Answers, as final destinations, are boring and incredibly unhelpful. I would even go so far as to say that they are unequivocally dangerous. Oh I know the illusory security is seductive. It comes down to a choice really. The question we must all engage; is do I choose to cling to my very narrow understanding or do I courageously begin to free myself from the chains of my own severely limited understanding? Do I refuse to collapse all exterior meaning in the other in terms of myself? Do I choose to value wonderment, awe, amazement, humility and bewilderment? Do I view life as something to be mastered or as a journey to be experienced?
Much of this, I would suggest, can be explained in terms of narrative theory. We in the west have become increasingly accustomed to clean tidy resolutions in our stories that Hollywood has so masterfully provided. There are significant exceptions such as the TV shows “The Wire” and “The Sopranos”. However these are unmistakably not the norm. Dr. Dan Allender said it well when he said:
“In fact, if a story or life can be summarized as a moral, then it has lost its intrigue.”
Dr. Dan Allender pg. 96 of “To Be Told”
This requires an intense commitment to forsake the security blanket of certainty and valiantly embrace living within the tension of unresolved story. Great literature always refuses to be reduced to a set of bullet points. Extraordinary literature cannot be reduced for it is always more than words can capture. The next is one of my favorite quotes.
“"[Mystery] must be entered into… For we do not solve mysteries; we enter into them. The deeper we enter into them, the more illumination we get.... a problem is solved, it is over and done with. We go on to other problems… But a mystery, once recognized, is something we are never finished with. It is never exhausted. Instead, we return to it again and it unfolds new levels to us… We live in a universe permeated by a divine reality whose hem we touch when we encounter mysteries. (Diogenes Allen)"
In short I am speaking what, I think, we all already know instinctively to be true. Answers to the deepest questions of life are only as useful as the questions they engender. If an answer beckons and pulls you further into mystery, then it contains within it the potential to experience a deeper level of reality. It is like a lover inviting you to, with wonder and awe, explore the infinite universe of the other.
Photo Albums
November 03, 2009
Scary Silence
Be still for twenty minutes and see just how uncentered and scattered you really are. This is one of the areas of my life that needs considerable attention. I have tried, in the past, to settle into a more contemplative rhythm. However for one reason or another I have never achieved consistency. However the intermittent meditative encounters have meant more than words could contain. The evidence is incontrovertible; industrialized society is inundated with noise. I personally own a T.V., iPod, iPhone, iMac, Macbook, AM/FM radio in the house and car as well as an XM radio. I live in an apartment downtown Austin and there is more visual noise than I could look at in a lifetime. It is entirely far too easy for me to avoid silence altogether. Many people have pointed this out in my life as an unhealthy practice to say the least. The thing is I am largely in the norm when compared to my surrounding culture. When is the last time you sat in silence with your eyes closed for longer than fifteen minutes without falling asleep?
This weekend I was a part of the Netzer Co-op’s contemplative experiment. We set up various stations for people to go and try various contemplative meditative practices. At each a guide was stationed to help explain each respective practice. At Netzer I appreciate the fact that that we avoid the one-size-fits-all approach. It was great to see people consciously try to get out of their comfort zones.
Regardless of the nature of your faith; meditation is a practice that is invaluable to living deeply and purposefully. It is in silence that you can begin to calm the incessant frenetic swirling that is within us all. This is a daunting task for most of us; myself included. But it is here in silence that I begin to become aware of the nature of ontological existence. It is a remarkable realization to begin to grasp how aimless and trivial the majority of my daily thought life is.
I think part of the problem is that in our capitalistic consumer driven culture meditation simply doesn’t fit. Now this is simply me thinking out loud here. But maybe in meditation we find that all of those things we buy only provide us a temporary distraction until we can buy the next thing. At the end of the day maybe we realize that all the noise and things we buy allow us to stay at the periphery of our lives. Maybe people, myself included, are scared to see what we may find there in the middle of what defines our very presence. What if I don’t like what I see there? What if I find nothing. Maybe it is this very chain of causality that inevitably leads to these kinds of questions that scare so many people.
This for me raises some interesting questions especially concerning my time management. I honestly don’t watch much T.V..However I cannot tell you the countless hours I spend aimlessly surfing the internet. I typically get up in the morning just in time to go to class. Then at night I don’t go to bed until usually one in the morning. So all of that to say I think it is time for me to re-examine how I spend my time.
October 31, 2009
East of Eden
Ancient wisdom cries out that we are all profoundly east of Eden. This knowledge seems to be woven into the very marrow our senses. We all somehow know that, on some level, things are not the way they should be. Not only is the world broken but so am I. There seems to be two extreme positions on this. On the one hand many people operate under the illusion that they are unique in their confusion, pains, hurts, losses and angst. These people are confused as to how everyone else seemingly has life all figured out. On the other side of the coin there are those that have come to the seductive conclusion that the problem is out there. That somehow if the world would just think and see things the way they do it would all be better. These individuals are convinced that the problem is in the other. In some cases these two paradigms are inconceivably simultaneously present in the same person. Both of these views are incredibly misguided and dangerous but all too common. They are both seductive paradigms for various reasons and their sway is difficult to break. These are lessons that are hard to learn and internalize. I have found that I need constant reminding. Otherwise it is all too easy to slip back into one or both of these paradigms.
Many people claim to want community but I seriously doubt their understanding of what they are asking for. True community is messy, time consuming, frustratingly impractical and at at times painful. More to the point I need it like I need oxygen. We all need to feel deeply connected to each other. We have all been hurt in some way and carry scars. Some hide them better than others; but they still hide. We yearn to be accepted and loved by the other. But alas here is the snag; this requires being vulnerable to more pain, hurt and the possibility of rejection. It takes madness to step out of the known and into the amorphous unknown of the sacred other. Samir Selmanovic said it well in his new book when he said:
“If I cannot in some way surrender to the unknown, I cannot love, and there is no greater bondage than the inability to love.”
page 112 of It’s Really All About God Reflections of a Muslim Atheist Jewish Christian.
We can, and many have, speculate endlessly as to how we have, as a culture, become increasingly isolated from each other. Presumably there are many factors that have contributed in varying degrees. Those are important questions worth exploring. However the fact remains; we all in some way sense that things are not the way they are supposed to be. Collectively we all feel the pain, hurt, scars, angst, confusion and deep sorrows that seem to permeate the whole of human experience. Once again I must confess that I lack adequate answers. I confess that I along with the rest of humanity am broken. However I am not afforded the luxury of waiting until all of the evidence and answers come rolling in to tell me how the story ends. Life will not wait and continues to march on. So I choose to step out into the uncertainty and learn how to embrace the other. I am slowly learning how to be connected to the other. I am learning to accept the radical nature of our collective interdependency. I am learning how to live and love well. I am trying to find the way back to Eden.
October 29, 2009
Choosing versus Oscillating
Sometimes I ask myself if being the constant cynic allows me to avoid taking action. I see before me a myriad of stories with which I could join. Some are more inviting than others. I am somehow compelled by an invisible force to wrestle and struggle with these burning persistent questions burgeoning and swirling from within my soul. I ask myself what scares me about choosing a path. Is it for fear of choosing a path that is less than the whole of existence. Am I somehow operating under the illusion that I can somehow walk a path that will allow me to experience some kind of uber reality. Is this derived from the knowledge that regardless of the path chosen, will ineluctably mean an incomplete fragmented existence. Is there still within me a latent yearning for Cartesian certainty? But how can this be? I long ago took to heart the words of Nietzsche and accepted that certainty and objectivity were but mere myths. I confess that I have concluded that the ambiguous nature of truth is unavoidably irreducibly pluralistic and multi-faceted thus giving it multiple dimensions and textures. Truth is like a woman that refuses to be mastered and laughs at the arrogance of the myriads of men who have attempted as much. The most anyone can aspire to is to experience an encounter with this ineffable force. I can continue to fashion these feeble metaphors to somehow point towards reality. However they will always be woefully incomplete. I confess that my reality is not all encompassing of the real. Life does not, never did, and never will revolve around me. My reality and perceptions amount to but a grain of sand on an endless beach of never ending mounds of sand. As I continue to toil and struggle within these entangled webs of ontological and epistemological puzzles, I continue to return to the same existential problems of how to live. I am most likely going to oscillate between the competing paradigms, theories, hypothesis, philosophies and theologies for the rest of my life. I will, I hope, carry out the Socratic imperative. I will fearlessly ask why! The question still remains how do I live today. I must make a choice of ethics. There is no abstaining from this question. To abstain is to choose. This then brings me full circle. For I cannot say what I am to do or orient myself to unless I know what story or stories I am a part of. At the same time it must be said that only the fool does not heed the lessons of history. There is no sense in arrogantly trying to completely re-invent the wheel. This then brings me to the problems of how to live by a moral code without becoming entangled in grand schemes devised to gain power. As both Nietzsche and Foucault both vigorously exposed; grand meta-narratives that purport to have an iron clad grip on the objectively definitive universal moral system are nothing more than empires. These systems cannot recognize meaning outside of their own respective systems and so they are compelled to colonize all meaning and stories into their own normative grids. So I am left with all sorts of questions. Anyone who claims to have all the answers to these questions must either be so much smarter than I am or they are simply intellectually dishonest and lazy. So this is where I am and I hope that my friends and those whom I encounter will help me to not only ask these questions but ask better questions.
October 14, 2009
Paradoxical Journey
I am presently acutely aware of the paradoxical nature of my irrational emotions. Currently I could easily be described as being the happiest I have been since I can remember. In so many ways I feel as though I have finally been placed where I belong. I am a full time student and my life is finally going somewhere. I am in the process of becoming. Whereas before my life had been on extended hold in a way. Honestly it is impossible not to be overwhelmed at just how fortunate I am when I begin to take stock. It is because of this however that so many of my emotions are all bubbling over and surfacing. I think this is because I learned how to practice extreme compartmentalization long ago. However now that I am out of the uniform those lines have become blurred and literally disappeared. The way I conceptualize my life no longer looks like a waffle with nice neat definitive lines. It is rather more or less like a giant interconnected mess of spaghetti. This is a good thing, I think, and has enabled me to see that those lines were in fact artificially constructed illusions. My emotions are quite literally all over the place and right now I am at the beginning of learning how to healthily live a holistic integrated life. I have been so comforted to be reminded that in reality we all have problems and issues. It is good to be encouraged to own it without becoming fixed on it. I am surrounded by people who are willing to walk alongside me as we continue down this journey called life. Maybe we will find enlightenment, love, understanding, wisdom, peace, serenity, happiness, meaning, identity or transcendence. Or maybe just more road. In any case I am going and becoming!
September 29, 2009
A New Chapter
April 25, 2009
Genuine Hope And Redemption
Only when all hope is lost can true hope exist. It is situations like these where we can peel back the layers of our mixed motives, only some of which we are aware. It is amazing how a story can display such events and in so doing inspire it’s viewers to realize something about themselves that is so surprisingly simple and yet profoundly fits the patterns. Last night I watched the new movie The Soloist and I was convinced that I had just witnessed a masterpiece and my head was spinning. It is a story of redemption, hope, love and the impossibility of all three. One of the many things that struck me about the movie is the sheer impossibility of the situation that the reporter finds himself in. Throughout the movie he struggles with coming to grips with the fact that he can’t fix everything. He isn’t even really sure that he is helping this homeless street musician at all. As he comes to terms with the sheer impossibility he begins trying to assign blame to everybody he can think of. Then there is a great scene where he is at his wits end and the reporter’s ex-wife tells him that its not about whether or not he can fix it or not. She tells him that its about just showing up and being his friend. I won’t go into all of the details of the movie but I want to point out that this movie is not about the redemption of the street musician as the title of the movie might suggest. No I think that in the end it is the reporter that is redeemed from boredom and a sheer lack of passion. As a reporter he has built up a callousness and a sarcastic wit as a defense mechanism to be able to survive in the world he lives and works.
The second thing that really stood out to me was the connection that this movie seems to have to the movie the Big Kahuna. Again this movie, while it had a low budget, remains to be one of my all time favorites. Without giving an entire recount of that movie I want to give a basic summary. There are these three businessmen that go on a sales trip at a convention where it is vitally important that they meet this one particular client to make a big sale. One of the sales men is brand new to this business and is a devout Christian who tries to figure out how to weave Jesus into every conversation with every person he meets. The fall out comes when he does this with the very client that they need to make the big sales pitch to. However instead of pitching what he is being paid to pitch, he pitches Jesus just as you would pitch any other product much to the chagrin to the two other business men. The dialogue that ensues is some of the best ever written on the subject. They discuss the ethical lines and the nature of regret and being genuine. I think that the movie The Soloist would have been the perfect movie to show this young devout naïve Christian. I will it here and I strongly encourage you to go out and see both of these movies
April 23, 2009
Honest Cry For Hope
I post with a heavy heart
I cry that I might find a voice
I hide that I might not be exposed
I scream that help might find me
This ache this hurt in my sole is real
Real beyond categories and questions
Oh God where are you
I cry out and drown in pain and alienation
Mess and me have become one
Tangles and toils and turmoil is the state of my soul
The rhythms and beats have become wails and tails and tears
Beautiful music I cannot hear and cannot make
But I will still make a noise no matter the quality
Maybe that will get you’re attention
Maybe you will hear me
Maybe you will hold me
Maybe you will heal me
All I have is noise and a bunch of maybe’s
February 18, 2009
Abandoned Memories
