contemplations and thoughts on god, etc.

the power of clean

2009-04-27T23:41:00.000-07:00

I just finished detailing the exterior and interior of my car after two hours of grueling work. I guess you could say I used to be an enthusiast, where I would clean my car every two weeks, undergo the tedious task of carefully applying car wax, grow frustrated, and then carelessly buff off the wax to create an impeccable shine. Well, not so much impeccable. But the car did look shiny.

Sadly, the only motivating factor in this week's edition of Clean My Car was the fact that I'm picking up the president of our organization tomorrow from the airport and I felt ashamed for having such a disgustingly dirty car.

Lately, I've been thinking about the power of cleaning. It seems like a waste of time to scrub away the dirt and detritus from the surface layers, only to have those layers magically reappear within the span of weeks. It seems terribly inefficient.

I used to not wear deodorant in high school.

I'm not sure why. I think it began with the fact that I really had no idea that people were supposed to wear deodorant. This was something my father did not inform me about when I was growing up, along with the birds and the bees, and also how to use tools. This progressed onto the stage where I really didn't care if I took showers, and eventually I was a walking pandemic.

After a few complaints and some instruction on deodorant, I realized that, even though it seemed like a terrible waste of time, cleaning myself was more of a necessity than a luxury. More than anything, the way I present myself to people, odors notwithstanding, was the way I viewed myself, in many ways. And now I dutifully paint on layers of deodorant every day – yet I still haven't had a date in years.

Redemption was the same for me. I used to wonder why I would have to come before God as a repentant sinner every week on Sundays when it was quite obvious that I would end up sinning again. It just seemed to make more sense to let a lot of sins accumulate over time until I figured it was time. That time usually came during church retreats, when the speaker would boom the importance of redeeming ourselves before God, and then our group would collectively sob and feel clean again.

The tough thing, the lesson that I didn't learn early on, is that being clean is immensely important in spirituality. The word 'clean' appears in Leviticus at least 55 times. Lepers throw themselves before Jesus, asking them to make them clean. Jesus tells people to wash themselves, and those people find themselves miraculously healed.

I'm not saying that washing ourselves or maintaining a clean lifestyle will cure our diseases. Well, not all our diseases.

It's a metaphor that God is tracing out for us, where He's telling us that to receive grace, we must first admit that our souls are dirty. It makes perfect sense, really. You don't ask someone to clean your car if you think it's immaculately clean – even if the car is disgustingly dirty. No, rather, what He wants us for us to admit that our souls are not clean, so that He can do the work of cleaning it for us. And Jesus illustrates the point as well when he's out curing the populace of lepers, who all openly admit that they are diseased. Had those lepers approached Jesus and said, “I don't really need to be healed, I'm sure my ear will reattach itself somehow,” I doubt Jesus would have cured them. I doubt Jesus would have even committed to having a conversation with them.

On the flip side, the Pharisees refused to admit that their souls were dirty, and that's probably why Jesus disliked them so much. They believed that their maintenance of the rituals that had been passed down for so long, that to avoid touching a corpse or cleaning their hands a certain number of times a day had somehow made them exempt from the power of sin. And the truth, which Jesus knew, is that it didn't.

Bottom line: we can't be cleaned until we admit we're dirty. And when we do admit we're dirty, we find our souls, heavy with the soil of sin, wiped clean.

lessons on being human: love, pt. 1

2009-03-18T22:27:00.000-07:00

Whenever I think about grace, I always think about a shirtless friend of mine.

The story goes like this: An hour before service was going to start at my college ministry, a few of us were lounging around the sanctuary, chatting about our plans in the near future. I was planning to go back to college at Santa Cruz, and I was sharing this while my friend Big Joe was playing the keyboard. He was playing in his undershirt, his buttoned shirt hanging nearby on a chair, when an older woman wandered into our sanctuary.

It should be noted that Big Joe has the mammary glands of a pregnant walrus, and he, for obvious reasons, refuses to go anywhere in public with anything less than an over shirt unless he's comfortable. Until that woman walked in, he was completely comfortable.

Big Joe, with an uncharacteristic shriek, scampered back to his shirt and hurriedly buttoned it up with special care given to his modesty. It took a few minutes and by the time he had finished, the woman had disappeared, probably frightened by the feral scream emitted by my friend.

This image always comes to mind when I think about God and the grace He bestows unto us, the human race. I don't know why, but when I think of how our sinfulness has stained our souls, we can't help but run from fear of shame that we have done. The human spirit has an overwhelming sense of pride, and sometimes I feel that it will go at any cost to preserve it.

I have ambiguous feelings towards Adam and Eve. On one hand, you have to think they must have been pretty bored, being naked and living in a garden all day. There's really only so much you can do in that situation. And, if you're not a firm believer in Darwinism, they're essentially the ancestors of everybody who has ever existed, so I feel like a bit of an ingrate when I resent them.

On the other hand, you have to hate them, just a little bit, for exposing humanity to the concept of sin. Just think: you've never had to want for food or companionship, and your soul is completely at ease knowing that you're perfectly connected to the One who created you, and suddenly, with one bite, your world comes crumbling down. You then realize that you've been naked for most of your mortal life and must make clothes out of leaves to cover yourself, introducing the human race to Abercrombie and Fitch and, worst of all, shame.

There's a basic essential truth that as humans, Adam and Eve (and, by extension, the human race itself) took a cosmic love for granted. And that's something we tend to do with anything in abundance, really, whether it be with friendships or money, that regardless of how we behave it'll always be there.

However, God created us with that very intention in mind – to create us as beings who run exclusively on love, as entities who crave one of the purest emotions; on top of that, He created us to function only with one cosmic love: Himself.

The funny thing is that when we're missing a vital part of ourselves, we tend to fill it up with other things that don't do so well as a replacement for a cosmic love – sex, money, coffee, you name it. C.S. Lewis wrote a particularly poignant passage, where he described a car engine that was designed to run on gasoline, but when given water as a substitute, it never seems to work in the way that it's intended; in the same way, humanity was a machine designed to run on God, and by replacing God with something else incapable of filling our souls, we inevitably fall victim to sin.

Some people see Adam and Eve as a cautionary tale, but I really see something more there – I see it as a portrayal of the human race, who, despite itself, is constantly yearning for something that overwhelms our sense of loneliness.

conversations with god

2009-01-12T22:09:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, I once wanted to write a story called “A Conversation With God.” It was going to be a story about how someone could speak personally to God. The narrator was going to be an everyday, common man, one who could really ask the difficult questions about why life, like how girls seem to only chase the boys who were jerks, or why we hurt ourselves physically and emotionally, or why God decided to make the sea blue, instead of green. It was going to be brilliant, and I could imagine myself being on TV and explaining the depth of the conversation.

Ultimately I never wrote the story, because as it turns out, talking to God is not an uncommon idea. I saw Bruce Almighty, which featured Morgan Freeman as the Almighty, and heard about a television show called Joan of Arcadia which featured a girl who could talk to God, and recently I read a book called The Shack which featured a man who spoke to God, who was portrayed as a large black woman, and you know, I'm guessing there's thousands of stories like that out there nowadays.

So I guess it wasn't so original after all.

I somehow feel that there is a yearning out there to communicate with a Being unseen, to touch the intangible. Someone once said in the absence of evidence, there is faith, and I believe there is truth in that, but at the same time, humans cannot live on faith alone. Like I said before, humans are designed for reciprocity. We can't exist without some sort of reinforcement.

I used to feel like prayer was more like leaving a voice mail on some cosmic cellular phone, instead of a two way conversation. I would lie in bed and think about the ways that God would touch my life, and it was comforting to know that I could feel His presence on a consistent basis, but it was never about give and take. I guess what I mean is that when I spoke to God, I expected an immediate response.

Lately, however, I have come to realize that God speaks in more ways than directly. In the times when I feel discouraged or depressed, He paints breathtakingly amazing sunsets. He speaks to me with encouraging words from a friend. In some ways, yes, He does answer prayers directly, but in many more ways, He can talk through ways that we must strive to perceive and receive. And there is something comforting in that, because when we expect only the standard response to our problems or fears, He is always ready with a pleasant surprise. To think that He created us to simply live in relationship with him is an idea that I sometimes have trouble grasping, but it's an idea that I gratefully accept.

to a God known

2008-11-15T22:40:00.001-08:00

Nowadays, when I think about stories of God speaking to humanity, I don't quite imagine it as being accompanied by a thunderous lightning storm, or a great flood, or even fire from heaven. Mostly I wonder whether God had ever spoken to people subtly, quietly, reassuringly, in ways that transcends the Dungeons & Dragons way we expect God to speak to us nowadays. The old days are not these days, I guess. Or maybe it is and I'm expecting something different.

There's always some sort of disbelief that creeps through my veins when I hear people speak excitedly about how God spoke to them. Maybe it's the cynic in me – all I know is that when God speaks to me, He speaks to my heart. It's never been about grand ambition or sudden epiphanies (although those have happened).

God has always been about the quiet, slow realizations, and He speaks most effectively to me through people.

Someone who I admire greatly once told me that I had a gift for people, and whether he meant it literally or not, it seems that I find my encouragement (and sometimes my own frustration) in people. Having meaningful conversations gives me strength, something I cannot easily find with sleep or entertainment or a good book.

I remember a few months ago when I was preparing to go to bed. I was pretty mentally and physically exhausted – working two jobs can do that to you – and I was just burnt out spiritually. You can pray for ten hours straight, but if you don't have a sincere community to fall back on, you'll sink faster than the Titanic. And I wasn't praying for ten hours straight.

Suddenly my phone rang, with a friend who had just read what I had written before, an entry on the riskiness of love and how God is the constant when people are not. As we talked, I could feel my weariness leaching out of me. We shared our hearts to one another, and as she spoke to me and I responded with my own insecurities, I could feel God touching my soul, telling me that He provides for me when I feel as though there is nothing there. It was nice, and it was unexpected, and I think that's how God loves to surprise us, in ways that we don't fully expect but yet fully appreciate.

At night, when I'm drifting away to sleep, I have whimsical conversations with Him, quiet revelations about myself that I know is reciprocated by the way people can form intimate friendships with me and the confidence that I am loved.

superstition in the pigeon

2008-02-19T20:53:00.000-08:00

There's not many things about Santa Cruz that I miss, to be honest. I went there for school because that was the only college I had been accepted to, and I quickly found that life there was composed of surfing, marijuana, and parties, with the exceptional dosage of hippie pessimism. Which, in my opinion, is some sort of paradox that will eventually explode. Still, I have to admit that one of the few things I miss about my school are the classes.

One of the more memorable classes, Psychology and Religion, was taught by a local psychologist named Ralph Quinn. He had an odd habit of referring to himself in the third person as “little Ralphie Quinn” whenever he waxed nostalgic about the past, but every quarter, his lecture hall would be packed with students who were attracted to his stories and the fact that he required no textbooks.

Over the course of the quarter, the material ranged from Freud to Jung, from clinical psychologists to Herman Hesse. Admittedly, these were all interesting people, but there was one that stood out in my transitional period, while I rejected legalism and embraced the freeing power of grace: B.F. Skinner.

Skinner was a psychologist who performed experiments on pigeons – he would first begin by dropping food into the pigeon's cage at regular times of the day. Eventually, the pigeon would get used to the scheduled food and expect the food to drop in at the predestined time. After a period of time, Skinner began observing that the pigeons associated a random act, performed right before the food was dropped, as the causative factor. Soon, pigeons began turning in circles, flapping wings, poking heads in a very particular manner that suggested the birds had somehow developed superstitious behaviors that, in their minds, was the main reason for the food dropping.

After that particular lecture, Ralph Quinn spoke about the illuminating power of Skinner's study, and how it could plausibly explain the existence of religious rituals today. “Imagine you're a primitive human being,” he began. “By clapping your hands together, or dancing in a particular way that precipitates the arrival of rain, you've now become one of the mightiest humans in the world,” he said, looking uncannily mystical with his round glasses as he swept his gaze over the lecture hall. “Now guess where superstition comes from.”

It had been nagging in my mind for the past year, because sometimes I look at people who profess a great love of God and yet have reduced some of our most cherished practices to superstition. Prayer is no longer about meaningful conversations, worship is no longer about really having a connection with God, and fellowship has been reduced to shallow blurbs about the past week without any real emotion. Instead, religion has replaced interactions with quick sayings to ward off bad luck, and worship is more about the performance than the heart.

Jesus was never about superstitions, at least not the Jesus I know. He got ticked off at people for maintaining the letter of the law, but missing the spirit entirely: the Pharisees attempt to convict Jesus based on the fact that he healed people of maladies on the Sabbath. Jesus knew that loving God and loving one another was never about empty gestures.

Through it all, I've constantly been reminded that genuinely speaking to and loving God does not make you impervious to whatever life may throw at you, but it does make you whole. And that is what separates us from the pigeons.

1.26.08

2008-01-26T13:01:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I take it upon myself to perform social experiments, or at least a few observations, while in a church setting. What I've found most interesting in the past few months is how a few pastors can speak for half an hour to an hour and yet not mention Jesus once during their entire sermon, which is actually pretty sad considering the fact that he is the basis of everything we believe.

Whenever I read Jesus' parables, I wonder whether he meant something deeper. For some reason, I don't buy it when pastors perform a straightforward translation of Jesus' words for us – I think he wanted to demonstrate something deeper than outrage towards mere greed when he overturned the tables in the outer court of the temple, and I think he wrote something more profound than mere sins in the sand when the Pharisees were prepared to stone a cheating woman.

I've been thinking a lot more about when Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed. For some reason, every explanation of this parable has always been simple and straightforward, a call to evangelism to expand the “kingdom.”

Lately I've been thinking that Jesus was very deliberate in the way he describes the kingdom as a mustard seed. Whenever you plant a seed (or even the mere act of gardening itself), the process is never simple. You have to break through tough soil, pull out the weeds, dig through the manure and dirt just to place the seed in some soft, vulnerable soil. It never guarantees that the seed will succeed, because you always have to tend to it, water it, watch over it. You can't just toss the seed on top of some dirt and expect it to survive.

In the same way, you can never just throw some evangelism shtick towards people and expect a response. You have to break through the tough exterior of people, dig through the manure and dirt of people's lives to really be meaningful... and even then, you have to keep in touch with people, have overpriced coffee and entertaining conversations, tears and laughter. In other words, in order for the Gospel to be meaningful and relevant in people's lives, you must be meaningful and relevant in people's lives.

I don't think the mustard seed was ever about “expanding the kingdom” in the traditional sense... I think Jesus was talking about how big the Gospel could get inside of you, how it could expand to the point where you could start touching people's lives just by how full of love your soul could get.

8.7.07

2007-08-07T12:34:00.001-07:00

I believe one of the major weaknesses of human beings is our own pride.

Even if you don't believe in Darwin, you can naturally assume a number of our emotions are tied to some oblique survival mechanism, something intended to help us survive, just like how adrenaline is pumped into our system at the first instance of fear. I just wonder sometimes why humans are seemingly the only species where we worry about the length of our hair, the aesthetics of our clothing, the size of our biceps, or the symmetry of our own face. By that same token, we are the only species that attempt to (and sometimes successfully) hide our own flaws from each other.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to spend time with two friends I had grown up with inside of the church, and we were able to engage in candid conversation. Take this with a grain of salt, but I think if three guys get together and speak openly about a subject, it will invariably wander to the opposite sex, regardless of what subject you began with. You could start with the chemical composition of Splenda, and end up talking about your past crushes. It's just a simple fact of life.

"You liked her just because she's intellectual?" Eugene asked, sometime after two in the morning.

"Yeah," I affirmed.

"I don't buy that."

Eugene is a bit more blunt than most people, which is simultaneously endearing and infuriating. He is unafraid to say what he really means and feels. As I am someone who loves to save face whenever possible, he is my worst enemy in an honest conversation.

"I do," I said, defending myself. "She's just so smart, which is really attractive. At least, it is to me. I've met a lot of pretty girls who were dumb, but it's a different kind of attraction."

"Well, you're shallow," Eugene concluded.

"I'm not shallow."

"Let's say you had a fat girl who was intellectual, and another girl who was intellectual and pretty. Which one would you choose?"

Fact: I hate hypothetical situations. Who really knows how life plays out?

Joe interceded, the peacekeeper of our little pow-wow. "The physical aspect of it has a lot to do with our initial attraction to someone, though."

"But you have to admit you're shallow," Eugene said.

"Okay, I'm shallow," I admitted. "But I'm not that shallow."

Both of them sighed.

I think pride interferes with faith, in the sense that we can't really accept the fact that we are broken people. Accepting the beauty of grace means that we also accept the fact that there is something amiss in our own lives, that there is a cosmic hole of loneliness eating away at our hearts. Grace only comes when we admit that we are wholly incomplete.

The more I explore my own spirituality and heart, I'm coming to the conclusion that we sin because we are not whole, and we desperately need to distract ourselves from that gaping internal emptiness.

I love how Jesus makes a point to heal and love those who openly admit that there is something wrong with themselves, how he loves the sick and the prostitutes and the corrupt who have lost any semblance of pride during their life journeys, the people who ache so desperately to be loved in a way that makes their cosmic loneliness nonexistent. I want to love and be loved in that way, but truthfully, I think a cosmic loneliness can only be counteracted by a cosmic love.

6.11.07

2007-06-11T22:17:00.000-07:00

"I'm telling you, once and for all, that unless you return to square one and start over like children, you're not even going to get a look at the kingdom, let alone get in. Whoever becomes simple and elemental again, like this child, will rank high in God's kingdom."

-- Eugene Petersen's The Message

I used to wonder why Jesus wanted us to be like children.

Pastor Drew told us that the process of maturing is a funny thing, because, where you are right now, you will look back ten years before at who you used to be, shake your head, and say, "I can't believe I was that immature." Then fast forward ten years, rinse and repeat. It doesn't seem as though the process of maturation ever finishes, which is both comforting and discouraging -- comforting because no matter where we all are in our various stages of life, we will always be at an impasse with ourselves, which gives us all something to relate to; discouraging for the exact same reason.

Faith is something that seems to get exceedingly more difficult as you age. Looking back in my formative years, I feel as though the God I knew was painted in shades of black and white, with a dab of divine glory and fury all mixed into one -- you can hardly blame God for that, though, because it was the lessons we received while growing up. Don't steal, don't lie, don't sin, and you will withstand a forty day flood that wipes out the rest of humanity. As I said, it was achingly simple, which persisted when we became older, because we continued to associate karmic consequence with actions and perhaps even holy judgment with our sins.

I don't think it was until a few years ago, in a belated epiphany, that I realized God and Jesus were complex individuals, capable of realistic relationships, which is agonizing, if you think about it, not just for us, but for them, because we have been missing something so impossibly obvious for so long.

I once told a girl that I thought she was the greatest person I had ever met, which is a fantastic statement if you actually mean it (which I did) but looking back, I wonder if I said that because that's how I felt then and felt this need to be mushy, because I don't feel as though I still think she is the greatest person I have ever met, because I have met and realized that there are many in my life who are my heroes, like my parents and my spiritual mentors. At the same time, I wonder whether I will do the same to God, because He is so important to me right now, whether He is a trend to me in this current stage of life and whether I will leave Him behind once I grow older and mature, and my thinking is overly complex and I begin wondering whether synthesizing faith and hope in a Being entirely composed of love can ever make sense in this day and age.

Brennan Manning says that faith without hope falls short of trust.

Ultimately, I think what God wants us to do is to act as children -- love endlessly, hope recklessly, act in the most simple of manners. I think that as we get older, we have a tendency to create assumptions and draw connections between meaningless concepts because that is how we are educated, and I do think that, in some sense, that has bled over to our personal lives because everyone has been hurt, and thus it makes sense to learn from experience. But I think that God places great importance on love, not only with Him, but with one another.

Some people say God cannot be proved, that you can no more measure the amount of God in someone than you can see the air, and they do possess a very strong argument in that you cannot measure God. It is a fact, and yet sometimes I wonder whether we place too much emphasis on facts. Personally, it is very encouraging to me when I can see people connect in an open, humanistic manner without the use of facts and data, or sometimes even in spite of such things, because you can't very well prove those types of connections either, or measure the depth of love.

We were sitting in Pastor Daniel's apartment one Sunday afternoon, and I voiced the opinion that one of the things I liked about God is that I continually learned something new about Him every day, and I wondered aloud whether we would ever completely figure out God. Pastor Joe looked at me, very reassuringly, and told us that the moment we figure out God, He ceases to be God. And there is something stunningly beautiful in that because I don't want to believe in Someone who can eventually be predicted, because that reduces God to mere odds, and if I'm going to do that then I might as well go to Bellagio.

Science is man's interpretation of events in life.

Truthfully, I like it that the most persistent atheists are scientists, because it means I am following God for personal reasons, for spiritual reasons, which will always be more meaningful to me than science. Don't get me wrong. Science has produced some wonderful things, but it has yet to answer that yearning in our hearts, a yearning I know everyone has felt at one point or another. You reduce God to science, and you have defined God in man's terms. What I want, or rather what I need is Someone who is defined by who they are, which is why I find it so fitting and comforting that God described Himself as "I Am," because it is as if He expected us to know, intrinsically, the meaning behind that.

5.30.06

2007-05-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been thinking about life, and time, and how much they mean to each other, because it's been a while since I've felt that fierce, raw pain of heartache, and I guess that's all right, because it makes life that much more enjoyable when your intentions are simple. And sometimes I get to wondering if I'm ever going to find that nirvana of happiness that couples in their eighties talk about while they're holding hands, and sometimes I wonder if I even want that. Some days I do, and most of the time I'm not sure.

I think I'm afraid of love.

One time, years ago, I thought I was in love with one stunningly beautiful human being, but I'm fairly sure I wasn't, because it lacked any of the complexities or the mature shading that real love has. In any case, my happiness was defined by one person, and it was devastating when that person left. I'm never quite sure whether I am defining myself through my own life experiences, or whether I am being defined by other people, or whether I am defining others, because, quite honestly, none sound appealing.

When I think about people using other people to identify themselves, I'm reminded of that one scene from Anger Management, where Jack Nicholson, with his ridiculous hair, asks Adam Sandler to tell the group who he is. And Adam fumbles for a bit, attempting to identify himself through his hobbies, or his personality, or, you know, anything else nowadays that people naturally use to identify themselves, until he loses his temper and says, "I don't know what you want me to say!"

I am Adam; you are Adam. Any person unsure of who they are defines themselves by how others define them. Someone once said that God is love -- if you don't know love, you don't know God. By that same token, if you don't love yourself, you can't know God. I think that's both beautiful and tragic, because people will keep on trying to know love through sex or white powder or money, and none of that really seems to be working for them, because they're trying to fill a hole in their heart. People are constantly yearning for something greater in their lives.

It's rather funny, or simply interesting, the conversations I have with God when I'm stuck in traffic. I was on the way to the airport yesterday, with inexplicable traffic on the 17, and I struck up a conversation with God. At first, it was pleasant, exchanging salutations with one another. Eventually, as the traffic worsened and the temperature rose, our exchange became sour. I told God that I was bitter, that I seemed to be the circumstantial victim of Murphy's Law. He nodded with a knowing frown. Then I told Him I was angry, that I had no stability in my spiritual life for the past three years, which I had been kicked from town to town without any real home to call my own. And then I cursed at Him -- eventually, though, as the traffic alleviated, I apologized to God as I sped along the 880, although I was still angry.

As I entered the on-ramp for the airport boulevard, God told me how He was sorry, and how much He liked me, and how He wanted me to be happy. I told him I was just tired of being disappointed, and He told me He knew, and then He told me about how disappointed He was in general -- that people can't enjoy this gift of life, that they have to spend time judging or worrying instead of trusting in Him.

At that point, it's difficult to be angry at God. Sometimes you realize that you're just in the wrong place at the wrong times, but it's nice knowing there's Someone there for you, traffic or not.

5.14.07

2007-05-14T21:33:00.000-07:00

I must be truthful: when I think about Jesus, or when I am most encouraged by him, it is not when I am listening to contemporary musicians who have decided that electric guitars and the Gospel go hand in hand, nor is it when I am listening to sermons by a friendly preacher. This is encouraging, but not the most encouraging, and I think it is important to make that distinction for the purposes of illustrating my faith. I am most encouraged when I drive my car while the sun sets nearby, the moments when my life is clearly defined by the brushes of soulful music, when I have not slept enough and I seek the comfort of loneliness.

C.S. Lewis wrote that the only way to protect yourself from the danger of heartbreak is to isolate your heart until it is immune to all emotion.

Loving people is an inherently risky business -- in a sense, because people, by very nature, are not static, there is always a risk that one runs in associating with people. If you can shower someone with constant love, you may receive a diluted return on that emotional investment -- or worse, nothing at all. Loving God is safer, in a sense, because you receive unconditional love, but I think people are conditioned to accept love only in physical manifestations. What I mean by that is someone who says he loves his wife, yet does not hold her hand or kiss her tenderly, is viewed as a liar. In that same way, people want proof of God's love, with miracles or promises or, you know, anything nowadays that constitutes heavenly action.

In those moments when I have been driving for several hours, though, on a stretch of highway that seems to disappear in the distance, while the sun descends into a nest of cumulus clouds, when the air is crisp and brushes against my face, I feel God in my bones, and I feel His love on my soul.

Recently, I began reading the Gospels again, and I was struck by the poignancy of the passages that described Jesus' need to retreat from humanity, to be alone with God and to engage in introspective silence -- poignant, because it simply illustrates how human he was. I think people have a tendency to overlook that aspect of him, as though he was simply divine essence, but he was human too, and the fact that he had human needs, that he felt hunger and needed to sleep and became tired, that is so encouraging because in the moments of my life when I feel hunger and need sleep and I'm tired, I identify with feeling the emotions that Jesus felt. To me, it is not unlike having a fondness for Cheerios, and suddenly discovering that your favorite actor has that same love for the breakfast cereal. In those moments when I need to retreat from humanity, the times when I speak to God in the car on the way to my classes, I feel, in some sense, that Jesus is speaking with me.

I once read a New Yorker article that reviewed the gnostic Gospel of Judas, where the writer of the magazine concluded that the gospel, which illustrated Jesus as a magician of sorts, able to animate sand and spoke in mystical non sequitors, was not a Jesus he was interested in knowing, ending with the epiphany: "Orthodox canon gives us a Christ who is convincing as a character in a way that this Gnostic one is not... brilliantly concrete in his parables and human in his pain."

Jesus is human; I am human. Jesus is perfect; I am not.

I've been wondering what made Jesus so perfect -- sin distances us from God, so I think what really made Jesus perfect was his constant, consistent, eternal connection with God. His lack of doubt that he was loved by his Father was reflected in his actions, he treated the marginalized with love that had been bestowed by God.

People say Jesus' resurrection was miraculous, and I'm not denying that at all. But I do think there's something spectacularly revolutionary about his life as well, because otherwise it would have been logical for the disciples to simply start the Gospels with Jesus nailed to a cross.

4.10.07

2007-04-10T19:33:00.000-07:00

I think I will always think of love the way I saw it a few days ago. I saw a couple walking on the beach: the husband, who must have had diabetes or maybe a bad foot, was walking in the soft sand with a cane and stumbling every other step or so, while his wife was faithfully clutching his arm, not once missing a beat when her husband stumbled. The husband would talk and stumble every other step, and the entire time, the wife strode alongside him, nodding and probably making thoughtful noises to show that she was listening.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about love, and beauty, and everything that we hold so dearly to our lives. One reason I don’t like Darwin is that his theories never explain deeper emotions, like love, or beauty. What kind of purpose does love serve in the evolutionary scale? You can’t deny love exists. Musicians strum guitars and look balefully in cameras singing about how love hurts, and people direct movies where people go through ridiculous amounts of humiliation for the sake of love, and there’ve been movies about how people have had sex in cars and then froze to death while the Titanic sank for the sake of love. Well, the Titanic sank because it hit an iceberg, but all the stuff preceding its demise was for the sake of love.

It exists, just like beauty and air and chickens, it is there, and you can’t just deny it doesn’t exist just because you can’t explain where it came from.

I took a personality test a few months ago for my psychology class called the Meyers-Briggs test – essentially, the test operates off of principles established by Carl Jung, who says that you are either an introvert or an extrovert, a sense-based or intuitive learner, and etcetera. I came out as an introvert, which is a bit surprising to other people but not to me. I get tired of people. If I spend three straight days with people, I need at least a couple days of curling up on my bed and reading a book by myself.

Anyway, the reason I mention this is because I keep wondering why God created us with this need for social interaction. I mean, if you think about it, a lot of inhumanities in life happen because of this need for social acceptance, which comes from social interaction, right? So, you know, theoretically, you could prevent racism, or the Holocaust, or whatever, if there was no need for us to be accepted by other people.

At the same time, I’ve come to realize that sin resembles loneliness, in the cosmic sense. God wants us to be free from loneliness and sin, so He creates other people for us to emulate the type of relationship that we’re supposed to have with Him. When Moses was writing Genesis, I wonder if he was just being extraordinarily clever or just achingly poignant when he wrote that God created us from dust, in His own image, with the implication that we would find joy and love with one another, and, hopefully, that we would be able to find joy and love with Him too.

I live by myself, in a tiny studio off San Lorenzo Boulevard, and I admit that some of the benefits are great. I can leave my socks on the floor, and I sleep in my jeans, I never have to share the bathroom with anyone and I don’t have to share my food. Sometimes I will play my music really loud, with this gleeful knowledge that I don’t have to acquiesce to anybody else, and other times I will use as much hot water as I want in the mornings. I also don’t have to worry about the times when I snore.

But I ache for people. It’s hard being a hermit seven days out of the week –- hard to the point that sometimes you don’t know how to be around people most of the time.

And the sad thing is that I don’t have to grow up, because I never have to take other people into consideration when I’m living alone. I have this terrible fear that I will wake up, forty years into the future, and I will still be sleeping in my jeans and using all of the hot water and playing my music really loud and my wife will suddenly leave divorce papers on the desk when I get back from work, citing irreconcilable differences, which means that she had to take cold showers and picked up all of my socks and had nothing to eat because I ate all of the chicken pot pies.

I don’t think that’s what God had in mind when He made Adam and Eve. I think He wanted us to learn to respect other people, which mean sleeping in pajamas and playing music at decent hours of the night and sharing our pot pies.

Jesus reinforces that point. He could have easily won over crowds by himself, and he wouldn’t have to be crucified if he hadn’t gathered Judas as a disciple, and he wouldn’t be so frustrated all of the time because his disciples couldn’t understand the concepts of grace, but he did. In fact, the only times Jesus is alone in the Bible is when he goes to talk with God, which is something I find oddly comforting, because it means even when we're alone, we're never alone.

4.5.07

2007-04-05T17:08:00.000-07:00

Just as there were many who were appalled at him —

his appearance was so disfigured beyond that of any man

and his form marred beyond human likeness—

(Isaiah 52:14)

It never dawned on me that Jesus was ugly.

I remember the first Bible I ever bought: it had a white cover, with Jesus and a child holding a lamb, and Jesus had this terrific halo around his head, and he looked like a very good looking man with a beard and absolutely no acne, and he had this serene look on his face when gazing upon the lamb, as though he wanted to adopt it and name it Dolly. Since I've never seen another painting that portrayed him as otherwise, I just naturally assumed that he was a good-looking guy, and that was that.

When reading Searching for God Knows What, D. Miller brings up the point that Jesus was ugly, and it distracted me for days. I don't know why I cared so much that Jesus was ugly -- it's like those times when you are trying to convince your friends that the girl you're dating is pretty, so that your friends congratulate you and are secretly envious. [Of course, I don't do that anymore.] Anyway, I suppose it's a pride thing. Nobody ever wants to admit that an ugly person willingly died for them. It's always more gratifying to say that a beautiful person sacrificed themselves so that you may live, because it boosts your own self-worth, right?

I started wondering why God, in all of His resplendent glory and creativity, would make his Son ugly. It just didn't make sense to me.

It struck me yesterday, when I was walking towards class, that maybe God, in His intuitive wisdom, knew that if His Son was good-looking, that perhaps people would follow him for the wrong reasons, or that some people would be alienated. Maybe the women would start following him, hoping that Jesus would ask them out to a candlelit fish-and-loaf-of-bread dinner. Maybe the men would be jealous and envious, deciding instead to drink wine and spread rumors about him. In any case, what was at risk was people taking Jesus at face value, instead of learning how to build relationships with one another and learning from his lessons on how to be human.

Back when I still thought Jesus was good looking, I always thought that the Pharisees were angry because... well, I used to think that, in a high school setting, that the Pharisees were the resident geeks with constant acne, while Jesus was the handsome football player with a Mustang who wooed the crowds of people, the one who dated cheerleaders and was voted king at homecoming; he was the one voted "Most Likely to Succeed" while the Pharisees were voted "Most Likely to Disappear And Have Nobody Really Notice." I don't think that's a category, but I did think the Pharisees had geek envy.

But now I'm beginning to realize that maybe the Pharisees, being the leaders of their time and the top scholars, were the handsome football players. And along comes this ugly carpenter, who directly defies them and woos the crowds of people. I guess you could say Jesus was the ugly geek with zits who dated cheerleaders, became homecoming king and bought a Mustang, the one person who disrupted status quo.

Yesterday, for my Marketing class, the professor told us we would be watching an introductory video about the merits of marketing, and also a particular success story involving Wahoo's Fish Tacos. "I think this is a good introduction to the class," she told us before dimming the lights.

Essentially, the premise behind Wahoo's is that three brothers wanted to create a restaurant that emulated the ambiance of true surfside restaurants. One brother in particular, Wing, took care of the marketing aspects of the business. When the host asked Wing how he managed to market Wahoo's so effectively, Wing sat there, looking decidedly Zen-like with his long hair and goatee, and said, "The premise behind it was that I would say, hey, I'll donate an hour out of my time to help this rock-climbing business. If it helps me, great, but that's not why I'll be doing it." And as he explained, looking increasingly like a wise Buddha, he said that his selflessness convinced the customers of the rock-climbing business that he was on the up-and-up. There were no fancy advertisements -- it was simply word-of-mouth reputation that led to their success. Wahoo's also provided the food for surfing competitions, he said, and the business generated from donating food to events was tenfold.

Cut to an interview with one of the business partners named Steve, who explained that their business strategy had very little to do with sales goals and more to do with human contact. The fact that he said this with a Hawaiian shirt on made it hard for me to take him seriously until he said, "I said to one of my managers... look, I don't ever want to hear anything about sales quotas. What I want to hear about is this -- did you learn two customers' names today? That's more important."

It got me thinking while I walked down to the bus stop and got on the bus and rode it to the parking lot and I got into my car. I started it up, and I decided that maybe there was something to this lesson of relationships, and investing yourself into people.

I'm not sure why I started thinking about Jesus being ugly after I watched this video, except that for the people who Jesus healed and cried with and ate with, I'm beginning to think that his life went against the grain, defied any conventionality of the world and gave people peace. And the fact of the matter is that we crave this sense of community, we flock to it -- and I'm beginning to suspect that's why Jesus always had crowds of people following him, despite the fact that he was ugly. He treated people with respect and love, and he probably remembered their names after meeting them once, which is something I still can't do, and he ate with local prostitutes.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the important thing about Jesus is that he ignored that trivial superficial stuff, and just looked at who they were. He just talked, and people listened; and when people talked, he listened. He appreciated people, not in the ostentatious manner that many people seem to employ nowadays, where they shout or laugh loudly in libraries, but in the sense that he set aside time to listen to them, to feel for them, and I think that when there is someone in your life who does that, you can immediately sense it.

4.3.07

2007-04-03T22:43:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me today that this culture war is more like the two warring sides in America have everyone convinced that either: sex is evil [and you will die] or sex is casual [and you should have as much of it as you can before STDs disintegrate your organs] and somehow I'm not convinced that either side is right.

It's as though saying chocolate is the greatest flavor ever while someone else argues for the merits of vanilla. The question is, what do you say if you don't like either flavor? It's not as easy as making a swirl cone -- in fact, that's the worst solution, because you just synthesized two flavors together that you hate to make one abominable creation.

I've been thinking about the nature of sin. It's ill-defined, yet universal. Everyone defines sin differently, but they agree on its effects.

I've been re-examining a lot of what the Bible says is a sin... and comparing it to my own life, I think I'm coming to realize that sin is anything that distances us from God. It's those actions that make you feel like sludge. It's that one momentary glimpse, that one instant when you realize your life is pathetic, and you are possibly one of the loneliest creatures alive. Anybody who's had too much to drink one night and wakes up the next morning knows what I'm talking about -- it's as though someone yanked open your psyche and poured some shame sauce onto your best clothes.

I can begin to understand Adam and Eve's panic in the face of sin. One instant, heavenly content; the next, instant depression. It's almost as though someone confiscated their divine Prozac and replaced it with aspirin.

And I'm beginning to see what sin forces us to do -- we crave to stave off that loneliness. We resort to making clothes out of leaves, we resort to naked women on the internet, or alcohol, or working too much, or, you know, anything we do nowadays to relieve ourselves for a moment, however short, of that loneliness, to distract us from the fact that we need to be loved.

A pastor named Drew, who spoke at a retreat, once told us a story about two friends of his, who were the unlikeliest of best friends. One was a scholar, and the other one was a reformed drug addict. The scholar asked the pastor, "Do you know why he's my best friend?" A pause, and then: "Because I spell relief 'S-T-U-D-Y-I-N-G,' and he spells relief with 'D-R-U-G-S.' That's why. Because we both need relief from something." I think there's something beautiful to be seen in that, not just because I like to spell, but because people relating to people, regardless of where they grew up or what they like to eat or what kind of leaves their clothes are made out of. You can't find that just anywhere.

Usually, whenever I'm back at home, I regularly call up two other good friends and we meet at an overpriced coffee shop where you can smoke outside. I don't smoke; they do, and since majority rules, I guess that's why we go there most of the time.

Texas, one of the two, tells me that the fact the three of us meet up is an absurdity in itself. "Only at church will you see people like us being good friends," he says. I think that's a pretty accurate statement. Texas likes to wear stylish, fashionable ripped clothing, sings like he was a pop star in a former life, and likes to think up annoyingly convoluted hypothetical situations. Big Joe, the other one, is self-conscious, dresses like a reformed gangster (which is stunningly similar to a regular gangster), and laughs like a cheerleader. I'm overly sarcastic, listen to a lot of rock music, and I've never had a girlfriend. Between the three of us, oddities abound. The one thing I really like about our nightly meetings, though, is that we don't think twice about our differences. We just talk.