The best stories speak of life in ways you can understand, by commenting anecdotally on the things you know in your heart to be true, but are so subtle or subconscious that you've never thought of them before. But just as soon as you read these elements of good stories, you say in your heart, "Yes, of course. I've thought that for my entire life, but I've only just now put the thought into words. Or rather, this book has. I should quote this in my blog."
I just finished reading Life of Pi by Yann Martel, which took, well, not long at all for a man as busy and slow-reading as myself. I spent about two and a half weeks on the first 180 pages. And I read the last 150 last night. Couldn't put it down. And I wouldn't want to bore you with a book review that would critique the story and suck all the life out of it. I give it a 10 out of 10. That's all you need to know. Looking for something to read? I would suggest Life of Pi. There, book review over. But I do want to share with you a passage from the book that has been nearly life-changing for me these last few weeks. As I described above, it's one of those passages that made me say, "But of course! I've always known that! Now I finally have words for that thought!" For context, Pi, the main character and narrator, is the son of a zookeeper. He actively practices Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam. His fascination with animals and God often intersect, helping him, ultimately, to better understand people, and God. It's an intriguing read. And the following passage has stayed with me since I read it on page 31, the very day I started reading the book.
Just beyond the ticket booth Father had had painted on a wall in bright red letters the question: DO YOU KNOW WHICH IS THE MOST DANGEROUS ANIMAL IN THE ZOO? An arrow pointed to a small curtain. There were so many eager, curious hands that pulled at the curtain that we had to replace it regularly. Behind it was a mirror.
But I learned at my expense that Father believed there was another animal even more dangerous than us, and one that was extremely common, too, found on every continent, in every habitat: the redoubtable species Animalus anthromorphicus, the animal as seen through human eyes. We've all met one, perhaps even owned one. It is an animal that is "cute", "friendly", "loving", "devoted", "merry", "understanding". These animals lie in ambush in every toy store and children's zoo. Countless stories are told of them. They are the pendants of those "vicious", "bloodthirsty", "depraved" animals that inflame the ire of the maniacs I have just mentioned, who vent their spite on them with walking sticks and umbrellas. In both cases we look at an animal and see a mirror. The obsession with putting ourselves at the centre of everything is the bane not only of theologians but also of zoologists.
Indeed, the self is an interesting thing. We Christians like to dismiss it. Selflessness is a virtue. Nietzsche considered that to be the worst thing about Christians - the dismissal of the self. Ayn Rand, too, thought it was despicable, not specifically the Christians but altruists altogether, to consider selflessness a virtue. I do believe that Nietzsche and Rand and all the rest who despise the Christian/altruistic view of the self as despicable have indeed misinterpreted things, skewed them to fit an agenda. The Scriptures don't actually encourage selflessness. Love God and love your neighbor as yourself, for instance. Well if we didn't care about the self at all, we certainly wouldn't make very good neighbors.
It's just that the self has a right place and a wrong place. The self is a gift given to us. For people who were created in the image of God, the self is always going to be the most accessible image, however incomplete it may be, of the image of God. Placing the self as an incomplete but accurate image of who God is would be placing the self in the right place. Assuming that everything we do or think is the image of God - now, that would be taking the matter too far. We are not God, though we often would prefer it. But we must humbly acknowledge that everything that is good in us is probably a reflection of God's person, given to us out of his overwhelming love. He could have created us to be completely different, separate, opposites of him. But as with humans and animals, only certain things are separate and different between us and God. Other things are quite similar.
The fault of the anti-altruists - Nietzsche in particular - is that they liken Christianity to Asceticism. Asceticism is not the Christian calling. Self-denial is not good. Self-oppression is not virtuous. Self-destruction is not noble. The Scriptures do not call for that. It is because we know the love which God has had for us that we even know how to love those around us. It is because God has forgiven us that we know how to forgive others. It is because God has placed joy in our hearts that we desire for others to know true joy. It is because Jesus died on the cross for us that we wish to live sacrificial lives on the behalf of others. And it is because Jesus rose again that we know life after death is available to us, and it is precisely because it is available to us that we desire it to be available to others. If we eradicate the self, we eradicate all the memorials of what God has done, for it is our own souls that are the grounds for those memorials. Destroy the self, and you destroy all the memories of God's good work - the change and tranformation He has worked out in our lives.
Indeed, often we go astray, and we do what we do with housepets and zoo animals - we describe God in human terms, in a human perspective, with human limitations. We limit the limitless. In the dangerous task of using the image of God that is ourselves to understand better who God is, we must acknowledge that he is so much bigger, better, and more holy. In myself, I see a minuscule piece of who God is. By getting married, I see in my wife another minuscule piece of who God is. Throw in our church community and our students in InterVarsity, it's a lot less minuscule, but still minuscule. Throwing in nature around us helps too. Throwing in church cultures from around the world, the picture gets a little clearer. But regardless, ourselves, our spouses, our churches, our communities, our cultures - all of them are clouded over by sin, which prevents us from fully being able to see who God is through who we are.
The bottom line is this: God is who He is. Flat out. Nothing can give us a complete, holy picture of who He is, except for Him. So the self can only go so far. The self is how we remember what God has done. It is how we respond to what God has done. But it is only God Himself who can reveal Himself truly to us. And, you see, He's thoughtful like that. For God is very big. Let's give thanks that He's actually kind enough to reveal Himself in small bits so our heads and hearts don't explode.
Welcome to Lent. I guess we don't really "kick off" Lent. We kick off football games and school years. Lent we more mozy into without an ounce of excitement. Nonetheless. Come mozy with me.
Some of you (myself included) will be walking around this evening with a cross of black ashes on your forehead. Some of you, if you're not a Christian, will be wondering why those crazy Christians are walking around with a cross of black ashes on their forehead. Some of you, if you are a Christian, will be wondering why all the crazy Christians are walking around with a cross of black ashes on their foreheads. I've never done the ashes thing before. I've never been in a church tradition liturgical enough to do an Ash Wednesday service. But now I'm a practicing Anglican, so ashes here I come.
Lent is a weird thing. For 46 days (I think that's right; don't quote me), people of faith in Jesus Christ look toward the crucifixion of their Lord. We focus on sin, grief, confession. We spend 46 days in a state of emotional downturn. We stop saying "Alleluia" in church. We remember that we are dust, and that to dust we will return. For a month and half. Is it all really that necessary? Well, I won't say it's necessary. I haven't done it ever before in my 25 years. And I think I've always had a sufficient understanding of Easter. But man, I think it can be hugely beneficial for a lot of reasons; I'll focus on one.
We are people of immediacy. Gone are the days when people pray for one thing for an entire lifetime, much less for more than a few weeks. People throughout the history of Judaeo-Christian faith give us an example that we can never achieve because of our idolatry of Now. Abraham prayed for how many years that he and Sarah could have a kid? Moses never got to see the one thing he spent his entire life pushing for. Solomon saw some great things in his life, got to see and experience one of the few and far between periods of peace and progress in the history of Israel. And he wrote a great book, Proverbs, to set up his son to carry on the greatness for many more years after his death. And what happened? Dude squandered it all. Solomon also left us with Ecclesiastes, documenting his long struggle with feeling like all his efforts in labor were pointless. These faith ancestors of ours were surrounded by the disappointment of working hard for a lifetime and not knowing if it's really worth it all.
Me? When I pray for something starting today, if I don't have it by next week, I move on. That's a clear "No" from God. Simply ridiculous. Selfish. Shallow.
The fact of the matter is that we are all people full of disappointment whose chief aim in life is not to show the world how disappointed and unfulfilled we are. But God responds to our long periods of disappointment, to our lives that often feel wasted, with an offer of eternal fulfillment, joy, and life abundant. We may spend 46 days looking toward the cross with grief in our hearts, but it's so that we can enjoy the resurrection basically until Christmas. An illustration of how pathetic death is compared to life within the gospel of Jesus Christ. A feeble illustration, yes, but it'll do for now.
So it's been a loooong time since I've stopped here and written. The beginning of a new semester is certainly no coincidence in that. But man, there's a personal side to it too. January and February have been a good time for me to begin processing things, and with an August-thru-November like we had, I might be there a while. The weird thing is that in the midst of where I am personally, things in ministry at UNC have been, well, as good as one can imagine. Students are praying like never before, inviting like never before, and the Spirit is seemingly at work like never before. We've seen two students come to know the Lord for the first time, some who are new to faith beginning to take it seriously, and some who have just been gone for a while come back to Jesus. And we've seen students who a year ago had serious issues with that word which seems to have become a dirty one - evangelism - embracing it as a lifestyle. In InterVarsity, we like to talk about transformation, and it abounds right now in the UNC-Chapel Hill chapter.
But the trickiness of it all is that ministry is what I do, but it is not who I am. While things are going really well on-campus, I can't deny that I still feel a bit like the man born blind in the 9th chapter of John's gospel on the personal front. Well, except for my under-developed left eye, my eyesight is just dandy. But I feel like a man emotionally born blind. I've always been one to opine before I emote. That's just kind of the way I've been wired. Not unlike many men I suppose. But man, last fall called for a different John Farmer. If all I can do is opine about last fall, I would certainly be able to do nothing but spin myself into a cycle of clinical depression, I'm pretty sure. Losing two of the closest people in your life - I think you can guess my opinion on that. But I needed to learn, and learn fast, how to emote. Not how to deal with emotion - that's quite a different thing. I've always dealt with emotion - hey John, stop it! That's what my inner monologue has always sounded like. I haven't needed to deal with emotion; I've just needed to do the messy business of simply emoting.
The process went through the end of 2009 without so much as one discovery about myself or about how I'm taking things. But January and February have been a bit different. And I'm realizing that it is very deeply a spiritual process. Because emotionally, I was born blind. Fortunately, I was born into the church, and my blind self has been laid in the shadows of the temple just like this man, where Jesus would find me. And he definitely found me found me back in middle school, when the gospel became clear and real to me. But he's constantly finding me again. See, we're not fortunate like the miracle-recipients of the gospels, who seemingly had one or two needs - blindness, paralysis, a hemorrhaging problem. (Kidding.) But seriously, we're all incredibly needy. And we're in a cycle of Jesus finding us in the pit of despair in a lot of different ways throughout our lives. Well, this spiritual process of getting emotional eyes has been largely non-epic. We have this image of Jesus' miracles being these epic displays of power, like scenes from a movie except not. But no, dude took dirt, added spit, making mud, and anointed the blind man with it. That's not the way Spielberg would have written it, I'm pretty sure.
Imagine what it was like. You're blind. Can't see. You've functioned primarily out of your sense of hearing your entire life. So this man comes up to you, and seems intent on healing you. So you're listening really well to hear how exactly he's gonna do it. You hear him spit. Confused yet? You hear him bend down, and you hear him taking his fingers and stirring together his spit with the dirt like it's a milkshake or something. I'm questioning his wisdom by now. And then you hear him take a dollop of the newly made mudshake onto his finger. You feel the warm sensation of the mudshake on your eyes. When this crazy lunatic who just slathered spit-mud on your eyes tells you to go wash yourself in the pool, do you do it?
Here's where the blind man has an advantage on me. He's been aware of his need for sight for all his life. People like me, who think we have it all together, we want to say to Jesus when he does weird things to heal us, "No, I'm fine, you keep your spit to yourself." But the blind man is no fool; if it has even a chance of giving him sight, he's gonna do it. So he goes and he washes, and in faith receives his sight.
So yeah, receiving emotional sight has been a spiritual process. The more I understand about the person of Christ, the more I have eyes to see what is happening in my heart after a hard fall. I'm glad to be back to blogging. It's always a good way for me to process things, to share things, and to invite others into my process, if it's actually interesting to them - to you. When asked why the man was born blind, Jesus says, "It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him." That's always at the root of our needs. We live in a broken world, a world broken by us no less, and we all as a result have immense needs. But a redemptive God shows the world where the true source of redemption is through powerful works of healing in those who come to him in faith - who in faith can admit their needs, who in faith confess that Jesus can heal them, who in faith believe that whatever weird way Jesus chooses to heal them is just fine. So I'm glad to be back to blogging to share this process so that maybe the works of God might be displayed in me too. There's no point to our suffering if the power of Christ over suffering is not displayed in us.
