When Time Devours Space

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated with history – not so much as an abstracted list of dates, events, and personalities, as if existing as an unrelated diorama, curated as a curiosity of time. But rather, as a glimpse of how the world takes shape from one generation to another – how cultural perception inextricably grows out of the past contextualized by the particularities of place. In short, history is the ever unfolding story of time and space as we’ve experienced it – therefore, inevitably, our creating of history is made in how we transition from one generation to another . . . as our experience of time and space continues to shift.

But the phenomenology of technology invariably creates the illusion that technology is somehow saving us time – as if time could be captured in a jar and placed on a shelf for later. But truth be told, technology is merely a compression of time – inescapably attenuating our experience of space. Consider travel. I can travel by car in one day, what would have taken a week by horse drawn carriage . . . and I can travel that same distance in a few hours by plane. In each case, my experience of that distance (space) would be profoundly different . . . from a fully embodied memorable event — to an inconvenient trip, as a means to an end.

When we make this trade-out between time and space – our resulting experience of that time becomes less embodied . . . we invariably become less present within each moment, as we experience life sped up. This is what happens when time devours space. Consider the amount of time we spend on the internet – a virtual space that requires nothing more than the portal of our backlit screens to access. We can disappear for hours into this virtual space, losing almost all sense of our experience of the literal space we actually occupy. This time spent feels necessary and significant . . . all the while, we become ever more disembodied in our own experience of the real world.

Perhaps you see this as a simple matter of wasted time – imagining that seeking a more efficient and meaningful use of our time hasn’t already been the driving catalyst behind all of the technological wonders we now own. No, this is far more than a simple matter of time management. It’s about how we return balance to how we experience time and space – where we exchange our fast food approach to information and relationships for a more meditative and engaged life. Could it be that the crisis of identity and meaning that currently besets our culture is merely the obvious symptom of living in the myopia of our own sped up disembodied lives completely disconnected from any sense of history?

Jesus chooses to step into history – the God who speaks the whole universe into existence, the God unconstrained by the limitation of time and space, chooses to enter into the world we experience . . . so that we might be able to truly know him. And in knowing him – we might be able to truly know ourselves. And here’s the thing — it takes no time at all to find gratitude for the time that you’ve been given, within the place where you live . . . especially when you realize it’s all a gift. So take a minute to meditate on this truth, and allow that moment to linger in silence — until you remember what it is that truly gives your life meaning . . . and then fully embrace the person God created you to be at this moment in history.

. . . even though time’s always leaving.

A Form Of Godliness

The subtext beneath every political or religious debate is the presumption of the knowledge of good and evil – self-assured, each opinion hoping to leverage the moral high ground to make its case. And it is this very presumption of knowledge that has been the catalyst of every conflict since the beginning of time. Makes you wonder why we would even be tempted to possess such knowledge in the first place . . . O yea, there was that moment in the garden when we were tempted to imagine ourselves as being our own god – a temptation that still has the power to seduce us even now into every form of calamity.

So exactly what is the point of possessing such knowledge? If history is any indication, it has been a weapon of oppression wielded by those seeking to hold sway over others, ever reminding them of their guilt and shame, constantly passing judgement in an effort to create the illusion that those arbitrating good and evil are somehow above such judgement . . . as if they were god-like in their presumptive ownership of such knowledge. But here’s the thing, on some level, we all feel entitled to pass such judgement on others. Which makes me ask — in a world full of pseudo-gods, morally manipulating every relationship — does true forgiveness and reconciliation even have a chance of rising above our self-important impulse to pass judgement?

I would make a hard distinction here between using good judgement as a measure of discernment and evaluating my own way forward, and passing judgement over others so as to comparatively separate myself as being above them by measuring them against my own presumptive knowledge of good and evil. The former is born of a desire to live in ontological harmony with who I’ve been created to be, and the latter arises out of my desire to shame others into conformity with my self-involved opinions. One reminds me that I am not God, and the other tempts me to presume myself to be god.

2 Timothy 3:1-5 “But understand this that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” For me this passage offers great insight on how best to understand the difference between having good judgement, and passing judgement over others.

Paul here is speaking to Timothy about the way of the world . . . and not to the world about how it should behave. And the very thing he is warning Timothy about is how even the godless can presume the knowledge of good and evil, giving them the appearance of godliness . . . all the while denying the God who’s power they have coopted. So when Paul says “avoid such people” I think the subtext here is also . . . “avoid being such a person”. So maybe instead of being quick to make our own bold confessions about what we think we know about good and evil, our confession should be more like Paul’s “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” ~ 1 Corinthians 2:2

So let us humbly confess . . .

An Empty Cup

Our default assumption is to believe that we already know what we need and what we really want – this is likely because we are prone to believe that how we know ourselves is indisputably accurate . . . even though there is ample proof to the contrary. This lack of self-awareness is attributable to how we evaluate meaning and purpose. An evaluation that is inextricably incubated within our own self-referencing perception of the world, as we have been contextualized within the cultural expectations of conformity . . . including the non-conformist conformity we pretend we are maintaining.

Perhaps this is why we often experience a resident sense of dissatisfaction, ever recalibrating our expectations and desires to the distorted mirror our consumerist culture holds up to us. Or perhaps this dissatisfaction runs deeper as if it were the result of an unnamed longing lurking beneath every desire we have . . . waiting to be recognized. A longing so primal it seeps into everything. Deeper than desire, it can’t simply be tamped down by giving in to our every impulse of desire – which can only lead us to an ever growing diminishing return . . . until nothing really satisfies. Because it is a longing that points far beyond mere desire – as it points far beyond ourselves.

Bruce Springsteen sang “everybody’s gotta hungry heart” – about a desire of the heart beyond explanation. In the book of Ecclesiastes we get the complete run down on how everything in life is full of dissatisfaction and the vanity of chasing after the wind (hevel) – concluding that only when we recognize that God alone, is God and thereby accepting his words and decrees as essential to making sense of this world. But for the Christian, St Augustine seems to explain it best “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you”.

The conversation Jesus had with the woman at the well (John 4:1-30) is rich with spiritual insight – but this conversation, taking place at Jacob’s well, inescapably becomes a conversation about quenching thirst (vs 7-15). Jesus basically makes the point that we bring an empty cup to the water . . . and then drink that cup dry again. But with the water that Jesus offers – our cup never runs dry. Clearly, this is a metaphor about finding a lasting satisfaction in God, but not in the way we find peripheral satisfaction in transient desires – rather it is a transcendently loving response to our heart’s deepest longings . . . allowing us to submit our every desire into God’s keeping.

As Jesus anticipates the cross, (Matthew 20:20-23) the mother of James and John expresses her desire to see her sons exalted to a place of honor in the kingdom that Jesus is ushering in – to which Jesus says (v22) “You don’t know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I am to drink?” — referring to the cup, that Jesus himself will later that night pray that the Father allow to pass from him (Matthew 26:39). The truth is, we don’t really know what we want – because we don’t really know what it will ultimately cost. But praise be to Jesus Christ, who chose to drink the bitter dregs of that cup until it was empty – so that we could “ . . . know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” ~ Ephesians 3:19.

So we turn our eyes upon Jesus . . .

Gods Of The Quid Pro Quo

On the continuum between unity and fragmentation, our culture appears to have taken up residence on the fragmented end of the “us/them” divide. But here’s the thing about such a factionalizing ethos – the subdividing regress of schism incessantly splinters into ever new definitions of who the “us” and the “them” are . . . until it finally becomes the self-induced isolation of the sanctimonious arbiters of moral outrage. This is how the whole world closes in around the narcissist intent on living in the shrinking solipsism of their own pronouncement of the “authentic self”. And everyone doing what is right in their own eyes (Judges 21:25) is exactly what occurs right before a culture becomes a complete dumpster fire.

In a world where everyone is entitled to their own truth – truth itself has no real value, as it has become nothing more than a synonym for “felt experiences”. The pathology of such emotivism presupposes a self-existent ontology – where the whole of reality is ever reinvented to suit the latest iteration of existential pronouncement. I say this because our relationship to truth is meant to be as a reference point, placing us in full context within the whole of existence . . . and not just as we presuppose it should be. Put another way — competing ideas about what is true can be a healthy debate . . . but competing truths can only ever lead us to a deepening chasm of divide, ever alienating us from one another.

Think about it. A world where you can invent your own truth, is in fact, a world you imagine yourself to be a god – which might seem okay until it occurs to you that everyone else will also be inventing their own truth, imagining themselves to also be a god within that very same world. So either we all become the gods of the imposed will driving us to violence, or we become the gods of the quid pro quo – instrumentally using each other, living in our little fiefdoms of sovereignty, tending to our uneasy peace agreements with one another . . . but only until we’re able to seize the upper hand and expand control over our fiefdom.

Clearly, worshipping at the altar of the self, insisting that our truth can’t be questioned, invariably places us at odds with anyone unwilling to be held hostage to the hubris of our vanity. And this is the state of fragmentation our culture currently finds itself mired in – everyone demanding that their truth be validated . . . actual truth be damned! This is transparently an untenable way forward, because it can’t possibly be culturally sustained . . . as it is actually antithetical to what it means for us to validate the dignity and humanity of one another.

Here’s the thing – I can’t make you validate what I believe to be true, as you can’t make me validate what you believe to be true. But what we can do is humbly confess our own limitations . . . and that our interpretations of truth will inevitably be judged by what is actually true. Because pretending to be the gods of our own make-believe world, will eventually have to give way to the God of the real universe. Remember — Adam and Eve imagined that they could simply be like God . . . and we all know how that turned out.

Too long have we lived with the lies we tell ourselves . . .

Then The Moment’s Gone

Like a snowflake, or a fireworks display – life is but a mist that appears and then vanishes (James 4:14) . . . just a moment, then the moment’s gone. Which is likely why those who have had a near death experience, if only briefly, catching a glimpse of their own fragile and ephemeral mortality – tend to take inventory of everything and everyone in their life. Of course, nothing has actually changed . . . except for their perception of their own life. It’s not so much that they didn’t already intellectually know how brief their life was – it’s just that, now they have participated in the knowing of its brevity.

As someone keenly aware of the fact that I am closer to the end than I am from the beginning – I have become uniquely attuned to the preciousness of the time that remains. And this is a perfect example of how our relationship to time inescapably evolves . . . whether we’re paying attention or not. The longer we live, the more we are afforded a greater opportunity to participate in knowing what actually gives life value. But invariably such a knowing becomes fraught with the land mines of regret — ever attempting to ambush the life we still have left to live.

For the young, regret is viewed as nothing more than a bogeyman cautionary tale of parental concern. And for the old, it’s more like a cluttered closet full of everything that’s been left broken and unresolved. The former hasn’t lived long enough to sense the accumulative effect, while the latter has simply lost count. So it would seem that in a fallen world, regret is an inevitability – no one gets to escape it, or the un-knowing of the reasons for it. Because no amount of perpetuated existential denial, or self-affirming self-talk spin, can keep you from the facts of your own life experiences. So then, what are we to do with regret?

If there’s a silver lining to regret — it would be that our experience of regret clearly indicates that some measure of humble retrospection has occurred. For it is only in our humility when we become honest enough to confess our real need for God. In this regard, regret is not only a reminder of what path to avoid, but is also an invitation to remember the better path – the one our feet was originally made to tread. And this is underscored in 1 John 1: 7-9, which ties together “walking in the light, as he is in the light” (v7) with “if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins” (v9). So it could be said that regret can actually be our first step back into the light.

But what are we to make of all our lost and wasted time? If every moment we are given is the very currency of our life – then how we spend our time, arguably becomes an investment. And it’s this thought that invariably becomes the black hole of regret we end up struggling with – hoping to escape. We cannot recover the time we have lost – but the value of that time can be redeemed. For our hope is not confined by the limitations of time and space, rather it is anchored in the lover of our soul, the Lord Jesus Christ ever redeeming all things unto himself. It is in this timeless redemption where all of our lost moments are collected and given a new meaning, a new value – in the economy of God’s grace.

“This life is waiting for you to surrender all you are — this life”

Failing The Turing Test

This past year I turned 65 — as in 65 trips around the sun on planet earth. But I don’t know how old I’d be if I had lived the same life on another planet circling another sun – which is why it occurs to me, what a curiously arbitrary way it is to measure a human life in terms of its relationship to a planet. It would seem that there are far more qualitative ways of measuring a human’s relational experiences. I tend to think that all of my many experiences with family and friends would be a far more meaningful way of measuring my time . . . a far more human way of thinking about my own existence.

In 1950, computer pioneer, Alan Turing recognized the need for a test that could measure how well a machine could mimic human self-awareness in the way it communicated – in order to determine how much like a human could a machine become. Of course, such a test is predicated on the materialist notion that humans are nothing more than sophisticated biological machines attempting to process their own inexplicable existence in a meaningless universe. It’s a test that ironically presumes humans may be capable of designing and creating a machine that could somehow approximate humanity . . . the un-designed, uncreated – able to design and create.

This is one of many ways with which the materialist ontological narrative begins to collapse in on itself – because there is an innate cognitive dissonance to presupposing that complexity will always be reducible to its randomly coalescing disparate parts . . . and then can be reverse engineered by way of its patterns and design inherent to its complexity. In this way the rational mind begins to chafe under the reductive dogma of materialism. Which is likely why post-modernity was always inevitable, because post-modernism is a reimagining of materialism as being set free from the limiting constraints of rationality – preferring instead an existential perception of reality, to a reductively concrete explanation of reality.

Because the Turing Test presupposes a materialist understanding of what makes us human – it fails to anticipate post-modernism’s transitory perception of what it means to be human . . . ironically, making failing the Turing Test a likelier outcome for many humans. Whereas, I applaud the post-modern intuition to recognize that there must be something beyond materialism’s reductive explanation of humanity that defies empirical calculation – I still reject its existential self-affirmation, as nothing more than a self-deluded notion of self-existence. Because I believe the self-aware consciousness that the Turing Test was actually intended to detect, involves a far more ineffably transcendent metaphysic.

The principle truth of what makes us human is that as humans we bear God’s image – this is who we are. So our relationship to him is critical to how we understand ourselves. So yes, I live on a planet that orbits a sun – I’ve taken that trip 65 times. But intuitively I know that my relationships with family and friends are what make that time significant. And I know that because it is my relationship with God that anchors every human interaction I experience – I see his image on every face. Therefore it is God that makes us human — but you already knew that . . . and you didn’t have to take a test to figure it out.

. . . and sometimes discovering what actually makes you human can feel like a conversion

Mimetic Rivals

Often when attempting to explain the economic principle of supply and demand I will point out that if stranded on a deserted island, hay bales of hundred dollar bills would have no real value, other than as kindling . . . because money actually has no innate value. This is because any assessment of value inevitably requires a contextualizing criterion. And the perception of value can sometimes take on a life of its own. For example – from 1634 to 1637 the Dutch Republic experienced a tulip mania – where the speculative tulip bulb market went absolutely bonkers, making tulip bulbs a precious commodity, based on nothing more than a socio-economic perception of value . . . having nothing to do with real value.

But even apart from an economic motive, we can see how the perception of value inescapably shapes every relationship. Consider a child in a room full of toys, content to play with the one toy they have chosen. But when another child enters and selects a different toy, thereby placing value on that toy – the first child, now perceiving the value of this previously overlooked toy . . . begins to desire that toy above all else in the room. So what changed? . . . other than another child wanted it first. So is this just a simple case of envy, or is there yet another psychological layer of desire beneath this impulse?

Rene Girard, the 20^th century French philosopher describes this phenomenon as “mimetic desire”. He observed “Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.” – I find this quote particularly interesting. Girard seems to be premising our imitative desire on the fact that we don’t know what to desire on our own — as if we’d all been exiled from the natural home of our desire . . . and we are now nomadically following each other around in circles, in search of our heart’s true home.

So not only are we prone to follow each other like lemmings recklessly leaping off of the cliff of the latest fad of culture promising meaning and value – we are also prone to view one another as mimetic rivals, allowing the objects of our desire to divide us, ever competing for the associative value of what is by and large, meaningless. All of which invariably devolves into an existential measurement of comparative value – allowing for a meritorious framing of value to create a hierarchy of significance that we judge each other by . . . until some are deemed undeserving and unworthy of being treated with basic human dignity.

We recognize this as the fallen nature of man, made manifest – sin understood as the actions of our misplaced desire, perpetually distorted by the echo chamber of our collective self-delusion. St Augustine seems to have the dilemma of our misplaced desires in mind when he said “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” So by design we were made for God, created to desire him above all else. And it is only in our desire for God where we are able to live in Christ and thereby live out the profound unity of Galatians 3:28 “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

So come, all who are weary

Minute Particulars

I’m always amazed by how willing people are to share with me what they think would make the world a better place, whether as an extemporaneous reaction to current events, or as a half-baked system of thought applied duplicitously – meanwhile, the cognitive dissonance of their personal world is more than self-evidently out of control. Jordan Peterson addresses this in his book “12 Rules for Life” when describing the person who has trouble keeping their own room clean and organized, attempting to tell the rest of us how the world should be cleaned up and organized. Such a person not only lacks credibility . . . astonishingly, they assume their credibility shouldn’t have anything to do with how they live their lives.

But even beyond the conspicuous virtue signaling of cultural posturing – the politically motivated will very often presume themselves to be the definitive arbiters of what a better world should look like, and how the greater good can be achieved. To which the early 19^th century English poet, William Blake would say “He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars, for the general good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer.” Which I take to mean that when good is ambiguously defined and broadly applied it becomes nothing more than a rhetorical device, attempting to claim the moral high ground.

But I’m also drawn to the idea of what it might look like to do good in the minute particulars . . . and not in grandiose gestures, or as a politically correct talking point – but rather, in the small details of every human interaction. Could it be that doing good can ironically become a self-serving distraction from what it might actually mean to be good? We live in a world where moral posturing and existential pronouncements have become the cultural avatars of what constitutes good – where being good becomes nothing more than a social affectation . . . devoid of any real virtue.

This clearly is a performative understanding of being good – believing that doing what is socially expected of you will make you a good person. No doubt, this is how most people think being good works. But such an approach invariably makes cultivating virtue an unnecessary step, as it places all the emphasis on external perception over internal transformation. And this is the basic distinction between Jesus and the Pharisees – the Pharisees concerned themselves with the appearance of righteousness, and Jesus placed more value on genuinely being righteous. And if you read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) with this in mind, you’ll quickly discover that the economy of righteousness that Jesus is talking about is far more transformative than performative . . . because a genuine change of heart is what makes our actions genuinely good.

Within the Arthurian legend, the metaphor of seeking the Holy Grail wasn’t really so much an external quest, as much as it was an internal purification. The question of the Grail is: who do you serve by seeking it? Do you serve your own ego and ambition, or tribal validation, or political advantage? Or do you serve the one who held the cup, declaring “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” ~ Matthew 26:28. It is the confession of my Christian faith to believe that the body and blood of Christ are transformative – allowing us to seek first God’s Kingdom and His righteousness. But I also believe this is best expressed in “doing little things with great love” ~ St. Teresa of Lisieux

This is how God loves us . . . and how we are to love others

Facing The Empty Room

I remember my father observing, more than forty years ago, that “most people are uncomfortable in their own company”. I remember at the time thinking that this was probably true enough, but I had no idea just how true it would prove to be. My father’s point wasn’t that a person left on their own couldn’t find something to do, on the contrary, he believed that they would find almost anything to do . . . if it meant they could escape their own thoughts. I couldn’t have predicted just how true this observation would end up being — given that we are ever being seduced into a perpetual state of distraction by our irreplaceable backlit devices, ever occupying us with the mindless vanity and banality of our culture.

Interestingly enough, the 17^th century French philosopher and physicist, Blaise Pascal observed “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit in a room alone.” So clearly this isn’t simply a modern problem, but rather, there is obviously something unsettled in the human psyche, drawing us away from a more contemplative life. And again, Pascal gives us a clue as to why “Man is incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” Which is to say — the impulse of the finite mind is to push into abstraction anything that it can’t pull into a reductive explanation . . . and then simply set aside as trivia.

Now, all of this might strike you as nothing more than a high-minded intellectual exercise without any practical implications on how you live your daily life. And that would be true if my only expectation was that you’d be attempting to ponder the imponderable. But my point actually has little to do with the particular content you choose to ponder, rather I’m more interested in knowing whether or not you’re willing to take Pascal’s challenge of facing the empty room . . . and discover who you might be, without any external stimulation. And I guess I’m also hoping that you’d be just a little curious about what you might discover there.

In our naked vulnerability, as the onion is peeled, our abiding fear is that we might find out, an “onion” may be all that we are — that without all of our peripheral possessions, amusements, and affectations . . . at the core — we are hollow. Could it be that the deep longing of our soul is to be reconciled with our own existence – that in fact the hollowness we experience at the very center of our being is the “God shaped void”? . . . another phrase commonly attributed to Pascal. This also resonates with St. Augustine – “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”

And this is a restlessness, of which, not even a confessing Christian is immune, because it is such a primal longing — it isn’t simply intellectualized, and thereby reduced into an explainable resolution . . . as if our longing for God, the longing of the finite for the infinite, could be comprehended with a simple trick of the mind. The psalmist in Psalm 46:10 entreats us to “Be still, and know that I am God . . .” – because unless we’re willing to enter that room alone and undistracted, allowing ourselves to experience our great need and deep longing for God – then we will only know God as an idea, competing with all the other noise making ideas with which we incessantly preoccupy ourselves. Which is to say – we must come to the end of ourselves to truly find God.

O, have mercy, sweet Jesus!

The Hermeneutic Of Beauty

To the postmodern mind, perception is reality, which might strike you as an appealing idea, until it occurs to you that this idea is just a rhetorical sleight of hand – attempting to redefine reality as perception. But it is true that our perceptions play a key role in how we engage reality. In this regard, we are in a constant state of interpretation of reality, ever seeking to reconcile each new idea and circumstance with all of our previous experiences of reality. Now, this is not done as a conscious cognitive exercise, but rather, operates on the deeper psychological levels of our subconscious minds . . . where we presuppose our understanding of reality.

Paul Ricœur, a 20^th century French philosopher, within his work on the hermeneutic of phenomenology, talks about “the hermeneutic of suspicion” . . . which I found very interesting and insightful. But before I go too far, let me explain — hermeneutic is a ten dollar word used to describe a system or method of interpretation. So when Ricœur talks about the hermeneutic of suspicion he is speaking of the human tendency to interpret the world through the lens of suspicion – which is to say, our first impulse is to assume an adversarial relationship to everything and everyone we encounter . . . always imagining ulterior motives are at play, or that some karmic trap door is about to open up beneath our feet.

I think a hermeneutic of suspicion best explains those who feel like they are somehow at odds with their own existence – unable to reconcile, for whatever reason, the life they are given, with the world in which they live. But in a very real way all of our hurts, disappointments, and hard turn in life events that we experience can form in us a rather dark psychological pathology, ever tilting our perception of the world away from anything hopeful, and towards the place where our fears and anxieties set our every expectation about life, on edge.

Now, imagine if such a perception of reality, were reality – some would undoubtedly say it was a more realistic perspective, and given the state of the world today, it would be hard to argue, otherwise. And yet, intuitively we know that such hopelessness isn’t the way the world was meant to be. We can’t help but believe that our longing for a world set right, is more than a self-deluded pipe dream . . . and that there must be a different hermeneutic (system of interpretation) that unlocks the deeper truth of reality. So what if it were instead, a hermeneutic of beauty — one predicated on a grateful perspective, appreciative of everything as a gift? What if such a hermeneutic was able to find the love of God at work in everything — even in the unexpected places . . . what do you think that would look like?

It was in the backwater town of Bethlehem that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). The same Word that was with God, and was God in the beginning (John 1:1). And here’s the part that best interprets the world as we experience it – “He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him (John 1:10, 11)” And it’s this tragic truth that the next hopeful verse is set against “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God”. It is this beautiful narrative amidst the tragedy of a fallen world that breathes hope into our expectation of a world set right. So we need to remember that perception is a matter of focus – we can choose to focus on the tragic, or we can focus on the beauty . . . the beauty of the babe in the manger.

Early on one Christmas morn . . .

Beyond Knowing

Not long after a child begins to speak in complete sentences, having learned to put their thoughts into words – they discover the infinite regress of the question why. Parents, kindergarten teachers, and baby-sitters tend to experience this unique phenomenon in real time – perpetually having the premise of their every answer challenged by a single word . . . why. Inevitably, this incessant drilling down beneath every layer of answer, inevitably ends with the non-answer of “just because”. So at a very young age we learn that every answer we are given in life, comes with an assumed presupposed ambiguous premise of “because, that’s the way it is”. But the funny thing is, we still think having an answer for everything will somehow provide us with certainty.

Our unspoken assumption is that if we can get our questions answered we will be able to acquire a type of knowing that will approximate some level of certainty, and in our certainty we will be able to strategize some measure of control over our lives. It’s not that we consciously think through each of these steps, but like most things psychological, we simply default to the patterns that best serve our hierarchy of perceived concerns. So it would seem somewhere along the way we learned to silence our inner child who would undoubtedly be asking us “why do you place so much importance on knowing the answer?”

It is the illusion of the modern mind to believe that we can think our way to a better life if we only knew the right things – imagining such knowledge would ignite the chain of expectation behind our desire for certainty and control. This is a profoundly utilitarian valuing of knowing – knowing as a means to an end. But the human heart and mind are actually more naturally oriented toward the knowing we normally associate with how we know our loved ones. In this way, relational knowing is drawn to the more imprecise, and imperfect interactions we mutually share – a knowing that has the power to bind us together in ways beyond explanation.

All of this is what I am pondering as I read Luke 1:1-38 – where we find the archangel Gabriel visiting two different people, making two specific announcements, regarding God’s favor . . . but each announcement receives a very different response. Zechariah, a temple priest, is told that he and his barren wife’s prayers had been answered, even though they were in advanced years – his wife would now bear a son. To which Zechariah asks “How shall I know this?” and in doing so was silenced until the birth of John the Baptist. Then Mary receives her visit from Gabriel, where she is told that she will give birth to the Son of the Most High, Jesus. So in her amazement at such wonders of God she asks “How will this be, since I am a virgin?”

There’s a subtle difference between these two responses, but even so a significant one. And the difference between them serves to illustrate the distinction I’m making about knowing. Zechariah offers a qualified acceptance of the good news – he just wants to know how it works so that he can be certain of its truth. To which Gabriel decides it might be best if he doesn’t say another word. But Mary knows already who she has placed her trust in, and thereby finds her certainty in that relationship. So she doesn’t need to know how God will do it before she can trust that it’s true. In this way her faith goes beyond reason . . . beyond knowing. She is simply awestruck at how such a miraculous thing could be happening to her. And I would say awestruck is how we should enter this advent season . . . expecting God to be exactly who he has always been – and find our certainty in that.

Smart Phone Epistemology

Let’s face it, for the most part people default to superficiality – a world where a short attention span meets instant gratification and speaks with a 5^th grade vocabulary about mind-numbingly banal things, ad nauseam. And this has been the cultural default setting, for as long as I can remember. It has been my experience that most folks simply have neither the interest nor the patience for truly contemplating weightier things — because if it takes too long to get to the bottom line . . . then they lose interest. So here’s my question – how is it then that we now live in a world where everyone has an expert opinion about everything?

This is truly a phenomenon indicative of the internet era – prior to the internet only the unsophisticated unsolicited bloviating of know-it-all family members or coworkers would feign expertise about everything. But now, given that you can google-up anything in seconds – knowledge at our fingertips now fosters the pseudo-erudite illusion of expertise. So making-believe we know things we’ve literally learned seconds ago is treated like some kind of an epistemological life-hack – as if knowledge were nothing more than an information download. Such a smart phone epistemology can only ever portend a shallow intellectual pretense . . . ironically, keeping us from a meaningfully understanding anything.

Perhaps like me, you’ve experienced someone on social media dropping an article about an academic study into a conversation thread as a point of rebuttal to your post — as if somehow by proxy, the article was supposed to be making their point . . . as if an un-contextualized opinion about a study should have unquestioned credibility. Not only is such an approach intellectually lazy, it prevents an honest engagement of ideas – ideas that should be contemplated and shaped by a thoughtful internalizing within a principled perspective. So instead of fostering a greater understanding, such intellectual shortcuts tosses out any truly substantive consideration of the topic, in favor of a sophomoric half-ass attempt at appearing intelligent.

For some reason everyone feels compelled to offer opinions that they haven’t even spent five minutes thinking through. So ironically, in the age of access to a nearly limitless source of information – we spend our time pretending to know things we just learned two seconds ago . . . but this isn’t really how we actually know anything. It has become common in our culture to live in a self-induced fiction – imagining that reality will somehow conform to our self-involved explanations about life. I’m not saying that we’re incapable of knowing anything – I’m saying that our knowing inescapably occurs within the context of a presupposed framework of meaning and significance . . . and that’s something you can’t simply google-up.

God invites us “come let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18), but that doesn’t occur in a vacuum. In the Psalms we are constantly admonished to worship the Lord and meditate on his word. So when God places himself at the center of existence – he is giving us an anchoring reference point from which we are able to determine how everything else fits in. Because it’s the very nature of reason to require a context to help us define what is reasonable – but to whatever degree we depart from the context of God’s preeminence, our ability of knowing anything attenuates . . . because we’ve accepted a fictional context as reality. Perhaps this is why Paul concluded “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” (1 Corinthians 2:2).

The humble approach is always the best approach . . .

He Came To Himself

It’s complicated when arguing with someone who claims they are only wanting to be true to their authentic-self, because it becomes almost impossible to separate the veracity of the ideas being discussed from how that person understands their own identity. Making any challenge of their thinking an assumed assault on their very existence. This invariably derails any appeal to reason, choosing instead to make it an emotional exchange of existential pronouncements, a melodramatic sophistry of cognitively dissonant opinions which not only strain credulity, but are largely incoherent . . . thereby making an intellectually honest conversation not only impossible, but undesirable, altogether.

Alasdair MacIntyre describes this social phenomenon as emotivism – the idea that our feelings and experiences should be considered the essential substance of our being. An unconscious displacement of rationality by what the emotional state will allow, in regards to the formation of values and ethics. This has become our current cultural ethos, people speaking their own truth, pronouncing their own reality into existence . . . which inevitably creates a conflict of wills – each person establishing themselves as their own moral reference point by which all others are judged.

This concept of the authentic-self was first articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, an 18^th century philosopher. Rousseau believed that the self, uncorrupted by conformity to society, was innocent and therefore could be consider the authentic-self. Set aside for a moment that such a view invariably devolves into an insufferable egocentric solipsism – if everyone subscribes to this view, wouldn’t that make every social interaction contentious? Asked another way – if you place yourself at the center of your own universe, where is everybody else supposed to live . . . in their own universe?

In the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), we are introduced to a young man who became disenchanted with living as everyone else did, waiting to receive an inheritance after most of their lives had already been spent. He wanted to skip over this social convention, and discover who he really was out in the great big world, with plenty of money and time to become his true authentic-self, unencumbered by social expectations. Needless to say, when the money ran out, and he found himself in a pigsty, with all of the illusions of his existentially pronounced authentic-self dispelled – verse 17 begins with “But when he came to himself . . .”

It is in this epiphanal moment in the story, like all cautionary tales, he discovers the real truth about himself, only after he had bottomed out completely. So it turns out he did have an authentic-self, but not a self-serving one contrived out of his fallen nature, rather it is the self that was created in the image of God – for it is only in God’s image where all meaning and purpose can actually be derived. And arguably, it is the incarnation of Christ, where we find the perfect expression of God’s image – so when Romans 8:29 explains that we’re ever being conformed to His image . . . then we can embrace the promise of 1 John 3:2 “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” And it doesn’t get any more authentic than that.

Being adrift may seem a romantic notion . . . until you actually are

Beauty Into Clichés

It seems that the faster the pace of our lives, by necessity, the more attenuated our focus becomes, consuming the majority of our cognitive and emotional bandwidth – in turn, shrinking our lived out experience until it fits into the reductive universe of our own creation. And then invariably we complain about the quality of life we live — as if life were somehow just happening to us, as if we play no significant role in making it that way. Which, of course, is the inevitable complaint that one most naturally makes out of the reductively self-referencing world they have chosen for themselves. And this is just one of many ways we allow our lives to get off track.

But the ever-present temptation to desire control, is by its very nature, an inescapably reductive tendency, because we can’t control everything. So we end up attempting to convince ourselves that we can somehow limit our exposure to undesirable outcomes – until we begin to filter out all experiences we feel uncertain about. But the problem is, the very same emotional compression that protects you from experiencing emotional lows, invariably constricts your experience of the emotional highs — leaving you in the predictable in between . . . a place where your fears and desires can easily be repackaged and sold to you by consumerism’s parasitic marketplace.

This is how everything distills down to the lowest common denominator. This is why we are expected to speak to one another with a 4th grade vocabulary. And this is how we devolve into allowing culture to turn beauty into clichés. Because in a fast food world, sweet and salty is what sells. It’s why Mona Lisa keychains and tropical sunset placemats sell. It’s how love gets reduced to mere sentiment, and truth is nothing more than someone’s opinion, and justice devolves into a cultural grievance bureaucracy. Because when everything is drained of its transcendence then everything becomes an empty avatar devoid of meaning.

With a consumerist’s sleight of hand, these avatars imply the existence of transcendent meaning without actually referencing it – attempting to coopt its significance while disconnecting it from its source. That’s why we’re prone to accept the cheap knock-off of reality, instead of the fully-formed existence God created us to experience. So in a culture desperate for us to see ourselves as consumers, willing to buy the ideas of what’s meaningful and significant that it’s selling – going through the motions, and speaking the empty rhetoric is all a part of the smoke and mirrors that keeps us trapped in the in between . . . and keeps us complicit participants in the charade culture has become.

A pretentious banality is what we find when we look for meaning apart from God. In 2 Timothy 3:2-5 Paul gives us a glimpse – “For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” And in Romans 12:2 Paul juxtaposes conformity to the world with discerning the will of God and what is good, by a renewing of our minds – which is to say, we should all climb out of the clown car the world keeps stuffing us into and experience our lives as God intended . . . a life where the love of God is at the center of everything.

. . . making beauty into cliché

The Pretense Of Compassion

The distinction between the world as it exists, and the world we interpret – is the tension we feel between the ontological and the epistemological . . . expressed in our desire to believe that we know what’s really going on. Then there is the tension we experience between what we actually believe and what we say we believe – which is the distinction found between our socially performative posturing and our egocentric opinions that dare not see the light of day. For example, we all want to be perceived as a thoughtful and caring person – when in fact we put precious little effort into working through what we think. And for the most part, we have a pretty shallow concept for what actually constitutes caring for others.

So exactly what kind of morality should we expect to arise from a culture that largely feigns a thoughtful concern for the disadvantaged? I would argue that it would be an ambiguously premised morality that would predictably morph with the mercurial zeitgeist of cultural shifts in sentimentality and pragmatism. Which is to say, if I can evoke an emotional reaction from you (sentimentality) to a social concern, then the simplistic binary solution I offer you as the solution will likely strike you as the most practical response (pragmatism). And because compassion can be so easily coopted to manipulate our emotions – seldom do we even question the moral premise for what actually constitutes a compassionate solution.

If being compassionate were nothing more than a strong feeling of emotion we experience, then invariably the actions we take will most likely be measured by how those actions make us feel . . . instead of whether or not they actually address the need. And this is precisely why we end up playing down the unintended consequences of those actions. Because as we measure it – our intentions were good . . . at least they felt good. And it is this very same feel good relationship we have with the morality of compassion that drives our engagement of social concerns . . . and invariably comes to the wrong conclusion.

In John 12:1-8 we find Judas Iscariot advocating for the poor, but unlike the accounts of Matthew (26:6-13) and Mark (14:3-9), John’s account exposes Judas’ motivation for wanting to sell the expensive ointment for the money he says he wants to be given to the poor. It turns out that giving to the poor was merely a pretext for Judas to leverage compassion for the poor to achieve his own agenda. In this way, the pretense of compassion, and its good intentions, can create the illusion that you have the unimpeachable moral high ground . . . without ever having to explain why your opinion should be considered compassionate.

Inextricably, compassion requires a moral anchor, otherwise it will only serve our selfish need to feel like we’re thoughtful and caring people – making it nothing more than a self-involved exercise in social posturing. So then, what should the moral anchor of our Christian faith look like? We should always be emulating the self-emptying redemptively sacrificial love of Jesus. Which is to say – our desire for loving others and for doing what is right should arise from our desire for Jesus, himself . . . which is actually the point of this passage in Matthew, Mark, and John. In desiring Jesus above all else, we will begin to catch a glimpse of his heart for those who live on the margins of our society – so that we might begin to learn what genuine compassion really looks like.

For it is Christ within in us where true compassion comes from . . .