Jay Percival

beatific vision

2009-09-06T11:28:00.001-07:00

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.

Quotes

2009-08-20T16:58:00.000-07:00

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)

What is a Pastor?

2009-07-30T04:38:00.000-07:00

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 latter, salvation." In Romans Paul (not talking about elders but all Christians) says "we, who are many, are one body of Christ... we are members one of another." We are all Christians and there is no distinction in that because we are all one body of Christ. Yet, we are different members of the body ...

I also looked back at a Peterson book (my most read source on defining pastor) The Contemplative Pastor and he says in one of the first chapters that a pastor: prays, preaches, and listens. All three of these things require stillness and a sort of holy leisure ... time to listen, time to pray, time to personally struggle over the pages of scripture.

Now Peterson (so we don't think him all idealism) offers a caveat farther on in the book: "I am not contemptuous of running a church, nor do I dismiss its importance. I run a church myself; I have for over twenty years. I try to do it well. But I do it in the same spirit that I, along with my wife, run our house. There are many essential things we routinely do, often (but not always) with joy. But running a house is not what we do. What we do is build a home, develop in marriage, raise children, practice hospitality, pursue lives of work and play. It is reducing pastoral work to institutional duties that I object to, not the duties themselves, which I gladly share with others in the church."

So that is probably enough to think about right now. I am still thinking and reading and praying ...

Photo of our age: A Pieper Story

2009-07-22T06:41:00.000-07:00

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 enjoyment on a lovely October day. Pictures of the burning cathedral and town hall-surely not military targets-in the heart of the city. This is the world in which justice is hard to discern, courage not easy to come by, and hope difficult to sustain.

Ohio (Fostoria, OH)

2009-07-16T10:22:00.000-07:00

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 about going to Ohio. Fostoria is below Toledo. All I really remember is how flat it is and cornfields.

The Hawk (little poem)

2009-07-11T11:44:00.000-07:00

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

99 cents will change your life

2009-07-07T05:40:00.001-07:00

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 beast ... cut off from the world and pawing at the surf of your own internal chaos. (aren't blogs made for this kind of dramatic style of writing). The song is about our violent and beastly culture that is like the Roman games of old ... it is the bull who is winning.

Jayber Crow

2009-07-04T15:21:00.000-07:00

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.

Cynics and our lack of Joy

2009-07-01T05:03:00.000-07:00

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 today ...

Cynicism, today, is either a disbelief in persons or a disbelief in any sort of good end. It makes sense that it has become in vogue as of late. Most people have also been taught that nothing will ever really turn out that great in the end ... best to have the fleeting joy made possible to us through television, shopping and sex. And it seems that much of recent philosophy, is really just about seeing through everything (seeing the holes and brokenness in everything) and ultimately seeing nothing. All that means to the typical indie-rocker is that the only connection possible to even another indie-rocker is through sneering and seeing through the same bullcrap.

And how we got here makes sense. All of this is just the cool exterior of people who are desperately lonely and afraid of believing in love or relationship or life, only to be disappointed that it was a lie. We are the most advertised to people ever ... film itself sells us a way of life and a world of things every time we sit down to be entertained. I highly doubt that Shakespeare's set was elaborate enough to convince any peasants of the high-life, but our world is different. Everyone is trying to make us believe, and our only defense is to become cynical long before our time. And most of us are far to young to properly wear such a role ... we lack the long road of experience to properly discern what is false and what is true.

And there lies the dilemma, we don't let ourselves believe there is anything great in our world so we don't do anything great. We don't even look for it.

But the truth is, from God's point of view, this world was still shot through with enough beauty and goodness for him to descend into human flesh and give up his own life (exposing that the world was truly wicked ... just like Nieche said, we would kill God if only we had the chance), but something crazy and wonderful happened. The people around Jesus were forever changed and God descended again in the Holy Spirit ... that until the end of the world and unto the ends of the earth God would be at work among men and women through the church ... which is the Body of Christ. No matter what we see with our tired pilgrim eyes, God is at work in the earth. That is our foundation truth and we work from there always. And so the good news goes forth.

We see death and evil and sin like everyone else ... perhaps better because we know what to call it (the creation-killer), but we are always looking for how God is at work and asking him to show his face or at least his hands ("he's a workin' man") and we know he will. And joy means that we know all that. Not that we know it in some kind of constant vision rolling before our eyes, but deep down in our way of thinking. We know that God is good. We know that God is at work in the earth. We know that we and others like us (other human beings) can be part of that work. And so we have joy.

But sadly, youth culture today is connected to cynicism. Youth is typically connected to hopefulness and it seems a very sad thing that in our culture it is not. The opposite of joy is despair and despair is "the perverse anticipation of the nonfulfillment of hope: 'to despair is to descend into hell.'" (Pieper Hope) "Against all reality, they transform the 'not yet' of hope into the 'not' ... In despair, that which is genuinely human--which alone is able to preserve the easy flow of hope--is paralyzed and frozen."

But we have God at work and so we have hope. And because we have hope and belief in reality, we have joy. We have joy toward the end and we have joy whenever the end comes into the present (which happens a lot actually). We can also have joy in those spots of earth and humanity that are still blessed and shot through with glory (even if a shadowy one).

Old poem I found on my door

2009-06-25T06:37:00.000-07:00

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 histories.

Knowing Christ Today by Dallas Willard

2009-06-18T04:58:00.000-07:00

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 literacy with a decrease in ability to reason and judge truth ... leaving us as unarmed children in the face of the onslaught of the biggest media-blitz ever.

How can we see it any other way? Symbol is lost and replaced with logo. Moral judgement loses out to truth based on desire and what feels good. I am sure I sound like an old man, but I have trouble seeing it any other way. He ends by explaining that the call to discipleship is for the sake of the world, not for the church. The Kingdom of God is for "the whole life and for all of life. Jesus is not just a sacrificial lamb whose death gets us off the hook of our guilt. He is also the reigning Lord of all."

I am reminded of Bonhoeffer in some of his later letters from prison. He tells Eberhard (his best friend) that he is tired of the god of the gaps ... there to meet us at the limits of life (sin and death). God is a God of life and so the church should not be off to the side, ready to receive us when we are pitiful and broken, but at the center of life. "The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village." Dallas Willard is always calling us to live at the center of the village. Perhaps it goes back to his own choice. When he was younger and trying to decide which path to take between philosophy and theology, he decided that if he went with theology the world would never listen to him, but if he went with philosophy he could speak to the world and the church. This isn't everyone's choice, but it was his and he has taught at University of California in Berkeley for most of his life.

Truthtelling

2009-06-17T13:04:00.000-07:00

"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.

facination with words

2009-06-16T05:39:00.000-07:00

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.

Cool Whip People

2009-06-14T16:15:00.000-07:00

"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.

Festival of the Goddess of Reason

2009-06-11T04:42:00.000-07:00

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 Mlle. Candeille, a pretty actress, lavishly rouged, as the 'Goddess of Reason', crowned with a red woolen night-cap, and escorted by wind-music, she seated herself on the high altar, and the first communion service of the new religion was celebrated."

BUT of course it didn't last ... those French are such fickle thinkers! "Robespierre decided that Atheism is aristocratic. The idea of a Supreme Being who watches over the innocence oppressed and punishes the crime triumphant is an idea of the people. So he gave a festival of the Supreme Being, and had the figure effigy of Atheism solemnly burned."

The sad part is how this continues to happen, just in the politically correct way of language: imperialism through sarcasm, underlying assumptions and pseudo-intelligence. Times have been crazy before, are crazy now and will be again.

Galavanting vs. Fidelity

2009-06-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

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 the global way ... galavanting from one to another in some strange hope that we will become wise and understanding. But the mystery of the other is of such complication and such symbolic purpose that the only way to ever hope to understand is to spend an entire lifetime tooling around the same backyard. One women makes sense if we are to have any hope of cultivating even the facilities of knowledge required to cross the gender divide. What is more the uncovering required is so much deeper and transcendent than a physical revealing that it can only be rightly received with within life commitment. Nakedness points to the goal of God's metaphor for one flesh. But galavanting is to never know beyond the physical bodies, and since physical bodies are made to convey spirit, it is to never know the physical body either.

If we are to ever understand and know the opposite sex we much promise to sleep in one place ... we must lay aside the open road and plunge ourselves into the abyss of one.

"Dark" Art (why I'm glad to be a Southerner)

2009-06-07T14:28:00.000-07:00

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 and so our eyes are wide for even one brief moment of grace. In fact, let's start with her because I have the book out on my desk.

She quoted Walker Percy on why there were so many good fiction writers from the south: "'We lost the war.' [The civil war if you need reminding ... Flannery continues] He didn't mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we had had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence--as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our country." Read that closely, it is very important, especially if you live in the south.

The south is the only piece of American soil that has lost a war and while the spectacles of progress and the American story dazzle and sparkle ... the southerner (with his inburnt knowledge of human limitations) knows loss and limits, knows sinful choice and wayward-wandering, knows blackened buildings and gut shots, knows failures and failed ambitions, knows defeated pride and egg-on-the-face. Flannery continues to say that the south is double blessed with having losted a war and having the means to interpret it, "Mencken called the South the Bible Belt."

"In the South we have a vision of Moses' face as he pulverized our idols."

"This knowledge is what makes the Georgia writer different from the writer from Hollywood or New York." Whether for lack of maturity or a meloncholly disposession, my best work is an attempt to pulverize our idols.

Here is a short example (from what I read at 5X15):

I. Mechanical Mother Bird

Everywhere,
the mechanical mother,
the fowl of orifices,
spits pre-chewed,
artificially flavored,
microwaved worm
into our mouths.

We have no need for a coup
since our wings rot with disuse.

Our civilization has arrived.

We have finally shed all meaning.

All men have the unaliable right
to government funded pleasure and happiness
and any other restless pursuit
of soulless America.

Songs worthy of the name Poetry: Bob Dylan

2009-06-06T06:55:00.000-07:00

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
An' punched my cigarette."
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

Grandpa died last week
And now he's buried in the rocks,
But everybody still talks about
How badly they were shocked.
But me, I expected it to happen,
I knew he'd lost control
When he built a fire on Main Street
And shot it full of holes.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

Now the senator came down here
Showing ev'ryone his gun,
Handing out free tickets
To the wedding of his son.
An' me, I nearly got busted
An' wouldn't it be my luck
To get caught without a ticket
And be discovered beneath a truck.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

Now the preacher looked so baffled
When I asked him why he dressed
With twenty pounds of headlines
Stapled to his chest.
But he cursed me when I proved it to him,
Then I whispered, "Not even you can hide.
You see, you're just like me,
I hope you're satisfied."
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

Now the rainman gave me two cures,
Then he said, "Jump right in."
The one was Texas medicine,
The other was just railroad gin.
An' like a fool I mixed them
An' it strangled up my mind,
An' now people just get uglier
An' I have no sense of time.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

When Ruthie says come see her
In her honky-tonk lagoon,
Where I can watch her waltz for free
'Neath her Panamanian moon.
An' I say, "Aw come on now,
You must know about my debutante."
An' she says, "Your debutante just knows what you need
But I know what you want."
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

Now the bricks lay on Grand Street
Where the neon madmen climb.
They all fall there so perfectly,
It all seems so well timed.
An' here I sit so patiently
Waiting to find out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end,
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again.

Pretechnological Age

2009-06-02T06:59:00.000-07:00

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 the freedom of entering into deeper and deeper vunerability and shared responsibility (ie children). If freedom and "keeping options open" is the highest value then perhaps I never feel safe to enter into shared responsibility or vunerability. And this is not only true of marriage, but almost everything of significance and depth. To take up anything, whether vocation or study or land ownership, etc. is to enter into strong and manifold bonds ... "to abandon that thing is to suffer the trauma of the disruption of those ties and of injury to one's facilities."

But "when the supporting structure of daily life assumes the character of machinery that is concealed and seperated from teh commodities it procures and when these become isolated and mobile, then it becomes possible to style and restyle one's life by assembling and disassembling commodities. Life becomes positively ambigious ... "

Styling and restyling ourslves through assembling and disassembling commodities ... we are all like the invisible man. The invisible man is the story of our age ... the direct opposite of the emperors clothes, we think ourselves invisible and have to style and restyle to acheive existence. Maybe technology and political worldview has played into some of these feelings.

The picture is the unfortunate fate of this technological life ...

Aaron Henry

2009-05-29T11:51:00.000-07:00

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 to me
Came and prayed
Came and called Life
Into the void
yawning over Henry.

And life came.

The eternal child of God

2009-05-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

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 not only as somthing holy but as the realization that in the depths of this opened fullness of being there radiates the personal Face of his Father, personally turned toward him."

And so he is truly able to call us into sonship and daughterhood ... "we must perservere, together with Christ, in fleeing to the Father, in entrusting ourselves to the Father, in imploring and thanking the Father." He also talks about what fights against this for us modern humanity. The biggest is the "makability of man." Our leaning on the idea of being self-made ... of plundering and conquering the world (as opposed to seeing it as given to us). "Nothing, compared to this, has ever more emptied the wonderous mystery of childhood of its value. But the ideal of man's self-fabrication is infallibly also his self-destruction."

"Thanksgiving, in Greek eucharistia, is the quintessence of Jesus stance toward the Father. The Eucharist celebration is when we thank God for Jesus and through him are able to give ourselves away ... "Paul reminds his communities of this need to give thanks to God, and just as often he himself thanks God for having received the grace that enables him to spend himself for Christ's work."

And our thankfulness is also for our very existance ... that we are even ourselves. "To be a child means to owe one's existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person we are. This means that we never quite outgrow our condition of children, nor do we therefore ever outgrow the obligation to give thanks for ourselves or to continue to ask for our being. Individual men, cultures and institutions may forget this. Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things."

On Sex
"As the erotic faculties of the growing person begin to blossom, the ability to marvel that was enjoyed at the dawn of life again awakens in the same primal sense. Now the Christian task lies in trying to deepen the erotic faculty from the surface of the senses into the depths of the heart: for here eros can keep alive an awed amazement at one's partner's self-surrender within all the routine of the common life, even after the first sensual stimulus has evaporated." This is such an intersting perspective on sexual desire ... it seems very true.

On being present
"The child has time to take time as it comes, one day at a time, calmly without advance planning or greedy hoarding of time. Time to play, time to sleep. He knows nothing of appointment books in which every moment has already been sold in advance." Instead every moment "we should receive with gratitude the full cup that is handed to us ... And only with time of this quality can teh Christian find God in all things, just as Christ found the Father in all things. Pressured man on the run is always postponing his encounter with God to a "free moment" or a "time of prayer" that must constantly be rescheduled, a time he must laboriously wrest from his overburdened workday."

It was a pretty good book ... but more than anything the concept of our faith being led by the Eternal child of God is something we would do well to reflect on.

Danger of Reputations

2009-05-28T06:13:00.001-07:00

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 Whitespade, and therefore with the other official people, that was a perfect camouflage for what I had been and continued to be. Once I had the repuation, so long as I continued to talk up to it, I did not have to live up to it." (P. 44)

This is a good insight into the danger in reputations. Reputations should be preceded always by action and continued action ... unfortanetly it is easier than ever to simple live up to somethin in talk.

The Hearth

2009-05-25T13:50:00.000-07:00

"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 completely concealed with little more in our sight than the programmable wall console. Maybe our lack of center is one of the troubles in the home ...

St. Ignatius of Antioch

2009-05-21T05:50:00.000-07:00

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

NO (dangerous humans)

2009-05-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

"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 must be a voice that says NO to man, a voice not vague, faint and inward, like qualms of conscience, but equal in spiritual might to man's power to destroy.

.... The Bible, speaking in the name of a Being that combines justice with omnipotence, is the never-ceasing outcry of "No" to humanity. In the midst of our applauding the feats of civilization, the Bible flings itself like a knife slashing our complacency, reminding us that God, too, has a voice in history. Only those who are satisfied with the state of affairs or those who choose the easy path of escaping from society, rather than stay within it and to keep themselves clean of the mud of specious glories, will resent its attack on human independence."

This is all from God in Search of Man by Abraham Heschel.

We must listen to those telling us No ... (From Moses to Jeremiah, from John to Jesus to Paul, from Ireneus to Kierkegaard, from Walker Percy to Flannery O'Connor).

"Our eyes are witness to the callousness and cruelty of man, but our heart tries to obliterate the memories, to calm the nerves, and to silence our conscience. The prophet is a man who feels fiercely. God has thrust a burden upon his shoulder, and he is bowed and stunned at man's fierce greed. Frightful is the agony of man; no human voice can convey its full terror. Prophecy is the voice that God has lent to the silent agony, a voice to the plundered poor, to the profaned riches of the world. It is a form of living, a crossing point of God and man. God is raging in the prophet's words." (from Heschel's book The Prophets)

Love and Obedience

2009-05-16T04:39:00.001-07:00

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 public ministry and ultimately his signs failed to engender much belief (the ones who did believe cared to much about the praise of man to admit it ... see the end of chapter 12) and he is now sitting with the eleven (Judas Ischarit has already left) who are his disciples. And he tells them, "As the Father has loved me so I have loved you, abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love..." You will remain, you will show yourself as one loved by Jesus Christ if you obey his commandments. If you look like him, if you love as he loved (sacrificially).

So, it isn't easy to be a Christian ... it isn't just about being saved by grace or being forgiven ... but to (to Dallas Willard's point) it isn't easy being lost either. He says that we have heard of the cost of discipleship, but there is a cost to nondiscipleship as well. It is only by going the way of discipleship that we can abide in love and so have the abundant life that is promised to us in the gospels.

Legalism is law without love. Legalism is accepting the rules without accepting or seeking to know the rule giver. Jesus is grounding obedience in love. Jesus is revealing the lawgivers face. The invisible God is shown forth in him. We must accept him first, then his commandments or we will end up with legalism. But it is possible to be a friend of a king (another thing he talks about in this discourse) and still be obedient to him as king.

Only the believers obey and only the obedient believe. (Bonhoeffer) Bonhoeffer in talking about faith, goes on to say there is a danger of taking either of those statements alone ... if the first is taken by itself we fall pray to cheap grace and the second alone to works. Pastorally there must be an awareness of which may be lacking in a person ... someone may be sorrowing from lack of faith from disobedience so words of comfort will not help ... only repentance and confession of sin. Constant disobedience can spoil belief ... what does such a word mean if not some obedience. Yet the opposite danger is to think that through obedience you can attain faith ... perhaps leaving everything (even actions of service to God) without God.
He goes on to say it more simply that we must entrust ourselves to the word of Jesus Christ, "believing it to be a stronger foundation than all the securities of the world."

Perhaps this is also a true statement and tension we must keep: Only those who love God obey and only the obedient love God.

Calvin on Anxiety

2009-05-13T05:50:00.000-07:00

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 I deman from you; for you see how sincerely I am devoted to obedience to my Father, and how I persevere in this course. My Father, too, hath loved me, not for a moment, or for a short time, but his love toward me is constant." (italics are mine) And farther down commenting on the following verse he talks of Christ as the author of joy: "I call him also the Author of it, because by his Spirit he drives away dread and anxiety in our hearts, and then arises that calm cheerfulness."

Christ Spirit drives away dread and anxiety ... let those words speak to us. And more, for us anxious souls of the 21st century: "He adds, that this joy will be solid and full; not that believers will be entirely free from all sadness, but that the ground for joy will be far greater, so that no dread, no anxiety, no grief, will swallow them up..."

The Earth is the Lord's: Part 4 - Proper Unworldliness

2009-05-09T06:32:00.000-07:00

"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 universal church and we must not forfeit the deposit of faith passed down to us ... the apostolic tradition that we are called to live out and pass on to our children. Our life is meaningful.

Heschel goes so far as to say: "The gravest sin for a Jew is to forget what he represents. We are God's stake in human history... We carry the gold of God in our souls to forge the gate of the kingdom. There is a war to wage against the vulgar, against the glorfication of the absurd ... Loyal to the presence of the ultimate... we may be able to make clear that man is more than man, that in doing the finite he may perceive the infinite."

Bishop Kallistos Ware (now Metropolitaton Kallistos) lectured on the church at Princeton almost 10 years ago and he said the calling of the church in our modern age was to tell the world what it meant to be human. The world has forgotton. We have forgotten that man is more than man ... that we are in the image of God.

He said: "We sit bowed before our computers, but we do not see the face of our sister or our brother ... we are in great need of a renewal of our Christian understanding of what it is to be a person, what it is moreover to be a person in relationship. We need to understand personhood, not as something closed in upon itself, but as something creatively open to others, and that means, as I see it, one of the urgent task of the here and now is to relate the human person to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity." Here is the lecture.

The Earth is the Lord's: Part 3 - Books and Study

2009-05-08T05:48:00.000-07:00

"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 beauty.

There is a great story about Rabbi Zusya who started to study a volume of the Talmud. A day later, his disciples noticed that he was still dwelling on the first page. They assumed he must have encountered a difficult passage and was trying to solve it. When a number of days passed and he was still immersed in the first page, they gathered the courage to ask him why he hadn't proceeded further. Rabbi Zusya answered, "I feel so good here, why should I go elsewhere."

Nothing could be taken literally, neither Scripture nor nature. "No man, even if he lived a thousand years, would be able to fathom the mysteries of the world." Everything must be stared at and pondered and discussed and re-read. Nothing was simple, the simple was mysterious. Every word of scripture and ever living being.

The Book of Common Prayer

2009-05-07T05:54:00.000-07:00

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 most often experienced in the setting of choral evensong in the cathedral tradition: something of an irony because Thomas Cranmer had little affection for either cathedrals or their choirs."

This is an irony we are all aware of. The moves of Cranmer to make an intersection between the sacred and the everyday, to invite all to approach God ... is most often known as high church for the wealthy and literate. This is a good articulation of a major project within the liturgical streams in America. I do not think there is a simple solution, though. I think being American in the last 50 years when we consider the common man we can't help but think of opinion poles and the "average man or woman."

I guess I need to re-read and consider some posts on contextualization ...

Eliot's Conversion (in 1920)

2009-05-06T17:52:00.000-07:00

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 Earth is the Lord's: Part 2

2009-05-06T05:38:00.000-07:00

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 Cranmer calling England to daily prayer? What of Bonhoeffer and King and you? Our actions matter, they always have mattered. We aren't enfleshed on accident. What we do in our body affects those around us and our own souls.

Great and small, our actions are seen by God and they form and shape our souls. Life is not an opportunity for indulgence, but a mission entrusted to each individual. Men and women are constantly engaged in building or destroying. Heschel says our task is to restore what has been impaired in the cosmos, to labor in the service of the cosmos for the sake of God. The disciplines employed by the artists and scientists must also enter into the way we live. He describes how the Eastern European Jew was more concerned with hammering and carving a life. "This sense lent his life the quality of an artistic act, the medium of which is not stone or bronze, but the mystic substance of the universe."

And this is dangerous work. "Man has not advanced very far from the coast of chaos. A frantic call to disorder shrieks in the world. Where is the power that can offset the effect of that alluring call? The world cannot remain a vacuum. We are all either ministers of the sacred or slaves of evil." Calvin said that every mind is an image factory. We either worship the true God-- the shatterer of all images and liberator of humankind--or we enslave ourselves to an image. Heschel says that Jewish law to the European Jew is sacred music. Christ is our music. "The Divine sings in noble deeds. Man's effort is but the counterpoint to the music of His will."

"Even plain men were like artists who knew how to fill weekday hours with mystic beauty. They did not write songs, they themselves were songs ... They often lacked outward brilliance, but they were full of hidden light."

If you want more on this topic, I came across a youtube interview of Heschel

The Earth is the Lord's

2009-05-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

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 inexpressible" seems necessary lest our abilities blunt and darken.

What he is hinting at in the introduction, as he prepares to introduce us to the inner world of the Jew in East Europe, is what I have been working on in my own life for the last 10 years. Whatever talent I may have as a writer or thinker or creator, my life's work will be my life and all the living beings connected to it. Any slender volume of print will only be lasting in God's eyes depending on the lived life that shapes the turning and twisting of my pen. Words empty of experience do not count before one who sees into the heart of men and women. What is important as we try and take stock of our own lives or of Western culture in general is the history of our soul.

I have been very interested in this word lately: the soul. The soul is a word that captures everything within a living person: his body, his relationships, his heart and mind, his place in the world. It is a word for everything about him. It is that word that drove me to read this essay by Abraham Heschel. I plan to comment on much of what he said, so I guess this is a multi-part blog entry. If you are looking for something to title this, it would go something like: What we can all learn from Abraham Heschel and his people.

Abraham Heschel was saved out of Nazi Germany with other Jews who had published great works of scholarship. He was brought to America where he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr, living in a neighborhood with Neiber, and developed a long standing friendship with Father Neauhaus among other things. My friend Keith introduced me to Heschel when I was in college. He is a world of thought. One thing the Jewish people do far better than we Christians do is to remember. They remember and they study the collected memories and the tell their children the stories of the past. "The present moment overflowed its bounds. People lived not chronologically, but in fusion of past and present." The world is crammed with the living beings who have gone before and made a way for us to be here. There is much for us to learn.

Cemetery time with a friend

2009-05-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

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 different people who have mothers or grandmothers who have just been diagnosed with cancer. I am glad I cried during worship. I am glad that it hurts me to know that death is close. I am glad that I don't just repeat those words without a real dead father in my mind. We believe that death is more than biological, but spiritual and therefore that we can partake of it while breathing, or be free of it while lying in the ground. We believe in "the resurrection of the dead and life everlasting." We believe that in the darkest patches, bones covered not with skin, but with earth ... can become bright, that a living presence will rise as our Lord Jesus did that first Resurrection day.

But my friend has a finality to face. A door has closed that will not open until the Lord returns. Maybe that is why the early Christians prayed for him to come quickly. Maybe John wanted to see his Lord again and his brothers and sisters whom had passed into the earth. The pain was thick enough to break my heart. My friend is suffering.

There was something else that happened during our time in the cemetery. His presence became bright and real to me. His father was gone and I was there listening and internally mourning with him ... but my friend was alive. My friend was a living soul who spoke and reached out, who loved me and I loved him. My friend is a husband and a pastor and a father. And all this reality was bright to my eyes. So bright it stayed with me. Every brush with death livens life somehow. Every nearness to death is like a darkened day when all the colors of leaf and blade and bark glow and shout to be noticed and valued and celebrated.

Maybe there is something about our sinful state that cannot bear eternity ... that is constantly shelling up with activity and tasks so as to miss all the livingness around us. Maybe its so bad that we need death to remain aware of the preciousness of life ... the preciousness of a moment in time. To take a reckoning of our deeds and our doings and our hearts. Christ is our eternal King and he became flesh to save us from the grave. He is the Good Shepherd as Kris preached it who will lay down his life to defend us from the preditor. The wolf is not a wolf, but Death in wolves clothing. He bares his teeth and would snatch and scatter us, would seize and harden us to be living dead, but CHRIST calls to us to follow him.

Thank you God. Blessed is He. You are our eternal king. Thank you for my friend and his life. Thank you for all the living around me. Open my eyes to what is bright and keep me from closing tight these windows of my soul.

Drunken Kings

2009-04-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

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 important warning about drinking to much ... it can lead to pride, often considered the chiefest of all sins and therefore a terrible danger to the human soul and the Christ follower.

America's Problems are my problems

2009-04-29T04:17:00.000-07:00

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 the expense of friends and family which increases our need to buy dinner, entertainment, sex, counsel and even kindness.

And on the other side of things, if we are split off from any deep human connection, specifically our spouse and children, even in a philosophical way, we are of better use to the companies of employment. With no one staying home with the children (that is another booming service) we have nearly doubled the work force. Beyond that, with no philosophical or religious lines drawn to protect the family, coupled with our desperate need to own all the new technology and services, the new cars and new houses, we will overwork and travel and relocate and are at the mercy of the companies will. All this we call freedom and democracy.

Wendell Berry comments that feminism may very well have "liberated" women from the home, but it has enslaved both men and women to the heirarchy of corporations. The average woman of the past was never as inhumanly treated as the typical employee and also was never as unquestionably obedient.

But before you (or I) let American capitalism form itself into a demonic giant pulling strings and drunk with power, consider this: Capitalism is not such an all encompassing philosophy and the business men are not that interested or capable of that level of control. They just keep an eye out for any opportunity to make a buck.

But what is all this rambling anyway. I have only cleverly asserted manivolent ideas about a pejorative entity. I have just capitalized on the cheap amen that America has gone way wrong and that big business (i.e. Whitie or The Man) are the source of our problem. I have not offered one shred of insight into the real problem, us, human beings. Why do we do these things? Why do we create such a culture? How can we see it change or be part of the change?

This is the point that I think too many modern writers are unwilling to concede to Jesus and the Bible and the secondary sources that stream from it. Jesus usually doesn't seem that concerned about these clever assessments of the larger problems. Instead of getting high fives for seeing through the Roman Empire or even the system of priests, he was able to cut right to the human heart of the individual and by doing so is able to cut to our hearts as well. Let us be clear, Jesus did want priest's to stop eating up the widows and orphans, but he knew that the real problem was the evil sea rumbling inside their chest ... that evil systems weren't evil systems, but the creation of fallen men.

I imagine he would turn and chastise all of us who continue to serve "the man" so we can have everything for ourselves. It is us that have the problem in that we don't lose our lives to save it ... we are all spending money trying to save our lives and so we find them completely lost and enslaved (to sin and system and systems of sin). We are all in need of repentance if the world is to change ... we must give our lives to community and family in order to serve Jesus.

The Way of the Heart (Book Review)

2009-04-28T04:46:00.000-07:00

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, Nouwen convinces us that we face much of the same tribulation today that Christians faced in 4th century Rome. And so we have much to learn from the desert fathers. Specifically we must learn the value of fleeing (solitude), silence and prayer. Each of these can pull us away from the seductive spirit that speaks loud as ever ... so we can truly live in the Kingdom of God.

This is a book on the heart. The heart is the center of every person and the seat of the will. Yet, I find it hard to really know my own heart. These exercises that Nouwen gives to us land us face to face with what is in our heart. It is there we will find the Presence of God ready to work. Bonhoeffer once wrote that the kingdom of God is wider than the human heart, "it is as wide as the earth." He is certainly right, nevertheless, the kingdom must be in the heart before it can make its way out into the rest of the world. And that is the story of the desert fathers as Nouwen tells it. In the desert they found life boats so they might pull the whole world after them. You can't really reach out if your own feet are sinking ... you must find firm ground on which to stand.

My Son plays Baseball

2009-04-27T06:17:00.000-07:00

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.

My subject is my place

2009-04-26T15:36:00.000-07:00

"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.

People and Paper

2009-04-25T06:19:00.000-07:00

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 important and enduring than the Imago Dei I am relating to, whether that is my wife, my child, my friend, someone I pastor, etc.

Human beings or bits of paper with letters about them ... which is important. The crazy thing is that biblically we must remember that humans are stamped with the Image of God and are fleeting like fog.

that's all for now because my little Aaron is begging me to continue on with our morning.

Mentors

2009-04-23T07:38:00.000-07:00

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 the lack of this way of life in our current world). It challenged me with the significant power in word and affirmation towards others because I am a pastor and speak from a place of some authority. It is not something to be casual about or to throw around carelessly in hopes that it might work ... but it calls me to create avenues to come close enough to another person so that I might look into their lives and souls and speak a meaningful blessing. If we look at Jesus work on earth, it would seem that this action of his upon the apostles and the community of believers did in fact turn the entire world upside down. Two of his words from the cross were blessing (to a theif and to his mother and friend) and one was a prayer for forgiveness. These words went out into the air and landed deep into the soul of human beings ... causing something noble in them to rise up.

In Bob Dylan's Restless Farewell he says:

a false clock tries to tick out my time
To disgrace, distract, and bother me.
And the dirt of gossip blows into my face,
And the dust of rumors covers me.
But if the arrow is straight
And the point is slick,
It can pierce through dust no matter how thick.

The blessing of Jesus pierces through all the dust and dirt of sin and death and uncovers the image of God.

Morning Prayer from 1662

2009-04-22T02:14:00.000-07:00

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 Christ Jesu our Lord. And grant, O most merciful Father, for his sake; That we may hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life, To the glory of thy holy Name. Amen.

And this is a song called Te Deum Laudamus (you say or sing this after the OT reading):

WE praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee : the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud : the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim : continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy : Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty : of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets : praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs : praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world : doth acknowledge thee;
The Father : of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honourable, true : and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost : the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory : O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son : of the Father.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man : thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death : thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God : in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants : whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints : in glory everlasting.
O Lord, save thy people : and bless thine heritage.
Govern them : and lift them up for ever.
Day by day : we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name : ever world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us : as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted : let me never be confounded.

This is in the 1979 book of common prayer under rite I and II, but in both cases they changed some of the language and I think this is far better (honorable was changed to adorable and sharpness of death was changed to sting of death ... not major stuff, but I like this one the best).

2Corinthians xiii.

THE grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Ghost, be with us all evermore.Amen.

Here endeth the Order of Morning Prayer throughout the Year.

Poetry

2009-04-21T06:55:00.000-07:00

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.

Love is a fuzzy concept

2009-04-19T15:34:00.000-07:00

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 splintered after the fall and it is natural for us to remain alone and lonely. BUT, we are called out of this splintered isolation. We are called to be bound together in love.

Let us all read 1 Corinthians 13, but not think about marriage ... think about all the people you love, think about church, think about Psalm 133 and the blessing that God commands when brethren (and sisteren) dwell together in unity.

Lonely Times

2009-04-16T05:38:00.001-07:00

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. I know our gains in city life and technology and education are real, but I constantly wonder at what cost. We can't all go back to our homelands (many of us don't even have one) and start farming ... but what can we do about the loneliness that results from the splintered lives we lead. If people are not individuals, but connected ... set in families and clans, how do we even survive all chopped up and scattered about?

More and more I think the great calling of the church in the 21st century (is it the 22nd now?) is to provide a home to the homeless and a family to the orphans. The homeless live in mansions and the orphans are fat ... but homeless and lonely all the same. I am a rich and fat little orphan and I am affected with every mention of the word home in the scriptures.

The Cross

2009-04-15T08:47:00.000-07:00

Christ in his mercy has forgiven us our sins. Christ in his mercy has set our eyes upon GOD and let us see him first upon a cross. By as early as 200 AD we know that Christians were crossing themselves as a defense from temptation and a shield against evil. The cross is at the very heart of the gospel we have received.

How many pieces can we break into just marveling at this fact. The first Exodus involved a miracle of creation and the drowning of the Egyptian military. GOD is powerful and Israel was saved out of slavery. The second Exodus comes as the wounded Word hangs upon that cursed tree, blood coursing through the torn Word-made-flesh. We look upon a wicked death and see our savior and our King.

I know we are in Easter and past Good Friday ... but I am still thinking of the cross. I keep thinking about it.

Here is Tertullian (200AD): At every forward step and movement, at ever going in and out, when we put on our clothes and shoes, when we bathe, when we sit at table, when we light the lamps, one couch, on seat, in all the ordinary actions of daily life, we trace upon the forehead the sign [the cross].

Holy Saturday

2009-04-11T07:00:00.000-07:00

O God, Creator of heaven and earth: Grant that, as the
crucified body of your dear Son was laid in the tomb and
rested on this holy Sabbath, so we may await with him the
coming of the third day, and rise with him to newness of
life; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

These are the readings for Holy Saturday service.

Old Testament Job 14:1-14
Psalm 130, or 31:1-5
Epistle 1 Peter 4:1-8
Gospel Matthew 27:57-66, or John 19:38-42

On Holy Saturday, the Body of our Lord lay in a tomb.

Job says that a mortal, born of a woman, is few of days and full of trouble. We come up like a flower and wither ... we flee like a shadow and do not last. The Son of God, our Messiah and King, joined us even in our witheringness ... like a flower struck down.

Job continues explaining that there is hope for a tree cut down, but no hope for us. When mortals die, they are laid low. When humans expire, where are they? Mortals lie low and do not rise again. And then, because this truth is so dark and unacceptable, he asks the question "If mortals die, will they live again?"

Jesus was the Word made flesh. He was real flesh indeed, real flesh and blood. Real mortality. If mortals die, will they live again? Jesus dies and is laid low. He expires and where is he?

On Sunday he will answer Job's question ... our question.

The John reading ... the gospel story from those verses ... tells of Jesus' lifeless body. The wealthy, but hidden disciples wrap him in spice and linen and lay him in a tomb. It was a new tomb and so his body was the first to be lain there ... he was alone in the darkness.

The night was dark and silent. The day, Holy Saturday, was dark and silent. The beginning of the next night was dark and silent.

And then sometime in the early morning before the dawning of light ...

Maundy Thursday

2009-04-09T09:57:00.000-07:00

Lent has been hard for me this year. I have failed often in my attempt at self-denial. More than anything I just feel overwhelmed in my mind and keep letting myself off the hook for discipline using this feeling as my excuse. But all of it has forced me to think about Jesus Christ a lot. He is our King and as our King he came among us to lay down his life. On this night he gave his body and blood away in the bread and wine ... he, as Austin Farrar writes, "has no business left in this world, but to die."

Jesus is at work inside of us this week (and every week). He is at work through his cross. It is a weeping sign for us who are sinners as we look upon those bruises and stripes and wounds. It is a triumphant sign when we look upon his countenance ... He who with his last gasps would pronounce forgiveness over all of us, unite a homeless widow with a friendless son, and welcome a thief into his kingdom. He finished the work.

DEATH

2009-04-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

"Of late years, wealth has made us greedy, and self-indulgence has brought us, through every form of sensual excess, to be, if I may so put it, in love with death." (Livy, History of Rome)

Too obvious to say ... Livy is writing before or around the time of Jesus Christ. I know within some circles the comparisons of Rome and America are tired and overdrawn ... but this specifically connected with me when I read it today. Here is one of my favorite parts from The Second Coming by Walker Percy. The main character has been contemplating suicide and in a way even attempted it. Here we have him hitting on something: "for all the world like a man who has hit upon the solution to a problem which had vexed him for years."

"Ha, there is a secret after all, he said. But to know the secret answer, you must first know the secret question. The question is, who is the enemy?

Not to know the name of the enemy is already to have been killed by him.

Ha, he said, dancing, snapping his fingers and laughing and hooting ha hoo hee, jumping up and down and socking himself, but I do know. I know. I know the name of the enemy.

The name of the enemy is death, he said, grinning and shoving his hands in his pockets. Not the death of dying but the living death.

The name of this century is the Century of the Love of Death. Death in this century is not the death people die but the death people live. Men love death because real death is better than the living death. That's why men like wars, of course. Bad as wars are and maybe because they are so bad, thinking of peace during war is better than peace. War is what makes peace desirable. But peace without war is intolerable. Why do men settle so easily for lives which are living deaths?'

He goes on to say he knows all the names of death and he won't let any of them prevail ... then he comes to an end with some discussion of death and marraige:

"Death in the guise of marriage and family and children is not going to prevail over me. What happened to marriage and family that it should have become a travail and a sadness, marriage till death do us part yes but long dead before the parting, home and fireside and kiddies such a travail and a deadliness as to make a man run out into the night with his hands over his head? Show me that Norman Rockwell picture of the American family at Thanksgiving dinner and I'll show you the first faint outline of the death's-head.

God may be good, family and marriage and children and home may be good, grandma and grandpa may act wise, the Thanksgiving table may be groaning with God's goodness and bounty, all the folks healthy and happy, but something is missing. What is this sadness here? Why do the folks put up with it? The truth seeker does not. Instead of joining hands with the folks and bowing his head in prayer, the truth seeker sits in an empty chair as invisible as Banquo's ghost, yelling at the top of his voice: Where is it? What is missing? Where did it go? I won't have it! I won't have it! Why this sadness here? Don't stand for it! Get up! Leave! Let the boat people sit down! Go live in a cave until you've found the thief who is robbing you. But at least protest. Stop, thief! What is missing? God? Find him!"

We must stop the thief! Christ on the cross is the road for us ... Lord have mercy.

Holy Monday

2009-04-06T11:12:00.000-07:00

Today is Monday of Holy Week and I find myself thinking about my own weakness. I had a mental picture of sitting at my desk (which faces out with my books on two shelves behind me) and then them falling and crushing me. I got a call from my dad about another friend of mine (from the church I grew up in) who is having a malignant tumor removed from his colon. He is younger than me. The world is in great pain and many I know are struggling.

And yet, Jesus gave his back to those who struck him, and his cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; he did not hide his face from insult and spitting. (Isaiah 50:6) It is in his very wounds that we can hide and it is his body and blood that will save us to life everlasting.

Jesus, betrayed with a kiss,
Have mercy upon us.
Jesus, judged worthy of death,
Have mercy upon us.
Jesus, spit upon, blindfolded, and struck with blows
Have mercy upon us.
Jesus, bruised and scourged for our iniquities,
Have mercy upon us.
Jesus, laden with the Cross and led to Calvery
Have mercy upon us.
Jesus, nailed to the Cross,
Have mercy upon us.
Jesus, raised up on the Cross,
Have mercy upon us.
Jesus, bearing our sins in your own body on the tree,
Have mercy upon us.
Jesus, by whose stripes we are healed,
Have mercy upon us.

preparing for Holy Week

2009-04-04T12:11:00.000-07:00

And found again Lord I Believe by Austin Farrer. I am sitting on my porch crying, reading his sermon on I believe in Jesus Christ our Lord who was crucified.

"The proud men have hung me up, still breathing, between the earth and sky. This is their cunning, their art of propaganda, to nail up a living placard, the enemy of mankind ... Speaking of someone's opposition to our schemes, we say lightheartedly: 'I'll soon fix him, never you worry.' Jesus had been a trouble to the priests, but now Pilate had fixed him for them, so they did not need to worry. He could not stir a finger to trouble them any more. If he moved an inch it was an agony. This was the sting of crucifixion, that you had them fixed."

Then he falls into a contemplation of his pierced hands: "Those hands had not been sparing of their healing touch; and yet Jesus did not come to heal the body; had he been free, he would not, perhaps, have sought out the sick. Those hands, in a gesture of force, had thrown the market out of the Temple. The mere demonstration was enough; if they had been free, they would not have armed themselves for revolt. These hands, only yesterday---was it yesterday? How long ago it seemed! these hands, these very hands, had given away the body and blood of Jesus to his friends in bread and wine. Now, they might as well stay where they were, nailed to the beam. For a man who has given his body and blood away has no business left in this world, but to die; to die and make good his bequest."

"O Jesus! nailed to the cross, fasten our hearts there also, that they may be united to thee until death shall strike us with its fatal blow, and with our last breath we shall yield up our souls to thee." (from Saint Augustine's Prayer Book)

Easter is now only a week away, but what a week it will be. Holy Week is a time for us to watch as Jesus enters Jerusalem ... to join in the cries of Hosanna ... but to recognize in our own voice the alien cries to come on Friday: "Crucify him!" Holy Week leads us through his last week, but on Friday we weep. "Crucify him!" words that our sinful lives demanded. We weep because we know him as God among us.

Let us face our sins. Let us face our sorrows and pain. Let us face our fears. For all of it lands upon the body of Christ.

O good Jesus hear me
Within thy wounds hide me
Suffer me not to part from thee
From the malicious enemy defend me

In the hour of my death call me
And bid me come to thee
That with thy saints I may praise thee
for ages everlasting.

Kindness Killed the Cat

2009-04-01T12:02:00.000-07:00

So you have heard the saying ... Curiosity killed the cat, I am sure this is still true, but the new one is the kindness is the murderer. Our culture, and this has definitely crept into the church, is so concerned about being nice ... at least on a surface level ... that they are smiling as people fall off a cliff. "I just want you to be happy ... I just want what you want ... I just didn't want to make you feel bad ... "

"there is no kindness more cruel than the kindness which consigns another person to their sin." Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Let us speak up ... or we may have a lot of blood on our hands.

Need to Perceive

2009-03-29T16:51:00.000-07:00

I read one of those personality things the other day and one of the categories was the "Need to Percieve." That is definitely me. These are the things I am dying to read about but you can't read multiple books at once (of course you can have them all going, but you can't actually read them all at once):

1. Marriage and Divorce (man are we in a mess! our world is falling a part in this area. don't you realize that when the family falls about or gets stepped on the only alternative is the state and that our country is in love with the state because its man-made ... just think of all the things the state handles even now ... it only gets worse when you consider stats on single mothers and dirvorcees. I have multiple on my list ... a book on Divorce Culture and Leon Kass's commentary on Genesis)

2. The shape of liturgy (I have one book Liturgical Theology that needs a second read and another Liturgy for Living that needs a good purusal). So much to learn!

3. Discipleship (I am almost finished with Bonhoeffers and it definitely needs a second read and then I have Divine Conspiracy and a few by Robert Webber on my list).

Oh well ... I am still young.

4. AND MORE!

Graver sacrifices

2009-03-24T12:02:00.000-07:00

I was reading my biography on Bonhoeffer last night and one story has lodged itself in my brain. I keep wanting to share it, but don't know who wants to listen ... so here's to you.

Bonhoeffer was a brilliant theologian who was imprisoned by the Ghestapo at 37. Someone smuggling Jewish people across the border was stopped and questioned and Dietrich's name came out. He was part of a conspiracy to assasinate Hitler through an internal military coup. His brother-in-law was part of the conspiracy as a legal advisor and actually there was an earlier attempt to take the Furrer to court and have him declared insane by a board of psychologists (heading the board was Dietrich's father). So this was going on all around him. And the other thing was that Dietrich had strong connections and the conspiracy needed the allies to know that the coup was in the works and communicate them (which he was able to do through Rev. Dr. Bell in England). Plus ... the insanity of watching Europe falling like flies all around him and praying for the defeat of his own fatherland ...

He was a pacifist. If all of this hadn't blown up in such a whirlwind he was scheduled to visit Gandhi to study his non-violent resistent methods. But he was watching his own people destroying the world around him. Very early in the moves that Germany was making and its persecution of the Jews Bonhoeffer gave a speak to the confessing churchwhere he described three ways for the church to interact with the government: 1. The church can act as a moral consciounce and call them to account for their actions. 2. The church can aid the victims. 3. "The third possibility is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to jam a spoke in the wheel itself." SO ... there is more and more to share ... but this is the specific story:

Bonhoeffer and his close friend Eberhard were in a pub watching the news when France toppled to Nazi military. The entire place jumped up and began singing. Eberhard remained sitting and was struck with Bonheoffer who quickly joined in with the others. Bonhoeffer leaned down and said: "Are you mad! Let us not waste our sacrifice on such ridiculous moments ... We have to sacrifice ourselves for something far graver."

Idolatry in the West

2009-03-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

"in order to promote killing in civilized societies it must be legalized under deceitful names. Yet liberal societies seem happy to be deceived exactly to the degree to which they have developed into societies of covetousness." Ok ... I know you need more before you know where this is going ...

I am reading a book of essays on the ten commandments. This is in a section talking about the relatedness of all ten commandments, primarily through the command not to murder. He goes from there to make the point that we are a society dominated by want and covetousness and the more the claws of greed entangle us (from human traffiking to slave labor for our cheap consumer goods, to "designer babies" and whatever else technology deems to sell) the more we will redefine sin and morality.

Bernd Wannenwetsch continues: "the culture of death is essentially marked by the business of redefinition. In defining our own humanity we claim the property rights that entitle us to distribute life and death according to the self-images we draw." We redefine life, we redefine the world and we redefine men and women and in the fury of it we are lost as people connected. The greatest pummeling seems to be regarding family. At another section he talks about Peter Singer's secular wisdom of universal responsibility: "One has no more ethical duty to one's own daughter than to a girl of the same age ten thousand miles away in Bangladesh whom one has never seen and whose name one does not know." Neuhaus points out in one of his Public Squares that this abstract utilitarian principle is a "view from nowhere." "While the abstract principle of universal responsibility, in theory, commits us to care for anyone, we face the fact in practice that we cannot care for everyone." So we give up on caring for our own family so we can care for the whole world and find that we are again playing god and caring for no one but ourselves.

I have decided that nearly every modern philophy is a thin veneer over craven selfishness.

SO, we need to give up our cravenness and love those who are closest to us. If you can do that you are doing more than most today (though not much compared to our ape-like ancestors of the last 2000 years ... oh wait, maybe those neandrathal fundamentalists are right about something ... maybe its devolution, not evolution).

More on the tension (see below)

2009-03-19T07:55:00.000-07:00

“It is not contrary to disicpleship that we should, again and again, experience ourselves as simple caught in the tension between the reality of our sin and the reality of God’s forgiveness. What is contrary to the path of discipleship is that we should rest content in that static condition, that we should not in prayer strain against it as we ask Christ’s Spirit to make the history of redemption an ever more effective reality in what we think, say and do. ‘Strive,’ says the Letter to the Hebrews, ‘for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord.’” We must strive for more redemption, for more of Christ’s Spirit guiding our thoughts and words and deeds. This is from Meilaender in a book on the Decalogue.

Meanness & Sorrow & the Cross

2009-03-19T05:51:00.000-07:00

Meanness and sorrow seem to be a part of human beings ... our history is an incredible blending of ghastly ugliness and incredible beauty ... of meanness and love. I once heard that was much of the thinking behind John Cage and his noisy popularizers like Spiritualized and Sonic Youth ... pour out sheer noise and see if you shake out a few glimpses of beauty that stand brighter and truer for falling among such thorny sounds of chaos.

It is in these moments of insight that the cross is so powerful. In answer to ugliness and beauty, Christ, the shining face of God, looks down upon us bleeding and marred with mercy upon his lips while we continue in all our meanness and ugliness. This idea of mercy bleeding enthroned between heaven and earth, between God and man, just before he disappears from sight, swallowed up by the ultimate enemy of Creation ... the dread beast, the aghast horror that is sins culmination. "No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up." (Job 41) And this stone-hearted beast, who conquers king and peasent, scribe and begger, Death seems to conquer and the sun cannot bear to watch.

But Christ does conquer and through the power of the Spirit rises to eternal life and opens back the promise of redemption.

Yet, we are in Lent and Lent is a time to touch the still tension of the age ... Christ rose from the dead, but he has not come again. He began a work and that work is poured out in our hearts, but we feel the tension of his work, his victory in our own bodies and in the world around us.

(Bonhoeffer, among other things would not deny his Jewish brothers in the faith and even secretly brought them out of Germany, he spoke out against Hitler and the German Church who joined in with the Riech ... he was ultimately hung by an order from Hitler just before the American troops broke through) Here is a man who knew the tension of the world writing and reflecting on Christ and Christianity in a letter to his best friend:

“The Christian has no last line of escape available from earthly tasks and difficulties into the eternal, but, like Christ himself he must drink the earthly cup to the dregs, and only in his doing so is the crucified and risen Lord with him, and he crucified and risen with Christ. This world must not be prematurely written off; in this the Old and New Testaments are at one.” (Letters 336-337)

Christianity is not about escape from this life, but the bearing of Christ, being full of the Holy Spirit in the midst of this hard and torn place. And perhaps in every moment where we look down upon our world, to do so with a head like Jeremiah (Jer. 9) and the words of Christ upon our lips: "Lord have mercy."

A prayer from Saint Paul

2009-03-16T05:52:00.000-07:00

For us:

I bow my knees before the Father,
from whom every family in heaven
and on earth takes its name.

I pray that, according to the riches of his glory,
we may be strengthened in our inner beings
with the power through his Spirit,
and that Christ may dwell in our hearts through faith,
as we are being rooted and grounded in love.

I pray that we may have power to comprehend
with all the saints,
what is the breadth, and length and height and depth,
and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge,
so that we may be filled with all the fullness of God.

Now to him who by the power at work within us
is able to accomplish abundantly far more
than we can ask or imagine,
to him be the glory in the Church
and in Christ Jesus to all generations,
forever and ever. Amen.

From Eph. 3

Self-Awareness

2009-03-12T12:47:00.000-07:00

I am looking again at The Future of Success to prepare my sermon on Jesus cleansing the Temple in John 2. The Future of Success is a book by Robert Reich on the shaping of our souls by american business. I don't think he ever sets it up that way, but thats what its about. I really want to read it straight through ... it feels like a book everyone should try and read sometime.

"Society as a whole suspects that something is awry when it's shocked by events like children in an upscale suburb opening fire on other children at school. Such events are sadly expected in poor inner-city schools, but not in tony, carefully sorted suburbs. For a time, pundits, preachers, and politicians wonder publicly if our values are wrong, if we lack "balance" in our lives, if we're failing to spend enough time and energy on the "important things," such as our children. Then the crisis subsides, the headlines disappear, and we all go back to paid work, often more frenzied than before."

Or as Brian Walsh records in his opening to his commentary on Colossians in reference to 9/11 the day after "an astonishing assault on the temple of free enterprise in New York City and the cathedral of American military might in Washington, D.C." the presdident announces "America is open for business." Wasn't that rather callous and irrelevant under such circumstances? Not at all ... The myth of salvation in this country is "found in the ever-expanding global economy. If "America is open for business," then freedom still reigns! ... the highest patriotic duty of the American population was to go out and consume."

Well you pundits and preachers ... I am tired of our civic religion. It is time for a sustained proclamation of "important things" in life ... forget Focus on the Family ... Jesus said "Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father's house a marketplace!" Time for us to let the household of God shape our souls instead of this beleagered corporate identity that has no rest and has no relationships.

Reich also says: "For many men, the painful discovery comes when something in their lives explodes. It may be their marriage, or their health, or their child who suddenly gets in trouble. Or it happens when their job begins to demand so much that they wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. Or when their job becomes so rewarding that they suddenly discover the other parts of their life have all but disappeared. ...

Or earlier "As noted, the typical American is working 350 more hours a year than the typical European, more hours than the Japanese. And this feverish pace doesn't include time tkaen up with the ever more ubiquitous intrusions on personal life--phone, faxes, emails, business trips. Nor does it include the preoccupations, exhilarations, and anxieties that overflow paid work and flood the rest of waking life and sometimes even sleep. Many of us don't run out of time as much as we run out of juice. Constantly being on--creating, teaching, convincing, and selling---can be emotionally draining. ... Even if there's physical time for friends, family, community, and personal reflection, there's no psychic space left. Alternatively, we're so juiced up by work that we don't want to spare juice for anything else. The rest of life is becoming downsized, outsourced, and sorted. Is this the choice we've made? Is this the future of success?"

In the words of Howard Beale from Network: "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!" and niether should you.

Mice & Mosquitos

2009-03-05T06:27:00.000-08:00

“Some brothers . . . went to see Abba Felix and they begged him to say a word to them. But the old man kept silence. After they had asked for a long time he said to them, “You wish to hear a word?” They said, “Yes, abba.” Then the old man said to them, “There are no more words nowadays. When the brothers used to consult the old men and when they did what was said to them, God showed them how to speak. But now, since they ask without doing that which they hear, God has withdrawn the grace of the word from the old men and they do not find anything to say, since there are no longer any who carry the words out.” Hearing this, the brothers groaned, saying, “Pray for us, abba.” (Ward, The Desert Christian. . .P 41 of To Know As We Are Known)

God help us. We are in need of much intercession. Ours is a age in love with faith, but not in love with the object of faith. We like to be spiritual, to put it on like a pretty garment. It is the new word for the open-minded renaissance man or woman. But are we faithful? Are we faithful to Jesus Christ? And there he is before us, always before us in the words passed down, perhaps the most written about event in all of mankind's varied history ... has one phrase ever been said and studied more than "Christ crucified"?

Our world is full of suffering. Even in happy places with material wealth and success, we find complex suffering and pain. And so it is for us to look upon the cross and see Jesus Christ.

The crucified emporor,
the imperialist who was willing to lay down his life in humiliation, in scourging and in death,
the one who let the micely men strike his face and tear his beard,
who watched a monkey-lord present him in purple,
bleeding from his crown, crowned with thorns,
the one who whipped the sellers out of the temple,
let the same vain, power-hungry, mosquito men strip him down and gamble for his clothes.
And he is the one who prays for us.
He is the one who asks mercy upon us.
He is the one I believe in.

Good Lord, make us faithful ...
we who are grass and flower ...
we who are mice and mosquitos ...
we who are dust, shaped in your image and then cursed in our rebellion,
like the ground west of Eden.
Oh Lord, our hearts are laid bare before you.
Oh Lord, how bare our hearts are without you.
So create in us anew, a faithful people ...
from the same dust you took upon yourself.

Lord I believe in the truth of the gospel. The truth of the gospel makes a claim upon me in your commandments. And your commandments are life. May it be so.

Peterson writes about the gluttony of the cultured mind in the age of print. Our eyes are ever looking, ever collecting, ever consuming facts and information. We are "no longer listening to a voice, not listening to the God to whom [we] will give a response in obedience and faith, becoming the person[s] he is calling into existence." Instead we are looking for something we could use to do a better job. We must hear a voice that claims our allegiance so we can enter into his Kingdom.

Christ & the Earth

2009-02-28T13:06:00.000-08:00

"It is to this cursed earth that Christ has come ... the kingdom of Christ is a kingdom, that coming from above, is sunk down into the cursed ground.

The earth may be cursed, but into the cursed land Christ has come, building his Church in the land's hidden recesses."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

From his lecture on "Thy Kingdom Come" in November of 1932.

I also read of his radio address two days after Hitler took office (January 30, 1933) where he warned that a fixation to the person rather than the office would lead to idolatry. The radio message was cut short, and from the outset Bonhoeffer was labelled an enemy of the Third Reich.

A year later Barth and Bonhoeffer framed the Barmen Declaration:

Jesus Christ, as he is testified to us in the Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we are to hear, whom we are to trust and obey in life and in death.
We repudiate the false teaching that the Church can and must recognize yet other happenings and powers, images and truths as divine revelation alongside this one Word of God, as a source of her preaching. . .
We repudiate the false teaching that there are areas of our life in which we belong not to Jesus Christ but to another lord, areas in which we do not need justification and sanctification through him.

And then in June of 1933, the day of the church elections where Hitler won victory for his Army Chaplain Ludwig Muller to become the governing figure in the German Evangelical Church, Bonhoeffer preached: "But it is not we who build. He builds the Church. No man builds the Church but Christ alone. Whoever is minded to build the Church is surely well on his way to destroying it; for he will build a temple to idols without wishing or knowing it. We must confess--He builds."

More from Bonhoeffer is bound to come (I am reading a biography of him which claims that it is nearly impossible to make a separation from his life and thought ... the two were so seamlessly connected.)

My Son the Future President

2009-02-26T12:38:00.001-08:00

It is good to be fettered

2009-02-19T06:26:00.000-08:00

Kris bought me a book a while back that I have been slow getting around to reading. It's a book on called Pastor by William Willimon. This morning I went over the end of the book to read about constancy in ministry ... how to go a long time the right way. And he started to talk about one of the lies or idols of our culture: that maturity involves increasing freedom from ties, social restraint, all external authority. To try and translate what could sound like philosophy, he means we believe that in order to be our true self we must become less and less connected to and dependent on others. These are slippery lines, of course, it is dangerous to be over-dependent on others and that is a real sign of immaturity. BUT, "unfettered freedom is an illusion. There is no person without context and commitment ... none of us is self-made, self-composed."

I am who I am in certain contexts and commitments that cannot be dissolved. In fact, I go along with Wendell Berry and Betsy Fox-Genevese who say that upon dissolving the commitments of family and church we only come under less personal and more damaging fetters (of corporation, marketing, state, etc.)

I am, through Jesus Christ, a member of the body of Christ. I am who I am in context to the body. I am also who I am in context of my family. I am a husband and a father. These commitments define who I am, as well as fill me with a sense of purpose and calling and life. I am also who I am in context of friendship and the commitment that brings. I feel certain that lasting friendship is a gift from God. My great hero Dietrich Bonhoeffer is who he is because of his deep friendship to Eberhart Bethge. The only reason we know as much as we do is because of the profound letters and papers he shared with his friend while in prison.

He talked about friendship as being like a cornflower. Something that is not the fruit of much hard labor (like the corn) but a delicate beauty that is a gift of grace. Yet there is more than that to friendship, because friendship also involves a kind of commitment, a good healthy fetter to safeguard us from the impersonal forces that would enslave us. And as any commitment it requires effort and work from time to time. And it also requires perseverance. I feel I can say this with all surety, though I know that sometimes friendships break. Or perhaps like the darker moments in the scripture, one friend (Jesus called the disciples his friends, including Judas) gives up.

Yet I believe that friendships take on an entirely different source of strength and surety within the church. With voices constantly praying to Our Father; with One Christ, One Spirit, One body, One blood; with the constant reminder (one that came to me this morning in prayer) that Jesus builds the church, that all my work is really God's work, and not mine; with His care and concern over each of His children and His resolve to make us a family (the greatest images of commitment in the ancient world): all these things lead me to solid ground in claiming life-long cornflowers among my brothers in Christ, who have also been my friends for fifteen, fourteen and nine years.

Burning Agriculture

2009-02-17T05:31:00.000-08:00

Last night I was privileged to be on the panel of an art&faith symposium. I referred to one of my poems and thought I would put it onto the blog in case anyone was interested to read it.

Burning Agriculture

We have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence—as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of the country.
Flannery O’Connor

Daddy sends me out to repair what is lost,
To regain the proper nitrogen in the stripped soil,
But so much has been lost, so much has to be found.

“I light a match, and strike a chord of fire
walking
hot on my feet,
but that’s just the sun-hot asphalt around here.”

DROP.
The wooden candle is lost momentarily
among the old tobacco.
And then the brown smoking leaves are ablaze
and smoking.

These old plants immolate themselves,
protesting loudly in cracks and snaps.
I see colors in the flames and in the rising smoke.
I see black and white struggling,
I see blue and gray,
I see older fields burning, and homes and churches …

I see wealthy virgins.
They walk about all cotton-toed,
all cotton-eared.
Like stunted growth
like deaf innocence

I see white wolves walking proud,
money in their pocket
and owning large estates
not yet wearing hoods,
not yet fleeing to the hills.

I see dirty times.

I see a stoic from the north,
Marching a vast army.
He walks like bible times,
He kills all living things.
And smoke rises into a long night.

And the vision passes
and the winter passes

And comes the spring - On with the light!
And comes the summer - On with the heat!

And again, one hot day,
I survey the landscape, looking long over long ago.

And these thoughts escape my lips,
as if I, a brother to Ezekiel, were prophesying:

“The sun rises even on the wicked
And a smoldering flack
will miraculously come to life
in a moments notice”

So I look out into the fields
of tan heads
Blown through wind
splitting headache
as I think out loud
about blooming cotton and corn fields,
tobacco and the South.

The Body

2009-02-14T12:41:00.000-08:00

In Nachfolge [Discipleship] Bonhoeffer writes extensively about the body of Christ. Look at your body ... your flesh and bones. What you can touch and feel and see. If you are baptized, your body belongs to Christ (1 Corinthians).

"The body of Christ takes up physical space here on earth. By becoming human Christ claims a place among us human beings ... anything that takes up space is visible. Thus the body of Jesus Christ can only be a visible body, or else not a body at all. Our human eyes see Jesus the human being; faith knows him as the Son of God. Our human eyes see the body of Jesus; faith knows him as the body of God incarnate. Our human eyes see Jesus in the flesh; faith knows him as bearing our flesh. 'To this human being you shall point and say: 'Here is God'' (Luther)."

Here is God in a human body ... Bonhoeffer continues "A truth, a doctrine, or a religion needs no space of its own. Such entities are bodyless. They do not go beyond being heard, learned, and understood. But the incarnate Son of God needs not only ears or even hearts; he needs actual, living human beings who follow him. That is why he called his disciples into following him bodily. His community with them was something everyone could see. It was founded and held together by none other than Jesus Christ, the incarnate one himself."

We are called in our bodies and with our bodies. Merton once wrote in a journal that Protestants were too much in their heads ... too cerebral. I am sure this was because most Protestants have thrown aside the material of religion, ikons, oils, holy water, flames, incense. Merton said he liked Bonhoeffer though. I agree with Merton and Bonhoeffer ... Christianity is not something to simply be seen, heard and understood it must claim us entirely. We must follow the incarnate one.

"The community of those who followed him was manifest to the eyes of the world. Here were bodies that acted, worked, and suffered in community with Jesus." This is our calling. This is how we are to remain in Christ.

"Through the Holy Spirit, the crucified and risen Christ exists as the church-community, as the 'new human being.' For Christ truly is and eternally remains the incarnate one, and the new humanity is his body. Just as the fullness of the godhead became incarnate in him and dwelled in him, so are Christian believers filled with Christ (Col 2:9; Eph 3:19)."

The world needs us to be true to our calling. "Outside of the church there is only the old, internally divided human being" broken by the sin of Adam that still pervades. We must follow Christ with our bodies and so become true disciples and so become one new human beings. We must surrender and be made whole. It is our body that must be given to Christ. "Christ's cross is laid upon the body of the church-community."

personal thougthts 2 (and corrections)

2009-02-10T04:33:00.000-08:00

Here is the quote I was trying to remember: "Those who wish to focus on the problem of a Christian ethic are faced with an outrageous demand--from the outset they must give up, as inappropriate to this topic, the very two questions that led them to deal with the ethical problem: 'How can I be good?' and 'How can I do something good?' Instead they must ask the wholly other, completely different question: what is the will of God." Bonhoeffer ... the first words of his final work Ethics.

There is more on this in Hebrews as well, chapter 10... "Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water."

and this, chapter 13: "May the God of peace, who through the blood of the eternal covenant brought back from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep, equip you with everything good for doing his will, and may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen."

I also appreciate your thoughts and responses Candace and Cameron. ...

personal thoughts

2009-02-09T18:21:00.001-08:00

Why is our world such a mess?

I know why. It is me. This Christian life is always so difficult ... everytime you think you are doing well, it seems, you realize you have only just begun.

Right now I am struggling with God.

Speak to me. I am listening for your voice.

"Lord, I believe, help my unbelief." I think that sums me up pretty well.

I take comfort in what happened next for that tender father. Jesus ... reach out your hand.

So I am struggling with how to hear God's voice on specific questions ... how to hear his voice for guidance. How do believe for others ... encourage others to know the will of God. My wife is reading through Hebrews and pointed out chapter 3 to me today. One line really struck me: "Take care, brothers and sisters [this is key ... speaking to those in the church] that none of you may have an evil, unbelieving heart that turns away from the living God." The context seems pretty intense and strong ... but it still speaks to me.

I am a thinker. I am reader of books. I feel I must take great care not to turn away from the living God. I am also thinking of the first paragraph from Bonhoeffer's Ethics "It is not about understanding good and how we might do that good that is important for the Christian ... but to know the will of God." This is a paraphrase because my copy is at the office, but it is something like that.

What is the will of God? How do I discern his will?

I have much to pray about.

Made Not Born

2009-02-08T05:16:00.001-08:00

In 1976, the year I was born, Notre Dame released a collection of papers called Made, Not Born: New Perspectives on Christian Initiation and the Catechumenate. This little book was an attempt by Catholic scholars to deal Christian conversion and by implication, what it means to be a Christian in the first place. Here is some of what I have learned:

1. In the early church, when the church was small and on mission to save some individuals and enfold them into the body of Christ, baptism was radical. It represented a complete break with the life of society and an entrance into a new kind of life in Christ Jesus. The church was mainly baptizing adult converts. It was full imersion and involved annointing with oil and the laying on of hands and first communion afterward. It also involved a period of instruction and living the life with the believers, called Catechism, that usually lasted 1-3 years. The final great preparation happened during Lent when the whole church joined these new converts in fasting and prayer.

2. Much of this changed when the church managed to baptize the entire society. With the conversion of Contantine and all that followed, the mission of the church changed drastically. Society and Church entwined and so conversion was more difficult to define. There was also a final acceptance of infant baptism. Infant baptism was always allowable, given that the parents or godparents vowed to raise the children in the faith. But once everyone was de facto a Christian the church baptized infants much like Western doctors circumcize boys ... as a matter of course. Nathan Mitchell described what he called: the dissolution of the rites.

3. Baptism (including catechism), confirmation (involving the laying on of hands and the anointing with oil), and first communion were all one event in the life of the beliver ... all under the heading of Baptism. But once the church converted to infant baptism and was no longer seeing adult baptism as the norm, there was no reason for catechism and so confirmation took on some of the catechism role, but happened later in the life of the child and was then followed by first communion. The sad thing is that catechism died in that moment (around 5th or 6th century and didn't revive in the West until the Reformation). For example, in 1536, the people of the Fisher Coast in India were baptized en masse, in number about ten thousand, and then left without instruction or pastoral care, either before or after baptism, for six years!

4. Unfortunately, I wonder if we are doing much better. We don't do mass baptisms in America, but how much do we give ourselves to discipling those who are baptized ... or preparing them for baptism. This is where Dallas Willard's critiques of what he calls the Great Ommision come into play ("Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.")

Well more thoughts to come later. That is all I have time for right now.

The Light of the World

2009-02-05T18:39:00.000-08:00

Now burn, new born to the world,
Double-natured name,
The heaven-flung, heart-fleshed, maiden furled
Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame.
GM Hopkins

Each family is indeed a kingdom, a little church,
and therefore a sacrament of and a way to the kingdom.
Alexander Schmemann

I.
Oh Christmas Eve,
The eve of the great light.
Augustine said, God is younger than all.
He is light and life
He is color and being and action.

We are black and dull.
We are tired and old.
and empty of God.

He is brilliance.

We are dirty reflectors.

Was it hard for God to become man?
Once he was young,
A babe in a manger.
The vibrancy of new life was not hard for this little one.
Who was younger than all.

II.
Oh Christmas Eve.
This moment I am black soil,
Lumpy with rocks and lazy farming,
Acidic from poisons and lack of rest.

Flare up and burn these worn sugar fields.
Make of me softer soil
And richer ground.

III.
Oh Christmas Eve.
By my side and in my heart
Is my one and only.
To love and to cherish,
Until we are parted by death.
This is my solemn vow.
She is my gift from the Light
A glow within peering into me.
She is my gift from the Fire
A crucible of fire.

Glowing tongue of flame
Bursting bright above the heads
Of our wedding crowns.
Flowers afire, but not consumed.
This our little kingdom,
A house of God.

Light of the World
Fill us with your brilliant Winter flame.
Christmas Pentecost
“Miracle-in-Mary-of-flame.”

IV.
Oh Christmas Eve.
Your match of light sets about its work
Upon our dead wood.
And with empty hands
like leafless branches,
We go up in flames.

And then … out of season, in the middle of the night
We glow with blossom.
What seemed like a flaming tree…
Was a flowering one,
Glowing in the midnight sun.

Oh Christmas.
Oh candle indoors,
Oh flame of Christ.
Inside our house and hearth and heart.

This was my Christmas Poem for 2008 (I write one for Tara each year).

enough with our brambles

2009-02-05T05:58:00.000-08:00

"No man is obliged to learn and know everything; this can neither be sought nor required, for it is utterly impossible: yet all persons are under some obligation to improve their own understanding; otherwise it will be a barren desert, or a forest overgrown with weeds and brambles. Universal ignorance or infinite errors will overspread the mind, which is utterly neglected, and lies without any cultivation. ... every son and daughter of Adam has a most important concern ... to understand, to judge and to reason right about the things of religion. It is vain for any to say, we have no leisure or time for it. The daily intervals of time, and vacancies from necessary labour, together with the one day in seven in the Christian world, allows sufficient time for this, if men would but apply themselves to it with half so much zeal and diligence as they do to the trifles and amusements of this life, and it would turn to infinitely better account.

By acting without thought or reason, we dishonor the God that made us reasonable creatures, we often become injurious to our neighbors, kindred, or friends, and we bring sin and misery upon ourselves, for we are accountable to God, our judge..."

Nothing really changes in a few hundred years. I think this is a good word for us today. This comes from The Improvement of the Mind by Isaac Watts.

psalm 119

2009-02-04T10:50:00.000-08:00

"I have become like a leather flask in the smoke."

a frail vessel in the middle of a fire.

"O God, who knows us to be set in the midst of so many and great dangers, that by reason of the frailty of our nature we cannot always stand upright; Grant to us such strength and protection, as may support us in all dangers, and carry us through all temptations; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen."

(The Collect for the fourth Sunday after Epiphany from the Book of Common Prayer 1662)

Lent is coming!!

2009-01-26T09:52:00.000-08:00

Lent is coming! so I have been looking ahead at what scriptures will be read and preached in the upcoming weeks.

It looks like the writers want us to prepare for Lent and wander through Epiphany focusing on the power of Jesus to cast out evil, heal, cleanse leprosy. This seems a wise word to prepare us for Lent.

Lent is a time of prayer and fasting, where Christians focus on repentance, so it is good for us to know the power of God in our weakness before we attempt the discipline of fasting. God has saved the world through suffering, through Christ suffering on the cross. God shapes our souls through suffering as well ... as Kris preached this past Sunday it is often in times of trouble that the kingdom draws near. Lent is a time of chosen suffering. A time to recognize that we are lost without Christ and taking up the disciplines of fasting and prayer to push back the ingrown weeds and let God's kingdom come close.

Lent will lead us on a journey through Christ's wilderness trial (March 1). Where, unlike Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, Jesus, hungry in the desert defeats the serpent. Then we will jump to a foretelling of his death and resurrection in which the serpent speaks once again, but now through Peter (March 8). Jesus again denies his voice and retells of his way of suffering. Next we will witness Jesus in the temple, clearing it away in Godly anger so that it can be a place of prayer for all nations (March 15). After that we will hear that Jesus will be lifted up as a sign of salvation (March 22). That if people will look to him they will be saved. Then finally, before Holy Week begins, we will witness his agony in the words: "My soul is troubled" but he does not pray to be saved from the coming hour ... he prays to be glorified and lifted up on the cross (March 29).

And then we will watch the crowds cheer his entry at the beginning of the end (April 5). With Palm branches waving, holy week begins ... leading us to that terrible Good Friday, when Christ is lifted up for the world to see, the crucified Messiah. Followed by the quietest sabboth, when Jesus lay in the tomb and the disciples hid under lock and key. And then ... the resurrection (April 12)!

If you want to follow along as we go or look ahead I wanted to share with you a couple of websites that can help you keep track of the lectionary and the daily office readings:

Daily Office This site gives you the actual texts in full for each day from the Daily Office readings (this is a two year cycle of daily readings for devotions. This is what we print on the flyers and use for our mid-week service)

Sunday Lectionary This site lets you see the texts for the upcoming Sundays so you can look ahead or keep up with the week.

Two Quotes about 100 years apart

2009-01-18T16:52:00.000-08:00

First the old one:

"The home is the home of everybody of the nation. No nation can have a proper home unless the women as well as the men give their best to its building up and to making it what a home ought to be, a place where every single child born into it shall have a fair chance of growing up to be a fit, and happy, and a useful member of the community."

This is by Emmeline Pankhurst from her famous Women Sufferage speech "The Importance of the Vote" in March 1908.

“Every spark of friendship and love will die without a home.” This is by Win Butler (Arcade Fire) from their 2007 release Neon Bible.

I am sure it is obvious, but i am very interested in the home and wondering how we will make it through our current destruction. I don't find it strange that in a hundred years we go from the leading feminist voice to one of her great, great grandchildren ... a Canadian artist who knows the experience (like anyone my age does) of the destruction of the home. Please hear me correct, this is destruction wrecked by all Americans, not the feminist movement. Men are most often the leavers in homes and the destruction takes all forms.

Lord help us to build homes.

Broken Homes

2009-01-10T07:17:00.000-08:00

It's really hard to write. I have had ideas of late of writing something, trying to begin to write something, but so far it it is so difficult, I am not sure how far I am ready to get. No big deal, I doubt I will really have time or be ready to write for another 10 years or so. I tend to get kind of mean when I write. Not sure why that is. Maybe something I should pray about. SO, I guess take this little bit as in the vain of the prophetic ... it isn't directed at anyone specific as much as our whole culture and evil world, the one that Jesus came to overcome and save.

Broken homes –
Well the stats are that since the 80s 50% of us experienced the divorce of our parents. Of course that is only obvious brokenness, the family has been eternally under attack in this country (it is a land of industry remember … we ran all those family-oriented people out at the beginning, the natives as they are called). So what happens when you have experienced the disruption of something so basic as your two begetters splitting ways: well poverty, emotional and behavioral problems, higher risk of abuse and further breakdown as step-parents come and go. Quoting an article from the Atlantic Monthly in 1993, “Children who grow up in single-parent or stepparent families are less successful as adults, particularly in the two domains of life—love and work—that are most essential to happiness.”

Go figure. Our church is mostly people from college up to 35 and I see this struggle everywhere. Struggles to love and find love, desperation when love is lost or not found and struggles to identify work or to find vocation. Thankfully the gospel calls you into a household. The gospel calls you into a new place under the Father. This is not going to be an easy transition. The old idea that catechism is “conversion therapy” will have to consider this fact. We bring all our past ideas, painfully false though they be, into this new world of church.

When so many of us have suffered broken commitments our muscles of commitment are torn asunder by the many times we committed afresh only to have someone walk away or live apart. This is the WORLD. Accursed is the world for all the pain it wrecks daily upon the renewed face of our humanity. Martin Buber wisely interpreted the child as a creative reality, “the human race is born every hour in a thousand countenances” as what has never been comes to be. Yet we squander it all for personal happiness and through a corporate brokenness and loneliness and sinfulness. And no one speaks out. America no longer instructs us in dating and marriage and family, but only in lewdness and sexiness. We need to rise from the dead, but we have to admit we are dead first.

Decadence reigns, so I’ve heard, when the weakest and most valuable are squandered. I once heard a historian at Princeton commenting on Rene Renard’s philosophy that every society must have a scapegoat, that ours is our children. He meant abortion primarily, freeing both parents for career and work, but let us frankly admit that we sacrifice our children in a number of ways. Corporate America is a trite and defining term for our whole nation and the most liberal minded seem to miss that. Out of one side of their mouth they condemn Texas big business and out of the other side they send every able-bodied parent into the workplace to sacrifice their life upon the alter of careerism. Work is an idol in this country. We have lost our moorings and someone decided they would take cash. Its not just the ninth ward that is being plundered in during its catastrophe, the whole human capital in this country is plundered every day.

And that leads me to something else. We have all grown up being told we can do anything. Like candy in our brain, the government educators told us we could do anything if we just put our mind to it. They wrote curriculum for us so that our self would be esteemed. Well esteem it! No one actually esteemed our self and that is why we needed curriculum and textbooks … no one actually looked into our souls and said “I esteem you!” No one repeated those precious words of Sartre that justify our existence … “You are loved!” And so sitting in a room with 30 other kids our teacher read it to us from a textbook: “You can do anything, kids, if you just put your mind to it!”

And more acid brainfall we are told that everything is up for interpretation. Not only did we miss our sex talk and every other talk from our daddies, we learn from the free-thinkers (trickle-down from Paris coffee shops in 1900 no doubt) that everything is relative. You might have grown up thinking that there was right and wrong, but all that had to do with your parents and your church. So you get to decide your morality. You get to decide your profession. You get to decide the meaning of your life. Meanwhile, higher education kept getting higher and higher. Colleges were expanding and everyone needed a degree and then a masters and then a PhD. But what if you found out in your masters program that you actually don’t want to do that. Well get another one … its all on loan.

So in case you haven’t heard, there is a new life stage for this change. Its called adultolescence and it is characterized by (1) identity exploration, (2) instability, (3) focus on self, (4) feeling in limbo, in transition, in-between, and (5) sense of possibilities, opportunities, and unparalleled hope. No wonder. This is what we were all set up for. Without homes, without parents we are set to wander on a pilgrimage of self, usually accompanied by our pals who are also in search of identity and stability and self.

Overstewed!

2009-01-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

Ah, the perceptivity of novelists. I am reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky and there is an incredible dialogue that happens among all the mad characters drunk off wine and champagne about industry and humanitarian efforts. Lebedev is speaking seriously as the voice of Fydor but is being laughed at by his fellow partiers ... he is making a legal case that we were better off in the 12th century than we are today (even though he states that plauges and famines were a yearly occurrence). Here he is at the beginning:

"Hurrying, clanging, banging, and speeding, they say for the happiness of mankind! 'It's getting much too noisy and industrial in mankind, there is too little spiritual peace,' complains a secluded thinker. 'Yes, but the banging of carts delivering bread for hungry mankind may be better than spiritual peace,' triumphantly replies another, a widely traveled thinker, and walks off vaingloriously. I, the vile Lebedev, do not believe in the carts that deliver bread to mankind!"

He goes on commenting further on the supposed "friend of mankind." Malthus that he mentions is an English economist writing around 1800 and first perceived the threat posed by the increase of human population (I know this only from the notes in the back of the novel)...

"There has already been Malthus, the friend of mankind. But a friend of mankind with shaky moral foundations is a cannibal of mankind, to say nothing of his vainglory; insult the vainglory of one of these numberless friends of mankind, and he is ready at once to set fire to the four corners of the world out of petty vengeance..."

This is a great danger for all of us, especially in the church. How often is any attempt at humanitarian effort, philanthropy, justice ministry, benevolence for the giver more than the givee. We must watch closely for pride which is the chief of all sins.

Lebedev continues: "Show me something resembling such a force in our age of crime and railways ... Show me a thought binding present-day mankind together that is half as strong as in those centuries [preceding ones] ... And don't try and frighten me with your prosperity, your wealth, the rarity of famines, and the speed of your communication! There is greater wealth, but less force; the binding idea is gone; everything has turned soft, everything is overstewed, everyone is overstewed!"

Wealth without force or force that is all wrong. Overstewed!

Lord make haste to help us!

A return to the Bishops

2008-12-01T06:22:00.000-08:00

"During the years 100 to 600, most theologians were bishops; from 600 to 1500 in the West, they were monks; since 1500, they have been university professors. Gregory I, who died in 604, was a bishop who had been a monk; Martin Luther, who died in 1546 was a monk who became a university professor." Jaroslav Pelikan

I would like to see a return to the theologian bishop. That is one of the reasons I like N.T. Wright, Leslie Newbigin, Eugene Peterson and even Dietrich Bonhoeffer. They were all pastors as well as scholars. The world (especially in the industrialized west) has too many academics and not enough pastors.

Mental Cities

2008-10-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Hans von Balshazar (probably the greatest catholic theologian of the last century) said that the danger for people who live in cities is that they begin to think the world is man-made. Everywhere they look is the towering accomplishments of man or the business of man. I think our lives can become these mental cities that Balshazar warns about. We are busy with so much, worrying or accomplishing so much that we can think of our life as man-made. What can we do? His answer about real cities is that we need to walk in the woods on occasion or visit a field. We need to see that the world is giant and utterly God-made. I think the same can be said about Kris's phrase "margins of silence." We need to carve out time to sit with God in a quiet space or sit with the scriptures in a quiet space and remember that our lives are God-made. That God is the one at work forming us and shaping us and guiding us ... and filling us with life.

Door Quote: Hosea the Prophet

2008-09-29T18:38:00.000-07:00

I am the LORD your God
from the land of Egypt;
you know no God but me,
and besides me there is no savior.
It was I who knew you in the wilderness,
in the land of drought;
but when they had grazed, they became full,
they were filled, and their heart was lifted up;
therefore they forgot me.

Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God,
for you have stumbled because of your iniquity.
Take with you words
and return to the LORD;
say to him,
"we will say no more, 'Our God,'
to the work of our hands.
In you the orphan finds mercy."

O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?
It is I who answer and look after you.
I am like an evergreen cypress

Door Quote: Getting my bearings

2008-09-29T18:37:00.000-07:00

August 24, 1961

Is it a new country
In another world of reality...
I awoke
To an ordinary morning with gray light
Reflected from the street,
But still remembered
The dark-blue night
Above the tree line,
The open moor in moonlight,
The crest in shadow.
Remembered other dreams
Of the same mountain country:
Twice I stood on its summits,
I stayed by its remotest lake,
And followed the river
Toward its source.
The seasons have changed
And the light
And the weather
And the hour.
But it is the same land.
And I begin to know the map
And to get my bearings.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the 2nd Secretary-General of the United Nations. He died in a plane crash in September of 1961 en route to negotiate a cease-fire. He and fifteen others perished. This is the last entry from his diary that was published after his death.

(I like this because I feel myself lost in a new country and hope to get my bearings soon ... and that I know the map.--jason)

Door Quotes

2008-08-25T05:54:00.001-07:00

I started weekly door quotes on my office door. Just gives me a chance to value one quote from my weekly readings and share it with others. So, I thought I would post it here as well ... this is the quote of the week. (Two this week ... they are connected).

"Not only is recreational sex no fun, but consumer sex is profoundly anti-social. The sexual revolution has retarded people's ability to create community life and to relate to one another. Even worse, our modern sexual moral code does not cultivate an attitude of respect for others, in spite of our elaborate schemes of equality and our hypersensitive habits of speech. To the contrary, our modern sexual ways have led us to believe that we are entitled to use people."
Jennifer Roback Morse from "Smart Sex: Finding Life-Long Love in a Hook-Up World"

We have to ask ourselves where this idea of sexual liberation is really leading us. Its perhaps very clever of us to look down on those poor suppressed souls of days gone by, but again, do we have any real concern for community or are we trapped in individual rights and individual happiness? "If a man wants to sit down while a pregnant woman is standing or walk through a heavy door and let it slam in a woman's face, that is all right. Divorce on an epidemic scale is all right; child abandonment by one parent or another is all right; it is regrettable but still pretty much all right if a divorced parent neglects or refuses to pay child support; promiscuity is all right; adultry is all right. Promiscuity among teenagers is pretty much all right, for "that's the way it is"; abortion as birth control is all right; the prostitution of sex in advertisement and public entertainment is all right. But then, far down this road of freedom, we decide that a few lines ought to be drawn. Child molestation, we wish to say, is not all right, nor is sexual violence, nor is sexual harassment, nor is pregnancy among unmarried teenagers. We are also against venereal diseases, the diseases of promiscuity, though we tend to think that they are the government's responsibility, not ours."

"In this cult of liberated sexuality, "free" of courtesy, ceremony, responsibility, and restraint, dependent on litigation and expert advise, there is much that is human, sad to say, but there is no sense or sanity. Trying to draw the line where we are trying to draw it, between carelessness and brutality, is like insisting that falling is flying--until you hit the ground-- and then trying to outlaw hitting the ground.

Seeking to "free" sexual love from its old communal restraints, we have "freed" it also of its meaning, its responsibility, and its exaltation. And we have made it more dangerous. We are now living in a sexual atmosphere so polluted and embittered that women must look on virtually any man as a potential assailant, and a man must look on virtually any woman as a potential accuser. And in the midst of this acid rainfall of predation and recimination, we presume to teach our young people that sex can be made "safe"--- by the use of purchased drugs and devises. What a lie! Sex was never safe, and it is less safe now than it has ever been.
----- Wendell Berry from "Sex, Economy and Freedom"

Otis Redding

2008-08-23T11:58:00.001-07:00

Has anyone really given him a listen? Holy Cow! Its good stuff. A friend of mine just sent me a package that included a record called "Complete and Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul" and I challenge you to find me a song as good as Sweet Lorene or Tennessee Waltz ... every song so far is amazing.

Sittin' at the dock of the bay must have just been what made it on the radio with the Eagles and Alabama. But this is the good stuff.

Newbigin on Darkness (and light)

2008-08-05T05:06:00.000-07:00

This is from his commentary on John (commenting on 1:5):

"Human life is not just the story of life and light. There is also death and darkness. This is a fact. If we ask "Why is there darkness?" we do not receive an answer. God did not say in the beginning, "Let there be darkness." He said, "Let there be light," and he "seperated the light from the darkness." The darkness ... is what confronts one who turns away from the true source of his being, tires to find its meaning elsewhere, and is thereby plunged into meaninglessness. But the light shines in the darkness. We know that there is darkness only when we look away from the light. The light does not eliminate the darkness, but it goes on shining. There is no peaceful coexistence of light and darkness. The business of light is to banish darkness, and darkness remains the background to the story which John will tell--up to the moment when Judas walks out of the light of the Upper Room into the darkness of the night (13:30)."

funny quote

2008-07-31T07:07:00.001-07:00

"Yes, we are much less naked in the face of dread diseases but still ultimately naked in the end." --- Eric Cohen thoughts on his book Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology

He laughed a little after he said it ... I think he was actually referring to nuclear weapons and the nearness of even greater forms of death ... but couldn't help but think about our lack of modesty as well.

Married but not working

2008-07-30T06:47:00.001-07:00

1st - Read all the scriptures about marriage. Especially 1 Corinthians 7 and make sure you read it for yourself. Paul says: "To the married I give this command - not I but the Lord - that the wife should not seperate from her husband and that the husband should not divorce his wife." Are you taking this very seriously (you, not your wife that is thinking about leaving you or just might do it)?

Paul and Jesus don't let you work on your relationship with God apart from following his commands. You can't both "seek God for your life" and disobey his commandments.

2nd - Everywhere in scripture it is understood that the man will work to provide for his wife and children. This does not mean the wife doesn't work (in an agricultural context which was true for some of the portions of the bible, both man and wife are financial partners and have chores and duties in their business), but it does mean that the man must be responsible for it all and make sure his wife and kids have shelter, food, and more. There are major physiological reasons for this besides the theological ones. When a woman has a baby she is not physically in the best shape to do anything but care for the new life. The baby needs her mom emotionally and physically. This can only happen if the husband is willing to care for his family through providing and protection.

Theologically ... we have what I might call the practical gospel, the gospel before the gospel or even protoevangelion which literally means "first good news." Man and women disobey and the curse that was their warning falls upon them ... they become mortal. They no longer have access to the tree of life (they are exiled from the garden) and so they will die. BUT in the midst of the pronouncement of this judgement there is hope. The women will have hard and dangerous labor and the man will have hard and dangerous work. "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return to the ground; for out of it you were taken: for dust you are and to dust you shall return." As Leon Kass says; "Sorrow, sweat, toil, and death; the dusty earth opposes his needs, resists his plow, and, finally, devours him whole."

But in the midst of all this hardship that has come upon them, Adam hears good news. His immediate response to the curse is to name his wife Eve, the mother of all living. Adam will face death, but life will continue. "Guided by one glimmer in God's speech to the woman, the soul-saving passion of hope fixes his mind on the singular piece of good news: 'My God! She is going to bear children!' Woman alone carries the antidote to disaster--the prospect of life, ever renewable. ... a child is good because being is good, because life is good, because the renewal of human possibility is good." (Leon Kass again).

So, if men hadn't cared to join hands in marriage and protect and provide for wife and children then all hope would have been dashed. And don't think this hasn't nearly happened a few times. Jesus was born of God and woman, but both he and his mother were cared for by a carpenter.

Salvation comes through Jesus Christ and he is our Lord. But I think a form of salvation comes through practical obedience and through childbirth. I want to be careful, for the child's sake, do not seek to make a baby so you can find the "first good news." But make yourself ready and worthy of a child and you will find fulfillment in that obedience. And practically you will make way for a new life that offers hope of a better life. This is where I might be stepping out on my own ... but I hope that my children have a better life than me. I can't be sure of that, but I am doing my best as a parent in hopes that it will go better for them. Kass again (and finally): "the child unifying the parents as sex or romance alone never can; and the desire to give not only life but a good way of life to their children opens both man and woman toward a concern for the true, the good, and the holy. Parental love of children may be the beginning of the sanctification of life."

So if you are going to find yourself or find God's will for your life or whatever language you want to use, make sure it fits in with his actual commands to protect and provide. Your wife is the bearer of life ... she is a daughter of Eve, the mother of all living. Don't waste such a precious gift.

adultrous generation

2008-07-27T06:18:00.000-07:00

1. Have you ever heard the idea that post-modernism with its emphasis on choosing reality and relativism and loss off all dogma (because all dogma is just a power play) ... truly leaving us without any viable pattern of existance is really just a big cover for the global empire? Think about it, what does big business and post-modernism have in common? Personal choice. One is theory consumption (as opposed to looking to elders or even to lessons learned over generations) and the other is product consumption. We all think we are lonely kings, deciding morality, style, and vocation ... We think we are individuals, but in reality we are just levers in one vast machine accomplishing someone else's progress. Bob Dylan said it best ... this isn't simple progress, this is SuckSess at its best.

2. I would take the old view of responsibility and duty any day. MEN you are called to make the home safe. You neglect it at your peril. You have no purpose outside of defending vulnerable homes and standing for the truth. Making a safe place for love to bear fruit and for children to grow up with full bellies and full hearts. WOMEN you are called to love and cherish life ... all life. To bless the people around you, to ponder them. To celebrate life that will win over death.

Jay Percival

2008-07-19T13:02:00.000-07:00

I have always liked the name Percival for three reasons:

1. It is the name of one of the famous Knights of the Round Table.
2. It means to pierce the mystery.
3. I love Walker Percy.

Today I was doing a little online research about Percival (you guessed it wikipedia) and come to find out he was the knight who found the grail (later with Galahad) and healed the fisher king. The fisher king is the wounded king and his wound has immobilized him and made him impotent to rule. So all he does all day is fish behind the castle. The result is that his kingdom is in ruin and is referred to as The Waste Land. This is what Eliot wrote his famous poem about. Percival heals him by asking him a question: "What ails thee?" or something like that.

This blog is given to that question. What ails thee? Since the fall the sacredness of man has been wounded fatally. Christ has made the hope of restoration real, but only if we will stop fishing and recognize our wound ... the Fisher king was wounded by the sin of pride and his healing ultimately comes from recognizing the reality of the grail that he guards. (His castle is often the same castle as the castle of the graal.)

Percival is not wise in the legends ... he just happens to be there (on the scene) and so he is used for the healing of the king and the healing of the land. He is brave.

Fortitude is proof that the world is fallen ... Fortitude proves that evil exists ... that fact that we must bravely stand for justice (risking loss and death) is proof that there is good and evil. (these are the thoughts of Augustine).

Brothers we must stand with God on the side of justice. We must be brave. Before all of this we must be prudent so our eyes can see justice aright. And after that we must be temperate so that we are not lost in sloth or lust. And we know that steadfast faithfulness will win because of the hope and love in Jesus Christ.