a new chapter: jasonchu.net

hi, friends;

this blog has been useful, but has long since been replaced by my facebook artist page and other forms of social media.

as i prepare to launch my new project, THE UNCOOL, in Beijing and online worldwide, I've set up a new site to post music, videos, photos, and musings: www.jasonchu.net.

as i continue to grow as a servant, a brother, a son, a musician, a writer, and a friend, i hope you will also continue walking with me...

love

-jason

Vincent Chin. - memorial song

In March, Model Minority recorded "Vincent Chin." for our upcoming mixtape THE TIGER SONS, in the hopes of continuing to use music to educate our listeners and friends about the struggles and victories of Asians in America.

With Thursday being the 29th anniversary of his death, we decided to release "Vincent Chin." early, before the rest of the project, as a sign of respect for those who have come before us, and in the hopes that the tragedy that ended his life would never be forgotten.

The video clips that play during the song are selections from Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña's 1987 documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? and the instrumental is from Fort Minor's Kenji.



-Model Minority

Grand Master Chu
D-One
Inglish

Regarding the End of the World.

[a response to Gary Gutting's NY Times blog, Epistemology and the End of the World]


I moderately disagree with this article - if we buy into what he's saying, I think the scope of the argument may quickly broaden to the point where we lose any sort of certainty that's not grounded in what Gutting considers to be epistemically grounded rationale.

This includes, I suspect, not only future and even theologically dubitable events (as the Rapture distinctly is), but also present and even past warranted belief, including concepts such as salvation, the existence of God, the revelation of God to man, etc. I think that his argument easily applies to the status of Scripture, belief in my own spiritual experiences, etc.

So, yes, Camping's predictions are indeed "ill-advised". But Gutting has just pointed out the obvious; Camping's predictions failed. He provides no alternative schema for justification.

What would be interesting would be his providing a counterexample, some sort of spiritual belief that does turn out to be warranted or grounded. That would draw a clear line dividing epistemically warranted and unwarranted spiritual belief. But he doesn't - leaving me suspecting that he would a priori regard all spiritual belief as resting on epistemically shaky grounds.

prophets

"They tend to be, each in their own way, orthodox, conservative, traditional clergy, intellectuals or believers, but that very authentic inner experience and membership allows them to utterly critique the very systems that they are a part of."

Life on the Edge, a blog entry by Fr. Richard Rohr.

-courtesy of Peter Gent

Mariology

A genuine question: how do Roman Catholic theologians view these verses?

" ²⁷While he was saying these things, some woman lifted her voice above the murmur of the crowd: "Blessed the womb that carried you, and the breasts at which you nursed!"

²⁸Jesus commented, "Even more blessed are those who hear God's Word and guard it with their lives!" (Luke 11:27-28).

Gathered writings

Dear friends;

As I've mentioned before, I am now writing weekly devotional/reflection entries over at The Embassy Blog, on the official website for the young adults ministry of the Beijing International Christian Fellowship. My friends Phil and Billy are also contributing to the blog: Phil is answering questions about the Bible and the Christian life, and Billy is doing various entries on the Christian life. We'd love for you to go on over and take a look!

For the last few pieces, I've been writing reflections on the Book of Mark, which Phil and I have been reading through in February.

Who Are My Mother and Brothers? - who are we giving influence in our lives?

Responding to Jesus - what were people's responses to Jesus' presence?

Oh, To Be Clean! - how do we respond to the circumstances around us?

Big Hopes and Small Hopes - what do we rely on to give us hope?

New devotional blog for work

Dear friends;

I am pleased to announce that my young adults' group at the Beijing International Christian Fellowship is launching a new blog, with weekly contributions from myself and another friend or two. Please direct your browsers or RSS feeds to http://www.bicf.org/theembassyblog, and I hope you enjoy!

-jglc

I want...

...to give more than I thought was possible.

...to give my life to a cause that most people think is beneath me.

...to care enough to let myself be hurt.

...to cry, to hunger, to be meek, to love peace, to be disliked enough that this applies to me.

...to believe that Love will not only always win, but has already won.

...to have hope that not only helps me live, but changes what I understand living to be.

Information, the Internet, and Education.

I'm sitting here at 2:20 AM, lazing about as I browse the Internet, realizing the seductive - perilous, even - nature of content.

That is to say: we find ourselves in an age where opinions, media, art - entertainment - is available in gross quantities (numerically and repulsively gross) never before imagined. I can easily lose myself in entire afternoons spent, one after the other, non-selectively feeding off the vast streams of information pouring out of the global system. Poring over entire ecosystems of wikipedia entries, examining the output of a single youtube figure, simply perched at twitter.com/#home continuously refreshing the figurative timestream of minutiae.

But what does this mean? I was raised to believe that education meant learning more about what is. As a youth, posted on the couch - legs crossed, neck bent - I perused the Worldbook Encyclopedia, egged on in my erudition by eager parents. I was told that knowing more about my world would render me better-equipped to engage with it.

But that was a different era; a time when information was scarce, valuable. I had entire classroom sessions about the Dewey Decimal System; we were inculcated with the view of library qua gateway to the world, where a handful of rooms - curated and organized by hand - served as world-by-proxy: the sum total of human knowledge and experience gathered, summed up, ordered and described. At such a time, it was quite possible to exhaust one's storehouse of information on any given topic: if I wanted to read about, say, the role of samurai in 19th-century Japan (and I did!), there were n books on said topic available to me. And n was often less than 15.

But were I a young lad in today's bazaar of inputs, I find a humanly inexhaustible resource. Simply googling "samurai" + "19th-century japan" returns over four hundred thousand page hits, from fanboyish (there's another word that didn't exist!) gushings to graduate-level research on primary sources. The new information generated and instantly available, on a daily basis, long outpaces my ability to take it in.

The ramifications of this are, to my mind, vast: acquiring more information is no longer a talent or skillset; anyone with a 5-year-old sidekick and a $50 data plan can do that. In this world of infinite content and global context, information is cheap: what is highly valuable is the skill of adjudicating between streams of content. What is pertinent - what is credible?

And, most importantly: how can this information be repurposed? Were I to simply become a living repository of, say, humanity's knowledge as pertains to a subgenre of early-2000s electronic music, or Civil War reenacting, or a certain type of cross-stitching technique, this is insufficient raison d'etre. Where does this information go? The $64,000 question is - to what end is this knowledge being directed?

Whether we do it through a twitter account, wordpress blog (sorry, blogspot...), youtube channel, indie music distribution, or other mode of expression, the word of the age is productivity. To use a business-centric buzzword: what is the value added to the end consumer by my step in the process? This is why we see old-world names like Virgin Megastores and Fat Beats rapidly disappearing: if animals roam free in the streets, then why go to a zoo? If information is widely and freely accessible in the internet, why go through a middleman?

The metaphor provides its own answer: Because a zoo tiger is a beautiful, serene creature, while a street tiger is a terrifying beast. Zoos provide stable, credible, curated environments for interacting with animals that would otherwise tear one's head off. This explains why blogs have evolved into the tastemakers of our time: whereas before the local snobby record store would provide an auteur's-eye-view of "the scene," now Nah Right, Pitchfork, and that cool girl from school's twitter feed do so.

(1) People need guidance.

but

(2) People don't like paying money.

And so we have replaced the MSRP mark-up of Virgin with the ease of an RSS feed coupled with the cost-free nature of a bittorrent client.

This is not without ramifications. And the most obvious, in my eyes, is that those of us who are "wired-in" (to a certain degree) are rapidly becoming information zombies - shambling through the streets groaning "information.... informationnnnn..."

With such vast quantities of input, and much of it even checking in at a high quality, it is far too easy for us to become consumers only. I could spend evenings, days, weeks even just arming myself with information, paralyzed by the sheer volume, carried away like a hapless duckling in the surge of a fire hose (just go with the metaphor for now), and never even think to begin production. Both for the reason that, with so much content already existing in the wild, my two cents have fallen victim to massive inflation, as well as for the reason of it being simply easier to continue my unabated consumption rather than shift gears into the mode of critical assessment, energetic production, and - and this is key in the modern age of information - self-promotion.

The latter, perhaps, is a fitting coda to this screed: promotion. Marketing. Getting it - whatever it may be - into the right hands.

In the old days (which I am, likely, glorifying), with information comparatively scarce, promotion was as simple as announcing existence to the world. If a niche was filled, if new (or, more likely, new to this audience) information was made available, its debut was as simple as providing access and letting a target demographic know about it. But now, with a surfeit of information, promotion has become far more complex: no matter what type of music, writing, video work, or other content one is creating, there are already people out there who have created something similar. Better. More well-liked. More established.

Promotion now is not just announcing existence; it must convey superiority. If the target audience's desire is already being fed by a media outlet, then advertising must convince that audience that this information, this version of what-I-already-have is better. More like what-I-want than what-I-already-have is.

Hm.

wisdom

"[Martin] Buber admired how the Hasidic communities actualized their religion in daily life and culture. In stark contrast to the busy Zionist organizations, which were always mulling political concerns, the Hasidim were focused on the values which Buber had long advocated for Zionism to adopt."

I think the parallels are evident.

The ease of radicalism.

Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. - The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 5, Verses 11-12.

What an abused pair of sentences!

I've been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the odd - and oddly common - evangelical delight in the label of "fanatic". I can still remember grade school - 4th grade, was it? - when DC Talk came out with their CCM single Jesus Freak, and every cool Christian kid (alliteration!), it seemed, had the CD playing in their parents' minivan, Walkman, tape deck, etc. While the band, I'm guessing, had a higher purpose for their lyrics - talking about social alienation for the sake of Jesus, a thoroughly Scriptural topic - I experienced the preteen culture immediately around me using the song as the evangelical Smells Like Teen Spirit, essentially co-opting early-90s grunge culture with a Christian twist: using the purported fringe outsiderness of Christianity "under-attack" (via the apparently [?] incisive epithet of "Jesus Freak") as excuse to latch onto the coolness of Seattle circa 1993.

Now, Jesus Freak the song - and this general embrace of evangelical radicalism, at least in one sense of the word - has a point. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is not to be muted or watered-down; and it is a theological, historical, sociological fact that truly living a life that imitates and follows the life of Jesus Christ is going to lead to ostracism, persecution, objectification, and more. The way of the Cross is the way of self-sacrifice; of truly considering others as better than oneself and choosing to serve rather than to be served. To follow Jesus Christ is to receive Grace - infinite, unrepayable, impossible Grace - and to respond by giving others that same Grace. To be answer the call of God the Father through the Holy Spirit is to reject the things that used to bring cheap pleasure, and instead to assert the incredible value of life lived in the will of God. This is all immensely counter to the values and loves of this world and our societies; and so it is not wrong to label the Christian life as radical.

But the point grows murky when two subtly distinct - but wholly different - versions of radicalism get pushed together and confused. On the one hand, there is the Way of the Cross: of humble service and sacrifice, desiring that the life of Christ might be shared with others because it is normal. Normal, as defined by Chinese theologian Watchman Nee in his The Normal Christian Life, is the life that should be lived. Yes, this life is radical, but it is not glorious because it is radical; it is glorious because it is right and worthy.

To repeat the point, I mean: being radical is not what makes the Christian life worth living. Being fitting is what makes the Christian life (by which I mean, the life wholly surrendered to God and His love and loving will) worth living - and living to its utmost, most radical, most thorough form.

On the other hand, there is a form of radical Christianity that seems to take radicalism as its goal. In this form of Christianity, the "Christ" is de-emphasized, and the "radical" takes center stage: it seems less important that the one whom we are following is Jesus Christ, and more important that we are following to the extreme, or radically. This impulse towards radicalization seems an inborn trait: and it makes sense, given that we are born to live wholly given over to the will of God.

But we are also born to take great joy in sex, in food, in exercise. And all these can be taken overboard: the sex addict, the glutton, the steroid abuser. They go too far when a part of normal human functioning is mistaken for its end. And similarly, the human drive to radicalization can be taken too far: and the radical surrender that is a proper part of our worship of God becomes the goal of worship. It is enjoyable to be radical; it is easy to be radical.

After all, if we believe we are justified in our radicalization, that means that we never have to listen to anyone who says otherwise! You - I - we have all engaged, at one time or another, with someone who revels in their fanatacism: the aggressive atheist for whom every form of spirituality is a mindless crutch; the socialist who sneers at callous decentralized government; the Linux user who simply will not admit that a Windows computer can be useful. And, I suspect, such arguments (errr... discussions) find their conclusion when you threw up your hands, saying "fine! if all my reasoning and thoughtfully-constructed arguments have absolutely no purchase in your mind - just believe whatever you want to!" And we walk away, shaking our heads, while the other thinks to herself, "well, i just showed him!"

Of course, no such thing is true. But to the self-justified radical of this sort, that doesn't matter! What matters is that his radicalism continues to be self-sustaining, enjoyable, distinguishing him from you or me.

Some of you may have heard of - or even seen - a film called Jesus Camp (if you haven't... don't? Do? It will likely be disturbing.), where a documentary crew goes to various evangelical Christian children's summer camps and films the activities and talks there. Whether through tricks of editing, or the simple truth of the material, it's an absolute image nightmare for the Gospel. Children are given toy swords (representing the Word of God?), lectured on fighting the "culture wars," and the whole thing is generally presented by the (very partisan, I'm sure) filmmakers as a Western equivalent of a Middle Eastern terrorist training camp: indoctrination, self-justification, and radicalization.

Yes, most Christians aren't going to be strapping up with C4 and blowing a hole in the local supermarket. Thank God, middle America isn't the Gaza Strip.

But, lest we forget, men claiming to be acting in the name of Jesus Christ have committed terrorist violence on American soil. And the case isn't helped by, for example, the unfortunate lyric in DC Talk's Jesus Freak that goes "Kamikaze, my death is gain". Yes, DC Talk is probably referencing the point where Paul says: for me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. But to have the absolute ignorance to go ahead and connect Paul's words with Japanese suicide bombers from World War II is ludicrous. To die is gain - but we don't go to that death with a self-satisfied smirk on our faces; and the harvest we reap is not the bodies of enemies, but a bounty of grace, peace, and mercy.

This is not the sort of radicalism that Jesus Christ preached, either in the testimony of His words or in His life. The sort of radical God that we follow looked at the people slandering, persecuting, and murdering Him with tears running down His face and salvation in His heart: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Wow!

This is the kind of radicalization that we are supposed to undergo, as Christians: a transformation from the ways of the world to the way of radical love (as [a] Francis Chan and [b] Beyonce would say, Crazy Love). It is a radicalization that can never become self-satisfied, because being pushed to the fringes is not cause for celebration (oh look! I'm so misunderstood!), but grief - grief that the love we have will not be returned by its desired object, those who are pushing us out.

We the Church exist in this world not to condemn it, but to love it. Yes, we will be blessed when people insult, persecute, and slander us - but that blessing is not ours to seize by force of will, but rather to be received in gentleness and thanksgiving from the hand of God. Judgment is neither our privilege nor prerogative; mercy, love, and service are.

Amen?

His children's wounds

The moon will shine like the sun, and the sunlight will be seven times brighter, like the light of seven full days, when the LORD binds up the bruises of his people and heals the wounds he inflicted.
-The Book of Isaiah, chapter 30, verse 26

A couple of days ago, I was catching up with a friend over lunch, who brought up a point upon which he had been recently dwelling: that salvation, for the Christian, is not only, directly, or even primarily deliverance from earthly poverty, injustice, wickedness, and the other evils that immediately assail us when we consider the world around us. Rather, salvation is, at least in major part, a work wherein God removes us from His wrath and delivers us into His favor. We have sinned ourselves into becoming the objects of divine justice; a situation from which we cannot extricate ourselves, but from which God's grace brings us forth.

With this fresh in my consideration, I found it intriguing that Isaiah points out that the wounds of Israel which cried out for healing have been inflicted by God - and were, in turn, divinely healed. It brought to mind Proverbs 27:6: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend." Yes, we can be wounded - even deeply so - by our loved ones. And sometimes such wounds come out of ignorance, or failure on their part: speaking rashly, unthinkingly, in haste or anger.

But often such wounds sting: not because of their intent, but because of our brokenness. A thoughtful bit of feedback clubs our overweening pride, or concern for our actions is taken as an affront to our carefully cultivated self-worth. And so we are hurt; not because our friends have spoken carelessly, in bad faith, but because our rose-tinted reproduction of ourselves is exposed as a poor Photoshop job, juxtaposed with the sharpness of reality.

And it's cause for thanks (mixed with a bit of chagrin) that our God is not a God who is interested in spinning a PR campaign to us; if we ask Him to speak Truth to us, He will show us the Truth.

So, yes: as we become His beloved children, the ones chosen to wrestle with Him, struggle with the truth, and run the long race to the end, we will find ourselves inflicted with divine wounds, wounds that cut through the surface of our lies and penetrate to the ugly (but redeemable!) reality underneath.

And the wonder of grace is that, having inflicted these wounds upon us, God immediately proceeds to turn and bandage them up, healing us at cost to Himself.

Incredible!

Proverbs 20:13

"Do not love sleep or you will grow poor;

"stay awake and you will have food to spare."

a favorite

"For only blood can wipe out blood,
And only tears can heal:

And the crimson stain that was of Cain
Became Christ's snow-white seal."
- Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol

for a dear brother

We have walked and wandered
thru field and forest.
We have waded in pools in Brooklyn.

We have lived and lingered;
given and gotten,
we have glimpsed the face of God.

You are my brother
til breath is bitter
and still we push to the fore.

Run and stand
and sit in silence
and the journey is the reward.

movement

"The entire body of my earlier work reflects a movement towards Jesus Christ. In 2002, I consecrated my work to Jesus Christ. This did not involve a denunciation of works that reflected the journey. It was rather a statement that from then on I would write directly for Jesus Christ. I would write works about salvation, as opposed to alienation.

- Anne Rice, author of Interview with the Vampire, Queen of the Damned, and others.

what if

what if the Gospel is so big that even the people who get it wrong, still get it?



addendum (due to general confusion):

To anyone confused and wondering idly if I'm falling into heresy - some clarifications on this thought that came to me.

in brief, the setting was such: I was reading an LDS ("Mormon") friend's blog (what up, K, if you're reading this!), and she mentioned that her greatest passion was "for the Gospel".

It struck me how, as a Protestant Christian, I - and, I'm guessing, you guys - would say the exact same thing is our passion: the Gospel, the good news that God loves and saves a broken world. But yet we do mean, I think, fairly theologically different things when we say "I love the Gospel".

Then I flipped it - what if I approach the question, not from the angle of "what does it mean when I say - I love God", but from the angle of "what does it mean when God says - I love you"? To whom does He say this? Who can read John 1:12 ("Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God") and rejoice?

This extends to other communities. What about, for example, the Roman Catholic communion? I believe firmly that I fellowship with several Roman Catholic brothers and sisters; I love them, I trust that they love me, and, more importantly, I trust their love for God. I don't know if their doctrine is 100% correct - but I do believe that they are, underlying and interacting with their doctrinal belief, simply in love with Jesus Christ.

It makes me wonder what kind of thing the Gospel is. Is it something that we have to "know about" in order to obtain? I don't think many of us would want to say you have to understand philosophy about Jesus in order to receive love from Jesus - one reason being that this is actually impossible.

Now, when we ask questions about the Gospel, we're still talking about a pretty specific statement. Jeff points out to me that "the Gospel" is objectively defined, shaped by a specific and unique historical context.

My point isn't to be a universalist - saying, everyone, everywhere, is loving God. That's too broad, and it just rings untrue. That's not what I mean when I say, "getting it wrong."

What I do mean when I think about us "getting it wrong" is that I wonder what role knowledge and doctrine play in our love of God. God not as an abstract, nonspecific, vague concept, but God as a real, all-loving, all-powerful, incredibly present being whose presence and direct intervention is found throughout the world and human history. I think good teaching is vastly important - but even good teaching gets some details wrong sometimes. Does Jesus still love us when we make mistakes when talking about him?

...

This is meant to be a rhetorical question. The answer, I believe, is Yes.

But this begs a further question: "how many mistakes can we make, and still be talking about Jesus?"

And this is a very real question.

It's a big question: Which details matter? If you and I are both talking about our favorite cars, and I mention mine - the Mazda RX-7 FC3S - I might be picturing a white car, while you picture a red car. No big deal - we're still talking about the same thing.

But if I talk about an RX-7, and you picture a VW bug, or a horse, or a birthday cake, we're on pretty different pages. That's become a conversation whose details are so disconnected that it's not even a conversation "about" RX-7's any more.

And that's a question whose answer comes into focus when we humbly examine Scripture, seek God in prayer, listen to our mentors/disciplers, and so on.

Grace. (3 of 3)

[The last in a series of posts on Grace, excerpted from personal correspondence.]

"you can accept something with grace - like, without jealousy or anger or pride or vanity or whatnot."

-Right; I think that's true. This is a case of you extending grace to someone else, right: like taking someone's apology, when they have no way to force you to do it.

"can you struggle for grace? is it something to fight for?"

-I think you can struggle to give grace. But you can never struggle to receive it (because that would be earning it, making someone give you grace).
-But you can struggle with giving grace: because, like I said above, we're sinful. And because we're sinful, whatever we are supposed to do, we dislike doing; and whatever we're not supposed to do, we like doing. So, in the same way we were made to be like God, we were made to give grace; and, in the same way that we fail, daily, to be like God, we fail to give grace.

"if you have to fight for it is it somehow no longer grace?"

-I think it is still grace; the struggle, in the case of struggling to give grace, comes not because what you are giving is not truly grace; it comes because we, as flawed individuals, are unaccustomed to doing what is supposed to come naturally to us (in one of the analogies above: our lungs, filled with water, choke as we try to force in air).

"does it then equate to something akin to charity?"

-I think so. I think, really, that it all comes down to charity: our existence comes down to charity, to receiving something that is not ours to demand, but was, in God's abundance, God's to give.

"is that a totally irrelevant question if all of people's actions are a component of a god-given world?"

-I don't think it is. Yes, all of people's actions are a component of a God-given world; but just because we work within God's given framework doesn't mean that each individual action that we perform is directly licensed by and caused by God (if so, that's an incredibly messed-up version of a deity that I really don't want anything to do with). God created us with free will (if you want to talk about why, there's a whole separate discussion there), and I do think that us having free will is for the greater good. And I do think that God will, at the end of everything, make everything Right, for forever. But, in-between, there is a lot of us messing up, and God cleaning up after us, and us messing up again, etc.

Much love;

-jglc

Grace. (2 of 3)

[The second in a series of reflections on Grace, excerpted from personal correspondence.]

Who Gets It?
I said that Grace is offered to all, and I think that is true. From the sickest pedophile, to the cleanest-living Mormon, to the most hypocritical Protestant, to the loneliest homeless kid. I do think that is true. And Grace is unconditionally offered: God does not discriminate based on past, present, or future sins; God is not interested in striking a bargain of good behavior with us. Grace is ours, free for the taking, and we can have total surety in the assurance that this grace is effective and aesthetically ideal.

But, as I mentioned above: "faith without works is dead." I do not think that this means that faith can be alive but then, due to a paucity of good works, sort of sputter off and die. But I think it does mean that there is real, living, Grace-giving faith; and a kind of faith that is faith in name only, faith that calls itself faith, that says outwardly "I have received Grace", but, on the inside, never really understands what Grace means. And a present, even if freely and repeatedly offered, if it is rejected, or left unopened, languishes in neglect.

Then there are the tricky cases: people who never hear about Christianity? People who were abused by religion, who now hate the word "God"? All the good people, who lead beautiful lives of selflessness and yet never assent to the truths of my particular form of theology. What about them?

I could go into great length on each case, but I think two broad strokes might suffice to give you the general picture: (1) Everyone, from the best of us, to the worst of us, has broken the relationship we were supposed to maintain with God. And, again, no matter how well we live - no matter how hard we try to undo our brokenness, or to earn it back - Grace cannot be earned. BUT: (2) I don't know what it means to accept Grace, either. I know it has something to do with loving God, with realizing our inability to do it on our own. But I do not know exactly what the minimum standard of "wanting to find God" is, to qualify one as having accepted the gift of Grace. But I'm not interested in the minimum: sure, maybe I'd be OK if I weren't actively working on my relationship with God. But, believing that this relationship is precisely the point of my existence, I would be silly to abandon it; and kind of a jerk to my friends, if I were to give up on them finding and cultivating the same relationship that brings me such total fulfillment.

What About Human Grace?
So, if we're talking about grace, it would be silly or dismissive to avoid talking about the grace that we, as humans, give one another. But, in order to get to the point where I can address this mundane human grace, I think we need to understand what I believe the greatest Grace to be: because the two are, in my mind, intrinsically the same.

There's this idea, in most religions, that God made Man in God's own image, right? Adam and Eve and all that stuff. And that doesn't mean (though maybe it does also mean this) that we look physically like God. That means that, whatever we do, is a reflection of something that God does or can do. So our love, our care, anything in our relationships with others is an imitation of God's Love, Care, and so on, in the same way that anything a man or woman does can be traced to their parents, mentors, friends, media inspirations, etc. (even if they have placed some innovative twist or spin on it).

[Last, to close: addressing questions raised.]

Grace. (1 of 3)

[Some thoughts on grace, excerpted from personal correspondence.]

All right.

You ready? Sit down for this one, it's gonna be long. Feel free to read thru in a few sittings.

I have been wanting to get back to this question, for quite some time.

Grace is such a difficult thing to talk about, primarily because it is so mystical (mystical in the purest, least "religiousy" way possible... mystical in the sense of transcending what we are used to thinking about), so personal, and so rarely seen. That said, I think that the core of Christian faith and belief must be Grace: so it is also an incredibly important thing to talk about. So I'll try.

Let me see... OK. First things first: I am gonna say what I think Grace is, including what it's not, where it comes from (both in a mundane and divine way, though [as you could probably guess] I think the two are actually the same), and then, based on those beliefs/definitions, address some questions commonly raised.

What Is Grace?
I think the simplest and most impactful definition I've heard is simply this: Grace is receiving what we don't deserve. But packed into that definition (really more of a description, actually), is a lot of mind-twisting thought.

For one: by definition, we cannot deserve grace. And thus, grace is something that cannot be worked for; nor can it be pursued, strived for (one of my favorite Bible verses says that "equality with God is not something to be grasped"), or earned in any way. This is one of the biggest, worst, most fundamental mistakes that people (even many of the Christian faithful) make: they confuse the grace of and from God with something that we work to get. And so you get people "doing the right things" to "stay out of hell".

Nahhhhh.

[Side note: there is a point to doing "good" things, even after receiving grace: doing good things is a response to receiving Grace. It serves as a sort of sign that receiving Grace has changed us, and that it has really impacted our lives in a meaningful and life-altering fashion (another favorite verse says, "faith without works is dead").]

So, grace is something that we don't deserve, but that we receive. More than that: Grace is something that we don't deserve, but we need. It is literally vital to us: without grace, not only will we die, but we are dead. Grace is like the air in CPR, being breathed into unresponsive lungs. The lungs are made for that air, will quickly die and atrophy without it, but cannot, on their own, pull that needed air into themselves.

Why is this? It seems stupid for something to be made (humans) that intrinsically need something that they cannot grab hold of (grace), right? What kind of designer (ahh shades of "intelligent design" rhetoric... sorry.) would do something as stupid and broken as that?

Why Do We Need Grace?
Well, it comes back to a pretty oft-repeated topic: sin. What we humans nowadays consider to be our "natural" state is not the state of our nature as intended at creation (and I don't mean some dogmatic anti-scientific Creationist creation, either, I mean, at the metaphysical point where God designed the human). We were created to love God and to be loved by God; to know our Creator and be known by the Creator. But at some point in the history of our race - a point that is repeated in each of our individual lives - we broke ourselves. We were greedy, or fearful, or weak in some other way, and we heeded our own understanding of our purpose instead of the understanding of our Creator. And so we removed ourselves from that love, care, and nurture that was supposed to be the air in our spiritual lungs, replacing it with some noxious fluid of our own creation. And so now we lie, on the beach of this earth, gasping for nourishment. It is my fault, not the Creator's.

But, thank God (literally), the Creator still has a purpose for us; God still holds onto God's perfect love for us, despite our having abandoned it. So God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves: the Creator seizes the Creation and provides for us. It is my absolute and convicted belief that the way in which God provided that Grace (which is, really, a sub-heading of the greater umbrella of Love) is by a living act of sacrifice, the act and person of Jesus Christ.

Because, you see, Grace is free and offered to all (we'll get to it), but it is not cheap: to breath air into a victim's lungs, the person administering CPR must sacrifice her own air, right? It takes work to resuscitate the near-dead.

So this great illness that besets us - this fragmented person, this broken identity, this thing that is not as it ought to be - has to be made right, at some great cost; and, in the Christian faith, that cost was Jesus Christ, a perfect God and a sinless (and hence unbroken) Man, condescending to our level and taking our sins on himself. Dirtying himself, to clean us off. Which we in no way deserved, but which God wanted to give us. No child deserves a present - have they ever truly earned it? - but yet good parents love to give good things to their capricious children :)

[Next: Who gets Grace? And then - closing questions.]