Schools out, Training, and Enlightenment- Snooze (or Muse) 4

Finals are over, a couple of papers to write still, but the whirlwind is settling.  Training is starting to ramp up as I may be looking to March as the beginning of my Mountain Bike Season with the Pro XCT’s instead of the usual May start at WORS.  Waiting on feedback from a few sponsors, but I will train like I am going and trust the rest will grow up out of all the hard work I have been putting in.  It is so like farming, till the ground like a madman looking for a good place to sow, sow seed of ideas and wait, get a response and nurture it with more water and care growing a relationship. Hopefully I will be eating the fruit of all this hard work next season as I am still in that waiting stage with a lot of the seeds I have sown…

The Snooze

I think we will shift these to an “at least 1 a week” thing, but more if I can…I think this vid is a good intro though, classic and good.

The other day in my Foundations of Christianity class we were talking about the 12th and 13th century.  The topic involved trying to get our worldview to take a backseat and allow the worldview of a person in the medieval times to  drive our conclusions.  This was helpful because so often we bring a 20th and 21st century understanding of the world into a discussion or solution to a problem. 

One of the subjects was human nature and the understanding of what life is for a human.  A very interesting question came up.  What was gained and what was lost in the view of ourselves through the enlightenment? 

So often we think of the enlightenment as completely progress and only in a good sense, hence we use the word “enlightenment” which has no negative connotation at all.  Now please do not get me wrong, I think there is an enormous amount of good that came out of this period and I am in no way saying we should have the worldview of a medieval person or go back to what things were like.  What was discussed in class though was that human beings have a disconnection with their nature now.  I am very happy that life is so cushy and comfortable, but this also has created in us the ability for many vices and misunderstandings of what we are.  We think of ourselves as closer to masters of the universe and destiny, where the common medieval person had a much humbler point of view, although I am not them and cannot say it made them any more humble. 

Each individual wields so much power, has so much comfort, so much understanding now compared to someone then.  Each of these comes with loss as people are raised from birth in a different way of being.  It is almost like we have changed our nature in some ways.  But with any change something will be shed or lost from the nature of a thing.  There are a ton of bad things that were shed, hence Monty created the above skit, but can we think of any good thing that might have been was lost.  We are not actually medieval people so we don’t know their experience, but we can imagine.  I can think of a few off the top of my head. 

I already shared one thing lost above with our perceptions of our nature and self.  One more before I go…

We traded a good definition of “faith” for a bad one:  Through reading Luther recently and also from some of my own critiques of the modern definition of faith I came to this conclusion.  

It seems the general consensus today is faith equals “blindly believing in something you can’t see or verify”.  This is so far from matching my experience of faith that I have trouble even uttering the word when referencing the thing I experience in life.  I have found myself replacing it with the word trust so all the modern baggage gets left behind in my conversations.  I trust things everyday, therefore I have faith in things everyday.  I trust my wife in our relationship, I have faith in her character, it is a logical conclusion.  I trust a chair I sit in, I have faith in its quality to hold me up.  We use faith in so many ways.  It is the end point of a logical conclusion about what is right and trustworthy in the world.  The schism between faith and the enlightened happened when the Church fought with science and the scientific method won.  So they were seen as at odds with each other…it is just too bad cause the method involves faith, I come up with a hypotheses and test it to see if it is trustworthy, if I can have faith in it.  It is a part of our faculties, our nature and cannot be avoided, but why avoid it when it is one of the most precious and beautiful things we have.  It is one of the things that honors another most in a relationship when a person has our trust, if they have our faith we are saying a lot about their character and that they are worthy of our whole self in the context of that relationship.

OK, pedestal slowing forming beneath me…just excited about some of Luther’s ideas on this subject, but you can read about it in “Freedom of a Christian” if you wanted.

Anyways, I would love to see what any of you actually reading these snoozes think, feel free to respond anytime!