The Capital-T Truth

It’s been a year since the Joplin tornado. I made a video in reflection a couple of months following the storm last year. Over the past year I’ve been a two thousand miles away. My home has changed. I have changed. My relationships have changed, become disconnected – new ones have replaced old ones. My brother has graduated from high school; my parents’ house will be childless for the first time. Some old work friends of mine are getting married.

We grow older. Things change. We change. But will we remember? Will our children’s children remember?

Probably not.

Hell, we probably won’t remember in sixty years.

But that’s the course of life, of history – no? We repeatedly suffer – sometimes of our own doing, sometimes because of things out of our control. That suffering shapes us, but down the line comes a point where that suffering is forgotten. It’s inevitable because suffering is a very individual thing, even if others are suffering alongside us. And the individuality of suffering separates us from the world ahead of us.

So where does that leave us?

It leaves us with a choice. Not about what happens to us, but what we make of ourselves, what we make of the world. That choice lays there before us everyday; we make a choice whether we’re conscious of it or not.

I like this quote by David Foster Wallace: “The capital-T truth is about life before death.” For those (like me) that doubt that we’ll be more than dust after death, it’s important to know that nihilism is a fraud – that it can only exist on paper and not in the day-to-day trenches of life. Whether our lives matter, whether our sufferings and experiences matter is of no question. They matter to us currently living and experiencing them and to those around us doing the same. Those in the past, those in the future – they are only ghosts.

We exist now – we have a choice to make. I’m still in the process of choosing.

Ze Frank

Embracing Mystery

So I’ve been watching a Discovery miniseries called How the Universe Works over the past couple of weeks. It goes through explaining the processes of the Big Bang and how galaxies and solar systems came to be. Watching this has been fascinating but very humbling – just to realize how infinitesimally small I really am. That I make up one tiny person on one planet of one tiny solar system in one galaxy out of the billions of them that exist in the universe – and that I exist within only a tiny spec of the history of this universe. These facts can cause one to lose one’s self, to dissolve into a grain of sand among the infinite shore of the time and space.

After contemplating the idea of smallness, it starts making little sense to give the self what it naturally wants: a gratification of desires (typically unhealthy ones). What I love so much about the Dharmic religions (i.e. Hinduism, Buddhism) as compared to the Abrahamic religions (i.e. Judaism, Christianity, Islam) is that they have a much deeper sense of losing the self, of being perfectly altruistic. As a rationalist, Abrahamic religions make much more sense to me, which is partially why I buy into them more, but there is a side of me that loves contemplative mystery; rather, there is a side of me that fantasticates mystery, so much so that practice of obscurity rarely ever happens – there’s just fantasy.

Out of the Enlightenment came a large shift to reason and individual perspective in Christian thinking and practice. Art and music had reduced roles. Rituals were questioned. Everything was judged through the eye of reason. Because of this, the obscurity and mystery surrounding Christianity were drastically reduced. Even the study of Christianity was being done in ways that made more sense with logic (e.g. Science vs. Faith argument going on now).

I feel ambivalent about the Enlightenment’s effect on the Church. Like, I’m glad that it went through that stage so that we could arrive at the stage we are in now (which is something I would term, “apostolic” – see books by Alan Hirsch), and I’m glad that the Church can support my needs intellectually (at least most of the time), but I am horrified that the thriving sense of mystery that had permeated religious study and practice since history had started being recorded has been reduced to hogwash, unreasonable anachronisms that aren’t useful for anything. Our line of thinking has become backwards: individual –> community … rather than: community –> individual

What I feel like intentional community causes me to do is delve into the fantastical mystery of altruism, of the Resurrection, of unconditional love and grace. Intentional community helps me to see the world in a backwards state, and I’m really grateful that this kind of environment can exist in a world that is on the verge of worship of the self and its gratifications. To bring back the mystery of Christianity and religion in general, I must seek living with those who want a world in which we find our individuality in community rather than the other way around. For when seeking that mindset in community, one feels embraced by hugeness of the universe rather than infinitesimal.

Reflection on Suffering

I’m from Joplin, Missouri. I’ve been thinking a lot about the town and its people recently, and all that I experienced the couple months before I moved to Portland. I made this video before I moved out here:

David Foster Wallace

From 2005 Kenyon College Commencement Speech:

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it JC or Allah, bet it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible — sounds like “displayal”]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

Introduction: Steven

Hi. My name is Steven. I’m a 19 year old who just moved to Portland from Joplin, Missouri in the middle of July with the mindset of intentional community, which was inspired by both a mentor in Joplin and Shane Claiborne’s An Irresistible Revolution.

I grew up in the Bible Belt. Most people were Christians; most people were Republicans. To not be either was a rarity – or at least you didn’t wear it on your sleeve. Thus the implication is that I grew up a Christian, although probably not in the strictest sense of word. Given that my memory is somewhat sporadic and fragmented, I don’t remember much about the things I grew up learning within church, that is when I went to church (as I was an off-and-on church-goer up until about the age of 13, when I decided church wasn’t worth my time anymore).

During my sophomore year of high school, I started attending a non-denominational church of about 500+ members. This was the first time I really connected with the community of Christ, especially with those on the church staff. I spent most of my free time at the church or with those on the church staff, being part of both the youth band and the Sunday main band. I attended every event I could. Subconsciously, I was creating a pious monster that would eventually be purified with fire.

Just before my senior semester, I got burnt out. I needed a break, one that provided enough space for me to ask some questions – those key questions about the existence of God, about who I am, and so on. And once I started asking myself those questions, I didn’t have any guidance or advice from those on the church staff or some of my Christian friends. Granted, I would’ve denied receiving their advice even if they were around; nonetheless, not having Christians around that I considered to be close friends played a key role in establishing my agnosticism and general enmity with church folk.

The next step after high school was going to Bible college. Weird, right? I had won a scholarship in a drawing to go to the local Bible college, and I figured, hey why not? Free college? Hell, yes! Well, I wasn’t that excited about the Bible college aspect, but was down with a free semester.

Overall, I didn’t like Bible college. Almost every aspect I found to be repulsive. I was around people I disagreed with all the time. It wasn’t healthy. However, there was one basic class that sparked my religious interest again – Christian Life with professor Shane Wood (http://www.shanejwood.com). My views on Christianity during most of Bible College were somewhat hostile, as I questioned a lot of the morality of Christianity, usefulness, psychology, etc. It was a time where I needed to find something in Christianity that was going to be different than anything I had ever experienced in a traditional church environment if I were to ever join back in.

And that’s exactly what I found. In Christian Life class, I discovered that Christianity wasn’t something dealing strictly with Heaven or Salvation, or any of the worries and fears people have about the future, but rather, it was established here to provide comfort and love for those who needed it the most – the outcasts and downtrodden of society – whom I had felt a much closer relationship to after rebelling against the community ideals that I grew up with. In Shane’s class we read The Irresistible Revolution, which only further served my newly established views on Christianity.

After Bible college, I went to a community college for a year to finish up an associate’s degree. During that year, very few of my friends were religious. This not only impacted my views about people in general, but has served as a foundation for the relationships I want to establish throughout the rest of my life: ones that are based on reconciliation of the Church with people that have been hammered over the head with religious dogma.

And now I’m in Portland, trying my best to live out my values that I have been developing over the past year. Living in intentional community so far has been far too underwhelming, but it has shattered my idealistic expectations. What I am discovering the most though is how antithetical a lot of Christian intentional community values and practices are to the culture that surrounds us, especially of Midwestern culture. It’s hard for me, sometimes, to be exploratory in Christian community, discovering how much I can really give up to experience what God wants us to experience. But I know that this experience is better than doing the same thing or doing nothing at all. It will be foundational for who I am in the next decade (or more) of my life. And I’m grateful for the opportunity to experience love and grace in God and in my brothers and sisters in Christ.

Grace and peace,

Steven