Seeking Wisdom

This is going to be kind of a football blurb. A lot of people feel loyalty to sports teams. Whether they’ve played for them, rooted for them, or just been around them. Most fanbases are purely geographical, and people who are fans of teams outside their geographic area are often scorned as traitors (hopefully and usually lightheartedly), which I guess makes a little bit of sense and I’ve done it before (Brent Dunn). But you got to really dig into it, why are you loyal? Why should you be loyal to something? I think the concept of loyalty runs very close with duty. Loyalty is the feeling that you owe allegiance. That you ought to support this group or person. Let’s think about some of the reasons people do that, and which ones really hold up under scrutiny. There’s the geographic argument for loyalty. You should be loyal to the people that live near you because odds are you’ll need each other soon enough. And no matter how much good faith you have with people in Denver, it’s...

“Therefore stay awake, for you do not know the hour or the day.” I think this is intended less to have us fretting about the apocalypse every morning than to remind us that our faith is always urgent, as Lewis says it must not be of moderate importance. It’s very tempting to let ourselves go in our spiritual life, just as one might cheat on a diet. We say, “I’ve been so good lately” or “surely just a little can’t hurt” and then spend hopefully days, but sometimes weeks, sometimes months being dishonest in our faith, paying lip service to God without really offering the effort that would be necessary to sustain the oath. There’s a certain type of fundamentalist that will criticize the more conservative branches of Christianity, especially Catholicism, for attempting to be their own saviors, earn their way to Heaven. I see where they’re coming from. From the outside a Church that has allowed indulgences, that offers specific penances for specific sins, that has it members ever...

One of the things I was most surprised by in Nica was how familiar everything was. I’ve often heard that “people are the same everywhere” and “we’re all human” but I didn’t realize how specific it would get. Based on what I’ve seen and experienced, that’s not a vague, philosophical saying. It’s not just saying that we all have unique human dignity and all of these great spiritual attributes as Children of God. Before I make a point, a consideration, maybe Nica’s culture isn’t as different from America’s as some other places in this world are. But what I saw was that some people I knew and loved from home were reflected in the people I met while in Nica. Granted I never got to know any of them extremely well, I don’t feel like I really know Francisco (Chico) that well, but on the surface they bore striking similarities in personality. Furthermore, I had an intuitive sense that these similarities went deeper than the surface. I’ll start with Dona Carla (I don’t have a Spanish k...