Egregious Reader

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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