I and Thou - You, Me, and God - What will make our encounter genuine?

I am starting to read I and Thou for class, and while I will not get into the complexity of all this book, I will describe its effect on me.

It has to do with our relation to another.

To have a genuine encounter with another, we must approach one another in all of our humanity, and in doing so, we approach one another in all of who we are in God. When we do not relate to another as genuine human beings, we lose the presence of God. And if the presence of God is not existing in relation to one another, we lose the ability to relate to that person in their full humanity, as a human being, and not as an object. Both God and the fullness of humanity must be present for there to be a genuine encounter with another.

For example. If you come to me expressing how hard the week has been for you, I have three basic choices of encountering and relating to you. I can focus more on you, on God, or hold both of these. To simply focus on all of you, I objectify you. I treat you as an object, nothing more and nothing less. Now when I simply focus on all of God in talking to you, I take away your humanity. I tell you to 'just trust in God' or 'things will all work out for you in the end because God loves you'. This is an abstraction of the real you. It foregoes who you are and treats you as a means in order to find the end in God. This also treats you as an object. It does not take into account your humanity. It doesn't take into account what you think and feel, how your heart aches and longs. Now when encountering you I hold both the full humanity of who you are and the full presence of who God is in you, I encounter a true relationship. I hold all of who you are in God, which is found in honoring all of who you are as a human being.

Everything we are is to be given glory to God. Yet we cannot give glory to God without fully honoring the person. They play off of each other; the relation is reciprocity, a give and take. They must both be held. Where full humanity and full divinity meet, we encounter true relationship. One that honors the person because it honors God, and honors God because we honor each other.

May we hold both of these when we meet. May we approach each other recognizing and treating one another in the very deepness of respect, and at the same time know that this can only be true when we acknowledge the full glory to be given to God.

Coldplay, Dan, Passion, Therapy

Had another week with Dan Allender's faith, hope, and love…and it was just as intense as the first.

But some thoughts…my favorite song right now is from Coldplay, called Fix You. The song caught me by surprise, as I was driving back from Oregon with a sluggish posture, my body tired, my eyes heavy from the busy week and weekend. I was enjoying the mellowy Coldplay sound. The song Fix You came on and it started out slow as most of their songs do. I was half-listening to the lyrics, due to my half-numb state of mind. I was in a bumbed mood for several reasons, one part of the loneliness that wants to latch onto me once in awhile, and in the same way the questions like what in the world am I doing out here.

Yet suddenly the guitar started to jam out (like the U2 of old), and the tone and pace of the song sparked something in me, grabbed my attention. I turned the volume turned up, with the drums adding to the crescendo, and he then sang out several times ‘tears stream down your face, when you lose something you cannot replace.’ At this point, my mood had suddenly been lifted from indifference to intense emotion. I was immersed in this song. I listened to it several more times, each time absorbing, soaking up all the song had to offer me. I don’t know exactly what the song was initially meant to convey, but by the time it was done, it meant passion. It sang me into passion. It reminded me of the love for all the things that really matter. It could mean something completely different to you, but to me in my story, the song meant passion.

I say this because that is what Dan also leads me into. I cannot sit in his class and space-out with a temper of indifference. And this is one of the main things I have taken from my time with him; a calling to not live in indifference. Not to side with a numb, unconcerned, apathetic, uninterested heart. This is significant for me as I have read some more about the heart, how it wants to go into repression when it experiences pain, a form of safety to never experience the pain it once felt again. Instead of opening itself up again it opts for no feeling at all.

Like the song, Dan leads the class into passion. I don’t think anyone could sit in the class and not feel anything. You would have to either love him or hate him. No neutrality. This has confronted my own tendency to lie in the realm of neutrality. I am a mellow person. Not that I think that is inherently bad. But I think I can often use that to hide from what is really going on. I don’t like confrontation. Like anyone, I don’t like my heart to hurt. And like anyone, it has been, really bad, and I have often opted for the choice to sit in or around numbness.

Like the song, I have been led by Dan into an arena that wars with our emotions, our pasts that lie in the present by memory. I have been led to enter into the pain, not in a way that accompanies pity, but an action that desires to mourn and suffer well, which will ultimately bring out a passion and joy not only now but in anticipation of what is to Come in the future. Most of the songs in the Bible were expressed this way, in acknowledgement that to be living is to be in a sense of pain, but at the same time in passionate joy. This is paradoxical, yet this is life. And Dan has asked us how well we rest in that tension, that of death and life. Will you choose more of one than the other, or neither one, or will you embrace both? Will you choose to acknowledge reality when it seems like madness? We are often not fond of the reality that God has given us. Where do we then turn? What addiction takes us out of reality, turns down the knob for a moment? What is this thing which becomes your idol? Can you take the visible failure in idolatry and let it know what its heart really wants? G.K. Chesterton writes ‘every man who walks into a brothel is looking for God.” Do you acknowledge the desire that God has implanted in you which finds its home in your own brothels? Will you acknowledge that you are looking for God!!! Will you stop trying to numb life through addiction and enter into feeling where you can truly experience what life has to give, and to embrace that well in the suffering and pain that you know will bring you even more capacity for joy.

How have the times when you have been betrayed spurred you to construct gods that are better and more pleasing to you? How have you escaped being an orphan? How have you avoided being a stranger in a foreign land? Do you use wit or just simply talk so much that you keep everyone at an amazing distance, or euphemism your way to escape reality? Our idolatry is an effort to find joy outside of God. What do you kneel toward (good looks, intellect…) to keep yourself from being an orphan, to invert reality? Will we trust that we will not be left as orphans, or will we cling to other saviors? It is not about life working for us, but a preparation for what is to Come. Will we be made ready in our waiting and our trust of what is to Come. Will we live well today in that anticipation. Will we have good wine in a real community that is not perfect, in fact may be very broken, but in that way know how we are all the more waiting well for what will Come.

Where are you desiring His Coming? A brothel? Are you able to see through this? To what your heart desires? Will you wait well? Will you, along with the Scripture, hold both joy and suffering together? This is true passion, true living. Not a passion that wants to escape the world and go to heaven but wishes to embrace all that is right now.

This is what we are to offer in therapy. Not an escape and simple solving of the single problem our client has come to us for. It is always part of a deeper problem. We cannot be plastic surgeons. We engage them into the story of life. Only then can true heart transformation occur. It will not happen if we throw a Bible verse at them. That is using the truth as a weapon, not as a transformative language. We must enter into the language of their story. Only then will the love of the Gospel make sense. Then we can offer them the reality of what faith, hope, and love is. The Gospel is to be embodied, to be spoken with action, and occasionally with words. This is true therapy, giving flesh and blood to the ultimate reality of the Gospel. This is also an engagement with passion.

Wow didn’t expect to go off on that tangent, but just got into my notes from the past weeks and felt compelled to right. Hope you made it through.

Allow me to Process...

Wow. The past three days have been that word. I wish I was a better writer so I could fully describe to you what I’ve experienced. I will try, but will only provide poor reflection at best. The richness of being in a room where Dan Allender speaks with passion on life is like trying to describe the sunset to someone who has never been to the ocean. Ok a little overtly dramatic but hopefully I got my point across!

I had 12 hours of class this week where I listened to Dan speak on faith, hope, and love, the title of the class. When I first heard of that title, it sounded lame, and I was not real excited about spending so much time on topics I had heard so many times. And I guess that is where the beauty had been all week for me; Dan’s ability to speak in a language that not only brings such depth and life to those words, but also his skill in bringing your own story and experiences into a head-on collision with them. I was completely captured by his exposition of what those three words really mean; how they touch every part of our life - past, present, and future. It was the opposite of reading a definition. It was like taking each word of a definition and defining those in experience and then constructing out of that a theme which best described what the word meant.

He drew out my emotions, some I hadn’t felt in some time and some I forgot I had. I was about ready burst as he led me down the road of pain and betrayal and madness and glory and redemption and the faces we have and the stories that shape who we have become. And again, all these words can only be experienced in the moment, in the context, like any great story. In the setting, the people, and the face and person of Dan. He is the only guy I have heard a girl say has a beautiful face where she was not talking about his attractiveness. It just looks like it has done a lot of life, seen darkness and joy in one experience after another. It is worn. It can quickly change to reveal a new expression that colors his speech. And it has exuded the passion of life and the Gospel for me this week.

The talks were not direct. He did not read his notes like the teacher going through a syllabus on the first day. The ideas were hard to understand, like Jesus and the parables he taught. You had to engage in the story he was telling and relate it to your own heartaches and disappointments and hopes and longing for reconciliation. Dan did not teach on what should be taught or what is more reputable for him and the school. He taught on his life, his story, the stories of so many broken people who have come to him in agony, hanging by a thread. It was life, not what we want life to be. It was more like listening to a song than a monologue. Hearing the beauty in the rhythm and the highs and lows that usually describe experience much better than words.

That was my week, put into words as best as I could in the time I have. Thanks for allowing me to process.

Escaping to British Columbia

I was lucky enough to get a crew (my roommate Katie, her friend Liz, and Liz's random friend she met last week) and head up north for the labor day weekend, just north of Vancouver. Despite some anxiety from the group during the week about what we were really getting ourselved into, we did come back alive!

It took us about 7 hours at least to get there, due to 2 hours waiting to cross the border, and at least an hour more getting lost in Vancouver. But we finally made it and then soaked in the wilderness for two days.

We hiked the Stawamus Chief. It was beautiful all the way up, and as you can see, the view from the top was breathtaking. I'll just stop typing and let the pictures speak for themselves.