PhD

I am still in my first year of having earned a PhD and I feel like I am wearing someone else’s clothes. When people call me “Doctor Gonzalez,” it sounds kind of funny. The thought keeps going through my head that I am placed in a class of really smart people, but I tricked everyone. What if they find out I am a normal person? Or perhaps they are on to me and they call me “Doctor Gonzalez” because they feel like they have to? What if they think I am all ”hoity toity” being a doctor? I actually had a situation like that. A woman at my children’s school learned I had a PhD and said, “Well, I didn’t know you were so hoity toity.” I love it. I interpret it like this: “You? You of all people have a PhD? What? Are they putting advanced degrees in vending machines these days? How you’d you get so hoity toity? Look at how you dress.” It is one of my favorite stories about earning a PhD.

As I am now employed as a professor and reflecting back on my experiences in doctoral work, I am having some important thoughts about what I learned while in graduate school. So much of what happened while I was there happened so fast I had little time to process it. I couldn’t think about anything the way I do thinking best. Things just happened too fast. Learning at the speed of doctoral studies didn’t afford me the opportunity to sit and chew on things. At least not when I had to get done as fast as I needed to. For my program, four years was fast.

I figure that which returns to me now is probably something of importance and that which I cannot access may not have been all that big of a deal. Here are some things coming back to me now. Each of these would make a decent post or even essay. So, I am planning a series of posts on the following;

1. How to become a critical thinker without becoming a negative person
2. Science: All you are doing is asking questions and making decisions based on a new set of rules
3. Little Celebrations
4. Developing a research creed
5. Developing a scholarly network: profs, cohorts, and associations
6. Getting the advisor you need is better than getting the advisor you want
7. Pick a good official committee, then pick a good unofficial committee
8. Every single person in the graduate school context can teach you something that matters
9. Diversity: Fundamentalism lurks in every corner
10. Spirituality: Faith and science meet in the Academy
11. Oral Defense: A scholarly conversation about your favorite topic

Technorati Tags: PhD,Graduate School,Doctoral Studies

Sermon on the Mount 9: Reverse Polarity

Scripture: Matthew 5: 43-48

Focus: He sends His rain

Reflection: Continuing from His previous thoughts on Social Judo, Jesus takes it one step further. It is one thing not to resist, which is what he lead with in the previous section. It is quite another to love someone who hurts you. Again, Jesus is interested in more than correct behavior; He goes to the heart and the soul. He is not about mere behavior modification; He is about soul transformation. He wants more than people who do good things; He wants good people.

How does evil spread? One of the ways that the flow of evil happens in this world is through people’s interpretation injustice. What is the meaning of being wronged? What rights do I have when I am wronged? In general, an equal response is justified. Jesus has just said to try doing something different. Now he is saying let it mean something different. Interpret injustice as a cause for love.

WHAT?!

In short, two things happen when a person commits injustice to another. One thing is the injustice itself. One person takes something that belongs to someone else and thus the person has experienced a loss not of their own doing, but by the will of another. The other thing is the lesson of injustice. The victim just learned the power of injustice. They now must choose whether the put into practice the lesson just learned.

The obvious person to direct this new learning toward is the one who taught it to them – their enemy. If anyone deserves a dose of injustice, it is my enemy. In fact, if I give my enemy a dose of injustice, I can probably get away with calling it justice.

When this rationale enters into play, then there is the means by which evil is spread. Receiving injustice is interpreted as a cause to perpetuate it.

Jesus says, reverse the polarity. Interpret it differently. When injustice is directed toward you, then interpret it as a cause to spread love. Interpret it as a cause to be kind. Evil cannot spread when its presence is interpreted as a reason and a cause to do good. Jesus knows that all evil needs is to be legitimated in order to spread. When evil gets an OK from anyone, it can spread to anyone.

Jesus knows that you can’t stop anyone else’s evil, but you can stop your own. How would a person identify and become aware of their own evil? The quickest way is to identify an enemy and take inventory of how you think, feel and behave toward that person or group. Then compare that to how you think, feel and behave toward the people you love the most. If that were not hard enough, Jesus says to think, feel, and behave toward the people you identified as enemies in the same way you think, feel, and behave toward the people you love most.

Then he goes one step further – love them.

Technorati Tags: sermon on the mount,bible,lectio divina

Sermon on the Mount 8: Social Judo

Scripture: Matthew 5: 38-42

Focus: Do Not Resist

Reflection: There are many pathways to justice and there are many kinds of justice. it feels right, fair, correct and effective to do people what they do to me. It is the golden rule in reverse right? “Do unto others as they have done unto me.” Well, the Golden Rule doesn’t work in reverse. It only works one way. In fact, when someone hurts me, the Golden Rule is even more important to adhere to. That is what Jesus is saying here.

If I were to wrong someone, would I want them to get revenge? Of course not. I would want them to be kind to me, even though I didn’t deserve it. I am not interested in anyone’s retaliation. However, once someone is aggressed upon, in injustice is put into motion. And as a rule, injustice is not the antidote to injustice. The accumulation of wrongs do not sum up to justice. [Here is an example]

Retaliation and revenge are not solutions. They are the perpetuation of the problem. They level the playing field at the lowest common denominator. Jesus calls people to raise up the interactions non-resistance, by non-violence. He is calling for social judo. In judo, sometime you let the opponent come full force and rather than try to absorb or block the attack, you move and let the opponent’s energy move right by you.

Not resisting is redefining justice to a higher plain.

Technorati Tags: sermon on the mount,bible,lectio divina

Sermon on the Mount 7: I Had My Fingers Crossed

Scripture: Matthew 5: 33-37

Focus: Do not swear

Reflection: It’s pretty simple. Be honest. Everyone knows this rule. It is a rule of fairness and justice. It may be one of the most instinctive moral rules between people. Even from a very young age, children know that it hurts when they learn someone was dishonest with them. Upon experiencing dishonesty, a child is hurt, confused, and is trying to figure out what it means that there is a “what I say” world and there is a “what I do” world and that these worlds do not always match up. These lesson plans of dishonesty, sadly, are learned early and reproduced early. 

If dishonesty were left to children being dishonest with each other and when they grow up they learn to become honest, then I think Jesus doesn’t mention it. However, rather than become more honest, people become more clever and sophisticated with the ways in which they are dishonest. The goal, it would seem, is to get all of the benefits and credit for honesty without actually having to come through on promises, contracts, and deals.

So, in order to appear good and honest and true without actually having to be that way, rules are set up. Rules that some people know and others do not. Rules where I can say one thing and mean another, but you do not know the rules so when I say something, you think I actually mean it because you are not aware of the rules.

This happens all the time. It happens on the playground. It happens in the boardroom. It happens in the university hallways. It happens in governments. It happens in the church. “All men are created equal” didn’t actually include everyone. All white men with cash or status were created equal and the rest were there to perpetuate that bias. People with power make rules and don’t let anyone else in on them.  Although we’re all using the same words, some people are in on the secret of the double meanings while others are not. 

It is system set up in which the people who are actually honest end up looking stupid. They are stupid because they didn’t know the rules that no one ever told them. It is the old playground rule of crossing your fingers behind your back. One person tells another person something and the other person believes it and wonders why some of the other kids are trying to hold back their giggles. They are in on something, but what? Only later is the honest person revealed as the fool.

Jesus cuts through all this mess and says yes means yes and no means no. There is no more hierarchy here. Everyone plays by the same rules. And that means everyone, even the super religious people who know all the rules made up about swearing by heaven and earth. “Don’t drag God into your deceptions,” Jesus says. “Doing that is of the Devil.”

Technorati Tags: lectio divina,sermon on the mount,bible

Sermon on the Mount 6: Divorce

Scripture: Matthew 5:31-32

Focus: Divorce

Reflection: Jesus is on to some of these guys. They knew adultery was wrong, but they still wanted to have sex outside of their marriage. In the previous verse Jesus exposed their hearts and went inward. Now Jesus goes the other way and deals with sexual sin within their social practices.

They were using a seeming loophole in divorce law in order to have a different woman. It was a sort of serial monogamy running under cover of divorce law. Jesus totally busts them on this one. In essence Jesus tells them that this practice of divorce and remarriage does not get around the sin of adultery. In fact, it is promoting it. When you use divorce as a way to go from one woman to the next, then you are committing adultery, the very thing you are using legal cover to back up that you are not doing.

The take away message here is not specifics about how divorce and remarriage should happen in our modern day context. The important issues of domestic violence, threats, oppression, and addiction are not what Jesus is addressing here. He was confronting a specific practice. The principle here is that people when take legal cover to get away with their selfishness, evils desires, and sin it does not actually make it any less selfish, evil, or sinful. Using legal cover does not change a person’s heart and does not change the pain that can be caused to another person. Tapping into a legal narrative may seem to give legitimacy to a practice or behavior, but it doesn’t. There are laws higher than humans laws. There are principles, that transcend anything that can be articulated in human language.

Technorati Tags: sermon on the mount,bible,lectio divina

Sermon on the Mount 5: Trumping Plato

Scripture: Matthew 5:27-30

Focus: Tear it out and throw it away

Reflection: It was the location of sin that Jesus was getting at. Sin was not just what the body does, but the body was simply where the sin comes out. Yes, the body sins, but the heart sins first. There is a sin of the soul that is connected to, infused within, integrated in the body. These cannot be separated

Plato had made some ideas popular among the people of his day. Plato asserted that the body and spirit are separated. Thus, the body could do one thing and the soul another. There was a sense that body and soul were separate entities, that the body was a lesser and temporary copy of something else, some other body. Thus, what happened with the body was not all that important. Those ideas were in full swing in the days of Jesus.

Jesus trumps Plato with hyperbole. In a sense, Jesus was saying two things. First, that the body and soul are not just connected, but integrated. Second, if you buy into Plato’s philosophy that the body is not all that big a deal, that it is a shadowy copy, then act on it. What would it matter to partially destroy something that was of little consequence in the first place? In short, Jesus said that if you put your faith in Plato you are at risk. Plato would say that imperfection can only exist in the body, but Jesus takes it a whole farther than that.

By using hyperbole, Jesus makes the point of how important the body is. But he also makes the point that sin is not simply located in the body, but necessarily in the heart and in the soul. The eye and the heart are not two mutually exclusive things, but are integrated and mutually serving characteristics of humanity.

So, Jesus ups the stakes with the audience. He calls out their hypocrisy. There was the idea that if their bodies were not actually doing the sinful thing, then it was impossible for there to be sin at all. They were free to entertain any sort of lustful, greedy, hateful thoughts and feelings, but as long as they never acted on them, all was good. Jesus drills down and again gets to the seed of sin when everyone else focused on what sin looks like when it is full grown. 

In short, Jesus was saying, here is what adultery looks like when it is a seed. Look about the field of your souls, people, the very seed I am warning you about has been sown in your own field. Look. When you take comfort that sin is not full grown, you are at risk for it taking root. Sin is a problem when it is a seed. Take care of that. Is it tedious work? Yes. But there is no other way to go about it. Sin starts before you think it does.

Technorati Tags: sermon on the mount,lectio divina,bible

Half a Decade of Grief

Five years ago today I stood over my father as he lay dying in a hospital bed in the ICU at Fairview Ridges Hospital in Burnsville, Minnesota. It was a crisis. My sister, brother, and I had control over decisions about whether to “pull the plug” if my father were not able to communicate. He couldn’t.

One day prior we had decided late in the night that the next day we would stop all extraordinary efforts to keep him alive. We did this because it is what the healthcare directive. We read over the healthcare directive like it was scripture. We were going to follow our father’s wishes with honesty and integrity. We succeeded. He was unconscious, kept alive by machines and heavy drugs, and was unable to communicate in any way. The doctors gave us so little hope that he could make it through this that they left it to the realm of miracles.

All three of us believe in miracles, but none of believed this was going to be the time for one. Dad had burned through a few miracles in his life already. This seemed like the end.

Then, the next day, the doctors told us to come into the room as dad was conscious. This changed everything. He could communicate. He could be informed of is condition and asked his wishes. This would make the healthcare directive go to the back burner.

It was so good to talk with him and know he could hear me, see me, know me, know I was there for him…that I loved him. I did love him. My dad had been dying for years, really. His soul had been dying. His body had been falling apart. So much of the man’s potential never even got addressed by life. I had always loved him. Even though the collaboration of life’s cold mastery over him and his own self-destructive decisions had brought on the onset of death too early, I loved him. He knew that. But at death’s final blow, I got to be there and kiss his forehead and utter the words, “I love you.” Oh how I ached. Oh how it was sweet. I had a lot more relationship I wanted to forge with him, but it wasn’t going to happen.

He didn’t want to die, but he knew he couldn’t stop it. He was so afraid. I had never seen that look in his eye in all my 36 years of life, but I knew it to be fear mixed with helplessness. He was hoping for one more miracle. But the one he was hoping for was not going to happen. What did happen was that my brother told a joke. It was a very funny joke. I had not heard that one before and it got me laughing. It got my sister laughing. Mostly importantly, it got dad laughing. At well over 450 pounds on a 5’8” frame, when my father laughed, there was lots of body to move around. His body quaked on the bed. Hooked to machines that beeped a lot and with tubes down his throat, he laughed. It was his last act of defiance. Literally, my father laughed in the face of death. Afraid, helpless, and weak, he laughed.

There are times when laughing and crying at the same time is the only sane thing a person can do. This was one of them. My mix of emotions was intense. How could I feel some many things so intensely all at once? I knew my life was in transition and there was nothing I could do about it. I would never be the same again. It was as if God were saying, “from this point forward, your life as you knew it is over. Here is your new life.” What can a person do in that moment but cry and laugh? There is no point in trying to change the inevitable. All a person can do is to interpret it. It is our only defense.

Laughter was a defense our family had against the difficulties of life. It was the one theme in our family that could be traced back to the beginning. Laughter was a gift. There was so much conflict and pain in our family life in many areas, but there was always laughter. It was our medicine. And the last act of my father’s conscious life was to laugh. Within two hours after the joke, he was unconscious and fading fast.

And then he was gone. I know this because the nurse looked at me as I held his hand listening to the frequency of the beeps decrease as she said, “He’s gone. Any beep from this point forward is just residual electrical charges, but he is gone. I’m sorry.” And there I stood, over my dead father. Crying. Powerless. The man who gave me life was dead and there was nothing I could do about it.

Five years later, I still cry. I still ache. I still go to the ICU room in my mind and stand there with him. I have bursts of grief that just overwhelm me when I don’t expect them. There is a pain that will never leave me. Grief is not something that gets closure. Grief is a strange friendship. Well, it is a relationship at least. Grief shows up and never leaves. I must choose what sort of relationship it will be. I do not like being sad, but it is a relief to weep. It is orienting in a painful sort of way.

Also, five years later, I have good memories, painful memories, and instructive memories. Five years later I am still making sense out of my relationship with my father as I am developing a relationship with my children as a father. They, in turn, are trying to make sense out of me and their relationship with me.

Five years later, I grieve. Five years later, it is ok to grieve. 

Technorati Tags: grief,family,fatherhood

Sermon on the Mount 4: Little Murders

Scripture: Matthew 5:21-26

Focus: Murder

Reflection: Murder is a pretty big deal. Once murdered, no one gets unmurdered. No amount of forgiveness or revenge brings back the dead. There is a finality to murder that cannot be denied or undone. This is why it was included in the 10 commandments. Apparently back in the days of Moses, someone in authority needed to say, “Do Not Murder.”

But murder does not seem to be the sin Jesus is getting at here. He is not denying that murder is a sin and a problem, but he is getting at the micro-murders people do to each other everyday and don’t even consider the damage it does. In essence, Jesus is saying that waiting until someone is dead is a little late to be coming to the awareness that something might be wrong. Murder is not the beginning of the sin in question, it is actually the end of it. It is the sin fully grown to its full maturity.

Where does murder start? How does it grow? What does it look like when it is just a seed? These are the questions that lead us to the place where Jesus wants us to go. This is actually the place the 10 commandments anticipated centuries before, but needed to take an initial step.

According to Jesus, murder begins with anger or unresolved antipathy. Unreconciled relationships seem to have little murders as a part of their everyday ebb and flow. Jesus wants this sin addressed. What he trying to do is to make us aware that the sin begins early and looks like this. He even makes a specific reference to something people were saying all the time. He called out their use of the term, “Raca,” which means, you fool. The modern use would be referring to someone as an “Jerk,” “Idiot,” or “A-hole.” Each direct affront, each mumbling under our breath, each thought of this kind that we suppress out some form of decency is still a little murder.

Jesus wants us to intervene on little murders before the grown up murder actually takes place. The antidote to violence is not a stronger police force or stricter laws. The antidote to violence is early detection in oneself. It is knowing what the little murder is and doing something about it at that time.

Technorati Tags: sermon on the mount,theology,bible

Lies You Might Be Told

I believe in God as a living entity of goodness. I also believe in Satan as a living entity of evil. God and Satan exist and are active in this world of overlapping physical and spiritual realities. There are angles and there are demons active as well. As humans we are free to believe what we will. There is a battle over what we will believe, where we will locate our allegiance – toward good or toward evil. Good and evil are sometimes obvious, but much of the time one is not clearly differentiated from the other. We are told truths and we are told lies. We must be wise in order to tell the difference. What follows is a way to describe some of the challenges of this life with my own children in mind.

The life we live on this Earth is filled with all sorts of freedoms. God wouldn’t have it any other way. We have the power to choose all sorts of things. We can choose behaviors and what we do with our bodies and what we say or do not say. We can choose our thoughts and where to place our beliefs. And we can even choose how we feel to some extent and we can choose what to do with those emotions.

The ability to make choices in our lives is an amazing power that is also a vulnerable power. Wise choices with your life are a blessing to this world while unwise choices are not a blessing to this world and could even be a detriment to this world. Our lives are like a secret formula for incredible things to happen, but if that secret formula were ever to get into the wrong hands…, well, that great power could be used for evil.

God was wise to create us with so much freedom. It might seem risky for Him to give us this much freedom because we might not choose Him with the freedom. It is a huge risk. We look around see a world that has a lot of people in it that look like they are not choosing to love God or other people. It’s true, many people are not. However, many people are choosing to love God. Many people are choosing to love people with their lives. Many people are choosing to make their lives about loving God and others, which happen to be what God desires the most. In fact, He created us for love.

However, since there is freedom, there is the chance that people may not choose to love God and others. Satan, the force of evil in the world and the scriptwriter of lies, has noticed that freedom has some vulnerabilities to it. Satan believes God is stupid. He believes it was stupid for God to risk so big by giving freedom. It is Satan’s goal to make a fool of God by exploiting the freedoms God has given.

Now, where God has chosen not to violate human freedom, Satan would if he could, but he can’t. However, he can lie all he wants to. He has the freedom to try to convince people that they are not free. It is sort of ironic. So, Satan is a liar and will use all sorts of lying strategies to get people to be bad. If he can’t get people bad, he will lie to get them distracted or busy. He will do whatever it takes to steal people away from God. And if he can’t steal them from God, he will do whatever he can to reduce their usefulness or their range and depth of impact of goodness in the world.

Make no mistake about it, Satan is out there to make this world as miserable a place as he can. His appetite is for the humiliation of and destruction of God and is willing to use up as many people as he can in order to accomplish his goal. To Satan, people are disposable units that are created for his consumption in order to kill God and people. Satan hates God and is bent on destruction and does not care how many people are used, hurt, tortured, and exploited along the way – the more the better.

If Satan could kill us all off right now, he would. Think about it, each human is an image of God. Right now there are nearly 7 billion living images of God on this planet, more than ever in the history of the world. There is not a single image of Satan on this Earth. Every last one of us, even the most vile of us humans, looks more like God than he or she does look like Satan. God can look across the Earth and see so many images of Himself and Satan can’t find a single one. Satan hates God and there are 7 billion God look alikes. Everywhere Satan goes, there’s a whole bunch of us.

Did you know your very existence exposes Satan for who he is? Rather than be in awe of God’s love and generosity in the freedom He created in producing a world that could love, that could be free, he despises it. He hates it. God created a way for there to be even more love and more freedom (creation) and rather than being happy for there being more love and more freedom, Satan despises it. More people means more love and more freedom and it exposes Satan for who he is, someone who values neither love nor freedom. God has expanded His own goodness through creation.

So, Satan looks about the world of humans and hates us all. He wants us dead. And since he does not have permission to just kill us all off, he will seek to exploit our freedom to choose as much as possible and as in many ways as possible. Ultimately, Satan has one strategy – lie. His lies come in many forms and are about many things. He lies about who God is, who he is, about who you are and who other people are. He lies about the church. He lies about feelings, thoughts, behaviors. He lies to get you falsely feel bad, falsely feel good, to be too distracted too busy, too insignificant, too good for everyone else. He will lie about anything to anyone to make this world a worse place.

What follows are some lies I have either experienced myself, witnessed in someone else, or heard about thought other sources. These are only a few of the lies Satan tells, but they are some of the more commons lies. Since Satan can take any real thing and lie about in a number of ways, there would be no way to catalog all of the lies and make them readily available in a book. Satan is inventing new lies all the time. However, He seems to use a select few lies over and over again, probably because they have worked so well. Here is the beginning of the list:

You’re worthless.

You’re ugly.

God wants to keep you from happiness.

Happiness is found in pleasure.

Life is a battle between who loves you more, God or Satan.

God doesn’t care.

You make dumb decisions.

Hiding your mistakes will make them go away.

You’ll always feel depressed.

Guys/Girls will not like you unless…

You’re not good enough. You have perform to be accepted.

Nobody cares.

Nobody understands.

You are alone.

 

Technorati Tags: theology,lies

I Believe

Humans have the power to believe. Is there anything else in the world that believes things? Dirt doesn’t believe anything. Plants don’t believe. Animals don’t believe. Animals have instincts and they can be conditioned, but they do not believe (as best as we can know).

Humans believe things. It is an amazing reality. It would be nice to say that we humans believe things based on evidence, but we don’t in general. We want to say that we are objective and given the same evidence on this or that each of us would come to the same belief about this or that. It hardly ever (never fully) happens. Instead, we disagree and do it a lot.

We’ve developed systems and methods and disciplines in order to help us come to a common belief, but these systems fail and these methods are flawed. Religion has sought to form correct beliefs, but it has had a difficult time succeeding in bringing us all toward one belief. Science has made efforts to create systematic ways of making observations we could come closer to believing the same, but the great experts all critique each other’s results and methods and even integrity at times.

No, neither religion nor science has determined beliefs for all humans. 

It is an amazing thing that humans can choose to believe something even when the evidence points in another direction. It seems reckless and dangerous that such a situation could exist.

You can believe whatever you want to. So…

How will go about deciding what to believe?

What is your threshold of evidence to move you into belief?

Who could say a word and your belief would change?

Which comes first evidence or belief?

Technorati Tags: faith

Do you come to believe things in the same way?

These are not small questions. You have a power in this universe that is rare. Not only that, it is full of consequence. No belief goes unnoticed. Belief ripples. And amazingly, you cannot not belief. Even someone claiming to be agnostic on any topic believes something, even if it is in their own uncertainty. Having the ability to know what you believe and why is one of the greatest privileges and powers in the universe. 

What will you do with your power?