The First British Lutheran Blog Ever

...just really, really dumb.

So that mindset mentioned in my previous post lasted about... 20 hours, before failing and being replaced by another. And I think I'm much happier with this one. My strategy includes stuff like never EVER again playing "You're beautiful" by James Blunt on my guitar or singing it... very good song... just... bad, bad move. And planning to get out of the brain-dead, peanuts-earning job I'm doing right now and onto a real graduate training programme in a field which is actually engaging, probably business analysis or managerial accounting. That could take a few months to a year to happen, but I'm going to pursue it immediately. Then at least I'll be set up with a foundation of some financial security to be able to fulfill my dreams of having a wife and family someday. Hoping and praying and keeping an eye open aren't much use unless I'm working towards it anyway. But for now, I think I should stop thinking about romance for a while, to guard against the possibility rebounding into something, and to concentrate on my career.

That being said, here's some thoughts on romance:

Every human being in his or her lifetime has the desire, whether they deny it or pursue it, to engage in romance. People start off their lives with an intrinsic desire to be loved, and when they eventually fall in love, they become convinced that they are doing something more natural to them than breathing. It is as if it they found the purpose they were made for, which had remained secret to them until then: to relentlessly give and be given, in love, not love for what another person can give, but love for that other person. The unescapable reality of this, which each man and woman will face, be it in this life or the next, is that in that mind, they are thinking like God. We, as human beings made in the image of God, were made for romance. In loving, human beings, are doing something intrinsic to their nature, and to God's. While they may feel that they would rather die than be without their beloved, and that they would suffer anything, or give up everything, even their own life, for the one they love, they mimick their Creator, Who loved them enough to give up everything He had, and suffer and die for them on the cross. The pleasure they find in the one they love who is a gift from God, is a small foretaste and potential participation in the pleasure they were always meant to find, not instead of loving their beloved, or even in addition to, but through and in God. The trouble in humanity is not that they cannot find this love and pleasure in God, but that they exchanged the truth about God for a lie so that they cannot imagine finding it in their mental and fictional concept of God, thus they keep away from who He is in reality.

Still, God is a lover who did not give up that easily. Or else I wouldn't be writing this today.

"All theology is Christology" is a maxim that is true and right. Yet so is "all theology is romance". Theology, the truth about God, who He is, and what He has done, whether our understanding of it is deep or shallow, is the highest and deepest and truest romance, the original source after which our most treasured experiences of romance in this life are designed.

My heart, you're where?
May you be anywhere
But there.
Polypresent, ever-faithful,
Clinging to what you hoped for.
And you have said too much.
You hate the pounding you make
When you catch a glance
When I'm too tired
To pull wool
Over eyes.
Be buried, drown, die.
Perhaps you will rise
Again
To something great
Or something changed.
You have no home here,
Nor has defiance.
Drown, dear friend.
Your murderer's here.
Release your breath,
In willing death.
You will have no gravestone.

As much as I'd like to defiantly adhere to the cause of being myself whatever the cost, sometimes you just have to be a bit fake around someone, for their own comfort.

Inadequate, not good, but necessary, for now.

I trust God to make known whatever truth He wants known.

As for me... one day at a time.

No explanation is needed.

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end;
if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth, but only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."
C.S. Lewis

I've been at both extremes. I've followed my feelings and ended up a million miles away from the truth and in a very bad place. I refer mainly to my days in the occult. Then I became an objectivist, concerned with truth regardless of how I felt about it, and I ended up a Christian. Now, I've come to a point where I can stand back and enjoy the beauty of the interconnectedness of all good things through Christ. I can come up with things like "human beings were meant to be in love" and, taken with the understanding I say it in, I'm not wrong. I can talk about sexuality and theology as one thing, as you read a few weeks ago. But I could not enjoy this subjective understanding without having looked for and arrived at the facts.

I wonder how much use it is to those on the outside when we speak of the Christian life as changing from death to life, or to use more modern analogies, a statue becoming a real man, evolution being superseded by theosis, etc. I wonder if such speak run into the same problem as the crowds who love to say "God is love" (a phrase that is only used twice in the entire Bible, in 1 John 4:8,16) ignoring that such a phrase only makes sense if you understand Trinitarian orthodoxy and believe in the Atonement of God and man in Christ. How can you explain moving from "darkness" to "Light"? Say a tribe of humans were found living underground for centuries, never seeing daylight for generations... how would you explain to them what sunlight was? They would only know if they went outside.

I'm not sure if or how we should set limits. I think we just need to be careful of overemphasising the experience at cost to communicating its foundation. In my case, I'm glad I had my time of clinging to the hard facts, before I grew to enjoy and appreciate a life informed by and participating in the reality of those facts. I would not ever have the latter without first having the former.

I just finished logging what I did today in a work-journal that might come in useful in getting me into a management position faster. We'll see. Anyways, I found out something rather nice today. Not only do I get my travelling expenses paid, since I'm taking a support-role in a new store opening about 20 miles away, at 40p a mile, but I also get paid my usual hourly rate while I'm driving! :) Suddenly being stuck in rush-hour traffic doesn't seem so bad at all. And I love my little Fiat Punto of joy!

I'll blog again in a few minutes.

Saw "Crash" last night. Excellent, excellent movie. Along with exploring sociological phenomena such as racism, crime, politics, etc. wonderfully, though subtly, extroverted the inner character of its subjects in order to bring out the lesser seen (in film) aspects of the human experience. I suppose one of the messages I took away from it is that you only ever know a page or two at most, of the book that is someone else's life. Oh, and something very relevant to my own experience of the last few months, the lines,

You think you know what you are?

You have no fucking idea.

And don't I know it...

Anyways, I haven't blogged that much this week since we've had an extra five people staying here this week. So it was a little cramped and I didn't have much access to the computer. One of them was a mental health nurse who did her initial nursing training at the same time as my mother. Well, I think I've posted before on here that my home life sucks in terms of emotional stability and that I can't wait to move out once I've saved enough money, but speaking with her helped crystalize some things I've been thinking over the past few months. And this bit ties into Rick's comment in my previous post. He may have been right that I don't understand what I wrote before because I block it out so I feel nothing. The same goes for my coping mechanism with stress. People can tell when I've been facing higher than usual levels of stress from acne flaring up (in contrast, whenever I'm away from my parents, even when I was working all day long everyday on summer camp jobs, my skin became completely clear), but I tend to not feel it emotionally til just before breaking point... a point I've been at at three times in my life thus far. I think I'm getting used to it. I hate it nonetheless. I guess this goes back to everything I've learned about things not being so much good and bad, but good, bad, and inadequate. While it's not good that I block out what I'm feeling, it's sometimes necessary. And a lot of times it's been done out of love... burying your own feelings of love because the one you love doesn't want you to feel it, keeping level-headed because everyone else is going beserk and need you to restore something close to peace, etc. I'm sure I'm going to have many more cases of having to draw upon this particular coping mechanism in my life. It's an imperfect solution I'll be very glad to give up, so I can just be myself, completely, freely, but I don't see myself giving it up til the next life.

I also realised that I have a lot of anger towards my father. His wrongs are not mine to list, but I suppose at least some of it is that I've worked and continue to work towards shedding myself of the less-desirable qualities I fear I may have picked up from him. I tend to use wit to confront threat and aggression, but I know what I should do is let things cool down. I realise this attitude of emnity violates the Fourth Commandment and doesn't help things at home at all. I suppose what's needed is the grace to hate the sin but love the sinner, even at home. And a heck of a lot more patience. May God help me.

I can't say more without it getting even more personal than I'm usually willing to be on this blog.

Coping mechanisms... can't Live with them, can't live without 'em, I guess.

...whatever it says really. And sometimes not even that. I remember when I first started studying hermeneutics (how a message is communicated) I learned about how words serve as signifiers of that of which they speak, i.e. not being so much containers, but signposts to reality. Words are only subjectively meaningful if the hearer/reader has the necessary frames of reference in his/her experiences, or at least, something close in his/her imagination that those words can point to. And at best, with a blogging, you're getting a freeze-frame of my thoughts, which aren't frozen but dynamic and constantly changing and growing.

And I suppose that's really the inadequacy in my attempts at letting this blog sometimes be an open diary. It's the same thing I find when I attempt to reconstruct how I felt at certain times. For example, a few months ago, I scrawled this and it actually made sense to me at the time:

strange how silence can scream at you
how you're still breathing while torn in two
having thoroughly mastered
travelling without moving
on
what road I don't know
the best is yet to be
or maybe
it's what just died
I miss delight
fuck rationality

Now I see it,
Now you don't.

And now I just pretty much think "what the heck?". I guess being in love is either absolute madness or perfect sanity depending on which side of it you're on. Now when I read those words I can understand how someone could feel like that, but not really how I could feel like that, or what it is like to feel like that.

I'm not good at being systematic so this next point is only kinda relevant: I think I've learned to appreciate the value of experience in learning lessons. I remember a few months ago a close friend of mine got really annoyed because I insisted on taking her on the longer journey of getting her to think for herself, rather than just saying what I believed in one sentence. But the truth gets so cheap when it's purely theoretical. And some things take time to appreciate. For a lesson, for truth, to truly become yours, it has to have had its value established, or else my telling you it will become no more memorable or important than what you ate for breakfast this morning.

For the same reason, I question my faith more, and more stringently, than the most anti-Christian polemicists. It's meant I'm fine with continuing my life whilst not having all the answers, having unanswered questions, and at the same time, I've learnt that the Truth doesn't need my efforts to defend it. The Truth has proved itself capable of defending itself on its own perfectly adequately. It doesn't need to be spoon-fed or quarantined. A big part of my continuance in the Faith is that it stands up to even the most demanding lines of honest, realistic questioning, including mine.

Going back to my original point though... I guess it's impossible for any other mere mortal to say truly "I understand you". That's something only God can do, and I think I should stop expecting so much understanding from other people. I remember several months ago I probably bugged the girl I was crazy about at the time by asking her when she was standing quietly, "what are you thinking about right now?". I did genuinely want to know even those half-thoughts you think about when you're not doing anything which you immediately throw back into your subconscious when you need to do something, and which you're totally convinced, out of assumption but probably with good reason, that it's something only you can understand. I now realise my mistake with that. It was an unrealistic expectation. I'm not sure where the healthy medium lies but it's somewhere between full disclosure of thoughts and putting on masks and being fake. I don't know where between those two it is, but I'll know it when I see it.

In conclusion... I don't know what my conclusion is. This is another journey that makes me appreciate the truth I find at the end of it, I guess.

Imma go bed now.

...then I got a phone call.

Davy, one of the elders at my church, collapsed and died suddenly this afternoon. He was my friend, enthusiastic in carrying about the Lord's work, a caring husband, father and grandfather, and most of all, another bad person redeemed and rescued from sin, death, and hell, by Christ.

A small segment of a much larger story:

...Now when Jesus came, he found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb four days. (Bethany was near Jerusalem, about two miles off, and many of the Jews had come to Martha and Mary to console them concerning their brother). So when Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went and met him, but Mary remained seated in the house. Martha said to Jesus,
"Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you."
Jesus said to her, "Your brother will rise again."
Martha said to him, "I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day."
Jesus said to her, "I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?"
She said to him, "Yes, Lord; I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who is coming into the world."... -John 11:17-27

Christ is risen from the dead, and so shall we be. Death can go to hell.

Last week in work, since people were going on about what they'd have done if they had won £77 million on the European like one woman in Ireland did, I joked, "If I won £77 million, I'd give 77 million people a quid". The customer I had just served responded, "aww, that's a nice thought. You'll be going to heaven." Then she left with a smile.

I don't know if I've ever heard a single sentence be so wrong in so many ways in all my life.

But people stick with such shallow and ill-thought-through conceptions all their life don't they?

A while ago, I posted this quote. The following quote comes soon after it:

The main thing we learn from a serious attempt to practice the Christian virtues is that we fail...

I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a Christian, has the idea of an exam or of a bargain in his mind. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. When they find it blown to bits, some people think this means that Christianity is a failure and give up. They seem to imagine that God is very simple-minded. In fact, of course, He knows all about this. One of the very things Christianity was designed to do was to blow this idea to bits. God has been waiting for the moment at which you discover that there is no question of earning a pass mark in this exam or putting Him in your debt.

Then comes another discovery. Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment or moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already. So that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God, I will tell you what it is really like. It is like a small child going to his father and saying, "Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present." Of course, the father does, and he is pleased with the child's present. It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction. When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake now.

Yet the creed of the world remains:
"Good people go to heaven. Bad people go to hell."

But then Truth steps in and says, "there are no good people".

I'd much rather people learn this from experience than by people telling them. It's pretty easily done. Just... be good, in the highest form of what it is to be good. No excuses. Never feel hate or misplaced jealousy or lust or be ungrateful. And see how far you get. And that's just your thought-life. No one's said anything about your words and actions yet either. Everyone knows and assumes God is good, but in a fit of self-righteousness, they assume that He can be as lax and forgetful with that goodness as they are. He's not as forgetful as we are though. And that really bad stuff you once did remains really as bad in what it is on friday as it did on tuesday. And it's precisely because He is Good in a way beyond which we can imagine, it means He hates evil, wherever it is found, including in us.

So yeah, people like me, who fall far short of God's standard in thought, word, and deed, if we're hoping to pass a test or score brownie-points with God, are screwed. As already demonstrated, we'd have no bargaining chip to deal with anyway.

I'm not feeling so articulate tonight, but U2's Bono said it well:

Bono: I really believe we've moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.

Assayas: Well, that doesn't make it clearer for me.

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics—in physical laws—every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the Universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so will you sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.

Assayas: I’d be interested to hear that.

Bono: That’s between me and God. But I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I’d be in deep shit. It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.

Of course, for those still holding out for God to give them exactly what they deserve, they'll tragically get what they want.

You see, "good" people don't go to heaven because deep down, when histories are examined and their deepest thoughts and feelings are known, there are no truly "good" people, except One. And He lived the Good life us Bad people couldn't live, then died the death we Bad people deserved to die, nailing our Badness and the seemingly-unescapable consequences of it to the cross with Him. He clothed Bad people in his Goodness and started removing their Badness ready for the next life.

It's not because they could erase or make compensation for their own Badness, but because they are forgiven, and their Badness removed by God Himself, that bad people go to heaven. Bad people like you, and me.

It's been a long day. Out of bed to running 11 miles, then home for a very small lunch, straight to work, then getting changed at home and out the door to gymnastics class then home again, eating, and now I'm about to go to bed before waking up tomorrow at 5 to be in work at 6. I was going to blog something substantial but I'll have to leave that til tomorrow evening. So instead, I'll leave you with this thought:

I write this on my 22nd birthday. I don't know why but in the past months I feel like I've been re-learning so many of the lessons I learned as a teenager except ten times louder. I know time changes people but it feels like I'm getting the intensive accelerated-learning program right now. It just leaves me confessing how little I really know. I no longer pay much regard to the comment made to me many times "you're older than your years". Right now I feel totally new to this whole life thing.

Last week a friend of the family told me, "You're at that time now where you face two difficult choices: the right career, and the right woman; and if you don't get both right, you can be very, very unhappy."

But the truth is, I don't really feel capable of making either of those right now. Careerwise I'm following a path I believe I can be successful in, rather than having a concept of "my dream job". As for the other matter, in contrast to how I've been for a long, long time, I don't think I'm ready right now to make that decision... or perhaps I'm just realizing what I spoke somewhat theoretically about in my previous post on sexuality, that I'm not made to really know myself apart from knowing myself through knowing my wife. I'm in no rush, and have plenty to keep me busy right now, at any rate.

And I need to continue in my own personal mission to eradicate fakeness in myself. I've noticed I've become two-faced in my attitude.

Let me explain: There's something I really only just noticed myself doing this past week. I had long taken my stand against superficial politeness but I've noticed myself falling into the same trap. Instead of saying what's on my mind, I hold back, because my experience is that people either cannot understand or won't care enough to even discuss it, as if disagreement was this horrible thing that meant that a friendship was over and so the discussion should be avoided at all costs, hands over ears and "la la la I can't hear you!". For the past few years, my attempts to speak my mind and thereby introduce a deeper dimension into conversations have caused people to become uncomfortable and to seek an immediate subject change, as if my words presented some incredible threat to them, so much that it requires everyone to bury their heads in the sand and try desperately to ignore and forget I ever spoke.

Right now, it's come to my attention that in place of speaking my mind, I tend to just say a bunch of superficial stuff, often unintentionally repeating myself. I'm glad that one friend spoke her mind and told me plainly that she found it really annoying. I've probably been annoying the hell out of plenty of people lately. I need to drop the assumption gained from some people I've hung out with in the past, ceasing to apply it to my current friends group. They may react totally differently. It works both ways though. Out of courtesy I've also held back on telling people how offensive and idiotic I find it when they say "oh my God" or "Jesus Christ" to express shock or disgust. Suprising, no. I used to do it without thinking just as most people do now. But offensive, yes. That for me was pretty much the only thing that immediately stopped dead in my habits, rather than fading away, or being carried and fought, upon my coming to faith 6 years ago. Now I'm committed to a non-preachy, answer-when-asked application of my faith, but I'm no longer going to offer a shallow excuse when asked what's on my mind, or seek to find something superficial to talk about instead. I don't mean that every conversation I have has to be deep and life-changing. There's plenty of everyday stuff to talk about. I'm not looking to search the mysteries of life and the universe in learning capoeira or talking about cars. Nor am I gonna force it into people's faces. But if asked, I won't filter or water down my answer like I've done before. My friends have said things like "you can talk to me about anything" and I guess if I'm gonna be my honest self I'll eventually see how true that statement is. Perhaps I'll piss everyone off and no one will want to know what's going on in my mind and I'll spend a lot of time keeping my mouth shut and hiding my mind. Perhaps everyone I'm with now will want to bury their head in the sand and pretend that the most important issues in life don't exist or unknowable, just like those I was around before. What they do is up to them and I'll love them the same whatever they do. But you save the world by pissing off one person at a time, so I don't know the outcome. I'm not polite enough to be afraid of it though. What people choose to say or think or hear, they say, think, hear. What happens, happens.

But I'm gonna be me. No filters of politeness and accomodation, no fakeness, be I in the long run, welcomed or hated for it. Once hypocrisy becomes known, I can't continue in it. I guess on practical levels, this is gonna only change a small fraction of a percentage in my external behaviour, but it's a sweeping change in my attitude.

I long to have integrity, to be simple and uncomplicated. And for that, I have to be honest at all times.

Time to take off my mask to the world in more than my writings, so that there's not two faces to me, one for blogging, one for real life; but just one... May God help me.

Don't be suprised if I don't blog much for a while. I may, or may not, suspend this thing indefinitely. Maybe I'll just take a few days off thinking about it. Maybe I'll go back to a more objective, impersonal style of blogging. I don't know. I have some emptiness that's probably gonna take a while to unload. I won't give the details here but here's a copy and pasting from an MSN conversation with a friend regarding the tip of the iceburg:

with the best of intentions, shallow optimism, and inconsiderateness creeping in unchecked, i did a monstrous thing and made a very sweet girl very hurt... more so than if i just told her "i dont want anything at all right now".

As she said herself, "I thought you'd be the last person in the world to hurt me"

and i could only reply "so did i"



And now, I feel like I don't know who or what I am.
Let's start with: wrong, foolish, inconsiderate...

If you're not a genius, you'll probably need explanation of what this song's talking about, just like I did, at least in a few places. For such an explanation, click here. After 24 hours of regret and awkward feeling, having violated my own principles and engaging in a hell of a lot of emotional button-pressing when I was determined not to do anything of the sort, it's taken on more life to me than it had just over a day ago.

"Standing up for nothing" - Caedmon's Call

Well, I can't stop staring at myself;
My face reflected in this empty plate.
I can't decide if it's the devil
Or if it's just something I ate.
'Cause he's been down there all morning.
He's patiently waiting at my gate.
He's throwing rocks at my window.
"Hey won't you come on out and play with me?"

But everyday when I get up
I see folks trading in their crowns
for all these paper or plastic lives;
An opiate for the masses hounds.
And pride, like a vestige of lives lost.
It's the stench of the old folks coming 'round.
Now with the news I heard today,
I can't tell if this world is lost or found.

You go; I'll be waiting here.
And I'm awake, I cannot sleep.
So I'll sit upon this rock is you.
I ain't standing up for nothing.

Well, I've never seen my congressman,
But I can't deny that he exists.
'Cause I've seen his legislation pass;
I've seen his name on the ballot list.
Same, I can't deny this fallen world.
Though not my home it's where I live.
How can I preserve and light the way
for a world that I can't admit I'm in?

'Cause I know who I say You are,
But these crows can't be made to stop.
So I'll sit denying by this fire
I ain't standing up for nothing

Lack of interest leads to,
Lack of knowledge leads to,
Lack of perspective leads to,
Lack of communication leads to,
Lack of understanding leads to,
Lack of concern leads to,
This complacency denotes,
This approval denies
The truth.

But I can't stop staring at myself;
It's my face reflected in this empty plate.
And I know that it's the devil.

So You lead; and I'll be close behind.
So You speak and I'll hang on Your words.
You've got to lift me from this hardened tree,
'Cause I ain't standing up for nothing.

---

Kyrie eleison.

This day, I beheld Josh's comments on this post.

It just so happens that after a chat last night, myself and the aforementioned girl decided to start spending more time together and to just see how it goes. She's a sweet, appreciative, kind-hearted girl, who I enjoy spending time with, and it would be idiotic to let an opportunity like this pass without giving it a chance.

Whether that works out or not in the long-run, right now, I'm enjoying the sweet irony.

Meh.