neumatikos

This is mostly blogging for the sake of blogging, just so I can say that I have been actively writing something.

I made another attempt to start my running curriculum again today, which mostly consists of starting up over and over again, running for a week or so and then some snag comes up which I decide is insurmountable for the time being. The first snag was that the treadmill in the old apartment was broken, so I couldn’t run inside, and the complex was surrounded by high-traffic streets, and I didn’t want to be running in smog. When I moved, my new excuse was that I needed to get up at 5:30 just to get it done and showered and dressed and to work in time. I think I’ve gotten over that one by running in the evening instead of the morning. Pity. Running a “morning mile” sounds a lot cooler. But I have determined to take GW’s position to heart, that the discipline of getting it in somewhere is more important than making everything fit your own itinerary. He runs when he can cram it into his busy schedule. I don’t know why he’s so busy though. Not like he’s doing anything important…

So anyway, I was running (pathetically—I made it just over half a mile before I had to drop to a quick walk) and a song comes to mind. It was something the Lord gave me when I was stressed out a year or so ago over a paper I had to do where I was getting no headway. So around 1:00 at night I go, um, running, to get my mind cleared. I think it worked. I de-stressed a lot, but I still wrote a terrible paper. But somewhere in there I got this song. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a whole song, so it never got posted anywhere. I was shy a few lines in one of the verses, and maybe a bridge. It’s a moot point now—since my hard drives crashed, all I can remember is the chorus:

> You hover over me
> Like the winds of creation
> You hover over me
> Like the voice of the dawn
> You hover over me
> Like the winds of creation
> And I am created again.

It’s a powerful set of lines to me. The Hebrew word for “spirit” is “ruach,” which is simply wind or breath. It’s the word used in Genesis where it says that “the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” And, of course, the next thing that happens is God says “Let there be light” and there is light. The image I always get is like a hen brooding over a nest, which then of course reminds me of Jesus when He said, “how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings.” Whenever I thin of the Spirit of God, hovering protectively over His creation like that, I tend to think:

> You who created the heavens, will you re-create me?

For I know my attentions to Him have been as intermittent as my exercise regimen.

Oh, I’m a Christian, saved by his mighty grace, purchased by his blood, redeemed and continually being sanctified. But honestly, I’m not what I ought to be. Please, I know that. I don’t really even what to be what I ought to be. I want to be what I already am, and leave it at that. I want to think that I’m already “good enough,” as if “good enough” were something that could be measured.

In two different places in the psalms, “the psalmist” goes through an almost identical harangue mocking people who make up their own gods. Ps 115 puts it this way:

>They have mouths, but they do not speak;
> Eyes they have, but they do not see;
> They have ears, but they do not hear;
> Noses they have, but they do not smell;
> They have hands, but they do not handle;
> Feet they have, but they do not walk;
> Nor do they mutter through their throat.
> [vs 5-7. The other psalm is 135]

We like to think we don’t have idols, especially since, in modern English, any idol is by definition a false one. But honestly, we do—or at least I do. I didn’t fashion them out of stone or wood or gold, but they have all the above characteristics: that is, they can do nothing. But they somehow always seem to tell me exactly what I want to hear. While I was singing this song, jogging down the road, the Lord started showing me that I’m still like that. I have all these gods that echo back to me whatever it is that I’m already saying to myself. It’s so gratifying “to hear my opinion backed by a competent authority.” But I realized the reason they echo back to me is because they’re hollow. All form and no substance. Verse 8 says, “Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.” My gods are a reflection of me. They are hollow because I am hollow.

They echo because they are hollow. That’s their purpose. I am hollow because I am meant to be filled with something. That’s my purpose. I don’t think we’ll ever get over the need for something to tell us who we are: men are made for community. We have to work in conjunction with something. We make idols to echo back to us who we are, what we want to hear, but “Our God is in heaven” and “he does whatever pleases him” (ver.3).

I am a vessel, made to be filled by him, to be used by him. But I am a living vessel, prone to reshaping myself, prone to following my own agenda. So often I don’t even want to be what I ought to be. This earthen vessel cracks, and all His goodness leaks out. (I’m reminded of the space ship in Flight of the Navigator: “I do not leak, Navigator, you do—remember?) I need the Holy Spirit to hover over me and create me all over again. And that is precisely what He does.

I don’t know that I believe in the “separation of church and state” per se, at least not as it seems so often depicted, where religious institutions had better not interfere with the government and the government has to force the religious institutions into compliance with this rule. It seems rather unbalanced, somehow.

I do believe in institutional separation of all organizations, from all sectors. For instance, I believe that Microsoft should be barred from all attempts at dictating the policies of Sun Microsystems. In the same way, I don’t believe that any religious institution should have the authority to dictate the tax code and that the government shouldn’t have the ability to dictate the age of responsibility (when you are old enough to be baptized) to a baptist church, or who should be allowed to have marriage ceremonies at a Mormon temple.

Religious institutions are, de facto, forbidden to establish splinter nation-states within sovereign U.S., and conversely, we have an ammendment in our constitution that forbids the US Government from establishing a sanctioned religious institution. Many nations do not have such an equable agreement. However, institutional separation is as far as that agreement goes. Institutions get to have overlapping influences. Microsoft is completely free to create an operating system for servers and Sun is completely free to create programs and languages designed for home PCs. Steve Jobs gets to be CEO of both Apple and Pixar. Religious conviction gets to affect government policy and government laws very often dictate what kind of religious behavor is acceptable. We can’t be puritanical about our imagined wall between religion and government or the whole thing falls apart. If we had to be absolute monarchs over our spheres of influence, we would destroy the very spirit of cooperation and tolerance that the first amendment was designed to protect.

People can’t abandon their religious convictions the minute they leave their pews any more than they can flaunt the laws of the government the minute they enter the doors of their church. These things overlap–there’s just no way around it. Public morality is the field of both the church and the state. There’s just no human way to separate them. And so, when people go to the ballot box, they have to vote their conscience. How could anyone be expected to vote against what they believe?

You could say that a representative has to vote according to the majority of his constituents, but honestly that’s a little bit backwards. To do that he has to keep on second guessing and ends up never pleasing anybody. Instead, the constituents need to elect a representative who already has like convictions. That way everybody gets to vote their conscience, which is good, because ultimately everyone already does. They might bend on an issue they consider trivial, but nobody votes against what they feel is right when they think it’s an essential issue.

Of course, the people who have the best convictions are not always in the majority. I’m aware of that. We have historical proof: Slavery used to be hard coded into the Constitution. But that still doesn’t mean that anyone has the capacity to live their lives according to someone else’s convictions. The majority can oblige the minority on inessential issues, but nobody can compromise on what they consider to be absolutely essential. They just can’t. Honestly, we shouldn’t expect them to. That is, we shouldn’t be surprised or shocked when people act according to their convictions. We may be surprised to find what their convictions are, but never shocked that they act accordingly.

So what happens when the minority doesn’t agree with the majority on a core issue? The normal thing. People act according to their convictions, regardless of the law. Then the issue becomes not what our beliefs are, but how essential are those beliefs. The majority sets the law, the minority breaks the law, and either the majority determines that their conviction wasn’t so essential after all, or the majority enforces the law until the minority changes their mind. Things automatically escalate until someone decides that some alternative trumps their conviction.

In the case of the civil war, the South seems to have decided that total annihilation was ultimately worse than slaves’ emancipation and an abrigement states rights. Coversely, the North seems to have determined that repealing slavery and forbidding succession were worth the lives they paid.

Sometimes we fight at the ballot box, and sometimes we vote with swords.