Nouwen: The Discipline of Gratitude
Gratitude … goes beyond the “mine” and “thine” and claims the truth that all of life is a pure gift. In the past I always thought of gratitude as a spontaneous response to the awareness of gifts received, but now I realize that gratitude can also be lived as a discipline. The discipline of gratitude is the explicit effort to acknowledge that all I am and have is given to me as a gift of love, a gift to be celebrated with joy.
–Henri J. M. Nouwen
It actually is a major turning point in your life, the day it dawns on you that you need to do gratitude as a discipline. It delivers you one more step from the realm of sight into the realm of faith. It frees you from the vicissitudes. Each act of thanking opens up the next moment’s vision, that you would never have seen otherwise. Joy is an epistemological position.
Those who insist on striking an “objective” stance toward the universe, then reacting with joy or thanks when something good strikes their sense-organs, are doing nothing more than reductionism toward their own selves. They create a self-fulfilling bad prophecy, which they then label “science”. Let’s consciously strip ourselves of part of our humanity and then observe what kind of a universe that sub-human inhabits.
Duh.
Paul says it like this: “They didn’t see fit to acknowledge the Creator, so their hearts were darkened.”
This is epistemological method, folks.
Stated, again, differently:
Also, here is Douglas Wilson on the same theme:
.
..those who rebel against God in the first chapter of Romans are described as having two signature positions–their refusal to honor God as God, and their refusal to give Him thanks.
Our fundamental apologetic method, our basic evangelistic attitude, must therefore we gratitude. As an apologetic statement of the truth of the gospel, it is impossible to answer convincingly. Gratitude collides with grumbling. Thankfulness excludes murmuring. And St. Paul tells us that when we refrain from grumbling and complaining, we shine like lights in the firmament, bright stars against a jet black backdrop.
But such thanksgiving is a spiritual discipline. We learn how to do this…
Aslan: The Doctrine and Practice of Revelation
“‘And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs and believe the signs. Nothing else matters . . .’”
Douglas Wilson: “Come”
It is our custom, one that we believe to be scriptural, to practice insistent communion. That is, if you are here, and if you are baptized in the triune Name, then you must come. We insist. The Spirit and the Church together say come.We are not seeking to protect the Table from sinners. The teaching of Scripture is that sinners need to be protected from the Table. And the only safe way to be protected is to come to it humbly.
You may say that you are not walking with God as you should be, and so perhaps you should stay away. No, you may not stay away. You have no permission from God to stay away, and unless you were excommunicated scripturally, you have no blessing from Christ’s ministry to refrain. This is your life—you are a covenant child. But isn’t sin inconsistent with coming? Yes, it is, but the point is to drop the sin, leave it there on the ground, and come. But will it not be a defilement if you come without repentance? Yes, it will be. But it is another kind of defilement to stay away without repentance. As a covenant child, you are called to repent of the sin, and not to repent of your covenant meal.
You belong here. A place at this Table was purchased for you through the blood of Jesus Christ. He invites you to come and eat, come and drink. Come. We insist.
The Spirit and the Bride say “Come”.
Our genes are selfish, but we can decide whether to evolve or not
The Chronicle: 11/17/2006: The Social Responsibility in Teaching Sociobiology
The logic in this discussion is so bad as to be maddening. If the gene is selfish, and there is no ethic other than what “emerges” from our biological selves, how can anybody else tell me what I OUGHT to do? Why should I not kill my neighbor and take all his food?
Neitzche was consistent with his premises; but these sociobiologists and their fellow travelers like to have their materialist world with an occasional dab of what Francis Scheaffer called “semantic mysticism”: you get what a god would provide out of a cloud of language that, when dissected, means nothing except that you didn’t really like the conclusion you were driven to so you blabbed yourself around it.
Take this (bold is mine):
Yet the more we learn about biology, the more sensible becomes the basic thrust of social ethics, precisely because nearly everyone, left to his or her devices, is likely to be selfish, probably more than is good for the rest of us. The philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell pointed out that “by the cultivation of large and generous desires … men can be brought to act more than they do at present in a manner that is consistent with the general happiness of mankind.” Society is therefore left with the responsibility to do a lot of cultivating.
Seen this way, a biologically appropriate wisdom begins to emerge from the various commandments and moral injunctions, nearly all of which can at least be interpreted as trying to get people to behave “better,” that is, to develop and then act upon large and generous desires, to strive to be more amiable, more altruistic, less competitive, and less selfish than they might otherwise be.
If everyone is left to themselves they will be selfish and that IS NOT GOOD FOR THE REST OF US so we need to cultivate the GENERAL HAPPINESS OF MANKIND.
WHY???????????????????????
By that “why” I mean, precisely, why according your PREMISES should I not make you unhappy in order to survive? Because the species should be happy? WHY???????????????????
******************************************************************
Let’s re-state the logic in that paragraph one more time so we can see in the skeleton just how deformed is the body of thought:
– that which appears to be true is not good. So we need to add a layer to reality to achieve the good. But we see no need to account for whatever that is in us that doesn’t really like what appears to be true, nor do we need to investigate from whence we get the layer we are adding to materialistic truth. We know that everything that is in us comes from this process that we are observing, even though there are tendencies in this process we don’t like, but we don’t see any reason to think that the reason we don’t like those tendencies is that there is a part of us that does not come from the process itself.
Make fun of the medieval Schoolmasters all you want, but at least they tried to subsume their entire intellectual universe in a rational scheme. Compared to them, the materialists are — no other way to say it — weak minds.
The Tears of Things
Leithart.com | Tears of things
…in those tears Virgil expresses the the painful recognition – perhaps just beginning to dawn in the Roman period – of the costs of a peace won through the blood of victims. Those tears express the sense of waste of pre-Christian civilization – the waste of defeated victims every bit as noble and skilled as the victors, the waste of a thousand thousand sacrifices, the untold gallons of blood shed on earth.Aeneas’s tears are tears of despair, but their despair hopes toward a peace that will pass human understanding. These tears do not take how the world goes for granted, as a simple given. They have been touched by a vision of a world at peace, and long for more. These are the tears of things, the tears of empire and temple, that John tells us will be wiped from every eye.
On Touching Nerves That Supposedly Don’t Exist
Why ought monkeys acknowledge they are monkeys? « Once More With Feeling
I don’t think I’ve ever seen any other reaction from an atheist (bear in mind my experience is limited) who ever responded to the quesiton, no matter how gently put, of an objective basis for ethical judgments, without getting angry.
This is empirically true. But, it is oddly understandable, since it’s function is to avoid mental trauma. When you get angry at the very posing of a question, it means you don’t want your own mind to overhear yourself discussing it. This arises from the same sentiment that impels adults to protect children from hearing about atrocities or sex before their maturity.
The oddness in this case is that the protecting adult and the oblivious child live in the same mind. The child is the materialist part, who enjoys his fairy tale and doesn’t really want a parent. Just slide supper under the door and leave him alone.
Douglas Wilson dissects materialist logic
Douglas Wilson posts another in a series of answers to Sam Harris’ book “Letter to a Christian Nation.” First one here.
You refer to the “obscene celebrations of violence that we find throughout the Old and New Testaments” (p. 11). You set this over against the “utter non-violence” of the Jains, which you praise. This is frankly mystifying. You say the morality of the Jains surpasses the morality of the Christians, and you cite a Jain tenet. “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being” (p. 23). I really cannot figure this out. You are an atheist, an evolutionist. And yet you praise the morality of utter non-violence, which would have gotten the evolutionary struggle absolutely nowhere. Devout Jains will go barefoot all the time to avoid stepping on bugs, and will carry a broom to sweep the path in front of them all the time, for the same reason. Devout Jains will wear a mask to avoid breathing in, and thereby killing, any insect. You say this represents a superior morality to that of the Christians who believe in the Bible. So you are saying — as an atheist — that if America’s evangelical Christians all forsook the use of antibiotics because of the genocidal devastation it was causing to the microbes within, you would commend us for the moral advance? Do you promise? Because it seems to me that it would be a golden opportunity for you to dismiss us all as uneducated nutjobs.
Of course what it comes down to, in the end, is that atheists and materialists of all stripes do what everyone else does: they pick the universe they enjoy, then build intellectual scaffolds around it to shore it up.
Thesis: the human race is broken (cf. original sin)
normblog: The need to know what we do know
We have too much evidence that given the freedom, the licence, to kill and do other terrible harms, there are enough people who enjoy using it. I’ve argued this at some length here. A passage I quote from David Rousset, who was imprisoned at Buchenwald:
Normal men do not know that everything is possible. Even if the evidence forces their intelligence to admit it, their muscles do not believe it. The concentrationees do know.
The short life of the nation-state: 1789 to 1918 (Peter Leithart)
Leithart.com | Pro Patria Mori
The history of the modern nation-state, and the disillusionment with it, can be told as the story of changing responses to Roman-inspired patriotism, tinged with the rhetoric of Christian martyrdom and sacrifice. Simplifying to an extreme, the story of modern politics is about the resurgence (in France in 1789 or thereabouts) and the retreat (in France in 1918 or thereabouts) of Horace’s poetic claim, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (Odes, Book 3, Ode 2).
In America, Horace lived from 1776 till 1965.
Confessing Sin in Narnia, by Douglas Wilson
Learning how to say you were wrong about something, and that you are sorry, is one of the most important lessons anyone can learn in his life. It is basically a question of learning how to be genuinely honest. And as such an important lesson, it is not surprising that the Narnia stories are full of examples of this. We learn about real confession of sin in every book of the Narnia series.In The Magician’s Nephew, remember that Digory woke up Jadis when he rang the bell. How does Aslan make Digory confess his sin honestly?
“‘You met the Witch?’ said Aslan in a low voice which had the threat of a growl in it. ‘She woke up,’ said Digory wretched. And then, turning very white, ‘I mean, I woke her’” (MN, p. 147).
And was Digory really enchanted in Charn? “No,” said Digory. “I see now I wasn’t. I was only pretending.” (MN, p. 147).
And what does Aslan require of Polly in this regard? “‘And you, little Daughter’ (here he turned to Polly) ‘are welcome. Have you forgiven the Boy for the violence he did you in the Hall of Images in the desolate palace of accursed Charn?’ ‘Yes, Aslan, we’ve made it up,’ said Polly” (MN, p. 152).
Whenever we are telling a story (to ourselves or to others) in which we did not behave very well, we have a very natural (and sinful) tendency to clean it up (just a) little bit. But this is the kind of dishonesty that Aslan never tolerates. Notice that Digory is not telling an overt lie—he did meet the witch—but he is still leaving out some important parts of the story. And he is leaving them out because it would him look bad to keep them in. Aslan sees this kind of dishonesty immediately, and he doesn’t tolerate it.
READ THE WHOLE ARTICLE: BLOG and MABLOG
