9PM, 6/25 - two
there are only two sermons:
there are only two sermons:
people aren't just you and pretending to be different
people aren't tired and pretending
people aren't unhappy and pretending
some ppl find life inherently energizing and meaningful
songs that feel like a window open on a blue-pink afternoon
notes in the moral life
humans are thrown into a world in which we are always "becoming" in time
we become as we learn
we learn as we imitate
a question we cannot avoid: who are we to become like? in large part, culture = the roles and positions we are to occupy. what you learn from your cultural group is what you are going to be like, and who you are going to be like. and we learn this as infants + children through observing, imitation, modeling, mirroring others in our group
every cultural group has its own answer about which specific humans are worthy of imitation (since we can really only imitate ideals through imitating specific humans)
one inroad into christianity is to ask: who am i to become like? and the christian answer is: messiah jesus, the son of god. the specific human most worthy of imitation is jesus.
start with imitating jesus. not just as a great moral teacher whose teachings are worthy of action, but as a person whose life is worthy of imitation (including his crucifixion and his resurrection).
as paul writes in romans 8:29, god has predestined us to be conformed to the image of his son. in galatians: "until christ is formed in you." 1 john 2:6: "whoever claims to live in him must live as jesus did." other examples abound.
e.g. luke 6:40; 1 john 3:2; philippians 2:5; philippians 3:21; 1 corinthians 15:49; ephesians 4:13; 1 peter 2:21; 1 corinthians 11:1
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why imitate jesus? to become like him
because just as seeds become trees, and children become members of society, human beings become like jesus
why become like jesus? that the trajectory of his life would become ours - freedom from slavery, passing through death by the power of an indestructible life and love and coming out of the other side into a good and spacious land, flowing with milk and honey.
and that is the promise at the heart of christianity - not only that we are saved by him, but that we are saved to become like him, to do even greater things than he did, in him
this is why jesus' call is for us to follow him
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and what does it mean to imitate jesus?
it is to learn from him who is gentle and lowly in heart, to follow him in doing the desire of the heavenly father who is love, to listen to him in his commandments that to love god and to love one's neighbour are the greatest of god's instruction/teaching, to trust in him as the one who reveals god's character and will of salvation
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everything finds its place in the love of god and neighbour. things are good to the extent that they participate in loving god and loving one's neighbour. things are bad to the extent that they work against love of god and neighbour.
are megachurches good or bad? is being tough on yourself good or bad? is sex good or bad? are guns good or bad? is perfectionism good or bad? is free speech good or bad?
is hierarchy good or bad? is money good or bad? is calvinism or hypergrace good or bad? is makeup culture good or bad?
let's ask a new question: what place could this have in the love of god and neighbour?
so while we would like to draw a line between things that are good and things that are bad, the line goes through every single thing. the same "thing" or "concept" or "phenomenon" contains the possibility of both goodness and badness - can participate in creating wholeness + vividness or in wreaking destruction + death.
imagine: rather than the exclusion of things from our vision of goodness and our imagination of the kingdom, what about the redemption of things?
instead of banning swords, what if we beat them into plowshares? instead of shunning an ideology or an idea - what might it look like when placed into love?
basically, we have to think things through.
the thing is, some things are very difficult to put into love. some things have little to no place in the love of god and neighbour. this is important. there is no such thing as a loving genocide or a loving slavery.
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"There’s nothing you can’t use as a tool to obstruct, harm, defeat, and belittle yourself, from meditation to crying to hiking, and there’s basically nothing that can’t open you up, bring about healing, sink you into Life more deeply, it depends entirely on your approach/stance"
eg- if your implicit, background subconscious stance is in the neighborhood of “I need to Do This Correctly. Am I messing up? If I can just *focus* and *work* enough and *get better* at it, I can get my experience to match up with how other people’s good experiences sound…
If I can just Do The Correct Things in this framework, I’ll Achieve The Goal of having my life Feel How It Should” —that whole region of mindset (basically the sociocultural default) can turn anything into a tool you use to trap and hurt yourself.
conversely, if your background subconscious stance is something like “let’s explore this, I’d love to feel into this curious region of experience. Oooh, and other people have tried it out before and left field guides for me, let’s check how some of those work…" (link)
i am exiled from the good land
i would summarize god's character as "worthy of imitation"
god is worthy of obedience
and worthy of imitation
what god is like is always "what to be like"
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we can imagine someone worthy of obedience who is not worthy of imitation
"do as i say, not as i do"
they are wise and right enough, or powerful enough, such that it's a good idea to obey them
but someone is only worthy of imitation when it is good to be like them
god is king of kings and lord of lords, but also exemplar of exemplars
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if our final destination is to be conformed to the image of the messiah (romans 8:29), and we are instructed to be imitators of god (ephesians 5:1), to imitate people as they imitate the messiah (1 corinthians 11:1), to be complete as our heavenly father is complete (matthew 5:48), and so on, then the character of god is always such that it would be good for us to be like that
if god is angry, it must be an anger worthy of imitation.
if god hates sin, it must be a hatred worthy of imitation.
basically, i am suspicious of the idea that god's ways are not our ways to the point that god's goodness is unrecognizable to us as good - especially because we presume that there are exceptions for god that would be unacceptable for humans
of course i get where that's coming from, but we are also told to be imitators of god
so, again, what god is like is "worthy of imitation"
and there are many portraits and concepts of god which are far from good examples.
i keep coming back to improv
i think it's because improv is this game we can inhabit to embody openness
openness, spontaneity, surrender, attentiveness, and curiosity, rather than an imposed structure of control
that is what is so appealing about saying "yes and." that humour and beauty and joy and something wonderful could come from just being here enough to see what's available to play with - without pre-planning an ideal outcome or a way to get there.
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however, i've been thinking about a possible counterpart to "yes and"-ing, which is going along
that is, a kind of "yes" without an "and." this is saying yes to every first good idea, jumping onto every bit, leading to incoherence
and directionlessness eventually invites the dream of structure and hierarchy and institutionalization and optimizing.
which may be true
but i think there's something about how rather than needing to say "no," or discerning what to say no to (which is still important, don't get me wrong)
we can be mindful of how there's always multiple things to say "yes, and" to in every offer
like it's not about NOT saying "no" to an offer that seems immediately revulsive and unfunny to you
but about saying "yes" to the other interesting things going on - the other, perhaps more subtle, invitations there
(there's always interesting things going on)
the thing about yin (surrender) and yang (determination)
is that sometimes we deceive ourselves about being in yin,
and we exert as much energy trying to surrender
and lying to ourselves about what we're okay with
as it would have taken to change our circumstances
if we were not so afraid
1. self-compassion is a wide-enough home for all of you to live in.
2. self-compassion is recursive. you can have compassion on your complete inability to have compassion for yourself.
3. self-compassion is not primarily about trying to put up with yourself. it is about releasing the reasons we feel that we need to be put up with.
love says "it matters that you're around" - and means it
love says "it's good that god made you" - and means it
"How Being 'Hard On Ourselves' Sabotages Long-Term Discipline (And What To Do Instead)
"You Can’t Simply Decide to Be a Different Person"
"the way to spend less time on this app is to prepare more interesting sources of interaction and information, and allow your focus to shift automatically" / "btw I think this is the way to get things done in general, using interest, desire, and attraction instead of discipline or self-control" - @ftlsid
a collection of links on nice guy-ism as a defense mechanism:
interesting bc this is the kind of stuff i'd be more curious about but it really does seem to contradict a lot of my foundational beliefs re: the way of jesus, eschatological/resurrection gender, etc.
gosh im confused
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update 6/25: i'm now thinking that it's really more about honesty and being a whole person - having the outside reflect the inside. being true to yourself. you can aspire to celibacy but it's another thing to project celibacy and safety wrt sexual harmlessness while wanting to fuck on the inside. what you can say is the truth.
keywords: memetics, psychofauna, social contagion, social construction
improv is a kind of forgiveness meditation
improv without forgiveness is impossible
and vice versa
surrendering to unconditional acceptance of reality
some notes on first reformed: