5 July 2015

A friend asked me if I thought goodness was determined by the actions they have taken, or whether it was the actions they would take given the opportunity. But I think it’s the other way around. I think that the temperament of our souls determines the valor of our actions, and I think that the color of our minds will always determine the hue of our words. Actions and words both pour forth as a manifestation of our philosophy, of the things we dwell on.

But here’s the problem: I can’t bring myself to dwell only on things that are noble, true, right, pure, and lovely, because the world is not made of those things. The world is base, wrong, corrupted, and ugly, and denying its true form will not lessen the harshness of it. I know people whose denial of the depravity of the world comes from both extremes. You cannot pretend that certain actions are not evil. You cannot pretend that evil only exists when seen. To hide myself from the world and its dark nuances would be to effectively disarm myself; I cannot fight what I cannot see. 

I can’t balance goodness with honesty, and that is a strange thing to say, but I have thought it before. I can’t balance kindness with truth, and it makes me cruel. I can’t balance goodness with transparency, and it makes me crass. I think the world is made of twilight; the meeting of light and dark, and to separate one from the other creates something that is so concentrated that it corrodes. Too much light will blind you, but so will too much dark. 

There will be some that say, “Jesus is the light. You can never have too much of him.” Well, to you I say that I have seen people abandon their friends in the name of purity. I have seen Christians so wrapped up in their need to keep themselves pure and spotless, that they forget what a large stain disloyalty leaves. It’s hard to believe in a God that heals the broken when his followers are the ones doing the breaking. I think that there has to be some way to refuse to participate in someone’s depravity without leaving them to drown in it. Telling someone that they are drowning is not very helpful if you aren’t going to help them out. (And to those who say that you cannot worry about what others think; you cannot worry, but you should care; be wary what sort of Christ you present to the world.)

We are selfish creatures, and we wrap ourselves in bitterness to keep ourselves safe, and this too is a mingling of light and dark. It is no crime to desire shelter. It is no virtue to harbor resentment. 

Perhaps I’ve taken the question and lost it in the answering. Maybe I don’t really have an answer. I just know what I’ve always believed; that we walk a narrow road with a bottomless cavern on either side, and one is marked Decay and the other is Preservation, and somewhere in between the two has got to be something called Living. 

19 June 2015

I went to Haiti last week, and I encountered a world where the air is hot and thick, sticking to your skin and filling your clothes with the constant scent of burning rubber and human filth. Trash littered the streets and animals ran amuck amidst a sea of people who seemed not to even notice that their gutters were overflowing with old bottles and crushed cardboard. And as we watched natives carve two feet for every six inches of ours, I wondered what the point really was.

Here we were, a bunch of fat white Americans, come to do in five days a job that could have provided income for several Haitian families for two or three. Here we were, handing out cheap plastic toys that we would never, in America, pretend were anything significant, and yet we presented them to the Haitian kids as if they were something devastatingly special. It seemed so condescending to me, so pointless. What were we actually coming to accomplish? What could we actually do for Haiti? Nothing. It seems to me that the money might have been better donated to an organization that could actually accomplish something instead of spend a lot of money to feed 17 people American food once a day.

To be fair, the youth leaders said that the point was not to try and save Haiti, but to try and connect with the people and have our own hearts changed. But how can you connect with someone when you don't even speak their language? How can you know and love someone if you do not understand their thoughts, their passions, their dreams, their hopes, their trials? Without some basis for communication, we are just a bunch of white teenagers expecting kids to feel loved because we can mispronounce some of their names and ask how old they are.

As for having my own heart changed? It has changed, but not necessarily in the way that, perhaps, my youth pastor might have wanted. My questions about honesty and loyalty and the lack of it in the Christian church were met with a surprising amount of resistance, an attitude that seemed to suggest that I should blindly trust someone's opinion because they were older than I. My suggestion that perhaps not all teenagers are as hormonal and stupid as we are made out to be was met with a kind rebuttal that once again alienated me from the rest of my age group. My opinions seemed to be treated with a sort of disinterested condescension. As if I were not old enough for them to be considered valid. As if the fact that I had not read all the Bible meant I could not think.

I think a lot of Christians spend so much time worrying about the Truth that they forget to care about individual people's truths. I think that sometimes personal experiences and convictions are pushed aside and ignored in the face of doctrine. I think that Christians tend to forget that we believe many lies about ourselves and, instead of trying to kill those little lies at the root, they try to cover it over with a blanket truth.

I think that sometimes Christians are so concerned with keeping themselves pure and staying away from all appearances of evil that they forget that disloyalty is one of the biggest evils there is. You cannot love someone and abandon them; you cannot claim to love everyone in the world and cut off people who think or act differently than you. You cannot isolate yourself from the world and still claim to care for it.

And yet, I think there is a difference between abandoning someone and stepping away. Sometimes, you reach a point where you can no longer help someone. The difference, I think, lies in the message sent whilst stepping away. I think that you can distance yourself but still remain open to helping that person if they are willing to change. However, I think most people feel shame and inadequacy when they cannot save someone, and to cover over their shortcoming, proceed to treat that person like trash, justifying their damnation with Bible verses about purity and righteousness. You can refuse to join in someone's depravity without severing from them completely.

We're supposed to be the light of the world, so what is the point of us if we never venture into it?

8 June 2015

There's something within me that cannot believe in something without knowing the reason why. If I do not understand a motive, I do not trust it. Perhaps this is why I distrust people who only say nice things about me. Perhaps this is why I distrust charity and help. Perhaps that's why I distrust christians so much. 

I think that sometimes christians are very good at acting loving towards someone without actually loving them. They claim to be motivated by love, and yet, it seems that more often, they operate out of a sense of duty as opposed to genuine affection. This unique and well intentioned duplicity is hard to pinpoint and verbalize, but is always detectable. 

I think that a crucial part of loving someone is liking them, at least a little bit. Otherwise it is not honest. It's a false front put up to keep people from seeing what you truly think about them, and I can't reconcile dishonesty with love. How do we balance honesty with loving everyone?  Do we simply love those we can and leave the rest for someone else?

I would rather know that I am not liked than to suspect every friend of kindly meant falsehood. I would rather face the world alone than be surrounded by people who must call upon their God to survive me. 

In a society that claims to value kindness above else, is truth the price we will pay for our attempts at benevolence?