Lolly Pop Jesus

This is a short post on something that continues to confuse me.

This is the story of "lolly pop Jesus."

Once upon a time, Jesus came to earth.

2000 years later, people start to read Jesus's teachings, life, and works through the Gospels but come to an interesting conclusion: "He was a good teacher, but he couldn't have been Divine."

Ok, then it seems to me you are facing a problem here.  Even the earliest Gospels record Jesus as making claims to divinity: "Son of Man," "God's One and Only Son," "I and the Father are One" "I am the Way the Truth and the Life."  He does not, as most Jewish teachers of the day did, speak in meager terms, but called it "My Father" "My Kingdom" which is no doubt why the Gospel records many times in which the Jews pick up rocks to stone him and finally send him to Pontious Pilate to be crucified for heresy.  Aside from that, most outside historical sources affirm that he was crucified for heresy and made such claims, many calling him a "sorcerer."  So how exactly do you address this?

"No, you see all that divine stuff was added in by later people who wanted to see him as God.  Really, Jesus was just a teacher."

Ok, now youve got another problem, and the most important one: you've made the bizarre and unbased assumption that all of the Gospels were originally a bunch of humble statements with no claims to divinity when, all the sudden, a bunch of scheming apostles come along and write in a bunch of Jesus saying divine stuff despite the fact that A) the Gospels name specific witnesses that would have been alive to testify against them and B) the Gospels make the apostles look like the dumbest people on planet earth, yet they didnt think of changing them to make themselves look good and C) the apostles changed their own fate from being simple followers of a Jewish teacher to cultic apostles that would all get brutally murdered later.  If the apostles did write these things in, they must have actually been the dumbest people on earth.

Despite the holes in that argument, the main problem is this: you've asserted that the Gospels have been tampered with and changed, so now you have destroyed the credibility of the same sources where you get Jesus's teachings.  If the Gospels were so obviously tampered with as youve asserted, then by no means can you say with any certainty that Jesus said "blessed are the poor in spirit" or "turn the other cheek."  For all you know, these are also just random additions by apostles, and possibly not even the same person (welcome to the Multiple Jesus hypothesis).  As it stands, there is no point praising Jesus's teachings and at the same time negating their authenticity.  At this point, Jesus's good teachings are no better than a feel good quote on an Urban Outfitters handbag, cited "anonymous" or would be better at home in a random quotebook of Hebrew proverbs than in any sort of organized biography.

Not only do I think this thought process is fraught with errors, but also just plain intellectually dishonest.  What historian would ever think its ok to ignore some of the things Plato said because you found some of it offensive?  What fervent atheist philosopher would be ok with you taking offensive passages out of Bertrand Russel's "Why I'm not a Christian"?  Is not picking what you want and discarding the rest intellectually dishonest and disrespectful of history?  So why does this differ with Jesus?

Funny enough, even after 60 years, the old Lord Liar Lunatic argument still readily applies here: people are always looking for the middle way with Jesus, a way to soften him up and make him more cuddly and cute and instead of the guy on the street corner who's claiming divinity and talking about hell; but the fact is Jesus is who He was, and denying that doesnt make you open minded, rather just makes you the fool who wants to look all day at the landscape he painted instead of going outside.

And this is the story of the lolly pop Jesus: a prophet that fits in your pocket, good for five minutes of enjoyment, and can be thrown in the trash can later. 

That is all.

~Jared

The Command of the Open Hand

This is a blog mostly inspired by this blog post from a good friend about giving; something that should shock and challenge us, but fails to.

"Give generously to him and do so without a grudging heart; then because of this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to.  There will always be poor people in the land.  Therefore, I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land" - Deuteronomy 15

"And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full.  But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." - Luke 6

Giving is always a sort of tongue in cheek subject in the States: something we know is important, but doesnt ever seem to register too much.

One of my friends here in Chile is a Haitian man who I bizarrely befriended on the street one day (apparently out of all the people he would try to start a conversation with, I was the only one who turned around and responded).  Ivers has been in the country a little over a month now, and works at a bakery making a small amount of money.  One day, I saw him on the metro and said hi to him, noticing he's drinking a box of chocolate milk.  Without hesitating, he sees me, leads me back to a random snack stand and buys me a chocolate milk as well and then walks off.  This sort of thing, as an American, usually just leaves me flabbergasted.

Another friend of mine, Heyner from Peru, walked with me one day to go get an ice cream cone and bought mine without any hesitation.  I try to be polite and throw out a "oh no really you shouldnt" or "I'll pay you back" but its usually in vain, and just provokes some weird looks from any of my friends.  To them its normal to buy things for friends and in the end for them an ice cream cone or a chocolate milk is a small and expected cost to pay when you're with a friend.

Conversely, Im used to experiencing something like last night when I was in Valparaiso with some gringo friends.  As the check comes forward, all joyful conversation comes to a stop and we discuss business; "how much per person?" "whats 5600 divided by four?" "how much is that with tip?" "All put in this much, and you'll just owe me" "how much do I owe you again?"  The check dances around from person to person, as the amount that each person pays must be a carefully, crafted sum that neither cheats nor overly benefits anyone.  Once the check and the money given are carefully scrutinized by all parties involved, a satisfactory conclusion is reached and everyone can leave comfortable.

Its such a funny thing, isnt it?  I see myself so needlessly close handed for no other reason than that it is the way that my culture has raised me.  I try so very hard to fight against this, but my Americanness cant help but calculate the cost of everything, make sure I pay back everyone the exact penny I owe, and find non-chalant ways to remind people they owe me money.

Yet, my friends from other cultures seem to live in a way that is so effortlessly open handed about money, even when they give in need: both the friends I mentioned gave not out of their excess, but out of their poverty.  Charity out of necessity becomes much more than just the object itself, but rather a symbol of friendship and of love.  It reminds me of one movie, called Ushpizin about one Israeli Jew who hosts two escaped convicts at his house.  They abuse his hospitality constantly through the movie, yet he continues to serve them out of his poverty.  Those who have been in Arabic cultures know that it is extremely hospitable, possibly more than any other culture in the world.

Yet interesting how one ancient Middle Eastern text, the Torah, says very explicitly that God commands people to be open handed.  What we treat as a suggestion, a post-script, a good idea when the time is right, is, according to Deuteronomy, a mandate as strong as any other.  When Christ shows up on the scene, the idea is reiterated with the idea that you should not only love your enemy, but also lend them your things and never expect anything back.  I would hazard to guess that even for a Middle Eastern culture this would have seemed crazy, and for Americans its just plain ludicrous.

In fact, do an experiment for yourselves: show any God-fearing Christian that Bible verse and watch how the excuses will pour forth!  They will no doubt squirm and say "yeah, but," frantically reach for the book of Proverbs, hoping there's going to be some verse in there that says "thou shalt make wise decisions with your money and not give it to people who dont deserve it," and finish their justification by saying "well thats just not wise!"  And God wants us to be wise right?

The fact is, no one is comfortable with this verse: I've never heard a sermon on this verse, never see it held up at football games, and never see anyone write it as a Facebook status to get any likes from the youth pastor (because everyone is on facebook, dont you know).  There is something so ruthlessly brutal about the suggestion of lending to the evil that brings up every justification in existence to be able to shove it into a corner and never speak of it again.  Arab or American, Peruvian or Haitian, no one likes to see their money go to waste and no one is ready to be taken advantage of.  The command of the open hand, if actually followed, implicates a shift in one's life and philosophy that few have the stomach for.


But lets think about this, I mean really think about why Jesus might have said this.  What are the results of living a life that follows the command to be open handed and lend to the evil?  My take:

1. It invokes a serious change in how people begin to see you.  When you do something so brutally against everything the human race seems to be chasing after, there is no way that people cannot notice you, and no way that people can continue to equate you with any other person or culture.  You are no longer defined by your own cultural precepts, but by Christ alone.  It is no coincidence that Christ follows up this command with the promise of a new title: "you will be children of the Most High."

2.  If you truly follow the command of the open hand, it is impossible to be attached to any sort of material thing.  Can you truly have your work schedule depend forever on a rented car?  Base your life around a rented apartment that you must someday give up?  When we truly realize the command, nothing becomes your own, rather a good to be passed to someone else; we stop thinking of how long we can hold on to something and start thinking of how we can pass it on.  Nothing, as Deuteronomy suggests, can any longer be held closed in your hand, but you must be able to let go of anything at any given moment.  Still many will say this is unwise and will lead to poverty (and those looking for a justifying Proverb will only find 23:5 - "Cast but a glance at riches, and they are gone"), but what does the author say?  "Because of this the LORD your God will bless you in all your work and in everything you put your hand to."

3.  The last, as my friends have shown me, is that when you learn to be open handed, wealth abdicates its lofty position and friends and relationships receive the due importance that Christ really stresses.  My grandfather is in the habit of stressing this, in a peculiar sort of way; we, his grandkids, loved to tell him hippy aspirations of living in poverty, but he would always look at us, smirk to himself, and declare the wisdom of Christ that too few people quote these days: "Make friends with unrighteous mammon!"  This verse I think hits home for alot of people in my generation who backlash from materialism and want to vow to poverty, cursing the result of greed rather than greed itself.  Wealth is useful, just not for the uses that we would like to think.  In the end, the wealth we receive is made to passed on to someone else, and only when we do this do we really see what material wealth was meant to be in the first place.

I can scarcely imagine what the world would be like if Christians (myself included) begun to really take this seriously.  So how can we implement this?  What are the practical steps we can take to begin living this way?

In my opinion, it seems to me one key is getting it in our heads as a command.  This is not a suggestion, Jesus isnt saying "oh gee wouldnt that be swell" and Moses isnt a passive-agressive mother sighing to you saying "oh dear, well I'd rather you listen..."  This is a command, just as serious as any other.

And last, Im thinking its like getting to Carnegie Hall: "Practice, practice, practice."  One ice cream cone, one box of chocolate milk at a time.

If youve read this far, then surely you wouldnt mine giving your own two cents in the issue.  What are practical steps we can take in getting there?  How should our view of homeless people, beggars, and the people we hate change?  Comment button is below.  Just sayin.

~Jared

The Eye of the Needle (Why I am an Abolitionist)

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'Truly I tell you, it is hard for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.  Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.' When the disciples heard this, they were greatly astonished and asked, 'Who then can be saved?' Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.'" - Matthew 19
  

"Friends of Goodwill, be dissatisfied with your work until every handicapped and unfortunate person in your community has an opportunity to develop to his fullest usefulness and enjoy a maximum of abundant living." - Edgar James Helms, Founder of Goodwill

 This post is dedicated as a letter, specifically to my friends and future friends in Washington DC, Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship.  My hopes that the mere words I type into the web can somehow spread from here to others, and tell why the issue of Modern Slavery is important to me. 

Dear Friends,

As people of the 21st century, and most notably as people at AU, you are no doubt bombarded by thousands of ways to be charitable.  In a globalized world, there are now more than a million countries, projects, schemes, and funds that you can devote your time and finances too, whether its people peddling bracelets on the quad or human rights films in the Tavern.  As the issue of modern slavery just appears as one in a million, you may ask why this issue deserves your attention and effort.

As far as I am concerned, I would hardly be any person to lecture anyone about optimistic change the world schemes.  I have been a hardened cynic most my life when it comes to those who spout goals of ending poverty, achieving world peace, and ending world hunger ("but arent they going to just get hungry 4 hours later?).  Even as a Nietzsche totting agnostic until the follower of Christ I find myself to be today, I have never been a dreamer of that sort.  I always thought it impossible, until freshman year.

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle"

I saw a film about sex trafficking in the Phillipine Islands two months into college, put on by some people from Chi Alpha.  I remember very clearly all the images on the screen, of 12 year old girls with sunken eyes and desperation dancing in every word of their speech, of the slums stretching for miles and miles and the dimly lit street corners littered with little girls soliciting every car that rolled by.  The images stuck in my head for days, and Im not sure they've ever left me.

For many people, this is where the story ends.  The images are disgusting, the reality is ugly, but for most it will fade back with the rest of the images we've been bombarded with of pot bellied children in Africa and never find their way to resurface.  The issue of sex trafficking has been a huge issue for many years, the fact of slaves has existed since the dawn of humanity itself.  What makes any of us think that it can ever be stopped?

"they were greatly astonished and asked, 'Who then can be saved?'"

Many of us will shove this issue back in our mind, choosing to live in blissful ignorance of something so horrible because, as human beings, we hate the fact that it has no clear cut solution.  We want a snap ending, not an indefinite problem.  But we were not called to ignorance, but rather truth; and all of us have a duty to respect it, no matter how ugly it is.

However, the story doesnt end here; believing in Christ, whether I like it or not, makes me an idealist, even an optimist.  Despite my cynicism I firmly believe, with all my heart, that we can see an end to human trafficking within our lifetimes, and this is why:

1. Slavery was stopped once, it can be stopped again.
 When one British man dared to challenge the status quo and demand an end to the Atlantic slave trade, there was no good reason for anyone to believe him.  Slavery has existed nearly as early as humanity can remember, and anyone demanding an end to such a time honored practice might as well have been demanding an end to hunting and gathering: its simply something mankind has done for survival, and will likely always do.  As one historian put it, the question is not why did slavery continue, but why did it end.  Despite everything against him, William Wilberforce, driven recklessly by his own Christian idealism, dared to demand what no one else thought possible and, shockingly enough, brought one of the most decisive steps against slavery in the history of mankind.  In our world today, we not only must finish what Wilberforce started, but also confront the oldest profession in the world.  It wont be easy and may even seem impossible, but we have a reckless duty to try; without Wilberforce's reckless duty, who knows where slavery would be today.

2.  This is a backyard problem.
Unlike many charitable causes, this is as much an American problem as it is a Filipino or Cambodian problem.  You dont need to go to a foreign country to see the horrors of slavery and sex trafficking: simply look in your own backyard.  The United States Justice department recently recorded nearly 17,000 people being trafficked into the states a year.  10,000 of our population are forced laborers that we know of, and the number is probably much higher.  Atlanta, Washington DC, and New York all rank as cities with high levels of human trafficking activity.  Its happens in our cities, it happens in our restaurants, on our very streets.  This is not someone else's problem, this is our problem.

3. Awareness Matters.
Its a known fact that in America the most popular charitable causes are the ones that require the least amount of commitment; also known as "raising awareness" and waiting for the problem to go away by itself (see: Stuff White People Like).  However, human trafficking is one of the few causes where awareness is one of the principal challenges and the principal way of defeating it.  If human trafficking really happens in the house next to you or in the back alley of your route home, then one of the principal ways of bringing people to justice is simply to be aware of it and report what you see.  Many people in forced labor or prostitution are waiting for just one person who is concerned enough to call the police.  As simple as it sounds, awareness is no easy task as most people have trouble coming to terms with the fact that it happens in such a civilized country.  Therefore, the challenge begins with yourself: educate yourself, educate the people around you.  This is in no way the ultimate solution, but its the most practical step that people can take to clamping down on the problem.

For me, these are the three most convincing reasons why human trafficking, out of all the causes we are bombarded with, deserves your support and attention.  As a generation of millenials, we are in a unique position that no generation has ever been in before to effect change.  As Mordecai says to Esther: "who knows but that you have come to your royal position for such a time as this?"  The only question is, will you be part of the solution?  What legacy can we leave to our children: a legacy of ignorance, or a legacy of reckless duty to truth?

 So my advice is this, similar to the advice that the founder of Goodwill gave:

Do not be content.

Do not be content with what is happening in our own cities
Do not be content with what is happening in far away nations
Do not be content with the millions suffering
Do not be content with apathetic empathy

And above all, do not be content with only trusting man for the solution; trust the One who gave you the idealism and the spark, trust the One who gives a truth to fight for, and trust the One who can do more than we can ever ask or imagine.

"Jesus looked at them and said, 'With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.'"

~Jared

The Age of Inundation

"When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place. So, what we view our role as, is giving people that power." - Mark Zuckerburg

“Over the course of the last generation or two, a variety of technological, economic and social changes have rendered obsolete the stuff of American social capital.” - Robert Putnam

Im sick in bed today, without much hope of doing anything else rather than express my opinions from a computer.  Regardless, trends in social networking and social capital have always interested me, and I feel that the recent changes in Facebook, an incredibly powerful company in this day and age, start to really reveal what it is people desire in both social networking and in social capital in general.

First of all, we should ask what is social capital.  Social capital, as defined by Collins English Dictionary, is "the network of social connections that exist between people, ... which enable and encourage mutually advantageous social cooperation."  Simply put, social capital is any and every way that people interact and build relationships with each other.  Social capital is anything from playing cards with neighbors to lending someone money, and the capital that we build is theoretically used just like any economic capital is used.  Its incredibly simple, despite any sort of technical jargon you add to it, but its role in development and poverty studies has only recently been realized and really respected.  Today, we actually begin to look at social capital as something as incredibly necessary as any sort of basic good. 

Leaving theory behind, the real question is what role social networking is playing in social capital.  Well, it sort of depends on who you ask.  Robert Putnam, a distinguished political scientists, wrote a whole book titled "Bowling Alone" to argue that social capital is on a steep decline in the United States and that technical advancements in social interaction through the internet is partly to blame.  Though he doesnt explicitly mention Facebook in the book (from what I can remember.  been a very long time since Ive read it), one can only imagine what he would say about thousands of college students and young professionals maintaining nominal relationships through their computers and doing less of actual social interaction.  For people of our generation and age group, more and more social interactions are taking place online instead of in person, and this is perhaps worrying to some people (including myself) but also supported by others who view it as augmenting social capital, not destroying it.  So which is it?

Electronic savior?

One thing is for sure, Zuckerburg is pretty sure of his own position.  The young billionaire, along with owning one of the most successful social websites in history, sets himself up as a starry eyed idealist who, rather than lining his pockets, seeks to revolutionize humanity and our methods of communication.  "The thing that we are trying to do at facebook, is just help people connect and communicate more efficiently," he says.  

For Zuckerburg, at least this is what he claims, Facebook is a revolutionary idea that gives the voice to the voiceless, mobilizing the world and making people more open minded about sharing information.  And with this claim, who could really be the one to criticize him?  By blabbing on about democratic ideals of representation and transparency, Zuckerburg hides behind a wall of good intentions that assures all critics and naysayers that Facebook could not possibly be up to no good, but only has your best interests in mind.  Thus, when Facebook roles out new changes that open your information to new people in ways you didnt think possible, how are you going to be the one that protests to transparency and representation?

Despite Zuckerburg's lofty ideals, being in charge of a social networking site means that he is still accountable to the people that use his service.  He can only give them what they truly want and, if they dont like it, they are free to leave.  But if Google + has taught us anything, people are cemented to Facebook for the very same reason that people criticize it: a compromise of your privacy.  

Behind the lofty ideals of its creator, Facebook is un-sexual voyuerism, from its beginnings as "Facemash" to the giant database it is today.  When someone logs on Facebook, they are given the opportunity to scan thousands of people's preferences, pictures, and lives without anybody knowing that their watching.  The same inkling that sends thousands to movies to watch stories play out from a safe position and urges literally millions to watch porn on the internet is, at its basis, the same inkling that keeps people Facebook stalking for hours at a time.  Scanning people's lives from the comfort of your computer takes out the risk of social interaction, since you can gather information with no risks and, this is the best part, they literally have no way of knowing that you're doing it.  People can now know more about you than you will ever know, yet this innocent voyeurism isnt seen to be strange, because it is voluntary and widespread.  As Zuckerburg remarked once, people are sharing more and more information about themselves than they ever have before, and dont even seem to mind it.  In fact, trends show they are encouraging it!  Zuckerburg, in the end, doesnt claim to be in any sort of wrong with lowering privacy because, in the end, its what Facebook is based off and what people will always be seeking.

So how does this affect social capital?  In the end, and in my opinion, what we see is a dispersing effect, not an augmenting effect.  Facebook, though originally only intended to reflect the relationships that you already have in real life, has become a way of making friends in of itself.  So, one could argue, how is this any difference from having friends over e-mail, or even over letters?  Since Facebook has such a wealth of information about preferences, beliefs, and to some extent personality traits, it can partly satisfy needs for social capital in a way that nothing before it has been able to do.  By constantly feeding you information through your newsfeed, Facebook gives the user a feeling of being nominally connected to thousands of people which nearly eliminates the need for close connections.  Obviously, you could argue that Facebook is what you make of it, and that the people who want to maintain thousands of nominal connections will and those who want fewer, closer connections will keep them.  However, the changes in Facebook show that Zuckerburg and his team are not neutral in the matter: they know people want to see more and more information, become deeper voyeurists in a way, and will therefore make sure this happens by feeding people as much information as possible and to cement them into using their service.

Should we be panicking?  Too soon to tell.  Maybe the trend will begin reversing and people will want their privacy back, but whats clear is that this generation is enchanted by sensory overload.  All internet services in one way or another seek to inundate the user with information since its more available than it has ever been in the history of the world.  How this will affect how we interact with each other will be sort of interesting I think.


I have too much of a headache from sickness to continue this thought. 

~Jared

The Alien

"When I was very young and the urge to be someplace was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. When years described me as mature, the remedy prescribed was middle age. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked.... In other words, I don’t improve, in further words, once a bum always a bum. I fear the disease is incurable." - John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley 

"You and the alien shall be the same before the LORD." - Numbers 15

I have just hit the halfway mark here in this land called Chile, and the experience mirrors my last ex-pat experience in one very important way: I've done very little noticing of the actual people and more noticing of the immigrant population.  Lately I've been starting to wonder why that actually is.

Just recently, I met a Colombian girl in one of my classes who was studying abroad here in Santiago.  After class, we discussed some of our culture shock and observations of Chileans.  It was pretty similar to what a Peruvian friend of mine said.  I'm no person to lump countries together, but I had always thought I had the monopoly on culture shock for being an American, yet even a next door neighbor doesnt know what to do when he steps on through the threshold  Whether Nicaraguans in Costa Rica, Mexicans in Georgia, Ethiopians in DC, or Peruvians in Chile, the familiar loneliness of migrant living is a pain that's completely universal.  Yet its a pain that many are so willing to jump into out of necessity that it becomes a universal phenomenon at the same time.

In La Paz I did a lot of walking.  Unlike Santiago, La Paz always had something happening you couldnt quite ignore; whether the calling cadences of bus caller leaning out van windows or the seasoned voice of an old Aymara woman singing to flutes and guitars.  All my life I had dreamed about what Bolivia would be like, over time constructing a carefully drawn fantasy cradled in the Andes mountains.  When I arrived, this image was gloriously shattered by a real and very complicated reality of what Bolivia actually is: not a flimsy fantasy, but a real, breathing, living entity of epic proportions with its own tastes, fears, and passions.  Its own rumba de vida that wasnt going to be like anything else in the world.  In the end this is much frightening and complicating than any mental image could construct, but more gloriously overwhelming than any fantasy could ever capture.

Walking through poor neighborhoods turning to rich neighborhoods turning back to poor, the sheer immensity of La Paz always took me by surprise.  My epiphany of being in La Paz was that I remembered what I really cared about in life:

• The very fact that every single one of those small little houses was inhabited by someone, and its possible they need your help. 
• In a world where self help books flood shelves and people linger over the topic of "learning to love myself," I wanted to truly love my neighbor, whether I'm poor or rich, crying or laughing, and maybe even teach people to do the same.  
• To foster connections between communities that would not simply give them a few extra dollars in their pocket, rather to provide a lifetime of support to the "poor and the alien" that would challenge people to realize the love of Christ as a tangible reality, not a fleeting scheme of conquest.  
• To see the Church realize its real potential in this world as the one who cares for the downtrodden and does the work no one else in this world will do, and does it in a way that's helpfully informed by economic thought and development theory.  (Microloaning in churches? Why not?)
• And finally, that I may never be calloused to the reality of suffering on earth.  Summed up, to cry when the world laughs, and to love when the world hates.

The second realization is that immigrants are very much at the center of this for me, precisely because they are such a universal reality in the world; for this reason the Torah talks so specifically about caring for both the poor and the alien.  In all senses of the word, the Israelites were aliens in their land, and were always encouraged to treat the aliens they met with the same fairness.  For this reason they are "the same" before the LORD.

Unfortunately, this is not the reality and being an immigrant is perhaps one of the hardest struggles in our globalized world; immigrating is becoming much easier to do but not any easier to handle.  As the world becomes flatter, often times attitudes become cemented, and whether or not borders are closed, the worst part is that hearts are being closed.  Please dont confuse this for a political statement.  Open border or closed border, loving the poor alien is still a great challenge for most the world, and I think its key we think about this, regardless of your view about illegal aliens.

This is what I'm thinking about lately, though I have the feeling its only sketching the surface of a much bigger issue; one that will not be solved any time soon, but one that requires the thoughts and considerations of everyone taking the title of "Christian" and anyone who claims to practice the teachings of Jesus Christ.

This is a long process, but I think I'll have to find joy in the process of figuring out what this issue is really going to mean.  I know very little now and, as a friend of mine once said, "maybe someday I'll think about the rest."

~Jared

John Steinbeck on Church and Hell

From Travels with Charley In Search of America, a good read if you a couple hundred pages to kill sometimes

"I took my seat in the rear of the spotless, polished place of worship.  The prayers were to the point, direction the attention of the Almighty to certain weaknesses and undivine tendencies I know to be mine and could only suppose were shared by others gathered there.

The service did my heart and I hope my soul some good.  It had been long since I had heard such an approach.  It is our practice now, at least in the large cities, to find from our psychiatric priesthood that our sins aren't really sins at all but accidents that are set in motion by forces beyond our control.  There was no such nonsense in the church.  The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot.  And he was right.  We didn't amount to much to start with, and due to our own tawdry efforts we had been slipping ever since.

Then, having softened us up, he went into a glorious sermon, a fire-and-brimstone sermon.  Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn't make some basic reorganizations for which he didn't hold out much hope.  He spoke of hell as an expert, not the mush-mush hell of these soft days, but a well-stoked, white-hot hell served by technicians of the first order.  This reverend brought it to a point where we could understand it, a good hard coal fire, plenty of draft, and a squad of open-hearth devils who put their hearts into their work, and their work was me.

I began to feel good all over.  For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son.  But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me.  He put my sins in a new perspective.  Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity.  I hadnt been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension there was some pride left.  I wasn't a naughty child but a first rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.

I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minister and as many of the congregation as I could.  It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday... All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher.  He forged a religion to last, not predigested obsolescence." 


~Jared

A Year Older, A Year Younger

random story that may or may not need be told.  trying to get better at non-fiction.

 On the cusp of a rainy Saturday night, the streets of suburban Santiago were drenched and cold, like a stray city dog.  You could hear the cars whimpering through the puddles, the bright window lights shivering up and down the cozy block, and the drops shattering in noisy protest against tin roofs in the damp twilight.  From the outside of every house, it seemed the whole street was listening to the clatter in hushed expectation, yet with subdued disappointment.  The whole world was holed up, some never intending to leave.

Inside of one house, I was at a birthday party.  Despite the sound of it, take every nostalgic image of balloons and cake out of your mind; imagine instead a twenty year old gringo in the middle of six middle aged Chileans sulking around one flickering television set in a cozy den.  The news spewed forth tragedies and the adults sat around, making sparse commentaries in the din of the TV and reclining on couches in a way that preached professionalism and apathy all at the same time.

I was too young for these people.  That became clear early on in the night, but surprisingly not so clear over the phone when I was invited earlier that day.  I had heard plenty of other Americans getting invited to random birthday parties and thought that I should try and not be rude and decline.  After exiting the metro stop and waiting for the twenty-seven year old birthday girl to pick me up, I briefly wondered why I was going but quickly gave up.  When you're huddling under a bus stop hang over in cold freezing rain in the middle of foreign suburbia, the why becomes very unhelpful.

After some more comments and some awkward hellos, the six middle aged Chileans and I adjourned to the table and began to eat dinner.  The food was delicious and the meat tender, and the group became more lively.  A thirty-year old man with light hair and a calm demeanor at my side began chatting with me about what I was doing in Chile, and I explained I was an economics major and somewhat haphazardly let slip that I was dedicating my life to helping the poor.  He mulled over this fact a bit while chewing a piece of meat as a married couple shuffled into the room and sat down next to me at the end of the table.  As we began scraping the last bits of corn into our mouths, the man next to me asked me how people are going to get out of poverty.  I responded as best as I knew with some garbled answer about attitudes and resources, while he nodded like one nods to a kid with a great imagination.  He turned to his plate, pondering my response like a less than satisfactory piece of modern art. I might has well have been in diapers.

As plates were collected by the birthday girl's mom, who I affectionately called "abuelita," tea, coffee, and mugs were passed around to everyone and the short matriarch meekly took a stool from the kitchen and sat down at the table.  As the whole table lit up with talk of adult things, I politely refused tea on account of my insomnia.  The wild eyed man who had sat down to my left looked slyly and at me and commented "I guess only old people drink tea, huh?"  The end of the table settled into chuckling while I nodded along.

Soon, the everyone at the table began talking about the country side, a foreign concept for most people in Santiago.  "I prefer to be where the people are," the wild eyed man said proudly.  "I would go crazy out there with nothing but countryside."

Suddenly, the matriarch of the household began to lift her eyes and speak in a slow, seasoned tone of voice.  As she spoke, awed silence descended on the whole table.

"I remember living in the countryside.  Everything was very spread out, and your neighbor might lie miles in another direction and information ran slow.  In fact, I remember during the earthquake, it was hard to hear about how everyone was doing, because no one had televisions and very few radios.  Might have to travel a while till you came to a place that had one.  You know that main plaza west of the center of the city?  I remember there was one television there, and the whole world gathered around it.  That was how we got information.  That's how it was."

She sipped her coffee, while all seven of the guests sat in reverent silence, pondering a thing beyond their pondering.

"I suppose nowadays we carry TV's in our pockets," I said.  The whole table nodded along, eyes grasping their dinner plates.

"Now," abuela said.  "Who wants cake?"

We sang happy birthday and ate the delicious cake.  Despite the fact that one person was getting older, everyone felt just a little bit younger.

~Jared