Stuff to Remember

Last night I was part of a conversation that included a side reference to observing remembrance day in church (since it actually falls on a Sunday.) Last two years we've reeled off names of Canadian soldiers who died that year for us to remember. I think there are possibly a number of other things to remember as well. Here's my list. I should mention that this has been heavily influenced by a coworker's impressions of a history of World War II -- a book that demonstrates conclusively to his mind, and I think that he's got a pretty good one, that there were no good guys in that war. So, the list.

People first.
Several categories of victims come to mind.
Let's start with those whom the military arrogantly call collateral damage. Innocent bystanders who die because of war. Simple. Remember them.
Then let's remember the homeless and orphans through war, and their suffering. Finally let's remember the children of the future who will simply have less through the wanton wastage of resources by the armies of the world.

Along with victims, I'd like to remember the courageous and faith-filled ones who refuse to bow to the god of war. They, just like the young Hebrew men in Daniel, believe that God is able to save his people without resorting to carnal force, and resolve that even if He doesn't, they will not sacrifice their consciences to their countries or the forces of culture around them. Some of these have suffered horribly for their righteous stand throughout the centuries. Read this.

Other stuff.
Try the law of unintended consequences for example.
The fact is that war seldom accomplishes what it sets out to do. Every treaty contains the seeds of the next conflict. Every military ally has the possibility of becoming an enemy next. The evil Taliban of the present and the gallant, freedom fighting Mujahadeen of the past are, as I understand it, the same people. World War II, the popular no. 1 example of a just war, was a weird trade off where we took out Hitler by enabling Stalin.

Remember the adage that says that the first casualty of war is the truth. The implication is that people who believe the government's story about the state of the world and therefore enlist are perhaps not firstly heroes but dupes. Let us hope not. I have friends who have had military careers and they're not. But whole nations have been duped. No doubt about that.

Remember that today's generals march not into the front with their men. Soldiers who enlist as men are reduced to being someone else's pawns. Ugly but true.

Finally my choice for a remembrance day hymn.
The coda from Bruce Cockburn's It's Goin' Down Slow suits my mood for this Remembrance Day.

God, damn the hands of glory
That hold the bloody firebrand high
Close the book and end the story
Of how so many men have died
Let the world retain in memory
That mighty tongues tell mighty lies
And if mankind must have an enemy
Let it be his warlike pride
Let it be his warlike pride

Defense in Depth

I took a course on computer security last May. Lots of review. Some new concepts. Some stuff repackaged under a new name. Language is fascinating that way. If you have some idea you want people to remember, an alliterative phrase is a means to that end. A very prominent example from this course was "Defense in Depth." Isn't that catchy? It's a simple, and ideally speaking, pervasive, way of looking at computer security. It means you don't depend on only one way to keep your computers secure. Anti-virus software protects against one kind of attack. Firewalls protect against other kinds of attacks. Good passwords protect against other kinds of attack. Building security protects against yet another attack vector. Defense in Depth means you do your level best in each area. (Do All the Things)

I thought of it the other day when I was praying with a friend of mine. He was seeing a negative pattern developing in his life and at some level he wasn't just needing to help himself (i.e. to simply stop it) -- he also needed help, and in fact he was planning to go to counselling about the problem. But as it turned out, another dimension of help was also needed. As we prayed we discerned that there was a demon involved. We invited Jesus to deal with the demon and He did. Gone. Freedom. Hurrah! But my friend still planned to go to counselling, and furthermore we talked through some thought-based strategies to avoid the negative pattern in the future. Defense in Depth.

It came up again at a prayer meeting last Saturday. The raison d'etre of the meeting is essentially to pray for revival in our church. but typically at the end people bring up personal needs as time allows. Someone had a back problem and when we prayed, and, I might add, for only a short time, the pain went away. (When healings are that easy, it says to me that God is on the move.) But that wasn't the end of it. One of the group praying brought forth some counsel for our friend in the area of nutrition. Defense in Depth.

Point is, there's no one magic bullet. Jesus heals a man, and tells him to stop sinning to keep from further injury. He also talks about demons being driven out but coming back later to see if there is anything hindering a re-occupation. Life is a complex thing. Build on a good foundation in every respect. Defense in Depth.

Atheism Is Only a Symptom

There's a story I read as a child that still fascinates me. A town in China was expecting to "receive" a new allotment of "foreign devils," missionaries that is, and some discussion arises as to where they would be housed. "Why not put them in the house at the end of such and such a street. It's  haunted by demons-- they won't stay here long." "Good idea." So the western (American, British, Canadian, I don't know) family arrives and they are oblivious to the demonic realities around them. Realities that everyone in the town can see, know how to see, have known how from birth. The missionary family blithely moves into the haunted house and the towns people wait to see the demons attack. What they see instead is the demons fleeing through the windows, fleeing from these blind westerners, who for all their unawareness, carry the presence of Someone the demons fear. Some in town convert to Christianity on the basis of this obvious demonstration of power, and they tell the missionaries, only to be surprised that the missionaries never even knew what had happened.

I chatted about this story with someone who was recently as missionary in an Asian country, who said it's still this way. Haunted houses are cheaper to rent, and you sometimes have to pray through them to clear away the spiritual cobwebs.

Here's the deal. What I've just related has no place in the materialistically oriented minds of my generation. We don't see, don't sense, don't believe in ghosts, demons or anything. Whatever unseen organ in us that senses, intuitively understands, grasps, gets whatever is spiritual around us has, through that materialistic worldview, atrophied to the point of amputation, such that for us to actually experience God or anything else spiritual, is oh so close to impossible. And the ironic thing is that although we are a blind minority in the world, we think of ourselves as having grown up past all the superstitious "idiots" who actually still can sense what we can't. And we think we are the advanced ones.

I mentioned in an earlier post about materialism and Christianity. Materialistic Christianity is a ludicrous thing. On one hand, you have a world, real because that's all we will allow in our minds, of nothing but what you can see, or test for empirically. But, oh oh, we still believe in God, so we will tack on to our lonely universe the idea of a Creator. (I'm not even going to explore what our impoverished worldview has done to the story of redemption. That would make a study!) We read the Bible and ignore the stuff that makes us nervous. Call them fables. Or, if our tradition won't let us call them fables, let's dichotomize. At all costs, let us avoid being confronted with our foolish notion of a materialistic-only world. Let's teach that all of those miracles were for a different time. God's not doing that kind of thing anymore...

And this is the kind of Christianity many of my friends grew up in. No wonder some have turned to atheism. At least two I know, have, after a period of asking God to make himself known to them, so that they could really believe, given up completely and concluded he's not even there. But it's like trying to use a radio that has only a transmit and not a receive channel. The ingrained materialism has made it impossible to hear God's answer. Furthermore when they are around people who really do communicate with God, they are to inclined ignore them as foolish and superstitious. Human nature is not naturally humble. Instead of regretting one's own blindness, it's easy to switch over to superiority-- "We've outgrown superstition..." As C.S.Lewis put it, we've "seen through what [we] haven't even seen."

 Where does this leave us? Well as far as I know the only thing that changes worldview is experience. Let us continue to pray for miraculous signs and wonders, just like the first church in Acts did, so that the blinders are shaken off and even our materialistic generation can be saved.

Healing, Ornery Style

I like praying for healing. Especially when it works. Thursday I got to pray for a co-worker who has some kind of chronic pain. She checked back with me about an hour later and it was about fifty percent less. Another co-worker (I do work in a faith-based agency after all) commented that my prayers were "more effective" than hers, because she hadn't seen the same results praying for healing for the same situation. (Co-worker number 2 wasn't really being fair to herself, actually. The two of them pray together regularly and that is a greatly sustaining force in both their lives.) But what she said about effectiveness made me think. Could it be that in my crazy ongoing attempts to see God's kingdom come through healing, I have stumbled upon something that works, something that could work even better if put into the hands of that multitude who are holier and closer to God than I ever could be? Well if so, the attempt to transmit it should be made. So here goes. This my take-it-or-leave-it subjective and ornery guide to praying for physical healing.

 1) Be aware of the Holy Spirit moving through you. How you do this is your business. Just thinking about the Spirit sometimes is enough, A spoken invitation might be your thing. I think it just as valid to invite the Spirit as to make yourself specially aware that he's always with you. Really there's not much functional difference. Ultimately the goal is to be a conduit for his power to flow through. Yes, you're going to have to feel something. I get a sort of tingly feeling. Some people feel heat. (Did I mention this is subjective?)
2) With the permission of the one being prayed for, lay your hand on or near the part of the body with the problem.
3) Tell the body part to get better, tell the pain to go away, something like that. Believe that God has actually given you the authority to heal. That means it's your job to call it. Use the imperative mood -- tell the thing to happen. Keep it simple, though. As soon as you start discussing medical conditions with God, you are praying for healing in a way that Jesus never did. And try not to experiment with catchphrases that you've heard. "Come into alignment", and "I plead the blood." are near useless as far as I'm concerned.
4) Wait. Relax your hand. Expect, feel God's power flowing through your hand. This is something I've picked up recently. I used to imagine that I was a wizard or a Lord (see the 1st Thomas Covenant Trilogy) directing fire from my hand at something and burning it up. This is pretty well the opposite operation to ministering God's power. Funny thing about the wizard thing is that my hand tenses up and it seems to choke off the flow of God's power. On the occasion I mentioned, when I relaxed, I actually felt the tingling move down my arm and it seemed to enter the body of my co-worker.
5) You can't pray forever. (It's just not feasible) so if you have no, or incomplete results, you have to conclude with something. I usually ask God to remain in the location where the problem is and complete the healing.


Lots more could be said.  But this is stuff that (I think) I've learned.

Don't worry about the big E.

The idea that evolution might be proved strikes fear in many Christians' hearts. But not so. If evolution were conclusively demonstrated, the only thing that would really change is that we might have to take the Genesis account less literally. So what. Assuming that it's completely proved, what would we have? A phenomenon of gradually improving life over billions of years. That's all it would be. A phenomenon. A feature of our mysterious universe that can tell us nothing about how it came to exist. A feature void of interpretation. The interpretation is still up to you.

The Worldview with a Hole

Houston, we have a problem.

Back in the early days of the 'third wave' charismatic renewal (OK, to be more precise, the Vineyard) there was a new paradigm, a new worldview that asserted itself to correct what we of the western materialist bent had believed all our lives. Materialism says there is nothing, and no cause but that which is material, physical, empirical. It's the prevalent view in many countries and we Christians have largely unthinkingly accepted it and tacked on our idea of God on to it. It was this worldview that gave us a basically non-miraculous, functionally deistic lifestyle. After all, the thinking goes, why would God want dirty his hands messing about with the material world he created to run a certain way. The paradigm shift we experienced back in the day, taught us that this materialism plus God wordview had a major component missing. That component is what is generally referred to as the 'Spiritual Realm.' It contains the whole gamut of angels, demons and of course God in the person of the Holy Spirit, and once you include it in your worldview you can allow for and experience miracles like never before, because you can start to grasp the idea of  multitudinous forces exerting pressure on the physical, empirical reality -- forces you don't understand, that naturally need prayer and the constant interaction from our Father who reigns in that realm as in all realms.

So what's the problem? Well it looks to me that materialism has largely reasserted itself, and we have ceased to be aware of the spiritual in our day to day lives. Now I grant you this has not happened in a vacuum. We have been in reaction. We don't like to be people who see "a demon behind every bush." We have found that people really do have chemical imbalances in their brains, which may or may not be demonically influenced. The medical profession has made great strides even in our life time to solve problems that in the past would have needed a major miracle. I think we also find physical factors and causes less scary and every time we have been able to attribute something to the physical there's been a false sense of comfort. But above all, there has been a dearth of the gift of discernment in the church by which all spiritual entities are perceived. Have we marginalized discerners? Have we in our reaction, made it unattractive to discern spirits, angels, demons? Maybe. But it looks like we are flying blind. The spiritual realm hasn't gone anywhere, for all our eyes are shut. It's time to pray for the gift of discernment. It scares the heck out of me, but I think it's something we need. Again.

Polish - A personal red flag

Ever think that something is just too good to be true? I seem to be plagued with this thought all the time. Especially in the Christian realm. When something, anything, worship music, teaching, website, is produced with too much polish, I have a hard time believing it. Some months ago, I saw a video of a worship time produced from Bethel Church of Redding, CA. It was amazing, if you could believe what you saw. I was ambivalent. Yes it seemed authentic, except that the video production and the facial expressions were so perfect as the camera passed, it was hard to imagine that 1) the thing hadn't been rehearsed like any other music video, although it purported spontaneity and 2) that the performers and non performers were unaware of moments when they were in view.

Several years back there was a movement on for Christians to perfect their art and not be 'mediocre.' I don't know whether this ties in to this or not, but I hope that the result of this hasn't been more polish. This pilgrim doesn't handle polish well.