Bonhoeffer on Pleasure

A quote from D. Bonhoeffer

"I am sure we ought to love God in our lives and in all the blessings he sends us. We should trust him in our lives, so that when our time comes, but not before, we may go to him in love and trust and joy. But, speaking frankly, to long for the transcendent when you are in your wife’s arms is, to put it mildly, a lack of taste, and it is certainly not what God expects of us.  

We ought to find God and love him in the blessings he sends us. If he pleases to grant us some overwhelming earthly bliss, we ought not to try and be more religious than God himself. For then we should spoil that bliss by our presumption and arrogance; we should be letting our religious fantasies run riot and refusing to be satisfied with what he gives. Once a man has found God in his earthly bliss and has thanked him for it, there will be plenty of opportunities for him to remind himself that these earthly pleasures are only transitory, and that it is good for him to accustom himself to the idea of eternity…. 

I am sure we honor God more if we gratefully accept the life he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, grieving deeply and sincerely when we have belittled or thrown away any of the precious things of life (some people grumble at such behavior and say it is bourgeois to be so weak and sensitive) than we do if we are insensitive towards the blessings of life, and therefore equally insensitive towards pain."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

Quote found here: <http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/10605420042/i-am-sure-we-ought-to-love-god-in-our-lives-and-in>

A deep breath of cool clear water (or something like that)

For several years now I have been attempting to understand how the culture I am immersed in (as an American, and with Western History in my particular past) has influenced me.  How has it shaped my understanding of reality and the truth about the world I live in?  It has been an exhausting investigation as I realize that I have been radically and fundamentally influenced by the last 400 years of culture currents.  In several senses, I have never had an original thought in my life, but have been fed every thought I have ever had by others, and I have been curious about who those others are, and what it was they were attempting when they passed on their thinking to subsequent generations.  In some ways, this whole endeavor has been unhealthy, causing a large dose of epistemological claustrophobia.  In other ways it has been a spreading of my horizons as I understand who I am better.

For example, try reading Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.  This book will alter your view of what it means to be an individual, and forces you to realize that you are only "individual" and "authentic" in roughly exactly the same way as everyone else in this American Democracy is "individual" and "authentic".  That book made me laugh out loud, it was so startlingly accurate about me and my neighbors.  And it was written by a Frenchman in the early 1800s!

So, for a couple of years now I have been trying to figure out how to respond to this strange, constricting realization I have come to: how deeply the philosophies around me (in particular, the branches and fruit and fruit pies coming from the philosophies of the "Enlightenment" (really, the Endarkenment) and Romanticism have been all I have ever partaken of, in some senses.  In fact, in a difficult and sometimes amusing way, I only ever assess the Enlightenment on its own terms...from an Enlightenment perspective.  Arrgh!  How to escape from this philosophical tail-chasing.

Along comes a couple of quotes in the last few weeks that have helped me take a really deep breath for the first time in a while.  One from Bonhoeffer by Eric Metaxas

To procrastinate and prevaricate simply because you are afraid of erring...seems to me almost to run counter to love.  To delay or fail to make decisions may be more sinful than to make wrong decisions out of faith and love.

In the middle of trying to carefully weave my way through decision-making, attempting to take into account all of the philosophies that are informing my thinking has been pretty crippling.  Here, Bonhoeffer reminds me that LOVE is the goal, and (I add) since I know I am probably not going to get it perfect, even if I reflect on a topic for decades...why not put love at the forefront, pray, think and then take action...then assess, and take more action...then assess again, etc.  I am trying to make that my new Mode of Operation.

THEN, along comes a few more thoughts, this time from Tim Keller's book, Gospel and Life.

A worldview is...the story of the world that operates at the root of a person's life.

And

We cannot help but participate in the worldview of our particular culture and generation.  But the gospel changes the way we look at everything.  We are to look at everything...and decide (a) what to keep as good, (b) what to reject as just too distorted, and (c) what to revise, rename, and reshape with the gospel. 

Very helpful thoughts for me.  I have realized for a while now that I can't "get out" of my own worldview, and that participating at some level in the worldview around me is impossible to escape.

Ken Myers suggests that we must make a decision.  Do we interact with that worldview in a mode of acceptance and adoption, or do we interact with it at some points in a mode of resistance and rejection.

Tim Keller's thoughts added to Ken Myer's help me to have a framework for thinking about these things.  And Bonhoeffer's helps to relieve the incapacitating pressure to think that I have to get it all logically and philosophically perfect before making decisions, and the Gospel itself, most importantly by far, has helped me to understand that it was for such an errant philosopher and sinner as myself that Jesus came to die, and restore me to right relationship with Himself.