Egregious Reader

"If [a composer] has a nice wife and some nice children, how can he let the children starve on his dissonances?" ( CI: A Life With Music 143) Ives made is money selling insurance. "God must get awfully tired of hearing the same thing over and over again, and in His all-embracing wisdom could certainly embrace a dissonance -- might even enjoy one now and again." " Beauty in music is too often confused with something that lets the ears lie back in an easy chair. Many sounds that we are used to, do not bother us, and for that reason, we are inclined to call them beautiful. Frequently,—possibly almost invariably,—analytical and impersonal tests will show, we believe, that when a new or unfamiliar work is accepted as beautiful on its first hearing, its fundamental quality is one that tends to put the mind to sleep. A narcotic is not always unnecessary, but it is seldom a basis of progress ,—that is, wholesome evolution in any creative exp...

A Playful Scripture Poem (for Tara's birthday) "as in fact there are many gods and many lords --- yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist."             1 Corinthians 8 When we were small we looked about and there were giants in our land lords lorded and we cowered or escaped. Sometimes we saw the giants were creatures. Like the old fairy tale, sometimes we opened a kitchen drawer or a box in the garage and our eyes beheld the fragile crying giant heart tucked away from all the little ones looking little inside a box. St. Paul says there are many gods and many lords and I add, in my mind, there are many worlds. There is creation there is history there is work and play there is childhood there is maturity (and immaturity) there is school ...

I came to know Oliver Sacks through the online show Radiolab. He is a regular guest on that show. He begins his book quoting a physician from Glasgow named Ivy McKenzie: "The physician is concerned [unlike the naturalist] . . . with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances." Dr. Sacks takes this approach throughout, he approaches each patient with all of his scientific knowledge, understanding its great value, but he approaches each one as an individual, as a human who is greater than scientific knowledge. I appreciate the insight from Walker Percy who says that the scientific method, though rich and valuable, can never say anything to the individual human being in their uniquness. (Because it understands the world through finding commonalities). There is a passage in chapter two where Dr. Sacks is working with an amnesiac who is locked in the past and has his memory wiped clean, back to when he was 19, every few...

I finished my first reading of Collected Poems 1957-1982 this morning. I was given this book seven years ago by a friend who still a regular part of my life. It was at my 30th birthday party. In the inside cover I wrote down all the names of the people who came to my party. I can still look over this list and remember how much I enjoyed that part. However, there is also some sadness, as the great majority of those who attended I have lost all contact with. There are circumstances that explain this happening to some extent, but it is decidedly foreign to the world that Berry commends to us in these poems. There are many poems in this collection that are important to me. I will touch on two: This is from At a Country Funeral: But our memory of ourselves, hard earned, is one of the land's seeds, as a seed is the memory of the life of its kind in its place, to pass on into life the knowledge of what has died. What we owe the future is not a new start, for we ca...

This is from a lecture in 1986 describing his fiction: Everybody grows up inside a particular, almost invariably small world. Everybody, without exception. Very early in our lives we learn the "banking system" of that world: family, small town, neighborhood, church, community. At the same time, ideas begin to come to us from outside this small particular world. These ideas are often alien to those values we are being taught in our particular world. We learn to behave and act in a certain way from our fathers, mothers, grandmothers, aunts and uncles. We learn if we behave incorrectly, certain things follow from that incorrect behavior. We turn on the television set and someone is behaving incorrectly. Nothing happens as a result. It's a joke. It's a laugh. It's accepted. When we experience this sort of thing in an ongoing way, we develop a certain method of handling this constant clash of values. What I'm trying to explore in my books is one kind of such co...

Chaim Potok is one of my favorite writers. We had to read the Chosen when I was a freshman in college and I was really struck by him then. I went on to read the Promise and then My Name is Asher Lev . This year I went back to him and re-read those three and this morning I finished his fourth novel: In The Beginning .  His novels deal with racism, religion, family relationships, and the modern age. In the beginning is a professor David Lurie telling the story of his beginning, growing up in Brooklyn through the thirties and forties. His mother and father had fled religious persecution in Poland and David is named after his dead uncle who was killed in a Pogrom. The book, like all of his works, puts you deep into a world at war within itself. David is subject of brutal racism with the polish boy who lives in his building. His father was part of an armed resistance that fought and killed Cossacks and Poles who were killing Jews. Meanwhile, the depression hits and they all go...

Here are the quotes related to the writing scrap from yesterday's post. You will see that he is taking these in a different direction, but they are certainly rich quotes, worth seeing in their full. He is responding to the predicament of the church on the run from culture changes, specifically science and politics whereas I am critiquing my own past pastoral life and whether pastors have the room or the maturity to work beyond the surface crisis or mere church attendance. "The displacement of God from the world, and from the public part of human life, led to the attempt to keep his place secure at least in the sphere of the 'personal', the 'inner', and the 'private'. And as every man still has a private sphere somewhere, that is where he is thought to be most vulnerable. The secrets known to a man's valet--that is, to put it crudely, the range of his intimate life, from prayer to his sexual life--have become the hunting-ground of modern pastoral...

One moment you feel elated and close to heaven. You feel your own goodness. Maybe its in a smile you give to some humiliated soul, showing how magnanimous you are. But will you remain so? Will your love really go with this little one on their soul's journey? Or will you do your best to forget the broken vessel who sat once and cried in your chair? Is it sufficient to be useful in a moment of crisis, but impotent beyond that moment? Bonhoeffer reflects in his letters about pastors to often being like tabloid journalists, digging through people's garbage to expose their sin and need of God. He said too often the church only works at man's limits, sin and death, only preaches to those edges, only invites people to God at their ends. But if Jesus is Lord, isn't he also Lord of the living, of life, of the center? I wonder about this question, is the center growing, does the pastor work at the center, is his vocation to see the souls in their long growth or simply to seiz...

Though Bonhoeffer was in London from 1933 to 1935, he spent much of his time involved in the church struggle. Basically there was the Reich Church which was the official church and then there were various oppositions all trying to hold together as the Confessing Church. It might help to say that both sides in the conflict were afraid of falling into the nature of "American free churches." Germany, since Luther, saw the pastors as civil servants. The government supported the work of the church (and likewise). Again this can be easy for some of us from America to write-off and easily reject, but it is important, if we are try and understand the struggles of this time, to try and accept it and understand all that was happening within this context. It appears from Bethge's biography that most people saw the battle as primarily within the church, the church struggle. However, there were plenty outside of the church ... many Prussians, who had major concerns over the ne...