I disagree with the general Christian approach to the doctrine of original sin. We are NOT born as sinful beings. Original sin is not a metaphysical doctrine, it is a social one. We are not born sinful, but we are born into systems of sin.
Of course this quickly resolves the whole dilemma about what happens when innocent children die, etc.
However, as we grow-up in our societies we blindly participate in systems of sin, oppression and death, and as such we become sinful. At this point ignorance is no excuse. I may not have realised my money was supporting child-labour but it was. I may not have realised I was treating women as objects, but I was.
So, although I was once born innocent, I am born into a sinful world and thereby become sinful.
That's why Paul keeps saying that our battle is not with flesh and blood but with powers and principalities. Some charismatics have taken this way out on a tangent and developed intricate diagrams of spiritual beings and their ranks, etc, etc. Really Paul is attacking the social structures of the Roman Empire when he writes this way.
The powers and principalities are sin and death. And it is these that Jesus defeated on the cross. They are ideologies. They are all the things that claim the place of God in our lives yet destroy right relationship in doing so. Racism, Sexism, Capitalism, Patriotism… They are also corporations and businesses. Nike, The Gap, Shell, MicroSoft… These are the structures of sin that exist in our society.
And it is these, I would like to suggest, that are damned to hell, it is these that are damned to annihilation. God is in the process of saving the world, of making all things new. These structures of sin and death and the only things that will not be redeemed. All else will be ushered in. Death after all is not a presence but an absence. When God is fully present there is no room for death.
And this is why Christians are now called to announce the forgiveness of sins. Somewhere along the way we've gotten it all wrong. We've been announcing judgment when we should be announcing grace. No, you are not damned, you are beloved! No, you are not tainted, you are beautiful! No, you are not being cast out, you are being welcomed home! What Christ has accomplished has been achieved for all.
The thing is that Christians also need to be living in a way that signals that the powers and principalities have been defeated if their message is to be heard. “It is by the church living as the one believing community, in which barriers of race, class, gender and so forth are irrelevant for membership, and to holding of office that the principalities and powers are informed in no uncertain terms that their time is up, that there is a new way of being human” (Wright). That's why John says that they will know we are Christians by our love.
Of course we can announce the forgiveness of sins. Israel wasn't called to be God's people so that they could be saved while the rest of the world wasn't. No, election was all about saving the world. Abraham was called so that all the earth would be blessed. So, now, after Jesus, it just doesn't makes sense to say God has called a different group of people while the rest of the world is damned. No, God, in his love, is saving the world and making us all new.

Laughing, we were laughing. And in the midst of it all my brothers phoned to say they missed me and they loved me.
“I keep going to different get-togethers and expecting you to show up until I remember, 'Oh yeah, Dan's not coming.'”
Then I return to the laughter. The conversation has shifted and one of my friends is being teased about her fear of clowns. Somebody brings up an old episode from, of all things, 'Little House on the Prairie' in which a girl is kidnapped and raped by a clown. Now they tell her not just to watch out for clowns but to watch out for clowns because they might rape her.
“Ohhhh, that would be aweful!”
But she's not so much talking about being raped as being raped by a clown. And she's laughing as she says it. Everybody's laughing. And I… I guess I sort of shut down. I stopped laughing and couldn't really start again.
I once had a dear friend write me a poem that said this:
Joy for her in loving a friend
whose conscience burdens him with the crimes of others
not just his own.
A lucky chance to widen her heart.
But I don't think it's the crimes of others I carry. It's their wounds. It seems that all my personal wounds have healed. Yet always I am carrying the wounds of others and these – these have no time to heal. Everywhere I go, every circle I move in, they are ripped open again. How can people laugh at such a thing when I can hardly bring myself to write the word in my journal? These wounds will not heal until the other has been healed. And what chance do they have? If this is how it is for me, how is it for those who carry such wounds on their bodies?
Alas for situations like these. It seems hope has no place here. Not because it comes across as far-fetched, it's just that it feels inappropriate. Hope: nice idea, it just doesn't fit this context. There's no frame of reference to put it in, it just floats around without meaning.
but in the garden of simple
where all of us are nameless
you were never anything but beautiful to me
and, you know, they never really owned you
you just carried them around
and then one day you put 'em down
and found your hands were free
– Ani DiFranco

In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures.
– Philip Larkin
Not that long ago I was thinking about the creation of the heroic within narratives, biblical and otherwise (I think I was reading Dostoevski's The Idiot at the time; David James Duncan's The Brothers K would be a more recent example of what I'm talking about here).
In my journal (May 15, 2003) I wrote:
It is always the narrator who creates the heroic. It is the narrator who presents the ordinary in the extraordinary light. Therefore, any of us may yet be heroes were our stories only told. For this is how stories differ from our lives; in one we discover heroes, those we can admire; in the other we discover ourselves, in all our pettiness and malaise. We are neither strong enough to be heroes or villains. Rather we are poorly written secondary characters who appear for long enough to be slightly repulsive and quickly forgotten.
Or so it would seem if it were not for one thing – God. God is the master narrator. It is he who has crafted this world, it is he who will also one day recount the true and real story of our lives. There is yet hope that our lives will be far more significant than we can imagine.
Yet here's the thing. Our lives gain significance not in discovering that we were heroes all along. Our lives gain significance in discovering that, all along, we were Beloved. You see, the narrator is not some distant omniscient observer. The narrator is our Lover, himself entwined with the narrative.

I go into exile, not because I am forced into it but because I choose to enter, knowing that by doing so exile itself will be abolished.

I think that people who have suffered greatly often fall into two traps regarding self-identity and understanding. Not that that is their fault – it seems to be one of the inevitable results of trauma. Trauma leads to brokenness, one's world is shattered, and often, one's self is shattered along with it.
I find that people who have undergone trauma often:
(1) define themselves by the wrongs that have been committed against them.
and/or
(2) define themselves by the wrongs that they themselves have committed.
In both of these definitions there is a way in which the past maintains an iron grip over the individual. Something has happened in the past that is inescapable, the past is that which defines oneself and there's no getting out of it.
Now, I think the way in which we understand a seemingly abstract concept like the flow of time becomes surprisingly relevant in this regard.
I think that the common understanding of the flow of time is to see things moving from the past, into the present and then the future. We were, we are, we will be. The past moves into the present, the present moves into the future.
I would like to suggest (and here I am indebted to Moltmann… as always) that time actually flows the other direction. The future breaks into the present which then becomes the past. That which will be becomes that which is, and that which is becomes that which was.
So why is this significant?
This is hugely significant because if this is true then we are not defined by our past but by our future. If this is the case I can live a hopeful existence, not trapped within the realm of the wrongs committed against me, or the wrongs I myself have performed. Not only that but, because I have some sense of the nature of the hope that I hold, I am able to live a liberated existence in the present. Because it is this future that defines me and can start to live within it now.
And if this assured hope is one that consists of love relationship and an ever deeper movement into intimacy then I will not define myself by any type of wrongdoing, whether my own or somebody else's. Instead I will come to know myself as Beloved, with all the beauty, freedom and joy that that entails.

I was talking with one of my brothers last night and he said to me,
“You know, it seems to me that in your writing a lot of anger comes through. It seems that in your writing I see a lot more of your 'righteous rage' than of your love and grieving… But when I talk with you, when I see you, I never see any anger, only the other side, the love and the broken-heartedness.”
Now there was nothing negative in what he said, he was raising it more as a question or a neutral observation, and even said that maybe it was just in response to the recent entry on Psalm 137. But it's gotten me to thinking…
I think that love and grief and anger are often deeply intertwined.
The thing is this is a journal. Journals tend to reveal internal struggles that never surface. When faced with injustices, especially when one sees one's loved ones abused or worse, rage is a feeling that naturally flows out of love. However, rage is not the feeling that conquers because, ultimately, love means being able to love both the oppressor and the oppressed, even it if that means standing in opposition to the oppressor. You do so not because you hate them but because you recognize that they too have been dehumanized by the acts of violence they have performed. Love desires to break cycles of violence, of sin, and of death, not further exacerbate them. Therefore, although there are times when I write angry words, I believe a grieving love wins out every time because I have never resorted to violent praxis. Nor have I lost hope. It is this oft neglected hope that enables us to continue in love.
Anger is often the first gut-reaction that love produces, hatred and violence do not have to be a part of it. They only become so when we give in to the negative side of anger. As Paul says, “be angry but do not sin”. I find my rage always gives way to tears. If that is not more fully expressed in my journals it is because it is hard to write of grief without sounding melodramatic. I like to think it does, however, fully express itself in my living.

I have two friends who, last week on their wedding day, said to me,
“You will always have a home with us.”
Pause.
“We mean that.”
That's all.
There was no need to say more.
I think that it's only those who have been homeless that are able to understand what lies behind such a statement. I never knew what home was until I was without one. Like they say, you never know what you've got until it's gone. Home, one's place of belonging, is not found in physical places but in love relationships.
My friends knew what they were saying. It is rare to find friends who understand love in such ways. I think that I have never been offered a greater gift of love. Indeed, this is the gift of love God has offered to us. To find such love in another friendship is truly marvelous.

“Apart from the fact that they prostitute their daughters, the Lydian way of life is not unlike our own.”
– Herodotus
Dearest Lydia,
Once again I find myself writing to you.
We have become intrinsically connected. Perhaps there was once an 'us' and 'them', a 'you' and an 'I', but in this mad storm of passion all things have blurred together. I have gone into you, and you into me and we have become one flesh.
And what is this talk of prostituting daughters, Lydia? Slanderous, slanderous! Those who tell me I am blinded by my love… fools! It is my love that allows me to truly see. Let me cast out the one who speaks such words. Let me speak of your beauty, let me speak of the longing the fills me when I am apart from you. I pray that I will never be parted from you again.
“let's grow old
and die together
let's do it now”
– Ani Di Franco

I often feel like Jesus' disciples before Pentecost.
It's as if I'm starting to get it but there are a lot of things I'm missing. Like Peter confessing Christ one moment and then completely misunderstanding what that means the next moment. That's why the story of the blind man who was touched twice proceeds Peter's confession. Peter understands Jesus' title but misunderstands the implications. He thinks Messiahship is all about victory, conquering and glory when Jesus is trying to tell him its about victory through suffering, conquering through sacrifice, and glory in humility. The blind man represents the disciples. They have started to see, but at the time, only see people that look like trees walking. It is only after Pentecost that they fully see and understand.
I think I am that blind man. My vision has been partially restored. Whereas before I was blind I now can see. But something is still off, people look like trees, I'm still waiting for the picture to be made clear.
I'm still waiting for Pentecost.
How can I still be waiting for Pentecost?
How can I be a member of the people of God and yet feel that I do not possess the Spirit of the new age?