Just Passing Through

I gave it two weeks. Worked hard at making sure I tried everything available to meet my requirements. Couldn't do it with Win7.

Were I to type up a list of my complaints, it might include the following items:

• Almost nothing works on the console. If you've never used the commandline, you may never understand my complaint.I found a nice 64-bit package for Vim and gVim, but nothing else compiled for Windows from the vast array of good commandline tools would work for me. And as yet, I can find no free compiler bundle for Win7, nor even Vista. That is probably a year or more away, which means I can't do what little I might be able to figure out in making the tools work.
  
• Lack of choice; lack of control. If I want my pointer to be golden yellow, I have to turn off Aero effects. If I want a different style of the bundled games, I have to pay money. If the tile sets in Mahjongg are hard to see, I'm out of luck, because more of them cost money. If I want to run some really interesting tools, I have to fork over a lot for Win7 Pro, because MS refuses to release them for Home Premium. On and on it goes.
  
• Senseless limitations. It's all perfectly legal for me to build and run a certain range of multimedia tools, but MS actively blocks their use in Windows. While codecs aren't such an issue these days, I have to jump through a lot of hoops just to play a video DVD I purchased legally, often purchasing other software.
  

I could keep going, but I don't wish to bore you, dear reader. The point is, while most of my needs were met, there is a large amount of peripheral items which were out of reach. When it is possible to gain those peripheral items another way, and with relative ease, it makes sense to switch.

So I'm running openSUSE 11.2 again. Sorry, Win7. I really tried to make it work.

There is no way to explain it. Maybe I can use words to indicate something about it, and some of you will get the idea. Just over a week ago, there was an odd, subtle, almost imperceptible shift in my consciousness. It changed everything. The business of mysticism is reality.

Maybe I can lay out some visible markers to where I've gone, in case you are interested in exploring it yourself.

I realized long ago the notion of objective truth was just a delusion. There are facts, and there are even wise and astute analysis of facts, but there is no truth in the sense most people mean it. In this world, truth is a fleeting collision between the context of this world and God's revelation of Himself. Truth is God, and insofar as something works to reveal Him in some way, that passing moment of revelation is truth. Lots of people mistake warm fuzzy feelings for a moment of truth. Lots of people assert they understand the truth with their minds, but it's not possible. We can barely recognize it if our minds are trained by mysticism.

When you become committed to the truth, even your entire being takes a back seat. You don't take yourself that seriously. You don't expect to control much of anything because you realize you never had it in the first place. So when stuff comes along which you did not anticipate, you aren't angry, impatient, taking it as a personal insult and looking for someone to blame. You just take it in stride and try to figure out what to do next.

The idea you can make your own world, make things happen, is sheer blasphemy. God is in charge, and you aren't Him. You'll be really blessed if you can just control your own reactions. You might be able to discern where things are headed and generally succeed in reaching some worldly goal of prosperity, social approval, etc. It's an illusion. When you are gone, no one will remember those things. Try to do things which will reflect something which outlasts you. Not just fame, massive fortune, or great power and influence over other people. What happens when those you influenced are gone? The whole of human history is filled with forgotten names. Get over it, because after that, you stand before God.

What will He remember? He'll remember how much you looked like His Son... or how much you didn't. You can't simply try to learn acting like Jesus. It's not what God looks for; He's looking for the very essence of how His Son managed to portray eternal truth in every context. You can claim to be covered by the Blood of Jesus, but it may also be just words. People who have been washed have this strange tendency to want to think from a very different level. They tend to realize just about nothing in this world matters of itself. It will all be gone, a forgotten memory.

There will come a time when Jesus comes back here. All those pieces of wood people claim were chunks of His Cross? They'll burn up. So will the Shroud of Turin, and every "holy" place in this world. So much for our concept of holiness. If you can see it, touch it or say it, don't call it "holy." Holy is not the quality of things, but of moments. They pass by, show themselves, then are gone. Only insofar as they reveal something about God's holiness can we call them "holy." So what if they find the actual footprints of Jesus in the sand, or His sweat stains on some place He passed by -- it's not holy.

Holy is the desire to make Him known, to please Him like a child wants to please their father. The treasure of the Kingdom of Heaven, the "coin of the realm" of the Spirit of God, is sacrificial love. By this will all men know you are My disciples: You have My love for others. Everything else is just tools for the work. Inappropriate tools get laid aside, worn tools get replaced, and broken tools are thrown away. Your life on this earth is just a tool.

God uses broken vessels because there aren't any other kind. I'm not any less broken than before. I don't have more of Him in me than you do. But God has seen fit to show me just one more glimpse of His treasure in me. You can go to Heaven without mysticism. You can be a mystic and not go to Heaven. But you can't fully appreciate truth, and truly walk with God if you don't embrace His mysticism.

The word "character" means something distinct from others of a similar nature. We refer to characters in type setting and fonts, because if you can't tell what the marks mean, they don't mean anything beyond some nebulous decorative purpose. For words to have meaning, they must exclude things they don't mean. Though Heaven's language is indicative symbols, there are lots of things we have to do to make the symbols work, and that means having human language with sounds and character combinations which take on meaning by narrowing down what it indicates. Degrees of precision may be the subject of debate, but the basic principle stands.

By choosing terms such as "mystical" and "emergent," we naturally exclude things we don't want associated with our ministry. That we would also find ourselves including things we may also not want is another matter. The process of communicating is presenting pools of meaning, then pointing to the place where those pools overlap. Two words each meaning very broad ideas will then together winnow out the chaff.

It is likely we could never be a part of the Emergent Village -- the original emergent ministry -- because we are frankly not inclusive enough. For them to include us would dilute or tarnish the branding, as it were. But we cannot easily avoid the connotations of what they are. There comes a point where you don't waste too much effort chasing down every possible meaning, defining and defending it every time someone asks. This remains a fallen and imperfect world, and part of being emergent surely includes embracing and tolerating things unsettled, as a part of the on-going conversation with God and His Creation.

This is precisely the point. No one of us, nor any group of us is fit to be all things to all men. We would love it if God would do that, but He made it pretty obvious He would not. Only Jesus gets that privilege. The rest of us are the multitude of expressions of Jesus who take Him to little parts of God's Creation. Choosing the label "emergent" means we exclude folks who don't like that label. We do add to the pool of meaning, but we hardly control how it registers in the minds of others. Accepting the very real limitations, we seek God's face for definitions to our service in His Realm, and it seems He has led us to this choice. We are called now to work with those who won't choke on the term "emergent." We let go in peace those who don't like what they feel "emergent" means.

The baggage we do have is now pretty easy to start identifying. Mysticism, which we have already embraced long ago, is an obvious part of that label. In some ways, I feel our justification for mysticism is probably stronger than I've seen offered by most emergent writers. I'm not sure how to go about sharing that with them, but I would gladly. Meanwhile, there are a host of other associations.

We don't do suit and tie, nor any part of the subculture which calls for it. Feel free to wear one, but don't ever pretend it's important to what we do. We don't do settled and predictable, so organization will always be fluid, contextual. While ideas surely matter, people matter more. We place the burden of adjustment on ideas to meet the needs of people. That hardly excludes some things being settled in Heaven before God. At the same time, we quickly take issue with what most people assume is settled in Heaven.

Most obvious, and most perplexing to non-emergents, is our actions tend to follow a wholly different logic. We utterly reject the notion conversion is a cognitive process. It surely has cognitive results, but redemption is born -- is rooted -- somewhere else in the human soul. If your definitions of things forces that to mean "subjective emotions" then we can't offer you much help. That is, we discern you lack the spiritual equipment to hold a discussion. In our minds, there is such a thing as heresy, and Aristotelian/Enlightenment epistemology is that.

Thus, or actions will make no sense to folks still rooted in human rational "theology" which declares a "propositional truth" in God's Word, since Jesus Himself eschewed such a thing. We aren't selling a cognitive decision, but offering eternal grace, a mystical gift which will always defy human understanding. We can walk among the sinners of this world making no demands whatsoever unless absolutely critical to our own witness. We don't care about keeping our personal boundaries intact, because we are nothing in ourselves; our only value before God is our commitment to Him. We draw that circle of defense much closer to ourselves. We don't believe keeping yourself "unspotted by sins of this world" means public relations maneuvering, and we don't believe keeping yourself from "the appearance of sin" means a shallow pretense.

We expect to earn the privilege of being heard, but demand the right to be seen. We'll stick out not because of our subcultural expressions of artistic and stylistic tastes, but by the graceful personal interactions. To a large degree, we choose to absorb a lot of abuse just for the sake of the Cross. We let splash on us lots of filth because appearances mean very little, but persistence means a lot. So, yes, I call homosexuality a sin, but I can't do much good to gays if I don't remain friends with them in the long term. They need to know grace from Heaven is stronger than all their other gay friends, and what bonds me to them is not some sexual preference, nor merely an acceptance of it, but something deeper. If they never catch on, that's not my problem, because only God can reveal Himself. Yes, it will surely lead to some misunderstandings, but I'm sure Mary faced a lot of them, as did Jesus regarding His paternity.

So we defy convention, not merely for the sake of defiance, but because it is broken. The very definition of convention is whatever people come up with to reduce complexity and increase convenience and comfort. Convention is fundamentally a product of avoiding difficulties by nailing things down in neat categories and procedures. The Truth of God cannot possibly come to us in that framework, since He is ineffable. God always colors outside the lines, and even redefines color itself. Man is utterly unable to grasp order on God's level, so he mocks God by creating his own pitiful caricature of order, and thereby rejects God entirely. How else can we bear that mighty grace to you if everything we do is what you already expect? Your god is too small.

I love Classical Music, but I'll put up with almost any artistic acoustic expression if it gets me closer to people who need Jesus. I'll make friends with tax gatherers, prostitutes, queers, traitors, commies, thugs, dope dealers, pedophiles -- I'm not afraid to be seen with them. It's no different from helping the blind, burn victims, broken hearted, poor and anyone else who is suffering. It won't matter how they got there; they need to get out. I can't help them if they can't touch me.

That's the choice, and giving it the label "emergent" is simply a measure of accuracy.