If you don't have at least one deep dark, shameful and terrifying secret to be shared with other people, there are only three possibilities as to why. Either you have already shared with others everything about yourself, or you are completely blind to your own humanity, or you are the most plain, most boring, most un-human person to have ever lived. May God save us from being the third, deliver us from being the second, and know us as the first.

I haven't gotten around to watching Obama's acceptance speech yet; I'll watch it as a podcast when I have the time, as I will McCain's. But a Kingdom-sympathetic, bridge-building, space-spanning person like myself can't help but raise a thumb upward for Greg Boyd's brief comments on division, polarization, empire and Kingdom.

In this season (unfortunately, more like year) of political campaigning, this general subject seems timely. The other day one of my classmates brought up the realm of a writer's voice as related to a writer's identity. Noting right from the start that voice and identity are both subjects that a person could spend a lifetime studying and theorizing about, I'd still like to cover some points about them.

There is a tension within me that results from various concerns and forces tugging and pulling at some nebulous, ill-defined center called 'my identity.' A few of them are involved with the subject of this post. Several years back, I worried a great deal about finding my writing voice, which in my thinking concerned style and content. "Oh if I could just figure out my innate style" I would lament. I sort of got over that, realizing that a writer doesn't have to have a single style. This alleviated some issues with style, but didn't do much for identity. So then I thought of identity in terms of confession and subject matter, until I wrote the essay "Deconstruction, Truth, Meaning." It was then I admitted to myself that neither writing, nor anything else, will ever result in a full presentation of one's identity. "This I confess," is possible; "Now you know me," is not.

These are part of the tension. An additional part is the ages-old spiritual quest for contact with one's singular, "true" identity, which nominally is expressed, with no façade or fiction, in every moment of life—versus the theoretical view that we each have multiple identities. We are different, in some ways, depending upon the context of the moment. Are we talking to children, our own children, coworkers, fellow students, folks at church, etc.? On the one hand, it seems each of us should "just be me" in all of life's varied circumstances. But on the other, are we really the same? Do we, can we, should we, must we show the same self to everyone in all cases? In theory I have an ultimate true identity in God. In theory identity is merely a malleable social construct.

Reiterating, voice and identity are subjects we could spend a lifetime analyzing and theorizing about. Likewise with our social interactions. None of these are simple. But just to try to place something onto somewhat firm footing, it's pretty safe to say that nearly all of us act a bit differently depending upon social context. We say different things, and we say things differently. And this is the small point of the moment, in this post. Do we each reveal a fundamentally different identity in each case, are we revealing different voices of the same identity, both, or neither? What determines what? Can we answer this, at all?

I think we should try. When at the Abbey of Gethsemani, I talked to an aged monk who was long ago a friend of Thomas Merton. Naturally, we talked about Merton. So this monk's voice was the voice of a friend and historian. When this same monk talked to my daughter, his voice was more like that of a loving father. I would assume that his voice when speaking to his superiors in confession would be different. Yet, I tend to think that in this man's discipline and age and wisdom, all of these voices are from a singular, integrated identity. There is no contradiction; no false implications. No pretending. No self deception. On the other hand, consider a political candidate who travels from venue to venue. There is a speech in the northwest about gun-toting rednecks, perhaps. There is a speech in the south about the right to bear arms. There is a speech in the Midwest about the working man and woman struggling to make ends meet while the rich get richer. There are talks behind closed doors, about making the rich richer. And in each venue, not just the vocabulary, but the literal physical accent, inflection and cadence of speech, and the stories, change. What does this person believe? Who and what are they? What is false, pretend, real, genuine? What, if anything, do the answers tell us about identities? That the politician has many identities, or actually only one, which has nothing to do with being genuine and everything to do with wanting to be elected? This example is more personal than we might think, if we ask ourselves the same questions, only substitute "liked," "admired" or "loved" for "elected."

I am somewhat aware that there is code-switching in discourse, such as I might say, "I view this as a very positive development" to a group of professionals, and just plain "Sweeeeet!" to my pre-teen child. I can say to my younger coworkers, "Owned!" and they understand that which with an older audience requires, "Wow, the other party clearly attained the upper hand in this situation, and at your expense." This is natural in the sense that almost all of us do it every day, to some greater or lesser extent. There are people I know who don't, but they typically come across to others as boring, stuck-up, out of touch, or just plain frightening. A bit of code-switching is necessary, and is a positive aspect of discourse. To me, code-switching means I want to communicate with somebody at whatever level they communicate. And I think here is the crux of the issue. Why do I want to communicate, and what do I want to communicate? Are my motives selfish or no? Is my communication for good or ill? It is for the benefit of the other, or for me? And I can ask myself, should ask myself, if the communication is true to "who I am" regardless of the code.

And this leads me to a few concluding thoughts. When we communicate, we make statements explicitly and implicitly. We are also aware (I hope) that inferences will be made. True enough, inferences are largely the responsibility of the audience and cannot be controlled by us. But this is not entirely the case. We perceive at least the possibility of particular inferences. Sometimes we encourage them. Certain rhetorical forms depend upon them. In such cases, do we manipulate the inferences, and to what end? In all of these cases (explicit claims, implicit claims, and cajoled inferences), are we speaking from a single identity that controls our speech keeping it consistent to our "true self" no matter what the voice, no matter what the code? I have no firm conclusions. But one thing that seems promisingly useful is to remember that our actions are valuable in that they reflect our state of being. If our speech acts, properly translated from various voices and codes, are contradictory, we are not speaking from a single identity—or, our single identity is behaving dishonestly. It doesn't take a genius to realize that there are cases where we are genuinely, and for the good, being all things to all people—and cases which cross the line to where we are simply being false.

I sort of like to backpack once in a while. I like the feeling of accomplishment I get from it, I like getting away from civilization so to speak, and most of all I like the simplicity of it. But it's not like it's my favorite thing on earth. I'm not a person who has a lot of physical strength and stamina, so I get tired. And I have a horrible sense of where I am and where I've been. I can get disoriented and turned around in a New York minute, making getting lost a very real possibility. Being aware of this personal limitation helps a lot in keeping me out of trouble, and am completely unashamed to backtrack in order to find my bearings again. Backpacking is a lot like life: pride will get you lost and/or dead faster than just about anything.

Accordingly I've been a bit uneasy with this summer's posts. I really find myself in this trap where I feel the need to draw lines for myself, and more so to share those lines in an effort to be more transparent and known. The trap is that, as I've been saying over and over this summer, when I do so I find myself seemingly contradicting myself at a very basic level. It gets back to the posts I wrote about accepting people, judging people, and that sort of stuff. For the most part, since posts are one-sided, every post that tries to draw a line is going to result in this situation. But I don't think there's a warm and fuzzy solution to this personal problem of mine. I think I'm chasing a feather in the wind if I think I can solve it painlessly.

So, I will backtrack a bit, and retrace a few steps all the way back to my post "A Place to Start." Bottom line for the leg of the hike from there to here? Defining what a Christian is, and being one, occur at the personal level, between an individual and God. For me, being a Christian means taking seriously what (I believe) I know of Jesus, and doing my best to align my life with his teaching. To me this means that loving God and loving other people are far and away the first answers to all things. It also means that one's life with God is, above all things, about living in humility. It means that if I catch myself being concerned with something silly, like my own eternal reward or punishment, or where I think some other person stands in relationship to God, rather than being concerned with loving God and others in abject humility, then I have gotten seriously off the path of the journey.

With that summary I'm now at a waypoint that feels good enough to me that I'll mark it. But there's still the painful part of the journey that has to fess up and take a punch like an adult. So here's my first step onward from here, in the effort to draw a line and be transparent: The fact of the matter is, and this is part and parcel for the entire spiritual journey as far as I can tell, if you're a person who thinks you've got it all figured out and you have nothing to say other than how and why you're right and the rest of us are wrong, well, maybe so. But I don't think there's much point in you and I wasting our time by talking with each other; I don't think we're going to agree on much of anything. Perhaps we should each go to our own closet and pray for the other. You can pray for the salvation of my soul and I can pray for the opening of your heart. And who knows? Maybe God will hear us both. Maybe this is the mysterious reason we are so different in the first place.

Prayer and love are really learned in the hour when prayer becomes impossible and your heart turns to stone. — New Seeds, chapter 30

I was sitting around tonight thinking of music, and this idea I have once in a while of including music videos in this blog. Usually I stop short of doing so, because I find that sort of thing distracting when I read other blogs that are concerned primarily with the arena of spiritual discussion. Admittedly, I face the same thing when I put posts in here about Spadefoots, complete with photos, but hopefully I've written enough explanations as to how the Spadefoots fit into my discussions of faith.

At any rate, I was thinking of music and also of my desire to present something a little less rambling and thrown-together than my recent posting trend. And then along came to my mind a short, informal assignment from my first class in grad school. It covers both of the bases I was looking for tonight, so here it is. (I'm making my first attempt at embedding video in the blog, so let's hope it works. And I will mention, as a reminder to myself, that this song is intriguing in its own right for its appeal to Heaven in the wake of a friend's suicide. It deserves a post of its very own, some day.)

And, uh, I recognize that the claim I'm making, to place this song into anywhere near the same realm as Nietzsche and Greek tragedy may seem absurd, but—I dunno; think about it. Here's the paper:

The professor asserts:

I see [Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy] as an argument about culture and the role language plays in the shaping of culture. I include literature and rhetoric within the broad category of language. The relics of language including literature and recorded oratory map the progress or degeneration of culture. This assertion, however, comes close to being a tautology. (If only a tautology, would Nietzsche have spent so much time writing, rewriting, and qualifying The Birth of Tragedy?) There must be a greater purpose.

Response:

MY ANSWER begins with an image of war. Nietzsche mentions briefly in—but significantly, at the beginning of—An Attempt at Self Criticism that The Birth of Tragedy was conceived during the Franco-Prussian War. What Nietzsche does not note is that he was serving in that war, in the Prussian army, as a medical orderly. At the time he placed pen to paper, a young Nietzsche was witnessing first-hand the horrors of war. This is far from trivial, and in attempting to wager what The Birth of Tragedy's greater purpose may be, we must consider Nietzsche's immediate situation as a possible causal element in his thought process. If we attempt to place the imagery of warfare, the dead and the dying, the blood on Nietzsche's hands and garments into our minds, it begins to make perfect sense that, as he further notes in An Attempt at Self Criticism, he finds himself pondering science, life, religion, art and morality(3). In the middle of man's greatest horrors, horrors often intensified by the genius of science, legitimized by morality and sanctioned by religion, his staggering intellect is brooding with a depth few of us will ever fathom. It is brooding over some thing he considers to be "of utmost importance and… deeply personal." And the nagging question haunting his classical mind is, "What is the Dionysian?" The greater purpose of The Birth of Tragedy (and let us pretend there is only one) is an idea born from a synthesis of all these constituents; an amalgam formed in a crucible heated by the fires of war. In what proportions it is mixed we cannot say, but we can make some sense as to the type of product the synthesis produces.

NIETZSCHE'S PRESENTATION and analysis of Greek tragedy demonstrates Dionysian art as an art that transports the artist beyond himself, to "become art itself" and into the eternal nature of the world. This alone, according to Nietzsche, is man's escape from illusion and mask. Art is the greatest expression of humanity; Man's only pure expression and experience of what it means to contact existence itself(4). But against this salvation stands a modern science, which in gestation destroyed Nietzsche's beloved tragedy and in middle age is advancing the horrors wrought by an ever more modernized warfare. Allied in effect with this science is a sterile morality that seeks to destroy art and thereby nullify Man. Both science and morality appear as anti-life, and therefore as young Nietzsche's enemies. In a calculated response born of his romantic mind, Nietzsche creates and chooses for himself a discipline of life that is anti-moral and pure art. He names it The Dionysian.

It would be an obvious mistake to take this summary and label Nietzsche's presentation as simple, uncomplicated or straightforward. But it is not unfair to say that The Birth of Tragedy is verbose enough to obscure the fact that Nietzsche is being very human in the face of a timeless and very human dilemma. For all its riches, The Birth of Tragedy remains, in large part, a scene taken from a perennial play; the struggle of the individual to find its relationship to, and place within, the Universal. It is typical that this struggle is born of or greatly intensified by the worst of conditions, and wartime strongly qualifies as one. We see Nietzsche traveling, as each of us do, his own unique path to a resolution. Nietzsche's path was simply, but not merely, more intellectually stellar than that of the average person, and held Greek tragedy as one of its annotated waypoints. What we have in The Birth of Tragedy is Nietzsche's working out for himself a view of self vis-à-vis God; at least, a god-like spiritual reality that Nietzsche can acquiesce to consider God. For Nietzsche, it is The Dionysian that delivers one to such a place(4). This, I contend, is the greater purpose of The Birth of Tragedy. And can there be any greater?

WITH A NOD to [the professor], this analysis may well be tautological in its own right, and in a related sense I note that The Birth of Tragedy remains fully relevant for us today.

Contemporary culture in America abounds with analogs to the Dionysian concept, bringing to mind the words "extreme" and "edgy," especially in relation to trends such as body modification and radicalized performance art. Videos of alternative rock band members throwing themselves into crowds of frenzied fans come to mind, and it is difficult to deny that the very heavily tattooed and pierced person is not attempting to go beyond the performance of art to become art itself. Such practices can
be attempts to take humanity beyond humanity, into the realm that lies beyond (or under) humanity; to loose one's self of self. Not surprisingly, they are often intellectually unrecognized as such, and placed under the labels of trend and fashion.

When applied to our culture, Nietzsche's view of morality is most clearly represented in fundamental religion of monotheistic faiths, and in the less radical yet conservative evangelical Christian faith. These continue to exert the same art-nullifying influences against which Nietzsche rails. Nietzsche is correct in saying these influences are anti-art; which is to say, they are intent on stifling the creative urge in humanity. This remains today one of the great ironies of such religions; that ostensibly in the name of a Creator, they seek to attenuate the inherited Creative Urge gracefully breathed into the soul of the created. This nullifying element is represented by media in iconic form as America's religious right.

While both "Dionysian" and "moral" elements flourish in our culture, the Apollonian seems to be suffering. Fine art in "plastic" forms is relegated to museums, visual arts are limited to moving imagery and are often only in tertiary support of other mediums, and the higher ideals inspired by Apollo are mistakenly equated to morality per se. The resulting vacuum remains a tremendous weakness in our society: pundits incite the populace to reduce everything into binary quantities of the Dionysian versus the moral. Missing are Nietzsche's Apollonian, and a second form of mysticism Nietzsche himself had likely encountered yet happens to ignore completely(5). We are left in a state far less than ideal, for when the Apollonian does not exist to temper Dionysian, and other forms of mysticism are ignored, it remains far too easy to believe that everything capable of loosing us from ourselves is unquestionably expedient. This tendency is exacerbated by the intuitive realization that our society's only advertised alternative is an arid, life-limiting morality few find appealing.

The Creative, Artful Urge within us is telling us to run from that which stifles it and into the arms of its eternal source, and indeed we are often quick to run. But I am afraid our running is frequently blind, and not always to God.

Notes and points of discussion:

1. An example of contemporary Dionysian art?

Say Hello 2 Heaven, by Temple of the Dog. Seriously open to debate (and even more so to musical taste), but listen to the ending chorus, as the singer begins to loose himself of any concern of being a singer. The art is overtaking the artist. In the spirit of this paper, listen to the song while imagining a battlefield. I think one can begin to get an idea of art transporting us to a place that science and morality cannot:

2. Sources

Quotations below are from The Birth of Tragedy translated by Ian Johnston of Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, last revised June 2003. An etext is available at:

http://www.mala.bc.ca/%7Ejohnstoi/Nietzsche/tragedy_all.htm

3. Excerpts noting the constituents of Nietzsche's dilemma

"Whatever might have been be the basis for this dubious book, it must have been a question of the utmost importance… a deeply personal one… Testimony to that effect is the time in which it arose… that disturbing era of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71… The issue which that bold book dared to approach for the first time… to look at scientific enquiry from the perspective of the artist, but to look at art from the perspective of life…"

"…above all the issue that there is a problem right here and that the Greeks will continue remains, as before, entirely unknown and unknowable as long as we have no answer to the question, 'What is the Dionysian?' Indeed, what is the Dionysian? This book offers an answer to that question…"

"We see that this book was burdened with an entire bundle of difficult questions. Let us add its most difficult question: What, from the point of view of living, does morality mean?"

"… art, and not morality, was the essential metaphysical human activity, and in the book itself there appears many times over the suggestive statement that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon… the entire book recognizes only an aesthetic sense and a deeper meaning under everything that happens..."

"And what about morality itself? Isn't morality… the greatest of all dangers? And so, my instinct at that time turned itself against morality in this questionable book, as an instinctual affirmation of life, and a fundamentally different doctrine, a totally opposite way of evaluating life, was invented, something purely artistic and anti-Christian. What should it be called? As a philologist and man of words…I called it the Dionysian."

4. Excerpts supporting the idea of Dionysian art as contact with the ground of being

"…it is possible for us to imagine how he sinks down in the Dionysian drunkenness and mystical obliteration of the self… his own state now reveals itself to him, that is, his unity with the innermost basis of the world…"

"Only this 'I' is not the same as the 'I' of the awake, empirically real man, but the single 'I' of true and eternal being in general, the 'I' resting on the foundation of things. Through its portrayal the lyrical genius sees right into the very basis of things."

"But insofar as the subject is an artist, he is already released from his individual willing and has become, so to speak, a medium through which a subject of true being celebrates its redemption… We should really look upon ourselves as beautiful pictures and artistic projections of the true creator, and in that significance as works of art we have our highest value…"

"This is the most direct effect of Dionysian tragedy… the gap between man and man give way to an invincible feeling of unity which leads back to the heart of nature."

"The ecstasy of the Dionysian state, with its destruction of the customary manacles and boundaries of existence, contains, of course, for as long as it lasts a lethargic element, in which everything personally experienced in the past is immersed. Through this gulf of oblivion, the world of everyday reality and the Dionysian reality separate from each other."

"The sphere of poetry does not lie beyond this world as the fantastic impossibility of a poet's brain. It wants to be exactly the opposite, the unadorned expression of the truth, and it must therefore cast off the false costume of that truth thought up by the man of culture. The contrast of this real truth of nature and the cultural lie which behaves as if it is the only reality is similar to the contrast between the eternal core of things, the thing-in-itself, and the total world of appearances."

"Hence our entire knowledge of art is basically completely illusory, because, as knowing people, we are not one with or identical to that being who, as the single creator and spectator of that comedy of art, prepares for itself an eternal enjoyment. Only to the extent that the genius in the act of artistic creation is fused with that primordial artist of the world, does he know anything about the eternal nature of art, only in that state in which (as in the weird picture of fairy tales) he can miraculously turn his eyes and contemplate himself. Now he is simultaneously subject and object, all at once poet, actor, and spectator."

It seems reasonable to view these types of images as analogs to concepts of God we find in systems of spiritual and religious thought: non-duality in select Eastern religions, and God as "the ground of being" in Paul Tillich's Systematic Theology.

These lead me to believe that Nietzsche's concern is really one of (his) humanity in experience of and/or relation to true deity (i.e., God).

5. The mysticism that Nietzsche neglects

It's interesting that Nietzsche comments on Christianity yet limits his observation, apparently, to Orthodox and/or reformed orthopraxis. Nowhere is there mention of Christian mysticism, although can't we assume that Nietzsche would have been familiar with Meister Eckhart? Perhaps not, though, in his twenties?

Christian mysticism, and the spirituality it represents, are a missing element in Nietzsche's thought. Perennially, there are two basic approaches to mysticism in Man's spiritual traditions. There is the inward, meditative, emptying tradition (e.g., Christian mysticism, Zen Buddhism) and there is the super-man, beyond man, I have become God approach. This latter approach is foreign to me except for having read about it. I wonder if the Dionysian is an example of this. At any rate, both approaches have the same end: dissolution of the individual into the eternal; not Man as God, but Man in God.

I gotta tell you that I read through some of these posts, like the one immediately prior to this one, and I think, "Geez. That's a little spastic." In my defense, lately I've been writing posts in little ten-minute bursts, and I'm not terribly good at carrying a single line of thought along from burst to burst. But let's see… where was I?

I've been aware, since I was a kid really, that words are just labels that the majority of people agree to use to refer to certain things, and that we consider this agreement to somehow be concrete and meaningful. As I recall, it really struck me one day as a kid when I was thinking about the names of colors, and it became obvious to me that just because you and I agree a lemon is "yellow," that doesn't at all mean that you and I perceive the physical, "true" color the same way. What if, in fact, in your brain you're perceiving it as what I perceive as blue? Maybe your yellow and my yellow aren't the same at all by way of our physical senses, but we call both "yellow" because we've been taught to do so? And this is actually what happens, and can be demonstrated—is demonstrated all of the time—when two people argue over an "in-between" color that falls in the dividing line between more easily agreed upon colors. We brush this off as thinking that one of us has never been taught our colors; colors like vermillion or mauve or what-have-you. Certainly sometimes this is the case, but I would venture that often it also shows we have applied the same labels to very different perceptions. I once had a shirt that to me was absolutely without doubt brown. My spouse was convinced without doubt that it was purple. There was no in-between in either of our opinions. Apparently, what I have learned to label brown and purple are fundamentally different things from what my spouse has learned to label as such.

In this context and to carry the previous post's discussion further, the discussion concerning explicit definitions diluting things into nonexistence, suppose we talk about the color red. Let's say there's a range of, I don't know, a hundred different wavelengths of light, measured in angstroms, that I learned to label red. Supposed there are a hundred and fifty that you have learned to label as red. We never notice a problem between the two of us as long as we refer to colors which fall into the overlapping areas of our respective perception/label systems. But one day we can't agree on "red," so to remove ambiguity, we work together until we get that number of angstroms to a set of twenty. And then ten. And then one. Now we've gotten somewhere. Forgetting for a moment that our "scientific" devices for measuring down to the angstrom, and the concept of angstrom itself come into play, we now have defined, for once and for all, a single color "red." But what happens to the other ninety-nine I called "red," and the other hundred forty-nine you called "red?" What we have done, effectively, is almost entirely removed "red" from our lives. "Red" means something very, very, very precise; something that, for the most part, no longer exists. Do we now find labels for everything else that was "almost red?" Do we now have to come up with a hundred forty-nine new colors? Do we call them all "red-ish," or do we step backwards and say, "Close enough. They're all red?" And having done so, does "red" really mean anything particular anymore? At some point, we would hopefully agree that there are a bunch of things we agree to call "red," even though we know we don't see them the same. We agree to share a word, with the understanding that it refers to a poorly defined, shifting, somewhat arbitrary set of things. We go wrong only if we continue to believe the word represents reality, and/or the word itself is real.

Enter the previous post. Take a label like Christianity, or man or woman, and now apply the math. By and large, we agree to use these three words (and all other labels) to refer to sets of poorly defined, shifting, rather arbitrary sets of things. By and large, this method of getting along and engaging in workable but far from precise dialogue is successful. But sometimes it is not successful, and where we go wrong is in believing that the labels are magic and precise and take precedence over that to which they point. In truth, we don't have enough words to cover the gambit of Christianity. Neither do we have enough to cover the gambit of gender. There is nothing we have which points precisely to what "Christian" may or may not always be. There is nothing we have which points precisely to what man or woman may or may not always be.

I have picked three labels which are very basic to our views of life. Of course I have not picked them at random. In today's American culture, the three are swirling in the windy front of an immense storm which is already beginning to rain down upon us. Mark my words: barring any totally unforeseen realms, it is Christianity versus gender—the ideas of labels, definitions, perceptions and reality—that are going to be the main event of Christian doctrine in our lifetime.

And so now I'm waaaaay off from where I started, but that's okay. I'm always thinking about these three labels engaged in battle, so it's no surprise they finally found their way to a post. It seriously is the battle Christianity needs to acknowledge and bring to peace in our lifetime. Christianity must deal with this one battle before the next big one comes: "what (or who) is truly Human?"

Okay. So this post is nothing like I originally intended…

I was intending, as I finished up the "One Thing You Lack" series, to post a series asking what it means to be a Christian. My motivation was mostly personal, in that I've pondered the question at a personal level for a long time. Is it a set of doctrinal beliefs, is it the practice of particular religious rituals (which would include, say, "going to church" on Sunday), is it following Jesus (if so, what does it mean to follow?), a combination of these, or something else entirely?

But I've decided that there is far too much risk that, in trying to go at the issue in a way that attempts to be somewhat methodical, I'd say things I have no business, no authority, no right to say. And, as this post will demonstrate, I've found myself getting onto a different tact all together.

So what I've decided to do for starters is to simply step back and observe my own existing opinions on the issue, and formulate them into statements. As best as I can tell, the following three cover my views of "who is a Christian." To my satisfaction, a person is a Christian if:

That person believes her or his self to be a Christian, and

(That person believes intellectually that Jesus was sent by God to in some way achieve mankind's salvation, and that person desires and claims that salvation for his or her self, and/or,

That person chooses to make Jesus of Nazareth the main determining factor as to how she or he lives life, and/or,

That person has undergone one or more formalized rites accepted as placing one into a Christian faith tradition.)

Let's see… yep. That about covers it for me, and what is interesting about my response is that it doesn't really say much. My list is not terribly far from "If somebody says they're a Christian, then they are a Christian." More on this point later, but for now to whatever degree my view may be correct, I can say that being labeled a "Christian" doesn't say much about us. What's in a word? In this case, not necessarily very much.

I'm wondering if this is why some Christians work very hard at defining Christianity in excruciating detail and then drawing lines, saying "this and only this is true Christianity." Perhaps it's their way of trying to make some sort of ordered sense of things. They don't want, or can't bear, to say that "being a Christian" doesn't really have to mean much at all. So, In a certain way, I can grasp this and accept it as the way some folks are. To them Christianity is serious business, and they want to keep it that way. So they define all the ways that help keep it serious, and discard everything else as not Christian. Simple, neat and tidy.

Please don't think I'm being condescending. At least not yet. I'd say that by far, Christians who attempt to protect the title "Christian" are doing so for very good reasons, and for the most part I can relate to them. After all, whenever I see somebody like, oh… the Christians who went to the funerals of war vets and said their deaths were a good thing because they were fighting as puppets of a nation which accepts (what these Christians) see as immorality, I get pretty motivated to stand upon a soap box and say, "That's not Christianity! Those people aren't Christians!" From my viewpoint, they're making a mockery of Christianity in the midst of a world which needs the very opposite. Trust me, there is a part of me that would like to put them in their place, as defined by me. There's a part of me that would like to scratch their eyes out and write them off. But. When I am intellectually honest, they are Christian in—at the very least—a religious sense. And what's more, I must at some level—whatever it may be—accept them. I cannot claim to hold my personal views of Christian living while I reject these other people. If I rejected them, I'd be much like them. I choose differently. I choose to be inclusive in my faith; not exclusive.

My inclusive approach explains, in part, my list above for being a Christian. My qualifications are explained more fully by my noting that I am accepting a very large, very general, world view of Christianity in which Christianity is a religion. In a world almanac, where Christianity is listed along with Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism and scores of other religions, what is it that places a person in the "Christianity" box? We have to think of this, in order to address the practical question of the word Christian. And this is why I say that really, the word doesn't mean much. Being a Christian may mean nothing more than a simple checkmark in a box on a form. It tells us little more than nothing.

And this is really the first layer reason as to why this topic is big. It's difficult to nail down the playing field for where, in what context, to define "Christian." I've chosen here the high-level field. Is somebody a Christian just because in a list of five boxes, with the fifth being "other," she or he checks "Christian?" Well, for certain purposes, yes, and it may be a checkmark made with very, very little conviction of any kind behind it. Like I said, it tells us little more than nothing. Words are like this. We cannot, must not place much stock in a label. Ideally, it would be nice if we could get away from them altogether.

In the long run, being a Christian means whatever it means inside of a person, and the range of meanings is therefore now and always limited only by the number of people who are willing to form a definition. In this sense, the word can become one of dubious merit in terms of conversation, except for being a starting place for dialogue.

And finally, an interesting paradox. When we want to avoid or "solve" this issue of the word Christian being at risk of meaninglessness, the instinctive response in our modern minds is to "define" the word. When this doesn't seem to work, we assume the problem is that the definition is too broad. So we tighten it. There is some sort of conventional wisdom, a common sense, that tells us all we need to do is to define the word precisely (as if "precisely" is meaningful per se), and there will be no more confusion. But here's the paradox: it is often the case that the more rigidly, the more precisely we try to define a term, the more meaningless we make it.

Let's take an example that is a little more clear-cut and universal than "Christian." Let's take the word "man." Most people will say, there are men and there are women; you're one, or the other. And of course, there are qualifications for each, which of course are created to keep the two words properly defined and separated. Separation is, by the way, one of the roots of the meaning of "gender," so perhaps we should expect nothing else. Anyway, so let's say here is a set of qualifiers for being "man":

You don't wear dresses. You don't wear makeup. You don't wear earrings. You hunt. You like fast cars. You like sexy women. You don't cry from physical pain. You don't scream when you see a bug. You don't cook. You like to eat red meat. You love beer. You're courageous. You like watching sports on TV. You like dogs. You hate cats. You like action movies with blood and gore. You hate romance movies. You don't like to share your feelings. You'd rather have sex than do anything else. You fix your own cars. You take out the trash. You believe cleaning house is women's work.

I realize some of the above qualifications seem ridiculous, but for one thing they are placeholders for any one of a number of more sublime qualifications, and for another thing they are all part of our conditioning none the less. Now consider the possible combination of answers to the above qualifications. The number of possible sets of yes/no answers? About four million. Four million chances to look at somebody else's answer sheet and say, "You claim you're a man, but you're not: a man would <fill in the blank>." And so, what is a man? In the end, what we find is that the definition of "man" is so exclusive that there is no "real" man, and eventually the idea of "man" becomes meaningless. There is nothing left but a mythological prototype, the single imaginary individual who embodies "manhood," the one in four million; a creature who is culturally reinterpreted, revised and recreated as time and generations pass. The entire concept of "man" is nothing but an elaborate formulation of an incredibly complex sociological system, and yet remains as something held to be absolutely fundamental to what "human" means—even though it is (sorry!) a fiction. And, to be fair, the same thing holds true for "woman," which in some ways should be even more obvious as to its fiction. After all, if you're not 5'9", 135-ish, 36C, have a flawless complexion, exude sex appeal, have two cute kids, and love nothing more than to spend time in the kitchen cooking up heart-healthy delicacies for your family, which version of the four million kinds of pseudo-woman are you?

Sorry. Pet peeves of mine. I digress.

The reason for the example is that "Christian" is like this. I am willing to bet that there are self-proclaiming Christians who could list one hundred independently answerable yes/no qualifications for being a real Christian. That would leave, oh, let's see… I think about a million, trillion, trillion possible sets of answers. Seriously. That's the order of magnitude we're talking. Along the same lines as the gender discussion above, where in all of creation does this leave the label of "Christian?" To my mind, diluted into an utterly meaningless one.

What's in a name? I'd like to think there is room for names to be deeply meaningful. But at times I'm not so sure. I feel the need to continue this post soon…

One of the first signs of a saint may well be the fact that other people do not know what to make of him. In fact, they are not sure whether he is crazy or only proud; but it must at least be pride to be haunted by some individual ideal which nobody but God really comprehends. And he has inescapable difficulties in applying all the abstract norms of "perfection" to his own life. He cannot seem to make his life fit in with the books.

Sometimes his case is so bad that no monastery will keep him. He has to be dismissed, sent back to the world like Benedict Joseph Labre, who wanted to be a Trappist and a Carthusian and succeeded in neither. He finally ended up as a tramp. He died in some street in Rome.

And yet the only canonized saint, venerated by the whole Church, who has lived either as a Cistercian or a Carthusian since the Middle Ages is St. Benedict Jospeh Labre. — New Seeds, chapter 14

If I had to claim at present an area of research for my degree, I'd say that ostensibly it's about "Building bridges and spanning spaces." Supposedly I concern myself with internarrative spaces and the breakdown of communication between discourse communities. And, of course, magical ways of forming connections across these gaps: a little something I impressively label "memetic bridging." Yeah. Thumthin like that.

I truly do find internarrative spaces fascinating. But I have to admit that sometimes they're just plain disheartening. When you study the differences of frameworks in ardent opponents, sometimes it's simply frustrating and you just wonder why the groups can't see what each other is saying. But what's really unsettling is when you try to grasp the supporting structures of each framework in certain cases, and also examine, on each side, the critiques of the respective opponent's framework. This is not so much frustrating as it is simply mind-numbing. It becomes obvious why, in certain meetings of certain communities, the end result is that each group decides the best thing is to just do their own "thing" and leave one another alone.

I've been reading a present debate on the internet between two guys who belong to one Protestant tradition, one guy in the Bible Belt and one guy way out west. The former is, in my point of view, a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying fundamentalist, while the latter is… well, more conservative than I am but a flaming, hell-bound liberal in the eyes of the former. Same religious tradition, same Bible, and about 170 degrees off from one another. This could be considered the intriguing, even frustrating, part. But, the reading of the interpretations that each has of the other's words, and the comments of people who are reading the debates, is the mind-numbing part. Beyond the fact that everybody is writing in English, there is almost no framework which exists to support effective dialogue.

Yet both these groups fit into a big bucket the secular world hears say, "Come unto us in the name of Christ, and find the Truth."

Time for me to go sit and rock in a corner, hugging myself, trying to find a happy place.

The few lines of today's Merton Monday are deceptively simple; the ideas of "true" self and "false" self may not, in the end, cover all the bases. At the very least, I think the false self can be broken into false selves as far as I tend to view it. And then there's the idea in my mind that all this disunity within me, this propensity to foster the disunity by breaking things down, is a (if not the) problem. At the very least, walking a path of discovering one's "true" self in God involves not only casting false selves aside, but also integrating them—or parts of them—into a whole. In other words, part of my true self is the very fact that false selves tend to exist within me; I cannot ignore them, pretend they don't exist. I must recognize them and—in a certain sense and for a certain moment in my life—accept them. After all, there's no way to acknowledge them, to identify them, to bid them farewell, unless I first agree that they exist and then converse with them. And most likely, it is only some aspect of my true self that can accomplish this. Just thinking out loud for a minute.

What I like most about this Merton Monday is the idea of the immense tension which exists between the humility to be ourselves and the pride of our false self (or selves). Merton is correct that this is a struggle of heroic proportions. The idea of it reminds me of intuitions I feel when I'm around other people. At one end of the spectrum are folks who are totally immersed in false selves (their own and those of other people). At the other end are the rare breed who seem to have found their true self and are amazingly humble and peaceful. In the middle is all the rest of us. Toward the people along this spectrum, I confess, I hold various opinions and feel various emotions. I feel compassion for those who are so mired in falsehood they don't even think about truth. I am amazed by those few who seem to have found their true selves. Honestly, I think the ones I just can't stand are those who are fully bound up in falsehood yet spend their time proudly proclaiming it to be the singular Truth. And honestly, I think the ones I identify with the most are those who at some level understand the struggle and are fighting gallantly, against the whole world, to win it. Some of them appear as total freaks to the rest of the world, but I really think that many of them are attempting something quite noble—whether they fully realize it or not. The role of humility in this latter case is to recognize that being considered a freak may at times be necessary—unavoidable, even—in the quest for truth, but it is not an end in itself. Being a freak for the sake of being a freak is a pride which is just as ignoble and ugly as any other of its more common, accepted forms.

And so it takes heroic humility to be yourself and to be nobody but the man, or the artist, that God intended you to be.

You will be made to feel that your honesty is only pride. This is a serious temptation because you can never be sure whether you are being true to your true self or only building up a defense for the false personality that is the creature of your own appetite for esteem.

But the greatest humility can be learned from the anguish of keeping your balance in such a position: of continuing to be yourself without getting tough about it and without asserting your false self against the false selves of other people. —New Seeds, chapter 14

I've finally gotten around to putting a few labels into the posts. It's a bit catch-as-catch-can as far as when I' getting it done, and since I'm still trying to get it all categorized in a way that makes sense to me, there's some rework here and there. If you feed this blog and end up getting a bunch of superfluous downloads of posts, I beg your indulgence :o )

Walking about our property with a keen eye will reveal little froglets hopping about the plants and shadows. I guess we did our job okay, and it's in nature's hands now.

Out of the hundred or so frogs we released, we kept these three: three kids, three frogs, naturally. These three are relatively small ones from the overall project; they are a bit less than half an inch long. The photographs were taken in super macro mode with a Canon S3; the lens is two inches or less from the frogs. As you can see, the natural camouflage is quite good: peering into the little environment we have set up, it takes the four of us a minute or so to find these little tikes...

Call me a little mixed up priority-wise if you must, but I'm frustrated that today I had to go to work instead of staying home and… taking care of froglets.

I didn't have time to pursue the grand media compilation I wanted for this year's Spadefoot Project, but overall the project has been successful, and started out with a great show. Two weekends ago we had rain for two solid days; probably leftover from a tropical storm as it pushed its way northward. This resulted in a lot of standing water two Saturday nights ago; the water filled up our ponding areas and flowed into the street. So imagine me outside at midnight, in the rain, soaked through and through, holding a camera, an umbrella and a flashlight. It was Spadefoots galore, with my favorite part being the group of frogs who came hopping determinedly down the street (just where do they all come from?), making a beeline toward those in the pond who sat and bellowed their sheepish-sounding mating calls. I have some good audio I'll try to make available, and some poor, grainy but somewhat recognizable video of a frog or two croaking. I wasn't about to take the spouse's nice camera out into the rain, so the video is from my kid's cheaper camera; lighting and resolution leave a lot to be desired. And, admittedly, trying to hold an umbrella to protect the camera, while trying to point a flashlight, while trying to video, is a bit beyond my skill level. But, trust me: there were frogs everywhere. Very cool.

The ponding area where the frogs gather doesn't hold water long enough to sustain the eggs deposited there, and I had a hard time convincing the kids that we can't "save all of them." There's a larger lesson here I'm trying to fit into all the other items in my brain, but the fact is, if you try to save all of them, you end up losing most of them. We learned this last year, but of course this didn't keep us from still taking too many; each kid had to grab a clutch, so we wound up with a lot of eggs. But, I can say that last summer I learned a few things about being a frog raiser, and this year we're currently dealing with a whole bunch of little froglets that we're setting free around the property.

The lessons recorded from last year are:

1. In this case, it was sixteen to twenty-three days from egg to froglet.

2. Next time, collect a much smaller number of eggs.

3. Next time, place them in a much larger container.

4. Exchange a portion of the water at least daily to keep it clean.

5. Next time, once the tadpoles as a population begin to get front legs, check them as often as possible, as the transformation is extremely rapid from this point.

6. Next time, try to create an environment that includes a smooth and shallow transition from water to land.

7. Fish flakes seem to be an acceptable food.

8. Record dates and times again, and see if the lessons learned produce a shorter elapsed egg to froglet time.

9. Don't get so emotionally involved, or, just decide to leave nature well enough alone in the first place.

The lessons learned this year are:

1. Take still fewer eggs.

2. Reptile stick food works very well; better than fish food.

3. As far as containers, it looks like the width and length of the container need to each be about twice as much as the depth of the water. Pans work well, buckets do not. This year I used a kiddie pool in addition to pans and buckets, and it was the best approach of the three. The tadpoles in the dish pans did well enough, but tadpoles did not grow well in the buckets. Buckets should be avoided.

Items 5 and 6 above are the challenge we're dealing with right now. I didn't get a chance to develop the smooth transition area, and as soon as the tadpoles sprout front legs that are mature enough to have an "elbow," they need to come out of the water or they'll drown fairly quickly. From all appearances, they are fully capable of hopping off into the great unknown with their short little tails at this point. (I tested this by creating a very shallow area of water that led to a flower garden and placing a couple dozen froglets into it. They all made their way out of the water and onto the land by themselves.) Because the metamorphosis of Spadefoots is so rapid, this takes nearly constant vigilance if the froglets can't walk or hop out of the water and onto land. The job of removing such froglets from the water every hour is a job I left entrusted to the girls today.

I'm presuming that a point of data indicating improvement in the overall care of the tadpoles this year is that the earliest frogs formed only ten days after the eggs were deposited. This is getting closer to nature, which I've read takes seven to ten days in this species. (Don't know if this is factual or not.)

That's about it for the project this year. We'll continue fishing froglets out of the kiddie pool until there are none left. If you ever find a clutch of eggs after the rains, and they're in an area you know is going to dry up, try the process out (just don't take them from a pond where they would be fine on their own!). It's an interesting experiment concerning the lives of one of Earth's little creatures; guaranteed to bring a smile or two to your face.

Wow. A whole week slipped by me somehow. Back to Merton Mondays…

[The truly humble man] is able to see quite clearly that what is useful to him may be useless for somebody else, and what helps others to be saints might ruin him. That is why humility brings with it a deep refinement of spirit, a peacefulness, a tact and a common sense without which there is no sane morality.

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another man's city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life? His sanctity will never be yours; you must have the humility to work out your own salvation in a darkness where you are absolutely alone… —New Seeds, chapter 14

Of course Merton understood that we find ourselves and we find God in the lives and love of other people, but he also took great pains to point out that while we are doing so, the working out of our salvation is a mystery which occurs in our internal lives, between each individual and God. In my estimate, what is so very important in Merton's presentations is his understanding that this occurs only when we are each free to be our self as God created us. This freedom must be allowed by others, certainly, but also by ourselves. Both are difficult, and their necessity cannot be overestimated.

This is, at the very least, one of the core weaknesses in mainstream Christianity; that in the name of being holy we spend our lives trying to be something we were never intended to be—while in truth each precludes the other.

Okay, I've been thinking about the "final" post in the One Thing You Lack series, and finding myself caught in an uncomfortable place. Do I believe what I said? Yep. Am I afraid it's going to be misinterpreted? Yep.

It's the next series of posts, a kind of miniature exploration of "what being a Christian might mean," that is supposed to more sharply define what I may or may not mean by my closing comments in the series. I'm impatient. I want to sharply define right away. But there isn't a way to do so. The issues of personal faith, of what certain ideals mean and how they are implemented into our lives, of trying to view Jesus in the present day, are not trivial. So for now I'll just say that in terms of our riches, I'm satisfied with the content of the posts, but I'm worried people will take them wrong, and in taking them wrong, miss a useful point.

The first area I think people might take wrong is that I'm saying, "Hey, if you stay rich, you go to Hell." This is not what I'm saying; the simple reason being that I don't think of Christianity in terms of going to Heaven or Hell as being the main point of Christian living. Personally I think that if I live my life ordered around my personal eternal reward, I'm being selfish about the whole thing, which in the overall scheme makes no sense at all. My job as a Christian isn't to win myself a place in Heaven. My job as a Christian is to love God and love others, and let the eternal chips fall as they may. I realize that to some people this is a completely wacked way of looking at things, but there is an idea that simply resonates too much with me to ignore, and it is that God calls me to love him and to love other people; not to worry about what he's going to do with me now or later. It's a bigger version, I suppose, of Mother Teresa's view that God didn't call her to be successful; God called her to be faithful. I don't think the Bible is about living life in such-and-such a way because God is going to punish you or reward you. I don't think the Bible is about play nice and you get candy, play mean and you get a lump of coal because God is really into the whole reward/punishment scene. Rather, I think this is a child's way of looking at things, and we adults who profess Christianity need to be a bit more mature in our theology. I think the Bible is about playing according to the way Creation is in the being of God.

It's not that I'm saying, "God says live this way, so I do." Honestly, I'm not a good enough, nice enough, obedient enough person to do that. The context is elaborate, but to me the meaning of Jesus' life and death, as God incarnate if you will, is that there is a way that creation is, in the heart of God, and that's the way to live if you want to be in relationship with God. This is why we are supposed to become something new, and it in turn determines what we do. So if, for example, the Bible says God has no relationship with the proud, it isn't that a person is proud and God says, "Blah! I reject you! To Hell with you!" No, it's just that the way life works is, if you're proud, God can't relate with you; the phone is unplugged on your end. The difference in views is significant. In the first, God sits on a throne and deals out heart-candies or swats, rather enjoying both. In the latter, God offers relationship with himself, and you come to it or you don't. The difference is that God in the first place is a totalitarian who becomes angry when you disobey, while in the second place God is a patient and loving figure who waits hopefully for his children. As for me, I pick the latter view. Personally, I wouldn't much want the other God; it wouldn't be a god big enough to love me.

So. Be that tiny summary as it may, I say it for this reason: Don't think that when I say we rich have rejected the Way of Jesus that I'm saying we're going to Hell. Maybe this interpretation is why people get so defensive and aversive when I mention it, but it isn't at all what I'm saying. But what I am saying is, yes, I think that if we get rich, and if we stay rich while helping not those who are suffering, we're rejecting a large part of what Jesus taught. And in rejecting that, we're rejecting the way the world really is, and accordingly the way we are supposed to live, in the heart of God. So what I'm saying is, those of us who are rich need to take a dose of humility, and understand we have some growing up to do. We aren't rich so we can have fun kicking back and playing with our toys. Life isn't for each of us to suck up as much fun, entertainment and excitement as we can while we rest complacency in something called "eternal salvation."

As for the point I'm afraid people will miss by misinterpreting what I said in the previous post? Well, it's something like this: There are plenty of us who think Christianity is about being richly blessed with money and goods and having a grand old happy time with good, clean, "moral" fun ("Let's take our church buddies out on the boat this weekend! We'll share the Lord's Supper on the lake!"). What I'm saying is that if we are having so much good, clean fun while we're doing precious little to help those who are suffering—then maybe we are practicing immorality in a far larger sense of the word than we ever choose to consider.