When Christy was in college at Cal Poly, she shared a room with 3 other gals. They were in Campus Crusade and so there were always some number of Christian guys around...you know...circling.
Christy supplied most of the house dishes from her own stuff, having previously lived on her own. Her dishes included Corell Ware plates. These were advertised as being "unbreakable." Of course, that whole ad campaign was conceived by someone who probably only ate Chinese takeout from cardboard containers and who, due to the era, hadn't been around long enough to experience the long term effects of microwaves on some types of china.
One day, a group of guys came over that included one particularly shy soul. In an uncharacteristic act of bravado he saw one of the plates and said, "HEY! These are those really cool unbreakable plates!" and proceeded to drop the dish he'd picked up. It shattered...nearly into powder. There was stunned silence as everyone looked at Christy. She broke out in hysterical laughter understanding as she usually does, the complete social context of what had just happened.
This writing is not about Christy or the guy. It's about the plate.
Ideas, beliefs and even love are all to greater and lesser degrees like the plate in the tragic comedy above. We pick them up, look them over and make conclusions about what we're looking at. Those conclusions are based on all sorts of things. They're based on our experience, our learning, our culture and of course various information media (...like TV). Lately, they've come to be based more and more on how we feel about something...the degree of emphasis this receives is kind of new.
Any of these can become a problem when we make an incorrect assumption that's based primarily on anything other than the thing itself. "HEY! These are those really cool unbreakable plates!" No...no they're not.
I'm thinking here mostly about yet another new book about God, the universe and everything (author and title to remain nameless). This particular book has ideas that have been floated before in a thousand different ways and contexts. In this case though, the ideas flow very much from how the author feels first and what God says about who he is as found in his book The Bible, second. As a friend of mine likes to say, "That ain't right."
In fact, that's the way you break a perfectly good plate. You pick it up and you throw it down, assuming things about it that aren't true, and then everything breaks. Things might break sooner and they might break later but break they will. And just to be clear, in all the above it's not God that's the breaking plate; it's the idea of him as it is written in the author's new book.
The ironic part is that the arguments this author posits are not without some merit and are even worthy of consideration. He rightly points to areas of belief that I think we have drawn very bad conclusions about. Even so, his feelings about God carry him a good deal further than any reasonable consideration of God, his word, the universe and all would support.
Each of us represents the ultimate universal authority on how we feel. However, if breakage is to be at least somewhat mitigated, we need to fully, openly and honestly consider the nature of the plate before we let our feelings test it's break point.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Parts is Parts - A Metaphor I will Attempt to Beat to Death
Probably most of you don't remember the title here. It sums an ad campaign that once attacked McDonald's Chicken McNuggets. The idea of the ad was that our nuggets are made only from chicken breasts and McD's are made from almost anything, probably even including both chicken lips and toes.
Apparently McDonald's had it right, much to to the chagrin of chickens that value their parts. Small kids still beg for Happy Meals with Nuggets and I can't even remember who ran the original ad.
Apparently, parts really are parts after all and all of them are apparently good together...at least in the world of Happy Meals.
I do wish our churchianity could approach the ecumenical nature of a McNugget, rather than assume the mantle of, "we only use the VERY best." (i.e."Churchianity" is my shorthand for all things associated with Sunday-go-to-meetin'.) It seems to me we really like the "my idea/doctrine/approach" is better than yours. Unfortunately, when we run to buy that product, we wind up with something that will soon be forgotten and maybe never existed at all.
Oh, and back to nuggets for a minute, note that all nuggets eventually get boiled in oil of some kind. The actual health benefit of any particular kind of nugget becomes rather obscure or even non-existent when you bread it and boil it in oil. So, in the end it becomes a rather thin matter of taste and to a large degree perception, whether we prefer one offering or another.
Some things do constitute substantive differences. If I want Nuggets of any kind, I sure don't want to be served a salad. (Is anyone praying for my dietary tendencies yet?) Identity and identification matter. Differences of form, do not.
Let's switch from diet to religion for a minute. There are a lot of things that aren't Christianity and that have over time, proven themselves to be direct and stark attacks on the core of Christianity. Identifying differences at this level are pretty easy; there are in fact, an embarrassment of riches. My two favorites are:
But then on the greater than eighth day of creation came the 'isms...And that's everything from Catholicism to Methodism to Calvinism; all these and many many more leading in turn to the big ISM namely, schism. I have to say, I think most of these were created in our image rather than God's.
In response, I want to propose another ism. Namely: "I-don't-know-yet-ism" I won't lay out the doctrine for this because, happily, there isn't any. Instead, let me give a bit of example. Suppose someone says, "Everyone was predestined from before time as to whether they'd go to heaven or hell." The proper IDKY-ism response is: "Huh. There seem to be biblical teachings going both ways on that. "I don't know yet" which might be correct.
In case you missed it, we will eventually know with absolute certainty the answer to this and all other questions. This might come at any time but will with certainty happen at the point when we cease to "see through a glass darkly." Then I think, we will be stunned at the irrelevance of both theses sorts of questions and of their necessarily limited answers.
Apparently McDonald's had it right, much to to the chagrin of chickens that value their parts. Small kids still beg for Happy Meals with Nuggets and I can't even remember who ran the original ad.
Apparently, parts really are parts after all and all of them are apparently good together...at least in the world of Happy Meals.
I do wish our churchianity could approach the ecumenical nature of a McNugget, rather than assume the mantle of, "we only use the VERY best." (i.e."Churchianity" is my shorthand for all things associated with Sunday-go-to-meetin'.) It seems to me we really like the "my idea/doctrine/approach" is better than yours. Unfortunately, when we run to buy that product, we wind up with something that will soon be forgotten and maybe never existed at all.
Oh, and back to nuggets for a minute, note that all nuggets eventually get boiled in oil of some kind. The actual health benefit of any particular kind of nugget becomes rather obscure or even non-existent when you bread it and boil it in oil. So, in the end it becomes a rather thin matter of taste and to a large degree perception, whether we prefer one offering or another.
Some things do constitute substantive differences. If I want Nuggets of any kind, I sure don't want to be served a salad. (Is anyone praying for my dietary tendencies yet?) Identity and identification matter. Differences of form, do not.
Let's switch from diet to religion for a minute. There are a lot of things that aren't Christianity and that have over time, proven themselves to be direct and stark attacks on the core of Christianity. Identifying differences at this level are pretty easy; there are in fact, an embarrassment of riches. My two favorites are:
- Does the religion in question accept that Jesus is who he said he is?
- Does it have at it's core the value of love expressed in both concept and behavior?
But then on the greater than eighth day of creation came the 'isms...And that's everything from Catholicism to Methodism to Calvinism; all these and many many more leading in turn to the big ISM namely, schism. I have to say, I think most of these were created in our image rather than God's.
In response, I want to propose another ism. Namely: "I-don't-know-yet-ism" I won't lay out the doctrine for this because, happily, there isn't any. Instead, let me give a bit of example. Suppose someone says, "Everyone was predestined from before time as to whether they'd go to heaven or hell." The proper IDKY-ism response is: "Huh. There seem to be biblical teachings going both ways on that. "I don't know yet" which might be correct.
In case you missed it, we will eventually know with absolute certainty the answer to this and all other questions. This might come at any time but will with certainty happen at the point when we cease to "see through a glass darkly." Then I think, we will be stunned at the irrelevance of both theses sorts of questions and of their necessarily limited answers.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
For Whom the Bell Tolls
I've included Donne here before and no doubt will again. As a follow to the 3/14 post, there follows a link to Donne's meditation XVII. This was the one that Hemingway helped to re-popularize by using a line of it as the title of one of his novels.
Beyond that, this is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. Rather than re-post it directly here, I've included a link that contains some hyper-link cross references of language forms and usage that will likely be obscure. Speaking first to myself, we must never lose sight of how much we need and support each other and of how much we need to support each other. In the case of the body of Christ, this is even more acute (Eph. 4:15-16). God bless.
Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris.
Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.
Meditation XVII
Beyond that, this is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read. Rather than re-post it directly here, I've included a link that contains some hyper-link cross references of language forms and usage that will likely be obscure. Speaking first to myself, we must never lose sight of how much we need and support each other and of how much we need to support each other. In the case of the body of Christ, this is even more acute (Eph. 4:15-16). God bless.
Nunc lento sonitu dicunt, morieris.
Now this bell tolling softly for another, says to me, Thou must die.
Meditation XVII
Monday, March 14, 2011
Tough Times on Planet Earth
It's been a rough 6 weeks or so to be a human being on the 3rd planet from the sun.
To recap: 1) Civil unrest and even civil war has broken out all across the middle east and North Africa. Likely thousands have been killed, arrested and tortured as a result (reporting is sketchy due to censorship). 2) One of the largest earthquakes on record hit Japan with about a thousand killed. 3) A tsunami followed closely on the heels of the earthquake, killing thousands more. 4) After the earthquake, a couple nuclear generation facilities have gone very wrong. It's unclear at this point how this part will resolve. 5) Largely missed in all this has been extreme rain and flooding in the North Eastern U.S.
All this has been in addition to the background drumbeats of disease, human trafficking, bad economic news, etc.
Here on the West Coast, other than extensive damage at the yacht harbor and up at Crescent City, we've been largely spared so far. Still, the Loma Prieta quake and the rains of the 80's should remind us that we don't really have a pass or Get out of Jail Free card. It's just not our turn right now.
The only real point I have in summing all this up is that things are becoming progressively more challenging...exactly as we've been told would be the case. I think the tsunami in particular is a helpful physical illustration of the issue at hand. Waves, one following the other, pound and destroy where they haven't before. The sea runs out of it's boundary.
To be clear, none of this is lost on God. In fact, Jesus talked about all this at some length 2000 years ago.
Past the knowing, it can be much harder to integrate this information into who we are. That is, to really trust that God is good and that we belong to him.
I will say this: Recent events represent a great invitation to accelerate our relationships with God.
If you've ever read the bible and thought something like: "Wow. Wouldn't it have been great to be one of the people that knew Jesus or saw him ascend into heaven!" Well, there will be souls for all time that look at us and say, "Wow, they were there when the curtain finally came up. They were witnesses and participants of the end that was the beginning."
Truly our great challenge is not to merely survive. Our great challenge is to grow, thrive and share the joy and hope that is in Christ, even when the earth is moved, the sea overflows it's appointed shores, and practical hope seems only a memory. We are those that are called to deny victory to fear, hate and all greater evil. We do so by insisting on co-authoring our lives with the God who spoke us into being.
To recap: 1) Civil unrest and even civil war has broken out all across the middle east and North Africa. Likely thousands have been killed, arrested and tortured as a result (reporting is sketchy due to censorship). 2) One of the largest earthquakes on record hit Japan with about a thousand killed. 3) A tsunami followed closely on the heels of the earthquake, killing thousands more. 4) After the earthquake, a couple nuclear generation facilities have gone very wrong. It's unclear at this point how this part will resolve. 5) Largely missed in all this has been extreme rain and flooding in the North Eastern U.S.
All this has been in addition to the background drumbeats of disease, human trafficking, bad economic news, etc.
Here on the West Coast, other than extensive damage at the yacht harbor and up at Crescent City, we've been largely spared so far. Still, the Loma Prieta quake and the rains of the 80's should remind us that we don't really have a pass or Get out of Jail Free card. It's just not our turn right now.
The only real point I have in summing all this up is that things are becoming progressively more challenging...exactly as we've been told would be the case. I think the tsunami in particular is a helpful physical illustration of the issue at hand. Waves, one following the other, pound and destroy where they haven't before. The sea runs out of it's boundary.
To be clear, none of this is lost on God. In fact, Jesus talked about all this at some length 2000 years ago.
Past the knowing, it can be much harder to integrate this information into who we are. That is, to really trust that God is good and that we belong to him.
I will say this: Recent events represent a great invitation to accelerate our relationships with God.
If you've ever read the bible and thought something like: "Wow. Wouldn't it have been great to be one of the people that knew Jesus or saw him ascend into heaven!" Well, there will be souls for all time that look at us and say, "Wow, they were there when the curtain finally came up. They were witnesses and participants of the end that was the beginning."
Truly our great challenge is not to merely survive. Our great challenge is to grow, thrive and share the joy and hope that is in Christ, even when the earth is moved, the sea overflows it's appointed shores, and practical hope seems only a memory. We are those that are called to deny victory to fear, hate and all greater evil. We do so by insisting on co-authoring our lives with the God who spoke us into being.
Saturday, March 5, 2011
The Truth about Mr. Rogers
If you know me and cringed when you read the title, read on anyway. I promise to not excoriate "The Sweatered One" here. At least nothing like I might if we were at dinner and we were all laughing way too much.
The "Mr. Rogers Show" was a PBS show that ran for many years. It featured Fred Rogers, who was apparently the nicest human being ever to walk the earth. Fred trained to be a Presbyterian minister. At the time this was happening (the early '60's), he also became disenchanted with the then current state of children's programming.
I've never really had a problem with Mr. Rogers. What I have a problem with is the glorification of coddling to the point that it excludes teaching and coaching. The former is all about avoiding as much pain as possible and feeling warm and gushy in the moment. The latter is about the hard work of supporting someone through the moment and helping them put one foot in front of the other; helping them take the next step.
Mr. Rogers sat kids on his lap, read them stories and told them they were special.
Our oldest son once upon a time, had a little league manager who approached the matter differently. Toward the beginning of the season, the manager started holding scrimmages during the last half of practice for which he was the only umpire. Along about the second or third of these mock games, a kid slid into second base, obviously safe. The manager called him out and the kid went off. (He actually had been really really safe.) The manager let him go for just a bit and then he said: "If you want to stay on this team, shut your mouth now, go back to the bench, AND DEAL WITH IT!" I capitalized that last bit because he actually did raise his voice a good deal.
As the scrimmages continued, this treatment extended to all members of the team. I have to say, it was brilliant. He was intentionally exposing his team to the injustice and frustration of real world games...and teaching them how to handle that injustice. None of that could have been accomplished anywhere near as effectively by teaching them good, warm lessons about unfair calls.
Gratuitous rhetorical question: "Do all these sorts of things have to always hurt?" No, not always, just usually.
At various times over my life as a parent, I've had occasion to pin each of our children to a doctor's table as the doctor did what was necessary in the moment to preserve their health or on at least 2 occasions, their lives. One of these times, a lab tech offered to get an orderly in to do the job so that I wouldn't have to be there and my child wouldn't have to think of me as the person that held him while horrible things happened. In an all too uncharacteristic moment of self control, I told him in a very quiet voice that I would not abandon my child to the mercy of strangers for the sake of emotion, be it mine, my child's or his.
I held that boy through the procedure, as well as for the rest of that day, including his nap. It was extremely expensive. It remains expensive to this day. I cannot think of it without crying and know that I cried hard writing this.
We must love our children and each other enough to allow the lessons of life that are necessary in order to live the life we've been given. We must not deny them this because it hurts us too much to see them hurt. We must not make the absence of all pain the sum of all virtue.
Of course, we must protect children and loved ones from catastrophe where and whenever we can. That's why we set out to intentionally teach about adversity in the first place. The point is that coddling, insulating and patronizing do not accomplish this. These only serve to insulate us from the difficulty of watching others incur difficulty. And for a brief season, to delay greater pain that must now be incurred without benefit of prior teaching.
Finally, consider that this is the love and respect God gives us as his children. The old saying is, "Things that don't kill you just makes you stronger." As children of God we believe nothing really kills us. I think in the end, walking with God makes us pretty strong.
The "Mr. Rogers Show" was a PBS show that ran for many years. It featured Fred Rogers, who was apparently the nicest human being ever to walk the earth. Fred trained to be a Presbyterian minister. At the time this was happening (the early '60's), he also became disenchanted with the then current state of children's programming.
I've never really had a problem with Mr. Rogers. What I have a problem with is the glorification of coddling to the point that it excludes teaching and coaching. The former is all about avoiding as much pain as possible and feeling warm and gushy in the moment. The latter is about the hard work of supporting someone through the moment and helping them put one foot in front of the other; helping them take the next step.
Mr. Rogers sat kids on his lap, read them stories and told them they were special.
Our oldest son once upon a time, had a little league manager who approached the matter differently. Toward the beginning of the season, the manager started holding scrimmages during the last half of practice for which he was the only umpire. Along about the second or third of these mock games, a kid slid into second base, obviously safe. The manager called him out and the kid went off. (He actually had been really really safe.) The manager let him go for just a bit and then he said: "If you want to stay on this team, shut your mouth now, go back to the bench, AND DEAL WITH IT!" I capitalized that last bit because he actually did raise his voice a good deal.
As the scrimmages continued, this treatment extended to all members of the team. I have to say, it was brilliant. He was intentionally exposing his team to the injustice and frustration of real world games...and teaching them how to handle that injustice. None of that could have been accomplished anywhere near as effectively by teaching them good, warm lessons about unfair calls.
Gratuitous rhetorical question: "Do all these sorts of things have to always hurt?" No, not always, just usually.
At various times over my life as a parent, I've had occasion to pin each of our children to a doctor's table as the doctor did what was necessary in the moment to preserve their health or on at least 2 occasions, their lives. One of these times, a lab tech offered to get an orderly in to do the job so that I wouldn't have to be there and my child wouldn't have to think of me as the person that held him while horrible things happened. In an all too uncharacteristic moment of self control, I told him in a very quiet voice that I would not abandon my child to the mercy of strangers for the sake of emotion, be it mine, my child's or his.
I held that boy through the procedure, as well as for the rest of that day, including his nap. It was extremely expensive. It remains expensive to this day. I cannot think of it without crying and know that I cried hard writing this.
We must love our children and each other enough to allow the lessons of life that are necessary in order to live the life we've been given. We must not deny them this because it hurts us too much to see them hurt. We must not make the absence of all pain the sum of all virtue.
Of course, we must protect children and loved ones from catastrophe where and whenever we can. That's why we set out to intentionally teach about adversity in the first place. The point is that coddling, insulating and patronizing do not accomplish this. These only serve to insulate us from the difficulty of watching others incur difficulty. And for a brief season, to delay greater pain that must now be incurred without benefit of prior teaching.
Finally, consider that this is the love and respect God gives us as his children. The old saying is, "Things that don't kill you just makes you stronger." As children of God we believe nothing really kills us. I think in the end, walking with God makes us pretty strong.
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