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jenny_islanderI am reading only the introduction to the study guide today.
Foster summarizes the Good Life as "provision, place, and personality." I am looking at what he calls "personality" today.
The Good Life is promised to all, but the world is full of bad life instead. We can easily see one cause today. Tyrants and their imitators want, among other things, to make as many people as possible poor, frightened, vulnerable, weak, miserable, isolated, hopeless, and exhausted; even if they can't get material benefit from destroying the Good Life, it's fun for them to think about the harm they inflict on others--just listen to how they boast!
The potentates of this world stand between us and the Good Life, but there is another obstacle even in times of peace and freedom. "I do not understand what I do," sighs Paul. "For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do... I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing."
Paul calls this tendency "sin living in [him]." So what's sin? Pop culture says that it's the thrill you get from having sex when you weren't supposed to or enjoying something delicious although dieting is held up as the right thing to do. Some Christians teach that it's a long list of Do Not: if you don't do anything on the list, you aren't sinning. But what does Paul mean by it?
In his letter to the Christians of Rome, from which I quote above, Paul appears to assume that his readers know what sin is. But we need a working definition. So I will venture possibly further than I should, because I am not a preacher or theologian or scholar on this topic.
I learned in church that (per the first chapters of Genesis) this world was created as good, then wounded. Human will wounded it. Why? Because the first people decided that it was not enough to trust God to have their best interests in mind in the midst of the Good Life. It was not enough for them to have been made in God's image and to live in God's care. They must also have God's ability to tell the difference between good and evil.
So they took it, and suddenly they knew that something was not right. They were vulnerable, they were ashamed, they were scared. Why? Because we were made in the image of God, but we are finite. A pool of clear water can perfectly reflect a small part of the sky--it can be made expressly to do so. That does not make it the sky. If it says "Well, now I know when there ought to be rain and when the clouds should move on," it cannot follow that up. But it can make a Hell of a mess as it heaves and splashes around. And the mess doesn't go away.
I was taught that the loss of Eden was a consequence, not a punishment. It was no longer possible for humankind to live the Good Life without effort. Hard work, worry, and grief awaited us instead. But God keeps calling and promising, reaching out and guiding. Reaching back toward God, we find the Good Life for a while. Then we fall again, doing harm to others or to ourselves. The Bible is (among other things) a chronicle of this continual bleeding of the wound of the world. It is a record of sin.
What Foster has to say about personality is that there is a way out of this. With respect to my fellow Christians who believe in a single prayer that prefaces a great transformation, I agree with Foster that spiritual life is more complicated than that. Thinking and praying must be accompanied by working, giving, listening, and so on. There is no division: they are all part of the real world in which we live. Foster has written a distillation of many centuries of observation and testing of the ways in which we can, by systematic practice and habit formation--by discipline--more often succeed in living rightly in the real world. The disciplines enable us to reach back more often and more easily when God reaches out. They help to fit us for the Good Life.
Like everything else that humankind has wrought, the disciplines have within them the tendency to go wrong. That is Foster's next topic.
Foster summarizes the Good Life as "provision, place, and personality." I am looking at what he calls "personality" today.
The Good Life is promised to all, but the world is full of bad life instead. We can easily see one cause today. Tyrants and their imitators want, among other things, to make as many people as possible poor, frightened, vulnerable, weak, miserable, isolated, hopeless, and exhausted; even if they can't get material benefit from destroying the Good Life, it's fun for them to think about the harm they inflict on others--just listen to how they boast!
The potentates of this world stand between us and the Good Life, but there is another obstacle even in times of peace and freedom. "I do not understand what I do," sighs Paul. "For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do... I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing."
Paul calls this tendency "sin living in [him]." So what's sin? Pop culture says that it's the thrill you get from having sex when you weren't supposed to or enjoying something delicious although dieting is held up as the right thing to do. Some Christians teach that it's a long list of Do Not: if you don't do anything on the list, you aren't sinning. But what does Paul mean by it?
In his letter to the Christians of Rome, from which I quote above, Paul appears to assume that his readers know what sin is. But we need a working definition. So I will venture possibly further than I should, because I am not a preacher or theologian or scholar on this topic.
I learned in church that (per the first chapters of Genesis) this world was created as good, then wounded. Human will wounded it. Why? Because the first people decided that it was not enough to trust God to have their best interests in mind in the midst of the Good Life. It was not enough for them to have been made in God's image and to live in God's care. They must also have God's ability to tell the difference between good and evil.
So they took it, and suddenly they knew that something was not right. They were vulnerable, they were ashamed, they were scared. Why? Because we were made in the image of God, but we are finite. A pool of clear water can perfectly reflect a small part of the sky--it can be made expressly to do so. That does not make it the sky. If it says "Well, now I know when there ought to be rain and when the clouds should move on," it cannot follow that up. But it can make a Hell of a mess as it heaves and splashes around. And the mess doesn't go away.
I was taught that the loss of Eden was a consequence, not a punishment. It was no longer possible for humankind to live the Good Life without effort. Hard work, worry, and grief awaited us instead. But God keeps calling and promising, reaching out and guiding. Reaching back toward God, we find the Good Life for a while. Then we fall again, doing harm to others or to ourselves. The Bible is (among other things) a chronicle of this continual bleeding of the wound of the world. It is a record of sin.
What Foster has to say about personality is that there is a way out of this. With respect to my fellow Christians who believe in a single prayer that prefaces a great transformation, I agree with Foster that spiritual life is more complicated than that. Thinking and praying must be accompanied by working, giving, listening, and so on. There is no division: they are all part of the real world in which we live. Foster has written a distillation of many centuries of observation and testing of the ways in which we can, by systematic practice and habit formation--by discipline--more often succeed in living rightly in the real world. The disciplines enable us to reach back more often and more easily when God reaches out. They help to fit us for the Good Life.
Like everything else that humankind has wrought, the disciplines have within them the tendency to go wrong. That is Foster's next topic.
