The Little Children

 Mark 10:13-15

¹³ People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. ¹⁴ When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ¹⁵ Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” ¹⁶ And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.

In light of the discoveries of these past days, I feel I should make some affirmations of things I believe and things I choose to reject.

1) Jesus loves little children.  All suffering of children everywhere is a tragedy, and the death of a child is one of the signs that we are living in a world that is not as it should be.

2) God created the family as the place where children should be raised.  Any power or policy that separates families goes against God's design. Some families are broken and some children need to be protected from their parents, but that should be done by the community around the family.

3) Canada is not a Christian nation. Canada was created by bureaucrats, rich businessmen and politicians.  Yes, there is a foundation of justice and human rights that comes from the biblical view of humanity that underlies English common law.  There were Christians in the room when Canada was negotiated into existence.  But government in this world is not what Christianity is about; otherwise, Jesus would not have been crucified, he would have gathered an army and conquered Rome as many thought the Messiah would.

4) Jesus did not create a religion of hierarchy, power, and imperialism. Humans have taken advantage of every opportunity to be selfish and to collect and exercise power. Jesus comes to every institution in every society, including his own church, and challenges its selfishness, its corruption, and its pride. In the great vision of heavenly worship in the Book of Revelation, there will be people from all tribes, nations and tongues declaring allegiance to Jesus as their King, with no intermediary monarchs. His kingdom is not of this world. When the church has tried to institute God's kingdom through the exercise of power, it has produced some of the most blatantly evil times and events in history.

5) God will judge evil. That He allows evil to happen, even within His church, points to how much dignity He has placed in humanity, to make choices and to then have the consequences of those choices play out over generations. In the understanding of the historic church, the ones who cause (or have caused) suffering to children will be punished. Sometimes the evil is so vast that punishment in this life does not seem to be adequate. We understand that God has created us as eternal beings, and that punishment and blessing both extend beyond this mortal life. This provides hope for me that justice will be done. This does not mean that we should not strive for justice here and now.

6) Jesus is the model for people who declare allegiance to him. That means we should do what he did, which is to lay down our rights and our lives for others. As a Canadian citizen I am free to use the laws of Canada for my benefit. As a follower of Christ I need to balance my opportunity for gain against God's love for others. Jesus did not come to be served, but to serve. All who follow Jesus should do the same.

I have learned a lot, but I have much more to learn, about how powerful white Christians have abused their positions to cause others to suffer. Some of that suffering was out of malice. Some of it happened despite good intentions, because of the blindness of white Christianity to its racism and its domination of others.

The church that follows Jesus Christ now needs to be silent and mourn. We need to humbly listen to others, whether those people are from First Nations, from other cultures, from communities that we have shown hatred to. We have not earned the right to say "Jesus loves you." 

We are supposed to be Jesus' hands and feet, going out to the highways and byways and inviting all the poor, the crippled, the blind and deaf to the wedding banquet of love that Jesus is putting on. We have become the ones too busy, too rich, too self-sufficient to even attend Jesus' banquet.

I am sorry.

A Failure of Discipline, or the problem of "Actual"

This is a follow-up post to my previous post about Discipline.

My wife and I finished P90X.  We had to move a couple of days around, but we did all of the workouts in the schedule within the 90 days.  The only workouts we didn't do were the optional stretching days, which ended up being rest days (as well as travel days, "we worked on other things" days, etc.).

I did not continue reading "Celebration of Discipline," and I did not do a weekly follow up.  That may still happen.

But I have continued to think and to learn.  I am thinking about the difference between saying you will do something, and actually doing it.

We (Deb and I) said we would do P90X, and we actually did it.

I said I would do a weekly chapter summary, and I didn't do it.

...

I am going to apply this to my own Christian life.  I am a long-time, long-term, committed follower of Jesus Christ, as I understand Him in my 21st century, Canadian, Evangelical context.  I have said the "right" things and am accepted as a member of our local church.

But am I "actually" living as a Christian?  What would that mean?

First of all, it has nothing to do with me not sinning.  If holiness in our lives was a prerequisite for "actual" Christianity, none of us could get started.  We may asymptotically approach that goal, but that would be an outcome of our Christian walk, not the means of it.

Am I a public, outspoken, obvious evangelist and "good-deed doer"?  Have you read Matthew 6?  We are to do our good deeds in private.  So that's not it.

So my "not smoking, not drinking, not dancing, not chewing" doesn't get me there.  And my Sunday morning attendance doesn't get me there either.

What does Jesus "actually" want?

I am committing (ha!) to following up on this post.  But I'm going to leave it there for now.

What do you think "Actual Christianity" would mean?  And what have we added on to it, that hides the truth?

If you want to get these posts in your inbox, I have set up a mailing list (signup link).

Discipline

It seems as if we have removed external discipline from the menu.  No physical aggression, no emotional harm, no "micro-aggression" that might cause even the slightest discomfort.

So we are left with self-discipline, and for training others (like children or students), hope (which is not a strategy).

Perhaps some of us who are trying to find a way to navigate this culture as Christians should stop trying to impose discipline on others, and do a better job of disciplining ourselves.  Perhaps the fruit of a life of the Spirit may create some space in our culture for our anachronistic beliefs.

One of the ways that I am learning about discipline is by embarking on a workout program.  Actually, my wife and I are six weeks into P90X.  I am more flexible than I have ever been in my life, and my average weight in the morning has dropped about 4-5 pounds.  But the real lesson is in telling our bodies that we are going to do this painful thing, without giving our lazy bodies an option or an out.

That's discipline.

Those of you who know me personally know our family lives in a large log home we built ourselves.  It is unfinished but it has been our home since we started building in 2008.

The next lot over is another log home, built with love and care by an enterprising professional as a weekend retreat.  It took a lot longer to erect, and is still not liveable. 

A couple of lots away is a mostly empty lot, with some preliminary work done, but no structure.  The owners have come for weekends, but never stayed.

We stayed.  We sold our city home and gave ourselves no option.  We have a house.

The secret of discipline seems to be commitment, not giving ourselves an option.

I am investigating the Spiritual Disciplines.  The bases for my research are four authors: Dallas Willard ("The Spirit of the Disciplines" which I have not yet read), James Bryan Smith ("Good and Beautiful God"), Richard J. Foster ("Celebration of Discipline") and John Eldredge ("Desire/Waking the Dead" to start).  I own the latter three works and am going to do a (re)read-through, with a weekly report on what I am learning. 

There are others learning about self-discipline through the scientific method.  "The Power of Habit" by Charles Duhigg, and "Hooked" by Nir Eyal are two books on manipulating our own behaviour in order to remove old habits and create new ones.  I will be exploring those books in parallel.

I invite you to come along.  If you would like these posts delivered via email, sign up here.  I have also created a private Facebook group for further discussion, which will be open to email subscribers only.

My next post will be about "Meditation", from Richard J. Foster's Celebration of Discipline.  I will also include a signup for Faithful Workouts, a free program of workouts and diet plans from a Christian perspective.  I will be alternating between spiritual disciplines and habit formation from neuroscience, partially based on feedback from you.  So please sign up, and I'll see you in the comments below, or in the Facebook group.

Shalom,

Dave Block
North Creek

Consequences

Lots of controversy these days, lots of moments where you might start to get excited because something you believe is being attacked.  Let's back down a bit and look at what's underneath these differences of 'opinion.'

If you start from a different place, what you are looking at will look different.

One of the big differences in the way people think is the way we look at consequences.

Let's start even earlier.  Let's consider our view of people.  Four choices (one is a straw man):

1) Fundamentally evil: This is what you think of others if you are paranoid and always looking for the worst in everyone else and in the world.  But there is too much love and beauty in human relationships for this to make sense globally.

2) Fundamentally good: This feels better.  This is where the world likes to say it lives.  The problem is, how do you explain the bad things that people do?  The answer is, they are victims of their environment, forced by circumstances to do things they wouldn't do in a perfect world.  Fix the environment, fix their behaviour.

3) Biological Determinism: What we do is programmed by our genes, our biochemistry, and our brains.  It is all a matter of successful coping strategies in a world that has no opinion.  The winners are the ones that replicate their behaviour in others (via reproduction or cultural transmission).  Good and Evil are manufactured because they are part of a useful strategy.

4) Made in the Creator's Image, fallen:  This requires the acceptance of a ton of backstory, but it provides a nuanced view of human behaviour that doesn't require the loss of meaning or ethics.  It means that I can celebrate the glorious beauty of another person, despite not agreeing with their philosophy or theology, because I know that they were created by a Being that loves beauty and wants to see them at their best.

Obviously, I favour #4.  The third option is gaining steam as more behaviour evolutionary psychologists do more research, and write cool stories, but it still removes any universal meaning from our lives.  Let's look at the implications of the Image/Fallen view some more (since I'm writing this, I get to drag you along).

One of my programmer heroes wrote this response to the Charlie Hebdo shootings.  Obviously, a matter of life and death, with massive consequences for choosing to value free speech above other's religious sensibilities.

On a completely less urgent note, there has been a flame war in the Christian Blogosphere about cleavage and yoga pants.  Girls, I am male, a father of two teenage daughters, and married to a smokin' hot wife.  Therefore I am not qualified to say anything about your wardrobe.

But Consequences...

The problem with thinking as a victim is that one's own responsibility is minimized.  This actually reduces one's own worth - if you did not cause anything to happen, you can be safely ignored.  This ends up depersonalizing everyone.

But responsibility is scary.  Acknowledging that behaviour leads to a response means that we sometimes have to pay for what we've done.  That can get expensive.  Easier to push responsibility away.  

If a set of consequences happens consistently, and is understood throughout a society, it results in a set of rules that everyone agrees to.  For example, once we see the violence that comes from revenge, we stop vigilantes from responding to crime with more crime, and we centralize authorized violence in a government, which is allowed to impose justice and end the cycle of feuds.

But when part of society follows #2 above, claiming that they are victims, the rules fall apart.  We are left with individual judgements in every situation - who is the biggest victim?  Whose rights were violated the most?

If we agree with #3, we may negotiate a set of rules that some agree with, but in that world, success is the only value.  Winners win, and set the rules for others.  That leads to a backlash from the losers, who adopt the language of victims.  And so we are back at blaming others, and avoiding responsibility.

If we are created beings, endowed with free will and agency, then we need to take responsibility for the consequences of our actions.  As my financial guru John Mauldin quotes of economists, it's not the seen consequences that make a good forecast, it's the unseen.  So only taking into account first-order effects of actions is not taking life seriously.  Look for the results of your actions several chess moves forward.  Think about how you see yourself.  Think about how others see you.  Think about what others think about your actions and how that will change their actions in turn.  Then don't be surprised when there are surprises, because we do not have God's perspective (all-knowing, eternal).  We don't see the lion in the grass.  We don't know that our butterfly wing flap will cause a monsoon on the other side of our (social) world.

But we do have responsibility.  Given that God put us here to display His creativity and glory and beauty, we need to work towards that in ourselves and others.  Every time we fail, we understand that failure is inevitable because (a) we are in an imperfect world, and (b) we have fallen from perfection by choosing to go against God's perfect design.  But success is possible, because (a) our world was created by a rational God and it can be understood, and (b) there is enough of God's character in us that we can create beauty and glory despite our limitations.

I am heading toward a philosophy where I very carefully regulate my own actions, taking into account my relationship with my Creator and my social sphere, and where I discount the views of the wider world, since the wider world is abandoning the Image/Fallen view of humanity.  That means that there may be consequences in my relations with society, where I will be 'victimized.'  But I choose that, not as a victim, but as a responsible agent.  Meanwhile, I will demonstrate in my life, in the richness and beauty and glory of my relationships, the benefits of living as if I were created within a meaningful story, as if I am a character who gets to play a part, whose chapter doesn't end when my life here ends.  I choose my path, and accept the consequences.

Beauty

Do you want to build a snowman?

The experience of building a snowman and enjoying the feeling of creating a "person" is one of the joys of being Canadian.  Places without snow have other advantages (...) but we get to create with this amazing material that just appears out of the sky.

Many of us have also experienced the feeling of having our creations destroyed by "the big kids".  This is a major policy issue at the local elementary school during winter.  The destruction of what was your creation is hard to deal with.  So much potential, gone.

Let us return to our examination of the universe.  We postulate a Creator, an entity who has a Mind and has created a universe and also the minds within it.  That act of Creation has echoes in our little snowmen, log houses, businesses, teams, et cetera.  We could say that we create because we have the nature of a Creator inside of us.  We are Its (His? Her?) snowmen!

Yet it is obvious to us that we do not live in an ideal world.  We are constantly under attack - from the weather, from random acts of destruction, from other people (other snowmen?) - it feels as if the system is not entirely for us.  Even though there are amazing resources out there, and we have won many battles (smallpox, polio, measles, tuberculosis, poverty), we are in a universe that has such potential, yet so often thwarts that potential.

So a story (meta-narrative) that would explain our experience of the universe would be valuable in interpreting individual events, and in predicting the kind of actions we should take in order to achieve success and avoid failure in our lives.  Empirically testing the results of that narrative would take lives or generations.  It may say nothing about the truth of the narrative, but it would give evidence of the efficacy of the story in aiding navigation of this universe.

So I return again to the story of the Creator.  The Creator builds an ideal Creation.  The Creation is made to host small Minds that reflect the creative character of the Great Mind that envisioned and created the universe.  In order to fully express the character of the Creator, the small Minds are embodied in the creation and given the freedom to act.  This freedom results in the loss of the ideal nature of the Creation, since not all free acts will follow a perfect path (as envisioned by the Creator, or as can be determined by examining the Creation).

The implications of such a story would be stupendous - it is an entirely different starting point than a naturalistic explanation of the universe supplies.  And indeed, it leads to a different kind of life - not a perfect life, but a life of beauty.

As you probably have figured out, the story that I refer to is chronicled in the Bible.  If you examine the historical record, looking for the impact of people who recognize this story and use it as a base for their behaviour, you will see selflessness, sacrifice, joy, faithfulness, community, and love in their stories.  And when the Creator gets personally involved with His Creation, the story just gets more beautiful.

God sees the beauty in each one of His creations.  He wants to see that beauty revealed and restored.  Rebellion against God's design leads to damage to His created beauty.  But, there are moments in everyone's life when they just can't help but display the beauty that is deep in their nature.  Treasure those moments, cultivate them in yourself and others.  We were created to enjoy that beauty, and to enjoy the One who imagined Beauty in the beginning.

Gravity

Few things are as mysterious, as ubiquitous, and as necessary to our life as gravity.

Water flows downhill.  Ice has a density less than water, so water floats when it freezes.  Rain falls on the just and the unjust.  Even pride goes before a fall.

When God said, "Let there be light!", did he include gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces, and electromagnetism?  Because as far as we know (dark matter and dark energy excepted), those 4 forces determine the course of nature.

Now I am reading C.S. Lewis' Miracles (a Christmas gift) and so I recognize that a Newtonian universe really would be determined, given a complete specification of initial conditions.  That leaves precious little room in the universe for free will or rationality.  From a scientific point of view, it's a good thing there is Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle -  which makes things unpredictable at the level of the very small, and chaos theory - which makes things unpredictable at the scale of weather and economics.

So we live in a principled, mostly (but not completely) predictable, mostly (but not completely) understandable universe.  One of the things that is perhaps more mysterious than Gravity is Mind.  How is it, if the universe depends on a combination of Newtonian determinism and quantum randomness, mixed together with chaotic instability, that there are organic beings that are self-aware?  Is Self-Awareness important to the understanding of the Universe in the same way that Gravity is?

When one examines the possibilities for the start of a Universe like ours, one is left with a binary choice (again, hat tip to C.S.): either the physical world is a creation, or it is an accident.  There is a God, or chance allows for the development of such wondrous things as trees and redheads.

 


Since no one from inside this Universe is still around from the time of its creation, all we can do is infer from what we see and understand (from looking at the present universe) what the moment of creation must have looked like.  Could a Big Bang have held all the matter of the whole universe in one spot?  Could we (and nebulae, and symphony orchestras) be just mud-spatter from an explosion?

But if there was a Creator, It was certainly present at the Creation, and one would hope that this Universe was not a dying act, leaving us with a designed world without a Designer.  It (the Creator) might even have some interest in Its work.  Perhaps there are some ways in which the understandability and the unpredictability of the Universe show the Personality of the Creator.

And then, certainly, Mind and Gravity would both be immensely important in the understanding of Creation.  Because Creation would have a point.

Your life would have a point.

You would not be a piece of mud splatter.  You would be part of a story that is being co-written by an Author and billions of little authors.  And maybe the lesson of Mind is that it is not completely determined by this Universe and may outlive it.

The Creek Bed

You never step into the same river twice...

Riverbeds change, currents change, rocks and trees and other obstacles impede progress.

But if there is water, it will find a way to flow downhill.

Understanding a river at any one time does not mean you understand it for all time.  But understanding the forces underlying the river will help you to be able to predict how changes will impact other parts of the river.  It may not be the same river, but it will be recognizable as related to the river you stepped in last time.

The world we live in is like a river.  It changes all the time.  This blog is going to be my attempt to scratch out on the cave wall a little bit of my understanding of the world and what underlies the system.

I live beside a creek, which hardly flowed last year due to a beaver dam.  The picture of the changing river is one that I often return to.  What are the "parts" of the creek that I will want to look at?

1) Spirituality.  Influenced by my faith, my family background, and writers such as C.S. Lewis and John Eldredge, I see the spiritual world as a major factor in the state of the world we see and feel.

2) Economics.  I don't know how #1 will interact with #2, and I may end up splitting these blogs, but I believe that economics plays a large part in the local world that we end up inhabiting.

3) Geopolitics.  As taught to me by Stratfor, I see that geography often constrains politics.  We'll see how that plays out.

4) Technology.  Things change so fast in the tech space that it helps to look for the longer-term trends behind the latest iDevice.

We'll see how much of each category we get into as we go.  Look for updates more often than weekly, less than daily.  I will post links to each post on Facebook if you want to follow that way, or you can use the tools provided by Google to keep track of the content here.

Shalom!

David Block
Sandy Beach, Alberta