Spiritual insight #3

Living in Nepal has been a time of reflection and rest amid attempts of putting thoughts into writing (a book that is sloowly coming together) and as such I have garned some insights into my own spiritual life as well as what I consider spiritual insights in general. By no means are they novel or ground-breaking but they are thoughts at least I think hold some value.

The first one was that Jesus is, and has to be, elusive.
The second one was the absolute need for holding on to Christianity's claim to objective truth and reality and being able to know it.

The third insight is that when it comes to faith according to Christianity there is no such thing as cause-effect in the general way we normally understand cause and effect to work.

Make no mistake, most of what we do in our daily lives and most of what we consider to be real or true is based on the relationship of cause and effect. We consider it, whatever it is, to be real or true if it can be proven through a cause-effect test, even if we don't understand the relationship (perhaps especially when we don't understand the relationship).
For instance, most of you don't know anything useful about microwaves but you do know that they can make cold stuff warm through the use of a microwave oven. Are microwaves real? Sure, we can see the effect of them.
Is love real? Sure, that feeling inside could be indigestion but it seems to be caused by the girl/guy you walk by every day in the office. Love is real because we understand and feel its effects. Nothing makes us do more crazy stuff than love.


Here in Nepal it's all about cause and effect, but rather effect and cause. As far as I can tell the entire Hindu religion is built on this idea of being able to create (desirable) effects by doing certain causes, or rituals. It's called Puja.
Since it is a manmade religion it can't accurately predict what the different causes will have for effect. That is why there are so many rituals and rites. When they build a school they do certain rituals, causes, for the desired effect of a safe and good future for the school. However, if/when trouble arises the reasoning goes that another cause, or ritual, is needed for a good effect. This goes on ad nauseum.

However, when it comes to God and the Christian faith it is different.

There is nothing we can do (a cause) that will create a certain effect, save for the act/cause of repenting and believing in Jesus Christ which will cause the effect of salvation. We can't make God do anything.
We can't be good enough.
Smart enough.
Holy enough.
Hurt enough.
Broken enough.
Strong enough.
Pray enough.
Read our Bibles enough.
Go to church enough.
Love enough.

To make God do what we want.

No, there is no ritual or rite we can perform to get the effect we want. Period.

Think about it. You are completely powerless to make God do what you want or get what you want no matter how good or great or loving or kind or wonderful of an effect you are seeking. That's a little discomforting.

Perhaps you already knew all this. Perhaps you already live your faith in Christ as if being completely dependant upon "His will be done". All the time.
But I don't think so. I think you, like so many others, try to be a good Christian by seeking good outcomes/effects by doing certain things/causes. For example, how often haven't we sought a good outcome/effect by asking as many as we can to pray for something...as if God would listen and answer and give us what we want if we have enough people praying. No.

However, at this point perhaps a Bible verse comes to your mind. "..and he will give you the desires of your heart". Doesn't that seem to indicate that there is something we can do do get what we want, like a good hindu?

No, there isn't. Here's the deal.
Those verses always tell us that we first have to:
"Delight in Him"
"Commit our way to the lord, trust Him and He will act"
"Be still before the lord and wait for him"

A Christian can't make God do anything based on a ritual or deed or rite. All he can do is to "trust" or "delight"in God or "be still and wait for the Lord". This is because our God is personal and not some power or essence. Only persons can delight or trust or believe.
This is also the meaning of Jesus's words "Whatever you ask in my name I will give you" and why so many people include those words "In your[Jesus] name, Amen" in their prayers. However, to just include those words do nothing and amasses to something very similar to a hindu's mantra.

The words by Jesus "- In my name" mean that we should pray according to him and who he is...and this can't be done if we don't first delight in him, commit to/believe in him and wait for him.
To get what I want doesn't exist for a Christian. To get what God wants does. Sometimes they are the same thing, sometimes not, but no matter what it is always because of who he is and what he wants, not because of some fancy ritual or rite or deed I cooked up.

And that is spiritual insight #3.

Spiritual lessons from Nepal #2

Being surrounded by pantheistic pagans is surprisingly like being surrounded by secular swedes. Both groups are subjectivists, relativists and pragmatists. In normal speak, they believe in whatever feels right to them as long as it works and doesn't hurt people. A Nepali would talk about Karma and gods and Moksha and Samsara and a legion of legends from time immemorial. A Swede would talk about Science and Human rights and the Goodness of Humankind and Equality.
But in the end the result is the same. There is no objective truth or right/wrong. There is "whatever works" instead of "whatever is true/good/right". I find it very strange indeed that this isn't seen as a mild case of insanity considering that "whatever works" means different things for different people.

For a hindu, there can be no objective anything since god/Brahma is everything and thus, everything is true or good or right...or not. It's all subjectively up to you. For a swede, there is nothing outside humankind to offer an objective understanding of truth/goodness/rightness.Thus, it is what is currently agreed upon or fashionable or legal. It's all subjective/up to you.

Thus, my spiritual lesson #2 is the absolute necessity of holding on to an objective reality that is outside of humankind and also distinct from everything else, i.e. a supernatural God. In Christianity God is not everything although God is everywhere. He (gender neutral usage here for my Swedish friends :)) is the only logical and possible source for an objective "value system" or more simply put, God is the only possible source for something being actually and truly and universially and eternally true, good or right.

This would all be fancy philosophical fun, but nothing more, if our world didn't display some sort of familiarity with an objective reality. If people in Nepal, or Sweden, had no concept of an objective reality of right/wrong, good/bad or true/false then Christianity has no message to proclaim.
However, Swedes and Nepalese do in fact have a very acute and innate sense of a reality of objective values that they keep bumping up against every day. They rely on it every day even as their philosophical foundations have no support for it.

An example:
People in Sweden and Nepal argue and debate and fight about these things all the time. They call things and people and events "evil" or "wrong" or false" without realizing that, according to their own beliefs, they are only expressing their own opinions. When faced with this "discrepancy" they either just shake their heads as if caught in a dilemma they don't care to figure out OR they try to explain it away. Usually it has to do with the severity of the issue or how great the majority is that supports their belief.

But this is a fatal flaw.

Forgive me for this rather "heady" talk about how I have learned, or re-learned, the importance of objective truth. It isn't even something that most people, in my experience, care about...as long as whatever people are doing "works", whatever that means.

But, the fatal flaw of a subjective system always comes crashing down when people are the most vulnerable and that makes it all the more devious. When something bad happens people always remember that evil is real; that wrong isn't that hard to recognize; that truth is easily found.
But by then it is usually too late. This is why people swamp churches with flowers after tragedies but never darken said churches' doorsteps. It is too difficult to make the connection between objective truth=God in the midst of tragedy and trauma...so the moment is lost and people go back to trying to make sense of life without God, the sad de facto reailty for most people today (at least in Scandinavia). Those moments when their entire being aligned with God's reality of objectivity are gone and a sense of confusion or lostness follows.

So, I have been reminded that even though people don't care about objective truth it is something valuable and precious that we/I need to hold on to. The alternative is not good nor healthy. Without it our world becomes either a thick applesauce of pantheistic mush-values or an arid and arrogant theater-act by powerhungry narcissists. With it our world can find something to hold on to.

The hidden premise here is that I assume that people can actually find out what this objective reality is. The temptation can be that we elevate whatever we believe to objective truth...which is dumb. This is why the message of Christianity in proclaiming Jesus is so crucial. We/I believe and preach a God that is both objectively true and good and right AND that we can know this objectively reality in and through Jesus who came to show us and tell us about it.

At the end of the day, reality for you and me is not without borders (Nepal) or confined to humankind (Sweden). It is Jesus Christ as revealed by His Spirit in the Bible and through His church eternal...and it is good and true and right and worth remembering and holding on to...especially when surrounded by pagans or atheists.

Spiritual lessons from Nepal - #1

Lots of people come to Nepal for spiritual insight and as my time here is winding down I want to take some time to reflect on what spiritual insights I have learned/gleaned while living here in Pokhara.

First of all, I doubt that most people who come here seek spiritual depth within the riches of classic Christianity. There is ample proof that the so-called Eastern religions are much more alluring to my fellow pilgrims. It seems reasonable to me that there is some wisdom in those religions (after all, people here are not stupid) but I have to confess that they seem to offer a very "random success" faith, by which I mean that it is a religion that is a posterioi (after the fact). It seems to be based on random chance and trying many different things to appease very needy and fickly gods who seem very distant and moody. Why would their supreme god, Shiva, need to meditate, for example?
I did have a conversation today with a hindu guy, trying to learn about this oh-so-prevelant religion in Nepal. All I basically learned was that a) if it makes you happy, it is good karma so do it, and b) what is real is whatever I believe. Interesting discussion for sure, but it sounded like the modern western values of individualism, relativism and subjectivism with a bunch of weird myths thrown in for traditional value.

However, my time here has included many instances and lots of time seeking the Triune God of Christianity. No surprise there. The first "thing" that comes to mind when I reflect on my search for a deeper communion with God is that Jesus is elusive.

Let's cut to the chase, shall we? Christianity offers a tremendous deal to the world. The deal is that the almighty creator God of the universe not only cares about us and loves us but that we can also have a personal relationship with Him through His Spirit and the life/death/resurrection of his only begotten son Jesus...through faith, by grace.

In essence, Christianity argues that the most amazing thing imaginable (and that every religion seeks) is readily available to anyone. For free. Without doing anything but simply believing/trusting Jesus. That should sound suspicious to you because it is the only exception ever to the popular truism that "there is no such thing as a free lunch." I think Christians could do well pausing for a minute and ponder the utter "weirdness" of the offer Christianity proclaims because if it doesn't sound crazy to us we're doing something wrong.

Although there isn't a catch there is something that Christianity (us pastors) often don't talk about and that is that all this, while true, is hard to grasp, or find, or live. Why? Because this Jesus guy who is at the center of it all is elusive. It seems that way to me, at least.
As I have spent time in the Bible or doing devotions or praying or reflected on God or simply lived here I have found that Jesus is rather hard to find, or connect with or "go deeper" with. True, it could be that my spiritual state is not right or where it should be and that is why I find him elusive. Or it could be that I have some sin in my life that blocks my spiritual vision/communion (there is no fellowship between light and darkness) and he hides from me not so much because of Him but because of what I have put in the way. Or it could be that I haven't tried hard enough and that since all good relationships involve effort and time I should just try harder...and by that I mean I should have prayed more, or read my Bible more or gone to church more, etc..

To be honest, I think there is probably some truth in all of the above. I am not as spiritually mature and holy and Christ-like as I should be by now. I do have some sins in my life that needlessly are allowed to dwell within my heart and hinder Jesus' and my communion. I surely could have tried harder at reading my Bible or praying or whatever.

This is where it is very common to see the  "Grace flag" hoisted and saluted.Grace covers my spiritual immaturity. Grace covers my sins. Grace covers my shortcomings. But that is not Biblical grace.
Grace is not spiritual affirmative action, giving me extra spiritual points because I am immature, sinful or lazy. Grace, God's unilateral action towards me because of his love and holiness, is more like Him raising me up and enabling me to stand and take action. Making someone lame walk; not patting a lame on the back. I believe that Grace doesn't leave me a person full of immaturity, sin and/or laziness but enables me to become someone who is spiritually mature, free from sin and diligent. A real and full human being.

But this is only part of the question of Jesus's elusiveness. Because while I believe it is true that I am partly to blame I also believe that his elusiveness is intended on his part.

It stands to reason that an almighty, all-knowing and good God who wants to be with us would make it obvious and easy for us to find him. It makes sense because he would have to power to do it, would know how to do it and would love to do it. So what do I mean when I say that his elusiveness, or hiddenness, is part of who he is?

I have realized that Jesus is elusive because he wants to be found by people who want to truly find him. Sounds normal, right?
But think about it. If what Jesus wants is a relationship with us AND he is God almighty AND if he didn't hide himself...would anybody have a true choice in the matter or would it just be an overwhelming and overpowering "have to" instead of a free choice on our part? A poor analogy would be if a love sick but immature and silly 16-year old boy, pining for a relationship, was approched by a swimsuit clad Heidi Klum on a beach, gesturing for him to come over and join her on her blanket. Would he truly have a free choice? No.

To find Jesus we have to be willing to search for him and desire to find him for who he is. Not what he can do for us. Not for a ticket to Heaven. Not because it is what our parents want or because of anything else but Jesus himself. Any other way and we would not end up with a relationship but more like those people in the Bible who kept following Jesus so they could see more miracles but completely missed who he was (God) and walked away. This happened a lot in Scripture. Lots of people found Jesus geographically, but very few found him "relationally" or personally. Why? Because they didn't really have an interest in finding the man/God Jesus but only the exterior "trimmings".
So, knowing that he is over-powering and overwhelming, He hides from us, out of love, so that when grace enables us to escape our corrupt inclinations and limitations and temptations, we will be able to truly search for the real and living Jesus...and then we will find him.
In my experience here, this is hard, mainly because there are so many things that influence us, derail us, tempt us and mold us into beings that will do lots of things but that.

So the lesson is this. If I am honest with myself and I truly want to develop a true and real and deep relationship with Jesus I have to a) train myself to think and feel that this pursuit is better/worth more than all those things that get in my way, and b) that I have to depend on his grace to enable me to get up, focus on things above and get on with my pursuit.

An elusive Jesus is hiding in plain sight for those who truly want to find him.

Did you see the leopard?