The Little Friar

Quite a bit of my time recently has been spent in a variety of contexts counseling. And one of the most important aspects of counseling -- the process of Christian care -- is to stand with another and simply say, "I love you". It's hard to believe in the love of God unless human beings stand before us as signs, representatives, sacraments and ambassadors of God's love.  When we Christians say "I love you" to another, we're not simply expressing the warmth of an emotion.  We're also demonstrating God's mercy, grace and forgiveness.  It's hard to experience the mercy of God.  It's hard to feel forgiven.  And the church doesn't help much with this.  As Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in  Life Together  in the church "we are not allowed to be sinners": For the pious community permits no one to be a sinner.  Hence all have to conceal their sins from themselves and from the community.  We are not allowed to be sinners.  Many Christians...

I don't put a great deal of faith in modern apologetics.  Most of it, it seems to me, has lost its way.  In appealing to a common "reason", they crowd out the place of faith.  The "reasonable account" we're called to give, I maintain, has less to do with reason and more to do with love.  Thus, my tweet yesterday: What the world needs isn't a defense of scriptural reliability or historical account.  To be honest, the problem of atheism isn't whether God is a hypothesis we can do without.  No, the problem of modern atheism is that we Christians have given the world so little to believe.  God's love is incredible -- unbelievable -- in the face of so little Christian loving.  I'm often asked, "How can I believe God loves me, when no one else ever has?" So many.  Often.  Ask.  I think many people struggle to believe that God loves them.  The love of God in Christ isn't believable, isn't credible.  Usually because we've been e...

Kendra and I celebrated our Christian marriage yesterday.  It is but the first celebration of daily celebrations hereafter, but I want to offer some reflections of lessons I've learnt along the way to that celebration yesterday.  Christian marriage not only creates a new family -- it unites already existing ones.  Sometimes those families come with burdens that push up against the very boundaries of being Christian  in ways we -- or at least I  -- never appreciated until the past few weeks.  First, I must say I'm a Christian.  That confession shapes and molds -- is shaped and molded by -- a number of practices, not just intellectual affirmations.  Among those practices is the practice of reconciliation .  "God was in Christ, reconciling  the world to himself" (2 Corithians 5.17).  The practice of reconciliation is extending the graceful forgiveness, respect of an for the Other, kindness and humility toward those who despise and abus...

I hear quite a bit of talk about karma  these days, from all different sorts of Christians.  Karma , of course, is the notion that the Universe (or God, or Satan, or someone cosmic) keeps score.  That for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction.  It's a kind of "eye for an eye" logic writ rather large.  In karma, we think folks get what they have coming to them.  Somehow -- eventually -- so the logic goes -- folks who've been cruel or mean or unloving will find their cruelty coming back to roost.  In karma, atonement is written into the universe as a spiritual law of investment and return.  It's a moral calculus of accounting that says pain is reaped by those, ultimately, who inflict it.  Thing is, my moral and theological imagination is honed by Jesus and the Scriptures.  So I'm not so sure  karma  really is the law of the universe.  The word I hear isn't karma but  grace.  Grace  turns karma o...

Most of us remember David Wilkinson's 2000 book on The Prayer of Jabez:  Breaking through to the Blessed Life.  In it, Wilkinson focused on the prayer of Jabez from 1 Chronicles --  "Bless me, and enlarge my territory" -- in a prosperity gospel direction.  You pray the "prayer of Jabez" so that God might bring you success and good things in life -- the expansion of your "territory". That's not how I read that prayer at all.  First, here's the prayer from 1 Chronicles 4.9-10: Now Jabez was more honorable than his brothers, and his mother called his name Jabez, saying, "Because I bore him in pain." And Jabez called on the God of Israel saying, "Oh, that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me, and that You would keep me from evil, that I may not cause pain!" So God granted him what he requested. I focus less in that prosperity way and more on the intended result -- "that I may ...

I was talking this morning with a friend about Jesus' second Greatest Commandment ("Love your neighbor as yourself").  Particularly, a friend asked a question about it in relation to self-esteem.  Generally, her interpretation of what Jesus said rings widely true in the Church these says:  You  have to love yourself  first , and  then , once you love yourself, you can love your neighbor.  In this formulation, self-love functions as a prerequisite for the love of others.  And you often hear it described as a two-stage process: Stage One:  Love yourself Stage Two:  Love others In one sense, I agree with this.  It's hard to really love others if you've got a catastrophically bad self-esteem.  In those cases what looks like love might actually be, underneath, a fearful, servile dependency.  So in that sense, I get it. But, I don't think this is what Jesus is saying.  I don't think Jesus has this very recent, Western psych...

I have a long-standing debate with friends.  I ask, "Can you sin if you're on a desert island, alone?"  They say yes; I say no.  I think sin is a social notion.  No people, no sin.  And luminaries such as Spinoza back me up on this.  Spinoza said:  "In the state of nature no sin can be conceived".  I agree.  What's more, I think Jesus' very incarnation backs this up.  Sin isn't natural.  It's learned.  What's more, it's learned in groups.  Think Adam and Eve's sin in isolation from one another and the rest of creation.  If that worked, the judgments in the latter part of Genesis 3 wouldn't work.   Sin isn't natural.  So the line that people often use -- "I'm only human" -- is a serious misstep.   Being human  isn't being naturally sinful.  If it were, God's embracing it wouldn't make much sense.  Now, of course, this is all in direct disagreement of my friends.  They tend to view sin...

We live in a world of stuff .  And that stuff ("resources" from the basic -- food, clothing, shelter -- to the complex -- cars, diamond rings, computers) can cause us problems .  Consequently, Christian practice will involve actions to manage our stuff in holy ways.  Stuff  causes two big problems.  1.)  Stuff is distributed unequally .  Some people live with vast excess (way more than they need to survive) while others live in want, many facing starvation.  If the well-off group refuses to share, we call this "injustice".  Thus, acts of "social justice" seek ways to enact some sort of redistribution of stuff so that all people can have enough stuff to survive and thrive.  2.)  Stuff is used to signal status and hierarch y.  Much of our stuff is a signaling device, a way to inform strangers (in personal life and the world of work) that we are "high status".  This point was most forcibly made by Thorstein Veble...

I have lately had two very different experiences of friendship that have involved very different expressions of power.  Those very different friendships have also left me wondering:   For friends of God, what's a proper exercise of power? First, there are friends of God who dominate.   My worldview is best summarized by a combination of  Deuteronomy 6.5 + Leviticus 19.18 + Matthew 5.44:   You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  You shall love your neighbor as you love yourself.  And you shall love your enemies .  So exercises of cold power, in which Christians attempt to "lord over" the weak and vulnerable and hurting (Mark 10.41-44), have me simultaneously grieving and writhing in the righteous anger of James 2.  How we treat the poor and vulnerable demonstrates how we Christians treat Jesus (Matthew 25.31-46).   Either Christian love is costly, or it isn...

Occasionally, I come across things that demand -- based on their sheer truthfulness -- to be read by everyone.  This address is one of those must-reads.. It is author George Saunders' convocation speech at Syracuse University for the class of 2013.  (For those who aren't inclined to read the address, you can see it here .)  I won't abstract the speech here.  There are too many wonderful lines and it needs to be read in its entirely.  It's a profound meditation on many of the themes that have preoccupied me and my writing here.  The centrality of kindness.  That sin in the form of selfishness and self-absorption is deeply ingrained.  And that because of this, kindness is very, very hard.  And how immersion in a spiritual tradition can help with this struggle. A recent NY Times profile of Saunders and his new book Tenth of December can be read here .  In that profile, Saunders is asked to reflect on the spiritual and redemptive aspe...

Most of us are probably familiar with Hannah Arendt's notion of "the banality of evil".  The phrase was Arendt's attempt to discern the origins of the Holocaust from the personality of Adolf Eichmann, insights Arendt's summarized in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil . The argument that Arendt makes in that book is that evil isn't dark and deep but is, rather, thin and superficial.  Evil is ordinary people thoughtlessly making a million small choices.  No doubt this account cannot explain all that needs to be explained about evil, but it does explain much, even much about the Holocaust.  The Holocaust couldn't have happened if the German populace hadn't over time gradually consented through seemingly insignificant daily choices .  Laughing nervously, but without objection, to the anti-Semitic joke.  Not shopping at the Jewish store.  Accepting the promotion when the more qualified Jewish person was passed over....

I have long argued that Christians should work a whole lot more on kindness than love.  Love, I've argued, is too amorphous and abstract.  Christians have lost the meaning of that word in day to day interactions.  Even worse, some Christians use the word love to justify being harsh and exclusive.  Love becomes doing what is "best" for you and, by the way, you don't get to decide what is best for you.  I do. But it seems to me, when you look at the Christian virtue lists, that kindness comes before love.  So we start small.  Work on kindness first and then graduate on to love.  If you are a thorough-goingly kind person, odds are you have a great shot at becoming a loving person.  But if you skip the lessons of kindness it's very unlikely you'll learn how to love.  It's about baby-steps.  And they start with kindness.  To capture this there's a saying that I share quite a lot:  Kindness is the tutor of love. ...

Here are my three steps for creating a better world. Step 1:  Cosmopolitanism We need to recognize that, despite our differences, we all seek the same things in life.  We are each citizens of the world.  A global village.  As JFK said, "For in the final analysis, our most basic common link, is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's futures, and we are all mortal". Step 2:  Kindness I recently read a quote from the Dali Lama that said, "My religion is kindness".  I love that sentiment. The troubling thing for me is how so few Christians view kindness as being at the heart of their religious practice.  I see this as a serious problem.  I think this is because the Christian moral vision is often too heroic.  Christians say that love -- that big and heroic vision -- is at the heart of their practice.  But as they say this they tip waiters poorly, criticize co-workers too har...

Aristotle once rightly observed that ethical character is a matter of habits :  We are what we do.  Or, to quote him: We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. Lots of us, in fact, want to believe we're someone else.  We usually say we're not really the miserable, grumpy, cynical, obstructive or unreasonable person we appear to be -- it's just that, right now , there are some extenuating circumstances.   The boss is being a Nazi.  Our childhood sucked.  Money's tight.  We just don't have the time.  It's not my problem.  We like to imagine we could change the world -- or at least our little corner -- if circumstances were different.  Inside our heads we're convinced that we're kind, forward-thinking, engaged members of society who, given half the chance, would be working to make the world a better place. Thing is, Aristotle was right.  We are what we do.  That miserable...