What I write about when I write about running

I've never been one for athletic metaphors for life or the Christian experience. They've always left me cold, to be honest, partly because they're cliched, but mostly because I'm no athlete. I can relate to them about as much as someone born in the Ghobi Desert can relate to "The Little Mermaid". Maybe a little bit more since I have actually seen an athlete before, but now we're just splitting hairs.

The point is that typically, when I hear people talking about how something or other is like a marathon, my eyes tend to glaze over almost as quickly as they do when people try to explain economics or sub-prime thingummies. But, being Australian, I'm in the minority, I realise. Besides, people who use athletics as a metaphor for Christian life are in good company. After all, Paul did just that, drawing on the strong Greek athletic tradition (the very word "athlete" is Greek in origin) when he wrote to the church in Philippi:

Forgetting what is behind me and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. (Philippians 3:13-14)

He also wrote to his protege Timothy:

If anyone competes as an athlete, he does not receive the victor's crown unless he competes according to the rules. (2 Timothy 2:5)

And, in a famous closing remark on his ministry drawing to an end he wrote:

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. (2 Timothy 4:7)

So I suppose I should feel rebuked for my dislike of these kinds of metaphors. The fact is, Paul may not have been much of an athlete himself, but he saw in the kind of strength and perseverance that an athlete must show a helpful metaphor for what it is like to persevere in the faith.

Today, going on my second longish-distance run in three days, I feel qualified to make all kinds of comments on running as a metaphor for "going the distance" as a Christian. The fact is, I am neither qualified to speak about running nor about going the distance. My running career leaves much to be desired, and I am too young to say that I have gone the distance. Still, running in cold weather, rain and over a muddy, hilly track, with my muscles still sore from two days ago, I made a few observations that I will finish with here:

1) If I have any intention of making a fist of this running habit, I will need to do it even on days like today, when I had much rather not.

2) Being gung-ho is not the same as persevering. Persevering requires sustainability. So I need to be willing to spend some time doing the same thing - running the same distance, the same place - to build up my strength and stamina, before I rush into something else. Looking after my body is an important part of training it to be stronger.

3) The extreme muddiness of the track today made it necessary for me to slow down, even walk, to avoid slipping. We need to be willing to slow down when the track is unsafe or unstable.

4) We then also need to be willing to run whenever the track allows us to. You might think that slowing down at the muddy points would have helped me get up my energy to run the rest of the time, but it wasn't so easy. Slowing down made me more inclined to stop; I had to push myself to run the rest of the time.

5) Persevering through a difficult run like today will not be enough to make me magically able to persevere for the rest of my life. There are no magical bullets or defining experiences that make perseverance easy. Perseverance can only happen over time, and with great persistence.

It isn't very profound, I'm afraid, and I may well find that, in a few weeks or months, I'm no longer running. But I hope that I can continue, not only for the sake of the running itself but for what it will teach me about discipline and perseverance.

I must remember that perseverance is not easy in any area, whether in running or in faith, and we will rarely make it to the finish-line looking calm and dignified. But Jesus does not require that, when I get to the end, I look anything other than faithful and persistent. He only requires that I make it to the end. And that certainly is my aim.

Wishful thinking

One of my favourite moments from C.S. Lewis' prolific career comes in his early allegorical novel, The Pilgrim's Regress. In his most obvious parody of Sigmund Freud, Lewis has his hero, John, imprisoned in "Zeitgeistheim", a prison where humanity is revealed "as bundles of complexes" and in which John concludes that "there may be no Landlord [the novel's equivalent of God]" and that "I am mad. I am dead. I am in hell for ever." John is rescued from the prison, however, by a woman called Reason, who is able to ask the giant imprisoning John a series of riddles he cannot answer. Once freed from the prison, John and Reason attempt to rescue the other prisoners, "those who have been Freudianised too long", but they refuse to be rescued, "wailing together and saying: 'It is one more wish-fulfilment dream: it is one more wish-fulfilment dream. Don't be taken in again.'"

The average Australian may not be consciously influenced by Sigmund Freud on a day-to-day basis, but in this one sense we are very much his intellectual children: we don't like to be taken in by anything. Think Darryl Kerrigan from The Castle with his catch-phrase of, "Tell him he's dreaming." We pride ourselves on our state-of-the-art b.s. detectors. There's no fooling us.

But, just as it was for Lewis' prisoners stuck in the "darkness of the pit...and the filth" of Freud's prison, the land of You-can't-fool-me can be a very lonely place to be. In fact, if you take it too far, you can start believing in nothing.

There's something about Christianity that seems profoundly too good to be true. Sin defeated, death overcome, eternal peace and happiness and fulfilment ahead of us...It does sound a little like a pipe-dream, doesn't it? But there's a flaw in our logic that kicks in at exactly the moment we call something "too good to be true". The flaw is this: we assume that something really good must be a fraud, or have some kind of "catch" hidden in it. Why? Because life disappoints us, constantly. So we guard against disappointment by...refusing to believe in anything enough to let it ever disappoint us. Which sounds kind of sad, when you think about it.

If a scientist developed an anti-ageing medication, we'd look into it. If a wealthy businessman offered us his secret to success and happiness, we'd pay to hear him speak, or buy his books. Well, Christianity can top that. Christianity had someone come to earth and say, "I am life. You can't have life without me." It had someone who said, "Death is not the end, and let me show you how I know." It speaks to our deepest cynicism, because it doesn't just come with the claim; it comes with its own credentials, and with its own proof. And those who first expounded its truth to the world knew that it was true, not because they were easily duped, but precisely because they weren't.

We know they all doubted. Some even doubted when Jesus appeared before them, risen from the dead (see Matthew 28:16-17 if you don't trust me). And they were well-acquainted with doubt. They'd found someone they felt they could put all their trust in, someone they could give their lives to follow, someone who (they were pretty sure) was the one God had promised. And then he died. Just like that. You don't recover from that kind of disappointment quickly. So if anyone in human history has reason to feel disappointment with life, any reason to be doubtful and cynical, it was them. So, when they found that it was true, that death had been defeated, that sin had been overcome, they knew they had to give their lives to tell everyone.

It's easy to say, from the sidelines, "It can't be true. Dead people don't come back to life." And you'd be right. They don't. But someone came to earth to change all of that, to show us another way. We don't experience it fully now. We only experience it in part. But, if you let it sink in, the truth of that event changes everything. However things look now, in the darkness of this pit, it will look a whole lot different when we can see it from Jesus' perspective. Because the boundaries have now been changed - the boundaries of what can and cannot happen, the boundaries of what is, and what is not, too good to be true.

All the lonely people

Some years ago, when I was feeling dissatisfied with happy-clappy, "everything's great" Christian music, I found myself drawn often to the music of Jars of Clay, and the relationship has continued. Their later albums did not really live up to the promise of their early efforts, and their music has always erred more on the side of the mainstream than I'm necessarily happy with, but it's their lyrics more than anything that have been of great encouragement to me - the sort of lyrics that capture perfectly the Christian tension of suffering yet rejoicing. Their double disc release from a few years ago, "Furthermore: From the Studio/From the Stage", captured that tension particularly well, with much of the studio disc perfectly encapsulating the hope of those whose experience of suffering has left them broken but acutely aware of grace, something that allows them to continue hoping in the face of renewed suffering: "You have calmed greater waters/And higher mountains have come down."

So imagine my annoyance when, on 2003's album, "Who We Are Instead", they released something as vapid and trite as the track "Lonely People". It's always been a bit of a frustration that the song is one of the album's catchier numbers, with a cool bluesy groove to it that gets me every time. But then there's the lyrics: "This is for all the lonely people/Thinkin' that life has passed them by/Don't give up until you drink from the silver cup/Ride that highway in the sky". Now, in fairness the song is working within a genre and does so quite successfully, but it's a perfect pastiche: empty of its own meaning. Whatever else Jars of Clay were, they were always sensitive. They understood what it meant to hurt, to be broken. Sadly, it seems, they just don't know how it feels to be alone. No-one who's known true loneliness would attempt to encourage anyone with such cliched images. How anyone is expected to fight loneliness by "drinking from the silver cup" is anyone's guess. Give me Wilco's "How to Fight Loneliness". At least that song shows empathy.

So why am I writing about this today? Am I feeling particularly lonely? No, not really. I'm too busy to be lonely right now. Besides, whatever else 2009 may hold for me, it certainly isn't seeing me being bereft of friends when I need them. Though loneliness is something I've battled a lot throughout my life, now is not one of those times, thank God.

No, what prompted this post was in fact listening to that song yesterday afternoon and finding myself feeling those old, familiar feelings: that feeling, more than anything else, of being patronised by someone who didn't know what loneliness was but somehow thought they could encourage me about it. And then I found myself thinking about how I was no longer lonely, but didn't for a moment regret that I had been. Loneliness, when I've felt it, has taught me independence and a kind of self-sufficiency that's invaluable in life. But, more than that, it's taught me to rely on God in a way that I would never have done if I'd had a more bountiful supply of people to rely on.

So I found myself skipping the track, simply because I didn't need that kind of hackneyed encouragement, and saw no need to endure it any more. It also made me thankful that I've known loneliness so that, if I'm ever in a position where I am called upon to support someone else, I'll know enough how they feel not to insult them with platitudes. And I'll hopefully be able to tell them of the true comfort - one that Jars of Clay a little clumsily pointed to, but could have done so perhaps more tactfully had they just used these words:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted."

I'm very grateful to know what those words mean.

"Chesterton's a swell guy"

Something inspired me recently to re-read some of Chesterton's wonderful Father Brown short stories. I was remembering how Father Brown's "arch nemesis" for the first several stories, the extremely tall French criminal mastermind Flambeau, later becomes his closest friend and partner in - well - solving crime. Something about this attracted me to the stories again, and I've been very pleased to rediscover them.

Here's the wonderful moment when Father Brown confronts Flambeau for the last time (and, of course, there's a spoiler alert):

"'Stand still', [Flambeau] said, in a hacking whisper. 'I don't want to threaten you, but -'

'I do want to threaten you,' said Father Brown, in a voice like a rolling drum. 'I want to threaten you with the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched.'

'You're a rum sort of cloakroom clerk,' said the other.

'I am a priest, Monsieur Flambeau,' said Brown, 'and I am ready to hear your confession.'"

Most people love Father Brown because he is such an unlikely sleuth. Where Holmes has become a cliché - wandering around with his deerstalker hat and magnifying glass - Brown trades on people's trust in him, and their common assumption that he's, at best, a bit of a dill. As a young reader, I was inspired by the concept of a man who no-one suspects and who is thus enabled to see what no-one else sees. I tried my hand at creating a few "unlikely" detectives myself, although, sadly, they were all a little too unlikely, and hence it became quite unlikely that anyone would want to read about them.

Father Brown, on the other hand, is brilliant but misunderstood - by Chesterton's characters, and also by his readers. Often, the point people make about Father Brown is that he seems so innocent (indeed, the first collection was called "The Innocence of Father Brown"). After all, he's a priest, isn't he? Of course he'd be innocent, if not a bit ignorant. How can he solve crime? I mean, that's funny, right? A priest who can solve crimes?

Chesterton, I suspect, would be having a bit of a jovial chuckle at that idea. How can a priest possibly be ignorant of crime, and of sin? What makes Father Brown so wonderful as a detective is his intuitive knowledge of human nature. And what makes me love him, for many other reasons, is that he offers his criminals a chance at redemption. Flambeau is testament to that. Holmes solves the mystery, but quite often doesn't give a stuff if the criminal is brought to justice or let run free to commit more crimes (see "A Case of Identity" if you need proof of this). For Father Brown, however, crimes - all human crimes - run deeper than the mere identification of "whodunnit". In fact, if there were to be a truly theological approach to writing detective fiction, surely the real question should be - who didn't do it?

And Chesterton, just like Father Brown, would be ready with the answer. When asked by The Times, along with other "eminent authors", to comment on the question, "What's Wrong with the World?", Chesterton wrote a suitably short, witty and profound response:

"Dear Sirs,
I am.
Sincerely yours,
G.K. Chesterton."

Are you on my side?

There's apparently some kind of social dictum that says you should never talk about religion or politics. I suspect my family were all away on the day of school when that was taught. Religion and politics are all we ever talk about. And it's often what I talk to my friends about as well.

But a handful of conversations lately with friends who share my religious views but not my politics have made me think a bit more than usual about the connection between the two. Or, more to the point, I've been wondering if there's any connection at all.

My last post (written almost a month ago - sorry about that...) touched slightly on the idea of objective truth - namely, the fact that many are offended by mainstream religions because they claim to know "the truth". In fact, the founder of Christianity, the big man himself, took it as far as to claim to be the truth. Now, in a postmodern, multi-cultural pluralist society, that may seem a tad insensitive. More on that later.

But here's the thing: subtly, we make the same claim about our political views. We argue that America should have gone to war with Iraq, or alternately argue that they shouldn't. We say that Kevin Rudd's recent apology to the indigenous people of Australia was right or, on the other hand, that it was wrong. Do you see where I'm going with this?

Now, put that kind of commitment to ideological truth along with a commitment to religious truth, and what you often get is something that sounds like: "If you're a good Christian, you have to be anti-Iraq", or, "If you're a good Christian, you have to buy Fair Trade coffee", or, "If you're a good Christian, you have to support American foreign policy". Christians on either side of politics are devastated to find their faith being aligned with political agendas that they don't agree with. I'd always felt insulted by the assumption that Christians are automatically right-wing, but a right-wing friend of mine spoke to me just last weekend about feeling that most inner-city churches in Melbourne are strongly biased towards the left to compensate for the perception that, being Christian, they must be right-wing. He himself said that the last four or so years have been a "difficult time to be a right-wing Christian". And, while I'd never felt sympathy for the right before, I had to admit that I could see his point. When all your fellow believers are saying, "We're not like them" - well, how would it feel to be...Them?

Which makes me ask the question again: how interconnected can religion and politics ever be? And I began to see a distinction, while talking with my friend. It's only a work in progress, and not very well-developed at that, but here it is, for what it's worth. Politics looks to reshape the world according to views and values about how the world should look. Sound a little like religion? Well, here's the difference. Politics looks to human and worldly systems to make that change. Religion looks beyond this world.

Bob Dylan, a man that everyone connects with whatever viewpoint that they wish he espoused, once asked "when will I learn that there'll be no peace, that the wars won't cease, until He returns?" The fact that Dylan was, at the time, getting a lot of crap for his quite public conversion to Christianity means that I'm fairly confident in guessing who the He of the song is. And essentially he's pointing out the flaw in all Christian political ideals - that really, as good as things can get here, some things won't change this side of eternity.

If you don't believe in Jesus, then this will all seem irrelevant to you. Why put your faith in the possible second coming of a guy who, we believe, lived 2000 years ago and then died as a criminal? Why wait for his return before making the world a better place?

I don't believe that we should just be sitting passively and waiting, and Jesus criticised those who planned on doing just that. But politics still fundamentally tries to fix the world by human means, while Christianity at least posits the claim that human means will never fix everything, because we as humans need to be fixed.

Christians, if we're to be at all effective in helping a broken world, are going to need to focus on what we have in common. Politics may divide us, and that doesn't mean that we can't believe in politics - but we must not base our faith on politics. After all, Jesus never actively opposed any system of government, even though many of his followers hoped he would. Jesus talked of a kingdom that was not of this world, and that, I suspect, is the kingdom we as Christians should be voting for.

No God, Only Religion (The First Sunday of Lent...)

And so this is Easter.

Well, Lent - the first Sunday thereof, as you'll know if you're Anglican, or Catholic. If you're neither, I'm not sure if you're missing out or not. You certainly won't experience the purple robes, and you won't be told that you should be giving something up for the next forty days - although, in reality, you should have already started, since Lent began last Wednesday, after Pancake/Shrove Tuesday (celebrated at my, notably secular, school).

Normally, I like to prepare myself for Easter, although little really can prepare you for it. For me, Easter has always been about grace, something that there's little we can do to prepare for, or make ourselves worthy of. So how do you prepare? Most Protestant denominations make little deal out of the lead-up to Easter. I remember churches sometimes celebrating Palm Sunday when I was a child. I also remember celebrating Passover with family and friends twice when I was about ten and eleven. The rest of the time, the lead-up to Easter has traditionally involved counting down the days until holidays begin. I'm sure it should mean more. I always WANT it to mean more, but the thought of what Easter really means, and how little I deserve it all, tends to be one of the more difficult parts of my faith to address. I believe in it, my life depends on it, and yet...it's so much easier to thank God for parking spaces, good days at school and nice times spent with friends than it is to thank Him for dying for our sins.

So I suppose I can see the merit in Lent. It makes us prepare. It makes us stop and think about God's sacrifice, even if only in the amazing inadequacy of our own sacrifices. Going forty days without chocolate isn't going to earn us salvation. But Jesus giving everything up for us just might. Perhaps, in humbling ourselves in this small way, we can come to understand that little bit more what sacrifice means. And we'll certainly be reminded of how weak we are. If we can only just make it through a Lent without chocolate, or coffee, or buying CDs, then it can remind us, I suppose, of how dependent we are upon God's grace.

But Lent, in and of itself, can be particularly meaningless. The sacrifice becomes an end in itself. We feel that, in giving something up, we are ourselves triumphing over our own bodies, our own fleshly weakness - which was exactly the attitude that Easter should serve to overcome. If forty days of deprivation can earn salvation, why exactly did Jesus need to die? Is His death and resurrection only effective when accompanied by our piety, albeit only forty days of piety?

I'm surrounded, at work, by religious people - people who come from Catholic and Orthodox traditions. I have complete respect for these traditions - something that occasionally separates me from my fellow evangelicals - and believe that they are an expression of a desire for God that evangelicals should be working with, not against. But I do know that, in both traditions, ritual so often takes the place of relationship. Any faith tradition that becomes more about religion than about God obscures the real issue. I know people who will observe Lent, but possibly won't talk to God at all during the working week - and I know that this isn't okay.

I haven't decided yet if I'm going to give anything up for Lent. The few things I'm considering are mostly things I've gone without for the last week or so anyway, so officially starting a few days later won't hurt. I've never observed Lent before, and am not sure why I feel any differently about it this year. Perhaps it's all the "religious" people around me who are challenging me to think about it. Certainly the talk at my church this morning (somewhere in between low and high church on the Anglican spectrum) has challenged me. But mostly, I think I just want to prepare properly for Easter this year. I want to be focused on what Easter really means. Religious tradition, where it helps you focus on the truth, can only be a good thing. Religion that distracts from the truth has become completely self-serving and is of no use to a relational God.

So, no decisions today. Just a reflection, and a prayer, that this Lent, I might prepare properly. Let's see how it goes.

I've seen the future, and it's amazing

A jaunt to the outer East of Melbourne to catch up with a friend yesterday led me, on the way home, to Blackburn, not a place that I'm especially fond of, but the home of Koorong Books and Music - a shop, for those of you not in the know, that sells a range of Christian books, music, and merchandise of varying quality. It's pretty rare for me to find anything there that I feel especially inspired to buy, particularly in the music department, and yet it's perhaps equally rare for me to find good Christian music outside of Koorong. So, every few months, I like to go there when I am in the area and see what is available.

I was just beginning to despair on the state of Christian music - it's a bit of a routine of mine at Koorong, but a feeling that I think was this time most inspired by a CD that professed to be for fans of "Switchfoot, The Fray and Ryan Adams"; now, how can a band possibly sound like all those artists, without being simultaneously wonderful and utterly MOR? - when I came across a gem from the almost infallible Seattle indie-CCM label, Tooth and Nail, an unheard-of 2007 release, "Love Is For the Rich", by a band called Surrogate. The little sticker on the cover told me that this band, unlike my earlier discovery, was for fans of Sun Kil Moon, the Red House Painters and Pinback. Now, it's rare enough for not one but two Mark Kozalek projects to be mentioned with reference to a Christian CD, and Pinback have won me over whenever I've heard them, so I was instantly sold; as was the CD, by the time I took it to the counter.

Several listens yesterday and today have confirmed the wisdom of my purchase. There are more than enough quality indie reference points with an album like this - aside from the very accurate descriptions on the cover sticker, there are definite hints of early Death Cab For Cutie, Say Hi To Your Mom, and even a few moments of a Northern Californian Phoenix (if you can imagine what that sounds like). The lyrics are far from preachy; in fact, they are quite enigmatic. Rather, this CD reminds me, if I needed any reminding, of what makes Tooth and Nail the prince among Christian music labels; they produce quality alternative music that simply talks about the world from a Christian viewpoint. Tooth and Nail bands rarely aim to convert all their listeners. However, being Christians, they want to be honest about how they see life. So Christianity comes through in the way they talk about the world. A wonderful example of this is the wry and catchy "Death Penalty", which talks nonchalantly about the singer's less-than-perfect past but looks forward to a wonderful future in Heaven. There's also the less optimistic but equally godly anthem about climate change, "Stay Out of the Sun", which is a simple but compelling listen, and definitely the best environmentalist indie-pop song of 2007.

What my favourite Tooth and Nail bands understand is that you don't have to be singing "Jesus is my boyfriend" songs to be creating meaningful, Christian art. They get the Christian perspective out there, in a way that people may actually be able to listen to without feeling completely alienated.

They often also aim to make wonderful music, which I figure has to be important, although not everyone would agree with me. Thankyou Surrogate, for not disappointing. I suspect you'll stay stuck in my CD player for a few more days yet.