A Principal Certainty

It was in 10th grade Chemistry class that I was first introduced to a not-well-understood phenomena that somehow captured my imagination. We were studying subatomic particles — you know, those electrons and protons and such — and we came upon a principle known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

This fella, Heisenberg, thought about what it would be like to “look” at an electron. Remember that to “look” at anything takes light. It takes a particle (or wave) of light bouncing off of an object and reaching your eyes in order to make out what that object’s shape, color, and texture is, as well as its movement and distance from you.

So these electrons, these very small particles that orbit the nucleus of an atom, are tricky creatures. The thing about these little guys is that to look at them you have to bounce light off of them, right? For most objects in our everyday world, a few light packets (what scientists call “photons”) bouncing off of it has very little effect on the object itself. But for electrons, which are so small and of such low mass, bouncing light off of them results in moving them. And so you may be able to “see,” say, how fast the electron was moving, but now you don’t know where it’s at, because you moved it by looking at it. Or, maybe you found out where it was in space, but now you’ve changed how fast it is moving and so you cannot predict where it will be in the next bit of time. In short, you can either know how fast the electron is moving or where it is in space, its position, but you cannot know both at the same time with complete certainty. The Uncertainty Principle.

The implications of the principle are now so widespread even in contemporary culture as to have bent it largely to its relativistic sentiment. Society has latched onto the uncertainty idea and applied it to areas that it doesn’t belong, like ethics (how somebody is supposed to live), epistemology (genuine knowledge or truth), and theology (our understanding of God). We have decided to say that no one can know anything for certain, including the knowledge of God, and that in the end it doesn’t matter how someone lives their life.

But I digress. The most interesting thing about Heisenberg’s idea is that it does so aptly apply to everyday lives, to the way we understand spiritual truth. Which really is to say, the way we understand ourselves and our daily business of living. Or not living, in many cases. The thing is, we have things that we want to say, that we need to say, that must be spoken. There are elements of reality that must have light shone on them. The difficulty happens when we shine the light on them, because suddenly they are not there anymore. Or maybe we are not there anymore. It is difficult to say for certain where someone may be in their spiritual lives, in their walk with God, and even in their place in the world, because once we find that spot, they have moved from it. Their momentum has changed. Or maybe we find out the direction they are headed, but once we discover that we realize that it has shifted ever so slightly because the vision they hold, the gravity that pulls them in to orbit their God, has altered their course once again.

Yet these things must be spoken, these things, as Kushner says, that are just “between the noise and the silence,” things that ultimately cannot ever really be said.

That is why Jesus cannot be spoken of from a distance. He demands we face Him. He demands we hear Him. He demands we eat and drink of His body and blood (Matthew 26:26-28). This is why God demands us to be either in intimate and personal relationship with Him, or not in relationship at all (Luke 11:23).

Kushner continues, “That’s what seekers of truth do. You devotedly, stubbornly, compulsively return again and again to that line between noise and silence, hoping against hope to find a way to say what finally cannot be said. If it could be said straight out, you wouldn’t have to try and find a better way to say it. If you couldn’t speak it at all, then you’d have to resort to such nonverbal modes of communication as art, or dance, or music. The thing about spiritual truth is that it wants to be spoken. It is too important, too transforming to be left alone in silence…. the problem is that once you speak or show the words to someone else, then both of you are different…To say what is just at the the outermost edge of what can be spoken is to deal with words that are so primary and dazzling that they are infinitely personal and intimate.” – Kushner

With all that is said and all that ever will (and must) be said regarding our lives, in the end there will be only one thing left to hear, and when spoken, that one thing — intimate and personal beyond all imagining — will ring out for the rest of eternity. That is one thing we can be certain of.

 

Postmodern Depression

Over the last few hundred years, popular culture in various ways has dictated to the mass populations of the world their idea of the way things were, the way things worked, and the ultimate truth in life. Scientific study sprouted out of a new-found way of discovering and disseminating tangible reality, and empirical research allowed for information-gathering and analysis. The Age of Enlightenment and the Age of Reason grew wildly during this era of modernity, and the result was a vary rationalistic, intellectual, information-driven and perfunctory way of seeing the world. The heart as the Hebrews understood it (as the central source of a person’s life and personality and being) was reduced in the West to a warehouse of emotions, something to overcome and control with the mind and reason. As humanism developed, the goal of the sciences eventually changed from learning more of God through his general revelation in the natural world to dethroning God all together, devising ways of thinking that were completely secular and detached from heart of the universe (like psychoanalysis, for example).

A simple example of this is William Congreve’s play “The Way of the World” that was first performed in London in 1700. As a “Restoration Comedy,” it contrasts the lowly, awkward, backward, and unsophisticated ways of a country bumpkin or Puritan with the courtly and materialistic bourgeoisie. It told its audience of the day that there is a particular way to live, and that way can be known and modeled.

Skip ahead a couple of hundred years. Largely in reaction against the absolutist and concrete view of the world (largely unbiblical, by the way), modern culture in the West began adopting what we now call a “postmodern” worldview. At an extreme, postmodernism embraces relativism in all aspects of life, assuming that nothing can be completely and fully known, that there is not a single coherent truth to anything, and that one way is just as good as another.

It is easy to see how this could run frighteningly contrary to a biblical understanding of life and everything relevant to it: God, our souls and hearts, our roles with the Lord in the world, the ministry of Jesus for us, and even the way the church operates in the world at large. And, indeed, it has affected the church in the West. I would love to think that I, personally, am immune to the effects of the culture. For a long time, I’ve believed that to be true. After all, Peter says that the church is not peripheral to the world but that the world is peripheral to the church (Ephesians 1:20, The Message).

But something has been nagging me lately about the way I view the things of the Kingdom of God. It started some months ago when I began detesting a biblical teacher for his hard-nosed “right way-wrong way” approach to an understanding of ourselves and of God. He would go so far as to lay out certain ways of living that were right and holy and others that were not. And I don’t mean morality that we often think of, detached from full living (the dichotomy itself is in part a product of modernity). I mean that there are certain things that we need to learn as we develop and grow in our manhood or womanhood as people of God, and certain things then that we should be (and are given freedom to be) doing as we go. I found myself balking at it thinking, “Well, that’s his take on it, maybe, but why does it have to be mine?”

Listen to that statement. Only a couple of weeks ago I started getting a bad taste in my mouth when I thought it. Why? Because it reeks of relativism, of the thought that there are many ways to go, even when we’re talking about God, or that no one person has any claim on the truth in the matter.

And then I encounter Jesus all over again, and that profound answer to my pride and conceit: “I am the Way” (John 14:6). There is a way, one way to live, and that is with Jesus ever before me, walking closely in his steps and filled to the full with his Spirit. There are certain things to learn along the way, things about life and love and faith, things about my own heart and the heart of God. There are certain truths that flow like tributaries from the ocean of Truth himself, that is, Jesus, the full expression of God.

This is such a scant and incomplete and maybe incoherent thought, but I am brought back to a reality that there is a way, and that that way is learn-able. I can have the life Jesus promises because He has come to give it to me and reveal the way to grow it and grow in it. There is a path to walk, and His word is a light for me to find it (Psalm 119:105).

As an old man, John the disciple reflected on the life of Jesus his friend and Lord. He thought about his first encounters with Him, and the effect that Jesus had on the rest of his days and on the lives of so many. He summed up this effect with these words: “In him was life, and that life was the light of men” (John 1:4). There is a path, a way, and it is shown us in the life of Jesus. He is the Way.

 

Jehovah Rafa – God the Healer

Christ was sent into the world to heal the broken hearted. -D.L. Moody

On hearing this, Jesus said to them, ‘It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.’ -Mark 2:17

So many we know are hurt, so many ill, so many torn to shreds by the affect of the Fall, by sin, by the work of the Evil One. We are a fractured people, all of us. We are all of us the broken-hearted, in need of healing.

But the modern approach to healing (since the era of “modernity“) is to try to fix only the outer shell. It’s like taking a truck that’s been totaled to an autobody place. They may be able to fix the external body for awhile, but the engine (the heart) and the frame (the soul) may remain a wreck. Eventually, the truck will be back in due to more damage. The bent frame will force it back into the ditch, or the damaged engine may throw a piston through the hood. Or, the outer shell will be unfixable because the frame or engine is protruding out of the truck and it will be deemed “terminal.” “There’s nothing more we can do.” The thought of opening the hood and dealing with core structure of the frame doesn’t even enter their minds.

The church, instead of being “central to the world and the world peripheral to the church,” has taken on this incomplete reality and has largely approached people in the same way in our era, seeing them mostly as body only and not recognized, not really, not in practice, the soul or heart. That is why therapy and psychological sciences have only been around for the past 150 years or so. Before then, the church largely took care of the soul. For all his loony-ness, Freud at least recognized a gaping hole in the culture’s ontology and began dealing with the unseen, deeper reality of the soul (what he termed the “subconscious” and mostly misunderstood and misrepresented, but at least tried to recognize.)

We now have the “medical models” in the healing professions that seek to diagnose a “disorder” and seek to fix it, typically through medication. It’s a product of our culture, really. We are used to television shows that wrap up in an hour, to microwavable meals that are ready to eat in 2 minutes, to quick-drying glue and instant messages and packages that arrive to us expediently. The thought of an involved process is not new, but it is neither desired. And why is that?

To speak of process is really to speak of a journey, and in terms of the healing of our souls, it is a lifelong process. It is a journey, really, of becoming. Becoming whole, becoming holy. Jesus has provided us all we need for this life and all we need to become fully healed and fully whole, just like Jesus is (Philippians 4:19).

That is why the labels we use to identify “disorders” and those with them are so often unhelpful and even harmful. “He is bipolar.” “She has attention deficit disorder.” For one, it implies that the treatment must call for the use of drugs, which implies that the problem is biological. Second, it sets the person with the condition like a post is set is concrete — it solidifies the two together, making it rather hopeless for the one with the problem. Usually their best hope is to find a medication that will “work” for them to “fix the problem.” But the real problem is that the problem is not usually resolved, and the deeper issues of the heart not addressed, brought up, and exposed to the Light of day so that God may bring healing and wholeness to that person. The condition you see is always, always, a symptom of a broken heart due to the fallen world, sin, the work of the Evil One, or a combination of the three, which is usually the case.

I am taking a graduate-level psychopathology class in which we study the various mental disorders that are detailed in the DSM-IV, the psychiatrist’s handbook and bible. I need to know the labels and the disorders listed here simply because it’s the terminology that’s used and so many have been diagnosed with these various illnesses. And make no mistake, these problems are real, for sure. It is what we do with them, how we go about discovering the real problems and treating them that is lacking.

This is why Neil Anderson says*,

Secular psychology makes sense if all you are doing is studying the nature of fallen humanity. Scientific research studies and categorizes flesh patterns and with the intention of helping people cope. The goal of secular counseling is to explain people’s difficulties based on their life experiences, help them make better choices, and learn to live a more responsible life. They would need to relay on their own strengths and resources and the support of others, and take medication when deemed appropriate. The is the best the natural person can do if there is no gospel.

I promise you, attention deficit disorder is not the core issue. It never is. I know of a high school student who has been on Ritalin since he was 5 years old. Why? Because his mom is a single mother, trying her hardest to balance full-time work with being the full-time and only parent for her children. He was an active child, a creative one. The quick fix? Put him on medication that slows him down, keeps him calm, keeps him controlled. A pseudo-parent. He is now 17 years old and has no idea how to be a man, no idea what to do with the manly and creative energy and passion of his heart. Not only is he broken-hearted — no doubt due in part to the absence of a father in his life and now to the reality that there is no man around to lead him into true godly masculinity and manhood — he has doctors and other adults around him telling him that his real problem is that he is too active, too “ornery” and wild. Too wild?! But he is a young man! Wildness is his very nature! That is being medicated out of him, all the while the wounds go unaddressed and untreated.

Psychopathology is another way of talking about psychological abnormalities. But what is “normal,” anyway? Seriously. Conformity to a standard? What standard? What one culture defines as normal is viewed as outside the range of the average acceptable behavior by another. It seems to be culturally defined. Jesus definitely did not fit what the culture of the time viewed as “normal.” For this, he was misunderstood, rejected, thought to be “out of his mind” (Mark 3:21), and of course eventually crucified. In our day, he probably would have been diagnosed with disassociative identity disorder, fancying Himself to be Immanuel and all. He would have been placed in an asylum, given electroshock treatments, and dosed up on high amounts of reality-altering drugs.

But “normal” is not so relative as we would like to think. A friend of mine had a brilliant definition to the term. He said “Normal is the image of God displayed in His people.” The “standard” of conformity is to His image! Jesus, as the “image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), is the ultimate standard and definition of “normal”! He is the one we are to become like. It is His image we are to bear. It is His image, His heart, His attributes, that we are growing by grace to inherit, to express, to extend even unto “the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). We are on a journey to becoming like God. We are being “fully trained” (Luke 6:40) in righteousness, which is to say, in full living (John 10:10). He is showing us the Way.

Do you see how that definition of normality is so hopeful? It is because all the ways we are abnormal, all the ways in which we miss the mark, are redeemable. The healing and restoration of the broken places of our hearts is the very mission of this Intimate Savior (Luke 19:10; Isaiah 61:1). If I have problems that point toward something like attention deficit, maybe it is because I have lacked a father in my life. Well, let me be introduced to the Father of all fathers! If I have issues that relate to obsessive-compulsive disorder, let the deep waters of my heart be explored, the broken pieces found and set back together, that I may become “whole and holy” by the love of God (Ephesians 1:3, The Message).

I am not trivializing the problems we face or trying to over-simplify them. They can be horrific and quite complicated. I’m actually recognizing them as much deeper and tragic than what we typically believe. But without the gospel, all we can offer is management of the problem, or a “once an addict always an addict” mindset. We will not be able to treat them without the Healer Himself, the One who has come that we might have life to the full. Nor am I saying that medicine is a bad treatment option for some “mental” disorders (are they not “heart” disorders?). I am saying that it is not enough, and it never will be. The deep ministry of Jesus to our hearts is a grace, a gift. The Spirit that we are given is a Counselor, and He has come to stay. God must think that we need a lot of therapy. How great it is He has come (John 16:7). And how great it is God has given us men and women with compassionate insight and godly wisdom (Proverbs 20:5) that through their help as well we might discover and bring to light the lost and broken places of our hearts, that they might be fully healed, made whole, and set free.

Neil Anderson continues,

Without the gospel, the best we can do is help those with mental health problems learn to cope, live more responsibly and try by human effort to abstain from negative thinking and behavior. Secular programs admonish their clients to, “Work the program, the program works.” But the best programs in the world, including Christian ones, can’t set anyone free, and good works can’t either. Only Christ can set us free. The goal in recovery has to be more than abstinence. If that were the goal, then Ephesians 5:18 would read, “Be not drunk with wine, therefore stop drinking.” The answer is to be filled with the Spirit, because where the “Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Corinthians 3:18).**

*Found at http://ficminternational.org/themessage/page3.html

**Found at http://ficminternational.org/themessage/page5.html

 

Too Close for Comfort

O LORD, our Lord,
how majestic is your name in all the earth!
You have set your glory
above the heavens.When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,
the son of man that you care for him?

-Psalm 8:1, 3-4

Can you imagine what the enormous black sky, peppered with a million bursts of light, must have looked like to David as he peered into it? No other lights to compete with its glory. No light pollution to drown out its splendor. The only noises those of midnight bugs and bats and prairie animals. He is overcome as he beholds its magnificence. His heart explodes with wonder as he ponders it all. Its vastness. Its beauty. That God had time and creativity and enormity enough to create it all – not just once upon a time, but this night, right then where David was. Unique. Never again would he behold it exactly as it was then. Everything would move. All would be different the next evening as God set out again to lavish his universe with His creative passion, expressing Himself to his children, pursuing their hearts. David got it. In this moment, he was captured by this God-of-Love. He recognized God’s pursuit and wooing, and collapsed into it.

“What is man that you are mindful of him?” he asks as his jaw drops and his breath stops in his throat. “How could you even have time for man?” his heart wonders. And yet… And yet… God not only had time for David, but he did it all for him, to have his heart.

But for our modern, sophisticated, educated minds it is too much to think that God would create such a lavish universe just for us. Sadly, we come up with anything we can to distance ourselves from His passion: scientific reasoning to explain away His creations, stuffy academic postulations to push back His passion; equations and formulations to eradicate His desire. Explain it away. Keep our distance. We are “enlightened” to learn that the earth is not the center of the universe at all and translate it to mean that we are not the center of God’s heart or longing or the point of His creation. We become insignificant specks of particles on an insignificant planet held in place by the awesome force of gravitation (not the power of God Himself) in an insignificant corner of one of a limitless number of universes. To translate, it means that we have become not the center of a cosmic battle, an invasion, a rescue, a Redemption, but meaningless and pointless accidents in a sea of atoms and subatomic particles.

We come up with our scientific posits because the Reality is too much to bear, much like those in C.S. Lewis’s The Weight of Glory who cannot bear to walk upon the grasses of heaven as they are because the blades are so substantive, and they only shadowy wraiths, that they puncture their feet and cause great pain. They are unwilling to grow in their soul-substance by standing in the blinding light of the unbearable glory. We rearrange the order of the Psalm to read not “what is man that God is mindful of him,” but “what is God that man is mindful of him?”

I understand. I do the same thing. I often wake and rush off to my checklist of things to do rather than stand or kneel in the Presence of the Creator. I dabble in distraction rather than confide or be confided in by this Friend (see Psalm 25:14), to know His deep heart. I work to secure my place in the world and with the people around me rather than revere the Lord God (revere = adore, applaud, treasure, worship, wonder at, fall for, cherish, embrace, cleave to, enjoy, desire, grab a hold of, run after). I suspect we all do this. The disciples did. On the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter, James, and John witnessed the astounding glory of Jesus revealed. Jesus took off his veil, so-to-speak, and Moses and Elijah were there, too, in their full glory. Peter and the other two were terrified and fell face down on the ground. Peter told Jesus that they could erect three shelters, one each for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses (Matthew 17:4). Tents, in other words. Tabernacles. Something to hide their blinding glory from the three disciples. It was too much for them. God honored their fear and sent a cloud to veil the glory from them. He will, it seems, only give us as much of Himself as we can bear.

But what happens when we pause and really consider even the work of creation? Spend half an hour doing nothing at all except staring out into the starry night. Don’t try to discover the constellations or name the objects you see; just let yourself be pierced. What do we discover when we do? That God is glorious. Copernicus gave us the heliocentric model of the solar system, that is, that the sun is the center and we orbit around it. We took that to mean that we were not the center of anything at all. That is where we got it wrong. Deadly wrong.

We are the center of more than we think.

Why would the earth need to “tremble before Him” (Psalm 96:9)? Why would “the heavens rejoice” and the “fields be jubilant” and the “trees of the forest sing for joy” (v. 11 & 12, 1 Chronicles 16:33)? Because the Lord “comes to judge… the peoples in his truth.” Or, in the words of Eugene Peterson’s Message paraphrase, “He comes to set everything right on earth.” Because of His redemption and rescue of His people… because He has set His heart on bringing us home (see Isaiah 44:23). Everything that God does is to bring us back to Himself (see Ecclesiastes 3:14).

God has made us for Himself. Adam and Eve lived in glorious union with God. But God’s enemy and ours came and stole God’s love from Him. Adam and Even fell from grace – that is, they fell from God. And now, a cosmic battle has ensued in which God has come with fierce intention to free us back for Himself. We are the center of a great cosmic battle. All of the earth is to shout to God with joy, you see, because He is powerful enough to cause His enemies to “cringe before Him” (Psalm 66:3) and to win us back from them. He is not only a restless Lover in pursuit of the bride that His enemy took from Him (that’s us), but He is also a Warrior with enough courage and power and strength to win us back. He will find us. He will win us. He will have us. Jesus coming, dying, and rising again has proven that much.

What is man that God is mindful of Him? Man is in fact God’s whole desire. His whole heart is bent on us. On you and me. Intimacy and communion and the adventure of His love is the whole purpose of God for us. That is the purpose for which we have been called (Romans 8:28).

God will give us as much of Himself as we will allow. Jesus is the glory of God fully revealed to us (Colossians 1:15). Through Him we can approach even God’s throne with confidence and boldness, without fear or hesitation or reserve (Hebrews 4:16). We can come back to our Lover. We can come back home. This is the invitation of God to us through Jesus. This is our place. This is the beginning of our life — the adventure of walking with God.

 

From the Silence, Speak

  

I forgot the wisdom
of the poem is silent wisdom,
the space between letter
and letter.

-from I Forgot by Arnon Levy

Max Picard in The World of Silence says of the Hebrew language that its architecture is vertical. “Each word sinks down vertically column-wise into the sentence. In languages today we have lost the static quality of the ancient tongues. The sentences become dynamic.” His next statement is a piercing metaphor for most of our lives today, “Every word and every sentence speeds on quickly to the next. Each word comes more from the preceding word than from the silence, and moves on more to the next word in front of it than to the silence…”

The same could be said of our lives. The same could also be said too often of those who speak for or to us, our pastors, our talk-show hosts, our news anchors, our politicians.

In the recent elections, how do we know who is who? Who stands where? How do we know when all we hear in the media is what this one says about that and what this one thinks about that one. Everyone speaks, and everyone speaks loudly, clamoring for attention and votes, and so no one is heard. It is like the clanking and clattering of dishes shattering on the floor of a restaurant by an overwhelmed waiter spilling his server tray that deafens friends, even if temporarily, to the conversation they went there to seek. Why is it that a quiet beachfront picnic or an evening over candlelight is more romantic for two in love than a night out at a carnival or a club? It is because there is silence, and in that silence each can hear the heartbeat of the other.

No wonder God often speaks in a whisper, and that in the deafening crowd of the streets no one will hear Him (Matthew 12:19).

Henry David Thoreau said it well. The more we are deafened by the drone and buzz of the noise around us, “we go more constantly and desperately to the post office [or to check our email],” but “the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while…. Read not The Times,” he finishes, “read The Eternities!” Dallas Willard summarizes Thoreau’s thoughts by stating that “conversation degenerates into mere gossip and those we meet can only talk of what they heard from someone else.” While I’m not sure I wholeheartedly agree with Eleanor Roosevelt’s thought that “great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people,” it is true that the mind and the heart itself withers by the constant sounds around and eventually almost entirely disappears, swallowed up by the life, or what we perceive as life, happening in a maddening speed around us.

James warned us to be slow to speak (James 1:19), and I think this is why. It must be from the silence and what we encounter there that words are formed in us – the tragedy of that silence and the weight of it, and the comedy that ensues when we actually hear from God, and the jaw-dropping, heart-stopping reality of what it is He actually tells us.

The Israeli poet Yona Wallach wrote to “Let the words work on you… they’ll enter you, they’ll come inside… let the words act on you, do with you as they wish.” We would do well to remember that is was out of the Word that Jesus came to dwell among us (John 1:1), a Word that the world didn’t recognize (John 1:10).

And how could it? The days of Jesus were tumultuous ones, no less so than in our present Western, modernistic society. It was only those willing to be done with the grasping to be heard and actually walk with Jesus who would later have the authority to speak, whose words would echo and reverberate from the empty hearts of millions that would follow in the centuries to come. No wonder the Psalmist tells us to “be still and know that I am God” (46:10), using for the word “still” one that means to sink down, to leave alone, to withdraw.

Last week God brought me to Mort Walker trail, a path that meanders through some woodlands in a conservation area not far from where I work. While there, I wrote this in my journal:

I am seeking the presence of the Father more immediate and intimate than I normally experience day-to-day within the noise and busyness of life. It’s in the silence that I am given “ears to hear,” as I have asked Jesus to give me, and the solitude beckons me into the secret place with Him. It always has.

I feel like He had this prepared for me like a secret picnic, a “table prepared for me in the presence of my enemies.” And here, in the deepest gratitude, surrounded by groaning creation as a reminder of what is to come – the feast of the wedding day – I eat. I dine. I linger here with the Wild Lover who wants me not to have him but to be haved by Him, who desires not that I possess but that I be possessed – with Him, with His life – and insobeing remain in Him and He in me.

If I am to speak, then it will be from that place and from that place alone. For it is the place of love, and the Source and Fount of my life.

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