I've been reading a fairly wide array of things lately. Between philosophy of religion, Chinese humanities, comparative ethnic studies, linguistics, and the typical blogs, bible, and articles on Relevant (along with a couple other Christian-Lit books), I have had a diverse stream of ideas running through my consciousness-dam. This has lead to a lot of insights and subsequent dramatic expansion of my perspective of God and things. I guess these are the things I'm mostly musing on right now, which seems odd. I feel like I should be contemplating the joy of life and being alive since it's my birthday, but it's barely 1:00am right now, so there will be plenty of time for that to come.
One of the crazy ideas I've been able to process lately comes from my Chinese humanities course. The focus is on the Tang Dynasty as a model Golden Age of Chinese civilization, but most of us in the class knew nothing about China beforehand, so there has been a lot of background info laid out for us to set the context for the rest of our learning. One of the biggest things I've grabbed from this class has been the idea of Yin and Yang and how challenging it is to the common Western mindset. We always seek to compartmentalize, divide, and understand things. That doesn't work with Yin and Yang.
A lot of times Christians will talk about the need for a "balance" between two things in life. This shows up with things like faith and reason, outreach and personal growth, prayer and action, work and rest, love and justice, abounding happiness and melancholy thoughtfulness. All of these things we understand as opposites that are working against each other. Praying isn't acting, reaching out isn't growing personally, believing isn't knowing, working isn't resting, being happy is not being thoughtful, and loving can't involve justice...
can it?
That's what I've learned from Yin and Yang. All these things that I try to divide and separate so that I can understand aren't really divided or separate when it comes to true reality. There is action within prayer and an aspect of prayer within action. Love is just and justice is loving. You can think while you're happy and be happy while you think. I can grow from reaching out to others and be equipped to reach out through personal growth. All these things are intertwined. They aren't two weights on opposite ends of the scale, they are two cords wrapping into the same rope. When I talk about needing a balance, I am really talking about wanting to be in control. I want to reach out just enough and grow personally just enough to make me happy (or perfect, or what have you). I want to make a formula out of life. But these parts of life don't have formulas. And that's on purpose. They shouldn't. God didn't tell us exactly how much of each part to have (with the exception of work/rest), because there is no single answer to that question and because that is the wrong question to be asking. We are supposed to be living honestly with God. If we can't be honest with Him then we can't be honest. In this honest life we have no reason to worry about getting everything just right. He will guide us and tell us where to add and take away. The real problem with the idea of "balance" is the underlying pride. We think that at some point we will get it all right, all balanced. We assume (maybe subconsciously) that we will eventually find and maintain these balance levels. God never tells us that that will happen. At least not in this life. The point of this all is that we need to live openly with ourselves and with God and stop trying to be something for Him. Because the balancing act is just that, an act.
I've also been thinking about belief and understanding lately. Basically, it's pretty dumb that we are so obsessed with them. Here's what Michael Gungor (who has a new album out, btw) said about it in his blog:
I think modern Christianity has placed far too much value on cognitive belief. In the stream of Christianity that I have had most experience with, it is actually the central issue to get people to philosophically adhere to a certain set of beliefs. This makes Christianity a sort of network marketing pyramid where the job of Christians is to simply get other people to believe like them so that… well, so that they can get other people to believe like them, and so on and so on. Like a pyramid scheme, it might grow ever fatter and larger, but doesn’t really have any point if the point is simply to believe something.
It reminds me of a little story Jesus tells in Matthew 7 where people are coming to Him at the end times and expecting a warm welcome. He tells them "I never knew you. Get away from me...." He doesn't tell them "You never believed in me," and He doesn't tell them "You weren't good enough for me." He says "I never knew you." This word here, "know," is really powerful. In the biblical context we see it being used to talk about the most intimate relationships man can experience. Jesus doesn't deny people because they needed to believe harder or live better, He denies them because they were never intimate with Him. They never knew Him. A little later in that blog, Gungor starts using the word "Reality" when talking about God. He says this:
What this does to my religion then is that my faith becomes more about encountering and experiencing this Reality than domesticating, dissecting or dogmatizing Him. It becomes less about “believing” in some invisible deity, and more about experiencing this Reality. The book of John refers to this Reality as “the Word.” Then he writes this beautiful statement that the Word became flesh in Jesus.And then this:
Faith in God is not supposed to be primarily cognitive, it’s supposed to be an entirely different way of living.Most people don’t primarily “understand” music. You listen to it. You play it. You dance to it. You sing. I’ve studied a lot of music theory, but I don’t fully experience music when I think about scales and modes and 12 tone rows… I experience music most fully when I engage with it.
Just a couple things I've been thinking about lately. Hopefully you can enjoy them as well :)
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