Under the Sun

Are you defined by what you do, by surviving another day, by endeavoring to build something worthwhile with the sand grains of tide and time?  This is a superb and sobering analysis of what we do and the dangers of being defined by that.

Consider...

"For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it". Jesus (Mark 8:35).

Yesterday, whilst walking home from work, I noticed a Thrush perching on a branch in windy conditions that appeared way too weak to hold its weight.

Initially I found myself thinking 'goodness, what amazing confidence that bird must have to rest in a such precarious spot', but quickly dismissed the thought as I reminded myself that the confidence I assumed wasn't required at all - this creature, should it slip or begin to fall, had wings, which meant at any moment it could soar off into the air and quickly find somewhere else to perch.

It's 'confidence' came from the fact that it was a creature used to something I could only imagine - experiencing the world through the gift of flight.

I found this left me pondering about what should be 'natural' to all of us.

There's been much discussion and debate at large recently (as I noted in a prior posting) about the value and place of our religious propensities in life - are these just a mistake, or are they indeed pointing to a deep truth and reality about our existence that we need to notice and consider in the kind of way I was thinking about the nature of the bird. Does what lies deep inside of us tell us that we can so easily miss the moment when we should be able to encounter the world in a completely fresh and life-changing way?

I was fascinated this week to discover a new video that seeks to unpack the second part of a trilogy of highly provocative films - Terrance Malik's Knight of Cups. The philosophical analysis examines how easily we can loose ourselves in our world by becoming enveloped and overwhelmed by the sensual and the transitory at the expense of unpacking our true nature and significance.

What fascinates about this analysis, and Malik's recent movies, is that they are pointing to the fact that in the human condition, this simply destroys us - it leaves us adrift, like the main character in this film, occasionally registering that there's something more we need to pursue, but essentially powerless to do more than to feel that there's a truth there that troubles us.

Recent dark web materials have been registering this same issue. Yes, there may well be a greater intelligence that us. Yes, there may be some form of consciousness after death. Yes, there may even be some purpose behind all of this.

So, what does "religion" answer to that?

Jesus' statement above is deliberately bold and shocking.
He claims that not only is this loss of ourselves a palpable reality that so readily overcomes us, but that true identity, true purpose and meaning are defined by Him, and it's by coming to terms with His character and purpose (the Gospel) that we can escape our inherent lack of place and become who we are meant to be - we can gain the ability to see the world anew.

That's why the truth claim at the heart of Christianity isn't about what we can or cannot do - it's about what another can do for us, making us whole and showing how all those things we suspect to be true are actually true, and we can have confidence in that truth.

Malik's movie shows how we in ourselves so easily fail, but also that the love that is given to us doesn't change, and the struggle and the suffering is worthwhile if it leads us to understand that astonishing truth.

Consider what is going on beneath the futile, the temporary, the moment. The light of that care, that grace, is never far away.

Not just pretense (Looking for beauty in dereliction)

"This is a pleasant fiction".
Lucilla - Gladiator

I'm sorry I haven't been posting much of late, but I've been going through the harsh reality of facing possible redundancy from work this month, and I'm still none the wiser at present as whether I'm being kept or not, so weeks of uncertainty are, as you can imagine, not making the everyday things particularly easy.

Yesterday, I attended a farewell meal for my manager, who has been made redundant already, and it was a pretty awkward affair. On the surface, my work associates sought to be pleasant even merry, but just below the chuckles and smiles, there was far deeper truths in play regarding anxiety and frustration, fear and pain. It was there in some of the freer statements made as well - truth beneath the surface.

It made me ponder about how much spirituality comes into the same realm. How often do we go 'through the motions' of projecting what is deemed as acceptable in our 'ministry' (mailings, messages, worship) as Christians as a way to avoid people touching on the deeper truths or troubles within?

In the song of songs, we read how the lovers revel in foods, perfumes and spices to adorn their love play, but this is never a problem because of two vital things the story shows. The man loves the woman in her wild natural beauty (see chapter 4) and she cannot live without him (chapter 5), so everything else merely feeds into the depths of their longing for the other, enhancing what is genuinely present at the core of their affections.

In this story, then, we truly encounter a love that cannot be dulled or assuaged by trial or times when they are far apart, even death is deemed small before the strength of their passion. What happens, however, when such vitality is absent and all there is to feed our busyness is the peripheral  - the things we deem to adorn our belief and practice become paramount at the expense of putting aside the gifts and affection God provides to us in Christ in His Word and Sacraments?

We love Him because He loved us, but that primacy of God's love isn't merely seen in some conjectured exchange we think occurs because we "do" something (however "spiritual" we consider what we're doing at such a moment to be) - it's purely because His nature, His deepest desire, His entire sphere of actions towards us is to convey, express and unite us with the love that brought Him to us in the midst of our misery and sin. That and that alone is what saves us, holds us, brings us home. It is the Father running to us, adorning us in such affection, reveling in our safe return that makes His word our sure hope, His offering up our certain life, His union to us our full assurance. What we do, all we do, is become recipients of such unmerited, overwhelming mercy and grace.

We should therefore rest in Christ's astonishing giving of this love, and only find solace there - as His word and table and our union in baptism confirm. If our practice, our expression of Christianity becomes about the cosmetics of what we have done or say - because we 'made a decision', made a public witness, made a fair show of ourselves, we are 'doing' something worthy of merit or spiritual commendation - then we can find ourselves easily heading for the folly of self righteousness. Expression of service, we are warned on various occasions, can be entirely empty unless this springs wholly from the life God the Father so ravishes us with in the pouring out, for us, of His beloved - that is the life, the fragrance, the beauty, that we all so need to have.

It is so very easy in our times to miss what truly counts and hold on to what leaves us less.

These lines by Thomas Merton touch upon the essence of what scripture is seeking to reveal:

For, like a grain of fire
Smoldering in the heart of every living essence
God plants His undivided power —
Buries His thought too vast for worlds
In seed and root and blade and flower,

Until, in the amazing shadowlights
Of windy, cloudy April,
Surcharging the religious silence of the spring,
Creation finds the pressure of its everlasting secret
Too terrible to bear.

The Point

"The Post-modern has adopted the idea that there is no such thing as meaning"  Martin Robinson - The Faith of the Unbeliever.

So, it has proved to be a season of debates.

I myself have watched several in the past month via Social Media, and they all verify one key theme of our times - the world (world-system) is as lost as it ever was.

Certainly, there are more folds and wrinkles now in the philosophical 'fabric' of the current culture, but the dark heart of human meaninglessness - so common to every era of our existence - still resides at the core of this tragic world of ours; it's merely a case of that reality being at least in measure acknowledged by some.

Nothing about us has really changed, (move over Bob Dylan - these lyrics cut to the chase) including a seemingly bottomless capacity to lie to ourselves about what really counts. Post-modernism may tend to obscure the nature of the discussion, but when the likes of Douglas Murray speaks of 'preferring' the old religions to the present chaos and then goes on to poignantly state the resurrection never happened, it tells you exactly where secularism lands us.

The truth is that aside from a few nods of the kind just referred to, the West has become predominantly post-christian as it pursues its 300 plus year old quest to allow what it defines as 'reason' to hold full sway as some magic bullet that will finally kill our need for the folly of God, but it must do so whilst dismissing all prior modern attempts at social change as ill-placed or poorly done, even though some of its voices clearly contend with such a diagnosis.

The myth at the core of so much of the current conversation is that science came about to replace the stories and misconceptions of reality that were being propagated beneath the panacea of religion, but that simply is not so.

The Enlightenment, which came much later than the scientific revolution of the 1500s, qualified our 'objectivism' by a very old form of defining what was true and what was not (see Romans 1:18-23), and the 'empiricism' this has lead to is riddled with pit falls that are deadly (interesting to see this in a recent discussion between Dr Hugh Ross and Dr Peter Atkins. Atkins spends a great deal of his time conceiving of 'what ifs' and total conjecture in regards to the material universe, where Ross seeks to principally tie his theological insights to observable, verifiable data, yet Ross is presenting the theological world-view).

The gift of modern rationalism is that it has made us orphans in a meaningless, entirely material universe, with no worth or value, to quote Sam Harris, beyond the moment you currently inhabit - that is all you really have. The basis of this tower of rationality is the supposedly unassailable creed of naturalism that verifies, via natural selection, as interpreted by Darwin, this world view.

Therein lies the problem.
If we accept the understanding such suppositions provide - that there is no 'horizon' beyond a very fleeting and essentially purposeless and accidental existence, how do we derive any sense of meaningful purpose, any sphere of values from that? If the universe is in effect a meaningless mistake, why would anything we do really count?

The question becomes entirely relevant when we encounter anything that makes us aware that naturalism may not be as comprehensive or as correct as it claims, or we experience something that causes us to consider the possibility of the transcendent, the second of these interlocking with a very deep and real longing within. This is why Christianity speaks of the notions of our secular world as being a negation of something we all inherently know to be true.

The vital criticisms of naturalism's presumptions are many, and are essential in the current discussions.
If we make the sole reason for our being here nothing more than the conclusion that nothing actually matters, then we become nothing more than accidental participants in a brief 'blip' on meaninglessness - the universe. If, however, we take Paul's argument in 1 Corinthians 15 concerning the life and purpose of Jesus Christ as historical (and the cornerstone of his argument here is that it was), then life and death are not the only truths we have to face - there is a far greater value to who and what we are.

The question we all must face is are we willing to concede that life is just a fluke or that there is much more going on. That is where, fully aware of the debate, we need to begin.