He said:
Hey man, can you help me, I can't reach it.
Pointed at the camera in the ceiling.
I climbed up, blocked it so they could not see.
Turned to find you out of bed and kneeling.
Before the nurses came, took you away,
I stood there on a chair and watched you pray.
– The Weakerthans
This is a journal.
That means I'm struggling with the things I write about – not claiming to have discovered absolute truth.
Please do not go and base your life or faith solely on anything written here (or on your interpretation of anything written here).
~
Naturally, if you speak to enough people about enough subjects, particularly subjects that are deeply personal or deeply controversial, misunderstandings will inevitably result. So let me clarify a few things:
When I write about remembering suffering at Christmas I'm writing to comfortable middle-class Christians, not those who have suffered. I'm writing to Christians who have made emotional happiness and instant pleasure the be-all-end-all of their Christian existence instead of responding to the call and example of Jesus.
When I write about universalism I'm not claiming that all religions (or lacks thereof) lead to the same God. I'm not surrendering terms that the Bible dictates nor am I adopting a laissez-faire approach.
And I'd like to think that when I write angrily I'm not writing (too) arrogantly.
And that, my friends, is my disclaimer. Read critically.

It's coming on christmas
They're cutting down trees
They're putting up reindeer
And singing songs of joy and peace
Oh I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
– Joni Mitchell, River
You know, more and more, I have trouble viewing Christmas as a celebratory time of year. I mean, apart from all the Christian ranting about how this time of year has been co-opted by contemporary cultural paganism (“Jesus is the reason for the season!”), I'm not convinced that a Christian approach to Christmas – that of remembering the birth of Jesus – should be a cause of so much frivolous joy.
Certainly there is a joyous element to it. Jesus' birth signals God becoming human, God entering into our world, coming alongside of us to redeem us. God with a face. God we can know and love and hold and be held by. That surely inspires awe and celebration.
And yet how can we unrestrainedly celebrate that event when we know what it leads to? The birth of Jesus was just the first step of a journey of humiliation and suffering. God humbled. God made vulnerable. God as a child. A child destined for abandonment, torture, shame and death. Surely a cause of awe, that God should love us so dearly as to endure such things for us, but not so much a cause of frivolous joy. Christmas is the first step to a journey that culminates in the cross.
I wonder how much those who celebrate Christmas really understand suffering. I wonder how much those who sing the words, “Thank you for the cross” really understand what it entails. Saying thank you for the cross is like saying thank you for the rape of a loved one. Celebrating Christmas so lavishly and thoughtlessly is like celebrating the first step that leads to that loved one's rape.
~
Only in light of the resurrection can we thank God for the cross. And even then it is a thank you that we whisper, that we speak with tears on our cheeks. It is not a thank you for forms of torture but rather a thank you for a love so deep that it was willing to be tortured, and by being tortured set us free.
That's why I think Easter Sunday is the truly celebratory moment of the Christian calendar. New creation bursts into the old. Life is brought out of death and hope out of hopelessness. Humanity is reconciled to God and God is shown to triumph over even the most brutal forms of forsakenness.
This Christmas season, while the world celebrates and feasts, I think Christians would do well to step back and remember a child held by a breathless mother in a barn in Bethlehem. Awed by the miracle of birth, his tiny fingers clutching her thumb. Christians would do well to remember how that same mother would come to see her son beaten beyond recognition and hung naked before a crowd that mocked him as he died. His weathered hands outstretched and pierced. Christians would do well to remember that while the world celebrates we are called to mourn, and while the world feasts we are called to fast. During Christmas we need to remember the God who identified so deeply with those who are oppressed and forsaken that he entered into their forsakenness with them. This Christmas season let us remember that we are called to do the same.

“You know it's got to be this personal relationship thing that you talk about because that's the only chance I have. I can't count on others, I just can't. The man who abused me was the holiest man I knew. I just can't bow my head, I can't cross my hands, I can't even listen to the kind of language. It triggers me. When I talk about God it's like something deep inside of my chest doesn't even want to say the word. It's like something tearing, weighing on me, I can barely talk about it. No, the only chance I have is what you're talking about.”
…
“Prayer, it's more about a conversation, more about just talking openly with somebody, it's not about formulas or right words. It's like talking to a person.”
“So when I yell at God and say, “Why the fuck did you let all this happen to me?” that's more of a real prayer?”
“Yes! Exactly, that's the most genuine kind of prayer.”

It is love who mixed the mortar, it is love who stacked these stones, it is love who made the stage here, though it looks like we're alone.
In this scene set in shadows, like the night is here to stay, there is evil cast around us, but it's love that wrote the play.
– David Wilcox, Show the Way
David Ford, a theologian with the heart of a poet, says that our lives are shaped by our interaction with the overwhelming. I tend to think of things that overwhelm us as negative things. Ford does well to speak of “overwhelmings”, a multiplicity of things that overwhelm us – things both positive and negative. Thus, I can be overwhelmed by horror but also by peace, by ugliness but also by beauty.
So which overwhelming becomes the most formative? Which of these shapes our lives most dramatically? Ford argues that the solution is found in living in the midst of overwhelmings in a way that lets one of them be the overwhelming that shapes the others.
Here we face a crucial decision about the way in which we choose to perceive the world. Whether we choose to see the world as a brute (and brutal) fact or as made by love for love determines whether a negative or positive overwhelming becomes the one which shapes the others. There is no absolutely convincing argument one way or the other and so all of us engage in an act of faith when we make this decision.
Ultimately, Ford asserts being overwhelmed by God is the overwhelming that should shape all the others.
I love Ford's words, his insights and his gentle strength. I resonate with this. It is because I have been overwhelmed by God that I can move amongst so many other overwhelmings and remain hopeful. It is because I have discovered the tenderness and passion of God that I can continually love and be tender to the people I journey with without hardening or breaking.
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in our mortal flesh.
– Paul, 2 Corinthians 4.8ff

Psyche bit her lip till the blood came and wept bitterly. I thought she felt more grief than the wailing Orual. But that Orual had only to suffer; Psyche had to keep on her way as well. She kept on; went on out of sight, journeying always further into death. That was the last of the pictures.
The Fox and I were alone again.
“Did we really do these things to her?” I asked.
“Yes. All here's true.”
“And we said we loved her.”
“And we did. She had no more dangerous enemies than us.”
– C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
The faith we claim to profess is illusory unless it is demonstrated in our relationships with others. Anyone who has stopped to consider the nature of faith has realised this.
However, I think there is one area in particular where the implications of this have been overlooked. Perhaps we have been too scared to consider such implications, but our refusal to do so has been devastating.
Here's the thing. Christians tend to profess a personal trust in God, they recognise that times of suffering may come but they feel called to love enemies, bless instead of curse, give the thief more than he imagined to steal, that sort of thing. Yet, when it comes to our loved ones, it seems like a completely different standard applies. You know, strike me and I'll turn the other cheek but if you touch my beloved I'll kill you… slowly. There's a double standard that exists. I trust my life to God but don't trust the one's I love to God. I can't help but wonder how much we've fooled ourselves into thinking we've trusted God with our own lives when we don't trust God with the lives of others.
Of course, we don't have to look too far to realise how harmful this way of thinking can be. That's how we end up with “just wars”. That's why Christians in America are impotent to prevent things like the war in Iraq… and in fact actually end up supporting that war.
Now, even as I come to recognise this I'm not too comfortable with the implications. I mean, I don't want the people I love to be hurt. I want to stop them from being hurt in whatever ways I can. It's like I've recognised that I carry a cross if I follow Jesus, but I do all I can to prevent the people I love from even realising what a cross is. However, as I learn to trust others to God it means I actually allow people I love to go into situations where they might be hurt. Sometimes it even means I allow people I love to continue in places where they have been hurt. I just come alongside of them and hurt with them instead of doing all I can to bail them out. It's no longer about taking the cross off their shoulders, it's about helping them carry it because new life is found on the other side. Only on the other side of crucifixion is there resurrection.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not suggesting anything close to turning a blind eye to abuses or encouraging people to return again and again to places where they are dehumanised. To do that is to repeat another mistake which, to our everlasting shame, has been made over and over again within the church. After all, in order to regain its prophetic voice the church must once again begin crying out on behalf of the oppressed and abandoned and journeying in genuine love relationship with them.
It's just that we must do so in a way that resolves this double-standard. We need to learn again what it means to trust God as we journey in love relationships with others.

I plundered the library's commentaries. I found all ten of the biggest names in the field – Longenecker, Betz, Dunn, Bruce, Lightfoot, Hays, Chrysostom, Martyn, Matera, Cousars – added in a few others for the sake of historical perspective and walked to the counter with their books. Then I remembered the book limit in my undergrad. Something like eight books for each specific subject. So, I ask the guy at the desk,
“Hey, is there a limit on books I can get out on a single subject?”
“Yeah,” he responds smiling, “but don't worry, you can still take out forty more.”
Welcome to grad school.
I'm like a kid in a candy shop. Damn it, I'm going to hit that limit.

It's not about pedestals. It's not about turning a blind eye to a person's faults or weaknesses. It's about defining a person by something other than the things they are ashamed of.
But until that person does the same they will tend to think you have romanticised them. I mean, they've seen it all before, someone who was smitten until they knew the full story. As the truth comes out everything just falls apart. And that's what they expected. They never felt like they deserved to be treated as something special anyway.
I don't mind being misunderstood. I have stood the test of time before. Goodness is stronger than evil, and love stronger than hate. This I learned not from poetry but from life.
you keep telling me i'm beautiful
but i feel a little less so each time
your love is so colorful
it flashes like a neon sign
but i finally drove out where
the sky is dark enuf to see stars
and i found i missed no one
just listening to the swishing of distant cars
– Ani DiFranco

“It seems like all of us have an emptiness inside of us. You see it all the time when people are dating, they're always looking for somebody to complete them. They're looking for the person that will make them whole. But there's nobody out there that will make you whole, there's nobody who will fill that emptiness. All of us will always carry it with us. But that's okay. I mean if that was filled, if we were complete, if we were perfect then what would be have to live for? If we were like that life would be meaningless, we'd just die.”
“Well, I don't know… I wouldn't use the language of emptiness. I think it's more about intimacy. It's not so much about arriving at a point of being where that hole is filled, it's about engaging in a continual process of becoming. Because I think I've found a love that fills that hole. But I've got all sorts of things to live for, it's like I've only just come alive. What I engage in now is an ever deeper movement into intimacy. It's like Till We Have Faces: first we discover our face, we discover who we truly are and then we begin a true journey in loving and being loved. Of course until we discover our faces we will always be left with that emptiness.”
I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
C.S. Lewis – Till We Have Faces

Only in television commercials did Superman ever walk again.
In reality he wiggled his toes, breathed a few hours without a machine, and died.
All of us are prone to embracing fantasy, until fantasy itself becomes our reality.
“This is where I want to be, this is so much better.”
Soon the world of my own construction is the world God once pronounced good and I myself am the divine.
It is ironic that in such a situation the visionaries (the seers and prophets) are said to be blind. Dismissed as those who chase utopian pipe-dreams, those who do not take into consideration the true nature of reality.
Yet the prophets are those who have not only escaped fantasy but discovered a greater reality. They realise a truer way of being than those who have spent their lives fleeing that which is instead of facing it and discovering that which will be.