the needing God

sometimes relationships and dialogue serve as a catalyst for these great lengthy rants.
other times, they spawn these little platitudes that would probably make great fridge magnets.

synthesizing a few different streams, i was prompted to type this in an email to a friend:


the need that is to be attended to in ministry is what God needs you to do, not simply what you and others are in need of... if we all think this way, the world need not go hungry.

it's a bit quirky to speak of God needing.

(tangent: i sometimes get all caught up in these silly kinds of things and the result of the catching is that i overthink my way out of expressing the idea. i remember a friend once spoke of the danger inherent in editing, as one can unwittingly edit brilliance down to mediocrity. although i recognize the value of choosing words carefully, i sometimes am so careful that i end up saying nothing at all. i have heard people pray this way, flipping and flopping around with verbal shock absorbers and 'not my will but thy will' phrases to the point where you gotta wonder if God isn't just finding those infinite reserves of divine patience and longsuffering being depleted. God sits there, forcing a smile, saying was there something you wanted to talk to me about?)

i wonder if the idea of a God with a need isn't such a bad thing.
what if the idea of need further completes our picture of God, further augment the perfection and the holiness that we ascribe to God?

can one with need be complete? be God?

for me to embrace this notion, i must let go of the projections that i am tempted to slap onto God which are actually human conditions- human conditions that drive me mildly crazy. you know the ones: those aspects of the phrase 'needy' that suck our own reserves dry.

a needing God is not the same as a needy God.

God needs regular people to show love to each other
God needs regular people to share what they have with each other (you get the idea...)

see, God has created us to engage in meaningful life and experience with one another, and seeks to work miracles of faith and provision through these engagements. i'm fond of saying that

every good thing is of God and
every bad thing is something good that's been compromised

i believe this, but if what i believe is true, then part of God's glory must needs be realized through me. i have a responsibility in this bigger picture- this grand mosaic that presents the face of God to humankind through the faces of each other- to be part of what's going on, lest my lack of stewardship in the area entrusted to me become compromised and no longer bearing the truth of God's invitation.

i am needed to actively share the aspects of God's face that are part of God's revelation through me... failing to meet this need, part of God's expression of love to this world is stifled, suppressed.

in my view, these things don't change who God is. i'm not tossing some home-brewed version of pantheism onto the table and claiming to have discovered something new. creator is still separate from the created.

thing is, aspects of creator go unexpressed in direct relation to the responsiveness, or lack thereof, of the created to divine opportunities for revelation.

God needs people to express things as creator which can only be truly expressed through the created of God. whereas, some aspects of God's character are plainly evident in this world of somethings, the relational aspects must be expressed through the someones.

take, for instance, a song that i was given back in 1999. it was the last song i wrote in the 20th century, written on new year's eve.

(i say 'given' because there are many different processes for or approaches to creating art, whether this art is visual, dramatic, musical or linguistic. modes of inspiration? probably a whole nother blog that someone else has posted already and articulated better)

the way this song was written was unusual for me. it was almost like automatic writing of sorts, in that there were ideas that seemed to synthesize themselves, arriving on the written page already finished and requiring virtually no editing at all. the ideas flowed in an order contrary to the way i usually think, exploring the passion of the Christ, forgoing any discussion of resurrection and moving backwards in time from the burial to the passover meal.

break this thieving heart and place it in the ground
turn and walk away as darkness falls all around
pick up all the pieces of your life
as if we'd never met
and maybe then i'd know how to love

crucify this thieving heart-bind it with thorns
strike it with your fists, subject it to scorn
pledge undying faithfulness
and then betray it with a kiss
and maybe then i'd know how to love

take this thieving heart and do with it what you must
feast upon the flesh, forsake its every trust
drink deeply from the cup
it laboured so earnestly to fill
and maybe then
just maybe then
and maybe then i'd know how to love

i find this all very humbling, because when something like this takes place you are left with a sense of divine visitation of sorts. this is what i mean by revelation.

now whether the revelation of God through a person is as dramatic as this example seems to be for me, or simply a moment when the need of another presented itself and a person responded in love and grace, i must conclude that God needs us in order to express these aspects of God's character that fall silent in our absence. the need of God, then, seems to be both contextual and infinite- well, as infinite as the possibilities and opportunities that exist mathematically if we assign a number to every person who has lived, does live and ever will live, and then multiply those numbers by themselves to the Nth power... that's infinite enough for me to represent a pretty huge divine need.

that you and i are part of the meeting of this need causes me to feel incredibly small, yet somehow integral to the 'self actualization of God.'

blaise pascal spoke of the God-shaped void within every human being. could it be that in the heart of God there is a human-shaped void for each of us?

the maybe God

"Maybe God does get upset with us for offering all sorts of prayers. Maybe God gets upset some days and not others. Maybe we think God capable of that and maybe not but I guess the point is that if we equate a certain way of thinking with "the accuser" or "Satan" or "the evil one" I'm just not sure how we can avoid calling anyone (at least implicitly) who thinks this way evil." (hineini)

you, know, i am so incredibly comfortable with a 'maybe God' idea that i wonder if it represents some kind of faith shortcoming in my theology or something. what i mean is that a God of possibility makes more sense to my heart than a God of impossibility... this is challenging for me to embrace in light of my sunday school upbringing, but there is a natural invitation to my heart there that i cannot deny.

recently i read a deep, meaningful and frank email from a friend who is fed up with his job- particularly his boss. none of his prayers seem to be answered right now and it is making him crazy. unfortunately, i'm not sure my words were much comfort because i had been asking questions of my own.

but what? God is only interested in our growth when we are theologically orthodox and well-behaved? where is that written down?

perhaps we go through famine in order to discover aspects of the spiritual walk that elude us all these years of plenty. perhaps pain and calamity are necessary parts of our invitation into dialogue with the maybe God. perhaps we cannot grasp the concept of the maybe God in times of affluence and charm.

the God of faith and UNcertainty- can we deal with a God like this?
all over the world, others do.

it's like we have been using theological hand sanitizer for so long that the smallest doubt bug will wipe us out as an entire people because we have no faculty for dealing with the God who doesn't get right back to us on this one

the God of the wait
the God of the silence
the God of the apparent absense... the maybe God.

maybe God is focusing on global injustice and disparity
maybe God is wanting me to sort this one out myself
maybe God is more like the sovereign king that the weeping lover
maybe God is angry
maybe God is hardline
maybe God punishes
maybe God isn't interested in the win-win
maybe God isn't going to ever give me a sign

not even the slightest movement of the curtain as i throw rocks at the window in the sky (rev david whitticomb, 2001)

what do we do with the maybe God, who can therefore be the undoing of everything we always thought about God?
the things that we found so endearing about God?
the things we've based our entire faith upon?

what if the maybe God is a truer picture of God than the one we've held onto our entire life? what then?

Jesus said

"Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

i think that Jesus was talking about the maybe God.

what if my issues with my boss are actually my issues with my God?
is there enough faith left to still hold on? if not, what do i need to do in order to get a better grip on this God-person?

i mean, letting go is not an option- but what if the most important learnings of our lives take place in the time of punishment? what if the most important work we do for God is still before us and is contingent upon our embracing of these new revelations of God- these divine possibilities?

these are the questions that i ask the silence

to be systematic and carve very rigid lines between who God is and who God isn't presumes a lot, i think. there is no awe for me in an understandable diety. this doesn't mean that i like the glib, nonspecific, acknowledgement of a someone or something that is beyond or at best removed and therefore irrelevent- i just find comfort in the knowledge that the more i discover within the character of God as revealed in scripture and demonstrated in people, the more aware i am of how much more there probably is to discover.

geometrically, a ray is a line that extends from a starting point on to forever, whereas a segment is the portion of a line that connects one point to another. i think that it might be more comfortable for many to see theology as a segment and their own personal growth as a ray. for me, however, there is great joy in considering both my personal growth and my theology to find their beginning at a point on a pre-existing line and travelling on that line to eternity at the same speed.

i don't think that the pre-existing line is God or 'the pathway of God' or anything... it's probably just a linear model of time. however, the idea that life and love can move along this together at the same speed appeals to me, in that it is my desire to be somehow growing and deepening in my capacity to love with each passing day.

to increase one's capacity to love and express this love is, in my view, the point of a personal theology.

and this is for the questions that don't have any answers
(kid rock)

TGWU (baggage handlers' union)

some good questions:
1)why is unencumbered good again? (hineini)

wow- well posed. i think that hineini's question above is really strongly related to societyVS' one below:

2) Outlive a painful experience, interesting. Like as in 'forget about it' or 'deal with it'? (societyVS)

both of these questions have been going round and round in my head the last couple days for reasons that have nothing to do with blogging, and the more i think about them, the more i wonder if, in fact, unencumbered is necessarily a good thing. i mean, it probably depends on what we mean by unencumbered.

here's what set me off. last night a mom showed up at our small wednesday night prayer group and shared some desperate pain with everyone there (it was a small meeting compared to some- only about 10 people) concerning her angry young daughter's journey into extreme sports self destructive decision making.

at this gathering was a guy who had been absent from our fellowship for about 8 months. having been admitted to the hospital for day surgery back in july, he had contracted an infection which had brought about excruciating pain that had to be treated eventually with morphine which triggered his cocaine addiction and caused him to basically fall off the edge of the world, spiralling downward for literally months. he was completely unreachable and, at times, even untraceable until the disease finally remitted and he came to at one of the local rescue missions where he now lives, having sold everything he owned for drugs.

so he didn't know this mom or her daughter at all, having been seriously 'out of the loop' per se. he sat quietly listening, drinking in the whole story. when he spoke, however, it wasn't to recount his own experiences or personal regrets, providing glib testimonial to the fact that hope was not completely out of reach because any one can change blah blah blah. he instead shared his duaghter's story which, for all intents and purposes, was very similar to the story just shared.

suddenly the conversation was between two people who knew what they were talking about. the rest of the group bore witness to it all, but listened in silence. the true healing that took place there (obviously in small measure, considering the tragic tales being exchanged) was in the basic sharing of common pain.

unencumbered? hmm. i'm not sure that one completely unencumbered would have been much use at that meeting. it was an enactment of God's mercy and grace that, on this particular evening and in spite of the bad weather and the multiple bus transfers that were needed to be worked through in order for my friend to come to the prayer group, he was there as the one completely empathically understanding set of ears in the room. reminds me a lot of the kind of environment that societyVS describes in some of his earlier comments. the writer of acts concurs, as does the apostle paul in what he extols the baby church to become in 2 cor 1.1-11 (which had been my chosen devotional text for the evening, having no idea what was about to happen.)

so if living unencumbered means somehow glibly denying that this or that abuse happened again and again and no one seemed to be listening, or winking at the moral failure of one in a position of authority, or otherwise just running from reality because it hurts then what's the point? but if, when we speak of living unencumbered, we mean somehow outliving (surviving) truths that would enslave or negatively redefine us- and using the freedom that follows to inform our journey as we walk alongside of others in community and support, then i'm in.

That there- thats not me
I go where I please
I walk through walls
I float down the liffey
Im not here
This isnt happening
Im not here
Im not here

In a little while Ill be gone
The moments already passed
Yeah its gone
And Im not here
This isnt happening
Im not here
Im not here

Strobe lights and blown speakers
Fireworks and hurricanes
Im not here
This isnt happening
Im not here
Im not here

(thom yorke, circa 2000)

dysconnected

So this is my prayer: that your love will flourish and that you will not only love much but well. Learn to love appropriately. You need to use your head and test your feelings so that your love is sincere and intelligent, not sentimental gush. Live a lover's life, circumspect and exemplary, a life Jesus will be proud of: bountiful in fruits from the soul, making Jesus Christ attractive to all, getting everyone involved in the glory and praise of God.
(philippians 1.9-11- The Message)

i was thinking a lot about the whole phil1 thing the other night before our church board meeting. however, i didn’t want to preach a whole ‘sermon’ on it (a sermon and a board meeting? too much, even for these amazing saints that sit on our board…) so there were some things that i wanted to say but didn’t. it's tough when you know that you only have room for a devotional and yet the message burning within you is bigger than that.

you see, my mentor had asked me a really good question a week earlier and it was still alive in me when i read this passage. the question was a simple one: who are we attracting to this church?

later on that week, with such a question richocheting around in the cavernous hallways of my brain, i was able to separately meet with members of four different households that have just recently begun to call this place and the people who worship here 'home.' what was really neat was how, although completely unsolicited by me, they all volunteered some pieces of the answer to the big question of the day...

in each case these relative newcomers reflected upon how this little church was (my words now) both receiving and accepting; in each case there was a person who had been hurt by the religious establishment and had been prompted by God through another believer to give this whole fellowship road another go...

apparently my answer was right in front of me...
my answer even had faces.
those who are hurting and in need of healing within a loving and accepting environment.

so reading phil1 with all of this life going on was affirming:
love is both our message and our method
love is both our raison d'etre and our modus operendi.
love is the point.

but here's the thing that i didn't have time to share: the love that we share, which originates from the Spirit of the Living God, seems to be best detected by newcomers. they feel, as i mentioned that night, received and accepted. where it can break down in this community, as in any one i imagine, is that once someone is assimilated they are presumed to be connected. this presumption can be dangerous, as people seem to fall through the cracks all the time. i spent a fair bit of energy building into a group of young adults last spring, but over the summer they all drifted elsewhere… we lost their fellowship. God didn’t, but we did.

sometimes in a relational vacuum, people just leave. other times, connectional counterfeits can grow to meet the basic need for connection illegitimately. you know the kind- religious circles are infamous for them: negativity groups, specializing in the establishment and maintenance of malcontent. driving wedges between church people and then continuing to hammer them down over self oriented (as opposed to others oriented) shallow-water issues, these perspective collectives often preach a gospel of criticism and social dissonance... but do so out of basic hurt and disappointment. see, they really sensed that people cared for them once, but hadn't felt it for quite awhile.

back then, everyone had them over for lunch. everyone learned the names and ages of their children. everyone offered them the fellowship that they so desperately longed for. it hooked them because they hadn't expected this- they had heard that churches were clique-y and judgemental. this experience was none of that. but that was for a relatively short time a very long time ago- back when they were 'newcomers.'

i think that there is something important to note here: as we continue to grow and impact the lives of those new to to our fellowships, there is a very real need to be attended to in the basic loving of our regular attenders, lest they become ensnared in the type of negative mindset that becomes ballast for greater and greater works that are trying to get off the ground.

everyone needs to continue to experience the love that initially attracted them. otherwise, embitterment sets in.

embitterment has a distinctive spiritual smell. it is the smell of rotting fruit. it is the smell of good things going to waste simply because no one is doing anything with them. to fail to disciple those who no longer qualify as 'newcomers' is to leave carefully gathered baskets of fruit in the orchard to spoil while racing around to fill more.

paul continues later on in phil3.12-16 with some humble words that i am trying to live. if the mission and the method is love, then i think i need to make every effort to keep it at the front and centre of everything i personally do and say... and, well, some days are better than others:

I'm not saying that I have this all together, that I have it made. But I am well on my way, reaching out for Christ, who has so wondrously reached out for me. Friends, don't get me wrong: By no means do I count myself an expert in all of this, but I've got my eye on the goal, where God is beckoning us onward—to Jesus. I'm off and running, and I'm not turning back.

So let's keep focused on that goal, those of us who want everything God has for us. If any of you have something else in mind, something less than total commitment, God will clear your blurred vision—you'll see it yet! Now that we're on the right track, let's stay on it.

off the record

okay, so here we go again.
it seems if you really want to see the phone lines light up, just bring up either worship music or homosexuality among a group of evangelical pastors... this time the catalyst was a decision to by wal-mart to become corporate members of the Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.
(http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20060821/pl_usnw/national_gay___lesbian_chamber_of_commerce_announces_wal_mart_stores_inc__membership109_xml)
one person made this honest and open statement at the end of an email on a list which invited opinions from many different angles:

"The homosexual community is so suspicious of the Christian community that I am concerned that a boycott would only convince them of our lack of love toward them. But I'd love to hear what other people think about it! These questions always challenge me to rethink my interaction as a Christian with the larger world."

amidst a barrage of, in some cases insightful and in other cases unsightly, comments and opinions on whether or not to boycott wal-mart and the like over their willingness to join said organization, one voice resonnated with the grace of experience, so i wrote the guy to talk more. what i've tried to do is pull some of that ongoing dialogue together here so that it reads a bit like an interview... meet william gardner.

WG: Hi Jolly. Sorry my response took so long. I just got back from a missions trip where we work amongst our own samaritans (ie: acts 1.8) every summer. Then I did a quick family getaway to cottage land. Just got back from that.

JB: hey man. thanks for writing back. i remember hearing of your work from a mutual friend and how it was so obviously Holy Spirit-inspired. love it when God takes on the logistics that would typically hold us back... the same kind of stuff has happened with regard to our missions to sri lanka.

anyway, thank you for your words and, more importantly, i think, the tone of your words. there is so much unlove around- particularly among clergy- that the heart behind a few simple lines here was a cool breeze amidst so much hot air.

WG: Thanks for the kind words. Appreciated!

JB: i have a question, however. context: a guy that had started going to our church asked me to go for lunch about six months ago, so we hooked up at this great little thai place downtown. amidst a whole bunch of other questions and curios, he slipped in a question about my position on gay relationships. didn't think much of it at the time, as the whole lunch felt a bit like an interview- sort of a reverse membership process.

WG: Very cool that you had lunch with him! To me that is the way we are supposed to be. I am going out for a drink with a lesbian who has checked us out on the web and wants to know if she would be welcome at our church.... As she is? Supposed to be going this week. Have another good friend who is a practicing lesbian...errr, actually she is legally married to her partner. She has come a few times to our church and loves the love she feels here.

JB: yeah, well, last sunday he came up at archived me back to our conversation... in particular, the relationship part. then he told me that he is currently in a gay relationship.

WG: Funny how people do that.

JB: right. so, okay, now my rhetoric is being tested. i've blogged a couple times in this direction:

http://e-pistles.blogspot.com/2005/07/others.html
http://northvus.blogspot.com/2006/05/song-for-drella.html

what i am trying to sort out is whether my position held is something that i can maintain publicly amidst possible pressure from those in our church who are spectating... believing in God's grace for themselves without receiving it to overflowing- that others' thirst for it would be quenched through a cup of it given by them in the name of the Lord, ya know?

WG: Yeah, I find people are so low on the giving grace to others scale. Showed in the recent hurly burly online. My goodness- that one guy was attacked by some really stupid comments. I wanted to jump in and call the other guy an asshole. But I have learned... the knives of right wing fundamentalists are very sharp.

JB: i always hold that we are introducing people to Jesus, and that the real work is being done by the Holy Spirit- but what if my friend missed what i was saying when i spoke of sexual purity and how intimate friendships between people of either gender are part of how we share God's love and strength with each other, but that these are not to move to sexual relations... hearing only that "love is love and the pastor said it's okay?"

WG: I think you should not worry about that. That is how we start to want to play the role of something we are not. We are not the Holy Sprit. God is. We are what we are....stumbling, fumbling, bumbling people who ache to dance with God. Indeed we do dance with God. Or rather, God dances with us and lets us stand on His feet as it were. He carries us in this crazy dance. It looks comical, like a little kid standing on his dad's feet does. But what a picture. It makes you smile. It makes you feel warm. Not sappy crap warm. But real warmth. God warmth. That draws people.

Relationship takes time. Trust. In that time and trust, lives are changed. Gently, lovingly, grace-filled-ly.

JB: i remember hearing someone refer to the neighbourhood inwhich your church is situated as being an area with a high gay/lesbian population within its demographic.

WG: Um, we probably have the same percentage that your own neighborhood has. Just some places are a bit safer for people to be honest about who they are.

One of the safest and most honest places I have ever been was a narcotics anonymous meeting with one of my people ( a recovering heroin addict). She wanted me to see her "other church"...her words. She also wanted her other church to see her pastor. They asked me to speak that night, impromptu.

It was awkward as I got up and said: "I am not worthy to speak here because I have listened to all of you speak so stripped down honestly about all kinds of stuff and I feel as though I could slip into some kind of inauthentic bullshit. I do not want to do that in this place. I just want to thank you for letting me be present here tonight. With you. Your stories are precious. Thank you."

That NA meeting was more 'church like' than most churches I have been in over the last 20 years. I was convicted by the reality there. By the presence of God there.

I share that tid bit because, I think a lot of church folks think they are bringing God into a place or situation. That is completely wrong headed. I do not bring God anywhere, He is there ahead of me and asks me to join the wild dance He is already doing in that place.

God is already amongst the Gay people. He just is looking for a few of us to go and be His skin in the situation where He already is.

JB: great story. a nice one to have lived, not simply heard somewhere... i am reminded of one of my favourite bible bits, 1 corinthians 14.24-25, where paul speaks of strangers just showing up 'impromptu' and being so moved by the apparent presence of God at a meeting that they are convicted of the sin in their own life- like what happened for you at the NA gig.

it is important for people to not only feel but actually be loved when they enter God's house- i don't really care who they are because it doesn't seem as though God does.

no- strike that.

i think it is more that God cares deeply about who they are while the people of God often get sidetracked by the sin problems that are so much more evident to the naked eye than the soul being strangled by them is. we fail to see Jesus' blood upon others, finding ourselves ever fixating upon that which our knowledge of good and evil recognizes in others (even if our knowledge of good and evil is skewed by far too much human tradition and history to be objective anyway)... this whole world view being the one thing from which God tried to save us back in the garden anyway.

WG: Yeah. Hey, sorry for blabbering on and on. Thanks for engaging me. I hope you don't mind my being fairly open and honest with you. There are a lot of people in the church world that I would not talk as honestly and real as I just did above. After reading your Warhol blog though, I felt I could be myself with you. Thanks for that.

Blessings and joy be yours!
William.
***

blabbering on and on? no worries from my end... it's what i do best.

but now for some questions with no answers: when, if ever, do we address the whole area of sexuality and fidelity and the like with our gay friends, and how do we do so without coming off all sanctimonious and, as was said above, ready to perform surgery to their current sexual identity with a very sharp right-wing fundamentalist knife?

i keep saying 'they' and 'their' because, within my own sphere i know very few people who are 'out.' there are some natural degrees of social separation that i'm trying to somehow attend to for my part. however, i have had a few frustrating discussions (with one individual in particular) which have brought to articulation some pretty comfortable little prejudiced defaults of others towards clergy. because i am a pastor, i am sometimes relegated by others to as few distinguishable characteristics as your everyday homophobe might for a lesbian... in this view, i am autocratic and judgemental and presumptuously ethnocentric- holding to my own bigotted view of what the scriptures say rather than considering other more open-minded possibilities. i have conceded that this may be true of many in my vocation (thinking of the online skirmish that prompted the conversation with william, for instance) but that one has to be careful not to reverse discriminate...

however, in roll the personal doubts. these brow-beatings have me continually reassessing my own world view, wondering if these relational presumptions are in fact true of me and all that. i don't want them to be. i want to lead everyone who becomes part of our church family in the paths of righteousness, and am eager to discern by God's light, where these paths truly lead and through what terrain.

whatever- tangent. nevermind.

point is, our church is starting to become a place that is investigated every now and then by an openly gay person looking for God... i see this as a blessing because i think it means that God is trusting us with some really spiritually fragile people who have received a lot of heavy disaffirmation in their lives and have somehow heard that our church on the corner is safe.

i want it to continue grow into the identity of a safe place- even for 'others.'
i want the one investigating to sense that this is an environment where we are going after deepening relationships with God and each other and that the Holy Spirit is the one who is doing the convicting.

i guess that i am aware of the 'us and them' scenarios both on and off the record, and am eager to proceed on to the 'we.'

rings and loops

c.s. lewis, one of my heroes, wrote an amazing article long ago entitled 'the inner ring.' in it, he says this:

of all passions, the passion for the Inner Ring is the most skillful at making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things...

as long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. you are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. until you conquer your fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain...

the quest for the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. but if you break it, a surprising result will follow. if, in your working hours, you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. you will be one of the sound craftsmen , and other sound craftsmen will know it. this group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. it will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the professional as a whole against the public, nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. but it will do those things which the profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which the profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. and if, in your spare time, you consort only with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside, that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. but the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric, for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do the things that they like. this is friendship. aristotle placed it among the virtues. it causes perhaps half of the happiness in the world and no Inner Ringer can ever have it.

(c.s.lewis; exerpted from 'the inner ring', taken from 'the weight of glory', circa 1962)
***

if we make loving others our profession, what are the implications of lewis' words here?

i think the implications of this are a feedback loop the builds upon itself with each cycle to a deafening celebration of everything good.

could this, perhaps, be the voice of God himself?

*note: jollybeggar is off to sri lanka until the end of august on a mission. for descriptions and details of what this kind of mission can entail, feel free to read his journals from last year, posted at www.acts1v8.blogspot.com (hyperlinked to your right under the heading 'jollybeggar abroad')

shalom, my friends.

a stranger in court

verily i say unto you...

if exclusion is anti-love then hell is the most exclusive club in town.

it is the nightclub with all the lights and none of the warmth of human conversation- a place where everyone is waiting for someone else more interesting to arrive.

it is being utterly alone in a cold crowd and unable to leave, yet aware of a really great house party just across the street

to what degree does the house of God feel like this to the stranger seeking the taste of hope and the sound of love?
***

you know what i find interesting?
this began as a leftover on another blog- a short metaphor about hell with one little line of question at the end for the institutional church- and turned into something else in the comment box.
(http://northvus.blogspot.com/2006/05/chill.html)

In the end though, the ball falls in both courts...people need to walk into a church and not have an invisible "bar" which all churches are expected to meet. they also need to know that things don't happen overnight. -cinder

okay, this was about hell first, BUT if we are going to see the last line as the point, then let's deal with this idyllic 'stranger' at face value...

the stranger at the end is seeking the taste of hope and the sound of love... one earnestly seeking these things has already come to the net in the 'both courts' analogy and is standing with a hand outstretched, not realizing that we shake hands at the end of a game.

this person is new and doesn't know the rules. this person has come more to hook up with some new people, learn a new game and develop some new aspects of his or her character than to actually win anything. here he or she stands looking and feeling a bit socially awkward, and wondering why the people with whom he or she has come to play are always standing outside the court, poised and ready for a serve instead of coming to the net to greet.

honestly? the fact that the newcomer has even found our little tennis club is a pretty amazing thing, considering all the opposition that has been leveled against him or her from everyone in the spiritual realm who sees even the investigation of a tennis match as a threat.

okay, enough analogizing... i'm getting bogged down and i think i have something to say.

we are sometimes guilty of expecting everyone to know everything about this weird environment called 'church' before they get there. it is very unnatural for people to go to a place in order to investigate an ideology or a theology or a whateverology... especially in canada where we have this fear and mistrust of institutions in general and authority figures in particular. introduce an institution like church with its sovereign authority figure (and all the noisy little subordinate ones like me) into the ongoing life-dialogue of a canadian and then see how ready that canadian is to go to a meeting. as cinder was stating, different people do come bringing with them different experiences which inform everything that happens next, colour everything they perceive and prompt their every action.

so this is where the current rhetoric of the 'go-to church' versus the 'come-to church' links up with our social reality. the church needs to go to the people, not expect the people to come to it. (i think that societyVs has said this once or twice in his social gospel of justice and active love, yeah?) the people of the church need to recognize that if their meetings are the only thing that they do on planet earth then they might be falling a little short of the great commission- no matter how high quality their meetings are.

our church is learning this- she is taking a long time because there were a couple decades under a number of different leaders where the status quo was to just flip the switch on the holy tractor beam and suck the seekers into her midst, but she is indeed learning. she is mobilizing. she is initiating. she is engaging. there is hope for her.

but any canadian who comes in the door has already gotten up, chosen clothes, rearranged sunday breakfast/brunch habits, in some cases battled family before during and after battling traffic lights and the clock which brings them ever closer to the eleventh hour (or whatever- you pick the time), found parking and made their way up the steps and through that door... in the face of, along with everything else, the canadian ethos.

they've already come a long way to meet in the middle.

so to what degree, after all that, does the church feel like "the nightclub with all the lights and none of the warmth of human conversation- a place where everyone is waiting for someone else more interesting to arrive"?

that's the ache i feel. just as societyVs was saying in his comments, i pray that when someone does get here that they will actually want to become part of this fellowship. i pray that, having overcome all of that (not to mention countless other spiritual and psychological missiles launched in the spiritual realm) in order to get to a building marked for the purpose of glorifying God, that the meal at the end of the journey and the laughter and warmth around the table reflect God's love and welcome for that person in every way.

but with all this thought about how to get people to come to the church, i am constantly trying to dream up meaningful ways to leave it.

left, left, left right left

we were talking about this whole holy-militia approach to social issues. a good question came up:

are believers supposed to march or simply stand?

i mean, you can have your own stand on a social issue without marching around trying to spiritually bully people.

next up for incineration- the harry potter series... but narnia is fine.
and we can only drink milk from a christian cow.

onward christian soldiers
marching as to war
with the cross of Jesus
going on before...

i know that the brown shirt variety of believers make it very hard to even briefly consider that the God they serve may be valid, however they are hard right minority and like their islamic counterparts the al qaeda network, they don't speak for us all... they just think they do.

matt7.21-23 comes to mind... it's better to let God do the judging.

but everywhere we look, it becomes apparent that people are getting really tired of a bad-news gospel. take my friend fredcall... please! (jokes)

if i remember correctly, the conversational thread that led to fred's story about his younger brother began when he sent me a note that had been written proudly by a mother whose elementary school-age child had torn nearly the entire book of leviticus out of a bible because of basic justice issues arising from a literal misinterpretation of the scriptures.

i made a remark about this jefferson bible maneouver being simply an anti-religious expression of the same mindset that has books like catcher in the rye and huckleberry finn removed from schools and burned.

and, well, off we went, exploring together the differences between theology and ideology.

Ideology and spirituality are not one and the same. Unfortunately what is passing for fundamentalism (Christian, Judaic, Islamic, Scientologists and Moonies for example) are basing their beliefs on ideology, not spirituality...

Theosophically (or philosophically or politically or scientifically or whaterver) understanding what you are talking about goes a long way toward something along the spiritual line of tackling life's situations. Manchurian Candidate ideology is far short of anything I look upon as spirituality. If you (figuratively you) are marching to war, do you understand why you are marching to war, or are you wound up by an invisible hand- turned key. -fredcall

if i read his attitude towards most things correctly, he is interested in people's ability to sort things out for themselves rather than the simple adoption of a company line with regard to topics of ultimate importance. although fred's approach is confrontational and mildly unorthodox, his quest is the pursuit of enlightenment- not only for himself but for others- and it is fueled by, among other things, love and frustration.

love for his younger brother (which could be pretty much anyone who has been drawn into a faith that has robbed him or her of the capacity for reason amidst the faith) and frustration with empty words and pat answers in an increasingly complicated world.

One time I playfully asked my kid brother what he thought about Free Will versus Determinism (as bandied about by Dante and Milton and lots of others). My kid brother got this far away look in his eyes before saying, "Let me think about this before I answer." To which I said, "Sure, take your time." He went back to his (church) Elders with my question and they told him point blank rote what to say to me. He came back with some kind of response that were not his words. He didn't even understand what he was saying. He had memorized what he was told to reply without the foggiest clue what it all theosophically meant.

I had to bite my tongue cause he's my little brother and it's not my place to embarrass him in front of his fundamentalist friends. I just nodded and left the discussion at that having learned a lesson that I can't engage this (church) ideological bunch in a theosophical discussion.

well, now that is one heckuva playful discussion topic.
yeah, let's keep it nice and light and then we'll go wrestle in the backyard!

yet so much of our take on what's happening with regard to the big questions (and, might i also say, others' big answers) has to do with how we've managed to sort through this one in order to sleep at night.

in the last month, not prompted by anything circumstancial or situational or relational, I have been reading job. interesting book- especially as we read behind the dialogue that takes place between job and his friends. I really believe that these friends love him and that they are sincere, but their theology continues to take them around the horn to one particular notion: job has done evil and is refusing to acknowledge it.

we, the readers, have a pretty nice little role in the story: do nothing and learn all there is to learn vicariously. we read job's words to his friends and feel his frustration. we read his friends' words and hear the conventional, cause-and-effect wisdom. yet we have the luxury of knowing before the whole thing starts that God is in charge and job is, in fact, righteous. the discrepancies and the real spiritual danger for job lie in the fact that these dear friends are being used to cause job to doubt himself, his heart and his life, considering the possible integrity questions that are inherent in the statements that these guys make in order to defend himself against them. when they could be bringing strength, they are instead bringing doubt.

the book of job is a pretty good example that this kind of discussion has been going on for as long as people have been trying to sort out why so many bad things happen to good people in a world created and overseen/manipulated (big fork in the road right here) by a God who is supposed to be sovereign.

but will one man's answer ever really satisfy the longings of another man's soul? hmm.

i was thinking about an interesting quote by brian d mclaren from his book finding faith and decided to try to google it in order to cite his words correctly. i ended up at the site of a blogger whose online handle is based upon the same quote by cs lewis as my own... (http://jollyblogger.typepad.com/jollyblogger/2006/04/tim_challies_on.html)
well anyway, whether by free will, determinism or just a goofy coincidence, this guy has a post dealing with the emergent church... citing and acquiescing with, in particular, one guy's (a certain tim challies) misgivings with mclaren's take on the emergent church in the postmodern world:

The faith McLaren commends is a faith that always questions, always doubts. It seems that the only faith McLaren hates is the faith of a person who knows what he believes and is convicted by Scripture and by plain reason that what God has revealed is truth--true truth. As others have observed, the real enemy of the Emerging Church is conservative, biblical Protestantism.

well, regardless of challies' feelings about brother brian, the description cited is exactly what makes the work of mclaren resonnate with me. since when is questioning wrong? although Jesus likened people to sheep, i don't think that he intended for us to adopt the orwellian animal farm sheep's characteristic blind, unthinking ascent. Jesus also said that we are to have the faith of a child and, as you know, little children ask a million questions a day because it is in seeking answers to questions that people grow. if there's any point at all to this, it is that our asking of questions is as crucial to our brother's journey as it is to our own.

a friend of mine is a successful financial planner who was once a seminarian and decided that he just had too many questions of God to continue. well, whether he missed some sort of calling or not is between him and God, as he seems to be doing quite well managing other people's fortunes for fun and profit. i like going out for a guinness with him because the conversation is always engaging and always challenging.

i once said to him that if he were to ever meet someone who could ask him questions that stretched him and ripped conversational remote control from his hands long enough for him to begin searching for the answers, his faith journey might resume. you see, he knows that no one can respond to his questions with answers that satisfy his reason, so he does not have to change or grow.

i think that the primary factor at work in the heart and life of the 'questioning faithful' is that person's desire to actually discover the answers to the questions posed. sometimes we just ask questions to make points. who has time for all that rhetoric?

as for all this marching, standing, and burning things, there is nothing wrong with being activistic. however, sometimes we can be so convinced that we are the only ones who are right that everyone left is a liberal or heretic. the important spiritual, not ideological, discernment helps us to determine whether to march or to stand still to listen to the message on the wind. (yep, that's a fredcall soundbyte)

how much love is there in calling anyone an anything?

starting point?

a friend of mine who used to play in our band is a new-age pantheist. i don't think he'd mind being categorized, as in his view we are all God and simply struggling through varying stages of self-realization and memory. it shouldn't matter to a real part of god if other parts of god have the wrong picture of what it is... it is not the worship of the other parts of itself that a god desires.

so he was talking to me one time about zen moments where one is simultaneously enlightened and confused, and it put me in mind of the richard bach novel illusions. the book relates the adventures of a reluctant messiah. in the story, the main character (richard) is a travelling barnstormer who meets another (albeit suspiciously perfect) barnstormer named don. don never has to change his oil or polish his engine- he's got it all together. richard decides to disciple under don, a new guru.

as will happen within a fallen world of action, reaction and causality, richard's plane needs some repairs one day, and the two find themselves in a hardware store for parts. richard is moving down an aisle when he hears the most beautiful soulspoken music of his life coming from another part of the store. he follows the sonic fragrance to its source, finding don playing a toy guitar in a makeshift toy aisle (how many really good toys are there going to be in a hardware store?).

'i didn't know you could play guitar...'
'what kind of messiah would i be if i couldn't do something simple like play guitar? the only difference between you and me is that my belief in my ability to play guitar is greater than your belief in yours. some people have to practice for ten years before they actually believe that they can play...' (okay, really sloppy paraphrase, but that's the gist of it)

and so on. well, if godhood and guitar prowess are related in any way, then i think that the realization of my friend's own personal godhood is still a long way off. he recently moved to korea and doesn't have to practice as hard or even change his strings. he sends us photographs from time to time, but never song ideas.
***

my friend kinkazzo spoke recently in an email of his restlessness and a desire to unite with the universal mind. he outlined a story of how he had once launched an online cosmic consciousness group that caught on and grew so quickly that they were even to the point of discussing the prospect of holding a convention. yet amidst all of this excitement, and the realization of a lifelong dream, my friend found himself in a funk and told the whole lot of them to piss off so he could shrink back once again into relative obscurity.

i think that it must be really hard to be a god.

it's frustrating to author something that ultimately means nothing. chasing after the wind or whatever. certainly in kinkatso's case, the experience is heavily reminiscent in its conclusions of the teacher in ecclesiastes: it still speaks of an unfulfilled desire to be a necessary part of something bigger than big, realer than real, and above all, satisfying. although he had created something 'ex nehilo', it was not from love but from restlessness that the new incarnation arose. the thrill was all in the chase.

I had something going there, just as I always wanted. But I couldn't follow through, I lost my appetite: that's the way I am. I lose interest quickly, and my dynamism disappears... This is surely due to my disquieting mind, my irregular personality and my pressive character. Right.
But why?
What am I looking for?
Why couldn't I keep it going and create a REAL movement? It would have been sooooo good: just the way I liked -- people talking in-depth; people looking at important issues; people being spiritual and superconscious.
Damn it: I really wanted to CREATE A STAR!
A "conveyor" for my Fire.
A channelling for my Inspiration, my Creativeness -- (all capitalised!)
Egocentric? Sure, but what a goal!
And I ruined everything with my instability...

you can't create something real from something unstable. you can't create something that is perfect, balanced and needing nothing to survive from a personal need to create something that is blah blah blah. it's strength is tied inextricably to its author but realized in the quality of the materials used. it's like trying to create free energy with a mechano set and a bunsen burner... some things cannot be created, only discovered.

a laugh for the man in the eyes of the world trying to make things work
tried to create a new jerusalem and ended up with new york...
(bruce cockburn)

look at humankind. our greatest strengths seem to reflect that perfect ideal personified that we have named God. (i love how God dodged that one from the beginning, knowing that if we were to be given a specific name to address him as, we would just use it wrongly anyway... so he let us identify him in the most meaningful way we could) our greatest weaknesses, by choice, seem to be in direct contrast to those strengths.

however, i just can't subscribe to nietzsche's 'beyond good and evil' thing- that subscribing to a morality which jives with universal law on things like 'goodness' and 'justice' is somehow subjecting oneself to being repressed; and that God's choice to permit free will is evidence of his weakness as a deity: a flaw indicative of the fallacy of God- i choose to push against that one. free will is our greatest gift- superceding even Jesus in God's grace. i mean, Jesus was the remedy for the bad stewardship of our free will which resulted in a severed relationship between love personified and goodness actualized: between the creator of all things and his crowned of creation. the ability to choose came first.

but as long as we choose to be gods we will be frustrated.
we create, but it's never out of the raw material of love alone.

do you think that all creation came from nothing but the word of the intelligent designer in need of an outlet one day? although the creation story begins with the spirit of God hovering over the face of the deep, as it were, how figuratively or literally are we to take this? i love the idea that everything good (including time) was concentrated to a specific location having no dimensions and a specific moment having no duration- a starting point only- and that the voice of God is what the ancients a thousand years from now, schooled in antiquities and curios, will call 'the big bang.'

over the next few days, kinkazzo and i continued the dialogue further. originally i was going to just copy and paste the whole thing in the comment box of this blog, but then i thought 'gee, maybe that's rude...' so instead i've just linked his blog on the side.

(tangentary questions: in this information-processing epoch, to what degree is any dialogue between two consenting adults a private matter? especially among bloggers where so much intellectual property is released into the public domain? i don't know the answers to these questions, except that i believe the more we can interact with each other's ideas, either directly or indirectly, the more opportunity we have to grow as people. i still struggle with what that means pertaining to 'obscenity,' censorship, and ideas that contribute to the moral and spiritual unravelling of our planet, however. my parenthetical point is that, like effects without cause or yang without ying, i can't seem to isolate and articulate ideas from the dialogue without at least partially citing the ideas in italics which led to them... hope that's cool, k-man!)

anyway, he cited eregina:

God is eternally partially self-ignorant. If he knew all of himself, he could define himself. If he could define himself, he would be finite.

but is the lack of definition an inability or a refusal?

i mean, i recognize the logic that binds the infinity of God to the unknown and incalculable, but what if God exists beyond logic as he exists beyond time and beyond evil? what if that which God does further affirms his capacity to be all things and do all things, whereas what he does not do just continues to be that which he has simply not done, neither defining nor deifying him?

"I AM who I AM"- nothing logically comparable- no appropriate simile or metaphor when it comes to his power or his holiness. then the questions return to that old human stomping ground: what does God do? what has he done? what is he responsible for? or, my personal favourite: what is he NOT responsible for?

But all he knows of himself is what he has created. What is created is his knowledge or represents the expressed, revealed and therefore finite aspects of his actions and his knowledge

what is potential is his mystery: mysterious in him and to him. i don't think that God is a mystery to himself. it is like that guitar story- until don had played guitar, all that richard could possibly say was that don had never played guitar- no, not even that... all he could say was that, to his knowledge, don had never played guitar. were don to share, would it be necessary for him to qualify his ability by saying 'yes, of course i knew how to play before playing' of might it be enough for the playing of guitar to be within the realm of don's capability, but not, as yet, something that he had done? does 'if can do' logically imply 'then has done' or are there in fact things that God can do that he hasn't done and, seated outside of time, will never do? there must be. i mean, there are things that i am capable of doing that i've never done- how much moreso God?

i agree that our causative, hierarchical thinking is problematic at best, mainly due to its subjectivity. through this lens we quantify, qualify and classify, attempting to catch a glimpse of some meaning. that's probably the problem. we attempt to examine and explain the rest of the world (let's not even bother with theology, let's just scientifically and experiencially comment on our existence alone, like descartes) from this tiny and subjective point of context rather than to seek to comment on this piece of turf upon which stand against the backdrop of everything around us.

God is caused by what it causes; is made necessary by what it necessitates; we cannot comprehend. I cannot comprehend, and I can't accept it.

i cannot comprehend but i am okay with accepting it. i find the whole fallacy of entitlement to be a bit of a red herring anyway- to conclude that we are entitled to answers that allign with our reason is a bit presumptuous, i think. if i as a man believe that i can somehow comprehend the mind of God without being God, then surely it must follow (although probably not very logically, as my brain doesn't work that way most days...) that i would be able to comprehend the mind of a woman without being one? i mean, there is probably much less difference between the thinking and purposes of a man and a woman than there is between a man and a relationally able, conscious creator of all good things both seen and unseen. yet what an incredible mystery my wife can be somedays...

dare we presume to be capable of drawing finite parameters around one who is, by virtue of basic doctrines like omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, perfection and holiness, absolute and without parameters apart from those which attempt to address his very nature? that might be a bit much for a creation to accomplish, using only created materials and means to measure and summarize the immeasurable. might that be like trying to use a ruler to measure the mass of a beam of light- the tool selected to do the job being not only insufficient, but in fact irrelevent? rather than a box to keep him in, perhaps our understanding of God would be better served by trying to sort out the things that are at the centre of who God is: the things that characterize that location having no dimensions, that instant having no duration. it is from there and then that love and life did begin.

so play the game of existence to the end of the beginning
(lennon/mccartney)

time to go practice...

the L word

been thinking a lot about love lately. (that L-word)

i know that this word comes up a lot in the stuff i write and all that, but this past week the whole idea took a bit of a turn in my head.

we were sitting around in the comfy chairs at one of the many coffee bars in this area when someone interrupted what had, up until that time, been a relatively casual conversation, with a heavy: 'what has God been teaching you lately?'

silence- there always is as everybody tries to change gears and get all holy. onto our faces go those renaissance fresco looks of otherworldly preoccupation, while the internal scandisc busily hums away with the prompt 'find:*.*God.spk'

to my surprise and delight, there was something there. lately God has been tugging at my heart concerning the centre of everything i am about.

love is supposedly the source of everything good we do, yet often we fail at the realization of it. why? well for me it crystalized this way over my really amazing cup of 'redeye': if love is only an external expression then its source is merely good intention. to put it another way: if love is a thing i do rather than a thing i am then it will only be as successful as my best human effort to distribute precious cargo. if love is something that only goes outward, then it is too shallow in origin to be of any real import.

the passage of scripture that deals with annoying surface level love being compared musically to the clanging of pots and pans (1cor13.1-3) hints at this, but i don't think that i ever really saw the implications the way they settled in on my heart that day: if i refuse to allow myself any self-love, (deeming it egotistical or vain or whatever) always trying to somehow talk myself out of feelings of personal satisfaction or success in order to strive for 'something higher' then i render myself incapable of experiencing and expressing love to or for anyone or anything that falls in any way short of the ridiculous ideals that i have set for myself. talk about vanity?

no, it seems to me that, in order to completely give love for others i need to first have some within me to give. that which we give we must have first been willing to receive.

we are not love generators. i don't believe anyone but God is capable of that one. the best we can do is accept the love expressed by God through his creation (which includes other people) and then pass it on to others. if a person like me wants to give love away, that person must first learn how to humbly (without all that false humility crap) accept it beforehand.

it occurs to me that perhaps that is true humility: graciously accepting expressions of love from others, being fully commited to giving every last molecule of it away to someone else.

in a cheesey 70's song, the band 'sweet' claimed that 'love is like oxygen' and then went on to fail miserably in making the simile stick. i don't think love is like oxygen- it is more fundamental than that. i think that love is more comparable to energy: it can not be created or destroyed, only transferred. where love has not been received, there there is no love to give.

(note: in the u2 lyric below, the simile is not between love and everything on the list, but between ONE'S NEED for love and everything on the list... to me that is quite an important distinction. by the way, as long as we're talking about need, go to www.live8live.com and add your name to the list if you haven't already. let's urge the G8 leaders to make this a year of jubilee - leviticus 25.10-17)
***
like a desert needs rain
like a town needs a name
I need your love
like a drifter needs a room
hawkmoon
i need your love

like a rhythm unbroken
like drums in the night
like sweet soul music
like sunlight
i need your love

like coming home
and you don’t know where you’ve been
like black coffee
like nicotine
i need your love

when the night has no end
and the day yet to begin
as the room spins around
i need your love

like a phoenix rising needs a holy tree
like the sweet revenge of a bitter enemy
i need your love
like the heat needs the sun
like honey on her tongue
like the muzzle of a gun
like oxygen
i need your love

like thunder needs rain
like the preacher needs pain
like tongues of flame
like a blind man’s cane
like a needle in a vein
like someone to blame
like a thought unchained
like a runaway train
i need your love

like a fighter’s rage
his dreams in a cage
like faith needs a doubt
like a freeway out
i need your love

like powder needs a spark
like lies need the dark
i need your love

(hawkmoon 269, bono, '87)

hemispheres

*note: this is all i could salvage from a blog response that crashed during publishing... hope it makes a little bit of sense

in 'taken hostage' we were talking about being social thongs…
well, we weren't actually talking about that, but our conversation took my imagination there...being stuck between two virtually identical, yet perfectly symmetrical and therefore completely opposite hemispheres. the thong does not divide nor bind together, it simply fits best in the middle because of its design.

well, there are parables and then there are just really bad analogies.

anyway, i left off with “if synergy is spiritual and God is receiving less worship from human beings who know him and each other personally, then it is as though hell holds our relationships hostage. all this with the a powerfully imminent and evident change in the holy weather on the horizon… sounds exactly like what i would do if i wanted to be God and had to settle for eternal damnation instead- nowattamean?”

and Sushi said
I've been thinking about this for a while now, thanks for putting it into words. Now how do we avoid it happening in our fellowship with others and in our relationship with God?

it’s not that, for awhile now, sushi has been thinking of buying some racy underwear (or avoiding buying it, for that matter- who’s to say?) it is that she has found herself, once or twice, in between two halves of the same bum. we’ve all experienced this and it drives many of us crazy.

relational triads exist as yet another example of the wisdom contained in solomon's reflection found in ecclesiastes: ‘nothing new to see here… move along.’ however, we can’t just indiscriminately apply solomon’s sword solution to any dispute in question, giving each plaintiff half of the conflict situation as their settlement any more than solomon could.
(I kings 3.16-28)

i guess what i mean here is that we can’t avoid this stuff- it is part of our free will complex- and so God equips us with what we need to acknowledge it and then address it accordingly. for me it all breaks down when i start attending to the wrong voices.

i’m sitting with two people who don’t want to be there. i’m thongboy- the ‘mutual friend.’ as much as i want to be a neutral party that facilitates a healthy resolution to the conflict, i have brought something of my own to the table that can blow the whole process to bits: i’m not actually neutral.

i try to be. i love both of my friends as equally as i can, and recognize that both own parts of this conflict that they need to sign off on. that’s fine. the problem is that i value the relationships i have with both friends respectively and so i am in danger of compromising in favour of my own self interest. fear and insecurity start to sneak in and i start wondering which person is going to leave mad at me or who is going to leave the church or whatever.

solomon’s sword starts looking really appealing.

but i’m attending to the wrong dialogue- allowing the inner one that no one but i can hear to shape the outer one to which i’ve been called as a friend and fellow. the relationships that have been entrusted to me which involve these other two friends are now being held hostage by my own interpersonal issues. the circle grows bigger... pretty soon we’ll have our own twisted anti-support group where we all bring our stuff and start working it out on each other.

a lot of churches unwittingly operate in this manner, i imagine.

so what are we to do? invite someone else in now to mediate this relational tree?

yep.

God is eager to step into that role. sure it's a problem that he chooses to use regular people as his instruments, but there is hope in the fact that the intrapersonal (self-concept, insecurity, fear) issues of regular people are internal and between us and he who created us. the Holy Spirit mediates here, clearing our heads enough, silencing our own internal dialogue enough that we can hear others speak and can focus on what he wants to do with all of the interpersonal relationships in the room.

is it insightful or prophetic to be able to step outside of oneself long enough to see things as they are, rather than as they appear to an emotionally volatile creature?

i don't know. i mean, somedays, worship leaps from us, other days it seeps from us. the song of a soul set free is the song of God, but there are many different types of freedom and life is, among a million other things, a process of self-discovery. the way we see things is based on who what where when and how we are today.

i think a really good way to avoid relational hijackings is to recognize how vulnerable we are to them. oswald chambers speaks of unguarded strengths, and how the great heroes of faith often fell in the area of their prowess. a person in ministry is already about people, which means that people are probably going to be the greatest manipulatives used by hell to thwart anything God wants to do through them.

it's amazing that hell does the same things the same ways and we still fail to recognize them when we are stuck in the middle.
***
"if i were a good man i'd understand the spaces between friends"
(roger waters, from the 1970 pink floyd album 'atom heart mother')