Christ’s life may have looked servile to some: an ultimately fruitless attempt to avoid offending the local authorities. Certain revolutionaries would say his life displayed a girlish distaste for violence. That he died because he couldn't bring himself to kill.
Such explanations overlook the obvious.
Jesus had nerves of steel and his words reflect it. He tolerated no challenges to his chosen course of action. By way of warning off interferers, he constantly emphasized the fact that his actions hung on the word of his Father.
Because Jesus was so obedient, no one could push him around.
Christ never did anything "merely" because someone wanted him to. His acquiescence to local authorities was a suspension of force in lieu of a higher reality. When the schemes of the establishment fit nicely into the Master plan, Jesus went along. When the blood streamed from his body, it was not coerced. As Christ said, “No one takes my life from me. I lay it down of my own volition…”
He was a train en route, unfailingly on time. Sometimes the tracks ran parallel to human institutions, sometimes they ran through them. But whether Christ was obeying Caesar or demolishing the Pharisees, he was, without exception, submissive.
Christ’s obedience, magnetized to his Father, turned out to be the irresistible force. When his submission encountered the religious leaders’ accusations, it was they who turned tail and ran.
Paul, the first-century theologian, writes of this same phenomenon when he states, regarding a group of religious hypocrites, “I did not submit to them for one instant.” In his defiance, Paul was unerringly obedient.
This submission is more profound and simple than any so-called pacifism or “humility” that we can impose on ourselves. Complete deference seems awful to us because we’ve placed it in the wrong context: Capitulation to man’s whims is slavery. Conformity with God’s plans is an uninhibited dance, resulting in a revolutionary life like Christ’s. To submit, ultimately, is to defy whomever you must.
So then, submission is for the very strong, not for pansies.
For an earlier post on freedom as it relates to submission, read this.
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Iron Submission
Friday, September 09, 2005
Nuclear Sub
My reentry in the public work force has gone more smoothly than expected. I assumed there would be an adjustment period as I remembered how to rule the classroom. The substitute's job is filled with bewildering nuances: Give orders charmingly; schmooze preventively with would-be teacher's pets; diplomatically put upstarts in their place. No one can say this job is easy.
But having said that, coming back wasn't too hard.
Today I handed out four detentions without blinking an eye—behavior that my younger, more tender-hearted self would have paled at—then shredded three of them after the intended hush fell over the room. Maybe I'm getting pragmatic. Or maybe I'm just getting better.
Yeah.
More powerful, more adept at controlling my surroundings. The kind of sub who gets less flack than others.
A nuclear sub.
(At least that's what I'm choosing to believe for the purposes of this post.)
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Broken Time
The artificiality of time has been sinking in lately. My thick books reveal that time is too thin. My achy knees assert that time is out of joint. You may think these are dubious indicators of time’s sham nature, but time is broken.
At the very least, our experience of time is dysfunctional. This may mean (although I speculate here) that it was not meant to register with us at all. Time is told by clocks; it would be better denoted by their absence. “Timepieces” hang strangely on our walls, attesting to lives that were not meant to be partitioned.
How else should we explain the universal dismay and bafflement that surrounds aging? As if grayness had come unexpectedly, although it has been going on (like clockwork) since the world began. Likewise, in the pursuit of knowledge, and the understanding behind it, who hasn’t had the creeping sensation that to master his subject will take a lifetime, maybe several? The feeling intensifies if one has multiple areas of interest.
You spend a lifetime on Marine Biology, only to learn that it will take two more. Or you set out to nail down the basics of “wisdom” (like Solomon), only to realize that wisdom lies beyond you all the time, watching your wanderings with amusement—you have yet to reach her doormat.
I read a book, set it down, and eye it with puzzlement, knowing that its full message still eludes me. As Ian Barbour writes, “One never finishes a book—one simply abandons it eventually.” My shelves are lined with abandoned books that I have read repeatedly.
At every bend in the road, Time springs out to surprise us. “How tired I am!” we say, disgust mingled with inexplicable surprise. “How you’ve grown,” relatives intone over and over with seeming stupidity—but their puzzlement is genuine. “How times flies…” we mutter at the end of an enchanted weekend. We make silly remarks in our efforts to accustom ourselves to finite time, to soften the discomfort of its contours.
We measure our lives in time, but it should be the other way around. Time should be at our mercy—and in the end, it will pitch forward and measure its length on eternity’s floor. Time, our intended atmosphere. Time, the air we were previously too weak to breathe. Time, the life-enhancer. As measured by our lives, it will be qualitative, not quantitative: Time, the stuff through which we timelessly live.
Time will only have meaning when we fill it—use it to hold the pieces of our lives. “Seventy years” will become (ala Dante) “the time I spent in the woods.” “Ten years” will be “when I explored that hilltop.” If we notice time at all.
If we stop and stare at a child’s game for seven years in order to really see it, I wonder if we will even know it.*
* George MacDonald presents this scene in a paragraph of his beautiful short story, “The Golden Key.”
BookQuake
For several weeks now I’ve been living a lie. My life has been hijacked by wishful thinking. I’ve allowed fancy to solidify as fact; quixotic ideals have made me disingenuous.
Well, I can’t do it any longer. This crutch—this historical relic with its illusory well-being—it must go.
Faith and reason have collided, and reason has won out. I recant, I recant.
And now I’m updating my All Consuming list.
::
Yes, it’s true: the three titles displayed lately in my sidebar as “current” are really no longer current. They’re no longer strewn on the coffee table. They’re not even piled on my desk. They are shelved, the casualties of summer's end.
As my semester began, I comforted myself with the thought that I could polish off Pascal and Augustine “in my free moments” and wrap up Cortazar during lulls in my lectures. It was childish. Folly. Pure book-élan.
I see that now.
And despite the emotional consequences, I have updated my “currently consuming” list. Sigh.
I am now a sadder but more honest man.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Mere Theft?
Last Sunday I left my annotated copy of Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis) at church, and repeated rescue attempts came up empty-handed. Apparently someone had lifted the book during the week: Mere Christianity. Left in a church building. Stolen.
This was ironic.
The deed seemed slightly akin to stealing a Bible, although the potential resale value was significantly less. I was almost forced to assume that whoever took the book did so because they wanted to read it—and so the plot thickened. I could only hope that Lewis was in the hands of someone really evil.
*This Sunday morning, I cunningly baited a trap with a similar prize—Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology, which is not only more visible than Lewis’ slim volume, but carries more monetary weight. Then I preceded to watch my neighbors discreetly. Sadly, I didn’t notice anyone eyeing Theology or stealthily edging closer.
I realized that to really do it right I’d need to leave Grudem sitting on a chair, alone and vulnerable, while I waited in the shadows (at midnight) with a flashlight and a revolver (or maybe just my raw physical strength). However, I’d watched far too many suspense films not to recognize that callously using live bait can have awful results.
If Lewis was really gone, I wasn’t sure I could risk losing Grudem to a similar fate.
But somehow, I would be revenged. Then it struck me: Maybe I could leave a copy of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species disguised in a highly misleading gloss cover…
Yes, that just might do it.
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* At this point the story veers slightly into fiction, but, as you see, it impugns no one and actually makes the post more interesting. Mere Christianity was returned Sunday morning by a friend who had realized Lewis’ imminent danger the week before and grabbed the book before a less principled person could do so. Our reunion was a joy to behold.
Monday, September 05, 2005
Life Translation
Are God's thoughts like JavaScript?
It’s only to be expected that my words fail me when I try to describe God’s. But the spiritual catalysis unleashed by the meeting of our minds guarantees that I’ll try anyway.
Where to start?
This is worth mentioning: Reading the Bible is more like Shakespeare than Physics. Yes, I’m finding truth—indisputably, this is the point of my reading—but the truth is transformative, begging to be worn and spoken, not dry formula. Yes, the Bible contains principles, but they are for inhabiting, not categorizing. In light of this, the goal is “life translation” of God’s thoughts into my existence—not a larger knowledge base.
Given this fact, I found myself thinking of my Bible-immersion in a slightly ironic way last week. This is like, I thought, reading Java instructions over and over again until I can finally implement the code.
You’ll gather that for me, HTML is shrouded in mystery, which is why, I guess, the analogy works at all. I read the coding instructions again and again until there is a breakthrough in my understanding (very finite) and get it. At last, the script becomes active! Maybe I tweak just one character that I’d mistyped—but the new functions come awake and my page springs to life. “Mere knowledge” has been translated into exciting new ability.
As I read the Bible, I often have the sense that a passage has something profound to say to me if I could somehow get inside it. Or get it inside me—which seems somewhat like swallowing the world. But if I could only apprehend the truth beneath the syntax, it would grow up and overshadow me and I would see more clearly.
Memorizing words God has said is, I think, the best way to really get at their meaning. Why? Not because rote memory “translates” them into my living. But because, having eaten them, I have them available for digestion. Or for “analysis,” in the Java analogy. I haven’t mastered the words yet, but since they are under observation, the cylinders keep firing.
And then something happens. An invisible tumbler clicks into alignment, and life adjusts itself accordingly—I’m one degree nearer to seeing the world as I should. People and thoughts resolve themselves into greater clarity. A glow suffuses the problem that moments ago seemed impenetrable.
Call it life translation. Or call it “inner gold”—leading to a life that rings true.
As David, the warrior-king and poet, wrote: “[Your thoughts] are worth more than the finest gold and are sweeter than honey from a honeycomb. By your teachings, Lord, I am warned; by obeying them, I am greatly rewarded” (Psalm 19:10-11).
Here’s a type of gold that transforms what it touches, flesh and blood included. David, if anyone, embodied God’s thoughts lived out. Life translation, for him, meant valor in battle, mercy in judgment, and mode of living that overawed (and sometimes puzzled) those around him.
David took the aggressive route toward this treasure: he grabbed it. And when he started to grasp God’s thought, he threw his full weight on it, and found that he was walking, running, jumping—fully upright. He had the guts to do what few of us will: shrewdly eye the Bible as a living mystery that would change him if he came too close. Than he deliberately came too close—and was steeped in the life that blazes from God himself—“the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live” (C.S. Lewis).
Caution: The Holy Bible, that leather-bound and slightly musty relic, is wildly flammable if it gets beneath your skin. Get too close—look too hard—and the inner gold may grow you stronger eyes for everyday seeing.
You may find yourself slipping, to your alarm, into true reality.
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Prayers for New Orleans
The first and only time I visited New Orleans, I had a hard time seeing the people for the city. At least at first. At Mother’s, the waitress’s lines had to be scripted. The trumpet player and drummer mixing it up in the square knew they were a live display. When I walked into Paddy O’Brien’s in search of a Hurricane, the atmosphere was too deafening to be real. In Bourbon Street at dusk, the postures and catcalls were pure facade.
Almost, you could believe everyone was moving to a script they’d committed to memory. The script, I thought, was New Orleans. 
It took a couple days before the people began appearing as entities apart from their creative/swingin’/Cajun! environment. The people started appearing about the same time as the cracks did.
Bourbon Street was too forced to be really festive. The gumbo sometimes featured sand. The beggars really were desperate. And surprisingly, the culture embraced death—in a token manner, anyhow—above-ground graves dotting all the city maps. New Orleans was raucous beauty. Porticoes bright but chipped. Spanish moss caressing crypts.
You saw how tenuous the whole place’s grasp on Art and Passion actually was. The jazz maestros playing in Preservation Hall sweated while they jammed; when they snapped at people with video cameras, you sensed this wasn’t the venue of their dreams. When you strolled into a restaurant just before the evening traffic flooded in, you could catch the proprietor looking bored. The trinkets and T-shirts at the Bazaar by the Café Du Monde sold more briskly than the real art propped up in corner shops.
New Orleans was people, and the people were restive. The place was bittersweet, all the more for the cover-all blush that smeared the hollows between her better features. The glorious sunsets didn’t quite obscure the fast-food trash littering the streets.
Eventually, I’m happy to say, the city’s populace eclipsed her. The musicians were more memorable than their jazz. The beggers outdid the beignets. New Orleans is her people.
They’re who I’m praying for when I pray for New Orleans.
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Buzz
I was disconsolate over the fact that I didn't manage to write a "real" post today. In fact, I've been limiting myself to quick blurbs for about the past week, and the self-imposed shallowness is starting to tell on me. Believe me when I say, a Post of Substance waits nearby.
In the meantime, I may as well note that Teen Revolution posted one of my pieces: Coffee With God. They asked me to submit something to their site a couple months ago, and I finally managed to do so. Veteran readers may note that the article sounds vaguely familiar...
In other breaking news, newbie blogger lazlo has conducted some statistical analysis on my Fun with Evolution post:
"Anyway, bottom line, the post and the comments totalled 12,000 words. 33 pages when I cut and pasted the whole thing into Word. (Just to see.) If you could write 33 pages of anything and didn’t repeat yourself or tell a lie, that would be quite an accomplishment."
Touché. Although my conscience is clear, the redundancy has been killing me for days. And beware, the comments are still proliferating. ( Lazlo's quick take is worth a read.) But at least now you know why no posts of epic proportions have appeared here lately.
Catch 'Em While They're Small
I killed a baby copperhead today. The 8-inch snake twitched once in the air, then died, gaping convulsively. It didn't seem much of a victory. And it was an accident, the snake hidden by leafy sunlight on a mulch trail, too sluggish too stir.
However, if serpents were the harbingers of sin, an embodiment of evil, as in Medieval thought, then this would be the ideal way to kill one.
Thursday, September 01, 2005
What I’ve Been Doing In My Spare Time
I’ve always said I wanted to write a book. And now I have. I can’t say I intended my first work to have a coauthor (Give dr zen a hand, folks), but hey—fame creeps up on you unawares, and you have to accept her conditions or bail.
You can view the manuscript (complete and unabridged, sprawling and disorganized) at the bottom of this post. The title? Comments Appended To My “Fun With Evolution” Piece. Catchy, I know.
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And while we’re on the subject of books, I have to bring up one of my favorites (again), which I recently discovered a friend of mine is reading. G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy continues to splash around in my thoughts, and Tim’s initial take suggests the book may have a similar effect on him. At least I hope so, because then we can talk about it.
Anyway, check out the connection he makes, and be sure to read his clarifying comment, which (if I may say so) outstrips the original post.
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