the original language of the christian scriptures has an interesting take on time. there are two words that refer to “time”. chronos refers to the passing of time - the concept of a chronological set of events. The fascinating word for time is kairos. kairos refers to “the right time”. it is used to proclaim the conviction that “the time is now”!
kairos is a way of living. it honours the present.
I say, if God can’t be found in the present, he won’t be found.
We may be tempted to go looking for God in other circumstances. We may be tempted to go and sit at the feet of some swami in India. but God (truth) is not more apparent or real in India or Tibet or any particular holy shrine. If you can’t find God where you are, you’re not going to find him in India!
We may be tempted to go looking for God in other times. We may read about the early church in the book of Acts and wish our lives away, desiring to rather have lived in that time. Or we could fantasize about some utopian future and wish our life away in favour of the dream. but God (truth) was no more present back then than in any other time in history. If you can’t meet with God today, you’re not going to suddenly awaken to intimacy tomorrow. Intimacy will begin today with the desire for it. For even “the desire to pray is prayer itself” (dom chapman)
We may be tempted to wait for a better season. We may be struggling with pain and despair, a period of depression or physical sickness, or suffering the loss and longings of bereavement. And we may be tempted to think that the invitations of Jesus are just too hard to be meant for now… We’ll wait for an easier time to begin to listen and follow. There will be no easier time. Nor a better time to begin to listen to the gentle invitations, intended not to constrain but to free, not to confound but to guide and heal…
the rules are always changing. the way we tell the stories about our lives is constantly evolving.
this morning i read a story about a woman who has significantly affected the current US presidential race. 61 year-old Mayhill Fowler - a financially contributing supported of the Obama campaign - joined a volunteer journalistic programme that gave many ordinary “untrained” people an opportunity to report on the campaign. the programme, initiated by The Huffington Post, is called “Off the Bus” and was designed to give ordinary people an a voice.
So when Mayhill Flower got into a private fund-raiser and recorded Barak Obama speaking about the bitterness of certain American communities, she was placed in an awkward position. She was disappointed that he sounded like those people that buy into generalisations about certain communities. But she had also followed him around and covered his campaign out of her own pocket (with no allowance from the Huff Post) - motivated by a desire to see him become the next president. She knew that reporting what he had said would hurt his campaign. She sat on the story for 4 days reflecting on what she should do. Finally she published the report and news quickly spread.
Was it journalistic integrity that won out?
Are the ethical rules of journalism changing? (she didn’t announce herself as a “journalist” but then she also isn’t being paid, so one could argue that she’s just an ordinary person - an ordinary person with a laptop and a wireless internet connection… increasingly powerful tools to influence history it seems…)
Should journalists announce themselves so that politicians are aware who they are speaking to? Or, is this revolution of information and the ordinary person’s voice making politicians more honest?
the thing that most impacted me about the story was that she was not paid - not even for her costs. She travelled around and reported at great cost - all at her own expense.
What motivates a person to do that?
What makes you do what you do? Do you love what you do? (would you do it even if they stopped paying you?)
pornography is an interesting “evil”. those who are quick to condemn it might miss the complexity of the “problem”.
are we agreed that nudity is not bad - not in and of itself. actually it’s quite nice.
are we also agreed that sexuality is a gift. a treasure. again, not bad, in and of itself.
(those who roundly condemn pornography without any pause to acknowledge the closely related components - sexuality, nudity etc - will probably further compact the damage that has been done to a generation of people who were so afraid of sexual sin that they were unable to embrace the gift of sexuality and struggled to enjoy pleasure.)
what makes pornography a tricky issue is that those that produce it are reflecting things that are not in and of themselves bad or wrong. in fact, the sexual revolution that has made porn so freely available is a movement that is based on a positive premise: sexuality should not be denied or suppressed.
nudity is beautiful.
sexuality - the suggestion of it - is attractive, even obsessive. it’s a strong force.
i believe that a holy spirituality will integrate a balanced and healthy affirmation of the body: exercise, eating, rest, and… a place for passionate and caring sexuality.
isn’t it fascinating how afraid we are of being known. we carry secret regrets and shame. some stories will never be told.
one of the scary things I was taught at Sunday school was that on the Last Day everything would be revealed - that God is going to put my whole (miserable) life up on a big screen for everyone to see. (probably like a drive-in screen. Data projectors weren’t invented back then…)
this terrified me.
at first.
slowly it’s dawned on me how liberating it will be to be known. sure, there will be embarrasment and shame. but then relief will quickly take it’s plac. no more hiding. no more secrets.
and honest relationships. if there are still people who will talk to me after the screening of Barry Goes Bananas, well then, they are truly gracious people!
ok, so move the idea of transparency into daily life. you get drunk on saturday night. you embarrass yourself. monday morning you tell your colleagues at work - that you a) got drunk and b) aren’t totally proud of your behaviour… maybe some shame, a little bit of embarrassment…
next thing someone who was at the party sms’s your colleague to say “you’ll never guess who totally embarrassed themselves at the party on sat night…”
your colleagues response is: ja, heard about it, he told us, and yip he’s pretty regretful…
gossip kind of loses it’s edge.
it’s dangerous and scary to value transparency (like i felt here) but maybe it’s more dangerous and threatening in the long run to NOT …
“owning” something doesn’t ensure that it can’t be lost or takne by someone else. and if someone else takes it, does it then belong to them?
do we own the land on which our house it built? what does it mean to say that the land is mine? obviously there is a sense in which the land belongs to me because there are soceity rules governing access to that land. i can restrict access based on my title-deed. but in the greater scheme of things, can I say that the land is mine? earth-quakes and floods tend to make fun of title-deeds.
and our bodies? human rights express the right of every person to safety and the freedom of their own body. i am fully supportive of the desire to support and protect those basic human rights. but ultimately those “rights” are again undermined by death. my body is “mine” until that confidence is undermined by sudden illness or death.
divorce reminds us to be cautious about speaking about “my wife”… we often speak like a person can own their spouse.
and children… when they leave home, they challenge our sense that they are ours.
i think we need a huge re-think on the matter of ownership.
(for our own well-being, as well as the well-being of people in the light of increasingly materialistic and consumeristic ways of doing life)
i am slow to learn. most of the people i bump heads with are probably not actually that far away from me (in the sense that we probably live out of very similar values and choices). the way we choose to express our convictions leads to conflict…
what has become clearer to me is that certainty produces bad fruit. good fruit does not grow from the tree of certainty. the spiritual quest for truth (if that is in fact the heart of the spiritual quest) is not a quest for certainty.
it’s a quest for righteousness. it’s a quest for the good.
“everything you know is wrong” is a provocative claim that U2 uses at their live concerts. it’s a statement that denies certainty. but it’s so certain about it’s claim that it ends up denying itself. but of course, the opposite can’t be true: that everything you know is right!
it’s a fantastic example of a statement that doesn’t have to be true to do it’s work. it’s precisely because it’s false, that it expresses the truth… that certainty, the quest for certainty, and all (ignorant and arrogant) claims of certainty are not only false, but they cause pain.
recently i stumbled on the bible’s alternative to certainty.
conviction
certainty is like perfection - it’s all encompassing conclusiveness is static. nothing more to be said, nothing more to be learned, nothing more…
conviction is attractive. it’s motivating. it’s energy. it’s the Spirit of God moving us out of our static complacency. we don’t have to know it all. we don’t have to nail it all down before we act. we act because we sense a conviction. we don’t even know that we are right about or conviction. we test our motive. we share the conviction with friends who care. we wait and we pray.
but in the end, without 100% clarity, without complete knowledge of the implications of the journey, without a clear picture of the road ahead…
We may be tempted to go looking for God in other circumstances. We may be tempted to go and sit at the feet of some swami in India. but God (truth) is not more apparent or real in India or Tibet or any particular holy shrine. If you can’t find God where you are, you’re not going to find him in India!
isn’t it fascinating how afraid we are of being known. we carry secret regrets and shame. some stories will never be told.
