I won’t talk about two of the songs, the novel, or what dreams they represented, at this moment, because they will no doubt receive special treatment when they are recorded / completed. I did, however, want to share one song, an instrumental piece I composed in Logic with my keyboard. The composition took over many long nights, zoned out hammering keys, headphones pressing a wide canyon in the top of my skull.

Even all the way through the retreat the song had remained unnamed, but now that I have had some time to think on it, I have decided to call it “The Wayfaring Aesthete Engages the Road in Conversation”. (Originally, it was supposed to be called “ReCreation”, but I didn’t want to inflict on it too great a connection with this weblog, and the storied nature of the final name is much more appropriate).

The dream of mine which corresponded to this particular work was that of creating/designing objects/experiences which faithfully and reliably transmit emotion. In a word, “evoking”. I long to evoke responses in others the way that good art evokes incredibly deep emotional responses in me. I treasure those experiences as gifts, and desire to give such gifts to others as well.

Click on the link below to download the iTunes-format version of the song. (The picture is a screenshot of the song’s timeline, with its various instruments).

The Wayfaring Aesthete Engages the Road in Conversation

Let me know what you think. Friends who were with us on the retreat–I encourage you to likewise post your creations, which were all excellent!

My main contribution was a song I had written the day before the “retreat”, but I will save its lyrics for the time when I have a recording to go with it. I also wrote a short poem while on the top of Mt Tamalpais, north of San Francisco, where we had all gone hiking on Saturday. From Mt Tamalpais there is a glorious view of the SF bay, and this apparent division of the world into air and water, juxtaposed all about by land, inspired the poem, which I am calling “Tesseract’s End”:

Rugged shoulders to spines on back
A strange animal I traverse
Its own life an undefined breath
Overlooked substratum of heaven on earth

I walk sometimes up, sometimes in
Phase shift accomodating forms that
Disregard boundaries of texture--
Oh that my soul felt the same!

To swim or run or fly between
The lines that slice the diff'ring spheres
A hardened wire of surface tension
That feels, from altitude, as rock
(on it I fall, and am crushed)

To be of wing or fin was given
To marvels of motion and muscle
But lightspeed travel twixt high and low
Alone can I exhibit
--if only I could breathe at Tesseract's end

The idea was to imbue some more constrained object (a few paragraphs of prose, or a haiku, or a rant) with a more focused, albeit artistic, answer, with the hope that this presence would be actually a more meaningful way to share than just saying verbally whatever would have come to mind. Indeed, I was very surprised at the level of depth I felt we were able to achieve, seeing as we were working with a significant economy of words; in fact, when we came back together and read what we had written, we had enough time to go around twice, in order to further understand people.

Hopefully at least a few of us will post what we wrote on our weblogs here–I’m going to start with my work of the evening, entitled The Amnesiac Shipbuilder. It’s a story.

Land, that once felt safe and so sweet
Now a detestable spit of sand
What gave life and surety to feet
I'd banish if I thought it would heed a command

Water to drink is no good if it keeps
Life alive but alone, incomplete
Fruit follows suit, it belongs in the deeps
If health is all that there is in this heat

I have in the wreckage a thousand tomes
Whose wisdom's satisfied a thousand men
But my adventure lies not at home--
Useful a shipbuilding book would have been!

Resignation is my lover at night
With whom I wrestle sensuously
But her charms are not even close to delight
And in daylight, I spurn her contemptuously

Laziness would no doubt have been my bane
If I thought effort could affect
But helplessness never gave one gain
Unless him for rescue did God (or fate) select

Either one would be fine.

• Vision, Values, and Praxis for a Community of Faith

Recently, I have become aware that community is much like this. One might think that a community is just an aggregate of particles (individuals), and so it should behave like an aggregate of individuals. Another might think that a community is like a wave–it behaves like a single extended entity. These people will treat community differently; the first person will place ultimate foundation in each individual, and will argue that their motions (i.e., the influence of God’s will in their life, and their response) qua individuals define the epiphenomenal motions of the community at large. Those of the wave persuasion will argue conversely that God directs the community as a whole according to his will, and the motions of individual members follow like crests and troughs in a wave–all very connected.

It is hard to know within which paradigm I should be viewing community right now. Are we fundamentally separated, and therefore at the end of the day we must discern our calling from God as pertaining to ourselves alone? Or are we fundamentally connected, and must therefore all collectively submit our motions to the movement of the larger group?

Right now, it seems appropriate to view the motions of some as following the particle paradigm, and others as following the wave paradigm. Are we therefore separate entities (i.e., in separate communities)? Or are we exhibiting the true essence of community and just failing to describe it in classical sociological terms, exactly the same as physicists failed to describe quantum phenomena using Newtonian language?

We have been gathering data for a while now, but I think we still need some more. Anyone else have any data worth sharing?

Basically, I haven’t been able to think of a negative adjective recently that hasn’t in some way or another been able to apply (truthfully and in full reflective honesty) to myself. My “bad state” is not any low self-esteem resulting from that observation, however. On the contrary, it is precisely the opposite–I really can’t bring myself to want to be any different right now. Different than what? Well, my thoughts and actions are being ruled by desire, anger, passion, arrogance, loneliness, distrust, self-pity, impatience, selfishness, lust, frustration, jealousy, deceit, and fear, and I am enjoying it all too much to want to escape my dark little corner. I feel myself pulling away from my friends and not wanting to talk to them. I feel very poignantly the gulf that separates each of us, but I do not want to call on Christ to bridge that. I am tired of how different I feel from everyone, tired of the loneliness of which I am such a connoisseur, since it so quickly drives me to dwell on my self-inflicted self-image (self-illusion, self-delusion): dark, wrapped in a black cloak, hiding great thoughts and great power that no one else understands or cares to understand, seeing things others don’t, too proud to give up my precious individuality and collapse into the sea of mundane personality, of people who can’t see beyond their closed eyelids, can’t see or hear or smell or taste or feel the beauty that is in the world, the terrible darkness and sorrow that define the noble soul… This is what I imagine myself becoming, and I love it. I plunge in wholeheartedly and wallow in it, and it is a self-reinforcing cycle, since because no one else follows me to that place, it further illuminates the loneliness which defines the illusion. It is a dark and joyless fantasy which I adopt to become mysterious, to become a mystery which I desperately hope someone will want to solve (yeah, right). I cry out like a child for someone to do that, to come and find me in the storm of my own devising, but no one notices the whirlwind of aloofness ironically designed to attract; to everyone else, I am just like they are (but with flashes of melodrama, which is what this entry will be chalked up to). And so bitterness grows and becomes a palpable wedge and I want to run. I want to run now, away from the mess of misunderstanding and hurt feelings and people that have gone from being my salvation to being my despair. I want to be alone with myself, but then again that’s the last thing I want… I don’t know what I want, and this confusion goes right to the core of things and sometimes I am so befuddled with it I want to hurt people just so they will send me away. I want to hurt the people I am supposed to, whom I want to love, so that they push me away so I don’t have to love them, because I can’t give that. The black-cloaked, high-minded wanderer does not reveal himself in love! No–he is pursued and uncovered and persuaded to love by someone who has discovered how to do this pursuing and persuading, and then he is able to love. But right now, love cannot escape the cloak–his unnoticed “mystery” (plea for attention) suffocates it before it can be free and bring life…

It has been a long time since I have found so much ugliness in myself, and my response is isolation. When I am with people, I am only reminded of lack: they cannot give what I need, and I cannot be what they want… But when I am with myself, I am only reminded of my own insufficiency. (Oh yeah, God doesn’t seem interested in meeting those needs either). For the first time in perhaps ever, I feel hope truly dying. Hope that this community experiment would start me on a path that would remain new and exciting and would change my life forever. Hope that some girl that I want to love me would actually want that too. Hope that there are hidden and beautiful things just waiting to be named. Hope that I would stop writing blog entries in anger against God and just fucking submit. All kinds of hope, draining through the floor as I type. Underneath my cynical exterior, I have always been deeply hopeful. Now, I sit here and stare ahead, and in my deepest of hearts, it really does look dark. I moved to California for the hope of living out faith in a community that I could be myself in without neverending conflict, and for the hope of finding someone to love. A year later, I don’t just feel no closer, I feel tricked.

I don’t know whether it is God, the world, or myself, that has done the deceiving, and I don’t really care. None of the options make any sense to me. A month ago I was hopeful, and my life was as integrated as it had ever been. Now, I’ve never felt any more dis integrated, and despair is in my lungs like water, drowning me. All the things I thought were real and true have been laid bare, deconstructed, and at the bottom of many of them I see my own plans, my own machinations, my own desires, my own subconscious urgings…and maybe nothing more. I see the same motives of mine that have caused me so much pain in the past being replayed in new contexts, being brought out all of a sudden like a twist in the plot, and I’m devastated.

Enough words. Here is how I feel: I want it to rain for a long time. I want to call it forth and let it run like rivers all over, and I don’t want it to stop.

The content is basically science, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, theology, and where we can find a healthy and fruitful convergence of these disciplines. Of course, I’m all about that, so I’m finding myself taking more notes and asking more questions in three days then I did in most whole courses at Stanford.

Best of all, I was able to convince Nick, Jenna, and Justin to come to Orlando, stay at my house, and attend the seminar as well. We are having great times of hanging out at night, chilling in the hot tub (look, a joke!), cooking, maybe a little beering, whatever. It’s meaningful for me to have them here especially today, since it’s one year exactly since I took a hindsightedly fateful flight from Orlando to California, and met up with people there for the first time since graduation. This of course spawned that whole series of discussions on faith and community that lasted months, and culminated in my eventual (and gradual) move back to Palo Alto, which was a decidedly big switch in life trajectories. I’m still in the middle of the fruits of that decision, but I’ve already seen so many wonderful things come of it. I’m only hoping for more, though I have no idea what it might or might not look like.

So, even though I haven’t been getting a lot of sleep due to, ahem, World of Warcraft with my brother, and there’s no doubt lots of things I could complain about in various areas of my life, it would be a supreme travesty to feel anything but a profound sense of gratitude at this moment. That gratitude also conveniently enables me to put aside my perennial worries about the future and girls and so on (mostly girls), at least for a while, and it’s a welcome relief! I can always pick those worries up again when I get tired of being at peace (which will probably be in about 5 minutes…never had much luck with the stuff).

There are other ways to ask the question of course–what is the goal of this community? Why are we doing this? What is it we are doing exactly? Why are we here? But my favorite is still, “what are we trying to become, and why?”

My bet is that people would not all write the same thing, nor would they feel the same about what others wrote. What does that mean? How much should we want to “be on the same page” (i.e., have unity of vision), what does it take to get there, and what’s worth sacrificing for it?

It doesn’t feel good to realize that you have been treating people with less than the fullest of respect; and it feels even worse to not know how to go about changing, or whether you even want to. Christ help me.

It was the first time I’d been to one of these events, and needless to say I was shocked by the high price of the tickets. I realized halfway through, however, that I was watching one of the finest performances I’d ever seen, anywhere. The physical training and prowess displayed easily surpassed any other show of ability I’d seen, whether in sports or arts, and the live music must have been played by some of the best musicians in entertainment.

The show was also particularly interesting for me because it was one of those things where there’s always something going on. There was always someone or other dancing or doing something clever in the background, or flying across the upper parts of the auditorium on a wire, or whatever.

As a rule, I’m hyper-aware, so it was a feast for that hyper-awareness to always have things to notice. Every time I saw something I wasn’t intended to see because my attention was supposed to be focused on the main act, I got excited and leaned over and told David, who probably didn’t care. I’m just talking about times when the cast would surreptitiously clip a safety carabiner to a hidden harness on their way to a dangerous move, or when the electric violinist you could barely see, hidden behind several layers of columns, was really rocking out. I loved all this background stuff.

But, having been thinking a lot about community and spiritual things lately, I was surprised to also have several somewhat awesome realizations whilst watching this display of artistic excellence, relating to the spiritual life lived in community. I remember having 3 or 4 of these realizations, but all that I can recall now are two:

1. Unity is awe-inspiring. There were a number of times throughout the performance where a group of performers would be doing something incredible on their own, for example rolling around in these huge circular wire cages, or playing with this insane chinese yo-yo thing (I know, I need video clips). Anyway, it was amazing, and the crowd burst into applause.

Then, these groups of performers would do something even more complicated, namely performing with their respective props, but synchronously. That is, their actions and motions interplayed with the actions and motions of another, forming this intricate dance whilst maintaining an impossible individual routine. And of course, the crowd bursts into applause.

But then, the best thing of all would happen–two of the performers would actually pretend to be one person! In other words, say there were two girls doing tricks with this chinese yo-yo thing, which requires both hands to manipulate in all these incredible and impossible ways. Well, they would get together and share the same prop, using the right arm from the rightmost girl, and the left arm from the left, to act as one performer.

This subtly blew my mind away…the level of focus and control to do what they were doing seemed to require having one mind. It was insane how their hands could move as if they were receiving instantaneous instructions from one source. So now, the crowd goes the most wild, because they unconsciously realize this point–being that on-the-same-page with another human being is truly awe-inspiring.

The spiritual lesson: it is the same with our community relationships! If we do things with a unity like that the Cirque cast has achieved physically, then the crowd (read: outside world) will involuntarily shout out in applause, because it is delightful and amazing.

2. Discipline brings freedom. At one point during the show, a well-muscled, gymnast-looking man grabbed hold of two narrow red curtains which had dropped from the ceiling, took a short run, and then jumped. He proceeded to soar, arms back and back arched like gliding bird, in a huge arc toward the sky. With the fluttering of the sheets around him and the fact that his body was kept perfectly still, he appeared to serenely lift. In truth, it looked less like the curtains were pulling him upward, and more like his body was actually propelling them with its own power of flight.

The lie was given when the next act took center stage, and I glimpsed this man in the shadows, stomach heaving with the exertion he hadn’t shown during his routine. It had looked like nothing special for him to iron-cross through the air without even solid rings, but in fact it was hard even for this burly guy. It would have been strictly impossible, of course, for anyone in the audience.

But he had trained his body to such an extent that, with every muscle in it straining, it looked like flying was completely natural to him. This training came at a certain cost–daily discipline. No doubt he had some latent physical ability from birth, but without the discipline he would have been like the fat guy they picked for the mountain biker to jump over earlier in the show.

I’m imagining that, in none of his practice sessions, whether it was lifting weights or running or doing scores of pull-ups, did he ever feel like he was flying. To the contrary, his body probably never felt more tied to the earth than when he was bench-pressing something insane. But twice a night (or however often), he gets on stage and flies like a bird, with a smile on his face, and in the freedom that discipline brings.

The spiritual lesson: spiritual disciplines will probably not feel very illuminating or liberating. In fact, they may feel very much like chains. More importantly, they are not instant pathways to anything or at all related to my desire for the end state they bring, in the same way that, even if I wanted to be like this flying Cirque du Soleil entertainer, it would take me years at least to be physically able…who knows, it might even be impossible, given that I have been set in certain physical ways for so many years!

But in the end, after years of hardship and training, spiritual disciplines will pay out in the most unimaginable of ways–the ability to truly fly, spiritually. And if and when I do, those around will greet it with awe, believing that this is some supernatural power being shown, when in reality it is simply what happens naturally in a life that is oriented in a certain direction. It is a genuine natural miracle–natural because built into the fabric of life, and miraculous because it is the work that God desires to do in us.

Well, between these two things, I think there is a lot to ponder. The most excitement comes, in particular, with thinking about the integration of these two lessons–can you imagine a spiritually unified, disciplined group of individuals? I would like to see it; I would like to be it. It would be so amazing, just like the performance that moved me last night.

We spent hours each day getting to know each other more and learning of our deepest-rooted fears and hopes and scars, in the context of a real adventure where we forded rivers with 4x4s and got stuck in potholes multiple feet deep.

We were able to find our own little place on the Guanacaste coast and stay there for 5 days, having practically our own private beach to surf and play in. Each night we were treated to the best and most authentic Italian food we have ever had, prepared by a talented chef solely for our group (including fresh, hand-made pasta) and served by an impishly delightful old Italian woman, world traveler and former NYC dancer.

We were able to sink into a rhythm for a few days that did not consist only of work and sleep, but something more real as we felt the freedom to engage in each other’s lives without worrying what else we had to do.

In truth, we fell in love with Costa Rica, with its country motto, its country beer, its country liquor… But more importantly the people and the way of life we saw, which while so much more crude in some senses than life here in the US, was so much more beautifully simple. There were many dreaming discussions about moving down there, starting a school for local children (including ours eventually), teaching in a new and more profoundly spiritual way, building homes without cutting down trees, and developing without destroying the essence of the place (which destruction we saw beginning to happen with American-owned resorts popping up along the coast). Big dreams and big ideas, from the philosophy of education to housing development!–see, the kingdom knows no boundaries.

And lastly, we talked long and hard about how we could maintain some of the practices we engaged in upon returning to our Silicon Valley locale. We are very hopeful that our experience will help kickstart a new, more vibrant, and more prophetic way of life here. But honestly, now that we are back, I think we are all a little overwhelmed at the difficulty of that task. The first thing I did when coming home was to check the absurd amount of e-mail I received, and it reminded me of all the subtle ways in which our culture literally oppresses us and makes true community, true life, nearly impossible at times.

If we can figure out how to maintain our spiritual order here, though… if we can do that–I believe it will be one of the most powerful and miraculous things that can happen. And that is our hope.

Anyway, the conference call was the result of some chance interactions that several in our community had with Millard (which, incidentally, were the reason I heard about Koinonia, etc…), and the purpose of it was to see if there were any good ways for us to partner with Millard’s new organization, the Fuller Center for Housing. This new company aims to help people who are “too poor” for Habitat to work with.

Some in our community were pretty excited about the prospect of doing work with an organization like this, even before the conference call, and as we listened to Millard share his vision of basic housing for the entire world, it was indeed inspiring. Already there are lots of projects all over the world for the Fullers–more than they can handle, in fact.

We discussed a few next steps for various members of our community, and we will probably try to get together with Millard again soon to talk more. We’re hoping that, at the very least, all of us could go work for a short time on a project somewhere, maybe overseas in Nepal.

Personally, I have no desire to devote myself to hammering nails in Nepal, even if that is a genuine need in the world and even if it is a mandate of Christ to do that sort of thing. Well, that’s not true–I do have a desire for it, just not as great a desire as for other things which I feel have an even stronger hold on my passions and abilities, and my heart. This dream of ours at Teleios, for example, is keeping me very centered in my “calling”, to use a bad Christian word.

Still, something about physically bringing some of the signs of the Kingdom to a part of the world is very attractive, and I think that discipline is all too often overlooked by Americans in particular, and evangelicals especially. So I am glad to be in a community where such disciplines are true loves, and where I can support efforts to those ends with the resources that I have, whether it is friendship or freelance web design or physical action.

So I’m not sure what is going to happen with this; who knows, maybe in a year a few of my friends will be moving to Sri Lanka to head up housing projects there! For me, I’m excited to see what will happen.

After the fireworks, we watched a slightly different film.

This film was a documentary, called Briars in the Cotton Patch: The Story of Koinonia Farms, and it indeed was the story of Koinonia farms, a small farming community in rural Americus, Georgia in the 40s and 50s, founded by Clarence and Florence Jordan. The farm was interesting because there, (a) people were living in very close Christian community in much the ways that our community is trying to live now–sharing meals, working together, etc…, and (b) blacks and whites were treated genuinely equally.

Both were radically counter-cultural, but Koinonia got into a hell of a lot of trouble for treating blacks the same as whites. While people in Georgia were happy to let an odd little Christian community be all communal in their farming in living, they were certainly not going to stand by and let them treat blacks as equals!

The story of Koinonia from its inception through to now was incredibly inspiring for those of us watching. They weathered oppression of almost every kind–religious, financial, and physical. Their farm was bombed and shot at and boycotted and almost muscled out of town, but the resolve that theirs was a true way of life kept Koinonia members in their path.

Later on in their history, Habitat for Humanity was born out of Koinonia, and that is now an internationally-recognized Christian organization which actually does some good for the world.

What I took most to heart about the documentary was this: when trying to live a life out of an authentic and genuine interpretation of what Scripture tells us the full life really is, we will naturally bump up against the things that need to be confronted in our culture. For Koinonia, it was very much the issue of racial segregation and prejudice. While the rest of their country was content to kick black folks out of white churches, Koinonia stuck with an authentic interpretation of what church is supposed to be, and as a result of that they were vilified (by Christians in Americus no less than non-Christians…though everyone was “Christian” then anyhow).

The question it raises for us as we try to live in our authentic communities is then, what is the issue or issues, not that define us, but that define the fallen state of the world around us, which we will naturally come into contact with and will inevitably have to decide what to do about? Is it maybe peace, international policy? Is it poverty? Is it aid? Is it HIV/AIDS? I’m not exactly sure. But I am excited to live a deeply true life with Jesus in community, and have no doubt that he will guide us directly to the hurts of the worlds that are around us. I hope when that happens we have the courage to address those hurts and not assume, like the white people in the 40s did, that that was just the way things were supposed to be.

Koinonia farms is now Koinonia Partners, and they have a bit of history on their website: check it out.