The Pulley by George Herbert

I feel a post coming on, it will probably get done late one night sometime this weekend. I'm going to talk about some stuff that's been going on with me and try to figure out how pain can be used by God, not caused-see angry Piper rant. Anyway as a sort of epigraph to the post I'll later put up, here's "The Pulley" by George Herbert, a 17th century English minister-poet, the poem talks about how God uses restlessness like a pulley, He converts the downward pull of restlessness into the upward movement towards Himself (by the way, as seems to be my habit on this blog, I'm going to recommend you buy some sort of metaphysical poetry collection that has at least Donne and Herbert. Don't be turned off by "metaphysical", it just what they called the 17th century poets, and even if you don't like poetry, you may like this...)

The Pulley
When God at first made man,
Having a glass of blessings standing by;
"Let Us," said He, "pour on him all We can:
Let the worlds riches which dispersed lie,
Contract into a span,"

So strength first made a way;
Then beauty flowed, then wisdom, honor, pleasure:
When almost all was out, God made a stay
Perceiving that alone of all His treasure
Rest in the bottom lay

"For if I should," said He,
Bestow this jewel also on my creature,
He would adore my gifts instead of me,
And rest in Nature, not the God of Nature
So both would losers be

Yet let him keep the rest,
But keep it with repining restlessness:
Let him be rich and weary, that at least,
If goodness lead him not, yet weariness
May toss him to My breast!"

Little update- I tried to write a post, but so far it has been far too much complaining and too little that would be worth reading, so here's a Sufjan Stevens song from the Illinoise album, Casimir Pulaski Day.  It's both a very honest and in my opinion very Christian response to loss.  Anyway it always gives me something to think about...

Something I probably should've thought about more before posting

Back probably six months ago or so, I read a book by Walter Miller (not the guy that wrote The Crucible, that's Arthur) called A Canticle for Leibowitz (which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be that strange sounding of a title.) The novel was written during the 60's at the height of fears of a nuclear holocaust, which probably would concern us in the United States more today if we didn't own the majority of the nukes left (but of course we'd never use them right? I mean what we did to Japan aside, surely our government wouldn't do anything illegal or immoral, right? Seems I've wandered on to a soapbox somehow, time to step down). Anyway, the book opens some hundreds of years after a nuclear holocaust has sent the world back into the Dark Ages and follows in the first part a young novice in the fictional Order of St. Leibowitz. The Order, much like the monastic orders of the Middle Ages, has tasked itself with preserving not only Scripture and other religious writing, but also general knowledge works like scientific texts and even blueprints. The problem is that the loss of the intellectual context in which the scientific knowledge was understood has rendered much of what they are preserving unintelligible. For example, would preserving a mathematical formula like E=mc2 still mean anything if we lost what those variables stood for? Would it still constitue knowledge? If society loses the cultural and intellectual context that previously allowed the language to express truth, how is it regained?

The point, that I've have come such a long way roundabout in making, is that today's society is largely losing the context in which the key ideas of Christianity (not that Christianity is by any means a set of ideas)- sin, redemption, resurrection- make sense. The evangelist seems to be stuck in what is really preparatory work in the convicting of sin, rather than the true work of an evangelist preaching the evangelion, the Good News of the coming of the Kingdom of God through Jesus. So what do we get? We get a reduced Jesus, an abbreviated Jesus. (good I-monk post here) "You have a specific problem, sin, (I have convinced you youre a sinner, I trust) well here's the solution, Jesus! Just plug Him in and you'll be alright." We talk a lot about that "Jesus-shaped hole" and we end up with a hole-shaped Jesus; wherever I am weak and I need help, that's where Jesus gets let in, the other stuff I can handle. So we get this whole wacked-out concept of the Gospel as a specific answer to the a few distasteful habits. And if we can't convince people that they have a problem, then obviously they have no more need for Jesus; we've plugged Him into an equation and none of the terms surrounding Him make sense to them anymore, He has not come to them as Immanuel, God with us, but as a symbol without any referent.

There used to be an old hymn, "I Love to Tell the Story", and it went, "I love to tell the story of Jesus and His Mercy of Jesus and His Love..." The problem is, we aren't telling the story anymore. We are telling them something else, something more expedient. If I hear, "salvation is as simple as A(dmit), B(elieve), C(ommit)," one more time I think I'm going to scream. If Jesus' life boils down to alot of traipsing around Galilee and Judea with a group of flunkies and rednecks telling odd little stories before He went to the Cross and has no significance other than that, I feel that, first of all the Gospel writers wasted a lot of time and could have whittled it all down to a pamphlet or tract. But we don't bring them Jesus living and incarnate, we sell them our little problem-solvin' Jesus, who was you know a really cool guy and stuff and then He died so your life would be alright. Now I am not saying we can't talk about sin to people because they won't understand, but when Jesus is not shown as He is, when He is simply an answer to a sin problem we are putting seed on shallow soil. Because if Jesus is supposed to make us just stop sinning, it won't take long to realize that our equation doesn't seem to work. If Jesus is not a man, if He just is an answer, then what do we with our life when we mess up- walk an aisle again, try and believe harder? In Dostoevksy's Brothers Karamazov a story is told about Jesus coming back to Toledo during the Spanish Inquisition, He heals some people and is worshiped before being arrested and brought in for questioning by the Grand Inquisitor. When He comes in, the Inquisitor asks, "Why have You come to disturb us? What right do You have to return?" The Church had so institutionalized salvation as what it may bestow on the world, that it had no need for Jesus incarnate; our systems can't bear much reality.

I realize that this has been a pretty long, rambling post. My fault I guess for blogging late at night. But I'd like to put out two quotes before I go, the first from Thomas Merton a twentieth century Trappist monk, that comes from Confessions of a Guilty Bystander, basically a notebook of his that was published. "Faith is by no means a mere act of choice, an option for a special solution to the problems of existence. It is birth to a higher life by obedience to the Source of Life: to believe is thus to consent to hear and obey a creative command that raises us from the dead." The second is from the British novelist Graham Greene, whom I've yet to read, I've no idea where it's from, I saw it in a book of readings for Lent, Bread and Wine, "You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." This is what is needed, the mystery of Grace and Mercy in Christ confronting us, baffling us, and inviting us in.

District 9 Review- "Who is my neighbor?"

Having nothing better to do in Mandeville, I decided to go to the movies to see District 9 today. Without giving away too much of what happens, the plot follows an official tasked with moving a group of some 1 million aliens who have stalled out over Johannesburg and now are living in a ghetto to a site further away from the city. Given the South African setting and the legacy of apartheid there, the implications are very clear, especially considering some of the interviews were actually real people talking about immigrants who had moved into the country looking for work (this, however is not one of those interviews). The movie on the whole was pretty good, though I can't help but think it may have been better if it had been released at some other time than the summer (less explosions, more plot). It also had this weird sometimes documentary style, sometimes not; plot considerations kind of forced this- a fugitive followed around by a camera crew just wouldn't be realistic- but it still comes off a little strange. Putting the movie in South Africa does make the implications pretty obvious, but as the director was from there originally, they can't really be faulted for that.

Throughout the whole movie, I couldn't help but think about Flannery O'Connor's short story "The Displaced Person". In the story, a Polish family is forced to flee their home and are placed on a farm run by a widow. The father of the refugees is a fairly well-educated, hard worker who is nevertheless looked down on by the other white family working on the farm, who eventually come to regard them as lower than the two black workers on the farm (a serious thing in 1960s rural Georgia). Not wanting to give anything away here either (because if you haven't read O'Connor, you need to get your life right, I'll even loan you my book if you want), the Displaced Person is clearly associated with Christ throughout, with one of the characters derisively remarking to a priest that, "Christ was a displaced person." So then who's are neighbor?
Jesus was of course asked this same question and responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan, but if you notice, He doesn't address the question directly. In the end He asks His listeners, "Who was a neighbor to the man that was attacked?" He reframes the question, it shouldn't be "who is my neighbor?" because I am, after all, only responsible to him under the law, but "how do I act like a neighbor to whomever I meet?" So then we are responsible for whomever we can reach and technology and tranportation making that an increasingly wide circle. The hungersite, for instance, allows me to help others across the world just by clicking (if you haven't gone there before, please go now, I promise you don't have to sign up for anything). Various Christian organizations let me sponsor children in other countries for about $30 a month.

These are all great things, and the need is great all over (think about donating a net to help prevent malaria here), but this is not all that we're called to. Neighbors primarily means our actual physical neighbors, you know, people you can actually see and hate (funny G.K. Chesterton quote- "The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people.") Not to get all nerdy on you here and throw in another literary reference, in a post about a sci-fi movie no less, but in Dostoevksy's Brothers Karamazov a woman comes in to the monastery asking for advice. She notes that the more she claims to love mankind, the less she loves individual men. And lest we forget, the Nazis, the Soviets, and countless other regimes through the years have killed millions of individual men, women, and children in the name of the good of humanity. The Jews were killed by men who loved their country and were concerned with the public good. The love of humanity is too abstract, lets too many things in, after all, "Isn't it better that one man should perish, than the entire nation?" Once you meet someone, they become your neighbor, you are called to love them, because they too are made in the Image. That said I don't know whether or not space aliens are made in the likeness of God, but let's cross that bridge when we come to it.

Piper knows what tornadoes mean... no gay clergy!

Ok for those of you who don't know, a quick recap: The ECLA, the largest Lutheran denomination in America convened a meeting in Minneapolis to discuss, among other things, whether or not monogamous homosexuals could be ordained as clergy. Wednesday, a tornado briefly touched down in Minneapolis, shredding tents set up around the convention site (apparently Baptists aren't the only denomination that likes to set up tents at every meeting, I wonder who brought the tater salad? Did conservative Lutherans bring a side, while the liberals were told to bring a dessert? These are the kind of questions that need to be asked). Anyway, the tornado also split the steeple at nearby Central Lutheran which was being used for the convention also. John Piper a Twin City pastor offers up his thoughts (if you could call them that) here. To sum up what he says, God used the tornado to send a "gentle, but firm" warning to the Lutherans not to approve of homosexual clergy.

Little side note here, I agree we should not have openly gay clergy (or secretly gay clergy, I suppose), as to how we should engage with homosexuals to love them like Jesus would, that's another post, probably another blogger- I really don't know.

Piper is firmly in the Reformed-Calvinist camp, in love with God's sovreignty ("I hear you saying my theology doesn't make sense, are you saying the God of the Universe isn't sovreign enough to operate in the way I'm telling you? Well who are you, O man, that you know the mind of God? He acts as He wants, which just happens to be exactly how I'm saying He acts. So there, you 'tare amongst the wheat', you!") He pretty much connects all the dots for you, tornado-Lutherans-gay clergy-message from God? and then steps away right at the end to cover himself, "but it's really a message for all of us." A kind of slippery guy, he uses Luke 13:4-5 to say this really has a broader application. The problem is Jesus' message here is exactly the opposite of what Piper has been pointing us to all along. Jesus, speaking on the fall of the Tower of Siloam in Jerusalem that killed 18 men, asks if they were more sinful for having been died in the accident. Well no, of course not, but if you fail to repent, you too shall perish.

So, taking a page from Eugene Peterson, a modern update from The Message Remixed- Dance All Night Edition: "The church in Minneapolis that got hit by the tornado, remember that? You think they were worse sinners for getting hit? Nah brah! But y'all all need to repent." The whole way Piper has held our hands to lead us to this point- homosexuality is a sin, God controls the winds, ...God sent the tornado to smack those Lutherans into obedience, right? But here's where Piper starts to hem and haw, he doesn't actually go so far as to say that, he tries to back away into a general call for repentance.

I would be completely fine with a general call to repentance, Lord knows I need it. Paul later said in Romans that not just catasrophes, but also God's kindness, the pure gratuitousness of a beautiful, tornado-free day for instance should call us to repentance, in fact leads us towards it. But Piper isn't really doing this, at least not principally. He's saying God sent the tornado and he sent it to warn the Lutherans specifically (I guess He didn't care as much when the Episcopalians were making Gene Robinson a bishop, as far as I know they got nothing, how should they know what to do without bad weather and John Piper to tell them?). This causes all sorts of problems because it makes God responsible for evil, but that simply not what the Bible talks about when it speaks of evil. Paul in Romans, Joseph in Genesis, both talk about God using evil to affect good, but that doesn't mean the evil is redeemed; its "woven" into the good for those who love Him, evil isn't redeemed, its overcome.

I realize I could really jump off from here into discussion of the problem of evil and what "natural evils", those natural disasters that we attribute to living in a fallen world. But I won't, at least, not yet. Briefly though what can we say about all this hurt, all the problems and evil in the world? All we know, beyond any theories, beyond philosophical pursuits of a theodicy that makes sense of it all, is the Word become Flesh. Jesus didn't consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing and came down into our mess and our hurts and our fears that the problems of life are judgments on us. Pascal once said, "Jesus will be suffering until the very end of the world," and what he meant, I think is that Jesus really does identify with us in our sufferings; He is present in the midst of them. When He says the goats did not minister to Him, I think He saying more than just they weren't being very nice guys, I think Jesus is saying He really is present with the hurt, suffering, "harassed and helpless" of the world. He has chosen to share in our sufferings, whether or not we choose to share in His.

Random Links

So until I actually start putting up stuff people may be reasonably interested in reading, I thought I'd put up some links to some stuff I like
1. The Kindlings Muse- Dick Staub hosts the podcast. All sorts of good stuff about Christians in culture. Lots of stuff about C.S. Lewis, because he from the good ole days when Christians, would you know, leave the bubble from time to time. http:/www.thekindlings.com

2. Internetmonk- a pretty good blog from the "post-evangelical wilderness". An SBC guy who is thoroughly frustrated with alot of the silliness of evangelicals. You need to go there. At least once a week. Seriously. Do it. Go Now. www.internetmonk.com

3 Sufjan Stevens "To Be Alone With You"- maybe my favorite song by him. One of those Christians who actually make good music, the kind non-Christians acknowledge as good. Pretty crazy.

4. Nick Drake- "Place to Be"- good song by one of the, if not the, greatest reclusive 70s era British folk singers of all time. Which may actually be a pretty big group, I really don't know. He's the guy who sang on that Volkswagen commercial back in my high school days, which seems kind of a strange setting now.
And here's that commercial, weird that I remember this

I might put some more stuff up later, I just felt an intro and a crappy poem as my only posts made for a pretty weak blog....

Coming soon- a pissy rant about John Piper's "God uses tornadoes ripping off steeples to warn us about gay people" spiel. I can feel the anticipation building...

Probably a good way to scare most potential readers off...

I could have perhaps entitled this, "How not to start off a blog 101", but I'm going to go ahead and go through with it because it is, I think, the last thing I wrote (the suburbs seem to be making me - let's say "less intellectually active"- I don't think I've really thought about anything since returning to Mandeville). Anyway, a poem (please don't let that stop you from reading on, although it might stop me) I wrote about a month ago. Not really sure if it's any good, but I write poems to help me think about stuff, especially to wrestle with Scripture. Lots of different ideas going on here- Jacob meeting with Esau after his own wrasslin' match with God, Esau's carpe diem mindset ("I'm hungry and this birthright ain't feeding me") put alongside Jacob's deceptiveness and his own inability to wait, all confronted by Jesus in the Eucharist.
Oh and points and a big gold star to anyone who can spot the third "twin" in the poem. Enjoy it, because if you catch it and know why he counts as a twin, you're probably a bit of a nerd...

To my brother, to redeem the time
You took it seriously,
For that you should be praised, I think.
You took the moment and recognized fullness
How were you to know, my brother, that I'd set a snare

We aren't so very different you know
Look past the pelts and hair, the quiet cleverness,
Your strength and my limp
The blood, the faults-the same

I wanted to be you, to feel a father's love
To win
Time mattered- the trap sprung just so
The quick eye catching, the fingers loosing
The little smile as the hart stumbled
To put your hand in its side
To feel the holes you'd made
To know

At last I'd done it, I was you
It was a moment that united us
At last you knew, the hunger, the malaise
How it comes, so regularly, you cease to act
How meaning evacuates the day
Slips its noose- but now it was caught
Meaning in a meal

Side by side before the roiling red we made
The meal that was your birthright
We made one man
Deceiver and deceived
You gave yourself to it in despair, to save your life
I in hope- time redeemed
But the meal-
the meal, dear Esau, was for us all

-7/16/09

Why I'm Blogging

Well, I guess boredom would be the main reason... But beyond that, I write to figure things out. Just a little trick of how my mind works, I really can't think about anything seriously without writing about it. After years of writing privately, journaling or diary-writing or whatever the kids call it nowadays, I've decided to start putting some of my rambles and rants out there; not because I feel I have anything particularly valuable to say or an emo "need to express myself, but to invite others to come wrassle with these things along side me. My conception of how community works is that everything, once given to God, returns to us where no one can claim ownership of it. So, for example, if I ask a question that brings out something in someone else, neither one of us can claim it, we share it so far as we share in Him. So I hope this all is educational, that it educes things from me and from whoever takes the time to read this; its your blog too. Ramble on.