This one seemed underwhelming in the beginning, but I'm so glad I pushed through because the threads came together beautifully and brought themes of love, friendship, and the possibility of change into clear view. Also, the bookishness of it all was so endearing. The truth that right book isn't the right book until the right time shines brightly here. Also, "I like talking about books with people who like talking about books."
"The things we respond to at 20 are not necessarily the same things we will respond to at 40 and vice versa. This is true in books, and also in life."
"The most annoying thing
about it is that once a person gives a sh*t about one thing, he finds he
has to start giving a sh*t about everything."
"Why is any one book different from any other book? They are different, AJ decides, because they are. We have to look inside many. We have to believe. We agree to be disappointed sometimes, so that we can be exhilarated every now and again."
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Sunday, April 12, 2020
04.12.2020 📘 Coming Clean and The Book of Waking Up
COMING CLEAN
"The bottle is not the thing. The addiction is not the thing. The pain is the thing" (71).
"In the school of bootstrap theology, children learn straining and striving. They learn a responsible, if not tired, faith. The sin prohibitions promote personal holiness, and personal holiness kept our Sunday best from tarnish, and in turn, it kept us from tarnishing the glory of God. After all, the Christian faith isn't all about us; it is about God, we were told. And told. And told" (73).
"These prayers and supplications tire me. After all, it is an insane person who engages in the same behavior in the hope of achieving a different outcome. I don't suppose myself insane, so instead of these spiritual gyrations, I find a way to kill any expectations" (87).
"[The area of my nonconformity to God's will] is my inability to accept that God's plan might be opposed to my own human will, my desire for immediate healing. And the mismatch between my will and God's gives rise to the anxiety, to the pain" (137).
"It bears admitting--this word from God could be nothing more than the tired mind playing tricks...This is why our more conservative, systematic brothers in the faith tell us not to trust listening prayers. THere is a danger that one might conflate the voice of God with your own, they say, and I am not naive to this. This, some believe, is the reason we listen for answers only and always through the Scriptures, never through the still small voices that speak to us in the night. I find this notion ironic. No one ever has misread, misheard, and misapplied a passage of Scripture..." (151).
"Titus's healing would bring steel to the legs of my faith. But in praying through the divine no, in asking God to relent, I am finding that my will is becoming more malleable; I am becoming more open to the not my will but yours be done. This is the slower process of shoring up genuine faith, and it seems a different expression of faith than that of the faith healers of long ago.
"This is an expression of faith that hurts.
"The bones of faith are brittle. This is a product of the human condition. When our prayers go unanswered, when God does not meet us at the point of our desires, we turn to the lowercase gods to ease the pain of living. Bow to the god of booze; bow to the god of sex; bow to your food, to your material possessions! I traded my prayers for a liquid fire-god, because the idea of having my will bent around God's (as if I'd yet discerned it) was unbearable" (157-158).
"The invitation to make our will known to God, to beg fro his intervention, is an invitation to act like the blood-sweating Jesus in the garden. Bending the will, though, requires the Christlike willingness to endure the cup of unmet expectations" (158).
“I consider his presence then, his presence now, and I’m hopeful that the bending of my will to his is yet another sign that he is with me, even to the end of the age (158).
"If you can seek comfort in the arms of another," she says, "you can handle the worst the world has to offer" (177) quoting Sue Johnson in some EFT teaching.
"As Buddy Wakefield, spoke-word poet, says, 'forgiveness is releasing all hope for a better past.' At the same time, though, forgiveness is the manner of preparing oneself to forgive all future deaths, releasing all expectation of a pain-free future.
"Forgiveness is unbounded by time and space. It operates within the fifth dimension to this dynamic marvel we call life" (199).
Quote from Henri Nouwen, page 210: "Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family."
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP
"If the life of Christ shows us anything, it's that the Stuff of Earth is meant to point us to the substance of heaven. How? Consider the way he came eating and drinking" (51).
"Pain has a shape, yes. It has a voice too. It spins archetypal narratives.
"Scarcity whispers, 'There's never enough.'
"Abuse pounds, 'No one is safe.'
"Loss reminds us, 'You're always alone'" (82).
"...ask yourself this: Am I able to shake the temptation to use whatever it is, or do I always give in?
"See how so many of our coping mechanisms sound a great deal like addictions? See how we all might be addicted to something?"....
"Often, habits, affections, attachments, and dependencies lead you around by the nose, just as cocaine leads the hardcore drug user" (116-117)
The brain is "primed to chase pleasure when pain comes knocking" (119).
"If you turn to the Stuff of Earth when you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, or all four, there's a good change you're running in a groove etched by a dopamine loop" (135).
"Dr. Gabor Mate' writes, 'Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anesthetics.' Put more succinctly, he writes, 'The question is never, 'Why the addiction?' but 'Why the pain?'" (148).
"Addiction is nothing more than attachment to the thing that could never satisfy our deepest longing, the longing for bonded connection" (151).
This is where the word "attachment" gets confusing to me. I think he's using it to mean our habit of seeking pleasure, relief from the pain; it also seems so connected to the 'attachment' of Attachment Theory / Science.
"Sobriety is all about ordering our affections, our loves. It's about being awake to God in every moment, even the moments of our pain, and fixing our adoration to him. It's a call that can be seen throughout the Scriptures, even in the oft-misunderstood Ten Commandments" (164).
"Jesus knew that true sobriety--a sobriety characterized by living int he love of God--requires a deeper sort of awakening, an awakening to our underlying emotions, desires, imaginations, even our pain" (171).
page 183:
132. Jesus Used Bread to Point to the True Bread, Wine to Point to the True Wine
Yes, Jesus came preaching a message of proper attachment: Don't attach to the Stuff of Earth. Attach to me, the only one who can satisfy you. But still, he used the Stuff of Earth to draw the people into that attachment. In the aforementioned gospel story, he used loaves and fishes to point to himself as the bread of heaven. In the water-to-wine miracle in Cana, he used wine to point to himself as the true life of every party. He used water as an object lesson to invite a serial divorcee into his eternal love (John 4:7-15). He used spit and mud to give sight to a blind man( John 9:6). He even used a coin to invite the religious leaders out of a fixation on the Roman Empire and into the eternal kingdom (Mark 12:16-17).
See? For Christ, all material is useful for drawing us into the Divine Love of God. He uses the Stuff of Earth to direct us to the love of heaven.
"[The goal is] a true, inner, sobriety. A sobriety that is less about avoiding addiction and more about the practice of adoration. It is a way of seeing the Stuff of Earth with eyes wide open. A way of understanding how all things--bread, books, clothing, making money, and even wine--are diving portals to draw us deeper into his Divine Love" (193).
"Step 1: Wake to your pain and invite God into it.
Step 2:Wake to your coping mechanisms, your lesser loves and confess them.
Step 3: Wake to the Diving Love and pursue it as best you can" (196).
Community, with whom we "eat the waking meal" (communion), "sing the waking songs," and "participate in the waking community."
_____________________________________
What can be said to sum these up, to make them into concise ideas, articulated to bring understanding? Probably nothing I can say. I think these works and ideas are so important. Probably especially to us Enneagram 9s, who numb out with the best of them. Haines teaches that we all have pain, and we all turn to addictions/coping mechanisms to deal with them. He points out how this Stuff of Earth can often be either sacramental, or idolatrous and harmfully addictive, depending on how we choose to partake. I so appreciated these thoughts. I wanted more about what Waking Up looks like. How do I stop doing the old habits to find pleasure and escape pain?
Probably the biggest take-away for me was the idea that we all have pain (yes, different pain, and some pain is bigger and worse...but we all have it; that's real) and that we all, by our very brain chemistry, seek out practices/substances/experiences that give pleasure so as to stop feeling the pain. We are all addicted, in a way, looking to the Stuff of Earth (which he wisely points out CAN ALSO BE SACRAMENTAL. DRAWING US TO CHRIST, when we are seeking to be "rightly attached" to him and he is our greatest love,) to bring relief, in the form of alcohol, food, shopping, social media, or, he even mentioned once, books (!). Often the first step is to identify the pain, and look right at it and sit with it, stop trying to lessen it with these addictions. But we only experience victory over addiction when we actually stop looking at the addiction and how to avoid it, and turn to adoration of Christ.
I still have so many questions about how. It makes me want to revisit You Are What You Love, all about how every-day liturgies can draw us into loving Christ more. It makes me want to Just Practice the Thing. I loved his three general types of pain and something about that rings true. I was left wanting to know a lot more about the pain, but maybe it's something each individual needs to approach in the presence of God. I was also left wanting more facts and definitions, etc related to attachment. He talked a lot about attachments and affections, and it seems to have so much overlap with Attachment Theory/Science (and he does seem to be sympathetic with/come from a perspective of EFT, so it seems like he knows it too) but maybe that's something I'll have to work through for myself.
It had a lot of concepts I've been learning already in my journey of healing. It had a few more ideas for me. And I'm hungry to keep going.
"The bottle is not the thing. The addiction is not the thing. The pain is the thing" (71).
"In the school of bootstrap theology, children learn straining and striving. They learn a responsible, if not tired, faith. The sin prohibitions promote personal holiness, and personal holiness kept our Sunday best from tarnish, and in turn, it kept us from tarnishing the glory of God. After all, the Christian faith isn't all about us; it is about God, we were told. And told. And told" (73).
"These prayers and supplications tire me. After all, it is an insane person who engages in the same behavior in the hope of achieving a different outcome. I don't suppose myself insane, so instead of these spiritual gyrations, I find a way to kill any expectations" (87).
"[The area of my nonconformity to God's will] is my inability to accept that God's plan might be opposed to my own human will, my desire for immediate healing. And the mismatch between my will and God's gives rise to the anxiety, to the pain" (137).
"It bears admitting--this word from God could be nothing more than the tired mind playing tricks...This is why our more conservative, systematic brothers in the faith tell us not to trust listening prayers. THere is a danger that one might conflate the voice of God with your own, they say, and I am not naive to this. This, some believe, is the reason we listen for answers only and always through the Scriptures, never through the still small voices that speak to us in the night. I find this notion ironic. No one ever has misread, misheard, and misapplied a passage of Scripture..." (151).
"Titus's healing would bring steel to the legs of my faith. But in praying through the divine no, in asking God to relent, I am finding that my will is becoming more malleable; I am becoming more open to the not my will but yours be done. This is the slower process of shoring up genuine faith, and it seems a different expression of faith than that of the faith healers of long ago.
"This is an expression of faith that hurts.
"The bones of faith are brittle. This is a product of the human condition. When our prayers go unanswered, when God does not meet us at the point of our desires, we turn to the lowercase gods to ease the pain of living. Bow to the god of booze; bow to the god of sex; bow to your food, to your material possessions! I traded my prayers for a liquid fire-god, because the idea of having my will bent around God's (as if I'd yet discerned it) was unbearable" (157-158).
"The invitation to make our will known to God, to beg fro his intervention, is an invitation to act like the blood-sweating Jesus in the garden. Bending the will, though, requires the Christlike willingness to endure the cup of unmet expectations" (158).
“I consider his presence then, his presence now, and I’m hopeful that the bending of my will to his is yet another sign that he is with me, even to the end of the age (158).
"If you can seek comfort in the arms of another," she says, "you can handle the worst the world has to offer" (177) quoting Sue Johnson in some EFT teaching.
"As Buddy Wakefield, spoke-word poet, says, 'forgiveness is releasing all hope for a better past.' At the same time, though, forgiveness is the manner of preparing oneself to forgive all future deaths, releasing all expectation of a pain-free future.
"Forgiveness is unbounded by time and space. It operates within the fifth dimension to this dynamic marvel we call life" (199).
Quote from Henri Nouwen, page 210: "Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family."
THE BOOK OF WAKING UP
"If the life of Christ shows us anything, it's that the Stuff of Earth is meant to point us to the substance of heaven. How? Consider the way he came eating and drinking" (51).
"Pain has a shape, yes. It has a voice too. It spins archetypal narratives.
"Scarcity whispers, 'There's never enough.'
"Abuse pounds, 'No one is safe.'
"Loss reminds us, 'You're always alone'" (82).
"...ask yourself this: Am I able to shake the temptation to use whatever it is, or do I always give in?
"See how so many of our coping mechanisms sound a great deal like addictions? See how we all might be addicted to something?"....
"Often, habits, affections, attachments, and dependencies lead you around by the nose, just as cocaine leads the hardcore drug user" (116-117)
The brain is "primed to chase pleasure when pain comes knocking" (119).
"If you turn to the Stuff of Earth when you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, or all four, there's a good change you're running in a groove etched by a dopamine loop" (135).
"Dr. Gabor Mate' writes, 'Addictions always originate in pain, whether felt openly or hidden in the unconscious. They are emotional anesthetics.' Put more succinctly, he writes, 'The question is never, 'Why the addiction?' but 'Why the pain?'" (148).
"Addiction is nothing more than attachment to the thing that could never satisfy our deepest longing, the longing for bonded connection" (151).
This is where the word "attachment" gets confusing to me. I think he's using it to mean our habit of seeking pleasure, relief from the pain; it also seems so connected to the 'attachment' of Attachment Theory / Science.
"Sobriety is all about ordering our affections, our loves. It's about being awake to God in every moment, even the moments of our pain, and fixing our adoration to him. It's a call that can be seen throughout the Scriptures, even in the oft-misunderstood Ten Commandments" (164).
"Jesus knew that true sobriety--a sobriety characterized by living int he love of God--requires a deeper sort of awakening, an awakening to our underlying emotions, desires, imaginations, even our pain" (171).
page 183:
132. Jesus Used Bread to Point to the True Bread, Wine to Point to the True Wine
Yes, Jesus came preaching a message of proper attachment: Don't attach to the Stuff of Earth. Attach to me, the only one who can satisfy you. But still, he used the Stuff of Earth to draw the people into that attachment. In the aforementioned gospel story, he used loaves and fishes to point to himself as the bread of heaven. In the water-to-wine miracle in Cana, he used wine to point to himself as the true life of every party. He used water as an object lesson to invite a serial divorcee into his eternal love (John 4:7-15). He used spit and mud to give sight to a blind man( John 9:6). He even used a coin to invite the religious leaders out of a fixation on the Roman Empire and into the eternal kingdom (Mark 12:16-17).
See? For Christ, all material is useful for drawing us into the Divine Love of God. He uses the Stuff of Earth to direct us to the love of heaven.
"[The goal is] a true, inner, sobriety. A sobriety that is less about avoiding addiction and more about the practice of adoration. It is a way of seeing the Stuff of Earth with eyes wide open. A way of understanding how all things--bread, books, clothing, making money, and even wine--are diving portals to draw us deeper into his Divine Love" (193).
"Step 1: Wake to your pain and invite God into it.
Step 2:Wake to your coping mechanisms, your lesser loves and confess them.
Step 3: Wake to the Diving Love and pursue it as best you can" (196).
Community, with whom we "eat the waking meal" (communion), "sing the waking songs," and "participate in the waking community."
_____________________________________
What can be said to sum these up, to make them into concise ideas, articulated to bring understanding? Probably nothing I can say. I think these works and ideas are so important. Probably especially to us Enneagram 9s, who numb out with the best of them. Haines teaches that we all have pain, and we all turn to addictions/coping mechanisms to deal with them. He points out how this Stuff of Earth can often be either sacramental, or idolatrous and harmfully addictive, depending on how we choose to partake. I so appreciated these thoughts. I wanted more about what Waking Up looks like. How do I stop doing the old habits to find pleasure and escape pain?
Probably the biggest take-away for me was the idea that we all have pain (yes, different pain, and some pain is bigger and worse...but we all have it; that's real) and that we all, by our very brain chemistry, seek out practices/substances/experiences that give pleasure so as to stop feeling the pain. We are all addicted, in a way, looking to the Stuff of Earth (which he wisely points out CAN ALSO BE SACRAMENTAL. DRAWING US TO CHRIST, when we are seeking to be "rightly attached" to him and he is our greatest love,) to bring relief, in the form of alcohol, food, shopping, social media, or, he even mentioned once, books (!). Often the first step is to identify the pain, and look right at it and sit with it, stop trying to lessen it with these addictions. But we only experience victory over addiction when we actually stop looking at the addiction and how to avoid it, and turn to adoration of Christ.
I still have so many questions about how. It makes me want to revisit You Are What You Love, all about how every-day liturgies can draw us into loving Christ more. It makes me want to Just Practice the Thing. I loved his three general types of pain and something about that rings true. I was left wanting to know a lot more about the pain, but maybe it's something each individual needs to approach in the presence of God. I was also left wanting more facts and definitions, etc related to attachment. He talked a lot about attachments and affections, and it seems to have so much overlap with Attachment Theory/Science (and he does seem to be sympathetic with/come from a perspective of EFT, so it seems like he knows it too) but maybe that's something I'll have to work through for myself.
It had a lot of concepts I've been learning already in my journey of healing. It had a few more ideas for me. And I'm hungry to keep going.
Saturday, April 11, 2020
04.11.2020 🎧 The End Is Always Near by Dan Carlin
"The idea of 'progress' is not without bias."
"The question of motive and context are crucial when deciding how far to believe a contemporary account."
"So much of war is about nerve and morale and avoiding panic."
"Looking at history has a way of putting our circumstances in better perspective...premodern dentistry alone is enough to convince me that things are pretty good now."
I started this book exactly 6 days before Covid Got Real (in my world.) I wanted to read it because I've listened to some Hardcore History with Andrew, and I certainly like his story-telling approach to things, and I liked even more the idea of his words contained in a focused, succinct book, because my attention span is often no match for the podcast.
The first two chapters were my favorite. I loved the questions he raised about toughness, like: Do tough times make more resilient, even virtuous, people? Considering how different cultures have different definitions of and morality assigned to the concept is fascinated. I was then absorbed by the questions about how different child-rearing practices might have affected people in different cultures, because of differing interpretations of said practices. All of this reflection on what is truly timeless and what is culture-based is so interesting, especially for one always on the lookout for how to have a better hermaneutic for a text in which a deity identifies himself as Father.
Each chapter after that is a vignette of a different point in history defined by sudden transformation, either "progress" or "fall." I didn't really get into the main part of the book until it became available on Scribd as an audiobook, and I think listening to Dan Carlin narrate was the ideal way to consume this book. The point of all of these historical snapshots was well-made and hard-hitting: the people described here probably didn't expect their city to be taken, or their way of life to suddenly change any more than we do now (or did a few weeks ago, when our sense of control and security in predictable comfort were even greater than they are now.) It's so easy for us in our current age to think that we are uniquely unassailable... but every country conquered, every culture with a sudden change to their way of life thrust upon them probably thought the same thing too.
@tonyreinke has pointed out in one of his books that our current relationship with digital media has made us lose our place in history and gives us a "miscalibrated time stamp." I think maybe one of the applications of that concept is this: when something terrible happens in our lives or especially in the world at large (like, say, a global pandemic), it can be easy for some of us to think that this is the first time the world has ever seen something like it. (Am I talking about myself, confessed history ignoramus and stereotypical millennial, obsessed with having feelings about my feelings? ((This idea is from @iamdavidkessler on @artofmanliness podcast, and yes, I feel seen.)) Why, yes, I think so.) Reading this book was oddly comforting to me because it showed that humanity has survived far worse changes in the past. I also learned a lot!
"The question of motive and context are crucial when deciding how far to believe a contemporary account."
"So much of war is about nerve and morale and avoiding panic."
"Looking at history has a way of putting our circumstances in better perspective...premodern dentistry alone is enough to convince me that things are pretty good now."
I started this book exactly 6 days before Covid Got Real (in my world.) I wanted to read it because I've listened to some Hardcore History with Andrew, and I certainly like his story-telling approach to things, and I liked even more the idea of his words contained in a focused, succinct book, because my attention span is often no match for the podcast.
The first two chapters were my favorite. I loved the questions he raised about toughness, like: Do tough times make more resilient, even virtuous, people? Considering how different cultures have different definitions of and morality assigned to the concept is fascinated. I was then absorbed by the questions about how different child-rearing practices might have affected people in different cultures, because of differing interpretations of said practices. All of this reflection on what is truly timeless and what is culture-based is so interesting, especially for one always on the lookout for how to have a better hermaneutic for a text in which a deity identifies himself as Father.
Each chapter after that is a vignette of a different point in history defined by sudden transformation, either "progress" or "fall." I didn't really get into the main part of the book until it became available on Scribd as an audiobook, and I think listening to Dan Carlin narrate was the ideal way to consume this book. The point of all of these historical snapshots was well-made and hard-hitting: the people described here probably didn't expect their city to be taken, or their way of life to suddenly change any more than we do now (or did a few weeks ago, when our sense of control and security in predictable comfort were even greater than they are now.) It's so easy for us in our current age to think that we are uniquely unassailable... but every country conquered, every culture with a sudden change to their way of life thrust upon them probably thought the same thing too.
@tonyreinke has pointed out in one of his books that our current relationship with digital media has made us lose our place in history and gives us a "miscalibrated time stamp." I think maybe one of the applications of that concept is this: when something terrible happens in our lives or especially in the world at large (like, say, a global pandemic), it can be easy for some of us to think that this is the first time the world has ever seen something like it. (Am I talking about myself, confessed history ignoramus and stereotypical millennial, obsessed with having feelings about my feelings? ((This idea is from @iamdavidkessler on @artofmanliness podcast, and yes, I feel seen.)) Why, yes, I think so.) Reading this book was oddly comforting to me because it showed that humanity has survived far worse changes in the past. I also learned a lot!
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