Year: 2016 (Page 2 of 3)

I Love Audio Books

June 9, 2016 / Trent / 0 Comments

Audible-Audiobooks-883_l_96e7ae5d2c81e2af

This past year I’ve been listening to audio books. I like listening to audio when I climb up my local mountain. I looked into Audible Books, but at $14.95USD it was too expensive. They did offer a free book if you gave them a try. Being a cheap Dutchman, I went for the grandfather of all books–War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. That’s 61 hours and 8 minutes of listening for nothing. Audible Books just got pwned! The problem is, I loved this book, seriously–I thought this book was infamous only because it was the longest book. It’s long, but it’s also one of the best books I’ve ever read (listened to). I loved listening to a great reader read it to me. It was very immersive; I hardly felt that I was climbing.

This was such a delight that I thought I would keep my membership for just a few months. Just to knock off some other biggies. Books that I had started, but for one reason or other had not been able to finish: Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman.

Just one more. I had seen the trailer for the movie, so I decided I’d listen to the book The Martian by Andy Weir before the movie came out.

I had always meant to read A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry, but I’d need more than a summer to read it, so I never picked it up. Wow, what a book, and a great performance by John Lee. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is in the top ten of almost every list of must read books, so I checked that one off.

I did some listening directly related to my work: Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor and two collections of her short stories, A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge. Also, All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain.

I have already read Tolkien’s trilogy four times, and the Hobbit at least a dozen times, but the last time was a while back, so I listened to them.

Then I listened to some religious books: The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns, The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan and Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

Most recently I finished Watership Down by Richard Adams, and I am just finishing Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell.

I purchased a bunch of books on a few very good sales, so i am set for a while. I look forward to another year of listening and hiking.

If you are interested in my recommendations for listening or reading, here is my list in order of awesomeness. I’ve separated Tolkien out because with Tolkien I have no objectivity.

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Two Towers by J. R. R. Tolkien

The Return of the King by J. R. R. Tolkien

So here’s my list in order:

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

Watership Down by Richard Adams

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Martian by Andy Weir

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis

The Bible Tells Me So by Peter Enns

Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor

The Pilgrims Progress by John Bunyan

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

From Routine to Ritual: Classroom Attendance

June 2, 2016 / Trent / 4 Comments

stevepb / Pixabay

So I was thinking of a routine I might turn into a ritual, as per my last post.

A school routine . . .

Attendance! In every class, I take attendance. This routine is so routine, there’s probably no one who doesn’t know how this works. The teacher goes down the alphabetical list, calling out student names and the students say, “Here,” when they hear their name. It’s a routine; it exists for no other reason that its purpose, and it’s executed quickly and efficiently.

I was thinking that, rather than every student saying the same thing, “Here,” why not have then each reply with something unique? In my first class, I asked them to reply with their favourite colour when I called their name. Attendance took a little longer, but the break from routine generated some excitement.

In my other classes, I asked other predictable questions:

What is your favourite food?
Who is your favourite villain?
What is your dream job?

The next day:

Who would you like to have coffee with?
What’s one book you’d want on a desert island?
In which historical period would you like to live?

Then we got a little more creative:

Which political or cultural figure would you like to hit with a pie in the face, or give a carnation?
What’s the grossest thing you’ve ever eaten?
What job would you never want?
What is your “spirit” animal? No, your “spirit” kitchen appliance?
What do you do when you are really sad (one word)?
One word, your most t embarrassing moment?
What movie would you like to be in, as which character?
What stupid superpower would you like to have?
What is a characteristic of one of your parents you hope you never acquire?
In my English classes I can ask, in which dystopian world would you rather live?

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The routine of classroom attendance, can be transformed into a ritual that creates community and transforms the individuals in it. #teaching #teachingpractices #teacher #education” quote=”The routine of classroom attendance, can be transformed into a ritual that creates community and transforms the individuals in it. “]

Norms

Interestingly, these questions generated a lot of excited chatter. So much that it made it almost impossible to get to the end of the class list. So we worked on some normative behaviours–“norms” that would improve the ritual. I asked the students for their ideas and they came up with a good list.

Don’t tell your answer to your neighbour until your name is called.
Look at the person whose name is called so you can hear their contribution.
Respond quickly and positively.
Don’t forget to ask Mr. DeJong his answer.

Rituals mean something beyond the activity itself. What I like about this attendance ritual is that it sets the tone for the rest of the class.

It’s fun and creative.
This fun and creativity is focused and contained.
This ritual celebrates the uniqueness of each individual as well as the importance of the communal context;
the value of each contribution, and contributor, is reinforced by the norm of respectful listening.
Everyone gets a voice; everyone’s voice is respected.

These “meanings” are at the core of what I am trying to teach in all of my classes–this “mindless ritual” is helping me to do it.

If you have any other suggestions for “Attendance Questions” please send them in the comment section. I will be needing about 100 of them.

Turning Routines into Rituals

May 21, 2016 / Trent / 0 Comments

Alexas_Fotos / Pixabay

Both routines and rituals involve a regular repetition of some action.

But they are very different.

Routines will flatten our lives, but rituals can thicken them.

Routines are locked in ordinary time, but rituals are linked with “higher times.”

Routines

With a routine there is a clear, linear connection between the act and the purpose of the act. The routine of brushing your teeth is performed so that you have clean, healthy teeth. You routinely make a breakfast of oatmeal with flax and blueberries to prevent cancer or heart disease, I can’t remember which, maybe both. You grab a coffee on the way to work so that you can hit the ground running when you arrive. There is no more meaning in a routine than the desired outcome.

Rituals

A ritual, on the other hand, does not have this clear relationship between the act and purpose. The purpose of a handshake, or fist bump or whatever it is the kids are doing these days, has nothing to do with the touching of hands. At a graduation, we don’t throw the hats in the air because we want them to be up there. In Holy Communion, we don’t eat the bread and drink the wine because we are hungry and thirsty.

The meaning and purpose of a ritual transcends the action itself.

Mindless Rituals

In some Christian circles it is a given that “mindless rituals” are bad. Notice that the basis of this censure is that rituals are bad when they are not of the mind, or non-rational.

Where rituals are opposed because of their mindlessness, is where the idol of Modernism is still maintaining some control of a church. The thing about rituals is that they are fundamentally not about the mind–they are not and never were supposed to be. Does shaking hands when we greet someone make any rational sense?

Rituals train us in ways much deeper than the mind, deeper than the emotions even. They train and transform the deepest part of ourselves, precisely because we do them over and over again. And it’s not with our minds that we repeat rituals, but with our bodies.

James K. A. Smith says, in his book Desiring the Kingdom, that rituals aren’t just things we do, they do something to us. We’ve got it all wrong when we think that humans are primarily rational beings. Descartes was wrong with his conclusion, “I think therefore I am.” Rather, Smith says, we are desiring beings–“I love therefore I am.”

Rituals get at the core of who we are, through out bodies. If you say a rote prayer before the every evening meal, with folded hands and closed eyes, you are physically acknowledging a presence that deserves your reverence, a providential being to whom you ought to be grateful. This simple ritual shapes identity, and it “thickens” experience in the world as it connects a person and his food to a transcendent provider–this “mindless” ritual is an incarnational event. If this simple prayer is such a significant event, think about Communion.

Routines into Rituals

We engage in functional, but empty routines all day long. I wonder if we can’t elevate some of these to the level of ritual.

I’ve ritualized the routine of hitting snooze on my alarm clock. Every morning when I wake up, well almost every morning, I say, “Good morning, Lord.” This ritual reminds me that the day does not begin when I wake up; during the seven hours that I’ve been sleeping, God has been busy. I am joining God’s day, “already in progress.” It is a quotidian reminder and that the all-powerful king of the universe loves me because he’s there every morning to hear me say, “Good, morning Lord.”

I think I just leave the brushing of my teeth as a routine, but there are some interesting possibilities for ritualizing my morning coffee.

Poop Packages

April 24, 2016 / Trent / 1 Comment

Dog Poop bagged

Am I missing something, or are people complete idiots?

We have decided that we don’t want to have dog poop all over our community. To this end we expect pet owners to bag the feces of their beloved canine, and dispose of it in a convenient garbage can. If there is no readily available waste receptacle, we expect it to be packed home and disposed of it there. Fine.

But not every seems to understand all aspects of this complex procedure.

There seems to be a number of dog walkers who struggle with the important steps beyond the first.

I go walking up my local trail almost everyday and regularly find neatly packaged bags of dog poop protected from the elements in bright white or neon blue baggies. I don’t understand. Why don’t the pet owners move on to step 2.

If the stuff was just left, unpackaged, beside the trail, the rain, sun and snails would erase it from memory. But inside its protective case, this doggie dump can sit like a monument for months commemorating the site of this momentous movement of digested kibble for the devout pilgrims who pass it on the trail.

I suggest that this dog poop ritual is an all or nothing kind of thing. Either go through the entire procedure and take the bag home with you, or don’t even start down the road of courtesy–just knock the stuff off the trail with a readily available stick and let nature take its course.

There’s Meaning in the Mug

April 9, 2016 / Trent / 0 Comments

Do you choose to drink your morning coffee out of a Styrofoam cup?

I’d almost rather not have my morning coffee than to suck it out of a styrofoam cup. Almost. I can’t imagine anyone sitting in a diner asking the waitress to replace the ceramic cup with a styrofoam one. Coffee tastes better in ceramic.

Is this in our heads or is it really a thing?

In the modern secular West, we have this idea that meaning is in the mind–the individual mind. The logic being: It has to be because it can’t be anywhere else.

We start with this premise and are forced to the conclusion. But what if the premise is all wrong.

Meanings are External

The Greeks used to think meaning was external–in creation–in the logos. Judeo-Christianity also teaches that meaning was external–it’s source is in the transcendent God.

In the recent past, we made a couple of turns in our thinking and end up assuming that meaning lies within us as individuals–meaning, indeed reality, is subjective–this is subjectivism.

It is as hard to disprove this foundational assumption of subjectivism as it is to prove it, but we can look at where this view takes us in the end, and perhaps draw some conclusions.

The Mug Matters

So, back to drinking coffee from the Styrofoam cup. The coffee itself doesn’t taste any different; it’s the experience that’s degraded. It just sucks to drink coffee out of Styrofoam. My grandfather, it is said, refused to drink coffee out of a clear-class cup–I’m with him, but glass is better than the paper cups we get from Starbucks and nothing is as good as a ceramic one. I think this experience is universal.

I think tea drinkers are even more aware of this principle–the mug matters.

There is meaning in the mug.

Now a subjectivist will look at my argument that “it sucks” to drink out of Styrofoam and the experience is “degraded” and say that it is a subjective argument. But I don’t think we have all independently decided that one vessel is superior to the other for the consumption of hot beverages,

Take 10 babies and raise them in isolation until they are 20, then give them a hot beverage in two vessels, one ceramic and one Styrofoam. As them which they prefer. 100% of them will chose the ceramic. It’s an objective truth and it lies in the mug itself.

The objective qualities that make one mug superior to another is not simply a matter of practical considerations, although these are important. For instance, if the vessel is too large, or the walls too thin, the beverage will cool too quickly. But there’s something in the intersection of subject and object that makes drinking coffee our of a ceramic mug better.

There is inherent value in the mug itself that enhance the consumption of its contents. This has to do with the blending of a host of qualities, not the least of which is tactile, that point at which its physicality encounters my own.

Is the mug magic?

If the mug is just a mug, then the drinker is just a drinker. When we devalue the world of objects, we also devalue ourselves.

When the world is flattened, we become flattened.

If you sense that you are more than an object and that a thing that has value beyond its utility, then perhaps you are in no immediate danger of the modern malaise. If you want immunity, start by seeing the inherent value in your coffee cup.

So part of the cure for the modern malaise is the recovery of objective reality.

Read a related post here. It’s about onions.

The Modern Malaise

April 3, 2016 / Trent / 0 Comments

Free-Photos / Pixabay

Do you ever feel that life is a little flat?

If you do, you are not alone according to Canadian philosopher, Charles Taylor. He calls it “the modern malaise.”

Taylor says that the experience of living in a secular age is one of “flatness.”

This feeling comes about because of a new view of reality which affects how we experience reality. The view goes by various names–Naturalism, Physicalism, Philosophical Materialism, or Exclusive Humanism. It is the belief that there is nothing over and above the physical. There is no spiritual dimension to reality.

“Nature has no doors, and no reality outside herself for doors to open on”

C. S. Lewis, Miracles.

This loss of the transcendent results in a malaise. Without God, the world lost the enchantment it derived from his presence; meaning is more difficult to come by; it’s not so easy to anchor truth to anything absolute, the same goes for the good and the beautiful.

In the absence of a transcendent source of meaning, where do we look for it?

Other Sources of Meaning

The Romantics looked for it in Nature and the Modern thinkers in Reason. In the postmodern context, these have become inadequate. In our current context, we look for meaning within the individual mind, says Taylor.

Well, that’s cool!

Is it?

Any meaning to be found in the universe is to be found in my head. I get to decide if a thing is good or true or beautiful. I don’t know; I feel inadequate to the task.

“I told you once you’d made a God of yourself, and the insufficiency of it forced you to become an atheist.”

— Robertson Davies

Without the higher things, our experience of reality is flattened. Hence, the malaise of modernity.

The symptoms for the modern malaise:

We ask, “Does anything have meaning?”
We seek “an over-arching significance” in life.
We tend to commemorate important life events, but feel as if these efforts were all for naught.
We have a sense of the “utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary.”

People are obscenities. . . . A mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it’ll no longer function.”

— Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

So how do we bring some fullness into our experience to counter the flatness?

Family
Membership
Sports
Toys
Vacations
Parties
Halloween
Etc.

These can sometimes mask the symptoms, but fail to cure the real illness.

A Prescription for the Modern Malaise

A broader conception of time.
The recovery of objective reality.
The re-enchantment of the cosmos.
Recovery of the transcendent.

I’ve covered the first in previous posts, the first of which is here.

The other three will be addressed in the posts which follow.

Microwave Chicken Teriyaki Jesus

April 1, 2016 / Trent / 1 Comment

I really liked Bryan F. Hurlbutt’s book Tasty Jesus. In it he asserts that Western Christianity holds to various cameos of Christ that aren’t accurate. This is because we tend to reconfigure Jesus to suit our personal preferences. In order to make complex cultural and philosophical ideas accessible, Hurlbutt uses food analogies to illustrate the shortcomings of five most significant “christological malformations” in the Western church. His analysis of these is thorough and nuanced. But I’m wondering if, perhaps, there is not a configuration that might be added to his list, and a food analogy that would challenge the view of Christ held by many of the readers of this book: Modern evangelicals.

Hurlbutt’s 5 Predilections

First, here are Hurlbutt’s five predilections that wield a lot of power in the Christian West:

Theological liberalism has largely naturalistic roots and, consequently, has stripped Jesus of his deity. This is the “creampuff Jesus,” tasty, but of no nutritional value at all.
Fundamentalism is a response to theological liberalism. It tosses out the creampuff, but keeps crossing things off the menu–out with the potatoes, pasta and bread. This no-carb approach eliminates important parts of a balanced diet. Ultimately, this approach is spiritually toxic.
More recently, postmodern ideas have influenced ideas of Christ–the core of this stance is relativism. Like a meal at a smorgasbord, this version of Christ can appeal to many diners because it makes no absolute claims. Have some pork chops, top them with ice cream and vegetable soup–whatever.
Gourmet Jesus is the Christ of those who believe in the prosperity gospel–God wants you to be rich. The Biblical promises of spiritual or eternal flourishing are understood to mean material prosperity–God’s wants you to eat lobster thermidor. He clearly says so in the Bible, if you take a few verses out of context.
Pop-culture Jesus–this is a “shallow and spurious” Jesus. Gastronomically, this is the homogenized Jesus, heated to the point where anything dangerous or confusing has been eradicated. It’s the opposite of the delicious unpasteurized cheese you can buy in Europe.

These are Hurlbutt’s five. There might be a sixth cameo of Christ that is significant enough to be added to this list. It is the view toward which many of the readers of this book might lean.

My Sixth Cameo of Christ

I called this group Modern Evangelicals. That’s Modern, with a capital ‘M’–it’s the church that is highly influenced by Modernism.

These terms are so overused that their meaning has become unclear, so let me explain who I’m talking about.

They aren’t like the traditional mainline churches for they have left behind traditional liturgies and no longer hold strictly to their traditional theologies.

They are, like Hurlbutt, critical of the Emergent church because it adopts post-Modern idolatries.

But they are conservative, meaning they resist change. But in their resistance to post-Modern idolatries, they hold on to Modern idols.

4 ways which Evangelicals Worshiping Modern Idols:

Rationalism: They take a rational approach to reading the Bible. They tend to talk about the Bible in terms of inerrancy rather than inspiration. They have a tendency to think of truth in the narrow sense, of fact, rather than in broader terms.
Materialism: They think of Communion as a meal of literal bread and juice through which we remember the sacrifice of Christ. There is no supernatural encounter through the physical materials. There is no mystery. Jesus does not interact with his people through communion.
Individualism: There is a strong emphasis in the role of the individual. It is the individual who decides to follow Jesus. This decision is celebrated in believer baptism. This emphasis places the role of the community and that of God in the background.
Secularism: They do not deny the transcendent, of course, but they tend to see a radical separation between the transcendent and the immanent. For example, they will emphasize the the divine authorship of the Bible at the expense of the human authorship.

They will be quite happy with Hurlbutt’s five cameos because they are not particularly guilty of any of these. Just as it’s easy for Canadians to see peculiarities in the American view of the world (and vice versa), to which they are themselves blind, so too Modern evangelicals can easily see problems in the Liberal or Fundamentalists stance, but fail to see the plank in their own eye.

What is the gastronomic analogy that might get at some of the limitations of the Modern evangelical take on Jesus?

A microwave Teriyaki Chicken dinner.

It is an individual serving, efficiently prepared with the modern convenience of a microwave. It’s slightly exotic–it’s teriyaki, after all–but it’s largely Westernized. The ingredients are theoretically tasty and nutritious, but the effects of mass production and microwaving have removed most of their structure, taste and probably nutrients. It’s convenient, only requiring a few minutes to prepare and eat–ideal for busy people on the run. Even if you ate it every day, you could do worse–it’s probably healthier than any of the other five diets.

Now, I know plenty of evangelicals that do not have the microwave teriyaki chicken image of Christ. For these, the analogy would be more like a healthy, well-balanced dinner–an herb-roasted chicken with mashed potatoes, steamed asparagus and a small, sweet dainty for dessert. But I think even this more robust and balanced picture, as compared to the microwave meal, reveals the limitations of the evangelical Christ.

The best gastric analogy for the Real Jesus

I think it would be a family meal, something Middle Eastern. My daughter told me about the meals she ate in Israel. These were family meals. They ate fresh pita and hummus, tzatziki, olives of course, lentils, roasted vegetables, lamb on skewers, lamb in grape leaves. Importantly, this is a balanced meal. But the contents, especially the spices–cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, thyme–were strange to her western palate. She had to humbly look to her hosts, even the children, for some indication of how to eat it and what to put with what. She was not confident, uncertain. She was repeatedly surprised–sometimes delightfully, at other times, unpleasantly by the flavour combinations. This meal was full of grace and love–the family that prepared it, pulled out all the stops because there were guests at the table. My daughter felt so blessed that such a sacrifice would be made for her.

No analogy can ever begin to capture the true Jesus, but I do think that even evangelicals need to think, not only about other, clearly problematic predilections, but also their own reconfigurations of Christ.

Radical Individualism–The End of Our Quest for Freedom

March 28, 2016 / Trent / 1 Comment

nastya_gepp / Pixabay

Where do we find Truth and Meaning?

Truth and Meaning reside in the individual mind. It wasn’t always so.

The idea that meaning resides in the individual human mind, has been a long time in development. 500 years ago, meaning was external–context mattered.

In the Medieval world and before, the human self was understood in terms of three key relationships. That between God, other people, and the world. These relationships were understood in terms of hierarchies. The most spiritual things were on the top and the most physical things were on the bottom. Angels were at the top, with humans just underneath, then animals, birds, plants, planets, and the purely physical elements.

Each of these categories were ordered in their own hierarchies–the animal hierarchy was headed by a lion with the oyster at the bottom. The elements were framed by gold and lead. The planets from sun, to moon, to the other “spheres” to lowly earth. And every human lived between the king at the top and the insane beggar at the bottom.

One’s identity, and the meaning of all things, had everything to do with where it fit within all these hierarchies. Meaning and truth were external, sought and discovered in their context.

Freedom From Hierarchies

Then came a series of events that would free the individual from all these hierarchies.

Religious Freedom came about with the Protestant Reformation which began in 1517 with Martin Luther nailing his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg. This event was the catalyst to a movement that would allow individuals to read a the Holy Scriptures in their own language and interpret the content for themselves.
Political Freedom came in a series of revolutions. The English Revolution in 1649, the American Revolution in 1776 and the French Revolution 1789 seriously limited or eliminated the hereditary position of king.
Freedom from the Transcendent/Divine. When did we stop believing in God? Some of us haven’t, but let’s just say that it was in 1882 with Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Gay Science. In it we find those famous lines, “God is dead. . . . And we have killed him.”
Racial Freedom continues to be clarified, but two significant events are worth mentioning: the Abolition of slavery and America’s Civil War in the 1860 and the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s.
Freedom for Women – In the first have of the 1900s women won the right to vote in many Western countries. Countries. Progress in even more equality were won in the 1960s.
Sexual Freedom was also a part of the 1960s.
Freedoms related to Sexual Orientation have been won in many jurisdictions in the last decade.
Freedom from Biology – 2015? The latest emancipation seems to be from our biology. Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal are representative of this new-found freedom against biological gender and race respectively.

Total Freedom, Increasing Isolation

This is where we are now. For the modern self, context doesn’t matter–meaning is internal, within the individual human mind. There is no authority higher than the self. The modern human is an autonomous human, not to be ruled by God, pope, king, or biology.

There are some consequences to this shift from external to internal meaning. Just one effect is our isolation from other people and things.

We aren’t as engaged in our world as we once were: In his book, Bowling Alone Robert Putnam points out that civic engagement has been in steady decline in the last third of the century. What is the evidence? We don’t do a bunch of things as much as we used to, things that Putnam suggests are indicators of civic engagement.

newspaper reading;
TV news watching;
attending political meetings;
petition signing;
running for public office;
attending public meetings;
serving as an officer or committee member in any local clubs or organizations;
writing letters to the editor;
participating in local meetings of national organizations;
attending religious services;
socializing informally with friends, relatives or neighbors;
attending club meetings;
joining unions;
entertaining friends at home;
participating in picnics;
eating the super with the whole family;
going out to bars, nightclubs or taverns;
playing cards;
sending greeting cards;
attending parties;
playing sports;
donating money as a percentage of income;
working on community projects;
giving blood.

As far as I know, there is no proof that civic disengagement is a result of the radical individualism I have described, but it seems to follow.

Freedom and Individuality are good things, but they are not ultimate things. We’ve made them ultimate things–we judge everything based on the degree to which it aligns with the worship Individual Freedom. But good things cannot fulfill the demands made of them when we put them into the place of God. They will become very cruel gods before too long, but before that, they will move us away from the other. That they move us away from relationships, suggests their inadequacy as gods, for we find we are most fully human within our relationships–the purpose for which we were made.

YOLO: The Wisdom and the Folly

March 22, 2016 / Trent / 0 Comments

szanyierika97 / Pixabay

“YOLO” — You may have heard a young person say this just before they do something stupid, or as an explanation as to why they did something stupid.

It means “You Only Live Once.”

It suggests we ought to live for the present, as opposed to thinking too much about the future.

The Wisdom of YOLO

There is some wisdom in YOLO. Focusing too much on the future is foolish.

I know I think too much about the future. I think about the airplane crashing. I think about my future health. I think about next year’s writing projects and potential speaking engagements. I think about retirement. I don’t think I am alone in my obsession with the future.

Our obsession with the future plays right into the hands of the demonic powers–this is C. S. Lewis’ view articulated in The Screwtape Letters. Senior tempter, Screwtape, says that God wants us “to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which [we] call the Present.” The devils purpose, then, is to get us “away from the eternal, and from the Present.” They do this by making us ” live in the Future, because thinking about the Future “inflames hope and fear.”

By thinking about the future we are focused on “unrealities.” I can simultaneously worry about never marrying (being alone for the rest of my life) and about marrying the wrong person (being miserable for the rest of my life). That both of these would occur is impossible, still I manage to fear both.

And one lifetime is not enough to encompass all that I have ever hoped for. I will not get one of those $20,000 grand pianos that play all by themselves. I won’t live in New York City and write books. Won’t get PhDs in history, philosophy and literature. I won’t work as an author/artist in Brittany. With all its hopes and fears, the future is filled with unrealities, and to live in the future is to live outside of reality.

We [says Screwtape] want a man hag-ridden by the Future . . . We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The #YOLO mantra correctly breaks us away from obsessing on the future, and turning toward the present. #Screwtape” quote=”The #YOLO mantra correctly breaks us away from obsessing on the future, and turning toward the present.”]

Coffee can only be enjoyed in the present.

A good book can only be enjoyed in the present.

A friend can only be enjoyed in the present.

A lover can only be enjoyed in the present.

We can only be kind in the present.

We can only be happy in the present.

We can only be honest in the present.

The Foolishness of YOLO

But if you dig a little deeper into the YOLO philosophy, you will find it empty.

Lewis says that the Present is the most real component of time, and it is “the point at which time touches eternity”; it is “all lit up with eternal rays.”

The YOLO philosophy says that the present is important, but not because “it is all lit up with eternal rays,” but because it is all there is. This life is all there is. When it is over, there is nothing. So if you don’t do it now, you will never do it. There is no eternity, so have fun while you can. Live for pleasure; live for the present.

Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. –C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

Hear Oh People, The Lord is Chronos

March 6, 2016 / Trent / 0 Comments

Bru-nO / Pixabay

I’ve written a few posts about Time. In the post that kicked it off, I suggested that having a “Biblical” or “Christian” worldview meant much more than opposing abortion and gay marriage, or being generous with ones time and money.

I argued that these things make up a very small part of what we call our worldview and that American Christians have the same worldview as their non-Christian neighbours. I attempted to make the point Americans, whether Christian or not, have a very secular idea of time.

Secular Time:

It is homogeneous — a minute is a minute; one hour is the same as every other hour–not really.
It is sequential — minutes, hours, days and years occur one after the other. There is another way to look at time as non-sequential–read more here.
structured by progress — we are, things are, improving, evolving, getting better as time passes. Not really–read more here and here.
It has been emptied of the transcendent — there is nothing supernatural in our conception of time. Really?

The Shema

The Shema is considered by Jews to be the most important part of the prayer service and it is recited twice a daily. It is found in Deuteronomy 6: 4-9. It is so important because it asserts the central tenant Judaism–there is only One God. It says that the only way we can remember that God is God, is by making this idea central in our lives.

Worldviews can be built and shaped through ritual and repetition. All residents of American culture are steeped in religious repetition and ritual in their worship of secular–or Chronos–time.

Here is a new Shema to a new, very material, god:

4 Hear, O resident of the secular age: The Lord is Chronos, the Lord is Linear. 5 Fear the Lord Chronos with regret for the past and fear for what the future might hold. 6 Time consciousness should always be on your hearts. 7 Impress on your children the importance of not wasting time and be sure they are in time for things, when necessary use bells. Talk about punctuality when you sit at home and as you walk along the road, insure that you set an alarm when they lie down so that they may get up in time. 8 Tie time symbols on your wrists or bind it on home screens of smart phones. 9 Hang them on the walls of every room in your houses, in your cars and at your places of work.