if my mind and heart could vomit every thought infecting it, it would look something like this. clean up on asile 2. bring the sawdust.

What can it mean to be Christian and not to be part of the world? How do you be Christian in the world? What came first the world or Christianity, is one defined as the absence of the other?


Christians often turn to asceticism to separate themselves from the world, but the way I see things, it seems like in America everyone has a bit of asceticism in the name of individuality. Many people religiously deny themselves things in the name of worshiping their identities. People refuse to eat certain food, wear certain clothes, buy certain products, and what not. It's not like these denials are always particularly superficial at all. In fact many come out of the very core of ourselves. My conscience tells me I cannot behave in particular ways and support certain ideas. To thine own self be true right?


I guess that's where my question comes from. The part of the world that I live in tells me that truth can be found anywhere, but the truths are validated by soul, my conscience, my intuition. I have no peace if I don't feel at peace. But what if something untruth gives us peace. Can I be trusted to recognize truth? Or maybe its not really me, maybe it's the holy spirit. Is my gut feeling the holy spirit? How do I know the difference.




In Eden there was not this dualism of world vs church or of sacred vs profane. People were created naked in all their hairy, awkward glory (well actually God's). Things just were; there was no need for jugdemental adjectives. Though for us, Jesus's death on the cross reveals that we are able to become something new from what we were before, we are not really becoming something new as much as we are becoming what we were; what we were intended to be. To find out what holiness and wholeness looks like perhaps we do not need to look forward as much as we need to look back. And looking back brings us back to the time where we did not need to frame things in order to make them Christianly acceptable. When people spoke of love, they mean love that came from God, when they spoke of sex they meant that it was God ordained, an act of obedience, when they spoke of truth it was something really, deeply, inescapably true.

I guess I struggle with wanting these words and behaviors like love, truth, sex, happiness, wholeness to be organic; to be as pure as taking about the creations of mountains and sunsets. But they aren't. Sin is here and it's deceptive and it draws lines between holy and unholy, pure and impure. This is not just a language issue but a need to validate the desire of the heart.

Am I pure? And if not now when? And if I'm not then how can I descern what is true, holy, or good. And if I can't discern sin using my intuition, how can I descern peace?