Faith Venture

Ancient philosophers going back more than 6,000 years thought about a lot of stuff but mostly about nature and about how to live a better life.

Today’s professional philosophers are mostly professors and mostly write to each other arguing ever finer distinctions about things that don’t really matter. Except maybe when ideas from Descartes or Derrida filter into the common consciousness denying the provenance of the spirit.

These people, and all of us really, often get caught in a loop. We get lost in an idea about truth or good or how people are treating us or how we feel. We get stuck in a loop of thoughts and emotions. If we loop too much, we’ll wind up in the office of a mental health professional.

In programming, we often program a for-next loop. For i=1-10 do this, i=1, do, next i. Then we forget to say what happens when we hit 10, so it just goes back to 1 and starts again. And your computer hangs up. (Or you dump a lot of granular product on the floor like a client of mine did once.) Lost in the loop can have dire consequences.

Observers and thinkers across many cultures and millennia have told us–break the loop, intentionally divert your thinking, take a deep breath and slowly exhale.

Try the 4-7-8 breath. Inhale through the nose and count 4. Hold the breath and count 7 at the same pace. Exhale slowly and completely counting to 8 at the same pace. Three of those should bring calm and break the loop.

This is then the time when we can bring our attention to the spirit and remind us of our first principles–love God and love our neighbor. Both Jesus and the Apostle James tell us that means action–finding a way to serve. Small ways or bigger ways. Just serve. Then you are out of the loop and onto the way.

Seth Godin’s podcast enters my podcast app Overcast every Wednesday morning. He always talks for 10 to 15 minutes on a topic and then answers questions from listeners. A question came in (you go to the podcast site, click a link, and audio record your question, it’s not live) “What’s it all for?”

This question proved timely for me. For the 33rd year I am doing a project. I started as a volunteer to provide a service for a relative small group. And it grew. As it grew, people paid me. It’s vacation money. But it has become increasingly difficult and time-consuming. I have worked about three hours per day since the first of July and feel no progress.

What’s it all for?

It was time for that question. It’s a motivational question. Or one that suggests it’s time to quit. In my case, I help more than 2,000 high school students participate in a sport. Such activities should be an excellent path to health and personal growth for those young people.

What’s it for? It is a means of serving others.

If this is so and since my mind never ceases in wandering and wondering, what is being a follower of Jesus for?

Is it just so that I can tell others? Note: in the US, we can say that with impunity or at worst suffer a sarcastic comment. In many other locations in the world such a statement can lead to physical harm or even death.

Maybe it is less telling others what I am and more about being the kind of person who does what Jesus taught us to do to truly live–love our enemies, share our clothes with those in need, feed the prisoner, provide healing for the sick when we can, encourage the discouraged. In that case, what’s it for? Service. Showing Jesus, not telling. Showing lasts. Telling can be like the wind–here and then gone.

For you, what’s it all for?

Even as a youth, I thought that the Christian church should teach a more practical life. This from a guy who was reading philosophy and theology by age 14 (no wonder I never had friends!).

We would be told what we should do but not so much how. Pray, they said. I felt like the disciples. Teach me how. Jesus had answered with what we call The Lord’s Prayer. Sermons have been preached on the meaning of each phrase. Nothing on the practice.

I offered to teach prayer. Six or eight people signed on. I wanted to teach how to pray. They wanted a discussion class on theories of prayer.

Perhaps that’s why I am drawn to the Stoics. Not a religion, they were philosophers of the practice of life. When you arise in the morning, how do you actually live that day.

Ryan Holliday, writing in his Daily Stoic, said,

A successful day for a Stoic is simple. It’s not about having made more money. Or having gotten more famous, or dazzled more people with your accomplishments. It’s whether or not you got better. Specifically, it’s whether you got better at life—more prepared for the troubles, for the temptations, for the opportunities that lay ahead. As Seneca wrote to Lucilius, the prescription for this philosophy is simple: “Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes, as well and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.”

Ryan Holliday

Prayer today can be breathing with awareness to calm and focus the mind and body. Service results from awareness of other people we meet and we see a way to help–even if it’s opening a door or picking up a dropped object. Worship can be a conversation. Those indeed would lead to a successful day as we reflect on the evening examen.

Evagrius Ponticus became esteemed for his thinking and teaching because he could see so deeply into the soul.

He taught that there were two peaceful states of the soul. We might use a different word that soul today. Some may not even know of its existence within them. Some modern philosophers of the past 100 years or so have even denied its existence. You can deny it, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. You just haven’t faced it, yet.

One peaceful state comes when we put on humility, not thinking of ourselves as the greatest, and realize our guilt.

Another when we put aside pride recognizing the drives and passions that control us–the ancients called these demons, but we moderns have tried to sanitize and even glorify them. Whatever we might call them, they exist. And they drive us as restless and unhappy beings seeking pleasure and relief in all the wrong places. At least until we lose the pride and drive the passions and desires out.

The Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible and the religious writing of many cultures agree on this most basic yearning of humans–to find that state of peace in the soul from whence we can truly begin to live.

Anger is like a hot coal you are holding in your hand waiting to throw at someone.

It ruins your day. You are burned. Your personality eventually corrupts into mean, vengeful, unwelcoming.

It feeds chemicals throughout your body that destroys sensitive organs.

There exists a righteous anger that motivates action to oppose oppression. But that must be channeled or it will also burn you more than the opponent.

Anger pervades much of our world today. Let us avoid picking up that coal.

Upon reflection at the end of the day, was that day a fruitful one (as in bearing good fruit) or a fruitless one (like the fig tree that Jesus cursed)?

Some days just seem to click from one thing to the next. Other days I feel adrift, unable to concentrate, wandering to the kitchen for a snack, checking outside, picking up and discarding a book. Even going to low as to check Facebook.

What is the difference?

Discipline.

I have made a list of things to do. I chop off the first one early. The tone for the day is set.

Other days I allow something to disrupt my thinking, and I drift. A couple of days ago it was a storm coming through about 9:30 am. It made me feel restless. But I also wasn’t clear on what my main tasks of the day were.

It’s a weird thing this relationship of discipline and freedom. If you are two-years-old or even an adolescent of 16 or 25, you think discipline is the opposite of freedom. Anything that interferes with your emotion of the minute is a denial of freedom, so you think. What it really does is sets you adrift, a boat without power or a rudder floating wherever the currents take you.

When you set your direction with discipline and structure, you paradoxically increase your freedom due to focus by restricting your options to the meaningful ones.

Humans figured that out thousands of years ago. Each of us must figure it out daily.

The economist John Kenneth Galbraith on the challenge of being open-minded: “Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

That’s not a generational thing. Don’t think Boomer or Gen X or Millennial. It’s a human thing. We hate to be wrong. Jungian psychologists who love the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator would say that there is perhaps one personality type out of 16 that is open to changing their mind.

And now the Instagram / TikTok / YouTube striving for notoriety age is upon us. When one has established a persona outlandish enough to attract a following of hopefully millions, changing becomes impossible. You could lose millions of followers. That’s millions of little endorphin strokes a day. That’s potentially loss of power and/or money.

Some people say they wish to change others when in reality they just want to build little clones. Find something to cling to that agrees with your group so that proof is handed to you and the uncertainty of openness is avoided.

Others find the tradition of the flowing spirit. Opening themselves to God daily, they seek where they have gone the wrong way and seek that change back into the spirit. Oh, Lord, I have done it again. Made a wrong assumption. Thought I knew better. Listened to the wrong advisor. Help me change direction and get back on the way.

The sin doesn’t lie in changing your mind; it lies often in not changing your mind.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Eccliastes 1:9

Reading thought-inducing serious books juxtaposed with detective novels became a life-long habit begun in high school. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I’ve read (actually read again) the Robert Van Gulik series of ancient Chinese murder mysteries, the entire Perry Mason series by Earl Stanley Gardner, and the entire Nero Wolfe detective series by Rex Stout. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series constitutes the latest addiction. He, by the way, is by far the better writer, although Stout is also excellent.

Published in 1965, A Deadly Shade of Gold delves into some political topics.

Today’s media in the US (the British tabloids are another ball game entirely) is completely built around sensationalism. It may be “liberal” or “conservative” or “objective”, but the objective is all the same. They must capture as much attention as possible to keep viewers/readers with them as long as possible in order to sell more advertising. The only difference with trade press, where I lived for a time, is that the writers are “encouraged” to write only about advertisers for the same reason–that is where the income flows.

Read today’s hype and you’re told that everything is new and everything is going to hell and you’d better get scared. Oh, and keep watching.

Then I read MacDonald’s book. The political backdrop to the story (which is always about McGee leaving the comfort of his houseboat in Lauderdale, FL to help return stolen goods to its rightful owner while getting beaten to a pulp) of Gold from 55 years ago reads just like a current headline. It’s the same injustice, the same battle lines, the same fears. There is nothing new under the sun.

Except, there is. There is a chance for each of us to renew ourselves by deciding to develop daily spiritual practices that bring our mind, heart, and soul into constant communion with God. The Kingdom of Heaven that Jesus proclaimed. It doesn’t have to be the same, the elderly Solomon’s lament notwithstanding.

Has it ever struck you that those who most fear to die are the ones who most fear to live? Life is flexible and free, and you are rigid and frozen. Life carries all things away, and you crave stability and permanence. You fear life and death because you cling. You cannot bear the thought of losing a relative or friend; you dread losing a pet theory or ideology or belief. When you cling to nothing, when you have no fear of losing anything, then you are free to flow like a mountain stream that is always fresh and sparkling and alive.

Anthony de Mello

Your orthodoxy or theory of life can be like an anchor that provides certainty. You know where you are. You can compare to others and know how to relate. But it, ahem, anchors you to one place.

Or, it can be like your home marina. You know where it is and know you can return, but you are free to sail, experience others, grow, learn.

Some approach God as an anchor to which cling. Sometimes desperately. I have always opened myself to God, to see where the experience may go, to see where I need to learn. But also to allow healing and understanding to infuse. Therefore, I am not afraid of facing the need to change my mind or attitude. I am not afraid to learn and experience other people and cultures. Leave fear behind to replaced by excitement of the stream of life.

Martin Buber wrote, “Once they told Rabbi Pinhas of the great misery among the needy. He listened, sunk in grief. Then he raised his head. ‘Let us draw God into the world,’ he cried, ‘and all need will be quenched.’ God’s grace consists precisely in this, that he wants to let himself be won by humanity, that he places himself, so to speak, into human hands. God wants to come to his world, but he wants to come to it through men and women. This is the mystery of our existence, the superhuman chance of humankind.”

Martin Buber entered my life through his book I and Thou (Ich und Du) when I was yet in high school. That was my introduction to Jewish thought aside from the Christian interpretations of Hebrew scriptures (the Old Testament).

The Associate Pastor of the church we left when we moved last year has a favorite phrase about being “the hands and feet of Jesus.” Same idea.

Which raises today’s challenge for living life with-God. How today am I bringing the grace of God into the world around me? How are you?