Egregious Reader

I was thinking of the beatific vision. All of life is a suffering journey to see that face, the face of GOD. The face that Moses longed to see and prostrated in haste upon seeing even the Lord's back. It is a face of such beauty that all saints have wandered many a briery furnace to glimpse and denied even the pain of death upon the sight. It is the face from which all other beautiful faces spring ... I think now of my wife and my daughter and my sons ... of my friends ... of strangers who smile with grace upon me. I think it is worth suffering to see that face. I think it is more than worth the journey.

What a solemn, precious lesson! It is not to sin only that the cleansing of the Husbandman refers (John 15:1-3). It is to our own religious activity, as it is developed in the very act of bearing fruit. In working for God our natural gifts of wisdom, or eloquence, or influence, or zeal are ever in danger of being unduly developed, and then trusted in. So, after each season of work, God has to bring us to the end of ourselves, to the consciousness of the helplessness and the danger of all that is of man, to feel that we are nothing. ---- Andrew Murry (from Dawn's Powers, Weakness, and the Tabernacling of God). Just try to imagine that the Pattern is called a "Lamb." That alone is a scandal to the natural mind. Who has any desire to be a lamb? (Soren Kierkegaard)

I am always asking that question (consciously or unconscionably). What is my center as a pastor? Am I being true to that center or am I lost in the many duties that amount on my desk or issue from meetings or fill my inbox. I must say that I am not totally sure ... So, I continue to read books about it and look in the pages of scripture. The two things I read today are: 1 Peter 5 saying that elder/pastors are to offer willing (voluntary, not for gain) oversight ... but not through "domineering over those in your charge but being examples to the flock." So a pastor is called to be an example of life with Christ. Does that mean showing people my life? How do I do that, really do that in the life of a church our size? That makes me think of a line from Augustine: "What I am for you terrifies me; what I am with you consoles me. For you I am a bishop, but with you I am a Christian. The former is a title of duty, the latter, one of grace. The former is danger, the latte

In October of 1943, when Josef Pieper was temporarily on leave from military service and at home with his family in Münster, he and his wife decided to take their three young children to the zoo on a lovely, almost summery, afternoon. He took along his camera for the occasion and had taken pictures of the children just a few hundred yards from the house when they heard the air raid sirens begin to sound. As they got down into a trench, he suddenly recalled that he had not closed the garden door of the house. Running the short distance back to do that, he saw the American planes over the very center of Münster, and in a matter of moments the heart of the city was ablaze. Camera still in hand, he ran to the attic and took pictures of the city in flames. And so it happened, he recalled, that on a single roll of film the contradictions of our century-and of human life more generally-are captured. Pictures of happy young children with their parents, heading off for an afternoon's enj

Recently, I asked my parents how old I was when we moved to Ohio. I was born in Columbia, TN and thought I was about 5 when we moved to Ohio. They said I was only three and so it kind of clicked to me that most of my memorable growing up happened (not in the South, as I always think) but in the midwest. My best friend really until almost college was Mark Haubert. He lived on a corn field and I remember going to his house all the time. So, I decided to go back for a visit. We moved away when I finished 3rd grade and I don't think we went back much after we moved to GA (which happened for 5th grade ... in between was a year in Connecticut). I really want to see those Ohio cornfields again for some reason and the Haubert place (Roger and Alice still live there). So Tara said she was up for it and so we are heading up there for the day on Saturday or Sunday. I think reading the summer fiction (Jayber Crow and Home) has really got me thinking about my past. SO, I am excited

A HAWK We will never conquer God's creation ... don't get me wrong, I know that we have doom upon our shoulder (whispering to be done with everything) But here I sit in Atlanta in the upper floor of a Starbucks looking upon asphalt and builder trees with a clever brick Verizonwireless neat and prefab across the street and direclty behind that in my view is the new Piedmont in beautiful glass and concrete and then the open sky above them both and there floats a HAWK ABOVE US ALL eagle eyeing what prey scurries gutters and dumsters ... or perhaps yipping on a leash Jesus, I love your birds. All those fifth day creations those manifold flyers who beat us by 10,000 years and continue to astound silver laptop poets with broken coffee pot brains wearing headphones and writing about relationships and thinking about the natives of old who knew the somber meaning of A HAWK

Listen. I am not sure how many readers I have in this category, but if you are single guy and need a good scare about your bad habits ... ok your sins and the beast they make of you. If you need to hear an incredible song that threatens the unreality that is Halo 2 (behind the times I am sure ... even though the album came out late 2008). If you want to listen to popular culture rip a piece out of popular culture ... actually you can't really refer to the Drones as pop culture just because they play in a rock band, they are too "depressing" in very non-typical ways for that. So I ruined my plot line a little, but go on i-tunes and buy the song The Minotaur by the Drones. Listen to it two or three times. Then look up the lyrics. Then find out what the Latin at the end means and refers to. And then repent and pray for all your brothers. Actually, if you are a man you probably need to lay your $0.99 on the barrel head and check your heart before you turn into a bull-headed b

Our society, by pushing away all that is demanding ... all that requires responsibility, by embracing all that is easy and "time-saving" or pleasurable immediately ... we have lost ourselves. We are more lost than during war or depression ... we are lost and without place. And Jayber saw it all in his days. He watched the fabric begin to tear and once it was torn it could only continue to tear as it has. There is much more that could be said about this excellent book ... I need to read it again to get it out. More time for it late in life when I am an old Jayber Crow.

I love reading about how typical feelings and thoughts are actually very, very old. Cynic, where we get all our ideas about being cool and cynical of everything, began with a man named Diogenes ... Plato called him "Socrates gone mad." From my Dictionary of Philosophy: "He took 'deface the coinage!' as a motto ... and refused to live by them. He ate scraps and wrote approvingly of cannibalism and [worse things]. One story reports that he carried a lighted lamb around in broad daylight looking for an honest human ... intending to suggest that the people he did see were so corrupted that they were no longer really people. Because of all this he was known as a Cynic, from the Greek word kuon (dog), because he was shameless as a dog." He and his band had a reputation for barking at the rich and respectable. Of course by the next generation his successor was softer and more accepted by society. This always seems to happen. So what does that mean for us tod

ITs from a poem I wrote called childhood ... I will post it all for something new to post: waken, quicken, open and crack the gulf divides and out of earthy black comes a new sprout a dead baby fell upon that ground once long ago ... there it laid covered a body in peat moss preserved and ignored for thousands of days. snakes shed their skin, children their insides. The shell remains and walks on, the heart is laid to rest. the body is heavy from new rain, swollen in the grave. maybe the time is now. when it will rise to the top not resurrection just to finally be uncovered. A choice will be yours, will you look upon this death? Will you weep? Will you take this little one into your arms cradling loss? Christ have mercy on us. You must become like one of these little ones ... You must become like one of these little ones ... His kingdom come, will open dead eyes. Your shell will find the past unchanged, but the child alive again like a new sprout from the dirty old ground of personal h

This was a very good book ... not consistently or at least some parts were less interesting than others. His explanation of spiritual life is solid and refreshing and his history of the "disapearance of moral knowledge" is very important. I see in the acknowledgments that this was adapted from 8 talks he gave on the topic and it does feel like that in some parts. BUT, there is much to recommend and as far as something readable like this, I know of no better book to show us some ground to stand on. Overall he helps me see that academic and high culture has effectively killed all knowledge beyond narrow physical and scientific truth and has failed to replace it with anything solid ... and so effectively has left us to the wolves. By wolves I mean advertising and media ... they are the new meaning makers since all other traditions have been exploded. No wonder we are in deep need of a shepherd. Another way to put it, to borrow from Dorthy Sayers, is that society increased litera

"There is only one right way of asking men to believe, which is to put before them what they ought to believe because it is true; and there is only one right way of persuading, which is to present what is true in such a way that nothing will prevent it from being seen except the desire to abide in darkness; and there is only one further way of helping them, which is to point out what they are cherishing that is opposed to faith. When all this has been done, it is necessary to recognize that faith is God's gift, not our handiwork, of His manifestation of the truth by life, not of our demonstration by argument or our impressing by eloquence; and that even He is willing to fail till He can have the only success love could value--personal acceptance of the truth simple because it is seen to be true." (John Oman quoted by Dallas Willard in his Knowing Christ Today, 2009) This is what we hope to do ... this is truthtelling.

Home is probably one of my favorite words. ... I found this in a notebook (I usually try and rip out the pages of my little yellow pad so I can file the keepers and throw the rest away): Homeless in America I have prayed and been in prayer and seen my fears entombed in the image of homelessness, without place in the world. I am going home. OPEN Open a door, that I might come in. Any door? No, no, no ... No hole in the wall, no luxury of experience no fine dining just laundry, labor and love ... A home.

"The availability, the freshness, the uniform perfection, and absence of demands that we value in Cool Whip we seek in persons as well, and being aware of how widely Cool Whip persons are appreciated, we seek to restyle ourselves in that image. Accordingly, as we remake our personality and appearance to lend them the appeal of availability, we foreshorten our existence into an opaque, if glamorous, surface and replace the depth of tradition and rootedness of life by concealed and intricate machinery of techniques and therapies." ---- Albert Borgmann ( The Invisibility of Contemporary Culture ) We are pulp and glamor and this is what dazzling success has done.

This is the Western world for a few hundred years: let's explode the Bible and in its place let us revere the human mind. With the 18th century French Red Republicans let us hold a service to the "goddess of reason" in Notre-Dame Cathedral. "It took place after a day of looting of the Paris churches. Carlyle graphically described the return of the looters to the Hall of the Paris Convention: "Most of them were still drunk with brandy they had swallowed out of chalices--eating mackerel on the patenas. Mounted on asses, housed with priests' cloaks, they reined them with priests' stoles. They clutched in the same hand communion-cup and sacred wafer ... Mules high-laden with crosses, chandeliers, censers ... thus did the profaners advance toward the Convention, in an immense train, all masked like mummers in fantastic sacredotal vestments ... God was evicted the next day in Notre Dame, and in various other churches. In Notre-Dame God's place was taken by

One way to understand the planet earth (and don't we like to talk global nowadays) is to travel far and wide ... to galavant across the continent and the big sea. We like to think that people who are well traveled are wise and understanding (don't get me wrong there is much good to come from travel). BUT that is not the only way to know the world ... and in fact it is only a way of understanding the surface. In fact, much of that has been little more than walking a concrete map ... their understanding is paper-thin. Another way of understanding the world is to buy a lot of land and live there for a long time ... maybe your whole life. To spend a lot of time walking in your backyard and looking at the trees and the bugs. Listening to the birds and observing the seasonal changes. Going to the same spot for groceries and talking to the same neighbors. This brings a different type of understanding of the world around you. Today, we often try and understand sex and relationships in

I am supposed to read something tomorrow night at our 5X15 night (15 artists sharing something for 5 minutes each). I feel pretty close to choosing a handful of my poetry and reading it (3 or 4 short pieces that I had previously strung together) ... I am just very aware at how stark and angry it sounds. I wonder how it will come across and what is more, most of my writing is like this. I don't know if it has to do with maturing or dispossession, but I find it incredibly hard to write about light and beauty and joy ... most of my writing is about sadness and loneliness and the unending (though often unnoticed) troubles in our country. I take comfort only in coming across some great writers who seem to give credence to my way of writing and the topics I am always tackling with pen and lyric. I am thinking of Walker Percy and his belief in the novelist as diagnostic for the soul. And Flannery O'Connor and her grotesque and violent short stories that are able to push us to the edge

Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again Oh, the ragman draws circles Up and down the block. I'd ask him what the matter was But I know that he don't talk. And the ladies treat me kindly And furnish me with tape, But deep inside my heart I know I can't escape. Oh, Mama, can this really be the end, To be stuck inside of Mobile With the Memphis blues again. Well, Shakespeare, he's in the alley With his pointed shoes and his bells, Speaking to some French girl, Who says she knows me well. And I would send a message To find out if she's talked, But the post office has been stolen And the mailbox is locked. Oh, Mama, can this really be the end, To be stuck inside of Mobile With the Memphis blues again. Mona tried to tell me To stay away from the train line. She said that all the railroad men Just drink up your blood like wine. An' I said, "Oh, I didn't know that, But then again, there's only one I've met An' he just smoked my eyelids

OK so granted much more needs to be argued to even explain what pretechnological Age means and to give context for this quote ... but blogger don't have time for that right now so: "Oppportunities in a pretechnological society were to be grasped and acted out as a destiny. More precisely, one opportunity among others, however few, was to be taken up and lived out in a lifelong commitment; and all other opportunities ceased to be open and to exist. In liberal democracy, on the other hand, any one opportunity never turns into destiny but merely into a state one is free to leave for the sake of one of the many opportunities that have remained open." (Albert Borgman Technology and the Character of Contempory Life P. 91-92) When freedom is the highest value commitment is not. When commitment is in place there is a much more vigorious form of freedom preserved. I am in bondage to my wife in that I am responsible to my voluntary vows of life-long fidelity. However it allows me

When my youngest son, Aaron Henry, was still in utero we had a scare with him. Tara's body was behaving in unusual ways and we were fairly certain that the baby was going to miscarry. A miscarriage is just another word for death and so like any brush with death, it was very scary and very sad. I called my friends and Kris and Marty (was Matt there ... for some reason I don't think so, maybe he was out of town) came over and prayed for our child. I think the prayer was effective or maybe we were misreading the signs ... either way, I don't care. I am glad he is alive. Here is a beginning of a musing/poem about it. My Kids Faces ... My wife bore and gave birth to these little faces. These funny and precious faces. My Henry he hugs in gritted toothy grins like a glittering puddle at sunset all in his tiny smile Life in this little shape is sheer gift (all life is). I saw his death once before he was born Broken cries and bleeding I called my friends And they came

I read a short book by this title from Ignatius press (by the way, if you ever want to see what great book design is, look into their stuff ... amazing). It was by Hans Urs von Balthasar and the cover has this picture by Emil Nolde. What a beautiful picture! Christ Among the Children . Balthasar is contemplating the stories of Jesus holding out a child and telling us that we will not enter his kingdom unless we become like this little child. He describes that ultimatley this is rooted in Jesus very way of life. As a grown man, he never leaves the "bosom of the Father." His identity is inseperable from his being a child in the bosom of the Father. No other philosopher or founder of religion or psychologist have ever lived more authentically and deeply as a child of the Father than Jesus Christ. In one part he imagines the child Jesus becoming conscious of the world around him ... "when the Mother awakens him, the opening up of the whole horizon of reality is experienced n

I am also reading Jayber Crow for summer book discussions. J.Crow is an orphan (at least after the first 30 pages) and lives in the orphanage called the Good Shepherd. He wonders if he has heard or should have heard (if he had been listening right) "the call." The call is what preachers talk about as being called into some kind of lifelong Christian ministry. When he finally decides he should tell Brother Whitespade (the director of the orphanage) he is delighted. It seems that J. Crow is the first ophan to ever even feel "pretty sure." He goes on to say that there was much in-intended benifit to what happened: For his [Brother Whitespade] sake and my own, I am ashamed to tell you this, or even to remember it. For the truth is that I had not changed very much, if any. I did not become a better student or a tamer one, or less troublesome or troubled, or less inclined to wander away through any opening that presented itself. But now I had a reputation with Brother Whi

"A stove used to furnish more than mere warmth. It was a focus, a hearth, a place that gathered the work and leisure of a family and gave the house a center. Its coldness marked the morning, and the spreading of its warmth the beginning of the day. It assigned to the different family members tasks that defined their place in the household. The mother built the fire, the children kept the firebox filled, and the father cut the firewood. It provided for the entire family a regular and bodily engagement with the rhythm of the seasons that was woven together of the threat of cold and solace of warmth, the smell of wood smoke, the exertion of sawing and of carrying, the teaching of skills and the fidelity to daily tasks." (Albert Borgmann: Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life ) So what is our new center? Warmth is now provided in a completely uniform way requiring no demands on our skill, strength or attention. In fact, the warmth device (central heating system) is c

He was a student of John the Apostle. He was fed to the lions.

"Man rarely comprehends how dangerously mighty he is. In our own days it is becoming obvious to many of us that unless man attaches himself to a source of spiritual power--a match for the source of energy that he is now able to exploit--a few men may throw all men into final disaster. There is only one source: the will and wisdom of the living God. The realization of the dangerous greatness of man, of his immense power and ability to destroy all life on earth, must completely change our conception of man's place and role in the divine scheme. If this great world of ours is not a trifle in the eyes of God, if the Creator is at all concerned with His creation, then man--who has the power to devise both culture and crime, but who is also able to be a proxy for divine justice--is important enough to be the recipient of spiritual light at the rare dawns of his history. Unless history is a vagary of nonsense, there must be a counterpart to the immense power of man to destroy, there

I am preaching on Sunday and my text is John 15:9-17. There is one verse in there that I think is particularly difficult to hear, yet, I think we desperately need to hear it and try and work out out. Jesus is speaking and says "You are my friends if you do what I command you." (v. 14) The greek word for friends is derived from the verb phileo which in John's gospel is used interchangeable with agape. So really he is saying "you are the ones I love if you do what I command you." What do you guys think about that? I guess on one hand, we know plenty of scriptures to explain that God loved us even while we were enemies and for God so loved the world that he sent his only son and further down in this passage, Jesus clarifies that we did not choose him, but he chose us. So, lest we be mistaken, Jesus loved us first. But maybe we don't have access to any real certainty of that unless we do what he commands us. Maybe, in this context, where he has finished his publ

John Calvin gets a lot of flack (from me even) for being a scientist with the faith with his institutes of religion and his theocrasy. But I am always struck by the beauty of his language in his commentaries (the man wrote a commentary on almost every book of the Bible on top of his volumes of institutes). His commentary is fairly clean of any references other than the scriptures. That doesn't mean he is only speaking from his own brain, he was well read and well studied and loved the early patriarchs (his conception of Eucharist borrowed heavily Eastern Orthodoxy), but he doesn't directly reference them as we do inncessently in our much more scientific commentaries of the past 50 years. But enough on that. Speaking for Christ, Calvin writes of John 15:10 (If you keep my commandments, you will abid in my love, just as I have kept my Father's commandments and abide in his love.) "'In me', says he, 'is brightly displayed the resemblence of those things which

"The sense of the transcendent is the heart of culture, the very essence of humanity. A civilization that is devoted exclusivley to the utilitarian is at bottom not different from barbarism. The world is sustained by unworldliness." "In our zeal to change, in our passion to advance, we ridiculed superstition until we lost our ability to believe. We have helped to extinguish the light our fathers had kindled. We have bartered holiness for convenience, loyalty for success, wisdom for information, prayers for sermons, tradition for fashion." And I want my %&$! money back. The Jewish understanding is that "the tasks, begun by the patriarchs and prophets and continued by their descendents, are now entrusted to us. We are either the last Jews or those who will hand over the entire past to generations to come. We will either forfeit or enrich the legacy of ages." We Christians must also deeply consider this. We are interconnected, we are part of the one unive

"In almost every Jewish home in Eastern Europe, even in the humblest and the poorest, stood a bookcase full of volumes; proud and stately folio tomes together with shy, small-sized books. Books were neither an asylum for the frustrated nor a means for occasional edification. They were furnaces of living strength. The stomachs were empty, the homes barren, but the minds were crammed with the riches of the Torah." In the Yivo Library in New York is an old book saved from the countless libraries recently burned in Europe, bearing the stamp: "The Society of Wood-Choppers for the Study of Mishnah (the earliest part of the Talmud) in Berditshev." Who ever heard of wood-choppers studying bible commentary in spare moments at work. They read and studied the scriptures as a way of "clinging to the source of all realtiy." In the eyes of Hasidim, "study for the sake of acquiring scholarship was considered a desecration." The aim was to partake in spiritual b

I spent a few minutes this morning reading an introduction to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer written by Diarmaid MacCulloch. He made a comment that Kris has made before and seems to me to be very important for us who use the BOCP in services and daily devotion. First let me set the stage with quote one: "The Book of Common Prayer, pivotal to all these minor and comfortable intersections between the sacred and the everyday, was intended as an approach to the divine." A daily approach and one for everyone. The two major contributions that Cranmer wanted to see accomplished in his lifetime was an English Bible and English church services. He was able to experience it for a few years under Edward and then was burned at the stake by Queen Mary. He wanted it written eloquently enough and historically enough that the Cambridge dons wouldn't snub their nose, yet understandable and sayable by the common people. But MacCulloch continues ... "Perhaps the Prayer Book text is now

Lest we forget how shocking that conversion was to his peers, consider Virginia Woolf's bitter lament to a mutual friend: "He has become an Anglo-Catholic, believes in God and immortality, and goes to church … . A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there's something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God." She adds, "we must consider him dead to us from this point on." (From an article in Books and Culture) The academic and literature culture of the 20th century is sure tough on Christianity and has been at least since the 1920s.

The Importance of Deeds It seems that Christians are hyper-sensitive about words like deed and duty. The scriptures testify that we will be judged according to our works of good or evil. The epistles attest to love in action and observing the commandments. But we also know that none of our works can save us from sin and death. None of them can redeem us. Only Christ on the cross can finish the work of salvation. So we are truly confused when the scriptures seem to call us to holy living. If Christ finished the work that we could never accomplish, what does it matter what I do? What of the travels of Saint Paul? Why did he walk the known world and suffer shipwrecks and beatings? What of Peter's journey into Rome where he was crucified upside down? What of pen of Augustine or his fiery sermons? What of the burning life of Saint Francis, penned by others for our memory and celebration? What of Oscar Romero and his voice for the poor that led to sniper bullet in his chest? What of Cran

Our age is brilliant with electric light. No further description is needed of this as we see it re-invent itself with each passing day. But what of the inner life? If we measure culture by the quality and quantity of its books, by the number of its universities, by our artistic accomplishment or our scientific discoveries, the Western civilization is a golden age. But what if we use a different criteria, "namely, how much spiritual substance there is in everyday existence." "The patter of life of a people is more significant than the pattern of art. What counts most is not expression, but existence itself. The key source of creativity lies in the will to cling to spirituality, to be close to the inexpressible, and not merely in the ability of expression." The God of the scriptures is always more concerned with our daily pattern of life than our abilities of any sort. More than that, the sense of transcendence, what Heschel calls staying "close to the inexpre

I cried in worship today. It happens sometime and is a good thing. Today it was during the newish song from Psalm 103. Even before we sang out the benefits of the Lord, before the line about saving us from the grave, I was crying. I spent a couple of hours with a friend of mine on Thursday. He lives south of Atlanta so we decided to drive until we met ... we ended up in College Park. It was nice day, so I suggested that we find a tree in the graveyard to sit under. We did. The last time I saw him, was at his father's funeral. His dad died at 54. This was his first April 28th without him. He taught his first class at a local College (his first class as a professor) and he couldn't tell his dad about it. He hates it and there is a lot of pain on his shoulders. I was crying because I was thinking about the grave and the cemetery and my friend. I couldn't stop crying, but I could sing. Bless his name, bless his name, bless his holy name. After the service I prayed with two diff

Yesterday's daily office reading was from Daniel 5. It is very much worth reading as it is a strange and intense story. The original "writing on the wall" story. A powerful king, under the influence of alcohol (v. 2) decided to bring out Yahweh's dishes for a drink. So this brings up an interesting warning about drunkenness. Calvin says "we must use wine soberly, that it may invigorate not only the body but the mind and the senses, and may never weaken, or enervate, or stupify our bodily or mental powers." He goes on to tell of a vulgar and common proverb ---"pride springs from drunkenness. For this reason the poets supposed Bacchus (the god of wine) to have horns, since intemperate men are always puffed up, and the most wretched fancy themselves kings. What then must happen to monarchs, when in their forgetfulness they dream themselves kings of kings, and even dieties?" Read the rest of the story to see. Calvin and the book of Daniel brings up an

The picture is from a Simpsons where Homer is walking on a beach in Brazil, someone shouts at him being an arrogant American and Homer is perplexed that they were able to pick him out so easily. This is a post from my original blog from last year. It was one of my best ever, so I thought I would repost. I don't know if that is a blog-sin. I guess I am simply "exporting" which at least is an option on my "dashboard." A theory I have of late is that economy and capitalism, or more precisely the greedy men making all the money, are quite happy to push Americans (and maybe the whole world) toward more and more autonomy and individual choice, labeling it freedom. They have reason to do this on both sides of the equation. First, this creates loads of new business, not only through overbuying due to choice, but the service economy is booming due to the impoverishment of "relational capital." As more of us seek to increase our financial capital we do so at th

Once there was a culture so malicious, yet banal that Christians felt they were drowning. The culture embraced them, persecution ended, but the violence of propaganda and the pagan way of life constantly assailed them. Many were sinking deeper and deeper into this poison culture. The spirit of the age was seductive and constant with its promises of happiness and material success. The constant refrain could be summed up as: "Keep your spirituality, that is something you enjoy ... just join us in every other way." And so the church became wealthy and sick. One famous story describes Christians walking through a Roman church. One comments to the other, "Have you ever seen such riches?" The other sadly references the story in Acts; "Silver and gold we have in abundance, but the power to raise the sick is gone from us." So some of the saints decided to flee from this shipwreck in search of find land on which to stand. They ran to the desert. Without effort, Nou

And he is very good. He is such an amazing boy. He is very sweet, often writing love notes to me and his mama. He is smart, reading and writing and remembers everything. And he is very athletic. That top picture is from our backyard, if you look close you can see that he busted the tee off its base and it is flipping through the air while the ball is headed over the fence.

"It used to be that I could think of art as a refuge from such troubles. From the imperfections of life, one could take refuge in the perfections of art. On could read a good poem--or better, write one. Art was what was truly permanent, therefore what truly mattered. I know longer think that way. That is because I now live in my subject. My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place." ---- Wendell Berry Damage This is some of what I was trying to get at in my last post. I want to live in my subject and be writing about what I am living. My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place. Abraham Heschel said that right living is like a work of art, the product of a vision and the wrestling of concrete situations. That is also some of what I am getting at.

There is a great danger in art ... it is the same dehumanizing danger in science and an unusual connection between art and science. It is a danger that some artists, like Wendell Berry, are much aware of and others, like Nick Cave whom I reference, are not. I developed a dislike for the transient, yet permanency, of love poetry when I listened to Nick Cave's spoken word essay called the Secret Life of a Love Song. It is really good, he makes the bold statement that a love song is trying to through a sheet over the invisible God so we can see him for a moment. However, the part I didn't like is when he talked about the transience of the relationship and the permanence of a love song. He said that women come and go, but the love song endures. When he said that it turns something in my stomach toward love songs and all writers in a sense. It made me bound and determined (though I regularly fail) to only write what I was living and to never think that something I write is more impo

Erick Erikson argued on the basis of his clinical experience that adults stagnate in self-absorption unless they take an interest in the next generation. If they do take such an interest they are likely to become “generative.” Being generative moves one towards a wise and satisfying old age. The self-absorbed, however, move toward despair. They become “elderlies,” distinguished only by old age, instead of “elders,” who quietly live up to their role as bearers of wisdom and dignity for the next generation. I am quoting this directly from a paper by Jerome Berryman called Children And Mature Spirituality. That short section really stuck out to me because it seems that we living out a world of "elderlies" and are all in danger of living and dying unto ourselves, alone. In the men's meeting at Trinity we have been talking about the danger of men being alone and the need to have mentors and be mentors. It was really powerful teaching (again, if nothing else, simply because of

This morning I followed the service in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer for my morning prayer time. It was very good for me. The language is all old English but the truths and the power of the prayers is not lost at all. And it involves confession of sin, readings, songs, apostles creed, the Lord's prayer and prayers for grace, mercy, peace, our nation, the church. Here were two of my favorite parts. This is the prayer of confession of sin: ALMIGHTY and most merciful Father; We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have offended against thy holy laws. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; And we have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us. But thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Spare thou them, O God, who confess their faults. Restore thou those who are penitent; According to thy promises declared unto mankind in

This is one of those bits of poetry that is so random it could be open for much interpretation. I still kind of like it though. Sometimes I just try and write a poem to write one ... so a lot of time they come to nothing. It's ok if you think this is an example of nothing, but I kind of liked it upon re-reading: Broaken bakcs undr ground dove hight dropping speed of light orbit still moonshine drinkin' fall away again fall apart.

What is love if separated from its binding commitment? Love is to be bound and how do we find ourselves bound and who do we bind ourselves to? Is not love a dangerous thing? How can it be safe to entertain being bound? Yet we play with words like love all the time. We love so much ... do we consider love's implications? Love is a tie that binds. Love is an affirmation that goes to pieces the moment we flake out and desert the one we pronounced it to. You cannot tell someone you love them, you applaud their existence, "It is good that you exist!" and then turn your back or walk away. But that means that we must use greater care when we say such things. Surely, there is a limitation to your love. God is Spirit and that is a good thing ... we are not, we are time and place, flesh and blood. We have limits that must be acknowledged. We must be prudent lovers. And what about giving up altogether. That is only to embrace a homelessness that is alien but natural. Mankind is spl

Yesterday morning my dad spoke with Trinity Men and shared about the importance of being connected as a man. He told about how he grew up on a farm with his Grandpa next door and his great Grandpa living behind his Grandpa. SO four generations all within sightline. He said that his dad and Grandpa both worked so a lot of the chores around the farm were left to him. He mentioned that chores were not assignments as much as common responsibility ... everybody on the farm worked. And the one to help little Larry (my dad) was his great Grandpa. They never planned out when they would meet up in the field ... it was just that when my dad went out to work, within minutes there was great Grandpa by his side. He was the one who talked about the world and life and struggle and farm work and economy and women with. He didn't have any education, couldn't read or write, couldn't drive a car ... but he loved my dad and was there for him day in and day out. This was a powerful story to me.