Sunday, March 1, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
The False Promised land
A look at romantic love as viewed from
Bonheoffer’s Life Together
. . . Just in time for Valentines Day
note - This is a re-writing of an earlier post I did, so i deleted the old one.
Bonheoffer’s Life Together is a Christian classic that has much to say to a sex-obsessed generation of consumer Christianity, shallow relationships, and individualism. America ranks high in percentages of it’s people who suffer from depression (the most common thing bringing clients into the counseling office), and even higher in the number of divorces. The sad truth shows that this trend is even matched among those within the church. It is my belief that one of the primary reasons for a number of the failing marriages around us stems from a sense of “wrong thinking” about the goal and nature of these romantic relationships. Indeed, a key component and school of counseling is that of Cognitive Behavior, and Rational Emotive Behavior therapy, which are based on the assumption that humans are born with a potential for both rational or ‘straight’ thinking, and irrational or ‘crooked’ thinking. Cognitive therapy looks at psychological problems as stemming from processes such as faulty thinking making incorrect inferences on the basis of inadequate or incorrect information, and failing to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Larry Crabb, a distinguished Christian Counselor and author from Denver, Co. notes
“every problem can be traced directly to a wrong assumption about how to meet personal needs. The primary problem with people today is misplaced dependency. We depend on everything but God to meet our fundamental needs . What then do we try to change? How a person thinks, what he is depending on, what he believes he must have if he is to feel truly worthwhile. We must change his mind. Transformation depends on renewing not our feelings, not our behavior, not our circumstances, but our minds. . . Right behavior stemming form right thinking yields a joyful, natural desired obedience to the God who has made us whole persons, both significant and secure. Even if right behavior accomplishes the goal, if the goal is not biblical, has Christian maturity been promoted? If a woman believes that her entire reason for living depends on her husband’s love, more effective wifely behavior may help her reach her goal of more attention from her husband, but she will not have added an inch to her spiritual stature. Biblical counseling should first teach her that Christ is her reason for living (right thinking), then should help her become a better wife (right behavior), not primarily to win her husband, but rather to please the lord and minister to her husband (right goal) if he loves her in return, praise the Lord. If her husband does not return her love, she is still a whole, secure woman, capable of going on for God.”#
Personally I found myself often left longing somehow to share life with another, to know and to be known, to bear my soul and longings to them, to come face to face with another who is frustrated with this life and all the junk that comes along with it, and to face it together. To find myself romantically involved with a person and that somehow someday this experience, or rather, that person would make me complete, or complete something in myself that was left lacking. But when these longings of mine are left unfulfilled, I was left to ponder them, to question myself, and my value, but even more importantly to question the validity of such relationships, and their significance. Perhaps these feelings of distress where caused by wrong expectations of these relationships.
My roommate and I talked about this often. One day he randomly came up to me and said, "its kind of like we have made this hope for a future mate into our own type of promised land that we are longing for." This really caught me off guard, but he was dead on. This whole desire that I have found in myself and others has become a substitute for our desiring of our communion with Christ, and real community with those around us. I had made it an idol, and I suspect I was not alone in this.
This longing to be made complete through immediate contact with another is one of the most rampant and often missed Idols that is plaguing our society and especially the church today, and I would bet that it is a major reason for the failing marriages that we are experiencing. Shane Claiborne in a recent interview, said of this idea, that
"we've idolized marriage to the point that that’s what everyone feels that they have to do! I can remember hearing a children’s sermon where a pastor showed a picture of a husband a wife and two children, then he prayed a prayer that each of them would find the one that God has for them. That’s horrible theology! (Consider) Mother Teresa- oh bless her heart, she didn’t find her hubby! And I think if we created communities where people can experience community and love, we transcend some of these issues. As one of my mentors said, he's been celibate for 50 years, ‘we can live without sex but we cant live without love.’ the church is a place were people should love and be loved."
Pages 32-37 in Life Together have a lot to say about how we think in terms of relationships with others, and while this is not specifically speaking to marriage relationships, the concept is overarching, bringing many different types of interactions under its umbrella. In speaking of applying the concept to romance Halden states
"Certainly Bonheoffer did not intend to write a treatise on romantic love for twenty-first century Christians who still happen to be single and think that marriage is going to fulfill them somehow. However, in an age where our longings for friendship and intimacy are ciphered through the ubiquitous notion of romantic self-fulfillment, Bonheoffer’s critique has a great deal to offer in smashing some key idols that plague us. The fact is that in our romantic imaginations we seem to remain disturbingly trapped in the zeitgeist of our age, hoping that by journeying deeper into the abyss of our selfishness we will somehow find the community that we long for with the other. As Bonheoffer points out however, the only way to find such true communion is the release of the other from our longings for possession and domination. For the Christian, true love, and indeed true romantic love, must take the shape of kenotically making space for the freedom of the other, rather than seeking to captivate and secure them in relationship to oneself."#
This is all found in Boenhoffer’s contrast of spiritual love and self-centered or emotional love. The first that he describes is that of the emotional or human love stating that in it
“there exists a profound, elemental emotional desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is a yearning from immediate union with other flesh. This desire of the human soul seeks the complete intimate fusion of I and You, whether this occurs in the union of love or — what from this self-centered perspective is after all the same thing — in forcing the other into one’s own sphere of power and influence. . .Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ. That is why self-centered love seeks direct contact with other persons. It loves them, not as free persons, but as those whom it binds to itself. It wants to do everything it can to win and conquer; it puts pressure on the other person. It desires to irresistible, to dominate. Self-centered love does not think much of truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the person loved. Emotional, self-centered love desires other persons, their company. It wants them to return its love, but it does not serve them. On the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving.”
This type of love is by its very nature desire, “desire for self-centered community. As long as it can possibly satisfy this desire, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others. But where it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, there it stops short-namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and calumny.” This attitude toward others is precisely that of our cultures attitude toward romance and personal fulfillment. We are bombarded with this ideal in our hit television shows, best-selling books, and most popular movies. Ours is that of a culture saturated in false hopes and unattainable dreams of a “happy ever after” ending, that we believe only comes from finding “the one”(sound familiar? think Twilight, which is a pretty pathetic story anyway.). Boenhoeffer also shares the idea that these kind of interactions can become an idol, saying that “ Human love makes itself an end in itself. It creates of itself an end, an idol which it worships, to which it must subject everything. It nurses and cultivates an ideal, it loves itself and nothing else in the world.” This sounds similar to the common saying of “being in love with love”.
And again, with everything else we find in scripture, there seems to be a strict dichotomy between the ways of the world and that of the kingdom. In this case it is evident in what Bonhoeffer calls spiritual love. He then goes on to explain the way that this love manifests itself to the other, in that it comes from Christ alone, having no immediate contact with the other. . .
“Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves. . . What love is, only Christ tells us in his word. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward the brethren really is. Therefore spiritual love is bound solely to the word of Jesus Christ. Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it. Where truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for the love’s sake, there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my human love. Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother. It originates neither in the brother nor in the enemy but in Christ and his word. Human love can never understand spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above; it is something completely strange, new and incomprehensible to all earthly love.
Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them. As only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others too, can only be saved by Christ himself. This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. The other person needs to retain his independence of me, to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ brought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. . . Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become. It takes the life of the other person into his own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men. . . It will rather meet the other person with the clear word of God and be read to leave him alone with this word for a long time, willing to release him again in order that Christ may deal with him. It will respect the line that has been drawn between him and us by Christ, and it will find full fellowship with him in the Christ alone who binds us together. “
This then is the way of love as found in the life that Christ has called us too. It is not a possessive love, seeking to validate something in the lover by finding something in the loved one which he can then make his own, which is a definition of a parasite. But rather, it “creates freedom of the brethren under the word.” In order to find this love and live it however, we will need to completely re-imagine all the ways we desire community, seek it out, and then remain in it. Maybe only then, when our views of romantic relationships are understood correctly in light of Christ, the cross, and his resurrection, will we be able to love and be loved as we were intended, and to find the true place and significance of romantic love.
“The existence of any Christian life together depends on whether it succeeds at the right time in bringing out the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and human community.”
Bonheoffer’s Life Together
. . . Just in time for Valentines Day
note - This is a re-writing of an earlier post I did, so i deleted the old one.
Bonheoffer’s Life Together is a Christian classic that has much to say to a sex-obsessed generation of consumer Christianity, shallow relationships, and individualism. America ranks high in percentages of it’s people who suffer from depression (the most common thing bringing clients into the counseling office), and even higher in the number of divorces. The sad truth shows that this trend is even matched among those within the church. It is my belief that one of the primary reasons for a number of the failing marriages around us stems from a sense of “wrong thinking” about the goal and nature of these romantic relationships. Indeed, a key component and school of counseling is that of Cognitive Behavior, and Rational Emotive Behavior therapy, which are based on the assumption that humans are born with a potential for both rational or ‘straight’ thinking, and irrational or ‘crooked’ thinking. Cognitive therapy looks at psychological problems as stemming from processes such as faulty thinking making incorrect inferences on the basis of inadequate or incorrect information, and failing to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Larry Crabb, a distinguished Christian Counselor and author from Denver, Co. notes
“every problem can be traced directly to a wrong assumption about how to meet personal needs. The primary problem with people today is misplaced dependency. We depend on everything but God to meet our fundamental needs . What then do we try to change? How a person thinks, what he is depending on, what he believes he must have if he is to feel truly worthwhile. We must change his mind. Transformation depends on renewing not our feelings, not our behavior, not our circumstances, but our minds. . . Right behavior stemming form right thinking yields a joyful, natural desired obedience to the God who has made us whole persons, both significant and secure. Even if right behavior accomplishes the goal, if the goal is not biblical, has Christian maturity been promoted? If a woman believes that her entire reason for living depends on her husband’s love, more effective wifely behavior may help her reach her goal of more attention from her husband, but she will not have added an inch to her spiritual stature. Biblical counseling should first teach her that Christ is her reason for living (right thinking), then should help her become a better wife (right behavior), not primarily to win her husband, but rather to please the lord and minister to her husband (right goal) if he loves her in return, praise the Lord. If her husband does not return her love, she is still a whole, secure woman, capable of going on for God.”#
Personally I found myself often left longing somehow to share life with another, to know and to be known, to bear my soul and longings to them, to come face to face with another who is frustrated with this life and all the junk that comes along with it, and to face it together. To find myself romantically involved with a person and that somehow someday this experience, or rather, that person would make me complete, or complete something in myself that was left lacking. But when these longings of mine are left unfulfilled, I was left to ponder them, to question myself, and my value, but even more importantly to question the validity of such relationships, and their significance. Perhaps these feelings of distress where caused by wrong expectations of these relationships.
My roommate and I talked about this often. One day he randomly came up to me and said, "its kind of like we have made this hope for a future mate into our own type of promised land that we are longing for." This really caught me off guard, but he was dead on. This whole desire that I have found in myself and others has become a substitute for our desiring of our communion with Christ, and real community with those around us. I had made it an idol, and I suspect I was not alone in this.
This longing to be made complete through immediate contact with another is one of the most rampant and often missed Idols that is plaguing our society and especially the church today, and I would bet that it is a major reason for the failing marriages that we are experiencing. Shane Claiborne in a recent interview, said of this idea, that
"we've idolized marriage to the point that that’s what everyone feels that they have to do! I can remember hearing a children’s sermon where a pastor showed a picture of a husband a wife and two children, then he prayed a prayer that each of them would find the one that God has for them. That’s horrible theology! (Consider) Mother Teresa- oh bless her heart, she didn’t find her hubby! And I think if we created communities where people can experience community and love, we transcend some of these issues. As one of my mentors said, he's been celibate for 50 years, ‘we can live without sex but we cant live without love.’ the church is a place were people should love and be loved."
Pages 32-37 in Life Together have a lot to say about how we think in terms of relationships with others, and while this is not specifically speaking to marriage relationships, the concept is overarching, bringing many different types of interactions under its umbrella. In speaking of applying the concept to romance Halden states
"Certainly Bonheoffer did not intend to write a treatise on romantic love for twenty-first century Christians who still happen to be single and think that marriage is going to fulfill them somehow. However, in an age where our longings for friendship and intimacy are ciphered through the ubiquitous notion of romantic self-fulfillment, Bonheoffer’s critique has a great deal to offer in smashing some key idols that plague us. The fact is that in our romantic imaginations we seem to remain disturbingly trapped in the zeitgeist of our age, hoping that by journeying deeper into the abyss of our selfishness we will somehow find the community that we long for with the other. As Bonheoffer points out however, the only way to find such true communion is the release of the other from our longings for possession and domination. For the Christian, true love, and indeed true romantic love, must take the shape of kenotically making space for the freedom of the other, rather than seeking to captivate and secure them in relationship to oneself."#
This is all found in Boenhoffer’s contrast of spiritual love and self-centered or emotional love. The first that he describes is that of the emotional or human love stating that in it
“there exists a profound, elemental emotional desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is a yearning from immediate union with other flesh. This desire of the human soul seeks the complete intimate fusion of I and You, whether this occurs in the union of love or — what from this self-centered perspective is after all the same thing — in forcing the other into one’s own sphere of power and influence. . .Self-centered love loves the other for the sake of itself; spiritual love loves the other for the sake of Christ. That is why self-centered love seeks direct contact with other persons. It loves them, not as free persons, but as those whom it binds to itself. It wants to do everything it can to win and conquer; it puts pressure on the other person. It desires to irresistible, to dominate. Self-centered love does not think much of truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the person loved. Emotional, self-centered love desires other persons, their company. It wants them to return its love, but it does not serve them. On the contrary, it continues to desire even when it seems to be serving.”
This type of love is by its very nature desire, “desire for self-centered community. As long as it can possibly satisfy this desire, it will not give it up, even for the sake of truth, even for the sake of genuine love for others. But where it can no longer expect its desire to be fulfilled, there it stops short-namely, in the face of an enemy. There it turns into hatred, contempt, and calumny.” This attitude toward others is precisely that of our cultures attitude toward romance and personal fulfillment. We are bombarded with this ideal in our hit television shows, best-selling books, and most popular movies. Ours is that of a culture saturated in false hopes and unattainable dreams of a “happy ever after” ending, that we believe only comes from finding “the one”(sound familiar? think Twilight, which is a pretty pathetic story anyway.). Boenhoeffer also shares the idea that these kind of interactions can become an idol, saying that “ Human love makes itself an end in itself. It creates of itself an end, an idol which it worships, to which it must subject everything. It nurses and cultivates an ideal, it loves itself and nothing else in the world.” This sounds similar to the common saying of “being in love with love”.
And again, with everything else we find in scripture, there seems to be a strict dichotomy between the ways of the world and that of the kingdom. In this case it is evident in what Bonhoeffer calls spiritual love. He then goes on to explain the way that this love manifests itself to the other, in that it comes from Christ alone, having no immediate contact with the other. . .
“Jesus Christ stands between the lover and the others he loves. . . What love is, only Christ tells us in his word. Contrary to all my own opinions and convictions, Jesus Christ will tell me what love toward the brethren really is. Therefore spiritual love is bound solely to the word of Jesus Christ. Where Christ bids me to maintain fellowship for the sake of love, I will maintain it. Where truth enjoins me to dissolve a fellowship for the love’s sake, there I will dissolve it, despite all the protests of my human love. Because spiritual love does not desire but rather serves, it loves an enemy as a brother. It originates neither in the brother nor in the enemy but in Christ and his word. Human love can never understand spiritual love, for spiritual love is from above; it is something completely strange, new and incomprehensible to all earthly love.
Because Christ stands between me and others, I dare not desire direct fellowship with them. As only Christ can speak to me in such a way that I may be saved, so others too, can only be saved by Christ himself. This means that I must release the other person from every attempt of mine to regulate, coerce, and dominate him with my love. The other person needs to retain his independence of me, to be loved for what he is, as one for whom Christ brought forgiveness of sins and eternal life. . . Human love constructs its own image of the other person, of what he is and what he should become. It takes the life of the other person into his own hands. Spiritual love recognizes the true image of the other person which he has received from Jesus Christ; the image that Jesus Christ himself embodied and would stamp upon all men. . . It will rather meet the other person with the clear word of God and be read to leave him alone with this word for a long time, willing to release him again in order that Christ may deal with him. It will respect the line that has been drawn between him and us by Christ, and it will find full fellowship with him in the Christ alone who binds us together. “
This then is the way of love as found in the life that Christ has called us too. It is not a possessive love, seeking to validate something in the lover by finding something in the loved one which he can then make his own, which is a definition of a parasite. But rather, it “creates freedom of the brethren under the word.” In order to find this love and live it however, we will need to completely re-imagine all the ways we desire community, seek it out, and then remain in it. Maybe only then, when our views of romantic relationships are understood correctly in light of Christ, the cross, and his resurrection, will we be able to love and be loved as we were intended, and to find the true place and significance of romantic love.
“The existence of any Christian life together depends on whether it succeeds at the right time in bringing out the ability to distinguish between a human ideal and God’s reality, between spiritual and human community.”
Friday, January 2, 2009
Pretty girl in my occipital lobe: A memoir by Parker Williams (As Written by Cody Vanvactor)
In a society like this, danger is lurking around every corner. Why do they torment? What sick pleasure can they derive by tantalizing our senses with alluring aromas and sparkling... ...sparkles?
A light switch in my home is mildly broken. If one flips it too gently, it is stuck half way. The flickering lamp in the corner may drive me to madness one day. I used to believe that women were like normally functioning healthy light switches.
However, I recently concluded that they are inexplicably and precisely like the switch in my home with its oscillating malady. The mystique is irresistible and THE leading cause of early death in all men in the world, ever!
One of the driving principles of women's complaints is commitment. The general idea is that men have the problem.
aside: Yes Dear. It is my fault. I won't commit. I'm sorry, for having these hesitations. It is just difficult when you make me dinner and smile right before you try to disconnect the brakes from my car.
Does the gleam in your eye mean that you love me, or that you want to implant this cutlery in my occipital lobe? While you're there, give me a bit of surgery. Cut yourself from the back of my mind. I think they call it a biopsy.
I know it is a tough decision for you, but I'm holding out hope that you'll change your mind... ...every 4 minutes and 18 seconds... ...for the next 60 years.
It is better to have loved and done 20 years for murder than to never have loved at all.
A light switch in my home is mildly broken. If one flips it too gently, it is stuck half way. The flickering lamp in the corner may drive me to madness one day. I used to believe that women were like normally functioning healthy light switches.
However, I recently concluded that they are inexplicably and precisely like the switch in my home with its oscillating malady. The mystique is irresistible and THE leading cause of early death in all men in the world, ever!
One of the driving principles of women's complaints is commitment. The general idea is that men have the problem.
aside: Yes Dear. It is my fault. I won't commit. I'm sorry, for having these hesitations. It is just difficult when you make me dinner and smile right before you try to disconnect the brakes from my car.
Does the gleam in your eye mean that you love me, or that you want to implant this cutlery in my occipital lobe? While you're there, give me a bit of surgery. Cut yourself from the back of my mind. I think they call it a biopsy.
I know it is a tough decision for you, but I'm holding out hope that you'll change your mind... ...every 4 minutes and 18 seconds... ...for the next 60 years.
It is better to have loved and done 20 years for murder than to never have loved at all.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
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