Which power posits you?

This is rough, it came to me while walking:

Our generation is the first of the centuries to be completely paradoxical in its presentation and schematization of reality; we are completely narcissistically pluralistic.

At the same time that we are the end all of reality unto ourselves, we “don’t feel the need to impress our reality and beliefs upon others” as modern colloquy will present it; in reality: we believe and don’t believe at the same time that our reality, our truths, are indeed real, are Absolute Truth.

We have complete assurance of our reality: we believe that we are “the shit” as it may stand; and yet, however, we rarely every stand completely, rather falter in our foundation as it is grounded in ourselves that posits our reality. We are not, however, “grounded transparently in the power which posited it [ourselves as relation]” as Kierkegaard would state it.

Insomuch as we are right and real, while maintaining the theory that we cannot however be right as the other is simply as valid, we have no ascription towards an objective mediator of reality. How can we, when the other is but is not inherently right?

When there is no objective mediator, there can be no objectivity to our argument which is the only way to make it transferable to other people, and thus we are forced to attempt to create ourselves into a vacuum; this cannot be, however, and by our own doing insomuch that we believe others opinions are as valid as our own, thus negating our vacuum reality: we both desire and yet cannot be and don't desire in a vacuum.

In that stance, there is no power which can posit us, save ourselves, which is only as stable as our beliefs in that power; the power which posits our beliefs is that which is in turn supposed to posit itself and there is no perpetually self generating stasis.

The sun is hot today. Bright, glowing orb of the heavens, I bless thee and beseech thee: give me rest from thy heat. O Lord who controls the lights, please, for thy servant: grant me relief.

My legs are tired from travel, and my back sore from porting my supplies. The cotton vestments itch and scrape my sweat laden torso. My sandals are worn; the leather creaks with each movement.

My feet! How disgusting my feet! Grimy and covered in dirt; sweat from my legs caking mud to my toes. Jagged rocks have caused numerous lacerations, and dried blood marks only the sections that are not covered in earth.

My destination: I see it! A small hill in the distance – the length from my hut to father’s. I miss father, and mother, my wife and my kids. I haven’t seen them in months.

Why? Why did I undertake this message? This calling? Why did I agree to go? I’m tired, sore, hot, lonely, and my feet! My feet!

Closer now, there it is. I see the spot where I will stand and deliver. What am I even to say? I have not the words. O Lord who controls the earth and its inhabitants – grant thy servant words.

Almost there, a little - aah! Cursed rock! Rest ye in the middle of the road to torture the wandering soul! My feet, you have injured my feet: the vessel of the vassal! I throw you to the depths of the hells, you accursed creation. I damn thee to the depths of nonexistence for your wicked stature.

I cannot continue. My feet are burning, I am tired, the sun – O Lord who controls the universe: please dim the light!

Sheep bray in the distance; a breeze wisps the olive trees.

What am I doing here? I have no message, no life changing speech. I have nothing new to say. I am worthless; certainly not worthy to do Your holy work, O Lord who controls all of time and space. You who reign in Your Holy Land, Yisroel. You who discern every man good and blessed in your sight, O Lord who pours salvation: grant thy servant strength.

Twenty more steps till destination is upon me. Blood is coursing from my feet and on holy ground nonetheless. Tattered they carry my body the last twenty steps, trudging with a might that they cannot know. Strips of flesh are hanging on only through their mercy to me. I collapse and remove my sandals, writhing in the dirt. Rocks that have been digging into my soles fall out of their place, allowing new blood to flow freely onto the blessed land. My wineskin in hand, I begin to wash my wounds. Hand outstretched to the final rock where I will once again stand, I begin to crawl to my appointed spot.

How beautiful on the mountain
are the feet of those who bring good news,
who proclaim peace
who bring good tidings
who proclaim salvation
who say to Zion
“Your God Reigns.”

Ordinary Words

Umbrella, light, landscape, sky –
There is no language of the holy.
The sacred lies in the ordinary.

Is how Deng Ming Dao puts it to open up his section for the day. And Buechner for the same day:

“[My English class] was a course less in literature than in language and the great power that language has to move and in some measure even to transform the human heart.”

And it all returns me to paradox: at the same time our language is inherently limiting; yet it is all we have to communicate with. It is especially limiting here where written (implying distance or separation) language is used.

And at the same time that we are stuck (doomed, to be precise) to a restrictive form of communication: “the sacred lies in the ordinary.” God lies in every steaming, putrid, foul piece of drivel that oozes out of our filthy mouths. He rests within every one of our words. He did, in fact, become: The Word. He became, to us, a metaphor, as all things everywhere are.

What is a word if nothing more than an allusion marker to another deeper meaning? And what is that meaning without a maker to the meaning? On both ends – in no way am I about to condone post-modernism and it’s foolish and deceptive “it all lies in the interpreters perception” stance. Nay, both the speaker and the listener take the word and infer it to mean and be something that they both think the other understands.

Right now, I hope in faith that you and I are talking around the same thing.

In riddles, He spoke, in parables. In metaphors and allusions – just like the rotten, stuck rest of us. Because He KNEW that the only way to convey something, would be to talk around it with ordinary situations and objects with the purest (bad pun) hopes of us getting it.

His ideals shall reign forever

Today, is a Monday. It is January 15th. It is cold outside. And it is the day to celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let's work backwards: MLK day. “A fine man. A great man, really, wouldn’t you say? Yes, yes, his ideals shall reign forever, in my heart at least.” Cries the aristocrat from our day. Corporation-leaders and drug-dealers alike vow, on this day, to serve the community in the name of someone who they themselves have lost the meaning of. And yet, racism, ghettos, segregation (to name a few) all still exist. Some physically, some implicitly – but all still exist. At the same time that we’ve made leaps and bounds, we’re still the same poor excuse of a creation that always has been.

“In that day the Lord Almighty will be a glorious crown, a beautiful wreath for the remnant of his people. He will be a spirit of justice to him who sits in judgment, a source of strength to those who turn back the battle at his gate.” Isaiah 28:5-6.

It is cold outside. 29 degrees Fahrenheit to be exact (28.6, really exact). Wind chills to the bone, and ravages a poor, black, ghetto-dwellers already tattered coat. But this is not the only cold, no. The rich man – rich off of the blood of others without recompense – sitting in his warm office, house, car, or private jet is experiencing an even worse cold: a coldness in his heart that he has learned to ignore. The chilling winds of bootstrap-ideology prove ineffective to people in power who say that our public clinics don’t need a rise in expenditure income. Who say that people who live in the ghetto are all lazy or addicted to drugs. Who say that everyone can get out if they really wanted to.

“The earth is defiled by its people, they have disobeyed the laws; violated the statutes. Therefore a curse consuming the earth; its people must bear their guilt. Therefore earths inhabitants are burned up, and very few are left.” Isaiah 24:5-6.

It is January 15th. We are more than two weeks into a new year. In his great Christmas/anti-war song, John Lennon demands: “And so this is Christmas/and what have you done?/Another year over/and a new one just begun.” More than two weeks have passed us by! What have we done? Or nearer to the point (my condolences to John – you were stricken from this earth far too early, brother, live on) what is ours to do? All that we can, in our humane power, if it ends there, is daunting at best. Terrifying, really, if we understand that humans are the source of the problem; terrifying more, if we realize that we aren’t. We were created imago dei; our P’u is to be good and right. If this disease of racism were solely a human issue, that would be a good thing – we can remedy our human actions with other actions. The act and actions of racism can be attacked. We – by our human selves alone – cannot destroy something that is spirit in nature. The metaphor – the ideology – of racism is evil. And we – by our human selves alone – are no match for it.

“See, I lay a stone in Zion, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts will never be dismayed. I will make justice a measuring line and righteousness the plumb line, hail will sweep away your refuge, the lie, and water will overflow your hiding place.” Isaiah 28:16-17.

Lastly, firstly, it is Monday. A brand new day. A brand new week. A fresh start. Hardly a sure-shot, but another go to say the least. Another try – another attempt – to cling to the ideals of brotherhood, sisterhood, love, kindness, peace, gentleness, self-control, understanding, equality, humility, fairness, acceptance, tolerance, and, ultimately, Christ: the cornerstone. The firm foundation to this spiritual battle, will be not only the recognition of the living Christ within ourselves; but, moreover, within the other.

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men were created equal.’

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough plains will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

I, too, have a dream. A dream of fair-trade economy. Of earth-loving ecology. Of person-loving equality. Of child-loving politics. Of God-loving fear.

I, too, have a dream today.

Isaiah's vocation is our vocation

Isaiah 6 is a pretty famous chapter – Isaiah’s commissioning. First, Isaiah is taken in a dream to “go meet his maker” so to speak. When confronted with God, he is overwhelmed by not His greatness or Isaiah’s own wickedness, but by the difference between the two. Having witnessed the holiness of the one he was to converse with, he describes his own situation, probably out of pure shock. Hearing this proclamation of wretchedness, and angel is sent to burn his lips with a fresh coal, searing the sin out of him. And then the most well known of the verses in the periscope: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said “Here am I. Send me!’”

Now – and I don’t know about you – but if I was mystically taken to see a purely Holy being, had my wretchedness not only acknowledged but then proclaimed (by my own lips, nonetheless), had an angel sear my lips with a flaming coal fresh from an alter to the Holy thing, and then hear the Holy beast demand a servant, I know I would be in a stupor rattling enough that I too would say “Uh, me?”

And I think the maker of humans knows this about them: that if they’re rattled by the presence of that which they are reverent towards, they will do whatever their object of worship desires. So, as if to test him and see if he’ll actually follow through, he demands a proclamation from this newfound servant to all of his friends and family. Let us review what God wants of Isaiah, shall we?

“Go and tell this to the people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’”

Ok, pause, let us recap: Crazy, God-meeting, life-altering experience; followed by a vocation to proclaim something like this: “You don’t understand me, and you never will, so tell them to stop trying so darn hard. You will never completely have me figured out, or an orthodoxy so perfectly crafted by you all that I will be completely contained within it. This guy won’t be around for a couple of millennia, but don’t Heisenberg the situation to fit what you’ve conceived of as “me” in it. Why don’t you just let the actual Me handle it? You’re in good hands!”

Now, granted, God didn’t literally say everything I just put in His mouth, so don’t take it as doctrine either. I think that God was simply telling Israel something that is completely pertinent today: “If I’m small enough to fit in your flawed heads; I’m not going to be big enough to ravage your hearts.”

Which is why God didn’t send a book or words; he sent the Word. He sent a person so that we would finally see that he was a little more complicated than already confusing and complicated stories and prophecies.

And at the same time as all of this, however, let’s examine what Buechner has to say about life:

“Life can be thought of as an alphabet by which God graciously makes known his presence and purpose and power among us. Like the Hebrew alphabet, the alphabet of grace has no vowels, and in that sense his words to us are always veiled, subtle, cryptic, so that it is left up to us to delve their meaning, to fill in the vowels for ourselves by means of all the faith and imagination we can muster. God speaks to us in such a way, presumably, not because he chooses to be obscure, but because, unlike a dictionary word whose meaning is fixed, the meaning of an incarnate word is the meaning it has for the one it is spoken to, the meaning that becomes clear and effective in our lives only when we ferret it out for ourselves.”

And hence my interpretation of Isaiah’s vocation. It means what it means to me through my life which is why you have every right – nay, privilege – to disagree and refute it because what God says to me may be different from that which He needs from and for you. Reading the Bible has less to do with adultly reading a tome, than it does with – like a child – having it read to you by the Spirit that works in us all, placing vowels as it sees fit. His proclamation that he wants Isaiah to make says the same thing as Buechner: “Be ever hearing, but never understanding.” Always seek to be attentive to the alphabet; God will help you fill in the vowels.

And in the same fashion, when Taoist author Deng Ming Dao talks of devotion he says that “our determination will build momentum.” If our devotion is to love God, or more to it, to let Him love us then our determination will fill in the vowels for us. And if we’re not careful enough to slow life down and take a look, we will completely bypass the vowels from our sheer momentum. Deng also says that “if our paths and our personalities are completely unified, then there is no distinction between the outer world, and the inner one. Nothing is faraway anymore, nothing is not open to us. That is why the world is like a single point; so strong is devotion that there is nothing that is not part of it.”

Deng’s words remind me of L’Engle’s on ontological living, or Tournier’s on the authenticity of personages. If we accept ourselves in our ontological state (like Isaiah before the Lord) then we can begin to simply live rather than try to be this thing we are not, causing ourselves to try to understand the un-understandable. When we accept our states: our persons: our ontology then we can begin to freely live in the alphabet of grace, proclaiming the vowels that are revealed to us rather than first seeking the vowels, and then trying to build a false life (alphabet) around them.

Oh, the power of stories

What is so fascinating of a story? If nothing else - its end. Chinese opera (as Dr Foltz so lovingly puts it) have the best endings not only due to their inherent beauty, but also from the fact that they are simply over. And good endings do that to a good story: simply put that they are simply over.

Good stories have good endings, and this makes them good stories as the entirity of the body of the story goes towards serving said end. The end of a story is the focal point throughout the body that all of the body works towards.

And that is precisely what draws us back to stories. That is precisely why we read, watch, listen to and consume stories: for the end.

And yet, look at our scientism. Over-scientification seeks, inadvertently, to remove the surprise of the end of the story. "Wrinkle-be-gone," "acne reliever," and other antiaging - antinatural - products all are advocacies of removing the naturally surprising end to the story of our physical beings. And the firms that create these products present this natural happening as the horrible letdown of self.

The same process can be applied in metaphor to other areas of study. Observe what the love of knowledge has the power to do to English majors, philosophy majors or psychology majors. In all, the over adamant love of knowledge can cause them to try too hard with the story they are presented with, thus killing the organic unfolding of the story. The English major has the propensity towards seeking for all the nitty-gritty and petty problems of the story. The philosophy major is presented with the pitfall of looking for the metaphorical universalities (if any, or with any hope of applicability) of the story. The psychology student (oh, I am speaking from pure experience) is looking to the author – what is she revealing about herself through the story?

And all of this causes us to lose the beauty of the organic story. And this, in turn, causes us to lose the beauty of losing ourselves in the organic beauty of the story. Even now, as you read this, I defy you not to wonder where I am going with this rant. Are you not seeking the end? Once again, I say, we are all on a bound to seek the end.

And it is good to have an end, otherwise (o’ crudely stated) we endlessly seek. However, to be motivated towards rather than captivated by the end is, again, where our dissection leads us. We care more about dissecting and figuring out the end of the story than we do about letting the end dissect and figure us out.

What is a story if not a dialogue between you and it – or more to Martin Buber’s view – you and the who who created it? The very who who creates a good story, from this monograph’s author’s perspective, does not begin his endeavor by first concluding the metaphor he wishes to convey:

He simply writes.

Or, more to the point: the writing simply hims.

Will the author contradict herself? By all means! As Madeline L’Engle states it the alternative to the organic, the over introspective, "may be more predictable than the rest of us, but they are also less real.” Why give up reality for predictability? If we could predict the end of a book in the first page, rather than let the real, organic story evolve in front of us, why read the book at all? Read the first page, and call it good! Why kill a story by seeking its end before its end seeks and finds you? Why try to kill the natural end of the story before the end is in sight?

I was talking to a friend the other day who works around the elderly. Now, granted, this friend (as long as I have known him) doesn’t not like the elderly, he is simply… uneasy around them. But in talking to him he told me: “Joe, if I ever get that old, and wrinkly, and whiny, and unattractive: shoot me.” My friend, you are killing the end before the end has the chance to kill you. I am not about to say: “Don’t take care of yourself, don’t try to look good, don’t care about your physical self,” would I be a good Christian if I did? But at the same time, I say to you: let the end of the story direct you, rather than imposing an end that might not even happen, such that your presupposed end directs you and you wreck yourself worrying about what might never be!

Makeup covers the natural end of a pimple; shaving the natural end of growing hair. Are these things and actions wrong? No, unless they are the tool you use to present to yourself a reality that only you can see. And they certainly aren’t bad if you associate culture to good, and nature to bad. Ought we to associate as such? That’s for you to decide.

But when considering a story: don’t lose yourself to analysis: lose yourself to the story.