Welcomeness

"Blessed are the happy-go-lucky boys and girls," Kurt Vonnegut writes. But today, I don't feel so happy-go-lucky. I feel like there's a lot wrong with the world, 'cause when I do the math, very little in this life adds up to justice, peace and harmony. I really don't want to let my thoughts degenerate into a mindless mash of pessimism and hopelessness, but sometimes it's hard to stay positive. 

Still, I think for all the mess and the sadness in this world, Jesus' beatitudes are a tremendous comfort to me. They acknowledge that the state of things is not as it should be; that we are not where we should be; they acknowledge our poverty of spirit, our sadness, our down-and-outness. But they also acknowledge the goodness of God.  He calls us 'Blessed' which is not the same as 'happy' or 'happy-go-lucky'. It's more like the word 'welcome':

Welcome are the poor in spirit. Welcome are those who mourn. Welcome are the misfits, the lonely, the outcasts, the strangers, the addicts, the beaten-up, the fearful, the hopeless, the pessimistic, the depressed, those who struggle, those who grapple, those who wish things were different. 

The beatitudes are not things to strive for, but realities to accept. We don't need to become poor in spirit, because we are poor in spirit. And yet, because of who God is, we are welcome to step into his home, to let ourselves be wrapped up in his arms, to feel loved and accepted despite our flaws and despite the messes we encounter in this world. I just hope that I will be able to offer that sort of acceptance to everyone I meet along the way.

Vulnerability and exposure

Every once in a while, in moments of weakness, I find myself uttering various kinds of deeply felt, deeply believed truth. In those rare moments I'm simply being honest about what I'm going through, and what I'm thinking and feeling. Often, if I'm lucky, my honesty is met with warmth, openness and gentleness. But, sometimes, those moments are met with a cold, blank stare or a blunt retort. 

This is something I've experienced throughout my life, but was reminded of today when something I said was met with the latter response. So, today, in being reminded of this, a startling truth was made evident to me, and it is this: that vulnerability feels like vulnerability only when it is not reciprocated. When two people are being vulnerable together it is the most liberating thing. But vulnerability without reciprocation is merely exposure. It's the exposure of everyone involved; of me and the other person. 

This makes me realise that we are all really like Adam in the garden of Eden, trying to hide our nakedness, trying not to get found out. But at the same time, we long to be known and understood. So here we are, vulnerable, yet exposed. We're hiding from God, but all the while He is calling out to us, asking us where we are. God longs for us to be vulnerable to Him, because He knows that when we are vulnerable to Him – when we own up to our flaws, our fears and our hopes – then, and only then, will we see that God longs to be vulnerable with us too. Only when we are vulnerable with God will we stop feeling so exposed.

God, rid me of God/me ...

It was Meister Eckhart who prayed that strange prayer, "God, rid me of God." It's a lovely prayer that deconstructionist, 'emergent types' like John Caputo (b.1940) and Peter Rollins (b. 1973) have embraced, because for them it represents a radical solution to flawed arrogance of Modernist absolutism. It's the idea that we need the real of God of All to destroy the idols that we have made in his name. Rich Mullins (1955-1997) echoes this when he says, "God is a jealous God and He will not share Himself with even the best ideas we have about Him." This is true, and we should affirm it as true. But we should also be careful of the consequences of making this kind of negative theology the only relevant theology.

In constantly seeking to destroy idols or have them destroyed, we may rid ourselves of true ideals as well. In short, we can end up throwing the baby out with the bath water. Negative theology seeks to find God by cutting away what is not God, similar to the way that the sculptor chips away the stone that is not the figure he wants to create.  It looks at effects more than causes, signifieds more than signs. Unfortunately, our natural human enthusiasm often leads us to chip so much away that we are left with nothing. And so, the ultimate consequence of negative theology is nihilism. Where there is no affirmation, all we have is negation: an endless chain of Derridean signifiers that end up signifying nothing. Where there is no affirmation, all we are doing is setting off on a journey that ends up merely away from here, a journey that ends up everywhere or nowhere. If everything is in flux, nothing is solid, and no knowledge of truth is possible.

Caputo calls deconstruction – this movement away from here – 'radical hermeneutics', or the 'hermeneutics of the kingdom of God'. But I side with Paul Ricoeur's (1913-2005) notion that it is really the 'hermeneutics of suspicion'. It can so easily become the suspicion that the God who is ridding us of God is not the God who should be doing so, but another construct that we have invented. 

My prayer, then, is something else: it is that God may rid me of me or "I". The destruction of the ego or the denial of self is what allows us to both negate and affirm, to cut away the rubbish in order to affirm truth. Having God help us to destroy our selves is a surefire way to destroy the false notions we have of God. For those who lose themselves will end up finding themselves; those who lose their lives will save it. 

May God rid me of me.

Paganism and redemption

I know it's a little premature to be talking about Christmas, but today I was reminded by my dad that there are some people in the world (who are, possibly, mad), who think that Christians shouldn't celebrate Christmas because Christmas replaces something that was, at its root, a pagan festival. Yes, as hard as it is to believe, I know people like this. They're nice, friendly, well-meaning, and (of course) utterly wrong. 

The thing to remember about all pagan practices, from tattooing to fertility cults, is that they are inextricably tied to the fall of humankind (which, I'm told, has something to do with a snake and a tree in a garden with a couple of poor, misguided people). And if people fall, which they do, then surely they can be picked up again? 

Christmas – the celebration of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, not the celebration of mindless capitalism – is a beautiful thing, especially if it replaces some odd pagan festival, because it symbolises the possibility that all things, even grossly ungodly festivals, may be redeemable. Christmas means that even people like me – people who lose their way occasionally, make mistakes, upset other people but generally do their best not to be walking disasters – are not beyond redemption. That sounds like really good news to me. The abolishment of Christmas, on the other hand, sounds like a crime against humanity.

Hereness

Sometimes we're miles away, dreaming of some future event or some impossibly distant outcome. Other times, we're locked in some subjective history-book version of random past experiences. Most times, we forget that the present moment is the only one in which we truly have contact with reality. And yet it's easier to dwell on what was or to speculate on what could be. And so, remarkably, we miss the sacrament of the now. Now we are everywhere, all around, but not here. Now we are then. Now we are not now. I really long to understand fully what it is like to really live in the moment. 

On the value of impractical things

I've been reading a lot of stuff lately, so my house is starting to look like a bomb has just gone off in storeroom for books. I've got books about postmodern philosophy, radical orthodoxy, design thinking, visual culture and many other topics strewn all about the place. The thing is, I have to read a lot at the moment; I'm busy writing a proposal for my PhD thesis. So the books-everywhere-mess is understandable. 

It's just that every now and then, I step out of this beautiful theoretical bubble and I wonder what the use of all of this is. I mean, the things I'm reading are all very interesting, and generally I find myself utterly enthralled by the ideas I'm encountering; but on any kind of practical human level – the level that we're all forced to live in at least 80 percent of the time – I don't know if it does me any good. Answer me this, Jacques Derrida, what is the point of your deconstruction? What does it help me to always be aware of the inherent decay of language and ideas? (For example.)

Okay, so, just in thinking about this for a few minutes, here are my thoughts on why it's important to read things that are of no practical use to anyone:

1) Practicality is over rated anyway. It's the impractical things like art and music and intricate, interesting theories that make life worth living. You can't brush your teeth with music or art or any of these weird ideas, but can you honestly imagine how drab and dull life would become without them?

2) Humility is an essential to living a decent, aware life; and there's no better way to be humble than to realise just how much you haven't figured out yet – or, better, to realise how little every one else seems to know as well.

3) Awareness is also essential to living a decent life, and there's nothing that wakes me up more than imaginative, well argued ideas. 

4) Man cannot live by bread alone, and while I'm pretty sure not all of the stuff I'm reading can be taken as direct quotations of the Maker of the Universe, I can't help but think that God is there in the words of this variety of thinkers. At least, I'm made more aware of God's being through these ideas that I'm reading. 

5) It's fun. And I like things that are fun.

6) Order is over rated. It's good, once in a while, to have your house covered in books because mess makes life interesting (but, again, only once in a while.)

 

Displacement and memory

This morning I met up with a friend at a new shopping mall, one that I didn't know existed until today. In spending just a short time in this new space, it occurred to me that our a sense of identity is often connected to our sense of space. Our homes, schools and places of work – these become extensions of ourselves, or inputs into our sense of self.

But I've noticed something that may or may not be alarming, depending on how you look at it: we keep on moving to other spaces, or changing the spaces we inhabit. In ages gone by, a person would spend his or her whole life living in one space, with very little changing. These days, however, everything changes all the time, and I'm starting to wonder how this might affect our sense of identity. Does this constant reshaping of the landscape cause us to gain a deeper sense of the flux of life? Does it make our sense of self more fluid? 

I've also noticed that we're losing a sense not only of self, but also of time. The spaces we inhabit, after all, are ways for us to connect with history through material realities. A sense of the sameness of space – a sense that one gets easily in Europe – helps to evoke memories, both personal and collective. The unchanged throws a sharp light onto what has changed, thereby giving us a better sense of the passing of time. But if the spaces we inhabit shift and change all the time, what is there to remember? The changing of spaces obfuscates memory. 

To be honest, the concern that haunts me the most is far more practical and concrete than the above concerns. It is the concern that we have another mall in this city. Surely there are enough temples erected in the name of the gods of capitalism? Do we really need another one? But, I suppose, we'll never have enough until we've had too much. Such is the nature of the insane greed of our age. 

Grattitude and humility

GK Chesterton writes that the secret of life is found in laughter and humility, but I'd like to add to that. The secret of life lies in gratitude and humility. Laughter, after all, is an expression of gratitude. It's a natural way of expressing thanks for the deconstruction of our solipsistic seriousness. Laughter pulls us beyond ourselves and humble gratitude helps us to see ourselves as we really are. It is only in gratitude and humility that we realise that everything we have comes from somewhere other than ourselves. In a nutshell, gratitude and humility force us to come to terms with the stark reality that we are not God. 

Thank God for gratitude and humility.