Egregious Reader

I really don't like politics. I think this is a normal feeling. I remember coming across this in a book of 20th century photos from Camus personal notebook: "Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics."  from his notebook in 1940.  So nothing new. When you hear them speak, to me, doesn't matter whichever side they sit on, they sound dumb. Yesterday as I was on my 7 minute commute back from lunch I heard a republican senator on one of the NPR shows (I think Here and Now, not positive). He was asked about his views on climate change and it could not have been more sloppy. I can't find the show or who it was so I can't pull the exact quotes, but, unfortunately, I think its a pretty common line (not something he came up with). First, he said he is not naive, climates change. He was from a state that x million years ago was under a glacier. But that cli...

A craving seized them in the wilderness, and they put God to test in the desert. He gave them what they asked, but sent leanness into their soul. Psalm 106 What a pity, to know want, What a sad affair to be lost, Desert-hungry But who is more lost than  one who has a lean soul?

I am re-reading The Idea of Revelation by John Baillie and am really enjoying the short historical reminder in chapter one. Thinking of our our diverse conceptions today: Baillie reminds us that into the seventieth century there were two ways of knowing truth: natural and divine. Reason could ascend to truth and there God also communicated truth to us. But in the seventieth century weight fell to reason and there were those who said revelation was impossible. Others said that revelation was for the impoverished minds who would never ascend to truth through reason, so needed revelation. Meanwhile, you have the protestant reformation who went the other way, the cast out reason as a way of knowing truth and embraced revelation as the only sure thing; saying that with the Fall of Man the reason was lost to corruption. As you get to the ninetieth century there is another movement that tries to take a middle way and reject both as sure ways of truth. Connected to the Romantic movemen...

I was looking through my daughters work from last year (3rd Grade) and thought this was worth sharing with everyone.

Aint no one in line,   I take out my heart, and then I fire it from a cannon With such a sound over the hills and   every trouble is abandoned Into the mercy wheel,   See it spinning in the twilight From Mercy Wheel off When the Devil's Loose.  I also like this song (American Hearts): We were raised by wolves And we are still wild And we howl when the troubled wind blows And in the TV's blue light Oh, assassins will lie Every wail just a-goin' down slow So don't tread on me For I am your brother I was born with an American heart And don't tread on her For she is your sister She was born with an American heart All the people you meet Down in the streets May be good but they don't wanna know So they cover their eyes, for Who wants to be sad? Life is sweet at the bottom of the sea And don't tread on me For I am your brother I was born with an American heart And don't tread on her For she is your sister She was born with an American h...

On another planet the sun is hidden behind a mountain and the moon stands full with its eerie light. The inhabitants are in constant search of escape, of finding some passage around the mountain, some way to find the sunlight. They are tired of night living, they are tired of moonlight. There is a deep place that craves the direct light of the sun.  But, one day the people become convinced that the moon is the only real thing. They are convinced that the moon is their God. They give up on their strange search for the other side. They lay it down and choose to combat the pain with simple things, numbing things, hard work, no work, drugs or health food, piety or hedonism. They lie down in their large bedrooms or they stand up on an underground train.  The search is forgotten. It is no longer receiving attention from the best minds . .. it is sheer madness and utter foolishness. No one looks upon the great mountain with anything but disgust and occasional fear. Disgust...

I have been watching the Wire, the HBO series about drugs, police and Baltimore. On one hand, I think its incredible, seriously good writing, amazing character list that keeps expanding, complex world. But I also hesitate to recommend it because it is rough in every way possible. The second season is at the docks and deals with the plight of blue collar workers. The center of that world is Frank Sabotka who is the head of the union for the long-shoremen. He has watched the decline of the port and regularly can't get work for his son (Zig) or nephew (Nick). So here is the interesting part and the part that got me thinking. Frank is a working man. He shows no flash in cloths or vehicle. I haven't seen his house, but I doubt its much. But all around people are busting trying to survive ... its perhaps not abject poverty, but its on the borderline and might easily tumble downhill. The other character is The Greek. He is into money and power and is running drugs and prostitutes...

Have you ever noticed how fast language expands? New words pop and swell out everywhere and vocabulary is corrupted and polluted left and right. Texting and twittering continue a downward spiral, but at the same moment television is constantly disseminating local jargon into the wide world. Destroying and expanding. But none of this is what I sat down to say. I sat down to write a story. So, a man is working furiously on his Monday load. He is one of those desk job people who spends all his time typing and looking at screens and needs afternoon coffee to keep it together. Well, this corporate person was typing away and decided it was nigh time to speed to the starbucks and get something for his head. He locks his screen and picks up his phone. He is thin and likes to take the stairs because he has a desk job. There is no concern about getting fat, he hasn't been fat since he was 9 months, but he does worry about all of his joints beginning to atrophy and figures a little runn...

What you do on the earth, the earth makes permanent.                                             Wendell Berry (1967) Everything we do lives after us.                                                                                      Wallace Stegner (1976) "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."                                                                   Abraham H...

The painting is called The Family by Samuel Bak. Samuel Bak is a Holocaust survivor. It is haunting. Some faces are covered, some eyes are covered, some eyes are dead, some eyes are closed, few are open and looking ... some faces are bandaged, some figures are disfigured, some are rich, some are poor, some are busts, some are real. An old man, Da Vinci maybe, has put on his sunglasses so we can't see his red eyes or maybe so he can't see the world anymore so weary he is from his many years. Beside him to his right is what seems to be him again, but reflected from a mirror ... another bearded and weary traveler or perhaps us who are looking on, reflected. Then to the right is a faded painting of someone, maybe an italian from the Renaissance. His/her eyes are open, but mouth is hidden. Below are two war wounded men, seemed to be surrounded by brass horns. And beside him is one who is dead, and dressed in a military uniform. Then behind the dead is one alive, but we ca...

Fish above provide by Aaron Henry Campbell, age 7. Cold blue sea, endless in its reach, profound, unfathomed. I think my favorite line in Moby Dick is at the very end. The whale has triumphed and the last masthead disappears and Melville writes: Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago. The sea is fascinating. So is something else. The fish above was called forth from a similar mysterious depth, one that lays its head in a pool of dreams each night, one that laughs and cries, draws and writes. The human person--young and old, rich and poor, black and white, male and female--is mystery, profound and unfathomed.

Last night, around 9:30, Peter woke up from what was supposed to be his night-time sleep and I volunteered to try and get him back to sleep. Nothing would comfort him, so I stepped outside and into a roar of tree frogs and peepers. It was beautiful and so, so loud. We walked around a minute or two and he went back to sleep. This morning, I woke up with Peter fussing at 3:40 and again needed to step outside to get him to calm down, but this was almost completely silent. All the frogs must be sleeping. I could hear a dim chorus of bug strings, crickets, I guess and there was a tiny breeze, but it made the trees crackle and the leaves clap and water drops fall to the ground. And now its 5:30 and I hear one bird song. I do not see any light, but this little bird must begin early and call up the sun. I know from a couple of days ago that by the time we get to 6:30 the noise outside will be louder than the one at night with hundreds of bird songs all going at once. So there are three m...

Upon this age, that never speaks its mind, This furtive age, this age endowed with power To wake the moon with footsteps, fit an oar Into the rowlocks of the wind, and find What swims before his prow, what swirls behind — Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Falls from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts . . . they lie unquestioned, uncombined . Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun; but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric ; undefiled Proceeds pure Science, and has her say; but still Upon this world from the collective womb Is spewed all day the red triumphant child.                                 Edna St. Vincent Millay This is from a book of poetry published in 1939. In 1934 the first man went into space and it wasn't until 1969 that man was able to "wake the moon with footsteps." The talk must have been very alive and real then. But here is the profound questions of the ...

On Friday coming home from work I caught this interview on NPR: ( here ) Its an interview with the Atlantic Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his cover article "A Case for Reparations." This question and Coates answer really stood out to me and point to the clearly larger and more complex issues that get lost in focusing on individual conscience issues: CORNISH: MTV had this survey on millennials and their attitude toward racial inequality and one of the things they found that millennials overwhelmingly see racism as a problem for older people, right? And then they aspire to colorblindness. Are you essentially trying to introduce this idea, which has like come and gone in many iterations over the decades to the Obama generation? COATES: Yeah, that makes me very, very sad. I think what happens is that those young people are the inheritance(ph) of an unfortunate idea, and that is that what really needs to happen to solve the - quote-unquote - "race problem" is to ...

Really awful story about the really awful things men do to those who are weak or different: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/12/victimised-blind-body-worn-cameras-abused It was supposed to be the start of a new life, but after moving to Stevenage Old Town in Hertfordshire last November, I found myself a target of haters and abusers in public. I still don't know why.  It began with a group of young lads attempting to guide me in to a lamppost before laughing and running away. Not long afterwards, the situation grew worse, with groups of mainly younger males circling me, swearing, and in one harrowing case, telling me they were filming for YouTube as they urged me to "trip over the curb you blind b@!%#" and "f@$% off back to blind land". Tom Waits sings in his song "God's Away on Business": There's a leak, there's a leak in the boiler room The poor, the lame, the blind Who are the ones that we kept in charge? K...

Underwhelming syntax      of my narrow expressions Hollow-hearted words      from liminoid spaces Border lands make for brave faces      or indecisive ones. Broken hand gone jellyfish      waiting for depth, but,                  lacking a solid floor. Pretty ok means sub par       and pretty good means               awesome or simply ok. Impoverished expression       made for stoic abstractions that seem to portray       sober self-control but to those who are heart-close       it looks like self-doubt              and lack of commitment.

The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.              -- GK Chesterton Lunacy and Letters Good sermon called Theology of Sleep by John Baillie: http://www.luc.edu/faculty/pmoser/idolanon/BaillieChristianDevotion.html#sleep

Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell, And to its lips thy story tell, And they thy comforters will be, Rewording in melodious guile Thy fretful words a little while, Till they shall singing fade in ruth And die a pearly brotherhood                 W.B. Yeats ...... Male as I am, my place, perhaps, is to sit down in a mysterious presence, leaving the vocabularies to toil, the machine to eviscerate its resources; learning we are here not necessarily to read on , but to explore with blind fingers the word in the cold, until the snow turns to feathers and somewhere far down we come upon warmth and a heart beating.                            R.S. Thomas

I understand this novel has been a favorite of Russians since its publication in the sixties (25 years after Bulgakov's death). I have come across it once or twice before in other works (M. Volf's work on forgiveness for one) and my Russian friend has recommended this novel to me more than once. I loved it. I thought it was incredible and look forward to re-reading it soon. The plot is terribly interesting, and needs to be told in short-form for those who have not read the novel. In the first chapter, a scholarly editor is scolding a poet who was tasked to write a blasphemous poem about Jesus for Easter (this is atheist Russia after the revolution). His criticism is that the poem makes Jesus come alive and since he never lived it has failed. Then a mysterious foreigner is there with him and he enters the conversation and contradicts the editor and quite unsettles him with some of his mysterious statements. This stranger is the devil himself and not only does he say that...

From my John Baillie Sermons he was talking about this image of Christ Knocking and made the following point: Religion always appears under two contrasted guises, corresponding to these two contrasted scenes. It is first an austere and disturbing challenge, and then it is a glorious and happy feast. Under the first of these guises religion is known to us all. In every man's life that first scene has been enacted. We all know what is meant by that stranger on the doorstep, and by that annoyingly persistent knocking, and by the terrible strain it puts on the man within. So much of religion is familiar to everybody. But the tragedy is that many a man's acquaintance with religion stops at that point, and he knows nothing of the second scene, when Christ is inside the room. That is why so many people carry with them all through their lives the idea of religion as a harsh and joyless thing, a thing that limits their freedom and cramps their spirits and makes them unhappy. That i...

I never thought of myself as ambitious. How can you be ambitions when you don't even know what you want to do? One of my biggest struggles as a young man was figuring out how I could be of value to the world. You hear people say, I alway knew I wanted to be a pilot or I plan on being a pastor when I grow up. I was the poster child of not knowing what I wanted to be when I grew up. Well, maybe not the poster child, because it really bothered me. My generation seemed to want to tell the world they could care less whether they ever made something of their life. I wasn't really like that. I cared a lot about trying to be something ... it was just difficult to name that something. And so through my twenties and into my thirties I really strived to find something I was good at, to make something of myself, to be something really meaningful. I was ambitious to have an ambition. Striving is such a good word for it ... man, I feel tired deep in my soul just typing that word. Strive...

My dad is really involved in a ministry that is largely serving the a community of Latinos in a local trailer park. This was all started relationally through a church community, and "corners outreach" has asked that local community, as well the local elementary school how they could help. The largest need was helping the kids with school. Anyway, there is no overt evangelism. The plan is to truly jump in and get to know people through working together. This seems obvious to my dad, but many church people who hear about the organization and want to talk with him about it are so locked into the idea of counting baptisms, they seem confused by this. A little more building up to why I bought this book again and read it all the way through. My dad recently offered to help people fill out their taxes for free. He has an accounting background and has helped plenty of people in the past. So someone from church came as a translator and men began coming to get help. What he saw and...