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In Which The Author Opens Up Briefly

01 May

It is something different than just acute introversion that sticks this chasm in my chest, I think. I can’t put my finger on what it is, which is intensely frustrating for me, but there is something about people here lately that has worn me down farther than late-night listen-throughs of Bon Iver can cure.

Humans sadden me. It is a terrible task we are put with on this earth: toil to eat, find God, deal with each other. Some days, it seems as though we are bad at all three simultaneously, but as I write this, that’s not what saddens me, even though I thought it might have been. What you are about to read is me thinking out loud (in type), attempting to unravel something of the sadness.

I suppose I shall construct something of an argument, even though I don’t know what that argument will be. The first step, I think, is to acknowledge that there is something quite different about humans than the rest of sentient Creation. I could, of course, use God-talk to describe this difference, but such a notion is standoffish and “not-good-enough” for my dissenters, so I will use something like Reason instead (which I also believe to be God-talk, but that is a topic for another day).
I believe it was John Locke who said that a human is a “thinking thing,” with thought being something quite inseparable from consciousness (if you can say “I think,” you supposedly have something like consciousness). I find this definition to be quite lacking, though, because there are a great number of thinking creatures which are not at all human. Octopuses (Octopi? This is such an awkward word.) are, apparently, creatures of incredibly complex intelligence, capable of doing things that are generally associated with Human intelligence, like learning by observation without being told. Elephants can learn to work together to accomplish basic tasks undoable by one elephant alone. Dolphins form alliances and brotherhoods and possess the same structures in the brain that humans have that allow for cognition and the processing of emotion. Chimps can identify objects and interpret pictures, communicating it with ASL. Humans are not alone as “thinking things.”

Yet the majority of us still assert that there is something that sets us apart from even the most intelligent thinking creatures (the smartest of which may be more intelligent than the dumbest of Humans… but again. A topic for another day). It could be that we are capable of undergoing Philosophical projects – we can sit and engage with some issue entirely in our minds. It could be that we are capable of introspection and self-analysis, that we can dissociate the concept of “self” and see it from a somewhat objective point of view. It could be that we possess the ability to ponder what it is that makes us human.
Again, the things presented here can be subject to speculation. For instance, I cannot say with absolute certainty that any other person I see around me is capable of mental projects. I assume that they have brains, for I have a brain, and I have read in some books and whatnot that it is impossible for humans to function without brains, but I have no way of KNOWING. Likewise, I assume that they can think and do “mind things” because I assume that they have brains and that they function like mine does. But at its core, the Problem of Other Minds (as the Philosophy of Mind likes to shout in your face) is a troubling one that cannot be conquered by reasoning or really anything but speculation. Perhaps I’ll write another day on why I am not troubled by this, because I can feel this train rapidly derailing.

What I have discovered about what makes us Humans (again, without employing traditional God-talk) is that we are the most imperfect of creatures on the planet. We do not have the luxury that crabs do of fulfilling our crab-tasks of scuttling about and molting our shells and eating plankton and whatnot and calling that a “good life.” We do not have the simplicity that bees do of our purpose being to pollinate flowers and make honey and terrify children playing in their back yards. Instead, we are animals cursed with the nagging question “why am I here?”, the plague of doubt, and this unceasing capability of letting each other down constantly.

But that is what makes us beautiful.

This not the sadness that I feel, for I am of the persuasion that from the greatest capacity for failure comes the greatest possibility for joy. We have fallen and will continue to fall so far that the prospect of Grace, a lighthouse shining a lamp from the shore, appears to us at once beautiful and terrifying and stark.
No, the sadness that I feel is that we do all we can to eliminate it.

Put on your happy smile, kid; don’t let them see you cry. We sell paste to paint our faces while we shout “you’re perfect just the way you are.” We hide the scars that hurt the most in their getting and mock the flaws in others we’re most ashamed of in ourselves. We have to have the perfect family and the perfect job and we have to make sure that people know whatever happened “back then” doesn’t bother us anymore, because that may show lack of Faith, when in reality it gnaws at your stomach each time you breathe, nauseates at the thought of it, and gives you that bit of unsettling doubt that says “if I can’t deal with this, what makes me worthy of somebody else dealing with it as well?”

I am quick to call the man with a cardboard sign a liar looking for booze, and I quickly forget that I am the more egregious liar for pretending it doesn’t bother me.

I’ll tell you what the sadness is: we are tin soldiers on the brink of being created anew with flesh and feeling and a connection to the One that creates beautiful things, if only we would realize that it is tin we are constructed of. Instead, we gild the rusty metal and spray the flesh-smelling perfume and act as though our tin-ness is something to be ashamed of. Like we will appear as nothing but tin fools to the myriad of tin fools around us.

Like if we don’t appear to have our acts together, we will appear stupid to the rest of us who don’t have our acts together.

The first step (so they say) is admission, and it is the one that we skip the most. Admission of humanity is a terrifying thing – it’s stripping naked and taking off the makeup and saying “look at me and see how imperfect I am. Why would I expect perfection from you?” It is painful, because you can feel the wandering eyes probing the gaping wounds left by abusive husbands and hallway bullies and needle-punctured track marks, and you realize that once the Phantom’s mask has been lifted, that porcelain outside cannot be seen again. It feels like loss, but I promise you it is gain. For how should something that insists it is not broken ever be fixed?

We are a broken species, capable of the vilest of evils, but for some reason are the recipients of the most marvelous Grace. Yes, I admit that I am perhaps unduly critical of humanity, but it isn’t a thing of hate, it is one of a recognition of this potential that so few seem willing to push for.

You want to know the difference between humans and the rest of our “thinking kin” on earth, which not even the most current branches of theory of Evolution can account for? It’s Love. I’m not talking about butterflies or sex or whatever it is Freud and Tumblr and MTV have made love out to be, I’m talking about the act of Love. Where you say, “I’m going to show you exactly who I am and trust you with it. It’s going to be awkward and it’s going to hurt and you are more than capable of rejecting it, but that is what makes it worth it.” Do we understand what loving our neighbor means? It is in no way merely “doing nice things for them.” It IS, however, saying, “I’m not perfect, so I won’t pretend to be. And I won’t expect you to be, either.”

 
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Posted by on May 1, 2012 in Blog

 

An Army of Apologists

02 Apr

I am incredibly far behind in my posting schedule, something which I could promise will be made up to you with bi-weekly posts or a string of witty aphorisms or free ice cream for everybody who didn’t complain about it, but I honestly cannot make any guarantees. I graduate from College in a month and it feels as though the entirety of my existence is caught in a whirlwind and I have not even a trace of ruby red slippers with magical heels to tap together.

I am not going to chronicle out the happenings of the past three weeks during which I exercised a bit of blog-silence, for such a journal would be incredibly lengthy and speculative and far more narcissistic an endeavour than I care to admit that I am capable of. So let it suffice that there are times, I feel, where it is necessary to take your brain out of the ten-thousand different vats you’ve placed it in, regroup, and redistribute it in those vats that need the most immediate attention.

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I have posted a version of a paper I turned in a week or so ago pertaining to this subject, and though it is far from perfect, I plan on revisiting it, replacing things that I had to cut to fit it within the word restriction, and adding to it to form a more formal critique. You can read a draft of it at this link.

What I want to get out there today is something of a more heavy nature than the quaint little aphorisms I attempted to produce when last we talked. Something of a struggle I am undergoing, for which criticism, advice, and general opinion would be appreciated.

I do not attempt to hide my admiration for Frederich Nietzsche, even though there is a strikingly small area of material on which we agree. On the one hand he is the self-proclaimed champion against the rise of Christianity, a vehement and angry opponent of all things humble or Divine. He roars in defiance of anything which dares threaten a living being’s climb to the height of its species potential, mocks the rampant herd mentality of modern religion, and cheers with a fuming pen the constant, infinite re-consideration and questioning and throwing out of value. Indeed, it seems as though the famous nihilist, in his own little ironic way, places extraordinary value on re-valuing everything people hold dear.

But I said before that I admire him, and that hasn’t changed. All that he opposes is all that I hold dear, and the monumental force of his unparalleled thinking power and rough polemic stand in gritty contradiction to a Christ-follower’s frame of mind, so what is it that I can learn from him? After all, it is a tidal wave like Nietzsche which often causes those on the fence about the Big, Important things to be tossed into the realm of radical skepticism and pure, unabashed nihilism.
But for me, he seems to do the complete opposite. Though I am at this point no match for his towering intellect or his hurricane-force rhetoric, he has demonstrated to me a height to aim for – not to rise up beside him, but to rise up in opposition against him. Chesterton I am not. Lewis I am not. I do not presume to be on par with any of these men, nor do I pretend to be capable of their respective feats of enormous intelligent significance, but it fills my heart with the drive to overcome, to firmly establish where I stand and to defend it against those who wish to see it destroyed.

It sometimes takes the heavy fabric of the darkness to understand the beauty of a candle.

Apologetics is a field with a longstanding tradition in any platform of belief. The idea is simple: you believe something, so you must be able to defend your point of view against issues that may prove problematic if you are unable to deal with them. While I am an advocate that a Believer is, necessarily, an Apologist (“provide a defense for the hope that is in you” and whatnot), I think that each person’s defense must be suited to that person’s field of specialty. The premise is, after all, a simple one: know where you stand and know how to defend it.

And Heaven forbid we should live and not just speak our convictions.

Hence my qualm with the enormous amount of people, especially in this Bible-saturated Southern culture, who claim the same Christ that I do. Because a lot of the time that I spend (as sometimes the only non-professing Atheist in certain situations) defending a Christian worldview is wasted dealing with the mess Christians have made of it, which people like Nietzsche are entirely too giddy to point out.
It is time used attempting to override the errant belief that there remain no intellectual Christ-followers, that the only Christian defense to tough questions is “Faith, brother,” that the correct response to those struggling with things of the world from one who has been delivered from it is judgment and hatred.
It is arguing that the Christ who inhabits me does not encourage cardboard signs outside of music festivals condemning the goers to Hell, but rather the man beside them holding an arrow pointing at their signs saying “Jesus is much more beautiful than this.” He would not advocate the bombing of an abortion clinic but rather the holding of a shaking, scared teenage girl and saying “I’ll love you no matter what.”
It is asserting that “standing for God” is not merely posting inflammatory, ill-formed “religious” drivel and retorts on Facebook statuses and YouTube videos that not only prove you an incompetent wielder of rhetorical power but a bumbling imbecile waving a plastic cross around.
It is proving that the Prince of Peace cannot reside in a heart of one harboring bitter animosity towards someone who believes differently from them.

I often wonder if we began living as the One who lets us bear His name did how necessary Christian Apologetics would be… but alas, the supposed attempted emulation of perfection is imperfect, so Apologetics unfortunately must exist. A tiring, taxing thing it is, for it finds formidable enemies in those like Nietzsche as well as in prosperity gospels and in portions of the Church itself. But take heart in adversaries such as these! For only through struggle comes strength; sound footing perhaps from the knowledge of where not to stand.

Though I do not believe I am fit to do such a thing (at this point in time, at least), creating a body of work in response to one like Nietzsche’s would bring me enormous joy. There is a dialogue that has gone largely untouched between the Nietzschians and who I will call the Chestertonians which would be an honor one day to contribute to, but until then I will hover just behind the line of “publication,” whetting my sword for the day I am called into battle. Perhaps I can at least try to rally the troops, no?

What if we could escape the culture of Christianity, embrace the person of Christ, and meet the beast of Doubt, of Apathy, of Lies, on his own ground together?
What if we were so rooted as a group that no “Hurricane Nietzsche” stood a chance at dismantling the anchor tethering us to Truth?
What if, as the Prince of the Power of the Air rose each morning to breathe the despair of empty, infinite rhetoric into our ears, we were ready to meet him and conquer his darkness with light?
What if those who were called by Christ’s name realized what sort of responsibility such a claim entails, and began acting like representatives to the King?

What if we rid ourselves of this rampant spiritual apathy, the cuddly images we grew up with plastered on flannel graphs in Sunday School, the nonsense of self-help spirituality and the battle between denominations and instead tuned our wits towards oncoming attacks, loved even those not deserving of love and recognized that we children of imperfection all need complete Perfection equally? Our fight is not of life and death, it is of creeping doubt and insecurity and of that tiny twist of Truth into lies. So anchor yourself to Truth once you find Him, friends, and soon your Nietzsche will fall.

 
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Posted by on April 2, 2012 in Blog

 

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A brief in-between posts addendum

09 Mar

I have been thinking in aphorisms lately. It is slightly annoying and I am still not great at them yet, but they are very fun for provoking thought. I would love to hear your contributions.

Continued from last post:

26. The Horrible of Mondays is unknown to the Sun illuminating them.

27. The comfort of Paradox comes with the realization that some things have solutions.

28. Give a man a pen and he will most likely lose it. Teach a man to pen and he will dream as big as the sky.

29. The most dangerous thing for human “productivity” is the sparkle in their eye when they talk of things they love.

30. The Philosophy of busywork: it is the means, not the end, which is valuable.

31. American Education: learning is best measured by receipts.

32. What if we handed out paint brushes as often and as freely as we do prescription drugs?

33. A life of regret: airtight backup plans padding forsaken dreams.

34. What has been seen cannot be unseen, only denied.

35. The more I learn, the more I realize that most of what I have learned is invalid.

 
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Posted by on March 9, 2012 in Blog

 

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Gilders of Borrowed Treasure

05 Mar

I suppose there comes a point after 150 undergrad credit hours where any new information you take in becomes like dirty laundry piled up in a corner in your room. You know you eventually have to deal with it, but more important things are happening in the rest of the room, in the whole of the house, in the city outside of your house, in the world even larger than that. At some point you are doing it because you know you must, not because you particularly want to.

So this week in the midst of travels, wordy inner dialogues, loud midnight shows, and an exhausted brain, I have compiled my own list of 25 of what Nietzsche called “Maxims and Arrows” that have popped up in my thought processes and have been jotted down in my Moleskine. They carry every bit of the weight of a wordy paragraph but only a fraction of the words. They allow for biting sarcasm or pensive tranquility or, at the very least, tweets to make you sound deep and dreamy. If anything, it is an exercise in brevity, which Lord knows I lack immensely, and which will take much more practice in order to reverse what 20 years of schooling have taught me. They are the anti-paper-stretch. Commence brain-dump.

1. A writer is a gilder of borrowed treasure.

2. There are 7 billion people on this planet, but of course yours is the correct view.

3. A man raised in a windowless house believes a ball of fire in the sky to be nonsense. But his reasoning is inferior to those who have felt its warmth.

4. By all means, question vehemently. It will not change the ebbing tide.

5. The Nightingale needs no reason to sing.

6. You can paint a wall to make it pretty. But even then, it is only a pretty wall, and is no good for conversation.

7. Cats are the most devious of domesticated animals. They are surely smarter than those who own them, and I think that they know it.

8. Lady Praying Mantises eat their mates while they are still alive. Females are terrifying across the spectrum of Creation.

9. “I think” often precedes a statement the speaker has thought little about. Think separately from your speech; speak with authority.

10. The more you look at and read aloud and analyze and ponder even your own name written on a page, the more it appears to be nonsense. What then of our analysis of Truth?

11. “Why?” Is the hardest and saddest of all questions.

12. Not because I believe it, but because I have the following words written on a blog: “Mass genocide is acceptable,” I will be quoted as a supporter of mass genocide by my opponents. The followers of my opponents would believe it. Ladies and gentlemen, American politics.

13. Why must all be comprehensible? Embrace mystery.

14. Take comfort in being Wrong, for at the end of the day there will always be a Right.

15. Boredom is not about doing nothing – it is about how much you are putting off.

16. It is only when Reason has been exhausted that we may begin to Know.

17. Let me get this straight: we have emerged as the victors of hundreds of millions of years of physical, societal, and intellectual evolution, yet Jersey Shore is a thing? No sir.

18. Before a storm, there is a noticeable chill and rising tension that foretells the intensity of it. So it is, it seems, with women.

19. It is after the beauty of a moment that it strikes us as beautiful.

20. There is a buzzing in your ears after being enveloped by the sound from an appropriately-volumed show. Ear experts will tell you this is bad for you, but I will tell you that it is the remains of the Spirit.

21. Is it telling about us that our language has no future tense?

22. Beauty will soothe even the grumpiest of moods. God whispers sweetest when we yell loudest.

23. How much would this world improve if we focused on just one other person as much as we focus on ourselves?

24. This is a generation of vanity. If we smashed every mirror, would we have things left to say?

25. Some people are simply bent on being difficult. An argument with them is a waste of your energy.

;

;

If you are doing this post a week thing with me, I would love to read your tries at these. They are surprisingly challenging to get done! Try keeping it to two sentences (I think I only broke that rule once). Try making the thing that you are trying to get across the thing that you don’t say.

Have a wonderful Monday, my friends.

 
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Posted by on March 5, 2012 in Blog

 

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Things I Think About on Infernal Wednesdays

29 Feb

I know, I know. Two days late.

If everything I loved faded or was stripped away, would I have anything left to live for? If the very fabric of society crumbled, if music failed to sound, if I remained as the last of mortal man in a sea of cracked pavement and ruined buildings and decayed civilization, would there be something worth salvaging? Could there exist some value other than in material or in accolades or in shiny gold medals pinned up in a glass case?

Hanging worth on things that I can hold or on places I can go or on words that I can write for others to read suddenly feels, in this peculiar state of mind, like an exercise in madness. A vapor cannot support a society. Philosophy does not prescribe value of life. Politics cannot attribute social worth. Love cannot be contained by words.

It seems like nowadays I check the weather on my phone rather than by opening my window and feeling the sweeping chill on my skin. I sit in class to check an attendance box while the world outside the windows spins further into the madness it started on whenever it was that we popped on the scene – when value became a thing that could be talked about, and when things began to go wrong. When we cast worship on ultimately pointless Degrees and sporting events and television and relationships and meaningless sex and religious dogma and sports cars and humanitarian causes and tech conferences and outlet malls and the almighty dollar and political campaigns and empty philosophy.

When I started trying to understand God, as if I were in a position to be able to do that. When I started trying to defend Him, as if He needed my defense.

I scribbled all of this in my journal in a moment of necessity to write, but wrote the whole thing using “we” instead of “I.” Like the questions I was asking were for some betterment of society reason and for distancing myself from the blame for its downfall. Like I wasn’t talking explicitly to myself. I started asking the questions I was scared to answer and scratched them out like that would make it as if they never existed. Like I could forget that I used as a platform for understanding what Is that which I could understand. As if my questions determined the fate of the Universe.

But they don’t. Nor do yours.

Nor does our economical infrastructure or our Saturday afternoon hobbies or our friend groups or our pressing job interviews or our oversleeping through ill-set alarms, because WE, no, I am not the object of importance here. Because I am expendable. But when I take away the wonder I should be directing towards a purely unfathomable God who, for some reason wants to call me “child,” with despair about not being able to understand Him, I have made myself and my intellect the object of worth.

If I base what I call important on something that decays, I am a fool. I am a priest to stones, a Mac enthusiast on a life raft in the middle of the ocean, a Bard in a boneyard. We live in a time where the things that matter are things we can gain, but I cannot help but see how flawed it is. It is no wonder nihilism is en vogue, because when material and fame and a good name are all you have to live for, there comes a moment of realization that these things cannot have any kind of value if they can be taken away tomorrow. It warrants a feeling of panic and a momentary despair. With clenched fists and spite in our throats, we declare that God must be imaginary, because of He were real our worlds wouldn’t be dismantling in front of us; that the problem is not with our clearly infallible reasoning and perceptions and understanding, it is with God.

I have to ask myself if the things I am doing are being done in such a way that the worth I ascribe to them or the glory I get from them are not ends in themselves. If I am living for something bigger than the smoldering remains of a broken world.

In a way, the nihilist is right. The skeptic hits the mark. He who mistrusts what he sees is wiser than he who takes all at face value, for value is worthless and knowledge is fleeting indeed, though they can only be worthless and fleeting in the face of Someone who sets the bar.

 
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Posted by on February 29, 2012 in Blog

 

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On Wonder, The Muse, and God.

20 Feb

When I was a child, I was paralyzingly terrified of sailboats. As well as I can remember through my own recollection and talking with my parents about it, it began one night when my family was staying at my great-grandmother’s house, which is spooky in all of the glorious ways old, low-ceilinged houses should be: cases full of glassy-eyed, staring dolls, antiquated beams which creak under even the weight of thought, and what I remember to be an immense, looming, full-masted sailboat atop the dresser in the room I slept in.

I don’t remember the boat except for in the one mental snapshot I possess, so I cannot tell you if it was equally as scary in the daytime, or if I had even seen it before my sole memory of it. I may have been carried to bed by my dad after falling asleep on a couch, but I really can’t remember.

But what I recall clearly: waking in the dead of night with the glow of a little yellow light illuminating the aging sails and the brown hull and spider’s-web of twine representing ropes from afar, so that a thrice-as-large shadow was projected onto the wall behind it. It loomed enormous, starkly real against the dark void of the room, and I think that this is what terrified me the most. It was unusually tangible, as opposed to most things which after waking are vaguely foggy, as though clouded by barely-remembered dreams.

In all honesty, the thing probably wasn’t all that big or fancy, it just struck my small brain as something truly big, and not big like jets or mountain ranges, but rather something unspeakable. Something of the Sublime: great beyond calculation or fathomability. The Big of nightmares, oppressing not just a volume of physical space but more a measure of your soul.

But despite all my attempts to remain terrified of them, I began learning (though I did not know it at the time) that wonder, marvel, and the kind of fear these boats inspired in me were merely knots on the same strand, and it turned to fascination.

I began collecting models of them, as much as a ten-year-old with nothing but an allowance can collect something that requires money to amass. The fear that once nested in my ribcage and made my chest feel hollow was replaced with wonder, and it was no less potent. When I think about it, that is what I collected, more than boats. I had harnessed a source of sublime fear and turned it into wonder.

When I grew older, I encountered the British Romantics and realized that they shared the same wonder, and had all sorts of lovely ways of trying to express it. Wordsworth described a craggy mountaintop lit by splitting lightening above a still lake atop which he floated in a stolen boat. Percy Shelley dedicated hymns to “The awful shadow of some unseen Power.” Lord Byron describes a vacant Coliseum so vast, so desolate, with such a history of violence yet where his steps seemed “echoes strangely loud.” John Keats called it the Nightingale, because of its mysterious, elusive nature juxtaposed with its infinitely enchanting song. Mary Shelley created a veritable monster out of the stuff, which her character Victor Frankenstein, even after laboring over every inch of him, describes his encounter with it: “I had desired it [the animation of his creature] with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

You can hear it in the music of Sigur Rós, who sing sometimes in Icelandic, sometimes in nonsense, just because there is something that needs to be expressed but is bigger than mere words can handle. You can feel it in Hemmingway’s “Hills like White Elephants” because to speak it would be to profane it.

The ancient Greeks called it the “Muse”, The Romantics the “Nightingale.” It is inspiration, and it is unbounded by human logic, unexplainable by empirical sciences, and untamable by any words or music or poetry that we could invent. It’s wonder, sublimity, and breathless fascination that can present itself as crippling terror or as stillness after rain, and is the proper reaction to the things of God.

Yet still we think we can somehow grasp Him. We beg for the Truth, when in reality I cannot help but feel that Truth, all of it at the same time, would drown us in its crashing power. We talk to God, the designer of wonder and splendor, the operator both of joy that makes us light enough to fly and the kind of sublime terror that rots our insides, like He owes us an explanation. Cody Banette sings in the As Cities Burn song “Clouds”: “I think that God isn’t God if He fits inside our heads.”

God Himself listened to 38 chapters of people bickering, reasoning, and trying to put words into His mouth before coming out of a whirlwind (!!) and speaking:

“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge?
Dress for action like a man;
I will question you, and you make it known to me.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?
Tell me, if you have understanding.
Who determined its measurements – surely you know!
Or who stretched the line upon it?
On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone,
when the morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

What is man to do with this? In the words of my friend Ariel Parsons… what even? We react to these unknowable Grand things in whatever ways we can conjure:
- With radical skepticism – saying that if we can’t understand it and explain it and because human rationality eventually circles back on itself, we can know nothing at all. Perhaps there is nothing at all.
- With microscopic probings – thinking that if we can perhaps understand the very small, can we possibly work our way up to the very big (although we do not even understand these very small mini-universes that make up the material of our bodies by the trillion).
- With art – perhaps even forsaking the search for answers to the questions and instead trying to merely understand the spirit that makes us feel the Grand crevasses in our chests.

I am positive that the only reaction to an encounter with God – with all of the Truth and all of the Joy and all of the inescapable, sublime Terror – is as Isaiah responds in chapter six of his book. Next to the Source of such grandeur, man can only feel trapped on a boat without a mast in the sweltering heat of Horse Latitudes, unless, of course, he is provided with a Path. Unless he is given sails and a strong wind to push him home.

 
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Posted by on February 20, 2012 in Blog

 

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Lovedrug on Valentine’s Day

15 Feb

I know, I know, it is Wednesday. But I didn’t want to write on Monday because I knew Tuesday would be something to write about, and I didn’t want to write on Tuesday because by the time I got home it was 2:30 in the morning. I do hope that you’ll forgive me this one week.

A favorite something is exactly the remedy that a tired soul needs, even if it means sacrificing a few hours of sleep the night before a decidedly difficult Epistemology test. And last night I got the privilege of seeing my favorite band yet again playing through my favorite album of theirs in celebration of an impending new album release. It was the most joyous Valentine’s Day of all.

Music is the loveliest of things we can experience in this wasteland, because it communicates in the tongues of heaven. It is not bound by the constraints of human language, by the limits of logic, by the fence of reason or scientific innovation, by the rules we have tried to set for it or by the doldrums of formula. It is the one thing that is purely worship* in a boneyard full of broken idols. It can say the same thing with silence as it can with sound, and sometimes to a more fluent degree. It can say what words attempt to say – about heartbreak, about anger, about joy, about the moment in between deliberating about a decision and the actual making of it, about self-disappointment, about betrayal – by skipping the language receptors of the brain and striking the exposed nerves of the heart. If you could intercept a musician’s thoughts while they are creating melody and chord and dissonance and resolution, you wouldn’t find a notebook full of words but rather a prayer** often only known to be uttered by lips.

Michael Shepard knows this about music, which is why I believe he quit pursuing a career in filmmaking to realize his passion for it. Because he couldn’t escape it. It was his love for it that “dragged” him back to it (hence the name of the band: Lovedrug). There is something about it that cannot be expressed even through other, all-inclusive means of expression.

But his bandmates know it too, and they are unashamed to shout it from the rubble of a somewhat bleak and tiresome world full of prima donnas and overnight successes and industry executives who see success as dollar signs. They perform as absolute veterans of their craft, with each band member (Thomas, James, and Jeremy) being equally as passionate about the notes they are playing as the man with a microphone in front of him and his face at the front of band photos. And they do it to crowds of fifty to a hundred at a time, all of whom shout the words of their songs right back at the stage.

Our country has become one where schools are no longer places to encourage and nurture effort, thought, and the acquisition of knowledge, but rather a place to throw money at as a means to a job. Politics have evolved away from reasonable discussions involving intelligent people who respected each other even though they thought differently and towards a priori party bashing and money-fueled advertisement campaigns. We’ve confined God to the buildings of our churches, we’ve replaced Love with candy hearts and roses, we’ve shelved books in favor the movies that are made about them. So it is no surprise that my music industry friend tells me Katy Perry makes better music than Bon Iver because she had 5 #1 hits on the radio.

Lovedrug has never had a number one hit on the radio, but they perform like their music is the most important thing in the world, and I think that’s why I love them. Michael told us last night that the producers were saying to him in the studio during that first record, “Dude, you need to pick a genre.” But there comes a point where you have to ask what the point in that is, if different things require different styles to get out. “We haven’t played some of these songs in a while,” he said (I swear he was mildly choked up), “and it’s bringing out feelings I haven’t felt in a long time.”

“So fall in love while you can, still hold your head up high and pretend that you’re alive again,” he belts in the chorus of the title track. The sound of the crowd swells above the drums and Michael smiles like it’s the best gift anybody could ever give to him.
In contrast, “I kissed a girl and I liked it, the taste of her cherry chapstick,” philosophizes Ms. Perry in the chorus of her first #1 radio single.

I don’t pretend that everybody will enjoy his incredibly distinctive voice or their schizophrenic, dark art-rock. But I do think that there is to be a line drawn between Music that is Art and Sound that is Entertainment. That education can be about transmission of knowledge and truth before exchange of currency for a diploma. That we can take political disagreement as an opportunity to enforce our individual beliefs rather than get hot in the head about it. That we can look at a band in a room of a hundred or so people, exploding with sound, bursting with passion, running their own merch booth before and after they play and know that if it was money or fame they were worshipping, they would have quit ten years ago.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Michael and Jeremy and their face rocking skills.

*”of what?” is the question you should ask, though this is a topic for another day.
**”to whom?” is the question you should ask, though this is a topic for another day.

 
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Posted by on February 15, 2012 in Blog

 

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Ecclesiastical Mondays

06 Feb

It has been a week, I’ll tell you that. I had a few almost-decent things to put up here, or ideas of them at least, but none of them seemed to flesh out so well as they were written. So what you have instead are the tired ramblings of a tired boy who is scraping towards the end of his self-imposed deadline.

Such are the contents of my days. I’m not sure what follows will be terribly uplifting, save for those who are teetering on the fence of Belief, unsure as to which side they should fall into. I’m not feeling very wordplay-y tonight, I suppose. But until I start hearing otherwise, this will continue to be my blog where I will speak what is on my mind.

Also, just so that none are unduly confused or enraged (because sometimes there is some conclusion-jumping that happens subconsciously), this is merely a collection of some frustrations, not my answers to all of them. This is not a Theological treatise. This is not an Apology for my Faith. This is not polemic Atheist-bashing. These are merely the thoughts of a somewhat weary brain. With that in mind, please feel free to comment accordingly, as I always welcome the appropriate exchange of ideas, conversation, and criticism.

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I find it extremely interesting that even the most Godless of men cannot stop talking about Him. That the most vehement Skeptic marvels, despite what his circular Epistemic reasoning would have you believe, at His creation. That Empiricists don’t question the origin of their faculties for observation. That those in the thick of it can doubt but never see the miracle in that very act of doubting.

I find it equally as interesting that the vocally Atheistic do not find the educated, perhaps Philosophically sound  Believer to pitch their squabbles against, but rather teenagers on Facebook and comment boards on Hillsong videos on Youtube, and that these occasional anti-theistic tirades seem to occupy a great amount of their effort. It is strange to me that a nihilist would take any time at all to defend himself against the promise of purpose as if it were a contest to be won unless he were afraid of what happens if he’s wrong. I don’t understand why such endeavors are not seen as scrubbing toilets on Oceanic Flight 815.

I find the majority of my daily encounters with those less-inclined towards belief than I am and, honestly, sometimes I prefer it. I connect more easily with those for whom faith is a struggle, who see God as something nigh impossible to grasp ahold of and forge a relationship with, because I have seen that side. But in my many conversations with Atheists that I engage throughout the week, I have come across some saddening, though not particularly new, revelations.

Atheists have become smashingly boring, and this tires me. We are locked in this loop where they keep clawing the same questions in the desperate hope that we’ll forsake our belief or something (or prove to themselves finally that they’re right? I’m not sure), and don’t even bother to see that the incredible majority of these have been answered already in formal, published works, with the rest of them talked about extensively in blog posts and radio interviews and the like. It has become an achievement to stump Average Joe Christian with Philosophically complex quandaries, and it is as interesting to watch as the MVP of your county’s Little League baseball team hitting against Randy Johnson (Does he still play baseball?).

They are stuck pitching the same four-seam fastball that they’ve been throwing for years: the third-year University student counter to reason and faith that “if Science can’t prove it, it isn’t real.” Their curveball: the intellectual mediocrity of “everybody” who affiliates themselves with Religion. The changeup: If God’s there, why are there still bad things? I’m sure you catch my drift.

Perhaps the most famous Atheist of our time, Richard Dawkins, even wrote a book about it called “The God Delusion” which actually, literally, resorts to name-calling, the granddaddy of all logical fallacies – ad hominem attack. I cannot fathom what possible purpose spending all that time writing a book about why Something doesn’t exist serves other than as the gasping attempts of a man desperate to find the source of the still, quiet urge inside of him to know what it all means. I know he possess that urge, because I have it too.

Sometimes I think perhaps I’m the only one of my friends who finds enormous comfort alongside the great frustration in the book of Ecclesiastes, but it has this to say: “He has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to end.” Perhaps the most desperate worry, yet simultaneously sublime repose the Good Book has to offer.

The Preacher hits home again, though earlier in his book:

“For in much wisdom is much vexation,
and he who increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

And he echoes it at the end: “My son, beware of anything beyond these. Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”

Can you feel it? The slow creaking of your joints under the pressure on your shoulders? The weight of the “unhappy business that God has given to the children of man to be busy with?” The sadness of “a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness” alongside the “wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing?”

Now feel the release of a Savior who tells you to drop your net and follow Him. Cast off that ensnaring burden of the world and focus on what is truly important.

Let Wordsworth’s lines that he wrote a few miles above Tinturn Abbey sink in and sound deep inside of yourself  to the point that you feel “that blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world, is lighten’d.”

God planted the desire inside of us and made it so that we couldn’t know. He breathed it so that it took the whole Universe to declare His majesty and stuck us on the smallest speck of it possible. He gave us telescopes to see as far as eyes can possibly see and then told the boundary of physical space “keep going, so that they’re always playing catch-up.”

It is the strangest peace a heart thirsty for what are always unsatisfying answers can hear – that they both came from the same Source that gives us Salvation from the muck.

 
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Posted by on February 6, 2012 in Blog

 

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A Brief Aside, and What I Am Means

30 Jan

Some business before getting into the meat of it. If you are uninterested in this sort of thing, you may skip to below the line:

I must thank you all for the unexpected and overwhelmingly positive reception of last week’s little article. I have received many encouraging feedbacks and emails and have seen it shared often enough to make it the most-viewed post on this page. You guys are awesome. I am planning on doing more things in that vein, including what is shaping up to be an Introvert’s Manifesto and Ebook, though I must admit that some of my motivation for that is that I’ve always wanted to write a Manifesto for something and publish an Ebook on my website. But in all seriousness, most of the reactions that I got to see only reinforced the idea that there are a lot out there who feel the way that I do though perhaps do not have the platform to say the things that need be said. So stay tuned.

I have still not decided what I want this blog to be. I read a lot of them that are very advice-y and full of lists and such, and those seem to have the most traffic. Because lists sell, this is fact. They are the “pop” of the blog world – easily digestible, somewhat predictable, often crafted to communicate one little gem of truth which sits, shining (perhaps literally with glowy text or clever puns) atop the screen, rather than relishing the subtle comfort of a web of it.
I also read a good bunch that are quite heady and cerebral and rooted in idea, which is comforting because this is how I tend to think. But these I have rarely seen be “successful” in the commercial sense – they are often a bit wordy, even for my taste (imagine that), and inaccessible. Surely there must be a blend somewhere of the two which is neither pedantic sentence-flexing nor traffic-pandering formula.
Still, I wish to talk about God when I want and spill thoughts on Philosophy or have nerd moments about music or even do reviews of books and film and albums. But none of these are exciting and revolutionary like the Introvert’s Manifesto or charges to turn off our internet on Sundays or to alter the ways we behave with one another.
And still on top of all of this, I at no time wish to dip into something trite for the mere sake of acquiring many page views. I maintain the wish for this to be a place of thought incubation as I referenced in this post a bit ago, and with that I accept that both bloggy, list-filled posts and the heady stuff are necessary at times. I’ve been doing this long enough to accept that it is no longer me sitting in a corner talking to the empty cloud of internet about the random stuff of the day; but today when I address “the audience,” it is no longer rhetoric to make myself chuckle, rather a literal breaking of the 4th wall, because I now have one of those out there.

What the paragraph above should say is “this blog is a curious thing and once I figure out a way to make conversation more than simply leaving comments, I will do it, because then we can get this think-tank going and perhaps I can step out of the way.” Because I feel as though perhaps I am wasting your time already.

 

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Because I had a rather lengthy aside at the beginning, I will make today’s post just a little shorter than they have been in the past. I need to do this anyway.

I have been unutterably blessed for more reasons than I can count, but for these purposes we will focus on the following: that I have been born here, in a country of unparalleled freedom, to a loving and supportive family, in a time when I can access the thoughts of anyone who cares enough to write them down and when I can give voice to my own whenever I see fit. It is something that I take for granted entirely too often.

I cannot help but think that God chose this specific time to place me in, because I have been given access to the most marvelous minds the world has to offer. I can, at any point that I want, sit and read Stephen Hawking or Ravi Zacherias or TS Eliot; I can watch TED lectures about deep cave exploration or string theory or education research or marvel at “mathemagicians” and improv musicians and subtitled talks from mute people about disabilities; I can sit at a computer and continue a 55+thousand word, several-month-long email conversation with my dear friend in North Carolina or talk with anybody in the world at the touch of a few numbers on a cell phone; I can listen to songs recorded with a guitar on a laptop’s microphone that is more evocative than one I’d hear in an arena with tens of thousands of people or I can listen to my favorite band through headphones and a device I hold in my hand. Friends, there is true magic in this world, and we can experience it every day of our lives.

However, and I think that this is true in most cases, we do not know how, nor are we equipped, to handle it. Just recently in our history as human beings, what you learned was limited by what you could experience firsthand, or what you could reason with whatever faculties you possess. Gone are the boundaries of knowledge and achievement that one solitary person or community was limited to. We have been presented the apple promising the Wisdom of God Himself and we have bitten hard into its bitter-sweet savor. We have been promised the possibility of omniscience and still cannot tear our minds away from it.

It is a difficult thing to stop, this search for knowledge, and a dangerous thing in the wrong hands. Our minds have not been built to grasp infinity and timelessness and unending streams of knowledge and limitless possibility, yet we have been put in a place where new things will never stop coming to our frame of vision. Our Universe, as far as we know, is infinite, and yet we continue to try to understand it in its entirety.

Some people despair in this. They see elaborate epistemic proofs which seem to eliminate the very possibility of knowledge. They look at competing, perfectly justified beliefs as muddying the concept of what is real. They see the power of Empirical discoveries negating the validity of Rational ones, and vice versa. The more our ill-equipped minds see, the more we dismantle our necessity for God.

Says the Preacher:

All things are full of weariness;
a man cannot utter it;
the eye is not satisfied with hearing,
   nor the ear filled with hearing. (Ecc. 1:8)

But see, He planned for this. After all, it was He who set eternity in the heart of man. It was He who created us creatures capable of reason and, consequently, of doubt. It is why He sent us something of Himself in a form we could wrap our human brains around, to rescue us from the what Wordsworth calls “the burthen of the mystery… the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world.”
There is a reason He calls Himself Truth, because it is Truth that we crave, and it is Truth we cannot reach using human versions of God’s things – logic, reason, and the like. Moses was told to tell the people “I AM sent me.” Arguably the most powerful words that could be spoken by human lips. His name is not “Prove Me” or “I May Be,” it is emphatic. Final. Independent of my human shortcomings and unchanging in time, space, and situation. Universal. I. Am.

I am by no means devaluing the wonder of knowledge and discovery, in fact, I whole-heartedly encourage it. Live in a way that you are constantly confronted with the marvel of this place of unending beauty. Roald Dahl writes, “And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” We are surrounded by it wonder, so long as we do not forget to look for it.

But just as oxygen is necessary for life to exist though an excess of it is lethal, so it is in this battle for understanding. It is perfectly normal to think of things that might be, for that is how we were created – to wonder at the heavens and try with all of our might to grasp things we cannot fathom – to think of things that might be so long as we do not lose sight of what Is.

 
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Posted by on January 30, 2012 in Blog

 

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In a World of People People

23 Jan

People are such strange and lovely creatures, but are also things which I am positive I will never fully understand. And I’m ok with that.

This is my blog, so I can do exactly as I wish. I have decided that today’s entry will break from the somewhat impersonal exploratory thought-essay that they tend to turn into and become a slightly more personal, “bloggy” entry full of lists and advice and stuff like that.

I remember when I was a kid, we in the Barber house would read this book about an Otter and a Beaver and a Lion and a Golden Retriever that served as an illustration for how we all have different personality types and how those different types can interact with each other. In hindsight, it is not all that surprising that we read such books, because my parents, both having double majors with one of them being in Psychology, understood the value of application for the things we learned through reading or movies or TV shows. The talking animals endured challenges in the pursuit of four pieces of a key in order to unlock a gate only by highlighting different things each was good at. I feel like there was a quiz or something in the back of the book to figure out which animal you most resembled, but it usually turned into my siblings and me arguing over who got to be the fun little Otter or the action hero Lion.

It didn’t take long, however, to realize that there are two major distinctions between these four animals, and that kids learn early to point it out. It is tricky being an introvert in an extrovert’s world.

I found two marvelous articles (1, 2) about misconceptions of the introvertedly inclined, on which I will be leaning in this post. In fact, in addition to the link down below, they may be more important than whatever I have to say about them.

There are things that every extrovert needs to know about his oppositely-minded brethren. And all of my similarly inclined readers may add anything at any point.

1) Do not confuse “introvert” with “shy” or “anti-social.” Related: do not get upset if they decline your invitation to the big Super Bowl party you’re planning or to some gathering of more than, say, 5 (including you and said introvert. This is serious business). It is not a commentary on your relationship with them that they politely decline (even if they’re bad about making excuses like, “sorry, I have a lot of homework” or “I’m going to be hanging out with my family” or “I really don’t feel like hanging out tonight”).

If this sounds selfish, imagine the opposite: you extroverted, group-minded majority want nothing more than to throw a smashing good party with all of the people you can imagine celebrating the fact that it’s Thursday and instead you are bombarded by people telling you you really should just go home and read a book instead. You keep asking people to go out and they keep imploring you to stay in. You get fidgety sitting idly behind doors or walking aimlessly in silence around a path by a lake. You want something to do and somebody to do it with.

It’s not a selfish thing that you want to get everybody together and laugh and have a good time, it’s a normal thing for you – that is the way you’re wired. Well, the introvert is wired just the opposite way: large groups, even if they are familiar, put them at unease (to say the least). Constant requests to “go do things” make them nervy. Don’t consider it an insult that they’re not particularly excited to participate in things like this, and take it as a compliment when they eventually, sporadically, do.

2) Do not make the mistake of thinking introverts do not like to talk. Some of the most talkative people I know are quite introverted – it just has to be about something that they can engage with their brains.

However, and this is very important, there are few things more discomforting to an introverted person than small talk… which leads to a dislike of large groups, which leads to the stigma of being antisocial and mute. Get us talking about something that we love and I promise you won’t be able to make us stop until you get up and leave. Tell us the sorts of things that interest you and we’ll discuss it together. We don’t even have to have a vested interest in the topic, we just like to be able to process things and interpret things and form opinions about things and engage with the subject of conversation with some emotion.

“Extroverts thrive on small talk,” says one of the above mentioned pages. “Introverts abhor it.” So if an introvert seems particularly silent when you’re asking redundant, shallow questions, there is probably a very good reason – and it is not that they do not like to talk. They just don’t like to talk about the weather or whether or not we enjoyed dinner or generic conversation starters like “so, what’s new?”

Silence is not the enemy for an introvert, and attempts at combating the silence with small talk will only make it more awkward for everybody involved. Do not assume that something is wrong just because we’re not saying anything – because if we’re dragged into something that just seems like painful attempts to break silence, something will quickly become the matter.

3. We do not hate people. I cannot stress this enough. I will of course joke along with my little sister who insists that I do in the comfort of my home, but the truth could not be more opposite. They are not people that we back away from, but superficial relationships. When we find people we connect with, whom we can call friends, loyalty is unquestioned. Friendship is something that we take extraordinarily seriously and is something that we won’t give up easily once it is acquired.

When the occasion calls for it, we can play the genuine people people card. We can be with big groups, entertain large crowds, play music all night long to as many people will listen – but we seek solace to recharge afterwards, because, frankly, people are tiring. Even people we like.

On a related note, if we are by ourselves in the corner of a restaurant or sitting alone in the middle of a movie theater or in a public place without company, it is not because we are sad. We are not “brooding.” Alone and lonely are two incredibly different things – and yes, even people who do not crave the attention of other people get lonely. We feel it without authentic and sincere connection, which is just terribly difficult to achieve in a big group.

Not only do we not hate people, but I daresay that the majority of us are very good at reading people, because we practice all the time reading ourselves. The self has become a scary topic and we try to drown it out with music and media and masses of people… but I think that the more you listen to yourself and figure out all of the things that aren’t right with you, the quicker you can set about fixing it. We can spot the self-doubt and the fear of rejection and the pride and the true happiness and the frustration. We are aware of how we interact with the space and the people around us (most of the time). We love any chance we get to turn acquaintance in to friend, but we understand that those don’t come around as often as they should.

4. We can’t change it. We are wired this way, just like you (I say “you” because I’m assuming that if you’re not nodding your head in assent, you’re of the extroverted persuasion, which is absolutely, completely fine) cannot change your wiring. It’s a game of bottom lines – when it comes right down to it, we look for that quality connection in other people. I can talk to anybody about anything when it’s a one-on-one situation. I’ll stay for hours seated in a hallway with 4 friends after setting up the gym for church – because we have gotten past the superficial nonsense.

Do not misunderstand me. We don’t want to have big, sublime talks about existential quandaries or intense discussions about philosophical treatises or any of that all the time – but there is a point when you move past the stuff anybody talks about and onto the stuff that friends talk about. When the connection gets personal. But we cannot be around people all the time, no matter how much we like you. We need that alone time to recharge and file our thoughts away and solve puzzles and breathe. We need to go to movies by ourselves and walk nowhere for no reason but the pleasure of walking and eat dinner with a book in our hand and make sure that we have ourselves at least partly figured out before we go on trying to figure other people out.

I said all of that stuff to say that there is no reason we cannot get along, intro- and extroverts. It just takes a little bit of understanding and throwing away of common misconceptions: Introverts are socially educated and competent, not morose and brooding. For every hour we spend socializing, it can take up to two to recharge, to collect ourselves, to digest. We are not “antisocial” and we are not “depressed,” it’s just that recharging is like sleeping at the end of the day or eating when you are hungry – a necessity. We are not arrogant (on purpose). We are not judgmental.

I will end with a pretty fantastic quote from another wonderful article to read about this (all of the links I have put in this post are, I daresay, more worth reading than this post itself), from the author named Jonathan.

“The worst of it is that extroverts have no idea of the torment they put us through. Sometimes, as we gasp for air amid the fog of their 98-percent-content-free talk, we wonder if extroverts even bother to listen to themselves. Still, we endure stoically, because the etiquette books—written, no doubt, by extroverts—regard declining to banter as rude and gaps in conversation as awkward. We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say ‘I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.’”

 
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Posted by on January 23, 2012 in Blog

 

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