Do not Fear; Fear God

If there arise among you a prophet, or a dreamer of dreams, and giveth thee a sign or a wonder, and the sign or the wonder come to pass, whereof he spake unto thee, saying, Let us go after other gods, which thou hast not known, and let us serve them; Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the LORD your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. – Deuteronomy 13:1 [Moses]

Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. – Ecclesiastes 12:13 [Solomon]

The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.
– Proverbs 9:10 [Solomon]

“Do not be afraid,” says the angel to Mary when he appears to her with the news of Jesus’ birth. “Do not be afraid,” says Jesus to the apostles as they stare at him in abject terror when he walks past their boat on the Sea of Galilee. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel to the women who are shocked to find an empty tomb three days after Jesus’ death. “Fear not,” says Jesus to John in Revelation, when he appears to him in a vision in blazing finery, causing John to fall down “as though dead”.

Is there a contradiction between the fact that Christians are called to be bold and courageous, are told repeatedly in the Bible not to fear when they are in the presence of God, and the fact that King Solomon, the wisest man in the history of the world according to the same Bible, says that fearing God and keeping his commandments is the chief end of man? It may seem perplexing, but I think there is really no contradiction. The people who are told not to fear were fearful – that’s the whole point. In the face of the full glory of God, seeing Him in person, the natural response is fear. Just as the natural, and right response to a hurricane, a tsunami, a lightning strike, is fear. Why is it natural and appropriate? Because a hurricane or a tsunami is incredibly powerful and has the potential to wipe you out entirely. It has the potential to destroy you. It is big, huge, overwhelming, and there is absolutely no way you can placate it. Almost anyone, faced with the immediate prospect of being snuffed out by a natural disaster, prays a prayer of some kind. It’s some feeble attempt to placate a thing bigger than you. On a smaller scale, you would be very frightened if a powerful warlord came round and held you at gunpoint, or even simply controlled an area near yours. Because he could, at any time, take a liking to your house or your children or your possessions, and he would have the arms to back him up if he should decide to seize it. In the absence of law enforcement, he could get away with murdering you. In those situations, fear is an appropriate response.

Penitence, acrylic on bamboo plate. By Larry Poncho Brown.

So why shouldn’t it be the appropriate response to THE power behind the universe – the one who gave life, the one who takes it away, the one who sets the rules, the one whose standards matter? If He indeed exists, and is all-powerful, omniscient, and just, and you have done something to hurt another human being, and that human being is precious to him, wouldn’t you be scared? What more, if apparently your wrongdoing was responsible for the utter humiliation and murder of this great monarch’s son – what if the King Himself had disguised himself as a commoner for an evening, and you had kicked him on the side of the road and spit on him for a laugh, not knowing who he was? What if, to your horror, you are called up to the court, and you recognize the face of the beggar in the face of the monarch? Wouldn’t you fall down on your face and beg for mercy?

The people in the first paragraph – the disciples, Mary, John, the women – they were counted as the “righteous” – people who walked with God. Mary was even the wisest woman in the world – the one chosen to bear God’s son. And yet they were afraid, because they knew that before God, they were all sinners, completely unworthy to be in His presence. Yet God, in His mercy, condescends to speak with them, and He gently tells them not to be afraid. Why? Because He loves them. This is an overwhelming message. It’s improbable, counter-intuitive. Why a great power should care about you, not to mention love you, has nothing to do with His greatness – it is an unexpected attribute. After all, wouldn’t you be surprised to hear that your president or prime minister has a personal interest in you and loves you, even though you’ve never met them? God is bigger than that – and yet He has revealed that He does love us.

You see, Fear in itself is not a bad thing. Fear is a reaction to power. We know we are limited in our power, and so anything that has greater power is worth fearing. But the thing about the Christian is she does not need to fear anything other than God, because nothing is greater or more powerful than God, and if we fear Him and keep His commandments – if we have thrust ourselves under His protection by accepting the sacrificial atonement of His Son, then He is on our side. To have the all-powerful, omniscient and victorious God, the one who made everything, preserves everything, permits everything and will redeem everything, on our side truly means that there is nothing that we need to be afraid of. And that is the source of courage and boldness – “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified. What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?”  says Paul, in Romans 8:28-31.

Am I trapped by fear of other things – of the future, of potential sin, of loneliness, of rejection – sometimes? Of course! I am often seized by fear – it comes out of nowhere, a sudden wave of it, and I feel completely thrown for a loop. But the thing is I know I should not fear those things – my fear should be reserved only for the Lord. The thing about the emotion of fear is, like all other emotions, it comes and it goes. I cannot control my emotions, but I can control my response to them. And I can choose to respond: No. I will not fear you. I fear God, and I will keep in lockstep with him, as faithfully as I can. I am more afraid of being apart from Him than I am of any of those terrible scenarios, and if He decides to thrust me into those valleys, I know He will be by my side, and that Jesus has endured them to a far greater extent than I can imagine, and He knows that we can bear them together. I can choose to believe in the God who has been nothing but good to me. I can accept humbly His promise that He loves me and wants only the best for me. I can accept that what I want isn’t necessarily what’s best for me, and that I will eventually come round to His point of view, even if it takes a while, even if it doesn’t happen in this lifetime. I have been bold to Him, I’ve wrestled with Him. I haven’t treated Him with reverence – I argue with Him and disagree with Him. But whenever I demand that He show Himself, I am always struck by fear, and accept that that isn’t really what I want. That it would be like annihilation to see the face of God as a mere mortal. And most curiously of all, whenever I get to that point, I feel at peace. It is an answer from God: it’s a demonstration of His power. And I am so glad that this infinitely powerful, infinitely merciful God is my God.

God’s Grace: Delectable, Unforgettable

“O taste and see that the Lord is good : blessed is the man that trusts in him.”

–Psalm 34:8

You know the feeling. The first bloom has died off. What you thought would last forever has withered away. Summer has gone on for quite a while now, and the sultry heat is starting to make you feel weary, rather than excited about yet another day of the beating sun. You feel lethargic, tired, testy, or dull. You’re not even really talking very much anymore. When you talk, you’re not that sure he’s listening. It isn’t as though you’ve gone through a big crisis or anything – in fact something like that would be quite galvanizing, exciting, even, though it might be difficult. Instead it’s more of a windless drift, like a tall ship marooned on the glassy sea without wind. There’s a restlessness to it, and yet it would seem tetchy of you to complain, so you keep quiet. After all, there isn’t anything wrong, is there? It’s not like you can put your finger on it – there isn’t anything to complain about.

But God doesn’t quite seem to be as attentive to your prayers, or maybe you simply go through the motions because you’re sure he couldn’t possibly be interested in the dull, plodding little things you have to say. And a little worm of doubt starts wiggling in your mind – maybe he is distant, after all, more like the absentee watchmaker than the “personal Savior”. Maybe he’s not that interested. Maybe he doesn’t really care. Maybe you’re supposed to get on with your life without him.

I was talking with a friend last Sunday who was living in doubt. Like me, he felt that he had been called by God at some point for some thing – had received a distinct call, a moment of revelation. Like me, he was feeling a little bit lost. Both of us keep going back to that moment and wondering if it really happened. As in, really really happened – wasn’t some kind of self-induced delusion of grandeur, or the effects of the weather and digestion, or some kind of foolishness best abandoned rather than entertained.

We beat around a little, depressing track of what-ifs. What if we made it up? What if God doesn’t really work like that? (He kind of does, though, too often to be dismissed, as recorded in the Bible) What if God was sort of tricking us? What if he really wanted us to go through some really arduous roads, and if we did something wrong they’d just get longer and more treacherous? What kind of God is he, anyway, who one moment seems so close and the next so distant? Then my friend said, “But then, once you’ve tasted something, you never forget it. Somehow your palate just never lets you forget it.” And I thought, that’s right. You never do….

image credit by Bruce Tuten

It is a good analogy. As a foreign student from the culinary mecca that is Singapore – like many Singaporeans, I have a very patriotic stomach – I have experienced a craving for food I can’t get all too often while tiding out the grim winters of Boston. There’s times when nothing but laksa will do, when I really want some fish soup noodles with that wonderful milk and wine soup from that particular store near my mother’s workplace, and thinking about it is just maddening because I’m a couple continents away, and whatever I can come up with is just a pale substitute.

And then there is the unmistakable phenomenon where you go to a favourite restaurant, and order your favourite dish from there, only for it to come and something’s off – the standard has dropped, some ingredient has been replaced by another, or omitted to cut costs, and you resolve never to go there again, in honor of the lost culinary experience that now can never be had again. Yet that sensory experience – that barometer for what you expect – is retained by your taste buds, otherwise you couldn’t have made that judgment. Nothing else will make the cut, even if it’s been decades since you last ate it. And it is so sweet to be able to taste again something from your childhood, even if it was something you didn’t even particularly like at the time. It brings back a flood of memory – ah, yes – those were good times.

There was a point when I grew suspicious of so-called Christian “mountaintop experiences” – often induced by retreats or particular spiritual conversations: those concentrated periods of Christian fellowship that produce a kind of lovely glow in the consciousness, but which very predictably wanes after a couple weeks of the daily grind. I didn’t want to accept that the glow would fade, so I decided it’d be better to avoid the glow in the first place – a kind of emotional Keynesian economics, if you would – evening out the fluctuations so you don’t get as great a trough for a corresponding peak. However, the problem with this approach is what you end up with isn’t a nice little line in the middle – what you end up with is all trough.

Now I recognize I can’t have all peaks with no troughs – after all, that’s actually just the same thing. Either way, I’d never learn. God’s project, after all, isn’t to make us blissfully happy all the time. That would be faintly disturbing, if not downright creepy in a world of pain. Think of a community that is always bursting with happiness no matter what happens, and you get the Stepford Wives – a phony kind of thing that denies the brokenness of the world. He calls us to be joyful even in times of trial, not constantly vibrating with good feelings. And he promised to be faithful to us, even when we are faithless – for he cannot deny Himself.

Chasing the experiential is as dangerous as chasing the intellectual – if it becomes the ultimate barometer of God in our lives, that would be the opposite of Faith. Faith is, after all, being certain of the thing we do not see – or feel, or understand. Amassing a lot of spiritual highs, like amassing a lot of intellectual knowledge about God, can be the mirage that makes us swerve off the narrow path, rather than keep faithfully on it. After all, we were not given an intellectual idea of Jesus, or a Jesus happy pill that makes us immune to pain, but Jesus himself, fully human, fully God, who, on the cross, felt so far from God that he cried that He had forsaken him.

You see, being faithful is pretty much one of the hardest things we are called to be. God berates Israel for having an adulterous heart every time it turned away from Him – which was, by the sounds of it, at least once every fortnight. For myself, it’s probably several times every hour. I’m dismayed by how easily distracted I am on a daily basis. There are things I ought to do, and yet it’s the easiest thing to find something else that is more compelling for another five minutes. It’s the same way with my heart. Somehow it’s a herculean effort just to crack open the Bible once a day, or to read it with real attention, rather than go at it as though earning a lot of brownie points to be redeemed later.

This is why it’s so good to remember, and so helpful that Jesus instituted the holy sacrament – to be taken “in remembrance of me”. Take, eat – and remember when you took and ate. Savor it, when you are in that blessed place of grace. Remember the contours of His goodness: how His provision meant such bread, such wine. Remember the Lord your God, who delivered you out of Egypt, out of slavery. Remember when you were in the pit, and He rescued you. Remember when you almost toppled into the abyss, and He snatched you from the brink.

Remember when He loved you through your family, your friends, who were wonderfully there for you just when you needed them. Remember te kindness of strangers, who had no reason to help you. Remember His goodness, and his tender mercies. Remember that the Lord your God is good, and he does not forsake the ones he calls by his name. Remember it’s His name on the contract, His blood that was the down payment, remember the very dear price He paid for you. Does He love you? Of course! I can taste it, and I trust it.

Also at the Harvard Ichthus

The Fall Of Man: Part 4 – Redemption

The Fall of Man: Part 1 – The Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil

The Fall of Man: Part 2 – Truth or Consequences

The Fall of Man: Part 3 – Expelled with a Promise

Location: L’Abri Rochester

Cast: Judith, Shelley, Tony.

The Sign and the Thing

There is something about human nature that is inherently awed by big things. I know this because I recently visited the St Louis Arch – this humongous steel sculpture, monumental, towering overhead overlooking the Mississippi. The response to something big – anything big – is always awe. Like the spacemen in Stanley Kubriks’ 2001: A Space Odyssey, the appropriate religious response is to whip out the camera and attempt to capture a sliver of it – not too different from the medieval pilgrim buying a little metal souvenir, or bowing at the feet of the thing and pocketing a little bit of dirt to keep in a small box. This is why the cynical South Dakotans decided to blow huge sculptures of presidents’ faces into a mountain – because they knew we are inherently impressed by bigness.

image source

We can laugh at this phenomenon, but the laughter dies away when we are confronted with a big thing – whether it’s a powerful man, the giant Mall of America – the largest mall in America (which I also stood at the feet of), a revered university, or even just a really, really large teapot. I mean, bigness makes us feel our smallness. Monumentality gives the illusion of immortality. We look at the St Louis Gateway Arch, and think, here is something man has achieved with the works of his hands – it looks like some relic of an alien race, left as a cryptic message for conspiracy theorists to decipher – but no, it was made by my race, my kind – and what a wonder and enigma is Man!

It stirs something fundamental in us – it makes us worship. Because we know we are mortal, mere walking, breathing time-bombs with a finite counter pasted across our chests, and that perhaps this thing, whatever this thing is, has a secret of something that lasts beyond time we can conceive – perhaps it is infinity, perhaps it is immortality. And because He made us to be immortal, we long for it – we rage against death, we allow ourselves, one by one by one, to be blindsided by it, unable to look it too long in the eye during our brief lives. But it is there, and it is raging at us, raging at us to find meaning, to find purpose.

And the thing about these big things is they always seem to be symbols – metaphors, similes, patterns that recur in the unconscious, things with unutterable meaning. Things which stand for other things. Things which stand for things which have no form. Things which are empty in themselves, except that they are imbued with heavy meaning.

To me, the Arch is always about infinity – that sweet yearning to encompass the globe, the sky. It always prefigures the rainbow, or is a left echo of the rainbow, that beautiful sign God set in the sky. I saw two rainbows this whole time, and was comforted, feeling a little like Noah, that yes, perhaps the days would be long before I saw floods, but I was on the right track. The first one, over the Atlantic, on a beach at Nankuket, Massachusetts; the second, set right over my train tracks, framing the gateway between Indiana and Chicago. They were little comforts, I guess, to a girl who cannot be sure one minute to the next where she’ll be going. Every time I see a rainbow, I think of my dad’s home remedy, from my great-grandmother. She used to say, if you have a wart, and you see a rainbow, you should rub the wart against the grass, and it will go away. I remember wanting to try this out badly, since I had a wart on my knee. I don’t remember anymore whether it was healed the day I saw that rainbow over the garden in Singapore. But my wart isn’t there anymore. I can’t for the life of me understand why I don’t remember such an important thing.

But I know that rainbows are about pointing the way – pointing forward, and pointing back. They are affirmations of a promise, a covenant God made between Himself and his beloved Earth. It was a cross of His tears and His beaming contenance, sorrow and relief flooding all at once. The St Louis Arch was conceived as  a frame for that golden land – the great (supposedly empty) West – the promised land, which (of course) always lay just out of one’s grasp, just out of reach. That is, if you were the conquering nation, and not the Native Americans who had to march that same route in tears, exiled from their own land. No, promised or not – the land is not the promise; the God Himself is.

For beautiful as they are, when we see the bow, it is only half the story – quite literally. For physics tells us that rainbows are, in fact, not arches but circles – we just never see the ends of them because our view on the ground cannot accommodate their perfection. Before the invention of the twin compasses, mankind spent no small effort trying to draw a perfect circle, imagining that if they could, they would discover the secret to perfection. We’ve all drawn circles now, of course, in primary school math class. But we fail to see the miracle of the perfect form, each point equidistant from the centre, with no edges, no points of division. Perfect equality, perfect harmony, perfect wholeness. Perfection – at the feet, encircling the Lord of Lords, the Prince of Peace, the Mighty God, Emmanuel, God the Three, and God the One. How beautiful He is in Revelation, his flashing eyes, his floating hair! How beautiful He is in my mind, with that rainbow sign, crowning His fair brow! How much glory there is even in ephemeral things, which man-made things only counterfeit, and then not with the delicacy and poignancy that Your touch lights upon the earth! How you love your people, that you should grant Beauty for promise’s sake, Beauty for our sake, Beauty for Your love, your delight, your pleasure.

I remember one of the dearest sermons I have ever heard, about God bringing the cloud, and setting His bow in the cloud – Oh He never spares us the cloud! For without the cloud there can be no dark grey to set the ribbons of light against – and if not for tears we can never see His unpuddled face.

Plan A: Love, Not Law

1. I AM the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before Me.

2. You shall not make for yourself any carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them nor serve them. For I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing mercy to thousands, to those who love Me and keep my commandments.

3. You shall not take the name of the LORD your God in vain, for the LORD will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain.

4. Observe the Sabbath day, to keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD your God. In it you shall not do any work: you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your manservant, nor your maidservant, nor your ox, nor your donkey, nor any of your cattle, nor your stranger who is within your gates, that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as well as you. And remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and that the LORD your God brought you out from there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.

5. Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God has commanded you, that your days may be long, and that it may be well with you in the land which the LORD your God is giving you.

6. You shall not murder.

7. You shall not commit adultery.

8. You shall not steal.

9. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

10. You shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, and you shall not desire your neighbour’s house, his field, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that is your neighbour’s.

– Moses, recapping the 10 Commandments to Israel in his final sermon in Deuteronomy 6: 6 – 21.

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD your God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”

– Moses, summarizing the 10 commandments in Deuteronomy 6: 4

image source

In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible – one of the most foundational texts in my personal formation (both as a Christian and as a writer and critic) Reverend Hale, the man investigating the witchcraft accusations in Salem, Massachusetts, asks John Proctor, the only “good man” in Salem, to list the ten commandments. Proctor has not been going to church because he considers his priest corrupt, but feels he has been keeping the faith, even though he has been having an affair with Abigail, the ringleader of the girls accused of witchcraft. He’s going pretty good with his list, until he gets to the tenth one, which he can’t, somehow, remember. It’s a heartbreaking moment when his wife, Elizabeth, quietly reminds him what it is – the seventh commandment, against adultery.

I’ve used this device recently in a couple conversations, and it is very telling what comes at the top and the bottom of the list. It’s pretty fascinating, but for one person in particular, the first that he listed was a sin someone was sinning against him, and the last commandment he listed was the one he was breaking himself. I’m no psychologist, but there’s definitely some relation between the things we forget about God’s nature and the sins we end up mired in. What disturbed me, though, is that in almost no case (including when I make the list myself) do I get a list in the order set by God Himself, as related to Moses. The most common pattern is that the last five commandments make their appearance first – the simple “Do Not’s” – murder, adultery, theft, covetousness, lying. But surely there is a reason why these are the last five and not the first – and surely there is something sinister in the fact that we often think of the first five last. God is an orderly God – He doesn’t simply give us a random order of laws – in the priority there is meaning.

Full article at the Harvard Ichthus

To Cross Ten Seas So We May Be One

“I wish indeed it could be brought about that men of learning and authority from the different churches might meet somewhere and, after thoroughly discussing the different articles of faith, should, by a unanimous decision, hand down to posterity some certain rule of faith . . . . As to myself, if I should be thought of any use, I would not, if need be, object to cross ten seas for such a purpose. If the assisting of England were alone concerned, that would be motive enough for me. Much more, therefore, am I of opinion that I ought to grudge no labor or trouble, seeing that the object in view is an agreement among the learned, to be drawn up by the weight of their authority according to Scripture, in order to unite widely severed churches.”

– John Calvin, Letter to Thomas Cranmer in 1552.

“Nothing can be clearer, of course, than that the conception of its unity enters fundamentally into the New Testament doctrine of the Church.” (B. B. Warfield, “True Church Unity: What It Is,” p. 299)

The Priority of Christian Unity

The pursuit and maintenance of unity among confessing Christians is a clear, compelling and central biblical imperative which cannot be ignored or refused without quenching the Spirit’s presence and power among us.  As R. B. Kuiper rightly notes, “The Word of God teaches the unity of the church unmistakably, repeatedly and emphatically.  It is no exaggeration to assert that this is one of the most outstanding teachings of the New Testament.”

Quoted from Nick Nowalk’s There Is One Body in Christ (4) : The Priority of Christian Unity at the Harvard Ichthus. Part 4 of an ongoing series on Christian Unity.

Plan A: Natural Increase, Not Genocide

“Behold, I send an Angel before you to keep you in the way and to bring you into the place which I have prepared. Beware of Him and obey His voice: do not provoke Him, for He will not pardon your transgressions for My name is in Him. But if you indeed obey His voice and do all that I speak, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries. For My Angel will go before you and bring you in to the Amorites and the Hittites and the Perrizites and the Canaanites and the Hivites and the Jebusites; and I will cut them off. You shall not bow down to their gods, nor serve them, nor do according to their works; but you shall utterly overthrow them and completely break down their sacred pillars. So you shall serve the LORD your God and He will bless your bread and your water. And I will take sickness away from the midst of you. No one shall suffer miscarriage or be barren in your land; I will fulfill the number of your days. I will send My fear before you. I will cause confusion among all the people to whom you come, and will make all your enemies turn their backs to you. And I will send hornets before you, which shall drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite, and the Hittite from before you. I will not drive them out from before you in one year, lest the land ebcome desolate and the beast of the field become too numerous for you. Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased, and you inherit the land. And I will set your bounds from the Red Sea of the Philistines, and from the desert to the River. For I will deliver the inhabitants of the land into your hand, and you shall drive them out before you. You shall make no covenant with them, nor with their gods. They shall not dwell in your land, lest they make you sin against Me. For if you serve their gods, it will surely be a snare to you.”

– Exodus 23: 20-33

When Hernan Cortes first arrived in the Americas, the Aztecs he met with thought he was a long-awaited god, whom their prophets had said would come in that very year. They thought he was Quetzalcoatl, the son of god, and honored him in a manner befitting a god. He was received with great pomp and ceremony by Monteczuma II, king of the Aztecs. What happened afterwards is, of course, a matter of dispute, but both sides agree is reeks of opprobium. The European conquistadors and colonialists in the 16th through the 19th centuries claimed they were planting flags in foreign countries for “Gold, God and Glory“. From the accounts of Las Casas, a Spanish priest who was horrified that Spanish soldiers were raping native women and spearing their babies on sticks, and decided to write his harrowing account of the genocide that was occurring, since he believed that Spain would be damned if it continued sponsoring these men, “Gold” and “Glory” seem to leave “God” a far-distant third in their motivations. Though of course there were also people like Las Casas, who had the conscience to be horrified.

The Aztecs believed that they were being attacked by invisible arrows that pierced them and made them ill – not too bad a visualization of the works of virulent diseases. By way of explanation for the rape and pillage and inexplicable interest in the fictional “El Dorado”, they came to tell a story that the white man suffered from a sickness that only gold could cure –  that in the absence of gold, they went mad.

The Igbo people of what is now Nigeria (or so I am told) believed that the white men who came to their shores were dead ancestors come to visit, because their own skins turned pale when they died. The cowrie shells traded for slaves represented the bodies of their ancestral dead drowned at sea – they believed they were redeeming their ancestors, which they bought in exchange for the enemies, who were shipped off to the Americas – an efficient, not to mention profitable way of ridding the land of one’s enemies.

All this is painful history, and doubly painful for those who call themselves Christians – because it’s pretty good ammunition for the argument that Christians are no better than non-Christians; that sometimes pagans treat Christians better than vice versa. And to people who whip out this argument, I guess there’s only one thing to say: it’s true. Nominal or practicing, those who have flown the banner of Christ have behaved no better and no worse at their best and worst at various times in history.

So, all this begs the question: Where was God in all this?

Full Article at the Harvard Ichthus

Would He Make it Past an Airport Gantry?

Guess Who?

from Religious Tolerance

No, it’s not Kumar

Conversation Starters, Conversation Killers

So, my “pick-up lines” have been a little more successful in the Midwest than in the Northeast, to put it mildly. But then again, it may also be a difference between 2008 and 2010.

Northeast, Harvard Coop, Cute Bookseller, Summer 2008.

me: Hi…. um, what time do you knock off?*
cute bookseller: Excuse me?
me: Er… do you want to get maybe coffee or dinner with me?
cb: No.

Midwest, Red House, River experience Cafe, Sound man who looks like John Lennon. Yesterday.

I’m at the counter buying a drink.

me: Hi! You look like John Lennon.
John Lennon-lookalike: Um, thanks! I’ll take that as a compliment!
me: It was!
JLl: I like to play his music…
10 minutes later, I am halfway through a strawberry lemonade frappe (excellent), he walks over.
JLl: Hey.
me: Hey. Do you work here?
JLl: Yeah, I’m working at Rock Camp, which is for teens who want to be in rock bands.
me: Cool! When I was 13, I wanted to be in a rock band. But I didn’t grow up around here, and we didn’t have something like that.
JLl: So are you visiting?
me: Yes, I’m from Singapore.
JLl: Cool! Which part of Singapore?
me: Singapore. It’s not a very big island.

We talk a bit about exactly where Singapore is located, geographically. He’s been to Thailand.

me: I’m “sailing” down the Mississippi, except not really, because I don’t have a boat. And I’m making a film while I go.
JLl: Cool, where are you headed next?
me: Wisconsin, probably. I have a long-lost cousin there I’ve just met.
JLl: You should take the Great River Road. I’ve been that way myself, it’s very beautiful. It looks like Japan.
me: I’ve never been to Japan.
JLl: Me neither, but I’ve seen pictures, and it looks like that. I was going to this Zen retreat centre run by a guy from Kyoto.
me: Oh! I hear that Kyoto is the most beautiful bit of Japan. They have a lot of sheep, or so I hear.
JLl: So you just came over from the museum?
me: Yeah! It was great!
JLl: I never get to go there, even though it’s so close by. I just don’t have the time.
me: Well, you want to see some sketches I made of the art there? I saw some really cool Haitian art, and the John Deere collection was fantastic!
JLl: Sure!

I proceed to show him my sketches of the Figge, two posts below/under the “Art” category.

JLl: There’s a lot of Jesus.
me: Yup.
JLl: Well, that’s the Midwest for you. Lots of Jesus.
me: Yup. Not necessarily a bad thing.
JLl: Oh no, Jesus is cool! I like Jesus. It’s some of his followers I can’t stand. I’m a fan.
me: Me too!
JLl: By the way, you are missing one H in “Rhythm”
me: Oh. Yeah. I can’t spell.
JLl: Sorry, I was an English major.
me: I was an English major, too, and I still can’t spell.
JLl: Listen, you have a good day now. I have to work!
me: Bye!

I finish off my strawberry lemonade frappe.

*”When do you knock off” is Singaporean Parlance for “What time do you get off of work?”. Apparently it doesn’t mean the same thing in America. You learn something new every day.

**John Lennon Lookalike’s real name is Lars.

***Also, I wouldn’t entirely blame the Northeast, because I think I was very awkward in 2008. But then, I still kind of am.

passing by Oedipus

passing by Oedipus

by Judith Huang

I was walking by

the walls of a kingdom

flushed in the fading sun

and passed hardly a glance

at the cloak in the gutter –

the one with the noble heart

(the eyes were closed,

I could not see

if they were truly blind)

(2001)

painting by Paul Rhoads