The Good Word

“When it comes to relationships, I’m the dumbest one,
And I don’t mean just with girls, I mean with everyone.
Your illustrations always point out just what’s wrong with me,
It’s chapstick and chapped lips and things like chemistry.

I’m not a fan of Christian rock. The fact that it has to be labeled as such, and given it’s own radio station so that it doesn’t have to compete against the All-American Rejects, is a pretty good indication that it fundamentally falls short of both epithets. I do, however, really like Relient K. But what makes them different?

Well, primarily it’s the fact that they’re actually good. If you’ve ever heard “I Can Only Imagine” you know that no rendition of that song has ever been pleasing to God, ever.

What? Come on Zach, that song is all about God, and doesn’t God like all hymns? I’m no prophet, but I’m pretty sure that the answer is a resounding “No.”

How do I know? Because reason and experience have given me at least a rough idea of who God is. God, even if you don’t intellectually assent to any of his other attributes, is the only being that exists for his own sake, the only uncreated thing, and the source of all that is created. He’s the definition of beauty, truth, and goodness because he is the source of existence itself.

As the author of creation, God wants us to use the powers he has given us for the sake of bettering and beautifying the world. The problem is that there is nothing uplifting or beautiful about “I Can Only Imagine.” There just isn’t. Nothing about it that acknowledges human dignity or divine charity.

On the other hand, there is something beautiful about things like “Stairway to Heaven,” the movie “Dumb and Dumber,” and The Office. Not that I think these examples are the pinnacle of human achievement, but they have done far more for humanity – making us laugh, stirring our emotions, and acknowledging the beauty of human life – than any repetitious and meaningless worship song ever has.

So, what makes Relient K different? Well, unlike tunes such as “Blessed Be Your Name,” “Mary Did You Know?” and, Heaven help us, “Jesus Take the Wheel,” their songs actually combine musical talent with a meaningful understanding of what humans actually love, think about, and strive for.

Today’s song of the day is about losing a cellphone at an amusement park, and yet it asks much of listener. It acknowledges that man is the sort of being that wonders how he has the ability to write a symphony and yet gets chapped lips, how he can love roller coasters and be entrusted with the task of seeking the truth about his world and his creator, and how he can be given a conscience which tells him he ought to be perfect, but a will that causes him to fall so short of that perfection.

Just like the Bible Study that teaches an 8-year-old that “Jesus” is the correct answer to any question, bad Christian music, art, T.V., and literature (a gross misuse of the word) gets by on stock answers that do nothing but encourage the sort of shallow facade that is not only useless to man, but displeasing to God.

Can I relate to you the way you relate to me?
Can you help me out with my chemistry?
I don't want to be perceived the way I am,
I just want to be perceived the way I am.

Who is God?

Is God that bedtime story we tell so that children will be good? Is He the leader of a secret club, a cult, the sole purpose of which is to shower its leader with gifts and praise? Is He a jailer – someone who makes a law and hides it, then locks us up and throws away the key when we inevitably transgress this hidden code?

Hold that thought.

Aristotle was a Greek. He lived several hundred years before the birth of Christ, he served as a tutor to Alexander The Great, and in his spare time he wrote extensively on nearly every science we practice today (biology, geometry, metaphysics, rhetoric, dramaturgy, politics, etc). He was the greatest mind of his time, and to put it lightly, the western world is still running off Aristotle’s intellectual fumes.

Again, Aristotle was Greek. He wasn’t a pantheist, but he also certainly wasn’t a Jew. Aristotle did, however, feel pretty confident that he knew God.

Aristotle thought that there had to be a God, there had to be a source, there had to be Being Itself. Knowing more than perhaps any man had ever known before him about how the world worked, Aristotle posited that there must be some thing, some conscious source from which all things emanated. This thing was the source of truth (it was the explanation, the reason, the logic behind all things as they were), goodness (it was law, it determined each thing’s purpose and how could a thing functioning against itss purpose be good?), and beauty (it gave order and substance to the world).

Hold that thought.

Today on Stuff Christians Like, a blog that I’ve read ever since I started using Google Reader, the author published a post about a Harley Davidson ad which appeared in last week’s Sports Illustrated. The ad read:

"For over 100 years, we've unleashed a lot of souls. We've made men bolder, women stronger and shrinks poorer."

Jon proceeds to comment:

That is adorable.

The idea that sculpted metal and rubber from a factory in Milwaukee is going to unleash your soul is so over the top ludicrous that it travels past ridiculous and comes all the way back to hilarious.

…

Am I the only one that wishes every idol was as honest as Harley Davidson?

By “idol” Jon means a false idol, like the golden calf the Israelites made after their Exodus from Egypt, and I take issue with Jon taking Harley Davidson’s claim so lightly.*

The company says that they have “made men bolder, women stronger and shrinks poorer.” I’m sorry, but if they’ve actually done any of that then they’ve been doing more for humanity than most local churches. If they’ve done any of that they’ve been doing good. If they’ve done any of that they’ve been doing God’s work.

The problem with God is that he’s not a set of rules, he’s not a jailer, he’s not even a cult leader. He’s Truth. He’s Goodness. He’s Beauty. And if your Harley Davidson motorcycle can do more to help a man realize his nature and be happy, then, by all means, run our churches out of business. Seriously.

Introduce some free market ideals here. Would your church draw the numbers it does if it didn’t have two electric guitars in band and four projection screens? Would you be there if it didn’t?

God is in whatever is good, true, and beautiful and if there is more goodness and beauty in a motorcycle than in your church, Lord help you.

In my personal search for truth, goodness, and beauty I’ve found only two seemingly inexhaustible sources of it: my soon-to-be church (Catholic) and creation itself. Pop music is a close third.

Now, do note that I don’t think salvation is going to come through a Harley Davidson motorcycle, at least not typically. But, it seems a lot more likely that you’ll learn who God is cruising America’s highways than at some Sunday services I’ve attended.

*Now, I’m not dissing on Jon here, nor am I trying to talk behind his back (I feel like posting a rebuttal on his site would be like a Little League team getting pissed about the outcome of the World Series and challenging the loser to game of sandlot ball).

I was thinking as I drove home from work on Friday, that even if cars end up eating the ozone layer and baking us all to a crisp, in some way, God has sanctioned their existence in the pleasure that a dog experiences when he sticks his head out the window.

Mallory responded to this thought by asking why it is that dogs love sticking their heads out the window of a moving vehicle, but they hate it if you blow in their faces....

What Has Jesus to do With Halloween

Every Sunday the bulletin at Divine Redeemer makes me smile. This week, among other things, it advertised a church sponsored haunted house. That's right, not a Fall Festival, not Trunk-or-Treat, but an honest to goodness, scare the pants off you, vampires and werewolves, haunted house.

One of the many thing I love about the church is that they take humanity as it is and go from there. They don't start with the assumption that if we know Jesus we're perfect already and just need to be kept that way.

Championing Halloween shouldn't just be the job of the Catholic Church though, Christianity in general should realize what a perfect opportunity for evangelism it is when, for a month out of the year, everyone in America acknowledges the existence of a spiritual reality.

I don't know about you, but I would much rather talk to a pantheist or the pagan about Christianity than an agnostic or an atheist. At least the devil-worshipper is working with all the same dimensions of reality as the Christian. They acknowledge that a spiritual world exists and that it interacts with the physical world in a meaningful way.

Every child, unless otherwise guided, by the age of 12 will have a fully developed set of pantheistic beliefs. They'll see God in nature, in music, in their friends and family. They'll see evil in the destroying power of divorce and family strife, in ignorance and hatred, in alcohol and even in the fact that the more they know, the less sun-shiny their world seems. Everyone feels the transcendent in music, in physical exertion, in the fuzzy feelings of a first love, the rush of the wind and a warm summer rain. It is only our teenage years or an earlier and more unnatural introduction to materialism that will either make us cling to our false gods or throw them, along with our stuffed animals and LEGOs into an attic, only to be held from that point forward with nostalgia rather than a truly spiritual fascination.

There is something so hard-hearted about not believing in any spiritual reality of any sort, and something ignorant about a Christianity that doesn't realize the real spiritual good that Harry Potter, Eragon, and Halloween are doing.

Christians should be able to embrace Halloween as the only time the most people will acknowledge that a spiritual reality exists at all.

It's amazing how much the shadow tells us about the light and how ineffectual a battle we would be fighting if we set out to conquer rap music, immodest clothing and fast food without allowing Christians and non-Christians alike to see that our battle "is not against enemies of flesh and blood...but against the spiritual forces of darkness of this present age."

Also, the bulletin announced that the Colorado Springs Catholic Young Adult Group would have their monthly "Theology on Tap" meeting at Jack Quinn's at 7pm on Wednesday. Nothing like a Bible study at an Irish pub. Seriously. These people really know what's up.

Your Halloween video:

Wow. In the words of Mike: "oh my kittens." That was a crazy day. Not so much because of the day itself, but because I have to do it again, and while I spent two weeks preparing for yesterday, I only had 16 hours to prepare for today.

The Three Step Plan

Class went well, it really did. The kids were quiet and well behaved. I didn't stutter over my material, I didn't forget to mention anything too major and the worst part of the day was when I accidentally saved over my book check-out document with a temporary attendance spreadsheet.

In our second session of English class today we read the poem "There is no frigate like a book" by Emily Dickinson. These kids are going to get their fill of Dickinson, but I thought beginning with that poem was especially appropriate because of the subject matter and the fact that it is ingrained upon the deepest part of my gray-matter in the voice of Mr. Tobey who read it in my own 7th grade English class.

The poem is as follows:

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
Of prancing poetry.
This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

I loved telling the kids about how Emily Dickinson slowly developed into an incurable recluse, and how her poems were only gathered and published after her death when they were found stuffed into her desk and even into the walls of her bedroom where she spent most of her adult life. For my money she is one of the greatest minds that ever lived and perhaps it was because she confined herself to the small beauties of her hometown and childhood home. Emily only traveled further than a few miles from Amherst once, and that was to visit her father who was serving as a congressman in Washington, D.C.

It was the simplicity of Emily Dickinson's life that really allowed her to become a great writer and thinker. She knew very little of the world, she had very few books to read, but what she knew she knew exceptionally well.

It occurred to me the other day that to be fully human - to be really living the human experience - only three things are essential, and that our models of humanity, from Shakespeare and Dante to John Paul II and Ronald Reagan, have shown us what this progression looks like.

1. Know Yourself - The truth is often so incomprehensibly simple that it can take us years to wrap our minds around even a small aspect of it. From our birth, our education should not be centered on "doing," but on being. It is not and has never been our job to find a profession or to learn a trade, but it turns out these things happen naturally as we learn to see the native beauty in ourselves and the world around us. But how does this education take place? Well, as I see it, if you are given access to formal education then the best way is through the masterworks of Western literature:Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton. When you are done with them: raking leaves, swimming, taking long walks, stargazing, playing with children, cooking your own meals, building a fire. That's how we become human. Neither the means nor the definition of humanity have ever changed, we've just developed an increasing number of inventions to distract us.

2. Make Yourself - As we digest the beauty of the universe and the produce of minds who have devoted their lives to pursuing the highest truths of the nature of man, we slowly begin to see the disparity between what we are and we ought to be. Between Jesus, Socrates, King Arthur, Odysseus and Atticus Finch, we have no excuse for wanting to stay the way we are and not conforming ourselves to a higher standard.

3. Make Yourself Known - "Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree rotten and its fruit rotten, because a tree is known by its fruit." - Matthew 12:33. Most literature, poetry, and culture in general today is a result of men forcing their way past self-knowledge to making themselves known. I can't imagine that a mind like Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson could do anything but write. You can see in their words that no matter how intricate and layered their meaning and intent, the composition was the effortless and natural consequence of comprehending real and abiding truth. I don't want to make this sound like reaching nirvana or anything like that, but I can't imagine how such understanding and comprehensive souls could do anything but provide, out of their abundance, signs and symbols that might act as intermediaries for the rest of us. Much like the atoning sacrifice of Christ, these giants of intellect devoted their lives and often their deaths to building a bridge between us and the truth.