Interesting Lyrics

This is from a favorite band of mine for years now. They're an austrailian punk band called "The Living End"...

I may not believe in God,
It doesn't mean I'm a lesser person.
I still have a heart,
And I know what it feels like to be broken.

I may not believe in Jesus,
But I believe in sacrifice.
Life doesn't always stand a reason,
And no one ever gets a chance to live it twice.

But I'd rather risk my fate,
Than to lose my faith,
In the lovin', the hatin',
The constant debatin',
The chaos, the calm.
Raise the alarm.

The living that die,
The constant deny,
The chaos, the calm.
Raise the alarm.

I may not believe in regrets,
But I believe in salvation.
Some things I'd rather forget.
We choose what we see, And we see what we choose to believe.

In the name of the father, The son, and the holy ghost.
I'm not concerned with religion,
After all it's what's inside that matters most.

But I'd rather risk my fate,
Than to lose my faith,
In the lovin', the hatin',
The constant debatin',
The chaos, the calm.
Raise the alarm.

The living that die,
The constant deny,
The chaos, the calm.
Raise the alarm.

Two things jump out at me from this:
1- Though he does not believe in a God, he still wrestles with his existential angst born out of his brokenness and past. It is from this angst that he hopes for and believes in salvation, sacrifice, etc.

2- The chorus characterizes his understanding of religion. For him faith is good, while religion is marked by an oscillation between the extremes of chaos, calm, love, hate- all marked by recidivist debate and denial. I, for one, agree with him on this point. Religion is an awful thing, yet Christianity at its core is not religion per se, but it is a message of forgiveness and peace.

the past...

A few weeks ago my parents moved from the house I grew up in to a smaller apartment in New York. And through the bustle of a family Christmas amid boxes and paper plates I was given several boxes full of my old things to look through and keep/throw away. The boxes were an accumulation of mementos dating back from before I can remember. As I read the yearbook notes and birthday cards and as I looked through all the old pictures I was filled with conflicting emotions as I relived what seemed to be my entire life.

I was specifically struck by how much my past still simmers beneath my consciousness, so easily stirred by a single photograph.

While I had many favorable memories stored in all those boxes, I also had many more memories that I wished could be left behind. Memories that I know I still carry with me and affect how I live today. The specter of past sorrows, embarrassments, and fears still echo today. Or as the Allman Brothers say, "What's done is done, ... and now I'm runnin' from a man with a gun"

It seems we always carry our pasts with us. In psychologist Clotaire Rapaille's book, The Culture Code, he postulates that people make their present decisions strictly based upon their past experiences. He says, "The combination of the experience and its accompanying emotion create something known widely (and coined as such by Konrad Lorenz) as an imprint. Once an imprint occurs, it strongly conditions our thought processes and shapes our future actions. Each imprint helps make us more of who we are. The combination of these imprints defines us."


Said another way, while each new day seems to offer an infinite number of possibilities, even the possibilities themselves are limited by past decisions and experiences. One's career, family, medical history, etc. all influence the number and amount of possibilities available. Even worse, the very decisions that I make now are, according to Rapaille, influenced by a past that is ever-present with me. My genetic make-up, social conditioning, family history all seem to dictate my eventual course of action. Though I wish I could simply "put the past away" (Third Eye Blind), I am never truly free from my past - I am bound by it!

One may (and should) ask: is it possible for one to be rid of their past and live in freedom? It is really possible to begin again? Can the "old man" die and be reborn as a genuine new creation?

This radical freedom from the past is only available by the grace of God through the forgiveness of sin. In faith the past and its folly is taken away as far as the East is from the West. When I'm loved as if that history never happened, then that past is gone. When I'm loved in the midst of the brokenness of the past, then I am given true freedom.

losing everything...

Yesterday I saw an article in BBC news reported that Adolf Merckle, a 74 year-old German billionaire, took his own life after losing over 600 million dollars last year alone. It seems that he lost everything he held dear: power, prestige, influence, the high regard of peers, etc. In losing everything, he despaired to the point that his own death seemed like the best option. With the US losing over half million jobs last month alone (raising the unemployment rate to a staggering 7.2%) I've been wondering a lot about the meaning of loss.

This brings me to the paradox found in Jesus' teachings when he says: "Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life will gain it." This phrase occurs 4 times in the synoptic gospels and once in John. It seems to be central to Jesus' teaching. It should be said that he is not talking about martyrdom, or death as a consequence of a noble war. He is instead talking about the death of the self and the loss of all that one holds dear. This is explicitly found in the parable of the seed of grain when Jesus says, "unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds."

One must beg the question, how is life to be found by losing it?


In losing our power, prestige, influence, celebrity, etc. we lose everything that has meaning to us. We lose all the devices that we've constructed as substitutes for God so that all we have left is God. As St. Paul said, "Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead. (II Cor. 1:9)"

When we have nothing left to hold on to, we find God. This is not some God of fanciful dreams, but rather is a God who himself lost everything for our sake. Death and loss is not a sinking into nothingness, but God is one who meets us in our death.