“… a living word, warmed with love …”

  • From “Daily Lives” today …

    The hearts of other sin­ners have been soft­ened by dis­cus­sions with pious peo­ple. You, too, go and have a dis­cus­sion. If you hear word after word of dis­cus­sion, will not one word strike you that will be unto the sep­a­ra­tion of soul and spirit, accord­ing to the thoughts of the heart? Per­haps a liv­ing word, warmed with love, will pen­e­trate deep into your heart and shat­ter the strong­hold of sin resid­ing therein.

    – St. Theo­phan the Recluse

    I thought that was very timely, con­sid­er­ing the topic and dis­cus­sion below about these very dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tions with hos­tile non­be­liev­ers. Good­ness knows, a per­son has to use dis­cern­ment. There are some of them that are just a waste of everyone’s time. But then … there are some of them that only seem like a waste of time.

    That cuts both ways. If you DO open the door to some kind of dia­logue, you have to be ready to find out that you might learn some­thing. The both­er­a­tion for athe­ists is that I don’t mean by that that I’m going to “learn” how to be faith­less (been there, done that). I think that actu­ally I’m learn­ing a lit­tle about the wheat and the chaff in my own beliefs. There are things that sound good to other Chris­tians and things we preen our­selves with and admire the effect (“Yes, I look very pious when I say that! What a fine turn of phrase!”). But they aren’t real, and any­one com­ing from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive can see in an instant they’re not real. Which is why I think Steven is right in the com­ment on the last post. Unfor­tu­nately, some­times we do look like the stereo­type. And then some­times, they really just do detest any­thing wear­ing a cross. So it’s another case for dis­cern­ment whether to con­sider the cri­tique or reject it.

    I’m obvi­ously still work­ing through it myself. Maybe I would’ve been bet­ter off not to even get into this. The chance of shed­ding any light in other people’s lives may be nearly nil. I’m not so sure about the chance of shed­ding light in my life.


    Related posts:

    1. For the love of God
    2. On silence (again)
    3. Hush your heart
    4. Ris­ing to God with­out machines
    5. Love the planet, hate the people

    May 19th, 2009 | Grace | 4 Comments |

4 Responses and Counting...

  • Ken Whisler 05.19.2009

    Grace, I co-moderate a forum for a very pop­u­lar gui­tarist. One of the other 2 mods is an athe­ist, with his own blog stat­ing clearly his beliefs. In the “Gen­eral Dis­cus­sion” sec­tion, there are no top­ics that are off lim­its with only 2 very sim­ple rules: no pro­fan­ity or porn, and no per­sonal attacks; i.e., “flam­ing”. Debate the idea, but never attack the per­son. The mods are given a lot of lee­way in their dis­cre­tion in apply­ing the 2nd. With fla­grant vio­la­tions, the 1st mod to see it drops the ham­mer. The more sub­tle ones we dis­cuss and then act as a unit.

    The worst offend­ers of vio­lat­ing the 2nd rule were com­ing from an evangelical/fundamentalist mind­set (in the protes­tant sense of the words). One had to be banned, the oth­ers left the forum with a cer­e­mo­nial “shak­ing the dust off of our feet” in a grandiose man­ner fit­ting a drama queen. Their behav­ior on the forum was very sim­i­lar to how I’ve seen Dawkins behave. All we did was enforce a very sen­si­ble rule of the forum, and they accused us of per­se­cu­tion, and accused me of sid­ing with the enemy.

    The athe­ist and I have had many dis­cus­sions on the forum debat­ing our ideas, off of the forum we usu­ally limit our dia­logue to the work­ings of the forum. He has admit­ted to me that he has learned a lot from me, and I will thank him for chal­leng­ing my convictions.

    The opti­mist in me likes to think, that even if I did not con­vert this athe­ist, I’ve at least planted a seed. And even if I did not plant a seed, maybe a micro­cosm of what a demo­c­ra­tic soci­ety should be has been estab­lished. On a social level, bad behav­ior is exactly that, regard­less of which side of the line it’s com­ing from.

    It is because of my expe­ri­ence here that the door should always be open.

  • s-p

    Grace and Ken, Yep. I always ask athe­ists “Tell me about the god you don’t believe in” and invari­ably it is the fun­da­men­tal­ists’ angry God who kills Jesus to sat­isfy his wrath. I reject that god too. At the risk of being self pro­mot­ing, I just did a pod­cast on Mada­lyn O’Hare and athe­ism http://ancientfaith.com/podcasts/stevethebuilder/…
    I think there is great poten­tial for fruit­ful dia­logue with athe­ists. Dawkins and prima donna fundies are all cut from the same drama queen cloth. Their reli­gion is a prop for per­sonal issues IMHO. I don’t waste my time with either of them.

  • James the Thickheade

    Maybe Kevin has the right idea… only that the seed we plant is not nec­es­sar­ily faith in another per­son, but per­haps under­stand­ing and patience with those who do believe. I think even the fun­da­men­tal­ists with whom I’ve been uncom­fort­able all my life prob­a­bly mean well… but just don’t know bet­ter. And it may be a pretty dog­gone good thing to defuse wrath… what’s that thing, “Blessed are the peacemakers…” ?

    I think Fr. Mele­tios Webber’s com­ments that as Amer­i­cans we often say, “I believe” and mean “I have these opin­ions I“m will­ing to defend to the death…” means that often as peo­ple of faith, we’ve been very agres­sive in our Way. It’s help­ful for folks per­haps to see that there is another more down to earth, and respect­ful way. But I don’t know exactly how you dif­fer­en­ti­ate kindly between a full faith… and some­thing less. So the whole seems a slip­pery slope. Hats off to Kevin for nav­i­gat­ing this.

  • Grace

    Along these lines, I’ve had the thought recently that athe­ists and agnos­tics have gone from not believ­ing there’s a God to not believ­ing there are godly peo­ple, from not believ­ing there was a real Christ to not believ­ing there are any real Chris­tians. I can imag­ine a lot of causes for that that I can’t con­trol, includ­ing a cer­tain nar­row­ness on their part and the high vis­i­bil­ity of “loudly-Christian” types who turn every­one off. But the part of it I can con­trol is how I come off, how I behave — moments of bad tem­per or unfor­tu­nate shal­low­ness. Do I bring honor to the name of ‘Chris­t­ian’? And if there are those who assume all Chris­tians are dis­hon­or­able, do I at least cause them to give that assump­tion a moment’s pause?

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