Weary of the Theory

Well everyone, time for a post on my Worldly Monk Theology Blog. I want to share an article that is the best writing about feminism that I have read. It has to do with Mary, which also is a topic that sometimes is not thought about that well. 

https://comment.org/the-marian-gift-of-dependence/

 

In addition to sharing that article, I will add my own belated and minimal contribution to the whole wave of feminist theory. The thing I suggest is relevant is the church as Jesus’s girlfriend.  Basically, the church’s survival and advancement, success and work over hundreds of years. It is very much a story of a sci-fi heroine who also fights alongside the ultimate Lord of hosts. The captain of all the armies in heaven, plus his beautiful girlfriend who also defeats all the monsters and enemies.  All of them. Not a single lash of Satan triumphs against the church.

 

When I was taught some Presbyterian theology a long time ago, which is the Tulip acronym, there is a mention of “perseverance of the saints.” I think it refers to the fact that the church will be found faithful.  I always doubted it because I was such a failure and being so overwhelmed by other people’s sinful culture at a horrible bookstore retail job. I just knew I would not do well on Judgement day, so I wondered in my mind why they couldn’t get it right and say “preservation of the saints,” at least to emphasize God’s mercy. But it is perseverance.  And I did accept that and not argue. 

 

But now I see it, what a fighter and winner the church is.  How it comes through for people with strength and love.  And how it is opposed so cruelly and captured at times when all seems lost.  Literally, when all seem lost. 

 

But it doesn’t just get saved, it rolls along with its righteousness from God within and is instructed to be “worthy of the calling."

 

So I think that some good feminism might be rooted in not just that truth but the reality itself, the nature of God and his people, and those who find their way with that kind of dedication are doing so as a likely participation in what is the ultimate universal triumph of good over evil.

 

Personally I think that is a very relevant example for someone like me to suddenly mention after years of weak singleness and a lack of engagement in the sometimes “fruitless” discussions about working mothers, or the south’s faulty, shameful, incessant nagging for people to look prettier so they could be righteous through marriage instead of Jesus’s blood.

The Worst Christmas Pageant Ever

 Well everyone, I just wrote the main post but thought of something else to share, which is something I learned the hard way.  And the thing is to figure out and even profess regularly that none of us are Jesus.  People say, well, of course we don’t claim that, but actually it is very common to get so carried away with trying to be like Jesus that people can’t admit the gaping difference that accounts for why our faces get ground in the dirt every day by life’s worldly abusers. Example: When I go to the ER for my gallbladder, I don’t say to the guy in a stretcher, “Arise and walk, your sins are forgiven.”  I don’t say to a neighbor asking for cereal, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.”  I don’t say to a lady on the bus, “Your daughter is healed at this very moment.” I mean obviously I am joking, but people’s re-enactments of Jesus’s life go that far off track all the time.  Maybe it is a cute blessing for God to see us so weakly imitate our hero like children. But frankly there are many people who get trapped in an acting habit that can only be relieved by secular society. What is a real example, you might ask.  Well for one thing, look at our cultural problems.  Think of the things some people had to do to survive, while the rest of the insulated church seemed to stay righteous. It’s either sin, or not risking sin enough to reach people. Both things are what I am talking about.  And often the exhausted and exasperated people who have to give up on their idealistic Christian ambitions actually are in that moment, more like Christ. 

War and Peace

 Hi everyone, every now and then, I think of a post for this blog, even though I already published it as a book.  And I want to share something helpful as people prepare to probably fight another war.  Here is an interesting verse from when Jesus was about to be crucified: John 17:36: 

³⁶ Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

 

So this usually highlights how Jesus was giving up his life and not fighting back.  And it was in fact the most merciful thing ever.  We should try to follow Jesus’s example as much as we can.

 

However this verse says something else that is very interesting to consider, which is that Jesus said his followers would in fact fight if they were defending an earthly kingdom.

 

Well he says would and not should, but I think he still presents this as an additional example of how much to use force to ensure people’s safety and well being as part of nations and communities.  The fact is that we aren’t Jesus, and though we pray and work for God’s will to be on earth as it is in heaven, most of us depend on government, rules, law, and justice of some sort.  A lot of us got used to it early in life and assumed we would always be doing mercy work. 

 

But here, with history’s spotlight on his every word, Jesus points out that it is more than appropriate for good people, and followers of Jesus, to use force against threats to their dearest communities, cities, and nations.  Our lives are very earthly, no matter how much we overlap with eternity and heaven. There is too much ignorance about this, partially because a lot of us started thinking so much about heaven and hell.  But even from that mindset, the teaching is there for people to learn that sometimes force is authorized and consistent with God’s teaching.

 

A lot of people who think they are above things like the death penalty, jail, cops, and armies, are acutally far, far beneath it, unworthy, and part of the reason bad guys get away with too much every day.

Other people’s Utmost for your Highest Greedy Ambition

Ok everyone, this is a topic that could extend into all kinds of societal trends and political ideas, like supremacy, and other church problems.  But I am sticking with the core of the matter which has to do with a challenge of doing everything you can for God and other people while participating in a society that involves interdependence and dependence.  What I am saying is that giving all you can give can sometimes also overlap with greed, of getting all you can get, and to maintain any unselfish goals requires caution about how much other people might be exploited in even the most innocent processes of “doing everything you can.” In other words, whenever we try to max out our own potential with the purest of motives, we still are usually functioning in a multi-resource system that incorporates other people’s efforts.  So as producers it is likely we are also simultaneously consumers in some way.

That is where this can be a whole book but what I am saying is that whole communities and cultures should be coordinating together for highest ends if they really want to please God, and individuals who have that goal on their own must figure out how much they can achieve their own righteous endeavors without crunching those who are leveraged into contributing without their own goals being satisfied.  Well this is where bad people might have an opportunity to see how they can clog the system or create a blackmail effect that slows down well-meaning people. That is definitely a sad thing that many will no doubt get caught for by the auditors of heaven.  Matthew Henry in his commentary on the Gospel of Matthew said the conscience is an auditor, so maybe the people who ruin things for everyone already know that about themselves.  But what I am saying is that when we have a feeling that nothing we do is good enough and we keep trying to please whoever we try to please anyway, there could be other people getting crunched in that machine as well.  

 

The most simple example is giving money to charity.  Well that is so nice, but doesn’t it mean getting a paycheck, and is that maxed out at any cost?  Well if you are doing good things to earn it, then all it does is multiply the goodness.  And yet we know that some people don’t do right. So during the “Get what you can get” phase, which usually does precede the give what you can give phase, is there someone else’s utmost that you are spending, and are they okay with that?  Maybe they should be and deserve some misery if they can’t get with the program.  Or maybe almost everyone has underestimated the power of working together for one good Cause.

What are you spending on your spending?

As I think about this topic, I feel that I have a whole book to say and could someday have the credibility for other people to learn from it.  But for a blog post I am only going to share the exact concept of the title, which is the idea that some success in saving money actually requires extravagant spending of strength and attention.  And the second thing to add is what could bother some people, which is that it might not be worth it.

 

I have said in other posts that I strongly believe a key thing to learn in life is that there are multiple overlapping economies of hundreds of blessings or efforts, and not all value is reflected in any financial economy, which is also likely to have layers and unaccounted resources.  

 

But what I am saying now is that when people try to be good with their money, there are a lot of options.  In a way I could say, what is needed is a whole life offering to God, so really you have to spend everything you have.  And I do believe that, but in terms of day-to-day budgeting, I actually have the opposite thing to say, which is that people might do well to not obsess about it and instead try to have just a few good habits. 

 

For me, in my successful years of financial faithfulness, it was a matter of not spending more than I had, and making sure I was generous.  I also tried to give ten percent to anything Christian, which usually wasn’t my church.  This is where my post becomes more like book material, and I will say I really think that during a certain 12 years, I was probably in a 99^th percentile of financial faithfulness.  I heartily prescribe that to other people, though everyone has different lives and a lot of people really suffer and have kids to take care of, etc.

 

People could get mad even at my little headline, but I know it is a good concept to think of.  There are two other phases of my life that are different, where I lived rather haphazardly on loan money from my parents, based on my probable and to me, due success as an author, and now, after some unexplained farce of rejection, a time of suffering when I am totally dependent on other people because of disability.  The people I am dependent on, which is taxpayers and my mom, are actually people who I think have “spent a lot on their spending.”  In other words, severe frugality and life cost to make sure money is not wasted.  And because of the limited resources that actually might not be a coincidence from that, I am both abpruptly and gradually reverting back to my old habits of general faithfulness on a small “salary.”

 

That is more personal info than I usually include in these worldly monk posts, but I think it is a good topic to think about, because there are many approaches to managing money, and to me, even some of the most popular books about it are misoriented.  What I am suggesting is not a joke, and the fact that my success and reward is currently obscured by abuse, loss and horrifically, financial dependence, will never reverse or undo the truth of how blessed my life was for many years as I survived as a humble and generous person with the budget that was granted to me by God, already minimized by greedy people who will never be satisfied by their unfair gain.

 

What are you spending on your spending?  Are you a coupon person? It could be a good idea. But leaving big tips and forgetting about money altogether also has its reward. That is all I will say. People can get mad and probably will. That is another economy of emotions that can also function with choices of investment in feeling better or living life with other goals.  

 

My book about this will probably only be available or accepted when I am dead, partially because this life-giving truth is the exact reason why people would want to kill me.

“Why do evangelicals talk to us like we’re stupid?”

I felt it almost every Sunday at the church I went to.  Songs that translated ideas from the bible in such a way that there almost wasn’t any meaning left.  People assuming you were an idiot because you were depressed.  Leaders who almost had to literally move your arms and legs for you as part of their act to use you in their conversion scenes. It was from some kind of ignorance, some kind of neglect to love as Christ loved, and some kind of motivation that caused people to be directors for a babyish play while we suffered in an agonizing moral crisis everywhere else we went.   

But I am going to have to defend people a little bit and say that there is a legitimate mistake in the mix, which is that it actually is pretty stupid not to follow Jesus Christ, and especially not to care.  God gave humanity and most individuals a lot of information about what really matters, and more than information, the actual blessings of common grace. And as evangelicals have watched people all around us choose a worthless life of abuse and waste, forfeiting the eternal rewards of basic church service, they can’t help but condescend with their own matching ignorance.
 
It's kind of comical to be a Christian for thirty years and have people assume you don’t know how to pray, all because you are sitting in the “audience” at church instead of standing up front, which is the one thing they would never let you do.  But at the same time, you have to kind of see it how they see it sometimes, like “why aren’t you one of us?” Gosh, I still have to say, you said it, not me, but I also have to say that the comedy is in their favor.  That their inferior culture expressions become almost like a God-inspired mockery of the true retardation in question, which is people’s stubborn, foolish persecution that we will never understand and never will have to.

A Bad Climate Indeed

When I was in seventh grade, I read a book about the creation and evolution debate, called “Inherit the Wind.” It is actually a play, and I think I went and saw it performed with a friend of mine from church. We had a nice discussion about how evolution and genesis were probably both true.  I was twelve years old.  

Later, in high school, I made a poster for my biology class about evolution, where I made the word “evolution,” evolve across the cardboard, and I tore a page of Genesis from an old bible and glued it next to some kind of science diagram that represented natural selection.  
 
I mention those two examples to say that I have a history of being a nice reasonable person who should not be portrayed as some kind of “William Jennings Bryant” religious freak who doesn’t believe in chemical reactions and photosynthesis.
 
But I am.  Everyone from my faith background is treated like garbage in the news and everywhere else, and the new context used against us is climate change.  It is the same political problem as usual, but I have to say that the pattern is as recognizable as the usual snake patterns found in the other worst parts of nature.  It is a complete media assault, also prevelant in schools that people pay to attend, and it will forever be seen for what it is.
 
Do you want to know my theory? I think some animals across time prayed to God in their distress, similar to us now, asked for help to survive, and received merciful mutations that gloriously lasted for hundreds of millions of years: generations of animal descendants who will be found faithful in God’s sight.  
 
Meanwhile, some species didn’t do so well, and have found their dodo birds of a feather with aggressive greedy liberals who only know how to prey on mistreated religious people or other swindled students who chose to obey God anyway with supernatural patience during another thirty-year attempt to warp religious life into a feeding trough of humiliation for devolved demons, many of which were probably the evolution champions of the 50s.
 
If you want to make climate change the new religion, you can, but I think the embarrassment will be yours if you can’t bring yourself to also acknowledge the realities of heaven and hell, or even earth, for that matter.