Christmas

There is a rusty and bent bedrail hammered into the ground to mark the northeast corner of my parents' property. Sometimes I stand on a little pile of dirt beside it and listen to the night silence when I get home late. Tonight, as I stood there I thought about what the world would be like if the sun went out - poof. I could survive in my house with the propane in our tank for a week, and eat some of the food we have. But it would be only a little while before the planet was a ball of ice. I was also thinking about the sun, and whether or not it really exists, or if God puts it in the sky every day, along with the stars, nebulae, and other things we humans have seen out there. All we can do to prove their existence is see them with our eyes - and what if our eyes lie? What if it's all a cosmic trick? A sense-experience Imax film played in our brains?

All this existential wandering happened on Christmas Night, which I think is cool, because part of the mystery of Christmas is faith. Are we really supposed to believe that Jesus Christ lived, died, rose, and mattered? On what evidence? The Word of God? It can be shredded by all kinds of criticism. Our own experience? My short 19 years have taught me that my senses are far less reliable than I give them credit for. So what am I doing? Am I a Christian or a fideist?

A Christian. I can't prove it to you, but this Christian story - it's true. God give me strength to live it.

May you meet the living Word this Christmas.

Love, Ben

I removed this from my blog because posting it on Christmas felt so unholy.

Postmoderns Are People Too.

This is one video on youtube that I would watch even if Ryan rolled his eyes at me. I don't think it would get me that token gang of friends gathering around me in the library to laugh at something mildly funny, but I still recommend watching it. If the name Derrida means anything to you, feel free to head on down to the end of this post, ignore my poor introduction to him, and click the link.

See, here's the deal. Jacques Derrida (the man in the clip) is probably the most important postmodern philosopher. His work concerns meaning - he tries to ask the question if any part of our lives really means anything, especially books and conversations. He is also the name most people associate with deconstruction, a technique for interpreting text which he believes is capable of stripping the text of all meaning. For Derrida, life has no meaning, but is a dance, a play, an undoing of the past and a knitting together of the present.

As a Christian, it's hard to accept Derrida as a good philosopher. It's impossible for me to tell you exactly why, but here's my best attempt: YHWH is the meaning and the source of life, and history is His Story. So working to undo the meaning we have in our life seems foolish in the true sense of the word (Psalm 14:1). And working towards a place where no words have meaning does not seem smart for a man who attempts to make his living selling books and giving speeches. Derrida seems unenviable, he is convinced that the world has no meaning other than the meaning assigned to it by humans. The only problem with this is that now his words themselves can be doubted.

Maybe it's more easily expressed with an example: if one person says: "everyone can create his or her own truth", he is not able to argue his position against a person who says: "There is such a thing as absolute truth." For the first person to argue would be for him to say that there is something that is true for both people; namely, his opinion. Derrida finds himself in a similar predicament.

The fact that he is in this predicament may make this video mean less, because Derrida is simply playing his game, building and then destroying even his own arguments to keep the dance going even at the cost of his own credibility. But you have to appreciate the humanity with which he expresses himself. It makes postmodern philosophy seem so attractive.

Sorry for keeping you all waiting. The video is available here.
Love, Ben

Anger.

Anger is an emotion. I feel it sometimes. A lot of the time my anger is pointed at some abstract thing. It's kind of like I need something to be angry about all the time. If I stop being angry with the fact that people are killed and women are raped and that the world is broken, I find myself being angry with things closer to home: basketball, philosophy, particular people who are friends but who I disagree with, and who are distant enough for me to be angry at them and never be forced to resolve the problems, because I don't see them often enough to see the tangible, physical effects of a broken relationship - the harsh body language, the chill running up the spine, the hole in the chest.

The thing is, most of my anger is sustained by space between people. If we were closer together, we could do something about fixing the issues, even if our only motivation was that the issues had more tangible effect.

Today though, I was honestly angry, at someone who was standing beside me, and who I had to deal with that instant. I had just gotten to "The Seer's Tower" on Illinoise, and was enjoying it in my subconscious, when a security guard tapped me on the shoulder and woke me up, telling me to go take a nap in my dorm. Who the heck wakes someone who is enjoying a nap on a decent couch in the only quiet part of the school? Seriously.

My anger needs to be directed. I tell the team I coach that they need to direct their passion and energy into good defense and good offense. Somehow anger has to lead me to constructive action. Which seems a really dumb thing to say, since we're not talking about rage and fury here, just annoyance. But annoyance is probably an alright thing to harness too.

There, I did it. My annoyance was fuel for the first blog post on here in a few months. Great blog, eh?

Love, Ben