Category: Personal

I have created a YouTube channel. Yes, I am a YouTuber. Subscribe!!!

So I have not posted in some time. No reason! I have been trying to write in a notebook, which seems to work for me.

I have been trying to read more. So some Kafka short stories and Satre’s No Exit for this week. I like No Exit – it gets there quicker than most Christian writers.

I do wonder why I read?! Is it for information, to stop boredom, or something more? Is it controlled interaction with people?

Anyway… stay warm (or cool) and read!

What is alienation, and what is an alienated person, and what are the results of alienation? Alienation is the psychological condition of somebody who is never allowed to be fully himself. For example, in the social order a slave is an alienated person because he does not belong to himself. His work is not his own. There is no real personal meaning to his life, because everything he does belongs to somebody else. Anything can be taken away at any moment.

Transfer that obvious example to a person who is never able to be himself because he is always dominated by somebody else’s ideas or somebody else’s tastes or somebody else’s saying that this is the way to act and this is the way to see things. We live in a society in which many people are alienated in that sense without realizing it. Their choices are made for them, they don’t really have ideas and desires of their own; they simply repeat what has been told them. And yet they think that they are making free choices, and to some extent maybe they are.

What happens to a person in this condition is that, without realizing it, he does not have any real respect for himself. He thinks that he has ideas and he thinks he is doing what he freely wants to do, but actually he is being pushed around, and this results in a sort of resentment, which in turn leads to hatred and violence under a cover of respectability. This is the problem of our world, psychologists tell us. People feel inner tensions and violence and hatred, and they are ready to explode at any moment because they don’t really belong to themselves.

Thomas Merton in Alaska: The Alaskan Conferences, Journals, and Letters, (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1989), p. 74.

I thought I would do an MBTI. In the past, I have ranged between INTJ and INFJ. For the first time, I tested as an INFP, which is the same as Kierkegaard.

This is one of the descriptions offered:

You’re not like everyone else – and neither are we. We aren’t satisfied with surface-level material. We only deliver deep, meaningful insights – the kind that can lead to real impactful change in your life. For example, did you know that among people of your personality type:

• 96% say they often feel misunderstood.
• 94% say they often feel like they don’t belong.
• 91% say they feel in need of transformation in their lives.

That may sound kind of bleak. But 98% also say they experience rich inner lives with much daydreaming and fantasizing about different ideas or scenarios. Never forget your magic spark, Mediator.

It is what it is. (Sorry for the meaningless tautology!) The answers are influenced by current circumstances. But I have had some insights reflecting on the above this afternoon.

Apple Music suggested this song to me yesterday. A lovely album!!!!

So let Your love come take the lead
I give up controlling things
When I’m with You, I can be weak
You’re my source, my shield
The strength that carriеs me …

My Jesus, my Jesus
I can’t get enough of
My Jesus, my Jesus

I have not posted anything for a long long time! So I am going to post some quotes from SK for your upbuilding.

I am preaching this Sunday and watching shows on “cults” – a dangerous mix.

Christianly, struggling is always done by single individuals, because spirit is precisely this, that everyone is an individual before God, that “fellowship” is a lower category than “the single individual,” which everyone can and should be. And even if the individuals were in the thousands and as such struggled jointly, Christianly understood each individual is struggling, besides jointly with the others, also within himself, and must as a single individual give an accounting on judgment day, when his life as an individual will be examined.

Practice in Christianity, 223

… the abstraction of leveling is a principle that forms no personal, intimate relation to any particular individual, but only the relation of abstraction, which is the same for all.

Two Ages, 88