An Honors Adventure Fall 2015: October 2015

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Weekly Reaction #8 - Sacred and Un-Sacred

My expectations were not very high when I heard we were going to watch an interview with Wendell Berry. His appearance, lifestyle, and way with words surprised me a bit. I guess I had pictured him as a young, radical man from one of the coasts. It took me off guard when I saw he was an older, still radical man from the South. The articulation and wisdom that he shared in some of his interview stuck out to me. Specifically when he said, “There is no sacred and un-sacred places; there are only sacred and desecrated places.” This along with the Wirzba readings and my group discussion again has fit into a theme discussed in my post (Doing vs. Being) about the “answer” I have seen through the Amish visit, many of the texts, and Carla Sunberg’s visit.

Berry was concerned that many of us believe there are sacred and un-sacred places. He argues that there are in fact only sacred and desecrated places. This theme of separation is rampant in our culture and in much of the church. Our work is separated from our homes which is separated from our social lives. We have very different faces during Sunday worship and the Monday commute. The scary thing is that I can see this in my life. I can see the sections of my life that I consider separated from each other whether this is my school work, family, friends, or faith. Thankfully, this is something I have been challenged by my parents, mentors, and pastors to check and change.

So why is keeping different parts of our lives separate dangerous? What should we do about it? I already posted about this in blog #6 but here’s a quick recap of what I have been realizing as the semester has gone on. The Amish community is a picture of how religious and secular are one and the same. I can’t speak for all of the Amish but from what we saw on our trip and from what Ben described to us, their way of life is informed by their faith and value of community. Much of this reminded me of the church described in Acts. A church where the believers supported each other spiritually and financially. They shared all they had, ate together, worshiped together, and spread the good news together. God had a say in every part of their life. And then there is the day on which Carla Sunberg came to class. She spoke about how we are called to be active in the Kingdom of God now. And this doesn’t just mean going through the motions but living lives completely centered on God.

This brings us to Wirzba and his “Sabbath Living” or, as my discussion group likes to call it, simple Christian living. For many of us, Wirzba’s description of Sabbath living was not a revolutionary idea. But he did an excellent job of explaining what happens when God is separate from different parts of our lives.

First, he talked about education. The last line of his chapter on Sabbath Education reads, “Our Sabbath education is a school of conversion and celebration in which our collective anxieties, fears, and arrogance are transformed into humility, awe, and delight” (p 141). Those last three nouns, humility, awe, and delight, are what Wirzba feels has been lost in education. We have turned education into a pathway of “success” or as a way to have a career and make money. We have come to take too much pride in ourselves and success. As an honors student, I can relate to this and see it in my own life. I often have to stop myself and make sure that I understand the reasons for any success is not my own abilities but the abilities that God has given me. With this in mind, I know where the true praise belongs and who I should take delight in pleasing. Education should not be a means to exalt ourselves; rather, it is a means to stand in awe of God’s incredible creation and character.

The last chapter we read had to do with worship. Wirzba writes, “We have divorced worship too much from our everyday lives and placed it in a purely spiritual realm, not realizing that in doing so we have rendered it abstract and anemic, cut off from the flows and patterns of daily life” (p 159). Need I say more? Worship is not something confined to the walls of a church sanctuary and only takes the form of singing a few high energy songs followed by a few (or very long) prayers and a quick (or, again, very long) sermon. On the contrary, Wirzba argues that worship should take place in everything we do. We worship God when we serve others, do a job well done, or share a meal together. And, I have to say, I’m with Wirzba here. Too often we confine worship to an hour long “experience” once a week instead of understanding that we are expected to live lives of complete devotion to God just as Jesus did.

So where does this leave us? I think it still leaves us seeking to break the barriers between each part of our lives, church, and society. We need to understand that God does not just want certain parts of our lives, he wants all of us. We must learn that each aspect of life informs the next aspect. When it comes to stewardship and sustainability, God is not absent from this subject. His creation is sacred and he found it very good, pure and simple. There is no part that is un-sacred. This theme of no separation should be taken as a lesson. Whether we label it as Sabbath living or simply Christian living, our lives need to be completely informed by God. No section, family, sustainability, or schoolwork, is unaffected. Therefore, to go along with the semester's theme, we should not take the stewardship of creation lightly.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Weekly Reaction #7 - Red Flags and Reoccurring Solutions

I try not to be too cynical. Honestly, I think it is a bad habit that too many people my age practice. Not only does it make for a negative way to live life but it also makes one’s worldview narrow. Something I have loved about the honor’s class this year and last year is how my worldview has been challenged and, in some ways, altered. This being said, I was having trouble reading some parts of this week’s reading without being cynical. Maybe it is because the general topic we have been digging into this semester tends to have so many opposite and often biased opinions. Maybe it’s because I need to reevaluate how I read some of the books in this class. It might really just be me.

There were two things that caught my attention as “red flags.” First, Wirzba writes in chapter one, “As such, the Sabbath is a teaching that has the potential to redirect and transform all our existence, bringing it into a more faithful alignment with God’s life-building and life-strengthening ways” (p 20). I have been taught to be wary of single, simple methods that promise to transform my life or our society. After all, the problems in my life (or our culture) have so many different aspects and solutions that one method of solving them seems improbable. Before I actually state my real opinion on Sabbath Living, the book makes it sound like an ideal which ironically is something that it also warns about in chapter 6. Wirzba writes, “Friedrich Nietzsche argued persuasively that much of our philosophizing and theologizing amount to inventions of ideal, supernatural realms so that we despise and seek to rise about the world as we commonly or naturally experience it” (p 79). I would almost go as far to argue that much of Wirzba’s description of a Sabbath Living that will “transform all our existence” is much like the Platonic ideals that he warns against.

The second red flag I came across was Wirzba’s description of the food industry, specifically the meat industry in chapter one. He describes the absolutely squalid conditions of livestock who will eventually be horribly and painfully put to death for the benefit of the masses. He also talks about the danger that the human workers are in as they work around the dangerous, heavy machinery in the slaughtering houses. Now, all of these things have been or unfortunately are still disgusting truths about some parts of the food industry. But, my problem here is that he only presents one side of problem. I tend to be distrustful of information that seems biased and only shows one extreme. After all, if one extreme is interesting enough to write about there is another opposite extreme that also deserves attention. Of course, this book was written almost ten years ago and I believe that the food industry has taken great strides in improving animal comfort and worker safety over the last ten years. So maybe the one extreme was all that existed at that time.

Well, now that you think I am thoroughly cynical and pessimistic, I would like to share what I do think about this Sabbath Living. From what I could gather, it meant living in constant praise and gratitude to God in everything we do. There should be no difference in the way we live Sunday and the way we live the rest of the week. In fact, the bottom line of this concept concerns how we live. Now, to me, this is not necessarily a new idea. I feel like that it is something I have been taught since being a child whether it was from the example my parents set or the sermons that my pastor preached. We are called to live every aspect of our lives in constant rest in the Lord. This comes back to what I wrote about last week. What matters is not what we do but who we are being because who we are dictates what we do. This is something that my pastors have preached about and I never quite understood until recently. As much as I talk about my wariness of this fancy Sabbath Living, living with God at the center of every part of my life and goals is something that I strive to achieve because I know it will ultimately transform my life whether that means in the next couple years or for eternity.