detangling life (pt.1)

If you want to live more simply, you can be sure that it is not going to be simple to learn how to live that way.

Life in our culture holds great challenge for anyone who wants to live a simple, or integrated life. The massive change and complexity of life we experience bring significantly higher levels of stress, anxiety, and frustration, while producing an ever decreasing creativity, thoughtfulness, and connectedness. We are heading for a burnout, and some of us are already there.

This is not life as God intended it to be. Many people today (myself included) live lives that are a tangled mess of obligations, expectations, over-commitments, aspirations, and convictions. All these things pull us in different directions and the result is the radical fragmentation of life. We have little pieces of a life spread out all over the place, but there is no whole—no integrated self. The ways of coping with this fragmentation vary from denial and escape (escape into media, alcohol, or work), to control disorders and violence (attempts to keep from feeling powerless). These coping strategies, however, are recipes for disaster—a disaster that is being played out in our homes, schools, and in the workplace.

One step toward bringing health and wholeness (the kind of life God intends for us to live) is to simplify life—-to step out of the frantic pace and fragmentation of the culture around us. This is not easy to do. We have decades of formation to unlearn, not to mention the weight of social pressure to conform (from advertising, peer groups, and inner insecurities). It is a complex endeavor to detangle the tangled mess of modern life, but it is one that we must undertake—-for our sake and for the sake of the world.

complexity

Life is more simple when you have fewer choices. That is not to say that it is easier. It may be that you have fewer choices because someone else is making choices for you. In our rush to be free to make our own choices--and to make sure no one is making our choices for us--we have landed ourselves into a world of paralyzing complexity. I wonder if most people have the capacity to deal with the complexity of life in our culture. Maybe we will acclimate ourselves to the pace of modern life. Maybe we will burn ourselves out from an inability to keep up with massive change and complexity. It would be quite ironic for people who so long to be free to choose to become incapacitated by the complexity their so-called 'freedom' brings.

cartography

I've been thinking about the way we should think about the scriptures, and the idea that keeps coming up is cartography--old school map-making. Let me break it down. (this may be a longer post than usual)

Maps are made by explorers. Maps are made for explorers. At least they used to be, so let's think about that time and think about map-making in that way.

Maps were made by explorers as they interacted with the territory. They would identify some direction and draw out a rough representation of the territory as they could understand it. Looking at some of the maps, they look pretty silly, but they are fairly accurate. Back then, we can say, they were adequately accurate.

Now, as these explorers continued to interact with the territory using their previous maps, they refined their reports on territory--not that they were wrong before, just fuzzy or a bit out of proportion. in addition, there was new territory being discovered, and that new territory had to be mapped now, too.

As these explorers passed on their maps to later explorers, the collection of these explorers' reports on territory grew. What emerged was a consistent, but progressively better understanding of the territory.

What if scripture is like a collection of maps made by explorers who were reporting on their interaction with territory? Of course, in the case of the scriptures, the Territory is revealing itself, but the analogy holds--it is the testimony of 'explorers' for 'explorers.'

Four other thoughts that are related and still germinating:
1) Map is not Territory. One of my seminary profs (Dr. Castelein) reminded us that "map is not territory." He wasn't talking about this, but the phrase keeps ringing in my head as I think about scripture as cartography.

2) We too are in the business of exploring and map-making. I would not go so far as to say that we can add to the scriptures in the sense of scriptures-as-closed-canon, but perhaps we should see our lives as a continuation of that long line of God-explorers, God-listeners, God-watchers, God-reporters. This all starts sounding very much like the New Testament language of witness to me.

3) We should expect any 'maps' we draw up to be consistent with previous 'maps.' This is not to say that they will be identical--we should, I think, expect progression--but we will not start drawing up imaginary maps. We are dealing with the same territory.

4) There is no 'satellite mapping system.' We cannot 'draw up maps from outer space'--there is no cartography apart from interaction with Territory.

resurrection

I apologize to my sunday school teachers if I didn't hear you right, but I don't remember being taught about the resurrection as the future of God's people. I remember hearing about going to heaven where we'll all get to fly around, but I never heard about life after 'life after death.' I don't hear too much talk these days in the church about the hope of resurrection, and it seems to affirm my suspicions that it was never taught to me. I am convinced that much of faith in Jesus absolutely depends on resurrection--Jesus' resurrection and ours. I think that there must be a great deal of re-thinking (repenting) by the church regarding our hopes for the future and its implications for the present. One more way that the church needs to be converted again...