Heaven gets a rap among some well-educated liberals, such as Oliver Burkeman, as being escapist. But it need not be divorced from justice here and now. On the contrary, it is a motivating vision. And a therapeutic one.
Faith, hope, and love can all be misguided.
Hope is:
- an imagined, desired future that you feel could come to pass and which prompts you to act accordingly,
- the supposed bringer of that future, or
- the feeling that accompanies imagining that future
Fear is the undesired version of the same.
Listening to Peter Gabriels’s “Big Time” with the volume cranked up is an excellent way to extract and maintain one’s hold on the verve created by a winning streak but satirically strip out the attendant bigheadedness.
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.
Lord, help me to distinguish righteousness from scruples.
The Holy Spirit ≠ spontaneity. The Holy Spirit ≠ awe at nature. The Holy Spirit ≠ frissons, feelings, or warm fuzzies. The Holy Spirit’s presence and activity may sometimes be coterminous with these phenomena. But He is not them, and the presence of these phenomena does not mean He is at work. Thinking otherwise can be quite misleading. Look instead for the fruit.
Lord, grant me a good, true, and beautiful sense of what is good, true, and beautiful.
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.
Bet your scruples have some loopholes ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Ain’t no room for hobbyhorses
In the stables of the Lord ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Note to self: When you find yourself reflecting unhappily about your job being helping make truck bed covers when you wish automobiles had never been invented, remember that these words of Paul were addressed to slaves: “Whatever you do, do your work heartily, as for the Lord” (Colossians 3:23). Whatever you do. And besides, DiamondBack is easily the best manufacturing company (and one of the best companies period) to work for in central Pennsylvania. Everything about working there pretty much couldn’t better.
An elaborated 1 John 2:15-16 with some eye toward Ecclesiastes 11:9: Have desires of the flesh, but do not love those desires. Have desires of the eyes, but do not love those desires. Possess things, but do not love the pride of possession or estate.
Have desires of the flesh. Have desires of the eyes. Possess things. But do so lightly. Instead of loving them, love YHWH your god, and love your neighbor as yourself. 🧘♂️
The CEB reads: “You have this faith and love because of the hope reserved for you in heaven” for Colossians. So the vision of heaven enables us to be faithful and loving! Fear of death be gone! You see this in stories of the original Christians.
“Mr. Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly represented those mixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling with him, as with all of us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge” (George Eliot, Middlemarch).
Isn’t this true for all irritations! We don’t seek the deep reason. We simply want to know we’re right in feeling!
When you marry, you relinquish unilateral control of your self-sacrifice. Most of it is automatically dedicated directly to domestic relationships. And even what remains is subject to a bilateral decision with your wife.
What could I be doing now in theory that I’m not doing because Carla thinks I would be overextending myself in light of family life and my involvement with house church (which is true):
- singing in a small, tight-harmony musical group,
- Big Brothering,
- raising funds for College Avenue path to campus, and
- writing songs (as if).
Now, maybe once I finish the Cross essay, I can start singing again.
I should be more strategic with how I spend my time. Wait. More strategic? Oi vey.
“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say, ‘In this world, Elwood, you must be’—she always called me Elwood—‘In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me.”
The word of the year for 2024 is “commitment,” as in an actor committing to a role, having no hesitation or second thought.
The word of the year for 2024 might be “whim.”
I am acquisitive. I am sorry, Lord.
Take your time, Scott. Just the next right thing.
It’s making more sense to me today, which is convenient as Thanksgiving approaches: We give thanks for spiritual gifts and the fruit of the Spirit, as well as miracles, yes, when we have identified them. Beyond that, are thanksgiving is general, as sure, we cannot thank God directly for putting food on our table, it being seed suppliers, farmers, distributors, and markets, along with our own trade with our employers of our labor for money, that have put the food on our table. But all of that is part of a system, a system we call Creation, in which such things are possible and indeed, such things bring pleasure. Since we are addressing the Creator of this Creation, it is right and good to give thanks! It is the kind of thanksgiving that results in the delight of the Giver because He is able to observe the joy and peace that His creation has engendered in other creatures.
Finally!
Don’t complain. There is no such thing as suffering. Only refusal to accept things the way they are. By the way, Buddhists have defeated the problem of evil. I just need to find a way to cogently combine it with Christianity.