you know Peter, put away the sword...

Lately, I've been on this Caedmon's Call kick... and I came across this song, "I will sing"... It drives me crazy that the only version I have is joined with "Carry On", a song that i have very low tolerance for... Anyway, here it goes:

"I will sing for the meek
those who pray with their very lives for peace
though they're in chains for a higher call
their mourning will change when the nations fall

In spirit poor
and mercy rich
they hunger for Your righteousness
their hearts refined by the purity
Lord let me shine for them
Lord let me sing"

i been thinking some about this idea of "praying with our very lives for peace"...
Are we really willing to move from "praying with our lips for peace", to "praying with our very lives for peace"? Often this is seen as being willing to lay down our lives for the myth of redemptive violence in war, or under conditions of being martyred for our faith, but praying with our lives for peace can take on so many forms...
Are we willing to make the sacrifices of time, energy, money, social status, favor, esteem, etc.... to give our lives to daily acts of peace-making?

The chance to live-for and participate-in the furthering of the Kingdom of God is the greatest honor of our pathetic lives, but it also involves a painful death... the loss of respect and dignity by those we love and trust, the loss of our morality in the eyes of the American church, the loss of even our own confidence as we question, "am i even doing the right thing?"... but it isn't a death for naught... it is the trading of death for life... "to pray with our very lives for peace..."
we will lose much, but God's creation will gain much more...

unlearning or simply forgetting...

i been home for about 1 year and 2 mos now, and as i look back over this last little bit of time, i realize that i've let go of a lot of things...

when i moved home last august, one of the most cathartic things i did was clean up my book shelves... in that first week of being home, i turned my bedroom upside down cleaning from 9 or 10 in the morning until 2 or 3am... i looked through every paper, school project, book, article of clothing, CD, etc, throwing away all things that no longer represented who i am... but by far, the purging of all things past was most difficult when it came to the books... partly because these books that had shaped my values, my faith, my worldview, i could no longer respect... i couldnt even read some of the titles without cynical thoughts dancing through my head. but instead of patiently attempting to understand the thought processes behind some of this literature nor in order to unlearn the dysfunctional and flat out untruth told in some of these books, i decided to give them away... to get them out of my room, and out of my life (literally and figuratively). In those moments it wasn't about unlearning misguided perspectives, or unlearning incomplete truths, it was a blanket forgetting of all things past...

in this last year and 2 months, i've treated many aspects of life, as i did those books... forgetting rather than unlearning/relearning...

tonight i was reminded... there are some things i wish i hadn't forgotten so easily, some things i wish didn't feel so far away...




PS: some books i distinctly remember being embarrassed to own even back then, but don't worry i've kept the ones which i cannot rightly deny their impact on my life, for better or worse... (im withholding authors and titles, in order to keep my dignity...)

from Jacob to Israel...

But Jacob said, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."
And he said to him, "what is your name?"
And he said, "Jacob"
Then he said, "Your name shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed."

ive been reminded of this story fairly often throughout the year and recently read a little commentary about Jacob. In the end the author, Rev. Frederick Buechner, writes, "God is the enemy whom Jacob fights by the river, and whom in one way of another we all fight - God, the beloved enemy. Our enemy because he demands of us everything; our selves, our wills, our treasure. Will we give them, you and I? I do not know..."

living with integrity...

i been reading some M Scott Peck... he talks some about the words "integrated" and "integrity"... about how the relationship between these two words has been lost...but in reinstating their connection, he says that living a life of integrity means living an integrated life: "the profession of faith is a lie if it does not significantly determine one's economic, political, and social behavior."
an integrated faith...
living with integrity...
not so easy...

see enough to know i'm blind...

over the weekend, i had a couple interactions that really made me think about where i been, where i'm going... the short of it is, i don't really know.
i ran into an acquaintance at the store the other day... we both went to the same church back in the day, but weren't really friends nor enemies... just acquaintances.... he went away for college and i hardly seen him since, until that day at the store... he started asking me tons of questions about our church, to which i had no answers... we left it at that, and agreed we'd see each other Sunday morning at service. when i got to the parking lot that morning, he also happened to be walking into service at the same time, and again he persisted in asking me all kinds of questions about church. Again, i had no answers, but i felt myself getting annoyed as he was asking... he seemed somewhat surprised that i knew hardly anything, and dropped the subject only as we were entering the Sanctuary for worship. For the first few minutes of worship, all i could think was, "why did he keep asking me all those questions, i told him ive been away since college, just like he has... why would he expect me to know all that stuff?"
On that same sunday morning, as i rode with Gramma to church, she also began to ask me questions about my participation in church activities, namely why i haven't been participating in anything these days. For her i also had no answers...

but all these questions about church and religion (outward forms), really annoyed me...

i spent most of sunday worship thinking about these two exchanges...

my faith in college was alive, and that was not the result of any coercion from my parents, it was totally and completely my choice, to own a faith that previously, i had only known through my family. in college, i showed up at every meeting, led a buncha different teams, read the bible so often that all my pen markings obscured the original print of my bible. i have no idea where it all came from, but it was a meaningful and fulfilling time... and as i look back on it, i don't feel that it was fake, or not respectable... in some ways i always feel a little nostalgic when i think about it...

but here it is, 3 years out of college, done with Mission Year, done with grad school... and from the looks of things, i have become extremely complacent, but while my faith no longer looks like what it did 3 years ago, i have to say that i have never struggled so much with God as i do now... the struggle to engage with God, no longer content to just learn about God...

its the attempt to find a balance between form and essence... the forms our faith takes, versus the essence or substance of our faith.

i struggle to read the bible and find comfort in the lifestyle that Jesus calls us to.
i struggle to worship with songs to which i cannot honestly sing the words.
i struggle to listen to sermons without becoming self-righteous and judgmental of American Christianity.
i struggle to take communion without wondering if i will remain committed to all this.
i struggle to live out God's love for the marginalized.
i struggle to pray with faith.

new every morning, new every morning...

so last week i agreed to play with our church's Jr. Worship team. it's been about 3 years since i played in a team at San Bruno, and if i'm honest, i have to say that while i agreed to do it, i wasn't exactly thrilled about the idea. anyway, we were practicing tonight, and we played the old skool song "The Steadfast Love of the Lord":

The steadfast Love of the Lord never ceases
His mercies never come to an end.
They are new every morning, new every morning
Great is thy faithfulness O Lord, Great is thy faithfulness.

and for a moment, my soul appreciated those words, "They are new every morning, new every morning. Great is they faithfulness O Lord. Great is thy faithfulness." ... it's been a good while since my soul has truly appreciated any worship song... so for that moment tonight, I am truly grateful...

Blessed are the Peacemakers...

i been reading "Blessed are the Peacemakers" by Wendell Berry, and its an amazing little book... he talks about how Christianity, popular as it may be, has drifted far from the actual teachings of Christ of Love, Compassion, and Forgiveness.

These are some excerpts from my reading...

"For a few feckless worshipers of God to obey Christ's commandments may be all right, but in practical matters such as war, and preparation for war, we will obey Caesar. The Christian followers of Caesar have thus committed themselves to an absurdity that they can neither resolve nor escape: the proposition that war can be made to serve peace; that you can make friends for love by hating and killing the enemies of love. This has never succeeded, and its failure is never acknowledged, which is a further absurdity."

In one essay, he starts off by talking about how a lot of Christians “are exceedingly confident in their understanding of the gospel” and who “are exceedingly self-confidant about themselves in their faith … They appear to know precisely the purposes of God, and they appear to be perfectly assured that they are now doing, and in every circumstance will continue to do, precisely God’s will as it applies specifically to themselves. They are confident, moreover, that God hates people whose faith differs from their own, and they are happy to concur in that hatred.
Having been invited to speak to a convocation of Christian seminarians, I at first felt that I should say nothing until I confessed that I do not have any such confidence. And then I understood that this would have to be my subject. I would have to speak of the meaning, as I understand it, of my lack of confidence which I think is not at all the same as a lack of faith.
It is a fact that I have spent my life, for the most part willingly, under the influence of the Bible, particularly the Gospels, and of the Christian tradition in literature and the other arts. As a child, sometimes unwillingly, I learned many of the Bible’s stories and teachings, and was affected more than I knew by the language of the King James Version, which is the translation I still prefer. For most of my adult life I have been an urgently interested and frequently uneasy reader of the Bible, particularly the Gospels. At the same time I try to be a worthy reader of Dante, Milton, Herbert, Blake, Eliot, and other poets of the Christian tradition. As a result of this reading and of my experience, I am by principle and often spontaneously, as if by nature, a man of faith. But my reading of the Gospels, comforting and clarifying and instructive as they frequently are, deeply moving or exhilarating as they frequently are, has caused me to understand then also as a burden, sometimes raising the hardest of personal questions, sometimes bewildering, sometimes contradictory, sometimes apparently outrageous in their demands. This is the confession of an unconfident reader.”

"In speaking of more abundant life, Jesus is not proposing to free us by making us richer, he is proposing to set life free from precisely that sort of error. [the error of the wrong kind of abundance]."

"The way of love is indistinguishable, moreover, from the way of freedom. We don't need much imagination to imagine that to be free of hatred, of enmity, of the endless and hopeless effort to oppose violence with violence, would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of indifference would be to have life more abundantly. To be free of the insane rationalizations for our desire to kill one another - that surely would be to have life more abundantly."

"And where more than in the Gospel's teaching about love do we see the that famously estranged pair, matter and spirit, melt and flow together? There was a Samaritan who came upon one of his enemies, a Jew, lying wounded beside the road. And the Samaritan had compassion on the Jew and bound up his wounds and took care of him. Was this help spiritual or material? Was the Samaritan's compassion earthly or heavenly? If those questions confuse us, that is only because we have for so long allowed ourselves to believe, as if to divide reality impartially between science and religion, that material life and spiritual life, earthly life and heavenly life, are two different things.
[...]
They are saying that not just humans but all creatures live by participating in the life of God, by partaking of His spirit and breathing His breath. And so the Samaritan reaches out in love to help his enemy, breaking all the customary boundaries, because he has clearly seen in his enemy not only a neighbor, not only a fellow human or a fellow creature, but a fellow sharer in the life of God."

"When Jesus speaks of having life more abundantly, this, I think, is the life He means: a life that is not reducible by division, category, or degree, but is one thing, heavenly and earthly, spiritual and material, divided only insofar as it is embodied in distinct creatures. He is talking about a finite world that is infinitely holy, a world of time that is filled with life that is eternal. His offer of more abundant life, then, is not an invitation to declare ourselves as certified "Christians," but rather to become conscious, consenting, and responsible participants in the one great life, a fulfillment hardly institutional at all."

"If we take the gospels seriously, we are left, in our dire predicament, facing an utterly humbling question: How must we live and work so as not to be estranged from God's presence in His work and in all His creatures?"

going crazy?

A conversion is a lonely experience. We do not know what is going on in the depths of the heart and soul of another. We scarcely know ourselves.

-- Dorothy Day

This is where you start...

"In this world, irrationality clings to man like his shadow so that the right things are done for the wrong reasons - afterwards, we dredge up the right reasons for justification. It is a world not of angels but of angles, where men speak of moral principles but act on power principles; a world where we are always moral and our enemies always immoral; a world where "reconciliation" means that when one side gets the power and the other side gets reconciled to it, then we have reconciliation; a world of religious institutions that have, in the main, come to support and justify the status quo so that today organized religion is materially solvent and spiritually bankrupt. We live in a Judeo-Christian ethic that has not only accomodated itself to but justified slavery, war, and every other ugly human exploitation of whichever status quo happened to prevail..."
-- Saul Alinsky

As bleak a picture as Alinsky paints of the human condition, the hope is that this is the beginning and not the end... but in attempting to move towards the end without accepting the brokenness of our foundation, our house will be built on sand... and we all know what happens to that house.
But that these faults dont stop us from pursuing the possibility of a better tomorrow... in fact, that this brokenness would propel our hopeful, creative, and prophetic imaginations to extend beyond the limitations of society's rule, into the ancient vision to which God calls us to return...
that's our finale... the New Jerusalem.

i feel like i havent heard the word "cool" in a long time... is this because its played out; or am i just too old to use the word?