Tag Archives: Christianity

the enemy within

Leave a reply

He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls. Prov. 25:28

He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. Prov. 16:32.

Boundaries are an essential issue in human experience. If we don’t learn to set boundaries, and respect those set by others, we are going to be in trouble real soon. These two Proverbs describe it as “ruling your spirit.” We are ultimately merely bundles of impulses, energy if you please, and learning how to handle these impulses is essential to life.

“Taking a city”, in Proverbs 16:32, was perhaps the greatest example of power that one could exercise. The writer was noting that can one who can harness that internal energy is “better than the mighty” that can take a city. It was an image of masculine prowess.

Proverbs 25:28 emphasizes that this ruling of one’s spirit is essential in “keeping the enemy out.” He was saying that if you don’t rule your spirit, it is like the walls of a city breaking down, allowing “the enemy” to enter. Now in one spiritual tradition, Christianity, “the enemy” has been labeled Satan. To them, this verse means, “You don’t set boundaries, Satan is going to get in.”

I like to think of it in terms of energy. We are all the aforementioned “bundles of energy”, some of which is adaptive and some of which is maladaptive. I think “the enemy” is the maladaptive energy that we all have in the depths of our heart. Jung termed it the shadow.

Truth and the NAR

Leave a reply

Truth is a dangerous commodity. I think it visits us on occasion as a momentary experience of Grace. But the experience is so profound, so intoxicating, so compelling that we have to own it and so we reduce it to the conceptual. And at that moment, it has become a true commodity and is immediately on the market.

Then there comes the human tendency to feel that he/she owns this “truth” and must convince others to see it and experience it the very same way. Thus comes the advent of conversion-oriented religions and non-sense like the New Apostolic Reformation movement of present-day. Movements like this consist of leaders who feel they have really seen the truth, not in the limited way that others have, and that they must bludgeon the world with it. And there are always millions of mindless lemmings who are willing to subscribe to ideology of this sort

I feel that truth is a process. It is something that we intuitive experience on occasion but it is never anything we own. At best, “we see through a glass darkly.”

And here is an interesting thought I just ran across on the net.  This is so important:

There is no truth that cannot be turned into a lie if you just take it seriously enough.  Anitra l. freeman

spiritual technocrats

5 Replies

A college history professor, teaching a class on American religion, once noted that in the frontier days the men who often got the “call to preach” were those who couldn’t do anything else.  They were the wastrels, the ne’er-do-wells, those who were floundering with their life when they suddenly realized, “Hey, I could start preaching and immediately I will have a job, and respect, and a place in the community.”  (I suspect that a neurological conflagration also played a part in many of those “calls”, especially those that appeared to be of the “got a wild hair up their backside” variety)

I think that so many of our clergy today are assembly-line, mass produced, machine-produced men and women.  They are spiritual technocrats, adept at trotting out a good sermon, propping up the congregation’s pretenses, flashing that Christian (or otherwise) ivory here and there, and going their merry way.  They are, as a friend of mine once wrote, “heroes of spiritual contraception who have long since despaired of rebirth.” (Charles “Chuck” Dewitt)

They have been enculturated into Christianity and thus are professional ministers, preachers, priests, rabbis, mullahs, or what have you.  But they have nothing to offer from beyond the pale for they’ve never been there themselves.   These “spiritual technocrats” reflect our culture which also has long-since “despaired of rebirth.”  Our culture’s only frame of reference is itself and that, as noted earlier last week, is mental illness.  These “technocrats” have never experienced the “Dark Night of the Soul” (St. John of the Cross) or “The Cloud of Unknowing” which would then empower them to offer a prophetic word.  They have never done their “time in the desert” like Jesus did.

Conrad Aiken once noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.”  The clergy that I’m upbraiding here have never been outside of that “small bright circle”.  To do so would entail an encounter with intense anxiety and despair.  It is easier for them to stay within the cozy confines of this “circle,” thus mirroring the culture at large which has done the same, which has “made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  (W. H. Auden)   This phenomena has been addressed in history and sociology as the church in “cultural captivity.”

Meditative prayer

Leave a reply

I think it is important to pay attention to how we pray.  Often when we pray we are merely chattering, tossing words around, praying to some kindly old gentleman “up there”, possibly one who sits on a golden throne with a baby sheep under one arm and a thunderbolt under the other.  Our prayer is often of the “gimme, gimme, gimme” genre, reflecting a vision of God as sitting “up there” with a huge duffel bag full of goodies to toss our way.  But an essential dimension of prayer is to clear our minds, to rein them in, to focus—that is, to meditate.  Meditative prayer can help us find our center and from that center we can make better decisions about our day to day life.   We could even, then, say “The Spirit of God leads us in making better decisions.”

Our words speak volumes about us, including the words we use in prayer.   Our word selection and the nuances of our speech reveals where we are existentially and spiritually.   For example, our word selection in prayer can reveal the perception that He is “afar off”, that He is “out there” and that we are fundamentally estranged from Him.  It is this perception of estrangement that leads to the belief that our tone of voice, our volume, and our ardor will help influence Him in his responses.  We forget that though God is transcendent He is also immanent.  In the words of Jesus, “The kingdom is within.”

prayer

Leave a reply

I think it is important to pay attention to how we pray.  Often when we pray we are merely chattering, tossing words around, praying to some kindly old gentleman “up there”, possibly one who sits on a golden throne with a baby sheep under one arm and a thunderbolt under the other.  Our prayer is often of the “gimme, gimme, gimme” genre, reflecting a vision of God as sitting “up there” with a huge duffel bag full of goodies to toss our way.  But an essential dimension of prayer is to clear our minds, to rein them in, to focus—that is, to meditate.  Meditative prayer can help us find our center and from that center we can make better decisions about our day to day life.   We could even, then, say “The Spirit of God leads us in making better decisions.”

Our words speak volumes about us, including the words we use in prayer.   Our word selection and the nuances of our speech reveals where we are existentially and spiritually.   For example, our word selection in prayer can reveal the perception that He is “afar off”, that He is “out there” and that we are fundamentally estranged from Him.  It is this perception of estrangement that leads to the belief that our tone of voice, our volume, and our ardor will help influence Him in his responses.  We forget that though God is transcendent he is also immanent.  In the words of Jesus, “The kingdom is within.”

Primordial grace

Leave a reply

Grace is a wonderful concept.  I even love the look and the sound of the word in biblical greek—charis!   But grace preceded the Judeo-Christian era.  Several days I even quoted Aesyclus re “the awful grace of God” and Aesychlus lived some 500 years before Christ.  But grace was not new even then.  I believe grace much earlier had been a concept in the evolving human experience, first being articulated as imprecise grunts and squeaks millenia earlier when some man or woman, probably sitting around a campfire, experienced the Beneficense of the universe he/she lived in.   Only much later did this “verbal imprecision” become more elegantly conceptualized and expressed.  Remember that Revelations 13:8 describes Jesus as “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world”, meaning “Jesus” was “sacrificed” before the advent of the space-time continuum.  Grace was something proferred to us in eternity past, something in the original germ of being.

For a poetic description of this concept, check out Wendell Berry’s poem, “The Peace of Wild Things.”

Christian social grooming

Leave a reply

CNN over the weekend posted an article about “talking Christian.” The author, John Blake, describes this as the Christian habit to obsessively regurgitate various words and phrases, sometimes having little idea what is really meant by them. The author had stolen my thunder! I was at that moment preparing to blog on the subject of what I call, “God talk.” To illustrate my version of this phenomena, let me describe another “talk” of the same genre—“car talk.” This “car talk” is chatter, usually between men (young and old) about the intricacies of the automobile. (I can’t do this glibly for I don’t know how to do “car talk”.) But it involves lots of discussion of the subtleties of carburetion….”four-barrel Holly” comes to mind. And there are the complexities of engine compression and possibly the desire to bore out the cylinder and install larger pistons to get enhanced power. And I remember “glass pack mufflers” being the rage. And there were details about “the struts” and “the cam shaft” or perhaps the fear of “throwing a rod.” Now, if I knew how to “car talk”, I could tie all the above…and more…into a meaningful conversation which would constitute an example of “car talk.” AND, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this “car talk.” It is one example of human engagement, it can be thought of as “social grooming”, much like chimps in a cage picking fleas off each other. ( Another example is “talking baseball” which I can do very well!). This social grooming is an essential part of day to day life.

Now though I am a “mal-adept” at car talk, I can recall being very adept at “God talk”, especially the hyper-conservative variety. It involved “well worn words and ready phrases” (Conrad Aiken) such as, “Jesus is my savior” or “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” or “He’s on the way back this very moment” or “I’m just a sinner saved by God’s grace” or “Why weren’t you in Sunday school yesterday, Brother Lewis?” or “Well, let’s remember to pray about it”. These and others are worn into a tapestry of routine conversation, the point of which was that each would recognize each other as a Christian and as a particular type of Christian. One would fit into the social context, one would be able to “offer a convincing performance” in that social context. And, once again there is nothing necessarily wrong with this variety of “talk”; for, religion does have a social dimension and this example of Christian “social grooming” has its function.

The problem lies when Christians, or persons of other faiths, never go beyond the social dimension of their glib expressions and search-out the hidden meanings. Failure to do so means that one has merely imbibed his/her faith, or the verbal trappings of his/her faith, from the social context. The words and phrases have only superficial meaning. They are “shop talk”. They amount to “chimps picking fleas off each other.”

meditative prayer

Leave a reply

I don’t think most of the prayers in my life have made it past my halo.  Most of my prayers have been mere chatter or desperate petitions for God to undo some bit of foolishness that I had trotted out.  And I’m not for sure what prayer is about, even now; but I know it is helpful, if for nothing else than a meditative effect.  “Chatter” prayer is simple, you merely trot out the usual verbiage, the usual “well worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.”  (Conrad Aiken).  But meditative prayer is a challenge for me.  It is so hard to quieten the mind, to follow the biblical admonishment, “Be still and know that I am God.”  Shakespeare grasped the importance of the meditative dimension of prayer.  In Hamlet, King Claudius kneels in prayer and laments:

My words fly up; my thoughts remain below.

Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

 

 

 

prayer

Leave a reply

I pray daily now.  One could even say that I follow the biblical admonishment and “Pray without ceasing.”  But this “praying without ceasing” is not what I used to think it was.  I do not go around compulsively praying.  My prayer is more of an attitude of prayer, of simple acknowledgement of God’s presence and an expression of gratitude for the blessings and beauty of life.  I like the Buddhist notion of “mindfulness” and this might describe what I mean by prayer.  “Mindfulness” is just paying attention from time to time at what is going on in one’s life, in one’s day to day experience.  For example, in recent weeks it has meant being “mindful” at the beauty of a yellow warbler cavorting in the underbrush on the shores of the lake, or a mockingbird sipping water from a birdbath, or a Great Blue Heron gently and elegantly patrolling his station on the lake.  It has meant being “mindful” of the first taste of coffee in the morning, or savoring a fine glass of wine, or spending time with friends—and certainly with my lovely wife.

 

Prayer has a meditative dimension.  It facilitates focus, the reining-in of a mind that is prone to wonder, of a mind that is often consumed with idle chatter.  The Bible admonishes, “Be still and know that I am God.”  The “being still” is often difficult but spiritual wisdom tells us that it is only in primordial stillness that we can acknowledge our Source.  Gerard Manley Hopkins noted:

 

ELECTED Silence, sing to me

And beat upon my whorlèd ear,

Pipe me to pastures still and be

The music that I care to hear.

 

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:       

 5 It is the shut, the curfew sent

From there where all surrenders come

Which only makes you eloquent.