Searching for Experience

This morning I was driving to work meditating on Johnny Cash/U2's song the Wanderer. I don't know if the song is meant to be overarchingly religious or if they simply use religious imagry. But even if it is not itself religious the imagry says a lot about the modern conception of religion in America, even if some of the comentators are right and he is talking about cold war Russia. Lets look at this one section.

I went out there
In search of experience
To taste and to touch
And to feel as much
As a man can Before he repents

This section is spoken (even differently that most of Cash' stuff is like it is spoken. This section underscores the carnality of human desire. On a top layer he is talking about food in the line, "to taste and to touch." I think we can relate this interpersonally as well, not only with sex, but also with desire. The singer leaves and wanders searching seeking to find as many experiences as he can, maybe to "get them under his belt," before he decides to change, before he repents.

I often wonder (wander) myself looking for experience, looking for life, a way to understand it in its fullness, its joys and pains, its happiness and suffering. And often catch myself thinking, "I can do this now, but when I am older and more settled I will have to think differently." What have we done to our religion that says, all fun must come before repentence, all fun must come as a youth so that in old age we can live more uprightly. I wonder if Jesus would want Christianity the way we understand it in the west. A Christianity where one spends all his time trying to stay pure, well maybe, but maybe Jesus would tell us we don't really understand purity.
See, I don't want to, "sin that grace may abound," but I also don't want to use my religion as an excuse to make my lack of experience and regret okay. CS Lewis contended we ourselves don't understand what being a Christian is. He seemed to think we have turned the word into a synonym for good, "Wow, that guy must be a Christian he is so nice." The culture has identified ethics and whatnot that align with concepts of right and wrong, good and bad, and many people choose to call those ethics Christian. They are similar ethics to that of the prechristian philosophers like Socraties, Plato, and Pathagoras. I would never say a Christian should ignore morality, and I would never say morality isn't normative, but I would say that in trying to keep othres from sin we have also crucified our freedom in Christ. For those of you who know me this harkens back to my philosophy of the use of language, but I think of this much more broadly, when I ask the question, not necissarily who is my brother, but who is my weaker brother. some of my weaker brothers are weaker so they can be manipulative and get their way. One author called it the "proffesional weaker brother."

Experience something today, taste, touch, feeling... even if you have already repented. These don't have to be bad things.