I was very heartened to read Paul's last post, as I have had so many of the same thoughts. Similar to the example of the woman in the interview Paul mentioned, we've all seen a nightly news clip, say, with an image of a burning train wreck in the background juxtaposed with the one surviving passenger being interviewed and thanking God for saving her while the fire directly behind her continues to burn. Maddening, as you want to yell, "TURN AROUND, there are other people who apparently God didn't save." Of course, this is a very understandable reaction on the part of a survivor but, nonetheless, it's still piss poor theology, as Paul highlighted in his post.

My particularly pet peeve is the expression, "Everything happens for a reason," which seems to apply a level of omniscience on the part of the speaker that I am only comfortable applying to God. But, then again, I don't think the future is completely knowable, even to God. I think God values freedom that much to let the future be that open.

Don't get me wrong. I do think some things happen for a reason. I think Jesus came into the world for a reason. But saying everything happens for a reason is about as meaningful and useful as saying, "nothing happens for a reason."

And the reason why I get so heated about this is because I think there are actually meaningless events, which are no-thing, literally. Evil for me has that parasitic quality of feeding off the good. And I think Christians should be in a position to see and witness to this. We should be able to say, "I don't know why this or that happened, but it does not have the last word." Why? Because the last word is also the first word, which is also the same Word that dwelt among us.

I recently read an interview with a woman who had very narrowly escaped being killed in the September 11th terrorist attacks. Why did she think she made it out alive when so many others perished? "I guess God just wasn't finished with me yet." I wonder whether any of the 3,000 people who were killed that day would have said when they got up that morning that God was finished with them?

How do you know when God is finished with you?

Now I understand that it's human nature to try to impose some sort of logic on the apparent randomness of life. Why is one person pulled alive from the wreckage of a plane crash in which the other 29 passengers have died? How does that brick which detaches itself from a building facade decide which head on that busy sidewalk to fall on? We try to make some sort of human sense of something quite mysterious -- something which could be the will of God, I suppose, but could also be plain, blind, totally meaningless chance.

I do wonder what people really believe when they make statements like "God wasn't finished with me yet." Do they think they are more unfinished than others, or that God is allowing them additional time to complete their assignments, or are they spouting a comforting platitude without thinking about what they are really saying?

In the burial service in our Book of Common Prayer, we find this prayer for the departed: "Grant that, increasing in knowledge and love of thee, he may go from strength to strength in the life of perfect service in thy heavenly kingdom." I'm not sure whether this prayer has any basis in Scripture, but it does imply that when we die we continue to grow and develop.

Although I do expect to die some day, I don't think God will ever be finished with me. And I thank God for that!

An hour left to work on Friday evening and I receive an angry phone call from a coworker in another department at the school I work at. The phone call goes from bad to worse, as we both bother not to listen to each other and proceed to argue about who was right, who was doing their job, and why the other should admit as such. A few hours later, I am still rehearsing the argument, licking my wounds, and wondering how to resolve it.

I think about going to his office next week to talk with him. But do I apologize, should I apologize when I felt I was in the right? Or does it bother me that someone is angry with me when I feel they shouldn't be? Or do I just want him to apologize? And then I think, maybe I just will tell him that I realize we had a bad exchange and that I know he had the best interest of the student at heart. Period.

What's that I hear fluttering around my ears?

Matthew 18:22

A difficult passage or just something to let us know Jesus could multiply?

The Episcopal priest and writer, Garrett Keizer, has described Jesus as "the wrath of God," a phrase I have always thought provocative because it just might be true. And, if it is true, it means we are given the grace of forgiveness that we do not deserve but couldn't live without.

Thanks, Paul and Stephen, for your comments on my Zoroastrian post, it helps me to imagine I’m not such a total weirdo to get interested in these things! Regarding the issue of faith vs. works, there’s a lot about that whole deal I really don’t understand, but for me it’s hard to separate the two. What I mean is, faith itself generates new ways of thinking, talking, acting in the world, and the deeper faith one has, the more deeply that gets acted out in the world. Monks praying and studying and working in a monastery are, by their faith, changing the world. And war-mongering (or suicide-bombing) zealots have something defective or broken in their faith which is why their works are so destructive. So I think I’m agreeing with Stephen when I say that I think our job is to work at becoming a channel through which more God can flow. And it’s likely that the more God we get flowing through us, the more good works we do. So it’s not about doing good works so God will reward us, it’s about developing a relationship with God that radiates God outwards in ways we can’t even imagine.

All very warm and fuzzy, except for the suicide bombers and crusaders, of course.

That’s what really messes me up. I believe that most people regard themselves as trying to be good guys, even folks whose behavior I find monstrous and horrifying. Even the worst people don’t think of themselves as manifestly evil. Both George Bush and Osama bin Laden really do imagine themselves as good guys, working hard to bring on the Kingdom of God. Just like I do. And how do I know that I’m not as deluded and corrupt and evil as they are, in my own small way?

(And I’m not saying this to get into a whole political discussion. Substitute Truman and Hirohito or Tutsis and Hutus if that will keep us better focused!)

So the tricky part, or one of the tricky parts, is to try to sort out what it means to be authentically faithful to God. I feel like I know it when I see it, (sort of like Potter Stewart’s standard for pornography?), both in myself and in others, but that’s a pretty unsatisfying and perhaps dangerous standard, because it leaves me open to all sorts of opportunity to justify selfish or evil behavior. But slavishly adhering to Leviticus or the Sharia or whatever doesn’t make sense either, since I know those laws are manifestations of a particular human culture and are not universal laws.

So I come back again to Jesus’ two commandments -- to love God with my whole heart and to love my neighbor as myself -- and I figure that continuing to grapple with those two instructions will bring me closer to the answers I am looking for.

My wise friend Zoe said to me that she is learning that the real deal is not trying to fight the bad guys, but to try to BE a good guy.

Even for all those years when the start of school meant nothing to me personally, September always felt like the beginning of the year. I'm not one of those people who think the city is dead in the summer, and I never take vacation in the summer, and I go to church and read serious books and even eat hot soup in the summer. Except for wearing seersucker, my life doesn't change much in the summer. But still... right after Labor Day commuters take the subway back from the tourists, summer blockbusters are replaced by more "artistic" endeavors, I can turn off the air-conditioning at night, my tickets for the new opera season arrive.

These past few years, though, September has come to mean something else. Maybe it's the angle of the sun that sets me off, maybe it's those intrusive electioneering telephone calls leading up to Primary Day -- but at some point around now I start to realize that I'm being unusually sensitive, hyper-emotional, and I'm tending to duck whenever a plane flies overhead. Since 1990, I work just two short blocks south of the World Trade Center site (I loathe that canned term "Ground Zero") and so, like many of us, live with a constant awareness of September 11th. Yet this is the week in which it all emerges from the background and takes over. I can't think of another event of my adult life which has so indelibly marked my memory's calendar. How many more years will pass before September no longer means a really bad case of the jitters?

See what you have done, Eve! Now the Times is writing about Zoroastrians.

Oh, the power you wield! =)

Having just read Eve's fascinating post, a few very jumbled thoughts of my own came to my mind.

For a quick (though not sure exhaustive) list of references to "Kingdom of God" in both the Old and New Testaments, you can go here: http://www.christinyou.net/pages/kingdom.html

I have just finished a very short but very informative book entitled, "My Conversations with Martin Luther," by Timothy F. Lull. The only reason I mention this, besides suggesting it to you all (we're up to like 7 readers now, right?), is that it highlights something very important. The resilience of the works vs faith debate.

From Eve's last post:

What really delights me about this vision is that we human beings are asked to do good, not so much for our own individual salvation, but more for the incremental salvation of the whole world. In a sense, we are all Jesus, we are all part of a larger picture, and every good thought, good word, and good deed (the trinity of Zoroastrian ethics) is hastening the moment when the final Restoration will take place.

As someone who was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, the sense that one must earn their salvation through good works is very palpable. (As an interesting aside, Lutherans and Roman Catholics have come to an agreement on justification by faith through grace, so this is not a doctrinal disagreement anymore.) So when first reading Luther, where the point is hammered home that salvation is a gift, not something you earn or can produce through you own efforts (i.e., works), my first question was, well, what's the point of doing good works then!

Now, my point (finally) is that I think the standard liberal approach to church is that the church functions as an additional social service agency, albeit with God's blessing. I think a better and more scripturally grounded view of church is that church is what God does to us for the benefit of the world. I think that Luther would say, "Look, God through Christ IS the salvation of the world." Period. Our job is to recognize this and work from this grounding. I don't think Eve would disagree with this (not so sure about Zoroastrianism), but I think it is an important matter of emphasis. It is not always about what we do, but what God does through us. We need to remember this so that we don't get to the point of thinking the Kingdom of God (or that salvation) is wholly dependent on what we do (i.e., "works"); for that, we should thank God!

In my last post, I made a sort of unfriendly comment about my Zoroastrian reading, which did not acknowledge how much I have enjoyed learning about Zoroastrian cosmology these last few months. There are a few things I want to tell you about it, because I think they are really compelling ideas.

I should say really clearly that I am not a theologian (by any stretch of imagination!) or a historian or anything else like that, so you may very likely read things here that are plain out wrong or just foolish. (And please correct me when you do!) I read all this stuff because it helps me sort out my own beliefs and faith and doubt and confusion, and because it gives me ideas for music I want to write, and because I find it fun. So I hope you will read what I write with the constant awareness that I am no expert on much of anything at all…

Scholars claim that many of the ideas embedded in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- ideas like individual judgment, heaven and hell, the last judgment, the resurrection of the body, and eternal life -- all originated in Zoroastrianism.

Basically, the core vision of Zoroastrianism is that there are two powers in the world, God (who is wholly good), and Evil. The two are in a battle to the end of the world, and God is going to win. God created the world, and human beings in particular, as a way of fighting Evil. So every good thing we do is an incremental defeat of Evil, and eventually Evil will be wholly vanquished and the world will no longer need to exist.

What really delights me about this vision is that we human beings are asked to do good, not so much for our own individual salvation, but more for the incremental salvation of the whole world. In a sense, we are all Jesus, we are all part of a larger picture, and every good thought, good word, and good deed (the trinity of Zoroastrian ethics) is hastening the moment when the final Restoration will take place.

While I think the idea that we are all working together for the arrival of the Kingdom of God is certainly embedded in Christianity, I don’t know where it appears in such a clear form, and if you can think of a NT reference that really embodies that idea, I’d really love to know about it.

Here’s another idea I like a lot: heaven and hell exist in a very similar way to the orthodox Christian heaven and hell, but at the last judgment, they cease to exist. Souls that have been languishing in hell since death go through a final cleansing, and then EVERYONE joins in eternal life with God. Zoroastrians could not conceive that a good God would punish creation for eternity, so that’s how they make sense of it. Pretty cool, no?!

Manichaeanism is actually a heresy of Zoroastrianism, which also infected Christianity (mostly through Augustine), and led to all the troubles that grow from equating Evil with Matter and Good with Spirit. All that body-hating and asceticism and (I would claim) woman-hating, grows out of that simplistic equation. For a Zoroastrian, Matter can not at all be inherently evil, because God CREATED matter, and in fact, is depending on the created world to restore Good for eternity.

Orthodox Zoroastrianism seems to be oddly silent about how Evil came to exist in the first place, but there is a heresy called Zurvanism that explains it with a really cool and beautiful story. I’ll tell you about that next time.

Well, we must all of been chosen to guest blog because we have somewhat recurrent insomnia! I, too, experience bouts every few months (sometimes more, sometimes less). I also try to pray during these times and am way impressed Eve that you get up and start working. Me, I think I get stuck inside the anxiety. Not always bad. There is a certain silence in the early morning that makes me understand why monastic communities for centuries got up at 3 or 4am to pray.


And, since there has been some poems posted, I thought I would share one of my favorite poems, written by the Welsh Anglican poet and priest, R.S. Thomas (1913-2000):

Via Negativa

Why no! I never thought other than
That God is that great absence
In our lives, the empty silence
Within, the place where we go
Seeking, not in hope to
Arrive or find. He keeps the interstices
In our knowledge, the darkness
Between stars. His are the echoes
We follow, the footprints he has just
Left. We put our hands in
His side hoping to find
It warm. We look at people
And places as though he had looked
At them, too; but miss the reflection.

Besides being a very haunting poem, it also reminds me that in the culture we live in, where God is mentioned at everything from a football game to finding a parking spot, it is worth it to remember that God is mystery that we all should feel a wee bit more humble talking about...except, of course, on this blog.=)

--Stephen

This is from The Gulistan (Rose-Garden) of Sa'di, the medieval Persian poet:
 
"I remember having once walked all night with a caravan and then slept on the edge of the desert. A distracted man who had accompanied us on that journey raised a shout, ran towards the desert and took not a moment's rest. When it was daylight, I asked him what state of his that was. He replied: 'I saw bulbuls commencing to lament on the trees, the partridges on the mountains, the frogs in the water and the beasts in the desert so I bethought myself that it would not be becoming for me to sleep in carelessness while they all were praising God.'

Yesterday at dawn a bird lamented,
Depriving me of sense, patience, strength and consciousness.
One of my intimate friends who
Had perhaps heard my distressed voice
Said: 'I could not believe that thou
Wouldst be so dazed by a bird's cry.'
I replied: 'It is not becoming to humanity
That I should be silent when birds chant praises.'

 
I love this guy! He has a sort of Blakean heedlessness and joy to him, and after reading a bunch of Zoroastrian treatises on good behavior (not very different from Confucian or Greek or Latin treatises about good behavior: they are all big on moderation and dignity and self-restraint), he came as a wonderful breath of fresh air for me...

Here's another taste for you:

Who has renounced appetites for the sake of approbation by men has fallen from licit into illicit appetites.