Christmas meditation

But Mary treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. (Luke 2:19)

In the process of maturing in one's thoughts about the Christian faith, it is possible to go back and forth between Christmas and Easter trying to decide which is the most important day for the Church. For a child, of course, Christmas seems to have far more gravity; we get off school for it, and we get a ton of presents. This fact does make one think about the relationship between faith and culture. What would life be like if the year were shifted around, and Easter were the central celebration of the year?

A more mature Christian will say Easter is the most important day for the Church because that was the day Jesus rose from the dead and accomplished our salvation. His death on the cross could not have meant salvation for the human race if not for his resurrection. Christmas doesn't even appear in two out of the four gospels. Easter, however, is the main focus of all the gospels, and indeed the entire New Testament. Without Easter, there is no gospel, hence no Christian faith.

The pendulum can swing back after a bit of contemplation. Without Christmas, the crucifixion couldn't have happened, and the resurrection would be meaningless. More specifically, without the Incarnation, there is no Atonement, because there is no blood. And more than this, Christ taking on human flesh means that human flesh is redeemed and transformed into its former glory. All of the work that Christ has accomplished began on Christmas. You cannot have the end without the beginning.

But there is another reason why I am a big fan of Christmas this year, and that is because Christmas comes really not at the beginning of the story but rather in the middle of it. The New Testament begins with Christmas, but in the larger story of the Bible, Christmas comes rather late in the game. Or in a bigger sense, recognizing that the world has really had billions of years of history, Christmas really comes at such a small, seemingly insignificant moment. When Jesus was first born, it is hard to imagine anyone noticed. Matthew tells us of a few wise men and Luke tells us of some shepherds who saw angels in the sky. Did anyone even believe them? And what difference did it make to them even if they did?

I'm not a very good Christian, in the following sense. During Christmas services, I'm told to think back to the birth of Christ and realize what a great gift has been given to humankind, and then I'm told to think about how this was the beginning of all the Christ accomplished. In other words, I'm told to believe that everything is really finished, that Christ has already done everything for us, and that the appropriate response is to celebrate that with worship and with good deeds. I admit this feels like a strange plan to me. Has it all really been accomplished? Is this really what the world looks like after salvation has already come to earth?

Perhaps it's simply too painful to remember what the world is still like, even after the good news has been preached all over the world. It's painful to remember how fragile life is, the way hurricanes and tsunamis can destroy hundreds and thousands of human lives, the way famine and disease still afflict millions of people daily, the way millions and millions of children go to bed hungry each night, the way corrupt world leaders fail to defend the rights of the most helpless, the way even good people do terrible things to each other, the way even the Church has contributed to the great evil of the world...

There seems to be a certain comfort that comes from hearing that everything has been accomplished already. That means victory is assured, and whatever evil may get in our way, we will ultimately overcome. But sometimes, I admit, this comfort seems rather perverse. The more people talk about what has already been accomplished through Christ, the more it seems to sound like a myth, a fairy tale, a comforting thought to help a man sleep at night. Many times it does feel like such comforts are all we get in this broken world. If we can't successfully lie to ourselves, maybe there simply is no comfort in life and in death.

Mary gets a lot of attention this time of year, even from us Protestants. Songs like "Mary Did You Know?" reflect on the idea that Mary was in the middle of the story, and could not see how it all would end. I guess we are supposed to appreciate the fact that we do see how it ended and how it will end, and we are supposed to wonder what it would have been like for Mary. But I find myself actually understanding Mary right where she is in Luke 2. She treasured up all these things, pondering them in her heart. She had neither answers nor explanations. She simply pondered what these things could mean.

Most of the time I feel so lost in the middle of a big story that I just can't understand the words "all that Christ accomplished." It's that darn word "accomplished." What about, "is doing" or "has begun"? Maybe I can understand those a little better. And maybe that's why Christmas means so much to me right now. Because in a world that really is so full of darkness, it is the height of conceit to pretend we know where we are going. Those who say they do are deluded. I've seen where it is they're actually going, and it isn't pretty: divisions in the church, hatred toward the outside world, and the neglect and/or destruction of souls who long for real answers to these questions about what's going to happen to this world. If I'm being a bit vague, perhaps my vagueness is a good way to illustrate what the real world is really like.

This Christmas, I am personally recognizing my great lack of ability to actually believe that anything has been accomplished. I'm not saying this isn't a failing on my part. The Church has always insisted that there is a higher reality which we cannot see until our eyes are opened. Perhaps that's what I am missing. In any case, it's something I wrestle with, and it isn't something that beautiful candlelight services can fix.

But while part of it may be a failing, in another sense I am certain that I ought to feel the way I do, because the world really is dark and perplexing. While I may celebrate with my family with all the comforts and conveniences of modern life, I refuse to forget in my heart all of the great mysteries and tragedies of life. How is it that I can be blessed with so much while others suffer with so little? Or on the other hand, how is it that some can find happiness with relatively little, while incredibly wealthy people find only misery? Where is the justice in all of this confusion and conflict? When will there be peace and wholeness?

There is light in the midst of darkness, hope in the midst of sadness, mercy in the midst of oppression, life in the midst of death. Though millions of children go to sleep hungry, millions more are fed by the generosity of others. Though hurricanes and tsunamis and earthquakes rage, still millions of people are willing to give their money and in many cases their time and talents toward rebuilding. Though governments oppress their own people, still the voice of reason and justice lives on. Why does it never seem to win? "A sword will pierce your own soul, too"--this, it seems, is the story of all humanity.

This Christmas, I am pondering all these things in my heart. Like Mary, I have no answers or explanations. All I can do is watch. I have seen light in the midst of darkness--but oh, how great is that darkness! Sometimes it seems we are all lost. And that is just when the Christmas story is needed most.

Christmas + Bacon = Awesome

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This is truly inspired.

Merry Christmas

Once again, it's Christmas. Time to celebrate with good food and lots of fun.

I've always found it easy to think about all the things that are wrong with the world, or with my own life, and think that I should be working on those things. How can I celebrate when there are people elsewhere who are starving? It puts a damper on the mood...

I don't recommend willful blindness to the problems of the world, but I do think it's a genuinely spiritual practice to set aside a time to enjoy the good things we're given in life. A little bit of excess once a year is, honestly, a good thing. It keeps us looking forward to a time when good things will be in true abundance.

I think maybe joy is itself a creative act of the human will. I've noticed that two different people can have very different reactions to the same thing: one can enjoy something that the other does not. Part of that difference is what you're used to. Whatever you take for granted, you sometimes don't enjoy.

But I think that when we look at the blessings we have, and we discipline our hearts and minds to truly understand how blessed we are by them, we are in a sense creating joy. Sometimes our enjoyment doesn't depend on how much stuff is put in front of us, but on how good an imagination we have.

I've certainly enjoyed this past year, and I'm going to very much enjoy this Christmas. Yes, there are many problems in the world that I'll continue to blog about, and there are many problems in my own life that I'll continue to deal with. But Christmas is a time to celebrate, when everything that is wrong with the world is eclipsed by the love shown to us by God.

My prayer for this Christmas is that we may all truly enjoy life. There's nothing hedonistic about this. True enjoyment is what we were made for, I'm convinced of it. So I'll be praying that we all learn to truly enjoy life, and I'll be practicing myself all day long!

Merry Christmas.

Social Conservatism and Power

Yesterday I read an interesting (but long) article about Robert P. George, a Princeton professor of jurisprudence and an influential conservative Christian thinker. The article got me thinking about the various ways in which Christians try to engage the culture in matters of morality.

George's approach is of the "Thomist" tradition (i.e. Thomas Aquinas), meaning that he thinks Christian moral principles can be argued on the basis of pure human reason, apart from divine revelation. This fits nicely into the secular age, in which religion is not the dominant political force.

However, even he acknowledges what other Christian thinkers say about human reason: that original sin has corrupted our ability to reason, so that we fail to see moral truths without divine revelation. Protestant tradition since Martin Luther has often stressed this.

What an interesting tension for Christians to deal with! On the one hand, if you believe in certain moral principles, you'd like to be able to convince others that those moral principles are true, hence you'd like to be able to derive those principles from pure reason.

On the other hand, the Bible does talk a lot about the "blindness" of man, the inability to see the truth without divine revelation. There is surely a lot of evidence for this in common experience, though many are stubbornly opposed to this idea as a matter of principle.

I wonder which attitude promotes a secular culture more. The second attitude encourages the separation of Church and State, does it not? If it religious truth is a matter of special revelation, then how can it be suitable for creating the laws of a nation? Leave us alone, and we'll leave you alone, that kind of thing. On the other hand, the second attitude, while it does make Christian ethics universal in scope, also makes human reason the foundation for morality, which is a highly secular idea.

If Christians are interested in winning the "culture wars," I suppose the Thomist approach makes more sense--explain to people in non-Christian terms why Christian ethics make sense. Either that or convert everyone in sight...

But I wonder, why such an interest in winning the culture "wars"?

I've been thinking a lot lately about power. There are many reasons to want power. One reason is obvious--selfish, but obvious. Power means I can do what I want.

There is, of course, a slightly more sophisticated reason to want power. If only I were in charge, with all my infinite wisdom, the world would be a better place. If people did what I say, they'd be happier. I need to save people from themselves.

It's hard not to resent this mentality. It's exactly the kind of mentality conservatives hate in liberals, and liberals hate in conservatives. Every political ideology comes with a little bit of self-righteous power-hungry arrogance that says, "Our plan will make this country better."

Awkwardly, the Christian story doesn't sound very far from this. When Jesus finally comes in judgment, then the world will be made right. It's not hard to see how someone in a modern democratic Western nation would have a problem with this.

But there's something different about this story. Christmas is a time when we celebrate the King of the Jews being born in a stable under scandalous circumstances. We celebrate the Messiah who would die the death of a criminal. "Glory to God in the highest"--how does this triumphant announcement jive with the dark scenario actually depicted in the gospels?

If Christians truly seek to "win" the "culture wars," shouldn't we first know what it means to "win"? If our Savior's life is any model, winning comes through persecution, humiliation, and death... and then finally through new life.

New life. New creation. The power of God is not found through destruction, but creation. Nor is power found through control of what limited resources this world has to offer, but through the gfit of new life, new creation.

The culture wars are fought with the noblest of intentions, I'm sure. But after all, they are wars of conquering and taking, of controlling the world's laws and institutions.

The real power is not found in controlling the world with its finite resources, but in creating something new. Jesus turned water into wine; he fed 5000 people with a few loaves and some fish; he raised his dear friend from the dead.

I realize there are battles that a Christian conservative must fight, as conscience demands. But conservatism often seems antithetical to the true meaning of Christ's birth--something new has come into this world. The kingdom of God is not about clinging to the old, but creating something new.

My heart desires something greater than winning political battles over issues like abortion or homosexuality. Oh, to actually change the world. It is creativity, not reason, that strikes me as more attractive these days. It won't do to simply be a conservative.

(Maybe this desire will lead me to do something new with this blog. I've had the same format for a long time now. I think it's time for something new. I don't know what exactly, but I can feel it.)

My prayer for Christian conservatives is that they will realize that the Kingdom of God is not about convincing the world that we have the Truth. It is about creativity, beauty, and power--perfect power expressed through love.

Instead of simply arguing that we shouldn't depend on the government for social welfare, shouldn't we instead find new creative solutions to social problems that can be implemented through local organizations?

Instead of simply arguing against abortion, shouldn't we instead find new creative ways to help mothers in need, and to celebrate life in all of its forms?

I don't know how to do these things myself; I'm just thinking out loud, as it were. And I have a feeling that my imagination is pathetically limited by my own human experiences. But imagination--that's what I think is at the core of true spirituality.

Imagine... what would it look like to truly live the way Jesus intended us to live? What did Jesus really mean when He said we would do "greater works than these"?

I guess that's a good Christmas thought to end on. Imagine... the little child of Bethlehem, actually a King. Imagine what that could really mean...

Rest

My semester is finally over.

It's interesting how little my own grades actually meant to me this semester. Far more important were the grades I gave other people (namely my calculus students). I hate giving grades, especially for the class I taught.

Do my students know enough calculus to use in whatever profession they will choose? How in the world should I know? Do they know enough calculus to move on toward doing mathematics professionally? Not a chance--otherwise they would've taken a more advanced calculus course. The whole situation is mildly ridiculous.

Anyway, I'm glad it's over. Now I get to take a vacation. I find vacations to be highly necessary. I love what I do, but it takes a certain amount of mental energy that needs to be recharged.

Florensky talks about organizing the soul. That's definitely what I need to do. Much like my desk, my heart, soul, and mind tend to get disorganized as time goes on. Left unattended, my soul will simply collapse into chaos.

Balancing the internal and the external life is an endless struggle for human beings. The Internet makes that struggle all the more interesting. Here on this blog, the line between internal and external life is greatly blurred, isn't it? Is this a personal journal, or is it a public forum?

In search of balance, I do turn to spiritual wisdom for guidance, but I'm not always sure about what I find. For instance I read this quote today:

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door; pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matt. 6:6)

The room of the soul is the body; its doors are the five bodily senses. The soul enters its room when the mind does not wander here and there, roaming among the things and affairs of the world, but stays within, in our hearts. Our senses become closed and remain closed when we do not let them be passionately attached to external sensory things and in this way our mind remains free from every worldly attachment, and by secret mental prayer unites with God our Father. (St.Gregory Palamas)

I just don't know about this. Is the way to find God to shut everything out? The world around you is created by God. Did He mean for you to stop looking at it, or stop caring what's happening in it?

Don't get me wrong, the internal life is tremendously important. After all, the internal life must be organized just like any other part of creation. But is that where God is found? Is the only way to truly pray to first cut off the senses?

All I have energy for right now is to simply muse on the subject. I've just been thinking lately how remarkably inconsistent Christian thought has been on the subject of creation. Is it good or bad? I seek a spirituality that affirms the goodness of creation in every way.

What's profound to me is that once I hit the "publish post" button on my screen, the physical world around me will be changed in such a way as to affect many other people that I may not have even seen before.

Imagine that. What a profound effect we humans with our imagination have on the creation! It is as if we are agents of creation.

With that in mind, it makes me sad to think of people piously shutting off the senses in order to get close to God. Surely I can find connection to God also in organizing the world around me, as well as inside me, perhaps as something of an offering to Him.

A simple point and click will actually make a change in this world around me, and the creativity of the soul is powerfully made manifest through digital media. What a world we live in.

As I settle down this Christmas vacation to organize my soul and re-energize my mind, I hope also to write down my thoughts for the whole world to see, because, you see, the human soul is not simply a matter of the internal life. The human soul is a powerful creative force constantly making its mark on the world around it.

My soul needs rest. Somehow writing does provide rest, even in the effort it takes to force myself to do it.

It turns out my body needs rest, too, so good night everyone. Hope you've got your Christmas shopping done.

A warning for Black Friday

I just a read a classic George Will column on why Christmas spending is so outrageously inefficient. Commenting on the book Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays, he points out:

Gifts that people buy for other people are usually poorly matched to the recipients' preferences. What the recipients would willingly pay for gifts is usually less than what the givers paid. The measure of the inefficiency of allocating value by gift-giving is the difference between the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent on gifts and the yield per dollar spent on recipients' own purchases.

Oh, George, you're all about efficiency. But seriously, the author of this book, Joel Waldfogel, has estimated that about $85 billion are wasted each year because of gift-shopping. And it hurts our economy, rather than helping it.

As Will writes,

If all spending justified itself, we would pay people to dig holes and then refill them -- or build bridges to unpopulated Alaskan islands. Spending is good if the purchaser, or the recipient of a gift, values the commodity more than he does the money it costs. Otherwise, there is a subtraction from society's store of value.

(Without saying so, Will is giving a subtle lecture on politics. One can easily see how the same principle would apply to the idea of government "stimulating" the economy. The question is not how much money goes through the system, but whether net value has actually been added.)

But don't people get net value from presents? It's the thought that counts, as they say. Maybe it's not all about efficiency, as stodgy conservatives think it is.

And yet, let's be honest--the thought that supposedly counts isn't usually very deep. My own family tradition has often involved excruciatingly excessive gift-giving, and the fact is you just have no idea what to get people. It's not just inefficient in terms of cost, it's inefficient in terms of people's feelings. You have no idea whether that person is going to like it.

As Will so cleverly puts it, "Were it not for sentimentality about sentiments, which are highly overrated, we would behave rationally..." (He goes on to suggest giving cash, which I admit is a little crass... but there's always gift cards!)

I think conservative religious types probably deserve to feel vindicated about this. In constantly harping on the excessive commercialization of Christmas, they're actually condemning something that legitimately hurts our economy.

So what can we do instead of gift-giving? Well, there's nothing wrong with gift-giving--as long as it's limited (the average American currently gives 23 gifts a year!!), and as long as it's meaningful. You don't add net value to an economy unless you provide something that will actually matter to people.

(Could it be that better relationships with one another would actually help our economy? Maybe a fundamental problem with this insane gift-giving is that we don't know each other well enough to see what would actually be meaningful.)

So this year, tell your friends and relatives you're going to help the economy by making your gift-giving more efficient. Limit the number of gifts you give, and make them meaningful.

Maybe you could buy them Waldfogel's book...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Christmas

Tonight is Christmas Eve, and my cousins and I just watched The Muppet Christmas Carol again, simply because we have done it for at least ten years in a row. I love that movie. It is a delightful rendition of Dickens's famous story, and really, who can resist the muppets?

Seeing that movie one more time got me thinking about traditions. So much of what we do comes from the familiarity of it. My mom's side of the family always goes to Pittsburgh for Christmas. From the time my brother and I and our three cousins were children, we always made a big event of Christmas, with all the gift-giving excitement you would expect in a typical American consumerist family. Why get rid of a good thing?

I'm happy to be here in Pittsburgh again this year, but I can't help notice how different things are. My brother, just like last Christmas, is on the other side of the Atlantic doing Christian missions. (Fortunately, he'll be with us tomorrow thanks to the wonders of Skype.) My cousin Loren is engaged to be married next year. Ethan and Eric are now thoroughly into their military careers, and I'm in graduate school. The "kids" are not kids anymore.

This is also the sixth Christmas I have celebrated without my father. Although I am glad to know that he rests in the arms of his father in heaven, I can't help but feel a little sorry for myself for having been without him all these years. I am astonished at how much more I have thought about him this Christmas season than I did in any of my four years of college. Perhaps that is because Christmas has given me the chance to reflect on these past few years more than the summer after my graduation. Perhaps I needed to look back at where I came from, so that I can assess where I've really gone since then, particularly in my college years.

I could go on about that, but I won't. Not here, anyway. I guess I was just thinking about how we tend to fall in love with the familiar patterns of life. All cultures develop some sort of calendar to keep track of time, both for practical and sentimental reasons. We need to know what's coming--what the weather will be like, for example--but we also need to set aside time to think about important events, themes, values, etc. which are represented by our various holidays.

What results from this scheme is a very cyclic view of the world. Every Christmas, we see something very familiar, and there is comfort in that. The New Year will come around just like it did last year, and we can look forward either cynically or optimistically to a lot more of what we've already seen. There is surely something good in this cycle. After all, it is part of nature for things to come in cycles.

But Christmas really isn't about cycles at all. If there's one thing the birth of Christ tells us, it's that history is going somewhere. Just as my cousins and I are not kids anymore, history also has grown up. Every year we are approaching the fulfillment of all God's promises; otherwise Christmas--the incarnation of God--is meaningless.

Human beings really have no excuse anymore for the way we continue to tolerate immorality and injustice. We have a perfect model in the man whose birth we celebrate this time of year. When I think about the atrocities of the world, whether it be the genocide in Darfur, or the terrorism of Al Qaeda, or perhaps the secret atrocities that we in the West commit daily, though we prefer not to think of them as such--I think, how can this be, seeing that God himself was born to us more than 2,000 years ago?

Yet the whole story of the world, according to Christianity, is one in which human beings cause both the downfall and the renewal of God's perfect world. "For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God." (Romans 8:19) Indeed, you can already see signs of life in the dead race of man. There is love, there is joy, and there is peace this time of year, in many places all over the world, where people gather together to celebrate the God of all goodness and beauty and wonder.

God is doing something among us, and that is why we see our lives moving forward. For me, it means that these years ahead of me in are not just about building a career for the purpose of gaining enough of an income in my adult life to be comfortable. My future is all about God's future, which means ushering in an era in which people really do act like Christ. It means standing up against atrocities, showing people the most excellent way, and hopefully living ever more consistently with the message I endorse with words. I cannot just sit idly by while the world suffers, especially when God really has been so good to me.

God is moving history forward. In a world of cycles, it is easy to believe that what has happened cannot be undone, and that every year we know what to expect. But the challenge of Christmas is to believe that in fact the dead can rise again. Not only do we celebrate people being changed from Scrooges into saints, but we also look forward to a literal resurrection, in which people like my father will once again live on the earth, never to die again. No matter what it is in this world that makes our hearts sigh and yearn for things to be different, we know because of Christmas--because God is now with us--that things can be different, and they will be different.

I suppose that's the whole reason I started this blog. I know that even though history tends to repeat itself, nevertheless everything we choose to do with the time we are given matters. Every word we say, every stand we take, and every person we reach is a building block in God's project of history. If I didn't see it this way, I think I'd go insane. It's nice to take comfort in what's familiar, but a life that only goes around in circles really is meaningless. I guess I have just enough faith to believe that God is using these silly little blog posts as part of His mission to change the world.

Having said all of that, I really do think one of the best ways to change the world is to celebrate. There's nothing like a celebration to show the world that love and joy really will prevail. There's nothing like a celebration to show people that the King really is here to make things right. After all, we ought to be living in light of our hope for the future given to us by Jesus Christ, so how can we help but celebrate? The world needs to see what a real party looks like!

So to all of you out there in cyberspace...

Merry Christmas.