DECLAWING THE LION

"The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore - on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him as 'meek and mild,' and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies ... He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either. But he had 'a daily beauty in his life that made us ugly,' and officialdom felt that the established order of things would be more secure without him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and quietness."

DOROTHY SAYERS, "THE GREATEST DRAMA EVER STAGED"

CHRISTMAS MUSINGS

there are only a few things where the more you think about it, the less it makes sense, but not in a bad way. when you think too much about atoms or just how big the universe really is, the intricacy and majesty of it all threatens to make the best of men start to feel a bit insignificant. the incarnation is one of those things. that the God who created all things by sheer force of will, who not only holds the ever-expanding universe in the palm of his hand, but also causes every blade of grass to grow, every electron in my body to spin, and every hair on my head to be counted, would enter into the time that he set in motion to redeem creatures who were foolish enough to shake their fists at the very God who gave them fists and the strength they needed to shake them.

heaven must have held its breath in uncertain anticipation wondering what would happen when the Creator entered into creation. would the universe collapse in on itself? would time be able to sustain the weight of its Maker? would galaxies begin to unravel under the force of entropy?

yet none of these things happened. instead, a baby boy was born. a baby utterly, almost embarassingly dependent upon a creature for nourishment, protection, and nurture. and this baby was God himself. not a part of God. not a picture of God. not a projection of God. the person, God ... come for us.

BEAUTY AND DEATH

"Every beauty suffers. A research scientist friend once told me that the autumn leaves are most beautiful on the trees by the roadside because they happen to be distressed by the salt and pollution. Every sunset is a reminder of the impending death of Nature herself ... The Japanese were right in associating beauty with death. Art cannot be divorced from faith, for to do so is to literally close our eyes to that beauty of the dying sun setting all around us. Death spreads all over our lives and therefore faith must be given to see through the darkness, to see through the beauty of 'the valley of the shadow of death'. Beauty is in the brokenness, not in what we can conceive as the perfections, not in the 'finished' images but in the incomplete gestures."

MAKOTO FUJIMURA, "BEAUTY WITHOUT REGRET"

TURNED INSIDE OUT

We need "an antidote to egocentric spirituality, which flees from the world and neglects the church in a private quest for spiritual perfection ... We cannot attain the fullness of the Spirit without being turned inside out so that our central focus is no longer our own growth, but the glory of God and the growth of Christ's kingdom ... the goal of authentic spirituality is a life which escapes from the closed circle of spiritual self-indulgence, or even self-improvement, to become absorbed in the love of God and other persons ... The substance of real spirituality is love."

RICHARD LOVELACE, RENEWAL AS A WAY OF LIFE.

WHEN YOUR HERO FALLS

When your hero falls from grace
All fairy tales are uncovered
Myths exposed and pain magnified
The greatest pain discovered
You taught me to be strong
But I'm confused to see you so weak
You said never to give up
And it hurts to see you welcome defeat
When your Hero falls so do the stars
And so does the perception of tomorrow
Without my Hero there is only
Me alone to deal with my sorrow.
Your Heart ceases to work
And your soul is not happy at all
What are you expected to do
When your only Hero falls

TUPAC AMARE SHAKUR, "WHEN YOUR HERO FALLS"

THE LOGIC OF MADNESS

"There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable ... Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extermely business-like ... Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom."

G.K. CHESTERTON, ORTHODOXY.

MATURING TO CHILDHOOD

i had the thought today that much of life is attempting to recapture the magic and wonder of childhood. there comes a time in life when the chambers of imagination are closed off as silly and childish. We're told to "grow up" and to "act your age." So we move on to speak of much more serious, adult-like things ... mathematics, rhetoric, science, logic, religion. and we leave the play room for the study, thinking that we have developed into real men.

but a strange, even magical, thing can happen if ever one finds the courage to look beyond the cold, automated world of adult rationality. if we look closely enough, (perhaps we should say if we imagine closely enough) we would notice within us an unsupressible longing for wonder. we find that we have often secretly, almost sheepishly, longed to be transported into the day-dreamy worlds of fairy tales. isn't this the tantalizing dream that has mysteriously evaded the grasp of philosophers and politicians and social theorists and scientists alike? we find this strange instinct within us to try to reconstruct those magical worlds using the only tools we have left for ourselves: reason and rationality. so we construct theorems and philosophies and laws and religions, all in an attempt to make time turn around and take us back to the home we can almost remember.

but we are sad to find that we have ever been infected with that unshakable bug called sensibility. we find that we've lost the ability to truly be silly again. and we wish that Peter Pan would once again become more real to us than George Washington or Frankie Robinson or the man that lives downstairs from us.

i think it was snow that led me along this journey. there was a time when snow filled me with wonder, an almost giddy kind of euphoria. i suppose it was because i never had to think about shoveling out a car, or paying heating bills, or driving on slushy, slippery streets. but that's precisely it, isn't it? it's precisely these thoughts that I find keeping me from the thrill of wonder. maybe the soul can't help but ossify with age and really become so crusty and fragile that it must think on these rather silly things lest it fall apart.

or perhaps we've misunderstood what it means to be a "grown up." maybe being grown up was supposed be mean that we could actually live in these worlds of wonder and magic, only we could do it as late into the night as we wanted. maybe it was supposed to mean that we didn't have to live in a make-believe world that was the size of our playroom, but we could live in a make-believe world the size of the world. maybe maturity wasn't supposed to be about becoming less like a child; maybe it was meant to be about finally becoming fully a child.

WINDOWS AND DOORS

i've found that the pace of life in a city often is not conducive to living a contemplative life. there is always pressure, from without as well as from within, to be doing more with life, to be "living life more fully." Yet, a life lived without reflection is mere living, but it is not life. it is perhaps existing with greater zest, but it is not a fullness of life.

contemplation does not come easily, though, to minds that are used to being entertained and stimulated without much effort on our part. it is as though we are a generation that is slowly attempting to walk again after our muscles have atrophied from our consumer culture. our joints creak, our limbs protest loudly, our bones groan under the weight, but there seems to be a newfound determination to be conscious again.

but consciousness without hope can be a depressing and dangerous thing. to enter into the philosophical wasteland without an anchor in a world of firm, unshaking, objective hope is to be lost in the darkness of the abyss we call the human heart. fortunately for us, there is a world alive and teeming with hope. and our world, in its paradoxes and contradictions, afford us, in fleeting moments of awareness, windows into that world which is not yet here, and yet already is.

if we'd only believe enough to peer through those windows we'd find that the world outside is much more colorful and lively than the drab, gray world that we find ourselves in today. and while the windows to this world are many, the door is but One.

HUNGER

there is a point where hunger becomes so great that it numbs you. indeed, the very hungry, those actually in danger of starvation, are those who can no longer feel hunger. cold works that way, too. there is a point where cold becomes so strong that one actually feels kind of warm. and those in greatest danger of freezing to death are those who no longer feel the cold.

i have often wondered if the soul isn't so much different. that those in greatest danger of starving to death are those who no longer feel any kind of spiritual hunger. that the souls in greatest danger of becoming as cold as stone are those who feel, to be perfectly honest, quite warm with who they are.

we become ghosts and apparitions the moment we find in ourselves no craving for spiritual food and no desire for spiritual warmth. we examine our hands and we find them to be disturbingly translucent, and yet we remain strangely undisturbed. and we quickly find ourselves perfectly at home in the coldness of our spiritual starvation.

i look upon my own soul and i wonder why i've not felt hungry nor cold in recent times.

and yet christ will let us have none of that. though we have an almost masochistic drive to withering our souls away, christ insists that he will be our bread of life. he insists that his Spirit will be in us a holy fire, warming us not from the outside in, but burning hot from the inside out.

DISAPPOINTMENT

"Guilt was not my problem as I felt it. What I felt most was a glob of unworthiness that I could not tie down to any concrete sins I was guilty of. What I needed more than pardon was a sense that God accepted me, owned me, held me, affirmed me, and would never let go of me even if he was not too much impressed with what he had on his hands."

LEWIS SMEDES, GRACE AND SHAME.

"O momentary grace of mortal men,
Which we more hunt for than the grace of God."

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, RICHARD III.

i feel like i've been forced to take inventory of my spiritual life the last couple of days. and to be honest, i wasn't really happy with what i discovered. i can still remember the first time i really heard the gospel as a Christian. it was amazingly freeing ... an indescribable thing. that was about two years ago. now, having surveyed the landscape of my soul, it was hard for me to find even a trace of that grace that once caused my head to spin, my heart to leap, my soul to dance. instead, i saw in myself a return to the mud-pits of seeking the approval of others, the shackles of trying to earn for myself an acceptance that seemed to make my existence worthwhile. i found myself stepping back under the yoke of performance. that once again, while giving lip service to the gospel of grace, i was mechanically working, laboring, toiling so that i might be able to say "see, i am significant, i am accepted, i am as good as i claim to be."

living life like that, ones worst fear is not that people will be angry with you, or that people will dislike you. because usually the people that are angry or do dislike are those people that you don't really care much for anyways. the greatest fear in living life under that bondage is that someone might be disappointed in you. it's the fear that those whose favor you've earned, those who you've gotten to actually like or respect you, might actually see you for who you are. it's the fear that people might be on to your charade; that they may be beginning to "smell a thief". it's that fear that can be absolutely debilitating. it's that fear that makes you feel like your stomach's going to implode and crumple in on itself. it's that fear that makes you cringe.

so what do we poor, senseless fools do? we work harder. we try to compensate for our lapse. we vow to ourselves that we'll never let that happen again. we try to prove to others (and to ourselves) that that disappointment was really just an anomaly in our character, a kind of moral hiccough. and so we dig deeper into our own slave graves.

meanwhile, the gospel offers to us a place of cosmic rest. it offers to us a freeing presence. it holds out for us the reality of an acceptance and an approval that cannot be reneged based on our inability to perform. it tells us that there is Someone who could never be disappointed in us; not because we could never fail him, but because we can never surprise him. and it tells us that that Someone has proclaimed before all the universe that "This one is righteous." And yet we refuse to remain in the gospel ... and we run back to our chains.

THE GOSPEL & THE MINNESOTA TWINS

I was in line the other day getting lunch from a place we affectionately call "The Green Place" and I noticed an older man, probably in his mid-fifties, wearing a Minnesota Twins pull-over. I was compelled, of course, to ask him if he was, indeed, a Twins fan. (To not do so would leave me dying of curiousity and beset with the guilt of being ashamed of my Twins.) He said he was and I said I was a huge fan too and we immediately made each others' day. We talked a bit about how great our pitching is and how little-league our hitting is. We talked about Torii Hunter selling his home and about trade rumours that have been floating around among teams that are, like us, watching the World Series from the comforts of their living rooms.

My order came up, so I paid and told him to take it easy. He told me to do the same, smiled and gave me a light punch on the arm,which, in secret man-code, is a gesture of affection. And it struck me how quickly the Minnesota Twins had generated the illusion of community between me, a 28 year old Korean-American seminarian, and this guy, a 50 year old white man doing who knows what on the North Shore. But, we went our own ways and that moment of community quickly dissolved into the isolated routine of another day.

Maybe I'm thinking about this because I've been thinking a lot about community and relatedness these days. Or maybe it's because I've been going crazy trying to develop theologies of just about everything: a theology of work, a theology of art, a theology of pleasure, a theology of recreation and, yes, a theology of sports. But, that moment, that Twins moment, made me wonder, first of all, what's wrong with guys that we feel more connected to people who root for the same ball teams that we do than we do with our own family members, but also the intriguing wonder of how we can, if we're looking, catch glimpses of the pervasive goodness of God even in the most mundane and silly things. Things as mundane and silly as grown men wearing tight pinstripe pants and tossing a ball around, dissatisfied with their multi-million dollar salaries.

But it's those moments, weird, inexplicable moments, that remind me of the work of God in giving us a desire to find others who value the things we value. As C.S. Lewis put it, to be able to say "You, too? I thought I was the only one ..." is the core of friendship. It's that desire to share ones inner world, even if it is just the safe stuff, that leads us into relationship. And ultimately that desire, when we're honest with it, is the desire to find one who knows so much more about our inner worlds than just the safe stuff, and yet speaks words of amazing acceptance into our lives.

THE FORGETFUL CHURCH

"... in all our preaching and teaching about the hope that the gospel makes possible, we have to keep steadily in view the fact that what the gospel offers is not just hope for the individual but hope for the world. Concretely I think this means that the congregation must be so deeply and intimately involved in the secular concerns of the neighborhood that it becomes clear to all that no one and nothing is outside the range of God's love in Jesus ... If the Good News is to be authentically communicated it must be clear that the Church is concerned about the rule of God and not about itself."

LESSLIE NEWBIGIN, A WORD IN SEASON.

There is a preoccupation with the self that has developed in congregations throughout the western world today. Only in rare moments of corporate introspection does it dawn on us that the church, somewhere along the line, has sadly started to exist solely for itself. We notice that the main duty of the pastor has become providing spiritual care for the members. That the main duty of the members, at least the more "committed" members, has become providing the manpower needed run the programs of the church, programs designed primarily for itself. Given enough time, most congregations become increasingly self-absorbed ... a hallmark of our rampant western narcissism.

Yet, in the midst of all this, the thing that fades quickly into a kind of congegrational amnesia is the call of the church to be for the community. We forget that, in the New Testament, as much as a church was "the church of Christ", it was also "the church of Corinth" or "the church of Rome" or "the church of Galatia".

In the insecurity of our self-obsession we have forgotten the millions caught in the cycle of institutionalized poverty ... some of whom live just a few blocks away from us, on the "wrong side of the tracks". We have forgotten the single mother of three who watches her children slip namelessly through the farce called "inner city education" to find that they have learned nothing but fear, violence and hatred. We have forgotten those who wander aimlessly in the streets that they call "home", and we stop only to remind ourselves (as they themselves do as well) that they're human, too.

The church, having been so consumed with itself, has lost its vision of itself. The biblical paradox holds true for the corporate body as well as individuals: it is in moments of self-forgetfulness that we find that we have truly been ourselves.

ONE TRULY SERIOUS PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest – whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer … If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument. Galileo who held a scientific truth of great importance abjured it with the greatest of ease as soon as it endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is a matter of profound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile question. One the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it? …”

ALBERT CAMUS, THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS AND OTHER ESSAYS.

A FATHER'S TRAUMA

Can you imagine the trauma of a father, whose son wants to draw him a picture and so goes into his room behind closed doors and works furiously, frantically, relentlessly. But no matter what he produces, he always feels like it's not good enough. He says, "My Father loves me so much, he's been so good to me, and this is all that I can come up with? This is the best I can do??" He compares it to the art that hangs upon the walls of his dad's bedroom, and even to the cartoons and artwork in the New York Times that his father reads, and sees in his heart that his feeble attempts simply do not measure up. "My father is worthy of so much more than this," he says. And so, paper after paper, sheet after sheet, he draws and crumples, draws and crumples, draws and crumples ... and after hours of the same, he breaks down in tears, violent sobs, because he sees that his best will never be enough. Can you imagine the trauma of the father who sees his son needlessly running himself into the ground to do something that he never asked him to do? Can you imagine the trauma of the father who watches the child-like love that began his son's quest being transformed into destructive insecurities, inadequacies and feelings of failure? A quest that began in love came to destroy that very love that once drove it.

Is it possible that God actually loves me and not just the One I am clothed in?