Gratitude For My Spiritual Roots

It's easy to despise the subculture one was raised in. Like one's biological family, the warts, ugliness, and "unlovable" parts of it are so blatantly positioned in your sight that no decently reflective person can miss it.

After graduating university, I went through a phase where I was sick and tired of the Toronto Chinese Christian Community (TCCC). Growing in it for around a couple decades made its seemingly despicable protrusions bulge to grotesque proportions in front of my eyes. A lack of depth in terms of touching upon matters of the soul. A lack of modeling of being appropriately assertiveness when necessary (especially for males). A lack of healthy conflict resolution and loving relational confrontation to heal the social fabric when conflict inevitably occurs. A lack of serious engagement with the arts. A lack of taking the Christian mind super seriously with sharp intellectual training to engage the secular narrative in dialogue at the worldview level. And much more. All these things, I had to learn by exploring outside the very small perimeters of the TCCC bubble.

I'm an adventurer at heart. By my very nature, I like discovering new spiritual continents that have new eye opening awakenings in the things of God. Through almost a decade of a journey post-university, I've learned how to practically listen to and discern the Holy Spirit's voice and leading. I've learned how the landscape of the soul works, how it heals, and to take it very seriously. I've learned how to discern deep hidden spiritual strongholds in the wounds of one's heart, uproot them, surgically remove the lies embedded in those wounds, and bring them to God to be healed. I've learned how to be appropriately assertive when the situation calls for it. I've learned how to engage in loving relational confrontation when necessary. I've learned how to bridge Christian theology with a serious engagement with the arts. I've trained my mind with some rigour in serious Christian thinking. After spending a decade travelling and immersing myself in different Christian subcultures on different countries and continents as well as spiritually journeying through exploring different spiritualities from differing denominations across the Christian spectrum, I've been exposed to quite a bit in terms of the extended worldwide family of God's kingdom outside the narrow parameters of the Toronto bubble I was confined to before I reached my 20s.

It's easy to bash one's family. It's a lot harder to appreciate the things taken for granted, things that have been moved to the background noise of one's environment that one should be continually thankful for.

Something's been happening recently in my life though. Without me consciously making an effort to discipline myself to do so, I've naturally developed more of a deep appreciation for my original spiritual roots in the TCCC. I helped out at a TCCC conference for teens lately where I was reminded of how I was when I was a teen in this upbringing. It's priceless. You can't put a price tag on it, like your family roots. During the conference there were moments where I was just taken back in awe with my soul's pin-drop-silence of attention in gratitude. This was the spiritual subculture that raised me. The unspoken habits of the subculture. The lingo of the subculture. The bodily conditional responses embedded in the social context of this subculture. The unspoken assumptions of the subculture. The emphases of the subculture. The theological slants of the subculture. The mental framework people have towards understanding God in this subculture. The lifestyle of spirituality promoted in this subculture. It grounded me and helped me stand on my 2 feet and gave me the base to explore from. Without it, I may have not had a spiritual journey to start off with at all. I may have had no springboard to launch me on my journey. This is my heritage. It's in my faith's blood. It has precious yearbook moments in my soul. And though I don't always agree with it, I don't always like it, and there are major flaws in it, at the end of the day, I truly, genuinely love it, just like my biological family.

Wow.

These are my roots. I can't despise them. I can't have bitterness towards them. I'm realizing that it would be unthinkable to be thankless towards them. I can't secretly look down on them, even if no one ever found out.

Thank you TCCC.

air-ee-oh-it-uh-ee

I enjoy unknowns, don't let the scary-prohibit-me
I'm a mystic, I view scenarios-mystically
With a odd mind, I don't think stereotypically
My mind's on different planes doing aerials-physically

A Bass On Which Purpose Is Built On

Lord, I need you to perform CPR on my spiritual imagination.

Lord, I need a heart that throbs to your purposes like a bass drum.

Lord, I need you to pump some purpose-saturated soul rhythm in me.

Lord, I need you to hit that bass drum of my heart. And pound it. One pound at a time. To make each divinely inspired pound have repercussions that reverberate all the way up to my mind and fire it up with life-rejuvenating purpose.

The Art of Truth

"Art doesn't beat you on the head with truth. It invites you to taste the truth before you know exactly what it is."
-Jan Johnson

I would add that, because art opens us up to new experiences we've never had before, it can enable our minds to detect new conceptual categories that have been philosophically camouflaged beforehand by inexperience.

Oh, how we need good art.

Love and Laughter

"God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God and God in him."
-1 John 4:16b

If someone is really immersed in the love of God on a deep and life-changing level, it will cause that person to sincerely want others to experience and enjoy the love of God even more than oneself does. But one must first be deeply immersed in the love of God, or this will not take place.

Now, since this can be somewhat abstract, perhaps an everyday illustration can humour our finite understanding of such a phenomenon.

If someone enjoys a hilariously funny story on a deep level of laughter, after the initial enjoyment, one sincerely wants others to enjoy the really funny story, and to even enjoy it and laugh harder in reaction to it than oneself originally did when first hearing it. But one must first deeply enjoy the really funny story oneself, or this will not take place.

Scriptural Meditation That Is Not Dead

What if we realized that meditating on the Word of God was not merely a cerebral activity of just cognitively recollecting heady theology to oneself? What if we realized that it involved stepping out of the narrow, restrictive, and suffocating perimeters of our own mundane storyline and stepping into a world with a pulsing and absorbing plotline of God's drama-saturated blockbuster, while being accompanied by a gripping soundtrack that beautifully reverberated and amplified the deep, wordless satisfaction of being immersed in the Greatest Story ever written?

"Words have a life. The Word of God is a living and powerful thing. Powerful. Living. Something living has a movement to it."
-Dallas Willard

(1:06 - 1:20)

If we realized this dimension of alive-and-moving scriptural meditation, where the Word of God has a live and pulsing movement in its interactive dynamic due to it truly having a life of its own, we'd be on the cutting edge of the Lord's greatest weapon against a mundane and miserable existence.

It Hurts. It Burns.

Persevering for your special instructions is excruciating Lord. It hurts. It burns. It's longer than I signed up for. I don't know how much longer I can persevere for this. Many in my situation would have quit one way or another already. This uniquely tailored perseverance trial is grueling, agonizing for my soul at times. Lord, I hope it comes to an end soon. I don't know if what's in me can continue any longer for this. I need your fuel.

Mel Gibson, your movie is a Godsend

Hacksaw Ridge

So moving. My eyes dampened with water emerging from the ocean springs of the heart on several occasions. My soul gave slow-motion awe-filled applause multiple times for the courage of the hero. Profound admiration for his Hulk-like muscles of integrity to his convictions that held strong to his unshakable convictions. Convictions that refused to bow down to agonizing external pressures constantly lacerating at him on all sides to compromise. Refusing no matter what. Such a person is extremely rare in the West. Extremely.

Mel Gibson, thank you so much for this movie.

Speaking Like Solomon

"Not only was the Teacher wise, but also he imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true."
-Ecclesiastes 12:9-10

There is immense spiritual importance in "finding just the right words" to express life-transforming wisdom. If wisdom touches the soul of a person, and the soul of a person is touched by art, then beautified verbal artistry can touch the soul in ways that scientific and technical verbiage cannot. A computer will never be able to construct beautiful and wise sayings phrased with soul-sourced aesthetic eloquence. There will always be Smartphones. There will never be Wisephones.

An excerpt from a footnote from my Old Testament professor's book Old Testament Theology: Divine Call and Human Response really hits home on this point:

"Israel's wisdom traditions viewed aesthetic concerns as extremely important.... Along with the aesthetics of practical organization noted in 1 Kgs 10:4-5, wisdom prized artistry of expression (see Eccl 12:9-10). Wisdom, in part, consisted of the ability to match wise content with forms of expression that themselves displayed wisdom. The sages communicated their wisdom with rhetorical and aesthetic power so as to move the receptive hearer closer to the ideals they wished to communicate. For example, Wisdom literature typically exhibits a fascinating use of words and sounds and creative use of language, much of which, unfortunately, is lost in translation. it frequently uses rhyming, assonance, and word play... Similarly, several texts are written as alphabetic or acrostic poems, i.e., poems in which each line begins with a letter of the alphabet, in consecutive order (Prov 2; 31:10-31). Wisdom also uses numerical sayings... a wide variety of figures of speech, and most especially powerful and creative metaphors. Sometimes these metaphors are sufficiently imprecise so as to provoke creative thought (e.g., "The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life," Prov 14:27). At other times they may be profoundly sensory and visceral (e.g., Prov. 10:26: "As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, / So is the sluggard to them that send him")."
-John Kessler

Thank God for modern day Solomons like C.S. Lewis, who can use careful, thoughtful, and aesthetic word choice to beautifully paint spiritual Mona Lisas of wisdom in people's imaginations.

"In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the consolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret which also pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordworth had gone back to those moments of the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The book or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of at tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
-C.S. Lewis

Man, just look that that discernment. Sharp deep leveled perception. With so much confidence thrown in his assertion of the other's hidden identity.  Having the accuracy of his thrown assertion hitting right on target by virtue of him missing. Assured that the true nature of the man in front of him is struck bullseye by the very act of his evasion. It is only when Barry Allen finds out that he has elusively pinned himself down that he is able to put his finger on the the accuracy of the thrown assertion, causing his secret identity to flash open before his very eyes. That's something even the fastest man alive can't dodge.

Man.

But the Lord said to Samuel, "do not consider his appearance or his height, for I have rejected him. The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart." Then Jesse called Abinadab and had him pass in  front of Samuel. But Samuel said, "The Lord has not chosen this one either." Jesse then had Shamah pass by, but Samuel said, "Nor has the Lord chosen this one." Jesse had seven of his sons pass before Samuel, but Samuel said to him, "The Lord has not chosen these." So he asked Jesse, "Are these all the sons you have?" "There is still the youngest," Jesse answered, "but he is tending the sheep." Samuel said, "Send for him; we will not sit down until he arrives." So he sent and had him brought in. He was ruddy, with a fine appearance and handsome features. Then the Lord said, "Rise and anoint him; he is the one." 
-1 Samuel 16:7-12

1 Kings 3:9, 1 Kings 3:16-28, Malachi 3:18, Mark 2:8, John 7:24, 1 Corinthians 12:10, Philippians 1:9-10, Hebrews 5:14