Work hard play hard, an all too commonly used description popularized by Wiz Khalifa seems at times all too accurate of a description of myself. While this attitude and approach towards the responsibilities and joys of life has its positives, it is for the most part, characterized by a chaotic nature. This is a chaos that I reckon many, and most likely, all readers know.
There is something so surreal about being captivated by the melody of music or listening to something as mundane as the soft sound of rain falling along the sidewalk. Even the magnitude of a butterfly flapping its wings can cause a hurricane halfway across the world. This hurricane is a chaos that all of us have experienced, whether it be a sudden passing of a family member, the falling out of a precious relationship, a dream never accomplished, life is full of tragedy. This tragedy seems in part birthed by the nature of malevolence within our world, an outward acting out of the potential for sin we each have, but at the same time, this tragedy is no doubt a created reality. I say a created reality because without humans, it is indeed hard to imagine tragedy at all, as we are the creators of this word, and the perpetuators of the sin which causes such tragedy.
So in the face of the tragedy of sin, how do we attack this problem, if we are the cause of it? If even by trying to pursue a blameless life we are doomed to fail, and doomed to create chaos, what’s the solution? An answer many Christians have heard before would be something along the lines of: Even though we are doomed to fail by our own efforts, we can rely on Jesus Christ to save us, and through him we are saved. That’s not good enough. While the statement is true, it reveals a surface level grasp at the scale of sin itself and our role as the created.
What do we mean when we say we are doomed to fail? Does this mean even the saved Christian is a sinner? My simple answer would be that Christians are both sinners and saints. Christians are sinners by birth, and saints by response to God’s election, and constantly in a dual state of being both while on earth until the Christian’s state of being a sinner is permanently removed at Judgement. To say that we are only saints or sinners, to leave out our free will, God’s predestined election of the saved, or the cleansing of the spirit of sin entirely is inconsistent with the Bible when taken as a thematically organized(and not chronological) text that communicates the word of God.
The deeper reason why the ordinary answer of simply stating an absolute truth like “being saved by Jesus” is not adequate, is that it does not actually grapple with the paradox of us being both the creators of sin, and the one’s trying to abstain from sin. Here’s where my consideration of chaos and stasis come in as one coherent model.
Stasis. A word rooted in Greek origin to mean στάσις “a standing still.” In stability theory, stasis refers to a state where all interacting forces are equal and opposing, therefore they cancel out each other. We can interpret this as a state that is much like what we mean when we think of the word stability, a life that is peaceful and relatively without conflict. However, the key difference is that stasis does not actually mean without conflict, but that the conflict is being balanced out by an opposing force of stability. This implies that there are two forces. One is the stability that grounds us, which we can conceptualize as the rational part of us which allows for cognitive ability and thought. The other force is conflict, both in the physical sense that nature is a constant threat which society builds itself from the ground up in order to combat with, and in the metaphysical sense that there is great conflict within us. Ahhh yes, this conflict within us is the key issue, as we shall see in a bit.
Stasis is what I think is the default state for most Christians and non-Christians alike. People in general don’t like to change from their habits, preconceptions, and beliefs. That is not to say that certain beliefs should be changed at all if you know why you believe them, but it is simply to say that people are stubborn. For example, a lot of what we learn we learn painfully. You tend not to learn until you have to, and what you tend to learn are by difficult lessons. This is just storing up the catastrophe for later, and so the better idea is to eat a little poison every day so that you don’t have to overdose in a month. You don’t learn unless you are forced to learn. While some psychologists may argue that there is the voluntary search for knowledge that exists as an antidote, it is not really one that exists at all, for even if we had all the knowledge of the universe, sin would still exist in us. However, what is true is that the reason why we don’t learn is because we think theirs some way of forestalling the necessary learning.
But something happens when we are saved. When we are saved, we begin to actually learn! And so you may ask, what do we begin to learn? Our sin. When we respond to Christ’s calling to be a Christian through faith, what inevitably happens by definition of actually “responding” is that we begin to see our sin a little more clearly, bit by bit each day. This gradual awakening of the spirit, as theologians might say, is not a linear progression. That is to say, we don’t continue to be able to see more and more of the sin that exists in the world, and in us, because like the inevitability of change that is accompanied with responding to Christ’s calling of election, spiritual sensitivity to sin(aka spiritual growth) takes a step back, before it takes two steps forward, because of the sin that still exists within us. That is to say, we are in a state of stasis less and less. As Christians see sin more, they see chaos more, both inside of and outside themselves.
Naturally, if stasis is the opposition/perfect balance of the conflict of sin and the stability of reason, then chaos is the opposition of the conflict of sin with the Holy Spirit. In fact, it is the Holy Spirit that allows for this conflict at all. Notice two things: Firstly, the aspect that both chaos and stasis share is the conflict of sin. Secondly, and more importantly chaos is not possible for the non-christian, and it is precisely because of this that stasis is the permanent start of the non-Christian. Because they do not realize the sin they have, they are constantly in the state of stasis where sin and reason are in a perfect balance, and they remain within this balance as the two reinforce each other, never letting any imbalance to slip through. When stasis happens in Christians, we experience a period of shrinking(shrinking, and not stasis, because one cannot stay still in relation to God, you either move away or you move towards) in spiritual closeness to God. When chaos comes, that’s when we grow. Because if you have been paying attention, then you already know why: chaos cannot come without God. So the next time the Holy Spirit causes chaos within our lives, let us welcome it, and rejoice in knowing that it is this chaos which is the trial of our faith, and the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Concluding remarks: This post flowed quite naturally, and I’m fairly satisfied with the picture and end model I had in mind. It answered a lot of questions myself as I kept typing away at the post. Although this blog took a bit longer at roughly 3 hours, I noticed at the end as I was writing out the concluding paragraph and definitions for what stasis and chaos actually are, I realized that I had dove into the origins of stasis but not for the word chaos and how I was using it. I think it would naturally make sense that chaos be the conflict of sin with the Holy Spirit, however after looking at the origins, I think it’s best that I did leave it out because it’s Greek origin of chaos being thought of as “abyss” is entirely inaccurate to what I had in mind and would be irrelevant. I had in mind chaos more so as turbulence, a struggle, and not the absolute emptiness of space-time that existed before things came into being.