Objectivity...

There are parts of me that lean toward fervent acts of faith and other parts of me that learn toward hard, rational and objective study and critique of religion.

I mean to an outside observer religion can look like lots of things, a tool for establishing community, a system of rules and paradigmatic stances which are designed to "enslave" a people, or just plain ludicrousness. But to one who believes it is all encompassing. History, life, choices, the future, everything can be interpreted through ones beliefs. The Objective/Critical view and the Subjective/Interpretive view are at odds, at least for me. I do not hope to justify my faith with a rational explanation of what I believe. If anything, I am more likely to use rationality as a tool to serve my faith rather than a tool to verify it. If rational thought were more fundamental, and capable of explaining faith, then faith would not be needed, we would have a clear explanation through reason. Reason then becomes not a power in itself, but a method subject to use by Faith.

Anyway, before I spiral too far into non-sense. I am taking a class about the Dead Sea Scrolls. I am trying to understand the sect that created the scrolls in an objective sense. I am trying to look at them as themselves, not with the baggage of history that followed them. As I do so I cannot help but see some of the thoughts of their theology born forth into Christianity. I end up seeing them as a precursor, or at least a stepping stone toward what I believe. In the lens of history there are two ways to view this. One is to say that God, in his wisdom was paving the way for Jesus, his Christ. These sects in the desert were mere foreshadowing of what was to come. This is a highly subjective view, where I view history with a purpose, and see the work of a personality which is steering history. The other view is that intellectually the DSS sect probably affected the development of Christian thought either directly through interaction of members of the sect with the founders of Christianity or indirectly through associations and coincidence. The objective view might see the link between the two belief systems, but would not see the link as part of a direction in History.

So which is right? I would say neither is wrong, or right. The second view describes what we can physically ascertain. We can verify the tenets of a sects beliefs and compare them with another sect. We can find textual similarities that point to similar religious idioms and thought. We can not proximity and draw conclusions about sectarian interactions. All these things are verifiable, and clear. When we start to see the workings of a guiding hand on historical events, it is not objective, it is an act of faith. To assign purpose to history is faith, faith in something which is capable of shaping history, i.e. God.

To stop short of proclaiming God's hand in history is safe. It is verifiable(in a shallow sense). It is not blind or daring. It is a commitment to a fragmented understanding of life, and humanity. I don't mean "fragmented", in a derogatory sense, but if there is no purpose in history, then it is just an amalgam of events strung together in a weakly causal sense over a spanse of time. While later events depend on the occurrence of earier events, those earlier events did not occur in order for the later events to happen. There is no "telos" to time for an objective viewer.

So here I am, beginning to formulate thoughts regarding our first papers for this class and I find that I need to be careful to keep my tendency of reading history in an inspired sense and to stick to what can be documented/explained using the evidence at hand.

Faith Not Magic

Christianity is not magic. There are many that talk of a belief in Christ as if it is a mystical/magical experience. It is not. It is about faith. Magic implies that one has a certain power to "conjure" or affect change on some unseen power not yet documented by science. There are formulas, incantations, techniques and manuals for performing magic. Christianity is not about having the right words to say or doing a sacrifice on the right day. There is something called Orthopraxis, or right practice, but that is wholly different from magical ritual. If anything the practice of the Christian faith is necessarily flawed, not that we should not attempt to practice, but rather it is not humanly possible to acheive the totality of Christian practice, hence the need for Christ.

Really Christianity is about relationships. First and foremost is one's relationship with God. Any acts that God chooses to perform are expressly of his will, it is not the perfection of ones prayer which binds God into a certain action. It is not explicitly the taking of Communion that restores ones soul to its natural place. God gives us what he does because he wills it to be so. Now that being said, God makes promises. He promised Abraham that he would be a father of nations, Abraham had faith AND God accounted that faith to him as righteousness. I think the last part is important. Abraham was not a particularly great man, he was not someone which special spiritual powers, he just believed what God said. It was God that made Abraham righteous because of Abraham's belief. I want to qualify the word "because" in that last sentence, it is not a strictly causal relationship. God chose to honor Abraham's faith, for God's own reasons. This is a personal relationship that typified by one party honoring something from the other side. I think of the way that I want to do things for my child, I see him smile and I want to talk to him, even baby-talk to him. My infatuation with my little boy is exacerbated by his cuteness, but his cuteness is not the cause of my attention to him. I still choose to attend to him and there are times when I must focus my attention elsewhere, like now when I am not in the same place as my child. He can be as cute as he wants to be right now, but I will not be able to attend to him -- so his actions aren't causal. In the same way, Abrahams actions are not causal, God and Abraham had a relationship, and God chose to honor Abraham.

In the same way that God honored Abraham, he honors us as Christians. We are told to break bread in remembrance of Him, and we do. There is nothing magical about the act, but God honors our symbol of faith, because he said he would. It is not the preist that makes the bread and wine into Christ's body, it was Christ when he said, "This is my body... This is my blood", he honors us through out time because we keep his imperative, "Do this in remembrance of me". When one takes Communion in a disorderly way(without preparation of ones heart and mind) they are not fulfilling the command(and I say command in a qualified sense, like mitzvah, a command which should be followed through with joy) "Do this in remembrance of me." Rather they condemn themselves through delusion, they profane the Eucharist by treating it like magic, like the act of taking the bread and wine is what matters, not like they should be actively reaching out to God, seeking to change, and become closer to God. That delusion while it may seem like it has no consequence is dangerous, it is what removes the soul from Christianity. It is a reduction of a relationship with God, to a practice of religion. This is what Jesus rebuked the Pharisees about, they performed all the rituals, but not because of their faith in God, not because they wanted to understand and become closer to God, but because they thought that if they kept the commandments that they were righteous. This brings us back to Abraham, he was not called righteous for his actions, but his faith. Granted his faith affected his action and as James wrote in his epistle, "faith without works is dead", but it is not the place of humans to judge the works of others. We can advise or try to correct others, but we should not judge others unworthy or worthy because of their actions. There are many people that do good things for the wrong reasons and while that does not taint the quality of their works, it does not mean that they are good people. Conversely, there are many who cannot help but do bad things, or at least undesirable things, though they have the best of intentions. There may not be excuses for their actions, and every person should bear the consequences of what they do, but one should exhort those who do bad things to do good things and also to bear the consequences of their poor choices.

Anyway, I reached a little beyond my intended scope. My point is that Christianity is not meant to be a secret religion where one advances to levels of greater understanding or power. It is the development of self-knowledge and knowledge of God, through a life long working relationship with God. If God grants us a blessing it is his will, but not a result of some set of prescribed actions we take. Rebuke those who say things like "tithe and you will become rich", "Just pray and you will be healed". Those things may happen, but only if God sees to do so. God is not our genie, or our servant, if he serves us it is out of his compassion for us, not because we have said the right prayer 50 times. For our part, imagine us as the child in a parent-child relationship. A good parent is not going to abandon their child for being bad, but they aren't going to be happy about it. A good child works to please their parent, and while the standards of what a child might be able to do don't meet up with what a parent could do themselves(like a mishapen arts and crafts project or a poorly drawn picture), a parent enjoys gifts from their children, they enjoy seeing their child help out around the house, or try to do chores despite what they might have missed along the way. A good parent enjoys those things AND they work with the child to do those things more perfectly. God is working with use to do everything more perfectly but He finds great joy in seeing us try to do good, emulating His example.

The only thing

It struck me today as I thought about the phrase "vanity of vanities" about how much of life is actually worth something(very little, and I was spurred to this blog-thought because of Fr. Patricks Christmas address at the HROC site). I think about everything I have done, everything I have gained and the only thing that I feel is a truly creative, beautiful thing is my son. My wife and I have produced a beautiful little boy. How will I be able to communicate to him that nothing in the world(by world I mean, cars, houses, money, etc) really matters. I want him to know that his purpose as a human is to search for love, for life, for God and all those things converge.

I like my car, my house, my laptop, but they do very little to make me a better person. I do not love God more because of my car. I do not feel invigorated and alive because of my laptop. I do not feel complete and fulfilled because of my house. Those things satisfy a baser desire for comfort, for status, or in the vernacular -- bling. They are vanities in a world of vanities. My wife and my son are what I thank God for, they invigorate me, they make me feel loved and fulfilled. My friends complete that circle, my family makes me stronger. Every "thing" I have is just that, a thing and just as my body will some day be buried and decompose, so will all those things. I believe however my friendships, my love for my son and wife, my search and desire for God are eternal. Those relationships will reverberate through the people I meet and keep in contact with, I pray that I make a positive impact and that I will represent what it is to be human in a good way.

BTW, when I first read Ecclesiastes and saw the phrase "vanity of vanities" I read it as a superlative, that somehow it was the vainest of all vain things, but I see a different meaning now. Vanity of vanities can also be read as cherishing that which is vain, or taking vanity in vain things. I think both ideas are worth pursuing and perhaps the phrase was constructed with both meanings in mind.

Friday Nights

After my case was adjudicated in a juvenile hearing, I was sentenced to do community service. I did some of that service with the person whose house I broke into. I helped her at a soup kitchen in downtown Seattle. Most of the community service was done at KCC however. I was never an outgoing person and never really developed into one, so I didn't have a huge social life at the time. This community service arrangement at my church was very convenient since it meant that I could do the community service very quickly and for a place that I was invested in. At the time I used to clean and setup for a Friday night youth hangout at the church. I would vacuum, and stock the fridge and candy counter. I would put out the sign and basically get everything ready for what was at times 80 or 90 teenagers who would hang out in the basement of a house on church grounds. The purpose of the place was to give kids a place to be where there was adult supervision, fun stuff to do, and no drugs or alcohol. There were opportunities to talk about God and the night usually began with a prayer for the people that helped out. There wasn't a lot of pushing though. We weren't there to tell every teenager about how they needed Jesus or they would burn. For something like 2 years I helped run that hang out. Eventually attendance fizzled and I think they wanted to use the space for something else.

I thought about this today as I spoke to my friend Aaron. I met Aaron something like 9 or 10 years ago when I used to go a coffee house held at Holy Resurrection. I went there with Katrina and it was one of the first encounters I had with Orthodoxy. I remember encountering people that had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to be Christian and I found that inviting. I wanted to learn more and it sparked my interest in this Ancient form of my faith. As I spoke with Aaron today I remembered helping setup or teardown some nights at Holy Resurrection's coffee house. Maybe it was just familiar for me to serve in that way. I kinda miss it and I feel a little out of place sometimes when I have nothing to do in a social setting. I went to the Christmas Coffee house held this year at Holy Resurrection. It was definitely cool, but I just felt old and out of place. I wanted to help setup or do something but I got there after most of the work was already done and there were plenty of people already doing stuff. There was also a significantly different tone to the purpose of the event. Maybe it was just that particular coffee house, but I remember the purpose of the old coffee houses were to open the church up to the community. There would be college students, drunks, random people passing by who would stop in, have a free cup of coffee. Some would ask questions, some would look around and leave. The Christmas coffee house seemed more like a performance designed for the OCF audience, not for anyone who wanted to stop by.

A new year

New Years is always a time of reflection, planning, and self evaluation for me. Here in the Northern Hemisphere we celebrate our new year with the cold of winter. I feel like the weather sets my mood as I look back on what the previous year brought and I prepare for the upcoming year.

This last year was dedicated to transitioning from a couple to a family. Nicole and I got pregnant last January and spent the first 10 months of 2007 figuring out what we wanted for our new baby. We talked about how we want to raise him, about his religious identity, about whether he would be turn out to be a boy or a girl. It was a hard and exciting process that I feel only barely prepared me for fatherhood. In those moments as our son Asher was born something happened inside me that changed my identity forever. I saw his bluish little body, gasping for breath and I could barely contain myself. In that room I had a foretaste of what my future would be. I was the happiest and most fearful I can every remember being in my entire life. That little baby was my son, and I can't imagine ever not caring about him.

After he was born I realized that parenthood is work. It is not something that just happens. At 3 in the morning you don't want to change diapers, but you have to. I have a habit of sleeping through Asher's cries, so my wife takes the brunt of the work. I try to help her out, letting her sleep early while I stay up with Asher to feed him, but in the grand scheme of things I am getting off easy. The other thing is that you never have a day off from being a parent. Even if you manage to get a babysitter and schedule a date with your wife, you can't help but think about whether he is ok. I am forever changed, I believe for the better.

This coming year I want to focus on growing up. I need to regain some self-control, and discipline myself to accomplish the tasks I set out to do. My ability to execute something that takes a lot of time has been shoddy in the past. I have a habit of focussing on things that are right in front of me and not planning out what is to come. I want to change that and I am going to start by choosing my goals and breaking them down into manageable chunks. Even God didn't create everything in a day.

I want to be a better father. I want to be able to teach my child how to be a boy and then a man. I believe that also means that I need to focus on my spiritual life. I know that many people these days think spirituality is just what you believe and religions are bogus. I tend to think that religion has developed in order to focus one's spiritual life. Religious practice forces us to see beyond ourselves, back in time at all those who have gone before use and laterally to those who practice now. It also helps develop self-discipline by asking one to give up small things, maybe just one thing at a time, but to replace that lost thing with God. This is like exercise for the soul. I aim to inch my way back into religious practice so that I can begin to control my own desires and grow as a human being.

We will see how 2008 plays out. I am looking forward to it.