I'm CEO

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 October 2014.

"If I glorify myself, my glory is nothing; it is the my father who glorifies me"

(John 8:54).

Bob Lefsetz celebrates the amoral acumen of the "professional," contrasting him with the sorry-ass amateur.

The Social Network (and the true-life story it depicts) shows how only one person wins, only one person gets to say "I'm CEO, bitch."

The latter of these two stories has all the classic raw material needed for tragedy.

What will our success story look like as Christians, and not just in the afterlife, but here? We have willingly and consciously embraced our constraints, or at least considered the fact that they might be expressions of God's will, which is "love and mercy itself." But they do put us at a distinct disadvantage at least from the worldly viewpoint, don't they?

We didn't go to Harvard. We're not the next Bill Gates. Doesn't look like we're going to be the next Mother Teresa either.

The saint finds refuge in the shadow of God's wings, in obscurity, in the hidden life. But how does that intersect with rock 'n' roll stardom?

Job was prospered after his trials, after he acknowledged the greatness of God's power, the inscrutability of God's wisdom. His intercession on the part of his friends (some friends!) is the last step in his definitive surrender. He is similar to Nietzsche's Dionysiac man in that his former freedom and prosperity are eclipsed by the blessings won by his present passivity.

The frequent mention of the Leviathan in Job suggests that our existence finds its foundation at the bottom of these dark, primordial waters. Yes, we are to build our lives on the rock, but we also need to be drowned in Baptism.

The greatest mystery is God's mastery of chaos.

Not mastery in the sense of vanquishing chaos: there is no analogous "captive led captivity" for chaos. Rather, God's mastery takes the form of transforming that element into something holy: the waters of Baptism, the waters of the womb. I just marvel at the thought that when the angels "came to present themselves before the LORD, the satan also came among them" (Job 1:6). And so God gives satan his "blessing" in a certain sense, and in so doing, transforms satan's trial of Job into a blessing.

And this is the miracle: when those whose lives have been touched by evil or chaos or tragedy are somehow blessed by that encounter. Yes, in some cases that happens through reparation after the fact, or even after death. But also it happens in life.

And so, with faith do we go down to defeat and failure, knowing that somewhere in those depths we find our foundation.