It's 11 am on a Tuesday morning as I begin to write these words. Last night one of my neighbours, Tawa, a visual artist originally from Zimbabwe, came over for supper. We often cook and eat together, for there is something healing about sharing a meal. It was one of those beautiful evenings where two kindred spirits on this journey of life shared and reasoned and laughed together.

At one point Tawa asked me (and I am paraphrasing of course): 'I hear you talk about meditation quite often. I also want to meditate more often, but I am not always sure how. I mean, how do you deal with distracting thoughts and so on? How do you meditate?'

At the same time I was engaged in a WhatsApp conversation with one of my friends from New York. We met earlier the year when she visited South Africa, and she was telling me (amongst other things) how her visit and some of the conversations we shared had made a significant impact on her life, specifically the idea of living one's life from a place of rest rather than a place of haste.

I don't want to rehash some of the stuff we shared between ourselves for the time being. Instead, I want to acknowledge that the search and desire for a deeper, more connected life is something so universal and urgent in our day that I find the theme popping up almost everywhere. Today I want to tie the idea of abiding in Christ (of which I wrote yesterday) to this universal search, hoping to contribute a little bit more to the conversation we find ourselves in as seeking souls. This I want to do not by proposing cut and dry formulas or a list of seven irrefutable steps, but simply by sharing a bit from my own life and, more specifically, my life this morning. We are, after all, the letters that God writes to each other, and from time to time it serves us well to read the lives of others or allow ourselves to be read.

(For those of you who view Christianity simply as the intellectual acceptance of a belief system and not also as a way of formation - a spirituality so to speak -, what I share here might seem weird, 'Eastern' and dangerous. To you I can only say: read and explore a bit wider than your current cultural confines. The Christian tradition is filled with men and women who lived with great depth and awareness of spirit not in spite of their faith in Jesus Christ, but exactly because of it.)

This morning, sometime before 8 am, I went to sit in the chair on my wooden deck that is perfectly positioned to soak up the rays of the early morning sun. I had one of those restless morning up until this point, you know, one of those mornings where you struggle to find your inner tempo that gets your feet moving in the right direction for the day. I had read some Andrew Murray, Francis Schaeffer and the apostle Paul earlier the morning, but somehow what I needed for today wasn't locked up in words per se. What I needed was silence, reality, spirit.

I sat myself down in my chair and started to centre myself. As a follower of Christ, centring myself is not so much about emptying myself until only a vacuum remains. Sure, emptying is part of the process, but when all is said and done my focus is not some impersonal nameless Other or immovable Mover, nor do I seek for divinity within myself apart from the revealed mystery of Christ in me. I am not driven to a point of stunned silence fuelled by despair and nothingness, but to a point of awareness of an actual God doing an actual work within my actual self. Sure, much about this God and His work remains a mystery to me, but just because I don't perceive Him exhaustively doesn't mean I cannot perceive Him truthfully.

Sitting on the chair in the sun outside my house, my words soon turned into one word, 'Jesus', and this word soon married itself to my breathing: Je- (breathe in), -sus (breathe out). My breathing became my prayer, and my prayer became the key to my awareness. I became aware of this deep, bubbling peace inside me, reminding me that this is my truest home. 'A peace that surpasses all understanding', I thought to myself.

I also became aware of the world around me, the world I so easily miss in my usual state of hurry and preoccupation. I became aware of the sounds of birds and insects all around me, this life that is always there regardless of whether I know it or pay any attention to it. Some birds came to play on my roof and deck and front lawn, reminding me that what they offer Providence in exchange for their care is not their worry but their joy, their playfulness, their being-ness. I sat there for a few minutes, and I found myself edified from within and from without.

My phone rang. It was a business call from Johannesburg, and took about 10 minutes of my time. After I put the phone down the high pitched 'ping!' of my phone announced a BBM message from a friend of mine who lives in the Western Cape: 'May you experience the love of God all around you in everything today.' I took these words with me as I decided to take a meditative stroll on the property I call my home.

I experienced this love in the gift of sensual feeling as the grass touched my bare feet; in the sound of the sheep 'blaaaaah-ing' in the background; in the kiss of one of the Arabian mares on my left cheek; in the buzz of the bees seeking refuge in the roof of one of the other houses on the property; in the blue and red dance of dragonflies next to the pond; in the joy of the jumping grasshoppers who cleared a path as I approached them; in the dedication of the ants stocking up their food pile for the soon approaching winter.

As my short stroll through a whole other world just outside my doorstep returned me to my sun-kissed deck, I found myself at home in this world, content, connected, happy to be alive. And so I came to this point, sitting in this chair, sharing with this mind and these fingers the joy that's been my portion this morning.

I know that this account is a completely subjective experience of my own existence, and my existential experience doesn't make it universally true or binding. I am not unfamiliar with the fact that I have been conditioned to identify certain things according to a set of presuppositions which I hold, whether by choice or by default. But, in the end, that's all we have to offer, isn't it? Our own phenomenological experience of life as we see and experience it. Our own joy of living. Our own inner peace. Our own sense of well-being. Complete human objectivity doesn't exist, as even the most distant scientist or devout churchman must admit: the 'objective' scientist is still the one setting the parameters of his experiment; the 'objective' religious man is still the one interpreting the data of his discoveries.

That's why the call of Christ to abide in Him - with all my warts and warps and isms and everything else that makes me uniquely me - is such a liberating and joyous experience. I come to Him as I am, with an imperfect understanding not only of myself and the story I find myself in but also of the One I approach, and I rest at peace knowing that the real God can interact with the real me regardless of how unreal my reality in actual fact is.

Let me end this post with some food for thought from Thomas Merton:

‘If one reaches the point where understanding fails, this is not a tragedy: it is simply a reminder to stop thinking and start looking. Perhaps there is nothing to figure out after all: perhaps we only need to wake up.’

The last couple of posts I have been exploring the invitation of Jesus that calls us beyond beliefism into a living and dynamic way opened up to us by the following words: 'You, follow Me.' I know that I have hardly scratched the surface of what this invitation meant 2000 years ago in the context of Jesus' earthly life, but hopefully I will explore it a bit further in the days to come, if my thoughts stumble in that direction that is to say.

What I am interested in for the time being is how this invitation applies to me and you in the here and now. Obviously Jesus is no longer gracing the grass and the gravel of Galilee, so I need to discover a different approach to make this invitation real and lasting for me.

The last couple of weeks I have been grappling with this and related thoughts intensely. Whenever a thought overwhelms me - which is quite often, as I am prone to consider every foreseeable option and take its implications to the nth degree - I go into flight mode. Whenever I am too lazy to think an idea through, or whenever I am slightly intimidated by the repercussions of a given conclusion which I might discover in thinking deeply about a given thing, I do what any person fearful of change would do: I simply avoid the issue.

I fill my time with movies and computer games and unnecessary work, all in an attempt to pass the time in the hope that whatever issue I am confronted with will simply fade away. But, alas, whenever I am faced with a real important thought, it wears me down and sucks me dry like an army besieging a city, until I emerge from the walls of my own illusory safety bearing a white flag of surrender, accepting whatever transformation might come my way.

What I am yet to learn is that whenever I set aside my silliness and inattentiveness, coming to the truth in surrender after running out of resources to occupy and entertain myself, I am greeted not by a warlord intent on making me a slave, but by a wise and gentle teacher intent on making me fully alive. Always. Without exception. And so too it is with this idea of following Jesus or, as the apostle John put it, abiding in Jesus.

Writing his account of the gospel of Christ a few years after Mark and Matthew and Luke, John was interested about expanding on the spiritual application connected with some of Jesus' teachings. Because the largest part of his audience most likely never knew Jesus in the flesh, both because the account was written about five decades after the death and resurrection of Jesus and because it was primarily addressed to a non-Jewish crowd, John aimed at making the message of Jesus clear and audible in a way that his readers would understand.

Now, to someone who never knew Jesus in the flesh (especially those who did not understand the rabbinical connotation of the words which would've been plain to a Jewish crowd), the invitation to 'follow Me', taken on face value, is as logical as saying 'follow the poached egg.' John, understanding this, reframes and expands this invitation in a discourse of Jesus recorded in John 15:1-17, summarised by the three words: 'Abide in Me.' This, according to the apostle John, is what it means to follow Jesus in a post-resurrection context.

So then: Abide in Me.

When I think of these words the following comes to mind: to linger with, to live within, to be united to, to be inseparably joined together. When we begin to ponder the implication of these words in John 15, it soon becomes clear why John wedged this section of his gospel account between discourses of Jesus that told of the coming reality of the Spirit of God. In some mysterious yet very real way we are granted access into the life of God as we listen and yield and respond to the Divine Spirit moving and breathing and working within us.

That's why, if given the option, I choose to be a mystic rather than theologian. This distinction might be unfair, I know, but what keeps me moving forward and pressing deeper into the way of Christ is not the desire nor even the hope that I will somehow someday emerge and say: 'Eureka, I finally have it all figured out.' On the contrary, the more I know the more I am aware of how little I know. Even so, the more I know the more I make peace with the fact that life is not primarily about exhausting the mystery.

You see, some people have this idea that as followers of Jesus we are supposed to know on the tip of our fingers the answers to the great questions of life. If you are one of those people or, more poignantly, one of those Christians supposing you should live in such a manner, I can only invite you to reconsider your position based upon at least one witness: mine. There are so many examples I can use to elaborate my case, but let me use just one for the time being: the whole issue of creationism vs. evolution, both of which are theories which exist because of our preoccupation with beliefism, the desire to rob our world of mystery and wonder by turning into either a science lab of impersonal data or a case-study of verifiable dogmas.

For what is worth, I don't wake up in the morning anxious with thoughts about how we all got here. I don't know how old the world is and how exactly it all came into being, and I have a strong distrust in both the pure-blood evolutionists who claim that existence and personality and beauty burst forth from nothingness, chance and natural selection as well as narrow minded creationists who believe in a 6000 year old creation when, to name but one fact, the furthest observable body of mass in our galaxy is about 13.7 billion light years away, meaning that matter and 'being-ness' is at least that old - had it not been the case then we wouldn't have been able to observe that body of mass today, for its light would still be travelling towards us.

What I don't mind is talking about and exploring and discovering whatever light we are given on the subject of us being here, whether we are enlightened by new ideas or edified by old stories. What tires me is the fighting and the name-calling and the belittling that seems to fly between the camps who, from where I stand, has long since lost the plot of discovering where we came from, having turned it into an argument about who is right and who is wrong.

Maybe it's just my temperament, I don't know. I am by nature a lover rather than a fighter, and from where I stand I look at the whole scenario outlined above and think to myself: even if we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt where we come from and how old (young?) the universe is, so what? What then? These aren't new questions, and many of the answers people on 'the cutting edge' are giving us are not new answers.

I have kind of resigned and distanced myself from these and similar 'pressing issues', because existence - my 'being-ness' - is not a problem to be solved but a journey to be lived. Sure, I have my opinions, but like anybody else's opinions that exactly what they are: opinions. These opinions mature and change over time, but whatever my beliefs and doubts and questions and insights at any given point, I find myself immersed in the constant flow of God's divine life within, a flow which seems rather unaffected by my choice of opinions about issues that become less relevant the more I find myself at home in my Father's house. When

I am at my most content in my own skin when the words that define my existence are not the in or out words belonging to certain categories which our culture have deemed important (such as, am I pro-life or pro-choice?, am I conservative or liberal?, am I capitalist or socialist? etc). When I come home to that place where I discover my truest self as a being made in the image of God - pure, holy, clean, guiltless, free, innocent, divine - the words that lead me there and keep me there are not words associated primarily with beliefism but words associated with abiding: love, union, attentiveness, belonging, peace.

The point, after all, is to come home to that place where we are most truly ourselves, not simply to endlessly discuss the possible roads to get there.

In the previous post I explored Jesus' constant invitation in the gospels, summarised by two simple words: 'Follow Me.' In doing this, He wasn't merely calling people to believe certain things about Him. Important as some things may be, the bottom line question when it comes to being a participant in the Jesus way is not: 'Do we believe the right things?' but this, 'Are we actually following Him.' In this post I want to explore this reality a little further.

Whenever I read church history, I am always fascinated by the different things different people in different times held to be absolutely important. Richard Foster, in his book entitled Freedom of Simplicity, notes that ‘history has a wonderful way of freeing us from the cult of the contemporary.’ Whenever I read history I become acutely aware that my life and thoughts are only a small contribution to the story of humanity. In the light of my smallness, I temper my convictions with the full acceptance that I, like the rest of humanity, see in part and know in part.

I recall a conversation I had over a cup of coffee with one of my lecturers way back when I still had the courage to study theology. He eventually went on to complete his doctorate in Pauline theology, so he was obviously the sort of person who gave careful thought to what he held to be true. I cannot remember much about that day, except for two things: one, where we were sitting (on the outside section of the Mugg & Bean in Boskruin, Randburg), and two, our conversation at some point turned the life and ways of St. Francis of Assisi.

I think it got to that because I was reading or had just finished reading The Little Flower of Saint Francis, a biographical account by one of his contemporaries and companions about the weird and wonderful life of this much loved saint. To give you an idea of just how weird and wonderful some of these tales were, there is an account of St. Francis talking to a feared and ferocious wolf and getting the animal to agree to stop stealing the village livestock. Then there is the famous account of St. Francis preaching to the birds, a sermon to which the birds actually responded - unlike his human hearers. I am sure that in this famous little booklet of Francis there are some myth woven into the facts, but what is clear is that Francis believed and experienced many things very differently than my lecturer and I.

'He had an interesting life, sure' said my lecturer to me over a cup of coffee, 'but what do you make about some of his beliefs?' With that he meant the fact that St. Francis believed in stuff like purgatory, praying to and through saints, and acknowledged the authority of the pope of his day - who according to many accounts was a bit of a swindler. I can't recall exactly what I said that day - it had something to do with context and upbringing and God meeting us where we are at in spite of ourselves, but what I do remember is that after that day I could never quite escape the notion that maybe, just maybe, there will come a day when people look back on our generation with our particular beliefs and say: 'How in the world could they have believed that?' Ever since I have taken myself and my beliefs a little less seriously, and I am willing to add a disclosure of sorts to most statements I make:

' ... but I might be wrong.'

This realisation becomes even more tangible when I consider the differences between many of my friends and I. I am not merely talking about the different beliefs between my a-theist or anti-theist friends and I, which is a discussion for another time, but the difference of opinion between the people in my life in whose lives the reality of Jesus Christ has made a significant impact. Even if we follow the same Way, we all approach the way a little differently and as a consequence we find ourselves at different places in this ever continuing process of learning and unlearning as we walk in the path of God's salvation.

But what's maybe most sobering is the difference in opinion and interpretation within my own life. The man I am today is at odds on many points with the man (boy?) I was ten years ago. And it is most probable that the man I am today will be in conflict on certain points of belief and interpretation with the man I will be in ten years from now. Why wouldn't it be? I am a man in transit, always moving, always discovering. If the movement stops then so does life.

Can you see why beliefism is such a debilitating and sub-standard approach to the way of Christ? Not only do we have the epistemological difficulties as touched on in the previous post, but we also have the difference in opinion and interpretation between Christ-followers both today and throughout the ages, not to mention the continual conflict and convergence of ideas and theories within each thoughtful individual Christ follower. No, beliefism - the blind acceptance of certain beliefs - is not the answer, nor is it the offer.

Whenever people make an appeal to 'historic Christianity' or even 'biblical Christianity' in an attempt to defend their own presuppositions, I cringe knowing that they haven't really thought that statement through at all. Whose history are they referring to when saying that? The Orthodox Christian's history? The Roman Catholic Christian's history? The Protestant Christian's history? And whose interpretation of the Bible are we accepting when we talk of a biblical Christianity? Augustine's? Aquinas'? Luther's? Calvin's? Barth's?

I know we would like to believe that there is an unbroken thread of unquestioned beliefs throughout our history, but the fact of the matter is there isn't. Sure, in reading history we will discover certain common themes, and even though history might not agree on the application of that theme it will still nonetheless agree on the fact that the given theme is important and worthy of our thought and exploration. Still, even if we figure out a fit that best agrees with our convictions, we are still stuck in the rut of beliefism. Helpful as good and (near) correct beliefs might be - it is better, for instance, to believe that we should look both sides of the road before crossing a street than believing we shouldn't (if you don't you may still make it across the road but you run a much greater risk of injury and even death) - beliefs in and of themselves cannot be the be all and end all of what life is all about.

In the next post I will explore the alternative to beliefism in some more detail.

It's Sunday late afternoon as I write these words in the comfort of my home. The sun is setting over the hilltop to the west, kissing the green treetops with its last few breaths of warmth. I've spent the last four or five days in the Kruger National Park with my parents, and the combination of longs drives, limited electricity and almost no internet connection to speak of made it difficult to step through the magic wardrobe into my world of words. But I am here, finally, and the thoughts are pounding on my fingertips, waiting to be set free. So, as a disclaimer of sorts, I apologise in advance if the next couple of posts are a bit lengthy and heady, but I have a lot to process after a few days of keeping it to myself.

In exploring the way of Jesus as primarily a way of living as opposed to simply a belief system that may or may not have a significant influence on the way I live my life, I am going to break down this Way into a number of smaller ways over the course of the next few posts. In doing so, I am going to try and explain - or at least express - the difference between a personal way and an impersonal belief system. It's not that I want to downplay the importance of certain beliefs as much as I want to frame it within the larger context, without which doctrines and ideas and theologies become superfluous.

For the time being I know that I want to explore at least three ways which helps us on the Way. These ways are expressed in the following words of Jesus: 'Follow Me', 'Abide in Me' and 'Learn from Me.' Interestingly enough, each of these words are phrased as invitations, and hence it requires our personal response and cooperation for it to have an effect on our lives. The first invitation, 'Follow Me', is the way that I want to explore in this post.

In some of my earlier posts I moved towards the importance of coming to Jesus as He is, not as we want Him to be. Whilst none of us come to Jesus in complete objectivity, we need to at least aim at coming to Him naked, open and without an agenda of our own. If we want to follow the real Jesus and not simply an idol of our imaginations, it is of utmost importance to come to the gospels with the honest inquisitiveness of a child, instead of the imposing prejudices of a man or a woman seeking to defend their own positions or protect their own interests.

When I read through the gospel narrative, there is one central theme that permeates all its pages. No, it is not money or morals or marriage, as some may proclaim. Sure, Jesus had something to say about all these things, but His teachings weren't framed in a vacuum. The one constant throughout the gospel narrative is the following words uttered by Jesus: 'Follow Me.' Whenever Jesus brought a man or a woman to an impasse of sorts concerning Himself, He extended a personal invitation to that man or woman or group concerned with the these familiar words: 'You, follow Me.' Some, like Peter and Matthew, left what they were doing and started to follow Jesus. Others, like the rich young ruler or the man who first wanted to bury his father and set his affairs in order, chose not to follow Jesus.

Note that the invitation was not about believing in Jesus or believing certain things about Jesus. Believing in Him as a matter of fact was no big issue (as is the case today for many who don't believe in Jesus as a historical figure), for He was standing right in front of them: flesh and bone and smelly feet. Believing certain things about Him, on the other hand, may have played a part in their decision to up and follow Him, but with that said we now know in retrospect that even their beliefs and expectations of what Jesus was doing in the world was largely at fault - they expected a Messianic liberator of the physical nation of Israel, a Davidic king of sorts, whilst Jesus was up to something completely different. Take Peter as an example. Even after years of following Jesus, both in person and through a post-resurrection spirit-union, we see a man who hasn't fully outgrown his nationalistic tendencies - and it took nothing less than a dramatic vision from heaven and a stern rebuke from Paul (to name but a few instances, I am sure) for Peter to mature in his beliefs concerning a doctrine that lies at the very heart of Jesus' message.

Today we are faced with a dilemma of sorts. Because Christ is no longer dwelling with us incognito in the person of Jesus, the invitation to follow Him is somewhat difficult. Or at least, so it appears at first. When faced with this difficulty, we often do one of two things. One, we rewrite the invitation to say something else than 'Follow Me.' Two, we keep the invitation the same but we fail to contextualise it in a way that is not only relevant but also real. When I look at Church history, as well as our current predicament during our little hoorah moment in time, I see us opting for these two aforementioned options over and over again.

The first option, that of changing the invitation from 'follow Me' to something else such as 'believe certain things about Me, yourself, God, and the universe', or to 'use Me to secure your own happiness and security in this world' or whatever else, is very common. I want to focus briefly on the notion of repainting the invitation from 'follow Me', to 'believe certain things about Me', what I will call here 'beliefism'. Now, I fully understand why we opt for this. What we think and, maybe more importantly, how and why we think what we think, is crucial not only in God-matters but in all of life. One of philosophy's major branches, epistemology, is devoted to the theory of knowledge: 'how we know, or how we know we know' as Francis Schaeffer used to say. Part of following Jesus is believing certain things about Him. If this wasn't the case, the question of why we follow Him and to what extent we follow Him has no reasonable basis.

But there is also a problem with beliefism per se. In order to explain myself I am going to make some broad simplifications here for the sake of time and those who aren't interested in big words, so to those familiar with some of the themes and definitions and intricacies of philosophy and epistemology specifically, I apologise. Speaking in broad terms, in the area of knowledge today, we find two extremes fighting for their position in the equation of right knowledge. I call them extremes for that is what they are, the complete embodiment of their position taken to the nth degree. On the one extreme, you have those who believe in absolute truth or truths. Let's call this the white side of our equation. On the other extreme, you have those who believe that all knowledge and knowing is relative, so much so that nothing is knowable - all 'knowledge' is simply perceived knowledge. Let's call this the black side of the equation.

The white side of the equation stems from the Platonic world of ideals, or universals, and their expressions or particulars. Hence a particular cushion, in order for it to qualify as a cushion, has to have some of the attributes of the ideal cushion, or else it is no longer a cushion but something else. Hence in this world it is possible to say that 'a' is not 'non-a', that is, a thing cannot be its opposite or its other, although it may contain elements of both. In this world of absolutes knowledge is knowable. Because knowledge is knowable, the communication of knowledge (language) is possible - if this was not the case then the sentence that you are reading now might as well have read blah blah blah blah and you could decide for yourself what each individual blah means. Hence, from the extreme white side, you have absolutes firstly existing and then also coming into the equation.

From the extreme black side, you have no-knowledge-at-all is possible coming into the equation. Now, this is not as farfetched as some people might at first assume. The theory of relativity as an epistemological phenomenon was birthed exactly because people started off believing in absolutes, but found it impossible to reconcile their different interpretations and angles and views of knowledge into a system that is accepted without question, whether these objections came from other people or from within themselves. Even the most objective of observer couldn't reason away the fact that he or she as the observer is a filter for understanding absolutes, with both internal and external forces shaping the understanding of an absolute (or, in reality, a perceived absolute), making an objective thing subjective to the observers observations. Hence the popular notion of relativity, 'If it works for you, do it', is a conclusion of despair and desperation more than anything else.

Still, to make any statement at all presupposes the existence of some form of knowledge and the ability to know knowledge. Relativity, as a theory, is possible only because it assumes language to be understandable, i.e., that knowledge is knowable, at least to some extent. Can you see the relationship between absolutes and relativity? To make the claim, 'everything is relative' is true to some extent, seeing that knowing anything is relative to the observer (the object doing the knowing) to some degree or another, but it is only true because it accepts as a given that the statement itself can be understood, and therefore that knowledge itself is possible, which will logically lead us back to absolutes, or at least absolutes of connotation. The universal absolute of connotation regarding the word 'red', for instance, is that red is not blue or green or yellow or any other colour, nor is it an animal or a plant or anything else but a colour.

When people talk about absolute truth vs. relative truth, as if one should without question be pitted against the other, it just shows that they haven't really thought about what they are saying. Absolute truth and relative truth is part of the same continuum, the same paradox and pendulum, and both have their place. If we believe in absolute truth without considering that our relative understanding thereof will be, by default, incomplete, then we are blinded by our pride and communication is stifled. Pure whiteness is blinding to the eyes, after all. If, on the other hand, we hold the illogical conclusion that all knowledge is relative in the sense that nothing whatsoever is knowable at all, we are also blinded and we stifle communication, because to carry the theory of relativity to its logical conclusion means that we would be left with nothing but silence and suicide, for words itself will be meaningless. Pitch blackness, likewise, makes it impossible for us to see even if we have eyes.

To come to the knowledge of the truth, whatever it may be, we need to be sensitive to the existence of certain absolutes, even if these absolutes are just absolutes of connotation. We can go further back than this (and some would insist we must), but for the time being I am not going to. Having said that, if we accept certain absolutes, even if they are just absolutes of connotation (what we generally understand the word to mean), we simply must be open to the reality that our interpretation of these absolutes, whether individually or as a sentence or statement or theory, is relative to our own human selves. We carry our world views, cultural connotations, preferences, biases etc into our epistemology, and not to acknowledge that is both dishonest and illogical. This fact need not render us impotent, but it should at least make us humble - both to learn more and to listen to what others have to say.

Having said all that, and being vaguely optimistic that some of you are still reading this, I want to raise my objections against reducing the way of Christ to merely a system of absolute beliefs. There is simply too much ambiguity and variables involved not only in knowing knowledge itself but also in interpreting the Bible to accept that in the end it all comes down to right knowledge and believing accordingly. It's not that we cannot grow to believe some things in the right way, but right belief does not give us access to the Father. Jesus alone does that, and in insisting that people must believe the right things about Jesus before they can accept His invitation to follow Him has kept more people out of the kingdom of God than most probably anything else. I know that some people will shout curses at me right about now, but let's get back to the example of Peter: It is only AFTER following Jesus for some time that he makes the great confession of his faith: 'You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.' Too often we say to people: 'You have to confess Jesus as Lord before you can expect or experience the involvement and care of God in your life.' But why should they? It is in following somebody, in being exposed to their presence, that we come to certain conclusions of who that person is. After all, the Jesus I follow says that His Father makes it rain on the just and the unjust alike. Maybe our job as people who confess Jesus as the Christ is not about condemning others who don't believe as we do as it is about us showing them that Jesus is available to them at anytime. And whilst I don't have to budge in my position that Jesus is the only way to His Father, I can accept that there are truly are many ways to Jesus - the narrow minded approach of beliefism simply doesn't cut it.

But that's enough of that for the time being.

I want to quickly return now to my second observation, as a way of introducing what I will be writing about in the next blog post. When we are faced with the difficulty of following Jesus today, and we avoid the temptation of not changing the invitation from 'follow Me' to something completely different, then we often end up failing to contextualise it. You have those who are serious about the words 'follow Me', and they stick to the words of Jesus with a legalistic fervour that at first seem amiable - until you realise that Jesus used words and imagery and metaphors that made sense to people 2000 years ago, and if I take them into my world and context without some serious re-interpretation it may make very little sense. To stick with the example we have been using: Jesus told Peter, a fisherman, that He will make him a fisher of men if he decides to follow Him. Now, if Jesus appears to me today and tells me that, I might get what He is saying because I am familiar with fishing, but because it is neither a profession that I practice nor a hobby that I particularly enjoy, the full force of its words will be lost to me. Hence when Jesus calls a man or woman to follow Him, the invitation is deeply personal, which implies that the road the person will travel when accepting this invitation my differ a great deal from the road that another person will travel who also accepted Jesus' personal invitation of following Him. And whilst it is in our hands to choose whether or not we want to follow Him, it is not up to us to determine the road upon which He chooses to lead us.

In a world where the way of Christ is reduced to simply believing the 'right' opinions about the 'right' things, conformity is inevitable. Conformity, in turn, breeds tribalism, and in so doing we begin to work against the new world that Jesus is bringing about which seeks to move humanity beyond tribalism into a new identity that is rooted in Him (I blogged about this last month, check it out if you haven't read it yet: Jesus' plan for a new world: Beyond tribalism (kind of) - Part 1, 2 and 3). But if the way of Christ is indeed a living way, then how do we actively participate in this way? How do I follow Jesus today without changing the invitation into mere beliefism on the one hand, whilst remaining sensitive to my own time and context on the other?

In the next post I will explore this a bit further.

It's Thursday morning as I write these words. The grey and white of the cold cloudiness resting on the treetops outside my bedroom window of my little house in the mountains invites me to stay inside, to listen, to write. I gladly oblige.

The last few days I have been meditating on what it would mean to approach the way of Christ honestly, in nakedness, without the lens of my presuppositions or preferences tempting me to prove my point or state my case. I know that complete and total objectivity is an impossibility, but I can - and must - try. To be a student in the school of life I ought to remain teachable, and in order to remain teachable I need not hold too tightly to the world and the ideas that I have thus far constructed for myself. In the words of Thomas Merton: ‘We do not want to be beginners. But let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!’

If I want to remain honest in my understanding and practice of the way of Christ, I need to welcome a good degree of disillusionment and doubt from time to time. Far from being the intruders we sometimes make them out to be, being disarmed of our illusions is a good thing, and doubting what we hold to be true gives us the courage and the opportunity to discover things that are worth believing in. The construction of a good way to live by is necessarily preceded by the deconstruction that comes from doubt and disillusionment. This is not some post-modern jargon, but simply a statement of common sense.

That said, deconstruction in and of itself is no virtue. In fact, when deconstruction becomes an end in itself we will be forever dissecting the frog until there is no life left in it, killing the frog and leaving us with blood on our hands. The anger and aimlessness of many people in my generation testifies of the fact that deconstruction is only half the path. If we fail to move on from the ruins we created, we will eventually suffocate in its ashes.

It is with this in mind that I approach the way of Christ for what it is: a way. It's not simply a system of abstract beliefs or impersonal do's and don'ts. It is an active, living, breathing way, given form by the person, example and work of Jesus the Christ and inviting our freedom as we participate in this eternal dance according to our own unique and often quirky rhythms. We are free to choose other ways - that of capitalism, pop culture, religious convenience or whatever else - but let us not confuse the way of Christ with ways he neither begun nor would endorse today. Jesus can never be a means to a different end than the end or ends He had in mind. To the extent that we manipulate Him to fit in as a means towards any other end or ends which He had in mind for humanity, to that extent we have alienated ourselves from His way. The way of Christ has its own end in mind, and when we turn to Him we are not only relinquishing our means of getting by in this word, but also the ends which we hold dear.

Therefore we need to come to Christ and the gospels without an agenda of our own, difficult as that may be. In exploring and accepting His way we need to allow ourselves the full brunt of what it means to be confronted with His words and ways, without the sugar-coat of our Western preferences. We need to allow for both the comfort and the confusion, the inspiration and the intimidation, the clarity and the obscurity, the easy and the impossible. To the extent that we pick and choose what we want to ignore and what we want to accept about Christ's ways and words, to that extent we divert from the way of Christ onto another.

I want to end our current time together with a quote by Eugene Peterson, from his book, The Jesus Way. So much more can be said on this topic, and in the weeks to come more will be said as I explore it further, but for the time being let us part ways with the following words:

'So many who understand themselves to be followers of Jesus embrace the ways and means of Western culture as they go about their daily living "in Jesus' name." "Getting on in the world" means doing so on the world's terms, and that the ways of Jesus are useful only in a compartmentalised area of life labelled "religious." This is wrong thinking, and wrong living. Jesus is an alternative to the dominant ways of the world, not a supplement to them.'

Amen to that brother.

In any given field of human knowledge or communication one has the dual ingredients of form and freedom. These two are interrelated in such a way so that the one cannot really exist without the other, yet they remain distinct enough so as to be clearly differentiated.

Take human language as a case in point. Any given language has a certain form: specific letters make up specific words, and specific words make up specific sentences. Whilst there may be different interpretations for given words and thus different readings of specific sentences or statements, the form of our language and the common connotations we attach to the words in our language make it possible for us to communicate intelligibly and understandably. Within this form there is a lot of freedom, which means that we can play around with the meaning of words and ideas and connotations as our languages evolve, mature and adapt, but without form no freedom is possible, for freedom itself would be an undefined and unintelligible word.

The same applies to art. Any given artist need to have a good blend of form and freedom to be able to communicate to his or her audience. Without a form that is infused by a certain unique blend of technique and genre and context, art becomes nothing more than random brush strokes or disconnected lines communicating nothing. It's not enough for the artist to claim absolute freedom and then call the cacophony that is their handiwork art, for art has a certain form - wide and diverse though it may be. On the other hand, if the artist have only form but no imagination or daring that comes from pushing the boundaries of his or her creative freedom, the artwork loses the ability to communicate not because it is unintelligible, but simply because its sheer boredom fails to captivate any given audience.

As with language and art, so with music and politics and economics and parenthood and whatever else we can think about. Any given human endeavour has this dual dance of form and freedom. To give one more example: without the form of music (understanding, reading or playing individual notes), no true freedom of expression is possible. A great guitar solo, for instance, is preceded by years and years of dry and monotonous practice. And so we can go on, giving example upon example.

The way of Christ, likewise, to be an intelligible reality that can be both experienced and communicated, is subject to the dynamic dance of form and freedom. There is a certain form that makes it what it is, and there is a truckload of freedom within this form to experience and express it in a myriad of different ways. Without the form, it ceases the be the way of Christ, in much the same way that the way of Alexander the Great (conquer by force) is not the same as the way of Mahatma Gandhi (non-violent resistance). Without corresponding freedom, though, the form will soon become lifeless, boring and irrelevant.

Hence to understand the way of Christ we need a certain lens to establish a certain form in which freedom can be enjoyed and celebrated. Now I know that there are those who pride themselves in not having any lenses whatsoever, as if their subjective experience and interpretation of the world is the objective truth of reality as is. But that's just rubbish. All truth is phenomenological in nature, which means that we interpret any given truth - even absolute truths (if we believe in such things) - according to the phenomenon of our personal experience. This does not mean that we cannot know what truth is, but it should make us humble and careful enough to keep our truth in the educating tension of communication and community.

Different people bring different lenses into their quest to understand the way of Christ. Some people choose these lenses after careful consideration, but from my experience it seems that most people are handed these lenses without their consent and many times without their knowledge: they are simply born into it by virtue of their upbringing and given context. To bring it closer to home, the way of Christ in the Western world has adopted a certain lens that can best be described as a religious one. I have written about it before, and don't want to rehash old material for the time being (For more info, see chapter 1.1 - Religion: What God's story is not about in my free e-book, Reading My Life, available for download on this website). This religious lens, in turn, takes on a very distinct vocal point based on our given allegiance to whatever denomination, organisation or cohort we belong to based upon the pre-determined values, practices and interpretations of these groups.

Now, I am not saying that this is all bad. I am just stating the obvious. Regardless of whether this reality is good or not so good, I see God using all of these various expressions to bring about His plan for a new world. Sure, many of these groups do more harm than good, or as much harm as good, but God uses all willing hands and hearts, regardless of ourselves. But if we view the way of Christ through the lens of our given religious subcultures, we cannot escape the inevitable: that ours will be a God of culture and convenience, for we filter His ways and His words through a context which we accept without question. Hence two thousand years down the line, we adopt a form and definition of the way of Christ that have been removed and filtered an innumerable amount of times through various lenses. Some of these siftings have been good and beneficial, others not so much.

Even the early Church, which we discover in the pages of the New Testament, is an expression of the form that Jesus intended, once removed. With once removed I mean that they were a ragamuffin bunch of people, with lenses and hidden motives and good intentions and bad choices (much like ourselves), giving expression to the way of Christ as they understood it. They had a certain form which they took for granted (the person and mission of Jesus Christ), and within this form they had the freedom to explore and express and communicate and celebrate and fail in the way of Christ as faith and fate and choice and chance determined.

I want to suggest that for us to best understand the way of Christ, we need not turn primarily to our given context or even primarily to the New Testament church to explore and participate in the dynamic dance of His way, but to turn primarily to the Gospels themselves. It is not that our given contexts are necessarily unhelpful, and I am definitely not saying that the church as discovered in the pages of the New Testament offers no guidance. On the contrary, I think the opposite. That said, I do think it better to let the Gospels shape our fundamental understanding of the way of Christ, after which we filter our experiences through the pages of the early Church letters, into the ebb and flow of our history, right down to our current given context. Too often, though, we do the direct opposite: we take our given context, locate it historically, justify it biblically and then we try to fit Jesus the Christ into the mould of our pre-determined understanding of things. This is backward thinking, and will always result in backward results.

In the next couple of posts, I will be suggesting ways in which we can employ my above suggestion to determine both form and freedom for the way of Christ. Stay tuned.

It's Saturday late morning as I write these words. My friend Jean and I are sitting in a Cafe Fino as part of our coffee hopping expedition around Johannesburg today. Jean is one of those special people in my life whose mere presence in my life invites me to be a better person, to say yes to all that is good within me.

We are surrounded by people going about their daily routine. On the table straight across from me there is what appears to be a mother and daughter enjoying a light meal and an equally light conversation. To the left there is the couple that has probably been together for 20 years plus, at home in each other's company as they bite into their food between shorts burst of conversation and the occasional glimpse at the TV screen overhead where the Reds are playing the Rebels in a Super Rugby match. To the back left of me there is a solitary figure, a thin man probably in his sixties, paging through the morning paper at a leisurely pace, appearing content with the life that has been his thus far.

Life. People. Stories. Experiences. Ideas. Histories. Futures. All crowded into one small room, sharing a moment in time in the ever evolving story that is our common fate. As someone who is a follower of God in the way of Christ (or at least someone who attempts to be), I am invited to explore the connectedness of our stories that for this short moments in time are rubbing shoulders, maybe to never meet again.  If this new world envisioned by Christ which I have been writing about the last few weeks has any significance or weight whatsoever, then it must matter here, now, in the boring ordinariness of it all.

We have already explored how the way of Christ, from my vantage point at least, moves us beyond the us vs. them divide of tribalism to a vision of a world that is loved and accepted, a world where oneness and reconciliation are treasured over division and distance. I have also been careful not to be too dogmatic about what qualifies as either in or out of Christ, although it does seem obvious to me that there are those who have awakened from the slumber of their tribalism as opposed to those who remain slaves to the ideologies of their given status quo.

The next question that logically follows is this: If I am found in Christ, then what? Or, as my e-friend Ken Howard continually asks in his book Paradoxy, 'If Christ, then what?'. If we chase the car and actually catch the car, what do we do with the car or, maybe more importantly, how does catching the car influence the way we live our lives?

Too often this question is answered from a tribal perspective. The answers we are presented in response to this question is usually the answers formulated by the tribe who has been influential in introducing us to the reality of God in Christ. There is no escaping this reality, and it is by no means a completely raw deal. Still, there is a danger in unequivocally accepting the voice of our given tribe. Many times our programs of discipleship are geared towards, deliberately or not, conforming to the answers and lifestyles and actions of our given tribe, instead of catapulting us into a life of listening and personal response. Such discipleship, then, has more to do with being a follower of the traditions of our given tribe (some good and some not so good), and less to do with being an actual disciple of Jesus Christ. Discipleship ought to happen in community, yes, but discipleship can never be about conforming to community.

When I think about the in-Christ life, I realise that being a follower of Christ today has less to do with upholding the ideals of my given tribe and more to do with responding to the music which God is orchestrating in my life. The one constant invitation which Christ had put out to men and women two thousand years ago was not so much about believing this thing or that thing about Him or the world or reality in general, but simply this: 'Follow Me.' That invitation, I think, still stands today.

What makes the way of Christ so intimidating and downright silly to so many people whom I know is the fixation we have with many archaic and outdated arguments, rules and regulations. Sure, as with any community, the community of Christ has certain guiding principles, and, being principles rather than laws, they should continually be open for re-evaluation and re-interpretation. But more often than not we are like men and women reading notes from a music sheet to a tone-deaf world, when all along the idea is not simply to master the theory of music but to accept the invitation of the music to move according to its soulful rhythms. What's more, how I dance to that music may differ considerably from the way you dance to the music, and that is OKAY (or at least, that should be okay). In this context, watching the movie August Rush might be more beneficial in helping us understand the movement of God's music in our lives compared to sitting through a dry and descriptive sermon.

In the next few blog posts I will exploring how this in-Christ life looks like for me. I will be touching on themes which I have explored in greater (albeit non-exhaustive) detail in my free e-book, Reading My Life, available for free download on this website. (Go to the navigation bar, Free Downloads/Book: Reading My Life)

In one of those epically memorable moments in cinematic history, The Joker (played by the late Heath Ledger) responds as follows to Harvey when asked about his plan (now, if that intro didn't make sense, do yourself a favour and watch Batman: The Dark Knight):

"Do I really look like a man with a plan, Harvey? I don't have a plan. The mob has plans, the cops have plans. You know what I am, Harvey? I'm a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught one."

I've been playing with these words in my head for the last couple of days. It got triggered by some news about a week ago of the world famous atheist, Richard Dawkins, admitting in a debate with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, that he cannot be a hundred percent sure that God doesn't exist. Which, technically, makes him an agnostic, not an atheist.

For a couple of days after this 'breaking news' I watched how on social media and blog sites the world wide web exploded with responses and thoughts about Dawkins' words. I find it a bit ironic, for this 'not quite sure if God doesn't exist' has been the man's position for a while now. Be that as it may, you had your theists on the one side celebrating a victory over the forces of darkness, and on the other side you had the non-theists defending either Dawkins or his statement or both. I'm generalising here, but you get the point. That was about a week ago. Today it's old, almost irrelevant news.

I for one don't mind reasoning, debate and dialogue which aims at a communal understanding of life and truth. In fact, I welcome it. But this little blip on the map of information last week led me to ask the following question: After proving our point and winning our argument, then what? I don't know about you, but I am rather sick and tired of all the back and forth arguments regarding so many things that seems to do very little more than keep us busy with the interests of our own tribe whilst at the same time alienating those who don't agree with us.

There are so many warring camps out there: the creationists vs. the evolutionists; the theists against the non/atheists; the pro-lifers against the pro-choicers; the fundamentalists vs. the liberals; the no-gays vs. the pro-gays and so on and so forth. At first it is rather exciting to side with one or the other, to fight for a 'good cause' and all that, but in time you realise that those on the other side of the fence are as adapt in their arguments and reasoning. In time, if you had enough exposure to the other side, you begin not only to sympathise with the people on that side but also to understand why they think the way they do. The pro-choicer, for instance, may soon realise that some of their arguments for abortion may lead to unbridled sexual conduct and the dangers and heartache that often go with that, whilst the pro-lifer may realise that the answer is not as black in white when the person in front of them is no longer a statistic but a pregnant rape victim.

And so our world goes back and forth: arguing, lobbying, propagating, proselyting and protecting the interest of the tribe or tribes we are affiliated with. Is this the way it is supposed to be? Are our only options in the world to choose one or the other tribe and simply become a part of what they are doing? And if I join a tribe and that tribe goes on to win the argument, to catch the metaphorical car so to speak, would we know what to do with that car? And, maybe more importantly, if we catch the car - whether we know what to do with it or not - will our victory help us shed our doggish nature, or are we forever damned to this dog-eat-dog world and the primal instinct and nature that gives rise to such a world?

It's only when we realise the damningly paralysing nature of the desperate back and forth-ness that springs forth from our obsession with and allegiance to a tribe that we can begin to comprehend the good news of a reconciled world in Christ. What would a world beyond tribalism look like? And can this world ever come about through right theories and answers that, important thought they may be, will always face the scrutiny and correction of other theories and arguments? And if this world cannot be set right simply by - and dare I say primarily by - 'right' knowledge and 'accurate' facts, then how does being in Christ differ from just another set of tribal rules and regulations, rights and wrongs?

For that we need to turn to Jesus the Christ, revealed in and through the gospels. That he is indeed revealed through these documents, and that these documents are indeed reliable and credible, are arguments for another time. Having looked at both sides of these arguments myself, I am very confident that we have, in the very least, an accurate representation of the early Jesus-community's understanding of the person and work of Christ. If that is all we have, then it is enough to create not only context but also substance for us to understand our place in this ongoing mission of Christ reconciling all things in Him, even today.

And whilst I am not willing to be too dogmatic about who is included and who is excluded in the term 'in Christ' (check out my previous post for more on this), I do want to look at the consequences of such an inclusion: what would the man or woman or community look like who have embraced a self that has moved beyond (note: moved beyond, not denied or written off) any given tribal identity because of their identification with Christ?

More on this in the posts to follow.