Pilgrims on a Journey : Tolstoy and Nouwen (part 1)

Pilgrims on a journey. I've been wanting to blog about this topic for awhile, keeping a reminder on my PDA that keeps popping up. But yet, what journey and what pilgrims are we talking about?

Reading Yancey's Soul Survivor, on Yancey's heroes of faith, I find myself deeply identifying with both these heroes, Leo Tolstoy and Henri Nouwen. Today, I shall talk about Tolstoy.

Although born as a nobility, Tolstoy, once considered the finest writer Russia has ever produced, sharing the honour with Dostoevsky, lived a tumultuous life punctuated by high ideals and the depths of depression of the failure to obtain it. Even Mahatma Gandhi, the father the nation of India, found Tolstoy's spiritual writings profoundly moving and credited Tolstoy's 'The Kingdom of God Is Within You' as his inspiration of non-violence. However, as Yancey puts it, for every Gandhi stirred by Tolstoy's high-minded ideals, another reader is repelled by how miserably he failed to fulfil those ideals.

Whil growing up, I've always asked myself on how could I be more Christian in my conduct? The bible states in Matthew, for us to turn the other cheek, but in the world we live in, turning the other cheek only means being given a hiding by bullies and people who think you're just too soft. And how about the other aspects of the Christian life? How can we ever hope to reach the standards preached to us by Christ on His sermon on the mount?

During his time, Tolstoy constantly had to reply critics, which included his wife, Sonya, on whether he carried out what he preached. And Tolstoy responded with this, 'What about you , Lev Nokolayevich, you preach very well, but do you carry out what you preach?' This is the most natural of questions and one that is always asked of me; it is usually asked victoriously, as though it were a way of stopping my mouth. 'You preach, but how do you live?' And I answer that I do not preach, that I am not able to preach, although I passionately wish to. I can preach only through my actions, and my actions are vile... And I answer that I am guilty, and vile, and worthy of contempt for my failure to carry them out.

At the same time, not in order to justify, but simply in order to explain my lack of consistency, I say: 'Look at my present life and then at my former life, and you'll see that I do attempt to carry them out. It is true that I have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them [Christian percepts], and I am ashamed of this, but I have failed to fulfil them not because I did not wish to, but because I was unable to. Teach me to escape from the net of temptations that surrounds me, help me and I will fulfil them; even without help I wish and hope to fulfil them.

'Attack me, I do this myself, but attack me rather than the path I follow, and which I point out to anyone who asks me where I think it lies. If I know the way home and am walking along it drunkenly, is it any less the right way because I am staggering from side to side? If its not the right way, then show me another way; but if I stagger and lose the way, you must help me, you must keep me on the true path, just as I am ready to support you. Do not mislead me, do not be glad that I have got lost, do not shout out joyfully: "Look at him! He said he was going home, but there he is crawling into a bog!" No, do not gloat, but give me your help and support'

Yancey mentions that Tolstoy, like a spawning salmon, fought upstream all his life, in the end collapsing from moral exhaustion. Don't we all at times, whereupon at our weakest hour, we fail God, only to be fraught with dissapointment and despair. It seems so easy to just go to church on Sundays and cell group on Friday/Thursday, and then living back the same life as everybody else. 'Hypocrite' is what some fellow Christians call me when I tell them I'm trying to live a life worthy to be a testimony. Like Tolstoy, I want to pursue the authentic faith, even though I might seem to fail at times. Is it much better to just live a nominal faith? No! I can't bear standing in God's presence, knowing I'm wilfully sinning and not bothering about it.

'I'm not an orphan on earth as long as that man lives,' said Maxim Gorky, one of Tolstoy's most talented contemporaries. He raised the sights of an entire nation, and still today his writings bear that message to the world.

God Bless.

The Problem of Pleasure (and sex)

Trudging through life, I'm sure dat at times you wonder, why does bad things happen to seemingly good people, like for example, the friend that had her bag snatched by a snatch-thief, or even worse, as Ravi Zacharias puts it, a man who was an eye-witness to the slow murder of young Jewish boys in a Nazi concentration camp; whereupon the boys were hanged and slowly left to choke to death. The Jewish man promptly cried, 'Where is God, in the midst of all this?'

And I'm sure that we can go on an endless debate about the problem of pain. But take a moment with me with this jolly philosopher, who struggled with Christianity before accepting it, and was known as the philosophical Peter Pan of the 20th Century, as it was explained by Phillip Yancey.
'In addition to the problem of pain, G.K. Chesterton seemed equally fascinated by its opposite, the problem of pleasure. He found materialism too thin to account for the sense of wonder and delight that gives an almost magical dimension to such basic human acts such as sex, childbirth, play and artistic creation.

Why is sex fun? Reproduction surely does not require pleasure: some animals simply split in half to reproduce, and even humans use methods of artificial insemination that involves no pleasure. Why is eating enjoyable? Plants and the lower animals manage to obtain their quota of nutrients without the luxury of taste buds. Why are there colours? Some people get along fine without the ability to detect colour. Why complicate vision for all the rest of us?'

and here

'As Chesterton saw it, sexual promiscuity is not so much an overvaluing of sex as a devaluing.
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it...Polygamy is a lack of the realisation of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in a mere absence of mind'

And thus, wouldn't pornography and masturbation be a devaluation of sex and the intimacy of a Godly, loving relationship that is to come with it? It is like forgoing all aspects of a ten course meal at a lavish, exotic five star restaurant, in order to have the final dish, the ice cream, as an entire meal by itself, on a daily basis.

God Bless!

p/s: Comments welcomed! Please do post your views! ;)

Orthodoxy

Just got back from Borders, clinching one of the books I've been looking for almost a year. Orthodoxy, the book by G.K. Chesterton, who in turned influenced people and thinkers like Mahatma Gandhi and C.S. Lewis among the others. The repeated hearing of Ravi Zacharias' audio CDs convinced me to look and read for myself, what the modern fathers of Christian Apologetics wrote and thought about.


Oh yeah, got the compilation of C.S. Lewis' writings. Looking forward to get his other book, 4 loves. Do let me know if you're interested to borrow them ;) Now, yea, it's time to continue the exam preparations.


God Bless!
p/s: Yancey and Francis Schaeffer are good writers as well, though, you can't really find much books on apologetics in places like Salvation. MPH and Borders do offer a wider range.

Awesome Camp photos

And they try hard to crab-dance. The winner gets a year's supply of crab :p Now you know.. haha

Famous Amos. It seems to be the best way to win people's hearts ;)