Sun it Rises

"Meaningless! Meaningless!... Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless."

Sometimes good people die. Sometimes evil people prosper. Work is hard, painful things happen. People sometimes get what they deserve. Sometimes they don't. The sun rises, the sun sets. Life goes on.

There is nothing quite like a good meal, or a couple of pints. There is nothing quite like being in love. There is nothing like working hard for something and then achieving it. The sun rises, the sun sets. Life goes on. People are forgotten, memories are lost. Everything is meaningless.

Sometimes we take ten steps forward. Sometimes we get knocked twenty back. Some people die lonely, some people surround themselves with riches and are still not fulfilled. Some people are born in poverty and live in poverty and die in poverty. Some people are forgotten. The sun rises, the sun sets. Life goes on. Everything is meaningless.

There will be always be more knowledge, it will always be unattainable. You can study your whole life and still be discontent. Wisdom is valuable, but difficult. No one truly knows the future. No one knows how many children you will have, how happy you will be.  No one knows how many years you have left. The sun rises, the sun sets. Life goes on. Everything is meaningless.

There will always be poverty. There will always be hypocrisy in religion. There will always be ignorance. There will always be selfishness and greed. There will always be those who strive for something beyond themselves. All came from stuff. All are heading back that way. There is nothing new under the sun. The sun rises, the sun sets. Life goes on. Everything is meaningless.

Life is good when you're young. I read lots of books. Listen to music. I have hardly any responsibilities or ties. I am in love. I drink good beer, I eat good food. Bad days will inevitably happen. Difficult times no doubt lie ahead. I will seek after God with all of my life. I will pray to him, worship him, live a live focused on him. The sun rises, the sun sets. Life goes on. Everything is meaningless.

So what next? What can we do in face of such meaninglessness?

"here is the conclusion of the matter: Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgement, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil." 

The sun rises, the sun sets. Life goes on. Everything is meaningless. It is in these words that I find truth, and then hope. 

Nobodys Fault But Mine

I was speaking on Sunday at G2 about Jesus' command of 'do not worry- seek first the kingdom of God'. I reckon I'm a much better writer than nautural public speaker- and so my speaking largely comes out of something I've written carefully and deliberately. I rarely go off piste when I'm speaking on a topic. But as I prepared in the hour before the meeting, I felt really strongly that I should fit something in that I hadn't planned to say at all. So midway through speaking, I casually slipped in:

"You do not have to be anything , you do not have to do anything- do you know that?"

You could have easily missed it. And in fact, most people probably didn't think about the significance of that question. But I could talk for hours about that alone. Tonight, as I lay in the bath reading (it is the place of most creative and spiritual revelations) I was struck again by the potency of this. The book I was reading about leadership, claims that our development, our leadership, is down primarily to what we put into it. Self leadership is one of the biggest skills a leader needs to learn. But we have the tendancy to blame everyone else for our lack of success or movement in life; circumstances, lack of input, negativity, opposition, people. But at the end of the day, the responsibility for what you get from today lies solely with yourself. 

I am reminded of a very famous scene that Sartre paints in 'Being and Nothingness' of a waiter who plays the part of a waiter perfectly. He is a little too eager, his smile perfect, he moves around the restaurant effortlessly; he has become in his own mind: 'a waiter'. Sartre accuses the waiter of living in 'bad faith'; he denies his own freedom and his own existence by reducing himself only to a 'waiter' as if it were an object; as if he were only a waiter as a rock is a rock. The truth of his existence and his consciousness cannot be reduced to this at all. The human condition lies much deeper than that of rocks and chairs. The waiter denies his fundemental freedom to exist, to be conscious.

And it's true in my own life as I stop and look back. For the past 2 months, I have become a little bitter and fustrated with certain things, I have become a little lacking in passion. And I have blamed the lack of a holiday or any time off, I have blamed a lack of time, a lack of input, too many hours at work, too much to do. I'm sure all of these factors have contributed to my situation. But the truth of the matter is that I have been living in bad faith; denying my own responsibility in my life. I have reduced my self and become an object influenced by causes and effects. It is to deny a fundemental truth about myself. It is time to face myself as responsible for the content and state of my own life.

How about you?

Do you know that we choose what we have? Always. We choose the life that we adhere to? Always. I can often be so fustrated even by my personal morality restricting what I can and can't do. But the truth of the matter is; I am free, I choose. I choose my actions, I choose to adhere to a system of ethics. I choose to get up and go to work instead of lying in and lying about it. I choose to approach my relationships the way I do, as fustrating as it can be. I choose to hardly ever have a day off. I choose be lazy, I choose my state of being. I choose my bitterness and lack of passion.

You don't have to go to work tomorrow, you don't have to stay in your marriage, you don't have to diet, you don't have to go running, you don't have to finish your degree or hand in that essay on Friday. You don't have to adhere to a system of morality. If you wanted to, you could sell all your stuff and move to Kenya tomorrow. You choose. Always.

That is not to say that those things go without consequence or influence, but ultimately you choose. And it is not to say that sometimes choices are restriced, and sometimes difficult. But the more you recognise that you always have a choice, the more you realise that only you are responsible for where you are, what you do, and what you make of life.

Tomorrow, you'll probably choose to get out of bed; what will you make of it?

Breathe

When did I let my life become so mundane? I feel at the moment like I wake up, go to work, come home, go to bed, repeat. And somewhere along the line, I've forgotten that I'm actually living. I've allowed myself to stop thinking, to stop reflecting , to stop really breathing.

I realised tonight something so precious that I can't believe I ever forgot it. I'm alive. I'm breathing in the air around me. I exist. When you actually slow down enough to realise that, when you manage to tear yourself away from the mundane life long enough to know that- it is absolutely breathtaking. I can be anything, I can go anywhere, I am free, I exist.

Don't let me ever forget that.

It carries some of the essence of what Jesus said when he says: 

"do not worry about your life" "do not worry about tomorrow" "seek first the kingdom of God".

I find those words so fresh and releasing. So simple when I make things so complicated. At times I get so caught up in my life that I forget I'm actually living, sometimes I get so caught up in the future- where I will be, how I will get by, that I forget who I really am. And Jesus is frank about it- do not worry.  Live. Exist. 

It is so easy to get through weeks, months, years without really living. It isn't about traveling the world or becoming successful- it isn't about eating the most exquisite food or reading more books. It is about taking in every last drop of life- savoring every moment for what it is; realising that life is too short to live for anything other than the present. 

Ultimately life is fickle. Tomorrow is always too far away. It's not long enough until I'm married, until I have enough money, until we have a decent government. The truth is that there will always be another excuse to not really live; there will always be something not right. But ultimately the future is only a distraction from how amazing the present is, on how exhilarating life could be if we dared to really live.

This might be my last blog. This might be my last breath. If it is, at least I will go appreciating life for what it is, knowing that I am alive now and that is truly the most remarkable thing.

Basic Space

Sometimes we are in danger of forgetting that the claim "there exists a God" is an extraordinary claim. Especially when we get bogged down in mundaneness of every day life, and every day Christendom we forget how amazing the existence of anything at all really is. 

If you look on my facebook page, and the facebook page of many of my close friends you will see under the tab- 'religion' is the title 'Christian'. That word is very much a part of the fabric of this country and of the world. But the underlying truth statement of that set of beliefs is- there exists a God. There exists a being so unlike human beings that he exists eternally, he created the entire universe, he sees all, he knows all. He is unlike anything we can ever conceive or comprehend. That is a bold claim. 

Yet, somehow I seem to end up in a position of living in which Christianity, spiritual discipline, 'Church' has become mundane and at times lifeless. If I'm honest, it has been a while since I've felt sparked, passionate or fully engaged with the concept of God. But as I sat in a dark room, lying in a bath of luke warm water tonight, it suddenly dawned on me that what I believe, what I have faith in is utterly outrageous. But I believe that it is true. I believe there is something, some being that pre-existed this system, this universe that we now know. 

Somewhere along the line, I have lost my reverence for God. He has become a concept in a shoe-box, an ideology that improves human living that I reach for when I have my 'serious hat' on. But the core claim of Christianity, is not that there is a code of ethics, it's not that there is a way of life which can improve my living, it's not even that I can be saved for eternity- there is a statement that precedes all of that which is this- "God exists". When you strip away all of the teachings of Christ, all of the spiritual disciplines I strive for, when you strip away the Bible, the existence of human beings, the existence of the universe, we are left with God. A being, a power, a person. The question is- do I really believe that. Do I really believe in him, in his existence? 

I cannot begin to comprehend what that question really even means, but my answer is- yes. Yes, I believe there is something, when everything else is stripped away and I meditate on this fact, I am amazed at God. I am amazed that there exists anything at all. And I am so grateful that I have faith. Basic, simple, powerful faith. 

Tomorrow I will get up. And I will pray a prayer of sheer thankfulness, a prayer that I often pray when I don't know what else to say. "Thank you Lord that there is something rather than nothing. Amen". And I will take that prayer into my day, and revel in the simplicity of existence.

Running on Faith

I believe because I can do no other. I wasn't argued into faith, I wasn't persuaded into faith. I became self conscious and I believed. I'm not alone in this. Others can remember the first time they had faith. My mate James for example became a Christian 5 years ago. He was at a festival with me and my friends when he got out of his seat and went to the front to respond and never looked back since. I don't think anyone persuaded or argued him into it. He just got up from his seat and walked into faith. Today he is introducing people to Jesus left right and centre, he is devoting his year to serving God and his Church. It astounds me. All because of that one moment when he leapt into faith.

 Recently I can't get away from the absurdity of faith. Understand me when I say 'absurd'. I don't mean absurd in the sense that we might often hear it. Absurd carries quite a few negative connotations, we might say "The big bang theory is an absurd theory." When we say this we usually mean it's unreasonable or that we disagree with it. When I say that faith is 'absurd that's not quite what I mean. Sartre uses the notion of absurdity to refer to all of existence. Things exist and we are confronted with their existence but there seems to be no meaning behind them. There's some pretty hilariously pretentious pieces (apologies Sartre fanatics) when Sartre talks about being confronted by the absurdity of a tree trunk as a form which confronts his senses but which has no meaning, when we strip away the names we give it, when we experience things as they actually are, we see that they're utterly absurd.

For me that's a pretty good account of faith. I've become increasingly disillusioned with apologetics, with the whole McGrath/ Dawkins spat. It once used to fascinate me, I used to want to be able to argue any atheist into the ground. Now I can't really be bothered. Partly because the arguments don't always convince me, but partly because I think that faith isn't a proposition to be proved at all. Don't get me wrong, there's a use in discussing apologetics if it helps people to see that the Christian faith isn't absolutely bonkers. But it irritates me.

Kierkegaard argued that faith is a paradox, he held that the rational mind cannot ever comprehend God fully or prove that he exists. Faith is all about risk, faith is about leaping into something absurd. I daily leap into the absurd. I choose daily to trust in God. You might have read up to here and think that I'm actually a bit of an idiot. That I've lost a grasp on rationality and am just looking for a way to cling onto some stability that has been indoctrinated in me. Surely that's a possibility, but I don't think it's the truth. You see the thing is we daily leap into the absurd. All of us. None of us can fully understand the universe, the existence of consciousness, life our own existence. When we confront things as they really are, stripped away from all the meaning we bring to them, all we have left is absurdity. Christianity isn't a proposition at all. It's a complete overhaul of my being.

I endorse Christ to you wholeheartedly. I believe that he has redeemed me. That he has set me free from my own self centered universe, I believe that he offers me life eternal. But following Christ is a total worldview. It is a lens that infects every aspect of my existence. It is not something I can be persuaded of in the same way that I can be persuaded that there used to be dinosaurs walking on planet earth. I believe that faith in Christ is the ultimate fulfillment and it brings hope and truth to everything.

But at the same time it's utterly absurd. I cannot tell you why I believe. I believe because I can do no other. I am transformed into faith. That is why I am increasingly frustrated with the limits of rationalism. At some point we all have to leap. That is why Kierkegaard claims that faith is so offensive to rationalism, it threatens the very basis of it. It is a frustrating splinter that cannot be removed, even amidst the tightest argument, there always exists the slightest doubt. I have chosen to leap fully into Christ, and into his promises. I'm not an irrational idiot. But I will constantly fustrate the humanists of this world with my faith. Because faith cannot be eradicated by debate. When we start to enter into the view that rationalism is the only option, faith might diminish, might fade into the background. But I cannot escape the absurd, I cannot shake off faith. It is the most real thing to me.

We need to show faith, we need to model it. That is why I think my friend James leapt into the unknown that day; he saw faith amongst him. I leap every day into what sometimes seems paradoxical and unknown. My hope is that other people will see the power of faith and choose the same.