But are we really like the weather? Or better, is it important, or even needed, that we predict every rain shower in our lives, individual and collective, with precision, or is it more beneficial, and in a certain way more accurate, to say “monsoon season ahead” and leave it at that. Sometimes vagueness is more accurate, especially when the need of precision leads to paralysis or artificial inflation of some numbers to compensate for the lack of actual, you know, precision!

The part of this essay that has me thinking most, though, is this sentence: “we are part of an enormous flow of life and that we have an obligation to it.”

Now it seems sensible to say I am responsible for the quality of life of my children until they are old enough to work for their own quality of life. But these are partly biological and partly legal constraints. Biology imposes about 12-15 years, maybe 20 with our lazier Western ways, of responsibility on parents for their children. Legal because we decided that 18 is the ideal number of years for a human to reach the age of consent. Why? Not sure, and I am certain there is a nice story behind it. Historically speaking that is pretty late.

But I digress, the challenge for me is the obligation. This leads to all sorts of categorical imperatives which I am very unclear about (if you want to read up on categorical imperatives go here )

But here is the bone I am gnawing on: I concede that I do have an obligation towards my children. I fail to see where that “automagically” translates into an obligation towards other people, for example, let alone other people’s children (I have seen them, and I want no part of them!). I may want to voluntarily accept responsibility for others, and it seems to me this is quite a reasonable morality, but I do not see where I am obligated to do so.

If someone is a great parent, and in all other ways pursues only their own happiness, are they at fault for the sad state of our world?

Then we add another level.  Kant proposes a “Humanity” formulation where he holds that we should never treat “humanity” (in myself as well as in others) as a means to my happiness, but as an end in itself. This means that I cannot use people as an object of my pleasure. It also means I cannot judge another person as more or less worthy of respect. A person, by the fact that they are a person, is worthy of all respect – they are an “end” not a means or a tool.

But still, am I obligated to change my own pursuit of happiness to satisfy the, quite often, conflicting needs of others? Someone’s happiness may be the exact reverse of mine, and the means to achieve it might (frequently does) run counter to, or downright disrupt, my own pursuits. So where I am I left?

This clearly is a little ways away from the idea that we should think ahead 100 or 1000 years. While taking actions with concern for the future seems prudent, I am not sure at all it is wise. Mostly because I have absolutely no idea or capacity to predict all the consequences and unintended consequences of my actions today.

This concern for 1000 years in the future, or Kant’s formulations, are not quite at the same level of commitment to others that Jesus demands. Jesus say we are to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves. This would seem to imply that the pursuit of my own happiness must be tied with the happiness of others. In Biblical terms most especially the happiness of the weak (widows, orphans).

But the critical thing here is the word “love.” There can be no obligation to love. Love springs from a grateful heart. A grateful heart comes from true humility. True humility comes from knowing our precise value in the Universe. That value is that of belonging to a group (“the world”) that its Creator so loved (first!) that he gave His only Son so that all members of that group might be free to love.

Love collapses time into eternity. Which leaves us with the much wiser formulation by Augustine: “Love, and do what you will. If you keep silence, do it out of love. If you cry out, do it out of love. If you refrain from punishing, do it out of love.”

Antropofagia, de Tarsila do Amaral (1929)

I have been wondering for quite some time now about the ethical underpinnings of spiritual practice in the West. The first time it hit me was in talking to a Buddhist about karma. She said that the West interprets karma in an ethical way, with a “just deserts” implication. The original term has no such weight though. It is much more like gravity or electricity. Just karma. No judgement, no punishment. And punishment is always how I thought of karma, or at best a punishment/reward cosmic mechanism.

Moving away from this technical discussion I started to notice that pretty much everything in Western spirituality is fundamentally ethical. It is all about rewarding the good and punishing the bad, about going towards (or grabbing closer) the good fruits, and throwing out (expelling, purging) the bad rotten fruit. Even the rottenness of fruit carries some moral undertones. Or at least it does to me. Like it is the fruit’s fault that it has gone bad. And again “gone bad” as a description is a big hint.

Does it need to be this way? Is this the particular genius of Western civilization? To bring ethics into the discussion of every aspect of life?

Right now I have been trying to come to grips with an unethical form of Christian practice, well I should probably say “ethicless” not really unethical. What would it mean to strip away from my practice everything that has to do with judgement and prejudice (i.e. pre-judgement)? The Desert Fathers talk a lot about apatheia, which is one of my own central practices. It seems to me that apatheia has a strong component of ethiclessness to it. You are not to spend time thinking or even caring about whether this or that is good or bad, whether this or that person is good or bad.

One of the methods they use is to radically, deeply come to grips with my own personal sinfulness. If I am quite certain, deep in my bones, that I am unworthy of not even being a neighbor, let alone of coming before God’s attention, then I am much more likely to give other people some latitude.

Now this is a pretty violent approach, and can (and has!) lead to abuses. Both self-abuse and other or systemic abuses. So there are many pitfalls. When I was back in high school I came up with a few formulas. One of which was “To be generally kind and specifically unfair.” I think I meant that you give others a lot of room for mistakes and excuses, but when you are dealing with one person in a specific context, and when dealing with myself, then fairness goes out of the window and you are hard, demanding, “unfair”.

This could work, but again it is all in the delivery. No one wants to be around a difficult and demanding person unless that person is even harsher on themselves, and if that person takes the time to celebrate the positives. Because when we are harsh we tend to avoid the positives at all – and that is where the imbalances occur. Paul’s letters are a good example of balance, because they always start with positives, event to the Galatians!

But how to look at sin in a non-ethical way? After all isn’t sin the very bedrock of ethics? The way I have been trying to work this is to use an inversion which my friend Allen told me about a long time ago. When looking at the 10 Commandments, instead fo seeing a list of Shall Nots we should look at it this way: when you are perfect (enlightened, etc) you will not murder, you will not steal. So the 10 Commandments become a mirror which reflects only the True Self.

This adds some context to Jesus’ pretty outrageous commands that even looking at a woman lustfully is like committing adultery. I mean, really? Well, from the position of the true Self it is! From that vantage point, your compassion and love for every human being makes it pretty nigh impossible to look at any other person as an object to satisfy my personal appetites. First because appetites are something that belong to the False Self. Second because the Tue Self is satisfied with Christ. If you got God, it ain’t a pretty girl or a pretty car or a pretty house that are going to do the trick is it?

Another level. The ethical underpinnings of spiritual practice are driven by psychological rules of purity (as Richard Beck consistently points out). This means that we sublimate/mutate a mechanism which is used for food and eating into a set of rules for social interaction. Guess what, if you spend your life using food rules for social rules, is it any wonder that you will continually think of people as objects to satisfy your appetites? That you will call some a good fruit and others a bad fruit? That we will eat people with our eyes and that a multibillion dollar porn industry will gladly offer you some “food”?

For me the shift from ethical, food based spiritual practice to non-ethical, REality-based practice comes when you make a concerted effort to respect the integrity of every human being. This is exceedingly hard. The first stage of practice comes from simply recognizing our anthropophagous nature. The second practice comes from learning how to properly fast from such food, and thus tame the cravings. The final part comes from being able to join Jesus in saying:

While this was happening, Jesus’ disciples were saying to him, “Teacher, please eat something.” But Jesus told them, “I have food that you don’t know anything about.” His disciples started asking each other, “Has someone brought him something to eat?” (John 4)

What is your food? What do you eat every moment of your day? Are you stuffing your face full of enmity, strife, jealousy, greed, lust, self-righteousness? These are questions I am asking myself, trying to make sure I am improving my diet one thought at a time. The Real Body and the Real Self need Real Food. It is not about making an artificial discrimination. It is simple biology…or spirituality.

Long quote: “What Kierkegaard showed was that the only serious alternative to atheism or agnosticism was not what generally passes for religion but a much deeper commitment that left ordinary standards of proof and evidence completely behind. Perhaps that’s why so many of Kierkegaard’s present-day admirers are atheists. He was a Christian who nonetheless despised ‘Christendom’. To be a Christian was to stake one’s life on the absurdity of the risen Christ, to commit to an ethical standard no human can reach. This is a constant and in some ways hopeless effort at perpetually becoming what you can never fully be. Nothing could be more different from the conventional view of what being a Christian means: being born and baptised into a religion, dutifully going to Church and partaking in the sacraments. Institutionalised Christianity is an oxymoron, given that the Jesus of the Gospels spent so much time criticising the clerics of his day and never established any alternative structures. Kierkegaard showed that taking religion seriously is compatible with being against religion in almost all its actual forms, something that present-day atheists and believers should note.”

Time to read up on some K. methinks. How does the psalmist put it: “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere; I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked.”

http://ftw.usatoday.com/2013/05/victorious-h-s-relay-team-banned-from-state-meet-after-religious-celebration/

And here: http://www.khou.com/sports/Act-of-fath-costs-track-team-its-win-205661221.html

The story linked shows some sort of consternation by a local community when their track team failed to make the State finals. There are two versions of the same events here: one, and the one the press is loving, is one of freedom of expression and honest appreciation for God-given talents. The other, and the one which I subscribe to and am appalled that no one seems to have picked up on, is that using religion to excuse unsportsmanlike conduct is exactly why I believe that 90% of US Christianity is some sort of American New Thought movement and nothing at all to do with Christianity. To be fair, New Thought had or has very little with showboating, this stuff is pure Christianity. Alas.

Let me see if I understand the justification here: the young athlete raises his finger to heaven, and simultaneously his hand to his ear to listen to the crowds adulation, and claims this is a symbol of his humility before God…hmmm…how about we call this showboating and humiliating your opponents, and the worse type of ego worship that is so entrenched in so-called Christian churches these days.

Should I even ask if any of the other runners on the other team were Christians? Am I to assume that God has preferred this one idiot against the other runners? He is divinely appointed to win? Can we possibly try to inflate this ego any further?!

There is so much to detest here. First, the terrible form – I am sure if his coach is any good he will hear a thing or two about running through the tape BEFORE celebrating. In fact, this is exactly the case. had he run through the tape, and continued through and then going to the crowd raised his finger and so on, my guess is that nothing would have come of it. It was because of showboating, I am certain, that he got disqualified.

But if it had stopped there, I would have just ignored the story. It is the second part, where the terrible behavior is being asked to be overlooked because of it falls under religious freedom that really really annoys me. yes you are free to worship whatever ego you want, just please do not bring Christianity into it! Argh. it is hard enough these days to try to witness to the loving power of Christ without idiots doing this.

Can we just make sure we all understand: Jesus on the cross is an act of faith. Winning at sports is not. As a cleansing of my palate I will be working slowly through these minor little passage from this little book which apparently some people like to call “holy” but in fact use it as a springboard for their own prosperity and fame….Nary a  word here about winning…

• Romans 6:5 For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly also be united with him in a resurrection like his.
• Romans 6:8 Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
• Romans 8:36 As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.”
• 2 Corinthians 1:5 For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ.
• 2 Corinthians 4:11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body.
• Galatians 6:17 From now on, let no one cause me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus.
• 1 Peter 4:13 But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.
• 1 Peter 4:14 If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.

I have mentioned before that I think, at its best, a healthy monastery is one where the harmony of all its members imitates the harmony of the Holy Family, or perhaps even the harmony of Eden pre-Fall. If anyone has ever visited a harmonious monastery the charity pervades its courtyards and rooms like incense. it is truly uplifting.

But, much more common, is that monasteries are lodgings for wayfaring men who are busy plugging holes in many parishes due to priestly shortages. Others are continuing their educational studies in various places, most notably in Rome. Not much more about stability, even while there may be obedience there.

So we come to new versions. Lay communities which do attempt to fulfil the spirit of monastic life, with greater or lesser success. often referred to with some condescension as “experiments” it is also seen by others in the Religious world as the next wave.

the way I have come to see it is that all baptized Christians have a “rule” (the baptismal covenant) and they do so within the context of a worshiping community – first their family, then the congregation which they attend. But being a Christian means, or should mean, also living to the full all evangelical counsels, not just the ones we can or want, including St. Paul’s admonition to ‘pray without ceasing.’

So, if Christians are called live a life under the rule of baptism, in a community of believers, which includes regular daily prayer, study of Scripture, prayer and meditation, then what is the special calling of traditional monasticism?

This is where I am unclear. There is little that impedes your average person from living a monastic life of regular prayer, meditation and service. Actually, there is nothing that impedes it.

The last bastion of exclusivity for monasticism seems to me to be the learning of the various inner disciplines. This is still tricky, but in an age of internet and mass communication, mass transportation and even space stations, such information from valid teachers is available. In fact there is an abundance of such things. While in olden days a seeker would have to travel (and travel was dangerous, expensive and inconvenient) great distances to sit at the foot of a master, it seems that these days all that is needed is a good internet connection.

We can argue until we are blue in the face whether online learning is real learning. All traditional universities (themselves modelled after monasteries!) are having to do some serious soul-searching before the onslaught on information freely available on the internet. the ones who are resisting, and are on retreat, keep repeating a mantra about “experience”: the experience of college life is what you go to college for. I have heard similar things about monasteries: it is the living together and working together that is formative.

But, but, but…is that not the case with any family life? I would say it is, and even more so.

The bottom line is that there is no formula for bottling the Holy Spirit. There are some types of living and there are other types of living. None is better/holier/deeper/more faithful than the other. In fact, staying put (ah! we are back to stability again) is more transformational than its opposite arrangements. Deep connections to a place can only be gained over time – there are no shortcuts. But if the place you choose is disconnected from life, if you are not interfering with the world in your work of purifying it like a tree cleaning up the air (as Merton put it), then God bless you but you ain’t doing me no favors.

I too dream of sitting in the caboose in a lovely monastery with beautiful views, quiet organized housework, and a stipend. I too would feel very holy there, I am sure. But, poor wretch that I am, I am asked to be all of that while commuting to work and going to watch my kid play soccer and help the other with his math. To be husband and father (as well as son, of course, and brother). Do not tell me that this God-given option is the lesser….

You cannot understand yourself according to Freud or Jung, or according to me. Other people’s theories have no importance whatever. It is of yourself that you must ask the question, is fear to be divided into the conscious and subconscious? Or is there only fear which you translate into different forms? There is only one desire; there is only desire. You desire. The objects of desire change, but desire is always the same. So perhaps in the same way there is only fear. You are afraid of all sorts of things but there is only one fear.” (Freedom from the Known)

Only one desire. Only one fear. Many forms. This is a form of psychological or spiritual modalism. It makes sense if your goal is non-duality that you would want to find that everywhere.

“Objects of desire change, but there is only one desire.” I am not so sure. It makes sense linguistically to say so. After all the word “desire” is the same….but that does not make much sense. My desire for a donut (say) is different from my desire for world peace, or for my wife, or for the success and health of my sons. The only thing in common is that I use, by an accident of language the word “desire” for all of these.

Think of the word “love” and it will become clear as well. I love donuts, and my wife, and my children. But these are quite quite different. Were I precise in my language I might say “I crave donuts”, “I love my wife and children”. Even then there is a difference between spousal love and paternal love.

C. S. Lewis already identified in Greek different words for love: storge, phileo, eros, agape. What is interesting in his book is that he started with the simple “God is Love” formula and ended up, many pages later, with a four-fold distinction and the certainty that whatever else “love” is it is complex and complicated.

The same, I suggest, applies to fear and desire. I wonder if the Greeks had multiple words for “fear”? Does “desire” fit into “eros”? Or are there more words? I can imagine a whole cloud of related terms…try typing “fear” in here.

For my part if I want to improve my thinking (per previous post), I need to improve my vocabulary. It means that I cannot use “fear” or “love” or “desire” as umbrella terms. Perhaps this is where a convenient word becomes a mere acronym, and where using an acronym (eg. LOL) is really really sloppy thinking, though convenient for expediting conversation.

For example, when I accept the Jesus as my Savior, who exactly is He saving? because “me” is a very nebulous entity. Not always there, as they say.

Unpacking a little, we know we have experiences, even in the womb. These experiences ensure that I am never ever entering the world as a blank slate. And upon entering I continue accumulating experiences, which also are dependent on things outside my control: inherited DNA, socioeconomic status of my parents, the moment in history I am born into, and so on. Basically, everyone is born with a spoon in their mouths – for some people it is a wooden spoon while for others it is a silver one.

As my brain develops, the experiences are encoded on layer upon layer of connections, until they coagulate into thoughts. These thoughts then guide me towards further experiences (and way from others). Thoughts, basically judgements on the safety/desirability of whatever experience, react to my personally accumulated, though impersonally filtered, experiences. It looks backwards and then projects in a calculus of survival.

The problem comes when we live so divorced from our embedded, embodied software that we cannot use it for pretty much anything apart from communication. Not saying communication (intra and inter, infra and supra) is a bad thing. But the reality is that all my aversions/attractions are programs to make me survive in the wild *without having to think*. This is both curious and important.

We then use this survival tool, our intellect, to think. It seems the most obvious use of it, but I am increasingly unconvinced of it. I do not think (hah!) thinking should be used this way…it can be clearly seen in the deadening clarity of naturalism when reading the myopic statements of someone like Francis Crick, who says “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons,” one has to be grateful. There is a clarity there – the clarity of rushing at full speed down a road only to realize that it is a dead-end and there is a brick wall in front of you. The same is true of saccharine pious statements which punt the hard questions to an afterlife.

So we have this really cool thing just idling, and we want to use it. How should we use it? I am proposing that how we are using it now is, if not totally wrong, then certainly misguided.

Perhaps this would be a better way of saying it: we misuse our capacity for thinking when we use to it focus on creating pain and pleasure, repulsion and attraction, by projecting from past (suspiciously reconstructed) experience into a fantasy called future.

From fantasy to fantasy is all my thinking. St. Gregory talks about our interiority as being ruled by “passions” (irrational), and he saw these as being somehow exterior from your real self. Anthony of the Desert also regards our passions as “animal traits.” This is a common position in monastic thinking across all religions. It is, in fact, a cornerstone of the apologetic for a monastic program: our regular thoughts are like wild animals that must be tamed, or at least mastered, to become useful. Again and again monastic life asks: if someone is dominated by their passions can they be considered fully human? Can someone be considered a “potential human”? Without being able to do some inner work someone is surrendering their self to outside forces. This, in my view, is how the language of “bondage to sin” is helpful. Sinful living, then, becomes not an exploration of freedom, but rather a deliberate decision to be subhuman, and less free.

Am I doomed, though, to always fail, because I am incapable of living without relying on inferior thinking? Not always. And I more and more drawn towards those other moments of other-thinking, which are not fantasies. Moments of deep prayer. Moments of poetry. Moments of great leaps of thinking in understanding of reality. All the great moments when one person overcomes the immense invisible barriers that separate them from their neighbor, and they reach out and touch and help and love – and fear ends.

I feel strongly about both sides of this issue! No surprises here.

One tack is to say that marriage was instituted by God before the Fall and thus is the original blessing. Children, in this approach, come second. Actually third, since God comes first (though worshiping God was not the original mandate – procreation and stewardship was).

The whole “original blessings” thing, is so Mathew Foxy, and I do not really buy into it. But I was curious as to what the Bible actually says. In Genesis 1 there is nothing about marriage since man and woman are created together in the image of God. Genesis 2-3 brings out the idea of “helpmeet.”

These two chapters are not contradictory, of course. What they both are saying is that man-and-woman working together is the most complete reflection of the image of God. Not one alone. And working together to do what?  Well Gen 1 says to be fruitful and multiply. Which leads me to think that the Fall maybe came from Adam and Eve not “getting busy” and getting on with having some children? Too much time in their hands just doing what pleased them, and see what happens? (Complete speculation of course!)

At any rate, children do not get to enter the equation until after the Fall, though. And that is a significant point.

Post-Fall
My biggest complaint against the original blessings hypothesis (or exegesis) is that we clearly are not in Eden. Anything which happened there is useful simply to answer the question of whether God is malevolent or benevolent. This is, of course, not a trivial question, as the Gnostics and the Manichean heresy (as outlined by Augustine) shows what can happen when we posit a malevolent God. Philosophically this is actually a valid question, which needs answering. That is what the pre-Fall account gives us.

But we are post-Fall people. No matter what, this is where we are. So children are a fact of life, rather like having to work for a living!

So what are “children”? They are a “blessing from the LORD” (Psalm 127: 3-5). This equation of children and blessing is a constant in the Biblical account. A marriage with children is a blessed marriage. Even a marriage with adopted children is a blessed marriage, since we ourselves are adopted children of God (Eph. 1:5).

How are we, as creatures, to fulfill the original commandment of being fruitful (Genesis 1:28), which is demanded of all living creatures on Earth from plants to humankind, without, well, procreating?

So, it seems to me that marriage is the VEHICLE through which the blessing outlined in Psalm 127 (and many other places) can occur. Before we were fallen, blessings were not really that important. I mean Adam walked with God and chatted with him, and did some gardening. Pretty much a full life. And there was no curse to require an equal-and-opposite blessing.

Once we were kicked out (for our own good) God bends over backwards to keep finding ways to bless us, to bring us a little more of that goodly (and godly!) Edenic air. Finally giving us His Son, as the ultimate blessing.

To raise godly children has a profound and powerful significance in the economy of salvation. Being given a good helpmeet and then together raising godly (and helpful!) children is a lifetime practice of faithfulness to God.

I say lifetime because, even though we leave father and mother to be united to our spouses, we are never given an option to stop being their children. So the commandments to respect father and mother remain, and so do the parent’s responsibility to not drive their children NUTZ (Ephesians 6:4).

The mutual love which is evident in godly families is to be the cornerstone of a godly society: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Ephesians 5:21).

In fact Ephesians chapters 5 and 6 cover the family dynamic of a Christ-centered, voluntary mutual submission life. This will sometimes require that one member or another of a household be given more importance. And I guess that is my (long-winded) point: there is no set-in-stone formula, except that Christ is the center. Love demands that sometimes, for a minute, hour, day, or season, one person in the family be the principal recipient of everyone’s care. And then the tides change.

Where we go wrong, and where we always go wrong, is to try to take a snapshot of a moment in time, and hold it up, like an idol, as the one-and-only-way. We did this with apples, we did this with golden calves, Asherah poles, and Peter did it on Mt. Tabor. Over and over we take the “Kodak moment” and make it into the one and only reality.

Some husbands have gotten away with the “head of household” thing for a long time, without every really earning it (by loving their wives). Some wives have done the same.

Children, in this day and age especially, are told they are the centers of the universe. This needs to be corrected. They are a blessing, and a fundamental part of a godly family. But a part, not the center. They are also helpmeets, and the work never ends.

William Rowe has argued that God’s existence is inconsistent with pointless or gratuitous evil. By “pointless evil,” Rowe means evil that does not and cannot serve a greater good. And Rowe believes that there is such pointless evil in the world.

(1) If God exists, there would be no pointless evil.
(2) There is pointless evil.
(3) Therefore, God does not exist.

The linked apologetic article is quite brainy, but feel free to indulge. If you want to go closer to the source go here – which is this:

(1) There exist instances of intense suffering which an omnipotent, omniscient being could have prevented without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
(2) An omniscient, wholly good being would prevent the occurrence of any intense suffering it could, unless it could not do so without thereby losing some greater good or permitting some evil equally bad or worse.
(3) (Therefore) There does not exist an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good being. (Rowe 1979: 336)
This argument, as Rowe points out, is clearly valid, and so if there are rational grounds for accepting its premises, to that extent there are rational grounds for accepting the conclusion, that is to say, atheism.

It seems to me the original argument and the apologetic summary are a bit different. I do not want to get tangled in these. I want to ask an even more fundamental question: is there anything pointless in the world? Does anything pointless even exist? Ask it another way – is there anything in the world which is purposeless?

My point here is to tease out this idea of pointlessness, of a truly useless act, or even existence. Something which serves absolutely no purpose at all. Either in the past, e.g. fossils, or in the future, e.g. my child’s “time machine box” which we buried on our backyard.

A digression into art. Somewhere in the turn of the past century artists became infatuated with chance. There is a reason for this, reasons which belong to art history and criticism. But movements like Dadaism and Surrealism all came to want to upset the apple cart of a Victorian era which had congealed, or stagnated, into its own “perfection.”

Jump forward a little and you have the abstract work of  – who dripped paint into the canvas to make sure there was little of the muscle memory of the years of teaching he received. obviously, if you are trying to do away with the concrete, it makes sense to do away with the very mechanisms which makes it happen, your very brushstrokes.

Go a different direction and look at the long tradition in Japanese Zen calligraphy of drawing a circle (called Enso). Visually a circle is about simple as they get, perhaps even simplistic. the spirit behind it is very complex and the theology even more involved. In Zen, the Enso symbolizes a mind which is no-mind. This state allows the body and spirit to create the circle in one movement. Unlike other forms of art work, there is no possibility of modification. If you get it wrong you have to make a new one. But a new one will be so unlike the old one that comparison is impossible, thus making each moment unique and perfect as-is.

The brush stroke is guided by the spirit, not the wrist, and so it is action without effort. If you develop your spiritual faculties you will begin to see that your enso reveals your personality and even your spiritual level. Some say they can tell the speed and pressure the circle was made, and so your state of mind at that precise moment. It becomes some sort of ink-based Kirlian photography.

I am reminded of a particularly nasty form of torture perpetrated by totalitarian governments where prisoners are forced to dig holes for no purpose, day after day. This exercise in futility drives many to suicide. Is it because pointlessness is so unnatural? My guess is yes.

But the deeper question of purpose remains. To me, the universe itself has a point. Or maybe many points. Certainly everything that exists in the natural world in our planet serves a purpose from the mineral kingdom all the way up. Humanity has been able to create new meanings out of things, as when Michelangelo sculpted David. But the marble had its own meaning even as an uncarved block.

Unique events on the other hand, are those events which fall outside general events. Clearly naturalism does not believe that there are any such things as unique events. All events are general, even if they are rare. Still they are just one of an indefinite number of other events of a similar nature. In fact, the similarity of events is critical for the naturalist understanding. In a sense naturalism is a metaphorical way of looking at reality, A is like B in ways C, D and E and unlike Q in ways X, Y, and Z.

The Buddhists talk about interdependent co-arising , which is a really neat term which says that there is nothing unique, everything is interconnected in a web of causation.

This insight is central to Buddhism, and its solution to the problems of suffering. It is also central to science in its goal to derive principles and laws to explain events. I think this is one reason that Buddhism and science work so well together.

And it also explains why Christianity is so at odds with science at a deep level. Christianity relies on a series of unique events as the basis of its understanding. There is the uniqueness of Creation, the Incarnation, the Resurrection.

In an interesting way these three are interdependent! But their interdependence points to the absolute uniqueness of Jesus. There is no other event which can serve as a metaphor for Jesus, and Jesus is not a metaphor for anything else.

The attempts by Frazer, Campbell, and the more histrionic Hillman not withstanding, Jesus is not a type of sun god myth, dying and being reborn. Jesus is not a type of Osiris, Zoroaster or any others.

Even if the general pattern of worship, and the trappings of commonplace belief would end up making them look similar. The religions of men will tend towards a common point, precisely because they are the responses of finite humans.

Also, the attempts by the Jesus Seminar and other agnostics (or downright atheists) who usually claim an enlightened liberal theology not withstanding, Jesus is also not a type of Hebrew prophet. Jesus is not a type of prophet, healer, or magician.

Even if some of his teachings dovetail or are in line with other wisdom teachers, and his healing powers on par with other shamans and healers, and his prophetic utterings echoing other prophets. The wisdom of humanity will tend towards a common point, precisely because they are inklings of truth.

The claim of Christianity is that He is absolutely unique. Everything about him is absolutely unique.

The miracle of his birth, the miracles he performed, and the miracle of his resurrection, are not magical. Magic would imply some sort of general principles, either as a form of proto-science or even as a form of meta-science which taps into a grander view of reality. Either of these do not explain the miracle which is Jesus. The birth, life and resurrection of Jesus are signs of his absolute uniqueness.

This should be clear, painfully clear. It is probably quite offensive, I know I was offended by it for a long time.

As Aslan said to Jill in The Silver Chair:

Remember, remember, remember the Signs. Say them to yourself when you wake in the morning and when you lie down at night, and when you wake in the middle of the night. And whatever strange things may happen to you, let nothing turn your mind from following the Signs.

And secondly, I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly. I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the Signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances.

Remember the Signs and believe the Signs. Nothing else matters.

Pay no attention to appearances, look deeper into the Signs. That is the work: to remember and to believe in spite of, or better through, the appearances to the contrary.