Thought Chunk #1

A few years ago, mostly during my senior year of college and the year after, I wrote down some things in pseudo-poetry style that I have come to call "thought chunks," because I don't think it's quite fair to call them poetry. I am planning on posting some of these here. I wrote mostly when I was feeling sad/anguished but I think I usually managed to keep some measure of hope alive. The one I am posting today I wrote after listening to and reflecting on Florence and the Machine's Cosmic Love (before I put my writing I'll quote the lines from Cosmic Love that I found particularly inspiring). I didn't title it at the time, but I think I am going give it the title "The Offense" referencing Kierkegaard and John 6, since those things were definitely on my mind at the time. So here it is, let me know if you have any thoughts or ways that you think I can improve my writing.

Quotes from Cosmic Love: "The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out, you left me in the dark. No dawn, no day, I'm always in this twilight, in the shadow of your heart." "Then I heard your heart beating you were in the darkness too, so I stayed in the darkness with you."

The Offense

I don't know my God, but my God knows me. 

I fail to comprehend the infinite, 

and I am left with feelings of awe and fear, 

wonder and doubt

It is thus left to me to inhabit this dark, desolate land of faith

I long to return to the illumined lands, 

where reason seems to rule

However, no matter my yearning, 

I remain in the twilight presence of my God, 

believing that day will come

And so it is my prayer that my soul remain with my God, 

even if chained and fettered it must be

For though there seems to be light elsewhere, 

only here have I found the words of eternal life

And it is to those words that I must cling.

Christians and Gay Marriage

I am very happy about the recent SCOTUS decision to overturn bans on gay marriage. I think this is a wonderful thing for the many gay people who are in loving relationships who will now have an opportunity to be equally protected under the law of the land and have their relationships legitimized by the state and some churches (though, in my opinion, churches shouldn't worry all that much about how the US defines marriage). And, I hope that this will help the church to begin/continue to work to heal the many wounds inflicted on the LGBTQIA community by the church. So, in this respect I am both happy and hopeful because of the ruling today. There are two additional issues, however, that I think, at least, could use a little more attention, and those issues are what I will mostly be talking about in this post. The first is that I believe it is possible to be a loving Christian, who loves gay people, and still think that Christians ought not to support gay marriage. The second is that Christians need to be careful that we do not simply go along with whatever is popular at the time, but rather stick to those things that we believe to be morally right based on the Wesleyan Quadrilateral, which consists of reason, experience, tradition and scripture (I'm still a Greenville College student at heart).

Before I begin this section I would like to throw out a disclaimer, namely I am coming at this issue from a privileged perspective given that I am a straight, white, cis-gendered male who grew up in the upper middle class and has had some, but not all that much, experience with the homosexual community (wow, after typing that I feel like I should tell you to stop reading this and go find a better source). That said, I think it is possible for Christians to love homosexuals and still think that it would be better for homosexuals to not be "practicing." This is because I think it is possible to hang out with, eat with and generally be loving towards someone without agreeing with the way that they live their life. Additionally, I think it is possible for someone to disagree with homosexuality out of a place of love for the homosexual community. For example, one could think that men and women complement one another, and that two men or two women cannot be as happy together as a heterosexual couple. This is not to say that I agree with the aforementioned position, it is just to say that we ought not to label all of those who think that practicing homosexuals are doing something wrong as inherently hateful towards the homosexual community. And, lastly, I think we (we being Christians who do not think homosexuality is wrong) do the church a disservice if we merely dismiss those Christians that disagree with us as outdated or unloving.

I now come to my second point, which is that Christians ought not to support homosexuality because it is now popular to do so (at least among younger people, and increasingly among the entire population). To put it differently, I have more respect for a Christian who opposes homosexuality because they think it is not supported by their faith, than for a Christian who supports homosexuality merely because it is increasingly the normative cultural position. I say this because I think one of the most important things the church has to offer the secular world is a set of grounded moral principles that is opposed to the moral relativism that is, in my experience, becoming the social norm. So, I suppose what I am saying is that I think Christians ought to support "practicing" homosexuals, but I think that they ought to do so because that practice is supported by the intersection of reason, experience, tradition and scripture. In the interest of trying to keep this post manageable I am going to stop typing shortly, however if you have any comments, concerns or questions please let me know.      

The Overwhelming Oughts

From time to time I feel like I am being crushed underneath the weight of things that I ought to do with my time. I have a long list of books that I want to have read, as well as many movies, TV shows and podcasts that I want to have seen/listened to since they (they being the books, movies, TV shows and podcasts) contain such profound material. There are also many relationships in my life that I feel I ought to spend more time working on, including my relationship with my wife, my close friends, my immediate and not-so-immediate family and acquaintances that I don't know well but would like to know on a more personal level. Additionally, there are many personal habits I want (or more accurately want to want) to form, such as going to sleep and waking up at reasonable hours, eating healthily, exercising regularly, spending time praying/meditating daily, keeping the house and car clean, and brushing my teeth twice a day (yes I'm 25 and I still regularly struggle with this). Lastly, there are a myriad of inconsequential things I want to accomplish and yet consistently fail to get done. A few examples of things currently on my list are: putting a new lightbulb in the light by my computer, ordering a new hubcap for the car, replying to emails that have been sitting in my inbox and moving my music library from iTunes to Google Play. This doesn't even touch on the things I ought to be doing to help those that are in need due to the rampant social, economic, racial and gender inequality in our country. Just writing all of this down has been a little overwhelming.

Though I do occasionally further some of these goals, generally my response to the overwhelmingness of it all is to shut down and do something that is engaging enough to keep my mind off of the "oughts" I just mentioned but mindless enough that I don't get overly mentally fatigued (this usually means playing League of Legends). I think that my response is to distract myself either because I don't know where to begin, or I am convinced that my goals are unattainable and thus ought not to be pursued (also playing video games, or doing some other trivial activity often gives me a sense of accomplishment which is rather pleasant, and something that I less frequently encounter in actual life). I know that I'm supposed to be perfect just like God is perfect, but that fact isn't very motivating (sidenote: sometimes I wonder how Jesus got so many people to follow him around saying stuff like that).

This all speaks to a tension that I have increasingly felt for some time now. That tension is between the ideal of perfection and the realistic goals that I can accomplish. As I understand it, the Christian life calls me to strive for the highest standard imaginable, the perfection of God, all the while knowing that as a finite, contingent being I am incapable of embodying the perfection of God. As of right now, however, I'm not sure how to keep perfection as my goal without being discouraged. So, if you happen to be reading this and have some answers for me please fill me in, for the time being though I think I will continue trying to make sense of this tension while hopefully moving forward, however incremental my progress might be.

Why I Am Starting to Blog

Hello anyone who is reading this blog. I don't have high expectations for this blog, since I've never consistently journaled or blogged before, but I feel like writing something about my life right now could be helpful to me, so I thought I would try blogging. That last sentence pretty well sums up why I'm starting this exercise, I feel like it will be therapeutic for me to write about some of my thoughts and experiences and perhaps get some feedback from other people. The fact remains, however, that I am largely doing this for me, and overall I don't expect what I write to have a wide appeal. This is because I am not a particularly practiced writer outside of academic writing, and my target audience is rather specific (it consists of young, Christian aspiring academics who are fairly liberal, at least when compared to their conservative parents, yet want to remain true to the roots of orthodoxy, and are confused about how to live their lives well). I hope that what I write is either entertaining or thought provoking, and ideally both, however we'll just have to see.