Category: Faith and Wisdom (Page 1 of 6)

Jesus went out among the people and heard their murmuring. They come here and take, they said. Why do they deserve to draw water from our well, eat of our crops, and take jobs in our land? Their ways are not our ways. These and all things were promised to us for our faithful devotion to God.

And Jesus called them to gather about him, and he said:

There were two brothers. One, when the afternoon was long, would take the sheep out to the hillsides to graze. He walked along rocky paths and kept watch over them for predators. The other brother would go out in the morning to clear land with fire, plant, and harvest the wheat. He would carry water, dig ditches for irrigation, and maintain vigilance for pests.

One day, the brother who herded the sheep slipped in a rocky pass and broke his leg. He could no longer tend to the sheep, so the task fell to the brother from the wheat.

“Father, I cannot do his job while doing mine. He should have been more careful. He was negligent. Now he gets to relax and recline while I have to do two tasks. My own job is dangerous. If the wind turns, I could be consumed by the fire. If I do not bring enough water, I may die of exhaustion in the field. Who will look after me?”

And the father said, “Dude, what the fuck? Your brother is injured. He didn’t want to break his leg. He feels terrible that you have extra burden, don’t make this harder on him, dumbass. Take care of him and his chores, and he will return tenfold when he is able.

Like, what is wrong with you!?!?!”

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

I hope this letter finds you all in the good health and love of our Lord, and that you are all well and good, and that all your friends and family are good, because we all want each other to be good, and I know how good you are and how much you support me and each other and I want nothing but good things for you and peace and love (did I say love already – okay, lots of love 2x love loving love love), and that your soil is fertile, and your hands steady and your crops abundant and your communities healthy.

Y’all need some Jesus!

In loving peace and love that is love, your devoted servant who’s going to bring the hammer if y’all don’t shape up!

Paul 🙂

Here we are again. The carousel goes round and round. It’s starting to get boring. The right start chanting, “This is your religion of peace?!” The left’s reply, “They want you to be afraid of Muslims. And intermingled there is a chorus of, in no particular order: It’s part of their agenda. They want terror. They want a caliphate. They want to kill infidels. They are poor, disenfranchised, radicalized by individuals with their own agenda. It’s the oil sheikh in Saudi Arabia, desperate to hold onto their fragile claim to power. They hate our freedoms. They are avenging civilian casualties of the bombs of the West. They are protesting Israel. They want to establish an Islamic State. They want the West out of the Mideast.

And the list goes on, but I’m not convinced any of it is correct. In fact, I think it’s personal, deeply individually personal.

Is it any coincidence that more than a fair share of these nutjobs are reformed libertines? Osama Bin Laden was himself a hard partying, drinking, girl crazy young man. I don’t know whether his stash of porn in his compound in Pakistan is propaganda or not, but it fits the narrative of a self-hating, self professed sinner whose turn to Allah, “saved him.”

We’ve heard these stories from friends and relatives too, haven’t we? They went down the wrong path, drugs, sex, booze only to “find” Jesus and become born again. Now they want to push their particular theology down everyone’s throat. I was an evil sinner, corrupted by a world bent on my destruction, and slide toward the eternal abyss.

I have had these people around me my whole life. To them I am an infidel, unsaved, on my way to an eternal damnation, just because I can’t utter the same platitudes they do. Logic does not function with these people, nor does just the faintest of ideas that perhaps possibly there is just a smidgen of room for difference of interpretation of what “following Jesus” means. The Bible is inerrant. It is factual. Written by GOD himself. If you disagree, you have been tainted by evil.

They have similar stories, many of them. They slipped down a path that grew dark. They blamed the society around them. Easy access to drugs, alcohol, girls dressed suggestively, or boys looking so good, giving in to the temptations of the flesh. Shamed, their weaknesses exposed and raw, they sought to cover up in the trappings of religious fundamentalism.

It is also telling how many withdraw from society, homeschooling their children, turning off mass media, limiting contact with those that would corrupt them. Their worldview is limited to the fiery rhetoric from within their Christian 99% white church communities. They don’t want anything to do with society at large, because to them, it is a corrupting influence.

So let’s walk it back a bit. What does a self-hating weak-fleshed young person do when he is confronted with “sin” all around him, an aberrant society that seems to take a special interest in him personally? This society seems, from his point of view, to delight in pushing a “gay agenda” upon him, of rubbing his nose in sexual images, easy booze, legal pot, gender perspectives, political correctness, abortion, war on Christmas, and the continued secularization of America. He falls a couple of times, but his cultural baggage catches up with him and weighs heavily upon his unworthy flesh.

What does this person’s path to redemption look like? Leave society, turn off TV, join a Christian church. If you are a man, you will provide. If you are a woman you will be subservient in all things. This is how you straighten yourself out. It works for some people, I guess.

So here is the final question: What happens when these routes to redemption seem to be blocked, when desperation for one’s eternal soul overwhelms all other concerns?

I am convinced that modern terrorists are each on very personal journeys of redemption made available to them by their faith, lubricated by their self-imposed distance and alienation from the mainstream, and culminating in one final horrific act. The fact that they don’t believe they can knee and pray, seeking peaceful strength in submission to Allah, or say an Our Father, and a couple of Hail Marys to redouble their efforts is a terrible shame.

Pope Francis: better to be an atheist than a hypocritical Catholic

San Francisco cathedral will stop dousing sleeping homeless people with water – The Washington Post.

Did ya’ll seriously not run that that by operations first? No? It’s like right there in the company mission statement.

“Love thy neighbor.”

What do you mean, love can have many forms, some of them liquid? Would you like to be doused with water on a cold San Francisco morning? Well, of course you wouldn’t. I know you’re not homeless. What do you mean they shouldn’t be sleeping in doorways? I’ll bet they don’t want to get wet, probably because they don’t have a roof over their head. Instead of sprinklers, I’ll tell you what we should have installed – beds in the community hall. Oh, that’s where you play bingo.

Please come see me in HR, ASAP.

Laura and I talk a lot about marriage, fidelity, and love.  Sometimes I am scared of what I don’t know I don’t know.  So we talk, put it all on the table.  Are we crazy?  What are we feeling, thinking?  Should we be flipping out because we’re in our forties?

I have said it before, but it is distressing to us that many within our various circles have decided to call it quits with their spouses.  It’s like magic – hit your forties and bam, people start to think.  I don’t know what they think, but I know what thoughts consume us.  And we talk about it.

We constantly ask ourselves if even the questions we are asking are right?  What should we be thinking about as our lives near a midpoint (statistically speaking)?  Are we worried that we didn’t get to do the things we wanted?  We don’t have all the things we wanted or needed?  Is our house sufficiently comfortable?  Do we have lots of friends, nice cars, well paying meaningful employment?  Should we have dated more?  Did we miss out not having sexual conquests, sowing our wild oats?  Girlfriends?  Boyfriends?  Enough travel?  Who did we become?  Did we become what we dreamed?  I My, we, our, mine?

We do ask those questions.  I can imagine so many couples ask themselves, is this all?  I want more, I dreamed of more, but right now it’s too much work.  I want to start over.  You’re not doing it for me.  Laura and I do conclude that most of the things we thought we wanted when we younger have not happened.  Life is not ideal, we are not particularly successful by objective standards, I guess.  We have four beautiful kids whom we adore, but our lives are not champagne wishes and caviar dreams.  Money is tight, old friends are scattered over the globe, new ones are hard to come by.  Professionally we struggle for relevance.

I work in technology.  If you want to know what that means, consider the downfall of Myspace?  That happens to people too, to anyone who stops swimming for even a second.  The current will wash you away and no one will care.  The river don’t care, man, not one bit.

Laura struggles with being a woman working in a Latin culture, one in which women are secretaries, little girls to fetch the coffee, not capable of making important decisions.  A smart competent woman is paired with a rising male star only so that she will assist him and he may shine.  It happens over and over and over.  Most of them haven’t the drive, smarts, and wisdom she holds in her little finger – but because she is a woman, she gets a pat on the head.  Oh, isn’t it cute, the little girl has an opinion.

We are no strangers to difficulties, marital and otherwise.

Couples counselors will say that you have to work for what you want, that you have to put in effort.  That a good marriage takes work, sweat, and you will reap the rewards.  You will get what you want, but you have to work for it.  Sure, so people go to counseling and work on the externals; communicating wants and needs better.  Go on dates, and try to rekindle the new relationship energy.  There are lots of things, but all too often the problems in our families and in our relationships reflect our values in society.  Life is to be experienced.  Life is about what I get out of it.

I’d like to turn that on its head.  Life isn’t about me, it’s about you.  It’s not about filling your cup, but emptying it, pouring it out to those in need.  When we think of life as things to experience, things to consume, things to smell, things to imbibe, things to sex, things to use, we are pouring them down a bottomless chute.  All things that I collect for myself are transient, fleeting, will corrode, have no lasting effect, and will be forgotten along with our worm ridden carcasses.

When we choose to take from this world and stuff it in our maw, we will never be satisfied and the world will be poorer for it.

If, however, you choose to pour yourself out, to empty your cup, to leave it all in the ring, when the end comes you will have enriched the world, touched those around you, left a legacy to your life here among the living.  The saying, you can’t take it with you is true for everything, even experiences.

The best and most lasting thing you can leave behind is love.

I have written and erased this post a bunch of times. Too preachy?  Too self indulgent.  Poorly written? – Maybe one or all of the above.  In any case, I feel like I need to get it down and just throw it out there, let the universe have it, if it cares.

My pastor said something a while back that stuck with me, “Show me the God you believe in and I will tell you who you are.”  That’s pretty radical, if you think about it.  The God in whom you believe really is more about you than him/her.  The traits with which you identify, amplify, and espouse, really tell us about you, not some mythological character.  If you believe in a condemning, vengeful, short tempered god, guess what?  That’s you.  If your God is merciful and loving, the same.

When I was young, the angry god who would send people to Hell just didn’t jive with me.  There was never any doubt, even before I had any sense of theology, we’re talking like second grade, that there was something flawed about this god.  The idea of original sin, an angry spiteful god who would punish us for misdeeds never made sense to me naturally.  Like a good Catholic, though, I kept my more radical thoughts to myself.

Recently, the Internet has given voice to a growing movement of Atheists, emboldened by the ability to connect anonymously, they have found new solidarity from the daily pressures to nod and remain silent while the shrill voices of Christian dogma swirl around them.  To say you are an Atheist is nearly a death sentence in many circles, so they have found respite online.  While rational and cathartic, I have noticed some things that trouble me in the same way as those shrill angry vengeful self-professed christians.

On the one hand you have: god cares and has a hand in our daily lives.  He punishes the wicked and rewards the just.   He’s out there waving his magic shillelagh always on notice to smite the wicked.

On the other hand you have: the universe doesn’t care.  It’s not that the universe is capricious, though.  The universe simply cannot be appealed to.  We may prostrate ourselves to it, but there is nothing.  There is nothing to care.  Even an indifferent universe would seem a conscious choice.  No, there just is simply nothing that may care about you and your needs and your life and your little petty issues.  Nothing.

The universe is cold and does not feel your pain.

So I say to you, my fellow, do not tell me the universe does not feel, because I feel.  I feel your pain.  I care about you.   The universe is not indifferent, because I am not indifferent.  I know that I make a conscious choice to love.  It is not always easy, and I fail frequently, but I try to point my bow into the wind toward what I believe is my God, a god of love.  We may fail.  We may despair.  We may feel alone.  We may want to judge.  We may wish to punish, but if we do not have love for our fellows, we are lost, and surely god is dead.  You see, he’s not out there apart from us.

It is not magic, it is faithfulness.  Faithfulness to what, you ask?  Be faithful to love, my brothers and sisters.  Be faithful to each other.