Living with God, without God

In my studies this last semester I ran across a quote from Bonhoeffer that confused me some.  I understood how the quote fit into the bigger movement of history at the time, but not how it would have fit into the life of an actual living worshipful soul.  Here's the quote:

So our coming of age forces us to a true recognition of our situation vis-à-vis God. God is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who makes us live in this world without using him as a working hypothesis is the God before whom we are ever standing. Before God and with him we live without God. God allows himself to be edged out of the world and onto the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which he can be with us and help us. (Letter of July 16, 1944.)  Source Linked

I think I understand a little more of how Bonhoeffer might have understood the idea now.  Tonight I've been watching a movie while doing the dishes that contrasts a variety of people who do really idiotic things because they are certain that God told them to do it.  They are so desperate for answers that show up right away that they project their own understandings onto God.  When it comes to trying to get revelation that is I think always the easy way out.  To quote another author, Philip Gulley, that I've been reading recently:

When God is the extrapolation of our highest principles, we are seldom challenged to expand our consciousness, which is why the divine in any culture seldom rises above that society's collective morality.

In prayer, its easy to take the first impression that seems apparent and to run with it as a totally reliable source.  When life becomes complicated and we instead of just asking we wrestle with God in prayer- we are still prone to confusion and reverently echo chambering our own desires back at ourselves.  Reviewing the history of the religious ideas that people have felt sure of that their successors later abandoned as ungodly makes this all too obvious.  It can be easy to be frustrated, feeling that we need to take everything based on our own wisdom alone because when you expect God to give you all the answers they never seem satisfactory- or at least not in any complete and total sense that is impregnable to simply changing your perspective over time.

But what if what God wanted all along was for use to figure it out on our own?  What if instead of praying to be given answers we should pray for wisdom and guidance and recognize that our decisions are ultimately our own because God isn't interested in trying to push us into little boxes of perfection in a perfect plan but is instead interested in our growth?

So does God answer prayer?  Of course, but we should be hesitant to take the decisions and impulses we feel during times of reverence and put them in God's mouth because if we make those impulses God's we may fail to own up to our own shortcomings that may be reflected in those thoughts.  We should expect divine strength and guidance- but not an answer key to all of life's decisions.  As the Father expected Christ to endure the Cross in part alone, we should humbly expect to endure this life at least in part on our own wisdom.  We should be like Christ who on the same cross from which he cried "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" could-without divine hand holding- still say "Father forgive them for they know now what they do."

Two Sacred Cows, only one of which is a Cow...

So there's been some media coverage recently regarding a fight here in Utah regarding sacred cows vs horses that are treated like sacred cows.  Ranchers are accusing horses of eating all the forage for their cows and feral horse advocacy groups are claiming that this is mainly a problem because there are too many cows overgrazing the land in the first place.  With forage levels low from drought conditions the conflict is reaching the point where state and county governments are beginning to directly challenge the federal government to try to force a solution to the problem in favor of the cows.  While you might expect me as an environmentalist ecologist to side with the horses against the cows, I really feel ambivalent about the whole situation.

None of this will make any sense without knowing the background of the situation.  The short and sweet of it is that Federal Law provides really intense protections for feral horses- almost as if they were an endangered species.  Left to their own devices they breed like crazy and eat a lot of forage.  Meanwhile- cows also eat like crazy and are grazing on lands that are no where near economically viable because the federal policy is to graze the lands at far under market prices to sustain ranching as a traditional way of life.  So we as a nation feel nostalgic about feral horses and about ranchers and put in large amounts of support to both in order to keep them at very high levels.  To resolve the conflict between the two of them, the federal government is supposed to round up excess horses and feed them in taxpayer funded pens until they are adopted.  Meanwhile those left in the wild continue to breed like wild- sometimes slowed by contraception treatments but not really for long.  The thing is there isn't that much of a market for adopting feral horses out there- not compared to the supply.  And the federal government hasn't given unlimited funding to the program to keep the horses off the land.  Out of money- the BLM is in the awkward position of writing up land management plans that call for removing the majority of the horses from some areas and then doing nothing about them because they don't have any money to move ahead with the plans they draw up.  The horses in the pens are sometimes poorly cared for.  The law prohibits slaughtering the horses for profit which might get rid of the excess horses and provide funding to help take proper care of the ones that are left.  So the ranchers have a really good point- there are too many horses out there and the government knows it and is doing mostly nothing about it.

But the horse lovers aren't without there points as well.  The time honored tradition of ranching and grazing in the US before FDR decided to regulate everything was for grazing on public lands to be essentially unregulated and unlimited.  Even after FDR the rules more made things orderly rather than tried to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.  Its only been in recent times and with a great deal of protest that the federal government has acted more aggressively to regulate the use of its own land for the public good.  But traditionally over grazing on public land has long been perfectly acceptable. Some Republican appointees have even tried to declare that over grazing is a myth.  So horse lovers have a really good point as well- there are probably too many cows in many areas.

But from an ecological perspective of whether land is overgrazed- it doesn't matter as much what is trampling and over grazing the land as how much it is doing so.  You could destroy the health of land by overgrazing pigs, sheep, goats, horses, cows, elk, deer, or bison.  Different animals have different food preferences etc that make the nature of the damage unique for certain.  But when there are both too many horses and too many cows it is ridiculous to point the finger at either side individually.  Its like cooking dinner for two and then inviting the whole neighborhood over for dinner and then arguing that its the fault of the family next door that there isn't enough food to go around.  Cows aren't native species to North America and neither are horses.  The total stocking of the land of both species combined is ridiculously high and both as a result of nostalgic policies that benefit horse lovers and cattle farmers at the expense of the nation as a whole.  So a compromise needs to be worked out.  I'd prefer one that doesn't encourage local government lawlessness and takes the legitimate needs of all parties into consideration.  But unless Congress better funds the BLM or reduces the protections for feral horses or raises the lease prices of public land to be close to that of private land we are stuck with an absurd situation where the local economies that depend on cattle have every reason to want to take the matter of horses into their own hands.

What does it mean to blaspheme?

I don't like the word blaspheme.  In general I feel too committed to honoring how other people experience or don't experience sacredness to want to criticize people just because they are different than me.  Words that are that loaded with judgement tend to exclude any possibility that sharing or respect can occur.  No matter how bad something is that you are criticizing, when you start making it about whether its wrong to have the wrong take on God people who disagree with you only a bit are automatically unwelcome.  When I used the word in my previous post it kind of surprised me how angry I felt.  So I wanted to define the word.

I don't care about whether the symbols of sacredness evolve.  I don't care that much if they stay the same.  When you think about how much the ways people think about sacredness it would be almost impossible for symbols to stay the same.  Even if they are represented or performed in the same way they will be understood differently by different groups through time.  I appreciate the beauty of how people encounter what they find sacred.  I find people very frustrating in where they find sacredness.  Pick almost any group and there will be losts to disagree with or agree with, admire or dislike etc about how they encounter the most important things in their life.  Those kinds of disagreements don't tend to bother me at a general level.

But what does bother me is when representation of love are perverted into representations of hatred and fear.  Using torture as a baptism defiles the idea of baptism.  Its kind of the same kind of disgusting as turning a cross into a swastika or turning Easter into an excuse to indulge in antisemitism.  When you take away the parts of something that were tied to love and focus on the parts that are tied to evil then you have committed an evil against the sense of sacredness and the people who honor those ideas.  That is what blaspheme means to me.

God and Country

I grew up on the idea that the US is somehow extra special in God's plan for the world.  I read material claiming that the US somehow was spotless from imperialism, was a land of perfect freedom, that the USA was in some sense a Christian nation where the truth's of God could be favored over other belief systems, and that the USA had some kind of special role to play in bringing about the events leading to the end of the world.  As I became more mature and my understanding deepened  I understood that the United States history cannot be understood properly while ignoring its imperialistic past, that the USA is more important as a place where some ideals of freedom were formed as opposed to where they were first or best realized, that calls for running the government as a "Christian Nation" often are intended to be acted out in violations of the freedoms of those who were not Christians or whose version of Christianity differed from those in power, and that the end of the world predictions I heard in Sunday had often more to do with patriotism than with scriptures.

But, despite all of that the idea of the US being somehow special in God's plan just seemed like a harmless extension of patriotim that could be winked at.

Now I find the whole package kind of frighteningly unnerving.  In all the history classes I had taken up to date I had never understood the religious nature of the world wars.  I had assumed that Europe had secularized because of the trauma of the religious wars of the reformation.  I hadn't realized that it took a lot longer than this.  I hadn't realized that state religions had flourished in much of Europe until the world wars.  I hadn't realized that so many of the state religions had rallied for God and Country- to the point of preaching death to the enemy and often participating either actively or compliantly with the state brutality encouraged by Nazism.  Being in a religion doesn't make you a good person even if it gives you a narrative to explain how and why you want to be one.  After seeing so much killing done in the name of God and Country it makes sense for Europe to back away from state religions just as it backed away from the hyper nationalism of fascism.

But just how did these religious leaders justify to themselves the violence that they condoned?  It made so much more sense when I watched a video of some of them explaining what happened online.



In this film, it is explained how Hitler combined a sense of love of God and country together in a toxic mass of glorified nonsense.  German Christians who experienced his masterful rhetoric often would have viewed that the Nazi party acting through a militant Germany was God's answer to the Godless Atheists of Communism.  It was all part of God's plan for saving the world from the evils of the last days.  But evil is perfectly capable of acting through a theistic Hitler as through an atheistic Stalin.

So why does that matter regarding the USA?  I watched another video



In this video, Billy Graham argues that a militant United States is God's answer to the evils of godless communism, but only if it purifies itself through purer conversion to Christ.  One might argue that surely Hitler and the Christians who followed him were wrong and Billy Graham was right?  I'd argue that the Lutherans who followed Hitler and the Billy Graham's of the world aren't any more right or wrong than each other.  They were both expression a by then traditional form of patriotism by mixing up God in their own political and military goals.  The Lutherans following Hitler were simply unlucky that the traditional association of God and country turned out so sour for them because Hitler was a man of profoundly evil assumptions about the world.  But you might argue that in the US we aren't that depraved and that we would never allow our sense of destiny to override our sense of morality.  To that I'd say watch this clip



When a popular politician who was close to being vice president blasphemously suggests that the US should use water boarding to "baptize terrorists" and the crowd cheers at the idea- we aren't any inherently better than the Croatian Catholics who shocked even the Nazis by their brutality in massacring people whose religion they disagreed with.  We're simply lucky we haven't had a political leader elected who actually asked us to do such things on such a scale and instead get off easy with just a few incidents of Muslim prisoners raped and at least one tortured to death in US prisons.  We aren't magically moral because of our country or our God- but when we link God and Country too closely in our minds we risk assuming that we are and that all our actions are justified because of it.

The Reformation, and poetry

I've been taking a class on the history of Christianity this semester.  The author of the textbook has done a marvelous job presenting many of the different social movements and the people in history in a very sympathetic light so that I keep reading about a change in history and thinking "Yes Yes that addressed the problems of that era.  I so deeply agree or sympathize with what this person does" and then find myself turning around and saying "That was really sick.  There is so much wrong with what just happened there.  I could never accept that action or that opinion."  The experiments of human society are messy and unpleasant much of the time.  But I can' reject them because I'm human and my own world is subject to the same human imperfections.  This experience of relearning about the reformation led to my writing this poem.

Blood

The past is covered in blood.
Food robbed from the hungry
Water taken from the thirsty.
Quarrels broken into pools of blood.

I must escape this pool of blood
Restore food to the hungry
Give water to the thirsty,
And mend the wounds with the gift of my blood.

Sick of gore, the red sunrise beckons.
Come eat without price
Come drink without money,
Come cleanse your soul from blood.

The red mirage transforms to blood
The people are hungry
The children are thirsty,
And through my veins, flows blood.

What do you think, when there's nothing to think about...

Years ago I used to listen to what my family called "Boo tapes."  It was a bunch of audio dramatizations about the scriptures where a talking dog and a tree house full of kids act out and reimagine different stories.  One song that touched me deeply was talking about what must have Moroni spent his time thinking about after everyone that he knew was dead.  It suggested there were many awesome wonders of the world to contemplate and asserted that what you think about when there's nothing to think about defined who you were.  I don't like short cuts to defining yourself or other people, but it is hard to figure out how to handle those times when the emptiness just seems to want to fill up everything.

I'm socially isolated enough and have been socially isolated for long enough that I simply don't handle feeling alone very well.  I get lonely feeling pretty quickly and depression can follow as well, making it difficult to function.  Sometimes things are better or worse at work but it has not been uncommon over the last few months that I've been unable to find a way to consistently interact with anyone that I know.  When I'm dealing with an unstable group of strangers you might say that the engines in my mind that deal with socializing more or less freeze up like a car with no oil in it.  It takes me a long time to be able to function with a group of people, even when I do know them.  When I get home from work its not necessarily much better.  My wife has trouble getting proper sleep with the kids waking up during the night or trying to wake up absurdly early in the morning.  So she's typically about ready to fall asleep somewhere between 8:30-9:30 PM.  I don't get off work till 10 PM and probably won't get home till 10:30ish.  When school is going full swing we see each other during the days mostly for meal times.  Since dishes are hard to do with little boys trying to help sometimes doing the dishes falls to me after I get home from work.  I need to find ways to relax, detox all that work stress, clean up any perishables that might have gotten left out, and make a dent in dishes.

That's a lot of time spent alone.

Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I watch movies, sometimes I listen to audiobooks.  To me, music can be a great way to do an emotional stretching exercise.  I can let the emotions of the music move me around and help get me unstuck from a negative mindset.  Movies are about social interactions between people.  If I'm having loneliness caused depression setting in watching people interact socially in a movie can be a painful reminder of the social skill sets that I don't have.  So I haven't done as many movies recently.  I only sometimes have a good audio book on hand and they are a life saver when I have them.

Mostly these days I have listened to podcasts.  I had decided that many ways in which I viewed the world were just fundamentally wrong and I started information binging to try to help myself sort the world back out again.  On some subjects there are many people who are more than willing to give you hours upon hours of time listening to them babble on about just about any subject you can imagine.  When trying to redefine how I understood the world made me feel alone in even more ways than normal those talking heads in my earphones were a life saver.  At least someone else understood the sorts of questions I was dealing with and I could listen in as they discussed all sorts of research and thinking on the subject that I simply didn't have the time to do.

I could still spend hours upon hours listening to those, but there is a problem.  I've come to a new more or less stable outlook on life.  I'm not driven as much now to answer every new question and examine every new angle on those subjects anymore.  This is good in many ways.  You can only spend so much time staring down the uncertainty of the world without it taking a severe toll on you.  But in the meantime, what do I do now for all those hours that I still am spending alone?  The podcasts no longer meet a deep need for me.  I'm typically too out of sorts to spend the time on homework.  Movies are fun, but I honestly can't enjoy watching them properly late at night like this.  It simply doesn't work.  I could just read books, but paper books are often so enthralling for me that if they were worth it from the stress management perspective I'll end up not being able to sleep because I won't be able to tear myself away from the story. 

I need a better way to not be alone when I'm alone. Unfortunately there is no easy out for an issue like this.  Life is boring sometimes.  When there is nothing to think about you still have to go on thinking.  It's just life.

I love home made pasta

So Bonnie Jean and I purchased a pasta maker to help reduce the amount of money we spend on pasta.  I tend to take pasta to work on a regular basis as my lunch, so even though it isn't all that expensive its still something we were buying all the time.  The basic recipie we were working with turned out so well that I decided I wanted to get a pasta cookbook to help us learn all the other crazy fun ways we could use the machine.  We've gotten one cookbook so far that focuses on how to make the pasta itself and we might get another focusing on how to use the pasta in recipies or how to make sauces to go with it.  It's been a blast.

So far we've made a
basic fettuchini
half whole wheat half white flour pasta
        Either of the above altered by adding in basil, marjoram, or Garam Masalla
Lemon pepper pasta
         served with either a dijon chicken or with a pecan/garlic/olive oil/bread crumb sauce
Lime pepper pasta
         Serviced with basil avacado sauce or with sun dried tomato pesto
Chocolate Pasta
          Served with mole on top
Spinach raviolis with a filling made of feta, ricotta, breadcrumbs, onion, and spices

All of these attempts have been smashing successes.  We also used the chocolate pasta to make a chocolate/strawberry lasagna, but that needs some more work still to get it right.

The lemon pepper and lime pepper doughs are surprisingly strong.  As in strong enough that if you eat them straight the aftertaste will leave your mouth burning.  But just combining it with another sauce mellows it out and still leaves a strong citrus flavor behind.

It does take some time to make these dishes.  If I'm not helping Bonnie Jean will normally make up the noodles the night before for dishes.  But they are also fairly cheap.  For the every day pasta that I will still take to work, the 50% whole wheat dough tastes worlds better than any store bought whole wheat pasta I've ever had.  I love getting to experiment with new cooking techniques and foods.  Even if it weren't going to be so much cheaper, the 60$ or so we spent on the pasta maker was well spent.