MEANINGFULNESS & HAPPINESS

Enjoy. I was ending a counseling session with a client, and he said to me, with a smile, “I really enjoyed that session today!” I was a bit shocked because I never think about enjoying counseling and often counseling sessions are not enjoyable sessions, not in the way you enjoy eating a seaweed and kale salad (ok, maybe you don’t enjoy that). It reminded me of statements in which someone says that the reason we help people and do good in the world is that it feels good. I’ve thought about it for awhile, and I have participated in debates in which some people say we don’t enjoy such work and some people admit to enjoying it. I know why people disagree about this. It’s because they are speaking about two different things.

If you are helping people superficially or giving money non-relationally, then yes, you might do it because it feels good. If you volunteer in a one-time way or once-off, then maybe it feels good. If you give money to charity and then walk away feeling like you did something good, you might feel good. So I see and understand that.

However, those of us who actually roll up our sleeves and engage in the tough relational work of helping people know often it does NOT feel good. When you make yourself vulnerable and open up your home to people, whom others don’t trust, and they burn you; when you are counseling prostitutes or people riddled with diseases or suffering a loss, it does not feel good as we work through issues. When you work with ex-offenders and ex-convicts (who should not be defined by what happened in the past) and work through recidivistic tendencies as well as dealing with stereotypes people place on them, it does not feel good. When you are working with a woman who has turned against all men including you, it does not feel good. When you push a crippled person around, a person who is bitter at the world, it is not very nice. I could go on, but I think the very act of getting deep with people who need help and dealing with them as people, with all their pain, all their issues, all their expectations, and all of YOUR hurt, it does not feel good at all. It is hard. Often times you fail when you help people. You don’t know if you should start again, you don’t know if it matters. You feel like quitting.

It’s like any relationship really.

It just doesn’t always feel good.

And when you’re in a position of habitual, relational, continual help, working alongside someone as that person seeks to move forward, it’s often not a happy feeling, it’s work. You get frustrated, you cry, you get hurt. You hurt them. They hurt you. You feel like quitting, you see no progress. Where’s the impact?

Then suddenly someone talks about the difference she notices. A step forward is made. The person is in a better, stronger position in life. The person has actually started helping others, slowly but surely. And in that moment, however small, however fleeting, that person finds meaning. And, relationally, you find meaning, too. Meaning was never lost, but sometimes you lose sensitivity to it. So in that small moment, you, once again, feel the meaning or significance that was probably there all along. You experience a bit of satisfaction. You taste a bit of fullness. You begin to understand how you can be sad and fulfilled, simultaneously unhappy and satisfied. The happiness is emotional or circumstantial or superficial, the fulfillment or satisfaction or meaning is deep, very deep, undergirding, untenable, impalpable, and so real.

It’s why I can spend time with people with whom I have difficulty liking even though I don’t enjoy the experience and it doesn’t make me happy. There is meaning there.

It’s exactly why I’ve seen some of my friends shut out close people around them because of harsh treatment but other friends embrace pain-causing people because, as unhappy as those interactions are, they find meaning in continuing to love those people through presence and quality time.

This is exactly why Jesus was often sad, as described by certain writers. It’s why Mother Teresa’s most recently released letters show a deep long-term unhappiness, frustration, and depression, even amidst the meaningful work that she continued to do. It is why MLK was frustration, conflicted, and downtrodden sometimes. It’s why faith can be so important to people in such situations because it can help maintain, sustain, motivate, encourage, and even propel them forward through such long and constant periods of unhappiness, sadness, and unenjoyable times. They do it, we do it because there is meaning there. There, is love.

A lot of people ask me about being happy in life or in a career, and I’ve learned by now, it’s not about being happy. Though language is so imprecise, so often I will incorrectly use those word “happy.” But when I ask if someone is happy, I actually mean to ask if the work is fulfilling or meaningful. If you leave one job because you are unhappy to go to another job, it is rare that you will find happiness there. If it’s an amazing situation and circumstance, then it’s possible. Often, in practice, because it’s so hard to find an amazing situation and circumstance people end up unhappy in the new job. However, if you learn, first, how to be content in any and every situation, that’s a key to the deeper joy. Then, you can make a move to a new job, not from a place of need or negativity (I need to find something that will make me happy; I lack contentment; I hate these people and this place; I gotta get out of this dump). No, you are already content. You are moving to a new job from a place of positivity. You are growing and a new job automatically allows you to grow more and positively impact more people. The new job allows you to increase meaningful work in society and create greater social value. The new job allows you to help fulfill more people. The new job is just a better fit for you such that you are running to a job not away from a job. The new job allows you to express passions more and allows you to work in your love language more and cooking more of your love food.

A great example of life choices involving fulfillment and unhappiness is Viktor Frankl. I often wonder how his life would have been different if he didn’t live and survive a concentration camp during WWII. By age 16, he had started a correspondence with Sigmund Freud and Freud sent a two-page paper Frankl had written to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. And this was before formally studying medicine and practicing clinical psychology. By 1941, Frankl's ideas and work had received international attention. His logotherapy helped people overcome depression and attain well-being through finding unique meaning in life (not happiness). He had also established suicide-prevention centers for teenagers. But it was in the same year he had to decide whether or not to move to America. This is an excerpt from an online Atlantic article about him.

"That was the same year when he had a decision to make, a decision that would change his life. With his career on the rise and the threat of the Nazis looming over him, Frankl had applied for a visa to America, which he was granted in 1941. By then, the Nazis had already started rounding up the Jews and taking them away to concentration camps, focusing on the elderly first. Frankl knew that it would only be time before the Nazis came to take his parents away. He also knew that once they did, he had a responsibility to be there with his parents to help them through the trauma of adjusting to camp life. On the other hand, as a newly married man with his visa in hand, he was tempted to leave for America and flee to safety, where he could distinguish himself even further in his field."

It was a choice between being happy (circumstantially or superficially or temporarily) and feeling dissatisfied and unfulfilled due to his suffering parents or feeling like he was doing meaningful work as it relates to his parents and yet unhappy (because he, too, would probably end up in the concentration camp). To be fair, I have simplified the matter. Obviously, by staying in Vienna, he most probably imperils his wife and future child, and by leaving, he definitely saves them. What I’m differentiating simply is the difference between personal pleasure and temporal happiness from a situation, circumstance, feeling, or moment in time to satisfaction or meaning which can often be more long-term, unrelated to an unpleasant situation, constant in the face of suffering, and focused on others as opposed to self. I’ll let you see how he decided what to do, what he decided, and the implications of that choice in his life and the lives of others today. There’s more to life than being happy.

Sunset Journey

ATHEISM

The Agnostic Who Became An Atheist
by Peter Rollins

There was once a world-renowned philosopher who, from an early age, set himself the task of proving once and for all the nonexistence of God. Of course, such a task was immense, for the various arguments for and against the existence of God had done battle over the ages without either being able to claim victory.

He was, however, a genius without equal, and he possessed a singular vision that drove him to work each day and long into every night in order to understand the intricacies of every debate, every discussion, and ever significant work on the subject.

The philosopher’s project began to earn him respect among his fellow professors when, as a young man, he published the first volume of what would turn out to be a finely honed, painstakingly researched, encyclopedic masterpiece on the subject of God. The first volume of this work argued persuasively that the various ideas of God that had been expressed throughout antiquity were philosophically incoherent and logically flawed. As each new volume appeared, he offered, time and again, devastating critiques of the theological ideas that had been propagated through different periods of history. In his early forties, he completed the last volume, which brought him up to the present day.

However the completion of this work did not satisfy him. He still had not found a convincing argument that would demonstrate once and for all the nonexistence of God. For all he had shown was that all the notions of God up to that time had been problematic.

So he spent another sixteen years researching arguments and interrogating them with a highly nuanced, logical analysis. But by now he was in his late fifties and had slowly begun to despair of ever completing his life project.

Then, late one evening while he was locked away in his study, bent wearily over his old oak desk, surrounded by a vast sea of books, he felt a deep stillness descend upon the room. As he sat there motionless, everything around him seemed to radiate an inexpressible light and warmth. Then, Deep in his heart he heard the voice of God address him:

“Dear friend, the task you have set yourself is a futile one. I have watched all these years as you poured your being into this endless task. Yet, you fail to understand that your project can be brought to completion only with my help. Your dedication and single-mindedness have not gone unnoticed, and they have won my respect. As a result, I will tell you a sacred secret meant only for a few. . . .Dear friend, I do not exist.”

Then, all of a sudden, everything appeared as it was before, and the philosopher was left sitting at his desk with a deep smile breaking across his face. He put his pen away and left his study, never to return. Instead, in gratitude to God for helping him complete his lifelong project, he dedicated his remaining years to serving the poor.



Think of it like this. When someone says “I believe in God,” the next question or a good question to ask is “Which god do you believe in?” As Rollins would say and as we all know, theism refers to a belief in God and atheism is a rejection of this belief. But just as you can ask the theist “What God do you believe in?” you can also ask the atheist “What God do you not believe in?” This is because traditional atheism is specific; it is limited to attacks of specific notions and conceptions of God.

Therefore one form of atheism may attack a specific understanding of God but have nothing to say about another concept of God. Traditional atheism, in such concrete forms, isn’t just limited because there are so many varied concepts of God, today, but also because there are an infinite number of possible conceptions of God yet to be dreamed.

The philosopher in this short story sets out, then, to achieve an infinitely large task--to establish once and for all the non-existence of God. But to do this he must reject every known and possible concept of God. It is not until God steps in, that the philosopher is able to achieve a true universal atheism, one that can reject every possible description of God . . .in advance. Why? God transcends every possible concept and cannot be approached as an object or a thing at all.

But who is the one who points this out? It is God who says God doesn’t exist. This type of universal atheism runs strongly through the Judeo-Christian tradition (whether or not you have seen it in the mainstream forms, on TV, and other visible forms) especially in Biblical form. Approaching God as an object that can be grasped and known runs contrary to the Biblical God (or the growing understanding of God found through the arc of the Bible). This is because that God is above all names, above all labels, above all concepts. He is “received but never conceived.” Instead of understanding God like an object, a possible analogy is found in light. Light is not what we “see” directly in some sense. Light is what enables us to see transforming our experience allowing us the experience of sight. God is similar; God is not directly experienced (yikes people might get upset with me) but the name we give to the transformation of experience, to a whole new way of experience. You don’t experience birth; rather, birth opens you up to a whole new world of experiences. That is how God is.


So what my atheist friends and I were never told is that every description of God falls short, even descriptions we find in good books. With every description falling so inadequately short of God, we are led to a universal atheism. We only do justice to the reality of God by laying claim to the fact that no concept of God does justice.

Therefore religious believers can affirm a radical form of atheism in a true sense while still holding on to the reality of God. Are we questioning the importance of good forms of theism? No, rather we are saying that we never let these incomplete, provisional concepts of God stand as absolute authority (we often do this with incomplete expressions of God in the Bible, even if good expressions). A true understanding of the reality of God welcomes the rejection of incomplete descriptions of God and continues searching for less partial, less incomplete descriptions of God, never giving these newer, better incomplete descriptions of God final or absolute authority. You see this through the Bible and Torah as people’s understanding of God is improved and torn down and recreated through the Bible as we move closer to the person of Christ two thousand years ago.

So in the last answer to my “What do I want” questions, when my friend pitted atheism against theism, I want make sure that we understand that a universal atheism runs strongly in the Judeo-Christian tradition. We’re not just a tradition of priests (people serving under God) but prophets (people who speak out against God). You see this in Jeremiah, Amos, even Jesus, himself. . .

My good friend says she’s an atheist, and I think that means we have a lot in common especially if she’s rejecting the visible forms of religion she sees in the world today. I’m constantly in the minority in D.C. in my sub-circles when my policy and science policy friends find out I’m a Christian. The people they make fun of are often conservatives, people who depreciate science, and Christians--Christians who protest at funerals of victims of homosexual hate crimes, Christians who fight against the teaching of evolution in school, Christians who blame the people of Haiti for the earthquake that befell them (because God is mad), Christians who value life when it deals to abortion but do not fight for life as strongly when it relates to poverty or the global burden of disease or the application of the death penalty. Trust me, some Christians are atheist, too. There is more to say about atheism and what it means within the Judeo-Christian tradition, but perhaps I can talk more about it if you ask me to in a future update.

What I’m reminded of is the decline of the Christian church in North America. I’ll spare you the statistics, but it’s been noticed by priests, lay-people, youth pastors, even missionaries. In fact, I almost expect people who grew up in the church to leave it when the go off to college (university) or later. I expect people who grew up without God to stay as far away from him as possible. I’m often surprised at people like myself who grew up with God and yet, somehow, stayed with God. Why? Because both non-Christians and Christians have become increasingly disturbed by what they have seen embraced by prominent mainstream visible Christianity in North America--wars of choice, being anti-big government as if big is bad but being ok with big military and big business, embrace of growth over environmental conservation and preservation, focus on criminalization of abortion (without working on issues that decrease the need for abortion) but not working to fight for life in issues of the death penalty or poverty or disease especially when it disproportionately targets the poor, etc.

Brian McLaren talks about a great awakening, he calls it a new revolution in Christian understanding, thought, and action that is occurring today. I don’t think it’s as monumental as he describes; when I go to the book store the Christian books still mostly comprise books by authors who are not in this emerging understanding of God. Still, McLaren is right. It’s growing, almost like a mustard plant. There are many names of people and churches and groups around the world who are trying to search for something new, embrace something bigger than the concepts we’ve formerly understood and mystically dance with the divine in a new way. There are more authors and more people coming out to say “I’ve always had these questions” or “I’ve always thought that, but I could never find anyone to talk to or with whom to discuss.”

Brian has a new book called “A New Kind of Christianity.” I like this book because Christianity (what does that mean exactly?) is less about doctrines than it is about questions to me. So when I find a group of people or a faith community that embrace people and allow them to ask questions, even questions that remain unanswered still, I’m excited. I’m energized. I need questions. I need to continually strip down and reclothe myself in better understanding. I’m thankful to those around me who have helped me to do that, who allow me to be angry with God, and who show me that God is bigger than my questions and is not offended by them even though religious people around me are (I’m one of them).

Here are the 10 questions

1. What is the overarching story line of the Bible?
The usual answer to this involves the story that man of us Christians were taught to recount when talking to a non-Christian about Christianity. It involves Adam and Eve and the Fall. Over the years there have been minor tweaks here and there to this narrative but nothing major. But there have been parts of it that have been hard to understand and explain (for many this is ok because they want to worship a God they don’t understand). McLaren talks a bit about how some of the difficult concepts might be from men than directly the Bible or even the understanding of Jesus.

2. How should the Bible be understood?
This deals with the question of how the Bible is viewed. Is it a constitution providing an unquestioning legal framework of how to live. Is it a guidebook telling how we live our lives? I had a friend say this to me last Sunday at church. I reacted and said it’s so much more. I said the Bible was a story a history of a story of a people and how, through time, they have learned and unlearned, struggled and fought with God, questioned and loved God, turned away and hated God. Yes, through it we can learn things about our story and lives, but it is not a rule book and if you reduce it to that you’ve missed the main point of it. Regardless the answer to how you view the Bible depends on your answer to the previous question. This is very important because people often interpret and use the Bible for backup of their position. How do you properly interpret it? Is the Old Testament more important, less, or equally important than the New Testament?

3. Is God violent?
This is related to the narrative question. In the traditional narrative God is viewed as a either justice-seeking or vengeful or punishing or angry or hateful, etc. And this is seen in many Biblical stories. Are we viewing this correctly or is God different? How does this fit with Jesus? The answers to these questions depend on the previous two questions.

4. Who is Jesus and why is He important?
This is very important. Was he God or was he not? Beyond that, was he here to provide salvation to go to Heaven, or is it something more? What did Jesus say himself?

5. What is the Gospel?
What is the gospel? And what does it mean? What is the good news? Is the gospel related to salvation in the future, promising a spot in Heaven or something more? When people in the New Testament heard words like “saved” did it mean the same thing it means to Western Christians today?

6. What do we do about the Church?
How was the church understood when it started? Is it understood the same way? What is its purpose and function in the world? Is it there to help its members or non-members? Is its job to convert people to a new belief?

7. Can we find a way to address human sexuality without fighting about it?
Our sexuality is a mess. We have a problem not only with a battle between many churches and homosexuals but also with teaching children to deal with sexuality healthily. Teenage pregnancies (and even abortions) are rampant. Is there a way to deal with human sexuality that is closer to the heart of God than how we’ve done it? Are we missing something? Is this all of what the Bible and Christianity has to offer?

8. Can we find a better way of viewing the future?
Is the normal linear view of time and the future correct? Are we waiting and awaiting something in the future which dictates that the world will continue to worsen and de-motivates and discourages us? What exactly is supposed to happen in the future? And why isn’t Jesus here, now?

9. How should followers of Jesus relate to people of other religions?
This is a tough one. People of other religions (or no religion) have traditionally had a tough time with Christians because of its claims of exclusivity and the fact of a belief that everyone except Christians is going to Hell. Of course this relates to previous questions. But the real question here is how do we interact and treat and deal with people of other faiths. It hasn’t always gone well in the history of Christianity and we want to do it better.

10. What do we do now? (How do we translate our quest into action?)

PETER ROLLINS

God isn’t the different patches of meaning we all place on the wind of the unknowing; God IS the wind.

Pete is one of my favorite philosophers and theological studiers. He’s a researcher at Trinity in Dublin, and he’s written a few books. The thing I love about it him is that he understand theology as a means to an end and is ultimately more interested in working with communities that want to put some of these thoughts into action.


I was introduced to him by a great friend named April. She’s a beautiful, unassuming, sometimes self-effacing nurse with a real quiet, strong spirit. She’s increasingly more humble each day and ever so patient to let me rant and rave in my ego and arrogance while she just loves me constantly. What is most beautiful about her is that she is willing to be challenged away from the environment she grew up in, as long as it leads to what is true. So we’re searching for that together.


This first link is to a 20 minute video. There are several things on the web page...just scroll down to the video and press play.

http://solarcrash.com/2009/07/peter-rollins-stuff/

These other three are consecutive lectures that he gave...they'll be a little longer, but if you like the video content you'll want to hear these too.



http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1616209/rollins1.m4a

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1616209/rollins2.m4a

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1616209/rollins4.m4a


I’ll tell you why I like what Rollins says. Like Rob Bell, he’s the first to tell you it’s ok to disagree with him. In fact, Peter often disagrees with himself. This resonates with me as I’m still searching, struggling, figuring things out, trying to understand how to live in this world. I absolute love when people disagree with me because there is a chance on either side to learn and grow. And if the thing about which we disagree has a certain answer (an apple sits behind a curtain; you think it’s red, I think it’s green) one of us has an opportunity to learn what it is and maybe learn about why we thought it was something else (maybe both of us do). In fact if you disagree with Rollins, then you’ve already agreed with him (huh?).

Rollins also speaks about the heart of Christianity. I sometimes shy away from using the word Christianity because it seems useless to use it to mean what Jesus meant since it has so many other interpretations and realizations in the world, today. But Rollins doesn’t shy away from that. He calls it an irreligious religion, an atheistic theism. I understand this and try to help my groups back in South Africa understand that doubt was not something to fear. It did not have to be a hindrance to faith, but rather a necessary stepping stone. He talks about Christian atheists like Nietzsche. How cool is that?

There’s a philosopher-writer who thought about how anything can exist in our world. He said there were three ways. First, something could exist as an idea. This is the lowest level, and (to this philosopher since others would consider this the highest level) this is rubbish. What can you do with an idea? It’s not yet physically real. For example, I can have an idea of a new type of school, but if the school is not created, it’s only an idea.

Secondly, there is actual reality that was first conceived by the mind. For example, I can imagine a building in my mind (lowest level) and then I go out and build it. The physical building is now a reality that was first conceived in my mind. This is the 2nd level, a higher level.

Third, he hypothesized that perhaps there is a higher level. Imagine any type of reality that cannot be contained by the mind, cannot be understand by the mind. If something could exist in reality but be beyond the mind’s capacity to comprehend or contain, this would be the highest level, the third level. In fact, he thought if anything like this exists, it must be God.

In other words, most agnostics or agnostic atheists imagine that we don’t know God out of anonymity. If there is a God, he’s acting in a hidden, invisible way. He’s anonymous. His work, his touch is anonymous. And we can’t know God because he’s anonymous if he even exists; he may not exist.

The philosopher above is saying something different. He’s saying if God is a type of reality that is above and beyond the ability of our minds to comprehend, he’s not anonymous, but he’s hyper-nonymous. In other words, it is not that we don’t know God out of anonymity, we don’t know God due to his hypernymity. In other words, maybe he’s too much to know or understand. It’s an excess that our minds can’t handle. He’s everywhere. His imprint of excess is too much or great to take in.

This resonates more with me, personally, than anonymity due to the evidence both for a God and against a God. But this is too theoretical. Let me show how Rollins lives some of this out and how it resonates with some of the things I’ve been doing in South Africa.

Rollins has a group called IKON. Unlike most Christian churches that severely believe in man-made authority and leadership over each other, IKON operates with a doughnut structure where everyone is on the outside and no one is at the center. So there’s no membership for instance. Another example is that there is no professional hospitality or greeting team. In other words, if the person sitting next to you doesn’t reach out and say hello and love you then they’ve all failed. It’s on everyone and everyone does it; it’s not a role for some, it’s a living principle embodied by all. I could continue with more, but you can begin to see. Most traditional Christian churches feel that this could never stand or hold up, but I’ve learned that where there is love, perfect love, authority disappears. So when I tried to get my church to have a speaker about human trafficking and they wouldn’t allow it because they had a set agenda for months of sermon series and topics--that’s authority that’s not listening to the breeze of the wind through the people.

They offer an Omega course. Ha! It’s like exiting Christianity in 12 weeks. It’s like Alpha (and I like Alpha and am not knocking it as many people have started a relationship with God through it) but no answers are given in the end about anything so there is even less of an issue of saying the wrong thing or not believing the “correct” thing in Omega than in Alpha. This reminds me a little of a doubt series I did with my life/small/cell/house group while in South Africa. We did a few sessions on doubt. We had Doubt Night. People could write down their doubts about the faith on sheets of paper and enter it anonymously into a bin and we would read them out and talk about them. No answers, no resolution. Just doubt. Why? God doesn’t resolve (read “Blue Like Jazz”) like jazz music. Yes, some of those questions we had answers, but many we didn’t. It’s the tension of humanity that is our daily lot while living in the human condition.

They have atheism for Lent. They read all the big atheists during Lent, like Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, Feuerbach, etc. I LOVE this. Why? I read atheists. I read as much as I can about people who think and believe differently than me. I want to understand. More honestly, there are parts of me that agree with them as I doubt things that I do believe. I once gave a book about love to a Christian homosexual (non-practicing at the time) friend of mine struggling with homosexuality and not feeling that he could have someone to love while being a Christian. This book is called “Sex God” by Rob Bell and doesn’t even mention homosexuality directly (Rob can be vague sometimes), but he deals with love and sex so holistically and from a place of tension and release that I love. The church bookstore keeper order tons of books because she thought it would go well with the 6-part “sex” sermon series going on at the time. The pastor saw the book and rejected and told her to return all the boxes of copies saying that it was theologically shaky. She saved a book for my friend. This happened again with a book I wanted my small group/life group to read (I was leading the life group at the time). The pastor again rejected “Velvet Elvis” by Rob Bell because it was theologically shaky. And it killed me because I longed to be in a place where instead of sheltering sheep from different thoughts you expose people and allow them to doubt and breathe and question and understand while not understanding. Does that make sense? So many pastors are in a protection mode from even people with different thoughts within the SAME RELIGION. Many pastors, for instance, told their congregations not to read “The Shack” which I found a wonderfully challenging book. I’d love to be a pastor and have my congregation read from Richard Dawkins. It’s good to understand, see, feel, empathize, and sometime agree (and disagree).

They have anti-evangelism. My friend Jeannie asked me about being evangelical. It’s a bit like when a person ends a long relationship, engagement, marriage and it’s quite painful. The thing the heartbroken person wants most is to get back into the relationship or to find someone else. At least that’s what they say they want. In reality, they just want comfort and security and the feeling of being loved. If you give them what they want and they quickly find someone new it can be a waste and hurtful and disingenuous. Instead, you withhold the very thing they want in order for them to find it. You tell them, “No, you don’t need to get into a new relationship. Go do something with yourself. Get a hobby, develop yourself. Work on yourself.” Once you do that, and are engaged and actually fulfilled without some elusive love, you actually end up finding that love when you aren’t looking for it. Sometimes it can be similar with God if that makes sense. I won’t go on, but they encourage doubt in their evangelism as Christianity is a type of atheism mixed with theism, in a sense.

They do other things like Suspended Space, but I’ll stop for now. I encourage you, if you want, to go to the IKON website or just check out the links above in which he talks about these things. If you don’t want, that’s cool, too. I just love talking and moreso doing some of these things.

LOVE

Love is funny. Have you ever watched someone fall “out of love” with you? It’s quite interesting, really. At one time you were quite amazing to them in a way beyond just your personality and characteristics. You had that special “other” which drew the person to you and explains how so many of the people in the world who are ordinary-looking and not supermodels find each other and love and live. Sometimes I walk around and rationalize it, knowing it’s just chemicals and hormones and chemo physical and chemo-hormonal responses, that I could romantically like anyone, but still it’s a nice thing we have as people. And you know that two people can see the same characteristics in a third person but only one of the two fall romantically in love, and you don’t know why. It’s because there’s that other thing.

But watching someone view you again without the other is quite strange. You don’t really know what to do or say. You just watch and let it happen, I suppose. Peter Rollins (one of my favorite philosophers and studiers of religion) believes that the moment the person fails to see that in you, it didn’t just stop or cease, it never existed. That “other” never existed. Maybe he means it was created or made up and now that the person still sees the same traits in you but without that thing, that special other, that intangible---maybe it was never there. . . . . . .it probably wasn’t.
Read-it-here.