07: Sheer Christianity

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One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, "Of all the commandments, which is the most important?"

"The most important one," answered Jesus, "is this: 'Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.' The second is this: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no commandment greater than these."

"Well said, teacher," the man replied. "You are right in saying that God is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices."
................Mark 12: 28-33 (NIV)
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The long and short of it.... Christianity is about resolving your relationship to God, your relationship to others and your relationship to yourself, and from that resolution comes peace. Christianity is about resolution.

Love Trap
We live in dangerous times, but aren’t all times dangerous? It seems the two driving forces of our race are selfishness (what’s-in-it-for-me?) and fear (what’s-in-it-for-him?). I feel safe enough in my little town, but what happens when I step out? The farther I get away from what I know, the more dangerous the world becomes.

But what if there were some law by which I could live, by which all people could live, that would make the world a safer place? What if there was a simple rubric that could govern our interactions and make then safe and productive? What if there was a simple, clearly defined law that directed our path, like gravity directs the apple to the ground?

There is such a law, one that is ingrained in the West now–the Golden Rule—love your neighbor as you love yourself. But that’s not quite all there is. The first half of the law is to love God. But there’s a problem with this law, not a problem so much as a challenge. The Golden Rule is not automatic, like a natural law like gravity that exists whether we understand it or not, but it is rather a rule that you can decide to follow or not. It’s a choice. We choose to love, to hate, or to be indifferent to God. We choose to love, to hate or to ignore our neighbors. Sadly, much of human history is an illustration of how we most often choose.

And yet, if I take this rule seriously then I am required to love God and my neighbors. But loving exposes me. Caring opens me up to pain, to suffering, to attack. And what if my neighbor doesn’t love me as I love him? What if he uses my love for his gain at my expense?

Love is dangerous. It’s like stepping on to a battle field with the orders to hug the enemy. When he strikes me, I must turn the other cheek and allow him to strike again. What kind of God allows His people to be exposed to such danger? This is the same God who sent His son to die a horrible death by beating and crucifixion. What kind of God is this? What kind of solution is this love? What good does this sacrifice do? One lone man surrendering to death and brutality is good for whom, for what? Even worse, how does the call for His followers, his call to me to do the same, to become vulnerable and exposed to a vicious world, to be beaten and murdered, how can that possibly factor out to a winning strategy for me?

This love trap is not only dangerous, it is expensive. But my marching orders are to love.

History
How then do I love? How do I know that the God I love is really God? I don’t know God. My friends all have different opinions; I do too, and these all change from year to year, from days of plenty to days of sorrow. I suppose I love myself well enough, but loving other people? There are too many of them. They are too different. I don’t understand their languages; their cultures exclude me because I am not one of them, and I exclude them right back. I am hated and feared simply for the color of my skin, and I am supposed to love them, to sacrifice myself for them?

Relativity rears up. What is “love”? What is “soul”? They can mean anything I want them to mean in my here and now. I don’t know God. I don’t like people. I am supposed to love both? And what is a “soul”—can you see it, feel it, touch it, reproduce it, test it, measure it?

Finding these answers is exactly why we are here. Go back to the first principle – we matter. I am valuable. You are valuable. If this is true, then every human being who has ever existed, exists or ever will exist is valuable and matters. If I matter, then what I do here matters, for better or for worse. I am living out a story filled with meaningful decisions and consequences. It is too easy to think that it is all meaningless, all just random energy.

I am in a story, and the point of the story is to understand my value. In understanding my own value, I can better understand your value. Why else do we exist? We are living out the story of God’s love for us, and in the playing of our part we learn about what really matters to ourselves and to Him. This story we are in is not about defining God, for He is already defined beyond what any of us think or believe about Him. The story in which we live is about refining ourselves in relationship to each other and ultimately to God.

In other words, it’s all about finding meaning, and in the meaning finding our value. This is all about why. Part of finding this is not only looking at what kind of King rules us, but what kind of citizens we are and what kind of kingdom we all live in.

God’s “religion”
It is hard for me to be a “Christian.” When I was young, it was the born-again Christians of an elitist north-eastern Christian College who made my life miserable. They pretended to be my friend, but in the end I was not worthy, I was expendable in favor of other born-agains. I was damned, and I can only guess that they were glad to see me go. Being a questioning Unitarian I learned then that Christianity was about rules, of do’s and don’ts, of rituals, of works. Some of them were sinners cowering in the hands of an angry God, working hard not to burn in eternal lakes of fire. Others were God’s elect, cruising on the free pass of grace that allowed them in to heaven with the other select, privileged few who were like them no matter what any of them did. For still others Christianity was about health, about wealth, about blessings and prosperity and of being chosen for joy over others who are deservedly chosen for suffering. If you are sick or poor, you are “not right with God.” The “faith” they lived out in front of me, all over me, caused me 10 years of hateful, bitter wandering.

That was then; this is now.

I have learned that Christianity is about none of that. Christianity is about resolving your relationship to God, your relationship to others and your relationship to yourself, and from that resolution comes peace. Christianity is about resolution.

At the heart of God’s religion is love demonstrated by real sacrifice. Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God with us, suffered so I wouldn't have to suffer, died so I wouldn't have to die, conquered death so I could conquer death, built a bridge back to God so I could return home again. He did this for me, for you, for anyone who believes. You are worthy of such sacrifice—you matter. How God loves us matters, for His love allows us to come to Him. In the same way, how you love matters, for the way you love allows you to grow, and may allow someone else to suffer less, to avoid death, to come home. Your existence is valuable. You are valuable to Him. This thing we are in is all about God, about the people who choose Him, and about the people who do not choose Him. It’s about how He loves us, how we love Him and how we love each other.

But you may ask, if all I need is love, then why do I need Christianity, with all of its rules and rituals? Why do I need to follow a God named Jehovah, Yahweh or Jesus when I can love “god” as I know him, as he exists in my life, in nature, in others, in myself? What if I am a homosexual pagan but I love god with all of my heart, mind, body and soul? Wouldn’t I be loving God exactly as a heterosexual Catholic loving God the same way? I am who I am, so if God made me the way I am, then why do I have to be someone else to love him?

This thinking places self before the one you love, and that’s not love at all. It is more like lust. Consider the drug addict who lives by the rule “I am who I am, so if you love me, you must love my heroine.” This kind of “love” is all about him loving himself, and others in his life are forced to choose to follow him or abandon him. He does not consider change for others, but requires others to change for him.

This kind of love is like a baby's love for her mother. To babies and little children, the satisfaction of their desires and needs come first. It is only later, when they understand that “mother” and “father” are separate beings, wholly independent of them, do they begin to understand that love is giving as well as taking. In the same way, when an immature person demands that God accept him “as is” without the willingness to give or change, then it is a childish, infantile kind of love. Perhaps God doesn’t care if you are a homosexual Pagan or a heterosexual Catholic at the moment you realize that you matter, that God loves you and you can love Him. Perhaps these things in the immediate present don’t matter at all in relation to the growth and maturing of the lover in the lasting eternal.

Does a mother hate her son when he fills up his diaper? Does a father hate his baby daughter when she cries all night? A baby wailing in a crib cannot love her parents the same way that a fully mature mother loves her baby. The baby is all about satisfaction. The parent is all about sacrificing for the baby so she will grow into a little girl, a healthy teenager, and finally into a fully mature woman. In all of human history has a baby ever sacrificed in quiet hunger so her mother could get a good night’s sleep?

So what is love?

When you come to God with a list of terms and conditions to be agreed to as part of your loving God with all of your heart, mind, body and soul, then you are not coming with love at all. God requires mature, unconditional love, as this is what He gives you in return. When you love God unconditionally, you are saying to Him, “take me, make me into something other than I am now.” When you come to Him with conditions, you are saying, “These are my terms, you must accept them because they are more important to me than you are. (If you love me, then you must love my heroine.)” Would you love someone like that? By adding demands to your offer of love you are not choosing to love at all, but rather you are requiring the other to make a choice.

I me my.

Keep it simple
In essence, Christianity is about the gift of love that restores us to the presence of God, and this gift can only be claimed by those who love the giver. All of God’s religion is summed up like this...

• There is one God, our Creator We are broken (selfishness and fear), and this brokenness separates us from God and from others
• God wants us back because we are valuable.
• God has provided a bridge back to Him, built by the sacrifice of His love
• To cross this bridge, you must believe in and love the builder

To walk this path you must love the builder. Those who choose to take it can only take this gift of love. It is not something forced on anyone, nor is it something that can be seized or stolen or inherited. It is not something that you can conjure up, nor is it something for which you can take any credit. It is outside of you, outside of culture, outside of the body, outside of science, outside of religion, outside of this universe. Love is the key to the Kingdom of God; love is the language spoken there. By simply putting love for Him before love for self, God has provided the way for all people, from all cultures, from all corners of the Earth, from all moments in time, to find their way home.

08: Balance

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"Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.' But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'Yes' be 'Yes,' and your 'No,' 'No'; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.' But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect."

................Matthew 5:33-48 (NIV)
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The long and short of it.... God is perfectly balanced, perfectly developed and complete. We are like God, but we are imbalanced and incomplete. We are a work in progress. The basic building blocks of our nature, the four spheres or attributes are .......... • heart > emotion .......... • mind > intellect .......... • body > physique .......... • soul > spirit Developing these, all of these, so they are balanced and mature is a key purpose to our existence.

Simplify
Love is the only thing that can bind us together again. But what if we both agree that there is such a thing as love in the world, but each of us has a different interpretation of “love”? What if there were six billion nuanced definitions of love? At the lowest level of meaning we can agree that such a thing can exist, but we quickly move apart when it comes to defining how it works within our own relative context. If the definitions are so different that they have no common ground, then even the agreement that such a thing as love can exist fades, and love itself disappears in a roar of lust. What was a common bond becomes a common threat. Harmony becomes chaos. Accord becomes discord, consonance becomes dissonance, light becomes darkness.

The relative viewpoint is necessarily singular in an ocean of plurality. We are all isolated in time and space, searching for resolution, searching for peace and safety, searching for love. But what if my search threatens the search of everyone around me? My definition of love, of resolution, of peace and of safety eclipses all others, and to get what I think is love and peace and safety I make others, especially others who are different, mere obstacles to my happiness. Love to me then must be happiness at the exclusion of others. Once others are excluded from my perspective, nothing retains common significance—meaning is unmeaning. Diversity in this sense drives selfishness. The simplest rules that should hold us together (“Love God” and “Love your neighbor as you love yourself”) are meaningless. What is love? Which God? Who is my neighbor? Some people are neighbors, some are enemies. God is a tree in my backyard. Love is desire!

In a related sense, the absolute objectivity of science strives for common understanding. The freezing point for water is 32 degrees Fahrenheit, 0 degrees Celsius. This is good and true for all people in all times and in all places. It is a constant. But how does God fit into this paradigm? You cannot put God under a microsocope, nor can you put love in a tight, little box. What is love really? Is there a God? For that matter, what is “good art”? Science can't address these questions, so it wisely ignores them.

In other words, where science, the physical (body) and the intellect (mind), strives to be more objective, emotion (heart) and the spirit (soul) are more subjective, tied more closely to the subjective experience of living. The physical body is grounded in the physical reality in which we live, and so it is more easily understood from a universal perspective. A heart (the physical organ) functions the same in every human that has one. But the heart (the emotional metaphor) operates differently from continent to continent, from culture to culture, from person to person. And yet, though the emotions are different at the lowest level (e.g. love may mean different things to different people in different cultures), emotion itself exists and operates for all peoples (a mother loves her baby, a father loves his son). The emotion of love is universal, though not everyone has a very developed idea of what it is.

So the idea is that we are all designed the same at the lowest level (the physical), but we all develop differently within that common framework based on our location and experience. It can also be argued that the Soul is like the body, a thing that operates at the lowest level, and is therefore most easily seen across all peoples across all cultures. This is true, but the expression of Soul (like the expression of Body) is chained to the perceived realities of our circumstances (e.g. our cultural and emotional surroundings). So if we were to illustrate this, it might look like this, in which the lowest level is the most concrete, objective level and the highest level is the most abstract, subjective level.

This means that no matter what level or combination of levels of our make up you want to look at and focus on (whether the focus is on diversity or similarity), we are all fundamentally the same. A person is a person, no matter how small, and getting your head around the sameness of every person in the world, across all time and space, will allow you to understand what it means to be you.

SIDEBAR: The next several sections of this writing has a variety of models exploring the relationship of the four spheres that make up every human being—heart (emotion), mind (intellect), body (physique) and soul (spirit). They are models, ways to examine how we matter related to how we were built. They are not meant to be definitive or all-encompassing.

Compass—Micro
Since God made us in His image, we can then assume that we are made up roughly the same way (but at a vastly lower level) as God. All human activity falls into one or a combination of these four spheres—our nature. So then perhaps we look something like this:

In which the quadrants represent the four spheres that make up a human being and the values in the quadrants represent the corresponding attributes of each sphere and whose value is indicative of each attributes' influence on the other spheres. Emotion is the attribute of the Heart, and it is present to a degree in each of the other three quadrants. How the attribute of emotion represents itself within the realms of the Mind, the Soul and the Body are indicative of the maturity of the whole.

So if you put them all together in a single human being, say an artist who uses science as his point of interest and the source of medium for his art, it might look something like this:
You have to wonder (seeing where he is headed) what his art may look like if he gave greater attention to Spirit and Intellect. In the same way, if the person was both an artist and a philosopher, he may look like this:
Consider a faithful husband and an adulterer and compare them on two plains, Body and Emotion. The adulterer might look like this:
The locus of control for a person like this is centered mainly within the mind and body, and influences from the emotions and the soul are minimal. The farthest points from the center are Mind and Body, so he more easily tilts in these directions. This is how an adulterer can make such bad decisions and sleep so well at night. His actions are driven by physical desire and need and rationalized by the self-centered subjectivity of his intellect. The emotional connection to his wife is secondary (if there at all) and whatever pangs of conscience he may be getting from his soul are too tiny to make a difference, or worse, he is interpreting these as something he needs to further rationalize with his intellect. In other words, he is selfishly satisfying his body and rationalizing it with some kind of subjective logic, and both of these drivers obliterate whatever emotional commitment he made with his wife and that small voice of conscience he has become so good at ignoring. From viewing the person in this way, I understand that topics of emotion and spirituality will not be readily or seriously discussed with this man, since he puts so little emphasis on them. But these are the exact areas in which he needs training, maturing, in order to resolve.

Now consider the faithful husband, who might look then like this: A person like this is more balanced as the attributes within each quadrant are more developed and can therefore exert greater influence on the other quadrants. It's not so easy to put an arrow in the direction this person may go as he is more balanced, and therefore more inclined to stay centered. This person is less likely to hurt his spouse because the emotional and spiritual cause and effect of actions driven from the intellect and physique are more apparent to him. In other words, he is less capable of rationalizing destructive behavior to his wife and children driven by Body and Mind because of the pull by the more developed quadrants of Heart and Soul. There is no arrow that indicates a directional drag out of balance, since he is much more balanced.

Think of it this way—when you have a terrible headache, or if you have a terrible nagging ache in you back that no medicine can cure (this is the physical input), it is very hard, if not impossible to be emotionally attentive to your spouse, to be intellectually attentive to your job, to be spiritually attentive to God. The one quadrant holds the others captive as you tilt farther from the center and closer to any one influence. The farther you tilt out of balance, the less likely it is that any of the spheres will grow, let alone mature.

So the dynamic is all about the force (pull, influence, whatever you want to call it) that the attribute of each quadrant exerts on the other three quadrants (e.g. How the attribute of Emotion influences and functions within the other quadrants of Mind, Body and Soul).

If this is the model of how we exist, then perhaps we can reverse engineer God's make-up, which may look something like this:God is perfectly balanced, perfectly developed. We are like God, but He is complete. He is balanced. We are incomplete and imbalanced. We are a work in progress. So let us then consider this to be the basic building blocks of our nature—four spheres, four attributes—
.......... • heart > emotion
.......... • mind > intellect
.......... • body > physique
.......... • soul > spirit
—seeking full maturity and balance.

At any time we are likely out of balance, as perhaps we are more interested in satisfying the body by sacrificing our emotions (for instance the adulterer seeking out a prostitute at the sacrifice of his relationship with his spouse), or perhaps stimulating the intellect while ignoring the soul (for instance, ignoring the human soul because it cannot be proven in a laboratory).

Compass—Macro
So let's take a step out from the self and take a look at all of human endeavor. That's not such a huge leap! The corollary spheres of human endeavor are

Religion (Soul > Spirit—what does it matter?) Religion is broken into two categories: Prophetic and Wisdom (made up of Theism and Atheism). Prophetic religion is a religious paradigm revealed by God to prophets. Wisdom religions are those developed by moralists and philosophers over time, or are based on observation of nature, and no unique claim is made to revelation. The major religions in the world are (in order of size): Prophetic Religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Bahá'í Faith. Wisdom Religions: Hinduism, Chinese Folk Religions, African-Asian-American primal indigenous and diasporic religions, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Caodaism, Chondogyo, and Yiguandao. There are nearly countless other religions beyond these. 

Art (Heart > Emotion—how do I feel?) Art explores the depth and heights of human emotion, thoughts, passions, and the human experience using visual, language, performing, culinary, and physical expression, including architecture, the visual arts, cartoons, crafts, food, dance, common and not so common decoratives, design, drawing, fashion, film, language, literature, music, painting, photography, poetry, sculpture, theater and on and on. 

Philosophy (Mind > Intellect—what is real?) Philosophy is concerned with questions of the nature of reality, such as ethics, metaphysics, epistemology and logic, and is made up of such doctrines as Realism and Nominalism, Rationalism and Empiricism, Skepticism, Idealism, Pragmatism, Phenomenology, Aesthetics, Existentialism (my personal favorite) and the analytic tradition. 

Science (Body > Physique—how does it work?) Science, or Etymology, seeks to better understand how nature and the physical universe works by observing physical evidence and using logic to manufacture repeatable predictions and theories that become, over time, acceptable fact. This is the Scientific Method, which is reduced roughly to Knowledge = Observation + Logic. You can divide Science into three sub-categories: Natural, Social and Formal (Mathematics), and these include fields of study such as Physics, Biology, Mathematics, Chemistry, Economics, Psychology, and each of these can be broken down into a nearly countless number of sub-doctrines and studies.

What a stunning coincidence. The spheres of human endeavor track to the four spheres Jesus mentions in the Bible.

What is the point of viewing humanity this way? It gives us a simple structure with which we can step back and look at others at a deeper level of understanding. It gives us a way to

• listen to people instead of tuning them out
• watch the things they do with curiosity instead of judgment
• appreciate what is important to others instead of dismissing their needs
• perceive how they are balanced instead of labeling them as hopeless
• help others to grow instead of chaining them to their failings

Most importantly, though, it gives you a way to view other people that will help you feel greater compassion and empathy for them. When you view someone else as a person of equal composition and value as you, it is much less likely that you will label that person with the language of diversity (e.g. Homosexual pagan, conservative Christian, Arab, Jew, Dalits, Brahman, whatever) for you will see this person as “man struggling with fear” more so than you will see him as “Dalitis showing me deference” or “Radical Muslim planning to kill me.”

Do not look for the things that are different in people, but rather look for the things that are the same in everyone. Make it your habit. Do not suffer culture shock, but rather pursue family shock. Do not be surprised that a man in Asia eats deep fried bugs for dinner, but rather focus on the way he sits with his family at the dinner table, the way they talk to each other, the way he talks to his children. Do no look at the food going into his mouth, but rather listen to the emotion or intellect or wisdom that comes out of his mouth. Understand that people are fundamentally the same everywhere in the world and culture shock will disappear in an instant. Children playing in a park are the same everywhere in the world. This is invaluable, as it is a kind of compass you can use to relate to others and better understand yourself.

09: Self and Other

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Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother, Abel?”
“I don't know,” he replied, “Am I my brother's keeper?”
(Genesis 4:9, NIV)
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The long and short of it.... Humans are interactive and intense, synergistic and volatile, consuming and explosive. A person is not fully vested until exposed to other people. We are built for communion. You matter, but so do they.

Potential + Circumstance + Will + Other = Eternity
A new human is raw potential—given the circumstances this new person could become another Martin Luther King, another Ghandi, another Mother Teresa, another Hitler or Stalin or Mao. He could become a Lobsterman. A new born baby has everything needed except the chance. To take away that chance, to remove interaction with other humans, is to deny a person her potential. To deny potential is to stop grace. Jesus only uttered one curse—while standing with a child he told His disciples, “if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to be thrown into the sea with a large millstone tied around his neck” (Mark 9:42). We are not only responsible for our own destiny, we are responsible for the destinies of those around us, and so we are all bound together. In the same way that soul is both here and there, we are also simultaneously both self and other.

The Judgment will be about how we related to each other as much as it will be about how we related to God. Find a Bible and read Matthew 18:21-35, the parable of the unmerciful servant. Read all of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chapters 5-7) and you will find that the major teachings of Jesus were about living with others, about how to get along, about how to show mercy and grace and forgiveness.

Self and Other
These are the principles of Self and Other

1. Self is universal.
2. Self is object oriented.
3. Self resists Other.
4. Self is actualized by Other.

Perhaps you noticed that the principles of Self and Other are all about what Self is? That's because self and other are the same thing—self is perfected by other, and every self is an other to some other self. In other words, self is only completed when it coexists with other selfs. Self can only be defined as other in the context of other. I exist because I exist, but I have dimension because of all of the other people whom I have known in my life. If I was magically transported to some strange, isolated parallel universe with no other people in it, I would be some kind of self, but no kind of other. When we talk about other we are really talking about self fulfilling the role of other to some other self. E I E I O

Let's look at each principle briefly.

• Self is Universal: I've been sitting here thinking about all the different arguments that are needed to demonstrate our homogeneity as a single race, even going on-line and looking into the % variance in DNA responsible for skin color deviation, the ability to breed across physical variation, etc etc, and it hit me—who cares? The whole discussion as to the nature and make-up or our humanity has become a scientific discussion, relegated to mind-bogglingly obtuse discourse on the global variant distribution of recombinant DNA related to colors and shapes. Do we really need to slice and dice a topic that is so obvious? Of course we are all one people. So why all the effort to prove that we are not? Why all the effort to avoid that we are? It is all a matter of perception, of identity, of the meaning of self. But the sad truth is, we are attracted to those whom we look like and repelled by those who look different than we do. This is because we are superficial in our estimation of other's worth and value. This “surface magnetism” is an odd and interesting force, it both attracts and repels. I am comfortable around those who look like me; I am afraid of those who look different.
  
• Self is object oriented: The Curse of Babel—our perceptions of each other are all too often driven by the belief that other people are objects, not people just like us. When I drive in traffic I am surrounded by moving cars, not people just like me driving cars. This makes it easy to operate in the world, never having to make any emotional, intellectual or physical investment in other people. It's not required. I don't need to feel any differently about some person in a car across an intersection than I do about any of the countless tress I drive by. Objects. If that person pulls into the intersection and is broadsided by a truck, is thrown into the street and crushed visibly, publicly, spectacularly, I am isolated, insulated, protected by my objectivity—that other person is only an object, a colorful and exciting drama that plays out in front of me before I go home and eat dinner. Tomorrow my neighbor will cut down a row of pine trees and I will stand aloof watching that drama with as much dispassion. This Object Oriented Perception (OOP) is the main driver for our sense of difference and indifference. It is so strong that we can stand in a room together and look only at the micro differences (skin color, eye shape, nose shape, hair texture) and completely miss the macro similarities that make us the same (Soul, Body, Mind, Emotion).

The next two principles are so tightly interrelated that they must be treated together.

• Self resists, but is actualized, by other: Human beings repel each other, they resist each other, while at the same time they are only complete, they are only actualized and optimized, when they are joined with other. I resist you. I require you. You cannot become fully human, you cannot reach your full potential, unless you interact with ohter people. We were made not for ourselves, but for each other. But at the same time, you resist others from getting too close to you so as to protect yourself. You are torn between needing and fearing.

Human relationships are one of the true wonders of the universe. You are Spirtit coming into Virtual Eternity through living flesh, communing with others, resolving with them so you can become a fully mature Soul rising up to Eternity from the dying flesh. It is not possible to do this by yourself. You need God, you need others. You matter, but so do they.

10: Harmony

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Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church—for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh." This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
................Ephesians 5:21-33 (NIV)

"As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”
................John 15: 9-13 (NIV)
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The long and short of it.... The nature of the relationship of self to other is to find some kind of accord, to resolve. Like nature returns to a state of balance after natural disasters, a self-righting sailboat will eventually roll back to an upright position if it is overturned by a wave, but we can choose to remain in any condition we see fit, finding our own “balance”, no matter how unbalanced it is.

Consonance and Dissonance
In music there are various tones, each when played together result in harmonies that are either consonant or dissonant. Consonant tones are in a state of repose, or agreement. Dissonant tones are in a state of unrest or of needing completion or resolution. The tonality of a newborn baby is not consonance, as the Romantics suppose (e.g. that every human is born closer to the perfect state of nature and is corrupted by the world), but rather a state of dissonance, of needing completion or resolution. A newborn is in dire need of bonding, of learning, of growing. Whereas a newborn animal in the wild has a strongly ingrained sense of instinct, humans have an equally strong will to decide. But the will is influenced by the harmony of your life. We come into the world in a state of discord, of dissonance, and one of our main purposes is to find accord, consonance, resolution. This then is the nature of the relationship of self to other—to find accord, to find resolution.

Nature has a wonderful way of righting itself. The thing I love about some Eastern philosophies is their fascination with the balance of nature. All things work in harmony. Nature doesn't just do this or that of its own momentum—nature operates as designed. Inject chaos into nature and it will eventually right itself and move back towards a balanced state of equilibrium, even if it is a new equilibrium. People are different, we can choose harmony or chaos, and we can manipulate the environment around us to suit our choice. In other words, we subjectively define our own balance, irrespective of the balance of other, by the exercise of Free Will. Like nature returns to a state of balance after natural disasters, a self-righting sailboat will eventually roll back to an upright position if it is overturned by a wave, but we can choose to remain in any condition we see fit, finding our own “balance”, no matter how unbalanced it is.

This is the force that compels self, this force of desire. I want. This is a primal force—a newborn baby is all about shrieking “feed me!”, “hold me!”, “warm me!” Want me. There's nothing wrong with this, that's one of the ways babies survive. The problem comes when a baby never grows past this, when the man or woman grows into a consumer and desire becomes a bottomless pit of need. A person such as this can never find consonance, since there isn't enough food, love, safety, warmth or anything else in the universe to fill that hole.

Independent Codependence
Imagine any decision that needs be made, the more critical and life changing the better. This decision is influenced by current events (immediate surroundings), past history (previous experiences), ability to remember (the ability to learn from ones past), education (what's been taught), emotional disposition (not only the general character, but as it is impacted by current and past events), current physical condition (healthy, diseased, etc.), spiritual maturity (a babe in constant need and doubt, an adult with tested faith), and the completely variable and sometimes baffling influence of other itself. If a person is making a decision in a complete vacuum (not likely) then all these variables are dealt with in isolation, but when we exercise Free Will we are rarely ever isolated, and all these variables plus countless others are multiplied by the cross influences of other—what does my boyfriend want? Does my wife want to move for this new job? Are my kids happy with this decision? Who cares?

How on earth does this whole thing stay together? How does anything get done? Let's take a step back and look at our computer analogy again. An application cannot run in isolation. It exists within a context that gives it meaning and allows it to function. At the base level this is the platform, or Operating System. There are many different operating systems out there, and applications created for one platform cannot run on most others. The application (if it is a network application, like human beings) is most truly functional when it inter-operates with other applications across a network. It does this by using standardized, uniform protocols to pass information around regardless of where the information came from. To do this, it uses what is called the OSI seven-layer network protocol. I'm not going to go into a bunch of mind-numbing detail on this (here are two links that will give you a good idea of how this works: http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/OSI_Layers.asp, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) but the basic concept is this—different layers of the network are made up of different rules to operate, and in order to pass data from one layer to another you need to make them palatable to the next layer so they can be used there.

Consider this as example: I need food to survive. A mango is food. How do I pass it through myself to stay alive? At the top most level I take the mango in my hand and bite it, chewing and swallowing it. It goes into my stomach and is dissolved into it's base nutrients. The base nutrients are absorbed into my body, which uses them as energy passed back up to my hand, which uses the energy to gather and eat more mangoes. So it looks like this:
As the food passes down through the processes of the body, each process does not care about the process above it, nor does it care about the process below. The stomach does not care what the food is, as long as it can be digested and it keeps coming; once it does it's job with the food, it passes the product along as nutrients down into the blood. The stomach's two rules for food coming in are 1. it can be digested, and 2. it keeps coming. The stomach's two rules for passing things on are 1. nutrients go into the blood, and 2. waste passes out of the body. All the layers have similar rules for what can go in and what goes out. Each system is independent in it's operations, but codependent related to byproducts.

So how does a model like this work in the self/other relationship? Think of it this way—you are simply one layer of a complex, multi-layered organism. In order to survive, you need nourishment passed to you in a form that you can work with. You are therefore dependent on that which passes you the food, but you have rules that must be followed in order for the food to be successfully passed down to you. Let's assume that the layer above you follows the rules and the food is passed down to you and you can take and use it. What you do with the food once it is in your control is up to you, as you alone are your layer within the organism. As a result of what you do with the food, you will generate a byproduct that you need to get rid of, so it must be in a form that can be passed on to the layer beneath you. If it cannot be passed on, then you will soon be buried in your own byproduct, unable to pass it on, to get rid of it. The layer below you then has certain rules also that you need to address in order to get rid of the byproduct. Also, the layer below you passes energy up to you, so you can function. It's not too complex a machine and follows a very simple rule—you are allowed to operate any way you want at your own layer, but you must cooperate with those above and below you if you want to survive. If don't follow the rules in dealing with either the layer above or below, the cycle stops with you. The layers are independent by themselves, but codependent as a community. If the layer above doesn't play by the rules, you starve. If you don't play by the rules, the layer below you starves, and you drown in your own waste.

Human relationships operate under this principle. You are free to choose whatever path you want to, able to use your free will in any way you choose, but you are dependent on others around you to be fed and to be fulfilled by feeding others. You are not a layer in isolation, no one is. This independent codependence is the principle that keeps one man, one married couple, one family, one neighborhood, one city, one state, one Nation, the whole world in balance. When a layer breaks down, the system stumbles. You are part of this ecosystem, and the exercise of your will is balanced by the results of your decisions. If you eat but cannot feed others, you are a parasite that eventually dies after killing its host.

It is all the same with love...

Love is the ultimate food, the ultimate nourishment, and in the same way, hatred is the ultimate toxin. In between these lies the Self. There are three ways you can exist within this ecosystem—full of love, full of hate, or full of Self. If your layer is filled with hatred, it will absorb everything passed to it, but pass on nothing of use to any layer above or below, or worse you will pass on poison. For a while you will become bloated, but the layers around you will starve and die, and then you will slowly waste away and die yourself. Being self absorbed is similar in that you will absorb what is passed to you and pass what is both useful and useless to the other layers. You may flourish, you may starve—it becomes a matter of chance. If you love, then you will care about what lies above and what lies below and you will seek harmony with them. Being fed and feeding others will become your joy and the source of strength.

Odds are you know people like all three of these types—the parasite, the selfish and the good neighbor. Which are the people surrounding you in your life? Which are you?

The Special Chemistry of Marriage
It is tempting to think that certain magnetic forces exist between people with different dominant elements. For instance, to say that a woman with an emotional dominance is more likely to be attracted to a Body-dominant male (driven by passion or whatever). But the bond is not a simple positive/negative thing as you find in chemistry. Certainly you can have stronger bonds in some relationships than in others, but the magic is in the choosing. Unlike magnets, we have the ability to pair with others with which we are not compatible, with whom we should be repelled. One thing is for certain, though—once bonded, the two change (for better or worse). You cannot un-mix paint.

When a man and a woman are joined, there is a certain attraction that holds them together, a bond. This bonding is not in the physical, but rather it's in the spiritual. The Spirit that surrounds the whole being is the thing that penetrates the other. It's boundaries are permeable. So a married couple should look something like this:
This is why marriage is such a special relationship—it is the binding of two bodies and the force of soul that surrounds the whole thing, and from that binding more people are created. Whereas the bodies are joined immediately (and therefore the force of soul), the influences of one person to another over time will impact and shape the other spheres. A healthy marriage is one in which the stronger partner in one sphere braces and holds up the weaker in that sphere. An unhealthy marriage is one in which the stronger dominates and diminishes the weaker in any given sphere. A marriage can be full of love, full of hate, or full of selfishness.

11: Culture

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It wasn't long before some Jews showed up from Judea insisting that everyone be circumcised: "If you're not circumcised in the Mosaic fashion [e.g. The Laws of Moses], you can't be saved." Paul and Barnabas were up on their feet at once in fierce protest. The church decided to resolve the matter by sending Paul, Barnabas, and a few others to put it before the apostles and leaders in Jerusalem. After they were sent off and on their way, they told everyone they met as they traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria about the breakthrough to the non-Jewish outsiders. Everyone who heard the news cheered—it was terrific news!

When they got to Jerusalem, Paul and Barnabas were graciously received by the whole church, including the apostles and leaders. They reported on their recent journey and how God had used them to open things up to the outsiders. Some Pharisees stood up to say their piece. They had become believers, but continued to hold to the hard party line of the Pharisees. "You have to circumcise the pagan converts," they said. "You must make them keep the Law of Moses."

The apostles and leaders called a special meeting to consider the matter. The arguments went on and on, back and forth, getting more and more heated. Then Peter took the floor: "Friends, you well know that from early on God made it quite plain that he wanted the pagans to hear the Message of this good news and embrace it—and not in any secondhand or roundabout way, but firsthand, straight from my mouth. And God, who can't be fooled by any pretense on our part but always knows a person's thoughts, gave them the Holy Spirit exactly as he gave him to us. He treated the outsiders exactly as he treated us, beginning at the very center of which they were and working from that center outward, cleaning up their lives as they trusted and believed him.

"So why are you now trying to out-god God, loading these new believers down with rules that crushed our ancestors and crushed us, too? Don't we believe that we are saved because the Master Jesus amazingly and out of sheer generosity moved to save us just as he did those from beyond our nation? So what are we arguing about?"

There was dead silence. No one said a word. With the room quiet, Barnabas and Paul reported matter-of-factly on the miracles and wonders God had done among the other nations through their ministry. The silence deepened; you could hear a pin drop.

James [the younger son of Mary, the bother of Jesus] broke the silence. "Friends, listen. Simeon has told us the story of how God at the very outset made sure that racial outsiders were included. This is in perfect agreement with the words of the prophets:

.....After this, I'm coming back; everyone
..........I'll rebuild David's ruined house;
.....I'll put all the pieces together again;
..........I'll make it look like new
.....So outsiders who seek will find,
..........so they'll have a place to come to,
.....All the pagan peoples
..........included in what I'm doing.

"God said it and now he's doing it. It's no afterthought; he's always known he would do this.”
................Acts 15:1-18 (The Message)
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The long and short of it.... Culture is a tool, invented by people to make sense of their world. It is highly structured, divisive, subjective, manipulative, volatile, catalytic and shrinking all the time. Culture is a function of humanity, yet we often act as if humanity is a function of culture.

The Hive
Culture is powerful. Originally I thought of culture as a layer used to process and categorize reality, a way to relate to others quickly and easily while holding tightly on to our own sense of accumulated identity. It's something much more elemental and powerful than this, though. Culture is not the accumulated body of traditions and beliefs that make a people unique among other peoples, but rather it is the need for that collective identity that is ingrained within us, perhaps down to the DNA level. This need to belong to a pack of others like us in some way, any way (even in invented ways) shapes and defines how we think of ourselves and influences our every decision. It is this relationship of self TO others in a relative sense that binds us. We are not merely a singularity but we are rather part of a collective. Perhaps this hearkens back to our distant evolutionary cousins, the insects.

I drove down to the hardware store the other day and noticed that a bee was trapped in the car with me. I let it out, but the freedom I gave it was an unhappy one. That bee was doomed to die in separation from the protection of its own hive, and any other hive would only see it as an invader. Too far and disoriented to ever make it home, it would die an intrusive outcast to its own species. Bee destiny can be cruel too.

Human culture is not so instinctively locked as bee culture (I hope), but our history is full of such displacement and isolation. The Jews lost Jerusalem, lost all of Israel in 73 A.D. and were doomed to wander the Earth as outsiders to every culture with which they lived for nearly 2,000 years, homeless, hated aliens. What is this thing we call culture, and why does it have such power?

There is a distinct and huge difference between humans and our tiny, six-legged brethren. Bee hives in New England and termite mounds in Africa operate fundamentally the same as they did 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 1,000,000 years ago. If I stepped back 100 years, I could fit in with some effort, but to step back to 1692 would be impossible. The cultural differences would make me completely un-integratable. Step back 1,000 years, or 1,000,000 years and forget about it.

Culture for humans is both solid and fluid—it impacts with the force of a solid, but it also bends and flexes with the fluidity of a river. It has always been this way (we trade, we intermarry, we war), but this melting and mixing is accelerating at an exponential pace. The walls of geography and tradition are disappearing as the Scientific and Information Revolutions make the world smaller and smaller, less and less mysterious. Those strange and mysterious far easterners aren't convenient and manageable stereotypes anymore, they are coworkers.

A dichotomy exists within human culture that cannot exist within animal culture. You cannot separate the bee from the hive. The individual and the collective are one. Humans transcend this structure.

Though it can be a struggle, we can transcend our culture. We can choose to respond to outsiders irrespective of the programmed response of the hive. I can choose to move to another culture, and the other culture can choose to accept me, and herein lies the difference between mankind and every other social creature on Earth—we have choice, animals do not; I can move to India and survive, but the bee dies if it is carried away to far from the hive.

Consciousness. Our human self-awareness is a flame that does not burn anywhere else within the animal kingdom, a heat that melts the solidity of the hive, softens the leaden collective and allows us to flow. It is the thing that allows us to rise up and look back down at the honeycomb and notice it, conceive of it, think beyond it, accept it, reject it, embrace it, ignore it. We can kill the outsider just as easily as we can invite him to dinner.

Here is the nature of my underestimating culture—even though I routinely choose to rise above the constructs of my culture, it routinely pulls me back inside. I am like that electron, zooming around noticing stuff. Sometimes I am here, visible, streaking, sometimes I am gone, but always I am somewhere around the dense nucleus of my culture—my family, my church, my town, my country. I can notice it, conceive of it, think beyond it, accept it, reject it, embrace it, ignore it, I can even escape it with much effort, but it exerts force on me, it binds me, it influences me, it draws me back. What is this thing, and why does it matter to me? More importantly, how do I resolve within this force, and how does it affect how I resolve?

Invention
First and foremost, the varieties of human culture are purely human invention. The human culture in which you exist now only exists within your consciousness here and now in this temporal moment of time. It was invented by you and others around you, and when you die it will die with you.

Any given culture is not a natural thing, like an element on the periodic table or termite mounds, universal and unchangeable. As the world changes, so culture within your consciousness changes in order to continuously provide useful meaning; it is a tool we constantly reinvent to give meaning to what constantly changes. Japanese culture in 2008 is different than Japanese culture in 1938.

Humans are wonderfully creative, and we use this creativity all the time to build meaning around the baffling complexity of our universe. Some of that wells up inside us as music, then comes spilling out as percussion, rhythm, melody, verse, chorus, harmony, sung and hummed together, cherished, recorded, passed down. Some of it provides names and shapes to the mystery of creation, the terror of destruction, and the meaning of existence. Culture is the shovel we continuously invent to move this mess around. The moment we cease to exist, so does our particular brand of culture. Cultures have gone extinct through the centuries just as readily as anything else.

Hierarchical
Culture is all about structured organization. It’s all about filtering the inputs of the world so they have meaning, so those inputs can be more quickly acted upon, so they can be absorbed and understood by self within a context that makes the information more readily meaningful. This does not mean that the meaningfulness of the input is “true” or “false”, only that it is more readily exploitable. For instance, if I am a Muslim Fascist, I don't simply see the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City as an act of terror, of cowardice, cruelty and horror (e.g. through an American, or Western cultural, or a civilized filter); the incident is filtered by my cultural world view, and the sight of the towers burning and crashing to the ground is a vision of bravery and sacrifice. To the Muslim Fascist there were only 11 people who died on September 11th, 2001. All the rest were soulless infidel meat. That's culture in action.

It works like this.

Three things in this structure are constant for all cultures—I is the green center, various levels and flavors of “US” surrounds "I", and we are surrounded by that dangerous and mysterious red ring of "THEM." Everything is variable in the US layer-—the number of inner circles between I and THEM, what each circle represents, how thick each layer is, how permeable each layer is, and especially how permeable the US layer is. “US” and “THEM” are natural and ancient and instinctual. Bees are all about US and THEM. There is no higher, global, all inclusive “WE” in the world of bees.

The hierarchies are also a matter of scale. US and THEM applies to family, (sister and non-sister (everyone else)), and replicates at every level you move up in multiple directions. For instance—-my family vs. not my family; my neighborhood vs. not my neighborhood; my town vs. not my town; my state vs. not my state; my country vs. not my country; I, me mine vs. everything not I, me, mine. We view ourselves relationally within the universe-—we are at the center surrounded (preferably) with what makes us safe. This is the central dynamic of Self-to-Other-—somehow I need to relate to you.

Divisive
Division is safety. People are dangerous, and I need to protect myself. The self is wrapped in layers that increase in density, and the increased density provides protection. The layers around me act as filters, not only affixing meaning to inputs as they approach the core self, but also allowing that input to only come as close as I perceive as a reasonably safe distance. In this regard, culture is like a blanket that we use for protection, and this mechanism makes culture incredibly important to us. Like all creatures that can respond to their surroundings, we gravitate towards what feeds us and we pull away from what hurts us. It is in this context that the layers between I and THEM become US.
Culture becomes the defining filter system that weeds out the danger and draws in the nourishment.

Because culture is closely associated with what makes us "US", it takes on a life of its own. Because we draw our life from this US, it must therefore be full of Life that can be drawn. I feel safe in my house for many reasons-—locks on the doors, rules for my home, expectations as to my role and the roles of my family members. All of these things combined allow me to sleep safely at night. Whatever unknowns are out there, they are safely locked outside the walls of US.

Subjective
There is no such thing as collective objectivity. There is no socio-cultural embodiment of a peoples' past, present and future. If this was so, then we would not have choice, we would not have our uniquely subjective ability to choose our destiny. Because we have this freedom, culture is necessarily a thing of the moment. If you take a baby girl from China and raise her in America, she will absorb the collective beliefs, preferences, filters and tools used in America to organize, prioritize, understand and manipulate the world around her. Chinese culture will be, to her, an alien platform. If she goes back to China she will only have the cultural context to relate to little more than the similarity of body features.

Is this alienation from her Chinese roots a bad thing? It depends on how you want to slice up the cultural pie. She has a culture, it's just not temporal 2008 Chinese culture. “But she should be with her own people”, a Chinese nationalist may argue. But she is with her own people, other human beings. How do you dice it? If you want to define her “people” by the color of her skin and the shape of her eyes, then so be it. But be aware that her heart could be transplanted into the chest of an African boy. Where is the line between nationalism and racism? When does the act of protecting one's culture become an act of mere bigotry?

Consider your own community. At what point do your neighbors draw the lines between their collective similarities and their individual differences? The color of their skin, the smell of their cooking, the sounds of their music and accents, the texture of their hair? If these things get in our way, what then makes us a good neighbor, a Good Samaritan? Blindness? The loss of hearing, taste, smell, and feeling? Losing all of these is death. We can only come together when we resolve from within our collective that the collective is not as important as others around us. That Chinese girl is more important the Chinese culture's obsession with only having male children. The Jews were more important that the Nazi culture of racism and violence that tried to exterminate them. As a race we can only come together when we chose to shed the differences (color, texture, rhythm) and embrace the similarities (hunger, love, self).

Manipulative
Every community is a kind of cultural collective. Community is, at a minimum, self plus one other. Every community has its own set of rules, it's framework that makes meaningful the events happening within and to the community. This accumulated communal framework is a cultural collective, or simply a collective. Each family within a community, and even each member within each family, is both a part of and separate from the larger community collectives that surround and infuse them—-work collectives, religious collectives, neighborhood collectives, friend collectives, nationality of origin collectives, “race” collectives, class collectives, gender collectives, body type collectives, etc ad infinitum collectives. These associations drive us, define us, exert influence on our decisions every second of every day, and yet they are an illusory force. I agree to learn and follow the rules for work, but I don't have to. I have simply agreed to follow them. If I break the rules, I pay a price, but the ability to break the rules is there. If the price is high (say, my life) and the punishment is defined and enforced (others in the collective will follow through on the punishment), then suffering the results of my decision is the decision I make. The force is an abstraction, agreed to on mutual consent from within the collective, but it is not immutable law. The force changes with the times. Teenage pregnancy of unmarried girls used to be shameful in Western Culture, but now it is viewed as just another kind of "normal" to the point that some girls plan on getting pregnant to fit in. The force is illusory and abstract, but it is powerful.

Catalytic
Because culture is an invented, subjective, organized and divisive abstraction it is necessarily volatile and catalytic. Culture can change dramatically, explosively in one generation. The chain of 100 generations of tradition can be snipped and ended in a single generation. Consider the Mayans. They had a culture that thrived for 1,000 years that was ended in a few years by invasion and disease. Times change.

Culture is not a force of stability, it is a force of catalysis. Because humans learn, cultures modify. Because humans move, cultures combine, compound, transform, mutate. To be a Latina in 2008 is different than it was in 1908 and different still in 1808. But it was more similar between 1808 and 1908 than it is from 1908 to 2008. The reason is that the mixing and mutating and changing are hyper-accelerating. As information and people mix more and more widely, the layers that surround us become more and more diluted with different perspectives. The very encasing of culture starts to swirl around us like multicolored clouds. As the world shrinks culture becomes less an exercise in “Who am I” and more an exercise in “Who am I becoming”. This is the chemistry of the inner rings, but what of the outer layer? Friction.

As society becomes more and more globally integrated, there is a kind of cultural super-charging that occurs. Tension builds between “Who am I” and “Who am I becoming” as the layer of US gets thinner and thinner, as the layer of Them gets thicker and heavier. The various prejudices and beliefs passed from generation to generation are challenged, changed, abandoned. As the outer rings of culture collide the friction heats up that was once a comfortably warm, safe center. The comfortable boundaries of time and space deteriorate as we can now see and feel and smell and touch those dangerous THEMs who were before simply part of the distant abstraction. In the heat things start to change, they start to melt, to absorb and breakdown. The very structures that once kept us warm--common love, joy, laughter, song, language-—start to burn.

For the most part it is the good things, the things that nourish us that most readily get passed down through time. Survival is the closest thing to a filter for the system that there is, but in truth there is really no filter system for the filter system. Either a culture survives, warts and all, or it dies, beauty and all. Good bye Athens, hello Sparta.

Thinner
The world is shrinking. What was once hard and fast meaning is becoming unmeaning as I way them against the myriad of perspectives I am bombarded with every day. I find that the legends and myths told to me by my parents are exactly that—legends and myths. The magic fades. What was once ME and US surrounded by a distant THEM becomes an uneasy, scary WE. The walls are getting thinner, I can hear the neighbors, and they sound more and more like me. Like drops of oil on water, we are floating nearer and nearer to each other as the pool shrinks, as the curse of Babel is reversed. We bump up against each other and the membranes shudder for a moment, then disappear was we bleed together.

In the end, culture is a decision
Culture is a beast that protects, but it also destroys. It creates the illusion that humans are so many locusts, a cloud that swoops down and devours the land, driven by patriotism or religious fervor, but in reality we are not driven by the beast if we choose not to be. All too easily we try to hide under the blanket of culture, disappear in the cloud of bugs, vanish in the ripples of oil, but we can't. At the end of it all we are faced with decisions, and we are held accountable for those decisions. The guards at Auschwitz tried to hide under the blanket of the Nazi culture of fear and obedience, but in the end they were held accountable for their actions and paid with their lives. In the end we all are accountable. Unlike the locust, unlike the oil that obeys the immutable laws of physics, we choose. You are one self, and once you are done living your life, when you are laid into the grave, the security blanket of culture will not keep you warm.

12. Faith

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As Jesus went on from there, two blind men followed him, calling out, "Have mercy on us, Son of David!"

When he had gone indoors, the blind men came to him, and he asked them, "Do you believe that I am able to do this?"

"Yes, Lord," they replied.
Then he touched their eyes and said, "According to your faith will it be done to you"; and their sight was restored.
................Matthew 9:27-30 (NIV)
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The long and short of it.... Faith is less esoteric than you would think. Faith is obedience driven by beliefs, hopes and desires. By looking at the nature of a person's action you can see the object of their faith. There are many things in which you can place your faith-—yourself, the love of your life, wealth, your children, your culture, science, idols-—the list is endless. But faith cannot truly resolve unless it is placed in the thing that quenches all desire, that answers all questions, that resonates with joy, that satisfies all hunger-—The Ultimate Other, God Himself.

Our purpose is to resolve with other. Our ultimate purpose is to resolve with the Ultimate Other.

The beauty and wonder of our relationship to God is that we can either pursue or deny our source, and in that decision lies the value of our resolution. We choose to believe in, pursue and love God or we choose to deny or hate Him, to fight against Him, to ignore Him, to disbelieve in Him. It is up to us; no one is forced into a relationship with God.

What kind of love is forced? No love at all.

What kind of love decision is “fixed”? What kind of love relationship is based on bondage against one's will? Can “sinners” cowering in the hands of an angry god really love such a being? How can you claim that God's love is unconditional (John 3:16-17) and then turn around and add a bunch of conditions to it? Because your relationship with God is based on the exercise of your choice to love or not, it is of incalculable value, for love freely, thoughtfully, willingly, joyfully given is more valuable than anything else in all of creation. Just ask a child. God has done so with His gift to us on the cross, and we can do so back to God with our commitment, love and faith back to Him.

Think about that. You have all the freedom in the universe, in Eternity, to choose your own destiny-—in this life and the next. What kind of God would give that kind of power and responsibility to His creation? It is this decision about our design that tells us something about the designer. God understands love. But before we think about the Ultimate Other, we need to discuss a vital link, the piece of the network that makes access to God possible – faith.

Of known and hoped for
Without faith we are no different than dung beetles-—forgetful of yesterday, feeding today, oblivious of tomorrow. It is faith, not culture that allows us to travel time, it is how we tie together the past, the present and the future, and how we function within the matrix of decisions that shape our eternity. We record and try to learn from our past, we struggle in the face of the present, we try to change the future, all within the context of the hope of better, if not at least different things. The believer has faith that the sins of yesterday are forgiven today so there will be peace and joy tomorrow. The atheist has faith in the ashes, that the sun rose yesterday, will rise today and will rise again tomorrow. The scientist has faith in what is proven with the aim of understanding and proving more. We all, in one way or another, have faith in the culture that shaped us, in the belief that there is some kind of logic or reason to the experiences we are living out, and that these are reasonably repeatable and reliable. In other words, the belief systems for all people are a blend of known and hoped for. It is this catalytic quality that binds us together, fusing past, present and future self with past, present and future other.

Uplink
Using our computer analogy again, the hardware that makes the Internet possible is not the millions of miles of cable, the radio waves filling the air around us, the millions of servers or even any of the quadrillions of lines of code running on them. The Internet exists thanks to a thing called a NIC, or a network interface card. Every computer on the Internet has one, either wired or wireless. This is a card, or sometimes a hardware feature built directly into the motherboard, that has the sole purpose of communicating with the outside world. Like all hardware, a NIC operates using drivers. A driver is a bit of software that tells an OS how to use a piece of hardware, and tells the hardware how to deal with the OS. Without the driver, the hardware is useless. Without a NIC driver, the NIC cannot see or hear or know anything about the Internet outside. Without a functional NIC, a computer can know nothing about the Internet that it cannot access.

In us, the NIC is faith. We have faith in many things, our spouse, our children, our government, our church... God. Without faith there is no interaction with any of these, there is only self. But how does faith work? What are the drivers of faith? When I was an angry, confused teenager I often talked with my friends about faith. The definitions I got were pretty flimsy – it's just belief, either you believe or you don't; it's a feeling you can't really describe. “That doesn't sound like faith,” I would say, “it sounds like the result of faith. That's like defining blue by saying it is blue. So what is this faith thing?” Until only a few years ago the concept completely baffled me, and the answers I found varied wildly.

One Sunday in church we sang a very, very old hymn that started to make this faith thing a little more clear...

Trust and obey, for there's no other way To be happy with Jesus, But to trust and obey.

It wasn't the trust or the obey that stood out to me, it was the trust AND obey part. I realized that faith is multifaceted, which is why all the simplified, boiled down definitions didn't make any sense. So what are all the parts of faith, and how do they interrelate? Does this look familiar?
Faith operates at all levels of our make-up in different ways, and the combined force of belief, trust, obedience and desire make up the totality of what we call faith. Just as every person is made up of different but interdependent parts, each part plays a critical role in the totality of Self. It is the same with faith. Also, faith is a mixture of thought and action, not merely thought and not merely action. We can believe a thing, but if we do not act related to those beliefs the belief is neutralized. Same with trust. I can say I trust my wife, but if I don't act on that trust I am actually living out the fact that I don't trust her.

The table below breaks faith down into its core elements. Each element of faith corresponds to one of our human core elements.

• Faith as obedience is expressed through the body as restraint, nourished by our care for others, wasted away by dominance and control.
• Faith as belief is expressed through the mind as wisdom, cultivated by study, hindered by prejudice and ignorance.
• Faith as trust is expressed through the heart as hope, augmented by expectation, diminished by cynicism.
• Faith as desire is expressed through the soul as longing, strengthened by the outward seeking of Other, weakened and diseased by the inward obsession with self.

From Our Point of View
How is faith developed? In what ways is this thing a part of every human being, and how is faith manifested in every person and culture?

Every person within a family or a community is exposed to local views as to the nature of the world, whether this view is scientific or spiritual, financial or romantic, and this information becomes the basis of one's intellectual belief system. It starts early with learning language, communicating wants and needs and understanding how the outside world responds (or doesn’t). Because the start is so early, the other two spheres are also involved, emotion and strength. Children learn how to operate in their world, learning how to get fed, how to be emotionally nourished, cause and effect. The parents and larger community reinforce these systems, building in the child a set of structures on which he can rely to survive in the world. But with this acculturation comes baggage. As a race we often pass down things that are better left in the past, or worse, lose so much of their original context that they become baffling weights hanging around our necks.

At some point in every human life this mix of the components solidifies into one’s faith. The things we learn from our parents and peers, our lovers and enemies, our culture and history, jells into a solid, like an epoxy that hardens only when mixed with the solidifying agent that turns it from sticky goo into a crystalline gem. This is natural, but once this hardening occurs it is nearly impossible to break or change the faith. This is why you can have whole cultures that are corrupt, destructive and diseased, because the twisted beliefs and traditions that are destructive and divisive are the very foundation of their faith, and how they interact with the world. Within their crystalline faith are the ugly, dark streaks of opinion, custom, taste and bias.

You are probably thinking that this spin on faith sounds more like world view or "culture" than the traditional spin on faith (in its simplest sense one's belief (or not) in God). Consider this definition, though.

Faith is obedience driven by belief, hope and desire

• When a man pursues a woman he is acting out his role as a suitor (based on beliefs, culture, learning, etc.) to fulfill his hope that she will desire him as he desires her, and in doing so their relationship will resolve (girlfriend, fiancé, wife).
• When a scientist experiments in the laboratory she is acting out the methods of scientific inquiry to fulfill the hope that she will solve or better understand the problem or project on which she is working.
• When a business man builds a company he is applying his knowledge of the market to fulfill his hope that the money he is investing in the business will make him wealthy.
• When the blind men heard that Jesus Christ was walking by, they stepped into the crowd and called out for mercy and healing to fulfill their desire to see, to be whole.

In every case it is the same, obedience driven by belief, hope and desire.

Like our other faculties, faith must be exercised and strengthened over time. Ultimately you want to have a healthy balance between the elements, but getting there can sometimes be a trick. Having too much focus on any one of the elements can lead to a stilted and dysfunctional faith, not only in God but anything.

Ask an Atheist if she has faith, and she will tell you, “Yes, I put my faith in humanity, or science, (or pizza or tennis or whatever), anything but God.” An Atheist will never tell you that faith itself does not exist, rather that it's a matter of focus. Every human has the capacity for faith, for faith draws on and binds together the very core elements from which we are made. We have a mind so we can understand, and through that understanding believe the things we know. We have emotion so we can engage that which we understand (or not) passionately, with fire or with ice. We have strength so that we can act on (or choose not to act on) our beliefs and our passions. All of this culminates within our Soul, our Spirit, the desire to reach beyond our mere self to touch others, to touch God. Everyone has this-—it is our design. Faith is the essence of our humanity.

From Another Point of View
Ever wonder why we have been allowed to continue on as we are, with wars, violence, lust, greed, avarice, you name it? God does not destroy humanity in the face of our disgrace because He has faith in us. In the same way that we who believe place our hope in seeing Him someday, He also hopes to see us someday as well. Because He loves us, we are worth loving. Because we are worth loving, He loves us. If we look at it this way, we see that the question is not entirely, Do you believe in God? Do you trust God? Do you obey God? Do you desire God? The question is also, does God believe in you? Does God trust you? Does God obey you? Does God desire you?

Does God desire us? More than anything. Jesus Christ's sacrifice for us on the cross shows that God very much does desire us. In dealing with our separation and fallen-ness God had choices-—wipe everything out and start over, walk away and abandon us, solve this problem for us. He chose the last solution, to become a human incarnate and die a brutal death to clear the path so we can return home. He chose the later because we matter. 

Does God believe in us? The most interesting thing about turning this paradigm around is seeing how differently the question feels from God's point of view. For us it's a matter of believing in what is not immediately visible. For God it is believing in what is not immediately valuable. For us it is a matter of making an intellectual leap beyond grasping only what is tangible (definable, repeatable, controllable) in the present and chasing the possible in the eternal. God is in the past, the present and in the eternal, so from His point of view He knows us better than we know ourselves. God knows every moment of your life, every thought, every desire, and He waits patiently for you to come to maturity. If He did not believe in you there would be no promise that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whomever shall believe in Him shall have eternal life.” If God didn’t believe in you, would He make such a sacrifice and promise? 

Does God trust us? More than I (personally) am comfortable with, actually. Any parent who teaches a child to do something inherently dangerous (but necessary and easy once mastered, say like riding a bike) knows that the key ingredient to growth is trusting that your child can ultimately do it. All of my daughters took some nasty falls when they learned to ride, but we trusted that they could do it. We trusted that they could tolerate the pain to make the strides forward. Part of the reason we suffer is that we are learning, and usually it is only through getting a little singed can we learn how to light a fire. God trusts that we can handle that, and that we can do it. 

Does Good obey us? Not directly, but He does choose to respond to us. There are some believers out there who act like God is their personal genie, granting health, wealth and prosperity on those righteous few who follow the game plan (e.g. law) to the letter or maintain a positive attitude. But God does not use His strength the same way we use ours. We are fundamentally powerless becoming powerful, and therefore need direction from the more powerful and mature to learn restraint, to avoid self-destruction or destroying others with our increasing power. God, on the other hand, is all-powerful. He only obeys himself (He even swore by Himself in the Bible). For God, the use of strength on our behalf is not His obedience to our demands (some people believe that God HAS to fulfill certain obligations when they act out rituals spelled out in the Bible), but rather a combination of His gifts of grace balanced with restraint in dealing with us as we really deserve.

Faith Must Grow
The main challenge with faith is that it must never be the same. It must grow. If your faith is the same as it was 10 years ago, then you have become stagnant. A healthy faith is one that evolves, matures. If you do not actively work on exercising your faith, you will become weak and ineffective, or worse, when faced with real trials and hardships you will collapse and be left with the shattered remnants of a jaded, worthless faith.

Study strengthens the belief system of your faith, and this evolves over time into wisdom. We change over time, and often passages read as a teenager will have significantly different meaning when re-examined later in life. Someone told me once of a great scientist who read the entire Bible when he was twelve and decided it was silly rubbish. He abandoned his family’s faith in Christianity and embarked on a journey of scientific study that lasted 90 years. I suppose I was supposed to be impressed that a 12 year old would read the entire Bible and make such a decision, but what does a 12 year old know of such things, even a very bright one? I asked if he ever read it again-—he hadn’t that anyone knew of. How would he have viewed the Bible differently if he had been open minded enough to have bothered to read it again from the vantage of a life long lived? Would he have found wisdom in the book? Sad that such an intelligent old man would leave his eternal fate in the hands of a 12 year old boy.

Hope is a different kind of beast than study. How does one exercise hope? Trust. But it is hard to trust in this world. How many people in the world who are hopeless, or beyond that, cynical. Instead of looking to the future with any confidence or anticipation or expectation, they look to the future and see nothing but a black wall, the yawning pit of death and despair. What a bummer. Granted, some people’s lives are awful, and maintaining hope in the face of some of the atrocities heaped on them by their families, neighbors, strangers and the government can blacken the most expectant heart. But isn’t it interesting that there are so many people who do have hope in the face of atrocity? Isn’t it amazing that people do sing hymns as bombs fall around them? Many years ago I was reading a magazine that had an article about a little girl who was buried by rubble after an earthquake in Mexico. The whole town rushed to save here, digging her out of the rubble, only to find that she was so badly pinned down in the freezing well water that moving her would kill her instantly. There was a close-up picture of the little girl’s face as she looked up from the water at the camera man. The whites of her eyes were completely red as the blood vessels burst from the trauma; her face was pail, her hair slicked with water and filth. The caption read that her family was with her, holding her hands and comforting her up until she died. It was heart-breaking. Later a friend told me that she knew of this tragedy, and that the news magazine left out an important fact. The little girl, her family and the town’s people were singing hymns to keep her calm and reassured while they tried to dig her out. Her mother prayed with her, and the two of them sang quietly together while the men dug. And when the little girl died, she died singing. Yes, there is horror in the world, but it is the innate faculty of hope within the human spirit, a gift from God Himself, that makes us different.

Without wisdom and understanding in what we believe, without expectant hope in the meaning of our existence in the face of brutal nature, we are incapable of controlling ourselves, our bodies, our desires, our destiny. Unlike the other elements, the body is very much tied into the mechanics of the universe. Our bodies want to mate, to eat, to sleep, to defecate, and all of these functions are less under our control than, for instance, what we learn from our culture. It doesn’t matter what culture I am in, after a certain period of time and effort my body needs to sleep. Restraint of the physical beast is something that nearly every culture spends a lot of time working on. A human without knowledge and without hope succumbs to the forces of desire, both physically and spiritually, and can become a fanatical, ravenous, destroyer. Humans are terribly dangerous creatures.

Soul is the fuel that burns it all together, and so the Spirit is action, and in a mature Soul this action is restraint and obedience. The soul is an eternal thing, it will never stop growing and maturing. The trials and pain we suffer in this world refine it, purify it. Spirit directed towards God is powerful, unstoppable. But spirit directed towards self or other that is not God can become incredibly powerful and dangerous. All of the force poured into us from eternity can become misdirected, misguided, and all of the desire to resolve with God can become twisted towards motivations that never resolve. This desire to resolve is like a hunger, and if it is fed the wrong thing it becomes more ravenous, seeking gratification like an addict forever looks for the next fix, forever unsatisfied. When we are well fed with communion with God the spirit is filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These are the fruits of the spirit found in Galatians 5:22-23, and they come from a Spirit that is satisfied and full of rest. The spirit that is not well fed looks to other things to gratify its ravenous nature: sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions and envy; drunkenness, orgies (Galatians 5:19-21). It is by these outward actions that you can diagnose the inward condition of one's Spirit.

A Spirit can be driven by the endless need for gratification or it can be satisfied by resolution. Gratification is a means, it is indulgence and pleasure, the pleasing of tastes and appetites, but no matter how you feed the body, tomorrow it will need more--no matter how you are gratified by cavier and lobster, it is fleeting and you will grow hungry again. Satisfaction is an end, a destination, a solution, full-filling fulfillment, eating and drinking and never thirsting or hungering again. In this respect, gratification and satisfaction are mutually exclusive, the Spirit can’t pursue both. So the ultimate question of faith is this--does the thing in which you place your faith gratify, or does it satisfy?