A Practice in Coming up with Fancy Names for Simple Concepts

Sorry folks, nothing particularly brow-raising or feather ruffling for this week's post (not that these have ever in any way been weekly publications, there's always been a nagging intention...).

Today I would like to share with you a practice of mine. A tool that helps me very much so in understanding how I really read scripture, what I get from it, and at the same time encourages my mind to chew, digest, and grow from what I am presented with.

Eeehh, I suppose this practice should have a name. A mental index card to add to... er... we'll call it autotranslation. Sounds academic enough to be real. Excellent.

Autotranslation is a process that begins with the reading of a passage. (I like to stick with the Psalms right now for this, because it feels slightly less heretical and a bit more poetic...let me know about your own expeeriences). Pray about it... read it out loud. Read it again. What words stick out to you? What meanings stick out?

Now, for the fun part:

Write it yourself.

Seriously. How is your mind processing those squiggles and blocks on the page? What other words come to mind or you feel should be there based on your own understanding of scripture? Is there a better way in your own language of saying something again based on your own understanding of yourself? If this passage was written by you for you, how would it go? What would it say just to you?...

Psalm 1: Alexander Translation

Worthy to be praised and of great respect

is the man who's life, guiding principles, and sources

of renewal are contrary to those who do not

know any better, yet blindly pressure you to act as

they: founded in sin and ignorance.

His Base motivation, his wellspring of life and

joy come from an understanding of God's Truth.

(His life is ordered by Godly wisdom)

And as a tree planted by the water, he and all

he does will be filled with vitality and

fruit which is plain to see. The prosperities of his

energy will be for all to recognize and enjoy

and will be unaffected by seasonal disruption.

Unlike those who seek out the heart of God,

the spiritually iggnorent will make no lasting contribution

to human society.

That being said, neither the truely evil nor the

fool will find acquittal before God when all

our actions are accounted for.

For only those whose primary disposition is

parallel with the will of Christ will abide with

Him, while the will of the foolish can find

no other end yet oblivion.

Why not know: Belief in Faith.

Faith is a beautiful thing.

Faith moves mountains, Faith inspires, Faith encourages humans all over the world to forgo that which is assured for that which will one day reap an even greater reward. As I heard when I was young, and as a defense for faith, we place our trust in the unseeable and unknowable every day, from when I open a can expecting soup to be inside, I have faith that the label is telling me the truth, right? Or when you turn your key, you have faith that the engine is going to roar with life.

These, I feel, are false analogies. Faith is always a conscious decision. Generally, I turn the key without thinking about if it might not run. I open my can and of course it's filled with my soup. There is a choice in faith. You can't have faith unless you're thinking about faith. (Perhaps I'll expound on this later)

There's something about our society today that just loves faith. it's so darn inspirational! Hallmark probably generates half their revenue from that single concept alone... Believing in the unseen. Trusting in the unknowable...

I'm wondering if we're wrong about faith. Or maybe we missed the point.

I'm reading a book for class full of words or phrases like "habitus," "milieu," and "small scale societies." Anthropology, it fascinates me. So far I've learned: trying to completely enter another person's experience of life is, well, basically impossibly complicated. Perception of reality and the meaning of things within one's community completely alter's your experience and others' expectations.

In this book, there's a brief story of one of these small scale societies in South-Asia that had an incredibly difficult time understanding what Faith was from the missionaries sent there. Their local traditions had no analogue, because for them, the spirits of their forefathers were simply a fact. The existence of several states of after-life existence were simply different states of life, and that they could hold a conversation through a shaman with their deceased uncle is for them as mundane as going to the dentist is for us.

This got me thinking: why don't they need faith? Goodness, they don't even have a concept of faith. For them, this is knowing. It's real. An inarguable fact. Something perhaps we've lost the concept in our post-modern perception of the world: inarguable facts. There must always be another side or a bias or relative point of view or hidden agenda thrown in there.

So now all we're left with is: Faith. When presented the Story of Our Redemption, we're told it's real, we believe it's real, than what keeps us from knowing?

--> I wonder if we're all afraid of being found out as fools? (Then what's keeps us from not being afraid?) Or perhaps we as Christians are still trying to reconcile the ponderous quantities of knowledge, pomp, and foolery brought on by Enlightenment and Capitalism with our understanding of Scripture.

Embalmnation

So the other day, I saw a real dead body. Really, for the first time.

My hand, in an attempt to photograph something seemingly relevant

Alright, not in person, but rather in an instructional video. A training video for the process of embalming.

Apparently they have trade schools for everything. They call it Mortuary Science. Creep-tastic. Context: I'm currently in an Anthropology class on Death, so we get to hear about stuff like this 2 hours a day.

This was different, though. This was a real video, and a real dead body. I kept thinking over and over thats just a body just like I have a body... but different. They poke and they prod and they sew the mouth shut, and as would be expected, there are no signs of resistance. There's nobody in there. It's empty of life.

Empty... vacant. It was unreal, there should have been someone in there! It looked like there should be... his spirit had truly left him.

It was a strangely spiritual realization. How could you not look at that kind of body and understand that our existence is so far beyond the physical? That this flesh is merely a tent, as scripture refers to it?

Back to our Ruts

It's been quite a while...sometimes, it's easier just to forget the past and move on. Sometimes, that's just what we need, to get moving again instead of bearing this immense weight of past and history waiting to be written before the present can ever ever be touched.

So here I am.

Sitting amongst the light of a candle powered by the timeless wonder of bacon grease. 

Bacon Candle

Lights out, orange globs dancing about my ceiling... this connects. This grounds the mind in something that stretches further back than recorded history. Of fishing and gathering, of laughter and love, of the labor of your hands belonging to the tribe and nobody else. There's something almost spiritually grounding in firelight, also. Perhaps this is why we haven't replaced the candles in candle-light ceremonies with LEDs yet. Fire is rich in symbolic value also, in purification and judgement and survival.

I thought about all this today as I sat in church, musing about one thing or the other instead of the sermon. That's my problem, my mind seems to understand church services as free license to think about just about everything accept the message, maybe there's some sort of subtle rebellion taking place there, rejecting simple absorption of information.

Have we lost anything in Protestantism? Has there been something profoundly lost in the rejection of tradition? Traditions arise for many reasons, and certainly can cloud true reasoning, but we've become so intellectual, so heaven-bent on understanding that sometimes I feel Christian ceremony has become less capable of connecting with that deep core that simply desires to dance recklessly around a fire and scream to the heavens praise and grief and joy

I made it. I'm finally home, and after 43 hours of traveling, have slept in my own bed. I thank God for your prayers and for His traveling graces! Ilhamdilila

The Sea of Death

Weirdest water experience of my life. Seriously.

The other day on Saturday, we had the opportunity as a group to go to the Dead Sea, not only the lowest point on earth but also one of the saltiest. There's actually a legend I was told that attempts to explain this saltiness, that it is the result of when God destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah (It's actually due to all the run-off from the surrounding hills and from beneath where the lake now stands, from what I understand). This increased saltiness has some rather intriguing side effects. Buoyancy, is as you know, the action of stuff floating while submersed (at least partially) in the water. Or as Wikipedia puts it, "... is an upward acting force, caused by fluid pressure, that opposes an object's weight." In a way, it's very similar to Hot Air balloons floating through the air (but not "at the surface" of the air) because the hot air is less dense... there's more stuff in the air beneath the balloon than within or above the balloon.

In the Dead Sea, there is much much more in the water beneath you than you'd ever expect there to be in water: all that salt! As you're walking out into the water, past the rocks and that pricelessly cosmetic mud-slime beneath your feet, it becomes surprisingly difficult to walk, because you find that your legs no longer want to go down. Just as this realization and it's implications begin to hit, there's no longer anything beneath you, legs and body floating while completely upright. A subtle and nearly imperceptible muscle movement later, knees shoot up in front of you, back goes flat, floating on the surface. Buoyant beyond all reason. Inconceivable.

The mud was also pretty sweet, I guess it's the thing to do: cover one's self ridiculously with the nasty stuff and bake in the 107 degrees of sun for a while, rinse, and enjoy baby's-bottom-smooth skin. (I have to say, my Inner Child was quite pleased with this experience!) Upon the writing of this blog entry, my skin still feels like a good thing to be covering my body, more so than usual that is. Don't take me wrong, I'm generally pretty happy to have skin. But these days, when you're only showering once every 4 or so days... it can be nice to throw off the old man in a manor of speaking. ;)

Looking forward to daily showers when I get home... and church. I'll post more on that later, suffice it to say, I finally had the chance to go this morning. The Church of the Nativity. Pretty sweet.

Also, I would have pics from this adventure yesterday, but my camera is being all wonky, doesn't want to charge anymore. So much for pawn-shop treasures.

For now, Mas Salaama! See you all soon! (Such a very strange fact...)

Final Escape

I'm close.

I'm terribly close to being through with this entire adventure, and I'm left feeling all sorts of different things in the pit of my chest, the epicenter of some crazy hurricane. There was a Hurricane Alex a month or so ago, right? Wouldn't be suprised if it had been influanced by events here someplace between my lungs and heart.

Tough, in a word, is how life is now.

Politically speaking, things could hardly get worse here in the West Bank. I had the opportunity to spend this last weekend in Palestine's two largest cities: Ramalla and Nablis, traveling with my HLT group and visiting several NGOs and similar organizations along the way. At each, we heard a similar story of general decay of economic viability, the increasing possibility of the West Bank being split in several places by Settler-Only roads, The Wall, and et cetera, and that essentially the only thing for me to do that is helpful as a so-called International is to spread the word. Refugee camps bursting at the seems after 60 years, an ineffective and compliant government that doesn't get anything done... I don't have enough heart for all that's happening here. For all that's happening in my life in general.

And here, in the midst of all this confusion, I've been getting more and more struck by a particular theological question (It's been a while since I've posted on one of these!). It occurred to me actually in jest after we had visited Hebron last week, after I was reminded once more by someone how all that the Jews are doing is being done in the name of God. All politics aside, I respond that I surely wouldn't want to be serving a God that condoned the purposeful and systematic oppression, killing, and disrespect of an entire ethnic group...and then I had to pause. And...oh wait.

Deuteronomy 2:31-36 (NIV)

 ³¹ The LORD said to me, "See, I have begun to deliver Sihon and his country over to you. Now begin to conquer and possess his land."
 ³² When Sihon and all his army came out to meet us in battle at Jahaz, ³³ the LORD our God delivered him over to us and we struck him down, together with his sons and his whole army. ³⁴ At that time we took all his towns and completely destroyed ^[c] them—men, women and children. We left no survivors. ³⁵ But the livestock and the plunder from the towns we had captured we carried off for ourselves. ³⁶ From Aroer on the rim of the Arnon Gorge, and from the town in the gorge, even as far as Gilead, not one town was too strong for us. The LORD our God gave us all of them

This is merely a single example. From what I recollect of my readings through this part of the Bible, there were many such instances as Israel was establishing itself in the Promised Land.

I've heard repeatedly over and over, God is a God of justice[Leviticus 19:15 , John 5:30 , Acts 3:14]. He wants us to care for the downtrodden, the poor in spirit, those who are overlooked[Luke 4:16-21]. God is Love [1st John 4:8]. Neither the Jews nor the Gentiles are above one another [Romans 3:9-19].

How does this go together exactly? Here, I seem to be confronted with the fact that, if the Jews only are referring to the Torah and most of the OT (or is it all of it? I can't recall all that they considered Holy Writ), then they would seem to have ample support for what they seem to be doing today. (Granted, many Israelis are not acting explicitly or with the mentality that they are doing anything for God, but some are) And yet, there is plenty of support for God not wanting to advocate the wan-ton killing of entire peoples. (Not that this is exactly what's going on here either, but still.)  

I find myself conflicted....

... and that I'm leaving for home in 8 days.

Totally weird.

Eventually I'll have more pictures up, it's just an entirely laborious process overhere...

Salaam.