Mistaken Identity

I think was Archbishop Fulton Sheen that said, "Atheists are not atheists because they don't want to believe in God, they are atheists because they don't want to believe in sin."

We just don't want to acknowledge that there is a claim on our lives. Our culture has gone so far as to try and have it both ways; have our cake and eat it too, if you will. We have concocted denominations and religions that seek to deny sin. In this way we can have all the comforts of God without having to actually do anything. In essence, we want Christ but without all that gruesome cross business. We want freedom without responsibility. If this mentality were expressed in any form other than religion we would say a person was childish or immature. Because it is spirituality we excuse it. We are in a state of spiritual arrested development; the Peter Pan Syndrome of the celestial realm.

Let's say you've got a friend who got a job by making all sorts of promises to his employer about the things he was going to do and then made his agreement to show up and fulfill his duties to the best of his ability. Not too long and he starts showing up late and when he gets there he doesn't do anything. Eventually, he hardly ever even shows up, does no work, and even talk bad about his boss and company to others. And the kicker, he fully expects the company to continue to pay him. He would raise hell if they told him he was fired. That's our cultural spirituality: childish and immature. We expect our pay even though we don't do anything. It's not that I'm a bad employee, it's that the boss is a jerk.

Imagine a how a child operates. Why did you get punished? Is because you did something wrong? No, it's because Dad is mean. But why did Dad get mad in the first place? Is because you disobeyed? Perhaps on the surface, but there (hopefully) is something deeper. When I tell my 3-yr old not to touch the hot stove I don't explain the physics of heat transfer and what effect high temperatures have on human tissue; she wouldn't understand. But she does understand "Don't touch the stove; it will hurt you". As she matures she come to understand why and how the stove can hurt her. If she continues to try to touch the lit stove I don't say "Well as long as you believe that it won't hurt you...". I tell her she will will get a time-out (I feel stupid just typing that). She isn't punished because I'm mean. She is punished because her safety and future happiness depend (in part) to her learning that a hot stove will burn you, so don't touch it. In raising a child, freedom without responsibility would get you a dead child pretty quick.

So why do we get so upset at the idea that God has set out directions for life that He expects us to follow? Shouldn't we give Him the benefit of the doubt that, like the stove, we are a spiritual 3-yr old and He is trying to keep us from killing ourselves (our souls)? And, maybe when we mature, we come to understand why. We mature by accepting responsibility, not by shirking it or running from it. We mature by drawing nearer to Truth.

Crazy is as Crazy does

A friend of mine who will remain nameless (Bruce) convinced me to finally submit my paperwork to the Veteran's Administration. He lured me into it with the American Dream: money for nothing. I was assured that I'd get something for my hearing (I was a machine-gunner), something for my shoulder (6 dislocations reset by the corpsman in the field), and I should be up for some PTSD compensation. Now, I haven't got my appointment yet, so I don't know what, if anything, they'll actually award. I also want to say I don't think I suffer from PTSD and I don't want to diminish in any way those who truly do.

Anyway, I asked my friend how he knew I'd get some crazy money. I asked if I should say or do anything in particular to make sure the doctor noticed my mental state. He said, "No. Just go in there and be yourself. As soon as you open your mouth they'll know something is wrong." As much as I'm sure he was joking (I hope), for a moment I wondered if there is something going on up there. Here's the issue: If I were crazy, would I know it? Bruce is crazy. Should I take him seriously if he questions my sanity, or is it a question of "takes one to know one"? Like I said, I don't feel crazy. But if I am, would I notice it anyway? Would I think I'm perfectly sane and it's everyone else that's crazy? 

Then I thought about people like St. Francis and St. Thomas Aquinas. The people that knew St. Francis thought he was either a saint or a lunatic. Perhaps there is a fine line there (another discussion for another time). History proved him to be a saint. St. Thomas' contemporaries believed he was an idiot. In fact they called him the "Dumb Ox" and he turned out to be one of the most respected and repeated philosophers and theologians of all time. Let's just say that Caravaggio never created paintings of the people that called St. Thomas dumb. Before I go further, just to clear it up, I'm not simply talking about a cult of personality. Yes, there are many people that history remembers and that doesn't make them sane or saints.

The question is whether or not we should be worried if the world doesn't think we're all there. After all, the Jews of the Old Testament and those in the time of Jesus measured a person's sanity by the extent that they were or were not seeking the will of God. This meant primarily the person's observance of the law. For the Greeks, the sane person was the one who exemplified the life of virtue, or those whose lives came closest to conforming to the objective good. For Christians it is basically the same as the ancient Jews. We are sane to the extent that we are conformed to the will of God. If God is Truth, the sane person is the one whose life conforms to that Truth. This is also the point of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching; that true peace, contentment, and goodness or virtue comes from being in harmony with truth. For the sake of argument, let's say this is true.

I think it's safe to say that most of the world is and probably always has been a considerable distance away from the Truth. We all fall short of the perfection of God, but there are and have been those who are not just "falling short" but who are in active rebellion against Truth. The ones who have, in Jesus' words, traded the truth for lie. We are constantly bombarded with this. If only I were thinner I would be happy. If only I were younger (or at least looked younger) I would be happy. If only I had (insert item here) my life would be complete. We fall into this consumer mentality only to have our contentment blasted when the thing that was supposed to make us happy fails or is replaced by a newer model that we don't have. That's crazy. It's absolutely insane that a material good should have that kind of control over our mental well-being.

Okay, so the world is, for the most part, insane. It's insane because it has rejected truth. All of us are a little crazy. There is a spectrum of sanity and some are more sane, some are more crazy. The crazier we are the more crazy seems normal. The crazier we are the more sane seems crazy. And course, the opposite is true. The more sane you are the more you notice insanity in its varying degrees. Since the world is almost entirely populated by crazy people, crazy seems normal and sane seems crazy. So I guess in the eyes of the world, I would want to be crazy. I would want people to think my family is odd and out-of-touch. I suppose the best compliment I could get would be a condescending smile or a shocked sneer.

The question we need to ask is where we fall on the spectrum of sanity. How do you view the world? That should be a pretty good indication.    

Fresh Air

Here's an analogy for you. Let's say we are inside our house. Our interior self, our soul, is the inside of our house. God is the outside. He is all of the outside: the air, the trees, the grass, the sun; everything.

I guess the first thing we notice is that God is way bigger than we are. In fact, our house represents a very shallow false sense of security (anyone that's been through a hurricane knows this well). As sturdy as our house may be, one good gust of wind can rip it open. That's not even to mention all the things that can go wrong and destroy our fragile home from the inside.

The big idea here is simple: we can (to some extent) control what comes into our house. We are the ones who decide how much and for how long we accept what is going on outside. While the outside is much stronger and much bigger than our little home for the most part it is pretty docile. We have options. We can choose to open the windows as wide as they'll go and let the outside in. If the windows are open long enough the inside and outside take on the same character; actually, the inside becomes the outside. Never the other way around. We can flood the house with the fresh air and smells and sounds that are all around us, all the time, we just never heard them because the windows were closed.

We also have the option (which is probably where most of us are) of opening the windows but putting in screens. Why screens? We want to filter what comes in. We have decided that we don't want certain things coming through the open windows so we construct a device to filter them out. The problem though, no matter how minute it may seem the screen is a barrier. It obstructs the air, it clouds the view. In essence the screen enacts our prejudice. It becomes the tool that lets in what we like, what we will accept, and keep the rest out. With the screens we will get some experience of the outside but we are missing something. We lack the total immersion.

Of course the other option is to close the window entirely. Let in none of the outside world. We can create a cocoon. Instead of moving in harmony with the ebb and flow of the breeze we set the thermostat. In this analogy our central a/c becomes our attempt to create God in our image. We build a contraption, build a control for it, and then barricade our hearts in a prison of our own making, convincing ourselves that we've created a man-made paradise of material goods, conditioned and filtered air, with locks on the doors and windows to ensure nothing gets in (or out?). Then we turn on devices that make noise so we don't have to hear what's going on outside. If we don't hear Him because we've created our own world full of concocted noise, we can pretend He's not there. To carry on a little further, how silly that we do everything in the world to shut ourselves off from the outside and then buy a white noise machine to mimic the outside (Deepak Chopra, anyone?).

Our self-created world works only until something happens, like a hurricane. Then we realize just how fragile and fake it all was. We need to let in the fresh air and listen to the outside noises. We need to feel the slight temperature fluctuations. We need to accept God as He is, unfiltered.