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.

I support the idea of “wet” shelters and safe-injection sites. I support giving out condoms to prostitutes. I think that they are all part of the larger picture that is necessary in a society that has embraced harm-reduction as the model under which it operates. Thus for every dry shelter we need a wet shelter, for every drug treatment program we need a safe-injection site or needle exchange program, for every organisation that helps prostitutes flee the sex trade we need an organisation that helps prostitutes survive within the sex trade. Our society is structured around band-aid solutions and so we need everything we can to prevent people from abuse or illness or death. We recognise that we're not doing anything really effective at the level of the big picture and so we focus in on helping people survive in the immediate present.
However, I notice that, in the circles in which I move, a lot of Christians that I talk to favour safe-injection sites while opposing abortion clinics. Now, I've been thinking about this quite a bit over the last few weeks and I think that this is actually a double standard.
The same arguments that these Christians have embraced in the areas of homelessness, addiction and prostitution are arguments they have rejected when it comes to abortion. Abortions will continue to happen regardless. Abortion clinics are places where women can go and have an abortion without risking infection, serious injury or death. Therefore, even somebody who believes that a fetus is a living person, should, based on the arguments mentioned above, support abortion clinics. From that perspective a child is dying but the mother's life is being saved.
Funny how Christians seem more ready to humanise drug-addicts than they are to humanise women.
Here's the thing though. I am not entirely convinced that the harm-reduction model as a whole should be so fully embraced by Christians. I believe that harm-reduction is a necessary model for secular society but I believe that Christians should be addressing things at a much deeper, more big picture, level. If Christianity is about becoming fully human, than we should be offering something completely different than all these options. What may end up being the best approach in secular society does not have to be the best Christianity has to offer. Unfortunately, as with pretty much every other area of life, North American Christians seem to have lost any sense of their distinct identity.

Intelligent Christians are often the most dangerous.
Christians who have excelled in a particular discipline (Law, Engineering, Computer Science, whatever) often assume that they are equally qualified to speak authoritatively on matters of scripture or faith. Sure maybe they got gold stars in Sunday school, heck, maybe they even kicked a little ass in youth group Bible studies, but that certainly does NOT qualify them to assume they have a superior understanding of scripture or faith. Maybe they can form arguments that sound more persuasive, or appear more convincing than most people they encounter (maybe they're even more convincing than… drum roll… their pastor!) but, once again, this doesn't mean that they are right.
In fact, they are often quite wrong. And the consequences of their actions are often quite devastating (it's tempting to think all the Christians who support Bush are just high school drop-outs but we all know that's not true).
Now I'm not saying that all Christians need to throw their brains out the window when it comes to matters of faith. I'm actually saying the opposite. Christians need to treat their faith with the same respect that they treat the other disciplines. Christians need to start giving more credit to those who are scholars in the field of faith. Of course the fact that most Christians don't even have a clue about who such scholars are just shows how little respect they have (and the fact that people like Tim LaHaye or Bruce Wilkinson are considered experts is another shining proof).
Okay, you got straight-As in university. That's great, congratulations. Just don't assume that means you know anything about the Bible… or God… or the faith you profess to follow.