To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that love is the reason for my existence, for God is love. Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.

- Thomas Merton

Death, Success, and Peace (Part 1)

We begin every morning at MESP with a devotion – typically organized by a student, though occasionally Dena or Heather or I will take the lead on it. These take on many different forms: meditations on particular scriptures, times of song, discussions of important spiritual issues, etc…

On Thursday we had a particularly meaningful devotion that sparked a lot of discussion throughout the day and whose concepts are still in my mind. It was particularly relevant to my own thought process over the past few weeks as I’ve started to think about job-searching for the time immediately after I get back into the States in December and everything that comes after that. The devotion centered around a discussion of three basic, related questions:

“What do you want to do before you die?”

“How do you define success?”

“Do you have peace?”

I said little during the discussion itself, but the period provided an opportunity for some serious reflection on the lessons I believe God has been teaching me over the past two or three years. These have come in a variety of ways – through scriptures that have stood out to me, experiences which have powerfully defined my paradigm, and books which have opened my eyes to a new perspective on these primarily. After the devotion itself I had a long discussion of the questions with a handful of the MESP students during and after lunch.

On the first question: we of the West, spoiled by our success, have often in our popular expressions of religion and culture de-centered the reality of death and the fleeting nature of life. Thus, questions related to the popular formula: “What if you were to die tonight?” (A widespread tactic for scaring people into salvation that was ingrained into me at Christian leadership camps in high school) have a particular counter-cultural power. They wake us from the illusion of immortality with which our economic and scientific success have inculcated us.

For the religious (more specifically for those in the evangelical subculture, as that is the one I’m most familiar with, though perhaps the pattern is more broadly applied across American Christians), bringing up death’s immediacy is typically used as a powerful tool for convicting the believer, not necessarily of one’s moral failings but more of one’s complacency when it comes to the religious mandates of the faith: prayer, study of scripture, and, above all, evangelism. I can think of no better example than the first chapter of the book Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper, in which Piper tells the story of a man who accepts Christ into his life at a very old age. The man rejoices in his newfound salvation but immediately begins weeping as he thinks back over his life and cries: “I’ve wasted it! I’ve wasted it!” How to avoid the man’s fate then becomes the theme of Piper’s book. The immediacy of death is an opportunity for guilt.

For the more secular in American society, a reminder of death’s immediacy is a call to throw off all conceivable bounds of rationality and restraint and “live like you were dying.” While the specifics of this mode of life are rather vague one common theme seems to be trying out all of the most life-threatening activities imaginable, most commonly skydiving. For more details see the film “The Bucket List” starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson or just listen to Tim McGraw’s song “Skydiving” about ten to fifteen times a day (As those of us without CD players in our cars were forced to do for months at the height of the song’s popularity a few years ago).

The answers which my students gave to the first of the three questions largely seemed to fall in either the former or the latter category. Some expressed a desire to share the love of Jesus with Osama Bin Laden, while others spoke of hang-gliding and travel to exotic places. I can’t fault their idealism – it’s quite inspiring – or their desire to live adventurously. But, as one of the students pointed out, we all seemed to be approaching the question from a very Western, very American perspective that lacked somewhat in maturity. I certainly don’t claim to put my own perspective in a different, greater, “more mature” category than theirs. If anything, I was only able to articulate my own thoughts on the subject after listening to and attempting to de-construct the things my students said. And it was in the course of discussion afterwards that I truly managed to make my thoughts coherent. But the discussion did make me think of many of these insights that have come to me through my reading and experiences.

So, my own thoughts on the first question: First, I’m reminded of a story attributed to Martin Luther. Someone asked Luther what he would do the next day were he to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that at the end of the day he would die. Luther, without any hesitation said: “I would plant a tree.” The questioner was mystified at this response and asked the reformer why. Luther responded: “That’s what I had planned to do tomorrow. Whether I die at the end of the day makes no difference.” While I have some serious issues with Luther on a variety of other issues, I think he makes an excellent point here about a life well-lived.

The thing to remember when thinking about death is that far from being a calendar event or the conclusion of a particular stage of life it is an ever-present reality. You and I may die at any moment, through causes dramatic and noble or mundane and banal. When I finish writing I will go down from my flat and walk to the Cairo metro, a trip which will involve crossing several of Cairo’s busy streets, at any of which I may be hit by a car or microbus and instantly killed. And there is nothing more natural than this. We fear death and yet it is perhaps the most essential part of our nature. When we are born nothing is certain except one thing: one day we will die. The western world, with its preoccupation on eking out every possible instant of physical life, is in radical disconnect from the way which humanity has lived for all of its prior history and in which much of the world still lives today.

I think death must be re-centered in the west, so that questions of “what will you do before you die?” don’t strike us with such power and cause us to re-think the direction of our lives. And attendant on that is a radical re-thinking of our mode of life. Americans have too often bought into the fiction that they are owed seventy to eighty years on this earth and anything less is unnatural. And there is a certain rhythm of life which is based on this assumption. Thus when the assumption is swept aside by an illness or an accident our whole mode of living topples to the ground and we fly into religious guilt or hedonistic “living like you were dying”. This is what is unnatural.

So: “what do you want to do before you die?”

Nothing.

And everything.

Nothing because I denounce as false, as based upon this unrealistic Western view of life a checklist of things, religious or hedonistic, which must be ticked off in anticipation of my death. Everything because I seek at every moment to truly live out the joy and beauty of my divine calling.

A Myth

The command was “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”

But this was too hard, and so we humans reasoned our way to a loophole: “…unless you will be killed.” Then “will" became “perhaps you may” and grew to include any and all offenses imaginable. And ever so slowly we widened the loophole until the command itself became unrecognizable, a brief declaration at the head of an ever-lengthening list of possible exceptions. For we lacked faith.

And human beings fashioned an idol in their own image. It was an idol of many names. They called it the nation, and sometimes the state, and sometimes both. Sometimes, confirming its divinity, it even took the name of God himself. And this idol and its many cults of worship were seared into the minds of all mankind. And for this idol we once again re-fashioned the great command, adding to our long list of exceptions and interpretations: “Thou shalt not kill…unless the nation-state asks it of you.” For God was distant and his commands austere and we humans yearned for idols. God’s command was simple and naïve and we wished for some divine intermediary to comfort our itching ears with talk of tribes and borders and security. We would bring the idol offerings to sate its hunger, and the idol would bless our massacres.

Then in the fullness of time God sent his Son, the perfect divine interpreter, the image of the invisible God, the perfect Word of God who was with God and was God. And as we gathered at his feet the Son ascended the mountaintop and in a loud voice said: “You have heard that it was said to those of old ‘You shall not kill.’ But I say to you…”

There is a pause. At last! The words left out or forgotten by the distant God on the law-giving mount of old will finally be added! At last the loophole will be canonized and the nation-state given its rightful beatification. And who better to anoint High Priest of this cult than this grand divine interpreter! Men will bow to such a man.

Yet when he speaks there is a strange dissonance in his words. The Son of God speaks not of the clarifying insights of the centuries, the long list of exceptions and qualifications with which we have ameliorated God’s first word. Nor does he even mention the glorious idol of the nation-state and its divine authority.

He says: “When you are angry, you have already murdered within your heart.”

And thus with one stroke the grand interpreter puts to an end the chippings of the ages at the imposing divine imperative and instead places the sovereignty of God’s command over the deepest ground of murder: the human heart.

His words cut to the quick and silently, with growing frowns, we are forced to acknowledge that all of our many exceptions to God’s command were indeed as he has said: nothing more than the many incarnations of our deep anger: We were angry in our hearts, and so we fashioned the self-protecting loophole. We were angry in our hearts and so we built a collective idol that would bless and sanctify our anger. We were angry in our hearts, and so we killed. And so, as his words continue - “love your enemies…turn the cheek…forgive as you have been forgiven” - a horrible thought arises: what if God’s command was true just as he gave it, devoid of all our clarifying insights and exceptions?

Yet this answer is anathema to the ears of humankind. For we have grown accustomed to our massacres, our wars, our “self-defense.” They have become as dear to us as our own lives, and we love them because we love ourselves. They give us meaning and purpose in a world where the purposes of God are hard to understand and truth seems impractical and idealistic.

And so, by the command of the glittering idol of the nation-state, for the sake of peace and “national security” we killed the Son of God. And humanity could breathe easily once again. For with him dead we may canonize, we may interpret, we may with scholarship and principle and theory free ourselves from the sovereignty of the command and allow the anger in our hearts its freedom and full expression and kill without his convicting voice sounding the command of God.

Love is the Most Practical Thing in the World

What is practical? Think it out. The way we are living now, the way we are teaching, the way our governments are being run with their corruption and incessant wars - do you call that practical? Is ambition practical, is greed practical? Ambition breeds competition and therefore destroys people. A society based on greed and acquisition has always within it the spectre of war, conflict, suffering; and is that practical? Obviously it is not...

Love is the most practical thing in the world. To love, to be kind, not to be greedy, not to be ambitious, not to be influenced by people but to think for yourself - these are all very practical things and they will bring about a practical, happy society. But the teacher who is not dedicated, who does not love, who may have a few letters after his name but is merely a purveyor of information which he has picked up in books - he will tell you that all this is not practical, because he has not really thought about it. To love it to be practical - far more so than the absurd practicality of this so-called education which produces citizens who are utterly incapable of standing alone and thinking out any problem for themselves.

The difficulty with most grown-up people is that they have not solved the problem of their own living, and yet they say to you, "I will tell you what is practical and what is not."

- J. Krishnamurti

New Semester

Our fall semester students arrived a little over a week ago, and since then it's been one thing after another (Most days during Orientation week Dena and I get into the villa around 8 AM and leave around 10:30 PM). And though I do love my job, this weekend has been a good break from all of that - church, ultimate frisbee, and lots of good time spent with my neglected Egyptian friends.

Though I do get tired from the long hours, of course - and my job, while there are parts of it that I really love, also involves a lot of mindless work (printing, photocopying, stapling, etc...) I have just been struck over and over again throughout the past week and a half by how grateful I am for the opportunity to live and work here that MESP has given me. And hearing a new group of students once again being told the ethos and purpose of their time here just reinforced for me how wonderful it is to be working for an organization whose mission I support and whose ideas I'm fully behind. MESP isn't flawless - and being an employee instead of a student has certainly disabused me of some of the idealistic notions I had about it - but it is an excellent program, an excellent organization, and really does seek to change the lives of its students in the best possible way. I'm privileged to be a part of it.

I think if we spent less time trying to be good and great and noble and more time just trying to be decent the world would be a much better place. And if everyone in the world taught their children to be decent instead of be good there would be peace tomorrow.

New Podcast

Check out "The Moth" for a great podcast that I've become addicted to over the past week or so. The Moth is a show in New York and San Francisco that started out as a group of people gathering in a guy's living room to tell each other stories. Since that time they've grown to two mainstage performances, and they also tour around. Anyway, the show consists of of people telling unique 10-15 minute stories. Most of them are really funny, and many are incredibly moving.