Smudges on the Window

I have just realized that having a blog is like wandering around your house naked with the windows open; it's all very liberating until someone looks in the window. However, while being caught unawares is one thing, it is quite another to stroll up to the window and press your naked, flabby body against the coolness of the glass in a hideous form of vertical prostration for all the world to see, which is what I seem to do at times on this site.

While I do not regret (so far) anything I have said on this site, because it was what I thought at the time, it is very much a record of my journey towards God which I hope never ends. I want to always be seeking and never arriving. If I ever state that I have arrived, then I know that I have missed God altogether and I hope someone loves me enough to shoot me.

You Don't Have to be an A**hole

So, this one is going to require a bit of explanation. First off, I write this blog because it’s cathartic and I can feel free to say whatever I want because no one besides myself, my wife and a friend of ours (who can handle anything I have to say) ever reads it. In case there is someone out there reading this that doesn’t really know me, it also requires a bit of background information.

We live in a small town just outside a large city. For a number of years we attended the local evangelical church, which at one point produced a spin-off church in a smaller community not far away, with the pastor of that spin-off coming from the parent church. We tried an experiment a few years ago, that involved not going to church for a year, to see if our faith was based on the church or on God - we never did go back. We have been looking for a home church that is more closely aligned to our current spiritual beliefs; but so far no luck.

The other day, which was a few days before Christmas, spin-off pastor and his wife come into the dental office in town where my wife is the receptionist. They chat about various mundane things such as the Christmas programs that spin-off is having at his church. Eventually he asks what Parent church is doing for Christmas programs. With some trepidation my wife explains that she doesn’t know, because we haven’t attended there in three years, and when we do go to a church, we go to an Anglican church in the city.

The Dark Night of the Soul

All the posts you see below were copied over from my other site, due to problems with it. This is the first real post on this site. As I was copying them over, I was reminiscing on the various entries. I came across "Look Ma No Hands" and as this is Easter Sunday, it stuck out. Then for some reason I started to think back several years ago, before I started on my current spiritual journey, to I time when I was going through what has been described as the dark night of the soul by saint John of the Cross. It lasted about a year and a half.

Are Muslims Christians?

I fear I am leaning towards being a universalist. I don't think I'm all the way there yet, but the thoughts are definitely there. How can this be? I've always been taught that there's a special place in hell reserved just for universalists. After all, how are you supposed to feel self-righteous if you have no belief system that excludes anyone who doesn't think like you? But... it seems to be the only thing that makes sense.

Maybe the line in the sand - the line that divides non-christian from christian - is so hard to find, and define, because it's not there. Maybe there are only degrees of being Christian. Maybe when the bible indicates that christians will  become rulers and priests, it means that these people are the ones who have learned the most in this life, and are therefore worthy to be mentors to the others. Maybe this is the real meaning of the parable of the talents.

Does this mean that Muslims are Christian? Does this mean that any good deeds, done by anyone, all contribute to the kingdom of God, no matter who they are? Is this what Jesus meant when he said that whoever is not against you is for you. Does this mean that the sadness of the story of the rich young ruler is not that he failed to become a Christian, but that he missed an opportunity to enter into the true, and complete, kingdom mindset? That when he will be shown the error of his ways, during the final judgment, that even then he will reject the mindset of the kingdom - a mindset of self sacrificing love - because he is used to having too much?

Was Gandhi right when he said that he was Muslim and Hindu and Christian and jew and Buddhist?

I don't know. I think the jump from evangelical to universalist is too much. I think I'll go out and force myself to feel smug about my self-righteousness until this feeling goes away.

Look Ma, No Hands

“My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” This is the cry from the cross. The traditional interpretation is that God couldn't look on Christ anymore because of the sin of the world that he was carrying. When you think of it for awhile, you realize how ridiculous that explanation is. Since when can God not look on sin? Doesn't he have to look at sin in order to judge it as wrong? Hasn't he been looking at sin for millennia?

 The other view is that God moved away from Christ, such as in “the dark night of the soul”. But no one ever seems to give an explanation as to why. Perhaps God does move away, but not in the negative sense that most people would think of.

 Christ is the perfect model for how we are to live. He modelled for us perfect obedience and self-sacrificing love. Maybe God moved away from him in the same way as a parent moves away from a child learning to ride a bike.

 When teaching a child how to ride a bike, you run along side of them, holding onto the seat, keeping them steady until you sense that they have enough balance to do it on there own. And then you slowly release your grip on the seat, while still running beside, until they are doing it all on their own. Eventually they are riding down the street, all by themselves, without even realizing that you are no longer there.

 Maybe God saw Christ's perfect obedience on the cross and then slowly moved away, in the realization that his modelling of obedience and self-sacrificing love was now coming to completion. And, just as a child suddenly realizes that the parent isn't holding onto the seat anymore, there is a burst of fear and panic.

 Maybe in the closing moments of the cross, God was standing off to the side, slightly out of breath, but with a big smile on his face.

 “It is finished.”

The Middle Seat

I had to travel for work the other day. I'm always a bit concerned about what seat I get, as I hate sitting in the middle seat. I read an article that said the person in the middle seat should get both arm rests, as the window person actually has a bit of excess room between the arm rest and the actual window, while the aisle person can always lean out a bit for some more room. Makes sense to me, but I still hate the middle seat, and you can't count on the person either side of you having read the same article.

Anyway, when I checked in at the kiosk, I made sure to check my seats on all three legs of the flight to make sure they were aisle seats - they were. Perfect. When I boarded there was already someone in the window seat, but the middle was empty, so I waited, hoping against hope that no one was acually sitting there, which would give me even more room. The flight was just about compleley boarded when a woman came towards my row, and looked at the seat beside me with a crest fallen look on her face. Then I saw the man behind her, with the same look on his face as he made preparations for moving into the middle seat in the row in front of me, on the opposite side of the aisle. It was clear that they were together, and I waited for the inevitable question.

It didn't take very long before he asked me if it would be possible to swap seats with him, so he could sit beside his wife. Since he wasn't completely settled yet, I grasped at a straw and asked if he was in the middle seat. Yes. Sigh. "Yeah, sure - not a problem" I said in an attempt to act like the little Christ that I'm supposed to be. I consoled myself that it was only a 2 hour flight. It's not like crossing the atlantic.

After I was settled in my new seat, the guy comes over and tries to give me a five dollar bill to say thanks. Very nice, but I give it back to him saying that it's not necessary - and really it isn't. I didn't do it to gain anybodies appreciation, I really did do it to reflect Christ - as all Christians should be doing - trying to live life the way God had designed us to in the first place. All through the flight I struggled with what to say to the guy when we landed, because I knew he would try to thank me again as we were getting off the plane.

This is something that I have thought about in the past. I've always felt that in order for, what appears to be, a random act of kindness to be meaningful, that it should somehow be tied back to God.

I thought of a few things, but they all seemed cliche-ish, stupid, sappy or corny. Some I thought of only Gandhi could pull off. My mind kept being drawn back to this older Hollywood movie, Pay It Forward. I never actually saw the movie, but I heard enough about it to understand the basic premise. Then it kind of occurred to me that this was probably ok. After all isn't that what it's sort of about - trying to move the world forward, a little at a time, towards what the world was meant to be in God's original design. I know it will never reach that state until God returns, but it is the essence of Christian responsibility and purpose to do everything we can to move towards that state.

So that's what I did. Sure enough, as we were all standing up to retrieve our luggage from the overhead bins, he did thank me again, to which I responded that he could thank me by paying it forward some day. His wife understood, but I'm not sure that he did 100%. But that's ok, either she'll explain it to him, or someday he'll come across a similar situation as I did, and the light will come on and he'll understand at that time.