The Human Machine vs. The Human Garden

Popular Psychology, the kind practiced by most people, sees the Human Mind as a machine. We have buttons that get pushed, triggers that get pulled, or whatever else that might get our pistons going. It is often our excuse. “You caused me to lose my temper!” As I have grown older, I find the analogy fails. It fails primarily in it's effectiveness in our relationships. We often hear people describe themselves as "incompatible" as if each was a piece of hardware. It's an easy way to remove culpability from either party. The truth is that the situation is always much more messy because the situation is much more organic. Instead, we should think of the Human Mind in terms of a garden. To be sure, each mind is fertile for certain weeds just as it is fertile for certain flowers. Therefore a mind is not a thing to be “fixed” but a thing to be tended. When the weeds of corruption grow, we can’t look for a broken gear. We have to look for our gloves. We have to tear them out. Sometimes the weeds overcome us. Sometimes we become lazy and let them grow. Sometimes we deny they are weeds at all and promote their growth. But the analogy holds. My love for my wife has been a tree in my garden for many years. Before I knew it, weeds were all around that Tree of Love and I dealt with them the best way I knew how. I did not know what I was doing. I often thought of it more as an act of the will or a wall holding back the oceans that threatened to drown us. At times, when the walls were cracking and the floods were threatening, I could only invoke Kipling’s words and say,

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
    To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

knowing, as Kipling said, that this is what it meant to be a man. It still is. What I wish I had known from the beginning was that the oceans and armies were of my own making. I wish that I had known that it wasn’t the world that threatened us. It was the weeds. I realize that sometimes we make it look easy, and when that tree is strong, it really is. Try not to read into this any extraordinary marital problems. We have our share but not as bad as some. However, would be a lie to say that it is always easy. And what’s more it wasn’t easy because I let the tree be covered in vines. Sometimes it seemed like it might actually topple. But they were my vines. I always had the power to tear them out by the roots. I do not say I had the power to eradicate them. I am fertile ground. But I should have always kept them in check. At the first shoot I should have torn them out. Now I know. And what do we do when the ground is dusty, the good plants are turning brown and our crops of fruits are threatened? We do what every good gardener does. We pray for rain. And that is how I have finally come to understand what Grace is. Let it rain.

Forgiveness: Hurting Together

Forgiveness is a tricky thing. It’s a difficult thing to do and there’s a lot of misunderstanding when it comes to defining it. Like Charity (because it is a kind of Charity) it violates our sense of Justice. It involves giving someone something that doesn’t belong to them. It’s part of the reason why we have trouble owning our trespasses. When I offend my brother or sister, however unintentional, I do not deserve their love.


Another side of the coin is that on some level forgiveness requires co-suffering. We cannot merely forget the offenses made against us. That is simply impossible. We cannot pretend that it wasn’t an offense. That is dishonest. We cannot seek to understand and empathize with it. That only excuses very real grievances and condones evil. We must stand in the full storm of ours and their own pain and decide that we love them anyway. We want them anyway. We will give ourselves to them anyway. It is the only kind of forgiveness that actually heals. This is not to say that we should not empathize with each other and understand one another’s weaknesses. Nor does it mean that at some point we should not begin to forget. It means that first it has to be owned.

Today’s Gospel reading was that of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32). My spiritual father pointed out that this story was first told in a culture far different from we hear in modern America. The cultural context insists on a “Communal” understanding of the forgiveness extended by the father. In forgiving and welcoming his son, he shared in his disgrace and humiliation. In charity, we share in our brother’s poverty and are enriched. In forgiveness, we share in our brother’s shame and we are both redeemed. This may be a somewhat simplistic way to understand forgiveness and only applies to a specific situation (i.e. the offender seeks forgiveness) but I find it useful in my life at this moment and wished to share. God bless.

Abortion Is Now Safe

Today, while scrolling through my Facebook, I discovered an article from Huffington Post by a gentleman named David A. Grimes, author of Every Third Woman in America: How Legal Abortion Transformed Our Nation. The title, Deniers of Science: The Anti-Vaccination and Anti-Abortion Movements, raised an eyebrow. Upon opening and reading it I could not pass up the opportunity to unpack and parade the ignorance, arrogance, and erroneous contents.

For one, the Anti-vaccination and Anti-abortion movements are two different things in kind and substance. The Anti-vaccination movement is a complex social movement with a variety of motivations and players, but the most reasonable position that can be distilled from the movement is as follows: Vaccines contain chemicals which are bad for people and the war on disease has been mostly won, therefore the risk of vaccination outweighs the benefit. I am in agreement with Mr. Grimes concerning the error of both premises. Vaccines have been shown to be safer than peanut butter and disease is not eradicated but only held in check.  We do forget the horror of disease.

Then Mr. Grimes makes a jump so huge, so mind bogglingly fantastic that I have trouble believing it even exists. He asserts that the Anti-Abortion Movement is fueled by the same sort of ignorance as the Anti-Vaccination movement. Here he associates “Fraud, Celebrity, and Apathy” with “Junk Science, Patriarchal Dogma, and Apathy”. A reasonable assertion if it weren’t complete rubbish.

Junk Science

            The Anti-abortion Movement is not based on science (gasp). It’s based on definitions. What is the result of the combination of a human sperm and egg? A human being. Even when that combination fails and miscarriage follows we are still discussing the advent of a human being. While the movement may, on its fringes, grab onto whatever junk science may support the end result of convincing everyone else of this basic fact is as irrelevant as all the junk science Abortion proponents use to try to set some arbitrary point at which it becomes a human being, whether it is at 8 weeks or 8 months. At the end of the day it is nowhere near a scientific question. It is a philosophical question. What is a Human Being?

Patriarchal Dogma

            What. The. Heck. Whether it is Patriarchy, Matriarchy, Oligarchy, Plutarchy, Anarchy, or whatever archy is irrelevant to the question of whether Abortion is a moral positive.  Dogma is here used in the pejorative with the obvious ignorance of the fact that he is invoking his own. It seems to be a dogma of Mr. Grimes’ that dogmas that are held by Patriarchal philosophies are inherently baseless and backward. Patriarchy is, simply, the authority of the father. Matriarchy is the authority of the mother. At the base of either is the authority of the family. Both are opposed to abortion because they are proponents of the family and abortion is opposed to the family. All questions are ultimately religious questions and here Grimes gives us his answer. Religious definitions have no relevance whatsoever.

Apathy

            Grimes asserts that opponents of abortion are naïve about the days of unsafe, illegal abortion. He asserts that before Roe vs Wade, the state of abortion was just awful. In his words:

Again, apathy derives from naiveté; many adults today did not live through the "bad old days" of unsafe abortion. Legal abortion has become a victim of its own success, and our nation has become complacent as a result. An entire generation of Americans has grown up unaware of the danger of unsafe abortion.

            I doubt that Grimes has any wish to understand the position of us Patriarchal Dogmatists on the matter, but I invite the reader to replace every instance of “abortion” with “theft”, “heroin abuse”, or “rape” and see how it reads. In fact, I invite him to insert the word “murder” because that’s what we hear when we hear the word “abortion”.

Progressive Dogma

            We religious folks are familiar with the terms “Providence” and “Prophecy”. We accept them because we believe in a Power that governs such things. Our dogmas are relative to each other and find their foundation in a Prime Source. Progressive dogma is without foundation because there is no reason to believe we are marching into a brighter future. Who will cause it? Mr. Grimes has the audacity to speculate that the fashions that he happens to be caught up in today will be seen as the shining milestones of Progress in tomorrow’s history books. Eugenics was supposed to be the same thing by now. Abortion is the Holocaust of our day. This fashion cannot become a faux pas soon enough.

The Hidden Message

            What I have allowed and played along with, but will now dismiss, in this response is Mr. Grimes’ use of the term “Anti-Abortion”. Are we now presupposing that pro-abortion is the default and that its opponents are in a negative “movement”? No. Pro Life is not a movement. It is a moral and philosophical assertion. It is the default position. 

More On the Godless Universe

The following is a response to a friend of mine who asked me to elaborate on my statements concerning a Christian universe being a better prospect than a Godless one. I hesitated in posting it here, but at the end of the day I think there are things here that should be put in the public forum.

“How would respond to an atheist who believes their life to have more of a point after they gave up belief? Or would you even respond?”

Well, on the one hand my response would be tempered by my relationship with the person in question. There are people I can speak openly with and there are those with whom I must be gentle because I value their friendship. Not just shutting up to get along but some worldviews are so alien from one another that they have to treat each other carefully. Were I to encounter the argument on paper and set about to write a response, my response would go something like this:

                If we were capable of imagining that we had no preconceived notions of Christ, humanity, the world, etc. and were given a choice between a universe where we could live a finite life in as much pleasure as we wish or a universe in which we had the opportunity for eternal life bathed in truth and love and some discomfort, I’d imagine most people would choose the latter. The new atheist has made a similar comparison and concluded otherwise. I believe the reason for this is that they have compared the ugliest Christianity to the sun shiniest Atheism. You’ll note sometimes that an atheist will make a case for a specific Christianity before knocking it down (straw man). I had a friend once that was a Calvinist street preacher before becoming an atheist. When I expressed an interest in pursuing God in the most original context possible (Orthodoxy) before rejecting Him completely, my friend made it his mission to convince me that Calvin’s Christianity is the only possibly true Christianity. Think about that for a minute.

                The atheistic universe is one in which the Universe started one day and will eventually entropy into non-existence. In the intervening time it develops some interesting things, like humanity, that could be appreciated for a while by things like humanity and when either disappears there is no longer anything to appreciate or anything to appreciate it. It’s like the poem Ozymandias, except there won’t even be anyone to appreciate the irony. It might as well have not existed. I am reminded of a description of that time in a Doctor Who episode where “the furnaces were burning and humanity screaming into the night”. Damn God for not existing.

                The Christian universe is one in which the Universe was started and will eventually be sanctified in a final state of perfection. We were created to crown it and we are co-working with the Creator to sanctify it. Even at the end of Time we will continue infinitely into the ever deepening wisdom and love of an infinite God. In Orthodoxy, we even have the hope that all will eventually be saved, even if it is an EXTREMELY cautious hope.

                This is nowhere near an argument for the existence of God. It could just be that bad. It is only a demonstration of how one model is preferable to the other. The new atheist feels that we are free to work out our morality divorced from that of our primitive ancestors. The problem is that a morality based in the fickle and ever changing landscape of popular culture is a morality that is fickle and ever changing. Right now, those who experience same sex attraction are experiencing a certain level of social benefit but I would wager money that the tides of ideologies will change and they will suffer terribly. Remember how the serpent promised us we would be gods and brought us lower than we began. There is something to be said for having your stake (cross?) anchored in something eternal.

                There is only one good reason to believe that an atheistic universe is better than a Christian one and that is that in an atheistic universe there is no answering for anything. Choice and Freedom are maximized. They also mean nothing. 

Of Christ and the Guardians

Jesus is the same as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Except that He isn’t. To say that Christ is the same as Santa is to say that He is the same type of thing as Santa. What type of thing is the Easter Bunny? The Easter Bunny and company are myths and stories that fulfill, at least in the expression of their popular portrayals, specific sociological and psychological niches within the context of the culture in which they are found. Presumably, one could explain “why” the bunny and “why” the jolly fat man. It is outside of the scope of this article but the movie, Rise of the Guardians, comes to mind as an excellent example of this. The characters serve as representatives and defenders of certain things (hope, wonder, etc.).

If one makes the claim that Christ is no more than a myth, one must explain the myth. If Christianity is a made up religion, we must be able to explain the context of the fiction. Under what circumstance was it necessary to create Christ? I would posit(from my own experience in the faith) that if Christianity was invented, it was invented behind a brothel as a man lay in his own vomit and other men passed him by paying no heed. It was founded when every desire was met, every thirst quenched, and every hunger was sated. The moment it was birthed into the world was the precise moment the inventor looked inside and saw a twisted soul and was filled with nothing but self-loathing. If Christianity was not revealed to us by the God-Man, it was hatched in the mind of the most wretched of humanity come face to face with itself. In our lowest state, we conceived it’s opposite.

I’ve heard many theories from the modern atheist concerning the mysterious origins of my faith. Some are as simplistic as asserting that we are afraid of death and others are as absurd as asserting that it was invented to control the populace. The first fails in its scope and the second contradicts any serious study of the faith. But neither of these is as surprising as the assertion by New Atheism that a godless universe is an inherently good thing. Now, free from our archaic superstitions, we can finally reach our full potential. One of the several arguments that come to mind against this is that a godless universe is a universe that is inherently meaningless.

Vast ages of human beings have lived their lives with no meaning. That’s not just numbers. Billions upon billions of individual souls have looked upon the stars, looked upon their hands and could not contemplate that neither had any inherent value or meaning. Each of them had blessings in their lives and knew instinctively that SOMETHING had to be thanked for it. Each of them knew hardship, despair and suffering and cast their eyes to the sky in agony. In a godless universe, they were all mere chemical reactions. No amount of posturing and appeals to emotion can soften that. In fact, there is nothing to soften. It is not that one day we will die and be nothing. It’s that we already are nothing. Or, in a logical formula:

1.       Value is an assigned attribute

2.       Assigned attributes cease when there is no longer anyone to maintain them

3.       Value ceases when there is no longer anyone to maintain it

All of this is to illustrate the difference between Christ and the Guardians. The most striking difference is that Hope exists outside of the Easter Bunny and Wonder exists outside of Father Christmas. They are merely avatars of an already existing reality. Christ, if He is an avatar at all, must be an avatar of that which cannot be without Him; Eternal Life, intrinsic purpose and value, redemption, etc. Christianity has Christ Crucified at the center of the Universe because that is the only place He can logically exist.

Mediocrity

It’s been a long time. I have drifted into mediocrity. My prayer rule and my fasting are nothing to be proud of and my church attendance suffers similarly. I am, thank God, somewhat keeping my confessions up. I am a failure.

When I was growing up, I actually believed that I would change the world. I not only believed that I had the potential to save the world, I thought I would actually do it. In some sense, it was even my duty. I’m sure there is some unflattering word to describe that state of mind, but I would certainly not say it came from a place of arrogance or pride. I think it was naiveté. When the world is simple, the solutions are simple. World peace? No problem. Hunger? I got this. Disease? Please. Maybe I was just an overly optimistic child, or a by-product of my generation, coming to know the world after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War.

Where am I now? Well it should be obvious to the casual observer that I have not saved the world. As it turns out, I am one of billions of teaming masses of human beings that have ever existed and will never enter a history book. I work a job I enjoy, but in the grand scheme of things it has little effect beyond feeding my family (and thank God it does that). I am the faceless nobody you will pass in the grocery store and never have a second thought about. I will never be a doctor, a teacher, the President, a diplomat, a priest, an adventurer, an astronaut, or time traveler. I will likely never save a life. I will likely never even marginally affect that of a stranger. I am average.

At one time, as an evangelical, I even felt a “calling” to preach. I now lump this period of my life into the same category as my desire to go into politics. It was dreaming. I like dreams. I daydream quite often. In daydreams I create scenarios in which I can be something I’m not. I can be someone who “matters” or “makes a difference”. I can even be someone chosen by God for a special purpose. But I am not called to anything special anymore than the guy I saw holding the cardboard sign at the intersection. In fact, I am probably far less worthy of being called to some special purpose than he is. Through him, people are earning their crowns. Through me, people are receiving a quality service (mostly). Small miracles, right?

I and others I know struggle with this “calling” thing quite a bit. I think maybe it is because we feel guilty for wanting to be religious leaders. There are perks and stigmas attached to the vocation that immediately illicit suspicion. I do not want to be seen as a person who wants to wear the cassock so I can be respected among men; therefore I assign that guilt to God and remove it from myself. I cannot be accused of being an attention seeker if God has dragged me, kicking and screaming, to the altar table for ordination. It’s not my fault. I didn’t ask to be special. Of course, that has little to do with our real relationship with God and a lot to do with how we wish to be perceived by other people. We are engaging in the action in order to not appear to be engaging in the action. Some of us catch ourselves and reject it all together. We drive against the desire to serve because of the never ending circle of second guessing and guilt. Yet, even now I am writing this with the silly dream that my acceptance of my inevitable mediocrity somehow indicates some virtue that God will use to call me to a higher purpose, even though I have received no such promise.

So, should I ask God to make me content to be no one of significance, or should I ask Him to place opportunities at my feet that I will most assuredly fail at? Just some of the questions I struggle with these days.

Throwing Stones

As Christians, it is our duty to correct and guide one another.

Or is it really that simple? In Christianity in general, Orthodox or not, we love our Scripture. We very closely adhere to Paul's endorsement in 2 Timothy 3:

¹⁶ All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, ¹⁷ that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

As a "People of the Book" and practitioners of a revealed religion, the "Book" is integral to our faith. As history shows, however, it has also been very useful as a weapon. In the slave-holding South, it was used quite effectively in helping to control the slave population. In the infamous "God Hates Fags" campaign of the Westboro Baptist Church, it is used to cast judgement on other groups. One might believe that we simply must place a Bible in the face of offenders every time they turn their heads. However, a few things ought to be examined:


Where does the desire to correct our brother come from?

One of the motivating factors in leading the Christian life is to be healed of our passions. One of our most devious passions (and the foundation of others) is Pride. When we come to our brother to "correct" their opinion, worldview, behavior, etc.; have we removed the beam from our own eye? Are we truly concerned with their spiritual health or do we take joy in policing them?


Am I the best person to correct my brother?

Beyond the implications of the first question, we must also examine whether or not our relationship is the sort where corrections can occur. In most peoples lives, their are very few people, if any, that we can listen to without becoming defensive. Becoming defensive is a roadblock to correction because an integral part of one's defense is a process of self-justification. On can justify nearly anything to oneself (something that is not easily done in Confession.).


True conviction.


In my personal experience, true conviction is a difficult thing to achieve in another person. The adulteress woman of John 8:1-11 knew full well what the Law said. In fact, Adultery is one of the big 10. Yet she did not receive true conviction against her actions through mere knowledge of the Law. One might even presume that she did what so many who are unfaithful do and justified her actions. Those justifications might have even stuck with her right up to meeting our Savior. Something deeper must occur for true, life altering conviction. Some of us even need to suffer. All of us need Grace.

True conviction is something really very beautiful in the life of one who truly wishes to change. There is joy in the revelation that pinpoints the wounds that need healing, even if it is bittersweet due to the fruit of those transgressions. We should try to allow those revelations, even when they come in the form of accusations. But not every brother or sister is ready to receive them and, even more importantly, there are so few of us that are capable of delivering those revelations with love and humility. Perhaps the more powerful and effective force in the lives of our brothers and sisters is prayer.