and breath and sex and work and play and food and wine.”

This is my life! This is how my life seems to me. I think Bell is on to a sublime truth here (and in so many other places in this book). The good and the bad; the sacred and the mundane; the wrong choices; the repeated disappointments with myself and the insight that tells me that nonetheless I continue to matter and that my life is not futile. This is how God is real to me. Maybe my life is not the same as yours. So be it.

 

I recommend this book warmly to you, whether or not you are call yourself a 'believer'. I found his writing honest, generous, challenging, humble and insightful. I hope you too will find it full of 'ah hah' moments.

It would possibly not be a surprise to learn that not everyone is happy about his work.

 

A quick glance through the comments on the Kindle page shows that Rob Bell is not orthodox enough for some and far too 'loose' and liberal for others. For this particular conservative Christian though, who is also a bit of a rebel, and a bit of a mystic, I was reminded that I am not alone in the way I experience God.

 

I thank him for that.

__________________________

 

 

“The peace we are offered is not a peace that is free from tragedy, illness, bankruptcy, divorce, depression, or heartache. It is peace rooted in the trust that the life Jesus gives us is deeper, wider, stronger, and more enduring than whatever our current circumstances are, because all we see is not all there is and the last word about us and our struggle has not yet been spoken. There is great mystery in these realities, the one in which we are strong when we are weak, the one in which we come to the end of ourselves, only to discover that God has been there the whole time, the God who is for us.”

 

 

 

 

 

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(With apologies to the Beatles . . Or John Lennon . . Or whoever)

This post may puzzle you, or simply confirm your assessment of my brain function. It certainly changes course with a lurch part way through. Despite that there is a unifying theme. I hope it’s clear by the time you get to the end.

It all started last Wednesday evening. A group of us guys gets together on a weekly basis to share fellowship. The one essential for the get together is red wine. Nibbles usually accompany the wine, as does sharing and friendship of the blokey kind. We talk about work, sport, politics, family troubles, wives and girl friends. Occasionally we remember we are a Christian group and we discuss stuff about faith.

Last Wednesday these questions were posed: “What is the purpose of your life?” “What gives it meaning?” Well, the usual inarticulate silence finally broke with suggestions, helped no doubt by the wine. I can’t remember them all. Family, faith, and work each made an appearance. One however sat itself inside my head and took up residence. Someone said that love and relationships gave life its meaning. Maybe not news to you, and maybe not to me either, but a powerful nudge nonetheless. I remember feeling that this was talking directly to me, and mumbling that I didn’t think I was all that good at either love or relationships. I’ve thought about those two things, love and relationships, a lot since. It’s a bit like those marketing memes or those stupid songs that keep replaying in your mind for hours, sometimes days.

Now that I’ve considered it, it occurs to me that that is exactly what matters most to me these days: Love and relationships. I am pleased to write that nothing else comes anywhere close to these two. Sue, the children and grandchildren have become my life almost without my realising it. My friends also score on this scale. They are important to me. I have time for people now more than ever because, . . . I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe because life has led me to here. After a while, even the thickest person works out what is important and what is of no importance. I stumble to do the love and relationships thing right, but there is no doubt in my mind how important it is to me.

That was not always true. At another stage of life I remember being seduced by the importance of a successful career, and even before that, a stylish image (even though it eluded me then as now). Even earlier, the desire to be popular and have lots of girlfriends was front of mind (alas, another disappointment). In short, I can look back on a trail of dead ends where I discovered, usually the hard way, from where the light really shone.

This afternoon, gazing at the bookcase in my study, each item in it and on it has significance. Each one is a trigger for memories; some warm and life giving, some less so. When I look at my bookcase I stop and think about life and its meaning, about from where I have come and to where I’m headed. Love and relationships. That about sums it up for me. It’s a life giving feeling and I know with a quiet assurance that all is good.

  This is where the post lurches seemingly into another theme. I hope you will see it is really not different at all:

(Very) abbreviated Book Review

“Where God meets Man” Gerhard Forde (1972) Kindle E Book

“Up the down staircase”

This book was recommended to me by a friend who knows about these things. It is a powerful distillation of the Christian faith from a Lutheran perspective. The language is a little dated (e.g. ‘Man’ instead of humans or people, but the ideas transcend that. I have only scratched the surface of the content but wanted to share one of the author’s key ideas because it resonated so strongly within me in the light of the revelation about love and relationship last week.

Forde begins with a metaphor that explains so much about the long history of troubled relationships between God and human beings. It goes like this: We live our lives at the bottom of a staircase that we keep trying to climb to get closer to God, who we believe might be at the top of the stairs. The trouble is that it is a ‘down’ staircase. It can’t be climbed. Forde says we get it quite wrong when we think about Heaven. God comes down to us, and because we are too busy working how to game the staircase rules we fail to notice! Against all experience we persevere in trying to climb up the ‘down’ staircase. That staircase was never designed for us to climb. It was designed for God to descend.

Paradoxically, or maybe more accurately, perversely, human beings are obsessed with what they need to do to get the reward of heaven (i.e. to get to the top of the staircase). Because we think it’s all about climbing up to God we do our very best, only to be disappointed again and again with a God who doesn’t seem to play by our rules. We do all sorts of good deeds to impress God. We position ourselves to earn God’s favour, only to find ourselves mugged by the reality that nothing we do seems to impress Him. He is beyond manipulation it seems. He doesn’t play our games. Forde talks about people operating under the misapprehension “that “God is someone who can be bargained with, or obligated to pay off” our good deeds”. It’s a bit like we do stuff we think God will like (insert anything here . . . Being kind, good, charitable and/or pious) and then holding those things up to Him saying: Look what I’ve done! Now you HAVE to do . . . (Whatever).

The great tragedy of life and death and everything is, because we have the innate tendency to want to make it all about ourselves, we humans miss the crucial bit. We overlook what the Gospel is telling us, and so condemn ourselves to futile efforts to earn our way to God. “Gospel” means “Good News”, but through our best efforts to take control of the process, it seems that we humans have done a pretty good job of converting it into bad news for ourselves.

The Gospel can not be understood without knowing what Law means in theology. Very roughly the Law is what God requires of people for them to be acceptable to Him. The Law is a standard; a code of behaviour; a signpost pointing the way to fulfillment. Think of it as what is written in the Ten Commandments. Although theologians would say it’s more complex than that it’s not far off the mark. The commandments are a guaranteed one hundred percent rolled gold ticket to the promised land for anyone who sticks to them absolutely. Got it? Easy, right? . . . Wrong.

Those ten commandments look quite reasonable. Nothing more than common sense really. You know, the golden rule and all that. They’re what many people who don’t know a lot think Christian faith is all about: the golden rule and all that. ‘Do unto others’ etc. How many times have I heard that phrase from people who have summed up and dismissed Christianity before promptly changing the subject? Well folks, if that sums up the Christian faith, I would agree it doesn’t deserve to be taken too seriously. A faith based on the ten commandments is a fairy tale, good for scaring the feeble minded and keeping impressionable youngsters in line, but that’s about all it’s good for.

If we take a good honest look at ourself, can any of us honestly say we have kept those commandments at all times and in all situations in our life? Really? Some of them maybe, some of the time, but all of them, all of the time? Jesus seemed to delight in deflating the pompous pretensions of people who thought they were holier than everybody else. He was withering in his assessment of those who thought they had it all nailed:

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment. But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment …’ (from Matthew Chapter 5). It seems what Jesus was really saying was: “Don’t think living by the letter of the law is good enough. Those of you who congratulate yourselves on not having committed murder and think that makes you better than those who have, are fools. Even if you keep every letter of the law (and you can’t) but offend the spirit of the law, you are condemned.

Now that’s not good news. It’s about the point where people turn off. They don’t respond positively to the message of the Law. What they hear is that they are not good enough, and they put their hands over their ears and walk away to somewhere or someone who tells them a more encouraging message. They don’t realise they have listened to only part of the message. They hear only the Law that accuses them. They are deaf to the Gospel that liberates them and makes them whole.

Forde expresses this truth with beautiful poetry: “The point is that the law is not merely a set of commandments, not a list of requirements that could be disposed of by doing a few things and checking them off. The law is that immediate and actual voice arising from the sum total of human experience . . . a voice that will not stop until our humanity is fulfilled . . . Law is not a ladder to heaven. It is the mark of man’s existence in this age, from the rustling of the leaves to the agony of the cross. It is the voice which, for the sinner, never ends . . . What the Gospel does is put an end to the voice of the Law . . . An entirely new kind of life breaks in upon us . . . The voice stops only when we become what we were intended to be. The command to love, for instance, stops when we actually do love . . . The Gospel is the story of him who shattered the grammar of earth, who broke open the closed circle of the voice of the law and gave us the gift of hope”.

Now I don’t know if that meant much to you. It’s only after a lifetime of misunderstanding, misdirection, blind alleys and often misspent effort that it means anything at all to me. But there you have it.

Love and relationships! What more do we need?

Irrationality rules! Thank God

I read a short piece this afternoon on another blog I follow. It was about Christian faith and ‘souls’.
. . . It jarred, not for reasons you might assume, but it also germinated a few ideas. If you have a few minutes spare, you might like to read on.


(Google Images)

The blog extract:
“If you believe you have an immortal soul, and that, as Christianity teaches, that soul is destined after your physical death to go to Heaven or Hell, you will want to do everything in your power to live your earthly life so that you go to Heaven.”

At face value the piece carried a common view of Christian belief. The problem for me was that it spoke of a Christianity I did not recognise. It reduced it to a set of rules that people should elect to follow in their self interest. This is not a ‘Christianity’ in which I could have any faith. Thank God I don’t have to, but more about that below.

I’m not much up on souls.
I do know me, although sometimes I confess I’m not sure that I know as much about myself as I would like. That aside, amidst the uncertainties, I know for certain I am more than the sum of the plumbing, the biochemistry and the electrochemistry I carry around with me in that ever expanding sack of fat (especially fat), protein, connective tissue, muscle, nerves and skin that people see, hear, touch, smell, and associate with me.

(Google Images)

That sack; that body. I do not doubt I am more than it is. I am different. I am other. I transcend it. For me this is a puzzle that defies solution; the incomprehensible, the utterly unreachable; the seed of the eternal; the rock on which everything breaks. I am content to call it a soul. My soul is the thing that remains ‘me’ while my body changes, its cells and organs renewing themselves repeatedly, as it ages and eventually dies.

In this sense then, I share my fellow blogger’s belief in a soul.

I have no idea why I am certain of it. In fact, it’s not too hard to drift through the days of my fairly mundane life, cocooned in the cycles of working, eating, and sleeping, good times, bad times, and convince myself that these are the bounds of my existence. It’s not too hard to come to see this as all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be. Kind of comforting in a way I guess. But it doesn’t last. Any more than childhood lasts; any more than a career lasts, any more than health and beauty last; any more than life itself lasts. So, do I believe I have a soul because I want to cling to the hope that somehow what is ‘me’ will survive after my death? Do I believe because the alternative is too hard to bear thinking of? Is belief in a soul a kind of security blanket? A comforter? A buttress against reality?

I don’t think so. It would be easier to accept the seductive assurances of secularism. It would be so much less demanding to drift through life looking to science and technology for meaning; resting on the comfort of money and possessions; losing myself in the endless summer of consumerism. It’s just that there are recurring tiny tugs at my sleeve: the small voices of beauty; the fleeting moments of transcendence; the occasional grasped thread of meaning; the inexplicable gift of love. These things gently and persistently point me elsewhere for the meaning of my existence.
I can’t say why with any authority but I know calmly within myself that I am some thing of substance that transcends secular explanations that leave me short changed and frustrated.

So, why did that blog entry jar on me?
It was this sentence: “You will want to do everything in your power to live your earthly life so that you go to heaven”.
Plausible, right-intentioned even, . . . but headed entirely in the wrong direction: the complete and diametric opposite of the central message of the Christian Gospel. Of course, all things being equal I would want to do all I could to ensure I get to heaven, if I believed there were such a thing as heaven (which I do). The killer point is however that I cannot ensure that any of this will earn me entry. I can never pray earnestly enough, repent sincerely enough, or or live worthily enough to earn myself a place at the table.

The starting point for me as a Christian believer is the realisation of just how helpless I am and in what a hopeless position I find myself. Yes, being human I immediately jump towards the self-help manuals, the recipes for salvation, the right forms of worship, the works of mercy and charity that I hope will oblige God to notice me and accept me as his own. I do these things naturally but they are irrelevant and unable to help me achieve that goal. God, I sense, doesn’t play manipulative games you see.

The surprising, world changing, unexpected and irrational message of the Christian Gospel is that there is nothing that I can do and nothing I need to do! Everything that needed to be done for my acceptance and salvation has already been done by Jesus.

All well and fine, but what am I getting at?

I hear of so many people punishing themselves with feelings of unworthiness. (Done that once or twice myself). It’s hard to believe God is waiting to embrace people as they are, not as they think they should be. Nor is it helped by images of judgemental and self-righteous Christians but that, as they say, is another story. It is difficult to accept a free gift with no strings attached. Everything has its price in this world. It goes against human experience to think otherwise. Would it not be, however, the single greatest gift any of us ever received: to be accepted as we are, rather than who we might think we should be? This is the surprising and counter intuitive message of the Christian Gospel. It is so different from what we expect from experience, so ‘other’, that it is often discounted, disbelieved, and sometimes it even generates an angry response.

The thing is, the Christian Gospel says exactly that. Despite the oft repeated injunctions of those who should know better, the Bible does not anywhere say we need to earn our way to God. We cannot. God steps in and grabs us from the current. We do not swim to the edge and climb out. We cannot.

Good news for me as I find myself accepted by and belonging to God in spite of myself.
Naturally I want to do good things and love my fellow human beings but these things are responses to God’s initiative; not means to the end of manipulating God’s good favour.

I am not a slave to anybody or anything (if we discount my addictive behaviours and selfishness); not rules; not traditions; not the judgement of hypocrites. I am truly free to live life as God intended. What He has in store for ‘me’ (a.k.a. my soul) when this life is ended, I have no way of knowing, but I have no fear or worry about it either.

It doesn’t get any better than that.

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(Google Images)

Postscript

Reading my post from earlier today I thought it was a bit poor that I didn’t at least make an attempt to explain my take on the actual Christian Gospel message. I found it really hard to do this while avoiding theological jargon. So, imperfect as it is, here is a brief outline:

You will notice that being ‘pious’, performing public acts of charity or being kind to old ladies and young children, or handing out food to the homeless, or saving the world or whatever doesn’t seem to figure in what follows. Of course none of those are bad things. They just don’t affect my acceptability to my creator. In fact, what I do, my actions, have no currency at all.
That is why the Christian Gospel is good news to me. It tells me my innate sinfulness, from which I cannot free myself, is no barrier to God’s love and acceptance.

I have not created God. It is God who created me purposefully with love and care.
God’s creative and loving force works through me, in spite of me. By myself I can’t respond appropriately to God’s love and being human, given the choice, will always find a way to put myself ahead of God, in place of God. This is called sin. To be human is to be sinful.
Left to myself I can’t achieve the purpose for which I have been created, which is to be in communion with God. God knows this and has already acted to make it possible for me to have that relationship. Because of what Jesus has done in sacrificing himself to atone for my sin, I am God’s child. The same is true of all other people, who are therefore my spiritual brothers and sisters.
My achievements, wealth and status mean nothing. It is God’s achievement through Jesus in bringing me to himself that means everything.

That’s it in a nutshell. More words than I would have liked but it’s hard to leave stuff out without compromising what I wanted to get across. Of course it will all appear pretty much offensive nonsense to someone who doesn’t appreciate or accept their own sinfulness. To such a person the Christian Gospel will seem to have nothing to say.

Hopefully that made sense! At least it gives my previous post some perspective. God bless you whatever your beliefs, and good night.