Smile When You Say That

Spirituality Column #103
October 28, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN), Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Smile When You Say That
By Bob Walters

It’s hard not to notice the anger hanging thick in the air this political season.

Between the two – anger and the political season – I think the more important and dangerous issue for Christians is anger.

Anger is a spirit and Biblical issue for all seasons.

Broadly, there are two kinds of anger … righteous anger and selfish anger. Both are based on fear, but on two distinctly different kinds of fear.

One fear is the reverent, righteous fear of losing something we love … like our communion with Christ. Our “Fear of God” should be understood in this way, as an expression of our commitment to love Him.

We also must understand that God’s Old Testament anger is about His love for us; His wanting to protect us from the dumb, destructive things we do with the freedom that He gives us.

And by the way, are we all agreed as Christians that we are supposed to use that freedom to find Him, love Him, and worship Him? Not to find, love and worship ourselves?

The other fear is the self-centered, “or else” kind of fear that makes us afraid something bad will happen. It causes the foolish anger Proverbs warns against – the fear of punishment and condemnation; the fear that destroys love.

Selfish anger is an outgrowth of Satan’s evil grip on our world and, too often, on our individual lives.

Believe me when I say I’m not preaching here from some elevated pulpit. Controlling my worldly fear and anger is perhaps the most difficult part of my Christian walk, because I know I have a fearful, angry, worldly beast within me. Satan knows it too.

The upside of being able to simply say, “Jesus Christ is Lord,” and mean it in a way that only the Holy Spirit can teach us how to mean it, keeps that miserable beast of worldly fear and anger in chains.

Then the real upside of a Christian’s experience … peace, joy, hope, faith. love (see Galations 5:22-23) – even in a political season – is truly ours.

So … smile when you’re in church. Smile when you pray. Smile because the sincerity and depth of your love for God is a gift of grace you could not earn.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com), still thinking of this political season, reminds all to smile when we can obey Proverbs 15:1 and let our “gentle answer turneth away wrath.”

Rational Faith, Real Wisdom

Spirituality Column #102
October 21, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN), Current in Westfield (IN) newspaper

Rational Faith, Real Wisdom
By Bob Walters

Perhaps the Bible’s simplest book to understand is Proverbs.

It plays well to any crowd … everyone wants to be wise. And Proverbs is, front to back, advice on wisdom: How to get it. How to keep it. How to recognize it. How to increase it. How to apply it. How to share it.

Proverbs is 31 chapters of wisdom one-liners.

It also gives nearly equal time to fools: How to be one. How to recognize one. How to avoid being one.

Nothing else in the Bible is so secularly clear, so spiritually uplifting, and so humanly convicting all at the same time. Proverbs is a close-up look into a brightly-lit wisdom mirror.

The hardest thing about reading Proverbs is its common construction of couplets that tug us in two directions at once, e.g.: “The wise do this, but a fool does that.” Gosh, some of those first ones make me feel smart; and too many of the second ones make me feel dumb.

Proverbs insists that we are down-to-the-bone honest with ourselves. You can’t fool Proverbs.

In our everyday lives too often we confuse wisdom with simple book-learned knowledge. Too often in culture we see people praying at the altar of rationality and logic.

Knowledge, rationality and logic are good, but it’s wise to at least occasionally consider that they are manmade. I think, therefore I am. That is Descartes, not the Bible.

Proverbs tells us that true wisdom comes from God and resides in faith.

A dear friend advised me, in a time of emotional confusion, to consider Proverbs 3, verses 5 and 6:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding; in all ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight.

Lean not on my own understanding? Before I was a believer, I couldn’t imagine. As a believer, I shudder at the thought of having nothing but my own understanding.

I think, therefore I am? That’s rational.

I think, therefore I pray. That’s wise.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) suggests a month of Proverbs … read one chapter a day. Consider it “Vitamin P.”

Rational Faith

Spirituality Column #101
October 14, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) Newspaper
Current in Westfield (IN) Newspaper

Rational Faith
By Bob Walters

Bill Maher used to be a funny guy. I saw him 20 years ago when he was the hired entertainment at an auto racing banquet in Monterey, Calif. He did a nice job.

He turned up a couple years later on the ABC TV show “Politically Incorrect” and through the 1990s morphed from comic into a savvy political/cultural satirist/wise guy. Generally funny and irreverent, his nightly mix of four oddly-matched guests in group conversation about current issues seemed compelling, relevant and often surprising.

I remember one night his guests were hard-right G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate break-in fame, a verbose and passionate conservative African-American woman activist whose name I cannot remember, pleasant “Brady Bunch mom” actress Florence Henderson, and Satan-worshipping bilge rock musician Marilyn Manson, who by the way is a guy.

Surprisingly, the only guest who consistently made sense was Manson, speaking quietly of his desire, as an artist, to push the limits of what people believed. He didn’t bash Christ or defend Satan. His stage act is truly horrifying (I’ve seen clips and heard stories), but that evening he simply sounded like a thoughtful artist.

Maher moved on to no-holds-barred HBO and renamed his show “Real Time.” I lost track of him because I don’t have HBO. But he’s turned up now in the movies with his intensely anti-God screed of a film, "Religulous." It is a Christian-bashing, God-denying, religion-ridiculing atheist’s delight promoting the irrationality of faith.

Certainly some faith groups will organize boycotts, but it is so over-the-top I doubt many people take the film seriously.

Before its release, I spent quite a bit of time studying the film’s website which has several clips and plenty of explanatory background. I got the gist of the film and probably won’t bother paying to see it.

More than anything, I watch Maher and feel an intense human pang of regret, in a seriously prayerful way, that anyone is so distant from and intellectually hostile toward God and the saving grace of Jesus Christ. Maher seems like a scared kid trying to talk his way out of the principal’s office.

I’m happy, joyful and secure in my faith and see Christ as the most consistently rational, intellectually stimulating part of my being.

Rationality dictates that God’s existence depends neither on my saying He does, nor Maher saying He doesn’t. God just is. Faith is that simple.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) notes that so many people try to create God in their own image, and get so mad when God doesn’t cooperate.

What We Choose to Believe

Spirituality Column #100
October 7, 2008
Current in Carmel (IN) newspaper
Curren! in Westfield (IN) newspaper

What We Choose to Believe
By Bob Walters

Acclaimed postmodern writer David Foster Wallace, the recently deceased author of Infinite Jest, once said, “The only thing that is capital T True is that you get to decide … what you worship.”

This particular truth coming from a postmodernist – someone who shuns the ideas of absolute truth or of a God who is the final arbiter of right and wrong – is astonishing.

It was part of his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.

In adult life, Wallace said, “there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.”

Wallace lists money, things, our own body, beauty, intellect and sexual allure – our self-centered default settings – among that which we will unconsciously learn to worship in the absence of a conscious spiritual focus.

Wallace eloquently describes how our automatic, hard-wired human self-centeredness traps us and spiritually kills us, i.e., eats us alive: we will fear the loss of money, the loss of beauty, power and allure, the inadequacy of not knowing everything.

Wallace is saying that my conscious faith in Christ or your conscious faith in something else pulls our human passions away from, and hence gives us freedom from, our self-centeredness – our utter focus on self, and on self as God – that was Satan’s leverage in the Garden with Adam and Eve.

Wallace went on to say, “the really important kind of freedom involves … [our individual] … discipline … to care about other people and sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

Unwitting as it may have been, that is an excellent description – a capital T Truth – of what Christians are supposed to be.

Wallace suffered from long-term depression and committed suicide Sept. 12 (2008). I doubt he would have read so much Christian theology into his address, given that he couldn’t bring himself to spell out “Jesus Christ” (J.C.). But Jesus was unmistakably in that piece of writing.

We choose what we believe. True. Choose wisely.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) found this address in the Sept. 19, 2008, Wall Street Journal. It makes Bill Mahar’s new “Religulous” movie about the irrationality of faith seem awfully small.