Who is better - the truth-seeker, or the pure of heart?

What critique can the skeptic give to the pure?

What does the truth-seeker have to offer to the pure-hearted? How could a holder of truth bear to correct a pure-hearted, radiant individual?

If the truth-seeker thirsts after knowledge, but not goodness, the pure-hearted reigns over her, because his knowledge profits neither her nor anyone around her.

If the pure-hearted seeks goodness, but not knowledge, he is ignorant. But his goodness causes him to lean on others, bless others with his presence, and by nature of his goodness is a teacher to others through his way of life. He still reigns over the truth-seeker, because he naturally professes Christ through his life.

In this way, we see that stupidity as we commonly understand it is no tragedy whatsoever. Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.

But who would say that truth and goodness are dichotomous? Who would not marvel at the two if they came together? Both are obviously very good and work together; they're perhaps even equal in value. But one is first among equals. One is primary.

Lean not on your own understandings.

And the Spirit said to Philip, "Go over and join this chariot." 

So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, "Do you understand what you are reading?" 

And he said, "How can I, unless someone guides me?"

(Acts 8:29 - 31a)

As I become closer to Christ, I look back on my childhood and think, "Wow, I didn't know what goodness was! I made a lot of bad decisions in my youth." As I continued to grow closer to God, I looked at myself as I was a few years ago, and said the same thing. As I continued to grow closer, I looked at one year ago, and then month ago, and then yesterday. Now I look at today and think, "Good heavens, I have no idea who God is at all." I am so unversed, so unlearned, so ignorant of God's nature and His will. I am horribly ignorant, and also horribly unnerved.

All my life, I have thought of God as something that He's not. It might be even better to say that I've looked at pieces of Him, little descriptive attributes or qualities that He has (He is love, He answers promises, He is truth, He gives life) and didn't connect them all very well. I say now that I am beginning to understand Him better, but, how do you know when you hit the REAL TRUTH of who God is? Mustn't you always be humble and admit when you're wrong?

I think that part of the answer is this: Truth is real. There are real, true, logical answers to questions about reality. With good reasoning comes increased clarity, and the closer you get to the great Truth, the clearer the world gets, and the more clear it becomes how central God is to all things, without which nothing is possible. God is true.

I think it is the humble person who understands that he or she must submit to Truth. Contrary to what I was taught growing up, humility is not saying that you don't know in all situations; humility is being subservient to  truth and really pursuing it, wherever it leads and in whatever it holds. When you know whether or not there are cookies in the cookie jar, it's not humble to say that you don't know. That's dishonest. A humble person here would say that, yes, there are cookies in the cookie jar. Humility is expressed in being able to listen and learn, not jumping to hasty conclusions (Treebeard would be greatly displeased), using your knowledge where it is applicable. And in respect to the great search for God, it is quite humble to look at the great holy men and women of the past who spent their entire lives reasoning from the Scriptures and from their spiritual leaders and engaging their knowledge of God into their lives, and contributing those understandings to the great conversation about God that has collected and continued through the history of the Church. Discarding this breadth of knowledge, which persists through time, without a thought is like discarding the knowledge of previous mathematicians or scientists without a thought.

I'm afraid this is going to be terribly unpopular, but this is how I've been coming to understand the issue and I see no way around it. The terrifying thought has been creeping up in me is that reading out of the Scriptures and pulling out my own interpretations as best I can understand them, without collaboration with others who know better than me and can reason better than me, is a horribly dangerous notion. We say that Scripture is the final authority, but when I engage Scripture this way, aren't I actually appointing myself as the final authority on how to interpret what those passages mean? Doesn't that make me the Pope of my own religion, and aren't I making God in my own image, however I see fit? Or, in a softer way, doesn't that mean that I make the Bible conform to what I understand? On what grounds do I say "no" to what the Church has been saying for 1,500 years? Me, in my sin that I can't even always see for lack of clarity; me, in my laity and mere 23 years; me, without a deep understanding of the Bible, church history, theology, philosophy, or God in the first place? No, that's a pride that I never wanted or thought to look out for.

Very well, then. I must abandon this way.

Everything's cool, man.

In regards to the daily troubles in life, the holy person has internalized that everything is great, all the time. Nothing shakes him, because he knows that Christ has satisfied what C.S. Lewis so famously called the "Deeper Magic Before the Dawn of Time". From a zoomed-out perspective, we can see that we're rescued from death, so whether or not our lives play out exactly as we planned is not really that big of a deal. A holy person knows this, through and through.

When he feels like things are not great, he reprimands himself, because he also knows that during that moment, he has lost perspective.

I'm losing perspective a little bit today, but writing out these things that I know but haven't fully internalized has helped. It's amazing how much a little spiritual journaling helps the soul - journaling pins down the whims of emotion and forces it to reconcile with knowledge.

Kyrie Elesion!

Lord, have mercy! Teach me our statues. Show me where I'm wrong. I want to know You more.

Everyone wants to go to heaven, but no one wants to die.

There's always (at least) two things going on in any conversation. The information exchanged in a conversation is either true or untrue, and a person's ability to talk about the truth or falsity of a claim varies on how honest that person is willing to be. We see this all the time in relationships, but it is especially painful when applied to philosophy and doctrine.

As best I understand the situation, in matters of doctrine, it looks something like this: there is true doctrine, false doctrine, humble people, and proud people. When I say "true" and "false" here, I mean simply that the doctrine is either correct, accurate, and true, regardless of whether or not we know that it is true; or the doctrine is NOT correct, accurate, or true, and could be our best understanding of reality currently, but is NOT true. This brings up an issue of epistemology, which I'm not at all qualified to try to explain or deal with here, but understand what I mean for this particular entry. Additionally, when I say "humble" and "proud", I simply mean that a humble person is always willing to be wrong, because she wants to know what is true, and a proud person is not willing to consider whether or not he is wrong, for any number of reasons. Now, there are many scales of accurate, inaccurate, humility, and pride, and lots of reasons for doctrine being untrue and people being proud, but the reasons for not having true belief or humility is not my topic. I just want to describe this situation. Think about this:

A humble person with true doctrine is what we're all aiming for. As Christians, we all want to know and believe what is true, and always be ready to have God show us how we're wrong about something. We all want to know who God is, and be able to tell everyone we know about Christ's sacrifice in a true and convincing way, so we can all live happily ever after, unto ages of ages.

But I don't know anyone no one is like that perfectly. Except Christ, of course, who I was not blessed to know when He walked the earth. When I see people that are more humble and have better doctrine than me, I respect them more instantly, and I bet you do too! But what we usually have are the other three options.

We get proud people with true doctrine. Now, these people aren't always arrogant jerks who have grown up in Bible school and went to seminary and have read all the church fathers, saints, other religion's books, atheists, and philosophers, and with their logical training can argue against you (and the strands of theology that you're trying to tie together) up the wazoo until you have to concede or storm off, hurt and confused. Not all these people want to destroy your faith for their own glory. No, there's lots of people who are nice, too, but just unwilling to budge from what they've learned. And there's people that are passionate about what they believe, but have never heard an objection to some premise of their faith, and have built their life or ministry off that false premise. Change is hard, and when we're talking about pride, I mean anything less than perfect humility. It hurts to admit when you're wrong, especially if you've been living a certain way your entire life. Personally, I need to learn to have more compassion on people when they're in this position. In the heat of a discussion, I forget that everyone has grown up learning something, and not everything can be right - including what I grew up knowing.

There's also humble people with false doctrine. I've met a lot of people who are simple, fun-loving, growing Christians. Some of them are non-denominational Christians with non-aggressive personalities, and simply don't want to push their beliefs on other people, or have to have awkward doctrinal conversations. Some of them are Catholics who are used to hearing the jokes about priests molesting boys, used to having the occasional person joke about indulgences and the crusades, and just don't want to have to fight anyone about weird history things. Some of them are Protestants that don't believe homosexuality is right, but their friend in the same congregation believes it's alright, but they don't know how to back it up, since both of them have their verses ready to pull out to support their side, but don't want to have to duel over the issue. I've definitely been in situations where I think what a person is so passionately telling someone else is not totally Biblical, or is not something that never seemed to be an issue for the church fathers, or may not be logically valid, but, come on. Do I really going to fight someone when my information may just be wrong too? Will it hurt our friendships if I just want to explore the idea? As a good friend of mine put it recently, "I don't want to fight people. I need them!" However, we still have an issue over whether or not the claims are true. How can we ever get to that issue if we are afraid our friendships won't survive?

Then, worst of all, there's proud people with false doctrine. No one wants to be in this boat. No one wants to be so proud that they won't change their mind, even when they're shown that their argument is fallacious, or that their idea is historically inaccurate, or that scriptures and church fathers all have evidence against such a position. I wonder how often I'm like this? I never want to be, of course, but certainly there's a very good chance that some of my ideas about theology are simply inaccurate! I would absolutely appreciate it if a friend took me aside and told me, "Jann, I know you think that killing orphans is a good idea, but... do you think we can talk about it? I'm pretty sure this isn't a good thing to do."

And so, the relationship between truth and humility realizes in this way - I must be humble in order to know truth, and God is truth. I must be humble enough to honestly admit and change when I am wrong, or humble enough to do my best to offer my thoughts and opinions to others when it's relevant to do so. My growth and understanding is for the benefit of others as well as myself, because I am a cog in a machine, a single color in a painting, a step on a staircase - I don't exist in a bubble! I exist in a community of people, am born into a family, am surrounded by co-workers and friends. I must be humble enough to learn my flaws and fix myself, and to discard untruths wherever they appear. No amount of untruth is acceptable. No amount of sin is acceptable. So, can't we all just be humble and truth-seeking? And forgive when people aren't quite there yet? Do we not turn the other cheek because fighting back, in this sense, is not helpful, but destructive?

So, I've noticed that this sort of "square of opposition" is a way to think about doctrine and people. It's helpful tool for self-analysis, since it asks the question, "Which of these describe you?" How you answer (honestly)  inevitably guides you directly to a healthy spiritual life. It kind of blows my mind that one could be barred from understanding truth because they aren't humble enough. It is true that one must learn to be wrong to learn what's true, so if you're not humble, then you limit yourself in what you can understand. It seems that the world belongs to the meek in spirit, and that's the only way it can be! How crazy is that?

Growth is marked by pain.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me, a sinner.

I wept because I felt the weight of my iniquity. The confirmation of my own failure humbled me in an area where I didn't even have pride, really - only a pre-existing shame at the knowledge of my ineptitude. I already knew that I had no courage, and when circumstances tested our friendship in a way that required my bravery and honesty, I failed utterly. Oh, that my mistakes would harm only me and not others!

But I have no option of leaving you, even if I wanted to, which I don't. Our fates our bound up together - not just between you and me, but between all of us brothers and sisters. We, the Faithful, are responsible for one another's growth. What love do I show by not telling you what I have learned? What friendship is this, that has no courage to debate honestly and humbly, patiently and lovingly, to reach Truth together? How do we do each other any favors by keeping our thoughts to ourselves? Is there not but one Truth? Is Christ divided? 

We must communicate! We are not enemies, but partners and allies against sin. There can be no fair taking of sides except against evil and inaccuracy. I beg of you - love me enough to tell me when I am wrong, and I will do my best to do the same for you. I am weak today - I have no desire to fight, and I fear and hate it - but am working to grow stronger through the grace of God. Come, let us reason together so we can sharpen one another.

Each step of weathering a friendship hurts in increasingly private ways, but I am thankful for each excruciating moment. Each step sanctifies us and molds us more and more like Christ, who is perfect. I want to be more holy; to embody God's grace, love, and mercy and watch it spill over my cupped hands unto you. I don't know how to be a good friend, but by the grace of God, we are learning this together. 

It is in this way that I am always not happy, and am often instead filled with sorrow at my own sin. But this sorrow is deeply rooted in a great joy, because there is hope. Death is defeated, and the Lamb has been slain, and our debt is paid. The pain of the Christian life comes from the process of giving up our sin, which is often neither easy nor enjoyable, but rooted in the joy of the truth. There is nothing left to fear, so all of my fears - every last one of them -sos ungrounded. It takes much arduous, painful work to internalize this.

Triparion to Jann Black, the girl that died.

I wonder what good understandings of life we throw out as our personal philosophies mature.

When I switched to the timeline version I went back to some of my first Facebook posts to see what I wrote. I remember what I went through in high school - all my close friends, my relationship dramas, the growing of my understanding of Christianity at that time, and so on - but I didn't remember the kind of person that I was at the time. I was surprised by the things that I wrote on Facebook, and by the kind of person that I projected. I am a wholly different creature now than I was then, and when I look at the writings of this little girl, I wonder now who she was. I wish that I could talk to her about what she was going through and encourage her, or at least just listen to her. That younger me was so clearly crying out for a friend, while perhaps not paying enough attention to the ones that she had. She was crying out for understanding, for truth - even though she put her faith in God.

I bet that if I could talk to her now, my junior Jann would have some insightful things to tell me. She might not understand everything about life correctly - I would of course have a lot to tell her too - but I think she would have a lot to remind me. "Love better, Jann," she might say to me. "Why have you stopped painting? Why have you stopped writing stories? What happened to your creativity and imagination? You're much older and wiser than me in a lot of ways, but... I don't see me in you. I don't see my spirit in you." And she would be right. I'm not that quirky, artsy girl anymore. I'm a big girl now, with a stylish haircut, with big thoughts and bigger dreams. I have a new flavor, new goals, new direction. I would have never seen this kind of change coming, and I'm not sure if all of it is good.

It's not that people should never grow up, and it's not that one should keep everything they understand from childhood, because some of those things are inaccurate. Perhaps it's the spirit of childhood that we ought to try to keep. I miss viewing the world with wonder rather than skepticism.