I've been on vacation this last week. Nan and I just got back from the coast where yesterday, in something of a family reunion, we all boarded a boat at Depot Bay, motored out and around into Wale Cove, and spread the ashes of my wife's aunt Gracie into the ocean. We had a small memorial service there on the boat where family members shared thoughts and memories of Gracie, after which I delivered the following eulogy:
One of the many things that convinces me of the existence of God is the innate human need for meaning. If we were the product of a random universe and the accidental mixture of chemicals and electromagnetic discharge that Darwinism claims we are, there is and can never be any meaning to our lives. At times like these, when we celebrate the life of a loved one no longer present, our hunger for meaning is foremost in our minds: the meaning of our lives, the meaning of her life. When I think about Gracie, it seems that a lot of that meaning can be discerned from her name: Grace.
When Gracie's parents, Lester and Mildred, named her, perhaps they were thinking of nothing more than the clever inversion of Mildred's first two names, but reflecting on the course of her life and her beautiful personality, I can't help but think that in their action was an element of providence.
There's many definitions to the word, grace, but I think that two find particular expression in Gracie's life. The first is this: a disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill. As we all know, Gracie had spent the better part of the last eight years of her life volunteering at the Pikes Peak Hospice, spending time and giving comfort to those facing their final painful days. What better testament could we find to Gracie's loving and giving nature?
But all of us who knew her had experienced it. Personal examples of her sweet and gentle character will endure with each of us. My own fondest memory is the last time I saw her, in her and Uncle John's home in Colorado Springs. She asked me to sing for her and tears welled in her eyes as I did. Then she showed me pictures of her daughter, played selections from Tatiana's CD, and spoke lovingly and with pride of her only child. A disposition to be generous or helpful; goodwill.
The second definition of grace I find fitting to Gracie's life is that of theology: the undeserved favor of God's redemption. At Uncle John's request we started this memorial with the Serenity Prayer, a prayer that had played a central and persistent role in Gracie's struggle with the darker chapters of her life. She wrote about this herself in a poem she called, "The Now." Let me read a few excerpts:
I struggled with life, and made it complex. I wandered in a fog, a chemical fog, where I kissed the door of death, and finally I had to die in order to find life. For years I ran from myself, never knowing the real me, yet always wanting to find myself. --and a little farther on in the poem-- Today I can accept those things I cannot change and strive to change the things I can. She finished the poem with this: I am living in the now-- Loving life on life's terms, one day at a time.
Gracie's life is an example to us all of God's grace; a life turned from the brink of death and the horrors of self-destruction, and transformed to the beauty that became the second half of her life. When she surrendered herself to God's mercy, relying, as all who follow the twelve steps do, on his "higher power," she experienced not only the blessing of her own life, but in turn blessed all of us who came to know and love her.
As much as we yearn for meaning, we also yearn for transformation, to be changed from our propensity for selfishness, and self-destruction. That which is commonly called our conscience is a universal human code that describes, not what we are, but what we know we ought to be--not our actual behavior, but what we inherently sense our behavior should be. The tragedy is we are helpless to effect that change on our own; we are trapped in a perpetual loop that the Apostle Paul described this way to the Christians in Rome:
After all, the Law itself is really concerned with the spiritual - it is I who am carnal, and have sold my soul to sin. In practice, what happens? My own behaviour baffles me. For I find myself not doing what I really want to do but doing what I really loathe.
When I come up against the Law I want to do good, but in practice I do evil. My conscious mind whole-heartedly endorses the Law, yet I observe an entirely different principle at work in my nature. This is in continual conflict with my conscious attitude, and makes me an unwilling prisoner to the law of sin and death. In my mind I am God's willing servant, but in my own nature I am bound fast, as I say, to the law of sin and death. It is an agonising situation, and who on earth can set me free from the clutches of my sinful nature? I thank God there is a way out through Jesus Christ our Lord.
It reminds me of a line in the film, As Good As It Gets, when Jack Nicholson's character tells Helen Hunt's character, "You make me want to be a better man." We all want to be better men and women, don't we? But we can't, not on our own. And even if we could, what about all the bad things we've done in the past? There's still a price to be paid, they don't just "go away" on their own. And that's where the grace of God comes in. Jesus paid that price, took our punishment upon himself, and, when we surrender to that grace, he begins the transformation of our lives we so long for.
Gracie experienced that transformation. Her life was a living expression of it. It was a process that began when she finally submitted herself to her "higher power," Jesus Christ. As Paul said to Christians in Corinth,
And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him.
As we remember and celebrate Gracie's life and the blessing and joy she brought to all of us, I hope you'll join me in rejoicing that the transformation that started with her surrender to God's grace, is now complete; for we have this promise from the apostles. First from Paul's letter to the Christians at Philippi:
Jesus Christ will re-make these wretched bodies of ours to resemble his own glorious body, by that power of his which makes him the master of everything that is.
And then from the apostle John:
Dear friends, we are already God’s children, but he has not yet shown us what we will be like when Christ appears. But we do know that we will be like him, for we will see him as he really is.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
An Answer to Dan
A couple of Sundays ago a friend of mine posted a comment on my "Terror in the Night" post on this blog. I was very gratified that he took the time to post, and so I'm reprinting his comment, and my reply, in the hope that we can have further dialogue.
First, a short introduction of Dan. He's a great and interesting guy I met through a discussion group I used to moderate for readers of Townhall.com, the premier website of conservative political commentary. Dan makes his living translating between Japanese and English. The following are his comments:
For what it's worth coming from someone who fled Christianity when he was 18, I had the same night terrors for years as a child. I had been taught that one who died in a state of rejection of God would go to Hell, whereas one who died in a state of acceptance, Grace, to use your term, would go the other way ... **regardless of how they had actually lived their life**. Recall the constant refrain of "Good works do not get you into heaven."
I knew that (1) I was nowhere near as destructive and hateful as some other kids and adults in my environment, but (2) I found it impossible to sustain any faith in the Christian God for more than a few minutes at a time. The possibility of dying in a state of rejection of God was very real to me. This actually fueled a certain level of nihilism in me, because of the apparent capriciousness of God. After some years of my practice of Buddhism, I have lost nearly all my anger toward Christianity (this is not the time to discuss what I see as irritating habits of Christians). My view of how the universe works ("God", if you prefer) is that He/She is not really the cruel, capricious bastard I had "believed" in.
So what's the point of bringing this to the attention of Don and his Christian readers? I'd like to recommend that you address with your children the question that kept me up at nights. You may save them a lot of unnecessary misery. Whether or not it is true that "good works do not get you into Heaven", it is certainly true that good works tend to be the mark of a good character, and that will not be overlooked by any Force for justice.
My reply:
Dan,
First let me apologize for not getting back to you sooner.
I want to thank you for reading my blog, and especially for taking the time to comment on it. I always welcome comments, even if (or perhaps, especially if) they are in disagreement.
Reading your comments I can't help wondering what concept of God you were presented as a child to convince you that he was cruel and capricious. If it was the picture conceived and codified by John Calvin--the God who arbitrarily decreed before the advent of creation the select cadre of those whom he would irresistibly transform their will and thereby allow them to believe and be saved, but doom the rest to damnation--well, I can't believe in the fundamental goodness of that God either. I do believe that to give our existence and our relationship with God any meaning whatsoever, it was essential for man to be given absolute free will, and that an inevitable result of that free will is that many people choose to worship themselves rather than God.
My second question is regarding the concept of faith you were taught. Your comment that you were unable to sustain any faith in the Christian God for more than a few minutes at a time, causes me to suspect that you saw faith as a type of emotion or feeling, defined, perhaps, as the absence of doubt. But I think faith, just as courage, is rightly defined as action rather than feeling, a reliance, in the same way that I rely on a chair to hold my weight when I sit on it. My faith doesn't mean that I no longer have doubts, nor that I don't struggle at times with certain philosophical issues, but it does mean that, in conjunction with the extraordinary evidence for the resurrection of Christ and Biblical messianic prophesy, I see the Christian worldview as the most reasonable and logical system of thought that speaks to every facet of human reality, and also resonates with the deepest cravings of my inner life--my conscience, my longing for justice, my insatiable appetite for beauty and superlatives of all kinds.
Let me confess that I find your anthropomorphic characterization of the universe logically inconsistent with the "pure" Buddhist view that there is no god. From my, admittedly, meager reading about Buddhism, I understand that Siddhartha Gautama dealt with the question of the origin of the universe primarily by avoiding the question altogether. This seems completely inadequate to modern man. Whatever one can say about the various controversies regarding cosmology and the Christian doctrine of creation, at least we don't ignore it.
If I read you correctly, your anger at Christians--which presumably grew to encompass Christianity itself--was due to the injustice of Christians believing they could go to heaven regardless of what kind of life they lived: the doctrine of salvation by faith, not of works. First, don't feel alone in your anger at Christians. If you read my blog My-Road-Back, which is my story of return to practicing Christianity because of the events of 9/11, you'll see it was similar anger that drove me away from the church for so many years. But let me point out that the tension between the concept of God's redemptive grace and man's need to obey God's law has been present in Christianity since apostolic times. The apostles Paul and John had to deal with a heresy we have since called antinomianism whose adherents thought they should sin even more so God's grace would increase:
Shall we sin to our heart's content and see how far we can exploit the grace of God? What a ghastly thought! We, who have died to sin--how could we live in sin a moment longer? (Romans 6:1 Phillips translation)
My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense--Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only ours but also for the sins of the whole world. We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. (I John 2:1-6 NIV)
What seems to me particularly ironic is that your disgust at the behavior of Christians was based on Christian morality: you were evaluating the justice of Christianity by the yardstick of Christian moral truth inculcated in you through your Christian upbringing and American culture steeped in Judeo/Christian values.
This brings me back to the question of cosmology. If we exist in a purely material universe, which is ontologically essential in the absence of a personal, creator God, then morality is not--and cannot be--anything more than an evolutionary construct derived from primate behavior that necessitated close-nit social bonds for survival; there can be no such thing as moral absolutes. Morality becomes a thing of personal whim, and any particular variant of morality only has authority to whatever degree of political or social power its adherents can acquire. No one can, in any objective sense, say that one variant of morality is "better" than any other except with regard to its success as a survival strategy. From this standpoint we cannot honestly say that Pol Pot's moral vision, which necessitated the butchery of 20% of the population of Cambodia in one year for the objective of creating a truly equal and classless society, was "bad"--just unsuccessful.
This leaves me asking: when Gautama created his eight steps in the path of enlightenment--right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right mode of livelihood, right effort, right awareness, right concentration--from whom, or what, did he derive his concepts of the right? And why should I give his concept any more weight or authority than Pol Pot's, or Confucius', or Mohammed's, or Jesus', or the Marquis de Sade's, or better yet, whatever I happen to decide on any given day, depending on the state of my digestion, or the difficult financial crunch in which I may find myself?
Don
First, a short introduction of Dan. He's a great and interesting guy I met through a discussion group I used to moderate for readers of Townhall.com, the premier website of conservative political commentary. Dan makes his living translating between Japanese and English. The following are his comments:
For what it's worth coming from someone who fled Christianity when he was 18, I had the same night terrors for years as a child. I had been taught that one who died in a state of rejection of God would go to Hell, whereas one who died in a state of acceptance, Grace, to use your term, would go the other way ... **regardless of how they had actually lived their life**. Recall the constant refrain of "Good works do not get you into heaven."
I knew that (1) I was nowhere near as destructive and hateful as some other kids and adults in my environment, but (2) I found it impossible to sustain any faith in the Christian God for more than a few minutes at a time. The possibility of dying in a state of rejection of God was very real to me. This actually fueled a certain level of nihilism in me, because of the apparent capriciousness of God. After some years of my practice of Buddhism, I have lost nearly all my anger toward Christianity (this is not the time to discuss what I see as irritating habits of Christians). My view of how the universe works ("God", if you prefer) is that He/She is not really the cruel, capricious bastard I had "believed" in.
So what's the point of bringing this to the attention of Don and his Christian readers? I'd like to recommend that you address with your children the question that kept me up at nights. You may save them a lot of unnecessary misery. Whether or not it is true that "good works do not get you into Heaven", it is certainly true that good works tend to be the mark of a good character, and that will not be overlooked by any Force for justice.
My reply:
Dan,
First let me apologize for not getting back to you sooner.
I want to thank you for reading my blog, and especially for taking the time to comment on it. I always welcome comments, even if (or perhaps, especially if) they are in disagreement.
Reading your comments I can't help wondering what concept of God you were presented as a child to convince you that he was cruel and capricious. If it was the picture conceived and codified by John Calvin--the God who arbitrarily decreed before the advent of creation the select cadre of those whom he would irresistibly transform their will and thereby allow them to believe and be saved, but doom the rest to damnation--well, I can't believe in the fundamental goodness of that God either. I do believe that to give our existence and our relationship with God any meaning whatsoever, it was essential for man to be given absolute free will, and that an inevitable result of that free will is that many people choose to worship themselves rather than God.
My second question is regarding the concept of faith you were taught. Your comment that you were unable to sustain any faith in the Christian God for more than a few minutes at a time, causes me to suspect that you saw faith as a type of emotion or feeling, defined, perhaps, as the absence of doubt. But I think faith, just as courage, is rightly defined as action rather than feeling, a reliance, in the same way that I rely on a chair to hold my weight when I sit on it. My faith doesn't mean that I no longer have doubts, nor that I don't struggle at times with certain philosophical issues, but it does mean that, in conjunction with the extraordinary evidence for the resurrection of Christ and Biblical messianic prophesy, I see the Christian worldview as the most reasonable and logical system of thought that speaks to every facet of human reality, and also resonates with the deepest cravings of my inner life--my conscience, my longing for justice, my insatiable appetite for beauty and superlatives of all kinds.
Let me confess that I find your anthropomorphic characterization of the universe logically inconsistent with the "pure" Buddhist view that there is no god. From my, admittedly, meager reading about Buddhism, I understand that Siddhartha Gautama dealt with the question of the origin of the universe primarily by avoiding the question altogether. This seems completely inadequate to modern man. Whatever one can say about the various controversies regarding cosmology and the Christian doctrine of creation, at least we don't ignore it.
If I read you correctly, your anger at Christians--which presumably grew to encompass Christianity itself--was due to the injustice of Christians believing they could go to heaven regardless of what kind of life they lived: the doctrine of salvation by faith, not of works. First, don't feel alone in your anger at Christians. If you read my blog My-Road-Back, which is my story of return to practicing Christianity because of the events of 9/11, you'll see it was similar anger that drove me away from the church for so many years. But let me point out that the tension between the concept of God's redemptive grace and man's need to obey God's law has been present in Christianity since apostolic times. The apostles Paul and John had to deal with a heresy we have since called antinomianism whose adherents thought they should sin even more so God's grace would increase:
Shall we sin to our heart's content and see how far we can exploit the grace of God? What a ghastly thought! We, who have died to sin--how could we live in sin a moment longer? (Romans 6:1 Phillips translation)
My dear children, I write this to you so that you will not sin. But if anybody does sin, we have one who speaks to the Father in our defense--Jesus Christ, the Righteous One. He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only ours but also for the sins of the whole world. We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, "I know him," but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God's love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. (I John 2:1-6 NIV)
What seems to me particularly ironic is that your disgust at the behavior of Christians was based on Christian morality: you were evaluating the justice of Christianity by the yardstick of Christian moral truth inculcated in you through your Christian upbringing and American culture steeped in Judeo/Christian values.
This brings me back to the question of cosmology. If we exist in a purely material universe, which is ontologically essential in the absence of a personal, creator God, then morality is not--and cannot be--anything more than an evolutionary construct derived from primate behavior that necessitated close-nit social bonds for survival; there can be no such thing as moral absolutes. Morality becomes a thing of personal whim, and any particular variant of morality only has authority to whatever degree of political or social power its adherents can acquire. No one can, in any objective sense, say that one variant of morality is "better" than any other except with regard to its success as a survival strategy. From this standpoint we cannot honestly say that Pol Pot's moral vision, which necessitated the butchery of 20% of the population of Cambodia in one year for the objective of creating a truly equal and classless society, was "bad"--just unsuccessful.
This leaves me asking: when Gautama created his eight steps in the path of enlightenment--right views, right aspirations, right speech, right conduct, right mode of livelihood, right effort, right awareness, right concentration--from whom, or what, did he derive his concepts of the right? And why should I give his concept any more weight or authority than Pol Pot's, or Confucius', or Mohammed's, or Jesus', or the Marquis de Sade's, or better yet, whatever I happen to decide on any given day, depending on the state of my digestion, or the difficult financial crunch in which I may find myself?
Don
Sunday, May 06, 2007
A Modern Parable
Once there was a man-we'll call him John--born in the country of Amerigo. Despite the fact that Amerigo was a wonderful country that had educated him, provided a police force and a fire department that protected his property, and a utility grid from which he purchased his power, sewer and water, John decided that he no longer wanted to be a citizen of his country of birth.
John decided to secede from Amerigo. He built a large fence around his property and dubbed his domain Johnistan. Then he notified the government that he renounced his citizenship, and declared his property a sovereign country in its own right.
John did business with his neighbors, used the currency of Amerigo, and proceeded with his life with the added benefit that he no longer paid taxes.
John grew old and contented, and eventually decided to retire. He went to the office of Amerigo's sate pension, and applied for his pension payments, upon which he was notified by the pension case worker that he was not eligible to receive a pension.
"But I've worked hard all my life!" John protested. "I've never broken any Amerigo laws, and citizens of Amerigo have benefitted from my labor."
"That may be true," said the case worker, "but you're not a citizen yourself. You seceded, remember? You renounced your allegiance to Amerigo many years ago, and quit paying taxes. The fact that you obeyed our laws and contributed to the larger economy in other ways simply has no bearing."
John went home in a rage, only to find that his house was on fire. He quickly called the fire department, but upon giving them his address, was told they could not fight fires outside of the borders of Amerigo: John's house resided in the country of Johnistan. John had to watch his house burn, and over the next few days, surrounded by its ruins, he found his neighbors picking through the rubble for valuables that had survived the fire. He tried to chase them off, but because of his age and weakness, they ignored him. When he appealed to police for help, they too informed him that they had no jurisdiction in the country of Johnistan.
* * * * *
A common misunderstanding of sin is that its just breaking rules and that there will be a sort of cosmic ledger that God will consult at our eternal judgement; that if we have done more good things than bad things, we will be allowed into heaven. It's a comforting thought to those who have never done anything really bad, you know, like murder, or rape, or robbing a bank.
But the problem is, this idea is just plain wrong. Rule breaking is merely a symptom of the real problem, which is our state of rebellion against God. Sin is a state of being, a condition, in which we have seceded from his sovereignty and renounced our allegiance. Appeals to God to be given entrance to eternal life in his presence because we are "good," will make about as much sense as our protagonist, John, trying to collect his social security benefits from the country from which he had seceded.
If one spends his whole life ignoring his creator, and especially the sacrifice that Jesus made to repair that breech and reconcile us to God, his reliance on his own "goodness" will get him about as far as John's pleas to the fire department and police force of fictional Amerigo.
As C.S. Lewis said in The Problem of Pain
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question: "What are you asking God to do?" To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him. (John 3:36 NIV)
John decided to secede from Amerigo. He built a large fence around his property and dubbed his domain Johnistan. Then he notified the government that he renounced his citizenship, and declared his property a sovereign country in its own right.
John did business with his neighbors, used the currency of Amerigo, and proceeded with his life with the added benefit that he no longer paid taxes.
John grew old and contented, and eventually decided to retire. He went to the office of Amerigo's sate pension, and applied for his pension payments, upon which he was notified by the pension case worker that he was not eligible to receive a pension.
"But I've worked hard all my life!" John protested. "I've never broken any Amerigo laws, and citizens of Amerigo have benefitted from my labor."
"That may be true," said the case worker, "but you're not a citizen yourself. You seceded, remember? You renounced your allegiance to Amerigo many years ago, and quit paying taxes. The fact that you obeyed our laws and contributed to the larger economy in other ways simply has no bearing."
John went home in a rage, only to find that his house was on fire. He quickly called the fire department, but upon giving them his address, was told they could not fight fires outside of the borders of Amerigo: John's house resided in the country of Johnistan. John had to watch his house burn, and over the next few days, surrounded by its ruins, he found his neighbors picking through the rubble for valuables that had survived the fire. He tried to chase them off, but because of his age and weakness, they ignored him. When he appealed to police for help, they too informed him that they had no jurisdiction in the country of Johnistan.
* * * * *
A common misunderstanding of sin is that its just breaking rules and that there will be a sort of cosmic ledger that God will consult at our eternal judgement; that if we have done more good things than bad things, we will be allowed into heaven. It's a comforting thought to those who have never done anything really bad, you know, like murder, or rape, or robbing a bank.
But the problem is, this idea is just plain wrong. Rule breaking is merely a symptom of the real problem, which is our state of rebellion against God. Sin is a state of being, a condition, in which we have seceded from his sovereignty and renounced our allegiance. Appeals to God to be given entrance to eternal life in his presence because we are "good," will make about as much sense as our protagonist, John, trying to collect his social security benefits from the country from which he had seceded.
If one spends his whole life ignoring his creator, and especially the sacrifice that Jesus made to repair that breech and reconcile us to God, his reliance on his own "goodness" will get him about as far as John's pleas to the fire department and police force of fictional Amerigo.
As C.S. Lewis said in The Problem of Pain
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell is itself a question: "What are you asking God to do?" To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever rejects the Son will not see life, for God's wrath remains on him. (John 3:36 NIV)
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