To do more is to be alive…

I wonder why I want to do more and be more.  Why do I want so much more out of life than what I have.  I think in part, like Godin said, its what makes me feel alive.  http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/03/im-making-money-why-do-more.html.

I wrestle like hell like Jacob did with not letting go until I find the root of my design, my true hard wire.  What am I here for? Why am I here? You know the questions that make you get up in the morning, keep you driving throughout the day, and then wake you up only do it all over again.  I guess I “charge” it or press the edges to try and figure it out.  I want to feel alive.  I don’t want to lose in a world that is fervently pressing the edges of change and advancing the human soul to new peaks.  We live in a world marked by the fringe and I want to make sure that I am in the front of that fringe, or at least in pace with its current flux. I want to feel alive and I think the only way to do it is to fight forward and deny the innate latency that beckons us to fail.

Upstairs or Downstairs?

Where do you live? Do you see life from the Upstairs or Downstairs?

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Why?

Francis Schafer penned in his How Should We Then Live, “Epistemology is the philosophical foundation with which you are sure you could know something. It’s the theory of knowledge – how we know, or how we know we can know.”  Sounds complex right.  Not really. At a base level it says, for example that I can conclude vanilla is my favorite ice cream flavor because I like its taste best when put up against all other flavors.  So when I am asked at the counter of Cold Stone Creamery what flavor I would like, I can confidently choose “vanilla” because I know its taste and how it resonates with my preference.  It says why I choose vanilla time and time again.  This obviously is simple and very granular, but it demonstrates a pathway in my line of thinking that influences my actions based on a level of certainty.  Therefore, it’s the process you travel for your way of knowing what you can know. “This is what I believe and this is mentally why and how I can get there.”  It’s your “why” you believe.

Let’s reach this out a bit to more complex implications: 1)prayer, 2)worship, and 3)belief.  For example, how deeply you worship whether in private or corporate assembly is directly connected to how deeply you pray and how you deeply you pray is rooted in how deeply you engage the “why” you believe. In other words, the level of conviction in your faith determines the level of your engagement and risk you will take when you worship and pray, and this is based on the grip you have of your epistemology of faith.  Assuming a faith in God, when you pray and worship you begin from a philosophical and spiritual “springboard” or platform so that you can engage something outside your self, but without that platform of belief or place to jump or leap from you can’t leap beyond where you are.  “I believe in God so therefore I worship Him and pray to Him.”

That said, the question I am asking is how firm is your grip on your epistemology of belief.  How developed is your “Why” when you pray or worship.  Have you really established a footing on why you worship, why you pray, and therefore why you believe?  Just because you worship and pray doesn’t necessarily allow you or anyone to conclude that you have an epistemology of belief.  It might allege that you have a belief structure but it doesn’t make the thing real or determinable.  It just shows simply that you appear to pray and appear to worship.  You may raise your hands high and appear to exuberantly engage Him in worship or you may rest gently in the pew and reverently kneel low or you may just sing along and “look” engaged.  The physical action does not necessarily assume a greater or lessor level of belief.  It may presume it, but it is not proof.  Similarly, just because you boldly proclaim your prayers and eloquently stretch out your hands to emphasize your words in a prayer, doesn’t verifiably conclude that you have an evident or deeper connection to God over anything else.  It may just show that you are dramatic.  However, your belief (epistemology) does determine how you worship which in turn determines how you pray and vice versa because you have set a connection to your understanding, a correlation between subject and object, between you and God.  That is the vital pathway of correlation between subject and object.  Its a manifestation or of your relationship with God.  This is not to say that we can believe “enough” and therefore have a “good, better, or best” relationship to him.  That implies that we can earn that position.  I am not saying that.  However, what I am saying or asking is that when you pray or when you worship what do you believe?  How do you believe?  Why do you believe?  Where is your line that you take?  Because what does happen is that when you either pray or worship, you are choosing to stand on the floor before His very Throne at that level you are willing to define your “why?”

We can all worship.  We can all pray.  We can all believe.  However, I am asking like I ask myself when I pray or worship or engage my belief, how well do I know myself in relation to God.  How much am I convicted and traveled in my “why?”  When I really dig into prayer, really embrace the glory of worship, or really wrestle my belief, I am engaging at the level I choose to connect to the King and resonate with the cross, the hereafter, and my faith in the here and now.

Darkness as a Torch

Kind of like “jumbo shrimp” or “almost always” right?  I know this is an oxymoron but I wanted to raise an eyebrow and hopefully create a string of thoughts that might make some sense as you go and rummage through it a bit.

The darkness that I am speaking of is the necessary part of learning and the ugly place we have to live to “get it.”  I don’t mean the quick easy learns like slowing down on the freeway because you got a ticket, licking an envelope slowly to avoid that nasty paper-cut, not parking in your bosses spot your first day on the job, and remembering that in marriage you need to choose one hill to die on instead of every single one.  Those are important things to learn but they are reactions to relatively quick consequences that pinch and tug at your tolerance level of irritation and perturbation.  Sure they may sting and snap back like a junk yard bull dog or  a cornered squirrel huddled over his nest of acorns, but ultimately the lesson is quick and reminds you, for example, not to swing at a wasp because they keep stinging and stinging.  This darkness where we are forced and chiseled involves time and endurance, and yet it is ultimately as grim as it is liberating.

Depending on our engagement level and willingness to wrestle with sheer “gut feelings” and passion, this type of darkness depicts, to certain levels and certain scopes, what we are becoming.  I’m not proposing “what do you want to be,” like your vocational choice or personal calling, although they might intertwine at some point, but what you will become in accordance with your design specific to your person and its dance with humanity as you “choose or don’t choose to work through the darkness.”  This place of darkness can bring definition to the person, not as an end point but as a process, a rather arduous process of near drownings, hellacious descents, riveting falls, and unsuspecting loss.

I don’t mean to be morbid or overly pessimistic and use the darkness as a sticking point where it becomes the “only place you learn,” but for me the battle, in retrospect, is the deepest way I progress; it has a bitter, painfully enchanting haunt that pushes me forward to locations that I wouldn’t otherwise see, or necessarily even broach.  As a matter of fact, I hate it when I’m in it and I complain like a baby in a dirty diaper who is hungry and tired while I am there.  I labor loudly and writhe like a worm burning in the sun, and yet I know it is the place where I am ultimately refined.  It is the most probable place where I can grow but also a terrible place for me to loiter and intentionally linger.  Granted, I can say that now and write this here because I am through a long dark tunnel that has been my bane for years, but that darkness now is my torch.  It is my mentor. Strange I know, and perhaps a bit dreary and melodramatic.  But for me, that experience of darkness forged something in me that is more than what I was when it started.  I don’t think I did anything special or admirable.  There is no secret, but there is a task.  And that is we must muscle through and purposefully engage with the might of the soul and depth of the wit.  That is not to say that every point needs inspection and all details need to be flipped and examined, but within certain points you need to discern which ones to address, toss around and delve into with the hopes to eventually reveal implications and significance.

Sure.  It’s simple right?  I can say that here to you now as you read because I have no idea of your “tunnel,” your “darkness.”  You’re right.  I don’t, but I do think that the human plight, regardless of circumstance and individual tailoring, whether yours or mine, shares commonalities that allow us to interact in the core of this conversation together.  It is through some of its (darkness) base measures and components – pain, hurt, disillusionment, betrayal, confusion, grayness, etc. – that allow us to relate to the intensity of each other and the intensity of our personal experiences.  It is within this core of what the darkness humanly conjures, despite our individual lots, that ultimately bring us together.

Our details vary but the “tunnel” itself shares things that we all know to varying degrees, which in this conversation, then transforms itself into what becomes the torch.  Where it separates a bit and where we become different is the in application.  I think when we choose not to engage and instead allow the darkness to become all consuming, and I get that because I have tasted a darkness and felt its overwhelming tug to “jump,” is where the individuals split apart.  It’s not where one becomes better than the other, but where choice and fortitude differentiates one from another and where the process changes.  It’s not like there is a single moment where this happens, or only one point in this where we decide to move or stay.  I think it is constantly moving as we are constantly changing and growing.  One moment, for example, we may find the strength to push in and engage where the very next we may want to coil up and close our eyes.  I don’t believe that there is only one cliff where we get to decide whether we will jump or turn back or find a secret path down.  I think it is found, we are found, in the iterations of every moment and the undulations of every jolt of experience that becomes a string of defining behavior.  That is a part of what darkness summons.

What I am slowly learning is that there is a strange sweetness in the darkness that we must at least engage, or at lest push around a bit and interact with so that it can be given the chance to become a light.  I don’t want to personify the darkness here because I don’t think it alone has any real merit aside from our interaction with it.  It’s an item.  It’s a period of time.  It is a bundle of varied circumstances that produce different levels of hurt, anguish, pain, etc., depending on the person.  Alone it is just a sum of things in a certain time involving unique individuals.  Where it transcends randomness and coincidence is in relation to the degree that we choose to interconnect with what it can potentially pull from the depths of our human soul and the transformation we are being asked to task.  Darkness is powerfully heavy and filled with burden, but if we learn to look deeply and toil through the immediate and real confusion it seems to bring, I believe we can find something that is very close to light.

yeah, yeah, yeah “have faith,” blah blah blah…

It’s so intangible.  Faith is I mean.  Ambivalent.  Silent. Daunting. Nonsensical. Weird. Impractical. When you are going through the thick of it and someone pulls the “faith card,” it can seem and even sound really cheap.  It’s like the adult voices in the old Charlie Brown cartoons that you could never understand, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, “have faith,” blah blah blah.’

It’s especially all those things when someone outside of your “dark cloud” jumps into your ring of fire to help ease your travail and says, “just have faith.”  That’s the moment for me when I feel that heavy disconnect, when that heavy wave of impracticality hits me as I sit in my own private, dark writhing.  Faith? When actually what feels way more real, almost oddly comforting is that dark alley I’m walking through.  Not that it’s enjoyable by any means or that the better choice is to stay in the struggle or “the thing” whatever it is, but that tough place at least feels real.  In a weird way it makes sense. Its what is as opposed to what might be or could be or should be.  It’s not a matter of not wanting to leave the funk and the hurt, but the seemingly unrealistic task of putting faith in its place is a tough pill to swallow; it’s almost impossible.  To take on the role of faith is really difficult because it asks you to suspend what you feel and what you see right before you and call on Something that doesn’t reach our sight, taste, touch, smell, or hearing.  And yet oddly, there is an appeal to us, all of us, somewhere in the corner of our being where we are attracted to this idea of faith to at least some degree, whether scorn or curiosity. What is real however, are the circumstance(s) that bear down like a freight train, and that usually overtakes the faith component.

I suppose what’s worse yet is someone way on the outside (perhaps even me as I write this blog) or a person of faith who puts out the “just have faith” line when you’re about to go through that place again for the “umpteenth”  time.  Maybe you know this place intimately, every corner, every turn, every whisper.  You know what’s headed your way.  You know it like an old, angry, bitter friend.  This cold, long, dark, damp alley  has become more familiar than the well lit streets of Main and Main.  For example, it’s my buddy who’s wife was just diagnosed with cancer, the wife who just lost her 34 year old husband to a rare heart infection, the parent who lost their child after only 4 months of living, the son who can’t reconcile his parents divorce, or the wife who’s husband just left her.  These places are real, and they are dark.  Is this where you are supposed to find faith or just have it like you might a ham sandwich?

This alley, whether it is familiar or the first time you walked it, is the place where faith becomes an even more distant, far off pit in our head because of the immediate experience and its weight.  Faith on a good day is tough, but put it in the middle of “hurt and confusion” and it almost vanishes.  It’s also though not as simple as we just don’t believe.  The experience makes it difficult to even just breathe let alone “just believe.”  The situation causes us to live differently on a rough grid and to throw in the intangible realm of faith can sometimes just be impossible.

I think there are several common notions of it, faith I mean; 1) Some people loosely linger  there because its convenient and perhaps comfortable.  Its like a warm cabin in the mountains during a snowstorm with the fire place glowing its burning embers.  2)For many, faith makes no sense, but none-the-less they take it on for a moment as a place to go for reprieve, like a respite, like an oasis in the desert.  It’s a thought, an escape.  3)And yet there are others that think that faith is always a wasteland, a dry desert with an occasional rain, but nothing worth building a house on.

What do you do? Maybe you go to “faith” for a quick bit to escape the damp, cold pain or lift your head from the questions of life that just don’t make sense.  Perhaps you treat it like a trip to Oz – a make believe place to bring things back to perspective, and then you wake up with a new and better angle to tackle reality.

But really, “have faith?”  It sounds like you can it pick of the shelf on aisle 9 at Wal Mart for dirt cheap. It seems like such a lame charge.  Empty. Hollow. A puff of nonsense when held up against the pain of your situation and circumstance.  Is it that there is nothing else to say? Is there nothing else that can summon us from our barrenness? Or … is it actually the best thing to say in that it charges you to  a new place of unique surrender?  You see pain is paralyzing.  I get that.  I know that place and pain to a degree. It’s a powerful place. It’s consuming. It is very rich and thick.  It has the power to steal your attention, your headspace, your soul, your wit, and your focus.  It forces you into a corner because by its very merit it is a tangible piece with teeth, and we all understand it in our lives to some degree and at some point.  It forces your hand and beckons the pain intellectually and spiritually to forefront to dominate your mind-set, your thoughts, your feelings.  So, perhaps putting it out there to “have faith” is the charge that is demanded by design. Being in the pain, whether familiar like that old, bitter, angry friend or unfamiliar and new and raw, drawing on the power of faith is to put ourselves before the Maker and realize that no matter how hard we “will” ourselves from that place, or try to press through the pain by individual prowess, or simply fall deep and get lost in the cavernous ruts of anguish, the only thing at the end of the day that really has any merit, any vision, any, dare I say “hope” to provide a sense of Otherness to rescue us from despair is Faith.  The charge may sound trite and the call for many may wreak of religiosity, but I believe that it is a climb like that of Mt. Everest.  It is not for the simple, the faint, the weak, the slow, the weary. It is the place where we are made.

So when the pain, isolation, drought, and darkness of situations and circumstance beckons you to hold fast and firm to what hurts because its real, it makes sense, and its right in front of you, maybe then is the perfect time to reach out to what doesn’t make sense, and what doesn’t seem real.  Maybe right there and then we are to explore the possibility of the Unknown and the Unseen.  Maybe, in a weird kind of twisted way, this place of pain, this address is where we are to examine if we have a design, wrestle with our purpose and if we have one, or even if there is an intent on the lives that we live. Perhaps the just “have faith” in its simplistic, seemingly elementary form that has truly become a cliche, is really a very pure call and hearty challenge to stretch ourselves forward, our minds out, and our hearts to a place that could not have been explored if not for pain.  Perhaps, to “have faith” is the path, the climb that leads us to uncover what we all deep down inside really fear so that we can explore the realm of what could be and should be.  Maybe to explore the faith through the pain is the vehicle that is supposed to make us really see….

It’s in the living…

She was almost 98 years old.  Amazing.  Wow! She lived nearly a full century, almost a 100 years.  I can’t even picture with my mind’s eye what that might look like.  Imagine what she’s seen from 1912 to 2010.  She’s been in the mix from the days of the horse and carriage to the era of Twitter.  She’s gone from typewriters and hand written notes to cloudless technology.  She’s seen the first automobile, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the internet, the Cold War, 911, Obama, and FaceBook. She saw the birth of surfing and snowboarding and its subsequent explosion.  (I don’t think she really cared or knew, but the point is she saw it.)  She saw transformation of culture, baby boomers to gen x to gen y to whoever is it that’s next.  Pretty gnarly and deserving of some serious respect.  My grandma saw swarms of change and lived through massive upheavals and dynamic innovations in human mind and spirit.  She was married to the same man for over 60 years and stayed the course of her faith from start to end.  She was the matriarch of the family, the wall, the pillar, the mainstay.  The one who held the line at all costs for the whole crew.  Her faith and power to “stay” was inspiring and humbling in the same breath, while still she was battered with and encumbered by challenges and bad draws.  The end for her was rough.  Her life just slowly gave way, through pain, moans, lost memory, and ultimately a loss of reality.  And yet she never swerved or veered in task or faith.  I don’t quite understand her steady trot.  She had plenty of reason to change course and alter her destiny, but she chose to stay the drop and hold the line and create and carve her own wave.  She saw change of the global landscape and the swinging pendulum of humanity sway to and fro.  But she stayed.  She loved. She lived.

You know how ink is everywhere.  Tats I mean.  Tattoos. We all have one or several that represent things to us.  Sometimes the art of the symbol and the ink is clear in its depiction and representation while other tats are secret, personal, mysterious, and sometimes just freakin weird.  Anyway, the point is that ink usually represents us to some degree or another.  A piece or part of us that maybe we can’t say or show or tell, but its usually something significant.  I think there is a part of us in the ink that wants those who see our art, our expression to believe that we live a certain way, that we live for something off the cuff, off the grid; that we have a purpose outside ourselves.  That perhaps we live for something otherly, something different, something unusual, something our own.  Sure we all want to be distinguished from the crowd and march to our own ditty, but really, ultimately deep inside we all want and hope that somewhere in that ink it shows that we are different, set apart. That we are distinct from the usual. That we write our own story someway and somehow.

I realized that night though when I saw here in her casket.  (I was hoping I’d miss that part, the viewing.  It always freaks me out.) Anyway, I saw her there full of peace, calm, resolve, and an odd yet visible array of hope adorning her stay.  My grandma didn’t have any ink to set her apart.  She didn’t have that faint but discernible splash of color or last letter of a word or anything slipping out from her sleeve or collar to tell those of a clever quip or image that she had hidden ink.  She just lay there, still, lifeless, loving, gone.  But I saw something that put a rush in my spirit.  As her wrinkled, frail, boney, skinny, hardy hands were folded over each other, they were gingerly set to rest on her Bible.  Her Bible.  Her worn, used, tattered, frayed Bible.  The pages were torn at the edges and charred with use.  It was well traveled and explored. She lived in those pages. I think she lived there her whole life.  Its what gave her the ability to hold the line and stay the course.  My point is that the ink, our ink give us a sense of something other than ourselves, a sense of something.  We put it out there  because I think deep inside we want to represent something, we want to find something.  Sure to a lot of people its just art and expression, but for the most part its an angle.  It’s a somewhat secret piece of us we want to show but not always talk about.  But for my grandma it wasn’t ink that set her apart or ink that told the world how she lived or what she wanted to be about. For her it was much simpler.  It was in the living. She lived what she read in those pages of the book gingerly set to rest under her hands.  That Bible, that Book under her hands that she read over and over and over was her ink.  Her living told us quietly but steadily and faithfully that she lived for Something else.  Her life was her ink and she put it out there every day for her whole life for anybody that wanted to see.  At all cost, she stayed the course.  She held the line. For her, it’s in the living.  I love you grandma.

She lost her first tooth

She cried and cried.  Her legs bounced and her body squirmed as she tried to shake the fear, like when you try to pop a bee off your leg.  The tooth was hanging on by an invisible thing of something as I wiggled it around to gauge its readiness.  I gave a quick pop to see it I could loosen up the last little hold.  Boy, that freaked her out.  She went through the roof.  It wasn’t the pain or some deep agony.  She was scared.  The noise of a loose tooth and that little pop of it separating was enough to make her feel like the worst was about to happen.  In her perception the dark unknown awaited her in some deep alley of her mind’s eye.  That place and that feeling where the ambivalence writhes within your imagination pulling thoughts out like “this” might happen or “that” might happen. I tried to soothe her fear by talking soft, reassuring her that it will be okay, and that I’d wait till she was ready.  Nothing worked.  She was scared.  The fear in her eyes and the angst on her brow was visible, almost tangible.  Finally she let me take hold of it once more and with a clean, quick jolt I yanked out her first tooth.

I wonder how close to this experience we are most of the time.  No matter your age or gender, we all fear this place that is unchartered by our own first hand experience.  We suspect, we wonder, propose outcomes, try to shake it off, and ultimately hope that it will just fade into the horizon.  We don’t want the conclusion only because we don’t know what it is or what it will look like.  Of course, after we got the tooth out, wiped away a little blood, and helped her recap the big experience, all of a sudden she was transformed into a bundle of excitement and regeneration.  It’s like this tiny tooth lifted her spirits.  In truth though we all know it wasn’t the tooth, but the experience of overcoming and getting to the other side that made her excited.  For her, this little tooth, almost the size of a slender, oversized pea, riddled her state of being; it was monstrous and mind-altering. For most of us its the same.  I am not saying that extreme experiences like death, your health, your family, your marriage, your faith, your journey is in size and magnitude comparable to a tiny tooth.  What I am saying is the process of the transformation, where the road becomes unbearable in our mind’s eye, the circumstances seem insurmountable, or the event threatens to derail your soul, this process of travail for all of us is similar.  It is where we find our soul and our spirit. It is similar in that we are all charged by natural human law to overcome and get through to the other side, but we all have to choose how, when, and even if we can make that journey.  On the other side, it’s easy to look back, but before as we look out we are scared.  And yet we are made  in this process.  Where we show our colors is the road we take, if we take it, and what we do on it that is the making of the person; it is not necessarily where we end up that counts but the carving of our spirit in the undertaking.

I think that for me is the most difficult.  I can envision the other side of the canyon and see myself looking back, but as I stand on the opposite side envisioning the journey, the unknown, the untraveled, that is where I struggle.  I have the wit to do it.  We all do really.  We all have that design, but we don’t all have the spirit, the will, the discipline.  It is here, it is in your will and your spirit where you are made to excel and participate with the Potter and be shaped by the hand of life, or it is here where you choose to settle on the sedentary and fall back to let the fear keep you at bay, anchored in a still, protected harbor.

I told my daughter that if didn’t pull that tooth, it might fall out in her sleep and she’d swallow it.  There would be no tooth fairy, no reward, no exciting anticipation of transformation.  She closed her eyes, I grabbed hold gently but firmly, and popped it out. We wiped the tears, held her close, set the tooth by the side of the bed and congratualted her on her victory.  She overcame and took the journey.

I wonder how many times I leave my “loose tooth” in my brittle gum line for fear of the nervous anticipation of an unknown outcome.  Sometimes you just have to take hold and yank it out, hold it, and see that the spirit of the person is always wanting to journey and taste the other side of human transformation.