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Getting lost on the bus can teach you alot.
>Trust and Parenting
>”If there is anything that we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.” – C.G. Jung
Recently because of my road trip with my two girls and a sermon I heard last week, I have been thinking about parenting. The major theme I am putting thoughts under is TRUST. Why?
1. I notice that my almost two year old has the hardest time when her immediate needs are not being met and she does not believe that they will be.
2. I notice that my eight year old becomes obsessive about issues when she does not think we are listening to her or going to make sure her desires are met.
3. Both are crushed when we don’t do something we said we would for whatever reason.
The list goes on but these are the highlights for me recently. Each comes down to a lack or trust or trust being broken. As a parent it is important for us to teach our children to trust. It was trust that was broken after creation when Adam & Eve gave into the serpent, and it is a deeper trust we are learning in the recreation. So we teach trust in a few ways.
1. We fail and are untrustworthy, so our kids freak. (There are ways that this can be used to teach).
2. We are people who value our commitments and words, and build a track record of trustworthiness (the Jung quote was leading to that)
3. We build in clear situations for our children where they are aware of how dependent they are upon the care of their parents and call them to trust us in caring for them.
Where are the places you have had to grow as a parent in becoming trustworthy? What is the volue of our children learning to trust?
>The role of politics
>Post election year it has died down a bit, but there are still friends and family out there charged up about what politically is going on. I am grateful for my freedom and don’t want to see it continually taken away, and I am involved in a sustainable way in political action locally and less nationally. This morning I was reading a passage that again reminded me of the place politics is to have in my heart:
Jeremiah 18:1-12
The Potter and the Clay
18:1 The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: 2 “Arise, and go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” 3 So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. 4 And the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.
5 Then the word of the Lord came to me: 6 “O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter has done? declares the Lord. Behold, like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. 7 If at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, 8 and if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will relent of the disaster that I intended to do to it. 9 And if at any time I declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, 10 and if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will relent of the good that I had intended to do to it. 11 Now, therefore, say to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: ‘Thus says the Lord, Behold, I am shaping disaster against you and devising a plan against you. Return, every one from his evil way, and amend your ways and your deeds.’
12 “But they say, ‘That is in vain! We will follow our own plans, and will every one act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart.’
>Articles on Tobacco
>Just saw Guy Kawasaki’s tweet:
GuyKawasakiWhy people smoke: http://om.ly/FfOD
Had to republish this article…an old favorite:
First Things
Tobacco and the Soul
Michael P. Foley
Copyright (c) 1997 First Things 72 (April 1997): 14-16. The current brouhaha over smoking has made everyone painfully aware of tobacco’s effects on the body, but it has also obscured a more profound reason for smoking’s popularity: its relation to the soul. As the heyday of smoking passes into the ashheap of history, it is meet that we reflect on this connection.
The soul, of course, is a complex thing. Long ago Plato suggested that we consider it as divided into three parts-the appetitive, spirited, and rational-that correspond to the three basic kinds of human desires: the desire to satisfy physical appetites, the desire for recognition, and the desire for truth. Once this tripartite division is recalled, tobacco’s relation to the soul becomes clear: the three prevalent types of smoking tobacco-cigarettes, cigars, and pipes-correspond to the three parts of the soul.
Cigarettes correspond to the appetitive part of the soul, a fact that explains their association with both food and sex. The connection with the latter is particularly obvious: think of the proverbial postcoital cigarette, or of the ubiquity of cigarettes at singles bars. People with strong physical desires demand instant gratification, and they try to make what they desire as much a part of their own bodies as possible: hunger demands eating, thirst drinking, and lust making the body of one’s lover a part of one’s own. So too with cigarettes. A cigarette is inhaled: it must be fully and internally consumed in order to give pleasure. And a cigarette, with its quick buzz, is also instant gratification. Even the cigarette’s notorious connection to death ties it into appetites: both are indifferent to health in their quest for satisfaction, and both, when they reach addictive levels, become hostile to it.
Cigars, on the other hand, correspond to the spirited part of the soul. This explains their traditional popularity among men seeking honor or reputation-politicians, executives, etc. The reason for this correspondence can be found in the similarity between cigars and ambition. A cigar is visually impressive: with its large size and great billows of smoke, it often leaves a greater impact on the spectator than on the smoker. Further, a cigar is phallic-not with regard to male lust, but to male power. “Testis” in Latin means “witness”: the phallic status of the cigar is meant to bear public witness to the smoker’s prominence, his virility. The fact that a cigar is not inhaled reflects this external focus.
Ambition also has these traits: it too is more external than internal. Unlike physical desires, which are satisfied simply by consumption, ambition requires the consensus of others. The honor-seeker, for example, has to be honored by as many people as possible in order to be satisfied.
Finally, the pipe corresponds to the rational part of the soul, which explains why we tend to picture wise figures smoking pipes: the Oxford don surrounded by his great books, or Sherlock Holmes, who, in Doyle’s original stories, actually smoked other sorts of tobacco as well, yet is almost always portrayed with a pipe. Unlike cigars and cigarettes, a pipe endures. Similarly, the questions of the philosopher far outlast the passing concerns of physical desires on the one hand and human ambitions on the other. Further, while the cigar is entirely masculine, the pipe has both masculine and feminine elements (the stem and the bowl). This corresponds to the philosopher’s activity, which is both masculine and feminine: masculine in its pursuit of Lady Truth, feminine in its reception of anything that she discloses. Finally, the effect that the pipe has on others is analogous to the effect of philosophizing: the sweet fragrance of a pipe, like good philosophy, is a blessing to all who are near.
It is fitting that all three kinds of smoking tobacco involve the use of fire, for each relates to the soul’s responsiveness to reason, and fire, at least from the days of Prometheus, is especially emblematic of reason. But there are also nonhuman parts to the human soul. The growth of our hair and fingernails, for example, is due to the soul’s activity, yet is not responsive to rational instruction.
The use of tobacco that does not involve fire, therefore, somehow corresponds to these nonhuman-or more accurately, subhuman-parts of the soul. Chewing tobacco, for example, is a quintessentially subhuman activity. It is the rumination of bovine men. Or perhaps we should say it is camel-like, for camels not only chew, but spit as well. In either case, the point is clear: chewing tobacco is a sub-rational activity, which is why we usually associate it with men of limited acumen.
Snuff, too, would fall into this category, but with some minor differences. First, because it is not so disgusting, it would not have the same negative connotations as “chew.” (Activities can be sub- rational without being bad.) Second, snuff taken through the nose would fall under a different category. Everything else we have seen involves the mouth, and this is only natural, for the mouth was made to receive things into itself. But to sniff something up one’s nose . . . this is unnatural.
A question remains, however, about smoking non-tobacco. One candidate immediately comes to mind because it, like tobacco, is a natural leaf. Marijuana is also noteworthy because it is used in the same ways as smoking tobacco.
The key to the difference between the two is how each one affects the smoker. Tobacco-whether in a cigarette, cigar, or a pipe-leads to conversation, loosening the tongue just enough to incline it towards speaking, but not enough to disconnect it from the brain. Marijuana, on the other hand, does not keep this balance, loosening the tongue only to have it reel away from rational thought. It does not truly facilitate conversation, drawing the smoker into himself (not outwards, as does all good conversation) and dumbing-down any speech that is uttered. Thus the appearance of conversation can be created, but it is usually only that-an appearance. Marijuana is therefore a charlatan-weed, an impostor that apes its distant relative tobacco in a shallow and perverse way.
The uses of marijuana are twisted imitations of the uses of tobacco. Joints perversely imitate cigarettes in both their appearance and in their users’ claim to be erotic. But while the claim is one thing, the reality is another. Eros requires both a healthy tension and a sense of discrimination in order to be truly human. Marijuana, however, eliminates both. Think of the counterculture of the 1960s, which, in preaching sexual liberation, actually destroyed the human part of our sexuality by robbing sex of any sense of mystery, standards, or fidelity. Where once sex was a magical moment between eternally committed lovers, it was now purely animalistic, something that had no more meaning than any other bodily function. The pot-smoker fancies himself an erotic man, but ends up being an unerotic animal.
Similarly, the hash pipe is a perverse imitation of the tobacco pipe. The pot-smoker often fancies himself an intellectual: he gets high and thinks “deep thoughts” (again bringing the 1960s to mind). But the appearance is one thing, the reality another. Just as the wisdom of the 1960s student turns out to be sophomoric, so too do the deep thoughts of the pot-smoker end up being moronic.
And yes, there is even a marijuana counterpart to the cigar. In the early 1990s the inner cities gave birth to a new practice called “blunting,” in which cheap cigars are gutted and stuffed with marijuana. It is fitting that this practice originated in the same place where gangs come from. An inner-city gang seems supremely concerned with honor and courage: its elaborate codes would suggest as much. But seeming is one thing, being another. The gang-member fancies himself honorable, but is in reality a thug. Just as the cigar is the counterpart to the real virtues of honor and courage, the marijuana-blunt is the counterpart to the fake virtues of gang-honor and gang-courage.
As every student of Plato knows, if something has a relation to the soul it has a relation to the city. Thus if our theory is anything more than the smoke it purports to explain, it can be used to analyze political phenomena. For example, in recent years we have witnessed a concerted effort to sterilize our erotic attachments, to sap them of their danger but also of their vigor. The flat, unerotic words we now use for these attachments confirm this. Instead of “lover” and “beloved,” we now have “significant other” and, even worse, “partner” (a term which lends to the affairs of the heart all the excitement of filling out a tax form). Given this environment, it is no wonder that our most vigorous moral war waged today is against cigarette-smoking. Nor is it any wonder that this war’s only rival in intensity is the one in favor of “safe sex,” for condoms sterilize sex not only literally but figuratively as well.
Further, the relation between cigars and spiritedness may explain why cigars are now for the first time gaining a significant number of female disciples. For as women continue to enter the traditionally male world of competition, many are beating men at their own game by using the same tactics of gaining power. And with the tactics have come the symbols.
Most significantly, however, the relative rarity of pipe-smoking in America is a telling sign of its current intellectual crisis. If the pipe epitomizes the intellectual way of life, then is it any surprise that it cannot be found where schools substitute politically correct ideology for real philosophy, or where the intelligentsia, instead of engaging in serious thought, pander to the latest activist fads? Is it any surprise that America’s most famous pipe-smoker in the last thirty years has been Hugh Hefner, pajama prophet of the trite philosophy of hedonism? No, the age of the pipe-smoker is as far from us as the day when philosophers will be kings and kings will philosophize, a sad reality to which the thick blue haze of non-pipe smoke is only too ready to attest.
It should also be no surprise in this pipeless age that the ferocious battle over tobacco has missed the real point about its addictive power. Tobacco holds sway over the soul as much as it does the body. The qualities it takes in its various forms make it a near irresistible complement to the particular desire dominant in an individual’s soul. How we react to these forms says as much about our attitude toward those desires as it does toward the weed itself.
Michael P. Foley is a Ph.D. candidate in theology at Boston College. He is currently completing his dissertation on St. Augustine.
>A look at a different planet: Gran Torino
>Last night got to watch Gran Torino. Good movie which I recommend because of the captivating way the story is told. Similar in nature to Million Dollar Baby, which was a movie about euthanasia told so beautifully you don’t even realize it, yet more simple to me. The movie took on what it means to be a man. There were three parts which struck me as important:
1. We live in a ever more pluralistic world, where cultures clash side by side and next door, it cannot be stopped but rather we must ask what we do about it. This was a minor theme in the movie, though one that gets lots of attention because of Walt’s racism toward his changing neighborhood. His language never changes but his heart does. There is a moment when he is next door at his Hmong neighbor’s house where he looks in the mirror and says to himself that he has more in common with these folks then he does his own family. Living in Oakland we found this to be true. That many of our neighbors who were from different cultures had shared desires and dreams when it came to family and community, and therefore it was fun to figure out how to better care for each other and know each other.
2. Walt Kowalski is a dying breed. The Korean War vet who drives a Ford is hard for me to find in my life. Throughout most of the movie he almost seemed cartoon like in his racist comments and narrow views. Yes the racism needs to go away, but there is much more to Walt and to that generation which found themselves in a world very different from the one they grew up in very quickly and it was hard to adjust.
3. Men being men. “There is no greater love than this, for a man to give his life for a friend.” There were many false views of what it means to be a man in this movie. From the Hmong Gangsters, the liberal minded sensitive priest, the lost immigant kids who turned on himself, successful yuppies, and even Walt the stoic guilt ridden father. Men need other men to teach them the basic lessons of life. The scene where Walt is showing the neighbor kid the tools in his garage and he explains that it takes over fifty years to get a tool set like that, a basic lesson but one that as a young man you need to hear because the weight of such a insignificant thing as having a collection of tools to fix the broken things around you can be overwhelming. Walt mostly against his will at first invested in the young man. Every man I know could use that same kind of investment.
>The Art of Making New Dreams
>When I was a kid I regularly dreamed. So much in fact I had regular reoccurring dreams, not day dreams, but actual reoccurring dreams at night in which I was returning to the same place, even sometimes revisiting a previous dream. This is the first time I have thought about it but I don’t remember many of my dreams anymore, is it something that has just faded or was it taken from me I’m not sure.
One lesson I am currently learning is the art of making new dreams. While this might sound very beautiful to me it is difficult and feels like it is splitting me at the seams. In biblical terms it might be more like dying to one self (Matthew 16:24-27). Time and again already in my life things that bring about a great deal of meaning to me have been taken from me. Is this because they had a inappropriate place in my heart? Yes. Is this because of the sin of those around me affecting my dreams? Yes. Is it because of reasons I don’t have any idea about right now? Yes.
These transitions, dying, making new dreams has been hard. Not only is it about looking forward and having a plan, but it is about digging in the lowest and earliest regions of my identity. My life was one of the chosen son of blessing, a role which torments me because I know I can never meet the expectation and yet it is the standard in which I have for myself. Either I am all things or I am nothing. This is a dream that is from the depth of hell and it deserves being shattered. But if that happens, then who am I?
Even in writing this post I’m lost at how my intention was to talk of rebuilding, the art of making new dreams, and yet I’m left feeling as an orphan. Yes we know that adoption (Romans 8:15) is one of the beautiful picture of scripture, yet have you ever known a person who was adopted and had severe abandonment issues? That is where I’m at.
Struggling to hold my own self deception too heavy for me, yet temporarily I keep it up knowing that it shatters when dropped and only then I will be free to make new dreams.
>Two comments by a friend recently which nailed me
>First, that I’m good off the start but over time will flame out. I’ve known that is true for me but it is still a harsh reality to know others can see it so easily. One of my life motto’s is “I was built for sprints but God has called me to run marathons.”
Second, I don’t handle pain well. This one I would not have been able to articulate. Since it was said to me how I cope and how I’ve coped my entire life is very much in my face. I seek to solve my pain quickly, but when it is prolonged I seek to numb myself. Numb myself emotional, but especially of hope. Trying to keep that flame alive in the midst of pain is difficult.
>Godly Leadership
>This last weekend I went on my first ever session retreat. It was the five elders of our church locked away in the woods to discuss the big picture of what is happening at the church. We prayed, we laughed, and we got some good things done from my perspective. Here are the bullet points of what went on without the specifics:
There is a call for us to be more personally involved broadly in the life of the church.
There are situations within our church that we are seeking guidance in how to manage.
There is great opportunity for us with both church planting and training pastors.
We have a really amazing staff from full time pastors, chief musician, to operations!
Though in reflecting on it this morning I started thinking about what does leading God’s people look like and what should it look like. I know there are extremes when it comes to any practice of authority. Some think street fighters are authoritative and some think any authority is evil.
There are a few things I’m thinking and a few points I got from the Proverb I read this morning:
First authority is from God, he is the authority, and then he passes some of it on. The church is really only confirming that which is already there rather than placing it upon someone. Also it also means it is not something to be “worked” toward or stolen.
Proverbs 11:2 When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with the humble is wisdom.
Proverbs 11:12 Whoever belittles his neighbor lacks sense, but a man of understanding remains silent.
I am probably the most talkative on the sesson which makes me concerned about the 11:12 verse:) This does not summarize everything on Godly Leadership but it got my juices going today.
>Thoughts on old fashion journaling
>Not so in to it. I know that I have friends who live and die by it, and it really makes me feel like I’m missing out because I can find the deep connection there.
Currently though I am writing in a journal as I write down answers to career questions. This is helpful. First I think because it has a point. I’m able to sit back and write down answers rather than just float ideas out there. If I want to float ideas I’d rather do it on a blog. Second it has an end. There is never enough when it comes to a journal, therefore it is overwhelming to me. Having a clear purpose and hopefully time period devoted to such writing makes it bearable to me.
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