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No one calls on your name
or strives to lay hold of you;
for you have hidden your face from us
and made us waste away because of our sins.
- Isaiah 64:7-8Yet, O LORD, you are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter;
we are all the work of your hand.
“It always looks darkest just before it gets totally black.”
- Charlie Brown
Today’s Reading: Isaiah 64:1-9
Prophetic Repentance, or Good Grief
I’ve been through enough pastoral counseling scenarios to confirm the truthiness of that pop psychology axiom, “there are two kinds of pain: the pain we learn from, and the pain we fail to learn from.” When I was a youth pastor, I was fond of paraphrasing it this way: in this life you will experience pain, and there’s no getting around it. What you must choose is whether that pain will be stupid and pointless, or whether you will learn from it, redeem it, and make it beautiful.
Spirituality is related to physicality like bone is related to muscle. Our interior life is a dynamic skeletal foundation that supports and gives animation to our external reality. So the analogy of a bone fracture serves this discussion fairly well — the pain of a break has the potential to be either redemptive or stupid, depending on whether you allow the bone to be reset and heal up. What’s interesting about fractures is that we instinctively hold the extremity close to our bodies, and the last thing we want to do is feel the momentary pain of setting the bone, even though the alternative would bring greater unhealth in the long-run.
Given the conscious choice between stupid pain and redemptive pain, Israel is opting for the latter. In effect, Isaiah is saying, “look, we realize that Yahweh is an awesome and wrathful God, but he’s our awesome and wrathful God.” We’d rather go against our instincts and opt for pain now, health later.
This stands in contrast to the overarching narrative of our industrial age, which preaches a gospel intolerant of any kind of pain. We run frantically through life like Alice chasing the White Rabbit through Wonderland, treating symptom after symptom following the unending barrage of dosage instructions:
“Eat this.”
“Drink this.”
“Watch this.”
“Read this.”
“Buy this.”
And, like Alice, we find the situation gradually becoming more surreal and untreatable. This is what life looks like in spiritual exile — holding against our bodies these fractured hopes and dreams of spiritual vitality, we do life under the tyrannical rule of self, which is in reality the lawlessness of being ruled by nothing, thus being ruled by whatever is being marketed to us.
Would we choose this Advent season to be aligned with One greater than Self, which is the only path to the revelation of our true Selves, as “clay… the work of [Yahweh's] hand.”
The holidays, for many of us, feels like that circus act in which a trapeze artist walks across the big tent on a tightrope. Balance is the name of the game.
How do we enjoy a great meal when we have to sit so close to the people who know best how to push our buttons?
How do we balance the horrors of AmerIndian history with the abundance and blessing of living in the most prosperous nation on the little blue planet?
How do we balance the heartfelt desire to provide gifts to our loved ones with a teetering financial crisis?
Yes, the holidays are a tightrope act. Part of the draw is waiting to see who will make it across to the other side with poise and grace.
Grace. It’s a term tossed around so liberally, I fear it’s lost a bit of its’ newness and shine. It’s an idea that desperately needs a volumizing conditioner — something to remind us of its’ mystery and beauty, something that will get it to bounce off our shoulders and turn some heads. Grace is classically defined as unearned favor. I’m beginning to realize that this, or any attempt at definition is far from adequate. And that’s because grace isn’t really grace until the hot glow of her presence has fallen on your own sorry disposition. Grace is merely a theological construct to well-fed, First-World consumers who don’t give a second thought to the fact that, this Thursday, they’ll literally eat like kings while others in this same world literally starve. Grace is a cheap vocabulary word to Americans who simply assume that they live in the greatest nation on earth and take as a matter of fact that God-shed-his-grace-on-thee without diving even momentarily into the complexity of our blessing and how it came about (largely through plague, genocide, slavery and unjust labor practices).
Being godawful and pathetic, selfish human beings doesn’t disqualify us from blessing. It makes us good candidates for grace – the kind of grace that Jesus was referring to when he said that we’re blessed when we’re hungry and thirsty for righteousness, because we will be filled.
Then there’s what happens when we become recipients of that grace: when we choose to stand in the shoes of “the last, the lost and the least” among us, and recognize that we ourselves are not exceptional specimens of humanity but rather lucky and mostly dishonest, we can appreciate with true humility and appreciation what grace has been afforded to us, and be a little more willing to extend that favor to people with whom we might otherwise feel don’t deserve it.
So the bad news is, you’re a member of the human family. The good news is, you’re a member of the human family. Have a Grace-filled Thanksgiving… remember to love the least like you’re one of them.
Because you are. And Father loves you extravagantly.
This fascinating video from the TED convention features a neuroscientist recounting her own experience with a stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. First the video, then some initial questions:
- As beautiful as this description is, how much of it is her left-hemisphere’s perceptions based on already held assumptions of reality? I kept getting reminded that somebody was around to narrate the entire event – her Ego.
- What does this dichotomy between possessing a sense of self and a sense of selflessness between the hemispheres reveal about the nature of reality, the role of the human mind in perceiving it, and the way we understand and relate to God?
- Weren’t those moments of Nirvana arguably lapses into a type of brain-deadness – not a freedom from stress, only the temporary inability to process it? While it is certainly valuable to re-center by giving the right brain some time to run the show, as she suggests, I would also suggest that it is equally important to give the left hemisphere equal credibility so as to manage life and reduce the actual stresses the right hemisphere so effortlessly releases. I can imagine letting the dishes pile up, leaving my child to fend for himself, never showing up to work or paying the bills because they’re all so connected to the illusion of reality
. - Is it possible, based on the premise of two minds/one brain, that one’s theological biases (liberal, conservative, fundamentalist, postmodern) are influenced more by brain behavior than an objective standard of truth?
All kidding and questioning aside, this is a fascinating piece of analysis that we all can find useful, if only to help us understand the importance of balancing the brain’s influences on our actual lives. That, and the human brain had to be the coolest stage prop I’ve seen in a long time.
