Resisting the Stained Self
Christ is Risen! Truly, He is risen.
“And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual people but as to carnal, as to babes in Christ. I fed you with milk and not with solid food; for until now you were not able to receive it, and even now you are still not able; for you are still carnal. For where there are envy, strife, and divisions among you, are not you not carnal and behaving like mere men?” (1 Corinthians 3: 1-3)
I still find it difficult to not be the old man Toast, which of course means that he is not really put off, but at least I know where I stand in relation to him—he’s in the room with me and maybe that’s where he’ll stay until he can be crucified, which is hard because he’s how I’ve engaged with the world—his mind has been my mind for so long that to do away with him is like doing away with myself.
And that’s the point.
The old man is like a cigarette, to a smoker he’s a bit like armor, he’s a bit like comfort, he’s a bit like a break.
The smoker, for one reason or another, decides to quit the old man and it’s hard, because it’s like quitting a part of you, but it ain’t and never was a part of the smoker. It was one of life’s many distractions to them. The smoker quits, falls off, later they quit again and go longer, but they fall again. Eventually they quit enough times to get good at it and it sticks; they put off the old man.
Now, I ain’t the only former smoker to have this happen, but sometimes, maybe months after you’ve put off the old man you catch a whiff of him outside some dive and you relent. That’s important, by the way, we give in, the old man and temptations of this world will come, but we have to accept them in order for them to come to fruition in our lives as sin. The breeze is just right, the moon is waning, and you’re convincing yourself sobriety ain’t some myth of Sisyphus, so the old man comes right back.
Former smokers might relate when I say, the old man ain’t the trick anymore. The old man doesn’t offer the same comfort or armor like he once did and you’d feel more duped by him if you weren’t experiencing the shame of giving in to what was once, and no longer is, a passing lust of the flesh.
Stomping it out after a few drags knowing you can never go back to being a smoker, not really, but you also are aware of something, maybe for the first time since quitting: you are still walking with the Gentiles in darkness, behaving as mere men.
There’s division within you, not wanting to walk with the world, but relenting still and showing there’s work yet to be done.
“For what I am doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; but what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me” (Romans 7:15-17).
The old man Toast, wills to do the very thing he hates because the sin that is in him is what he hates, therefore there is nothing he can will to do except for the very thing he is. That void that is within, can never be filled by the world’s passing pleasures, no matter how much he consumes. No amount of stage lights, mellow-flavored cigarettes, or Jager-bombs will ever satiate the old man, because he does not want to be satiated, he only wants more.
This wanting, this yearning for more is indicative of the person’s attachment to the world and their passions. To want more is to affirm that having will satisfy, even if one knows, deep down, that it never will, but Toast keeps doing the things he does not want to do, not understanding why he does them. He does not understand why he does them because he is blind in his heart to Truth.
The old man Toast needs to stay ignorant because he is dwelling within us and his survival is contingent on us accepting him as our minds, but he is not you—he is Toast—and if we want to be authentic then we must put him off, otherwise we are identifying with something that has no reality. Toast isn’t real, he is the sin that dwells within us. However, treating him like he is not real gets us only so far, because the actions we take when the old man clouds our hearts are real.
The responsibility is still on us even if our sin is not us.
The old man fights to remain in a position of unaccountability, Toast does not will to be responsible for his actions. Yet, this is the thing about Toast—he does the things he does not want to do because he does not realize he has a choice.
The old man Toast has fallen and does not even realize it. His sins have become so habituated into his natural rhythm that he walks to the beat of his own drum—blind and in darkness—stuck in his own mortal hell with an inability to escape his choices, doomed to continue making the same ones over and over again.
“You will not be pleased with whole burnt offerings. A sacrifice to God is a broken spirit, A broken spirit God will not despise” (Psalm 50:18-19).
Unlike the choice that God offers each of us, the old man Toast has become enslaved to his passions. A prisoner, guard, and warden all on his own in the outer darkness, gnashing his teeth with madness having fallen so far from God.
We need to get out of this darkness, quit living as echoes of our own choices, and becoming degraded copies of our own selves with each iteration of action taken. It is like a zine where the twelfth issue printed looks vaguely like the first edition, but the twentieth looks like ink stain on copy paper.
The old man Toast is the dross that needs to be burned off; he is the gross matter of this world that knows only how to clot with the things that are like it. The will of Toast must be broken, it is as simple and as painful as that—this is not saying that this always happens—but it must for the old man to be put off. This process is sort of like printing a zine in reverse, where we are all born and, putting on the mind of the old man Toast, are that twentieth copy of a zine with a darkened nous and carnal mind.
In order to walk not as mere men with the Gentiles we must loosen our grip on our will, let go of what we are not meant to chase. Focus our mind, body, and soul on Christ—and Christ alone.
The zines I have come across are intrinsically linked with punk culture. The type of music and literature that raised me on a deep-seated disgust with Reagan and everything the man stood for (when he could stand), but more so than that it was the type of raw, unabashed, and unafraid missions statements that drove my stand-up, lashing out against everything under the sun, and occasionally the sun itself.
The zine is a do-it-yourself form of expression, not beholden to some faceless managerial staff or soulless executive being much more at home in tight, smoky rooms that are like skateboard decks colored yellow from all the stickers covering the nicotine caked-walls attracting hardcore kids, straight edge punks, and leather-jacket wearing posers all sharing an absolute distrust of authority if not outright combat.
This combat did not require physical violence though it would occasionally bubble up to such a degree; what this combat does require, however, is a rejection, violent in its discipline, against the world. Suited and booted knowing, “we are more conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing. Shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8: 37-39).
Everything the meaningless corporate state pushes is not an innocent fad or following trends, it is spiritual stagnation they employ in their methods keeping us all from putting off the old man. Those guys you smoked cigarettes with, waxing poetic about Hole, Sartre, and cocaine manners; oligarchies, white flight, and D&D; broken-window theory, King Lear, and High Life. The wide-ranging never found actionable conclusions, just an exercise in painfully aimless chatter and vacillation. Even talks on corporate power structure took on intellectual qualities, convincing ourselves we certainly saw the way the world worked, not seeing the way we played right into said structure’s machinations.
The punk movement, like everything else that poses a threat to the world’s power structure–and I mean the devil, here—got recuperated and repackaged without all its fangs. Same goes for the old man, mind you, the longer we go walking with him and the Gentiles the more diffuse our habits become, like the shout of a rebel hoping to inspire discontent amidst the blind and deaf.
We are, on our own, always up for sale… Everything we are, no matter with what intention it begins, will be swallowed up by the fallen state of this world and the faceless corporate powers that influence every stage of our life. So, in an attempt to remedy this painful reality, we can either sink into oblivion as have plenty of old punks gone the way of, or we realize that there’s a way to fight against this and in that we might, “be of good cheer, I have overcome the world” (John 16:33).
So, too, do we need to overcome this world by following the Way by putting off the old man Toast, walking renewed in Christ, and live by the spirit we must acknowledge we are not strong enough to do this alone, nor will we ever be unless we take the milk of Obedience.
Si comprehendis, non est Deus
Witness, NM 