Line from “Citizens” currently striking me: “Everyone born is illegal when love is the law of the land.”
A quatrain ahead of Mother’s Day:
Thoughtfulness requires thought.
It’s not a thing that can be brought.
So quit your feeling all distraught
And take a sec to think.
His Cross is not a coat of arms. It’s a teacher, a master, a goad.
Just finished reading: ”New Eyes: Forgiveness is not erasing” (2024) by Amy Low, whose main idea is that there is danger that forgiveness will unjustly erase the past. There is also a danger that unforgiveness will spoil potential futures for aggrieved and offender alike. Let us avoid both ditches as we walk the path.
I finally feel comfortable with my grasp of the relationship between non-retaliation, forgiveness, and reconciliation, together with God’s will regarding all three:
Mercy is by definition unjust.
Just finished reading “Die With Me: Jesus, Pickton, and Me” (2006) by Brita Miko, who argues that we need to love and forgive even the worst of sinners if we’re going to follow Jesus. My take: Not if you think forgiveness should be granted without confession and repentance, as it seems Miko does.
To love God is to want to delight Him.
Is it passionate love
Or just a love for passion? ✏️ 🎤 🎵
May all of our eros be agapified.
To insist it is my civic duty to read about, think about, and talk about tyrants only augments their tyranny. Ignoring tyrants is my preferred mode of protest. NB: This is not the same as saying I will ignore the effects their tyranny has on my neighbors.
The degree to which you don’t buy the fundamental idea I put forward in this essay that amends are necessary for a just forgiveness is the degree to which you can stand even more amazed at the love of Jesus in subjecting Himself to crucifixion to provide that (proxy) amends. You may not believe amends are necessary for forgiveness (and if you don’t, that itself may be an indication of Jesus’ ideological success), but Jesus’ contemporaries and forbears did think so. If the idea is mere cultural contingency rather than ethical fact, that only makes Jesus’ sacrifice all the more amazing in its condescension—and thus more apt as reason to sit at His feet and align yourself with His overall ethical program.
Some introspection while walking home from a nighttime walk with Matt after an evening when I failed miserably to bring together a cohesive Spring Break plan for the family:
Too often at home and at church and, historically at least, at work, I stand opposed to and suspicious of what’s being brought by others. Blame eighteen years as an academic. (I’m using that term very loosely to include K-12 and undergraduate.) Blame a natural bent of my mind.
But that’s not what’s gonna get it done. When I say “it,” I mean togetherness, I mean unity of vision and will. I mean a sense of belonging and cherishing. I mean laughter.
No, what I need if I want those things at my kitchen table, in church, and at work is the “Yes! And…” spirit of improv. Bring myself and what I have to offer in a positive sense, sure—and honor that which others bring of themselves. “Yes, that’s right! And we can do this…” That’s so good. That’s the way.
Part of 1 Corinthians 16 is as a good a motto as one can find: “Do everything in love.” Since so much of my life comprises words, and since the biblical proverbialists, Jesus, and James all emphasize the power and importance of our words, I’m going to provisionally subset the motto to concentrate its effect: “Say everything in love.”
“The secret to faith is to have two loves: one for God and the other for whoever happens to be standing in front of you at any given time” (Eloy Cruz to Jimmy Carter, as quoted by Randall Balmer in The Christian Century).
Our culture’s current and very understandable hangups about the injustice of forgiveness can be resolved by defining it as threefold:
- dismissal (of a wrong) as impetus to retaliation
- dismissal as impetus to resentment
- dismissal as impetus to alienation or reduction in standing
That list is not only a division, but also perhaps a progression: First, in very clear obedience to our Lord and to keep our communities and society from tearing themselves to shreds, we refuse to retaliate, despite our probably justifiable anger.
Second, and perhaps only as (a lot of) time passes but facilitated by both free ventilation and the wrongdoer’s repentance, we moderate our anger until it thoroughly dissipates. This part is an art, not a science: In the knowledge that we’re all quite capable of sin and likely blind to some of our own wrongdoing, we constantly tack toward total abatement of animosity and we refuse to cling to ill will; however, knowing that there are indeed things God hates, neither do we falsify anger’s cessation. As long it hangs around, we give it air when it’s time to give it air and let it motivate us to good deeds and systemic rectification.
Third, and properly only once the offender has confessed his or her sin, made amends, requested forgiveness, and otherwise shown ample evidence of complete repentance, we open the door to the end of ostracism, estrangement, and other relational sanctioning.
Technically, the second and third are interchangeable in order. Anger can and does linger even after witnessing repentance. But often, wrongdoers remain unrepentant, or at least inauthentically or unsatisfactorily repentant, which, while it renders the second form of forgiveness difficult, depending on the gravity of the offense renders the third form of forgiveness so hazardous to wrongdoer and injured alike that love requires it be withheld entirely. It is thus listed here last, even though, ideally, it’s something we should want, and deeply. If we love our enemies, how can we not?
God can and on some occasions does extend the last kind of forgiveness in the absence of amends because He is unassailable, rendering forgiveness less hazardous. But even He, for the sake of moral hazards to the sinner and the sinner’s neighbors, usually does not. We are to confess our sin against Him, point gratefully to the Cross as our amends, request forgiveness, and bear fruit in keeping with repentance, including making amends with our neighbors when our sin against God is coterminous with our sin against them.
There are many kinds of love. The most extraordinary kind is the love God has for us—it’s eternal. And then there’s the love parents have for their kids—bigger than you can possibly imagine. There’s friend love, which can be magical, but it can also change over time. And then there’s married love. This kind of love is extraordinary, because it requires so much, and also gives more than you can imagine.
— Amy Low, to her kids • “New Eyes” (2024), an essay published in Comment
I preached a meditation on hope in the New Testament to help the folks of University Baptist & Brethren Church ring in the first Sunday of Advent. (Here’s video evidence.)
I don’t feel at work the stress I feel at home, where stress accompanies not only the drive to get things done, but even the desire for recreation!
Why the difference? I’m not certain. But my surmises are several:
- For one, I’m explicitly working for other people. That relieves me of the kind of internal pressure I feel when I’m working on my own stuff.
- It also helps that those other people for whom I’m working are trustworthy and trust me. That means I basically have liberty to do as I please.
- I have liberty to do as I please as long as I color within the lines a distinct mission: To maximize the security, resilience, utility, and accessibility of DiamondBack’s information. That unity of purpose helps.
- Finally, five days a week I enjoy eight-hour expanses of time in which do the work.
- Oh, and I’ve largely managed to avoid working under deadlines.
Might I import those circumstances into my non-DiamondBack life? Yes. And in :
- I can view myself as explicitly working for God.
- God is trustworthy and trusts me to do as I please.
- The unity of purpose is easy to identify: The great commandments.
- As for time: Why so serious? What’s the rush? All of life is a gift.
From that last point, maybe the shorthand of it all is to feel that I get to do all the things: Whether I’ve actively decided to do something or that something is decided for me, it is all gratuity. Even adversity stimulates thought and the growth of wisdom and resilience. That’s how I feel at work. (How fortunate is that?) May I bring that feeling to bear in the rest of my life.
Faith, hope, and love can all be misguided.
Familiarity breeds laxity.
By this I mean that in my relationships with my wife and kids, I am not consistently stanced to apply the same effort toward socially sensitive demeanor and diction that I do in my relationships with friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. My habitus outside the family is more disciplined and sympathetic than that within. There’s a certain alertness and natural effort to fit with other people that seems to arise only outside the comfortable confines of home.
I’d like to reimport that stance back into my home life. Sure, home is for relaxation. But I sense in myself a slackness of love. Carla, Sullivan, and Éa deserve better.
I have occasionally found myself wondering whether journaling and posting as frequently as I have been is good. Doing so requires time and attention that I could deploy toward other, more directly interpersonal matters. And it’s probably sometimes a neurotic response to the fear of death. But the fact is I do feel more fully alive when I have been writing. And just now, as I was grabbing a late-morning protein snack from the kitchen, it occurred that I would pay a non-significant sum to have access to the collected written output of my parents, my grandparents, or my great-grandparents. The more voluminous and representative of their psyches I knew their output to be, the higher sum I would pay. I want to know them. It would be good for me to know them. It would be good in the way similar to how reading a great novel is good: You get to know your fellow humans, you cultivate sympathy, and you get to know yourself, all of which foster loving, harmonious, sympathetic, self-controlled interactions with others.
If I can provide my descendants with a thick account of who I was, I find myself suddenly quite confident they will be the better for it. And not because I’m a paragon. No, even if I were a scoundrel, I think they’d be the better for it.
If the 35–40 minutes it’ll take to read my essay about the reasons for and mechanisms of the cross of Christ is too verbose, Richard Beck, professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University, has managed to encapsulate almost all of my answer in the just five short paragraphs that close this post.
The only fault I can find with his take isn’t really even a fault per se: He puts forward no explicit caveat that the forgiveness on offer is not human-to-human forgiveness but rather God-to-human only. I’m sure, however, Beck would agree with that if asked. I suppose also don’t agree with some of the ontology and hamartiology he puts forward in the posts leading up to the one I’m recommending.
But still, “A Theology of Everything: Part 7, Love Made Visible Within History” is well worth your four minutes.
Lord, help me to distinguish righteousness from scruples.
You have heard it said, “Hate has no home here.” But I say to you, make a home for hate your heart. Hate heartily that which is hateful, including, yes, hate itself of any human being.
This is, I admit, merely a prescriptivist’s kvetch, since at some point somebody certainly did sneak a definition into the word “hate” that appears to mean “hostility and aversion based on category of human, such as skin color or sexuality.” But this new definition must not be permitted to elbow out its very useful precursor, that is, simply, “intense or passionate dislike.” Hate, defined as such, is, like trust and guilt, a very good thing—a virtue, even—when its is justly pointed. (I don’t need to point out the same about love, although the inverse is worth saying: Love is a very bad thing when it is unjustly pointed.) And there are plenty of things good and right to hate: ecocide, betrayal, unjustified violence, selfishness, and so on.