On Joy and Social Justice

The absolute BEST thing a person can do for this world is to live one's own life to its fullest potential.  This means loving others, but also knowing when to say "no" for the betterment of oneself.  When helping somebody else is wrought with obligation, nobody is being helped.  What good would it be to light another's candle if it only makes your own go out, or burn a little dimmer?

Never sacrifice your joy*.  The world needs people who are living a joyful life.  Making the world a better place isn't epitomized by serving at the soup kitchen or giving money to starving kids in Africa.  No, the best thing anybody can do for the world is live out their own joy, in their own life, everyday.

What does living out your joy mean?  For some, it could be the examples I used above--what we might call the usual suspects of serving others and working for social justice.  But there's so much emphasis on social justice in the church today, it has become scewed into more of a token gesture for many people.  If your Tuesday-night-service-activity is simply a "release valve"** to help you cope with the built up pressure of a day-to-day life full of slaving over a job you hate or making a living through shady business deals or working for a larger company with questionable ethical practices, the "good work" of "serving" is actually the very thing that perpetuates your erroneous lifestyle.  The presence of the release valve actually allows the bigger problem to persist.

Batman did a lot of token gestures, namely fighting crime.  But what did Bruce Wayne do by day?  He ran a greedy corporation and hoarded the money for himself--allegedly for the "good work" of keeping his crime-fighting operation going--all the while making himself richer and the poor of Gotham City poorer.  What Bruce Wayne failed to realize is that he was actually creating the very poverty that caused the crime that gave him something to fight.  Why was he so blind to all this?  Because fighting crime by night made him feel better.  He was unable to see (or neglected to acknowledge) that his daily life was causing it all.

Bruce Wayne lacked joy.  And his "token gestures" (e.g., service projects) kept him from seeing that.

Rob Bell put it nicely on Aaron Niequist's blog:

Your body is the medium, your essence the conduit, your flesh and blood the signal – the more clear and whole and healthy and thriving you are – from nutrition to sleep to brain waves to worry to bitterness to thriving marriages – the more you will radiate the kind of love and energy and presence and grace that people are needing. Who you are matters.

Who you are matters, and what you do everyday in your mundane, daily life matters.  THAT is where joy begins.  This world is broken, but sacrificing your own joy will not help it one bit.

Imagine a world where everybody did what they loved.

*Don't confuse the word "joy" with "happiness".  Happiness is circumstantial, joy is not.
**The "release valve" analogy is courtesy of Peter Rollins.

Insurrection: The Almost-Final Installment

I should have written the final installment of my review of Peter Rollins' book Insurrection 11 months ago.  I know what it will look like--Long ago I wrote it in my head and scribbled notes on paper.  But I'm scared to finally write it here.  There's only one way to honestly apply this book in my life, and publishing it is apparently something I'm not prepared to do.  Hopefully it will find its way to these pages soon.

Hymns and the Anti-Genre

Last Sunday at Hillcrest I decided to use all hymns for the music portion of our worship service, at the suggestion of an elderly lady in our congregation.  I was happy to oblige, not just because it was a great idea, but because I was thrilled that somebody actually had an idea/suggestion/input regarding their worship service.  (In over a year of doing this, this is the first time anybody has suggested anything.)

In short, it was really good.  The songs were more-or-less traditional arrangements with an acoustic guitar, piano, bass, and a female lead vocalist.  People were singing (which is a pretty big deal here at Hillcrest!), clapping, and smiling.  I had fun playing the music, as well as preparing it during the week.

This whole experience got me thinking, What exactly is a hymn, anyway?  Why is it that we can automatically differentiate a song as being either hymn or not a hymn?  And why does EVERYBODY have an opinion regarding hymns?

According to Wikipedia the definition of the word "hymn" can vary depending on the time period and/or religion one is referring to.  But when I boil it down, I would define a hymn as basically any liturgical music written before the 1960's.  Before this time, what we know as "hymns" was all that existed as far as liturgical music goes.  With the rise of rock 'n roll in the 50's people started writing their own music, and in the case of the Jesus Movement of the 60's, their own liturgical music.

As a gross generalization, people (especially Americans) are afraid of change.  This was the first strike against non-hymns: People simply weren't used to them.  Silly?  Yes.  But this fear still lingers in people alive today who were raised in that time period.

During the 1960's new "praise choruses" were introduced via the Jesus Movement, which borrowed tones and stylistic cues from the supposedly devil-inspired rock 'n roll music.  This was the second strike against non-hymns, albeit a subjective one.

The last strike against non-hymns, however, is a legitimate one: At the time of their inception, the lyrics were largely shallow, offering little more than a feel-good experience of happy praise.

Although they may have been flawed in their infancy, I feel that post-hymn* music has come a long way since the 60's, both in style and lyrical depth.  There's no reason to dismiss all non-hymns as being shallow anymore.  There are definitely specific songs that are worthy of such criticism, but as a generalization it just doesn't apply anymore.

At the same time, many hymns are very appropriate to use today, and in fact would be sorely missed by myself and others if they were disregarded simply because of their difference to modern music.  In fact, most hymns, when you strip them down to their most basic chords and rhythms, are ripe for rearranging and bringing to new life.  (Just because the old lady playing the organ at your Grandma's church doesn't know how to make Just As I Am sound good doesn't mean that the song itself isn't good!)

For worship leaders, there's a lot of music to pick from these days, but there is simply no way to please everybody.  So quit trying.  Choose songs that are appropriate for your congregation and your situation.  If you like the lyrics of a certain hymn, but don't know how to make it sound good, there are plenty of artists out there who will let you copy them--I do it all the time!  Or, if you think a certain song is shallow and lacking lyrical substance, simply don't use it.  But don't say that such-and-such style is all bad, or such-and-such time period is irrelevant.

In short, look for your anti-genre.  Strive for lyrics that are honest and a sound that transcends style, rather than caters to one.

*See what I did there?  I made myself look smart buy putting the prefix "post-" onto something church-related.  Boom roasted.

Life of the eternal

People (Christians) talk a lot about "eternal life".  Some think that it means the literal English definition: never-ending.   Others talk about it as being outside of the space-time continuum: Something beyond never-ending and more like transcending time.  Either way, it usually is described as something that happens in the future, someday, after death... then.

I don't care about life after death.  I care about life now, because Jesus cared about life now.  The phrase "eternal life" as used all throughout the Bible did not mean never-ending, as in a distance of time with no beginning and no end.  As Pope Benedict XVI described, that would be quite miserable.  The prophets, Jesus, and the disciples talked about a better way of life in this world.  There's the way things are now, and the way things are going to be.  There's this age, and the age to come.  There is pain, and there is redemption.  There is death, and there is life.

But even more convincing to me than all this rhetoric is what we can actually experience as little glimpses of "life of the eternal":

That feeling of losing track of time when you're doing something you enjoy.

The total loss of physiological awareness when you're immersed in something you're passionate about. 

Those moments when you just know that the thing you're doing is so right that you feel outside of your body, unaware of hunger, thirst, time, or that pile of bills on the kitchen table.

Some people call it "being in the zone".

I call it eternal life.

Too Difficult to Copy

In the age of paperless social networking, the value of ideas is taking over the value of tangible goods.  A book is no longer a paper book, it's a file on your Kindle.  An album is no longer a CD, it's an mp3 file.  I like to compare these "idea-products" to wind--they definitely exist, but have no tangible manifestation except in the minds of their creator(s).  And if they do happen to have a tangible manifestation (i.e., a book) it's the idea within the writing that people care about, not the paper and ink. 

In the past, it was easy to seemingly regulate the "ownership" of ideas, because ideas weren't recognized as existing until they were converted from "idea-form" into "tangible-form".  Hence, copy-write laws were born, and they were easy to enforce.  If you're a car company, you can't name your car a Camry.  If your a musician, you can't cover somebody else's song and call it your own.

The fashion industry, however, has always been in a different boat regarding copy write laws.  A precedent was set in the courts long ago that said articles of clothing cannot be copy-written (except for their logos) because articles of clothing are too "utilitarian" to copy-write, meaning that they purely serve a funtion, not an expression of an idea (other than the idea of not being naked all the time).

Of course, we all know this is not true.  Clothing is an expression of one's self.  Nonetheless, the precedent was set and never overturned.

In her TED talk, culture- and media-guru Johanna Blakley argues that the fashion industry's lack of copy-write protection (which you don't necessarilly need to invest the 20 minutes in to get my point), is actually a good thing in terms of creative work:


The point of copy write laws is to protect people from having their ideas stolen, and--here is where copy write laws fail tremendously--to supposedly increase creative processes in the free market by way of "not allowing" people to copy each other.  However, three problem arise:

• 1.  It doesn't work.  The beauracracy necessary is totally unmanagable.  It is impossible to capture the wind.  Which brings me to...
• 2.  It's not possible.  The nature of an idea is such that it is impossible to own*, yet parodoxically it is incredibally easy to trace its origin.  To deny the knowledge of an idea's origin is always a lie.  Therefore...
• 3.  It is simply not necessary to protect ideas.  Ideas protect themselves.  If somebody copies somebody else, everybody knows it.

This is proven in the fashion industry.  Top designers' designs are always being knocked-off (they're actually called knock-offs!), but the catch is that the people who buy the $20 knock-off shoes never would have bought the original $500 shoes in the first place, so nobody is losing anything.

"But what about the designer recieving credit for their designs?" you might ask.  The designer does recieve credit--where it matters.  Among the culture of people who buy the $500 orignals, and the stores that sell them, they definately get credit, not to mention money.  Do they really care if the consumer who bought the knock-offs knows they're buying knock-offs?  No, because they wouldn't have bought the original anyway.  If anything, the existance of the knock-off is good for the designer.

"But don't copy write laws cause designers, artists, etc. to strive to create better, more original ideas?"  No.  When imitation is allowed, as is proven in the fashion industry, it forces you to create something that is, in Blakely's words, "too difficult to copy".  Take TV's The Office for example.  You can walk around all day acting like Micheal Scott, or looking at an imaginary camera every time somebody does something stupid like Jim Halpert, or ironically re-inventing yourself like Ryan Howard... You're not going to be funny.  The brilliance of a show like The Office is that its humor only works in the context of The Office.  It cannot be copied.

The same could be said about music:  I could rip off so-and-so's guitar riff, melody, and drum beat and put it in a song, but everybody is going to know it.  Actually, people do this all the time!  They write dime-a-dozen pop songs and follow the same formula that every song that's ever been loved by non-music-lovers has ever followed--and they might even get airplay on radio, a top-40 hit, etc.  But it won't have lasting success, nor will it have a substantial impact on anybody.  It's just going to come and go.  It's not going to be loved by music lovers--it's just going to be "loved" by people who aren't paying attention to it, and people who can make a profit from it.

Copywrite laws, contrary to popular belief, are a hindrance to creative thinking.  They inhibit trends, and therefore possibilities. All creative processes can benefit from people copying one another.


*Did you know that Subway actually tried to copy-write the word "footlong"?

The Cross: Cause and Effect

I still have one more installment of my review of Peter Rollins' Insurrection in the works, but in the meantime, here's a little change of pace.

In light of the approaching Good Friday, and planning the special Good Friday worship service at Hillcrest, I have been thinking (a little more than usual) about the crucifixion, resurrection, redemption, and what these things really mean.  But rather than finding any sort of meaning--which, if you've been reading here for any amount of time, shouldn't surprise you--it seems that in every season of life, the redemption story evolves rather than resolves.  As usual, its essence morphs into something new, fresh, and full of even more life (rather than "meaning") than previously realized.  It truly is a living, breathing narrative.

A few months ago I read Richard Rohr's The Naked Now.  Then, a couple weeks later, I read it again, and have since started reading his blog.  This post about the crucifixion goes right in line with The Naked Now in offering a different way to see the Crucifixion (and the redemption narrative) much like Peter Rollins' Insurrection.

Our Western minds want to view everything in a strict "cause and effect" mindset, also known as "instrumental thinking."  In terms of understanding the crucifixion, we want there to be a cause and effect for Christ's death.  Then, we want that effect to become a cause for some other effect.  The spiral (if we're honest) goes something like this:

Cause:  I sin.
Effect:  Christ dies.
Cause:  Christ dies.
Effect:  I am forgiven (but I still feel guilty).
Cause:  I am obligated to be grateful.
Effect:  Nothing really changes.

I believe that the all-too-common phrase "Christ died for our sins" is a big cause (eh hem) of this efficient causation mindset.  What if we changed the word "for" with the word "with"?

Christ died with our sin.

Now, I am part of the crucifixion.  All of myself, including my shadow-self, is participating in the redemption narrative.  As Rohr says, "now life and death are both good."

Insurrection Ch. 5 & 6: Participation Creates Reality

This is my continuing "review" of Peter Rollins' book Insurrection, although I'm really writing with a mixture of review, summation, and personal reflection. In short, these writings are more a way for myself to work through what this all means, rather than a "review" per say, or my trying to convince anyone else of these ideas. Additionally, please note that my beliefs expressed here may not necessarily coincide perfectly with Rollins'.  You can view the previous installments in previous posts below.

Beliefs are important, but the comforting powers of beliefs need to be rejected.  Those comforting powers lie in the way that beliefs ease our anxieties, i.e., the way they satisfy our psychological need for God to exist.

The real event of the cross is not that some great injustice was done, or that an innocent man was killed, but rather that God as a psychological crutch dies.  There's more than just a feeling of God not being present--God actually is not present.  There is forsakenness of any divine figure, and then nothingness.  Every sense of certainty, identity, and order are drained of all operative power, and we are left naked.  There is an experienced loss of all meaning (existential atheism); the very foundation we've built our lives on is ripped away.

"The cross is the moment when we join with Christ in crying out, 'Why have you forsaken me?'" (p. 82.)  Religion is buried.


Anxieties are different than fear, in that fear has an object, but anxiety does not.  Fear is being scared of something, e.g., spiders.  Anxiety, however, has no object.  It is "a response to the foreboding shadow of nothingness itself."  (p. 83.)  As creatures who have a hardwired psychological need to believe, nothingness is the worst thing of all.  That's what makes Crucifixion so hard to truly participate in.  Anxiety is pure despair, with nothing but nothingness looking back at us.

Religion is what happens when we abuse our psychological need for God--when we believe in a constructed God in order to get relief from these anxieties.  The anxiety of death is avoided by believing in eternal life.  The anxiety of meaninglessness is avoided by believing that God is in control of, or at least aware of, everything.  And the anxiety of guilt is overcome by constructing and embracing a narrative of one's "personal life" to represent the truth of who a person really is, as opposed to the desires that drive one's actions.

That last part--the gap between our personal lives and true selves--is the majority of Chapter 5.  Rollins explores how we like to think that our personal lives (beliefs) are what really matter, and that we compensate for this shortcoming by trying to make our actions live up to our beliefs, i.e., "live out" our faith.  But the problem here is that our actions don't fall short of our beliefs--they ARE our beliefs.

Rollins' example of Hitler is a succinct way to describe this.  Hitler had an immaculate personal life--one that many of us would find admirable.  He didn't touch alcohol, he loves children, he was an aficionado of the arts and culture.  But the funny thing is, this narrative of personal piety that Hitler wrote into his life scares us, because it reveals to us that our own highly-prized personal lives can't possibly reflect the truth of who we are, since we know that this is not the truth of who Hitler was.

Furthermore, it is made clear that attempting to extinguish this gap between our beliefs (personal life) and actions (public life) only serves to affirm it.  The gap itself doesn't actually exist--we only tell ourselves that it exists, because then we can say that we at least have a good belief system, no matter how often our actions fail to "live up" to it, as if our actions are subject to something other than our beliefs.  In reality, however, our practices do not fall short of our beliefs, but our practices are our beliefs.

Christianity by-and-large has become a mode for us to both exacerbate this gap and avoid our anxieties of death, meaninglessness, and guilt.  Intellectual affirmation has been prized over life itself, convincing us that we are what we believe, and that our actions are somehow separate from those beliefs.  "The life of faith becomes a crutch," Rollins says, "and the Crucifixion becomes nothing more than a mythology we pay lip service to."  (p. 107.)  There's not an "outer world" that needs to be brought in line with some "inner world," for the very act of trying to align these "worlds" acts as a barrier to real, radical transformation.

But there's good news too.  The Crucifixion is where we actually confront our anxieties.  Then, resurrection can happen.  But Resurrection is not an "answer" or a "solution" to crucifixion--To truly live in a state of Resurrection means to be willing to undergo Crucifixion again, and again, and again.  This willingness is called Incarnation:  A way of living called Love (or God) in which we experience the world as worth living for.  It is an embrace of humanity, rather than a God "up there."

We don't live this way because God loves the world... We live this way, and that is God loving the world.  (How's that for a theological understanding of God?)  The highest truth is not to be loved, or give love, but love itself.  Belief in God, then, has nothing to do with a supreme being, but rather an embrace of humanity.

True affirmation of God is the material practice of love.  We become creators of destiny, rather than slaves to the idea that "everything happens for a reason" (deus ex machina).  We participate in the creation of the eternal itself.  Participation creates reality.