Turning Back Around

I apologize for the lack of updates lately. Between enjoying my summer and lack of inspiration to write a post, I haven’t found much time to write.

Another reason is because my faith seems to be lacking. I think it’s a combination of a few things. For one, I’ve been overexerting myself with all this spiritual and theological thinking alongside a rigorous curriculum at school. I just kind of burnt out and I’ve begun to take time for myself lately. Secondly, I’ve become a little disillusioned  with fellow Christians in my community. The reason I have for joining the church I currently attend is because the pastor had fantastic sermons. Maybe I was caught up in a spiritual rush at the time, because all I hear any more is filler. “Have faith in the Lord. The Devil is trying to tempt us.”

I have begun to realize that sermons should not be my first priority when choosing a church. With effort and a Faith-driven will I can find that truth on my own. What I truly need is a community. Somebody I can share my thoughts with.  Even to find one outside a church where people aren’t spouting out verses for vanity, blindly praising Him for brownie points, or looking to recruit. Please show me that you are Christian in way of life and not words!

I’m looking for something simpler in my faith than I have previously sought after: living my life and being thankful to Him for it. To know that He expects nothing in return, but I shall willingly serve in gratitude, regardless. I’m thinking I’ve been caught up too much in technicalities: churches, denominations, interpretations of the Word. Identifying those differentiations help me to grow, but inevitably reap nothing in the end. I don’t think God notices the difference between a Methodist and a Presbyterian.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do. It’s started to feel like a chore again, going to Church, and that should never happen. Granted, I’m not going to church on the premise that it’s fun to go. It’s because I want to go and I’ve committed myself to it. Right now I’m feeling rather depressed because I’m just wandering around aimlessly again, but I’m thrilled that I’ve got way more ahead of me. It’s galvanizing knowing that you have another challenge ahead of you. Please, somebody, tell me you know what I’m feeling…

The God Box

A question I usually confront myself with when assessing my religious views is, “What is my God box?” What is a God box? A God box is an individual’s current image of God and everything that God is.  For instance, a simple example would be a God in a toga, who looks like Zeus and lounges on top of a cloud throwing lightning bolts. This God answers your prayers and controls every facet of the universe. Many of us have shared this God box before.  Another God box would be “God is Love”.  In this image, God is more than just a concrete being. He transcends reality and becomes a concept as well. Depending on how you say “God is Love”, this could be seen as a more mature God box. These two examples are what I meant by  ”God box”.

My God box is constantly under evaluation, constantly evolving. Currently I see God as many things: He is the omnipotent father of all things, He is the historical/spiritual Jesus, and It is a spiritual entity that is nebulous in nature and can only be described by what It is not. This could be referred to as the Trinity. My God box is meshed with the concepts and realities of Allah and Buddha, not because I extract what I like from each religion to make my own “cafeteria-style” religion, but because I see how they are the same.  I say He is Love, but I don’t say it like others usually do. My image of God is One who does not do what you ask of Him. He helps you, but not in the way you often want. His will is beyond our will, implemented on behalf of not only our own sakes but everything else’s.

The best way to describe it is the will of a doctor and the will of a patient. We ask the doctor to cure us of our ailments. He cuts us up, he tears things out, he gives us pills. We go through all this invasive treatment with promise of feeling better… and at the end of the day we still feel nauseous and dizzy. Our sutures burn with pain, our insides are roiling inside of us, and the adverse effects of the medication makes us feel even worse. “How does this make me feel better?” the patient asks. The patient and the doctor shared the same goal in curing an ailment, but there was a difference in wills. The patient’s will was to be comfortable. To FEEL better. The doctor’s was to actually fix the problem. The patient was looking for instant gratification while the doctor was addressing the immediate medical priority AND the long term health of the patient. The doctor’s will may not be immediately inherent, but when you stand back and look at what all is going on and also realize that he is not just diagnosing you but hundreds of others don’t you think that what the doctor provided the patient was ultimately more beneficial than what was asked for? Trying to keep myself from writing a novel of a blog, this is the best I can describe what I see God as right now. There’s so much more to God than what I can describe at any point in time.

That’s what determines the scope of my God box: my ability to intuit God. My God box only exists to break God into digestible, bite-size pieces. It’s like a television, which is only capable of showing you what is able to fit onto film. What you see on the screen implies so much more, but you are not able to experience it in its entirety. As time passes, my God box seems to grow bigger and bigger to accomodate for my rapidly expanding image of God, and with each passing evaluation He becomes harder to contain into a box. My God box becomes more strained as I stretch it out. So what is going to happen when it reaches it’s limit? Is it going to halt in it’s tracks? Or is it going to split at the seams and bottom out? Is it going to be too much for me and I’ll just give up on it all? The problem becomes more than just being able to find out what God is. It also becomes an issue of preparing myself to experience more of what He is. It becomes an issue of my integrity as a vessel for God.

And after all that is said and done, after we have established a God box…what does it matter? What was it’s purpose? All we did was construct an image of Him, we never found Him. Wasn’t the God box constructed to help us see God in His entirety? How does it do that by cutting it into pieces? How does it help us see the big picture when all it is capable of doing is showing us a small window into what God is? How can we know who God is by making up our own idea of Him? One thing we must be aware of when constructing this God box is that what we see in it IS NOT GOD. It is our projections that we place onto what we believe God is. What we see in the God box we are more than willing to name God Himself. As DeMello said in Awareness, “people fall into idolatry because they think that where God is concerned, the word is the thing.” We construct a description of who we think God is then we fall into the rut of worshipping that, forgetting that it was only a guess at who He is. DeMello wrote about how he was confronted by a world-renowned scripture scholar. “It never struck me that I had been an idol worshipper all my life! My idol was not made of wood or metal; it was a mental idol.” DeMello reminded his readers that those that had constructed their own mental idol were the more dangerous idol worshippers because “they used a very subtle substance, the mind to produce their God.”

Maybe I was never meant to contain God in a box. Maybe I wasn’t meant to contain Him within me, this body serving as a Temple. How could all of what God is be within me? Maybe I’ve been using the wrong word this whole time. I’m not a vessel, I’m a conduit. I am a channel through which He flows through. Right now, the God box seems irrelevant. My experience and my ideas of God right now have surpassed any words that I am capable of expressing right now.  Right now it doesn’t feel like I could fit what I’m feeling inside a box and I’m all the better for it.

What is Truth and What is Theory?

Ok, I lied. I forgot I had a couple of journals saved as drafts. This one is from about two weeks ago.  ***WARNING: Amber Spyglass Spoiler*** You have been warned.

The funny thing about fact is that it’s only accurate when it comes to wordly things, but how many facts do we know when it comes to spirituality? I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Yes, we share similar experiences, but similar experiences are correlations. They do not prove causation.

The Amber Spyglass by Robert Pullman

I’m writing this because I just finished reading the Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. There is a part where the ghosts of the dead are all sent to limbo instead of heaven. Heaven exists, but there is a power struggle happening and pretty much nobody is making it past the “pearly gates”. One of teh main characters possesses a knife that can cut into other alternate universes. He cuts into the land of the dead and crosses the river Styx. He then opens up a portal back to the land of the living on the other side. Ghosts that pass back into the land of the living disintegrate into particles and become part of everything else: the trees, the grass, the air, the ocean. They feel everything at once.

It was a lot like my current definition of nirvana. The best way to explain my definition is through analogy. The traditional idea of nirvana is to snuff out the flame of the candle of your soul. My definition is to have the candle consumed in a conflagration of fire. Better put, it’s like saying that your soul was a shot glass full of water. If you dumped that shot glass into a fish tank full of water, the water molecules that you were composed of would still be there, but now they’re a part of the entire fish tank. They are part of everything else now.

I was going “Yes!” the whole time. “Ahh! This is so beautiful! How can something so profound be a work of fiction!?” And then I realize: how can something so profound as what I believe in NOT be a work of fiction? Pullman came to the same conclusion in a young adult book that I’ve been working at in real life. It brought to light the possibility that I can’t really prove that anything I believe is right.It could merely be a work of fiction. There is no incontrovertible evidence for what I believe in, yet there seems to be a right and wrong in religion.

Christianity, for example, has “facts” to prove its own legitimacy. There is an “authority” that we can refer to in Christianity itself: the Bible. There are doctrines, creeds, historical evidence. Using these as sources of reference, we can establish accepted standards in Christianity. But really, what sound basis are these facts built upon? One has to exercise at least a little bit of faith for those facts to be  legitimized. You have to trust that what the Bible tells you is true. I was under the impression that facts should be able to stand on their own.

I’m not trying to attack Christianity, but I’m bringing this up because I find a lot of Christians that are so cocksure of themselves, of how Chrisitanity, how religion is supposed to be. My most recent example of this was the Lutheran Bible Study. They seem to have all the answers. We were given a list of guided questions at the study, but it really irked me that the vicar had a list of answers. “The Bible says so, so it is true”. “The Bible told us to, so we must do it.” That really gets under my skin.

I want to figure things out, I really do, but I don’t really believe that all my searching will actually direct me to a concrete answer. All I can do is better define what it is I’m searching for. All I can really do is refine my results. Right now I don’t think the truth I’m looking for is attainable, but I’m fine with that. I’m fine with having to answer my own questions. I’m fine not knowing whether those answers are right. Continuing the search gives me something to do with my life.

Using His Name in Vain

Most people are aware of the second or third commandment (depending on which translation you use): “You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain.” It makes sense, right? Don’t say “OH MY GOD” or “God damn”. You are making a pointless or insincere oath. He wants you to put meaning into His name whenever you say it. Don’t use it so flippantly. At least that’s my take.

However, the word “vain” means more than just useless and ineffectual. Merriam-Webster’s fourth definition of “vain” is: 

4: having or showing undue or excessive pride in one’s appearance or achievements : conceited

That’s the definition I’m going to refer to today. One thing that bothers me is when I hear somebody make a reference to God every other sentence. To hear somebody attribute anything and everything that happens to them as either the work of God or the work of the Devil. To put in the token “First of all, I’d just like to thank Jesus Christ our Savior and God the Father,” in every acceptance speech I hear. I just feel like that’s the person saying “Look at me, guys. I’m a Christian. See how good of a Christian I am? I’ve made a reference to Him three times already in this conversation alone.” I just get the notion that when somebody does that, they are putting up a mask because they want to be seen as virtuous. They throw out all these context clues to imply that they are strong Christians. To me, that just turns His name into a buzz word. That’s the last thing I’d want to do.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that it’s not “cool” to be public with your faith. In fact, I want to promote that. I’m very open with my faith, and I would like others to feel as free as I am in sharing theirs. I just want people to stop and think before they say His name again. I don’t want it to become used so frequently that it becomes part of the background noise.

Think in terms of saying His name like you would say “I love you”. If I were to say “I love you” to my lover several times every time I met her, it would get old. There is almost no chance that I could possibly mean it with all my heart every time I said it if it was used so frequently. It would become more like a ritual to me, and the meaning would become diluted to the ears of my lover. It would be something she’d expect. She wouldn’t notice anymore if I had said it, but she would notice if I HADN’T said it. It would have become part of my identity to say “I love you”.  I don’t want the term “I love you” to be a part of who I am. I want it to be it’s own voice spoken through me. I want it to have a life of its own. I want her to notice every time I say “I love you”. 

That’s how I want God’s name to be used. It want it to be a treasure to say. I want it to resonate in the minds of others when I say it. I want His name to be an entity of its own, spoken through me. Don’t try to hide your faith, but don’t dilute it, either.

Touchstone 23: The Ways of Love

K. Bradford Brown, best known for founding the Kairos Foundation (aka Life Training Course), published a book of things he calls “touchstones”.  They are small insights, almost poems, that are simple at first glance, but are unbelievably deep. A group that I’m with at college sends one out in a newsletter every day for us to contemplate over. Usually I just glance over them, but the latest one, Touchstone 23, really got to me:

                    Love is
                         the way in
                           the way out
                              and 
                         the way through.

It got to me because it was telling me, “This is what love is.” Psh, like it could ever be that easy to define. But to have just this one small touchstone take up an entire page…there had to be more. It was broken down the way it was to emphasize each word. I looked at it, pondered it, and asked myself, “What is it saying to me?”  Well, lets undergo …a stream of consciousnessssssssss:

I think what it’s trying to say is that love is many things, and all those things are the same thing at the same time. Love is the way in…to your heart and the hearts of others. Love is the way out…of tough problems and issues. Problems concerning unhealthy relationships, deceased loved ones, and stigmas that come with both of those. 

Those first two options, when you start to integrate them instead of keeping them apart, make up the third option. You go IN one side and OUT the other. Isn’t that what you are doing when you go through something? Love is the way through. Use love to see through those that would otherwise be seen as unlovable. See through their faults. See the real person and learn how it is possible to love them. Use love to see through a lover. See past their mask. See through to the real person and learn how to love them more, or learn to love them truly for the first time. 

When passing through someone you are essentially, at one instance in time, occupying the same space as they are. You are the same. You are one, in a physical sense. What would it be like to see through them spiritually? Love can function as each option separately, but to find a more complete definition of what love is, look at it as all things at once.

Maybe I’m really getting into this Touchstone. Maybe I’m getting really deep with it. Or maybe the stress of nursing school and lack of sleep have finally gotten to me and affected my coherence. I’d like to imagine that it’s the former.

Either way, I think I may make this a regular thing. Blogging about a specific touchstone every once in a while could be good for me. It could stretch my mind in another direction, open my head to another way of thinking.

A Disagreement with DeMello’s Awareness

So now that I’m finally DONE with finals for this semester, I’m able to pick up DeMello’s book, Awareness. It took me six hours to read 15 pages, not because it was boring, but because it was so chock-full of information and I couldn’t stop taking notes! Plus…I was working. To write about what I think about it so far would take pages, so I’ll settle with my biggest disagreement and my biggest agreement with his book so far (the latter will be in a later journal).

In his chapter Our Illusion About Others he talked about a man who came to him to complain about his girlfriend. ”What are you complaining about?” he said, “Did you expect any better? Expect the worst, you’re dealing with selfish people. You’re the idiot – you glorified her, didn’t you?” He went on to say “Drop your false ideas. See through people. If you see through yourself then you’ll see through everyone. Don’t grapple with your wrong notions of them.” 

This rubbed off on me as unnecessarily cold and not quite the way I would handle the situation. I still feel I reserve the right to be angry if affronted. I have the right to express my feelings, as long as I don’t harbor those negative feelings forever. Whatever the offense, it still warrants forgiveness as long as they are sorry, in my opinion. 

 

Example: my former girlfriend broke up with me so it wouldn’t technically be cheating when she went out with somebody later that day. It hurt, of course. Like a motherfucker. Still does when I think about it. So I had wrong notions of her; I thought that she would be faithful to me under all conditions. I misjudged that one aspect of her integrity. Does that mean I got what was coming to me because I was being idealistic? Maybe, but it does not mean I don’t have the right to be hurt and angry.   

There is still a legitimate feeling there that needs to be felt. It needs to be communicated across, not intellectualized away. Besides, she didn’t do it to hurt me. She did it because she was selfish, because she was confused, because she had conflicting views on what she wanted and chose one (him) in lieu of another (me). Did that make her a bad person? Maybe to me, at least, but it can be taken from a different perspective and I could end up being portrayed as the selfish one. I would even go so far to say her action didn’t need to be corrected. It needed to be understood and forgiven/forgotten and that’s exactly what I did. We’re still good friends. In fact, I attended her birthday party last month. No ill feelings between us. All was forgotten (the harm, not the action). 

The reason I partially disagree with DeMello’s theory is that it’s a cynical view and applied across people as a whole. It doesn’t take into account each person as an individual, particularly the opposing side (the offender). It calls for the same ends, but not via the same means as I do. It doesn’t really allow for the processing, I think. It’s just: “You saw this coming. Just drop it. Move on and get over it.” 

 

Instead of looking through it, passing on through it, you should let it pass through you. That way, you can process it as it comes through. Just passing on through the situation like DeMello suggests doesn’t help you to see everything that went on there. It addresses the issue of my being offended, but it does not take into account why my former girlfriend did what she did. She had her own wants in this situation, her own aspirations. Were those an illusion? What I’m calling for is a true understanding, which takes into account all sides to fully realize. I hope somebody gets what I mean by that, or was I just talking in circles?