Water for Words: May 2007

Action is a strange thing. Doing, being, speaking, living, loving, these are all 'action words,' as my first grade teacher informed me. I have noticed many things about Christianity and it's relationship to action. Nate recently Posted a comment about prayer thought that got me thinking about this in different ways. He postulates that prayer which uses cliche and hackneyed terminology is often not really praying at all. The terminology he speaks of is often one of my greatest turn-offs in going to church.

Another friend of mine and I were recently talking about love in a similar way. He was telling me that he has begun to realize that when he meets someone, or is friends with someone who is making choices which he takes moral issue with, he speaks to them in the vein of attempting to correct them. Trying to make them see the error of their ways, trying to help them understand what they should be doing. He realized recently that this is not loving at all. It is placing certain aspects of them on the level of acceptable, and rejecting others. This is not loving someone, it is disassembling them, and not seeing them as a whole person.

how do these to things relate? When we pray, or if we are speaking as prayer, but our prayer is not "truthful," then the biggest reason I can see for this is that we are not choosing our actions well; choosing them at all. Prayer is in and of itself an action, but is that action does not correspond to the words in the prayer, then we are not praying. The biggest reason for this I think is habit. Addiction might be an even more apt word. I define addiction as one or both of the following things:

1. A behavior which "wields" a person, instead of the other way around, as in: our actions are in control of us rather than us controlling them.

~or~

2. Having, (partaking in, consuming) the world for the sake of our experience of it, and because we are in some way gratified by that experience, rather than allowing our experience to point us to the truths of the world. Our experience of the world becomes paramount, rather than what the world is.

I think people speak what they would call 'prayers,' or interact with each other in ways that they would qualify as 'love,' for both of these reasons.

This is part of a very long and ongoing thought process for me. As of right now, it speaks to problems I see in the church. But in connection with this, it also speaks to problems I see in the way in which people criticize the church. This is so because the real issue that I perceive to be causing problems is a consistent and severe lack of conscious choice of our actions. To illustrate how severe I think this is, I place certain aspects of this behavior on par with such things as looking at a person's body for the sake of your own sexual arousal and not giving a lick of thought to who that person is, but only because you are desiring the feeling of sexual arousal. These actions are not committed consciously, but we continue to do them because our brains know that the feeling of these things is gratifying in some way, but we have ceased to understand or pay attention to what is actually going on, and therefor have lost our ability to make choices about what we are doing. We are addicted. This is exactly what I think is going on in the church, with its prayerless prayers, and its loveless love.

Only part of the time I grew up did I attend church with any regularity. I remember feeling very much that I was in contact with something very vast and beautiful, but the time came when I realized that most people there were not having that experience, and what was more, would have thought it ridiculous had I spoken of it to them. Perhaps because in the pattern of behavior that was using them, these things were not common. I think they could tell, as well, because at times, I would say hello to them after the services, and they would glare at me like a 'hethen faggot,' who did not understand their religion of 'love.'

Many years later, I noticed, in reading the book of John, that it didn't really say any of the things they had told me it said. I felt at once the feeling of disillusionment, and a sense of joy entwined with the fact that there really was someone, somewhere, who not only said things like love your enemies, love your neighbor as yourself, and so forth, but actually did so, in the same breath. It was never this, "we should love everyone, at the earliest possible convenience, and with the fervor and conviction that they are exactly the same as us." Christian wars that have been fought (Northern Ireland, for example,) have been less about religion and far more about identity. In the same way, I deeply question whether the bible belt has any interest at all in the bible, but in an idea of who they are, how they are defined as a group of people. The realness of their identity depends on the realness of their religion, and the realness of what anyone believes is highly contingent on those around them believing the same thing, and therefor, their identity, drawn from the corporate identity of their culture, is highly contingent on me and you and everyone we know believing exactly what they do. This is the deepest kind of unlove and hypocrisy I know. But as for a nation which has been and is still called by some a Christian nation, there are very little conscious choices made to act with love. Act in the sense of basing your decisions around it because it is most important. We sometimes base our decisions around it secondarily, but not primarily. And we are terribly afraid of breaking this cycle, and rightly so, because if we actually began to remotely try to act the way we are commanded to by Yeshua, it would uproot every single thing we have based our lives in thus far. We do not try to do it, because we honestly do not believe the promises Yeshua makes us. For Paul and Barnabas, for example, they took no issue with owning nothing, living on the charity of others, and having no continuous home, because they believed the promises made to them that Yeshua would come and walk with them wherever they went. There was nothing more enticing than this prospect, and so they left everything. We are hard pressed to give a bum a dollar, and think ourselves extra spectacular when we do. It is not that everyone must leave their homes and give up everything else for this one thing, yet, at the same time, it is exactly that, or to understand that this one thing is more important than all the rest, and to remove all which distracts us from it. To act without hesitation when Yeshua tells us what we must do next, and to not turn away because it is uncomfortable, and because what is asked does not fall neatly in line with the rest of our habits which we don't like to think about (to the extant that we barely any longer realize their existence). If the church is floundering, and if the spirit of God does not move in it, it may be because one too many times it said "Lord, we will do whatever you ask!" and received a very clear and simple answer. "Be like Yeshua. Love everyone. Without condition, and without regret. Above all else." And one too many times, the church replied, "Lord, is that what you really meant?"