Swim Until You Can't See Land

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCQLEzm0nw

My favorite Scottish band Frightened Rabbit has a song on their third album called “Swim Until You Can’t See Land” and it is an absolute gem (above is the link). It starts with a faint plucking bass line, a happy little guitar lick and some tambourine over a pleasant background accordion. As the lyrics start, we find it is the story of a man making his way to the edge of the ocean and the edge of his mind. As he begins to dip his toe in he says, “if I hadn't come now to the coast to disappear, I may have died in a landslide of rocks and hopes and fears” and later, as he is knee deep, “Let's call me a Baptist, call this a drowning of the past. She is there on the shoreline throwing stones at my back” and as the chorus starts for the second time we can understand it; “Swim, until you can’t see land.” Lead singer and songwriter Scott Hutchison commented around the time of the album’s release that this was the first album he had written that was not about a miserable break up. I think that it is good to leave things behind, although hopefully this does not sound like a rehashing of what I said last week about being newly single, that has not been on my mind much this week.

            I put that song on the other night when I was driving home from the library where I had spent about five hours studying Matthew 6:24-34. I was up to my ears in thoughts on what it meant to take Jesus seriously when he said, “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matthew 6:34 NRSV). Do we not make plans? Do we seize the day so hard that we end it feeling like we have become the essence of carpe diem? And what of the fact that we are told that God provides food for the birds though they do not sow or reap and God provides clothes for the lilies though they do not spin or toil? Do we not even need to work? The short answer to these questions is no. As I had already felt and as many commentators explicitly we have not been granted permission to assume God will do everything for us, we have been granted permission to say that despite our best efforts, we need God. Without him, we are so easily consumed by our pasts or our futures that today’s troubles, which are sufficient in and of themselves, are so easily neglected. So how can we allow ourselves to have the proper amount of worry about all the days that are not today?

            The short answer to that question is that I do not know. We cannot simply forget our past and we cannot waste each day worrying about tomorrow. I like the analogy of driving a car here; we use our past as a reference point to figure out where we are yet we do need our eyes primarily focused ahead, but not so far ahead that we miss the things in the road right in front of us. We have to figure out what it means to be right here, right now. Part of that process is remembering that God is with us, right here, right now. Somewhere there are fuzzy lines where too much retrospection or too much speculation happen.

Right now I am coming out of a time when I have been spending a bit more time looking in the rearview mirror and have as a result wanted to do a bit more “swimming” than usual but I think that’s alright. Now I find myself asking God to help me enjoy the waters I am in now that I have left the coast behind me.

Relearning the Art of Leaning on God.

Being in seminary I have the pleasure of worshipping God with my mind all day long. In classes, as I do homework, and in conversations with my professors I get to think about, read about, and discuss the nature of God and his will for the world and for the church. This is a special and particular time of life as most of my life has not involved nearly this much mental engagement with God and I love having the opportunity to do so often in this season. That being said, discussing and reading about theology and scripture is not the same as spiritually engaging God and the opportunity to engage God with my mind all the time has often made me forget that I also need to listen to God, speak directly to God, and worship God with my spirit.

            Over the last week or two I have been reawakened to this need. In the midst of being newly single, being incredibly busy with school, dealing with finances, and being sad that my whole immediate family is now out of state I have often felt overwhelmed and alone. This realization hit me hard the other night and I turned in to God with the full force of what I was feeling that same night. Naturally, God was there, as he always has been. That night I was reminded again of his unending faithfulness to me. I was also reminded of my tendency towards being unfaithful and in those moments I often think of myself as Hosea’s wife Gomer, melodramatic as that may sound. I am so thankful for the reminder, found in the book of Hosea, of God’s faithfulness.

            I am thankful that the breakup I just went through was mutual and that it seems to have been what God was telling us to do. That being said, the complexities involved in breaking up have been stressful and I have had to ask God several times, “Why is this happening?” I had felt such a lack of peace in light of these complexities, until I took the time to sit down and listen for an answer. I felt like he said, in response, “You will not find peace, fulfillment, or real purpose until you found it in me”.  A quote from St. Augustine comes to mind here, “Our hearts cannot rest until they rest in thee.”

            I spent a lot of high school finding fulfillment in being a good student, being a good youth leader, and being a good boyfriend. When I came to Seattle Pacific for undergrad, all three of those things disappeared. I was dumped before college started, I started working for a different church where my ministry felt almost entirely unsuccessful and I graduated from college with a GPA significantly lower than the one I entered college with. As a result, the first three years of college involved a slow descent into depression until I realized that God’s primary concern was not my success in any of the aforementioned areas but in me knowing myself as his son. This realization was essential for pulling me out of depression; unfortunately I have not always been the best at remembering how important that idea is.

            I probably spent far too much of the six months I was with my now ex finding my fulfillment, yet again, in trying to be a good boyfriend. Now, I am again in the process of finding my fulfillment in God, and I do not imagine I will find peace until do. As wonderful as the work of doing seminary is and as much as it connects my mind to God, my heart cannot rest in that and my soul will not truly be fulfilled by that. Instead, I am relearning the art of leaning on God.

Division and Reconciliation

Recently we had a two and half weeklong government shutdown. Simply put, too many people on either side of the aisle simply could not come to consensus. It is easy to blame either side for having been too headstrong and so much mud slinging occurred that hardly anyone involved is above reproach. As the Senate chaplain Barry Black said most poignantly in one of his morning invocations during the first week, “Deliver us from the hypocrisy of attempting to sound reasonable, while being unreasonable.” Clearly when such a stalemate had been reached and so much polarization had happened, neither side could really be considered reasonable.

            A government shutdown is perhaps low hanging fruit for a reflection on division and reconciliation, but it has me thinking about the ways that the church has done this very same thing but with the power, at least in Protestantism, to “secede” readily available to any who find that their way is being rejected. Our Senate cannot simply split the nation in two and allow each to have their own way, yet the Protestant church is known for this kind of activity to the point where the number of denominations world-wide has broken 35,000. By comparison, (to my knowledge) the Roman Catholic church has only split three times in its nearly 2,000 year existence; once with Eastern Orthodoxy, with Protestantism, and with Anglicanism, though my understanding is that the latter maintains some significant catholic identity. How, then, have Protestants become so entitled to the point that their perspectives not being made doctrine is cause for a schism? Perhaps this is a “grass is always greener” mentality, but on some level I find that Catholics, who frequently and vocally disagree with their pope or priest, have a better way of doing things; they seem to be a united church with a diversity of opinions constantly discussing the right way of doing things while the cause of unity nearly always overrules the cause of being right.

            And yet as I reflect on all of this and point fingers at Protestantism, I know I have wanted to leave my own church over conceivably petty matters as well. I do not like that my church vocally designates homosexuality as a sin (though I am not yet sure where I land)***, I do not like that our worship music is cliché, homogenous, and stereotypically “Christian,” and I do not like that we use the ESV translation on the overhead on Sundays. Yet after two years, I still attend and have just recently become a member. I have prayerfully asked God for permission to leave, and he has said no. At which point I have been forced to ask myself, why I am still at Mosaic Community Church. The answer is the same as the answer to the question of why I started attending; Mosaic values community and has excellent attitudes about worship. I am proud to be a part of an expression of the church that genuinely cares for others and that appreciates seeing God glorified in myriad forms of worship. The community aspect I have never doubted. The worship aspect I have doubted frequently, but I also have to concede that since joining the worship team new instruments have appeared on stage for the first time (trumpet, saxophone, xylophone, accordion, mandolin and more) and new forms of worship have been engaged in (ballet, art and spoken word), so progress is happening.

In another morning invocation this week, Barry Black also said, “Unless [God] empower[s] our lawmakers, they can see the ideal but not reach it, they can know the right but not do it, they can comprehend their duty but not perform it.” The church, just as much as our congress, needs to be empowered by God to perform their duty to maintain our unity, and I do mean duty. One cannot simply say that compromise is the solution, but somehow the differences of the congress and of the church must be acknowledged and respected and prayer must be integral to our decisions. From there we might begin to see what direction God points us and, with his empowerment, might press towards the goal that he has set for us.

***I want to note that this last Sunday (about a week after I posted this blog) my pastor gave a sermon in response to the question "Don't Most Christians Hate Gay People?" On the whole I thought he knocked it out of the park and responded to this question very well. The only critique I had was on one comment he made suggesting that those who are not opposed to homosexuality in the church are "changing the word of God." I don't want to make to much of that comment as it may not have been meant how it sounds. Simply put, I think it's dangerous to say that their reading "changes the word of God," but the more important point is that he has not capitulated on his perspective, which I respect, and his sermon was really intended to be a welcome to all.

Why the new blog?

            For the last four years I have been writing, rather inconsistently, under the blog godisadork.blogspot.com where I have chronicled my some of my unique and varied interactions with God and where I see him all around me. This has included my reflections on interactions with people, events at church, the movies and more. Reflecting on the fact that I started the blog as an 18 year old who imagined that he knew something, I see some of the inherent immaturity in the blog posts. Additionally, while the title of the blog was intentionally chosen and I am not embarrassed of it, I do feel that it is time for a new title and a new approach in my reflections on faith and the pursuit of truth. Additionally, the fact that I am attending seminary now means that I am paying lots of money to study the various expressions of faith and spend lots of time reflecting critically upon them, so hopefully I learn how to reflect on my faith a little better along the way.

            My blog is now called “Polyphonic Truth.” The reasons why I have chosen this title may be apparent, but if not I would like to lay them out for you. I believe, like a modernist, that there is such a thing as absolute truth. I also believe, like a postmodernist, that the truth can be accessed in many ways and, equally important, expressed in many ways, hence polyphonic or "many voices/sounds." I see it in movies, in music, in people, in nature and in theology.  I am also keenly aware that as a twenty-two year old, white, male, urban, semi-Pentecostal, graduate student from an upper-middle class background I see truth in a particular way and the way I see it might not be the way you see it. Additionally, you and I may express truth very differently; I primarily use reflections on faith, you might use abstract art, ballet, or sculpting, none of which I understand very well.

            Because the truth is, admittedly, very hard to know, I have to try to take every expression of it seriously. I don’t want the tainted “Kendrick Barnes Translation” of the truth, I want the actual truth, which means that I want to hear about the truth from people who do not think, look, or act like me. As one of my theology professors Rob Wall said, “I must try to listen to other interpreters, believing that true objectivity emerges out of a community of subjectivities.”

            So here is my expression of truth, I am also very interested in yours.