Too comfortable

"Feeling free from constraint, free to act on one's wishes, means reaching a balance between the wishes, the imagination and the ability to act: one feels free in so far as the imagination is not greater than one's actual desires, while neither of the two reaches beyond the ability to act. the balance may therefore be established and kept unimpaired in two different ways either by tapering, cutting down the desires and/or imagination, or by expanding ones ability to act. Once the balance is achieved, and as long as it stays intact, 'liberation' is a meaningless slogan, lacking motivational force.  

"...It could be the case that the will to improvement has been frustrated or not allowed to arise in the first place (fore example by the pressure of the 'reality principle' exerted, according to Sigmund Freud, on the human drive to pleasure and happiness); intentions, whether really experienced or just imaginable, have been cut down to the size of the ability to act, and particularly the ability to act reasonably- with a chance of success. On the other hand, it could be the case that through the direct manipulation of the intentions- some sort of 'brainwashing',- one could never put the 'objective' ability to act to the test, let alone find out what they really are, and therefore would set the ambitions below the level of the 'objective' freedom.  

"...One such issue was the possibility that what feels like freedom is not in fact freedom at all; that people may be satisfied with their lot even though that lot were fare fro being 'objectively' satisfactory; that living in slavery, they feel free and so experience no urge to liberate themselves, thus forsaking or forfeiting the chance of becoming genuinely free. "

pg. 17 

Liquid Modernity
Zygmunt Bauman

On their release, Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them. When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. “Sovereign Lord,” they said, “you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David: 
“ ‘Why do the nations rage 
and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth take their stand 
and the rulers gather together 
against the Lord 
and against his Anointed One.' Indeed Herod and Pontius Pilate met together with the Gentiles and the people of Israel in this city to conspire against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed. They did what your power and will had decided beforehand should happen. Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus.” After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

Acts 4: 23-31 (NIV)  

In my college years I ran with a Charismatic/Pentecostal crowd.  I actually had a pretty decent prayer life during that part of my history.  I would go for long walks around the campus, sometimes sitting up at the top of the bleachers at the football field, talking to God.  I prayed with friends too.  It wasn't uncommon to be involved in a late night, sometimes impromptu, hours long prayer meeting.  We would meet with friends in someone's apartment discuss the Bible and pray for what we saw as God's Kingdom to come.  

We were passionate in our prayer lives, both individual and corporate.  We were conspirators.  We prayed about our interactions with our friends, asking that they “saw Jesus” in us.  We lifted up our classmates and teachers to a loving God.  We fervently believed that is was God's will, and consequently our will, that everyone we know be “saved”.   We prayed about how we were going to make ends meet until our student loan or Pell Grant checks were going to be available.  We also wanted God  to change us, to make us into the image of Jesus (granted, we kind of had figured out what that meant and knew what we would end up looking like). And...  we actually saw what appeared to be God intervening and people's lives changing.

Looking back I can see legitimate prayer taking place in my life.  It was often times motivated by an acknowledgement of my inability to control certain things in my life or in the life of others and a real dependence upon God.  I really wanted to see people's lives changed for the better, even if that change was actually wasn't enough to correspond with what it really meant to be truly saved in the sense that the New Testament talks about.   

I'm in a different place now.  Looking back I consider my previous way of viewing the world as truncated and incomplete.  I no longer view the Gospel as only about being “saved”.  I see focusing on people's status being changed from the out-group of  “the lost” to the in-group of “the saved” as an easy and unfalsifiable substitute for the real point of the Gospel, someone's life totally reorienting around the teachings of Jesus in the context of a community submitting to the rule, kingdom, of God now. I was blind to certain forms of freedom that the Gospel brought. I would go so far as to say I was participating in a system that by it's design (not necessarily intent) hid some of these deficiencies from view.  Following certain expected norms that reinforced systemic evils (the abuse of the poor by free market capitalism in Third World countries, marginalizing those of different religions, political ideology, or sexual orientation, to name a few) was labeled as unquestioned and unmitigated virtues.  

I run with a different crowd now.  I'm a participant in a liturgical tradition, Episcopal in particular.  Our congregation appears to be in the process of rising from the dead.  We have gone from a situation where we fully expected to shut the doors in a year to a place where we are growing.  We're reevaluating our current ministry model to try to eliminate the rigid distinction between clergy and laity and reform our theology and practice to having the Body of Christ actually address the needs of the Body of Christ and surrounding community rather than place the responsibility on the 'professional religious' folks in our midst.   Our little congregation is taking on an interesting flavor that melds a Charismatic pneumatology and a strong Social Justice streak.    

Additionally I have a group of friends with which I regularly meet to consume irresponsible amounts of caffeine and discuss theology.  We lament how our current vocations and lifestyles aren't congruent with the Gospel.  We hatch grand schemes on how to reconfigure our communities of faith to be a source of God's blessing and an outpost of God's Kingdom in our local community.  Two of our congregations are participating in a growing network that is feeding the people of our town.  

But...  despite our needs, despite our love for God and the Gospel, we simply don't have passionate vigorous corporate prayer lives (to be fair, I don't personally have a vigorous prayer life).  Why?

(I began writing after this point in a corporate first person (We) standpoint.  I don't feel comfortable with that in that I can't pretend to be the exemplar for the world I now live in.  I will use first person singular in order to more honestly and responsibly express my concerns).

Many options seem to present themselves. Below is a small sampling:

Have I begun the process of, on a functional level, jettisoning an otherworldly Santa Claus figure that I call God?  Have I taken full responsibility and control for my own life and my moral choices and in a faithfulness to God's agenda/Kingdom begun to move through the world as if God was not responsible for the world around me, but I am?

Has the world evolved in light of the presence of the Gospel into a world less hostile to that Gospel?  Does attempting to live out that Gospel require less conflict with the “principalities and powers”, thus necessitating less in the way of passionate situational prayer to walk in the way of Jesus?

Or, have I traded blindness to part of the Gospel for blindness to parts of what I walked away from?  Have I stopped drinking the fundamentalist Cool-Aid to drinking deeply of the spirits of the Enlightenment?  Was I sold a bill of goods, a world view that mollifies me, that makes me comfortable with my incremental 'improvement' in how I spend my money, or how I view those, both near and far, that are less financially, mentally, or physically well off than I am?  Am I still at peace with the world at large because I do not yet understand how pervasive, how radically different than the status quo, the Gospel actually is?  Am I still part of the problem?

I know some of my compatriots may feel comfortable dismissing the parts of the New Testament that depict corporate prayer to an interventionist God as ancient superstition.  I can't.  Label me a primitive and I shall put the button right next to the ones labelled “heretic” and “savage” and I will wear them all with pride.  I'm fine with being viewed as a fool by some, but I cannot simply be satisfied that the parts of the New Testament that don't match up to my life are the things that must be scratched out. 

I speak on the behalf of justice at my place of work.  I'm a member of my congregation's Vestry and I try to advocate for us to spend ourselves on the behalf of those outside the congregation.  I meet with my friends and discuss how God want's us to live his Kingdom in the here and now.  I try to be more responsible with how and where I spend my money so as to at least reduce my participation in systemic evil.  

But I have no battles.  It's all so damned abstract and slow.  Is this right?  Is this how the Kingdom is to come?  I have no need to pray, to wrestle with God, in a real way.  Or, is it more accurate that I am blind to my need?  Have I labelled my inadequacies as normal, my impotence as virtue?  

I was not made for this.  I was made to have an enemy, be it just an abstraction.  The whole peace as an absence of war thing is gonna drive me insane.  

God, I'm afraid to ask this, but would you mind slapping me around a bit?  Crush my illusions, offend my sensibilities.  Set me free from my prison of comfort. 

Immigration

I'm an immigrant.  I don't mean in a geopolitical sense.  I was born and raised here in the United States and continue to reside here.  That being said, my roots and upbringing were in the Dallas/Fort Worth area of Texas and I now live in Northern California, nearly 2000 miles away.  If we moved this little journey across The Pond to Europe, I'd be living in a totally different nation, with a different language, food, and social norms.  Even here in the great homogenous hulk that is the United States there are subtle differences in culture and language between Texas and California.

One peculiarity about me is that despite where I was born and raised, I don't have much of a detectable Texan accent.  I'm not accent free mind you, but it mostly hovers just below the surface.  It comes out when I'm very tired, nervous, or angry.  I also noticed it poked it's head out when I used to voice-chat with people from Texas while I played games over the internet.  It may have been a subtle desire to establish rapport, to fit in, to feel at home.  

But most times, it's pretty much undetectable. I think it's lack of prevalence is most probably due to the fact that when I was growing up I was told by my “yankee” father that several idiosyncratic Texan pronunciations made me sound uneducated.  I have no intent to make that sound negative.  I'm actually glad that I don't have a readily distinguishable accent.  It allows me to blend in a bit more.   

Having lived here in Northern California for nearly a decade I've picked up some of the things that make it different from where I was born.  Northern Californians say the word “bye” in a way that is some where between “buy” and “baa”, the sound we say sheep make.  Sometimes the word “almond” looses it's “l” and sounds like “amond”, but “Walmart” mundanely does not become “Wa-mart”. (Life is full of little disappointments.)  On a political/cultural level, there are many more laws here but less perceived moral restraint based upon assumed religious values.

Occasionally I run into fellow transplants.  More often than not I recognize their speech patterns first.  When I approach them I may or may not put on the accent.  The larger the group, the more apt I am to drop into a Texas drawl.  If it is only one, I may keep my enigmatic vanilla speech patters in place, but I start asking questions about where they are from and I see if I can drop a few geographical references that only a native would know.  Then they can drop their guard and we can talk.

I can relate to them in a way that a native Californian can't.  I know that a recent visitor from Texas expects the stereotypical Californian to be a deeply tanned liberal vegetarian who has spent most summers at the beach.  (yes, I'm purposely being ridiculously hyperbolic) I know that when they say “mexican food” what they really mean is TexMex, it must be spicy, and at least one item on the plate must be covered in melted cheese.  When they say they want a “coke” it could be any of a myriad of carbonated beverages, and when they want a hamburger, they are probably thinking more of a Whataburger (with bacon and jalepenos. Yummy) than In-n-Out. 

In my estimation a more significant immigration in my life was moving from a modern propositionally oriented faith to a postmodern faith that is a bit more mystical in orientation.  I wasn't born here in  Postmodernity, I travelled here from somewhere else.  

I can remember reading the Bible attempting to connect the dots in the text to unlock it's secrets, to be 'moved by the Spirit' as I read the text for myself.  I remember the heady intoxication of being certain of the clearly present Truth, it was right there in the text (never mind that many friends were certain that the truth was something else based upon the same text). 

It was good to know that due to my acceptance of God's free gift of Jesus, through grace by faith I was one of God's chosen.  I was different from the lost, those that could not see the truth because they were spiritually blind.  Some of them were blinded by their sin, some by their intellect, some by their man-made traditions. 

I longed to see the lost saved, to say the Sinners' Prayer and accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior.  I wanted to see them delivered from their sins of accepting Evolution over the Bible, of their chosen homosexuality, of their Pro-Choice political views.  

Then I moved.  

As I moved through life and found out more about the world I live in I became more and more impressed with this Jesus fellow.  Not only was he Lord and Savior, but he was brilliant as well.  I began to see genius in how he handled interpersonal, sociological, economic, and political issues.   I began to see Jesus as someone that wasn't just reciting idealistic poetry that can never be really lived, but as someone that saw the particulars of the world He lived in, the world I now live in, and had some real strategies to make a difference.  His followers seemed pretty bright too.  They understood that the answer to life's problems wasn't just about pie in the sky by and by.  It was about living as if God was in control now.  Living as if Jesus was King, not Caesar.  

I also saw that I had been wrong.  That I had mistaken how I made connections in the texts, my interpretation of the Bible, for the Bible.  My theological constructs, my tradition (that I called Sola Scriptura), were in my head, not in the text, and should not be weighted as much as the text.  

I found out that I had mistaken my view of certain parts of the Bible for an accurate representation of the scientific world.  This wasn't a new error.  My predecessors, Martin Luther and John Calvin had done the same thing when they opposed the Heliocentric model of the Solar System by quoting scripture to the contrary.  I guess there's worse company in which to be. 

Finding people who believed in Evolution, or were involved in loving committed relationships with people of the same gender who obviously loved the Lord also cracked my worldview open.  It is easy to characterize certain classes of people as hating God if you don't know any one in that class.  It becomes harder to ascribe a fatal flaw to someone and use it to dismiss their views and life outright when you get to know them and love them. 

I have become the foreigner now.  I am the one living outside the land of certainty and God's favor.  I am the one 'blinded by intellect' and my association with sinners.  

Ah, but I can still recognize the accent of those from my land of origin.  I can see their unease when I begin to talk of things that don't line up with their interpretational matrix of scripture, and are therefore 'unbiblical'.  I understand that I can appear as “one of them”.  I understand the judgement some of them have for me, but I love them.  How can I but love them, they are from the land of my birth. 

You know, life used to be so simple....

"It is, unfortunately, one of the abiding temptations of pastors and scholars to reduce Jesus to words alone, to replace a lived life with a preached sermon or an interesting idea. To remove, however, that which is radically subversive, socially revolutionary, and politically dangerous from Jesus' actions is to leave his life meaningless and his death inexplicable. "

pg. 93
Jesus: a Revolutionary Biography
By John Dominic Crossan

Although I would never have articulated it as such, for fear of being branded a person of little faith, or more accurately, incorrect faith, I used to wonder why they killed a platitude spouting Jesus that just wanted us to be nice to each other and consider the lilies.

I'm trying to figure out what it is for *me* to follow Jesus in this day and age. What sacrifices am I called to make for the sake of seeing God's Kingdom, or Dream, come to pass in the world that I've been planted in. Will it require some form of civil disobedience? Will it lead me into opposition to people that I've come to respect and spent years cultivating relationships with?

I'm considering going back to school and getting a Master's in Social Work. I'm beginning to contemplate how much that process will likely change my life. I may have to switch jobs to employment that is more conducive to going to school, which will more than likely mean a decrease in pay. This will be coupled with trying to find a creative way to pay for school on top of my normal expenses. Most probably there will be no reading outside of my coursework for three years. And the stress.....

All I know for certain is that I'm tired of being where I am in my life. Its time for some sort of change.