a post-hoc contribution via WhatsApp to a house church discussion I missed:
Since the prompt last Saturday (“How do we do our part in cultivating the fruit God seeks?”) was mine but I wasn’t around to help discover answers, would you permit me nine sentences in reply?
Having been thoroughly convinced of God’s lovingkindness—well, as convinced as one can be about the thoughts of a typically invisible, inaudible spirit—I find myself frequently emphasizing the value of direct effort toward the exercise of emotional and relational virtues. In other words, I tend to see God’s good fruit as habits to practice rather than virtues to receive. Just as nothing succeeds at mastering a musical instrument more than practicing the musical instrument—not reading books about music, not talking to composers—nothing will succeed at developing love, joy, peace, patience, and the rest of them more than trying to think, speak, and act in love, joy, peace, patience, and the rest at every possible juncture.
I daresay God agrees. :)
Direct effort is better and more powerful than any other spiritual discipline toward the goal of bearing good fruit. And I mean this very situational, down-to-earth, “if this, then that,” habit-building sort of way.
At the same time, I know I’ll fail at this. The trick here is to keep trying—“a righteous person falls seven times and rises again” (Proverbs 24:16)—and not grow discouraged. Even just trying to think and act better is good, and as Bruce highlighted a couple of weeks ago, “Don’t become discouraged in doing good, for in due time we will reap, if we do not become weary“ (Galatians 6:9).
When I am tempted to beat myself up for such failure, I call upon this quotation from Brother Lawrence (without going so far as to completely absolve myself of responsibility):
“When an occasion arose which required some virtue, he said to God, ‘Lord, I cannot do this unless You allow me.’ […] When he had failed in his duty, he simply confessed his fault, saying to God, ‘I could not possibly do otherwise, if You leave me to myself. It is You who must correct my failing, and mend what is amiss.‘ And after this, he gave himself no further uneasiness about his mistake.”
Energetic trying.
Hope the above is good for someone.
Remember: Jon Levenson says that the controlling metaphor in the Hebrew Bible for the relationship between Israel and YHWH is that of a suzerain and vassal or a king and subject and that love from the Israel side is therefore primarily expressed as glad, grateful obedience. When we say we’re going to love the Lord our God with our all hearts, minds, souls, and strengths, what we’re saying is we’re going to gladly obey Him with all of ourselves.
If you start to be able to pay for a service, you start to become worse at performing that service yourself. If a whole society starts to be able to pay for a service, then everyone becomes worse at performing that service except the professionals. This is why professional counselors seems like a societal hazard to me: We’re all going to become worse at active, sympathetic listening and at helping our friends and family through tough times.
This reflection prompted by the shyness I heard in someone’s voice last night to talk with anyone other than a therapist about figuring out some strategies to make his life better.
Why does my heart resist listening to music alone? For the same reason it resists watching audiovisual entertainment and reading books alone: It’s alone. It’s one thing when I’m by myself anyway, but if people are around, what the heck!?
Sexual ethics is not about consent. It’s about love, of which consent is just one, small, basic constituent.
The universe is singing! “Come Together,” indeed! (Éa and Sullivan will be sharing a two-instrument-and-vocal cover of it this week at school.) The word of last year was “with.” The word of this year is, “Finally, all of you be of the same mind, feeling with one another…” (1 Peter 3:8, my translation). Same mind, same feelings (sympathy). That latter part is what I’m working on with Dr. Wes Scala. If you want to understand behavior, you have to understand someone’s feelings, which in turn requires that you understand their thoughts, says Shawn Ishler of Bartell & Bartell at Leadership Flight School. Push toward understanding—and thinking and feeling!—the thoughts and feelings of Carla, of Sullivan, of Éa.
My friend pounces on perceived human psychological vulnerability like I pounce on perceived error. Both are good when deployed in love; both can be unwelcome and even harmful when deployed out of mere habit.
friend
[after I had “warned” someone against saying “God is always speaking”]:
I hope you didn’t walk away tonight feeling discouraged or unheard in any way tonight. Would love to pickup on connecting with God when we’re together next. Love you.
me:
Good morning! Nope, so probably no need. If you came away from last night thinking, “Ooh, Scott is ticklish about hearing God’s voice because he thinks he doesn’t hear from God,” you came away with the wrong impression.
I am ticklish about something, but it’s not my connecting with God. It’s my hearing abiblical maxims about God making their way unchecked around the church, running the risk of spiritual harm. The potential spiritual harm of “God is always speaking” is at least twofold: First, it can facilitate people spouting things they think are from God but which are not, and second, it can lead other people to suspect they are spiritually deaf, as I said last night.
What to say to my friend about why I’m on edge about his emphasis on vulnerability? Basically, I think he worships at its altar. Not everybody has problems all the time. My friend is like a problem-seeker: Dig up a problem in a person, get them to talk about it, apply the salve of God’s love. Right? That’s great, right? But the problem is that being vulnerable with someone leads them to have some measure of power in your life.
This Brené Brown quote seems adjacent: “Trust isn’t a grand gesture—it’s a growing marble collection.”
Love itself is the prime spiritual discipline. All others, including Bible study and prayer, are good only insofar as they serve to empower, amplify, or inform love.
Pianists don’t cultivate their skill and musicianship by reading books on the history of piano music or by talking with composers, as enriching and obliquely helpful as that might be. They improve by playing piano.
Similarly, the way you get better and more consistent at loving is by trying to love.
How do I want something but not grow anxious at its delay, interruption, or incompletion? This question came to me in the form of “The trick is to want things without becoming anxious when I don’t get them” as soon as I got out of bed this morning. It’s this anxiety that has been producing grumpiness recently. Here’s how:
- patience,
- attentiveness,
- gratitude, and
- love for others.
EDIT (12/28): There’s one other thing I’ll need: refusal to watch television or movies designed for entertainment. (I’m looking at you, Hawkeye.) Try though I might to think otherwise, I view it as a waste of time. I have for twenty years. There’ll be no changing it.
Carla told me as I spouted some of what I was learning from the Burkeman book that she suspected I don’t undertake things when I don’t think I’ll succeed at them. That’s something worth thinking about, perhaps.
My reflections on excerpts and quotations from Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mere Mortals (2021) by Oliver Burkeman:
I think before I dive in to actual quotations, I should say that the main effect of this book on me is to solidify something I should have know: You can’t do everything you want. You won’t do everything you want. The sooner you get over that, the sooner you can move forward boldly with whatever you want to do, whether that’s oriented toward accomplishment or relationships or something else. (All in love, of course.) I think this takeaway would make the author happy.
And the more individual sovereignty you achieve over your time, the lonelier you get (31).
Gah, I’ve sure noticed that.
If Hägglund were guaranteed an infinity of these summer vacations, there’d be nothing much to value about any one of them; it’s only the guarantee that he definitely won’t have an infinity of them that makes them worth valuing. Indeed, it’s slide only from this position of valuing what is finite because it’s finite, Hägglund argues, that one can truly care about the impact of a collective peril such as climate change, which is wreaking changes to his native country’s landscape. If our earthly existence were merely a preluded to an eternity in heaven, threats to that existence couldn’t matter in any ultimate sense (63).
The above strikes me as untrue—and it also misrepresents my Christian take on the weight of this life, although I can understand why he perceives the Christian view as this:
If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed (74).
“Pay yourself first” applies to time, too! But how do I distinguish “[my] most valued” from “other important”?
Their reason for treating distraction so seriously was straightforward…: what you pay attention to will define, for you, what reality is (91).
We must never forget that, especially when managing what we read and watch and listen to. People have all kinds of views on the way this world works—and it has to do with we pay attention to. With Fox News and MSNBC having been around now a while, that much is hopefully obvious. Also, that’s what I prefer not to watch TV, even fictional TV.
Can you have an experience you don’t experience? The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; and a friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a friendship in name only (94).
I should share the above with Ethan.
So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. In the words of the philosopher Harry Frankfurt, they sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want” (96–97).
That is why I don’t read the news. In general, I don’t want anyone other than God, myself, my family, and my friends to indicate what is important to me. Knowing how to deal with national emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, requires that I let the government itself tell me what’s important. I guess what I’m really saying is that I have no good reason to let journalists, who are neither experts nor friends, tell me what’s important.
Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process (109).
What does that do to the problem of evil? :) Zen Buddhists certainly can’t object to theism on that basis.
It would have been one thing if the Natural Parents’ justifications for insisting on “baby-wearing,” or co-sleeping, or breastfeeding until age three had simply been that these were more satisfying ways for parents and babies to live. But their real motive, sometimes explicitly expressed, was that these were the best things to do to ensure a child’s future psychological health. (Again: no real evidence.) (130)
For the record, I was one of the “Natural Parents” whose justification was that it was more satisfying—and, I’ll add, easier that way. Also, I question his claim of “no real evidence,” but I suppose I don’t have any, so whatever.
Why…should vacations by the ocean, or meals with friends, or lazy mornings in bed need defending in terms of improved performance at work? “You keep hearing people arguing that more time off might be good for the economy,” fumed John de Graaf, an ebullient sevenths filmmaker and the driving force behind Take Back Your Time. “But why should we have to justify life in terms of the economy? It makes no sense!” (149)
That’s not a difficult rhetorical question to answer: We have to justify life in terms of the economy because making the argument to our employers, whose primary interest in our lives is, naturally, our contribution to the economy. The point holds, of course.
idleness aversion (149)
That’s a noun phrase that will requires some rumination.
Peck’s insight here—that if you’re willing to endure the discomfort of not knowing, a solution will often present itself—would be helpful enough if it were merely a piece of advice for fixing lawn mowers and cars. But his larger point is that it applies almost everywhere in life: to creative work and relationship troubles, politics and parenting (179).
That might be the most important thing for me to take away from this book.
Because what is a “problem,” really? The most generic definition is simply that it’s something that demands that you address yourself to it—and if life contained no such demands, there’d be no point in anything. Once you give up the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop and appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem, given each on the time it requires—that the presence of problems in your life, in other words, isn’t an impediment to a meaningful existence by the very substance of one (180–181).
The above does not strike me as true.
[Carl Jung’s] sole advice for walking such a path was to “quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what that is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate” (227).
“Quietly do the next and most necessary thing.” Yes.
Focus on one big project at a time and see it to completion before moving on to what’s next ().
I’ve got to tell Ben and Brandon this.