Un-posted posts, a non-English Englishman, and how to love your neighbor while not really liking what he does much

So I still haven't put up that post about losing my granddad; I just can't seem to do it without coming off all emo, "woe is me".  It's not that I don't want to talk about it, or try and learn from it, it's just that I don't like emotionally dumping on people through a blog.  The temptation really is there to use this blog for that, and I wonder why that is: why is honesty and openness so much easier through something like this?  For some reason in our society it feels easier to be more personal the more impersonal the means of communication are.  For instance, I really have a hard time talking about this face to face or even over the phone, but I've been able to through texts, facebook, and this blog.  Maybe there's a post there, maybe it's just my problem, I don't know. 

Anyway I want to talk about this little quote I read today in this book I bought for cheap at a wonderful used bookstore in Houston.  The book is called Raskolnikov's Rebirth (refers to the main character in Crime and Punishment) and it's written by an English philosophy prof with the very non-English sounding name of Ilham Dilman.  Despite this, I still like to imagine him speaking in a proper British accent as I read, maybe sounding a bit like Michael Caine, not over the top snooty, but using very proper and precise diction.  Ilham, or Hammy as his friends probably call him, looks at a psychological view of good and evil, talks a good bit about Freud, and uses "one" as a pronoun far too much ("One must look at oneself, if one wishes to understand one's...").  He really needs to throw a he or a she in there or come up with a fictional character to use in examples, preferably with a proper British name like Basil or Nigel, but I digress.  So returning to the matter at hand, the quotation, "Furthermore blaming is not a form of intolerance.  Intolerance is the inability to tolerate what ought to be tolerated.  To attribute intolerance to someone is thus making a moral judgement about him- just as calling him 'judgemental' is doing so.  To tolerate anything whatever without any limit is not tolerance; it is moral indifference or total passivity."  Beyond being surprised at his use of a personal pronoun, I must say I wholeheartedly agree with Hammy here, a lack of standards is not a sign of moral superiority as it has so perversely become for some.

What then are we to do as Christians? We have, rightly I feel, received alot of criticism as a Church for being judgemental.  But what standards should we hold others to in order not to fall into the moral passivity of say the German Church during the rise of Nazism.  Part of the Church's mission in the world is to stand as a prophetic witness to the Truth of the Kingdom which both values man and Creation (which of course means we have a message for abortionists on the left and war hawks and "big-industry-screw-the-environment" types on the right.  There's a reason I can't find a party.)

Instead of putting more thought into this tonight however and rambling on, I would like to put up this passage from a few months back I found in the little notebook I keep.  Looking back on things like this I sometimes wonder what I was talking about at the time; it is a very strange feeling, almost like I'm reading something someone else wrote- once I forget writing it and stop thinking about it, it becomes external to me. Finding it again is a bit like walking into a house with the exact same floor plan as your own, it seems very familiar, but somehow foreign.  Wandering observations about the creative process aside, the troublesome part in the passage ahead is the talk about the "inarticulate part" inside that is beloved by God.  I think I may have picked this up from Auden (a fantastic poet by the way, that covers the compulsory recommendation portion for this post I suppose).  What is meant, I think, is that there is something deeper than our thoughts, desires, or even our wills that is drawn to God.  There have been times I have not felt particularly like a Christian and just wished for some end to all my duplicity.  Stronger than any decision of my will, I have felt drawn back to God.  This is not the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace, which tries to look at the whole process of salvation from some abstracted view outside the individual.  But it rather refers to something deep within that longs for God, as in Herbert's poem from the last post or St. Augustine's famous, "restless are our hearts til they find rest in You."

Goodness that was a lengthy introduction, hopefully some sense can be made of this, "The desire for change in a person and the acceptance of that person are not mutually exclusive.  We cannot, on the one hand, accept the person without regard to their faults and failures, as if those were somehow foreign to him (or as is, of course more likely in my case, her), but must see them in the fulness of their (fallen) humanity, as nevertheless bearers of the Image; otherwise we fall into idolatry either by the elevation of the other to a place they should not occupy or ignoring the frailty of our perceptions and self-deception and raising our subjective knowledge to objective truth.  We must acknowledge that we do not, cannot know the other fully, nor ourselves, yet in this hidden, inarticulate part we are beloved and may be saved in Christ Jesus.  Neither may we associate the other so fully with their sin that we are constrained to reject the person themselves.  It is precisely in the inarticulate, 'dearest freshness deep down things' [note- this is a line from G.M. Hopkins- "God's Grandeur"], the originality of their creation, declared as good' it is here that they may be saved and it is this which we must not reject in them.  To desire change, their existential freedom from that which yet enslaves them is not rejection, but acceptance of their created goodness, their declared belovedness by God."