On Alice In Wonderland (Or, How God Is Like a Rabbit)

 I saw Alice in Wonderland tonight. It doesn't follow the books -- it's kind of a sequel after Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. But you can learn a lot about life by watching the movie...

"You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret: All of the best people are."

The first scene occurs when Alice is young. She has these dreams that are disturbing to her of unusual things -- like mad hatters and talking rabbits and grinning cats.

She tells her father about these "impossible" things and asks if she is mad. His response? "You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret: All of the best people are...I try to think of at least six impossible things before breakfast."

When Alice goes down the rabbit hole 13 years later, she finds that the "dreams" weren't really dreams. They were memories.

Which made me think. I didn't know what it made me think of at first, but the spectres of something deep and wonderful in the scheme of my everday life that had something to do with this scene kept flying around in my head. I think I finally caught it.

When we're young, we have this sense of wonder. Everything looks bigger. Our dreams are larger. There are monsters in our rooms. Heaven's skies seem to open up when we go to the park, or when Dad lets us borrow the shovel to dig that backyard hole to China.

Then we get older. The environment stays the same, but the world fades into mundanity. We dismiss yesterday's excitement as a time when we were young and immature and didn't have the "real" view of things. Yesterday was a dream -- and now, we are in the real world.

But what if yesterday's grandeur is not a dream, but a memory of reality that we have abandoned?

A lot of us think, act, and talk like God is a dream. Many people (Christians included) have doubts about Him. There's a zillion atheists and agnostics who will say that He's a fairy tale -- a very nice, entertaining fairy tale to some, but a fairy tale just the same. The world isn't nearly as grand as we'd like to think, the doubts proclaim. We are deprived of grandeur; the world is a shade of gray; we as the human race are sentenced to spending our days chasing dust. Alone.

And then -- God comes. And we fall through the "rabbit hole." And all the mundanity disappears. The glimmers of color and light you saw at the corners of the drabness you called "reality" are exposed as the real thing. After death -- the ultimate transformation -- the faith we had in faint dreams overwhelmingly transforms into the reality of sight.

In the meanwhile, we dream the impossible -- that light exists in the darkness, that the brilliance defies the drabness, that love will conquer hate, that death cowers before life, that a perfect God loves you in spite of how small and weak and imperfect you are. We "try to think of at least six impossible things before breakfast."

That makes us appear a bit mad to some people. But I don't think very many want the "sane" world to be the real world. I think that's why we have the built in attraction to the following answer to the question "Am I mad?":

"You're entirely bonkers. But I'll tell you a secret. All the best people are."

Why God is like a Rabbit

Alice is in a judgmental town, and she's expected to marry someone who is pretty undesirable. But she needs to marry him because, as her mother states, one day her beauty is going to fade. Her chance is going to go away, and she'll be ugly. She needs to marry him NOW, while she still can.

That's like sin. I remember a guy at community college who fancied himself a playboy. He once told his life philosophy -- which was to live for the NOW. He didn't think about tomorrow. He chose to ignore consequences. He wanted to think about NOW.

It's donned on me that this mindset is the foundation of sin. Every temptation to sin advertises one or both of two messages. First, limit thinking that goes outside of yourself -- don't look outside of your personal bubble to see who you might be hurting. Second, limit your view of the future -- don't think about the long term consequences of your actions.

How many times have you heard someone say, "You're only young once! Have a good time while you still can!"?

And yet, when I talk to people who partied their twenties away, they tell me that something didn't feel right about it all. Something seemed a bit "off." Kinda like the way Alice felt when she was pushed to marry someone while she was still young. Something didn't make sense about it.

Now, here's the interesting thing. When the undesirable suitor gets down on one knee to propose to Alice in front of a silent, waiting crowd of hundreds (in one of the most awkward proposal scenes I've ever seen), Alice recites the reasons why she should marry him -- reasons based on time. Soon, she'll get old, she says, and she won't be pretty enough to marry. The fear of time running out -- a missed opportunity -- is what's driving her decision.

The same thing that drives our decision to sin -- the temporary nature of our flesh that says "get satisfaction NOW instead of waiting and possibly missing out"-- is what is driving Alice's decision. At first.

And then the rabbit shows up, behind a bush.

Holding a clock, and pointing to it urgently.

And Alice, forgetting about the ticking clock her mother gave her that would have made her say yes to the undesirable suitor, and forgetting about the "do it now" on the clock that is enblazoned in the minds of the hundreds of onlookers, begins to follow a different clock -- a clock that enables her to run fron the undesirable suitor and enter the world of her wildest dreams, to find that this dreamworld is the reality.

I think God is kind of like that rabbit.

The rest of the world has a clock that they think we should follow -- they have this "do it now or you're missing out on sin" mentality. On a level, because the crowd is looking on and urging us, we want to follow them. But if we listen closer, we'll find that something isn't quite right. And as we listen closer, we find that the clock the world gives us is an illusion -- and in working beyond that illusion, the world starts to fade.

Then we here another sound - a tick-tock that seems more real and hints at our dreams of eternity. And as we glance around to find where the clock is coming from, we catch a hint of God. And then, while the rest of the crowd scratches their heads, we race after the clock He is holding in His Hands...and down the "rabbit hole."

Why Alice Left Wonderland -- and Why We Should, Too

So Alice goes down the rabbit hole. She has a fantastic adventure and, as I stated earlier, finds that her wildest dreams are actually real. This is an epic world -- good and evil fight against each other (in an epicness that is a very, very faint shadow of our own very real cosmic battle). In a David-and-Goliath scene, she cuts off the head of the monster in the movie, the Jabberwocky. She begins to think that she's worth something and is valuable.

Now, here's the thing -- she can stay in Wonderland. Just like we can stay in church, and listen to the beautiful music and sermons. Just like the monk can stay in the monastary or the nun in the convent. It certainly would be more comfortable than the world she left behind.

But she cares enough about the people outside of Wonderland that she wants to bring what she learned in Wonderland back to them. So she returns.

Here's one of the fascinating things: After being in Wonderland, she has no qualms about telling the undesirable suitor "no," or saying several other things to members of the crowd. She begins to be ambitiious in giving business suggestions to the person who would have been her father-in-law. She is bringing Wonderland back to the world she knows. The more confident she is about Wonderland's existence, the more robustly and confidently she can bring back Wonderland to the world that doesn't know Wonderland.

But she had to go to Wonderland first.

In the church, I'm sensitive to two extremes. One is the extreme of being so much in the outside world that it's a crippling struggle to see and rejoice in God. The other is rejoicing in God so much that we aren't bringing God's heaven back to earth.

Like Alice, we need to face the drab worldview of the people who reject the land of wonder that we experience. But it's important to get the experience of being in that land of wonder -- because the more we have the experience, the more courage we will have to bring the wonder we've experienced to those who haven't experienced it.

That's how we can fulfill Jesus' prayer to God that "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." A.W. Tozer said that most important thing about us is our concept of God. That makes sense. The better picture we have of God, the more robust and confident we will be in proclaiming heaven to those who don't know it -- which means that we should be constantly pursuing a better picture of God. Then, as Alice brought back Wonderland to a world that didn't know Wonderland, so we can bring heaven back to a world that doesn't know heaven.

5 Different Theories Behind the Mantra "Christianity is a Relationship, Not a Religion"

I'm interested in what you have to say in response -- it's entirely possible that I've got this all wrong; I've had to scratch my head about this for quite awhile. When I first heard the saying, it was confusing for me -- and it's gotten more confusing as people seem to mean different things by the phrase. This is my attempt to clarify things in my own mind -- running it by whichever of you reads this to see how well I'm following this.

I also am not claiming to have arrived at everything written here -- this is an attempt to hammer out an accurate framework so I can head in the right direction.

American Heritage Dictionary
re•li•gion n. 
1. 
a. Belief in and reverence for a supernatural power or powers regarded as creator and governor of the universe. 
b. A personal or institutionalized system grounded in such belief and worship. 
2. The life or condition of a person in a religious order. 
3. A set of beliefs, values, and practices based on the teachings of a spiritual leader. 
4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion. 

As Christians, do we believe in and revere a supernatural power that we regard as creator and governor of the universe? Yes.

As Christians, do we exist in an institutional OR PERSONAL framework that is grounded in belief in and worship of this supernatural power? Yes.

Is there a life or condition that we, as Christians, are in as a result of being in this framework? Yes.

Do we follow a set of beliefs, values, and practices that are based on the teachings of a spiritual leader (like Jesus)? Yes.

Does Christianity include causes, principles, and activities that we pursue with zeal or conscientious devotion? Yes.

Then why the heck do we spend so much time denying that Christianity is a religion? A few theories.

1. This postmodern age doesn’t really believe anything is worth holding onto with conviction. Since many believe that we can never really know anything for sure, they think that we should forget about conviction and focus on action that is not necessarily based on any tyrannical concept of Truth. This attitude bleeds into the church, which is beginning to feel (thanks to cultural influence) that if it wants to convert people, it has to let some of its convictions slide and focus on the feelings of man instead of the truths in God’s word. Thus, this saying in this context seeks to ground Christianity more on relationships with people and less on God’s truth. There’s nothing wrong with relationships with people – but the problem here is that relationships with people lose value when they are not grounded in God’s truth, because without God, man’s worth (and therefore the worth of our relationships with men) is at best undeterminable and at worst nonexistent.

2. We have gotten tired of the limits imposed by man made structures in Christianity, like church buildings, services done in a certain order, and silly rituals that are specific to certain denominations. We feel that Christianity as a religion has become so focused on structure that we don’t spend a lot of time helping people in relationships and worshiping a God that is beyond the paintings and rituals. In this context, the saying “Christianity is a relationship, not a religion” is a way to get rid of rituals and structure and simply “love” God and others. This tendency has some positive elements, but we also need to be aware that love needs to exist in some kind of framework in order to exist at all. We need to pursue a definition of God in order to truly have a relationship with Him (Hebrews 11:6). We also need to have a worldview that helps us determine what is right and best for individual people. Without this worldview, it is impossible to determine what actions are loving and which actions are not. That is why 1 Peter chapter 1 says to make every effort to add to your faith goodness, and to goodness knowledge, and to knowledge self control. It is all about love—but love needs to be informed by an increasing knowledge of what is truly loving. Then, we can engage in self control that is focused on being loving according to the knowledge we acquire.

3. Sometimes, this saying is simply used to say that we are being too inner-focused and not outer-focused enough. We are doing too much stuff in the church and not enough stuff out there in the world. The quick and easy fix that is often prescribed is to go out in the world to convert and help them, instead of staying in our cocoon.

The problem with this view was discussed by Jesus. Check out Matthew 23:15:
You're hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You go halfway around the world to make a convert, but once you get him you make him into a replica of yourselves, double-damned.

Strong words. The problem with the Pharisees here is not that they weren’t outer-focused enough. Jesus was saying that to the extent that they weren’t right on the inside, they were going to be ineffective (and even dangerous) when ministering to people on the outside. When a church focuses on evangilistic outreach because it sees that its own spirituality is suffering, it may have things backwards, because such “outreach” can have the effect of converting others to its own suffering spirituality. What are we to do about this? Jesus gives the antidote:

Matthew 23:25-26
You're hopeless, you religion scholars and Pharisees! Frauds! You burnish the surface of your cups and bowls so they sparkle in the sun, while the insides are maggoty with your greed and gluttony. Stupid Pharisee! Scour the insides, and then the gleaming surface will mean something.

I’m going to be blunt. Not quite as blunt as Jesus, but blunt nevertheless.
I think it’s easier to see the problem as being OUT THERE than it is to see that there’s a fundamental problem IN HERE. Here’s the thing: I’ve found that the more I try to follow Christ myself, the more I can’t help but try to encourage other people to do the same. It becomes natural. I don’t feel like a salesperson – I just feel like I’m living the Christian life, and it becomes what I’m about. Christ becomes so relevant to so many parts of my actions, attitudes, and viewpoints that you can’t talk to me for more than five minutes without me having to bring him up just to explain myself. Once we start dealing with ourselves and our own relationship with Christ, outreach comes easier.

In short, I think the problems Churches often experience regarding outreach are, in many cases, not ones that should be solved with a simple “go out and tell people.”

If I’m not telling people around me about Christ, there may be more wrong with my relationship with Christ than my relationship with the people around me.

And a relationship isn’t just wishy washy – Jesus made it clear in Matthew 25 that the specifics shouldn’t be ignored. But the basics of love, justice, mercy, and faithfulness are things that we need to hold onto as we hammer out the specifics of carrying them out.

4. Sometimes, this quote is used to get us to focus less on rituals and more on service projects. Don’t get me wrong – I think service projects are awesome. We need to do plenty of those. But service projects don’t matter one bit if we are still gossiping behind each other’s backs, polluting ourselves with the world’s attitudes, satisfying ourselves with surface-level relationships with God, and engaging in activities (without remorse) that God would disapprove of. Service projects don’t excuse us from deepening our loving relationships with God and each other any more than rituals do.

5. Sometimes, this quote is actually used to encourage us to follow God on a deeper level, and encourages us to act in ways that are based on this deeper following of God and dedication to others. In this case, the quote isn’t entirely accurate – we are still practicing “religion” – but it is heading in the right direction.

How Trust and Acceptance Led To My Deconversion

One thing my Christian friends reassure me of is true, in a sense: Trusting God isn't all that complicated. As a Christian I went to sermons Sunday after Sunday telling me to give more, pray more, serve more. And I gave a little, prayed a little, and served a little, but I always felt guilty, in spite of people saying that I was saved by grace. And eventually I saw the disconnect. If I really believed treasure in heaven was greater than treasure on earth, I would spend that money I was going to spend on eating out and a movie on helping someone in need. If I really believed that prayer was talking to God Almighty, I would rather pray than play Halo for a couple hours. If I really believed that the highest virtue was to serve as Jesus did, I would allow the homeless to stay with me instead of being satisfied with visiting them and eating with them every once in a while. Following the God of Christianity became very uncomplicated in those ways, quite quickly, and when it did I looked at my behavior and I looked at the Bible, and the two didn't match up. At first this led me to embrace a crippling guilt, which led to more guilt, which led to a greater and greater need for acceptance -- which I thought I could only get through grace. Eventually, however, I became so disconcerted and disillusioned that I took some time out and focused on being honest with myself, my motives, my position in the world, and WHY my professed beliefs didn't math up with my actions. No excuses, no dismissal, no sugar-coating. No guilt or embarrassment. Just naked and bare. And I realized that I had severe doubts. Rather than run from them, I examined them, and found they were valid.

Now, when I do or think something, I don't just compare it against a set-in-stone standard of right and wrong. I begin by honestly, freely thinking, "What do I have to believe about the world for me to do or think that way?" In doing this, I've gotten to know myself a lot better -- as not a good person or a bad person, but just me. And I can take myself honestly without guilt (yes, that living without guilt was a surprise) and look carefully at the world to figure out how to most effectively and sincerely express this real me within it. I find it easier to be honest with myself and others, because I also try to understand other people by asking "What do THEY have to believe about the world for THEM to act that way?"

I take the whole package, and suddenly the world makes a whole lot more sense.

People aren't good or bad; they just are.

We all have our desires, our wishes, our dreams.

We are complicated. There are different ways of looking at us.

We can call pride "self-esteem."

We can call selfishness "self-respect."

We can call a sense of entitlement "a sense of one's right to belong."

We can call anger "a sense of justice."

We can call greed "a desire to be part of something greater than yourself."

And so on. It dawned on me that I could choose to see myself and others as evil, or choose to see us as good, or take away the moralizing altogether and simply try to figure out how to allow everyone to live the most satisfying lives they could (when I saw how people often interpreted the Bible to validate the way they wanted to live, I kinda saw this as what people were sorta doing anyway).

I think this is the true source of guilt in Christianity -- it's not the sense that your sins aren't forgiven. Rather, it's the trauma of claiming to believe something, and yet experiencing a debilitating, psychologically crippling block between what you claim to believe and what you do. It's the frustration that produces the guilt -- which leads you back to the church/Christian doctrine, which tells you to reaffirm your faith, which can further reinforce that feeling of guilt, which brings you back to the church...

And while this cycle can produce "good works" to rectify the guilt, as well as bring in more "converts" and make people more entrenched in church, the fact that Christians in the church still suffer from a burden of needless guilt makes the whole scene rather tragic. In the church I was attending on Sunday morning before deconverting, every single Sunday sermon was about dealing with this guilt. It was the norm. Most sermons either try to assuage the guilt or increase it -- both productive methods for encouraging church productivity. But the guilt is never erased altogether -- because the very next week the cycle needs to be repeated.

Christianity tries to split your psyche into two categories, it seems: the sinful nature and the spiritual nature. The sinful nature needs to be silenced, and the spiritual nature needs to be set free. This causes people to be afraid of themselves -- that dark sinful nature within them -- instead of embracing and potentially understanding themselves. Added to this is that the sinful nature is their natural state -- the one they were born into, thanks to original sin -- and they are, at the heart (at the internal level, without external validation), bad, terrible people deserving of eternal torture and hellfire. This fear that Christians have of themselves manifests itself in intense, gut wrenching guilt -- guilt which the church is entrusted with (through confession groups, accountability groups, prayer sessions, and the like), and this guilt is validated by those trusted with judging it, which further separates people from themselves. This dynamic made Christianity, I suspect, an extremely useful ideology for subjugating people. You could take the Native Americans over by force, for example, and then you could teach them Christianity, which taught them to be kind and to turn the other cheek. A similar dynamic could be performed on slaves -- Christianity could be used as a subjugating ideology that separated the less desirable qualities of slaves (like their desire for independence, their self-respect, etc.) from their more desirable qualities (their recognition of their master's position, their ability to be docile, the need for external validation, etc.).

This was all a personal realization for me. I have always been a bit awkward, partly because I was trying so hard to be a Christian -- there were large parts of myself I was holding back. I also tried to ensure others were controlled by the same rules I saw myself as constrained by, which often led to a lot of friction. Now, I'm learning to accept myself. I'm holding less of myself back. And I'm starting to realize that there wasn't as much reason to be afraid of myself as I thought. I realize that I am constrained by less rules -- that the rules are, to a major extent, a choice.

A lot of my life hasn't changed. I don't drink -- not because it's wrong, but because I know my family has a traumatic past with alcohol, and I simply don't want to experience that. I don't do drugs because my mind is very important to me, and I don't want to risk losing it. I don't cuss around my friends because I want to ensure I have a good relationship with them. I study literature because I enjoy it. And so on. I'm realizing more honestly what my desires are, and they aren't as bad -- so far -- as I thought they were. It's been very liberating. I feel much more confident, and I find that I'm much more understanding of other people.

I know that people insist, "Everyone can't do that! Some people are really evil at heart." First, I think part of the reason for crime IS the belief that, at the base, humankind is evil. At least, a similar reasoning has been behind the history of crimes by blacks in history. Second, I think that "evil" is a name we give to behavior we don't understand. That jerk who cut you off in traffic may be "evil" -- until you're in a rush and you have to do the same thing to someone else. I think "evil" is too general. We should look at "murder" as murder. We should look at "stealing" as the taking of property. We should look at actions and be forced to rationalize and explain how they are dangerous to other individuals. We should see these actions as actions someone has a tendency to do, for whatever reason, as opposed to skipping to the conclusion that the person performing those actions is "evil."

Maybe we do this a bit already, although in popular discussion I rarely hear this viewpoint. We should never skip to the conclusion that someone is "rotten to the core." We should look more carefully than that and leave the "core" issue alone, I think. We can get angry and furious at people, sure, because that is our natural reaction and it is a sign that there is something wrong. We can say that some people do things we really, really, really don't want done. But to say that people are evil seems to be a bit of a cop-out...people are almost always more complicated than that. This goes not only for court systems, but for everyday life as well.So I don't think I'm an evil person. I feel my heart, and mind and soul more than I ever have in my life, because I don't have to kiss any of it goodbye. And I take my entire self, without apology, and try to figure out, honestly, what the best choices I can make in the world are. Almost no (if any) guilt is involved. It's deeply freeing and liberating. As more of the guilt drops away, I wonder why I carried so much of it in the first place. It's really not necessary.

I think that many people become Christians because our media is saturated with Christian culture -- the idea that we are deeply evil at heart is something that is prevalent even (especially?) outside of Christian culture, a result, I suspect, of Christian influence. Many villians are "evil."

In addition, those in impoverished countries often become Christian, I think, because they get paid to be, so to speak (some homeless have figured out that professing faith can get them money, as well). Once Christianity is established, it becomes entrenched in the country due to the psychological guilt cycle, which works to control more and more minds and hearts in the country. Or, at least, that's what seems to make sense. Certainly, it is disturbing that many who think that we are a "Christian Nation" seem to believe that physical force is only part the battle -- ideological front lines, some seem to think, will also make the "Christian Nation" of the United States more powerful and influential. Proof of this in action is the prosperity gospel -- the message that belief in God will bring prosperity -- that is shipped to poor countries.

These are among the realizations that came to me slowly. I have said that my deconversion took place on many logical, emotional, and experiential fronts. This was an experiential/logical one. I looked honestly at what I did, and I used that to determine what I believed and who I honestly was, and I went from there. Oddly enough, that process filled a hole in my heart that the God of Christianity never could.

How To Like Barnes and Noble: A Primer

The first step is to stop thinking about paper. For practice, try to go to Barnes and Noble after 9:30pm, because that’s when the darkness makes reality a bit more flexible. Going alone makes it easier, especially on your first try.

Instead of thinking about paper, start by remembering that each book is a person. That’s not a romantic thought, it’s a flesh-and-blood fact. Realize that.

If you’re having trouble, think about the masks we wear. Think back to the last time you appeared one way and felt another.

Think about how much you struggle with understanding the hearts of the people you love – how little you can tell about the person by watching them meander in a social gathering.

Think about what the world would be like if everyone pulled of their masks. I’m not talking about physical skin. I’m talking about a world where people’s hearts are naked – the beautiful and the ugly parts.

Think about what life would be like if we could skip all the preliminary fronts and run-of-the-mill questions, and get to the nitty-gritty of our lives. The real struggles, the deepest joys, the sincerest loves would be exposed in high-definition.

Then, think about how people as books are often more real than people as skin and bone. If you need a further convincing, start by looking at a PostSecret collection.

Thought is not static because life is not static. There are actions going on here. There are thoughts powerful enough to murder millions of souls. Thoughts springing from a vibrant love that saved millions more. These thoughts are NOT a painting on a wall, because they are alive. They've done things that would make your own heart explode – that would comfort you, and shake you to your very core. And there are thousands of them – each of them is its own universe – not physical. It’s what driven the very core of the physical – in the widest imaginable variety of ways, and then some.

It’s not your imagination. It’s real. These people are real. And the books are more real than the people themselves.

W.E.B. DuBois was described as a rather soft-spoken person by Claude McKay – but read his books, and you will find out why his ideas are still setting black people’s minds on fire around the world.

Picture the penniless, marginal artist Adolf Hitler in a jail cell, a vision growing in his mind, scratching away the ideas that would kill millions and horrify billions more.

Paul, discouraged in the last book he wrote, scrawling down his heart and soul, deserted by most of his friends in a dark and damp stone prison cell – and the influence his words have had over the last two thousand years.

Socrates, chatting with Plato. A small conversation on a small corner of the earth that influenced the course of the last 5000 years immeasureably.

They are here. Walking, talking, available in all their spirit and gusto. The most sincere, heartbroken souls – to the deepest joys of the boldest martyrs -- to the ones who found secrets to laughter. The people who started revolutions, bound kingdoms, fought for rights, denied rights, controlled public opinion, suffered under public opinion … thousands of them. Right here. There is no paper – just their spirits –alive.

And think about the problems in your life. The world’s smartest and wisest advice-givers are here, available to help you out with your problems -- your wisdom can connect to theirs. They’ll also help you better understand and deal with the ones you care about.

So that’s step one. Stop thinking about the paper. Browse through the shelves, look at the names on the shelves, imagine what their spirits look like, and listen to the silence speak their cries, voice their laughter, and echo their whispers.

Step 2 is to think about writing without thinking about paper. Paper is flat – it can make the writing seem one-dimensional. It’s not. Every spirit is expressing itself through language better than almost 100% of the people in history. How many people in the last ten thousand years have written something down? Hundreds and Hundreds of trillions of words – and these are the ones selected as the most important right now.

What that means is that these words are more than just words. There is a reason they were chosen. There’s a shallowness to the words that appeals to many. Appreciate that. There’s a depth to the words that exposes many. Search for it. It’s a living depth that’s alive and active in your own heart, in the writer’s heart, in his own culture. Breath it in. Sink into it. Don’t be satisfied with the surface, but don’t leave it behind. Take the precious words – the song of countless souls sung in one of the best ways possible – and breath it in the core of your soul. You will find that the reality of life is greater than you were ever able to imagine.

Think about each writer, pondering over each word…picking it from the depths of their being, and giving it to you.

Step 3 is to think about the paper. Most people in the bookstore are physically dead. I could say a bunch of poetic stuff about how they are one with the earth – but I believe in heaven and hell, so I would be lying if I did all that. But my point is that the paper shows that it’s important to keep the spirits of these people alive on earth.

Think of the old testament scribe – a long, unkempt beard, hunched over at sixty from forty years of transcribing the Torah, savoring every word and having no regrets.

Think of the monk in the monastery doing the same. Of Martin Luther defiantly writing a German Bible in custody, then presenting the precious sheets of paper to the common masses and bringing a corrupt Catholic church to its knees. Of the constant search over thousands of years to come up with the smooth, white material you have in your hand right now. Of the 6000 years it took until Gutenberg came up with the idea of a printing press – an idea that, legend has it, came to him “like a ray of light.”

Of the value of this paper – how, before the printing press, only the most wealthy could afford to crack open a book. And because they realized a piece of what you are becoming aware of right now, the wealthy would pay a considerable fortune to get their hands on the words in front of you right now.

Think that you could read for the rest of your life – and there would still be books in Barnes and Noble, right now, that you wouldn’t have touched.

Read a poem. Savor the moment. Smell the page. Gaze at the living spirit crying out to you from it. If you do it right, you will be in a state of overwhelming euphoria.

And perhaps, while you feel the chains break free on Frederick Douglass’ wrists, or a sword starts to pierce your own heart as you partake in the depths of Sylvia Plath’s suicidal despair, or you close your eyes as you feel (for the first time) the heart of the blues in Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues,” or you are overwhelmed upon entering paradise as you finish C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series with “The Last Battle," you will find it hard not to enthusiastically agree with the refrain:

“I LOVE Barnes and Noble!”

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Flying Lessons

When I came into the airport on my way to Sedona, I was hungry and found I had about 40 minutes to kill. So I went to get some food at Taco Bell. Then I looked for a place to sit.

The airport is like a no-man’s land. People there could be from anywhere, and most of them you will never see again. Something about it being a place whose sole purpose is to defy gravity makes me feel rootless there. Everyone is a stranger, and yet we all belong here. We all have something common – defying the tyranny of our current location. There’s an unvoiced camaraderie that makes us a unit – a drifting, rootless unit – all headed towards different destinations but with, fundamentally, the same common goal.

That’s my theory on why random strangers come up to you at airports and tell you some of the profoundest things about their lives.

Like when I sat down to wait for my Taco bell order, sipping on my coke. An African American man sat close to me. He looked young initially, but his thinning hairs betrayed his old age. As he unwrapped his burgher, he made the comment, “You can’t eat and walk at the same time.”

I smiled, cordially. Then, there was a long silence. It wasn’t awkward. We both understood the comment and the joke, and our silence was an acknowledgement of understanding. People say that men often bond over long moments of silence. In this case, it was true. We weren’t saying anything, but by not saying anything we were communicating that nothing needed to be said, so we were actually saying quite a bit.

Finally, I asked him, “Where are you from?” He answered that he was from Florida and asked where I was from. I told him, and then asked what had brought him to Fort Worth. “A funeral,” he said.

“Someone you know well?” I asked.

He nodded, staring straight ahead. “Yeah.”

A short silence. I looked at him, then away, then back. He stared steadily straight ahead. “That’s tough,” I ventured carefully.

“Yeah.” He hesitated, then looked at me. “Time will tell. Time will tell.” A pause. Then, “Gotta keep going. Life doesn’t stop… gotta keep going.” He stared straight ahead again.

My order was up. I went, got it, then sat back down at the counter. I thought about the funerals I had been to, looking for an experience that would relate to this man’s. I’ve been to some very nice funerals where I felt I had closure. Then there have been the one or two funerals that never got tied into a neat little bow, and the deaths still hurt so much that I think when I’m old and gray they may still come to mind every once in a while and make me cry.

I wondered what experience this man had. I prompted him. “Most of the funerals I attended have been in California.”

He nodded, then changed the subject. He talked about how his brother-in-law was drunk and wanted company the previous night, but he had wanted to see his children (he was 50 years old and apparently had several kids living in Phoenix). Evidently, the inability to do two things at once frustrated him a great deal, because I could see a lot of pain on his face as he explained the situation. Sometimes, you have to choose who you are going to support and be loyal to. Sometimes, you have to choose between grief and getting on with life. Sometimes, you have to choose between eating and walking, because you can’t eat and walk at the same time.

After I sympathized with his story, he looked at his watch and announced that he had to go. I was genuinely concerned about him by this point, and I kinda felt like we were getting to be friends.
I have to figure out a better way to say goodbye to someone in an airport. When he left, I said, “See you later.” It was too late to correct the statement when I realized I’d probably never see him again. I’d probably never know if he actually made it through his tough time. I mean, I didn’t even get his name.
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On the plane, I met an older lady who was flying back from Costa Rica. She was excited about coming back from her trip. She talked about riding the rapids, going across rope bridges, trekking it through the wilderness. She had gone with a larger group of older people, who were all part of a traveling club. I asked her if this was her first trip. It wasn’t – she was part of several vacation clubs and liked to travel frequently to exotic places.

I should have been genuinely happy for her, but I found myself instead wondering why someone would want to travel so often. The way she talked, it seemed that, in spite of years of searching, she was still looking for Home.
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On the plane ride back to Fort Worth from Phoenix, I sat beside an old man. He told me that he was coming to Fort Worth to judge a competition, and from Fort Worth he was going to Mexico to attend a reunion with the high school choir he had headed – fifty years ago. He had been 23 years old.
He said that it felt like yesterday, which was disturbing. Today, I’m 26 years old. To hear that 70 years old is right around the corner is a bit frightening.

I also related to some other things he said. For example, he had retired a few years ago from heading up the music department at Arizona State University. He said that he had a history of being young for the things he did. He talked about each of his accomplishments that got him to his current point with relish. Apparently, he had gone to college with three really close friends, and they used to play basketball together in their early twenties. Each of these friends graduated and became very successful in the field of education; they all had illustrious careers. He told me that, last year, he brought the basketball out again to the friends. He told them they were going to play horse. With a smile, he recounted that they couldn’t even get the ball to hit the rim…

I could tell he missed yesterday.

It makes me not want to waste my life. This man had a career that would make most of those in the field of education envious. He touched countless lives and made tremendous impact. His eyes were bright and merry and young, even though his age was 76. Maybe I should’ve been happy about his life, and grateful that he could look back on it all the way he could.

But I didn’t -- at least, not at the moment. To be honest, the scenario he portrayed really scared me. Even if I live the perfect life, and everything goes as planned, and I touch countless lives and live a life of joy and prestige, tomorrow I will be old and wrinkled and rapidly approaching death.

It’s a sobering thought. The here and now isn’t enough to live for or boast about, because no matter how incredible your life is, death will cancel it all out. Unless, of course, there is a God that defeats death -- in which case, death will cancel everything out except what matters to God. Which makes God's opinion really, really, really important.

Maybe knowledge of that last thought is what kept the light in the old man’s eyes. I never got a chance to ask him before touching back down in Fort Worth, with my feet back on the ground and feeling, once again, the gravity of my everyday life.

Breaking Point

Breaking Point

He paced up and down the roof of the office building. Forty stories high. It was cold, and he wore only his T-Shirt and a pair of slacks. His dress shirt and tie were carefully folded and put on one of the random pipes canvassing the roof surface.

He was fine, and that was the problem.

Working a 9-to-7 job. Good money. Good Benefits. Respectable position as VP. Good Company. Bragging rights.

He was married. His wife had found him while he was still in undergrad at the local community college. Her parents lived a few blocks away from the office building. He and her lived a couple blocks away in a nice two-story house that was great for company.

When he came home, his wife was excited. Every night. She was a volunteer for a couple charity organizations. One of them made sure that children in poor neighborhoods got tutoring. Another sheltered and provided free counseling to battered women. She felt fulfilled, needed, kind, and adventurous. Her life was very exciting. She thought so, and most everyone else thought so, too.

She was a tall, beautiful lady with an anxious face of fragile determination. She was good at having watery eyes and asking for tissues. Never over the top, with just the right introduction of deep, sincere emotion that never failed to make her audience swoon. Passionate about the poor and about suffering women. She had a lot of friends.

And he was her husband. VP of an accounting firm.

He used to like numbers. The connection between black and white sheets and peoples’ lives had been interesting once. The figures and forms that piled on his desk were the the basic foundation, the cog that allowed the world to operate. They helped his wife do her work. They gave him bragging rights about his title.

But it was hard to get other people to understand what he actually did. It would take a lot of skill to make people sentimental about accounting, and he wasn’t very good at looking sincere and sentimental. He couldn’t even do it here, on top of the roof alone.

He ordered around employees. He took orders from his boss. But there wasn’t really a place to tell his story. Because there wasn’t a place to tell his story, he began to doubt that he had one.

That didn’t mean he didn’t want one.

He stopped pacing and paused, leaning his back against the iron rampart. Then, he turned and looked down.

He contemplated, then changed his mind. He didn’t want his story to be a tragedy. It was a triumph. Success.

Right?

He closed his eyes and tried to picture his work as triumph. It was hard going and he didn’t really feel changed when he opened his eyes.

He went in his pocket for his penknife and sat down on the cement rooftop. Calmly, composedly he lifted his left pants leg, cut a slit, and watched his blood escape. He began to feel more alive. For several minutes he sat there, looking at the dripping pain and thinking about feeling more alive.

After 20 minutes the bleeding began to slow.

Still calm, composed, and collected he stood up. He dusted off his pants, put back on his dress shirt, adjusted his tie, opened the stairwell door, and returned from his break.

Challenges to "Christian" Patriotism

These are not attacks so much as they are confusions. There are several parts of “Christian” patriotism that really puzzle me. I’m not trying to beat anyone over the head with attacks. In fact, I have grown misty-eyed over the stars and stripes more times than I can count. I used to highly value our rich Christian heritage. I’ve been adamant to others about the importance of standing up for our American troops. I’ve argued against liberals frequently. I’ve laughed at tree-hugging pacifist hippies on numerous occasions. I was cheering inside during Bush’s “Shock and Awe” campaign. I voted for George Bush in 2004 – without any really notable reservations. I decided to dedicate the last nine years of my education to pursuing a Ph.D. in American Literature because I valued our culture so strongly. And so on…

But over the last few years I have run into several features of American patriotism that have made me more and more uncomfortable with claiming the title of a “Christian” patriot.

There were little things before this, but what may have really got me rethinking Christian Patriotism was that bumper sticker I saw a while back:
“God Bless the whole world. No exceptions.”

Now…I respect our troops. I do. I appreciate them giving me the life I have here in the United States. But it just seems like one of the Christian Patriot’s duties is to weaponize God so that He annihilates anyone who gets in the way of the United States. I’ve prayed the “Lord, protect our troops” prayer many, many times. But recently I’ve wondered why I never pray for the other side. I mean, it may be unpatriotic to think this, but they have fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, friends, and lives they value. It seems like, as a Christian Patriot, I have to believe that our troops are more valuable than their troops, that our families are more important than their families, that our friends are more important than their friends, that our cultural values are more important than their cultural values (including cultural values that don’t interfere with Christianity).

It just tears me apart. It’s like the verse “Love your neighbor as yourself” only applies to fellow patriots and not to the Samaritan on the other side of the world. The Christian Patriot is expected to ignore the second commandment when it gets in the way of being a patriot.

“But,” someone says, “loving your neighbor is spreading democracy around the globe. That’s what the soldiers are doing. That’s not what the people fighting them are doing. That’s why we pray for the soldiers on our side and not for the soldiers on their side.”

Ah! So let’s fight for the sake of democracy. Let’s go through the entire world and slaughter the armies of those who don’t believe in the same government we do, since our government is so wonderful and theirs is so, well, not. Let’s burn villages and bomb cities unless they convert to our form of government. Yes, that is true patriotism! Let’s stand up with tears in our eyes as we sing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” in the serenity of vaulted cathedrals, and let those tears empower our hands to fill in circles on ballot sheets that will lead to the awe-inspiring arm of the Almighty God of American Democracy laying waste to as many undemocratic countries as possible. Let the screams of women losing their sons and fathers and homes and income and sanity be silenced by the fervency with which we salute the red, white and blue! And let any squeamish Christian in America who dares to timidly raise his hand and ask questions have it cut off by the sword of a million voices as they smother his face in the flag of freedom.

And let us see no contradiction in these attitudes as we dress up in strategically ripped jeans and expensively casual t-shirts and designer sandals made from the blood, sweat, and tears of a Communist country across the sea (who we haven’t Americanized yet, but we really look forward to a day when we can get them to see the light), and sit in booths on gay pride days and apologize profusely for the crusades.

And meanwhile, let's just forget that the first greatest commandment is to love God, not to love our country. Silence anyone who dares assert that “God” and “the United States” are two different things. Don't seek to base your love for your neighbor solely on your love for God – instead, feel free to pick and choose the way you love your neighbor based on your love for your country.

“But I thought you said you weren’t attacking us.”

I don’t want to make an enemy out of you. If you are an American soldier, I want you to know that I appreciate you protecting my right to write this right now. I really, really do. I’m just trying to point out some contrradictions I’m seeing. This is coming from one Christian Patriot rethinking his position after many years of practicing several of the prescribed beliefs, to another Christian Patriot who may have gone with the flow more-or-less unquestioningly, as I used to before becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the title.

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying American soldiers are evil. I’m just wondering why it’s so taboo to say that any enemy of the United States may actually NOT be an enemy of the almighty God himself. I’m just wondering why a God whose Son said “My kingdom is not of this world” is seen as the God of America and the God of Democracy.

I’M ALSO NOT ENDORSING COMMUNISM. I know enough about it to know that its viewpoint is dangerous to Christianity (although I often wonder whether capitalism is dangerous to Christianity, too. I think Jesus comes across as more of a socialist -- not a governmentalized socialist, but a servant-attitude socialist). And I freely admit that militant Islam is dangerous.

It just seems that, in the United States, Christianity has become weaponized…almost as if the Crusades aren’t over yet. I mean, the Crusades were meant to squelch militant Islam and protect the Holy Land, too…although they did get some power and, at times, money on the side...

Two thousand years ago, Christ said, “You cannot serve both God and Money.”

Maybe he was talking about the Crusades.

Maybe he was talking about the United States.

What do you think? Can we pursue the title of “God’s country” and “World’s Richest Superpower” at the same time?

Now, there are difficult questions. For example, if you don’t protect your country, people in it will die and lose their freedom. That’s a fact for the United States. But the "protect the country" rationale has been used for everything from spreading democracy to spreading Nazism.

It just seems that freedom isn’t free – there are always limits, and the freedom you do have often depends on taking away those same freedoms from other people who constantly threaten to take it away, whether they are Jews, Asians, Russians, or Arabs. I mean – Aryans who loved Hitler were fairly free in Nazi Germany. There were Christian Patriots there, too.

Which is why this question keeps bothering me: where do we draw the line between protecting the fatherland and seeing that God’s love isn’t restricted to the fatherland and those who closely resemble it?

And if you don’t think that is an important question…
2,726 people died in the World Trade Center bombings. 4,400 US soldiers have died in Iraq, up to date. 1,000,000 people have died in Iraq since the war began up to 2007, although there are widespread claims of undercounting.

How many tears and prayers have we shed and prayed for our dead American soldiers?

How many tears and prayers have we shed and prayed for the dead Iraqis?

"Love your neighbor as yourself..."

My vote and your vote (and, if you don’t vote, the opinions we shared or didn’t share with our friends and family) contributed a major role in killing those people. We helped pull the trigger – whether it was right or wrong. I could give other statistics from other wars, but you get the point. IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT IRAQ. It’s about our overall attitude as Christians, and the importance of questioning whether our patriotism is getting in the way of our picture of God.

But if this still uninterests you…hmmm… maybe you have a point. Maybe it’s not important. We shouldn’t think about it. From now on, when the anguished ghosts of a million corpses (along with the millions more who mourn their loss) beg us to rethink our application of the second greatest commandment, we’ll give an irritated shrug and say, “I really don’t feel like thinking about that right now. Shut up and die so I can close my eyes, raise holy hands, and sing praises to my God in peace.”