what is doctrine: maybe it doesn’t mean what we think it means?
you have to believe what i believe. what has happened to me must be true for you. and my experience must be your experience and so together we can agree that we have the same doctrine. sometimes the word doctrine gets defined as something we believe in or a set of beliefs that we must adhere to. but what of the word doctrine, what does that have to say to any neo-doctrinal belief system?
the word doctrine is latin in origin. it means ‘ teaching or instruction’. it is a verb, rather than a noun. so instead of it being something written in stone, it is the act of writing. when a parent is teaching a child the difference between right and wrong, the parent is teaching the child their doctrinal worldview. we tend to use the worde doctrine in religious circles, but the definition doesn’t preclude that the word is one with religious overtones. when a professor is teaching a subject, he is enacting his doctrine. when i speak at a church, i am enacting my doctrine. when we share our experience of the divine with those we meet, we are sharing doctrine. when we share our worldview with or without naming the person of God, we are sharing doctrine.
i think the first step in restoring our idea of doctrine is realizing that somewhere in our church history we intentionally/unintentionally have colonialized or spiritualized certain terminology above other types of words. and so we must be okay with the painful process of divorcing ourselves from the reality that we have created a stigma with the words we have chosen to associate ourselves with. and so i think the next step would be whether we choose to keep this terminology or seek out new ones….
what of the silent prophets…
for context: http://charismanglican.com/2010/01/18/martin-luther-king-jr-is-not-an-american-hero/
i think it is also how people (typically the traditional conservative view of a prophet) have defined a prophet. which is more of a ‘telling it like it is, no holds barred truth teller’, which i think at times could be anyone not just a prophet. we tend to equate them the open mouths, but what of the silent prophets? what of ghandi? what of mother teresa? what of you or i? i think the definition of prophet (traditionally speaking) needs to be revised and reframed in light of the rhetoric that has been used and abused. i would also add that if a gift is unwrapped or received, it is still being received, but maybe not realized?
anderson cooper in Haiti looting riot
http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2010/01/18/anderson-in-the-midst-of-looting-chaos/comment-page-2/#comment-976420
anarchy of words, a revolution of silence.
children want to know everything, their curiosity has killed many cats. if you give them a toy, they will find many uses for it, even unintended ones. their questions seem endless. their enthusiasm for learning never stops. they push and they prod. they try things that adults are now afraid to do. they don’t care much for answers, but are more intrigued by the discovery. by the intrigue. their hungry innocence guides them into more undiscovered countries and they beckon us to journey on. to find but not grab. and to hold things with a flexible resilience.
i have been instinctively, slowly moving away from theology as a practice. practically, it seems i cannot. the word itself carries so much baggage with it. it no longer is about studying god, it is about whether or not we have the right or wrong theology. and i just can’t be on board with that. and so maybe we need a new word all together. that is if we choose to continue to use the structures we are currently in. that is if we willingly victimize ourselves as helpless pedestrians of etymological captivity. let me explain. semantics, grammar, language, syntax and many other literary titles have followed us through the centuries. language has followed us. not mystery. definition has peppered the skies like clouds against the backdrop of ambiguity. but, i think we need to get ambiguity back. we need it to chase it down, like a jilted lover. mystery has become the prisoner of knowledge and enlightenment. mystery has become the whore on the street who seeks anyone that will take her. without mystery, there is the illusion that we can obtain all the answers about life, the divine, ourselves, pain, joy and the homeless guy begging for a cigarette. the mystics thought it was important that mystery be at the forefront of our discovery.
if we are always speaking and have words for everything, well that isn’t much different than colonialism or consumerism. and if we believe god has a word for everything, then we believe in a god who is about consumerism. a consumer god (my next book). we will support frameworks of oppressive language and regimes that advocate the necessity of response. in the middle of trying to find an answer to a question, we will do more damage than silence ever could. in the middle of a war-torn village where children get raped for rice, having an answer might disprove the existence of god. silence is golden as the say. i think the jews got god wrong, some of that shows up in their writings, like we get god wrong. and so god isn’t the army god who consumer villages and people groups, but he is the good who steps back and he himself is silent, not only so we can speak up, but so we too can join him in the conundrum that is silence…
if i want to be good at anything, it is being good at not knowing. and letting my unawareness build the necessary trust i need to keep moving on. and to invite the unnecessary truths that choose to peek out from behind the rocks. life is that beautiful of a journey, and i feel like the need for answers cheapen that. so, maybe we need an anarchy of words.
a revolution of silence. anyone want to join…raise your hand in protest. close your mouth in membership. and rest in the awe that the divine isn’t found in the spoken word, but is wrestled with in the tension between the spoken and the unspoken. this is where i want to be. where do you want to be?
evangelism as a teeter-totter (see-saw) OR it’s not working
i would say evangelism isn’t about saving souls. the word itself lends this idea that someone is learning or being changed or being introduced to a new idea that is shifting the way they see their world. if that’s true, then evangelism is more about how we are changing and less about who we are changing. sure, in the conversational transfer there will be an apparent teeter-totter of thoughts and ideas that each person shares that will whet the appettite for more. evangelism is more a two way conversation and less a verbal terrorist attack of overspiritualized jargon. it becomes a humble exchange of ideas that drip from tongues and hearts. it is an exchange of discoveries where people share truths they find and how they allow those truths to unwrap and unfold. and the unwrapping and unfolding become naturally transformational because it is shared as a gift not as a obligatory token of forced ideology.
we are all immigrants.
we were all foreigners once. either when we visited another country as a a tourist or whether we moved all of our stuff with us to call that new place our home. we went from being in the womb to being in the world. once we learn something new, we re-enter the world an immigrant and have to learn the new ways of that culture. whether we are in a restaurant or in a country where we know nothing of that language. all of us are immigrants to something or even to someone.
so why all these laws, why all this brutality and anger towards immigrants. i hear one guy yesterday just rip into some foreigners who come into to steal ‘our’ jobs. when are we going to stop ‘owning’ one another? when wil humans start embracing their humanity and their internal immigrant status as a good thing and help each other?
when will we stop thinking that everything we touch is ‘ours’ and start looking at it as ‘ours’? maybe we just forgot how to share? could it be that easy? could it be that things like nationalism, entitlement and selfishness lead our politics and maybe even how we see the world? grant it, not every person believes this…but instead of spending all of our energy on who’s in and who’s out, why don’t we just help each other…who knows, it might just work if we are ready to let go of all of our fears? but, are you?
for many years i was under the illusional impression that life was all about answers. finding them. deconstructing them. reconstructing them. claiming them. and forcefully ‘sharing’ them. i have since come to a different conclusion. (this is in response to the video below). when life becomes a journey about finding answers, the journey ends, most of the time abruptly. when life is learning what it looks like to ask the right questions, well then, the journey never ends. because then one question might lead to another, which will then lead to another and the journey becomes this scandalously beautiful roam of discovery after discovery. life becomes less about the end of the journey and about the journey itself. there were certain ‘other’ people who thought answers were the most important thing too — hitler, napolean, genghis khan and many others. not that finding answers isn’t important, but the issue is when we think the answers we find are the ‘ultimate answers’ everyone should find. when we think our truth is everyone else’s truth. we take something tribal and make it unversal, and in some instances, that is a good thing, like in the way of salvific understanding. but if we stop asking questions, then we stop growing. some of the questions have led me to this place that i have come to where i see the truth of god hidden in conversations, lyrics, the bhavagad gita, the bible, the sufis’, and many other places and peoples. and so what we must come to see is that our definitions can’t become everyone else’s unless we are comfortable with committing a sort of mental/verbal holocaust which is what we do when we tell people they must believe certain creeds or go to a mythical place called hell. we are saying that they must see their inferiority as a person (which is nowhere in the gospels) or die. i have heard that somewhere. and so can we agree that life is about discovery, about the journey, about the questions and the intrigue that lead us into places uknown. and those places uknown can change us for the good, but we have to be willing to let go. are you willing to let go?
This video showcases some of the well-known people within conservative christianity.
book quote: either or perspective
another quote from my upcoming book:
the dualistic worldview makes the “either-or” perspective the hero of the story. it is this worldview that endorses an exclusivist approach to almost anything it comes into contact with. are you in? are you out? is this right? is that wrong? was that light? should this be dark? the worldview reduces life down to a mechanism. this worldview puts the process of discovering what it light and what is dark over the discovery itself. non-dualism invites us into the meadows and streams and away from the processes where we get to be changed by what it around us rather than trying to discover something that may not have been there in the first place.
theological neanderthals
so the neanderthals were this primitive race who live during the development of civilization. their contemporaries would go on and create such technology as the wheel and then later on, many many years, we would have electricity and so on. but this race never changed. and that is the change in churches, in theology, in heart and in mind. that we don’t change. and if we don’t change we are no better than theological neanderthals. this is not some slam on conservatives or anyone for that matter, it is a reminder that change in all aspects of our development aren’t such a bad thing. scary sure. but lest we get stuck in rut and start calling that rut home, a reformation is at hand or the need for one should be. and so, let us move on from the ‘old ways’, let’s press on and find out what is next in the great unknown, for that is where god is, and the greatest adventure awaits us…
