I have to admit that I've taken to responding to the charity spam emails that I receive. You know, the ones in which some unfortunate sick man or woman -- who happens to be very wealthy but terminally ill, and happens to want to give away every penny of their money before they die, and has never met us -- knows we are just the one to help them despite the fact that they do not know our name or the first thing about us other than our email addresses.
I've taken this tack: I respond as if I take their claims seriously, as if I believe that they really are in such a situation. I suggest that, if they want to give their money to charity, it really might be more effective to contact a charity rather than to start mass-emailing complete strangers. And I wish them the best in their efforts to be generous. If I were in law enforcement, I would set up an email account and a fake bank account and respond to every one of these, just to see who was on the other end of the line.
What do you all do with your charity spam scams? I used to just use the 'delete' button or the 'report spam' button, but I'm fairly sure that the 'report spam' button has the same effect as the 'delete' button but is just labeled differently. I'm increasingly wanting to make a point to the actual human beings behind these scams. I'm not suggesting a counter-spam campaign -- that we all reply to each of these emails and have them sort through thousands of meaningless emails per day to give them a taste of their own medicine, as entertaining as that might be. But when it's obvious that a financial predator and liar is in my mailbox, I'm less and less willing to overlook that fact or accept the status quo and let fraudsters go unchallenged.
I wonder: what's our best Christian response?
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Sunday, October 12, 2008
Julian of Norwich: Challenging the comfortable life
It's a long story how I came to be reading Julian of Norwich -- and I am undecided as to whether her visions are trustworthy. All the same, I benefited from reading her Revelations of Divine Love.
Background for those who haven't read it: Julian had, in her youth, prayed for three gifts of God: a vision of the passion of Christ, a bodily illness to the point of death (which struck me as an unhealthy wish), and three "wounds": contrition, compassion, and an earnest longing for God.
The final of these three prayers draws me the most: the prayer for the three wounds. Of her three original prayers, this is the only one she offers without reservation. These particular three wounds have their roots in Scripture as wounds which the faithful might well desire. Contrition is portrayed as a wound in Psalm 51, where the psalmist says, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17). Compassion is portrayed as a wound in the letter to the Hebrews, where the author writes, “Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoner, and those who are mistreated as if you yourself were suffering” (Hebrews 13:3). The wound of an earnest longing for God is frequently portrayed in Scripture as the suffering of thirst (for examples, see Psalm 42:1-3, Psalm 63:1-3, Isaiah 44:3, Isaiah 55:1-2). As Julian meditates on the suffering of thirst in Christ’s passion, and as she envisions her own suffering so inseparably from Christ’s, it is possible that she had such passages of thirst in mind when for she discussed the wound of earnest longing for God.
As Christ’s wounds heal us, Julian seems to envision these three wounds as blessed wounds with the paradoxical power to heal. Psalm 51 supports this connection, as the well-known passage, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” is followed by the cry of contrition. Contrition is seen as the sacrifice for being cleansed of the stain of past sins – not an aloof regret but a broken heart over our sins. The wound of contrition challenges our attitudes towards our own sins, such as hard-heartedness, indifference, or willful ignorance of the depth of the problem of evil in our own lives.
Compassion is the wound from which love cannot desire to be healed and still remain faithful to the beloved. The wound of compassion challenges us that any concern for others which feels no wound is a lesser thing: cheaper and safer than compassion, and culpably timid. This type of wound challenges us on the comfortable distance we keep from suffering and on the convenience of any dissociations which justify the distance.
The earnest desire for God keeps us from being permanently satisfied with worldly things which have no permanence in themselves. Someone who is too satisfied with this life stops striving and searching for something more, and her life becomes closed. If there is no longing for something more, then there is little thought towards the future and little hope of things to come. The desire for God prevents us from adopting lesser hopes, from forgetting him from whom we come and to whom we return.
Julian’s early devotion in offering her prayer and her eventual decision to become a recluse are part of the same desire in her life: to reject the ways of the world in order to know and love God. She left the open life of the world for the enclosed life of a recluse, though her prayer indicates that she may have been mindful that a recluse was still a part of the world, just as susceptible to the temptation of complacency.
Of Julian’s original three prayers, we know the answers to two. We know whether she had her vision of the passion, and we know whether she had her bodily sickness. We do not know how she fared with her third request. Julian’s life and prayers ultimately challenge us whether satisfaction and comfort are worthy goals, or whether we would be better served to desire a few wounds.
Background for those who haven't read it: Julian had, in her youth, prayed for three gifts of God: a vision of the passion of Christ, a bodily illness to the point of death (which struck me as an unhealthy wish), and three "wounds": contrition, compassion, and an earnest longing for God.
The final of these three prayers draws me the most: the prayer for the three wounds. Of her three original prayers, this is the only one she offers without reservation. These particular three wounds have their roots in Scripture as wounds which the faithful might well desire. Contrition is portrayed as a wound in Psalm 51, where the psalmist says, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17). Compassion is portrayed as a wound in the letter to the Hebrews, where the author writes, “Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoner, and those who are mistreated as if you yourself were suffering” (Hebrews 13:3). The wound of an earnest longing for God is frequently portrayed in Scripture as the suffering of thirst (for examples, see Psalm 42:1-3, Psalm 63:1-3, Isaiah 44:3, Isaiah 55:1-2). As Julian meditates on the suffering of thirst in Christ’s passion, and as she envisions her own suffering so inseparably from Christ’s, it is possible that she had such passages of thirst in mind when for she discussed the wound of earnest longing for God.
As Christ’s wounds heal us, Julian seems to envision these three wounds as blessed wounds with the paradoxical power to heal. Psalm 51 supports this connection, as the well-known passage, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” is followed by the cry of contrition. Contrition is seen as the sacrifice for being cleansed of the stain of past sins – not an aloof regret but a broken heart over our sins. The wound of contrition challenges our attitudes towards our own sins, such as hard-heartedness, indifference, or willful ignorance of the depth of the problem of evil in our own lives.
Compassion is the wound from which love cannot desire to be healed and still remain faithful to the beloved. The wound of compassion challenges us that any concern for others which feels no wound is a lesser thing: cheaper and safer than compassion, and culpably timid. This type of wound challenges us on the comfortable distance we keep from suffering and on the convenience of any dissociations which justify the distance.
The earnest desire for God keeps us from being permanently satisfied with worldly things which have no permanence in themselves. Someone who is too satisfied with this life stops striving and searching for something more, and her life becomes closed. If there is no longing for something more, then there is little thought towards the future and little hope of things to come. The desire for God prevents us from adopting lesser hopes, from forgetting him from whom we come and to whom we return.
Julian’s early devotion in offering her prayer and her eventual decision to become a recluse are part of the same desire in her life: to reject the ways of the world in order to know and love God. She left the open life of the world for the enclosed life of a recluse, though her prayer indicates that she may have been mindful that a recluse was still a part of the world, just as susceptible to the temptation of complacency.
Of Julian’s original three prayers, we know the answers to two. We know whether she had her vision of the passion, and we know whether she had her bodily sickness. We do not know how she fared with her third request. Julian’s life and prayers ultimately challenge us whether satisfaction and comfort are worthy goals, or whether we would be better served to desire a few wounds.
Wednesday, October 08, 2008
De Facto Creed: What would yours look like?
Many churches confess the Nicene Creed, the only creed ever to be agreed upon in an ecumenical council. Yet most of those churches are not in fellowship. Consider this portion of the creed: "We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church." While the majority of Christian confess this, there are a few different takes on what it means. It seems to me the de facto creed of churches like mine (Lutheran) has something between the lines:
I hope one of the Roman Catholics will chime in with their comments on what their de facto creed would look like. As best I can tell, it would look more like this:
What about your church? When it comes to what we confess together and the differences that separate us, what is your de facto creed?
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church;That is probably close to our de facto creed, that the church and her mission is bound closely and uniquely to the original teaching of Jesus' apostles as their witness to him. Sola Scriptura, to a Lutheran, is the practical working out of the view that the apostolic church has apostolic teachings. Scripture is seen as the deposit of teachings that came from the apostles and therefore the guarantor of apostolic faith.
what we received from the apostles we pass along,
neither adding nor taking away.
I hope one of the Roman Catholics will chime in with their comments on what their de facto creed would look like. As best I can tell, it would look more like this:
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church,I hope I've done that view justice, and again would be glad to hear from the Roman Catholics around.
Infallible bulwark against which the gates of hell cannot prevail,
Whose authority is the Bishop of Rome.
What about your church? When it comes to what we confess together and the differences that separate us, what is your de facto creed?
Monday, October 06, 2008
On disasters in general, and the current disaster in particular
It was about a month ago that I spent a week watching as hurricane Ike rolled across the Gulf of Mexico and eventually took aim right at home. (No, Ike isn't the "current disaster"; the financial crisis is. I'll get there in a minute.) The news media was getting increasingly hysterical as the storm approached. I mean, if your average daily thunderstorm is Big News, and if O.J. Simpson merits a month of coverage, they have nowhere to go but off the scale whenever something important actually happens. So in the news media, fearmongering for profit as is customary at times like this, I even saw a headline that included the quote 'Evacuate or face certain death.' Now, not far from here down on the island where this quote may have applied, I think by the time the medical examiner released the counts, it was under 0.1% of the people who stayed who are known to have died. (While some are still missing, it too is a small portion of the people.) As they say one death is too many, of course, but "certain death" it was not. "Certain hardship", probably. "Certain disruption", no doubt. "Certain death?" Not really. The thing about all the overblown rhetoric is it got people so rattled that they risked panicking, and a panicked person is far more likely to do something stupid, or forget to do what they knew they should. A couple of the deaths during the storm were from people who had thought they would stay but then panicked and decided to evacuate during the storm. Bad idea, really, going out in weather like that, but panic will do strange things to your mind. If they hadn't decided they had to leave or die in the middle of the storm, those particular people probably would have survived.
The government declared the island uninhabitable while there was no electricity and no public water supply. No refrigeration, no air conditioning, only fire to cook on. Some of the old timers who had stayed just laughed: all our ancestors lived like this every day, they said. They were cooking outdoors and socializing and enjoying themselves, all in this "uninhabitable" place.
So about the current crisis -- and about any crisis in general. I'm not saying this isn't serious; time will tell. I'm saying that if it is serious, the last thing we want to do is get worked up about it. If the worst nightmare scenario comes true and western civilization falls, it's time to start a farm or an orchard or a biodiesel plant or something and rebuild. Take a few books -- and make sure some are just for fun. Take a musical instrument, maybe a few sheets of music, or maybe write a new song. In the ancient law of Israel, God commands more feasts than fasts. Celebration is not an optional part of life. Life is poorer without celebration than without an IRA. And the IRA never was the main thing to celebrate.
If things get shakier -- when things get shakier -- we need to be the steady ones for those around us. God is faithful. At the end of the day, that's enough for us.
The government declared the island uninhabitable while there was no electricity and no public water supply. No refrigeration, no air conditioning, only fire to cook on. Some of the old timers who had stayed just laughed: all our ancestors lived like this every day, they said. They were cooking outdoors and socializing and enjoying themselves, all in this "uninhabitable" place.
So about the current crisis -- and about any crisis in general. I'm not saying this isn't serious; time will tell. I'm saying that if it is serious, the last thing we want to do is get worked up about it. If the worst nightmare scenario comes true and western civilization falls, it's time to start a farm or an orchard or a biodiesel plant or something and rebuild. Take a few books -- and make sure some are just for fun. Take a musical instrument, maybe a few sheets of music, or maybe write a new song. In the ancient law of Israel, God commands more feasts than fasts. Celebration is not an optional part of life. Life is poorer without celebration than without an IRA. And the IRA never was the main thing to celebrate.
If things get shakier -- when things get shakier -- we need to be the steady ones for those around us. God is faithful. At the end of the day, that's enough for us.
Sunday, October 05, 2008
Whose sins are the worst?
I think, if the leader of a Christian worship service called, "Will the worst sinner please stand up?", that invitation ought to have the same effect as the phrase, "Let the congregation please rise." Everyone should come readily to his or her feet.
When we consider sin in general, it is easy to look around at society and see the unjust systems with obscene levels of sin on the national and international levels. In comparison with these outrageous sins, our own sins can be made to seem paltry, beneath notice, unworthy of mention. This is election season; repentance often is just a misnomer for mudslinging when the sins identified are always someone else's. It is tempting for us to discuss sin as if our own worst sin is to be inextricably trapped in an unjust system of someone else's making, tainted by someone else's sin which we loathe, blind to our own sins with which we are as unhealthily comfortable as a baby with a loaded diaper.
One pastor taught me this, which has blessed me for years: if ever I should be tempted to see sin as someone else's problem, to discuss sin but identify the worst of sinners as someone else, I have left behind grace. St Paul once identified himself as the worst of sinners. It would even be convenient for us to agree with Paul, not that "I" am the worst of sinners, but that he was the worst of sinners. St Paul had the right spirit and attitude on this: that the first sin we should condemn is always our own. As Jesus said, first we should get the log out of our own eyes. If our confession is, "Lord, I regret that I am caught up in someone else's sins and haven't done enough to stop other people -- you know, the detestable ones -- from sinning" -- then that is no confession at all. As Luther once said to Melanchthon: you have real sins and you are a real sinner; be glad, because real sins are the only kind of sins that God forgives.
When we consider sin in general, it is easy to look around at society and see the unjust systems with obscene levels of sin on the national and international levels. In comparison with these outrageous sins, our own sins can be made to seem paltry, beneath notice, unworthy of mention. This is election season; repentance often is just a misnomer for mudslinging when the sins identified are always someone else's. It is tempting for us to discuss sin as if our own worst sin is to be inextricably trapped in an unjust system of someone else's making, tainted by someone else's sin which we loathe, blind to our own sins with which we are as unhealthily comfortable as a baby with a loaded diaper.
One pastor taught me this, which has blessed me for years: if ever I should be tempted to see sin as someone else's problem, to discuss sin but identify the worst of sinners as someone else, I have left behind grace. St Paul once identified himself as the worst of sinners. It would even be convenient for us to agree with Paul, not that "I" am the worst of sinners, but that he was the worst of sinners. St Paul had the right spirit and attitude on this: that the first sin we should condemn is always our own. As Jesus said, first we should get the log out of our own eyes. If our confession is, "Lord, I regret that I am caught up in someone else's sins and haven't done enough to stop other people -- you know, the detestable ones -- from sinning" -- then that is no confession at all. As Luther once said to Melanchthon: you have real sins and you are a real sinner; be glad, because real sins are the only kind of sins that God forgives.
Friday, October 03, 2008
Christian Reconciliation Carnival
The Christian Reconciliation Carnival is up at Cross Reference. Stop by and give it a read. And a big THANK YOU to our host, Jeff, for once again doing a great job with the Carnival.
This Carnival's theme also has some beginning comparisons of different churches with different orders of service. I'm curious: what statement does your church make with its order of service?
The next Christian Reconciliation Carnival will be here at this blog at the end of the year. I am considering giving recognition to bloggers who have made noteworthy contributions to Christian reconciliation, the spirit of fellowship in conversation, clearly defining their beliefs (a prerequisite for assessing differences), or housecleaning within their own denomination. Anyone with thoughts as to other categories that might be good to recognize, please drop me a comment. And keep an eye out for those reconciliation-minded brothers and sisters in Christ. I'll be asking for nominations in the different categories later in the year.
This Carnival's theme also has some beginning comparisons of different churches with different orders of service. I'm curious: what statement does your church make with its order of service?
The next Christian Reconciliation Carnival will be here at this blog at the end of the year. I am considering giving recognition to bloggers who have made noteworthy contributions to Christian reconciliation, the spirit of fellowship in conversation, clearly defining their beliefs (a prerequisite for assessing differences), or housecleaning within their own denomination. Anyone with thoughts as to other categories that might be good to recognize, please drop me a comment. And keep an eye out for those reconciliation-minded brothers and sisters in Christ. I'll be asking for nominations in the different categories later in the year.
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
The restless will
It is not in the nature of the will to be free. The human will always finds something to wish, something to desire, something to support, a person or object or goal; or it always finds something to oppose, something to avoid. That is what the will does: it attaches our energies to directions and to goals, it focuses our thoughts and actions. There is, then, the restless will, the satisfied will or the dissatisfied will, but not the free will.
Look, for instance, and what the will can do to the ability to reason. This ability to think or to reason is an ability that we all have in some measure. But whenever we desire to have or to do something we ourselves think is wrong, our will gives our mind a very interesting task: tell us all the reasons why the thing we want is right. And the mind does as the will asks it to do. The mind is just as capable of working for a goal that is unreasonable as it is for something reasonable.
We can set our minds and actions on anything we want to; the problem lies in whether we can control those desires themselves. And if we cannot control ourselves as to what we want, then we are under the control of whatever is the object of our desires. Here is the root of addictions and ideologies, perfectionism and obsessions, lusts and fears and greed.
The will is an appetite, a hunger for satisfaction. And as each object satisfies or fails to satisfy, it is kept or discarded. The will always searches for what satisfies better, and its restlessness looks for the ultimate satisfaction.
Look, for instance, and what the will can do to the ability to reason. This ability to think or to reason is an ability that we all have in some measure. But whenever we desire to have or to do something we ourselves think is wrong, our will gives our mind a very interesting task: tell us all the reasons why the thing we want is right. And the mind does as the will asks it to do. The mind is just as capable of working for a goal that is unreasonable as it is for something reasonable.
We can set our minds and actions on anything we want to; the problem lies in whether we can control those desires themselves. And if we cannot control ourselves as to what we want, then we are under the control of whatever is the object of our desires. Here is the root of addictions and ideologies, perfectionism and obsessions, lusts and fears and greed.
The will is an appetite, a hunger for satisfaction. And as each object satisfies or fails to satisfy, it is kept or discarded. The will always searches for what satisfies better, and its restlessness looks for the ultimate satisfaction.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
