Dancer in the light

When I was 10 years old, I was a dancer, a real dancer. The New Orleans Cerebral Palsy Center decided to experiment with dancing as a therapeutic tool, and I was selected to be the test subject. So every Saturday for about 2 months I went downtown to the Arthur Murray dance studio to learn how to dance the waltz, the cha – cha, and the tango (!) with my instructor. I thoroughly enjoyed it and felt like I was good at it, the way confident 10 year-olds feel good at everything they do. Then, one Saturday afternoon I got all dressed up, went to the studio, and we went through our now-routine moves, only this time we did so before a ballroom full of people – doctors, physical therapists, and a TV crew, which was there to broadcast on the Saturday evening news the promising potential of dance therapy as a fun alternative to rigorous (and exhausting) physical therapy for increasing flexibility (and decreasing spasticity).  I remember the camera lights; I remember the vastness of the ballroom dance floor fringed with dressed up adults; I remember just how easy it was and knowing that I was doing everything right, spinning around like a real dancer. On that afternoon, I was a Star.

Sometimes I need God.

hope

The Bible is a collection of writings documenting man's search for God and for responses from the biblical God, who throughout recorded life has resisted communicating with humanity, as though history is a long game of endurance. If this is true, then the lesson to humanity is that it must endure, we must all endure : thus so is Hope defined.

Christianity is wrong if it seeks to assert that its scriptural writers, and the stories they tell, are privileged over all others' quests for God. Christianity has a critical truth to convey, albeit not the specific truths, through the specific stories, chosen and insisted upon by the church :  that men can have a part of the divinity they seek. Jesus is God in the same way that righteous men throughout history, and now, are God. Maybe the concept of life lived in harmony with the principles announced by Jesus IS God.

Faith that a life lived righteously is its own reward; such is the meaning of salvation.  Endurance of this faith, through endurance of life, requires but also provides the hope that through the lives we live in the way we live them we will learn, know, some of the joy which comes with realizing, and accepting, that our lives contribute to the body of goodness and beauty in life - natural and human righteousness - that is God.  

faith in the face of forsakeness

Faith in the face of forsakeness : that is what establishes the faithfulness of Christ. This alone is grounds for concluding that we must do likewise if our faith is to be real, and not the offer of a quid pro quo. But it is hard to do. We want to know why, and never do know. It takes courage to believe in a God who offers no answers except his own forsakenness. Faith has power if it is girded with courage, to stand at the abyss and to not know why, to suffer for no known reason. Except to realize that it is only in those conditions and with no assurances that faith will be rewarded, that one is acting in obedience to the call of faith. “The quality of our suffering determines our faithfulness”.

I hated God, was angry at God, because if I accept the presupposition that God acts in the world, then I had to conclude that he was acting against me. The biggest challenge I think is to come to the truth that faith in Christ is not real faith if it’s about us, to any extent.

As for the objection that what is described is a one-side relationship, a one-sided conversation, a shouting into the cave without answer : The nature of the God that is the object of faith, at least the faith described, is of a God who creates this world, all of it including its frustrations and inequities, who bestows the faith that requires the courage to shout and hear only echoes, but who has intervened in history in a way that allows us to reconcile ourselves with our lives only by recognizing that we are not shouting to an empty cave. And if we listen in faith, without expectation that we will hear anything, we do hear God, not shouting back but speaking his presence even as he hides it.

A God who shouts back is not a God. It is, as Barth said, merely humanity shouting in a louder voice. And shouting with an expectation of a two-sided conversation is not faith, it’s a solicitation for a quid pro quo.

still

As Papillon said, "hey, you bastards, I'm still here". Still trying to get it right; still trying to figure it, and me, out; still failing. But still trying.
We are, among other things, the collection of choices we make, to the extent that we can claim to be something of the persons we think we are or ever wanted to be. But maybe freedom, the freedom of self and therefore also of self-knowledge, amounts to no more than knowledge of necessity. That necessity is providence. Knowledge of it, even if only dimly, is wisdom.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving now rivals Christmas as my favorite day. Another of the many regrets emerging with advancing years is that I did not have at a younger age the depth of gratitude I now have for the wealth of blessings with which God equipped me for life and which I recognize now as present moment-to-moment.

For most of my life I took it as a badge of honor, and as the only responsible way to live, to put upon myself the harshest interpretation of whatever situation I was in. To me, to do so was smart, because if I could figure out a way to cope with the worst that could happen, then I could survive. This was not simply "glass half-empty" psychology, because more often than not what I reckoned as worst-case scenario is usually what happened : life has been one continuous "how do I get across the kitchen, how do I get to where Louis is standing over there" challenge, the whole way. By and large, this approach has served me well, because I have overcome the challenges, for the most part, and that's because I have seen things accurately, harsh and difficult though they may be. Indeed, it's been when I've expected more, when I've expected life to be easier, when I've made the big mistakes. So time and again, it's been back to the bunker whenever I've been stricken after venturing too far away from it, having thought "the war is over and I can come out now".

But living life and surviving life are different. Proceeding with a survival mentality produces only survival, not life. The cost of that mentality is to see the goal of life as staying at "zero", not rising above it. Of course, I've known these platitudes for years, but I did not know how to transcend what I've satisfied myself is indeed a realistic perception of the world and my place in it. I tried "glass half-full", I even tried throwing off concern for survival (with disastrous results, naturally). It's only now that I am coming to realize that it's not my view of reality that's been wrong, or my psychology for being in the world, that needed to change. Rather, it's the objects of perception, even the objects of my psychology, which should have been and is now different : instead of seeing life subjectively as it affects me, I should have been seeing life and what's important in it, as both subject and object. I.E., I am slowly learning that seeing life as it is, not only as it effects me or my welfare, is the necessary predicate to becoming aware of deep value of what is good in life - people, things, that are not me, and which have the capacity to bring joy to life in themselves, independent of and without the filter of me as subject.

Thusly presented, I see that I am surrounded by blessed people who bring joy to my life to a degree I have not always appreciated; I see that my life is good; I see that I have been given, now, the grace of God to realize my good fortune before it's too late or not at all. And what that means is that I am glad to be me, glad to see things the way I do, content. Thanksgiving, indeed.

the sound of humanity

If the sound of Mozart's music is "a parable of the realm of God's free grace" as Karl Barth thought, maybe even with a touch of the angelic to it, then Beethoven's is the sound of the response of humanity to the reality of God.