mgpcpastor's blog

A Community Where Weakness Fuels Transformative Growth (from Low Anthropology by David Zahl)

Gary Ware

January 5, 2023

The shared truths that a church holds help us articulate and share our sense of mission with each other and the world.
If the church uses those truths as a standard to include or exclude one another openness will wither and Christians will feel compelled to be less honest with themselves and with each other for fear of exclusion.
The church of Jesus holds its truth in such a way that we know and expect that we’ll all transgress the truths we hold, and the essence of the truth we hold is that God forgives us and loves us, and we forgive and love one another.
Our community grows through our shared experience of forgiving grace, not on our capacity to mutually enforce standards in such a way that it would appear that forgiveness and grace are never needed.

A low anthropology allows for friendships to blossom because allows for the whole truth. It does not expect people to be better or different than they are. The template for this sort of community is Alcoholics Anonymous and its many offshoots, where members open each meeting with a confession of “Hi, I’m ____, and I’m an addict.” Alcoholics Anonymous is a community bound together by shared weakness and is therefore a real community – a transformative one. Good churches sometimes function similarly.
Communities premised on a more optimistic self-understanding set out to foster togetherness but end up doing the opposite. This is especially true of communities knit together by ideology. They tend toward increasing measurements of purity that ostracize even the most faithful members. Will my fellow sustainability activists want to hang out with me if they discover that my favorite food is McDonald’s breakfast sandwiches? Will the other parents in the grief group reject me if they find out I let my teenagers play violent video games? If our belonging is predicated on holding a particular intellectual position, we will likely repress some inner contradiction for fear of being ostracized, thereby refusing for some part of ourselves to be known. Only communities that account for the flimsiness of human nature – that acknowledge the truth that we are all inwardly divided, consistent in our inconsistency – can dispel loneliness.
Since a low anthropology allows for hypocrisy and contradiction and frailty, it allows for love.

David Zahl, Low Anthropology, Brazos Press, 2022, pg 142-143.

Top Ten Dance Scenes From 80’s Movies (via MsMojo)

Gary Ware

no comments

January 4, 2023

I felt this list of top ten dance scenes from MsMojo had a shaky start, especially suggesting the 80’s was the greatest era of dance films. The video does make that statement ‘arguably.’
Any decades that had Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly in their primes would contest that point.
Perhaps a differentiation could be made about movies that have dancing as central to the plot and movies that have dancing as something that people do as part of a the larger story.

In any case the video evokes some pleasant memories and carries a few reminders of movies I haven’t gotten around to seeing yet and the top five don’t really get any arguments from me.

The Difference Between Forgiveness And Applied Empathy (from Low Anthropology by David Zahl)

Gary Ware

no comments

January 3, 2023

Various empathetic strategies come into play when a hurt or wrong is experienced. The empathetic strategies serve to contextualise or downplay the liability of the perpetrator in such a way that forgiveness is not so much required, but rather an expression of understanding about why the wrongdoing occurred.
Perhaps we might think that the incarnation was God’s way of developing empathy for our situation, and that the relationship of salvation he offers is tempered with understanding of our situation because Jesus has experienced human life.
I think that the outcome is perhaps something of the opposite: we know that God has experienced all that pertains to human life, and he forgives us anyway.
Empathy was not enough.
We needed forgiveness.
Jesus incarnates that forgiveness. His understanding of us is meant to encourage us to receive that forgiveness, not think that the forgiveness is moderated or contextualised.

Usually when we’re trying to forgive another person, we talk about motives. We didn’t mean to hit that person with our car. We didn’t mean to sleep through that emergency phone call. It could have happened to anyone.
Alternately, we may invoke backgrounds. “If you only knew hob had their childhood was, you might understand why they’re so prone to [x, y, or z.]” Or “If you were in their shoes, you might’ve done the same thing.” These are laudable attempts to reframe misfortune. When the damage we cause – and other cause us – is too great to tackle head-on, we marshal every rhetorical resource to shrink the infraction down to a more manageable size, preferably something small enough to require forgiveness, something for which applied empathy will suffice.
These strategies often work, thank God. But what about when the wrongdoing is so egregious that the burden cannot be minimised or empathised away?
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In the Bible … forgiveness differs from applied empathy. It is both more daunting and more beautiful. The offence tends to made larger rather than smaller, the loss involved more concrete and less subject to contextualisation, the resolution more final.
.

David Zahl, Low Anthropology, Brazos Press, 2022, pg 108/109.