My seminary correspondence work arrived today—for which I’m very glad. Life has been very… boring for me lately. I’ve been in a kind of isolated spot, what with working weird hours and having all my loved ones away from me. I wasn’t getting lonely, but it seemed that, of the important things, the things to which I really want to apply myself, none of them were available to me.
At the same time, somehow, things have been happening suddenly very fast. Things I need to think about, that is, not things I need to do. Tom’s getting married and I need to be there so I can be best man at his wedding. My work is going through a major transition: in the next few weeks I will almost undoubtedly be promoted to a full time position. Out of the 9 full time positions available, some 11 people were applying. Pretty good odds. But one of the full time positions available is not like the others. It’s an administrative job, which I’d really like to have. I think it would be more fun and more fulfilling, as well as a job where I’d be much more useful. There are about 5 other people who are thinking similar things. But even if I don’t get a full time position, all of our schedules rotate in July, and I have to pick a new shift. So in less than two weeks, my work life is going to undergo a major revolution, and I don’t even know what kind of change it’ll be.
Add to this the fact that my pastor at church has started teaching some things that I’m not so sure I agree with, and I’ve been having some heady debates with Zac over epistemology. And then my seminary stuff arrives. So I spent about an hour and a half cleaning my room while listening to the most expensive CD I’ve ever owned (the entire class, lectures, curriculum, coursework and everything is on a single CD, and the class costs $500). After about an hour and a half, my brain shut down. I turned off the lights and went back to bed, and I spent a good hour in that half-awake slumber where you milk through everything that’s been coming at your mind and try to curdle it into something stable (my apologies for the unwholesome metaphor).
As I was finally coming around, I realized what it was that was really bothering me. “Lord,” I said, “I feel so distant from you.” And he spoke back to me, so very clearly: “That’s because you’ve been trying to meet me with your mind.”
It crystallized for me then. That’s exactly what I had been trying to do. And it’s exactly wrong-headed. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The thing we do with our mind is secondary; that is, it’s what we do after we have met with God. St. Augustine had his whole life changed, then he wrote the confession.
To take from a completely different source, this is exactly what Wordsworth talked about in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads that launched off the romantic poetry movement. The quote is “…poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” Attempting to write poetry without having any powerful feelings usually results in pretty insipid poetry.
But in the face of conflation, I was attempting to worship God in truth, with only a nod to that whole spirit thing. It wasn’t working. But the beautiful thing is, in response to my question, he dropped an answer directly into my mind. He came to where I was to give me a way out.
That, my friends, is why I love him.
I’m going to work now. If you pray, please pray for me that I will continue to meet with him, for everything else flows from that.
neumatikos 
Of course…all of this is predicated on the belief that mind is contrary to spirit.
One may understand and possess true information, and yet not believe it. This is how one’s life is changed, truly believing God’s revelation.
🙂 All in good fun.
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I don’t think that this article necessarily supports the idea that the mind is contrary to the spirit. It reflects more on the idea that we have a tendency to lose touch with God if we try to focus on Him through only one aspect of our being. We are body, mind and spirit and they work in conjunction to bless us.
Also, I agree that we can understand and possess true information without believing in it, but our minds do no necessarily need to be divorced from our faith in something to have our lives changed by God’s revelation.
Peace and Blessings.
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It get’s worse. All this predicates on an experience I had… 😉
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just for the record — I get it. It is, however, difficult to verbalize, analyze or otherwise explain.
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“We are body, mind and spirit and they work in conjunction to bless us.”
What I’m doing is pointing out that we have such presuppositions in our theology that automatically preclude certain answers that may be correct. What if we are NOT body, mind and spirit, where mind and spirit are two seperate parts. And what I meant when I said, “the mind is contrary to spirit” is summed up perfectly in your post. Not that they oppose one another, but that they are not the same thing…they are two seperate things (I should have been more clear). What if mind and spirit are the same? OR what if mind is part of spirit?
“but our minds do no necessarily need to be divorced from our faith in something to have our lives changed by God’s revelation.” I’m not really sure what you mean by that, would you explain?
“All this predicates on an experience I had”…exactly. I was sitting in the car with my father once, and he was sure that he experienced me say something, so he asked me to say it again, only to be informed that I had not spoken anything. When my fiancee and I were looking at apartments, she claims to have had the experience of looking in the apartment next to the one that we eventualy got, I have no recollection of such an experience.
Is it difficult to verbalize or impossible?
I do not deny that we have emotions, but my question to you is: What are emotions? WHere do they come from.
What does it mean to “meet God apart from the mind?” Can a person do anything apart from the mind?
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Which statement makes more sense: 1) I have a brain or 2) I am a brain? Which statement makes more sense: 1) I have a mind, or 2) I am a mind?
Are you a seminary student presently, or becoming a seminary student?
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It depends on how you define the words. If “brain” means the gray matter inside my skull, then I only “have” a brain. I can’t live without it, but it doesn’t define the totality of who I am. Same with the mind. If you define the mind as only conscious thought, then I am much much more than this. Therefore, I am not a mind, but I have a mind. If you define the mind in such a way that it includes gut-level emotions and a spiritual awareness of God and of the world around you, I might be able to conceive of the mind as something more than what I have (i.e. a part of me), and into something that I am. Until such time, I will define myself primarily as a spirit, something ethereal and undefined, which merely posesses these other things.
I am sort of a seminary student. Until this whole wedding thing happens, I’m taking my seminary classes by correspondence, which might not be considered the same thing. 🙂
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