Where should we pray?

With all the troubling news that happens on a regular basis, we are inundated with people telling us they are offering their “thoughts and prayers” for these situations. And we are also asked to pray for these events and the people involved in them. But where exactly should we offer these prayers?

Proems and Poetry

I am singularly non-spectacular in the poetry I write, and spectacularly obscure and meandering in the prose I write (hence the name of this nearly 20 year old blog: nate's INCOHERENT babble). Thus it was recently that I realized I often combine the two mediocre art forms I enjoy— prose and poetry— into one meta-mediocre art form: The proem. 

The proem is a poem that is far too didactic and expositional to be enjoyable, with far too little connective tissue and logical linkages and tedious footnoting to be taken seriously as an essay. Thus, a proem is a merger of two insignificant art forms into one truly trivial art form.

So, I have created a new category of blog: Poetry and Proems. Enjoy, if you enjoy that kind of thing.

Mark Nine Twenty Four

A Proem...

A Personal Relationship with Jesus?

Recently a good friend of mine asked me a great question. He is a person of considerable spiritual depth and commitment to Christ, yet he has never been part of Evangelicalism. And he asked: 

What do [Evangelicals] mean by accepting Jesus as one’s “personal” Lord? Or having a “personal” relationship with Jesus? Like do they mean some sort of "warming-of-the-heart" kind of experience? Or is it some rejection of [the idea that Christ must be] mediated through the Church as an institution?

As someone who came to faith in Christ in the Evangelical world of the early 1990's, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I have a "personal relationship with Christ" which began when I "accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior". I have a definite time when Jesus became real to me, and I can pinpoint when I prayed a "sinner's prayer" to receive Jesus. And I have "witnessed" to thousands of people the lifesaving power of Jesus, known in his death and resurrection. I have shared the "four spiritual laws". I have asked people "who is on the throne" of their life. So, I began my response as follows:

On the meaning of Kenosis

What does it mean for God to be incarnate in the person of Jesus Christ? To get at this, let's begin with a thought experiment. Try to differentiate between what makes your self “you” and the powers that your self wields. You have a self consciousness of “I, me, my”. Your self also wields powers like physical extension and movement, knowledge and speech. You could be yourself while diminishing in power: If you lost some limbs or lost some memories, you would not cease to be yourself. You would still have a continuous experience of “I, me, my” animating your powers and experiencing your experiences. 

In a similar way, the Divine Self empties its powers to become incarnate... 

John Seven Twenty Four

“Do not judge by appearances...”

Let not popularity or power beguile you 

Do not look at self promotion or propaganda

Don’t be fooled by masks or makeup 

Or the sly salesmanship of snake oil sellers

Confusion is their strategy

False promises their bait

For they whisper what you want to hear in one ear

While their fingers pick your pockets

“But judge with right judgment.”

There is a standard we stand or fall before

There is a justice to which we are accountable

There is a Love who wants the best for all her children

There is eternal Beauty, Truth, and Goodness

That calls us home

And our judgments must point in that direction

Or they will direct us to destruction 

(A Meditation on John 7:24) 

On reading while walking

This is probably old hat to many people, or just not needed for your lifestyle. But if this helps, here’s a life hack: I love reading, and the experience of seeing and digesting the written word. Audio books or podcasts or lectures are nice, but don’t really do the same thing for me. But the problem with reading is that it is very sedentary. 

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Scripture

At the school I serve as chaplain, I was recently asked to provide some Scriptural reflections on our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Earlier, I did an essay for my previous school on how these values are rooted in Episcopal Identity and the foundational beliefs and prayers of the Episcopal Church. Not only that, but the Christian vision of God leads us to these values, because the very idea of God as the Trinity leads us to embrace diversity, and the Incarnation of God in Christ leads us to embrace inclusion. These ideas of God are, in turn, rooted in the self-revelation of God which is recorded in Scripture. So now it is time to dig into the foundational texts of the whole Christian Faith, and the founding stories of Jesus and his Apostles, to understand how they inspire us to create communities of diversity, inclusion, equity, and justice. 

Resurrecting the Matrix: An Ideological Review

I just saw Matrix Resurrections. Here are my responses in no particular order:

Stupidity as a gateway to Fascism

These excerpts on stupidity as a gateway to fascism are taken from a circular letter, addressing many topics, which was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer to three friends and co-workers in the conspiracy against Hitler, on the tenth anniversary of Hitler’s accession to the chancellorship of Germany:

Religious Fascination

I am fascinated by religion, and the process by which humans have created structures and norms and beliefs and practices which allow us to connect with the deepest aspects of who we are, the Source we come from, and the Destiny we are headed toward. I am fascinated by the sheer variety of rituals and art and foods and clothing through which people get glimpses of the Divine. I am fascinated by the constellations of overlapping and diverging beliefs about God and creation and humanity and final destiny. I am fascinated by the process of moral reasoning, through which ancient texts collide with contemporary experience to forge new paths into a (hopefully) better future. I am fascinated by how all of this intersects with our particular place in space and time, in the unfolding of history and culture, to form our sense of personal identity and collective destiny. But to truly study and embrace religion, we also have to embrace something like this insight from Acts:

God Insists

Two quests for God seem equally misguided: The quest to abolish God, and the quest to establish God. 

Proverbs 31 and the Noble Spouse

Recently on social media I read a thought provoking post that dealt with both the problems and enduring value of the “Noble Wife” passage in Proverbs 31. I think a simpler way to get at what they were saying is this: Proverbs 31 is an enduring list of virtues and values written in a culture that was cursed with patriarchy (if you read the consequences of sin for our first parents in Genesis 3) and tended toward misogyny (if you read many instances of the use and abuse of women in the books of Judges, Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles). Now we realize that in Christ there is “no male or female, no slave or free” (cf. Galatians 3). So the virtues are still valid, even if the patriarchal structure they were expressed in is obsolete and oppressive. 

Therefore, let’s extract the virtues and jettison the potential misogyny of the passage by simply universalizing for all people. It may have been first directed at women, but now it is directed at EVERYONE. An interpretation of this passage “in Christ” describes a hard working and virtuous spouse. Period. Regardless of whether that spouse is a man or woman. As such, in this text we find that we are ALL called to diligence, hard work, wisdom, discernment, and responsibility as spouses and partners. 

We might even imagine that we are translating Proverbs 31 into a language that does not conceive of gender the same way English and Hebrew have in the past. After all, English seems to be losing gendered grammar and vocabulary quite quickly, just as many other gendered languages have before us. So, imagine translating Proverbs 31 into a language that only has the word “spouse” or “companion”, and not “husband” and “wife”. A language into which “he” and “she” doesn’t really work. If we do this, we might read Proverbs 31 like this: