Cootsona: Reflections on Culture, Life, and Faith
In this blog, I reflect on topics related to my upcoming book, Say Yes to No. Simply put, these are topics that fascinate me on how to live to the fullest, how to make sense (or not) of the culture around us, and how to respond to God.
A Return to C.S. Lewis
2010-07-28T19:57:00.000-07:00

As I begin the first day of life post-sabbatical, I’ve naturally returned to work at Bidwell Pres. I’m also working on a concept for a new book, which represents something of a happy repayment on a thirty-year old debt.
            
It was sometime in 1979, as a wishy-washy junior in high school sixteen-year-old atheist-agnostic, that a friend handed me C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. I was dumbfounded: Here a writer, a Christian at that, was somehow making the whole Christian faith reasonable. I mean, I had been taught that Christianity was anything but reasoned. And it didn’t take the atheists to convince me that Christians weren’t intellectually engaged—it was the light-in-the-head church youth groups singing Jesus songs, which many of didn’t believe, accompanied by hand-signals that were totally mismatched with the message of denial, faith, and abandonment to God that I heard from Jesus. The flippant belief was all I needed to not believe myself. It wasn’t really hypocrisy; it was the frivolity that turned me away.
           
I didn’t know who this Lewis guy was, but he made sense. It was so similar to a sentiment that Lewis himself would record—and which I read many years later—about his own reading, as a young atheist, of the Catholic author G.K. Chesterton:
Then I read Chesterton’s Everlasting Man and for the first time saw the whole Christian outline of history set out in a form that seemed to me to make sense. Somehow I contrived not to be too badly shaken. You will remember that I already thought Chesterton the most sensible man alive “apart from his Christianity.” Now, I veritably believe, I thought—I didn’t of course say; words would have revealed the nonsense—that Christianity itself was very sensible “apart from its Christianity.”
Lewis, though funny, was never frivolous. He knew that Christianity was something worth our lives. And so—if plans proceed—I’ll be writing to invite others to the rich feast of Lewis’s writings where insights pierce the heart, where imagination takes us soaring, and where we might even touch God. The journey to get out those reflections sounds, not frivolous, but (excepting some of the times of hard work) entirely joyful.
Time for a Change, Time for View
2010-07-01T06:02:00.000-07:00
I type this from one my favorite places in the world--not mountain biking the Flume Trail above Lake Tahoe's north shore where this picture was taken yesterday, although that was amazing--but not too far away, at the Tahoe house where our family's stayed at for the past 25 summer vacations (and have loved being here every time).

It's time to change the blog a bit--I'm doing some alterations on the look and content, changing color and adding some new links, that sort of thing. My hope is that it will be more interesting and engaging. Other changes, I suspect, will emerge over time. But more importantly, I'm widening the swatch of topics for reflection, to include the sciences and the arts as components of my reflections on culture. I've spent a number of years studying these fields, and I want to bring them into this blog more intentionally. (We'll see how this plays out...)

All this makes sense (at least to me) as my sabbatical enters its final month, and as I seek to listen to new ways that God is directing me. I'm riding down some new trails, hoping to gain some new vistas. If Madeleine L'Engle was right--"we have points of view, but God has view." I hope I'll even get a bit of the latter. Time for view!
Saying Yes, Flow, and the Question of Selfishness
2010-06-19T16:15:00.000-07:00
I'm beginning work on a new book tentatively titled, Ten Beautiful Yeses: Further Toward What's Best in Life, Work and Love. Let's begin our search for the yeses in life, with what we really care about. In that light, I believe we can let our fears diminish in light of the scale of what we’re discovering and the joy and beauty we will experience.

To be sure, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has on odd name—I once heard someone comment (though I can’t verify this) that he prefers “Mike” and that his last name sounds something like “Chick-sent-me-high.” All of this intrigues me… which in a way is what he’s after—that is, what is truly intriguing in life. In Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi presented a key idea for grasping how we find our passion. In the state of the mind he named “flow,” we experience deep enjoyment, challenge matched by our skills, creativity, and sense that time is moving in a different, and fuller way. How can “flow”—or “optimal experience” be described? He writes that “‘Flow’ is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake”(6). One key example for Dr. C is the work of a surgeon, who works within certain limits (defined by keeping the patient alive), for a specific goal (the improved health of the patient), with a task that's entirely demanding and rewarding. Although paradigmatic, flow doesn't just happen for surgeons. It's actually a reasonably universal experience. But how did he find this out? He developed a new form of research, the Experience Sampling Method, in which hundreds of subjects wore pagers that beeped at odd intervals throughout their days. When paged, the participants had to quickly fill out a brief survey that noted what activity they were engaged in and a series of questions of whether they were more or less in the “flow.” Were they in “optimal experience”? 

Csikszentmihalyi’s research indicates some surprising results: for example, human beings more often experience flow when they are working than when they are at leisure (158-159). Although television requires mental processing, very little else mentally, like memory, is engaged. “Not surprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration, use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency when watching television” (30). Ultimately, he asserts, optimal experience makes life worth living. When we’re in the flow, we want to do nothing else. And we don’t really care about much else. “An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous” (71).
           
Doesn’t this “finding your passion,” and looking for "flow" seem just a little too selfish and therefore illegitimate as a way of directing our lives? Not necessarily. I have learned from a distinction the Christian writer and literary scholar, C.S. Lewis, who delineated an important distinction: between being selfish and self-centered. Finding what we are called to do is, in a certain sense, selfish—we love doing it and therefore we find great joy—but entirely not self-centered—when we do what we love, we forget ourselves as we delight in the activity itself. Lewis writes
One of the happiest men and most pleasant companions I have ever known was intensely selfish. On the other hand I have known people capable of real sacrifice whose lives were nevertheless a misery to themselves and to others, because self-concern and self-pity filled all their thoughts. Either condition will destroy the soul in the end. But till the end, give me the man who takes the best of everything (even at my expense) and then talks of other things, rather than the man who serves me and talks of himself, and whose very kindness are a continual reproach, a continual demand for pity, gratitude and admiration. (Surprised by Joy, 143-44)
So, in a way, I’m asking us to be more directed toward what we like because there we have the power to become self-forgetful and even other-directed. Here I’m proposing a form of enlightened selfishness. The point is not, as we often fear, that when we like to do something it will make us less moral, but what we truly love to do helps us to turn our eyes off ourselves and toward others, which is the beginning of right actions. Don’t stay selfish—that, as C.S. Lewis points out, can also “destroy the soul,” but learn to follow what you truly enjoy and follow it toward something outside of us. And that leads to mission….

So tell me, what do you think of all this?
Growing Up in America
2010-06-16T11:40:00.000-07:00
Two things came together for me today.

First of all, I came across an article in the New York Times that described how the road to adulthood has gotten longer and that our country is extending adolescent later in life, go here. The article presented several factors such as a poor job market, more expensive college tuition, and the fact that we are delaying both marriage and having children. Still the reality is this: our culture  today is not asking our children to grow up--to leave adolescence--until their 30s.

Second thing: I finished a really fine novel, "Lovely Bones" (Alice Seebold) that begins by describing the life of a family and a town from the perspective of a fourteen year old who's just been murdered. A pretty arresting start. And the scenes of family life--and this family's grief--are poignant. It's no surprise the American Booksellers Association award it "Book of the Year" when it was published.

But here's the thing: Seebold could describe the joys of adolescent life and especially teenage and twenty-something love, dreams, and sexuality. The lives of the adults, however, pretty much bottom out. Marriages fell apart (adultery, workaholism). Dreams were deferred and forgotten because of the relentless onslaught of the demands in adulthood. The book expressed little sustainable positive vision for what it means to go past this adolescence.

I'm not blaming Seebold. I don't know her work well enough--all I've read is "Lovely Bones"--and she might says she's just describing the U.S. But if that's the response, therein also lies the problem: our culture prides itself on excitement, adventure, self-expression, and staying young. Pretty much the description of adolescence. American doesn't want to grow up.

But where's the point where we say no to newness and self-orientation? When do we say yes to sticking things out and learning that, once the buzz of the "first time" wears off, that's when life really gets good? I treasure the moment when I first road my bike without training wheels, but I'm glad my skill level and mastery has improved over the intervening years. There's no way I could bike the trails I do today with the skills I had when I was six.

Those two things lead to a third: Being a kid, a teen, and an adolescent was great. But growing up has a lot to offer. And being an adult is sure a lot better than staying a child forever.
Prayer the Jesus Way
2010-04-29T22:26:00.000-07:00
I've been looking at the passage for this week's sermon (Luke 11). It's on prayer, it's by Jesus, and it starts in a reasonably unassuming way...

"He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ He said to them, ‘When you pray, say:?Father...'"

Then I came across this note in People’s NT Commentary, "The believer comes to God in prayer without flattery, bribery, or manipulation but already has God’s ear, just as a child has the attention of a good parent."

That stopped me, and I had to ask: Would that change the way we pray?
The Good Samaritan and e.e. cummings
2010-04-23T11:30:00.000-07:00
This week, at Bidwell Presbyterian, we're learning about how to follow Jesus through the parable of the Good Samaritan.  Here's the stunning take on Jesus's words by the underrated 20th century poet, e.e. cummings.


I'll let the poem speak for itself:



a man who had fallen among thieves
lay by the roadside on his back
dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
wearing a round jeer for a hat 

fate per a somewhat more than less
emancipated evening
had in return for consciousness
endowed him with a changeless grin 

whereon a dozen staunch and Meal
citizens did graze at pause
then fired by hypercivic zeal
sought newer pastures or because 

swaddled with a frozen brook
of pinkest vomit out of eyes
which noticed nobody he looked
as if he did not care to rise 

one hand did nothing on the vest
its wideflung friend clenched weakly dirt
while the mute trouserfly confessed
a button solemnly inert. 

Brushing from whom the stiffened puke
i put him all into my arms
and staggered banged with terror through
a million billion trillion stars




Female Disciples and the Good Soil
 2010-03-19T07:33:00.000-07:00
How much new could be said about the Parable of the Sower (Luke 8:4-15)? Jesus calls us to be good soil--not rocky or thorny soil--because that's the place where the seed of his word grows and flourishes. 


"Not much new," I thought to myself as I pondered a blog entry. And then I re-read Luke 8, and pondered the section that precedes the parable, where women follow Jesus, and are thus by definition (though not the Twelve) his disciples. Check this out:
Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod's household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
Women following a rabbi? In the first century that was radical.  Second, women bankrolling Jesus's itinerate ministry? Even radicaller. More radical of all? That these women are models for what it means to be good soil. 


Let's see if we can hear the parable's conclusion one more time:

Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown. "When he said this, he called out, "Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear."
Jesus, Capernaum, and the Outsider
 2010-03-07T07:02:00.000-08:00
Three months ago, I had the opportunity to visit Capernaum on the north shore of the sea of Galilee. In fact, here's a picture of my friends, Wally and Jerry, as they walk out the remains of this ancient Jewish city, having taken its guidelines with extreme seriousness. 


This memory of Capernaum provides context for a story from Jesus's life in the Gospel of Luke (chapter 7, 1-3):
After Jesus had finished all his sayings in the hearing of the people, he entered Capernaum. A centurion there had a slave whom he valued highly, and who was ill and close to death. When he heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave.
To ruin the drama of this encounter, I'll note that Jesus does in fact heal the slave. In the process, Jesus demonstrates that he's more than fine about moving beyond the confines of the Jewish people to do his work of healing. (This is a theme the Gospel of Luke loves.) But before that healing, another thing happens that's contained in these verses: somehow this Roman military officer--outside of the Jewish faith--heard about Jesus, which I suppose occurred through local people sharing stories about Jesus's messages and his healing. And that fact leads me to another question: How does this happen today?


My response is entirely too straightforward--people hear about Jesus through the witness of his followers. Sometimes it's through relating their faith. Sometimes it's through acts of kindness. If knowing Jesus is good, it's got to be shared. And I suppose the bottom line, as it follows the story here, is the goodness and beauty of Jesus isn't the sole property of the Christian community. Like a good infection, it just keeps moving beyond the boundaries we set up.
Foundations
 2010-02-23T06:05:00.000-08:00
I want to simply set down, one after the other, a piece of Gospels (namely Luke 6:46-49) and a related comment from The People’s NT Commentary.


First from Jesus in the Gospel of Luke:
Why do you call me, 'Lord, Lord,' and do not do what I say? I will show you what he is like who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice. He is like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock. When a flood came, the torrent struck that house but could not shake it, because it was well built. But the one who hears my words and does not put them into practice is like a man who built a house on the ground without a foundation. The moment the torrent struck that house, it collapsed and its destruction was complete.
Then from Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock:
Our culture encourages us to be concerned about an impressive superstructure; Jesus encourages us to think about the foundation.
Any thoughts on foundations and how this looks for our culture, or maybe more particularly, for you?
"I Desire Mercy, Not Sacrifice"
 2010-02-05T16:46:00.000-08:00
Jesus was a prophet. Therefore Jesus stood in the prophetic tradition--the great tradition of Hebrew Bible that emphasizes justice and mercy, especially for the oppressed. This means that if there was a decision to be made between our spiritual practices and mercy, he would always choose mercy. 

 
And that's clearly the case when Jesus cites Hosea 6:6, "I desire mercy, not sacrifice" as he calls a tax-collector, Matthew, to be his disciple, thereby scandalizing some of the most prominent religious leaders and biblical teachers of his day, the Pharisees. (See Matthew 9:9-13.)

 
Now lest we think the Pharisees were bad guys, remember that they were a reform movement in 1st century Judaism that desired to do the right things--to study the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and to live a life pleasing to God through rigorous observance of God's commands like eating kosher and practicing the Sabbath. It seems, however, they desired sacrifice--the sacrifice of right religious practice--more than mercy.

 
You see ,Jesus believed that caring for the hurting was more important, and when there was a conflict mercy must win over doing the right spiritual practices:
6On another Sabbath he went into the synagogue and was teaching, and a man was there whose right hand was shriveled. 7The Pharisees and the teachers of the law were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus, so they watched him closely to see if he would heal on the Sabbath. 8But Jesus knew what they were thinking and said to the man with the shriveled hand, "Get up and stand in front of everyone." So he got up and stood there. 9 Then Jesus said to them, "I ask you, which is lawful on the Sabbath: to do good or to do evil, to save life or to destroy it?" 10He looked around at them all, and then said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He did so, and his hand was completely restored. 11But they were furious and began to discuss with one another what they might do to Jesus. (Gospel of Luke, chapter 6)
But Christians today would never be accused on that, right? We'd never rush to our Bible studies, church services, or committee meetings, and pass by someone in need, a neighbor who needs a listening ear, a fellow student who needs a hand, or a needy person in our path?  Would we?


Maybe we need to remember again that there are times when we need to remember Jesus's emphasis: "I desire mercy, not sacrifice."