Doing without desiring

One of the reasons why I love Nietzsche so much is because he’s amazingly good at bringing to light the nasty subtext which accompanies many Christian endeavours. He does a grand job of debunking Christian do-gooding: we mimic a couple of gospel stories and then think ourselves as “Christ followers”. But we haven’t grasped his broader vision, and we certainly wouldn’t subscribe to it if we did, let alone die for it.

Occasionally, I engage in “doing without desiring”: I do not have the vision, but I do the “right thing” anyway. I do this because I honestly do not know any better, and because I believe that God blesses our genuine attempts, and that he might even walk us there.

So recently, I was chatting with a guy on the street while waiting for a train, and some nasty subtext ran through my mind: “hell, this guy does not speak any of the main European languages, we can’t communicate at all and I’m bored, we're going to run out of things to say, shit I didn't think of that, and how do we inscribe this into the future? He better have e-mail”.

I do not have a clear idea of why I decided to strike up a chat with this guy. I had no vision: to my dismay, Christ's is Chinese to me. Still, I thought that we might learn to interact with each other and to care about each other and that, if we were going to do that, we simply had to start somewhere. So I forced things a bit, hoping for the best.

The social distance hit me like a punch in the face: the whole thing felt much more like a collision than an encounter. But I’m still hoping, because several of these “collisions” have, by the grace of God, led to the most beautiful relationships.

Still, I’m tired of operating without vision, I’m tired of being genuinely ignorant of it, I’m tired of not knowing where to learn it from: I want to understand the mind of Jesus! (And maybe Nietzsche felt the same when he wrote that the only Christian died on the cross. I can relate to that).

Recently, I was reading some stuff by Jean Yves Leloup, a French theologian, on Matt 10.38 “anyone who does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me”. Leloup, based on the Greek version of the NT, seems to think that we could understand this passage in a new way: “anyone who does not take his cross yet follows me is not worthy of me”*.

This, in turn, could mean: “embrace the full vision, don’t follow bits of what Jesus said without taking on his full holistic vision, and without the full consequences of pursuing it”. I really want to know what this vision is now! And I want to know where the hell I can learn it from!