Ethan Renoe's Blog, page 12

I won’t die as someone who was tormented by life.

Mayan fires rise from the hills surrounding the lake day and night. The indigenous Quiche burn things to live while tourists speed around the water on motorboats, zipping from one lakeside hippie town to another. We buy their jewelry and fabrics. 

Maybe this was the last time I felt alive. I stood on the bow of a passenger ship we had chartered for just the two of us and watched the purple sun sink below the hazy hills. My girl was in the middle of the ship shooting videos for Instagram and I tried to balance while standing on the edge of the choppy water. 

Later as we lay on the dock, I watched her lips, large and sweet, as they relaxed with a breath into sleep. This was in January, near the equator. Back when I felt alive and wasn’t merely mentally acknowledging the fact that my lungs expanded and contracted.

Back when every kiss really meant something. 

I’m finding that a certain amount of risk is what equals vibrant life.
Well, risk and beauty. 

Maybe that’s why the first book I ever wrote opens with this minute exchange:

“Certainty is overrated,” one of my college roommates said to the other.
“You’re overrated,” he replied. 

Safety is overrated too.
Or maybe just safety nets. 

Spend your whole life fretting about funds and you’ll reach the end of it to find that they’re not what carried you along anyway. Love did. As did beauty and a little music. You’ll also realize that because you never took a risk that exposed you on any front, you never felt the violent rush of life which is, at its core, the answer to Why? 

Well, because it’s there.1

I don’t want to die as someone who was tormented by life. I’ve sped across African plains and eaten a chicken salad sandwich atop a Mayan temple. I rode an elephant through a Thai jungle and only later discovered how inhumanely they treat those animals. I’ve fallen in love one and a half times and watched my bank account dip below zero twice. 

I’m always on the cusp of buying a one-way ticket to the rest of the world. 

I lived in Los Angeles and got a peek backstage and the idiot behind the curtain didn’t like being found out. 

In Hollywood, you don’t ask where the money comes from, you just spend it. 

What they don’t want you to know is that the industry is funded by strapping people to a couch without touching them. If you can get someone to glue their eyes to their way-too-many-inches flatscreen for two hours watching your show, you can ride their attention right to the bank. 

It’s called a flatscreen for a reason. 

Trees aren’t two-dimensional, nor are ocean waves or quality French kisses. Don’t settle for the flatness of the life Los Angeles wants you to live. 

Go outside.
Spend money on a plane ticket instead.

I learned that science is beautiful too. I imagine that scientists don’t become scientists because they enjoy drudgery, but because they see beauty in the mechanics of the world. Mathematicians can see the music in the numbers like biologists can hear the song the wet world has been singing for millennia. 

Too many people have never quit a job.
Too many people are scared of discomfort. 
Too many people haven’t seen the ocean.
Too many people have never really realized they’re going to die.

I met a girl in a coffee shop and told her I’m a writer.
I lied a bit, but I do write…or try to.

She told me the tattoos on my legs look like the haphazard pages of a journal and I’m not sure if it was a compliment or not, but it’s accurate. If our life isn’t tinted by the scribbles of a random thought here and there, colored by the imprint of each season we pass through, then how will future folks know we passed this way? What markings in the sand will tell our stories when the wind blows and the water rises?

The unexamined life is not worth living.2
You could say the unexperienced life is also not worth living. 
The life in front of a flatscreen, watching other people live, is not worth living. 

What purpose calls out into the face of the inevitable Heat Death of the Universe?
If it’s not to risk, to love, and to be aware that it’s all happening now, then I don’t know what it is.

You could say that one of the dangers of screens is that it removes you from the present and into a time and place that’s not here and now. Even John Wesley, the great theologian, reportedly got nervous whenever people made plans too far in the future or reminisced too deeply on the past. Because neither of those moments is where we are. We’re in the present.

“Once you realize you’re not gonna be around forever, I think that’s what makes life so magical. One day you’ll eat your last meal, smell your last flower, hug your friend for the very last time. You might not know it’s the last time. So that’s why you should do everything you love with passion, you know? Treasure the few years you’ve got because…that’s all there is.”3

We are human beings.
Be present before you’re a human was. 

e

–

1George Mallory, on why he climbed Mount Everest
2Socrates
3After Life

A Summary of and Response to Nietzsche’s Death of God and his Superman Ideal

Here is a paper I wrote for my History of Philosophy class in seminary. Hope you enjoy! NOTE: Since WordPress can’t do footnotes apparently, the quotes are not cited, but there is a Bibliography at the end. If you really need help finding the source of a quote for one reason or another…well…try harder, untermensch.

Introduction to Nietzsche and His Thought

Friedrich Nietzsche, like many prominent atheists throughout history, lost his father at the age of 5 and came of age with primarily female influences. The removal of his father, it appears, caused him to ultimately abandon the idea of God and forge his own system of epistemology, ethics, and life in the absence of a deity. Although he is perhaps best known for declaring that “God is dead and we killed him,” (a quote often taken out of context) Nietzsche was profoundly theologically educated and did not arrive at this statement lightly. Nor, it should be noted, does Nietzsche think that a literal god existed whom human beings were capable of killing, and they had done so. 

Instead, Nietzsche seems to be commenting on a phenomenon which had already taken place, largely due to Enlightenment thinkers and even Christian philosophers like Sören Kierkegaard. Namely, that in a human-centered society, the need for God had evaporated, therefore, humans were free to go on with their lives in his absence. Whether or not God is actually dead, or absent, or ever existed at all, seems to matter less when one can live however she pleases sans divine punishment or instruction. This attitude and ethic took the reins in the decades following Nietzsche’s death, with one milestone being the TIME Magazine article which boldly asked from the cover of the publication, “Is God dead?” Wrote the article’s author: “No longer is the question the taunting jest of skeptics for whom unbelief is the test of wisdom and for whom Nietzsche is the prophet who gave the right answer a century ago.” 

Nietzsche spoke what others at the time were perhaps too afraid to say aloud, as if uttering it to others might make it true: That God, or at least the primacy of His influence in the world, its ethics, and its progress, has eroded and is presently unnecessary for human flourishing. In many ways, this was the cultural pendulum swinging to the opposite extreme of the era of the Puritans, who saw God as involved in every single aspect of their life. Theirs was the mentality that repented of hidden sin if one of their corn stalks wilted in the sun; God was imminently involved in every part of the world and their lives. Starting this theocratic civilization was even their motivation for fleeing the oppressive Catholic state in Europe. One could imagine Nietzsche praising the Puritans who lived this way because, although he intrinsically disagreed with them, they lived in a logic that aligned with their confessed belief. This way of life would change in just a few centuries between the age of the Puritans and the time Nietzsche was born (mainly due to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution), and this is essentially the sentiment behind his statement that God has died. 

Nietzsche states bluntly that religion lingering in the modern world only serves to satisfy the longing of the religious, simple-minded men to be herded like an animal. Ice writes, “It has a cultural meaning: God has passed out of our existence and become a dead entity for us because we crowded him out of our consciousnesses in creating and worshiping idols of our own ethnic likenesses…God language is dead and we have no factual way of determining anything about such an entity—hence, the term “God” very likely has never referred to anything actual.”

The struggle with power dynamics, stemming from his conception of slave-master relationships, pervades all of his thought processes. This led to one of Nietzsche’s largest critiques of the Christian church over time: the hermeneutic of suspicion, which brought to light certain doctrines which benefitted the power structures of the institution. This paper will not, however, focus on sociological power dynamics, but on the death of God and how, in the phenomenon of eternal return, the more individualistic übermensch, or ‘overman’ (but referred to as ‘superman’ from here on) rises above the rest of the herd animals, creating his own ethic by which to live rather than be subject to the terms of others more powerful than him. This idea was first announced in The Gay Science, but filled out more fully by the quasi-Christlike figure Zarathustra in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 

Death of a Deity

In his observations of modern secular culture, Mark Sayers points out that the average postmodern, post-Christian person longs for ‘the kingdom without the King.” They want the benefits philosophically provided by belief in the Judeo-Christian ethic, without the restraint or allegiance to an actual, living deity. Sayers explains how, over the past two millennia, Christians have championed everything from public education to healthcare as a basic human right. In the past couple centuries however, the growth of atheism, agnosticism, and ‘nones’ has shifted most people’s mental assents away from religion and toward either a vague spirituality or a total obliteration of the religious system. They do, however, continue to want things like justice, education, food and water for all, and healthcare. These things, in light of their looming nihilism, run counter to their longing for autonomy and lack of basis for human worth. 

This is exactly where Nietzsche is most honest while many of his supporters cheat. He acknowledged that a denial of the existence of God meant the death of a whole host of ideas. It meant starting over from scratch and creating a system based on his blend of nihilism, naturalism, and existentialism. “When you give up Christian faith, you pull the rug out from under your right to Christian morality as well…you smash the whole system.” While seeking to pull back the curtain on the little man behind the curtain (who turned out to be dead all along), Nietzsche did almost too good a job, leading the world into an age of moral relativism and a worldwide attitude of “if it works for you, do it.” And this, largely, was what he was after, hoping that the individualistic values would clash and the strongest person would dominate. After all, he didn’t see people as either inherently moral or immoral, but amoral. He thought of good and evil as terms created by societies to control people into doing what they wanted (reiterating his hermeneutic of suspicion), and saw them as utterly unrelated to actions. Many metaphors have been made of this comparison; it is like asking, “how far away is purple?” or, “how heavy is cold?” To Nietzsche, the categories of good and evil, as they related to actions, simply did not apply.

So how did Nietzsche seek to reconstruct his ethic in the face of nihilism? Most commentators see him seeking some sort of egoism which seeks the benefit of only oneself. However enticing this hedonism might sound, Nietzsche is careful to account for the weight of complete autonomy, which most people are not prepared for. “As Nietzsche hints, egoism hardly works for everyone. The weak faint under its burden and submit themselves to the strong-willed egoist who imposes his or her self-interest on them.” Unlike Kant’s categorical imperative, which lies a hair’s breadth away from utilitarianism, Nietzsche’s ethic operates on a highly individualistic imperative. In On the Genealogy of Morals, he writes,

“Originally”—so they decree—“one approved unegoistic actions and called them good from the point of view of those to whom they were done, that is to say, those to whom they were useful; later one forgot how this approval originated and, simply because unegoistic actions were always habitually praised as good, one also felt them to be good—as if they were something good in themselves.”

His argument drops an atomic bomb on the notion of deontological morals containing any sort of external foundation of right or wrong; good and evil. The hermeneutic of suspicion returns, probing the motives behind what was called ‘good’ for most of human memory. His ethic grinds against even such ancient laws as the Code of Hammurabi, who called for justice by means of ‘an eye for an eye.’ Through Nietzsche’s lens, why shouldn’t the more powerful person take two eyes from the weaker one and keep both of their own? 

If the majority of people in society are mere herd animals, clinging to the safety net of religious salvation, then in Nietzsche’s mind, the best a man can aspire to is to transcend this herd-like mentality and dominate, both other humans and nature itself. This urge, hardwired into human beings according to Nietzsche, is what he calls the will to power. The will to power is what ultimately leads every superman to his transcending of society. He who is not dominated by the shepherd and thus, behaving like a herded sheep, has overcome the failures of society and can now think for himself. The logic seems to be sturdy: Remove any source of external morality and the only thing humans are left with is, as Nietzsche put it, the will to power; the domineering of the strong over the weak. And this, in essence, is what the superman is. He is no longer herded by the masses and their guiding, unquestioned principles, but by his own will and success. 

Personal Analysis

As an angsty twenty-something feeling enslaved by powerful corporations and surrounded by millionaire pastors who got rich by selling hope, I can certainly sympathize with Nietzsche’s hermeneutic of suspicion, critique of powerful structures, and desire to rise above the existing system. Indeed, many of his modern adherents are men around my age who have nothing to lose and a world to gain. In exchange for ‘not following the same pattern as society,’ they gain freedom from right and wrong, complete autonomy, and perhaps best of all, the prideful position of looking down upon all the enslaved untermenschen. In modern typology, this is best embodied in the character of Tyler Durden in the film Fight Club, who fully embraces his position as an enlightened, nihilistic superman by destroying corporate America and blowing up every skyscraper which houses the nation’s credit companies. Durden presents his twisted vision of utopia in one scene of the film: 

“In the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”

In a film which portrays the utter destruction of the societal ideal, Fight Club overlooks (perhaps intentionally) many logical fallacies that accompany such destruction, such as how the rise of the proletariat simply creates a new bourgeoise. Nevertheless, its nihilistic roots continue to reflect and inspire the Nietzschian ideals which have inspired young men for over 200 years. As much as I’d like to turn in my Christian badge and convert to the ranks of such supermen, there are some logical boundaries which keep me from doing so. 

In lieu of a religious imperative to live life by, Nietzsche attempted to construct a morality apart from God. He got further than more atheists, and even agnostics, throughout history, but his argument still falls short. The issue found all throughout his writings, is that in the absence of a deity or a larger force or metaphysic on which to base his ethic, Nietzsche fails to satisfy the large question of Why? Writes Rosen, “The striking failure of Nietzsche’s thought is that although it is dedicated to rank-ordering and the reinstitution of aristocratic values, nowhere in his writings, published or unpublished, is there any satisfactory analysis of the concept of value.” Indeed, Nietzsche builds emotional and Herculean calls to might and overcoming, but this call is rooted in nothing more than itself; reach the top of the pyramid and then what? What is the motivation, other than overcoming for its own sake? It appears that there is an endless cycle within the ideas of Nietzsche, and not only that of eternal return in the metaphysical sense. In the rising and falling of supermen, being replaced by more supermen after the previous has risen and fallen, there is no real progress; only a meaningless cyclone of ‘overs’ and ‘unders.’ Just as Marx’s conception of the ruling proletariat inevitably results in a new bourgeoise, Nietzsche’s turnover of supermen doesn’t yield any universal good, which means two things: Nietzsche would be forced to abandon the idea of good and evil altogether (which he did), and that the sought-after ethic of his thought would be one of power rather than virtue. With the death of God, apparently, comes the death of morals. It also results in the death of meaning and purpose, save those purposes which serve to elevate oneself above society and above the enslaved herd animals, thus liberating them for their short stint alive. 

One issue I see in his genealogy of morals argument is that, most unegoistic actions do not serve the victors. It’s often said that history is written by the winners. However, history would need to be written by losers—or at least underdogs—if the idea of unegoistic actions being good really served to benefit them more than the strong and powerful who helped them out. In other words, if the best a human can do is dominate others, where would the idea of “unegoistic actions = inherently good” come from? Masters would always dominate their slaves and pat themselves on the back for being stronger than their fellow men. Slaves, in Nietzsche’s paradigm, would either grow comfortable with their ‘herd animal’ lot in life, or they would rise up and overthrow their master, creating a new ruling class and therefore becoming the height of humanity—the superman. Strength and dominance cannot be the ultimate end of human moral imperatives, or else there would never have been a genesis of the idea of humility and other unselfish values being praised. That, or we would inhabit a world in which the Nazi regime, Stalin’s gulag, the Kim family’s North Korea, and Mao’s China truly represent the heights of human accomplishment. I would hope that Nietzsche himself, were he alive to see these atrocities, would denounce them and adjust his critique accordingly. 

Perhaps the final blow to Nietzsche’s ethic is perhaps the simplest, and that is: the deep-rooted conscience embedded in every human on earth, save perhaps a select few sociopaths. Something within the heart of humans urges us to fight for justice, especially for those who are weak and oppressed. One needs to look no further than every film ever made to see that the human spirit is hungry for justice, and for the vindication of the downtrodden. One would have a hard time justifying Nietzsche’s principles to any group of people around the world, save some theorizing think tank of philosophy students. As Catholic saint John Henry Newman related, one’s “conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ.” This innate desire to see wrongs righted, to see the broken healed, and the haughty brought down, points to something deeper than societal conditioning to honor selflessness.

Indeed, if Christ is the center of all things, no matter how one slices history, psychology, and theology, then the moral accuracy of Nietzsche’s superman simply cannot stand. Jesus of Nazareth came as the antithesis to all things high and mighty, making Himself weak for the sake of those He could have easily conquered. For this reason, we know of many hospitals where strong, healthy doctors and nurses care for weak, sick patients. As a society, we see these places as an overall good: healthcare helps humans. It is also for this reason that these hospitals are typically named after saints, and why there will never be a place of care named after Friedrich Nietzsche. After all, why would a strong and healthy superman pause to offer any sort of care to an underman?

Bibliography

Fight Club, Directed by David Fincher. 20th Century Fox: 1999. Film.

Geissler, Fr. Hermann, FSO, Conscience and Truth in the Writings of Blessed John Henry Newman, p. 8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 1778.

Harper, Robert Francis, The Code of Hammurabi, King of Babylon: about 2250 B.C. : autographed text, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904.

Ice, Jackson Lee and Carey, John J., The Death of God Debate, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1967.

Kaag, John. Hiking with Nietzsche, New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018.

Nietzsche, Friedrich and Kaufmann, Walter. Beyond Good & Evil, New York: Vintage Books, 1966.

Nietzsche, Friedrich and Kaufmann, Walter. On the Genealogy of Morals, New York: Vintage Books, 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich and Kaufmann, Walter. The Gay Science, New York: Vintage Books, 1974.

Nietzsche, Friedrich and Norman, Judith. Twilight of the Idols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Rosen, Stanley. The Mask of Enlightenment, Boston: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Sayers, Mark. Disappearing Church: From Cultural Relevance to Gospel Resilience, Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2016.

Spencer, C. Ivan. Tweetable Nietzsche, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2016.

Theology: Toward a Hidden God. Friday, Apr. 08, 1966 http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,835309,00.html 

On the death of a classmate I haven’t seen since 2008

I logged onto Facebook today with a curiosity about a classmate I knew from my teen years. I went to 3 high schools and 2 middle schools, so I know a lot of people from those years. In my search, I got sidetracked by a little post I saw on some mutual friend’s page about an acquaintance I knew from one of those schools in Colorado.

He was never super nice to me. He wasn’t mean, he just wasn’t abundantly kind.

I clicked on his page, curious to see where life had taken him since our years in the same grade. I quickly deciphered through some vague language and heavy posts that he is dead.

He was born five months before me and now he is dead.

Suddenly all the thoughts and feelings I had harbored about him for the past decade seemed abysmally small and tainted with selfish bitterness. I clicked through dozens of tributary posts and tried to figure out what had happened—car accident? Health issues? The more I looked around, the less I learned. No one wanted to name it.

One post read, “I never knew you were in so much pain.”
And there it was.

Suicide, the monster you never want to name because to say it makes it somehow more real, somehow more permanent.

Suddenly I felt guilty, not for anything I had done or said to him, but simply for having those embers burning in the back of my mind for so long, and for such small reasons.

In seventh grade he didn’t laugh at my joke. In ninth, he made some comment about my kickball abilities. Really, Ethan?

It’s an overused cliche to the point that is has lost all umph, but you never know what someone is going through until you get to know them. This maxim regains all its strength when someone you didn’t necessarily care for (for utterly vapid reasons) puts an end to their life.

It’s easy to pile hate on someone from afar, watching their lives unfold on social media and holding onto that one thing that slighted you back in 2006, or whatever it is.

Recently, one of my posts on social media garnered a ton of hate from some folks who disagree with me politically. They didn’t just disagree with my argument in their comments, but piled up a ridiculous amount of hatred on me as a person. I can’t help but wonder how different their responses would have been if they knew that my dad has cancer and is undergoing radiation treatment; my dogs are in the slow process of dying; and I’m feeling increasingly skeptical about the existence of my own life’s purpose. I only say this to point out that it doesn’t feel good to be the recipient of blind internet hatred, yet how many times have I been the perpetrator?

When we carelessly toss hate around the internet, are we remembering that there are real lives being lived on the other side of the screen? That someone in their life might also have cancer, or that they’ve lost a family member? That they are fighting a hundred battles at once—just like you?

I felt convicted by the death of this man. I was guilty of judging him before knowing him; guilty of disliking him without cause. Guilty of focusing on my own pain more than his.

I want to get in the habit of speaking of people the same way I would at their eulogy. If I wouldn’t say it about them after their death, why would I say it while they’re alive? (and moreover, still able to be hurt!)

It’s easy to judge people, be annoyed by them, and cast them aside while they’re still alive. But the moment he passes away (how much more so by his own hand), all we are left with is regret: Why didn’t I reach out to him? Why was I so blinded by my own struggles that I didn’t care one iota about his? Why did I dislike him again; just for a few petty comments?

Everything you held against this person floats away into the ether. It’s like we gain some sort of objective clarity in these moments and are able to see that he was hurting from this event in his past or that struggle, and that’s why he said that off-color thing to me. Suddenly I’m a lot more okay with being offended by him…now that I see how much he was hurting too.

I’m the worst offender when it comes to holding a grudge and feeling offended, but moments like these call me back to some sense of clarity. I don’t want to be a grudge-holder or a judgmental nose-raiser. I want to remember that, no matter how someone comes off on the outside, there may be a thousand demons raging inside their chest.

If we can all try to remember this next time someone is short with us, or offends us on the internet, the world would become just a little more understanding and a little less hostile.

Until that moment comes that all things are revealed and we finally see all things objectively, as they are, not as we mistakenly perceive them, we pray

Maranatha, come Lord Jesus and heal our wounds.

e

I feel like God in a scary way: Can the rich be saved?

The ancient Mayan people saw their kings and priests as godlike, if not actual gods themselves. If you’ve seen the cripplingly violent film Apocalypto, you know that the Mayans practiced human sacrifice (a highly contested fact among viable historians; the Mayans seem far less violent than many other ancient people groups). In the film, the ritual is interrupted by the arrival of rain clouds. This is one area where the film makers did not take a wildly anachronistic stab at American history, though they avoid delving into the reason:

The Mayans saw their rulers as gods not purely because they grew up thinking that, or because they were brainwashed—it was because the leaders secretly controlled the water supply.

How do you convince an agrarian culture which has yearly seasons of drought that you’re not only in charge, but are connected to the supernatural powers? Yield the water and dole it out as you see fit. The people will worship you.

We see the same thing in Mad Max: Fury Road, where Immortan Joe holds back the water supply in order to hold onto his power over the people. Because it’s a dystopian future where currency has no meaning and only things of practical value can be exchanged, controlling the water means controlling much of the world.

The ones with the resources are the gods of the age.

It’s easy for us to look at Mayans or Mad Max and scoff. How could they be so foolish? We know who really controls the resources! All these natural things come from God! etc. etc.

But today it clicked in for me while listening to “Los Angeles” by Ameer Vann. At one point, he raps,

I remember back when it was simple
I ain’t have to fight with all my n****s
Money complicated every issue
Man, it’s crazy how they deal with you…
I feel like God in a scary way

The key is in the two lines I bolded above. He is telling the story of how he got rich, then his life grew more complicated. I had heard the last line many times before while listening to the song, but today it clicked in why he feels like God now that he has money.

Just like the classical cultures of old, the ones with the resources are the gods.

He controls who in his neighborhood could get an extra $10 for running an errand. He is in charge of…well, most things. People with money call the shots.

Money is the new water.

I feel like God in a scary way.

Now that natural resources like water, gas, heat, electricity, are somewhat regulated and we don’t need to fight over them, fiat currency is the new godmaker.

This isn’t a political argument for one side or the other, but think about the stimulus checks that have been going out lately. Who controls those? The poor people? The middle class? Or the ultra rich. They’re giving us money, but try to imagine for a moment how tickled you would be if you were the one pulling the lever to rain dollar bills down on millions of hungry folks.

The power would be intoxicating.

The rich control the water;
the rich control the world.

Rich people don’t just live in nicer houses, have cooler toys, and driver hotter cars. They control the downward trickle of resources into the rest of the population. Historically and sociologically, that is a function of a god, or at the very least, a god-king. From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the Caesars of Rome to whom every citizen had to offer an annual pinch of incense, human cultures are littered with power wielded in the form of wealth and resource control.

Suddenly, as a follower of Jesus, it makes sense why He would say that rich people will have a hard time getting into heaven (Matt. 19:24). I previously thought this was simply because they were distracted by their nice, shiny things. Now I believe it’s because, as Vann rapped, they “feel like God in a scary way.”

What use do you have for God if you’re God?

Why would you need to ask God for something when you’re the one controlling the resources?

I feel like God in a scary way.

The growth of your wealth and power is not merely distracting from the kingdom of God; it is antithetical to it to the degree that you think you’re in charge of running the world. The wealthy, in a very real way, call the shots and operate as a god to the rest of their citizens.

Perhaps this is why the first beatitude listed by Jesus is,

Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven

You can be rich and still be poor in spirit. There have been countless wealthy people who used their wealth to benefit the world. Francis Chan and Rich Mullins earned millions of dollars and gave it all away to help the world. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey gave away billions of dollars to help educate women in Africa. Granted, even acts like this could imbue him with the feeling of a god distributing aid to the millions crying out to him.

The legendary graphic novel Watchmen opens with a monologue from the twisted character Rorschach who stands atop a skyscraper overlooking the city and proclaims,

The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout “Save us!”…
…and I’ll look down, and whisper “no.”

The question is,

Do you feel like God in a scary way as the result of what you have?

Are you atop the temple, slicing up virgins as an act until you’re ready to hand out some water? Is the feeling of playing God intoxicating you?

You can also be relatively poor and be rich in spirit. I see this in my gym all the time. I talk to 19-year-olds who sell weed and sneakers and think they’re the kings of their neighborhood. By most standards, they are not rich rich, yet their hearts betray a mindset of those who are ‘rich in spirit.’

It’s not mere distraction that causes this, as I’ve heard countless pastors preach (“If you’re rich, be careful! Your money can distract you from Jesus!”). Rather, it’s the elevation of the self above others. It’s the feeling godlike among your peers. It’s the control and power you accumulate as you grow richer, and then how you use them.

So regardless of how much money we have, let’s grow toward being poor in spirit.

Let’s, as Paul instructs in Philippians 2, consider others better than ourselves.

Let’s adopt the mindset of Jesus who withheld nothing from those below Him, but joined us, His enemies, and suffered for us instead.

e

Wow. I just realized why I’m so scared of commitment.

There are the typical reasons we list off as reasons we struggle with commitment…maybe they’re all lumped underneath one big one:

What if I meet someone better after I start dating ____?

What if I feel trapped and can’t do everything I want to?

What if s/he changes in a few years? Gets fat? Goes bald?

Perhaps pornography, social media, and movies have rendered my committal capabilities to that of a paperclip, always bombarding us with novelty.

And so on.

But today, I realized another reason for my fear of commitment. It’s big. It could be even bigger than all the other factors combined, and as I’ve started to chew on it, I think it could be tragically accurrate.

I realized that my purpose in doing so many of the things I do in my life is for the end goal of attracting women. I work out, partly because I enjoy it, but largely to be attractive. If I were to commit to one woman and end up marrying her, much of my purpose for exercising would vanish; the mission would be over.

Same with many of my other pursuits. Not exclusively, but I love to grow in my education because I want to come off as smart and accomplished…making me more attractive.

I want to learn new skills and hobbies, partly because I enjoy them, but also because I figure that a diversely-skilled Renaissance man is pretty attractive.

Take away the underlying purpose of all these things—attracting a spouse—and suddenly my motivation for joie de vivre disappears too!

It’s like this: Imagine a deer hunter who tells everyone that he just hunts deer for food. One day, he suddenly receives a gift of a lifetime supply of frozen deer, shipped to him monthly. His purpose in life would feel somewhat deflated if hunting deer was his sole aim in life. It was never just about food, but about the thrill, the purpose it gave him, the teleos. Now that he has accomplished his goal of accumulating deer, what does he have left? He has deer/food, sure, but he now lacks purpose, thrill, and a teleological aim.

This is scary because in many ways it exposes an idol; it lays bare something I’ve worshiped from a young age. I’ve realized that by elevating a relationship with a woman (or the pursuit of one) to a godlike status in my mind, I’ll never be satisfied by the actual success of a relationship. Like the deer hunter, if I receive a lifetime supply of affection from one woman, I will lack purpose, thrill, aim.

This, I’m realizing at it sinks in, is the problem with elevating anything that’s not infinite to the position of god in your mind. It will be exhausted and you will be left hungry. I could marry the most ravishing woman on the planet and eventually start to crave that chase, that pursuit, that high again. Not even because there is a problem with my marriage or my wife, but because I’d have emptied myself of purpose, if my purpose in life is attracting a spouse.

I tell myself and my friends and readers that I want nothing more than a wife, but simultaneously fear that I’d have no further motivation or purpose if I were to actually attain one. I’m like the Joker in The Dark Knight, “I’m like a dog chasing cars…I wouldn’t know what to do if I actually caught one!”

And I’m tragically good at chasing cars (read: women). I’ll almost always get replies back on dating apps, or get the phone number when I ask for it. Sometimes, even when I don’t ask. Yet I somehow believe I want the chase to end? I want one of my biggest drives in life to suddenly evaporate by entering into a relationship?

This is the tension I’ve realized.

Take away dating, take away the thrill of pursuit, and you take away my purpose.

I feel the thalassophobia rising up as I peer over the edge of the depths. I wonder if I’ll ever be brave enough to take the plunge, not into uncertainty but into certainty! Into waking up beside the same person every morning and never experiencing that thrill of tumbling into love again with a stranger.

Will I be bored?

Or have I just been worshiping the wrong thing?

Perhaps, in my dating, I’ve been looking for less of a friend and companion and more of a satiation of my purpose in life. One woman I dated observed, “You keep thinking about the negatives of being in a relationship and neglecting the benefits!” She’s not wrong.

Making vows is for the clinically insane, or at least, the bold. Part of me (perhaps wisely?) wants to wait until I’m in a place where I feel like I can commit to a woman and honor it.

Maybe I need to adjust my vision to something more inexhaustible. Then, perhaps, this hunt for a partner will be less daunting, less pressurized, and less impossible.

Maybe I just need to go a little more mad.

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Anti-Mask Christians: WHY?? Don’t be selfish fools.

Let me preface this by saying that I hate masks. I think they are ridiculous and not as effective as we think they are. Even more so since I had Covid myself and know that I’m presently not at risk of catching it, or more importantly, passing it on to others.

I travel, go to the gym, and coffee shops and restaurants and don’t cower inside my home in fear of the big, bad Covid.

However, last week, two of my favorite YouTubers posted a video where they infiltrated a Christian church worship service. It took me approximately 0.04 seconds to realize that in this video, the nonchristian outsiders who were poking fun at Christians were far more correct than the Christians they interviewed who ended up looking like, well, fools.

The YouTubers showed up at the service with hazmat suits, masks, and face shields, while the ENTIRE Christian congregation bared their faces to the crowd. Multiple times, they asked the churchgoers why ‘no one here has a mask on,’ and almost each time the response was the same: God doesn’t want us to be afraid. God will protect us from getting sick. And so on.

Let’s look at a few of the problems with this mentality, especially among Christians. Again, this is coming from a relatively non-mask dude.

Inconsiderate to, like, everyone

The vast majority of folks at the church agreed with the general anti-mask mindset. No one interviewed seemed too bothered by the naked mouths and clouds of vapor spreading around.

But…

What if 10% of the congregation felt uncomfortable but didn’t say anything? Would it be worth it to cover their mouth for an hour to make that 10% feel more safe at their church?

What if only 5% felt unsafe—should Christians be respectful of even 5% of a population?

What about 1%? Should we go out of our way, making ourselves feel a little less comfortable, so that 1% of people present feel safer in the gathering?

It’s almost like Jesus had a parable about leaving the 99 to go out of His way to bring back the 1…

But not this church.
Swallow your health concerns or GTFO, old lady.

Or, consider everyone who stopped going to their church because they felt unsafe, and therefore wasn’t in the video. Is your personal opinion on masks more important to you than someone coming to your church? If so, you’d have an enormous amount of soul-searching to do.

This doesn’t even touch on how terribly faulty our witness would be in a situation like this; if an outsider who was nervous about the virus showed up, what would their first impression of Christianity be? Would they feel welcomed or uncomfortable? Would your reckless antics drive someone away from the church for good just because you couldn’t put a 6×6 cloth over your mouth for an hour?

You really want to formulate your argument in defense of something that doesn’t hurt you and which drives people away from Jesus? Come on.

This virus has revealed just how far many Christians are willing to go down the path of selfishness and paranoia (myself often included). We’ve done a great job of driving outsiders away from churches ever since the term ‘celebrity pastor’ came into existence; now we’re boarding up the doors and windows to be sure they don’t come back.

Faulty theology of healing

At one point, a woman tells the interviewer that God will protect her and her family from the virus so she doesn’t need a mask (then, strangely, proceeds to drop the F-word).

He brilliantly replies with, “Do you wear a seatbelt in your car?”

That’s the idea, except it’s more than that. A seatbelt protects you from injury. Not wearing one doesn’t necessarily endanger other drivers on the road; a mask or lack of one, does. This ‘Christian’ lady flaunts her divine protection as an act of rebellion against some oppressive regime, and in turn drives away many people who might think Christianity is a reasonable belief system.

I don’t know what world she lives in, but basically everything on earth is trying to kill us in one way or another. And sooner or later, something will succeed with each and every one of us, Christian or not.

100% of Christians die.

Does she think that no Christians have been killed by Covid?

More alarmingly—does she think their faith was weaker than hers? I’m sure there are some who believe along these lines, and this theology is beyond damaging. This is what happens when the prosperity gospel is allowed to take root in a culture for decades and then gets exposed by a worldwide pandemic. People start blindly exiting reality and living in some delusional reality constructed in the bubbly confines of their weird church’s pews.

Their pastors weekly feed them lies about the very world they inhabit, and eventually they end up forgetting that not only did our God come to earth to suffer Himself, but to promise that our own lives would involve suffering, conflict, rejection, and humiliation. Ours is not a Trumpian/Nietzschian religion of the victors, but of the downtrodden and the outcast.

TL;DR

The Bible is overtly clear in the New Testament that we should put no barrier between outsiders and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Christians who refuse to wear masks because of personal liberty, a skewed theology of healing, or just plain apathy are keeping people away from churches. They are making us all look foolish and inconsiderate.

This mindset is the opposite of the hospitality Christ embodied and which Paul spurred us toward. If someone is uncomfortable or feels unsafe because of our actions, we should bend over backward to make them feel more at home in our churches, no matter how we personally feel about masks.

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The wind is blowing again…

The wind is blowing again.

I walked into the sauna yesterday and inhaled the mustardy scent of human sweat. Soon I was contributing my own odoriferous flavor to the moist potluck and my mind began wandering. I remembered this time I was dogsitting and was struck by one of the most poignant pictures of the human condition I’ve ever seen.

I was asked to dogsit two dogs for a family from church. While I was staying at their house, I noticed something peculiar. Whenever I would leave, I locked the two hounds away in their kennels, and getting them inside was somewhat of a hassle. They didn’t want to go into their kennels because they knew they’d be locked there for a while, all alone, not free to roam the house. Same thing before bed, I locked them in their cages and slept.

But this was the weird thing: Sometimes throughout the day, they would wander the house and end up in their kennel to lie down and chill for a while. The cage door was obviously open, and they chose to stay inside their cage for a spell.

I thought about how interesting this was, and how many humans do the same. We have the whole world at our fingertips (aka, the whole house to roam), yet we choose to stay in the one place that feels the most comfortable, even if it’s a cage by some definition.

“I wish I could travel like you do,” is a sentence I hear a lot.

“Well then…do it,” is a sentence I say a lot.

For many of you reading this, there is no external force keeping you tied to your present situation. Like Gary V says, if you’ve ever spent $5 on a cup of coffee, you have no excuse for not doing the things you want to.

Valid ‘kennels’ are things like family, sickness, and there are probably a few others I can’t think of right now. Invalid examples are: work, money, laziness, procrastination, and fear.

Fear may be the biggest example of an internal prison in which we lock ourselves. Many people have plenty of money and could take a week off of work to head to Colombia, but it’s the mystery, and by extension, fear, that keeps them from taking that trip.

Honestly, I’m usually more scared of having a comfy life in the suburbs than I am of exploring the planet.

The wind is blowing again.

I’m almost 30 and I’m stuck in this cage. It’s a cage constructed of stocks, jobs, time restraints, and a series of numbers and acronyms to which people devote their lives: IRA, 401k, ETF, and so on. I’m tired of sitting in this American kennel and can’t help but wonder if there’s more of the house I’ve yet to explore; more of ways of doing life than I’ve previously tasted.

I work for other people. Someone else makes my schedule, aka, they manage my time. If your time = your life, then what am I subjecting myself to?

We’re far less free than we realize.

But the wind is blowing again.

Earlier this year I held a one-way plane ticket to Guatemala but I chickened out and bought a return flight a few weeks later—before I even left the States.

But now I’ve got friends in Chile and Costa Rica and a few profitable investments and I’m thinking of buying another one-way, but this time, without the chickening out. This time, I’m escaping from winter like Plato from the Cave. I’m fleeing the country as if consumerist capitalism could destroy my soul. (ahem)

The wind is blowing again.

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The Rise of Relational Pornography

No, Claudia is NOT an OnlyFans model.

Several years ago I heard about a device created in Asia which allowed two lovers to ‘make out’ digitally via the internet. Even if they were separated by miles, they could kiss this robotic mouth and it would respond instantaneously with the corresponding device of their partner, as if the two of them were making out together with the others’ disembodied mouth.

Crazy, I thought at the time. Who would be so desperate for human connection that they’d need to make out with a robotic extension of one?

Well, it turns out, millions of people.

The website OnlyFans, for instance, was created in 2016 and is officially referred to as a ‘creative content subscription service,’ but anyone who’s heard of the platform before knows what it’s really used for. It’s telling that in order to sign up for a profile, everyone must be over 18, and that the company’s logo is a keyhole, as if peeping on the creators.

The company claims to host chefs and personal trainers, but the company experienced a MASSIVE growth during the global pandemic and it was not because of recipes and workouts. It was because people by the millions wanted some sort of human connection to remove them from the reality of quarantine and panic.

OF and sites like it promise not just the opportunity to gaze at the bodies of beautiful people, but the opportunity to interact with them. To comment or message them directly, and hear back.

Going are the days where people were satisfied to watch nameless bodies in random videos on the major porn websites—those were far too impersonal. If the pandemic has revealed anything it’s that we are absolutely starved for human connection and (men especially) are willing to pay for that connection.

In looking into it a bit more (accountability software firmly in place lol), I found that this seems to be the direction most pornographic websites are heading. I don’t want to name any more, but every conceivable niche site offers the ability to chat and follow every type of model: tattoos, fetish, exotic, et al.

So I coined the term ‘relational pornography’.

Users have found some sort of connection on these sites which the porn of the past was not able to meet. You can only watch so many videos of random people before feeling dehumanized enough to move on. Now, however, with the perception of some sort of relationship with the person on the screen, the same itch can be satisfied but in a slightly…slightly more personal way. You login and see the same person or people in your feed, not unlike the people you follow on Instagram and are accustomed to their content and style.

“What OnlyFans customers crave,” said Tim Stokely, the founder of OnlyFans, “is a level of interaction and intimacy with the creator that they don’t typically get on Instagram or Twitter, where celebrities tend to share the most manicured version of themselves.”

Add in the fact that the models interact back with you (it boosts their status on the algorithms), and you basically have a real, honest-to-God relationship! Who needs to become one flesh with their beloved when you have OnlyFans? This is, without question, the next step in our progress toward becoming that dude in Japan who married an anime hologram.

I considered titling this post “The Rise of Interactive Pornography,” but then realized that this wasn’t strong enough—that people are not just interacting with the models on the screen, but through paying them and chatting with them, feel an actual relationship with this person, even if, in the back of their mind, they know this is her job.

The explosion of this relational pornography reveals that Covid is not the only pandemic ripping across the world these days:

It shows that we are turning to digital means of satisfying our deep need of connection.

It shows that people want this badly enough to ‘vote with their wallets.’

It shows that the market is heartless enough to profit off of broke people’s broke-ness and insecurities (read: low enough value of their bodies to sell them online).

It shows that we (mostly men) have become timid enough to prefer paying for this relational porn over asking out a real human in person.

It shows that, when the potential for personal connection is removed as in, say, a global plague, we are still willing to pay for digital interaction because it is such a deep need in the human soul, and that many of us are in positions where that need is not being met. I live with great roommates and close to my family, so loneliness has not been THAT bad for me, but I could see how my sanity would quickly devolve without my people.

We can clearly see that there is a real problem here, so the question is, what do we do about it?

The only advice I can offer is this: If you or someone you know seems to be drowning in the suffocating sea of loneliness, reach out. Offer alternatives. Even if it’s just a phone cll or FaceTime, it’s better than the other forms of digital interaction they may be contemplating.

Because I’m painfully extroverted, every single time I get in my car, I think, Who could I call right now? You never know, maybe those calls could be a much-needed lifeline in this age of isolation.

There are dozens of ways we can reach out and connect with people who may be settling for these digital means of connectedness and belonging. Those of us who are Christians especially should feel an urgency to unite and comfort the Body of Christ where it’s hurting, for as Paul put it, we are members of one another. When one of us is in pain, it should affect all of us.

When we are starving for human connection, the church should be the ones to rise and meet that need. We are ‘Little Christs’ with skin on who want to stop the bleeding of the world. That means showing up—in person wherever possible—for the lonely and timid.

May we be the antidote to the growing pandemic of relational pornography.

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Three years ago, I covered this phenomenon of modern loneliness much more in-depth in my book The New Lonely . Check it out if you want to dive more into the roots and coping mechanisms of today’s loneliness!

I broke a promise

“Promise me we’ll never stop going on adventures,” she said to me as we stared at the stars. 

It was the middle of June, 2013. I remember because the song—“Middle of June” by Noah Gundersen—was playing in the car speakers. I had played it that night as I do several times every June during pivotal moments. 

We were parked by a towering tree beside the beach on Cape Cod, and a gentle breeze lifted the leaves while Bita and I stargazed.

“We won’t,” I told her.

Neither of us were looking at the other as we hung out the side of the car, staring at the chiaroscuro stars bursting like tattoos from the night’s darkness. At the time, I believed it. I believed with all the blistering passion of a 22-year-old that she and I would never stop exploring the earth as amigos. 

Bita’s a gorgeous Venezuelan the same age as me and we had met the summer before in K Mart. Well, technically we met in high school and befriended each other on Facebook in the days when you befriended everyone you’ve ever seen across a full cafeteria. We never talked. 

Then in 2012 I messaged her and we struck up a playful conversation. I was in Africa or Boston at the time, and I told her I was moving to the Cape that summer to live on the beach and teach paddleboarding lessons. 

When I arrived on the peninsula, I met up with some old friends and we went to K Mart to play “The Wal-Mart Game,” where you divide into multiple teams and both teams fill a shopping cart with 26 items, one for each letter of the alphabet. Then trade carts with a different team and try to beat them at returning the merchandise to its proper shelf. She dove in with my friends and I.

That night kicked off one of—if not the—greatest summer of my life. I was homeless, tan beyond repair (I had a crisply printed waistband tan line for two years), and had two ridiculously close friends, Elbita and our friend Derek. The three of us echoed a thousand summers had before us by others on Cape Cod, the magical jetty into the Atlantic which seems to never weary of enchanting its inhabitants summer after summer. 

I took several flights to Nigeria for meetings, which baffled my coworkers at the surf shop: “Why is this homeless beach bum flying to Nigeria for a week for ‘meetings’?” We house sat in Dennis and escaped brutal rainstorms under the awning of an ancient seafood shanty which the Cape seems to be lousy with. 

We took not one, but two spontaneous trips to New York City to eat cheeseburgers and randomly meet Tim Keller.

We swam in ponds and the ocean, explored abandoned playgrounds, and followed trails through the woods while rain pounded the greenery all around us. We dove off of docks and laughed a lot. Our little trio seemed so packed full of chemical energy that we could have seen that summer unfold for thirty months rather than three.

Inevitably, summer ended as it always does, which meant I had to head to Chicago for my first year at Bible college.

Magic dwindled. 

I texted Derek and Elbita about our inside jokes regularly. I made new friends at school, as did they. 

The next June was when Bita and I found ourselves beside some beach—only God remembers which one of the thousands it was—staring at the sky. 

The waves sang their ancient song along the coast, and Noah Gundersen crooned through the car speakers and I made a promise to my friend in the darkness. 

As I spoke the words, I honestly imagined us aboard ships sailing to new continents, or backpacking tropical trails sprawling the Asian mountains. Bita, Derek, and I, the three amigos. 

I broke a promise. 

Derek wasn’t with us that night, but he was understood to be invited. 

The two of them married two other people and as I remain single—and the most mobile—I wonder if I should have run around making such grand promises at the ripe old age of 22. After all, as Chesterton has pointed out, only fools make vows and I have never claimed to be much more than a fool. 

The problem with vows is that they assume the same passion, emotion, and zeal that you feel in the moment of their conception. Vows also assume that you’ll be the same person in 1, 5, 10 years, which no 22-year-old will ever be. 

Promises and vows assume that life will always be like it is now.
Or maybe, they assume the promise will be easier if life remained the same. 

But life in the 2020’s is anything but static, as is every human’s 20’s. Perhaps the world is just going through a growth phase like the turbulent decade of self-discovery we all go on, which I am soon exiting. 

Reflecting on my 20’s and that starry night beside Elbita is interesting, and perhaps I didn’t break a vow so much as evolve it. I never stopped exploring the world, nor did I ever stop loving my two friends. We never had a falling out, just maybe a drifting apart. 

My 20’s changed me and I’ll be surprised if I don’t squeeze in a few more changes and bumps before they’re over in, ironically, the middle of June. 

But if Elbita and her husband called me up tomorrow, asking to take a trip to Israel, or traversing south to Cape Horn, I suppose a promise would have to be kept. 

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Squeaky-Clean Christianity

Photo by Luke Renoe

‘Clean’ can mean a lot of things. First and foremost, it’s a state of being orderly and untainted by unwanted dirt, clutter, dust, mess, and so on.

For the most part, our American Christianity is squeaky-clean.
Our understanding of the Bible is squeaky-clean.

The issue with this is that the Bible is anything but squeaky-clean, and the world in which we live (including our own lives) are far from clean. This seems to be a simple summation of why so many people struggle to rectify being a Christian when they look at the world around them, the lives of Christians around them, and their own lives.

We sanitize our faith to the point that is it ineffective, like bleaching a yogurt because it has some bacteria in it (that’s the point…).

Perhaps a better metaphor is our own gut health. I recently began learning about gut health and how our immune system is basically ‘good’ bacteria in our stomachs. I grew up thinking that all bacteria were ‘bad,’ and we should just kill them.

We essentially do the same thing with the world, with the Bible. Welp, this doesn’t fit into my worldview as ‘good’ so it can’t be from God. Gotta sanitize this and that…Christians can only make G-rated movies, etc.

Forcing our faith through such a strainer creates a series of impossible dichotomies for us to answer for. Like why are there X-rated parts of the Bible? Well…because there are X-rated parts of the world and they are not hidden from the real God.

You may have grown up under Veggie Tales and thought that the siege of Jericho involved slushies being thrown and Monty Python-esque taunts exchanged, rather than violence and the slaughter of women and children. I’m a big fan of Veggie Tales for the record…for kids. But when it’s time to move from milk to meat in our faith, that means cultivating a more nuanced, more sophisticated and complicated understanding of the Bible and how, exactly, it plugs into the world around us.

A G-rated religion has nothing to say to an X-rated world.

I don’t think I’ve ever met a Christian who was terrified of the world who was effective at reaching it. By that, I mean those people who only watch G-rated films, cite selected Bible verses to prove their points, and have never set foot in a bar/club/bad part of town. The sheltered homeschool type of Christian who is scared of tattoos and gay people, which is often how our faith looks to the outsider. The most effective Christians are those like Father Greg Boyle who don’t fear the dark bits of the world, but dive on into them, shedding light and hope where there was none.

It makes me chuckle when people ask how a Christian could watch a horror film, as if it was the most sinful genre. As if it were more sinful than a licentious episode of Friends where the harmless protagonists sleep around daily. As if the Bible wasn’t chock-full of horror tales of its own.

Some of the most prominent Christians in Hollywood made The Conjuring films, not just to make a quality horror flick, but to be evangelistic in reminding people about the power of the spiritual realm. And they were pretty successful. This is what it looks like for Christians to relay spiritual truths to a violent, not-clean world without sacrificing quality or Christian integrity.

Addressing this in my own faith also means that I have to admit that ‘my house is not in order.’ By that, I mean my system of theology still has a hefty amount of clutter and nooks with which I am unfamiliar. I have a lot of questions which will likely remain unanswered until death, and there are two ways to approach this: pretend I know the answers/force some answer upon those questions which would inevitably do it some injustice, or become alright with a little mystery, with a little mess.

American Christianity tends to pretend it has all the answers; that its structures and systems are secure and faultless. That you can know it all about God.

As someone who has worked behind the scenes of this machine for over a decade, I can tell you that your pastors don’t know all the answers. If they never answer ‘I don’t know’ to at least some of your questions, they are either deceiving themselves or you.

There are no airtight pistons in this mechanism.

This scares many people. It scares me. The comfort we can take in this is that Jesus Himself doesn’t shy away from our questions and doubts, from the areas where our theology seems to disconnect. When Thomas expressed some doubts about Christ’s resurrection, Jesus didn’t scold him with a line about getting his faith in order; He let Tom touch the holes in His hands.

We may have to wait a little longer to stick our pinkies in the divine wounds, but I like to think Jesus will still let us if we need to. I think He’s less like the strict Catholic nuns scolding us for straying from the path of perfect faith, and more like, well, Jesus letting Thomas touch His hands. (speaking of squeaky clean, think about putting your finger in a 3-day-old nail wound…).

No, the Bible is not clean by any sense of the word. It is not devoid of violence, sex, prostitutes, and a little confusion.
The world is not a clean place.
Your life is not a clean life.

And that’s exactly how it should be.

It seems like God likes things that are a little less than perfect…otherwise, He’d have no work to do!

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