A Vote to Save Trump's Soul

Unlike most of the earnestly progressive siblings in my denomination, I have a rather vigorous sense of Hell.  I've expounded on that elsewhere, so I won't get into that here, other than to say that I make no distinctions between God's love, God's wrath, and God's justice.  The cup we pour out is the cup we receive, after all, and against that measure, the current Republican candidate is in a world of trouble.

Donald J. Trump has already made American Christian discourse harsher, crueler, and more selfish, stripping grace, kindness, and wisdom from countless churches.   The crass brassy transaction of his relationship with evangelicalism has driven millions from the faith, as empty platitudes, flagrant lies, and the naked hunger for power have supplanted the Gospel.  

He has undercut the most fundamental blessing of our republic, subverting the Founder's intent for a nation in which leaders are freely elected, and where where power changes hands peaceably.

His anti-Christian nationalism has slandered millions of Latino migrants, 80% of whom are hermanos y hermanas en Christo.  He would turn America into a walled Jericho, into an inhospitable Sodom.  His misbegotten Abraham Accords "fixed" the Middle East by conveniently pretending the Israel/Palestine issue didn't exist, setting the stage for the unprecedented chaos and bloodshed of this last year.  Well, to be fair, it's precedented by millennia of strife in that benighted region, but you know what I mean.

But my deepest concern, honestly, are the tens or hundreds of millions who will suffer if he is elected again.  These are the souls that will starve, suffer, or be forced from their homes and lands because of his refusal to acknowledge our rapidly changing climate.  His flagrant quid pro quo with the oil and gas industries, coupled with his bizarre demonization of everything that would both allow us to adapt and become more energy self-reliant?  They've become pseudo-religious dogma on the far-right now, a bitter, unbiblical, and demonic creed-of-greed that will contribute to actually unprecedented human suffering.

Donald is aware of exactly none of this.  It doesn't even register.

He's a worldly man, after all, utterly unspiritual, as one would be as a Child of Mammon.  A little boy raised in a temple of gold will grow into a big man who couldn't care less about heavenly or eternal things.  And sure, yes, there's grace for all, but grace has to be freely received.  It is for all who repent.  He's great at doubling down, and has no use for repentance.  Repentance implies you were wrong, after all, and he is never ever wrong.

Yet despite all of this, Donald J. Trump is a child of God.  He knows not what he's doing.  I do not desire to maximize his suffering.  I do not wish him harm.  Though he is my enemy, I love him, because I do what Jesus tells me to do.

If he wins the upcoming election, he will receive the worldly power he desires.  But he will also reap the fruits of his actions once given power, and that...insofar as I can honestly see it...imperils his immortal soul.  It's the dark bargain of all who lead, of all who take on the mantle of worldly power, but for Donald, it's a particularly dangerous thing.  

Given power, Trump will pour out a cup of bitterness for himself, a cup as deep as the oceans, as deep as the night sky.

Don't vote against him because you hate him.  

Vote against him because you love him.  Because if he wins?  And God is just?

Lord have mercy on his soul.

On How to Love America

It was the third of July, and I was in the Grand Ole Opry, listening to Country music.  Enjoying it, even, though it's not generally my thing.

In the last set, a new singer was brought out, a little coltish dude with a breakout hit single about boats and trucks and beer, whose guitar hung down like an oversided decorative necklace.  He started in with the obligatory opening crowd-connect patter by uttering the words, "I love America."

No context, no build up, no lead-in, no explanation as to why, just "I love America."  There was much hooting and hollerin', it being America and all.

That got me to thinking, as I drove the ten hours back from Nashville through the heart of the deep South on the Fourth of July, about what it means to love your country.

I mean, seriously think about it, because Lord, did I have some time on my hands.

And as I thought, I reflected on love of country through the lens I'd bring to all other forms of love, and with the the things I'd say to a couple in relationship counseling.  Because while most Americans will *say* they love America, that love may not be the healthiest of loves.

Love, you see, requires you to love the whole person in front of you.  The actual person, the real, complicated, messy and imperfect person.  We do not want to do this.

Some of us would rather love the person who once was.  We want to love that person we fell in big dreamy love with ten years ago, and not the less dreamy person who's standing in front of us right now.  We want to love the one who lived for us and us alone, our best friend and lover, and not this harried distant soul who's juggling a million responsibilities and the weight of life.  We want to love that little angel-baby who never cried and never got sick, our selective memory of big eyes and cheeks and heart-melting smiles.  We do not want to love the frustrating fourteen year old who is sitting and furtively snapchatting to their friends about what a [expletive deleted] we are.

When the person we love is a person they no longer are, and maybe never were, then we do not love them.

This is how conservatives do not love America.

Then there's the love of what might be.  "I love you for who you're going to be," we say to our lover, "once I've remade you."  "You're just so messed up," we say to them.  "But I just know I can save you and make you who you need to be."  Oh Lord, if someone ever says this to you, you need to run like H-E-double toothpicks.   Because tempting as it is to be the white knight, the one who comes in and fixes and saves and makes it all right, that ain't love.  What we love then is the sense of power that tearing down gives us.  We love deconstructing for the sake of deconstructing, and that leads us to seek out faults rather than possibilities, flaws rather than living hopes.

When the person we love is only the person we want to make them into, we do not love them.

This is how progressives do not love America.

To love a person, you need to love the whole of who they are.  That means their past, their whole-truth story to date, with all of its triumph and tragedy, all of its success and mess.  You have to love their potential, which rises from the grace notes of that story in all of its complexity.

And you have to love them right now, in that ephemeral place where the told and the yet-untold meet.

That's how we love people, if we really love them.  And that love, truth be told, is the love that heals and transforms for the better.

I'm reasonably sure love of country ain't so different.

Our Love, Our Faith, and Our Violence

Of all of the cinematic experiences I've had this year, one stands out, and it wasn't even a movie.

It was The Last of Us, a game I played through over the last couple of weeks, although calling it a "game" seems vaguely unfair and inaccurate.  It was a participatory narrative, a story in which you engage and move, but which carries through you through the lives of human beings living after the collapse of our culture.

In that, it played off of some familiar themes in our storytelling.  There's been a fungal pandemic, one that renders its victims both insane and violent before devouring them completely.  It's a variant on the zombie apocalypse trope, and yeah, that's been done a whole bunch.

Before I continue just a warning--if you ever plan on playing this game, there will be spoilers coming up.  And they will spoil what is a simply brilliant experience.

The gameplay was good, and the graphics were evocative, but those weren't the best features of this game.  What was most striking, given that this is technically a "game," was the degree to which the animation and the voice-acting created a really powerful sense of the reality of the characters involved.  Our protagonists are Joel and Ellie, and their relationship is complex and finely drawn.

Joel, a grizzled man in his early fifties, lost everything that was precious to him when the pandemic hit.   Most significantly, he lost his daughter Sarah, a young teen who dies in the genuinely harrowing opening sequence.  All that matters to him now is survival--although he's cynical about even that--and any moral core that he once had has long since atrophied.

Ellie is a fourteen year old girl, who he's tasked with escorting across country for reasons the narrative will soon make clear.  She's never known anything but the fallen world, and is both a child and a young woman, both an innocent and hardened.

Their relationship develops slowly and organically over the 14-17 hours of gameplay, and as Joel bonds with the girl who echoes his daughter, she increasingly becomes the entire reason for his existence.  He's deeply reluctant to make himself vulnerable in that way, and self-aware enough to realize she's becoming a daughter to him, but the connection continues and deepens as their bond grows.  Protecting her, caring for her, watching over her--that becomes the purpose of his life.  By the end of the game, his love for her is palpable.

It also drives him to do terrible things.  The Last of Us is a violent game, intensely, realistically so.  It's not at all like Call of Duty or other shooter games, where violence is empty play.  It's rough, and unpleasant.  The game never lets you forget the mortal frailty of the characters you're playing, or the shared humanity of the people you find Joel and Ellie killing.

What you realize--in some very difficult but well-written sequences--is that eventually nothing matters to Joel but Ellie.  Nothing.  He will torture, he will kill, he will let all of humanity suffer under a plague forever, anything, so long as she is safe.   He will even manipulate her trust and lie to her, so long as he is convinced that his deception will keep her from harm.

There's a moment, the final moment of the story, when she realizes how far Joel will go to protect her.  She knows he is lying to her about what he has done to protect her, and knows he is lying because he only wants her happy and safe.  You see that awareness cross her face, and see her struggle with it.

Her safety becomes his purpose, his moral core, and the goal of his life.  She is the thing he loves above all else.  And while that is what makes him very connectably human, it is also what enables him to be a monster.

For human beings, that's always been true.  When we allow our lives to be defined by a singular goal--our existential ground, our life-purpose--that gives us our integrity as a person.  But that thing, if it is wrought too shallowly, can also be what allows us to inflict terrible harm.

We can be defined by ourselves, our pride, our desire, our ambition.  We can be defined by an ideology or nation.  We can be defined by our love for another person, our partner, our friend, our child.  Those things become the objects of both our love and our faith.

They also become what allows us to not really see those who are outside of that relationship as human, not see their value, and can become the foundation of our violence against another.

Our ability to love, if turned to the wrong end, is also the heart of our brokenness.

Perfect Justice

Where is that place of justice, exactly, between you and I?

How does one find that perfect balance?

I found myself wondering that, for some reason, as I walked and thought about love and justice this morning.

The pursuit of justice is, after all, the pursuit of rights and equity.  It comes when each has their rightful share, when none is denied what is theirs.  It's a balance.

So in my mind's eye, I saw a table.

On that table, a bar of candy.   Dark chocolate, preferably, maybe with a little bit of salt and caramel.  Mmmmm.  Chocolate.

Across the table from me sits Lady Justice.

"Hey Justice," I say.  "I let's split that candy bar," and she's into the idea.  She's fond of dark chocolate, after all.   I pick up the bar, and then set it down again.  I say: "We must each receive the same amount.  It must be just and fair, exactly right."

She sits forward, takes up her sword, and gets ready to split it.

"Wait," I say.  "I'm serious.  Make it exactly perfect."  Being Justice, she knows exactly what that means.

Perfectly fair can't be measured down to the gram, or milligram, or picogram.  I'm not even talking about a one yoctogram difference, which is ten to the negative twenty fourth of a gram, the approximate mass of a single hydrogen atom.

This is delicious chocolate, after all.

To be perfectly fair, there can be no variance in the size of the pieces, no difference, none at all.  If one portion has even the mass equivalent of the energy of one single photon at the height of the electromagnetic spectrum more than the other, then it is not perfect.

She looks at me funny, and then...lifting up her blindfold...stares with fierce intensity at the bar of chocolate.  She stares deeply, her piercing focus growing more and more intense.

Finally, she looks up, a look of frustration in her eyes.

"But...each of the halves are giving off varying amounts of moisture, and are permeable to the environment.  At every moment, they're sloughing off atoms and subatomic particles, varying in functionally unmeasurable, infinitesimal and chaotic ways.  I can't possibly split it perfectly.  It's not possible."

I give her a grin, pick up the bar, and break it in half, roughly down the middle.  I hand her the slightly larger piece.

"Sure it is, dear heart," I say.

Love is more perfect than justice, after all.

Mark Driscoll, Luhv, and the Meaning of NeoReformation

I'm not sure why, precisely, so many folks in my social media feeds seem to care about Mark Driscoll.

Driscoll, in the event you do not know him, was the pastor of a large nondenominational Seattle congregation.  He was the purveyor of a hip, muscular, hyperaggressive style of Christianity.  Jesus was a butt-kicker, according to Driscoll, a manly-man who brooked no mess.

I got to know of him during the brief rise of "emergent" and "emerging" Christianity back in the last decade.  Relative to the deconstructive, self-doubting, pomo crowd that tended to make up that movement, Driscoll was something of an anomaly.

Driscoll's approach to faith was an alpha-male testosterama, and he was perfectly willing to emphasize the "tough" part of "tough love" to the point where the latter seemed to evaporate away into nothing.  He yelled a people a whole bunch, to the point where his preaching reminded me of the pre-fight monologues in the WWE.  Sure, he was confident.  Bullies always project confidence, as they cut down everyone and cement their own power.  Tens of thousands flocked to hear him.  But I never understood the appeal, frankly.  Why would I go to church to be yelled at and berated?

Now, his large church is struggling, and his media-empire is shaken.

I struggle to understand why he should matter.  He's just this one guy, who only ever had authority because people--a tiny fraction of the population of a single nation--gave it to him.  Now, as his pattern of aggression has reached a tipping point, his influence within Christian culture is dissolving.  It felt inevitable.  I feel no shadenfreude-glee at the collapse of his work.  It's just sad.

One lingering fragment of Driscoll's work, though, was that he was supposed to represent a "Neo Calvinism" or...more painfully.. a "Neo-Reformation."

Thing is, I could never see anything new or reforming about anything he was doing.  Oh, sure, he wore hip t-shirts and talked the lingo and used presentation software.  But that was just window-dressing.  It meant nothing.

What Driscoll and Piper and others have been hawking as "new" was just the same old judgmental, isolationist, abstracted-from-reality approach to theology that has always defined Pharisaic faith.  It's the kind of theology that presents "love" as if "love" was just a sound we make.

"Luhv," he would say, but though vibrating air that came out of his well worn vocal cords seemed to be the same sound I make, it meant something completely different.  It meant obedience to power.  It meant control.  It meant the dominance of the strong over the weak.

It meant projecting the dynamics of our primate-nature onto the heavens, and declaring that "God's Love" looked just like you doing exactly what I say or else.  The Creator of the Universe is just a tiny bit more demanding than that.

That's not to suggest that a new reformation isn't necessary.  As fundamentalist literalism has done to scripture what Catholicism once did to ecclesiastical authority, there's a real need for a return to what matters.

Maybe one of these millennia, we'll figure that out.

Monkey Santa Wants Revenge

Last night was my older son's choir concert, and it was woven into the great swirl of seasonal scurrying that makes up this time of year.  The younger spud needed to be at a rehearsal in Vienna at 6, and the choir concert was at 7:30 in Annandale, which meant I was slogging through the worst traffic in America for a good solid hour and a half at the height of rush-hour.  One appreciates the Prius for the traffic-appliance it is at such times.

I made it to the big guy's concert on time, and settled in near the back so's I could book out at 8:30 sharp to go back to Vienna for a 9:00 PM pickup.  The school choirs filed in, and like their high school, they were a wide and hopeful slice of contemporary America.  It was a veritable United Nations, with equal portions of kids of European heritage, Latinos and Asians and Africans.  They were a mix of all faiths, Christian and Muslim and Jewish and whatever they wanted to be.

The singing started, and unlike concerts in elementary school, this wasn't an endurance contest.  They were great.  These kids cared about what they were doing, and were having fun doing it, and it showed.

Well, it did for most folks there.  In the very back of the auditorium was a row of individuals--"students" seems like the wrong word here--who were not there for any discernible reason.  They hooted and catcalled at the girls choir when they came up.  They talked without stopping, through the quiet reflective pieces, in between the songs.

When asked to be quiet, they responded with aggression, to the point where they had to be asked to leave in ways that made it clear the adults involved were quite willing to press the matter.

The rest of the concert was lovely, although I had to book out right before the last song to race back to Vienna to get my youngling.

When I touched base with my wife to debrief, I heard that things had not ended well.  Evidently the group that was asked to leave had not left through the main entrance, but had all filed down the hall towards the choir room before slipping out a back door.

The choirs returned to the choir room to find it ransacked, every bag gone through, dozens of items stolen.  Cops were called.  Police reports were filed.

Happy Holidays.

It was interesting meditating on my reaction.  My primate-self responds in a fairly consistent way to such things, mostly pitching out suggestions that involve Louisville Sluggers and unusual criminal sanctions from late medieval Germany.

My liberal and libertarian selves argued briefly about personal responsibility and the impact of socioeconomic status on social behavior, but considering that most of the choir members victimized were of the same ethnocultural and socioeconomic background, ultimately left and right started listening to my monkey brain as it talked about the how-to's of drawing and quartering.  Who do we know that can lend us us some horses?  Hmmm.

But then, for me, there is always the voice of Jesus.  Pesky, pesky Jesus, who always forces me to consider those places where the bright binary equation of retribution never has a positive result.  Meaning, reality.

Reality, where the role of the one true law is to protect those who are victimized, but also to avoid harming an aggressor--physically or spiritually--to leave open the possibility that they can change.

Because closing out the possibility for change shuts out the whole purpose of Advent, now, doesn't it?

Why Love Wins

My reading list is insane.

Here, I'm not complaining about how many books are in the holding pattern.  I'm saying, "It's insane," as in, DSM-certifiable.   Having just dispatched statistician Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise, I'm now most of the way through Blaise Pascal's Pensees.  Pascal is flawed but undeniably delicious, a delightful mind whose prose shimmers with a salon-sharpened wit.

The next book in the rotation?  A pastel-covered book by popular bestselling Christian author Stormie Omartian.  It's titled The Power of a Praying Cat, or something like that.   And yes, that's her real name, although I'm invariably tempted to write that surname O'Martian.

And then?  Then on to Rob Bell's Love Wins.  See?  Totally crazy.  Wild!  Wanton!  Utter chaos!

That last one I've been meaning to read for a while, particularly as my little church handed Bell's book out to our graduating seniors as they went off to college.  It seemed useful, a gracious and rational counterbalance to the callow dorm-room anti-theism they're likely to encounter.  But I hadn't read it.  Mostly, I've read reviews, some fluffy support, some raging bile, others more measured and balanced.

What intrigues me from my pre-reading, though, is that while Bell makes the theological case for the victory of God's love over all things, he doesn't appear to make the leap into the created order.

Of course we want love to win.  It's love, dammit.  But does it?  If we look out at the world, it often doesn't appear to be the case.  Love is for the weak and the bleeding hearts.   Love gets its [butt] kicked after school.  Love is cut down by AR15 fire as it puts itself between the children and the shooter.  And the kids still die.

Look out at the world.  It's red in tooth and claw, savagely Darwinian and seemingly loveless.  Partisanship wins.  Snark wins.  Hate wins.   But love?  Is there a rational case for the victory of the compassion that is at the heart of what Jesus taught?

Here, my wildly profligate reading has stirred a thought, one I'm chewing over in my mind.   Love wins because love is stronger.   Love is much, much stronger.  Why?

Because love can adapt, and hate cannot.   Love can change, and hate cannot.

A sentient being governed by love as a defining principle will approach another being as having something to offer.  It will encounter a new reality as a new opportunity.   If you love another, you can see from their perspective, moving beyond the confines of your subjectivity into a place in between.  We don't do that perfectly.  The existential walls between us are high.   But we can, nonetheless, get there.  With a little help, sure, but we can get there.

The individual governed by love does not exist wholly within themselves.   They may not embrace everything they encounter, but they're open to new things in every encounter.  That means that when the [poop] hits the fan, they're smart enough to duck, or to at least to close their mouths for a moment.

Love learns.  It grows.  It adapts.  It does not cling to biases.   That means that when the world changes, Love is ready.

Hate?  Hate doesn't do that so well.  Hate only knows one thing: itself.  A being governed by hatred is a being ruled by the self it already knows.  Difference and the Other are to be destroyed or subjugated.  Hate defines itself by rigidly clinging to what it is.  Hate wants power.  Hate wants control.  It seeks to dominate the world, to force the entire universe into the narrative of itself that is the only thing it is willing to hear.

And when it encounters the deep complexity of God's creation, hate rails and snarls and lashes out.  But what hate does not do, because it can't do it, is change.

Eventually, that means that hate is either destroyed by the change to which it cannot adapt or devoured by itself.

Love is what it looks like when sentient beings succeed.  Hate?  Hate is the defining feature of failed individuals, and doomed cultures, and species that have flirted with sentience and then regressed.

Lord help us.

King Lemuel's Valentine

One of the things I do, pretty much without fail every Valentine's Day and every anniversary, is prepare a card for my wife.  That card is handmade, typically with some high-concept idea behind it and with the skill and execution level of a precocious third grader.

In the card is a poem from me to her, pretty much every year.  Some are better than others, as my muse is a bit flighty.  But the poems are invariably meaningful, and they track out across the arc of our marriage in fascinating ways.  I'm not going to share any of them with anyone but her, ever.  They're between us,  and occasionally bawdy, and often speak into those places between us that are ours and no-one elses'.

But one card I can share.

About a decade ago, for an anniversary, I prepped a card with a Proverb in it.  It was a complicated card, involving the construction of a handcrafted binding assembled from paper purchased at a store specializing in artisan-crafted paper.  In it was written, in my own best hand, the final proverb from the Book of Proverbs, the saying of King Lemuel's mother.   It was an affirmation, on that anniversary, of one of the things I love and respect about my wife.

Lemmy's mom taught him what mattered in a woman, and it's a remarkable bit of wisdom from the heart of an ancient sacred tradition.

What it tells men to honor in the women they choose as their spouses.  To put it succinctly, it ain't the booty, and it ain't the drama.  What it also most definitively is not is a mate who is a subordinate.

The woman described in this little bit of scripture is notable for her competence.  She is not her husband's servant, but his strong and capable companion.  She is wise and hard-working, and not just around the house.

She's out there in the marketplace.  She's a public person, active and respected in the broader world.  She's a part of the economy, a human being who is known as a doer, and whose capabilities only bring more honor onto the wise and/or lucky sod who married her.

There was a time in my life, when I was an adolescent pup, when this was not what I wanted.  I was drawn to the messes, the shattered creatives, those who were complicated and just needed me on my white horse to come a-riding in to fix things.  Or so I delusionally told myself.  That didn't work out so good.  Eventually, thank the Maker, I stopped thinking like a child and set aside my childish ways.

After Lady Wisdom graced me with her presence, what I found myself seeking was not a subordinate.  What I was looking for was a companion.  An ezer, to use the Hebrew term from Genesis 2:18.  That means "helpmate," but not in the Mark Driscoll "I help get you a beer while you do important man-things" sort of way.   The word means "ally," as we see it in 1 Kings 20:16.  It is used to describe the help that comes from God, in Psalm 30:11 and 54:6.  It implies...heck, demands...strength.  It does not imply subordination.  It is the farthest thing from that.  Subordination is, after all, one of the curses of the Fall.  Only a weak soul seeks one weaker.

A capable and equal companion is what, if we're honest about reading scripture, makes for a good partner.

That's true no matter what her vocation is, whether she's caring for kids and home and hearth or jetting across the world to Important Meetings with Important People.

Living into that God-ordained reality requires some ego-checking, particularly when your spouse has through her diligence attained an income considerably higher than yours.  If you're a pastor of anything other than a Big Parking Lot Church, that's a likely reality.

But it requires more than that.  It requires that you affirm your partner's vocation as a part of what you value about her.  When she's doing her thing, the goal is to respect that thing.  Honor the gifts and abilities she's been given.  Let her know you see that as part of why you love her.  It's part of what attracts you to her.

It also involves prioritizing your relationship above the other demands on your existence.  Your work is important, but honey child, it ain't your wife.  You make sure you're making time, and giving her space to live out her vocation.  This is not particularly hard, any more than dishes and laundry and getting kids to the dentist is hard.

So give her those things.   Make room for her gifts.  And honor her, and praise her, and tell her she surpasses them all.  "I see what you're doing, my love, and you're amazing."

And now and again, tell her she's beautiful.  More precious than rubies, which should remind you of her lips.  That doesn't ever hurt, particularly when that beauty goes all the way through her.

Love, Dust, and Ashes

With a peculiar admixture of St. Wuventines Day and Ash Wednesday churning about in my head, I found myself reflecting yesterday on an infographic on page one of the WaPo's Science and Health section.

"Love is in the Mind, Not the Heart," it proudly announced.  The graphic explored the neurology of variant forms of emotive response, wrapping up the concept of love in a neat package of chemicals and transmitters.

Attraction?  That thrill of love's first kiss, that whirring surge of excitement when you both realize that the other feels the same way?  That's a heady cocktail of dopamine, noradrenaline, and seratonin.

Sustained attachment?  The gentle contentment of a couple comfortable together after decades, or the deep heart love you feel for your child?  That's an output of oxytocin and vasopressin, the evolved neurochemical response of a social creature.

Now, all of that is true, and measurable.  But just as there are places where faith can stumble, let me say that despite science being a big bucket of awesome most of the time, this is one of those places it flails about miserably.

You can approach love this way, sure.  But it's clumsy and mechanistic, completely divorced from the experience of love.  You've missed it, and missed it completely.  It's like that smart but clueless friend who goes to see a brilliantly acted Shakespeare comedy, and insists on spending the entire time deconstructing the semiotics of meaning underlying patriarchal Elizabethan culture.  They don't laugh.  They aren't participating, or allowing themselves to engage.

And yes, we are mortal beings, creatures woven up of dust and ashes.  But sorting diligently through the dust will not bring you closer to the reality of the experience.  Analyzing the carbonized proteins of the ashes will not make your encounter with another being any richer.

It does not deepen our humanity, not in any way that I can perceive.

Ah well.  Nothing's perfect, I suppose.

Dealing in Absolutes

With the manuscript away and in the hands of my editor, I've found myself re-engaging with the Believer's Guide.  Some if it came as I wove in the excellent edits plugged in by my wife.  You think you've read a thing through enough to catch every typo...but no...

Some of it has come as I have seen that goldarned fifth chapter for what it was.  Ack.  It's a clumsy flesh golem of a Frankenchapter, knit together out of the bits and pieces of essays and bloggery as I struggled to reassemble a stolen manuscript.

But mostly, the concepts stirred about afresh as I explored the heady fusion of a Many Worlds cosmology and classical theology.

When you come back to something after a while, those renewed eyes mean you can enter into a conversation with yourself, challenge yourself, and reconsider your thinking.  In particular, I found myself wondering about one of the sustained themes of the book: the challenge to absolutism.   Drawing from the joyous, endless generativity and freedom implied by a multiverse creation, a core theme of the book involves challenging the idolatrous certainties of both literalist fundamentalism and militant atheism.   And, frankly, any system that assumes that it's got the one final answer.

Absolutism bad, as Multiverse Hulk might say.

But wait, I say.  I do make claims about truth.  Throughout the book, and particularly in it's exploration of ethics, I present a series of arguments for both Love and God.  Throughout, I make the case that the ethic of radical compassion is The Essential Law governing sentient beings, and that love is the essence of God and God's self-expression.

I also argue for the existence of a Creator, The Ground of Being that is and should be the focus of our existence.

So, isn't that an absolute?  Seriously.  Isn't that just the same thing I rail against?  I mulled that one over for a little bit.  Took a good long walk on it, in the brisk cold of an evening.

And on two significant levels, the answer was no.

First, faith---the orienting of one's existence towards God--is not the same thing as orienting oneself towards a finite object or a neatly, cleanly defined system or pattern of understanding.   If you think for a moment you've entirely grasped the full nature of what you have come into encounter with when you stand in the Presence, then you've missed the point.  The thing you grasp cannot be the completeness of it.  It cannot ever be, for God's completeness is without end or limit.

The rigid certainties of the absolutist bear no resemblance to faith.

And love?  Love...understood not as emotion, but as the state of seeking and engaging in a compassionate relation with another free being...is also not an absolute.  It can't be, not if it's authentic, because the compassionate interplay between two free beings is not a finite thing.  Neither is bounded or delimited or set in stone.  Neither is an object.  Neither is an "it," and both are "Thou," as Martin Buber would have put it.

So the rigid certainty of the absolutist bears no resemblance to love, either.

First Presbyterian Church of QWOP

The other day, as a part of his effort to share all good things he encounters with his dad just as I share them with him, my little guy presented me with what he described as the most confoundedly impossible flash game of all time.

The game, a 2008 release entitled "QWOP," is deceptively simple.   It involves trying to get a runner to move down a track using those four keys.  Two control his calves.  Two control his thighs.

But nothing, nothing controls the laughter that comes from the repeated, helpless flailing that ensues when you try to coordinate the whole mess.  My wife and I were both driven to fits of nearly unmanageable giggling at the absurdity of the game.  I had to stop playing, things got so hysterical.  There's a good reason QWOP has become an internet meme in it's own right.  

As simple as it seems, it's an exercise in total floundering incompetence.  Nothing works together the way it should.  Nothing meshes.  What appears on the surface of it to be the most remarkably easy thing is just utterly impossible.   The whole time you play, you find yourself thinking, "My gosh (or words to that effect), I should be able to get this!"  

That breakthrough seems as close to the tips of your fingers as the touch of grapeskin was to the fingers of Tantalus.   And then down again you fall. 

It reminds me, unsurprisingly, of trying to be Christian, and particularly of the efforts Christians put in to being church together.  

Just love one another!  It's so very simple.  L.O.V.E.  How hard could that be?   

And yet Jesus folk have floundered haplessly at the starting gate for two millennia, pounding haplessly at their keyboards, the Body of Christ hopping and stumbling and crashing.  

There are a few tricks to beating QWOP, in my experience.

First, be light of heart.  The more easily you are angered by failure, or get frustrated when things get in your way, the more likely you are to fail.   You're not ever going to get there if you get angry.  Laugh a bit.

Second, be patient.  Keep at it.  If you give up the seventy seventh time you faceplant, you're not going to make the finish line.  It's at One Hundred Meters, by the way.

Third, don't be afraid to look a bit stupid.  If you reach the finish line hopping on one bent knee, waggling one foot in the air as a counterbalance and dragging along a hurdle, hey, you still finished.  Well done, good and faithful QWOPPER, saith the Son of Man, as he stifleth a giggle.  

With those three things, you can beat the game.

God Fearin'

In an interesting piece of  bloggery, Carol Howard-Merritt finds herself wrassling with the concept of "fearing God."  It is, or so our sacred tradition speaks it, the root of all wisdom.  Her struggling with that concept mirrors my own struggling with that concept, which generally takes two tacks.

Tack number one is theological.  If God is love, as we Jesus folk consistently and relentlessly insist, then why would we fear God?   It seems illogical and emotionally inconsistent.

Tack number two is sociopolitical and anthropological.   Within human institutions and cultures, fear of punishment is used to enforce conformity within autocratic cultures and family systems.  Do what I say, because you fear that if you do not, I will verbally abuse you and/or hang you, cut out your intestines in front of you, and then pull you apart with horses.   Generally, the former is family systems and the latter is...um...hopefully not, although I will grant that some families are worse than others.   If that is the character of the fear we are meant to have of God, then God would be little better than an abusive parent or medieval despot.

So is this a salvageable theological concept?

I tend to think so, with some notable caveats from the Apostle Paul.  Here, I'm talking about Paul, the author of the seven letters, not deutero-Paul, the follower of Paul who wrote in his name.  In his letter to the churches in both Rome and Galatia, Paul makes it clear that the purpose of Christian faith is not fear.   We are not meant to be slaves, living in fear, he tells the Romans.  If the Spirit of God lives and moves in us, then our connection to the gracious nature of our Maker frees us from the fear of coercion.  Christian faith is antithetical to "power over," both in our relationship to others and in our relationship with our Creator.  It is not a vassal/liege arrangement and not a social contract, with all the punishment/protection dynamics that such things entail.  That's the heart of the joyous anarchy of grace Paul proclaimed.

Fear of God, then, needs to be decoupled from the idea of social obedience and legalistic interpretations of Christianity.

But when it comes to our encounter with God...those transforming moments that take our faith out of the realm of ritual and abstraction and into the realm of the existential and experiential...fear takes on a different character.

Fear of God arises from the knowledge of God.

First, there is the fear that comes with unbidden theophany.  This does not happen often.  Being in the presence of the Numinous Other is the sort of thing that causes hair to stand on end, buckles knees, and leaves you unable to speak.  I've heard it described as a feeling of vertiginous awe, like looking out over a vast precipice.   That's close, but in my experience it's a bit more like that feeling when the railing you're leaning against gives way.  You are not observing the vastness from a distance.  It is grasping you, utterly present to you.

Fear?  Yes. When there is nothing between your face and God's face, yes.

Second, those moments when we feel most frequently connected to our Maker, at least in my experience, are moments of immense grace and calm.   We get there through prayer and meditation, through contemplation and self-stilling.  Emptied of self, we feel no terror, because we are consumed and suffused with God's Spirit.  "Feeling," in the sense of emotional affect, almost disappears in that great radiant wash of peace.   As a still fledgling and semi-competent mystic, I cherish those moments.  They are the existential anchor points for my faith, just as I'm sure they were for dear brother Paul.

That said, I don't live every moment that way.  I get angry.  I get confused.  I become lustful, and bitter, and impatient.   I get lost.

And in those all-too-frequent moments, I recall that depth of connectedness.  The light of that grace is a fearful thing when you are in the thrall of something...else.  Seeing how deeply the brokenness in yourself impedes your ability to live into the grace you have come to know is frightening.  Loss of that connection, of that grace, of the hope and strength it entails...that is a terrifying thing, because God as Other is a terrifying thing.  Not just because you're lost.  But because you know how deeply your lostness is incompatible with the grace you have known.

That fear is the root of right action, even in the separation.  Feeling the loss, and in the throes of the dark night of the soul, you nonetheless conform yourself to the grace you cannot feel.

And as wisdom is right action, that form of fear is, as I see it, the root of wisdom.

Faith and Self Love

In a post over at thehardestquestion, Carol Howard Merritt recently pitched out a really solid reflection on 1 Corinthians 3:1-9.   The essence of her reflection revolves around the contrast between Spirit and Flesh that the Apostle Paul glances off of in this section, but develops more fully elsewhere.  She then uses that to reflect on the toxic approach our culture takes towards the flesh, particularly the flesh of women who look at themselves and find that they are not the airbrushed perfection they're told they're supposed to be.   It's open, honest and thought provoking, as her writing tends to be.

In response to a comment I left, Carol said:


"How do you understand/explain the nuances between loving oneself and self-seeking?"

This had the unfortunate effect of sending me off into a conceptual cascade that was waaay to long for a comment, which I'm going to subject you to here.   Just warnin' ya.  There's still time to escape.

Honestly, when I went a-parsing down that road, I found myself mightily struggling with the idea of "loving myself."

Love, as I understand it both conceptually and from the ground of my faith, is relational.  It's something that exists between selves.  In it's highest form, it bridges the chasm of existential separation that divides us, as in it we share in the joys and sorrows of the beloved.  Not to mention it being both the Most Excellent Way and the essential nature of God.

But when I look to the heart of Christian faith, to the Great Commandment, self-love is hard to find.  Love of God?  Check.  Love of Neighbor.  Check.  But of self?  Hmmm.  It's the measure of how you love your neighbor...but...um...there's not much else there.

Meaningfully saying "I love myself" requires a fragmentation of being, a separation of self from self.  You can only love yourself if you are not at one with yourself.  This is the odd actuality of our existence as sentient and self-aware creatures.  In self-awareness, the self reflects on itself, and is aware of itself as a being relative to other beings.  There is, in self-awareness, the capacity to look at who you are and be either pleased or horrified.   It's an essential characteristic of being human.

I'd insert a Sarah Palin joke here, but my self awareness tells me that wouldn't be gracious.

Oh.  Oops.

But unlike loving others unconditionally, loving yourself unconditionally often results in sociopathic unpleasantness.   That's Narcissus in a nutshell, forever poring over his beauty and the wonder that is him, trapped in a recursive feedback loop of self-regard.  It's true for self-hate, too.  Dark Narcissus can sit by that bleak pool, forever lamenting his thin lipped pimply visage and his stammering incompetence at all things.   That form of self-seeking-self-love is a closed circle prison, harming not just an individual but also those around them.

For self-love to be transforming and liberating, it needs to be both rational and ecstatic.   The rational part springs from our self-awareness as a thinking being.  Presbyterians do this great.  Ecstasy, though, comes harder for us.  The term "ecstasy" means essentially to "stand outside" of oneself.   Love does this.  And the love of God that is the first element of the great commandment does this best.  Pouring all your heart and all your mind and all your soul into the Love from which we all spring is the highest form of human ecstasy.

This love, as I see it, is also a form of love of self.  That's not to say that we are God.  Not at all.  Do I look like Feuerbach?   Yeah, ok, maybe a little, but I don't think like him theologically.

Rather, this comes from the rather theologically basic statement that God knows us completely, and that God knows what we would be were we fully conformed to God's grace.  It is that self that is worthy of love.  That's not a love of the self you know.  Not the love of the self whose value is defined by your sociocultural context.  But a love of the self God sees, a self transformed as you empty yourself into God, and the love of God fills you and transforms you and heals and completes you.  George MacDonald, C.S. Lewises master, described this as your "True Name," your identity as you would be were you perfected.  As, in the knowledge of my Creator, I already am. 

That is the self that I am not.  And as I love God, that is the self that I love, unconditionally. 

That, as I still struggle my way through it, is the difference.

M-Theory, M-Theology, and the Nature of God

Hawking and Mlodinow have, in establishing that the nature of the universe involves a functionally infinite array of different universes, inadvertently given viable rational ground for the existence of God.  But...err...which God?

The scope of the M-Theory universe is dizzyingly, immensely, terrifyingly vast, and contains the possibility of almost anything.   Among the panoply of possible modes of being, getting to a being that is omniscient and omnipotent is conceptually easy.  Such a being would be inseparable from the processes of creation that blort all things into reality.  It would be a self-aware and endlessly generative Reality Engine.  But is this the God that Christianity claims is the source and font of all being?

Such an entity easily passes muster as the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle, or the distant, abstracted Clockmaker of Thomas Jefferson and the Enlightenment Deists.   It's also precisely the sort of entity that might have I Am That I Am on its nametag at this year's Higher Being Society Annual Convention. 

So we can kinda work our way to a Creator, immortal, invisible, in light inaccessible, hid from our sight.  But though we may love that old hymn, this isn't enough.  Does the God of M-Theology manifest the single primary defining characteristic of the God Jesus kept on about?  Can we point to such a Creator and assert that God is Love?

Honestly, though the M-playing field has gotten a whole bunch larger, I don't think that's any more difficult an assertion to make than it was back when the universe was only our little linear sliver of spacetime.  The disconnected, unmoved, unfeeling, utterly uncompassionate god-cog of Deism has always been inadequate conceptually, and the One Step Beyond we've taken into the multiverse doesn't change that.

The assumption of a being that is "impassible," meaning beyond the passions and feelings of humankind, is one of the underlying presumptions of most Greek philosophy about the nature of deity.  The Stoic logos, for instance, is neither personal or "feeling."  But the omniscience we suggest as a necessary aspect of such a being incorrectly approaches knowledge as abstraction.  Our human assumption is that an eternal, all-aware being would know things as we know.  We assume that our Creator knows us in the same way that even though I'm sitting in my church office, I know the wall in my living room is red.   Or through our symbolic forms of language or mathematics. 

But this is such a limited way of knowing.   Omniscience has always seemed meaningless absent knowledge that isn't just conceptual in character, but that is ontological in character.  Meaning, the Maker knows all things...knows you...in the same essential way that you know that you now exist. Right now.  As you read this.

Though it's beyond our capacity for grasping, such a being's level of awareness would annihilate any meaningful distinction between itself and others.  In forming us, it knows us, and approaches us as not an it, or an "other," but as a "Thou." 

This being is and always has been the heart and goal of faith.  If love...the highest gift of our faith...is our yearning for participation in the other, and compassion for the other, then within the probabilistic boundaries of a functionally infinite multiverse, our capacity for reason can give assent to the possibility of what faith has always known.  That to which faith cries out, O God, is and always has been, love.  And now that faith is evidently necessary to understand the infinitely manifold providence of creation as it actually is, and infinite love can be discerned streaming up from that probability fountain, well, gosh.  Quantum cosmology and the deep yearning of Christian mysticism seem finally united.

But what does this mean for us?  What does M-Theology do for the way we live our day-to-day lives?

Further up and further in...

I Am Not A Dog

As I gaze over at the little bundle of hyperactivity that is now napping on the mat by the front door, I marvel at just how genetically similar she and I are. Of the twenty-four thousand or so genes that make up the human genome, we share around 75% with our canine pals. That's a significant majority, the kind of majority that Nancy Pelosi can only fantasize about. You know, when she's not fantasizing about Fabio, human cloning, and hot tubs full of ghee. But that's a mental picture best left unvisualized.

Yet I am quite evidently not a dog, as much as that lifestyle might occasionally have appeal. The 25% of my genetic material that is not shared results in an entirely different species of mammal. Through the addition of different genetic material, the entire character and nature of a creature is changed. Though I share varying proportions of genetic material with most organic life, it's why I am not a dog, or yeast, or a bonobo monkey.

Which leads me to wonder why so many folks are so incapable of seeing Christianity for what it is. Here I flagrantly steal from De Debbil Dawkins Himself, who introduced to the world the concept of memetics as something that defines the norms of a culture or subculture. Memes are the symbolic equivalent of genes, units of information that self-propagate within and across cultures. They are ideas, thoughts, and concepts, all of which transform the character of a society or social organism.

In order to fully grasp the nature of a culture or a movement, you need to look at the totality of it's memetic context. Only by understanding the complex interplay of those norms and symbolic frameworks can you get a handle on the nature of the critter. If you leave something out, miss something, or willfully overlook something, then your understanding of the entity you are observing will be waaaay off. Yeah, we share 96% of our genetic material with baboons. But though the mechanics of things like human digestion can be partially understood by observing baboons, the complexities of our culture and our capacities for reason and symbolic exchange are significantly more than four percent different.

Tea party participants excepted, of course.

Which is one of the many reasons it strikes me as absurd to approach any tradition based on a refusal to honestly assess the full scope of it's memetics. Within my tradition, there are those who blithely ignore any intimation that Christian faith shows the memetic influence of other traditions. Like, say, some of the evident traces of the cultic practices of the Canaanite High God El, who merits a direct shout out in a couple of places in the Hebrew Scriptures. Or the rather more destructive spin introduced by dualism, which makes it's entrance into Jewish thought immediately following the Babylonian diaspora. That binary Marduk/Tiamat cosmology clearly informed Jewish apocalyptic, and then spilled over into Christian apocalyptic thought. There it remains, despite the best efforts of Jesus to subvert it. Recognizing the pastiche of cultural norms, insights and observations that have formed the symbolic framework of a tradition is essential if you are to truly grasp it's nature.

Then again, those who would dismiss Christianity as ignorant or inherently destructive based on a carefully selected subset of our textual material aren't getting it, either. For Christians, the teachings and life of Jesus of Nazareth are radically defining. He is, for our worldview, far more influential than that 4% of genetic material that differentiates me from a creature that seeks to impress the ladies by parading around with a big blue butt. And no, I don't, not even in the privacy of my own home.

The love ethic Christ embodied is so intensely defining as to transform the nature and character of the entire Christian worldview. If you look at the totality of our conceptual genome, it is what makes us what we are. It makes the difference.

Of course, when we go beyond approaching Christianity academically, and it becomes experiential and existential and...spiritual, things get a bit different. Those of us who know ourselves as Jesus people know it goes deeper than norms and symbols and memetic epistemology.

But to get there, you have to be a part of it.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad God?

As one of the three progressive Christians with a robust theology of hell, recent conversations require me to explore if my heckology counts as a form of coercion.

Hellfire and damnation tend to be the bludgeons that drive a significant portion of Christian "evangelism." You reach out because of your deep love for the unsaved unbelievers, knowing that unless they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, they will be cast eternally into the Lake of Fire. This is what leads Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron to get out there with their bananas. It's why Jack Chick is still in business. It's why that guy with the bullhorn is yelling bellowing scripture passages on your campus. And though this bugs the bejabbers out of most human beings, the folks who do it think they're doing right. Why?

Because as folks approach that tension between 1) the central ethic of love for God and neighbor and 2) the many warnings of the eternal consequences that come when you don't listen to Jesus, they become fixated on door number 2. You've got to save the sinners! Save 'em from HEEELLLL! Hell becomes the focus, and the Gospel becomes all stick and bad cop, as the masses run screaming from Jeezilla and into church as he rains atomic hellfire breath down on unbelieving Tokyo. Fear can be a powerful motivator, and folks are happy to use it to coerce belief.

Thing is, my transpersonal spirituality is completely compatible with eternal judgment. I view the existential boundaries between us as ultimately meaningless, and creation as the canvas onto which our eternity is painted. If we hurt others, that's our pain. Forever. If we seethe with hatred towards our ex, that hatred will burn in us permanently. Everything we do is, for all of the protestations of this Heraclitan age, etched forever into the face of being, of which we are a part.

So... does this count as coercion? Does my spiritual awareness of my connectedness to the beings around me and to creation "coerce" me into being more gracious and kind towards them?

Well, yes and no. There are times, particularly when I'm ragingly cheesed at someone, that my monkey-gut-response is to bare fangs and go for the jugular. At those moments, my cognitive and heart assent to the idea that the universe is not meaningless and without justice holds me back. Yeah, it might feel good at that moment to let 'em have it. Rip 'em a new one. It might even have immediate practical value. But ultimately, such actions have profound and permanent consequences. So I steer away from destructive actions with the same aversion that one might feel for a yawning precipice or that guy on the corner who's shouting obscenities at no-one in particular and brandishing a Glock. Go that way, says the tightness in your gut and the rapid beating of your heart, and bad things will come of it. In some sense, then, I do have a fear of hell, and it does occasionally guide how I act.

On the other hand, I don't really feel that as coercive. The love-ethic imperative that Jesus taught is just an inescapable part of the fabric of all being. That there are ontological consequences of living by it is, for me, no more forced than the breaths that I must take to maintain consciousness. Sure, I could resent breathing. I could be annoyed that I'm forced into the process of respiration, and shake my fist at my Maker for coercing me into filling my lungs without ever first consulting me or respecting my free will. I could fight the power, hold my breath, and pitch a defiant hissy until I pull a total faceplant.

But that would be pointless. Stupid, even.

Just as organic life is maintained by the processes of breathing, so justice, peace, and our place in the fabric of God's creation are established by our participation in the ethic of love that radically defines us. That's not coercion. It's just the Way of things.

Love, Love, Love

As I traipse through my blog feeds, I make sure a take a little time for the folks with whom I disagree. From secular neoconservatives to fundamentalists to atheists, it's important to stay in touch with perspectives that challenge your own...particularly if those perspectives come from folks who are literate, intelligent, and articulate.

One that I hit a couple of times a week is Hemant Mehta's blog, Friendly Atheist. Mr. Mehta is the atheist who "sold his soul on e-Bay" a couple of years back, promising to at least attend the worship services of the faith that put in the highest bid for him. He went for a little over $500, by the way. The blog alternates between "isn't religion doofy" snark and interesting reflections on non-theistic ethics. Hemant himself seems like he would be entertaining company.

In a recent post, he put up a list one of his Christian friends had written, in which he laid out the responsibilities Jesus people have towards everyone they encounter if they expect to establish a sense of unity and gracious presence. What interested me was the response of Mr. Mehta's mostly atheistic readers to the the last question on the list:

• Do I love all beings, and if not, am I willing?

Of the three dozen commenters who responded, some noted that this ethic seemed to result in people whose lives were filled with a radiant amount of peacefulness. A larger number, particularly those who felt compelled to directly respond to the question, replied with: "No, and I'm not willing."

Recognizing that love for all beings is really, really hard for human beings, it is nonetheless the roots-rock central ethical core of Christian faith. It has it's ground in our understanding of both the nature of God and the essence of God's expectations for us. Absent that mystical ground, though, is there a basis for loving all beings...meaning one's enemy, too...in humanism? Not respecting their intellectual ability. Not tolerating their difference. But loving them, caring for them, and being disposed positively towards them even in the face of radical difference?

I think it's possible, but saw little evidence of it over at Friendly Atheist. What thinkest thou?

Harmonizing

I encountered this delightful little video of scientists "singing" the praises of creation through the miracle of FaceBook, and felt obligated to pass it on after offering up the requisite tip o' the hat to Jeremy over at Master's Way. It's simple enough in it's own way, just another in a series of rather marvelous applications of Autotune. Lil Wayne hath wrought far more than one might have imagined.

After watching it, I drifted for a while into a reverie about that soaring place where science and faith almost...almost...meet. What I find fascinating about this video are two discrete but related things.

First, that it comes so very close to expressing the delight in the connectedness of all things that defines the experience of mystics within each of the world's religious traditions. Listening to this assemblage of scientists autotune their paean to the interwoven and interdependent structures of spacetime, I hear them harmonizing with Thomas Merton and Jacob Boehme and St. John of the Cross. Sure, it might be Carl Sagan, but with only minor tweaking it could also be Jalal'adin Rumi, or Chuang Tzu, or Thich Nat Hanh. The wonder they feel from their science is a close cousin to the wonder that the mystic intuits in those fleeting moments of union with all things.

Second, I found myself connecting connectedness to the core ethic of Christian faith. Folks of a radically atheistic persuasion will often argue that faith...particularly Christian faith, but they'll happily go after whatever you've got...is fundamentally evil. It's inherently irrational and opposed to science. Worse yet, it turns human beings against one another. Makes us hateful naaarsty peopleses!

But Jesus of Nazareth's message is a radical proclamation of orientation to the Other, a declaration of the fundamental unity of creation. We creatures are not separate from one another. We don't exist for ourselves alone, isolated from all other things.

Instead of focusing on our own interests, the central and defining fundamental of Christian faith is the ethic of love. That demands that we see ourselves not as isolated, separate beings, but instead calls us to understand ourselves in light of our relationship both to other beings and the One Who Is.

At its essence, Christian faith and ethics do not stand in opposition to the wonder many scientists feel at the intricate interweaving of ecosystems and cosmological constants.

It's a different spin, perhaps. But a harmonious one.

Trolls and the Holy Ghost Dialectic

One of the things the emergent church gets pinged on a great deal is our relentless focus on conversation. We chat. We gather. We discuss. We convene. The idea behind those conversations is to get to know the other, to open ourselves to who they are. In those exchanges, we find understanding of the other. More importantly, it is in conversations with those who are not exactly "us" that we can find the deepest and most potent movements of the Holy Spirit.

The problem for emergents, as I see it, is that we don't really quite grasp how significant the thing we're doing is. While this approach is a foundational and roots-rock approach to both proclaiming and living into the Reign of God, we keep it in house. We like to talk grace amongst ourselves, but often don't realize that the same grace needs to be intentionally applied to our more challenging relationships. It needs to be expressed outside of comfortable places, in relationships that go beyond cups of coffee or tasty microbrewed beer shared among like-minded people.

We need to be graceful to our trolls.

Trolls, as anyone in the blogosphere knows, are those true-believing souls who take it upon themselves to attack and subvert those who fail to meet the pureblood standards of their particular belief. I've had several over the years. I've had hard-core neoatheist trolls, who have mocked my faith and my stupid fake Easter bunny God. I've had hard-core fundamentalist trolls, who have hurled snippets of scripture and bitter invective in equal parts. I am currently in between trolls, although there are some recent promising prospects. Hi Mark!

It's easy...and, in it's own way, fun...to hammer on these folks when they show up. What is not quite so easy is to realize that when Jesus told us to love our enemies, he was talking about trolls. It's a tough thing to do. Our immediate and human desire is to go to war, to open up the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

This is what the trolls want, although it isn't what they need. They look to the troll-lords on shout radio and shout-tv for inspiration. Trolls want to rant and bellow. Trolls want to find self-affirmation in a seething and closed-circle hatred of those who are different. As such, they are part and parcel of the cult of baseless self-esteem that has come to define our increasingly blighted society. But what they need is the same thing that we all need: the transforming grace of Christ and the Holy Spirit.

So...get to know your troll. Hold on to what is good, and defend what is right, but still be sure to show 'em a little lovingkindness. When they spit on that grace, offer up some more, and then some more after that. The font of our grace is, after all, infinite and without measure.

Evil is, after all, not overcome with more evil.

Who Shouldn't I Like?

At a recent meeting in which I was asked my opinion about a range of individuals, I found myself in the peculiar position of being asked, only quasi-rhetorically: "Who DON'T you like?"

I've always had a relatively easy time getting along with most people. Generally, I find that there is more pleasure to be found in seeking common ground with another than whackin' away at them with my Mighty Mjolnir of Righteousness. Even in those instances where I find myself in diametric opposition to someone on an issue, that quest for common ground is still front and center.

Why? I guess I just have this weird fixation on grace.

It's gratifying to enter into a web ranting contest with a rabidly and profanely aggressive neoatheist and come out the far side with a sense that some mutual respect has been found. It's spiritually uplifting to have a strident fundamentalist start a conversation with you by hurling both scripture and invective, and work your way around to realizing that hating one another isn't necessary. Those conversations smell far more richly of victory than napalm in the morning ever could.

It doesn't always work, though. You can't always get folks to open up. Reason, humor, silliness, gentleness, and appeals to shared values and common humanity sometimes run crashing up against the brick wall of deeply seated hatreds and bias. People who have been so deeply hardened by cynicism and are woven through with negativity that they can't recognize any common value at all. Folks who are relentlessly narcissistic or engage in fetishistic worship of their own groupthink just can't recognize others as children of God.

And there are people like that out there. You just can't get through to them. I'm pretty sure I'd have trouble getting along with Mahmoud Ahmedinajad. He's just going to hate me, no matter what I do and however I approached him. By his standards, I'm monstrous, my wife and kids are the personification of evil, and I'm pretty sure there's nothing I could do to make our time together pleasant.

Maybe we could talk about fashion. He and I seem to have similar incompetence in that area. Or perhaps I could help him learn how to grow a real beard. That'd be a great topic, I'm sure.

Ann Coulter would be equally trying company. I'm progressive, and that means that I am someone to be vilified and mocked in terms that generally embarrass decent company. Like Ahmedinajad, she relies utterly on her ability to polarize communities and condemn those who are different. People who build political or commercial careers by demonizing others tend to be a tad on the hard side to get along with. And Dear Ms. Coulter really has put her heart and soul into making herself a caricature of the ranting, smug, and rigid conservative. That's why Ms. Huffington keeps her on retainer. If she ever showed signs of being pleasant to a leftist, she'd never publish a book again. It would also blow that whole fascist Cruella De Vil schtick she's got goin' on.

I'm also fairly sure ten minutes in the company of Perez Hilton would be nine minutes and forty seven seconds too long. As someone whose entire existence is dedicated to cattily defacing the lives and reputations and images (ew) of others, I'd doubt his soul has escaped unscathed. I could be wrong on that one, but whenever I've gone on his gossip site (research purposes only, mind you), I've felt like Nosferatu sunbathing on the Cote D'Azure. Only the other way around, if such a thing is possible. The absence of light is so intense, it burns.

Any openly gay man who can manage to be so impressively cruel, self absorbed and foul tempered as to draw censure from most of America's gay rights organizations must be a real joy to be around.

That I can't imagine being in close proximity to any of these folks is one thing. Liking them may not be possible.

But though friendship with folks like these might not be possible, hating them is also not necessary. Opposing? Yes. Resisting their influence? Viewing them as enemies of what is good? Absolutely. But hate never serves any purpose.

We are permitted to have folks we just don't like. That we still have to love them is the great challenge of Christian faith.