Today is a cultural post, but — due to tonight being the State Of The Union and the fact that culture & politics bleed into one another — this post will have a political flavor. i want to address today the idea of cultural priorities.
Part of defining a culture is identifying both the values and also the beliefs that lie behind it. Culture doesn’t just happen; it occurs in response to values of being that give birth to beliefs of action (and not the other way around as so many suppose). Culture doesn’t just randomly develop; there is an trajectoral arc that testifies both to the direction from which it came and also to the horizon towards where it heads. Culture doesn’t just emerge; it interacts, grows & matures, and responds to the input it receives from those who are inside pushing on it (giving), pulling on it (taking), and participating by observing it (acting more neutrally).
Existing in this world means navigating the systems of the world, and interfacing with those systems is an exercise in polarity. This fact (albeit non-exclusive) is because the enemy is a specific type of adversary to us. He is not a random kind of adversary – he is a certain kind of adversary. See, even as our adversary, he has to function within the confines defined for him both by the nature of his creation (for even he must be True to his created destiny as a creature and, indeed, cannot help but be) and also by the restraints, confines, & parameters placed on him by the Almighty. In short, he is a legal kind of adversary, and legality begets a very tight kind of dichotomy: black & white, right & wrong, good & evil, etc. He was not appointed to just any role – he was appointed to a legal role as the accuser of God’s children, as the prosecuting attorney tasked in this cosmic drama with bringing charges that showcase the “just” result so that mercy may be issued instead and simultaneously recognized as such.
As a result of Living – even with a ChristLife – in such a polarizing set of conditions spawned by two-dimensional systems where we are assaulted by such a barrage of systemic stimuli and barriers, we often perceive our circumstances to restrict our values of being and our beliefs of action to a linear spectrum running between two diametrically opposite points. However, if You imagine our systemic linear spectrum as either side of a high trapeze, You would readily see that there is a great deal of space all around that trapeze wire. Now, normal people would have to walk the trapeze wire to cross from one side to the other, but only because they cannot fly. Those who can fly find a whole 3-D plethora of routes to cross and also without the requisite fear of falling required by the nature of not being able to fly.
In terms of priorities, we generally reduce our options down to the ones defined by our two political parties or the two pundits representing alternate viewpoints. But there is what Rabbi Paul called “a more excellent way”: Love. The burden of capitalism is that it is a human invention. As such, it is limited to human motives, practices, & results. This is the same burden of communism or any other form of government other than a kingdom, although the salient difference between capitalism and communism, as one paired example, is that capitalism is birthed in freedom and communism in godlessness and humanism.
We need not box ourselves in the way we do. Far from being necessary, it is futile. The way away from the trapeze wire is not to lay down a perpendicular trapeze wire and proclaim a new mode of travel. The way away from the trapeze wire is to learn to fly…
As You listen to the President and responders tonight, keep in mind that they are really good trapeze artists but not capable of flight. They don’t have the mind of Christ; they know not the way ahead in the darkness, because they have no Light to show the way. They are political party representatives espousing tired, old, worldly, system-oriented perspectives. There will not be anything new in their rhetoric or cunning. There will not be anything fresh in their approaches. There will not be anything worthwhile in their pitches. There will only be the past repackaged as new.
Choosing either side of the linear spectrum we are shown to see by the professional pundits is like being caught between a Utopian Truth and a hopeless lie. You may have to Live in America and this world in practical terms, but You can see beyond both of them in spiritual terms and let that affect Your personal culture. For example, whereas kindness is a trait exhibited generally by people who have either a self-serving motive to it or by those with an internal reservoir of it based on either their personality or as a cultivated response to some event in their Life, a person who adopts the posture of the LORD Most High possesses kindness as a birthright, an heirloom, a family treasure to be distributed to anyone to whom You decide. The power of this is that it’s not coming from You, per se, but from Your family. In that extended backdrop, there is credibility, there is release from pressure to do it in expectation of anything in return or as a duty or because of social mores or due to a way to gain or get ahead. Instead of those things, You can be kind because kindness has been extended to You in abundance. You can be kind out of kindness itself. That is an entirely different scenario than in which most people ever experience kindness.
Don’t settle for the either/or of the world and its systems. Look for what is beyond the systems of our enemy who is in charge of this world at this present time. Close Your eyes and either remember the culture of heaven from where we came and to where we shall return or imagine it based on Abba, but don’t get caught in the lies of either extreme or the lie-ground in between them. Neither a Utopian Truth or a hopeless lie are Your birthright; Your heritage would never be so cheap….
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