Advent-urous Re-Thinking

The meaning of our lives is the shore eroding under the relentless waves of our technological and marketing preoccupations. The traumatic nature of this unnatural disaster is that our capacity to see what is happening is being decreased and the sand on which we stand continues to erode beneath our feet. In the midst of this creation we say we enjoy The Creator still speaks build your life on rock so that when your winds and waves come you might stand (c.f. Matt ???)

Now, less you think this is some melodramatic and existentially indulged blog post let us consider the season we are fast approaching in December. These days (increasingly no different than the rest of the year) are inundated with information at a pace that is not only overwhelming but increasingly decreasing our ability to reflect on life and our living. There’s a shear and relentless restlessness among us. It comes from the information supplied by the marketeers among us who prod us to pay attention to that which is inherently ephemeral. This only increases in a season that is ironically about eternal things—The Eternal One. Anything to distract us from that which can save us will do. The irony is we have sold our God given capacity to reflect on our lives and to discover the meaning inherently within (i.g. Imago Dei) to those who would sell another meaning back to us in appliances, gadgets, and other things that will be sold at a fraction of the cost 8 years from now. At Christmas, the marketeers yet again have convinced us to trade our savings for His Salvation.

The sand beneath our feet is washing away and yet we stand with a smile on our face.

Advent, ironically, a season of such happiness, cards, gifts, togetherness and festivities is a penitential season in the life of the church.

Today, I hear an invitation for us to allow fro some Advent-urous Re-Thinking in our lives. Instead of allowing this years holidays, Christmas, or whatever we call it to come and go and to come out with nothing but the glazed over look of an experience that was self-indulgent might we close our eyes, withdraw from the frenzy and ask for The Gift of The Christ to be born within—again? That we might see the life we’ve been given and live?

There’s much more that could be said, and someone much smarter than I could wax eloquent on it, but the rest of this post can only be written in the intimacy of your own quiet time with God. My hope for us all this season is that God will help us to do some Advent-urous Re-Thinking—to know the meaning He has given us in the image we are made in and The Image that is born among us this Christmas, which will save us and restore to us the joy of His salvation.

As Merton’s title and my lack of footnotes (as if someone else could claim the right to some originality—there’s nothing new under the sun) suggest these thoughts in this post are Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.

Frustrated as Hell…?

It would be way too easy for us to think our current frustration was related to our temporary if longer than imagined) global circumstances. The new limits we are all experiencing are unavoidable. And, we certainly need to honor them for sure if we are to see them come to a conclusion anytime soon. Today, however, I’d like to look a little deeper at our current sense of frustration in life. The word itself literally means in vain.

How many of us are frustrated with The God we don’t believe in whether we are Christian or some other stripe? The longer I live the more I encounter people (myself included) who have significant frustration with their own efforts, the actions of others, or some other frustration about the way things are or are not. I’m prone to sweeping statements so here may be another one of those moments, let the reader beware. Does not our frustration come from thinking life is measured by our efforts or those of others? Do we not then think God should be like us?

God, why the hell don’t you do something about that? God, what the hell were they thinking? God, that’s crazy as hell? We go on and on in our daily lives constantly evaluating the way things or people are and in so doing find ourselves comparing ourselves to others. This can land us in a significantly frustrated life. Michael Casey in his wonderful book Grace: On The Journey To God digs a little deeper into our frustration, I think. He conveys the notion that our comparisons imply at some level that we are better than the one we are critiquing in our judgments of them. We resist this idea saying no I’m just stating a fact. Whose fact? How do you know it’s a fact? Whose standard? Is that not the issue? Is that not what got us in this frustration to begin with in The Garden. We ate from that Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil with the temptation we thought was an invitation (evil is slippery) to be like God. What happened? We were in a state of separation from God and others—hell. And, the longer we live in this way the more our frustration grows. Hell is frustration as our living seems in vain. Only God gives life meaning and so relieves our frustrations. But, then we must ask who is God if God is not the calculating, judgmental, standard bearer that we are?

Could our frustration come from a God we don’t believe in as we functionally believe in our day to day in a god of getting what is deserved? The Christian Bible reveals a very different look at God. The God revealed in Jesus says, I did not come to judge the world but to save it? Is our frustration possibly more rooted in our having our own standards apart from The God who makes his sun to rise on the good and the evil, and send his rain on the just and the unjust?

Maybe our frustration is rooted in bearing the burden of our own standards when God’s are much lower and holier than we ever thought about being with ourselves or others? Are we frustrated as hell because we feel powerless to impose our standards on anybody else (as if we should) and the burden of not living up to our own standards most of the time anyway, but we doggedly try, all the while denying the more gracious way of living that God has made available in our flesh (Jesus) and has poured out on all flesh (Holy Spirit)? Are we frustrated as hell, living largely an impersonal life with others that objectifies by taking about, rather than with and acquiesces for an individualistically minded life while we are breathing until we die a death characterized by the sin that God came to save us from, which we didn’t deserve but were certainly worthy of as those made in His Image?

Maybe, in this time of not being able to do as many things, and not earn as much flattery in doing for others, we could remember how we were created by The Father—generously, how we are all saved through The Son—graciously, and how we are inspired to live with others post crucifixion through The Holy Spirit—generatively. God is not as hard on us as we are with ourselves and each other. I certainly can identify with you if you identify with this. Let us turn together from this strenuous way of living and discover the rest God offers us for our weariness of body, soul and spirit.