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I’ve wrestled for a while with whether I should go all political here. I mean, yaknow, I could lose my one faithful reader.
In the end I decided that this is who I am.
What I don’t want is for this to degenerate into one of those idiotic flame wars. So I’m enabling comment approval. I’ll probably approve your comment even if it is stupid. If I don’t, I encourage you to write your own damned blog and post a link here.
The following started as a status update on Facebook. It’s too long. I’m posting something FB digestible there and on Twitter with a link to here. There are several references to occurrences on FB but nothing overly specific, and the gist easily stands alone. Here then:
So maybe I’ve been a little obnoxious lately. I’ll grant at the very least that I’ve been vocal.
I’m not going to issue a blanket apology, because that would be neither honest nor productive, but I readily admit that I’ve said a few things (or at least said some things in a way that) I regret. I do apologize for any time I have strayed from the truth or said something gratuitously hurtful.
“Gratuitously hurtful” sounds a little overqualified, but I’m of the opinion that change is a painful process and I hope to be a catalyst for change; as such, I kinda want to cause some pain. Think of me as that asshole trainer who you know really likes you even though he pushes you in ways that you don’t think he should. Yeah, that’s maybe a bit self-aggrandizing but it’s more a statement of aspiration than belief.
I care about politics. I was thinking about it yesterday as I was driving with my honey. Just at that moment I saw someone with a Dallas Cowboys bumper sticker and I thought of all of the excesses people go to for their favorite sports teams and all of the noise they make about those teams (sometimes even more about the ones they despise) . . . or cute little kitties . . . or TV shows . . . or mediocre pop music . . . or wornout sayings that used to be clever turned into shoddy looking graphics, etc. Anyway, I feel alright talking about politics.
A few folks I respect have recently confronted me about my partisan posts. While I might disagree with them about various particulars, I want them to know that I’m listening thoughtfully and praying. And for the most part I agree with their concerns–if not necessarily how they apply to me. ;-p Even in that I’m willing to admit that I might be wrong.
I vet the things that I post on my timeline (less so but to some degree still with things that I “like”) and I pretty much stand by them without qualification. If I make a mistake I think I’m willing to own it. In my defense I usually find that I have gone to some pains to say things precisely and that precision is completely ignored for a quick and sloppy misinterpretation. To my discredit, that’s just the way language works and I maybe need to get over it. I make a point of being honest and I try to be fair but I am unapologetic about being partisan. I’m not going to promise to stop or cut back, but I’m going to try to slow down a little.
A couple of recent remarks about “sound bites” have motivated me to do something I’d been thinking of for quite a while.
So much of our conversations about politics amount to talking past each other as we twist the facts to conform to our preconceptions. I admit that I’ve done that. Of course like everyone I like to think that my biases naturally flow from the facts.
Another thing we do is assume agreement over the values behind our political choices. While I like to believe that we’re ultimately all on the same team, I’m increasingly convinced that we’re not all on the same page or even in the same play book.
Here’s what I want to do. Instead of arguing over “Truth,” factoids, sound bites, lies, accusations and innuendo, I’d like to try to articulate as clearly as I can what motivates my peculiar political enthusiasms, loyalties and inclinations. Since this is more of an internal, reflective sort of thing, I’m mostly going to try to avoid proof-texting or citing statistics, editorials or news articles, etc. I believe that my values fit nicely with the facts, with the texts that I consider holy, with sound reasoning. But as I said, that’s everyone’s bias. And it’s far too easy to lose sight of one in the process of uncovering the other. I’d rather try to be clear about the motivating values and get to arguing over the “facts” or even establishing sources later.
As I said, this is something I’ve thought of doing for a long time. Part of what’s kept me back was a desire to be complete, accurate and compelling. Screw all that. I’m just gonna start doing this. I’ll ramble. I’ll miss some things. I’ll misrepresent myself.
I would love to have your help. There’s a kind of help I’d rather not have, but I’m having a hard time putting my finger on it. For the sake of this exercise, I’ll try to be blunt in letting you know when you do it. Someone is sure to.
I had a thought this morning about prayer. It’s not really a new thought (I’ve had it and heard it before in a variety of forms), but it struck me with vitality. And I’ve been meaning to blog. Lucky you.
Most of what we do in the name of prayer (and, by extension, most of what we do in the name of worship and religion–or for all of you us pretentious bastards, “spirituality” or “relationship [with God]”) is just noise–a straining of our voices and a flailing of our arms; incessant, senseless striving. If we’re lucky, despite all of that nonsense, we stumble upon a moment in which we hear the voice of God. I’m pretty sure that that fleeting moment is the only thing that can rightly be called “prayer.” The rest is waste.
I’m not at all convinced that there’s any causal relationship between the noise and the moment. If there is I suspect it mostly amounts to this: we reach a point of exhaustion in which, by God’s grace, we find ourselves, one way or another, unable to speak or act or even will ourselves Godward. Somehow I think it still matters that we at least have an intent in our heart in Her direction but that thought may merely reflect my lack of enlightenment. And, yes, I reckon “intent” as qualitatively different from “will.”
Okay, there’s that and the fact that all of our meaningless “spiritual” noise temporarily displaces all some of our other distractions. But that displacement is at best a nearly-incidental medial point and should not be (though it usually is) mistaken for the moment or its cause.
In the months during which I finally lost hope in philosophy, ironically, I read some of the best philosophy I had ever read. One of my favorite encounters during this period, a guy named Marcel, said something about our inability to apprehend Truth except “out of the corner of the eye.” Maybe that’s true because even our eyes are frenetically, spastically overactive. Maybe this excess of overactivity (yes, that’s a redundant superlative; deal with it) is closer to what the writers of Scripture mean by “lust.”
Whoever you are and whatever you think you know, the title of this post is my advice to you, to us. Of course the very nature of the advice provokes our minds to war against its intent.
Joel 
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