the sacred and the mundane...

I had to say goodbye to somebody last night. Without being overly dramatic, I'll just say that sometimes life takes unexpected turns and the only thing that keeps a fella on the road is the guard rail. Anyways, he's taking a couple of weeks of vacation and then I think he'll decide what comes next. And me being the dutiful correspondent that I am thought I'd better say whatever I am going to say right now, before his vacation, because I might not see him again for awhile. And people need to be told things.

...

Apparently, I have a unique interest in telling people how I really feel about them. Sometimes it endears myself to people. Other times, well, it scares the crap out of them. I've had it go both ways.

An old college room-mate, who became one of my best life-time friends, told me that I was the first guy who ever told him I loved him. That same guy told me that the reason a mutual friend's ex-girlfriend wasn't talking to me so much might be because I head so directly into intimacy that she can no longer even talk with me. One guy I met pretty much jumped overboard on a new relationship because I told him that his skills and his passion, his character and his integrity thoroughly "excited" me. Yeah. I actually said that to his face.

Well, it was his face until it was the back of his head and the bottom of his running shoes. Running away.

(calling into the distant horizon with a hand cupped to my mouth) "Sorry! Didn't mean to SPOOK ya..."

He's a great guy, and I don't blame him a bit. I might have pulled the trigger on him a little early. Ah well. Lesson learned. Maybe (not).

I guess I just see so much ... insincerity in our lives that I feel the need to push back against it. Hard.

...

I told my friend last night that regardless of how he felt about himself, his successes or failures, that I had the highest regard for him and for his wife because it was their highest value to reach constantly for the sacred life.

From the look on his face, and the manner in which he put his hand on my shoulder, I know he understood what I meant.

...

I ask myself that question of myself often: Am I leading a life that is at every moment defined by sacredness? That strains towards God with each action?

The sacred life, as I understand it, is radical. The sacred life, as I understand it, is marked by a borderline myopic view of the cosmos, and its own place in it. The sacred life sees every decision, whether significant or mundane as being a decision of a "religious" nature. I use the term "religious" with a bit of reluctance, but wanting to be understood clearly, I'm afraid it must be done. By religious, I simply mean to indicate the spiritually charged-I don't know, the matters of faith. The matters of what we really believe, way deep down. The driving forces in our lives.

...

I want to live a sacred life. I want purpose. I want a reason. When the darkness encroaches, when my mood is thick and heavy, I think, "what is man that anybody should give a damn?" I think we all want to think that the blip on the cosmic radar that is our life should mean something, but just being honest, sometimes I look into my son's eyes and ask myself, how many generations of these little people (that would be *us*) have come and gone, and asked the same questions as we do, wrote the same poems as I have, sang the same songs that we do, and all of them expected to be remembered forever. By somebody. How futile.

And I don't know-maybe that's the destiny of a created being. Or, maybe it's just the whispers of a jealous angel trying to make himself like God.

I believe in God. I believe that He made everything, whether he did it by wriggling his nose and nodding his head, or whether He did it using apparently "natural" mechanical processes over eons of years.

I believe that He intended life to be something magnificent.

I believe that the magnificence of life was supposed to be an all-encompassing fullness of meaningful work, relationships of mutual and symbiotic dependency, and the victorious shalom of God's sabbath rest.

I believe that *all* people are beautiful to God. I believe equally that all people have defiled themselves by loving themselves MORE than their creator, such that God's absolute perfection cannot abide our slightest imperfection, and that Jesus was a sacrifice set up at the beginning of time not only to cover the acts of sin, but also the ontological state of sin-filled-ness that creation took on. And that he modeled the life that we should have lived but are simply unable to.

And his gift is not simply the negation of our sin-filled-ness, but it's also the gift of righteousness, the gift of being perceived by God as undefiled, and perfect. It's the promise of being restored to a life of purpose, a life of significance, and LIFE magnificent. Abundant.

Life that is good.

That is the sacred life, as I understand it. And that's the life that I want.

How I understand blessing...

So I don't know if I've every really said anything about this before. If I have, and you get bored, you are free to exercise your right to click out of here. But if you would bear with me, I'd like to tell you something that God has been explaining to me over the course of the last 2 or 3 years.

...

As I mentioned earlier this week, my bible sat too close on my desk to my text books, and through a sort of ambiguous, sort of metamorphosis, became another of them. Sort of like the borg: Resistance is futile, prepare to assimilate.

God's spirit put it into my heart that if I valued Him, it would show by my cleaving to his words. I had memorized songs, passages of plays, political speeches, but did not even recognize the words that God speaks! I started to think that if God spoke to me, I'd probably not recognize his voice for lack of familiarity.

So I began investigating the audio bibles. And I think that was the first step in a new direction for me. Who'd a thunk it. Ned Flanders, eat your heart out.

...

I have a remarkable difficult time accepting that I cannot work to earn my salvation. As time passes, and I prove it over and over again, I've gotten more at ease with the idea. I think that the role of the angry/disappointed Father sort of lolls about over me before the idea of the compassionate and understanding Father.

My dad was a good father. So I don't want anybody to get the wrong idea. But he was, I fear to say, a human, and thus, flawed. He was an academic (hey, I'm not pointing fingers or anything, I'm just sayin...) and as such, usually made his appeals to me rationally. And as human nature goes, much of what I did as a young boy wasn't, well, very rational. He wasn't heavy-handed---but he would tell me when I had disappointed him, and point out to me what he thought the more reasonable action might have been.

He told me he loved me plenty of times, and my sibs would quickly bear witness to his affectionate side. But somehow, we note the insults and rebukes more...

Anyway, my relationship to God has obviously been shaped largely, to this point, by my relationship to my Dad. But blessing abounds...I must also note that my relationship to God has been impacted tremendously by ... yep, MY being a father.

...

My oldest son, Tigger, has for a couple of months been pretty consistently challenging the boundaries of my authority. He's been consistently testing my sincerity, as well as the strength and conviction of my word. In other words: He's been driving me crazy. Not just sometimes. Virtually every day is a struggle with the frayed end of a fragile rope.

But I can testify to the restorative power of sleep. Even 5 hours will wipe my memory clean, and I wake up, see his wide smile and scrunched up eyes and just fall further in love.

...

If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

...

It has been passages like the one above that have taken on a new meaning for me. I'm sure you can understand. Even as Tigger is challenging me, even as he is suggesting that I'm an idiot (he doesn't use those words, exactly), I look at him and he is my own heart. And believe me when I say that I am capable of evil. Evil thoughts, evil deeds, good deeds veneering over bad motives, and yet I am also capable of greater love than I had ever imagined possible.

Jesus' younger brother asked rhetorically, can fresh water come from a salt spring? He was speaking about our mouths, our language, and the fact that blessing and cursing come from the same mouth. But I think the analogy fits in this case as well. Evil and Love from the same place? Indeed. This is a grace-given, broken but still operable aspect of our being created in the image of God.

He made us to love. It was the fall to depravity, though, which distorted that love, twisting it around so that rather than loving God, self and others in right proportion and order, we simply loved ourselves above all else...

I digress slightly...

...

But I've come to understand something greater. Something greater than the fact that love can surmount evil, or that mercy can be stronger than vengeance. Or even that grace can satisfy justice. I've come to understand that it actually makes God greater to bless me.

...

I can remember being reprimanded and taught to "be the bigger boy." The idea being that being bigger was equitable to being more mature, and that if I were more mature, I would be above whatever vengeance I had in mind, above whatever bait was laid out before me, above...how pithy and cheap it sounded to my young ears.

But as an adult, I find it in scripture constantly.

Now, nowhere in the canonized scriptures does it say, "And God was the Bigger Boy." Or, "For God so loved the world, that He became the bigger boy."

But I've read "He leads me in paths of righteousness, for His name's sake," and I've read "This is to my Father's glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples."

...

Father, when you bless me, it makes YOU greater...

Make Your kingdom come to pass on earth, through me, through us,

Your mission of healing, liberation, and reconciliation,

between man and man, man and earth, man and self, and man and You,

such that it causes the entire creation to know and say You are God alone.

Put it into my heart that Your blessing or favor on me is

not a reward for my behavior,

But is Your provision

for Your salvation army,

advancing Your kingdom against darkness, lies, and the tyranny of sin and alienation,

and is evidence of even more grace.

And that as children are born into a family, the love increases, rather than being split

into smaller

and smaller pieces,

That Your grace

grows

and abounds

and increases

with Your every gift to us.

Differing Economic Models...continued...

(backstory to this entry...)

...

Allow me to side-track a little bit for a second. My specific profession isn't really the centerpoint. But I think that the fact that I had a profession, and for a significant part, used that as an indexing point to define my worth is. I understood my worth to my family in dollars per hour. The more I was worth at work, the more I was worth at home. I'm not holding that up as a virtue, or even as healthy. I'm saying that it is the almost inescapable economic model of "this-for-that" which is used in our world.

Hence my question: How is the "this" in Jesus answered? My suggestion was that we are taught that our entrance into heaven is how we understand "this" in Jesus, and the "for-that" is understood as our "good behavior" and righteous acts.

But I can't live like that...I just can't. And it's not for a lack of trying, either.