Tag: bible

Christianity, Mental Health, and the Courage to Be

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I hate anxiety. Not just the somatic, psychological disease, but what the existentialists understood as an effect of a lack of meaning or fear of non-existence. But life is full of it. We dread the unknown and the future is entirely unknown, and somehow we have to make peace with that.

Jesus didn’t die for you to be anxious. He died for freedom from existential anxiety. He gave us the gift of purpose and certainty in God by repairing the relationship between us. We can be happy and truly happy. Even psychological anxiety is defeated: what do we have to worry about? There are no insecurities under the ultimate rock of God.

It’s only when we go back into ourselves and become self-centered and take on the delusion that we are self-sufficient. Our anxiety died in Jesus and it’s replaced with faith. There is such a freedom. Any earthly failure is insignificant. We rely on humility and prayer to God. Our identity is not in earthly work, but rather our eternal efforts. We have to keep the eternal picture in mind.

Whenever we are overwhelmed or lose control of our mind to the chaos of rumination, we can be certain that no authority compares even a little bit to God. Nothing on this earth can give us approval. All comes from God. We can throw the world away for a glimpse of the Lord.

One antidote is courage. The courage to be is a self-affirmation of one’s being in spite of a threat of nonbeing and the anxiety associated with it. We are full of the fear of death, guilt, condemnation, meaninglessness, and emptiness. In spite of this, we need the strength of faith to stand firm in God. Yet this is not of our own accord; we can only find the source of courage from God.

We need courage with every step. Every moment we forget our dependence on God. Our helplessness is always apparent and deluding ourselves into thinking we are not only reinforces the problem. Even in the mundane of everyday life, we need the courage to be.

Often, we need courage through action, and the main action we take in our modern world is through speech. Speech is the key device for interpersonal relations; we must use it to be holy. Being courageous must come with careful discernment and we must put a careful guard on our mouths. Yet we need to know when we must speak. When fear paralyzes our tongues yet we know it will do the Lord’s work, we must act and speak with courage.

A reminder is not enough. We have to actively practice courage at every moment. In all that we do, we have to lean into discomfort and get stronger under God. Little by little, we grow in God’s courage and become little gods.

Maximizing Talents and Influencing Others: The Way of Faith and Commitment in Christian Living

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A way of looking at the world can change after a night’s sleep. Some mornings we can wake up and everything in the world is shining and there is a veil of happiness; other mornings, doom and gloom, for no particular reason at all. In a more sophisticated way, we can be motivated by wages, the service of people, and, most importantly, hold the teachings and will of Christ in our hearts.

The perspective of Christians should be on Christ rather than Christianity. This is to say that our perspective needs to be aligned with the person and relationship we have with Christ. In contrast, we must not have our perspective aligned with the impersonal set of rules, doctrine, and theology of the church without first thinking of the person of Christ. The trap of the impersonal focus on Christianity is that we focus on the wrong thing: abstract bits and pieces that are applied in our lives that forget the very roots. It’s like copying out the letters of a foreign language without knowing what any of it means.

We must wait patiently for God’s plan. It can come overnight and we must be patient. By God’s will, we must trust and faithfully work as he guides us to larger milestones. The work is incremental and we might not notice, but there can be some drastic change we must be ready for at some critical mass. Since change can happen at any point, we have to appreciate the present. Things may seem monotonous but we can miss those days. We must value every day, minute, and second. And we have to work gratefully and diligently.

I try to be ambitious, whatever that means. I try to do the most in order to maximize what talents God blesses me with. But an issue I run into is having too many goals and having a fear of missing out. It’s important to maximize many talents and it might be possible if you delegate enough. You also need to make a game of being as fast and efficient as possible. All of this is also a fear of regret.

Life is short and we must remember we all die. We can take for granted that time passes and be passive until we face regret. Still, we cannot fear not achieving everything as this is a form of pride; we cannot believe that we are in any control of our lives and entitled to a kind of life. We must humble ourselves to the Lord and trust that we will live the best kind of life without any regret. The Christian life has no room for regret since we are fulfilling our true purpose–everything else pales in comparison.

As we live a Christian life, we always have to push hard and have a fighting spirit. We need to push through discomfort and be disciplined. Fortunately, with God, we have a good life and we can naturally push into these uncomfortable areas with a learning mindset and desire for knowledge. We can seek the truth and the tough road it takes to attain it. It gives us a tough day to come home and rest with satisfaction. We must commit to something, which means not committing to another thing. The opportunity cost.

Faith is the core of religion and has a bad reputation for being opposed to rationality. Faith is not irrational, as commonly understood. It is a leap after proper deliberation and forms a commitment in the areas that lack complete certainty. Complete certainty is often a lot more difficult to attain, especially with the scientific method. We aim for probabilities and inferences that are consistent with some base axioms. But we need not worry ourselves with questions of justifications among Christians. That’s the concern for natural theology.

There’s so much written on the topic of faith that it’s hard to add anything new; so, I’ll only share what I know, is unique to me, and I have experienced. Being faithful for me is always connecting everything in our lives to Christ. We give thanks first thing in the morning for continued life. The game that we get to play is insignificant from the eternal point of view. However, every action we take can have eternal ripples and we have to use every opportunity to serve God and glorify Christ. Faithfulness is directing all our actions toward Christ. We are the sacrifice: every hour, minute, and second. At the same time, we need not have an obsession based on some anxiety that we’ll be forgotten otherwise. Our eternal creator is faithful to us.

We can practice this virtue by being faithful to people. We can also be faithful to principles. It should be that order, however, because people should be our priority for serving God. He commands us to love others, not love rules. Rules are a guide to shape us to be loving. We have to keep loyal and steadfast in serving people. We have to remain trusting and confident that God will guide us towards the right people and that serving people will be a part of the great plan. And we have to be loyal to our relationships and love others fully.

Being faithful is ultimately a relational term. It is what binds us to one another. The precious relationship we have with Christ affects every part of us. It penetrates us through and through to the point that every decision in this life is understood through our relation to Christ.

Hope is the calming ointment from faith. Hope is also an act of faith and is tethered to the ultimate commitment of faith. Hope strives towards the eternity that is promised and that we cannot fully comprehend. Like a ticket of our faith, we hold onto hope and we experience the joy with Christ in anticipation of knowing him more. When we feel lost, we need to have hope. When we feel we are weak or alone, we must have hope. In the darkest times, we have to trust in the Lord with all our hearts and lean not on our own understanding. The relationship we have in Christ is unbreakable and perfect.

Hope overcomes the world. Any pain, strife, or trouble can be overcome by the hope we have in Christ. All is insignificant compared to the hope we have in eternity. We endure and wait as patient servants. Hope is has a direction: it points to our faith in Christ. Hope gives us the joy of desire and anticipation. We can have the safety net below us and we can always trust that our future will be good. Perhaps not comfortable, but good.

Being steadfast is understood in terms of resolution or being unwavering. We need this attitude towards our faith. It is not always easy to keep our faith in the center of our minds, even though it is the center of our lives. We have to have the right priority in being steadfast. The way we have to be steadfast in our work has to be in virtue of our faith, and not in the work alone. All the historical heroes are steadfast in their goals. They are steadfast in their mission through every trial or tribulation. We have to stay focused but focused in the right way. All other distractions get to draw us away.

It’s a commitment, loyalty, or faith in the Lord and his plan for us. We can never know if what we do is right or wrong or productive or completely silly. Our conception of what is correct is so often completely wrong, so we should lean on the Lord. That is our Archimedean point. We will be firmly fixed and not change in belief or determination. Like a servant or warrior, we will be moved and trust that we will grow to be sons and friends in the end. We have to grow.

Understanding the Virtue of Purity and Its Relationship to Modern Struggles

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Purity is tied up with the ugly history of Puritanism. Without going into this history, we can try to unbundle the virtues of purity. There’s another aspect to also be careful of that might be tied up with the ugly historical developments. That is the basicness or primitivity of purity in our moral thinking. Recent evolutionary morality traces our moral reasoning to basic instincts or intuitions that are sensitive to notions of purity. The adaptive component is related to disease prevention, but the same mechanism leads to repugnant social norms, like homophobia. In any case, a look at Christian purity as a virtue must be informed by these distractions and traps.

Corruption can be understood as the antithesis of purity. There is a really broad way of looking at purity: anything that is sin. But that is too broad to be useful. Still, we can make some broad observations before diving into a more focused look into specific topics. C.S. Lewis locates all sin as originating in pride. Applied to purity, pride is a corruption of purity. We might look to the allegory of the Garden of Eden. It was a pure state that was corrupted by the sin of pride of disobedience and self-reliance on knowledge independent of God. The impurity of sin is introduced. Something went wrong and there is no longer perfection. This impurity distances us from the pureness of God’s nature.

How do these abstract stories and conceptualizations relate to the virtue of pureness? Purity is aspirational in that it seeks to return to a sinless state. To this end, the virtues of purity are associated with an increased sensitivity to sin and a striving to eliminate it entirely. Sin takes diverse forms, so, large or small, this virtue aims to capture it all. It strives for a perspective matching God’s nature that is incongruent with sin; it is the Archimedean point from assessing the entirety of actions and our spiritual self; it is an unconditional commitment that gives meaning to every step in our life and continually strives to inch closer to God.

I want to move now to specific topics, with no particular regard for importance other than that it relates to my own struggles and the struggles of modernity. To begin, let’s focus on a manifestation of pride in psychological terms: narcissism. Narcissism is so common in the technological era of being bombarded with grand narratives and main character syndromes, the constant reminder of inadequacy and comparisons leading to envy, and the self-absorbed naval gazing that results.

I want to suggest that this is a particularly devastating problem for our ages. In the age of technology and instant gratification, we have an issue with wanting a thrill, lusting after that dopamine hit. We cannot stay still with our own thoughts. We need to be a part of the constant stream of the technological network and be a part of that community. Missing out, or the fear of missing out leaves us gnawing to get back.

The gnawing feeling can be thought of as an addiction, but we can simply understand it in terms of gluttony. We have an informational gluttony for constant updates. Every desire to take away our internal monologue can be satisfied by picking up the phone. We are fed a constant stream of other thoughts and information which takes us away from our own. The escapism from whatever plagues us, whatever our mind urges us to tend to, and the real issues confronting us are taken away by the ether of our technology.

What is the remedy? We have to correct our desires and control our thoughts. We have to shape our will to develop the ability to desire correctly. Simply put, we need the habit of focusing on the silence instead of the buzz of technology. The difficulty in this is that there is no person to be accountable to, and transparency in our actions is hard to come by in the privacy of our relationship with technology.

The Significance of Christian Love and Relationships in Human Existence

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Love is the greatest command given to us. It’s so elusive and hazy yet intuitive and inescapable. Language finds its limit in trying to capture this epitome of human existence. The cliches and central themes of every story and human experience point to this magnificence.

What’s interesting about love is that it’s a universal human experience yet also the center of Christian belief. We model our lives and often devote our entire purpose to love—romantic, service, and so forth—and it all leads back to God’s love of us.

Exercising love unto others is divine. It models our Lord and orients us into our true selves. No matter how imperfect we are, we can still for a moment become little Christs by exercising love. It is an active process. We serve and use our actions to show love.

Christian love is supposed to be the purest form. Christians have insider knowledge of divine love, which is the ideal form of love. I can’t possibly begin to explain this subject. I’m not sure anybody can. There is a vast theological literature on divine love, and I suspect it coincides with secular literature on the philosophy of love. All truth is God’s truth.

People are not islands. Relationships are necessary for a good life. As much as it’s easy to be passive about it and let relationships come to you–especially in his modern life where you might not be able to get away from people or you desire isolation. What’s crucial is to invest in your relationships. Investments must be careful, however, because you have limited time and resources in your life. But don’t be overly picky and shield yourself from people you aren’t comfortable interacting with. Investing comes with some level of risk, and some more risks can net you more rewards. Humans depend on each other; we are social animals. All the more, as Christians, we must establish and build relationships. A useful analogy, one which I hope won’t be taken too far into a harmful context, is an investment. We can invest in relationships through our interactions, love, and care. Relationships are a great joy for us, but our duty as Christians goes beyond our own selfish fulfillment. We have to create deep, meaningful relationships to show the love of God. Christians are not supposed to be an island all the time. We must interact with the world and this means connecting with people. Jesus did it. We must do it.

Christianity identifies the importance of relationships. Relationships with strangers are necessary for demonstrating Christianity and evangelizing, but they can often be more impactful with those you know. When you are intimate with somebody, you gain their trust and your testimony through your actions is a way of demonstrating what it means to be a Christian. Shine like a light. Not alone, under a bed, covered, or isolated; rather, shine for people.

It’s easy not to interact with people when you’re naturally a bit antisocial or anxious. The inertia of staying alone is easy. But that’s not our duty; this is also not good for us. It’s also wise to choose which relationships to invest in. Sometimes it’ll be clear to us through the hand of the Lord. We can be pushed in directions towards people that we can help and who can help us; the synergy of growth and development. We can’t be shy about this opportunity.

We cannot love without relationships. Our greatest duty is to love, but how can we love without interacting with the world. It’s an act of faith to be vulnerable. For me, as a man, raised in an environment of toxic masculinity and emotion suppressing, my emotional dimension was largely stifled. I had to really focus on this weakness and my lack of emotional intelligence because it really started to affect my relationships with others. I had so many barriers to overcome insofar as trying to not only express my feelings but understand my feelings. For me, communicating my feelings and understanding them went hand-in-hand. It involved a step of earnestly speaking without pretense, ulterior motive, or rhetoric. I had to unlearn my defense mechanism of avoiding these tough discussions. I had to bare myself to be hurt. I had to trust that I wouldn’t be hurt, or, at the least, that I could recover from it. This process wasn’t triggered by intimates, although they may have been a catalyst for it. Rather, my step towards vulnerability stemmed from a faith in God. My prayers had to be honest. I could trust God that I could be vulnerable. To speak the truth.

It can be tough to do so many things as a Christian. Trying to be social when we naturally aren’t or doing the hard work of reaching out and growing a relationship is uncomfortable. Our comfort is our sacrifice to God. What we value most–safety, time, comfort–is a worthy sacrifice. Compared to the more abstract sacrifices of efforts it should be easy to sacrifice in other areas, like charity or generosity. We have to note that it’s part of our duty to give all of our idols. Money is an obvious one. Time is an obvious one. Less obvious is a combination: our efforts, sacrificing financial gain or personal leisure time, to devote to others. We have to sacrifice the best lamb.

We see that our purpose is to have a relationship with God, and we cannot be alone or it’d be hell. In the world, we seek to mimic the perfect relationship with imperfect people. We cannot avoid people and I believe we are commanded to dive deep into relations with people. It’s how we show God’s love. It’s how we see the presence of fellowship. We can see this through God and model our relationships with our relation with God. In the best case, in this world, we can have a small glimpse of heaven through our relationships. We create communities. We have fellowship.

Living by Faith and Love: The Power of Trust and Care in Serving Others

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Conceit and selfishness are a type of temporary indulgence that is meaningless. Much of our purpose comes from serving others. We cannot take comfort in our own comfort. For me, my motivation comes from the service and sacrifice of my parents, and this generates my own attitude of service and sacrifice for their comfort. Often, we can be self-indulgent and accountable to no person in particular. But we need transparency. We should be accountable to ourselves and what can beget regret.

To serve with love and kindness requires humility. We have to be careful against pride. The temptation to be kind to ourselves over others is inertia. This temptation has been overcome by our Lord. We must serve others wholly without thinking about ourselves. It has to be love for love’s sake. We shouldn’t seek admiration from others or ourselves. Kindness—true Christian kindness—involves a deep and pure love for others. It isn’t self-referential. It teaches us to stop thinking about ourselves and be benevolent in the proper way.

We should practice kindness at every chance we get. We must look for every opportunity. We exist to serve. Even the secular world is given the moral sense to know that kindness is needed; we see it in toddlers. But as we grow more sophisticated, or perhaps haughtier, we must return to the basic kindness to show to others. The simple idea is to treat others how we want to be treated: with kindness.

We must be generous and considerate. It’s active and merciful. We must go out of our way to be kind. It’s our onus to others to bear the burden of social interactions. To make them feel comfortable and go out of our way to connect. In the same way Paul didn’t care about food restrictions in order to accommodate others, our job is to go out of our way to love others.

It helps us grow. Our mission is proactive and we have to bring a sword. But it isn’t to antagonize; rather it is to fight for souls. We have to teach others with tenderness, patience, and love. The weight and burden are something that a person must bear, and why shouldn’t it be us?

God accommodates us in the greatest and most perfect way. He gives us a bridge and lifeline from his eternal perfection down to our little, dirty world. We can see the perfect example of accommodation. But we also see where we don’t have to accommodate. We don’t have to tolerate sin in itself, but we must accommodate the sin within others as we do ourselves; we see God is perfect, and sin is more detestable but he still loves us.

We have to remember and habituate ourselves to put ourselves in the way of discomfort. It’s nothing compared to the actual harm and danger that Christian predecessors had. We should be considered fortunate that the worst we experience is discomfort or expend a little effort. This is our mission. Our fight is manageable.

The fight for charity and discomfort go hand-in-hand. We need to keep giving so as to not clutch onto anything as an idol. Our giving to others is an act of faith in God. I do not need anything but you Lord. We can be renewed in comfort by laying our heads every night on our beds inside our homes. We must be grateful but also appreciate that others are lacking. We must try to help others always and not lose heart.

In the modern age, we grow increasingly insensitive to private gestures of generosity. We can tip heavy sums to impress our friends but we neglect the homeless and destitute we walk by. It’s such a basic necessity that intersects with all social problems. I remember as a boy, I thought it was a given that everybody had homes. I remember some nights when I desperately wished I was home when I was out late at night.

It’s important to place others above ourselves. It’s a model of service that habituates us to be in the presence of God. When Jesus washed the feet of his disciplines, he did it out of love and care and it flowed naturally from his relationship with God. Those overt acts of service are not the only forms, though. Every step Jesus took and action was in service of us.

We are given a duty to serve. We are told to serve. We might know a tiny slice of why we need to serve others. I’m sure there are countless other reasons why it is good for us, but we need to do it out of genuine love for others or, at the least, love for God. We cannot lose focus from serving others. The sins that might hinder and entangle us can distract us and push us inwards into some navel-gazing. The best we should do is forget about ourselves and just serve. If we can’t reflect in the proper way without becoming self-absorbed, we should instead just serve others. Then we might learn to serve ourselves as we serve others.

We need to go out of our way to serve. Our every action needs to be to serve. With love and faith, we need to embrace every pain and discomfort that comes with service. It makes our lives easier: we have a singular general principle for action. I’m sure there are exceptions, but they are few and clear. The cross can get heavier, but it’s light for now.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. Trust others through our trust in God, but not naively. We must be faithful and generous with our trust in others, especially because it’s how we can show our love. We can live in peace when we are able to trust freely. I think about the shrewdness of being selective of who we trust. We fear harm. Some are warranted. We can expose ourselves to most harm except spiritual harm. We need to put our faith in God to have good discernment.

We must live by faith in the Son of God. He loves and gives himself. I think trust is easier for some than others. With empathy and care, trust can come easily. If we aren’t this way, we need to learn.

We need to care. It’s an active process. It requires emotion and thought. Where we often fail is to think that appreciating rights and distancing ourselves is sufficient to fulfill our duty to others. We have to for further and go out of our way to serve. Jesus cared for us. God cared for us. He didn’t have to show mercy and love, but he went out of his way to do so. We have to learn from this and model this.

Care is focused and devoted. We care deeply about individuals and get to know their needs so that we can properly address them. It tries to parse out people from the masses. Often, through tribalism or indifference, we group people and have a general misanthropic attitude. We need to get rid of it to love people—individual people, with patience and commitment.

We cannot be selfish, but we can show care for ourselves in a holy way. We shouldn’t think that reframing from sim or a good time is failing self-care; rather, it is a sacrifice and act of faith to God that he will take care of us and know what’s best for us.

The Christian Perspective on Honor: Rediscovering the Lost Virtue for Modern Faith

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Honor is a lost virtue. Honor, defined loosely as living up to the expectations of a group through keeping faith, promises, and truthfulness, is traditionally linked to free, adult males and is difficult to justify against universalist ethical theories. Honor has historically been central to political and commercial life, especially in a social context where individuals can bind themselves.

Modern philosophers often view honor as superficial compared to consequentialist and deontological ethics, yet some, like Aristotle, considered it the pinnacle of virtue. Honor’s commitments are socially contextual and non-contractual, relying on individual capacity and varying by society. It is seen as a measure of one’s ability to fulfill promises and display power. The concept faces challenges, such as its association with status and reputation, its misattribution to groups, and its alignment with the moral standards of its social context. While adaptable to enlightened concerns, honor’s non-universal nature may conflict with modern ethical intuitions like international human rights.

Despite its perceived primitiveness and association with questionable principles, like lawless gangs or vigilantism, honor remains significant in various forms. Honor cultures were much more common in the past, and it has grown to mean many things. Some relate it to valor, chivalry, and honesty; others connect it to a quality of worthiness and respect in relation to social standing. Socially, it has been connected to a code or a code of honor, or a kind of social norm that is understood and respected, and obeyed. It can cut to the core of what defines the elevated status of humanity: the dignity and respect owed to humans in virtue of being human. Of course, this dignity must be upheld and deserving through one’s actions.

The honor however does not come from our own pride, historical legacy, or honor of our tribe. The honor of the tribe is closer. We must remove ourselves completely from the equation. We must be honorable because we are a representative of Christ. Our honor is also not motivated by domination and superiority; rather, it is motivated by love and aligning ourselves with God. If anything, we seek to attain superiority over sin, but not over sinful people—this is an important distinction.

Through the Christian lens, honor is a duty. We must honor God, honor strangers, honor our intimates, and honor ourselves. We must align ourselves with the code of conduct worthy of Christians. Obedience to commands, while it is a small part of our relationship with Christ, is crucial and must not be taken lightly. Obedience and honor flows naturally from a loving relationship, but sin corrupts and we must always be conscience of honor to algin ourselves properly with God again.

Honor is closely related to holiness. We have to maintain holiness and strive to go beyond our sinful nature. The principles we follow from our relationship with Christ must be as important to us as the chase for glory is important for the warrior. We must enthusiastically uphold righteousness and high standards of Christ.

The lost virtue of honor must be on the minds of contemporary Christians. Drawing hard lines and doing things out of obedience is forgotten in this age of liberalism and self-reliance. To think that we are the arbiters of the code of conduct and that we can prioritize our desires over being honorable is hubris. We must humble ourselves. We must act honorably. 

Christian Meditation: Exploring the Unique Dimension of Relationship with God

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Meditation has been in the attention of empirical studies and its positive effects have been readily proven. Still, there is more to uncover, especially in relation to more abstract ideas of religiosity, mysticism, and sacred ideas of enlightenment, the divine, and so forth. It is difficult to connect to Christianity without casting Christianity in the box of just another religion. I will try to tease this separation out and argue for what is unique about Christianity and meditation.

Christian meditation can include other readily studied elements of mindfulness, peace, or whatever else is in popular jargon, but the unique dimension is its focus on the relationship with God. Christian meditation seeks to strip away all the distractions of the world and focus on a deeper reality of, as coined by Martin Buber, I and Thou. This is characterized by mutuality, presentness, and ineffability. It is a direct relation to God, who is ever-present in us and the awareness of the relationship is triggered by many sublime resemblances—music, nature, or other forms. We disconnect from this awareness of God so easily, and it becomes difficult to reconnect to this ideal view.

Being present is another widely used term in religion, particularly in Eastern traditions. One adage suggests that obsession over the future leads to anxiety and obsession over the future leads to depression; as such, the proper way to live is to be in the present. Meditation is supposed to help with this. A key takeaway is the ability to control one’s thoughts and control one’s ruminations on thing out of our control. It’s tempting to self-flagellate over our past or go through hypotheticals of the future, but resistance and focus on the present experiences is the healthier way to live our lives. Enough navel-gazing and paralysis through our catastrophizing.

How do we understand this through Christianity? God commands us not to ruminate on our sins; we must learn from it, ask for forgiveness, and move on. God also commands us to trust him for our futures; we can make prudent plans to some degree, but we must not overly commit to our future. This latter point needs explanation. We are not in control of our future and we tend to forget this. We think we have the power or control to direct our steps, yet we have brief glimpses of our helplessness. We do not know what to do with our ultimate helplessness so we naturally try to believe ourselves out of this. To delude ourselves into thinking we have control is the ultimate poison when things do not go our way. This is why faith and reliance on God is liberating.

The eternal perspective is best understood as a continual present. It takes faith and dependence on God to move forward this way. By staying in the present, we become free from everything else in the world. The daily scurry that is motivated by an uncertain future and the push of regret from a turbulent past—all those elements dissolve in the present. We can enjoy life by enjoying our walk with the Lord.

We also do not know what our past leads up to. As our past grows, it can become increasingly unclear how it all fits together. The trajectory of the past into the future can be so unclear to us. As the saying goes, things can change overnight. In this vein, the monotony of our day-to-day present can be upsetting. But we have to understand again that any second anything can happen and change can be drastic. We have to be faithful in our day-to-day for our master to call us. We must be ready.

The metaphor for me is the walk with Christ. As we live our lives, we are in constant walk with Christ. He never leaves us, and there is nothing outside of the walk; that is, our very steps into the future are our walk with Christ. Meditation allows us to tap into the reality above our day-to-day life: the presence of Christ by our side walking with us.

This is particularly lost in the modern world and meditation becomes that much more important. We get swept up in the distractions of the world and almost forget completely about the reality that is much more real than our day-to-day. The very mode of thinking becomes stuck. We do the most unhuman and unnatural thing for humans: forget the relationship with Christ. We can remember Christ through our inundated lens, but this forgets the relational aspect of fully experiencing the indescribable presence of Christ.  

I often meditate on the past in order to understand the present. I looked at an old photo album today and saw my parents. I meditated on their position as recently arrived immigrants—poor, scared, and working all the time. I felt so ungrateful for my current position and I felt like I had an infinite debt owed to them. This taste of being truly loved is a fraction of what God feels for us and what he’s done for us. The true depths are unfathomable.

Lost Virtue of Reverence: Rediscovering Humility and Sublime

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Reverence is an appropriate feeling of deep respect, awe, or veneration. Reverence for God can elicit “fear” (Proverbs 1:7), and worshiping God should be with “reverence and awe” (Hebrews 12:28-29). Albert Schweitzer notes a “reverence for life.” He contends that ethics and political life have largely lost the core tenet shared with nature, namely, that we all live and want to go on living. Paul Woodruff explores the ancient virtue of reverence in his 2001 book. He holds that reverence is a cardinal virtue, defined as a “well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have.” Modern life has lost a lot of the reverence for family time, sharing a meal together, reverence for our democratic duties as citizens to vote, or reverence for authority figures. We kept other ceremonies like a memorial for a dead friend or standing for the national anthem. Reverence, Woodruff explains, has the feature that “it cannot be changed or controlled by human means, is not fully understood by human experts, was not created by human beings, and is transcendent.”

The phenomenology of reverence, or what religious reverence feels like, is something I can describe only from my own introspection. To me, reverence is an active relational feeling instead of something passively bestowed upon me. It is deeply engaging and bleeds into ideas of worship.

It taps into the indescribable relation we have to God; as some describe as the I-thou relation. The finite and infinite. The categorical difference. We cannot comprehend it, but it is so familiar to us because we are created for it. We avoid it and find distraction because it is an overwhelming feeling. Once we appreciate it, everything in our lives—all the distractions, feeble goals, and passing value—instantly becomes insignificant. It puts our minds to the limits of ourselves and the possibility of what’s beyond. The spiritual. It goes beyond fear. It is the trembling that comes with facing something so much larger than ourselves that we feel like nothing. Our life can be extinguished, and it would pale in comparison to the ultimate greatness.

From reverence comes sober humility. Perfect humility doesn’t need modesty because it doesn’t even think about oneself needing to be modest. The closer we get to humility, the more we forget ourselves and think of others. Never will we think of ourselves more highly than others, but with faith, we can act in wise judgment. We can align ourselves with the wisdom of God and see the world more clearly. We can come closer with reverence and fear of the Lord to the truth. The truth of the world is knowing the truth of Christ and unveiling what the world really is.

The phenomenology is close to what Immanuel Kant characterizes as the sublime towards certain aesthetic experiences. Experiences of the sublime can be triggered by the vastness of space, a great thunderstorm, or a vast mountain. A great unknown, something larger than us, or something greater in comparison to us. Kant experienced the stars in the sky filled him with awe, and the heavens declare the glory of God. It’s an aesthetic quality commonly associated with nature. It is our taste of the vastness and eternity of heaven. The most magnified thing in our world is our experience of nature. There is no comparison to the firsthand experience. Everything is God’s creation. Seeing God’s touch in nature is a unique beauty. It brings out our soul to call for the Lord and want something beyond this life. For this reason, we should experience this feeling and nature quite often. Solitude with nature and God.

Others have observed the sublime in the context of music. It sparks an emotion of ascendancy and transcendence. I still don’t quite understand it. I’m not skilled enough. It takes a lot of skill and work to appreciate the finer nuances and develop the appreciation for some types of beauty. It takes work and time. Perhaps this is the power of religious music. Aesthetic pleasure in the arts only emulates this. Every art and science can be beautiful in the right light.

Modern culture has downplayed the sacred, and the sacred is tied to reverence. In the Christian life, our acts of worship and devotion can dangerously become complacent routines rather than acts of reverence. We must tap into the experience of the sublime with God as a renewal of faith and reflect on what Christ has done with reverence.