On a mission

Last week I went on college mission. Before I say anything of substance, can I just point out how horrific it is that this verb gets used as a noun. Or perhaps that's not the thing that troubles me - perhaps it's that the noun doesn't receive an article. Why do we say "I went on mission" when it should be "I went on a/the mission"?? This is the same sort of ugliness as when people ask "Where do you church?". Ew.

Anyway 'mission' was awesome. My group went to St Peters Anglican, just south of Newtown. I was hoping to learn how an inner city church can connect with the mass of disenchanted people, and to acquire the courage and skills to talk to scary homeless people. Here's some of the things I learned:

• It's tough. People are disinterested or hostile and they don't respond well to mass evangelism/marketing. But they do value relationships, and if over time you can win peoples' trust, well, then you've won their trust and they will listen charitably to your invitations to church or whatever. In each person's life there are plenty of opportunities to engage with the people around - your friends, the parents of your kids' friends, your hairdresser etc. You just have to be a friendly person who takes an interest in these people, and commit to getting to know them, little by little. It's that simple and that tough.
• I'm interested in people. Well I already knew that, but it was good for me to realise that, as long as I set out with the right attitude, I do have the courage to talk to homeless people.
• It's okay to be introverted and to get overwhelmed and drained by interacting with lots of people. It doesn't mean that I should give up on connecting with people - just that I should limit it to, y'know, one local supermarket owner, cafe, hairdresser, pharmacy, neighbour. And if I need time to myself, well then I can shop elsewhere and not interact.

Art

Creative expression is very often subtle and nuanced. It speaks to our emotions, subconscience and aesthetic sensibility. Its meaning may be deliberately or unavoidably ambiguous or hidden. Because it comes to us in this complex form, we can each respond to different elements. So, for example, I listen to music for melody and emotion. I like music with passion and music that makes me want to dance. Even though I love words, when I listen to music I don't care too much what they say. I don't even really mind if they're offensive. But other people listen to music differently and, for them, the lyrics will be the number one thing. In all things, Christians have to be careful not to judge one another, but, because it is so easy to make false assumptions about each others' experience of art, I think that this is even more important here.

Sober excitement

My dear friend Mikey has an awesome blog. Phewph, been meaning to plug it for a long time.

There's an embarrassment of great material I could link to, but I thought a couple of recent-ish posts were particularly timely. I see a lot of interest these days in creation and wisdom and God-as-Creator, in addition to what is regarded as a previously narrow emphasis on justification and salvation and God-as-Savior. I'm very much a part of this, but I worry that no-one is keeping an eye on the pendulum's swing. Until these posts.

Cultural assumptions

Some missos from Malawi discussed subtle cultural bloopers at college the other day. They observed that:

• Westerners need to think afresh about servant leadership in cultures where respect for leaders is shown precisely by them not doing mundane tasks.
• Western teachers and leaders see their number one task as getting the message across, but other cultures value relationships more highly. This disconnect may mean that it can actually be a blessing to speak the language badly, as it forces you to focus on relationships.
• When you try to communicate something cross-culturally almost every word you use can conjure up different things.

The world is mad

* a rant *

Does anyone else get really irritated when the speed camera people tell the public where the speed cameras are!?!!!!! Isn't the whole point for people to not know where a camera might be, and so to keep to the speed limit wherever they are!!

Book club

I've started attending a book club with my friend Emma. It's made up of her workmates and their friends - fiesty, intelligent, well-read women. Last month we read The Catcher in the Rye. We talked about things we would never otherwise mention - moral codes, hypocrisy, failure, cynicism, hidden motivations, disability and its treatment, the impact of grief and molestation. The experience was something like Hamlet's play within a play - it was safe to present our personal opinions and beliefs because we did so under the guise of talking about the book. I don't mean that what we said was ingenuine - just that there was more going on than discussion of the book alone.

Everyone should join a book club!

Unless you don't like books. That would be silly.

Up close and personal

I'm not sure how sustainable this line of arguing is, but it occured to me that if you worship a god who isn't real, then that god will necessarily be understood as distant from you. Perhaps one of the marks of the reality of the God that Christians worship is that we attest to a personal and intimate relationship with him.

Work

And here's some random insights from our man Alain:

I felt the awkwardness of having to look up to rocket engineers and technicians
as our ancestors might once have venerated their gods. These specialists were
unlikely and troubling objects of admiration compared with the night sky and the
mountains. The pre-scientific age, whatever its deficiencies, had at least
offered its members the peace of mind that follows from knowing all man-made
achievements to be nothing next to the grandeur of the universe. We, more
blessed in our gadgetry but less humble in our outlook, have been left to
wrestle with feelings of envy, anxiety and arrogance that follow from having no
more compelling repository of veneration than our brilliant, precise, blinkered
and morally troubling fellow human beings.

. . .

I was stuck by how impoverished ordinary language can be by contrast [with
equations employed to determine the force of gravity at work on a telegraph
cable], requiring its user to arrange inordinate numbers of words in tottering
and unstable piles in order to communicate meanings infinitely more basic than
anything related to an electrical network. I found myself wisheding that the
rest of mankind would follow the engineers' example and agree on a series of
symbols which could point incontrovertibly to certain elusive, vaporous and
often painful psychological states - a code which might help us to feel less
tongue-tied and less lonely, and enable us to resolve arguments with swift and
silent exchanges of equation.

. . .

Death is hard to keep in mind when there is work to be done: it seems not so
much taboo as unlikely. Work does not by its nature permit us to do anything
other than take it too seriously. It must destroy our sense of perspective, and
we should be grateful to it for precisely that reason, for allowing us to mingle
ourselves promiscuously with events, for letting us wear thoughts of
our own death and the destruction of our enterprises with beautiful
lightness, as mere intellectual propositions, while we travel to Paris to sell
engine oil.

De Botton concludes:

Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect
bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our
immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it
will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired,
it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble.

I admire his courageous honesty. But I am sad for him - for, by God's grace, I know that there is more to life and to death.


Quotes from de Botton, The Pleasures, 168, 206, 324, 326.

The right job

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work1 the wonderful Alain de Botton investigates the strangely hidden and unexamined world of work, celebrating and bemoaning its diverse, peculiar character. The first six chapters (Cargo Ship Spotting thru Painting) are astonishingly well written* - unfortunately things start to slip a little in chapter seven (Transmission Engineering) and he loses his way in chapters eight thru ten (Accountancy, Entrepreneurship, Aviation). Perhaps he found himself the victim of an inflexible word count. In the quotes below de Botton talks about finding the 'right job for you'.

the most common and unhelpful illusion plaguing those who came to see him [a careers counsellor] was the idea that they ought somehow, in the normal course of events, to have intuited - long before they had finished their degrees, started families, bought houses and risen to the top of law firms - what they should properly be doing with their lives. They were tormented by a residual notion of having through some error or stupidity on their part missed out on their true 'calling'.

. . .

The evidence suggested that the forming of an individual in its early years was
as sensitive and important a task as the correct casting of a skyscraper's
foundations . . . . the weight accorded to ideas of nurture and to the
development of self-esteem in theories of modern education no longer seemed like
a sign that our societies had gone mad or soft. On the contrary, this emphasis
was as finely attuned to the demands of contemporary working life as instruction
in stoicism and physical bravey had been to the exigencies of ancient times.

. . .

I left Symons's company newly aware of the unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled
within the magnanimous bourgeois assurance that everyone can discover happiness
through work and love. It isn't that these two entities are invariably incapable
of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an
exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of
seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life, will weigh down on us like
particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and error
in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective
consolation for our fractious marriages and our unexploited ambitions, and
condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having
stubbornly failed to become who we are.

* A reviewer, Geoff Dyer, writes: "Without losing any of his trademark clarity and lightness of touch, Alain de Botton here achieves a deeper sympathetic hilarity and a higher level of wan brilliance." Amen to that.


1 A de Botton, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009) - quotes from p113, 122 & 127-28.

Shining

I reckon these things should be the hallmarks of any Christian's life:

• Being honest and humbly repentant about your sin;


• Living with humility;


• Speaking graciously and kindly about people;


• Showing respect for your husband or wife, regarding marriages as of great importance and sex as a special part of that;


• Being willing to talk about the confronting, troubling things in life;


• Being persistently thoughtful, generous and other-person centred, in little ways and big.

I'm glad to say that when I look around at my Christian brothers and sisters, that's often what I see. :-)

Seeking understanding

Sometimes, when life's been hard the thing that I've desired more than anything - almost more than the end of the pain - is to understand. I want to see that:

• there was some good reason for my trouble. Even if I've been wronged, I want to know that there is a bigger picture that brings sense to all this, that there is some good reaching over it all. I want to know that my suffering didn't just come from randomness, negligence or cruelty.


• something good will come of my suffering. I don't want to go through all the pain and it be for nothing.


• it won't always be like this. I want to know that, one day, it will be well, and it will be good.

And my God answers "yes" to all these things. That's not why I came to believe in him, but I am glad that it is true. It doesn't mean he will let me in on his purposes or plans though, and that can be very hard. But he's trustworthy - he's worthy of my trusting him.

Poverty as a middle-class Westerner

The year before last I didn't have quite enough money to live on - so each fortnight I'd have to pay for something 'essential' on my credit card, and just hope some money would come from somewhere to pay it off before it got too out of control. I could've asked for help, but I'm not always good at that, and I had this strong conviction that if other people paid their own way through their studies then why shouldn't I. And when I'm unconvinced about something I find it near impossible to take action for practical reasons alone . . . At the time I wrote down the things I'd come to know through being (relatively) poor, but it wasn't appropriate to blog about it then, as I was still in the midst of bitterness. So here it is - all the unpleasant things you experience, without any of the answers - these are provided them in a series elsewhere. [Here's the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth posts of that series.] I hope that knowing this stuff will help us to empathise with and provide assistance to people in need, in Australia and overseas.

When you're poor you:

• are sick with stress and fear about surviving. Your trouble seems insurmountable. You have difficulty trusting God and not worrying.
• consider how much things will cost before you consider anything else.
• change your lifestyle and do without all sorts of things - in the process realising that many of the things you consider normal are actually middle-class luxuries.
• can't participate in things, or you have to choose the cheaper option, or you have to pretend you can afford it when you can't. You can't be hospitable.
• have to rely on other peoples' generosity and hospitality, knowing you're unable to return any favours.
• are envious of people who live lives full of riches, ease and sophistication.
• are aware that even as a poor Westerner, you're still very rich, and are horrified at true poverty.

Big scale

Sydney is an event city. Perhaps lots of big cities are. Things don't happen organically or small-scale here (well, apart from the health system ;-)) - they get organised. So, people go to the Official Opera Australia Program. They go wine-tasting at the Official Wine Tasting Festival Tour Thing. They explore ideas at the Official Series Of Lectures Put On By A University. And it's the same in the Christian world. If there's something everyone needs to learn or get amped about, we put on an Official Katoomba or Hillsong Conference or run an Official Beach Mission.

I actually think it's great that Christian culture accords with the wider culture in this regard. But I do find it funny - just because I'm not used to it. And I'm wary of it being seen as a foolproof solution because I know that it wouldn't work too well in a place like Tassie.

A little more like Jesus

God loves contrition. When it is right for us to be broken, then it is good that we are. But he also loves joy, especially joy in him. I feel like sometimes in Christian circles it's only permissible to say is how sinful we are; talking about growth in righteousness and love is taboo. This should not be! We must rejoice in the changes God is making in us, just as much as - and perhaps even more than - we mourn over our sin.

Seeing justice done

The thing that bothers me most about my faith is that some people will end up in hell. I don't think that this is unfair or vindictive of God - I actually think that's exactly what we people deserve - including myself. And I think that if God were to rescue even only one person, it would be an act of beautiful mercy - so it's wonderful that there will be "a great multitude that no-one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language".1

So what's my problem? This is it: I care more about God acting in mercy than in justice. I'm glad that God is just, but it doesn't stir my heart the way it should. I pray that it would.


1 Revelation 7:9

A cat in a china shop

Before I became a Christian, I dabbled in Buddhism - for long enough to get the basic gist - and to see that the basic gist is not where it's at. I mean Buddhism isn't even a thing for words. If you've managed to describe it in words and concepts, you haven't really described it at all. So I get very frustrated whenever I hear Christian people making brazen statements about Buddhism.

But last week I had the pleasure of hearing from a gentleman who's been working with Thai Buddhists for many years. He got across something of the complexity and subtlety of Buddhism, and he conducted himself with calmness, humility and courtesy. Here are his tips for sharing Jesus with Buddhist people:

1. Never argue - it will make the other person lose face. Never compare religions. Avoid 'friendly' mockery.
2. Accept them as a person and show them honour.
   
3. Tell them about your life - without being patronising. Tell them about the Creator God as well as stories about Jesus. Don't do this in a linear way - talk in circles. Explain that Jesus washed away bad karma.
4. Feel free to be up-front on a personal level - it's fine to ask if you can pray for them.
5. Leave the results up to God.