Christianity as a SPECIFIC way of being.

Jordan Peterson and Bishop Barron, Christianity as a Way of Being

Here's something I learned and fought off until I embraced it: 

When you get converted, or saved, you really need to embrace the full-life version of some group that are the people of God, something where they have a group-approved way to dress, walk, talk, limits of acceptable weirdness, and way of seeing everything.  

The heavy handed groups who spell those things out we call "cults." The friendly ones are churches with some kind of history and some kind of internal integrity.  The utterly fruitless and helpless ones are those who make no demands except for believing a few things and confessing a few things, which means they make no demands at all.

Understand this rightly: you can't find the *reality* of salvation by believing the gospel and confessing Jesus is Lord--which I believe to me necessary and non-negotiable, and if you go through getting saved in reality, GOD will bring you into The Church in some REAL expression. You can think of this step of the life of faith as what Baptism means, or, what makes Baptism make sense beyond just a hoop you have to jump through. (I understand that things we NEED to do in life LOOK LIKE hoops to jump through until after the fact.).  

You have to jump into the deep end of the pool, which means that we have to give up a shallow view of Christian life, and yielding up oneself to a *specific* version of a Christian way of Being.

A Review of Desolation Row, a song by Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan, Desolation Row.

https://youtu.be/GoegcebfdGc?si=lYCoT-6A-VUvv9Mu

This song Desolation Row,has meant much to me over the years, because in my interpretation, it spoke about the desolation people face in the world without God, ergo world without meaning, ergo T.S. Eliot's *wasteland*, ergo Leonard Cohen/Sharon Robinson's Boogie Street.  

   So come, my friends, be not afraid

   We are so lightly here

   It is in love that we are made

   In love we disappear

   Tho' all the maps of blood and flesh

   Are posted on the door

   There's no one who has told us yet

   What boogie street is for

I suspect that my 1969+,  four-year college, Woodstock/Altamont/Isle of Wight cohort were among the first to be launched out into a full-blown world aptly described as Desolation Row, 

a world which was nicely hidden beneath layers of eccentricities and strange habitués of drug users, slavers, and beatnik-homosexuals; a world described by Bob in his album liner-notes length poem on Peter Paul and Mary *In The Wind* LP 

[http://www.peterpaulandmary.com/music/f-03.htm], 

in which he introduces, by the way, the firemen rounding up the hipster intellectuals and Cinderella sweeping up after the ambulances go: 

Everybody used t hang around a heat pipe poundin subterranean/coffee house called the Gaslight-/It was at that time buried beneath the middle a MacDougal Street-/It was a strange place an not out a any schoolbook-/More'n seven nites a week the cops and firemen'd storm down the/steps handin' out summons for trumped up reasons-/

More'n five nites a week out a town bullies'd start trouble an/everybody from John the owner t Dave the cook t Rod the cash/register ringer t Adele the waitress t anybody who was on the/stage t just plain friends who were hangin around would have/t come up swingin dishes an handles an brooms an chairs an/sometimes even swords 'at hung on the wall in order t match/the bullies' weight an the bullies was always big bullies-/

   

  and this world was introduced dramatically in a watershed moment, the introduction to Zanuck's The Grapes of Wrath, where Tom Joad meets Jim Casy, the preacher without faith and without hope.  

Tom Joad Meets Desolate Preacher Jim Casy

https://youtu.be/N9cFmSKSTiU?si=FquSwc8bhqHBnfB3

The world all rolls downhill from there.  The folks go to California without any Do-Re-Mi, and the kids are ready to flee to Desolation Row, both places devoid of meaning, without God, and without hope in the world.  And some went into the military--either as Lt. Dan or as Steve McQueen's character in The Sand Pebbles.

Desolation Row, the song, then, illustrates the new world we've been still-born into, a world long prophesied and which holds the illusion of the new default.  

The illusion is not true, the illusion is not reality. 

Faith is as hard to come by as ever, it takes a miracle (but miracles are hard to come by these days).  Desolation Row is possible to escape, but digging out from the "of-course-ness" of it all is a terrible journey.