I am becoming
something I do not know

feel it growing
as it begins to show

heart beat screams intent
not just content to beat

works till it is spent
not resting till complete

don’t feel myself
am not me but a shell

wait to meet itself
a beast within a cell

want to step aside
a shadow to a seed

greater is inside
it yearns to emerge freed

I am becoming
something I do not know

all I do know is…
that I am becoming

When I talk with people about the Christian responsibility to the poor, I usually get two very opposing responses. One person will state that most of the poor around us are poor of their own fault. They are poor because they don’t work hard or manage their lives wisely. Another person will state that people are poor because of the injustices of society and that those in power are keeping others down. I have learned that neither of these accurately portray the state of the poor around us, and that our opposing, yet equally delusional, view of the poor keep us from actually helping them. The truth is the poor are truly poor, not because they don’t have money, but because they don’t have love.

Now I grew up in a very conservative community, so I know half of you out there just cringed at that last sentence, so please bear with me. I have struggled with money. just like almost everyone else. I have even gone through bankruptcy. Once, while walking downtown and indulging in some self-pity, I passed a beggar and thought to myself, “this guy probably has a greater net-worth than I do, he is at zero while I am negative by thousands”. Which was immediately followed by an epiphany, “Wait! This guy has nothing, while I owe thousands… so why am I better off?”

This thought followed me for a while and throughout the next couple years as I picked myself up, moved on, and rebuilt a business from the ground up. Even though I have less money (from a purely mathematical point of view) than a homeless man on the street, I was rich because I had an education, a clear view of my own path, a skill, a craft, an understanding of the world around, and most of all… a family that loved me.

Discovering Poverty

I spend 2 years mentoring kids in the Indianapolis Public School system through a program that identified at-risk youth. The adults I worked with, both the parents of the kids (if they had any) and the volunteers in the program, had a very negative and helpless view of the business world. I was often listening to conversations about how the rich are keeping them down, how they are poor because they are helpless, and how no one will give them a break. I never, of course, shared this point of view, but I began to understand why they had it.

My parents, who run their own small business, raised me with a sense of responsibility, work ethic, fair trade, how to manage business relationships, and some understanding of how the the economy functions. More than education, my family gives me confidence, pride, and the strength of will to stand up for myself while also showing grace to others. When people grow up without families, or even those they can love and trust, they grow up both without a practical education and the internal strength to survive in a truly hard world.

I remember training one young man to get a good job, one of the things I had to teach him was, “Stop calling people ‘sir’. As soon as you call me ‘sir’ you are placing yourself under me. You are my equal, and you have to make sure I know that. Respectfully introduce yourself to someone and then ask for their name if they do not offer it. ” Of course, he learned to call people ‘sir’ from police and school authority figures in his past, who wanted him to be submissive. He was beat down and used to begging people to survive, he did not know he had the power to take relationships into his own hands.

I learned a long time ago that what makes me rich is who I am. No matter how bad the circumstances are at the present, I will always make my way back up. Even when I have nothing, I am rich because I have a real world education, and the strength of will and confidence to make my own way. Those who are truly poor are those who have never been taught how to succeed, have no confidence in their own abilities, and have never had the opportunity to learn a valuable skill or craft. They look at the world, not knowing how those who are well-off got where they are, and feel helpless.

To often in the middle and upper class, we judge the poor from our own standards. We see someone’s behavior and say, “how horrible, I would never do that”. We don’t realize they don’t know what we know, or have experienced what we have, so of course we wouldn’t act like that… they wouldn’t either. We take our understanding for granted, not realizing the world looks so small and so harsh to so many people. No, there is no one out there to blame with “keeping people down”, but we aren’t taking the time to lift them up either.

Helping the Poor

Those who are poor do need help, and we have many poor communities in America that need real charity to heal. People who say, “they just need to get a job”, are blinding themselves to the real need, but those who say, “let’s just give”, are naive to the real problem. What we have in not a poverty of money, but a poverty of love. People aren’t suffering because they lack money, but because they lack development, the kind of development the rest of us get from our families.

When someone grows up in the world without love, they never really grow up. They are children, lost and confused, and looking for answers. In order to heal the hole left in an orphaned heart requires real human charity in the form of time and attention. Yes, the poor need food and shelter, but then they need brothers, sisters, and mentors. Organizations that are most effective in combating poverty in our world are organizations that help people using near one-to-one ratios. In other words, one person can really only help one other person at a time.

One kind of organization I love is the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (http://www.prisonentrepreneurship.org/). This group, along with others like it, equips inmates nearing probation with the tools and knowledge for surviving and thriving in the world of business. They have a recidivism of 10%, which is almost inverse of the average convict’s chances (usually 80%-90% of convicts usually end up back in jail). This proves to me that most of our “criminals” exist because they are put in a place in life where they don’t know how the world works, so they feel helpless and desperate.

Those working at Crisis Pregnancy Centers, another organization I have a lot of respect for, is always happy to receive donations, but can also tell you that what scared pregnant young women most often really need is love and guidance from another dedicated and patient human being. Volunteers are often a more scarce resource than money. Of course, those who have the courage to adopt are probably the best of all of us, and truly covering the darkness of the world with their own love and sacrifice.

People want to feel good by donating money, expecting others to actually handle the problem, but what the whole world really needs is more of us getting our hands dirty. We need to step across the cafeteria line when serving food and actually eat with those on the other side. We need to stop telling people to get jobs, and offer our time to raise up those who lack the skills and understanding to get a job. Society isn’t “keeping people down”, we just aren’t taking the time in our lives to lift up the weak. Poverty, in any given society, is nothing less than the mirror reflection of that society’s own selfishness and hardened hearts.

The test of the morality of a society is what it does for its children.
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Technorati Tags: Charity, poor, poverty

“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” – Benjamin Franklin

We humans tend to live in extremes.  Most people who drink, drink to get drunk.  If not, it is because they don’t drink at all.  Most people who smoke, chain smoke packs of cigarettes a day.  The rest of us stare them down while exaggerating our coughs to show how disgusting they are.  We gorge ourselves on fatty foods, or obsessively count calories (or carbs).  We surround ourselves with sexually charged entertainment, or blush at statues in the local art gallery.  This is our nature, which is the whole reason temperance was once a virtue we strived for, because it is so contrary to our nature but oh-so good for us!

In all things in life that bring us pleasure, there is the possibility of also bringing us harm.  Everyone has heard the phrases “all things in moderation” or “too much of anything is a bad thing”.  It would seem that those who fear for their moral or physical health tend to therefore conclude, “if it could be bad for me, why do it at all?”, or worse, “if it can be bad for you at all, then it is bad, period.”

People usually laugh and shrug off the quote by Benjamin Franklin I included at the top of this article, and while it is obviously somewhat hyperbolical, I believe the sentiment is accurate.  Just about every pleasurable thing on this earth was meant, by God, to do just that – to bring us pleasure.  The only alternative is that God all these things on earth purely as temptation to torment us, which is not something I find reasonable.

But there is more to it than pleasure, I believe that just like work, God made play as something to be mastered, which brings me back to temperance.  Food is better for us when prepared with love and labor, the worst food we have is “fast food”.  Wine is better when created by artisans who have worked hard, and then let the wine age over time.  Cigars have been enjoyed for ages with little guilt, but it is cigarettes that are killing us.

When we seek to master our pleasures, they become even more beneficial to us.  When we seek to cheaply consume our pleasures, out of pure gluttony, they produce in us all kinds of illness and mental disturbances.  Recent medical science has shown us the drastic contrast as moderate drinking is so good for us, and heavy drinking is so harmful (just Google “Moderate alcohol intake”).

And who drinks “moderately”?… People who enjoy quality wines, good beers, and fine spirits.  No one buys Bud Light to “savor the taste”.  People who smoke less than once a week don’t smoke cigarettes (or at least not the kind you find as gas stations), and those who have truly healthy sex lives, aren’t to be found at your local strip club.

So would this have to do with Christian Mysticism?  Well, it is hard to find a more effective way to balance the spirit, but taming and mastering the appetites of the body.  Not to be sanctimonious, and often self-abusive, by pursuing some kind of unnatural abstinence from all pleasures, but to be in control.  Using the earth God gave to us as a tool, using what we have, and not being used by it.  For the man who has dominance over his “vices” is healthier than the man who is dominated by them, and happier than the one who hides in fear of them.  Maybe Adam Ant was right after all….

“For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected when received with thanksgiving…” 1 Timothy 4:4

NOTE:  Image at the top from the window of “The Men’s Toy Shop” in Nashville, IN.  A wonderfully old-fashined small business run by great people, stop by if you can!

Technorati Tags: Abstinence, Christian Mysticism, Gluttony, Temperance

We are all born pagan. I realize how harsh that sounds, but just think about it. Idol worship and superstition come naturally to us. We quickly develop rituals to help our favorite sports teams have “good luck”. Gamblers blow on dice, lottery players have lucky numbers, and Friday the 13th still brings out caution in many (and maybe a rabbit’s foot or two). Even those of us enlightened “mono-theists” have our own methods of bargaining with “forces out of our control” to try to get what we want.

I see a lot of mutual frustration among well meaning pastors and active laity in their efforts to inspire and motivate their bothers and sisters toward a productive faith. I have thought much on the dilemma, on what it is which holds us back, and the best term I could come up with to describe it was “The God Bargain”. The sad truth is so many people approach Christianity as a method of appeasing God as opposed to actually just obeying God. Its a bargain, “God, I will do what you want if you help me *insert favor*”.

PERSONIFYING CHAOS

Many things in life are beyond our control. It would seem humanity as a whole has developed a habit of personifying everything we can’t directly manage. All pagan cultures throughout time have created gods for fertility, harvest, weather, hunting (ample game), love, and health… all the things we can’t directly control (or couldn’t until recently). Throughout the years of human history, man has taken everything out of his control, assigned it a god, and tried to gain that god’s favor. (Notice there are no ancient gods for “get your ass out of bed”, hard work, perseverance, charity, forgiveness, or rehab.)

Now that we live in a Judeo-Christian culture, we just take all those things out of our province and blame one God for them. Which leads me to ask this question: Aren’t we just being pagan if all we have done is consolidated our gods together but still think and behave the same? How have we changed if our prayers, rituals, and sacrifices are done in the hopes of getting good fortune from an appeased God?

IS GOOD LUCK DIVINE?

“that you may be children of your heavenly Father, for he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.” Matthew 5:45

So the question is becomes, just how should we approach good luck/fortune or bad? Is good fortune a sign of God’s approval, and bad fortune a sign of God’s punishment? NO! Emphatically, I say it is not. Any kind of assumption regarding fortune and God creates a kind of insanity. Are we to question our purity when lightning strikes our home and destroys our DVD player? Are we to assume our sins have gone overlooked when we find a twenty dollar bill in our coat pocket left from last winter? Is our sports team more in favor with God the year they won, and offending Him the year they loose (in which we can only conclude that one sports team can appease God at a time)? To look for “omens of fortune” to interpret God’s Will drives us to paranoia.

Life is hard for everyone, period, and God does not show favoritism. Expecting life’s challenges to go away, or diminish just because we are on “God’s side” is foolish and arrogant. If one looks at Scripture we find just the opposite, Jesus warns us to expect life to actually get HARDER when we choose to follow Him. True Christian discipleship is not the way of safety and comfort, it is the Way of the Cross.

LIFE DOESN’T CHANGE, WE DO

So as the blog title says (look out! shameless self-promotion coming up), let’s bring this back to some practical Christian Mysticism (told ya!). We don’t follow Jesus Christ for some shallow hope in worldly blessings, we carry our Cross because we are convicted of our own need to change. Discipleship isn’t about DOING it is about BECOMING. We strive to become like Christ, but more accurately, we strive to become what Christ intended us to be.

The world around us changes; not because we have favor with God, but because when we seek the face of God we change and begin to effect the world. Life doesn’t get easier, we get stronger. Our fortunes don’t improve, they just become less relevant. If we truly believe God loves us, and we cannot earn or lose this love, then it is not God who changes His attitude toward us, we change our attitude toward God.

STOP BARGAINING

Everyone starts their spiritual and religious journeys with pagan/superstitious habits of some kind. It is just our nature, and it takes time to mature. I write this article in large part from self-reflection of my own habits. I often find myself loosing perspective and trying my own bargains. However, I see many people struggle because they bargain with God and use that as the basis for their faith. I see people live “moral” or religious lives in hopes of convincing God to give them something, just to become jaded and discouraged.

Bargaining with God cheapens faith and robs us of the true blessings God has for us. There is so much to learn, to discover, and experience in life. When we use our religion as a bargaining tool, we keep ourselves stuck in a worldly perspective. We may believe in a God, but we are keeping our hearts in material and shallow concerns. Besides, we don’t get any credit for “believing”:

“You believe that God is one. You do well. Even the demons believe that and tremble.” James 2:19

GOD’S GRACE

“Three times I begged the Lord about this, that it might leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ I will rather boast most gladly of my weaknesses, in order that the power of Christ may dwell with me.” 2 Corinthians 12:8-9

To temper this article a bit, I want to end with God’s grace. Grace is something we all have access to, but is not to be confused with luck, fortune, or even blessings. Just like God’s love, we don’t earn God’s grace, it is given. God gives His grace so we can have room to grow and mature in Christ. If God did not give His grace, we would be crushed under the weight of our own sins and foolishness.

God gives grace to us generously, and all who trust in God enough to just go out into the world and live experience it. The grace we receive is sufficient for us to learn from our mistakes and have a chance to recover from them. God’s grace is sufficient for us to grow each day, not being dragged down by what we were before.

A FATHER, NOT A DEALER

God is our Father, not a tradesman. Does a good father demand actions from a child before offering his love (I said “good” father)? Does a good father wait for his child to grow up and prove himself before he takes the child into his home? So why do we think of God this way? Everything God has for us, He has already given, which means it is up to us to seek it, accept it, and live it.

Related Article: Our Abundant Common Grace

Technorati Tags: Christian Mysticism, God bargain, God bargaining, God's Grace

Man wants to be free, but always looks for a king to rule him. A strange contraction in human nature. The truth is, when things are great and seem to be under our control, we just want to be left alone. We don’t want anyone to tell us what to do when we have what we want, and we gladly take credit for our own fortune. However, when things get bad, we cry for a savior and blame anyone but ourselves for the troubles we find ourselves in. (Hmm… I think I just defined both political ideologies) Everyone has varying degrees of each in their lives, but this article is about the latter: Our search for a messiah to save us from our troubles. The sad truth is, we had one, but we didn’t like what he had to offer.

There is another prevalent contradiction of human nature. We so readily look to the mystical, the divine, and the spiritual to solve our material, carnal, and temporal desires. God gave us freewill, and yet we take every opportunity to convince ourselves and others that we are helpless victims and without the power of choice. We blame society, circumstances, and other people for our lives and then look to someone or something to swoop in and save us from our persecution.

Jesus encountered these paradoxes frequently during His time in our reality. As people confessed Him to be the Messiah, they then turned to Him to solve the troubles and conflicts of their own world. While Jesus did many miracles of physical healing and material provision during his ministry, He stopped short of what people really wanted from Him… political and social conquest.

The Crucifixion was a bewilderment to the disciples. When Jesus tried to tell His disciples of His rapidly encroaching tribulation, Peter responded saying, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” As what was surely a shock to such a passionate expression of concern, Jesus responded, “Get behind me, Satan! you are an obstacle to me. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

Why did Jesus react this way? It was because Peter, like many of his time, were looking at Jesus as a “material messiah”. Peter was looking for Jesus to free the Jews from Rome and establish a great earthly nation of which Jesus would reign over. Of course, this did not happen, nor was it supposed to. Instead, Jesus gave us something else… individual redemption and spiritual freedom.

It is not hard today to see that we are born as slaves to sin. Any Alcoholics Anonymous councilor, or rehab specialist, can tell you that man is often lacking “something” needed to take control of his own life. Jesus knew this, and offered man redemption through repentance. Through Jesus Christ’s sacrifice and then later gift of the Holy Spirit, God gave us the chance and the power to became the individuals He created us to be in the first place.

Jesus came, and then left, and He left us with nothing more or less than what we needed to truly live. And truth be told, most of us hate HIm for it. We didn’t want “spiritual” redemption, we wanted physical redemption. We wanted someone to give us a steady income, a worry-free life, a safe home, and good health.  We didn’t want to have a path open to begin a relationship with God, we wanted path open to a new car (Ok, nerds… would ” new chariot” be more historically accurate for you?). Jesus and the disciples tell us to look at life’s sufferings as a challenge and gift unique to this life… but we would have preferred Jesus left the receipt so we could have exchanged it for a new expresso machine.

Now today, we still have our many problems and troubles, all of which we brought on ourselves with our own greed and selfishness. Instead of looking at our own failures, we look once again for a leader, a savior, a messiah to fix it all for us and make our lives better. Little do we realize the only way that will ever happen is if we do it ourselves. We must repent, face our sins, and seek forgiveness. Only then will we see clearly enough to fix our own mess.

Technorati Tags: Christian Mysticism, fake messiahs, Jesus Christ, material messiahs, political saviors

Eagleton likes this turn of speech, and he has recourse to it often when making the same point: “[B]elieving that religion is a botched attempt to explain the world . . . is like seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.” Running for a bus is a focused empirical act and the steps you take are instrumental to its end. The positions one assumes in ballet have no such end; they are after something else, and that something doesn’t yield to the usual forms of measurement. Religion, Eagleton is saying, is like ballet… it’s after something else.

To use science to address religious concerns perverts it.  Likewise, to use religion to address scientific concerns is a debacle.  We need to stop choosing between the two, and instead recognize the purpose and limitations of both.

Here is the link to the New York Times article:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/

Here is the link to the book on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/Reason-Faith-Revolution-Reflections-Lectures/dp/0300151799/

Here is a link to my past article on this topic:
How Science and Religion Can Play Nicely Together… and Should!

Technorati Tags: Add new tag, reflections on the god debate, Science and Religion, science vs religion, stanley fish, terry eagleton

As a life-long C.S. Lewis fan, I always enjoy taking a minute and reflecting on the many contributions he made to Christian Mysticism.  I especially enjoy addressing the lessons inferred amidst his fictional writings.  One of my favorite mystical lessons, is the lesson of the wardrobe.  In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe C.S. Lewis teaches us a great lesson about seeking a relationship with the Living God… you can’t find God in the same place twice.

“I don’t think it will be any good trying to go back through the wardrobe door to get the coats.  You won’t get back to Narnia again by that route… Yes, of course you’ll get back to Narnia again someday… But don’t go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don’t try to get there at all.  It’ll happen when you’re not looking for it.”  – The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, the Professor talking to the children who just left Narnia.

Everyone who seeks after God, has encountered Him at some point in their lives.  There is always some point where God’s presence is so clear, that we ever wondered why we doubted.  But then the moment passes, and passes, and fades.  After a while we wonder if we experienced it at all.  In an existential panic, we try to recreate the experience, only doing more to prove to ourselves it never happened in the first place.

Let’s take the Professor’s advice here.  We should no go back and look for God where we previously encountered Him, rather we should move forward without looking at all.  Where would Moses have been had be returned to the burning bush for a fresh dose of prophetic inspiration, rather than moving forward with the task he had already been given?  Where would Paul have been traveling back to Damascus to look for a bright light?  Our encounters with the Divine are singularly unique, and it is our fault, not God’s, that we forget them so easily.

It is also part of how God encourages our continual growth and maturity.  If God stayed in the same place, so would we.  Rather, God reveals Himself at moments we need Him most, then moves on, hoping we will continue to seek Him.  As we move on, out of obedience, we find God without looking, and in a way we had never experienced before.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis, Christian Mysticism, living God, Seeking God, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe

“If you want peace, work for justice.” – Pope Paul VI
“If you want justice, work for chastity.” – Pope John Paul II

This begins a serious of articles I have decided to write in defense of the Catholic Church and her controversial teachings in our current post-modern culture. I have entitled this series “Catholisense” because this is a mystical apologetic rather than a theological one. It is my belief that the presence and teachings of the Catholic Church are not outdated or irrelevant but rather necessary. Indeed, I will argue it is the very presence alone of the Catholic Church and the Vatican that is preventing our society from falling off a cliff of self destruction.

The first argument I am presenting is the need for “Moral Idealism”. There is an ever growing outrage toward what people are calling “unrealistic” morality in the Catholic Church’s teachings on monogamy, sex, abortion, and birth control. Even other religious institutions of morality, such as the evangelical community, find the Vatican’s positions on these issues to be extreme. Even within the Catholic Church itself, many members have given up or refused to follow Church teaching on the grounds of it being “unrealistic” in contemporary society.

Assuming, for the moment, that developing and legislating societies of people based on Catholic morality is unrealistic, does that make the ideal irrelevant? There is so much anger directed at the Vatican for maintaining a seemingly unachievable stance on morality, but have we ever stopped to think what would happen to societal development if those standards and ideals of morality did not exist?

Think about this for a minute: even though fornication, adultery, and divorce are so rampant in our society it seems impossible to stop, what would happen if the ideal of monogamous marriage did not exist? What would happen to our society if we felt no guilt, no obligation, and no responsibility to attempt monogamous and stable marriages? Think about how much good the remaining population of healthy families and stable households does to preserve society and keep peace in our world. If there were no families, no stable marriages, and no obligation for family unity, how would even the most basic of social services be possible?

Let’s look at birth control as well. While persuasive arguments can be made for restricting the birth rate in impoverished regions, encouraging “family planning”, and preventing pregnancy in the unprepared young, what would happen if we stopped seeing the harm in preventing life to serve the living? What if we no longer saw human life as sacred or special, and became completely unhindered in controlling new life? What would happen if we only allowed the birth of people who we, in our own frail understanding of the universe, felt were worthy or deserved of existence?

More than morality, the Catholic Church presents us with an ideal. It gives us a vision of a society of self-sufficient families. Families full of love, commitment, strength, discipline, and charity. Families capable of successfully raising their own children. Families who contribute to society, as opposed to burdening it. Families strong enough to absorb the pains and injustices of life.

The Catholic Church gives a society where sexuality is a wonderful force of new life and blessing, rather than a burdensome drain where such a large portion of social resources are dedicated just to containing and dealing with the consequences.

The Catholic Church shows us a world where each and every human life is a blessing and a source of joy, rather than the anxiety filled gamble modern parents face as to whether or not their child’s existence will be “acceptable”.

The strongest argument for the Catholic Church’s ideal teachings on morality is that it is not an unachievable ideal at all. While it may seem like so few, there are still many families who live out the ideals of the Catholic Church every day. They are blessings to society because they prove the ideal is real. Their children grow to be productive and beneficial members of society, and their households become safe havens to all who know them from the chaos and darkness of the rest of the world.

The Vatican is the “city on a hill” not just in the real world, but in our collective subconscious. If it were not for the presence of this one remaining organized bastion of moral consciousness, we would be left unhindered to topple into amoral chaos. Even for those of us (myself included) who fail to live up to the standards and ideals set forth by the Catholic Church, having those standards preserved in the world today creates an anchor for our minds. We all, Catholic or not, benefit from those ideals.

Technorati Tags: abortion, birth control, Catholic Church, Catholic Mysticism, Catholisense, Christian Mysticism, moral idealism, sexuality, Vatican

“What does it profit them if they gain the whole world, but lose their souls?” Luke 9:25
“To be proud with wealth and honor is to sow the seeds ofyour own downfall.” Tao Te Ching 9

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Matthew 6:21
“The sage wears rough clothing and holds the jewel in his heart.” Tao Te Ching 70

“The least among all you of is the greatest.” Luke 9:49
“The best of people is like water. Water gives life to all things and does not compete with them. It flows in places people reject and so is like the Tao.” Tao Te Ching 8

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Technorati Tags: Christian Mysticism, Lao Tzu, Tao of Christ, Tao of Jesus, Tao Te Ching, Teachings of Jesus