Out of the Underground

2011-12-18T22:23:00.000-08:00


The Census at Bethlehem, Pieter Bruegel the Elder 1566

First a disclaimer - I don't know anything about art, I only know of this painting from writing about a poem by W.H. Auden, "Musée des Beaux Arts", as an undergrad and which alludes to the above painting while being ostensibly about another Bruegel work "The Fall of Icarus". Larger version of "Census" here. It took me quite a bit of googling (if that's a verb) to find the Giotto fresco too; larger version here if you click full-screen. Now that my typically American, culturally ignorant bona fides are established, we may continue.

Look carefully at the Bruegel picture, see if you can spot Mary and Joseph. And then do the same with the fresco by Giotto below.

The Adoration of the Magi, Giotto; Basilica of St. Francis; Assissi, Italy; ca.1337

The differences should be readily apparent; in the Giotto fresco the Holy Family are elevated, all of the figures turn their attention upon them, seven of the figures- the three of the Holy Family, the three Magi, and the attending angel - have stylized halos, all ensuring that there is no mistake about the scene you are looking at. By contrast spotting Mary on the donkey being led by Joseph (lower right-center for those who've yet to spot it) is like playing "Where's Waldo?", none of the figures seem to notice the seemingly insignificant pregnant couple as they all go about their tasks- bustling about with the census takers, preparing food or shoveling snow, the children skating and sledding over a frozen pond. Note too the settings, Giotto's fresco shows an unfamiliar landscape with camels and rich garments surely unfamiliar to the typical Italian peasant of the 14th century. The Flemish Bruegel's on the other hand looks like a typical winter scene - the snow and architecture clearly more native to Belgium than first century Palestine. In Giotto there is no mistaking who the child is, in Bruegel Christ comes incognito, as it were, looking at the scene there is no way of telling who the mother is or what the child may become.

Both pictures are necessary, both say something important and true about the Event. The early Church, when reflecting on the Incarnation realized this. They included in the canon two very different Nativities. In Matthew there are signs in the Heavens, a great commotion over the birth in Jerusalem, and much talk of kings - Christ and his opponent, the sham-king Herod (though not, despite Christmas carols to the contrary, the "three wise men"; we don't even know that there were three of them, I personally like to think there was a fourth that forgot to bring anything and then, when they reached the house over which the star had stopped, tried to make sure they all went in together so it would look like the gifts came from all of them, but I digress). Luke shows Jesus humbly born in a feed-trough and worshipped by shepherds, the lowest strata of society. The Incarnation is something absolutely new, something that changes everything, but it is something you can miss.

Søren Kierkegaard, liked to talk about the "infinite qualitative distinction" between God and man, which is a fancy way of saying that God and man do not exist on a continuum with each other. The Romans believed in apotheosis, that man could become God, and the Senate began a practice of voting on the apotheosis of an emperor after his death following Julius Caesar's passing, probably seen as merely a stamp of approval or a nice eulogy among the more cynical of their number. But monotheists don't and can't believe that. The gap between an infinite God and finite Creation is infinite, not merely some unimaginable number, like, say, the feeling one may get eating a Big Mac under the golden arches and imagining all those billions of hamburgers sold, but qualitatively different; there is no way from one to the other. All of which is to say that the Incarnation is not something that can be argued; there are no number of facts that one can tote up on one side of Jesus' ledger to "prove" that He is also God. Jesus doesn't come with a stylized, flat golden halo declaring His presence; He comes incognito. There's no way to tell who the child born that winter night in a snowy village is just by looking, He can be missed.

Thomas is probably my favorite of the Apostles, although I realize that is probably not a popular thing to say (on the other hand he probably is more popular than, say, Bartholomew or Thaddeus, because, really, besides the cool name what does Thaddeus have going for him). John gives us the lovely information that while he was known as Thomas (Aramaic for twin), some people also called him Didymus (Greek for twin), all while neglecting to tell us who this twin of his might be. I've come to the conclusion that until proven otherwise, I will function as his twin, since he obviously needs one (I mean his whole identity is wrapped up in his twinny-ness - if you make to adulthood and people are calling you twin in multiple languages it likely is pretty important to you). He gets a bad wrap for doubting, for wanting to put his hands in the holes in Jesus' side (as a side note, Thomas was featured in the first real post on this site, a poem about Jacob and Esau of all things, and I offered a gold star to anyone who could spot him, I'm pleased to here announce that the third twin was indeed Thomas, if you guessed that before reading this then your star is already in the mail), anyway despite wanting to see and feel the holes when Jesus does appear to Thomas there is no indication that he does in fact feel the wounds. Jesus offers saying, "Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side. Stop doubting and believe,” but Thomas responds, "My Lord and my God." Something else is happening, I think, and while seeing Jesus may have helped Thomas believe in the Resurrection, even it could not prove the Incarnation, that Jesus was in fact the God-Man, that His death and resurrection would save Thomas and that he too would be raised on the Last Day in a body like Jesus' glorious body. Tradition holds that Thomas eventually travelled to India and was martyred there. The Mar Thoma church in Kerala bears his name.

Advent is a time of waiting, of expectation, and hope, but it is a time that can be missed, swallowed up by busy-ness or vegetation. The central Christian mystery, the Incarnation, God among us and for us comes quietly. The people in Bruegel's painting are all going about their lives, unable or unwilling to realize what is happening in their midst. And as the Kingdom is not fully realized, tragedy may come and obscure the view, may in fact come on the heels and walk the same streets as the Mystery we have missed. But it is to us, as Auden said, "not an important failure", the commerce of Christmas, the buying and giving of gifts must continue and we can't be troubled with stopping to help. There is lovely scene at the end of Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer where the protagonist is sitting in his car outside St. Louis Cathedral waiting for someone he is to pick up and watching parishioners as they head inside to receive the cross on Ash Wednesday. As he sits, a very dark-skinned black man heads inside and after some minutes returns again. It is impossible to tell whether he has received the sign of the cross on his forehead or not, but he back into the world changed and bearing about on his body a mark of our mortality and the hope of the Resurrection which follows. The Eastern Orthodox Church often refers to Mary as the Theotokos, the God-Bearer, and describes her as a type of the Christians who would come after Pentecost, who, indwelt with the Holy Spirit would bear God abroad into the world. It isn't something that is obvious, that anyone can tell just by looking, but as we wait, let us not wait in vain.

Dostoevsky and Dickens

2011-10-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

In 1862 Dostoevsky met Dickens in London; some years later Dostoevsky recalled the meeting in a letter to a friend:

"He told me that all the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge [!?], are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity towards those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life.

Only two people? I asked."

via Brandywine books

After a long absence, I return to complain

2011-10-19T12:54:00.000-07:00

I don't really much blog anymore, but I feel compelled to air my grievances about a show I saw the other night called "A Gifted Man". The titular "gifted man" is a super-rational, slightly misanthropic neurologist whose wife has died and left behind a clinic. He works at some sort of sophisticated neurology place (complete with obligatory-goofy-looking-computer-animated-holographic-hand-gesture-reconizing-sciency-deal-that-while-not-serving-any-discernible-purpose-that-couldn't-be-fulfilled-by-a-regular-computer-still-seems-cool-and-futuristic-and-such-and-so-is-obligatory) he built along with volunteering at the poor people's clinic (could these two worlds ever come into conflict and our hero be forced to choose between the oppressed masses and his well-to-do clients? I tremble in anticipation.) This all complicated by his ability to see and converse with his dead wife which confronts his empiricist worldview as he sees her as a real manifestation of his wife and not a hallucination on his part. The mechanics of the show don't allow for his wife to be either unambiguously real or a product of his own mind, but if it is only internal, the show is made (slightly) more interesting when one considers his wife's existential crisis (if she actually exists) of being able to observe but having no agency in the world. Walker Percy talks quite often about people in modern, scientific society wandering around in their bodies like Banquo's ghost at the party - unable to really effect any changes but able increasingly to know everything about the world around them (thanks to science) while not knowing themselves. This would be interesting if the wife is somehow a sublimated expression of the man's own self cast as his dead wife to engage with dialectically, but if she just a ghost, it's not; I'd think that being ineffectual and ethereal-feeling is pretty much standard operating procedure for ghosts.
The whole dead wife thing points to the other major conflict in the show - science vs. the "spiritual". Those scare are there because the "spiritual" in question is New Age-y stuff; in the episode I saw the main character removed the partially absorbed twin from the head of an Indian teenager but was unable to stop the voice said teenager kept hearing in his head. The voice was finally stopped and removed when a shaman/carpenter performed a ritual to draw the spirit of the voice into a big piece of that rock-crystal candy stuff that's really just sugar and food coloring and not, I would think, inherently magical while he burnt like a fat blunt of rolled sage in a closed room with some candles in it (seriously). Oh and the carpenter's last name is Little Creek, so he's an American Indian of some generic, unnamed tribe, likely, which explains his magic, apparently. And so the plot is supposed to be this big conflict between these two healers -the neurologist and the shaman - and (BROAD OVER-ARCHING THEME ALERT) faith and science, which the two characters represent. The problem is that the choice of New Age spiritualism and ground on which they fight - healing- isn't a profitable or interesting intersection between the two. It is easy to lay them against each other antagonistically because the battle becomes essentially science vs. pseudo-science. The shaman is a practitioner in an esoteric field of study, but not, for the writers at least, functionally different than the neurosurgeon; as long as he performs the rituals correctly, the result will come. The real weakness of empiricism and the scientific method is not its own field, but the many things that fall outside its purview. The scientific method only approaches truth on an asymptote, its goal is to discover what is not the case. It doesn't deal with Truth, it approaches facts. The real problem for it (and thus for scientific societies such as our own) is its inability to describe the actual experience of being human. Biology, for example, can tell me that I will one day die, but not how to react to or live with that knowledge. I, for one, don't find science vs. faith nearly as interesting as science as faith and the problems which attend it, but I suppose cliched antagonism is easier to write and make seem superficially compelling. None of this is to say that there are not real points at which science and faith have conflicts (not Creation as some would assume, but the Resurrection, we know scientifically that you can't come back from the dead- of course I would argue that miracles cannot be studied scientifically- science is only interested in events so far as they are testable, part of class, rather than individual acts that God chooses to perform- but that is the subject for another post which I will likely neglect to ever write), but only that science vs. faith as pseudo-science is one of the least interesting topics imaginable.

Music: A Better Sort of Post

2011-07-29T02:50:00.000-07:00

I realize I haven't done anything on here for quite a while. My last post was on Maundy Thursday and was itself the first in a long time. I don't know that I'll be posting regularly anytime soon, but to try and get back into things I've decided to put up some music, because, well I like music - much better than I like reading my own writing.

I've recently been listening to Van Morrison quite a lot, beyond the popular "Brown Eyed Girl" or his earlier "Gloria" with the band Them. I started listening to more of his after seeing his performance of "Caravan" in The Last Waltz, the film chronicling The Band's final concert. I don't know if it was the weird, purple and sequins outfit or the eccentric leg kicks followed by the drunken-looking stumble off the stage, but I decided to look into his music further.

The first album I bought was Moondance, which contained "Caravan" along with jam band favorite "Into the Mystic" and the title track which, apparently, is a favorite among crappy would-be crooner/easy listening types (cough, Michael Buble, cough). It was a good, enjoyable album, but didn't prepare me for Astral Weeks, his eccentric, critically acclaimed second album. The songs have this weird stream-of-consciousness feel like they are being written on the spot, but placed over a bed of shifting jazz-inflected strings that seem to respond and move with the words. It is hard to describe, but I suppose that's why they recorded it instead of simply releasing a press release about how great it was a la James Franco. The following track, "Madame George", once I understood what it was about, immediately supplanted The Kinks' "Lola" as my favorite song about a transvestite. Not necessarily my favorite on the album, but gives a good feel for what the rest is like.

Farther off the beaten path by Morrison is Veedon Fleece, a truly strange album that in one of its songs recasts Jason and the Argonauts with William Blake and the Sisters of Mercy playing the respective parts looking for the titular Veedon Fleece, whatever it is. I won't post that song, but another which does manage to name-check (for no readily apparent reason) "Poe, Oscar Wilde, and Thoreau" - "Fair Play to You".

Moving on, one of my favorite "modern" bands (both in that they are still making albums and don't play in an obviously "old" genre like say, Old Crow Medicine Show or even New Orleans brass bands like Rebirth) is Fleet Foxes. They remind me quite a bit of Crosby, Stills, Nash (and sometimes) Young in their harmonies (compare for example, sans Neil Young, "Suite -Judy Blue Eyes" to the track below). Someone online said the opening lines from the new album: "And now I am older/than my mother and father/ when they had their daughter/ Now what does that say about me?" capture the zeitgeist (always in need of capturing that zeitgeist) in the same way CSNY's "Woodstock" did for that generation. I'm inclined to agree; here's the opening track- "Montezuma".

I always like to post older music on these things though, because I've found it harder to discover the good stuff than with modern music. Much of it has been so long in the collective memory of older generations that heard it originally that it is taken for granted that everyone is aware of it (did you know, for instance that Elvis made some pretty good music before getting fat and moving to Vegas, I didn't). Other songs have just gotten lost somewhere along the way as the people who first heard them moved on (to other music) or passed on. With modern music there likely will be some way to hear about new, good music - through internet radio, blogs, word of mouth, ect, but it is more difficult with old music. Anyway the final two songs here are ones I heard first within the last year. The first, is recorded by Bessie Smith, "The Empress of the Blues", the first of the big female blues/jazz vocalists who paved the way for Billie Holliday, Ella Fitzgerald, and Sarah Vaughan. She recorded multiple versions of "St. Louis Blues", the first coming in 1925 with a very young Louis Armstrong on cornet. The harmonium makes Bessie sound like she lurching along on a broken amusement park ride while Pops sits alongside commiserating on his cornet. A less disturbing version can be found here with what I assume is pretty rare footage of her performing. For extra points try and spot the Obama look-alike on sax when they show the band.

Finally, some gospel. And in case there was any doubt, let me say here: Dorothy Love Coates > Chris Tomlin, et al.

****Special Gratuitous Lagniappe Video*****
Posting that Bessie Smith song reminded me of a great performance by Satch I recently saw on a documentary and subsequently found on youtube, here he is performing "Dinah", complete with proto-chicken-dance arm movements at the beginning.

Self-aggrandizement via hyperlink

2011-07-29T02:49:00.000-07:00

I hesitate to do this but a comment I made on NPR's "All Songs Considered" blog made it onto their radio show (and the podcast, which you should subscribe to on itunes, completely independent of any desire to hear this particular show). They asked about songs that make you cry and a lot of people mentioned "What a Wonderful World". I wrote in about how "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans" reminded me of the storm and all those people from the nursing home they put in the PMAC and they saw fit to include it on the show. In my defense, let me say that I interpreted "cry" pretty liberally and that if I have ever have cried listening to it, it was surely a single, manly tear like one a Native American chief might cry at seeing pollution. Here's the link. Or the blog post. But the best thing to do would be to find it on itunes... or ignore this post altogether

Lenten Listening

2011-04-21T12:08:00.000-07:00

Said he saw him comin’ with his dyin’ garments on/ said he saw him comin’/ said he saw him comin’, dyin’ garments on. Wouldn’t mind dyin’ if dying was all. –Blind Willie Johnson

Durer, Head of the Dead Christ

I. Lent is a terrible season. Modern usage being what it is, a word like terrible has largely been evacuated of all meaning, profundity, and now is taken as something unpleasant, bad but to a higher degree of badness than bad,. The word, though, comes from a Latin root terribilis, to frighten, to cause terror. In his novel Descent into Hell, Charles Williams tries to reclaim terrible for its root, one of the characters asks the playwright Stanhope (Williams’ representative much like Prospero is for Shakespeare), “If things are terrifying, can they be good?” “Yes surely,” Stanhope responds, “are our tremors to measure the Omnipotence?” Lent is a terrible season.

II. The bluesman Blind Willie Johnson seems like a character out of a Flannery O’Connor story. Blind, black, destitute, he lived in a run-down house on a street corner in Depression era Beaumont. Every day, he would go out into the street with his guitar, a glass slide made of a broken bottleneck, and a Bible to preach on the streets and sing wild, frightening songs about Jesus dying on a cross. At some point he was noticed, brought into a studio and paid $5, $10 dollars a side to sing his eerie music into a can to be preserved on cheap acetone. One of his sides, surely unsettling to his producer sitting in the booth, reinterpreted the wreck of the Titanic as an Icarus-like fall, God’s judgment on the overweening pride of the ship’s captain – “A.G. Smith, mighty man, built a boat that he couldn’t understand/ named it a name of a god in tin/ middle of the sea, Lord, He pulled it in/ God moves on the water and the people had to run and pray.” Like all black (and many white) musicians of the day, he received no royalties, only a flat fee; soon he returned to the streets busking and preaching Christ crucified for our sins. One evening in 1945 his house burnt down, having no money, place to go, or way to make a living, Johnson lie down every night in the ashes of his ruined home in the place where his bed one stood. Every morning he would rise take up his guitar and head to a thoroughfare to play his wild music about his wild God giving His life for the folks living in Beaumont, Texas. In the late summer or early fall of that year Johnson caught malaria and died, refused any care at the hospital because of his skin color.

"God Moves on the Water" by Blind Willie Johnson

III. The terror of Good Friday is too often leapt over as we hasten to Easter; Easter itself has become for many day of obligatory church attendance and seasonal candy and, like language, is evacuated of much of its meaning. Music still seems like an entry point, an unguarded door where things can come in. It is hard to listen to Blind Willie Johnson moaning about the crucifixion in “Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground” and not be moved (to terror or pity).

It is hard to listen to Van Morrison, stunned, angry at his dying girlfriend for dying in “T.B. Sheets” and backing slowly away from the horror and the stench and not realize death is a terrible thing, an obscenity.

Johnson’s gravelly voice singing the refrain “I just touched the hem of His garment” in “I Know His Blood Can Make Me Whole” is not the treacly pop of CCM that can easily be dismissed; the man knows where he was, knows what Jesus did for him, knows where he’s headed.

Good Friday, Holy Saturday are places we need to linger a bit, imaginatively enter into, and this sort of music aids in that. Easter Sunday was, is a shock; people don’t rise from the dead, sealed tombs stay sealed, full, and all a messiah dying can possibly mean is that he wasn’t the messiah, God is with the victors. Yet death is swallowed up by victory, the tomb is founded empty and the King isn’t there, He’s on the move, abroad in the world. And we too, need not fear, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally/ And death shall be no more: death, thou shalt die.”

Your Cheatin’ Heart

2010-10-11T10:39:00.000-07:00

Actually, this post has nothing to do with Hank Williams (Sr. of course, while turning one song into a 20 year career with Monday Night Football is impressive in its way on Jr.’s part, Hank Sr.’s music still holds up today in contrast to Jr.s’ forgettable 1980s country-schlock). What follows is a longish, rambling treatment of why adultery is sinful that I wrote one night when unable to sleep. Actually it doesn’t have all that much to do with adultery either, it is rather a back-door entry into a discussion of relationships (marriage specifically, but really any relationship, erotic or not, should take and participate in suitable degree with this form for the Christian). Any obscurity in it is hopefully explained by how late in the night it was written, but I have no real interest in editing it here. Also there is a bit in there about marriage necessarily producing children and the inability for the adulterous relationship to do likewise. This should not be taken too literally - although there is perhaps some deficiency in a marriage that does not eventually desire children (see Europe) – but is emblematic of the necessity of the relationship to go beyond itself, be fruitful, and not become its own end. Again, this comes from a little notebook I keep and wasn’t originally intended for blogging – think Pascal’s Pensées, except less worthwhile. Also the Paolo and Francesca mentioned are from the first circle of Dante’s Hell and my thoughts here probably draw more than I realize on the notes from Dorothy L. Sayers’ translation of the Comedy and in turn from both my own and her reading of Charles Williams’ The Figure of Beatrice.
Why is adultery sinful: that is, what makes the adulterous relationship different from the marital? Lack of acceptance by the community. Adultery cares nothing for the community at large, does not seek its acceptance, but draws the sphere down to only two. “And the two shall become one flesh.” Without the community, the relationship is cut off from all others; Paolo and Francesca spinning alone for eternity. The relationship becomes an end in itself, neither regarding God or the community for its context or continuance it collapses into itself, into self-love, the mutual gratification of erotic love. It does not seek its own perfection; it seeks only its own gratification. By refusing to be itself publicly (eros expressed in and supported by the community in marriage) it may also cease to be itself privately, the somewhat tenuous bonds of eros failing, unsupported by familial love and refusing to seek perfection in agape. Christian marriage places itself in its correct orientation to God and fellow man. Adultery, precisely because it refuses to place itself in any greater context is unable to seek any end other than itself and thus can grow into solipsistic self-determination – when the other partner no longer meets my needs, I end it. Adultery is unable to forget itself because it has already declared itself to be all that matters. Thus paralyzed, it must continually reaffirm itself, take stock of itself against itself, and justify its own existence by its effects. As it only exists so far as the two individuals will for it to, and its paralyzing self-affirmation stagnates itself (such a relationship can have no children, no other objects of love, it begets nothing) the adulterous relationship must increasingly seek its validation in the effects on the individual rather than on the other. And the one shall become two. Marriage may be perfected, beget (and so forget itself as an end) and create a real union (two as one flesh) as the individual no longer seeks its telos in oneself or in the relationship (which necessarily resides in oneself) but empties oneself and looks not only to one’s own interest, but the interest of others and so shares in the mind of Christ, the Bridegroom.
Hopefully that was helpful as a preliminary foray into this subject, sketching out in broad strokes the trajectory I think we should follow. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the allusion to Philippians 2 in the last sentence, as the Scripture it points to is much more important, has much more to say on the subject than anything written here. Also, I would point you to an essay by C.S. Lewis called “We Have No ‘Right to Happiness’” that can be found, if nowhere else, among the essays collected in God in the Dock. While I only read it for the first time this morning and didn’t incorporate any of it into what has been written here, I found it to be good, useful thinking on this subject coming from a different angle.
– As a site note, I realize I have not been posting much lately. When the internet is not so readily available, it makes me more discriminating in the things I think merit posting. This may not necessarily increase the quality of my posts, but it certainly does decrease their quantity. I will try and make a note of new postings on facebook from here on out, unless they become somewhat regular again.

Fun with Emperor Marcus Aurelius

2010-10-11T10:37:00.001-07:00

Lately before bed I have been reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius who was the last in the line of so-called “good Emperors” of Rome in the second century. They were primarily called good because they really did appear so when put in relief against those that followed. Marcus Aurelius’ son, the aptly named Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Gladiator) proceeded to flush a lot of the good the previous Emperors had done down, well, the commode. But that’s not the reason I’m reading the Meditations, and the reason I’m reading the Meditations is not the reason I am posting this. Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic philosopher on the side, and I was interested from a historical standpoint in finding out more about Stoicism. Turns out it’s near-Christian ethics plus solipsism, making it the perfect philosophy for any occasion from emperors who want to feel good about their isolation at the top to Southern planters that felt justified in enslaving their fellow men because they convinced themselves that their paternalistic care for them really did improve their lives. Like Christianity, Stoicism commands love for neighbor, but not in order that the neighbor be loved or because they are bearers of the Divine Image, but because the Stoic is the sort of man who loves his neighbor; the object of the love is necessary only so far as it (and the other person can hardly be really conceived as other than “it”, only the self matters, has interiority) allows the self to manifest its love and so keep with the “spark of divinity” within itself.

But this is not the reason I am posting this. The reason I am posting it is because Marcus Aurelius says some pretty funny, strange things. To really see how strange these two meditations I am going to post are, it is necessary to see them in light of the rest of his meditations. Here is a typical example: “Every moment think steadily as a Roman and a man, to do steadily what thou hast in hand with perfect and simple dignity, and a feeling of affection, freedom, and justice.” (Incidentally, this meditation is the one quoted to Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s wonderful novel, The Moviegoer, by his aunt who is representative of Old South Stoicism.) In contrast to that, the following seems almost intentionally comic, although it is the emperor’s complete seriousness that in the end makes it even funnier “Are you irritated with one whose arm-pits smell? Are you angry with one whose mouth has a foul odor? What good will your anger do you? He has this mouth, he has these arm-pits. Such emanations must come from such things. “But the man has reason,” you will say, “and he could, if he took pains, discover wherein he offends.” I wish you well of your discovery. Now you too have reason; by your rational faculty, stir up his rational faculty; show him his fault, admonish him. For if he listens, you will cure him, and have no need of anger – you are not a ranter or a whore.”

The final passage I will post from the Meditations is, admittedly not quite so funny in my mind as the last, but it is a strange, melodramatic extension of everyone’s mother’s advice, “If you keep making that face, it will freeze that way.” From the seventh book of his meditations, “A scowling look is quite unnatural. When one often assumes it, the result is that all one’s comeliness fades and is at last so completely extinguished that it cannot again be lighted up at all. Look to conclude from this that scowls are contrary to reason. For if all knowledge of doing wrong is lost, what reason is there for living any longer?”

So there you have it: Don’t get mad at folks that smell bad and frowny faces make life not worth living. Thanks Emperor Marcus Aurelius!

Link about Reading

2010-07-18T14:56:00.000-07:00

If you are the type of person who will read something just because it was recommended on a blog, go read this (by way of Alan Jacobs' blog Text Patterns). It's what I would do.

Neighbors Needed: Why abstract love doesn’t work

2010-07-18T13:52:00.000-07:00

“Unselfish love that is poured out on a selfish object does not bring perfect happiness: not because love requires a return or a reward for loving, but because it rests in the happiness of the beloved. And if the one loved receives love selfishly, the lover is not satisfied… [his love] has not awakened [the beloved’s] capacity for unselfish love.”

“Love shares the good with another not by dividing it with him, but identifying itself with him so that his good becomes my own.” - Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, a woman comes before the elder complaining that she lacks faith. The elder advises that while nothing can be proven here, one can be convinced, “By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively and tirelessly. The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul. And if you reach complete selflessness in the love of your neighbor, then undoubtedly you will believe, and no doubt will even be able to enter your soul. This has been tested. It is certain.” To which the woman responds that she does indeed love humanity, to the point where she has dreamed of leaving everything, including her sickly daughter Lise, behind to become a sister of mercy and bind up the wounds and sores of the suffering. She fears that ingratitude will cause her “active love for humanity” to wilt, an experience which the Elder Zosima corroborates by telling of a doctor he knew who claimed that, “the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular that is, individually, as separate persons.”

“Active love for humanity” such as the woman claims to have, is a contradiction in terms. To be active, love must be particular; it must be active upon a concrete, individual person. As Merton said, love rests in the happiness of the beloved. (I would have perhaps written “good of the beloved”, if only to avoid confusion. Happiness has been misconstrued as that which is pleasurable – and so could include sinful activities – rather than as the true joy found in the ultimate good, life with God.) Regardless of the terminology used, it is only in seeking the other’s good or happiness that the lover really goes about the activity of loving. It is only through sharing life together, “identifying [oneself] with [the beloved] so that his good becomes my own” that we really love actively, something that cannot be done in distraction. This is perhaps reflected in the curious Gospel phrase, “Jesus looked at them and loved them.” In His humanity, Jesus could not be in relation at all times with all people and so could not “love them” in any way that would make sense, so it is only upon apprehending them that Jesus begins to love. When God is said to “so love the world” He is loving all individuals separately rather than abstractly and seeking to draw each into a relationship of reciprocated love, because that is the beloved’s greatest good. Abstract love, in contrast, is passive. It does not seek the good of the beloved because it has no relation with it. In fact it is a form of self-love, because all its benefits rest in the lover rather than the beloved. The lover of humanity puffs himself up with fine feelings about himself, but affects no good in the perceived objects of his love. As I’ve written before on this blog, love for humanity can lead to hatred for individuals perceived to be against the common good, from the conviction that it is better for one man to die for the sake of the nation to killing Jews for the sake of Aryan racial purity. Love for humanity constitutes a kind of tenderness and sentimentality detached from its moorings, and as Flannery O’Connor wrote, “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and the fumes of the gas chamber.” (A Memoir of Mary Ann) The commandment to love our neighbors is one which has both our neighbor’s good and our own as its end. Abstract love hopelessly collapses into itself; it is only through sharing in the good with others that we participate in the love of God.

Great Moments in Southern Literature

2010-07-15T15:47:00.000-07:00

(The title is only partially facetious. Imagine it as a recurring segment on your completely inane 24-hour news network of choice. How completely out of character and unexpectedly worthwhile it would be in contrast. You could have passages of Ignatius J. Reilly (bronzed, right) railing against everything while he waits outside the D.H. Holmes in New Orleans interspersed with clips of Lady Gaga’s latest doings or superimposed close-ups of Glenn Beck’s oh so expressive eyes. It would be awesome.)

I’ve really been on a bit of a Southern literature kick lately: Faulkner (a difficult but ultimately worthwhile slog it turns out), a Flannery O’Connor bio, the occasional essay by Walker Percy (Signposts in a Strange Land, the posthumous collection of his essays by his Jesuit biographer Patrick Samway has some wonderful essays on Louisiana and the South in general that should interest most readers along with some of a more philosophical bent dealing with the nature of language, art and faith, among other things, for those, like myself, more nerdy in taste. Here’s a quote from his wonderful “New Orleans, Mon Amour” that I particularly liked, “Out and over a watery waste and there it is, a proper enough American city, and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.”), a Civil War novel by Shelby Foote (the guy you remember from Ken Burns’ PBS series if you saw it), and the two authors I will feature here: George W. Cable and Eudora Welty. (Unfortunately, it seems reading Faulkner has done nothing to help the brevity of my parenthetical remarks.) First off, the wonderful Eudora Welty, a sort of amalgam in my mind of every funny old Southern lady I’ve ever met, to the point where I feel constrained to always refer to her as Miss Eudora Welty, out of respect and familiarity.

Despite that, I actually had never read Miss Eudora before this spring when I read both her wonderful short novel The Optimist’s Daughter and a few of her short stories (and was a little miffed no one had forced me to read her growing up, what are English teachers for after all if not forcing us to read good things against our will, there are better and more enjoyable Southern short stories that could be anthologized than “Story of an Hour” and “A Rose for Emily”, both of which still leave me a bit cold – no pun intended on the mortality, presumed or otherwise, of certain supporting characters in either story). I realize in painting her as the beloved Southern lady who sits in the back of the church and, after you chance to sit by them at a pot-luck meal, reveals herself as one of the nicest and simultaneously cuttingly funny people you’ve ever met - the kind that because they are old and because all they say is wrapped in good manners and propriety (prefacing even the meanest remarks with “bless his heart”) hold together these two opposing poles without so much as soiling their dainty white cotton gloves - I may turn some people off; positing her as a feminine, jokey, Mark Twain knock off trotting out that (formerly) highly prized Southern literary commodity: the amusing backwoods country bumpkin for laughs without much substance beyond that (because amusing and beloved as they are, most old church ladies probably shouldn’t be writing books- though I may be wrong on this point). But her humor in no way distracts or masks any potential deficiencies of her art. Think instead of a Jackson-bred Jane Austen, very funny but also a wonderful author. The following passage comes from Losing Battles, (though in the interest of full disclosure, I will say that The Optimist's Daughter is better) as one Miss Beulah describes to her new sister-in-law Aunt Cleo the one brother who is not present at the ongoing family reunion in comparison to the present brothers, Aunt Cleo’s husband included,

“Handsome! Handsomer than Dolphus ever was, sunnier than Noah Webster, smarter than Percy, more home-loving than Curtis, more quiet-spoken than Nathan, and could let you have a tune quicker and truer than all the rest put together,” said Miss Beulah.
“He sounds like he’s dead,” said Aunt Cleo.

As it turns out, baby brother Sam Dale is dead. But that sums up nicely part of what is so wonderful about Miss Eudora, natural humor in the flow of the story. *Here’s a short story also by Welty, “Why I Live at the P.O.”

Turning to a likewise often neglected (though with better reason than with Welty) Southern author, I present New Orleans’ own George Washington Cable. Cable is an interesting figure; he was a Confederate cavalry officer during the Civil War who later became an ardent supporter of civil rights for former slaves (which led to his eventual exile from the South). He was also a good friend of Mark Twain who during their joint national book tour (which if you can believe was at the time a highly publicized and culturally significant event, a far cry from the sad and lonely looking authors sitting alone at tables in Barnes and Noble with a pile of unused and unneeded Sharpies and photos) was arguably the headliner and the bigger draw. Twain is still read of course (along with having that ultimate sign of late 90s cultural relevance a movie starring Jonathan Taylor Thomas based on not one, but two of his works, placing him, by extension, on roughly equal footing with Santa Claus in terms of popularity) while Cable is largely forgotten (I only found him available through a small Gretna based publishing house). Cable can be a little bit moralistic at times and has the annoying (to modern readers) habit of writing in dialect, to quote from one of his characters “Mais, fo’ w’y’?” (points for anyone who can figure out how an apostrophe better captures the nuances of a native French-speaker’s pronunciation of “why” than a silent “h”), but he still is of some interest I feel. Cable places the action of all his best works in the society of prewar New Orleans of the 1820s and 30s a time when gens de couleur libres (free men of color) of mixed French and African ancestry and the Freejacks set at liberty for their assistance in the Battle of New Orleans held some rights (even owning slaves in some cases), much more so than in the days of the post-Reconstruction backlash of oppression by the newly empowered Democrats that Cable wrote in. This distance allowed him room to comment on society; much in the way that Arthur Miller used the Salem Witch trials to talk about McCarthyism. With that and Cable’s ardent Christianity in mind, the word’s of his priest Père Jerome in the novella Madame Delphine should be considered, although they seem hardly less applicable today,
“’It is impossible for any finite mind to fix the degree of criminality if any human act or of any human life. The Infinite One alone can know how much of our sin is chargeable to us, and how much to our brothers or our fathers. We all participate in another’s sins. There is a community of responsibility attaching to every misdeed. No human since Adam – nay, nor Adam himself – ever sinned entirely to himself. And so I’m never am called upon to contemplate a crime or a criminal but I feel my conscience pointing at me as one of the accessories.”
Make no mistake, slavery was an American sin, not a peculiarly Southern one (Northern looms were just as hungry for cheaply produced Southern cotton as Southern planters were to produce it, and so jointly profited and sinned). In the same way, the globalized economy expands the circle of our neighbors and we can no longer (if we ever could) claim ignorance about why our Nikes are so cheap. Beyond this our mutual responsibility (an idea found interestingly enough in Dostoevsky’s writings of around the same time, though neither possibly read the other), affects the way I at least interpret the Bible, especially Genesis. But that’s for another post (or two)…
***Before I got around to posting this, I came across this in Terry Teachout’s decent biography of Louis Armstrong, Pops, and this seems as good a place as any to stick it. Here Armstrong discusses his proposal to his future wife Lucille after originally being rebuffed by concerns on the part of Lucille, (the idiosyncratic capitalization is Armstrong’s),
“That’s when I stopped her from Talking by slowly reaching for her Cute little Beautifully Manicured hand And said to her, ‘Can you Cook Red Beans and Rice?’ Which Amused her very much. Then it dawned on her that I was very serious. She – being a Northern girl and Me a Southern Boy from N.O. She could see why I asked her that question. So She said: “I’ve never cooked that kind of food before. But – Just give me a little time and I think that I can fix it for you.” That’s All that I wanted to hear, and right away I said “How about Inviting me to your house for dinner tomorrow night.”
A few nights later Louis went and ate red beans at Lucille’s parents house which he reported to be, “Very much delicious and I Ate Just like a dog,” and repeated his proposal, which was accepted the second time asking.

Multiculturalism and Taste

2010-07-15T15:20:00.000-07:00

Pretty exciting title huh? I thought about entitling this post “Why silly liberal college professors should stop pretending to like underground hip-hop, Indian dance, and obscure subtitled movies from Mongolia and Thailand out of a sense of moral superiority and distrusting the rectitude of those who don’t share their enthusiasm and instead try to build up the steam-rolled mainstream American culture that produces drivel like Twilight, Two and a Half Men, and Miley Cyrus today when it used to put forth works like Absalom, Absalom! and Huck Finn, and artists like Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash,” but the present title seemed more succinct somehow, punchier. – You may have noticed that all the cultural products given as positive examples are from the South, while for the moment it is enough to note with pride (assuming you’re Southern) that all the most natural examples of American excellence in these fields happen to be from the South – the only that could perhaps be added would be Moby Dick, Dylan, and Elvis (who was also from the South of course), it is important that the examples are local I think, but more on that later. (Also as much I like, say, Fleet Foxes or Iron & Wine for example, it will be interesting to see how they hold up over time; survival to posterity is broadly a meritocracy although there are always some good things that slip through the cracks.)

Despite all possible appearances to the contrary, this will not be a takedown of multiple cultures; it will be a takedown of the culture of multiculturalism that values diversity as an end in itself. Rather being broadly catholic in taste and accepting the products of a given culture on the basis of merit, many seem to value these products of other cultures simply for their exotic nature – proof above all else that the multiculturalist is not a racist. This comes, I think to the heart of the problem: multiculturalism identifies the physical or intellectual products of a culture so completely with the members of said culture that rejection of the products constitutes a rejection of the culture’s members (e.g. accusations that musical critics who dislike rap are therefore racist). Thus their support for the products of a minority culture becomes a moral act, lending to them the cachet of an insider finding exotic products to astound their friends with and the moral superiority of being globally conscious and broadly accepting. The actual members of the culture, the concrete individuals, the images of God, are secondary to their cultural products; they are not valued in themselves for those things which unite the two (producer and, unfortunately, what can only be described as consumer), but rather they are valued simply for their diversity, instead of their excellence. Excellence is of course diverse in nature, it seems because God has willed it so (in sharp contrast to the popular conception of faceless cherubs sitting on identical clouds strumming non-descriptly on their harps, it is Hell that, as Lewis writes in The Great Divorce is the “grey town”). In some ways it is the multiculturalist who is more susceptible to a type of racism (or culturalism, if that, despite spell check’s testimony to the contrary, is a word), patronizing others for diversity’s sake regardless of their merit. It is quite possible to dislike the entire production of a culture while still loving individual members of it. As a Christian this goes from the realm of possibility to that of a command to “love thy neighbor”, though this does not, I assume, preclude discriminating taste in music.

This multiculturalism is, I think, more a Northern phenomenon than a Southern one. The North has always had a voracious appetite for other cultures it seems, eating up anything to fill the void within itself. An example may help say for example you were set up on two blind dates the first girl is described to you as, “your typical Southern belle, from Savanna, Georgia,” the second as, “your typical girl from Branson, Missouri.” Which one was easier to picture? Which would you feel more comfortable meeting now, knowing what you do? The upshot is that it is difficult to imagine the stereotypical Northerner. Would it have made any difference in your picture of the second girl if she was instead from Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon? Lacking any real sense of a cultural identity, the Yankee has taken to identifying with many cultures, eclecticism being the humanizing aspect as it is all nominally run through the consumer’s taste. The person thus becomes identified through their stuff, rather than producing culture from their own identity, resulting in turn in superficiality when the consumer tries to turn producer themselves. It is only it seems the minority, that because of their differences from the prevailing culture can identify themselves, that is capable of producing lasting cultural products. One can talk for example of the Harlem renascence or that of the South, or praise the Jewish literature of such authors as Chaim Potok or Saul Bellow (the former I have read and heartily recommend, the latter I haven’t, but have heard good things and invite you, dear reader, to go read him and tell me if I’m missing something), but the Great White North has produced no such movements. The problem with the South is that bright, bustling Atlanta and oil-and-space rich Houston have replaced old seedy New Orleans and the (formerly at least) insane denizens of South Carolina and Charleston as the leading cities of the New South, more reconciled and lest distinct than the South has ever been in its history. This creates two possible solutions, manifesting themselves as symptoms of a common disease: one either accepts his places, feels alienated and rootless, and stocks up on cultural products wherever he may find them, or else embraces the relics of Southern culture root and branch, often stressing the parts most controversial and least accepted by the rest of the country as primary to distinguish himself all the more clearly from the rest of the country (e.g. the Rebel flag). Lying back behind all this is the intuition that the prime days of the South have passed by and that either an anachronistic, sometimes belligerent self-imposed exile to the mythic past or an uneasy acceptance of the shallow present are the only viable options left.

All this said, no culture is monolithic and one must talk of Southern cultures as seen in the earlier example of perhaps the two most outstanding Southern musicians (excluding Delta bluesman like Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters who might also merit a place) Louis Armstrong and Hank Williams who came from quite different contexts but nevertheless can both be considered Southern. Louis Armstrong and Ray Charles releasing albums of country music or Johnny Cash covering old blues songs serve as good examples of what from the outside appear to be cross-cultural exchanges but to their practitioners seemed natural. Ideally this would still be true and locality would be the determining factor in culture, but media technology has progressed to the point where this is no longer the case. In music for instance, the lack of local DJs (in the old sense of people on the radio selecting the music, not folks doing funny things with turntables) and the shriveling local music scene (related to the lack of local radio) mean that individuals are no longer limited in their access to music by location. Splintered locals, uprooted from any tie to their soil, form virtual communities around their tastes, but it is unclear yet if such communities will be able to produce a coherent style in the same way local ones have in the past (e.g. Dixieland jazz or the 60s and 70s New Orleans funk of Dr. John and the Meters). Multiculturalism seems to me to be an enemy of this, pursuing eclecticism and globalism at the expense of depth and a local culture. At its extreme end, diversity becomes an end in itself, not a natural product of excellence in its many forms. Inter-cultural borrowing is a very natural process, but without a coherent culture of one’s own by which others may be understood, superficiality is the only possible outcome

Good Article from NY Times on Narcicism and Activism

2010-06-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

The article here

I've said pretty much all I have to say in the title, but for those just itching for more, here's a little lagniappe: I've been thinking something somewhat on the same lines for awhile, touching on it briefly here. I've also some vague plans in the works for a post on why project (red), Toms, and the like while being wonderful corporately and doing much good are not really charities and potentially dangerous for the customer if they replace true Charity (big "C" because I mean it in the old sense as the Christian virtue of love). The marriage of apparent charity with materialism, especially when this charity benefits some unseen (and so abstracted) person- not a neighbor in the traditional sense- can potentially collapse all attempts to do good into self-love, the good done to our neighbor across the world superseded by personal fulfillment granted by simultaneously thinking oneself to be generous and gratifying the desire for more stuff. Saving the world while you destroy yourself.

Like I said, there is a rant coming, that was just a taste. I'm sure I leave you both tantalized and anticipatory...

The Footnote to Poetry

2010-05-24T09:53:00.001-07:00

I don’t want you to think I am starting a trend here and turning this in to some sort of poetry blog, but I want to post one more that explains what I try and do in most all my poems, how sub-creating (as Tolkien would call it) points to the Creator, even when it seems to be doing something else. No more comments for this one, just a posthumous shout-out to Jack Lewis whose title I, well, jacked.

The Footnote to Poetry

I am, author, poet

sole actor, setting down

determining, giving to each in season

Marshalling words and ink, filling

void with meaning, writing

on the face of the deep

Proud but comforted rebel

“Restless is our heart ‘til we find rest in You”

And rest is offered, assured

Rebellion tempered,

by expected parry and riposte

ironic twist to show me false

Justification of foolish lines

Truth, freeing falsehood

to be entirely false

that even what it has shall be taken from it

and given- testimony to the Truth

and there was evening, and there was morning

Dawn of the ironic eighth

10/16/08

A Good Friday Poem, On Pentecost

2010-05-24T09:50:00.001-07:00

Having chosen not to take summer classes, along with the job market’s collective decision to, as yet, not take me, has given me sufficient free time and boredom to type another post- this the promised poem of the last post. While this particular promise is, doubtless, one no one would hold me to, nevertheless for want of anything else to write about, I’ll keep it. I seem to remember including in my previous post some ridiculous metaphor comparing the writing of poetry to walking about the house naked- either is acceptable enough in itself, so long as not put forward for public exhibition. Awkward metaphors aside, it does point to the embarrassment experienced by others when faced with poetry and why it has been forced into such a peripheral role. Mine tend to take the form of versified prose- neither rhyming nor scanning particularly well, almost a form of symbolic and extremely short story rather than “Poetry” writ large.

Anyway, this particular poem needs a bit of a disclaimer first and will be followed, as always, by some discussion of it. While a better poet perhaps would not need these after-thoughts to serve as a sort of support where the form did not quite attain to the meaning I proposed to set out and such discussion does indeed weaken, in some respects, the poem itself (in the sense that the poem itself is what the author meant, the meaning of a poem- or novel for that matter- is not a second thing exterior to the work, but intrinsic to it, the whole of the work is its meaning), I like to nevertheless because the subject of the poem, in this case especially as will be seen, is the end and not the poem itself. More on this later. I also want, at the outset to make an apology (in the old sense of the term) for the use of a “cuss” word- earmuffs please- “damn”, in this case. While I think passages such as James 3 on taming the tongue are much more concerned with what we say of our fellow image bearers- cursing them- than the use or disuse of certain culturally agreed upon “out” words- which I will call cussing and perhaps has more to do with the Puritans than the Bible- I realize that some folks may disagree with me. For this reason I try to restrain my use of them, both for fear of offending the “weaker brother” and because it usually signifies either a failure of language or tact. It is interesting, I think, that our “cuss words” come from a very limited range of categories: damnation (crap, I said it again), sexual, excremental, questions of ancestry (the “b” words), but I don’t really know why that is. Nevertheless, I do think it serves a purpose here. So there. Besides, it’s my blog and I’ll write what I dang well please. And so to the poem, complete with Latin title and Bonhoeffer epigraph…

Lancea Longini

“There are only two possible ways of encountering Jesus: one must die or one must put Jesus to death. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Christ the Center

Cock-crow or morning trump awakens

whatever the means, the result is the same-

I roll out, automatic being, devoid of thought,

‘til shocking cold greets my feet, and reminds me

Why I hate this damned desert.

Welcome routine softens, redirects my hatred

boots and girdle, lorica and scabbard, separate;

allow me to step, to wake to new modes of being,

that whatever may be the work of death

that today must be done through me,

I have ceased responsibility.

I is swallowed by Empire.

Festal days here mean work;

Work, welcome respite from imbecile monotony,

of the endless procession of eventless days

in this provincial backwater.

Today a last, frenzied gasp of activity

before the slow, ceaseless silence,

the death that marks Saturn’s day.

A whole slate of executions is marked for today

(the locals seem fond enough of death, of spectacle

but stop on Saturdays, though the buzzards still feed)

I’m not sure of the names or numbers; I like it better that way.

A named man has existence, stands as fact,

draws me out of unnamed, Legion-state

into being, choice, judgment

no longer does Empire stand in my stead

I measure the merits of following duty and preserving my life,

and taking and punishing my fellow guilty man

(I’ve killed three named men in my life

I remember each face)

Being a centurion has its benefits,

I can usually avoid trials if I wish.

Today, I wish I had.

They bring into the praetorium a poor, thin local

the charge seems a bit absurd-

this man of clear eyes and a strong silence

is charged with claiming to be king,

King of the Jews

He is stripped and beaten and mocked

Silence

And then it happens; eye contact, a spear to my heart

It’s a look I’ve seen once before

So long age it seems, like a forgotten dream

or haunting nightmare – it came from Father.

In arrogant youth I slept with a whore,

then killed her husband when caught

I returned home shaken-

I desired a look of utter disgust from Father

Instead a haunting, withering love,

fully conscious of my betrayal, meeting me in my wrong

with love.

I rush out of the palace, but not before I hear

a name- Yeshua

Today will not be a good Friday.

I’m forced to walk this Yeshua up

to walk him up to the place of my skull and decide-

what an absurd figure he is:

carrying his cross

King of the Jews, with the weight of my government upon his shoulders

the battered face of love

haunting – I decide.

I must kill it, even if that means killing him

Or such a face will be the death of me.

10/23/08

After a long poem, prefaced with an overly long tangent on the propriety of cussin’, the last thing this post needs is a lengthy discussion of the poem. Oh well. First, a few explanatory notes, starting with the title. The Latin is not there to impress with my incredible ability to use google and Wikipedia, but to be evocative without spelling out clearly from the outset what is going on. Translated it means the spear (lancea) of Longinus, which unless you are up to date on your obscure, semi-fictional saints, will not mean much to you. The narrator is of course the centurion who, in Mark’s gospel and elsewhere exclaims at Christ’s death, “Surely this was the Son of God.” Church tradition holds that he later became a Christian and has come down to us a Saint Longinus (hence his somewhat dubious status, although he seems more legitimate than Saint Lazarus- not the brother of Mary and Martha, but the one from the parable whose wounds are licked by the dogs). What is important to the poem at hand is that all this occurs somewhere outside the bounds of the poem. Indeed, in a sense it is only once he becomes a Christian that he passes from being a nameless centurion into genuine existence and possesses a name- Longinus- all of which I associate with that enigmatic passage in Revelation about the members of the church at Pergamum receiving a white stone with their name on it, emblematic of their true identity, found in Christ. W.H. Auden has argued that proper names can mean nothing in poetry because one might just as easily replace one name with another. What he was getting at was that one cannot, by virtue of naming, call up that person into the poem as a sort of short cut; their presence must be intrinsic to the poem or else we create something analogous to an idol, a golden calf of our making that we then name- “Behold your god, O Israel”. Given this, I could not, simply by calling this man Yeshua make him the historical Jesus- he could be anyone and faith is required regardless, even if this man that we see suffering, being crucified is the man Jesus, we still need eyes to see that, “This man was the Son of God.” Since the name in itself cannot signify, instead I had to make possession of a name emblematic of authentic existence. No one else, not even the narrator, is named in the poem and as has been seen the narrator is in fact only named in so far as he relates to Christ (in his later canonization by some perhaps creative members of the Church). In His incarnation He escapes reduction to a theological abstraction that makes our system work (like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who has no need for Christ Incarnate), and demands both a response to Himself personally and if He is God, a consideration of how we treat His fellow image bearers. Thus, encounter with Jesus is a confrontation, requiring as Bonhoeffer said, we either be crucified with Him or nail Him up to be crucified; He does not bring peace, but a sword.

One might wonder why, at least on the basis of my last two poems, there are never any good Christians in my poetry (not that you probably spend much time wondering about my poetry, but they are conspicuously absent and I want to talk about why). Much of the reason lies in the explanation Lewis gave for never writing a counter book to the Screwtape Letters containing the correspondence of angels rather than demons- it would require a saint to write it. There is a more fundamental problem, I think, in the structure of drama itself. As I wrote last time (you can scroll, I’m not hyper-linking), comedy is the fundamental Christian form of drama because it mirrors the Christian eschaton, the consummation of marriage- between Christ and His Bride, the Church, and between Heaven and Earth as the New Jerusalem comes down. Comedy always ends shortly after the marriage, often with the trite assurance that “they lived happily ever after”; when the marriage occurs, the dramatic tension goes slack, the story is over. Any continuation of the story must reintroduce conflict to drive along the narrative. Because of this, the Christian life can never be dramatized in its completion; it must always be a movement towards, never, except at the end perhaps, an arrival at. The Gospel cannot be dramatized, only proclaimed. The indirect method, with God conspicuous in His absence, in the faults and accidental allusions of the characters is the only way forward. Irony, the sinner-character’s wild, lunging attacks easily parried and riposted by God, amounts to the implicit proclamation of something else, other- the Gospel. This is what the great Catholic author Flannery O’Connor was doing in her fiction as she explains her essay “The Fiction Writer & His Country”, “When you can assume that your audience shares the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that is does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock - to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.” I hope better things for y’all that read me, but you never know.

Whew. Word tells me I clocked in at about 2,000 words on this one. I need to hide that word counter somehow, so that, in the future, instead of feeling discouragingly long-winded upon completing a post, I can be blissfully and ignorantly long-winded. Also in searching for this poem, I came across a note concerning it, written it seems when I was only begin to conceive it. The note recommends some sort of ironic play on the command to Peter, “Arise, kill, and eat,” lining out the structure of the centurion’s day with he becoming in the end a partaker in the Eucharist. Doubtless this would have made for a better poem, but it apparently slipped through the cracks. As it is doubtful I would have been up to implementing it, it seems better to let it float out there, an interesting idea that can be idealized for its not being executed.

How Not to Relaunch a Blog

2010-05-03T18:47:00.000-07:00

Taking a page from my playbook of how not to launch a blog, I’m rebooting the Underground with some poetry. It is well known that lots of folks write poetry, don’t read anyone else’s poetry, and then occasionally publish their poems to the web, in order that they might be ignored by a broader audience. Publishing poetry to one’s blog is much like walking around one’s house completely naked when no one else is around; if your friends find out, they make think it odd, but since it really doesn’t affect them (given that they neither read your poems nor peek through your blinds), they regard it merely as a forgivable, perhaps even endearing quirk. In keeping with this illustrious tradition then, I here publish two poems for you to disregard. Afterward I want to comment a bit about what is going on in them; if there is one thing that galvanizes an audience more than collectively ignoring a poem, its collectively ignoring commentary on poetry. My readership is soaring, I can feel it…

The Hippopotamus

It is as if in creating us God asked a question and in awakening us to contemplation He answered the question. –Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

Strange, at the end of pilgrimage

When friends have failed,

Wife given bad advice,

houses collapsed, sons entombed,

daughters dead, and sheep stolen;

to be offered, tendered

as some way of explanation

when the answer is a question

and I am given the task of being

Both: answer and question

You seem satisfied, which is good-

you know, I almost envy you,

Tragedy is not without benefits.

It may sound romantic in verse

to lie among the lotus

I of iron limbs and bronze tubed bones,

I assure you: it is a stinking mire

the river rushes, but my feet remain

stuck here – a pilgrimage in place.

That is, in time I move

occasionally called up

as something counter, spare, original, strange

by Him- whose beauty is past change.

Praise Him.

I do, I try at least

But my vocation disheartens

Perhaps I should take out an ad,

begin looking for my replacement.

Wanted: One to prove

the inscrutability of God.

Apply within.

2/11/09

If you can but defer your excitement to rush on to another poem and will bear with me a bit, I want to talk a bit about what I tried to do here. If you’re one of those types that like to form your own opinions about these sort of things or frankly want to get as far away from the previous poem as possible, feel free to skip on down to the next section. (As an aside, it is fortunate in a way that this blog hasn’t really taken off yet. The plan is eventually to get James Earl Jones to do voiceovers for the audio version of all these posts on a podcast. If you were listening to that you would have to cover your ears and hum through this entire section to avoid the commentary. And no one really wants to do that.) Anyway, in case you missed it, this is told from the perspective of the behemoth (which seems decidedly hippopotamus-y to me) that God directs Job’s attention to at the end of the book (of Job- but hopefully you figured that out). Also, if you must continue thinking about the narrator as a hippopotamus, think about him more like a hippo you might find in Narnia rather than a hungry, hungry one that spends all its time trying to eat tiny white plastic balls; it is a rational and moral being. One more thing needs to be pointed out before continuing, the last few lines of the penultimate stanza are from a wonderful little poem by Hopkins called “Pied Beauty”, if they look out of place (you know by rhyming, being good lines of poetry, ect.) that’s why.

A couple things do need to be said, I think, about why this poem takes the form it does and why I felt it necessary to write it in this way (this will also help show what the next poem is trying for). The poem is not explicitly Christian, in fact the narrator has an ambiguous, sometimes subversive stance towards the faith. The key part is that he is wrong. He cannot, of course, leave his vocation because it is (take the leap with me here) the human condition. In Jesus Christ, God has declared His love and His decision to be for us. Whether in the alienated boredom of the hippo or the anguish of Job, the declaration of the beloved state is in the end the proof of God’s inscrutability. The narrator’s desire to know (anything, even the certainty of tragedy) is subverted by the necessity of his fundamental acceptance of the mystery- the declaration that God is Love in and through Christ. Far from rejecting his office or finding a replacement, the hippo embodies and invites others into the mystery found in the Gospel, to the praise of God. The previous sentence if taken out of context is of course silly in the extreme, but this is entirely appropriate to the colossal comedy of the Gospel. Comedy (in the old Shakespearian sense that the story ends in marriage) is the most appropriate way of dramatizing the Gospel. However, like many of Shakespeare’s later comedies (The Merchant of Venice, to take one example) a good deal of tragedy is mixed in- the Christian is not to be unrealistic or “pie-in-the-sky, we’ll all escape to Heaven by and by” about the tragedies that still are inflicted on the world on a daily basis, but they are not to despair. “Take heart, for I have overcome the world.” (John 16:33)

-Word tells me that I’ve now reached near a thousand words in this post, so I’ll defer my other poem to another, later post. Try to contain your excitement in the interim.

I return from hiatus to announce my hiatus...

2010-01-20T13:13:00.000-08:00

Feels like time for ab update, so here goes. I haven't posted for awhile now for a variety of reasons, chief among them that, no longer living at home in post-graduate limbo, I have better things to do. I just recently started at Truett Seminary in Waco which also seems unable to really decide if its conservative or liberal and so is a good fit for me. Also, I don't have a working computer or internet at the moment (which perhaps makes the origin of this a post a mystery to many), which has contributed to this blog's sorry neglect recently as it stands like some lonely orphan in a forgotten corner of the internet. On the bright side, I've been able to get quite a lot of reading done, including starting Dickens' wonderful David Copperfield (which is perhaps what occasioned my orphan metaphor in the preceding sentence). I feel that I've have perhaps been to effusive in my praise of some books in previous posts and so have no room to communicate how wonderful this novel really is. It is quite an undertaking (my copy comes in at some 700 pages), but is so light and enjoyable (if not necessarily in content, in style) that one should not feel intimidated, as I do before, say War and Peace- I know I should probably read it, but how to begin?

Anyway all that to say that this blog is not dead and I do plan to return to it at some point. I probably will not blog with the frequency I once did upon return (it got to the point where even I didn't read everything I wrote), but like General MacArthur said upon leaving the Philippines, "I will return"- in a not altogether unrelated aside, on my return this time I found the comments section inexplicably overrun by Asian characters of some sort.

The Best Of What I've Read This Year

2009-12-28T21:07:00.000-08:00

It seems everywhere I look, I'm finding year-end lists of the best books different people have read this year. I'll admit, I might have forgotten that I read some of these this year if I did not keep a list of books read in the back of a notebook (a practice I began this year on a suggestion from Joseph Epstein, who though he did not quite make the list, wrote a thoroughly enjoyable book of essays, In a Cardboard Belt!).
Non-fiction -
Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn- I read a single volume abridged version of the intimidating three volume work. Beyond the amazing circumstances in which it was written (recounted here), it really is a remarkable book. It's is hard to boil down all that happens in the book into one paragraph, but I really couldn't give it a much higher recommendation.
Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher- I really haven't read any other books on economics, so I really can't compare this to anything. The book is subtitled "economics as if people mattered" and gave me a lot to think about. This may be an uninformed assertion (but isn't that what the internet is for after all?), but I would be willing to bet not many other books on economics cite papal bulls in their texts.
Shelby Foote's Civil War: A Narrative- Only read the first volume so far, but it is a very readable history. Foote was actually a novelist originally (and a lifelong friend of Walker Percy) and this shows in his writing. It probably deserves a wider readership than it has received, being too long - at three hefty, 500+ page volumes - for the casual reader and lacking the endless footnotes preferred by professional historians. This video of Foote from Ken Burns' Civil War documentary most likely will do more to recommend it to you than I can.
The Dyer's Hand by W.H. Auden- I really, really like this book. I would really, really like to recommend it to you. But, I doubt you would be interested. It's big, very "literary" for lack of a better term- lots of Shakespeare, Goethe, and Don Giovanni (by way of Kierkegaard), and unavailable at most book stores. If you have the temperment for it and can find it at a library (I checked it out from LSU's), I would suggest you leave your computer now and go get it.
Signposts in a Strange Land by Walker Percy- a volume of essays. You need to read The Moviegoer or this. I'm a big fan of the rest of his work, but these two seem to be good introductions to me.
Surprised by Hope by N.T. Wright- I'm not sure if this is a word, but I would describe this book as "epiphanous" for me. Really opened my eyes to a lot of things, as I've mentioned before on this blog (unfortunately it also kind of ruined bluegrass for me, except maybe for this song, "My Bones Gonna Rise Again". In other, but not totally unrelated news, I really like this poem by Hopkins

Novels-
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole- Wonderful, very funny novel set in New Orleans. Apparently it's funny even if you aren't from around New Orleans, because it is pretty well known nationally. Benny Grunch's "12 Yats of Christmas", probably is not.
Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome- Another very funny novel, but one that was written in the nineteenth century. If you have ever read and enjoyed one of Chesterton's novels, you will probably like this too. It was one of two novels this year that I purposely slowed my reading of to enjoy longer (Hannah Coulter being the other). There are many wonderful lines I could choose from as way of recommendation but in the spirit of the author, I'll simply cut and paste this one, "I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller- just your typical science fiction novel following an order of Catholic monks over a few thousands of years after a nuclear holocaust. I actually talked about this book way back in the infancy of this blog- August. You can find that here.
The Power and the Glory by Grahame Greene- when I first read this, I thought it may have been the best novel I'd ever read. I still really like it, but it hasn't stuck with me the way, say, Brothers Karamazov has.
Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry. Just a beautiful novel and really a joy to read. Very similar in outlook to the economic principles set out by Schumacher- agrarianism, small scale for local markets, appropriate technology, ect., but to call it simply a dramatization of those ideas would be a disservice to what a good novel it really is.
Bread and Wine by Ignazio Silone- written by a lasped Catholic turned Communist, and then subsequently turned lasped Communist (because Communism is a sort of religion, with its own eschatology that puts hope in the proletariat) about a Communist in Mussolini's Italy who to must disquise himself as a priest after returning from exile. He eventually rewrote large portions of the work after becoming disenchanted with communism. According to The Life You Save Might Be Your Own (a book on Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and of course Flannery O'Connor, that while enjoyable and informative wasn't really excellent and didn't make the list), it was one of Dorothy Day's favorites, which was a good enough recommendation for me.

Young, Restless, and Reformed- A failure of catechesis?

2009-12-19T23:10:00.000-08:00

Before we dive in, I have two confessions to make. First, I'm not sure I'm right about this (not that I'm sure I'm right about my other posts). But if one can't post unsubstantiated claims on their own blog, where can one go (besides wikipedia)? Second, I'm am not at all "Reformed". I'm even a little ambigous about the Reformation; I think it was necessary, but a necessary evil nonetheless. No John Calvin bobbleheads for me, thank you very much.

One of the big looming changes, and potential problems, facing Baptists today along with various non-denom churches is the growth of the so called "Young, Restless, and Reformed". This refers to the large group of 20- and 30-somethings who follow a Calvinist theology and are largely unsatisfied with the preaching at their churches (so they become fan-boys of one of many preachers with the first name John- Piper, McArthur, Edwards, ect.) I don't want to talk about Calvinism here however (or really anywhere on the internet as I will probably be much less charitable than I would be in person), but instead want to try and trace where this growth may come from.

As I said earlier, this new Reformed movement is chiefly drawing its ranks from among Baptist and non-denominational evangelicals and I think this might be due to some factors within these churches generally. Typically believers from these traditions reach adulthood with a hodge-podge of teachings from various preachers, youth ministers, Sunday school teachers, and untalented CCM artists, often without anything really holding it together or synthesizing it into a coherent whole.

Calvinism, for all its faults is logically consistent within itself. It follows teachings to their logical conclusion, even if that means heresy (I'm looking at you, Limited Atonement). When met with a system like this, often upon reaching college, many are attracted to it because it makes much more sense than the scattered, sometimes contradictory teachings they previously have experienced. I think it is significant that traditions that have a program of catechesis (wikipedia article here for my fellow Baptists who may not be familiar with the term) don't seem to experience this as much (but I have no real data on that, just an impression, hence my disclaimer at the outset). Say what you want about Catholics only memorizing the Church's teachings by rote bu not really believing or "feeling" them- actually don't, you will at the least be uncharitable and more often than not be wrong- but they could at least give you some reasonable explanation of what they believe without resorting to the old standby "Sunday School answers".

I probably need to do some more thinking about this and there definitely are other factors involved, such as the overwhelmingly Reformed domination of the blogosphere (a bit of a chicken-or-the-egg perhaps), but I thought I'd throw it out there. And just in case I didn't offend any and all Reformed readers who may have happened upon this blog or alert the discerna-bloggers to my presence, let me add this- I really like N.T. Wright.

Civil War and Civil Unions

2009-12-19T22:17:00.000-08:00

The Civil War pretty decisively settle the question of state's rights leading to the much increased power of Federal government over the states self-determination. Two places where this dynamic between state rights and federal authority are particularly contentious are the issues of gay marriage and abortion, with constitutional ammendments being proposed in both cases in order to settle the issues at a federal level. My concern here is not to argue the specific merits of each case, as that has been done endlessly elsewhere, but to ask how much a strong states rights position makes sense here. While I do agree that something approaching a consensus is much more easily reached at a state level, I wonder how much this makes sense given the advancements in transportation technology. The interstate system has had a well known leveling effect on the country, making for a much more homogenized culture. A civil war along state lines would be unimaginable these days because of the erosion of a regionalized mindset. Furthermore there are well documented cases of people simply moving to another state to get around laws (gay couples flocking to Massachussets and Vermont for example). So does a strong states' rights position still make sense?

British Government Now Determines who is Jewish

2009-12-16T20:18:00.000-08:00

From First Things.

Alarming link of the week- The British Supreme Court has ruled that preferential enrollment in Jewish schools for Jewish children is racist. An Orthodox Jewish day school in England was sued for denying enrollment to the child of a woman who converted to Judaism in a "progressive synagogue" who did not fit their criteria for conversion. The ruling effectively makes it impossible for Jewish law, which traces descent matrilinealy, unable to determine who is considered Jewish in a legal sense. Jewish schools will now have create other criteria than religious law which has been in place for some 3,500 years to determine the legal status of Jews; essentially a "non-Jewish definition of who is Jewish."

Bad stuff in Britain. The Catholic Church there has been pretty vocal in their support for the Jewish position; the Anglicans have been said to remain "smugly silent", which seems unfair, I doubt Rowan Williams sat around suppressing a smirk as he resolved not to speak out on the travails of Jewish day schools, but I really don't know. The law may be changed in the future, but in the meantime it makes things very difficult for the Jewish community. It would be nice to see common-sense prevail here, but that's probably a bit too much to ask.

Obama and Peace

2009-12-14T11:44:00.000-08:00

First, read his Nobel acceptance speech here.

Now I'm tempted to tear into this, go on and on about how there can be no basis for peace when you don't acknowledge the fundamental value of human life, including those of the unborn, how he obfuscates and covers over the use of violence to make it seem to be in the service of peace, but I won't. Instead, I'm going to let T.S. Eliot and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn do my talking for me.

Obama, drawing on Kennedy, talks about a "gradual evolution of human institutions" to eliminate evil.

To which T.S. Eliot, the former American, sends in this preemptive strike some seventy-five years in advance (because after all, preemptive strikes are the American way- don't turn the other cheek, slap the other person before you have to),

"They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and winthin
By dreaming up systems so perfect that no one will need to be good"

-T.S. Eliot, Choruses from the Rock
And as this guy at Touchstone magazine points out (by way of Christianitytoday), this would place the responsibilty in the hands of someone higher up rather than individuals. One can imagine Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who experienced this kind of thing first hand, adding,

"This is surely the main problem of the twentieth century: is it permissible to merely carry out orders and commit one's conscience to someone else's keeping? Can a man do without ideas of his own about good and evil, and merely derive them from the printed instructions and verbal orders of his superiors? Oaths! Those solemn pledges pronounced with a tremor in the voice and intended to defend the people against evildoers: see how easily they can be misdirected to the services of evildoers and against the people!"-A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
-This passage comes at the end of a chapter entitled "The Kids with Tommy Guns" about the young, indoctrinated guards of the Gulag. The guards were never allowed to speak with any of the prisoners, only given leave to shoot any of them. He relates the story of one guard who believed a prisoner was about to run out of the column he was marching. The guard squeezed off a burst that killed five men. When other guards' testimony had shown the column to be marching quietly along, he was given the punishment- fifteen days detention (in a heated guardhouse) for killing five men.

And finally another quote from Solzhenitsyn, this about the use of violence in general,

"Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take the lie as his principle."

A few various things and a poem from Hopkins

2009-12-08T23:59:00.000-08:00

Update: As one commenter pointed out, I neglected to provide a link to Jacobs blog at The New Atlantis, Text Patterns. Good stuff there too.
Just a few quick things here:
1. I've been a tiny bit upset by the spectacular fall in quality at The American Scene lately, to the point where I've removed it from the links. Things started to go downhill for me when Alan Jacobs left (who was the reason I started reading in the first place). I would say more about this and speculate about why this has happened, but the truth is I very rarely go there and do not care to figure out what has happened. There still are some good back-logged posts by Jacobs on topics such as Lewis, the meaning of the symbols (and whether or not, for instance, some Southerner's self-determination of the meaning of the Confederate flag as a non-racist symbol really makes it so), or T.S. Eliot's decision not to publish Animal Farm when given an early crack at the manuscript; or you could click on a more recent post, like one from today that claims to link to a "fascinating post on molasses". It's really your call.

2. A little over a month ago I put up a post about St. Anslem's ontological argument for the existence of God. A few things have been troubling me about it. First, I said something about Christ not being able to be thought about in terms of perfection "as touches His manhood" which of course would seem to be in conflict with the Athanasian Creed (not written by Athanasius by the way): "perfect man, perfect God." The point I was trying to make, though I may not have made it clearly enough, was that because the pre-Resurrection body was subject to death and not aesthetically perfect, as Isaiah summed up "we esteemed Him not", we can't perhaps talk of him as materially perfect. But this is not to say He was not morally perfect or sinless. The confusion comes because in trying to speak of Christ in His human nature without regard to His divine nature, we divide what cannot be divided but exists as a hypostasis, to use the fancy theological term. Secondly I kinda dogged Anselm for putting forward his argument, but I was perhaps wrong to do so. I have since read that he described his project as "faith seeking understanding", which is to say that he did not hope to convince people that God became man in Christ, but as a Christian sought to understand and support his faith. This is, I think, the real use for such apologetic work and in fact, it seems this is where it gets its most use; many more Christians have bought The Case for Christ than so-called "seekers". I'm very sceptical of this kind of work to bring people to faith, which I think is of a different kind than what one may be argued into through an apologetic, but I do think it has its place for encouragement of the Christian and allowing them to see how firm the foundation is that they have built upon. So my apologies to St. Anselm and any of his descendants who may have been offended.

3. The main thing I wanted to though was point you to this poem by Hopkins. Besides having the awesome middle name "Manley", he is a good poet, and at times a very profound religious thinker. He gets carried away sometimes in his poetry and uses so many musical devices at the expense of coherence that I wonder if he even knew what he was talking about sometimes. This is not one of those however, and seems a good thing to read and think about during Advent.

Nondum

Verily Thou art a God that hidest Thyself.’ -Isaiah xlv. 15

God, though to Thee our psalm we raise
No answering voice comes from the skies;
To Thee the trembling sinner prays
But no forgiving voice replies;
Our prayer seems lost in desert ways,
Our hymn in the vast silence dies.

We see the glories of the earth
But not the hand that wrought them all:
Night to a myriad worlds gives birth,
Yet like a lighted empty hall
Where stands no host at door or hearth
Vacant creation’s lamps appall.

We guess; we clothe Thee, unseen King,
With attributes we deem are meet;
Each in in his own imagining
Sets up a shadow in Thy seat;
Yet know not how our gifts to bring,
Where seek Thee with unsandalled feet.

And still th’unbroken silence broods
While ages and while aeons run,
As erst upon chaotic floods
The Spirit hovered ere the sun
Had called the seasons’ changeful moods
And life’s first germs from death had won.

And still th’abysses infinite
Surround the peak from which we gaze.
Deep calls to deep, and blackest night
Giddies the soul with blinding daze
That dares to cast its searching sight
On being’s dread and vacant maze.

And Thou art silent, whilst Thy world
Contends about its many creeds
And hosts confront with flags unfurled
And zeal is flushed and pity bleeds
And truth is heard, with tears impearled,
A moaning voice among the reeds.

My hand upon my lips I lay;
The breast’s desponding sob I quell;
I move along life’s tomb-decked way
And listen to the passing bell
Summoning men from speechless day
To death’s more silent, darker spell.

Oh! till Thou givest that sense beyond,
To shew Thee that Thou art, and near,
Let patience with her chastening wand
And lead me child-like by the hand
If still in darkness not in fear.

Speak! whisper to my watching heart
One word-as when a mother speaks
Soft, when she sees her infant start,
Till dimpled joy steals o’er its cheeks.
Then, to behold Thee as Thou art,
I’ll wait till morn eternal breaks.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

Vodka Pills and Venn Diagrams

2009-12-04T22:49:00.000-08:00

Just found this post on one of the occasionally wonderful First Things blogs. Apparently a Russian scientist developed a way to turn alcohol into a powder that could be stored in pills. While this sounds like an absolutely terrible idea, it did have the happy consequence of producing this great opening sentence to a post with the equally great title "How to Get Drunk Like George Jetson", "If you drew a Venn diagram of 'Things you wash down with orange juice' and 'Things the world doesn't need', this would be in the center: vodka in a pill form."

The post in which I rip-off C.S. Lewis while doing my best Rob Bell impersonation

2009-12-04T20:50:00.000-08:00

I'm fixing to smush a couple of posts into one here. Two things are going to happen here, first I want to talk about humility and competition in a roundabout way like Mr. Bell might (for one of my previous impersonations of him look here), then I will discuss what I think he is doing by going about things in the way he does. Don't look at it as having an extra long post to read (or not), look at it as getting a little lagniappe, like getting snow two years in a row South Louisiana (maybe). Oh and before I continue you might as well just read Mere Christianity as what I will write here, because that's where I stole most of it from.

I don't have an alarm clock in my room.

I.
Like.
It.
This.
Way.
(perhaps that's going a bit overboard on the po-mo formatting, sorry)
Anyway I have found that this is the best way, for me at least, to set things up. See, I'm a really light sleeper. Any noise is liable to wake me up and because of this I have often found myself waking up in the middle of the night. Previously, I had a clock nearby, so everytime I woke, I looked to see what time it was. No matter what time it happened to be, I found myself dissatisfied with having woken up at that particular time. After I while I realized why this is the case.

There is no "right time" to wake up in the middle of the night.

If I woke up at say 2am, I would think to myself, "Crap. I've been asleep for like an hour and half. That's like a nap. Now I'll never get back to sleep." Or if I woke up later at 5 or so, I would think to myself, "Crap. There's like an hour til daylight. Now I'll never get back to sleep." If I split the difference and woke up 3:30, I would think to myself, "Crap. It's 3:30. I need to pee. Now I'll never get back to sleep." No matter where I was at, I wasn't satisfied.

And that's kind of like our lives isn't it.

We can't be smart enough, or popular enough, or handsome or pretty enough, or whatever enough. We aren't satisfied with what ever our place is because we put it in competition with others. We don't want to be good-looking, we want to be the best looking man in the room. We are quite content with our own humor, but when someone else is funnier at the party, we think them to be chasing after attention too much.

Humility and self-deprecation are not the same thing however. Too many pretty girls go about trying to convince themselves and others that they are really quite plain; too many talented or intelligent men go about dismissing the abilities that could serve others. This often leads to a sort of falseness in revealing and acknowledging our abilities. It has come to be expected that the musician, when asked to perform in some private setting should act bashful, dismiss his skills, and perhaps even decline to play a few times before he begins; knowing all the while that what he would most like to do at that moment is perform, perhaps not even for selfish reasons, but because he knows the others will enjoy it as much as he. Humility is not a process of denying the blessings one has been given, or if privately acknowledging them, doing one's best not to let others no that this is the case. Instead, the humble man acknowledges his own quality, thanks God, and then does not think much more about it. Pride can't exist in a vacuum. It feeds on competition with others. When I find someone else superior to myself in whatever it is I take pride in, this pride is capable of producing hatred of the other. And hate of course is tantamount to murder, because it wishes the other did not exist.

Humility is not like this, it is often a sort of happy indifference. The kind that helps you sleep at night.

Shifting gears a bit, I would like to talk about what I think Rob Bell does when he does things like this (albeit much better than I just did, not that I'm jealous). Now some folks think I don't like Rob Bell because I've voiced some pretty strong disagreements I have with some things he said in the past. This post, with it's tongue-in-cheek absurd illustration probably only reinforced that perception. But in fact, I like what he does. He seems like a cool enough guy too, if a bit metro. I can't see him coming along on one of the famous "man night" bbq and action movie nights of the undergrad days, but I think we'd probably get along alright. Furthermore, I like what he does and I'm going to tell you why. In a new paragraph.

Rob Bell reverses the typical ADD non sequiturs that typify alot of amateur writing. If for instance, he start talking about church and his vision of Christianity and then all of sudden said, "By the way, church reminds me of jumping on a trampoline" (to use an example from Velvet Elvis) his editor would hopefully cut it, and may start to reconsider giving him a book deal. Instead he opens by talking about trampolines, or music, or something like that and relates this to some aspect of Christianity.

Going about it in this way gives his metaphors the effect of revelation. When he finally comes around to it, one says, "Ah, trampolines. They're bouncy. Alot like Christianity with a pretty generous, non-exclusionary orthodoxy." This has, at its far end, the effect of redeeming the secular world for the religious life for, if nothing else, a source of inspiration in understanding religious life. Ideally, this split would not exist, and as Luther said, "Milkmaids [would] milk to the glory of God." But there is a split. Rob Bell with all his far-fetched, creative, and sometimes tenuously connected metaphors helps re-introduce the religious life into a secularized day-to-day.

And so I'd like to tip my hat to him.

Metaphorically.

Princeton Professor Craves "Funky Love"

2009-12-02T23:40:00.000-08:00

By way of First Things this article on Cornell West's ghost-written memoir. The highlight for me is the following paragraph, taken from the book,

The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high -- and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!”

This may the most breathtakingly horrendous thing I have read in recent memory.

Google Books

2009-11-29T16:43:00.000-08:00

This may be old news to some, but I just discovered Google books. It has all sorts of full version books available if they are over 100 or so years old. It also has preview versions of more recent works. Good stuff if you have an interest in the classics- Austen, Dickens, Hawthorne, ect are all there for free.

Advent Odds and Ends

2009-11-28T09:39:00.000-08:00

I feel a smattering of posts coming on, but this one is going to deal specifically with Advent.

Advent is one of my of my favorite times of the year. In South Louisiana the weather is cold enough to be a nice change and make you feel "all Christmas-y" but isn't nasty and wet like it typically gets later in the winter (with the nastiness invariably reaching it's peak during Mardi Gras no matter if it comes early or late). That said and with the risk of sounding like Charlie Brown in his Christmas special, I don't like Christmas before Christmas day, all the commercialism and crappy music (a Bob Dylan Christmas album? I mean really, is that necessary?), the whole month long parade of terrible Lifetime movies being shown on tv and traffic filling the roads as parents buy far too much for their little darlings at home. Anyway Advent is one of the places where I feel the Baptists are missing out the most by not really using the church calendar. You may get a four week sermon series on "Reclaiming Christmas" or an occasional diatribe about the evils of abreviating the season X-mas, but as for putting things in context where things make sense and anticipating the Second Advent, you are largely on your own.

So, I thought I'd post some links and things here about Advent and resources you might could use. I'll probably post more later. If you find something you would like to share through this blog, feel free to put it in the comments section (I'm not sure if you can hyperlink or not there, if not, I can copy and paste the link into a post).
1. First a good article from First Things about how Advent saves us from the month long exhaustion of ballooning commercial Christmas. First Things will probably have much more in the future, good catholic magazine that they are, but you might also want to check up on Christianity Today periodically, I remember them having a good Advent calendar last year.

2. Let me first say that I usually do not like most Christmas music I hear. It is usually cheesy, campy, or just plain, good ol' fashioned awful. The more Santa Claus is involved in a song, generally the worse the song becomes. I feel like Christmas albums are probably very easy to make, but they are hard to make well. Adding to this problem is the sheer number of albums out there; artists feel like they need to make their album unique to stand out from the rest of the pack and this can lead to some spectacularly bad decisions. With that lengthy disclaimer out of the way, I will now proceed to plug a Christmas album. I really like Sufjan Stevens Christmas album. I'm not proud of this, but I listened to a few songs before Thanksgiving this year, something I am generally oposed to. There are moments when the album reaches just about the perfect tone. And this is because its a weird album, and Sufjan is a weird sounding artist. The Incarnation should sound mysterious, and that is why we always feel something when we go to a candlelit Christmas Eve service and sing songs like "What Child is This?"; God become man needs to cause wonder or you really don't understand what is going on. Sufjan's cd has moments like this. It also has ridiculous but fun songs like the wonderfully titled "Get Behind Me, Santa!" or "Come on! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance". Anyway you can listen to it online here ("What Child is This?", "Three Ships", the first version of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel", and "Star of Wonder" are standouts).

3. Finally something I did intermittently last year and hope to be more consistent about this year is reading the Daily Office. These readings come from the Book of Common Prayer and are divided for separate morning and evening readings if you desire to do so, but I usually read it all at once. Typically the Psalms are read first followed by two readings in the morning and one in the evening. If you split it up, the Gospel is usually read in the morning every other year, flip-flopping with the other New Testament reading. The bracketed portions are considered optional extensions of the reading. It is good to remember that these are simply the suggested readings, you may extend them as you wish. I'll post the first week here and hopefully will remember to put the others up later. The reading starts with this coming Sunday, tomorrow.

Sunday Psalms 146, 147 * 111, 112, 113
                           Isa. 1:1-9   2Pet. 3:1-10    Matt 25:1-13
Monday             1,2,3 * 4,7
                           Isa. 1:10-20    1Thess.1:1-10   Luke 20:1-8
Tuesday             5,6 * 10,11
                          Isa. 1:21-31    1Thess. 2:1-12   Luke 20:9-18
Wednesday        119:1-24 * 12,13,14
                          Isa. 2:1-11    1Thess. 2:13-20   Luke 20:19-26
Thursday          18:1-20 * 18:21-50
                         Isa 2:12-22   1Thess.3:1-13     Luke 20:27-40
Friday              16,17 *   22
                         Isa 3:8-15    1Thess.4:1-12     Luke 20:41-21:4
Saturday          20, 21:1-7(8-14)   *   110:1-5(6-7), 116, 117
                         Isa 4:2-6   1Thess.4:13-18    Luke 21:5-19

Tintern Abbey

2009-11-19T13:29:00.000-08:00

Here’s an excerpt from Wordsworth’s wonderful poem with the wonderfully long and typically British title, “Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour.” If you understand what he is talking about when he writes about the mood “In which the burden of the mystery/ In which the heavy and the weary weight/ Of all this unintelligible world,/ Is lightened,” then you can come camping with me anytime. If not, I don’t know what to tell you. Go take a walk through the woods or something and rethink your life.

In this passage he talks about how the memory of his last visit to the banks of the Wye has served him. This probably should remind you of C.S. Lewis if you’ve read him talking about Joy or Beauty (which he always capitalizes).

These beauteous forms

Through a long absence, have not been to me

As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:

But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din

Of towns and cities, I have owed to them

In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,

Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;

And passing even into my purer mind,

With tranquil restoration: - feelings too

Of unremembered pleasure: such perhaps,

As have no slight or trivial influence

On that best portion of a good man’s life,

His little, nameless, unremembered acts

Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,

To them I may have owed another gift,

Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burden of the mystery,

In which the heavy and the weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened:- that serene and blessed mood,

In which the affections gently lead us on,-

Until, the breath of this corporeal frame

And even the motion of our human blood

Almost suspended, we are laid asleep

In body, and become a living soul:

While with an eye made quiet by the power

Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,

We see into the life of things

Freedom in Obedience

2009-11-17T21:11:00.000-08:00

O God, who art the author of peace and lover of concord, in knowledge of whom standeth our eternal life, whose service is perfect freedom: Defend us, thy humble servants, in all assaults of our enemies; that we, surely trusting in thy defense, may not fear the power of any adversaries; through the might of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.- Collect for Peace, Book of Common Prayer

I want to look at the phrase in this collect "whose service is perfect freedom". It interests me (as the italics I inserted probably should've tipped you off to). It seems counter-intuitive, how is service freedom? James says something along same lines in his epistle speaking of the "law that gives freedom" or "the law of liberty" depending on what translation you're looking at. This is what I want to discuss, and to do that I want to go back to Genesis and the Garden.

After creating man, God gives him three commands: to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth and have
dominion over its creatures (both Gen. 1:28) and not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Now this last command stands out from the rest for several reasons, not least of which is that it is the one Adam and Eve fail to do. It is the only prohibitive command, the other two are positive in that they tell man what he should do. But more than that, and here is where I begin to steal from C.S. Lewis' wonderful novel Perelandra that reimagines the Fall in a different setting, the command not to eat is the only one not immediately recommended to them by their own nature; man naturally desires to be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth and thrive upon it (and we still don't seem to struggle too much with these two). This prohibitive command is actually the source of their freedom however, because in it they have the freedom to choose obedience, to love. If God had simply made obedience completely congruent with their natural desires, love for Him could not be shown through obedience as it would merely be acting in self-interest. It is what seems at first to be the arbitrariness of the command, because after all, the fruit is "good for food and a delight to the eyes and the tree was to be desired to make one wise," it is this arbitrariness of asking obedience outside of one's appetites that makes true obedience out of love possible. Which of course brings up a big problem- is the command, in fact, arbitrary?

Well the short answer is no, but it is important to see how and why we get there. You could perhaps argue that the choice of that particular tree was arbitrary, that the act of disobedience rather than some special property of the tree is what imparted the knowledge of evil to those who had previously only known the goodness of God and of His Creation, but that is not the core of the issue (no apple-related pun intended). We can see that obedience is not arbitrary by the effects of the Fall if nothing else. Man as "priesthood of all creation", to use Maximus the Confessor's term, affects the whole of Creation when he falls. N.B.- I realize that the sin-related account for natural evil raises alot of problems, for example, didn't hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, ect. all exist before the Fall since that is a function of how our planet regulates itself (as this clip from the Muppet Babies explains around the 6 min mark), but that is the subject of another post, one which I probably won't ever get around to writing. Obedience and the love of God is anything but arbitrary just as sin, it's inverse, is not arbitrary. Dante says something very interesting in the third canto of his Inferno, on the Gates of Hell is an inscription which reads in part,

"Justice moved my Great Maker; God Eternal
Wrought me: the Power, and the Unsearchably
High Wisdom, and the Primal Love supernal"

Charles Williams gives the following explanation in The Figure of Beatrice, "If there is God, if there is freewill, then man is able to choose the opposite of God. Power, Wisdom, Love, gave man freewill; therefore Power, Wisdom, Love, created the gate of hell and the possibility of hell." So then God in allowing us to truly love, also allows for the possibility of disobedience, of sin.

So, all that to say that obedience allows for us to love. I could've probably just told you to go read 1 John, but then the link to the Muppet Babies wouldn't have made much sense, would it?

A Cormac McCarthy Interview

2009-11-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal has an interview up of Cormac McCarthy, the guy who wrote, among other things, No Country for Old Men. McCarthy's writing has been described as Flannery O'Connor without God, but the interview shows at least some interest or openness to the idea of God. Now the interest seems to be confined to at most a vague "spirituality", but still makes for an interesting read.

A quote from W.H. Auden

2009-11-16T16:57:00.000-08:00

Over at Alan Jacobs blog, there is this wonderful quote from W.H. Auden's excellent book, The Dyer's Hand:
"All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. (Bertrand Russell). If so, then infernal science differs from human science in that it lacks the notion of approximation: it believes its laws to be exact. [. . .]

The first anthropological axiom of the Evil One is not All men are evil, but All men are the same; and his second — Men do not act, they only behave. [. . .]

One of our greatest spiritual dangers is our fancy that the Evil One takes a personal interest in our perdition. He doesn't care a button about my soul, any more than Don Giovanni cared a button about Donna Elvira’s body. I am his “one-thousand-and-third in Spain.”

One can conceive of Heaven having a Telephone Directory, but it would have to be gigantic, for it would include the Proper Name and address of every electron in the Universe. But Hell could not have one, for in Hell . . . its inhabitants are identified not by name but by number. They do not have numbers, they are numbers"

The rest of the post, which is itself in reference to a First Things post, can be found here. Jacobs' blog is worthwhile if you are interested in literature and how technology is affecting the dissemenation of knowledge. And of course I hardily recommend reading Auden, but that goes without saying.

Strange Civil War Metaphors by Chinese Diplomats

2009-11-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

From First Things. A Chinese diplomat compared pre-occupation Tibet to the antebellum South and said that Pres. Obama, being black and admiring Lincoln should support what they are doing. Tibet was a thoroughly imperfect feudal society before Chinese occupation. It is hard to imagine however that the Tibetans are all itching for freedom so they can re-impose feudalism; the government in exile in India democratically elected a prime minister in 2006. Maybe this kind of questionable logic works in China where state-run press and repressive policing gives people no chance to express their opinions. But not here in 'merica; we have Lee Greenwood and his fringed leather jacket, dang it.

Congnitive Mapping and Wickedly Swerving Free-Kicks

2009-11-12T22:29:00.000-08:00

Watch the video before you read the post. It's less than a minute long.

Something came up in a book I'm reading, Shopclass as Soulcraft, about currently en vogue models of brain function. The rise of computers has led cognitive scientists to conceive of the brain in terms of computing power, carrying out calculations at a rate of speed that is inferior to modern computers. (Interestingly enough the study of the brain has influenced computer design as well with artificial neural networks that make connections of varying strengths based on repetition of pathway usage similar to the way neurons function.) This modern conception of the brain as computer has some significant gaps I feel, failing to account for the intuitive use of the intellect by experts in their fields.

The video is a case in point. Either Roberto Carlos is a genius, making an incredible amount of calculations to hit a ball with the right amount of force, perfect initial direction, and sufficient spin to make the ball clear the wall and then curve back into the goal or something else is going on. As a former soccer player, I can tell you without a doubt something else is happening. When you go to strike the ball you look at the spot you want to put the ball and then look at the spot that you know you need to hit the ball; if all proceeds as planned you get a sense of having kicked the ball well, not of having carried out complicated computations. The brain and body seem to be intimately connected in this process somehow with practice creating the muscle memory, leg strength and the "knowledge" of how to hit the ball. When we conceive of the brain as simply an impressive, if now somewhat inferior, data processor, we really can't account for what Roberto Carlos is doing when he scores on poor Fabian Barthez (the French goalie in the clip). Man is not however an autonomous conscience that inhabits a body. One of the problems with Descartes separation of the conciousness from the body is that it uses the language of an embodied existence to describe a state in which the senses that supply our language are discarded in his program of radical scepticism. Language is built upon the senses. Even Helen Keller when learning language from her teacher Annie Sullivan thought in tactile terms: "This wetness running through my hand is related to the signs being made into my palm- water." Conciousness, if by nothing else than language, is tied to the body.

This is all to say that I really don't know what is going on with how the brain works in relation to the body in performing tasks that are accomplished intuitively, but I don't think the computational model is adequate.

Catholic Bishop on Abortion Debate

2009-11-11T21:38:00.000-08:00

This from First Things. A Catholic bishop calls out a senator who says disagreement with the church on abortion doesn't "make him less of a Catholic". First Things is a good, fairly ecumenical magazine that tends to be center-right for the most part- check out Alan Jacobs or David B. Hart articles if you go to the site, they're usually pretty good

The Mix-Tape Revolution

2009-11-11T00:18:00.000-08:00

One of the most saddening and deplorable developments in modern society is, indubitably, the fall from prominence that mix-tapes have experienced from their lofty perch atop the courtship ritual food-chain. In the golden days, before these new-fangled computers, and napsters, and what-not made music so readily available, suitors would spend hours manually recording the newest Bon Jovi songs onto cassette. Those days have sadly left us, and now prospective targets must be wooed by other means such as personal conversation, without recourse to the eloquence of modern poets like Celine Dion or the 2 Live Crew- but how else can I communicate that (Everything I Do) I Do it for You except through the tender croonings and smooth sounds of Bryan Adams?

But all is not lost.

While in the shower mourning over the loss of the mix-tape as courting ritual and simultaneously celebrating my newly minted compilation of various artists of a country bent, I came to a startling revelation: I have a blog.

I have a blog.

A blog with a readership that must run at least into the half-dozens.

I could start a grass-roots campaign that would bring the mix-tape method of courtship back into national, nay, international prominence (I hear the cassette is still big in Eastern Europe and rural Canada, so that's a start). This will not be like other grass-roots campaigns however; Fox News will not create it, seemingly out of whole cloth, promote it daily on telecasts and through websites and then be shocked when their coverage of the completely spontaneous "movement among the people" fufills all the expectations they had placed on it as they orchestrated it over the course of several months- no, it will grow from the ground up like... like... grass... no even lower than that, lower than the grass, it will start at the roots of the grass!

And that's where you come in. Now you may say, "I already have a significant other," or "I'm really not looking," or "I'm female and not that aggressive, in-your-face, I'm-gonna-get-me-my-man type, I like the guy to come after me", or "I actually hate the idea of mix-tapes, it's a weird thing to do, couldn't you just go about it in a normal way that doesn't depend on cheesy top-40 hits"- but let me tell you something, "None of that matters". This is a grass-roots campaign and you, my friend are thinking at a grass level. We won't actually be making mix-tapes for people to try and get them to associate all the romantic feelings that "On Bended Knee" produces in them with us, instead we will be promoting mix tape awareness. The important thing is not that mix-tapes are used by musically sensitive singles to woo prospective mates, but that they are aware of the idea of using mix-tapes to woo prospective mates . You don't get rootier than that.

Let's start this thing.

Would Montaigne be a blogger?

2009-11-07T17:22:00.000-08:00

Instead of adding more frustrated/bitter post-game comments to facebook (because I've done enough of that already), I thought I'd put up a quick post here.

This isn't really something I've thought about much- for one thing because I don't think much about blogging, as any number of my posts will attest- but I'm wondering if in the rise of blogging we may be seeing a return of the essay. The classic essay, pioneered by Michel de Montaigne, a French guy, in the 16th century is basically a short article written by someone who is usually a non-specialist and from a personal point of view. The term comes from the French essayer through Montaigne, and means "to attempt". These attempts to grapple with a subject from a layman's perspective are more easy to understand than scholarly articles, able to cover more ground, and, with a good essayist, actually enjoyable to read. Essays kind of went out for most of the later 20th century with the rise of the cult of specialization. While this specialization and, I would say, fragmentation of knowledge is still for the most part in place, to the point that specialists in their respective fields are largely unable to converse with specialists in other fields (see for instance the opinions of your typical department head of some branch of science at a local university and their inability to speak to or even see the value in other fields of study), the rise of blogs may signal a sort of re-integration of knowledge, at least at a popular level. This is I think potentially a very good thing. The specialist culture creates two significant problems, I feel. One either is at the mercy of whatever the current opinion of the experts are ("12 servings of carbs a day huh? Well if the pyramid says so...") or one elevates one's own area of specialization to an all-encompassing world-view that fails to account for other areas or types of knowledge (see Dawkins, Richard).

Which all leads me to the question would Montaigne (or Hazlitt, or Emerson, or...) be a blogger? Is this medium one in which the essay may return to exert some kind of influence on society? Or does it just allow anyone with an internet connection the ability to air their thoughts without the annoying responsibility of having to get someone to listen to them?

Seventy Year Old Man Beats Up Journalist over Bad Article

2009-11-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

From the American Scene.

Here's a fun story as far as journalistic fisticuffs go. Henry Allen, a nearly seventy year old feature editor for the Washington Post Style section, got into a fist-fight with feature writer Manuel Roig-Franzia, who, I'm assuming based solely on his hyphenated last name, is a pretentious jerk. The fight apparently centered around a lazily put together "charticle" about inadvertent disclosures, drawing on a congressman recently letting slip that several colleagues were under investigation for ethics violations. The story was said to contain several factual errors- stating, for instance, that Robert E. Lee's battle plans were found wrapped around cigars in Virginia, when the event actually occurred in Maryland- but must have been quite spectacularly terrible to elicit the response it did from Allen. Upon reading it, he was said to remark, "This is total crap. It's the second worst story I've seen in Style in 43 years." This has led to much speculation as to what the worst story may be. Reports say it was a story on Paul Robeson (who has the improbable occupational listing of athlete/actor/orator/concert singer/lawyer/social activist on wikipedia, someone get that man a "Slashie").

Another Post writer gives his take on it here and gives a link to what is for his money the worst article ever to appear in Style. I was curious and took the time to read it. Without having ever read any other Style articles, I can say that this must surely be the worst thing the have ever published; it reaches impressive depths of utter crapitude. This is the type article that it actually takes a somewhat talented writer to create: a large, sprawling, nauseating mess; as if someone found a fresh steaming dog turd on the sidewalk in front of their house, took a fancy to it, and decided to spend the next week crocheting a neon orange sweater for it to wear, and then upon closer inspection of the finished product decided to screen-print it with a brightly colored image of a family of gay, effeminate, bejeweled dolphins surfacing before a field of frolicking unicorns and so bring the level of crappiness to new, unimagined heights. Words really fail to describe how awful this article is, it has everything: mazes; visions of Native Americans dispensing vague, feel-good proverbs; lens flares that are perhaps profound spiritual experiences; ridiculous new-age associations between walking through a labyrinth and improving your child's standardized test scores; and a "moving Native American funeral flute solo and song and dance." Click the link, entertain yourself, you deserve it.

From Colbert...

2009-10-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

This might be the first time I've ever heard a crowd cheer on someone reciting the Nicene Creed.

This won't make sense if you don't follow the link, but I think Scalia must really be an idiot or be some kind of evil genius. The way he frames the decision should make Christians opposed to the ruling (so that the cross should not be emptied of its meaning into a general symbol for those killed in war). Looking quickly at his wikipedia page and his views on the death penalty, it appears he is simply really dumb, which is the better of the two choices I suppose. Here's the quote on the wiki page:

This is not the Old Testament, I emphasize, but St. Paul.... [T]he core of his message is that government—however you want to limit that concept—derives its moral authority from God.... Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral.... I attribute that to the fact that, for the believing Christian, death is no big deal. Intentionally killing an innocent person is a big deal: it is a grave sin, which causes one to lose his soul. But losing this life, in exchange for the next?... For the nonbeliever, on the other hand, to deprive a man of his life is to end his existence. What a horrible act!... The reaction of people of faith to this tendency of democracy to obscure the divine authority behind government should not be resignation to it, but the resolution to combat it as effectively as possible. We have done that in this country (and continental Europe has not) by preserving in our public life many visible reminders that—in the words of a Supreme Court opinion from the 1940s—"we are a religious people, whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being."... All this, as I say, is most un-European, and helps explain why our people are more inclined to understand, as St. Paul did, that government carries the sword as "the minister of God," to "execute wrath" upon the evildoer."- (the bold is mine)

Death no big deal, huh? Might want to re-read ole St. Paul on that one...

Good I-monk post

2009-10-30T10:41:00.000-07:00

Here's a good post from Internetmonk on the culture war. Here's an excerpt:

Imagine, for a moment, that I came to your typically conservative evangelical church and asked to visit with your young people, high school through young married couples. I want to ask them some questions. -What do you think of the President?
-What is your position on abortion?
-What do you believe about the legalization of gay marriage?
-Are you in favor of any version of Federally controlled health care?
-What is your church’s definition of the inspiration and authority of scripture?
-What is a brief definition of the Trinity?
-How does your church’s beliefs differ from Roman Catholicism?

He goes on to say he would get pretty vigorous, clearly articulated responses to the first 4 questions but a lot of blank stares at the last 3. Anyway he goes on to address this problem and talk a bit about American idolatry. Good stuff.

St. Anselm goes to Rehab

2009-10-29T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here's something I've been working out as I lay down and try to go to sleep at night, it has been a remarkably good cure for insomnia. This will probably end up being a pretty long and, for most people, uninteresting post- just so you're warned.

I'd like to discuss a little bit the ontological argument for God. Now before you go, "Whaaa??" and click away, let me explain what it is in a nutshell. The argument, first put forward by St. Anselm, is basically:
1. We can conceive of perfection (or that which no greater can be thought)
2. This perfection is an attribute of God.
3. Part of this perfection is existence (because existence is good)
4 God exists.
This idea has been poo-pooed by various philosophers ever since it was first published, including by this fellow Gaunilo of Marmoutiers, a Benedictine monk more popularly known as the "Island Guy". His refutation was basically that he could conceive of a perfect island, the existence of this island was part of its perfection, so the perfect island must exist, right? I'll be honest, the ontological argument just doesn't "do it" for me; if true, the argument only gets us to some vague philosophical conception of God, like Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, not necessarily Yahweh, much less addressing the truth of the Resurrection. But, all that said, I've never felt the isalnd think really cut it as a refutation. Thats right, this blog is about to weigh in on philosophical controversies from the 11th century. I can feel my readership exploding as I type; it don't get no more relevant than this.

The problem with the island is that an island can not be judged in the same terms as a being. We can discuss rational beings in terms of their ethical/religious character an evaluate them on such terms. One island, however can not be said to be morally superior to another (well I mean you could, it just wouldn't make sense). The island or anything else without rational intellect (a dog for example), can only be judged on aesthetic or utilitarian terms- it's beautiful, trashy, it has resources we can use, ect. and affirmed as good in it's createdness (but this is an act of faith rather than a philosophical position). It does not make sense to talk of it's perfection because any perfection would be aesthetic one. I don't know that we can speak of aesthetic perfection, because an aesthetic judgment is necessarily subjective, rely both on the object being considered and the observer. For example a perfect engine may need to be frictionless (for maximum efficency, which would ostensibly be part of its perfection) but the perfect tire obviously would not be frictionless as it must grip the road. The tire's (and the road's) "imperfections" that cause friction are in fact a function of it's usefulness.

Plato believed that there was a realm of ideas which was superior to the material plane, so that we could judge say, a desk, based on the extent to which it conform to the ideal standard of desks that exists in the realm of ideas. This system of thought influenced the Gnostic heresy, that plagued early Christianity (and I think still infects a lot of Christian circles today, but that is another post), basically that matter was bad and spirit good, which at it's far end led to the belief that Christ could not have become incarnate, but instead only appeared to be. I say all that to show clearly what dangerous ground I am on here when I say that we cannot, I do not think, conceive of perfection in material terms. Two reasons for this, first because materiality implies some sort of aesthetic judgment as part of its perfection, and second because of the corruptibility of the flesh, because of its susceptibility to death. So, before the question is asked, this means that we cannot I think talk about Jesus as being perfect as touches His manhood. This is a part of what the poem in Phil. 2 is talking about when it says He emptied Himself, He took on the frailties of man including death. This is why as Kierkegaard says, we cannot argue from the greatness of Christ or the effects of His life that He is God. There is, as he says, an infinite qualitative distinction between man and God, which is a technical way of saying that man does not exist on a continuum with God; God is essentially different than man. Which brings me nicely back around to the point I made at the outset, we cannot make an argument for God that is meaningful ultimately; faith requires an act of faith, not argumentation.

As a little postlude here, I do want to leave open the possibility for material perfection in the finally redeemed Creation. The Resurrected Christ was an anticipation of what is to come when, "God's dwelling place is with man". Now we don't really know exactly what it will be like, but then we could perhaps speak of perfections, because the diversity which God has created and so deemed good will certainly still be in place I would think. I'm totally stealing this from somewhere in the writings of Lewis, but I forget where precisely, so I'll just roll with. Goodness expresses itself in diversity, while evil is always monotonously the same. The remarkable variety of the saints when contrasted to the how incredibly similar evil men are in the end, is a case in point. N.T. Wright has some good stuff about this, and I found a pretty solid (at least based on my skimming of it) summary of some of the main points of his book Suprised by Hope here on the Relevant magazine website (but you should still read the book).

I'll end with a few lines from W.H. Auden that sum up my feelings about arguments for the existence of God.

And must put up with having learned
All proofs or disproofs that we tender
Of His existence are returned
Unopened to the sender.
-Friday's Child, W.H. Auden

A Trip to Barnes and Noble

2009-10-27T12:40:00.000-07:00

The other day I went to Barnes and Noble looking for a book I had wanted to read called Shopclass as Soul Craft, a book written by your typical philosopher/motorcycle repair shop owner about the dehumanizing aspects of the modern workplace - people don't really make things anymore, a tendency to replace skilled labor with un-skilled labor so that workers lose the benefits and stability of learning a trade, how white-collar jobs are increasingly becoming thoughtless, Office Space-like operations, ect. It has been pretty good so far, much in line with what I've been thinking ever since I read Small is Beautiful this past spring (a superior book to this current one, you should go find it at a library somewhere, good stuff) and contains the somewhat troubling revelation that some new model Mercedes do not have a dipstick (we can't even check our own oil now?).

Anyway, speaking of troubling revelations, while in the store I drifted over to the fiction section for a bit (and ended up picking up Three Men in a Boat, supposedly one of the funniest novels of all time, but have yet to start it) which is near the drama section, which is, of course, dominated by Shakespeare. While looking, I overheard a sales rep talking to a mother, presumably there to buy some play for school for her kid. The sales-lady said something along the lines of, "Here is our updated Shakespeare, it has the original text side by side with the text translated into English so you can understand it." Now, I don't go around saying, "By my troth," or calling people "saucy merchants" or anything like that, but really, a translation? Beyond a few marginal notes for anachronisms, I can't see the text as too terribly difficult if you read it slowly enough and think about what is going on. If I was a English major/teacher I might be marginally depressed by all this.

G.K. Chesterton and Obi-Wan Kenobi

2009-10-22T09:55:00.000-07:00

I frequently peruse Christianity Today's Books and Culture section; they have new articles about once a week and their reviews have steered me towards some good books in the past. Anyway two articles about G.K. Chesterton there (whom you should read if you haven't yet, especially if you like C.S. Lewis)- a general one on his recent resurgence and another, a review of a new biography of GKC (btw Baylor Press has got a book on Chesterton coming out next year by Ralph Wood, should be pretty good, I think). The former led me to Gilbert Magazine and an article about Alec Guinness, the guy who played Obi-Wan Kenobi. Apparently he also played Father Brown, GKC's priest-detective from a series of novels and short stories, in a movie in the 50s. The movie is pretty terrible from what the article says, but an incident during filming ended up having a profound effect on Guinness. While returning to his hotel in France during filming, Guinness, still dressed in the vestments of Fr. Brown, was met by a little boy, who thinking him a real priest took him by the hand and led him excitedly towards his home, talking all the way. Afraid to startle the boy with his poor French, Guinness remained silent. At a hole in a hedgerow the boy said a hasty good-bye and turned into to his house; apparently he had only wished for a safe, reassuring walk home. As Guinness writes in his autobiography, "Continuing my walk I reflected that a Church which could inspire such a confidence in a child, making its priests, even when unknown, so easily approachable could not be as scheming and creepy as so often made out. I began to shake off my long-taught, long-absorbed prejudice." Shortly after this Guinness converted to Catholicism, which is all to say that G.K. Chesterton might just change your life, you should read him.

Three Definitions of a Reader

2009-10-21T12:50:00.000-07:00

From a working library by way of Alan Jacobs' blog Text Patterns:

The first definition is the most familiar: one who reads, or one who is fond of reading. A young girl tucked under a tree with a book in hand; an old man waiting for the bus, nose pressed into the spine; three little boys sitting on the curb sharing a newspaper, ink smudged on their knees.

The second definition harks back to the single-room schoolhouse: an anthology of texts used for teaching. Here the term passes from the person doing the reading to the object being read, from reading for its own sake to reading with intent. The image of reading remains, but it becomes focused, purposeful; it becomes work.

The third definition shifts from the object to the machine: a device for reading data. No longer human, the reader becomes mechanical, the texts reduced to ones and zeros. There are no stories, only limitless information, each digit as insignificant as the next.

Church in a Railcar

2009-10-16T17:24:00.000-07:00

The Russian Orthodox Church apparently is organizing churches in old railway cars. Thought it was a cool picture.

Evolution and Genesis (Now there's a loaded title)

2009-10-13T23:59:00.000-07:00

First let me preface this by saying that this post will be wildly speculative; I will just be throwing alot of stuff out there and seeing if any of it sticks. Second, let me say that I feel there are ways in which this post is completely unneccessary. The main point is man was created somehow (through evolutionary processes or not) and suffered some kind of fall by choosing the knowledge of good and evil rather than the knowledge of God and life with Him. All that said, time to jump in. Let the controversy begin.

Before going in to the theology of all this, let me first speak to the science- and the limits of science. A confession here is in order first though, I haven't taken biology since my sophomore year in college- and then I napped in class on occassion and borrowed a textbook that I have yet to return; so I am not by any means up to date on the science behind all this. But as far as I can tell, and based on what some smart fellow Christians have said on the subject, the science points to evolution as the cause for the diversity of life on Earth. Otherwise, God has placed a lot of fairly compelling evidence for evolution, presumably in an attempt to dupe a bunch of scientists into atheism. So our options seem to be either accepting the theory of evolution as the best explanation of the available data, critique the science behind it (which many try to do, with little success), or accuse God of acting against His character by tricking us into belief in an evolutionary explanation (by hiding fossil remains in the earth for instance, so that when we found them we would interpret them as signs of man's predecessors and so be fooled). Maybe I making strawmen out of the other two options, but anyway looks like evolution is the most likely to me. So what does that give us, if anything? A means of Creation. Science cannot say anything positive or negative about the existence of God or the truth of the Resurrection. It is an approach to truth, it however cannot acknowledge something as true or not; the scientific method only rejects or fails to reject hypotheses, it is by nature (fancy theological word) apophatic. This however is not sufficient, it is not how men live their lives. An example that will perhaps help segue into the theology behind all this is our use of images in describing God. In Christian thought there have been two main ways of approach to the Truth of God in Himself which, as Paul says, we now only see "through a mirror darkly" (little explanatory aside here- back in the day they had different mirrors, made out of shiny metal rather than glass; in Paul's day it would be more like checking yourself out in whatever kitchen appliance is handy rather than walking all the way to a bathroom - you get the general idea of what's going on, but you can't pick out all the details). The two ways of approaching this truth have been through the use of images (the way of affirmation as Charles Williams used to call it)- God is a Father, Christ is a Husband, ect. and through the way of negation (apophatic theology)- God is not a Father as we conceive of fathers, not husband like we think of husbands, ect. Both ways are neccessary however, the way of affirmation so that we can think of God in human terms and the way of negation so that we do not make an idol out of our conception. As C.S. Lewis said once, "We must desire God more than we desire our conception of God."

Well it seems I have continued my habit of ballooning introductory paragraphs into such lengthy affairs. Good to be consistent I suppose. So then question becomes, "Given evolution as the most probable explanation for the origins of life on earth, what do we do with Genesis 1-3?" First let me say we should not on the one hand throw it out, or on the other be scared that it does not speak of evolution. The latter is more briefly addressed, so I'll turn to it first. The Bible is, primarily, a record of God's revelation of Himself to man and is itself a part of that revelation. He must either speak in terms sensible to man (as our Jewish friends like to say "The Torah speaks in human language") or reveal centuries of scientific knowledge and terminology to the Israelites as a preface to the Genesis account to satisfy our conceptions of what the Bible should be (which would make for an even longer introduction than the one accompanying this post). So instead the Bible uses sensible terms for its original audience (Joshua commanding the sun to "stop" being the most famous example), regardless of our satisfaction with those terms. But still the question, "What to do with Genesis?"

Two major implications are how do we tie what seems to be the narrative of a historical event, The Fall, involving two people to a species that arose and presumably arose as a species rather as two individuals and secondly how do we account for death and its existence before the Fall. Again let me reitirate that this is going to involve some speculation and is in the end, I think, unimportant; that is to say the theological importance of the fall and the explanation it provides for the human condition are vastly more important than tying the Fall to a historical event involving two historical individuals named Adam and Eve. It is much easier to for instance turn the story of Noah into an adventure on a boat or to argue the architectural viability of a boat that large made without modern materials, it is much harder to grapple with God being so distressed by humanity that he wished to destroy the creation (you could in fact translate the verb in Gen 6:6 I think it is as God repented of having created man).

The Eastern Orthodox (or at least our old friend Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov) have this idea of the universal culpability of man; that is, that as far as I am guilty of sin, I am responsible for all the sin in the world. I hear that they interpret Paul's talk of Adam in Romans 5 as being representative of all mankind. Since I am guilty of sin, I can no more blame Adam for the Fall than myself; we are all responsible and we are responsible for each other. Now let me say two things about this before relating it back to our main topic. First, that I like this idea very much. It explains things, shows our interconnectedness- a guy struggles with lust, a girl with body issues or eating disorders and we think these things are unrelated. It puts us in a position of responsibilty and shows how damaging sin it to the world and the impossibility of it being truly private. Second, this does not sit easily with the Augustinian doctrine of Original Sin. It shifts the blame from an inherited propensity to sinfulness to the personal sinful act. But I find it impossible to judge between the two. Human memory functions in such a way that we seem to begin life in media res, the story is already in progress by the time we get to it; that is to say, I can't remember myself not being or my entering into conciousness, neither can I remember my first beginning to sin. So whether we sin because we inherit the taint of Original Sin or we just start sinning early on, on our own steam so to speak, the result is the same- a loss of fellowship with God.

Now if I remember right, in the opening chapters of Genesis, Adam is referred to as "the adam"- the man or the dirt-guy (adamah the Hebrew word for earth is where we get adam from) and Eve is called the woman, they don't have proper names. So then perhaps the story becomes instead of a historical account of specific people, a general account of what man and woman always choose to do- desire to be God and fall out of fellowship. This then is where our idea about universal culpability comes into play, we all are Adam choosing to fall. After the Fall is when they receive their proper names I think, after that we can talk of historical people in what we can recognize as historical settings. The first chapters of Genesis are unique in that they portray a mode of being that is different from what we experience. As far a part as my life is from say, Abraham, I can imagine myself in his setting, dealing with the same problems; I can not imagine life in the Garden. This is why I don't see the point in tying Adam and Eve to individual people in a recognizable setting, we could not relate to them before the Fall anyway. The theological truth, that we are fallen and that we carry some sort of guilt over are exile is what is important.

The other big question is death before the Fall, a big subject. But I have written for far too long by now anyway and will leave that, for now, to a later post.

Father Damien just got canonized...

2009-10-13T12:28:00.000-07:00

I hadn't actually heard of him before, but Father Damien, a Belgian priest who ministered to lepers in Hawaii, just got canonized this past Sunday. He's a "martyr of charity", he eventually contracted leprosy and died of it from his years of ministry to them. Anyway here's his wikipedia article, good to see stuff like this.

And because it's just that kind of night....

2009-10-09T22:12:00.001-07:00

Another poem. YAY!

This one has a weird story accompanying it: I wrote it while I was (almost) asleep. It was one of those long mornings where I had a late class and could lounge around in bed, floating in and out of sleep. Anyway as seems to often happen to me, upon waking- and here I use the term pretty loosely- I had a song stuck in my head, except that what I had was not exactly a song but that fake interview David Crowder does at the end of his A Collision album with the clueless interviewer. In it, you hear the violin piece, "The Lark Ascending" (the part Crowder uses comes about 5 min. in) which is based on a poem by George Meredith, which I found online, (or just watch this video of lava lamp and skip to about 7 min in)

He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
'Tis love of earth that he instills,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
To lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings

Anyway I was kind of thinking about that and how Crowder said he often didn't feel like the lark and how un-larky I myself felt. I then somehow, and here is where my memory gets a bit hazy, composed a poem in my head about my non-larkishness, thought about it a bit as I lay there, thought it worthwhile enough to write down, got up, wrote it, and promptly fell back asleep. Weird. Anyway the poem doesn't really have a title, although I thought about using the horrendously cheesy pun "Birds of Pray". I ended up not because I thought someone might:

a) think I really thought that was a legitimate title and was myself horrendously cheesy

b) say to themselves, "Birds of Pray, hmm, you know I like that"

either of which would miss the point. The relation between God and man is at some level comic (and not just in the old Shakespearean sense that it all ends in a wedding). There is something so incongruous about approaching God in prayer that makes us all seem a bit ridiculous- like being a bit under-dressed somehow (a feeling me and my flip-flops have often experienced), but yet he takes us seriously, helps us in our weakness. Anyway the poem which shall remain nameless...

It seems prayers not personified

take up alien, avian forms

Some are ascending larks

or wandering woodcocks

strongly winged eagles

or light descending doves

but mine often take the form

of fat, self-satisfied pigeons

squat, couched carriers who've forgotten

their vocation and wander about low,

close to the ground and winging weakly

til fast-rushing Pneuma comes, meets

bears upward to ancient, holy skies.

-1/12/09

Poetry: A post you should probably just go ahead and skip....

2009-10-09T22:11:00.000-07:00

So it's been awhile since I posted much of anything, it's been even longer since I put up any poetry. Let me preface this by saying that I am not a poet. I'm too lazy. I like to explain things too much. And I just don't have that certain je ne sais quoi, as the French and pretentious English speakers say, that makes a person a poet. So what you get is somewhat crappy free verse with no sense of meter (and I'm not saying this out of false modesty, hoping someone will contradict me- "Oh, they're not so bad"- they are bad- as poetry at least). Nonetheless I do like to write it because it allows me a mode of expression that communicates more than simple description could. The following poem, which I wrote almost exactly a year ago, is a case in point; I could say that I wrestle with God and that my thoughts are somehow tied up with everything I feel about my dad (a prospect which terrifies me about my own future kids- but that's probably a ways off... a long ways) or I could show it. This poem is by no means an allegory, I really did used to wrestle with my dad when I was little (though we probably called it wrasslin') and I did like to climb up into his big leather recliner while he was gone- but that does not mean there isn't something more going on. Poetry, or some other type of creative writing, allows the author to show this- it invites the reader to share in the story and see how these connections exist. So, as I'm sure the suspense is killing you, here it is:

Father's Chair

I climb up, a child or old man, into Father's chair

It's soft- plush, full-grain leather- a contrast

to rough, scraggled hair, the birth or remnants of a beard

that scratched me as we wrestled,

Father is gone now, off to work perhaps,

or in simple absence for my benefit; the manliness

I feel approaching his chair, covertly or by institutionalized means

and sitting and smelling, familiar, masculine Father-smell;

remembering strong hands; gruff sports that drew me

close up; occasional victories, my own doing or not,

that made me like him. And these

soft, still moments,

intimacy in absence

that perhaps no father and son can speak of,

eternal memory

that I am his, in my Father's chair.

-10/12/08

A Little Political Quiz for You

2009-09-28T16:07:00.000-07:00

Here's a little two-part questionnaire, hopefully it will help you to determine precisely your level of partisan-ridiculousness. After determining your level, please use the comment section, anonymous letters to the opinion section of your local newspaper, or private emails forwarded to other, like-minded citizens to proclaim the superiority of your level of partisanship and denounce the weak-willed, insane, idiotic, America-hating, or otherwise deficient people who happened to hold a different level of partisanship than your inspired personage.

1a.If you are a conservative, how badly would you like Barack Obama to fail? Presumably you do wish him to fail, or at least be perceived to fail to such an extent that a Republican will win the next election. Do you, on the one hand wish him to be moderately successful, doing the best he can for the country, only to be narrowly defeated by the Republican candidate? Would you prefer a successful 3 1/2 years with a spectacular crash just before the election? Or perhaps a more complete failure that would mean, as often seems to happen, a corresponding shift in the makeup of Congress, with the Republicans then riding in to the rescue? Or on the other hand do you desire Obama to do this best possible job he can for the good of the country?

1b.If you are a liberal did you have similar feelings during the Bush presidency? Did they shift from the first term to the second (i.e., "now that we know we have him for the next four years, I hope for all success for W., despite my hopes for his spectacular, fiery, crashing, train-wreck of a failure just a few short months ago)? Did you instead still wish for him to fail in the second term, anticipating a call for a changing of the guard and validating your decision not to vote for him?

2.Did you find your vote swayed by your receipt of a forwarded e-mail sent by a like-wise concerned citizen who also happened to share your political views? Did the e-mail, with all it's unverified claims, outright slanders, and questionable logic stir you into action? Did the foreboding title in the subject line, "This is why I'm scared of....(Obama, Bush, McCain, Clinton, Warren G. Harding, ect.) motivate you to greater heights of political activism (for instance forwarding the e-mail to several friends who despite sharing your political party and showing no signs of changing, still needed to see this and work up the appropriate level of outrage at the thought of such a person running our country) or did you at least impart your new-found knowledge given you in the e-mail on someone else in casual conversation, with the dual benefit of showing both how political you are and striking your own little blow at the campaign of the lunatic- as you call the opposing party's candidate (either Democrat or Republican)? Were you instead influenced by the sight of a bumper sticker on the car in front of you? Or the facebook posting of your "activist friend"? What was the end result of this influence? A bumper sticker of your own? Re-posting the link again on facebook? More emphatically pulling the corresponding lever of your candidate in the voting booth?

Thank you for your time.

Walker Percy and Depression

2009-09-26T20:23:00.000-07:00

A few ground rules here before I start: I will not be arguing brain chemistry here. I have known several well-meaning Christians who poo-pooed the use of drugs for psychological problems because they thought the root cause was spiritual. I have even heard of others saying that the use of anti-depressants or similar drugs to be evidence of a lack of faith in God to heal. I really have very little to say to such people (if you can't say something nice...), but that they need to at the very least be more loving and not use illness, like Job's friends, as an opportunity for questioning others' relationship with God. On the other hand I'm not content to simply chalk it up to chemistry, suggest medication, and call it a day, anymore than I am willing to reduce love to that chemical reaction that occurs in one's brain in the presence of certain other persons. Something more is going on in both cases. There is a reason there are so many different schools of psychiatry each roughly as effective or not as the others- man is complex and our knowledge of him is perhaps more limited than in any other sphere, except for our knowledge of God; it is impossible to measure distances in the Infinite.

Lengthy disclaimer now out of the way, I would like to talk about one of my favorite novelists/essayists, Walker Percy. He eventually settled in Covington, right near my hometown and lived and wrote there until his death in 1990. A brief background is probably in order, Percy was raised by an uncle, also an author, after the suicide of his father and the death of his mother in a car wreck (which WP seemed to think may also have been a suicide). He then went to UNC, studied medicine, and interned at Bellvue in New York where he caught tuberculosis. His medical career was of course over and while convalescing and reading philosophy in a sanatorium, Percy made two important decisions: he decided to become a writer and he joined the Catholic Church.

Percy drew on his medical background to inform his writing, as he sought to write the diagnostic novel, a book that pointed to the disease of modern society. He noted how the illness as the doctor sees it is in fact the body's response to the latent disease; for example, an infection does not cause a fever or runny nose, the body responds by raising it's temperature and secreting mucus in an attempt to fight off the disease. Thus Percy argued modern depression, malaise, and alienation were not themselves diseases to be treated as such, but signified that something was deeply wrong with man, or society, or man as he finds himself in society.

The problem then is not as simple as "getting over it" or taking increasingly more pills in an effort to cope (not that medication or treatment is bad), but addressing the problems that cause this response of displacement. In fact as Percy says in the book I'm reading now (the satirical, fake self-help book Lost in the Cosmos), something is probably wrong if you are not at least the slightest bit depressed by modern living. Recognizing then by our own response to modern life that something in fact is wrong, that there is a sort endemic disease in man, what is our response? To point to a cure.

The problem is of course we ourselves bear the disease; we are part of the problem. Like Percy as he worked in the sanatorium as a doctor-patient while recovering, even as we work to alleviate the problem we ourselves carry the contagion that is its source. So we ourselves cannot be the cure, we would have, in the end, to destroy ourselves to destroy the disease. But if someone was able to grapple with our disease, bear it, and defeat it, then He would be inoculated, He could cure.

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
T.S. Eliot- The Four Quartets, East Coker

All sorts of music for listenin to...

2009-09-25T23:01:00.000-07:00

Just a few random links to music, I'm feeling kind of old school so not much from after the 70s unless its a cover-

Black Crowes covering "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down"
pretty good cover, can't match the original though- the feeling of loss in this song, my goodness; I am very glad we lost the war, but it just really destroyed so much down here. Southerners are unique among Americans in that we can say we lost a war and are genuinely pleased that we did (since we don't really count 1812 or Vietnam for some reason). I think it is vital to still identify with the Confederates in at least acknowledging that slavery was a part of our history. I went through so many triumphalist, "America is always right" social studies classes growing up that would brush over stuff like this- "after all the Union won, slavery wasn't a part of the real America, we've always been the good guys." We need to take responsibility for having this in our past. And while I'm on the subject, all the Confederate flag wavers at LSU are really putting their anger in the wrong place. They shouldn't be angry at blacks for being offended, they should be angry at the white supremicists and Kluxers who co-opted the flag into being a racist symbol rather than a cultural or regional one. Of course when you yell, "Go back to Africa,"at people you kind of betray yourself as not really being a good Southerner, and just being a hateful racist instead anyway. Dang it, couldn't even stay off the soapbox for one whole post.

Which of course brings me to this next Bob Dylan song "With God on Our Side". Talks about this myth of America's goodness and our history of co-opting God to our cause. Any Christian artist that covered this might get banned from Christian radio and Lifeway, which is a shame- the Church has a prophetic duty to speak truth to the country.
And here's a Johnny Cash and Dylan duet on "Girl From the North Country"- nothing really to say about it, I just really like it. And here's a cover of it by Conor Oberst (the Bright Eyes guy) and some other folks- got to love that steel guitar, takes awhile to get started though.

The Band again- "Acadian Driftwood"- without a doubt the greatest song by former Dylan backup musicians about the Acadians fleeing to Louisiana. None others really even come close. Oh and the French part at the end is something about arriving back in Acadia

Louis Armstrong- "Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans"- if you don't smile a little bit when Louis hits his solo after the last verse, I don't know what to say you. Go find another blog to read.

Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood back together- "Presence of the Lord"-it's a shame Blind Faith only lasted one album and six months or so, they could've been great.

Allman Bros.- "Statesboro Blues"- I tried to find the Family Guy clip where the Gregg Allman poster comes alive to give Peter advice in the Toad episode, but I couldn't, oh well.

Elmore James-"Dust My Broom"- great acoustic blues on the slide.

And finally to go really old school and drop some of that hot cello music all the kids are talking about these days on you- Dvorak-Cello Concerto. Do me a favor and click a link, it just might change your life.

The first of maybe several posts on the liturgy

2009-09-24T23:33:00.000-07:00

"Genuine spirituality requires spontaneity, but spontaneous spiritual expression will be richer if grounded in an equal measure of discipline and consistency"- Yoel Finkelman, whole First Things Article here.

So looks like the Orthodox Jews get it too, guess that just leaves us Baptists, some various non-denoms, and the Pentecostals who are still mostly in the dark. Maybe it's just me, but I really don't see the value of following the latest Lifeway fad, instead of 2000 years of tradition when worshiping God. I have heard the arguments against liturgy as being staid, constricting, and dead, but the thing is we fall into our own patterns often without noticing it, and liturgy, especially when organized around the calendar (Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, ect.), actually draws us out of repetition through planning. I know that for instance, when I lead a Bible study, it inevitably turns to one of a few "pet" topics, and preachers without some sort of lectionary seem to tend to the same thing. Or they go through cycles of fad, getting all focused on one topic, perhaps doing a sermon series on it, and then, along with the congregation, forgetting all about it as they move on to the next topic. We really credit ourselves with too much spontaneity. Our prayers take on a certain faux-spontaneity, having all the trappings of a spontaneous prayer (informality, occasional rambling , use of God or Lord in spaces we might normally fill with "uh" or "umm"- God, you know I just really, want, Lord, to...) but actually return again and again to a few time-worn phrases that we always use. Now this is fine, it's normal. Language fails us here anyway, so the return to phrases that have taken on a special meaning for us is really the only proper way for us to try and communicate. Thank goodness that we have, as Paul says, the Holy Spirit interceding for us with "groanings words cannot express". The difference however in liturgical prayer is that the words have a common meaning, as we pray together we live into them, they take on a shared meaning rather than a personal one. As I don't think I have a big Pentecostal audience here, I'll go ahead and say this: I don't think Paul's admonishing against speaking in tongues (i.e. other human languages, not, I don't think, crazy sounding talk that just comes out spontaneously, but I may be wrong- maybe) is too far off here. When we return to our favorite little phrases when praying "spontaneously", we are in effect speaking a slightly different language than our hearers because our words do not carry the same associations for them they might for us; language is not algebra. Without a translation from this slightly different tongue, the hearer isn't edified as they might be. Liturgy, by providing a common language in which things too definite for language are spoken about, mitigates this problem at least a little by allowing the congregation to invest meaning into the same words. And this works because we have much more in common than we let on, especially when it comes to our relationship with God. I mean we all have sinned against Him "in word, in thought, and in deed, by doing what we ought not do and neglecting to do that which we ought..." saying as much together bonds us together as a family more trying to figure out what the deacon is talking about while she's up there. (Did you see how I snuck that "she" in there as a deacon? Take that ultra-conservative, non-Biblical SBCers, you just got called out on a blog that is probably read by 5 or 6 people) Liturgy encourages us because it allows us to see the others in our position before God, we take a step back into the Church rather than perceiving our selves to stand alone in our faith and struggle. And of course the continuity of the liturgy places us into a greater historical context, a larger narrative of God's continued faithfulness and work within the world. This seems especially crucial with so many forces within the modern world creating a sense of displacement and alienation; liturgy provides a certain "rootedness" for lack of a better word, but that is probably a whole 'nother post....

As you can see this is also one of my soapbox topics with the Baptists (which I am, and plan to remain) which I will probably return to again and again. Perhaps the blog needs to follow a lectionary... Anyway, I-monk has been doing some good stuff on the liturgy lately too. You should check it out; that is, if you do that sort of thing.

The Need for Grace (or "Why I sometimes remind myself of a 'kept woman' from a 19th century Russian novel")

2009-09-19T23:48:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been reading Grahame Greene's fantastic novel, The Power and the Glory, and it has really affected me. If I thought my posts to be more memorable, I would warn against spoilers, but since you probably will not remember any specific details from this even if you do end up reading the book, which I of course recommend, I will press on. In it the Catholic Church is being violently suppressed in a rural Mexican province, to the point where only two priests remain who haven't been executed or fled. One renounced his vocation and married in order to save his life and is now trapped in despair; the other, always refered to as "that whiskey priest", has serious moral failures, not least of them his alcoholism. As the only remaining priest however, he feels the weight of responsibility and the tension between his calling and his failures. He longs to be caught by the authorities at times because he feels unworthy, but knows it is his duty to avoid capture, visit the villages in his parish and minister the sacraments of confession.

Hopping to another novel and another writer, in Dostoevksy's The Idiot there is a similar tension in one of the female characters. The story revolves around two overlapping love triangles basically, the common point of which is the Christ-like epileptic Prince Myshkin. It opens with Myshkin returning to Russia after years spent convalescing at a sanatorium in Switzerland. Upon arriving, he is quickly confronted with choosing between two women: Aglaia, a beautiful young girl he feels natural attraction to and the pitiful Natasha Filippovna. Natasha was orphaned at a young age and taken in by a wealthy noble who provides for her education. She grows into a strikingly beautiful girl herself and is the victim of what nowadays we call statutory rape by her "patron", and becomes a kept woman. At the start of the story, her patron, now looking to marry is trying to off-load her even offering to pay someone to take her, as she is "damaged goods". The two who eventually end up competing for her affections and making up the two legs of our second triangle are Myshkin and a man who is very nearly his antithesis, Rogozhin. All this complicated introduction is made to come to one main point (for my post at least), Natasha Filippovna must decide wheter to go with Myshkin who is sacrificing his high position and social standing to save her (she would basically be regarded as a prostitute at that time) or the wild, unprincipled Rogozhin who she perhaps thinks she deserves. The tragedy is that she really does love Myshkin, but fears she would ruin him; she feels the loving thing to do is to prevent her from loving him and choosing Rogozhin. This type of character occurs in several of big D's novels, including Notes from Underground, from which this blog partially takes it's name (along with the Herbert poem heading the page). All of them feel a call to goodness and life, but feel unable to live up to the standard they think they must meet to be saved. Rather than be caught between the two, they try to go Underground, to embrace wickedness and so become something- a wicked man. They always fail, they can't really becoming completely evil, they still feel the call to life, and this is a grace.

I see quite a bit of myself in both these characters, both with the relationship problems of Natasha Filippovna- if I, out of Christian love, want a good man for a girl I'm interested in and know I'm not a good man, what do I do?- and because I quite frankly don't feel qualified for my vocation. But then grace comes in. You can't fall to the temptation Natasha and the "whiskey priest" felt to sacrifice yourself- martyrdom can't be chosen and the Sacrifice has already been made. Christ came to bring new life to the dead. Man occupies the place as Luther said of being "simultaneously sinner and justified"; I know myself to be a pretty poor man, but in Christ I am declared to be otherwise. And this is not simply a vain, "Aww, you're not so bad!", but fully acknowledges my wrong, crucifies it, and actually creates that which it calls me to be. Justification is not simply a declaration of God's indifference to my sin, it is a collaborative effort through the work of the Holy Spirit in the Christian to bring him into the newness of life. Despite all this, sin is still destructive, temporally at least, and human rebellion can at least change the way in which the God works to "interweave all things to the good." So what do y'all think, how gracious are we called to be? Is NAMB or the IMB, for instance, right in barring Christians with rough pasts from service? What about sins that people still struggle with? (Because we love victory stories- "I used to beat my wife and get drunk every night. Now look at my smiling family and our perfectly straight teeth. Gee, thanks Jesus! This abundant life is awesome!"- but we don't like so much to hear about people who still struggle or doubt). As far as forgiveness goes I think we all agree that grace covers, but at what point does discipline come in?

A little quote I liked...

2009-09-18T21:15:00.000-07:00

All people feel the interior impulse to love authentically: love and truth never abandon them completely, because these are the vocation planted by God in the heart and mind of every human person. - Benedict XVI

This comes from the Pope's last encyclical letter "Caritas in Veritae" -Charity in Truth. You should read at least the first few sections in the introduction, I can't really comment after that because I haven't got further than that. If I ever finish reading it I might post something here, apparently it talks some about the need for concerted global effort to pursue justice in the world, stemming from a desire for love in truth with its source in Christ. I am convinced that it's stuff like this while Protestants are caught up in silly culture war stuff like prayer before high school football games that drives many people to "cross the Tiber". We Baptists are more concerned with boycotting Disney World for having a gay day than pursuing God's justice in the world and addressing epidemic AIDS and easily preventable diseases like malaria and water-borne illness in Africa. Makes me want to curse, but I'm trying to keep this a family blog, so I will limit myself to a dad-gummitt.

And that was my soapbox moment for the night, thank you very much.

Battle of the Buzzwords

2009-09-14T22:17:00.000-07:00

So I'm not real photogenic. Don't know why, don't know what I can do to change it- maybe there's a remedial class somewhere I could take. I really am only in normal looking pictures when I don't know they're being taken of me. When I know it's coming, I tend to intentionally make a weird face to avoid making a weider face attempting to look normal. It's just not natural for me. Instead of simply looking like myself, I end up looking like myself trying to look like myself; I fake it, I am a step removed from what I normally look like. I can't be intentional and authentic at the same time.

This is problem, of course, not just because of the vast number of slightly strange pictures of me on facebook or the even more vast numbers of pictures that were deemed to awkward to merit posting, but because it puts two of every good "missional" Christian's favorite buzzwords-authenticity and intentionality- in the ring together (like boxing each other, not on the same side in some elaborate metaphorical tag-team match where they team up together to defeat the two time belt holders "Indifference" and "Hard-heartedness"). Because intentionality is at some level inauthentic, it's somewhat unnatural, we have to force ourselve to do it, intentionally.

I don't want it to seem like I'm saying we shouldn't be intentional in doing all we can in ministry. We tend to the easiest way, the path of least resistance; intentionality saves us from all this, nakes our service an affair of the will rather than simply our desires. But it is not intended to stop there, it needs to deepen. We are called to love, not simply to act lovingly. Fortunately this does not depend on human will alone, the Spirit meets us in this, enables us to love, declares the beloved to be also made in the Image, and births in us an authentic love of our fellow guilty men. Grace reconciles authenticity and intentionality. (To return to the boxing metaphor it makes them like Stallone and Carl Weathers in Rocky III where he teams up with Apollo Creed to train for the fight against Mr.T- but that makes it seem a little too ridiculous, I suppose ). On own however, loving acts don't necessarily deepen into love. I've heard stories of new members of churches having what they described as "love bombs" dropped on them- members were giving, kind, generous people- until they got you in to the church- then since you joined the team they could slip into a comfortable indiferrence; perhaps a handshake or a headnod from across the room during the "hug and howdy", but no more radical acts of kindness were needed: you're on the roll, you've been saved- "mission accomplished". Now part of this is our problem of reinterpreting the Great Commission to read, "Go ye therefore and make saved folks to fill the pews" rather than taking an active interest in making disciples. Evangelicals have left alot of people homeless, far too often walking the aisle is the end and not the beginning. But part also is our effort to be intentional without being authentic. Grace puts them on the same team, lets us love like Jesus.

Another Link- One that will cost me a future SBC presidency nomination

2009-09-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

Well I survived the rainiest camping trip ever and am back in Mandeville without too much to do, which means of course more blogging. I'm going to put a post up soon about that little quote in green from St. Gregory of Nyssa about the difference between faith and knowing, but don't feel like doing that much thinking yet. So instead, I thought I'd post a link to a funny little article by Walker Percy, a Catholic novelist who used to live in Covington, about the aesthetics of bourbon drinking. If this offends you please consult your nearest New Testament. If not, please don't think I'm painting myself as one of those "cool Baptists" because I also like a bit of whiskey on occasion. Seriously, some of the Baptists who do drink are worse than high school kids about proclaiming they do drink and so are "cool". It seems to be an issue for Baptists on either side, really it should not be this big a deal. I just thought it was funny article.

Just a Link Really

2009-09-06T21:23:00.000-07:00

So after watching the U.S. National Team play El Salvador last night I'm in a soccer-y mood. Here's a wonderful post from the Run of Play about why soccer can be such an alternatively beautiful and frustrating game to watch. Probably not most people's cup of tea but some fantastic writing all the same. You should check it out, at least I think. That's why I posted it...

Un-posted posts, a non-English Englishman, and how to love your neighbor while not really liking what he does much

2009-09-01T23:20:00.000-07:00

So I still haven't put up that post about losing my granddad; I just can't seem to do it without coming off all emo, "woe is me". It's not that I don't want to talk about it, or try and learn from it, it's just that I don't like emotionally dumping on people through a blog. The temptation really is there to use this blog for that, and I wonder why that is: why is honesty and openness so much easier through something like this? For some reason in our society it feels easier to be more personal the more impersonal the means of communication are. For instance, I really have a hard time talking about this face to face or even over the phone, but I've been able to through texts, facebook, and this blog. Maybe there's a post there, maybe it's just my problem, I don't know.

Anyway I want to talk about this little quote I read today in this book I bought for cheap at a wonderful used bookstore in Houston. The book is called Raskolnikov's Rebirth (refers to the main character in Crime and Punishment) and it's written by an English philosophy prof with the very non-English sounding name of Ilham Dilman. Despite this, I still like to imagine him speaking in a proper British accent as I read, maybe sounding a bit like Michael Caine, not over the top snooty, but using very proper and precise diction. Ilham, or Hammy as his friends probably call him, looks at a psychological view of good and evil, talks a good bit about Freud, and uses "one" as a pronoun far too much ("One must look at oneself, if one wishes to understand one's..."). He really needs to throw a he or a she in there or come up with a fictional character to use in examples, preferably with a proper British name like Basil or Nigel, but I digress. So returning to the matter at hand, the quotation, "Furthermore blaming is not a form of intolerance. Intolerance is the inability to tolerate what ought to be tolerated. To attribute intolerance to someone is thus making a moral judgement about him- just as calling him 'judgemental' is doing so. To tolerate anything whatever without any limit is not tolerance; it is moral indifference or total passivity." Beyond being surprised at his use of a personal pronoun, I must say I wholeheartedly agree with Hammy here, a lack of standards is not a sign of moral superiority as it has so perversely become for some.

What then are we to do as Christians? We have, rightly I feel, received alot of criticism as a Church for being judgemental. But what standards should we hold others to in order not to fall into the moral passivity of say the German Church during the rise of Nazism. Part of the Church's mission in the world is to stand as a prophetic witness to the Truth of the Kingdom which both values man and Creation (which of course means we have a message for abortionists on the left and war hawks and "big-industry-screw-the-environment" types on the right. There's a reason I can't find a party.)

Instead of putting more thought into this tonight however and rambling on, I would like to put up this passage from a few months back I found in the little notebook I keep. Looking back on things like this I sometimes wonder what I was talking about at the time; it is a very strange feeling, almost like I'm reading something someone else wrote- once I forget writing it and stop thinking about it, it becomes external to me. Finding it again is a bit like walking into a house with the exact same floor plan as your own, it seems very familiar, but somehow foreign. Wandering observations about the creative process aside, the troublesome part in the passage ahead is the talk about the "inarticulate part" inside that is beloved by God. I think I may have picked this up from Auden (a fantastic poet by the way, that covers the compulsory recommendation portion for this post I suppose). What is meant, I think, is that there is something deeper than our thoughts, desires, or even our wills that is drawn to God. There have been times I have not felt particularly like a Christian and just wished for some end to all my duplicity. Stronger than any decision of my will, I have felt drawn back to God. This is not the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace, which tries to look at the whole process of salvation from some abstracted view outside the individual. But it rather refers to something deep within that longs for God, as in Herbert's poem from the last post or St. Augustine's famous, "restless are our hearts til they find rest in You."

Goodness that was a lengthy introduction, hopefully some sense can be made of this, "The desire for change in a person and the acceptance of that person are not mutually exclusive. We cannot, on the one hand, accept the person without regard to their faults and failures, as if those were somehow foreign to him (or as is, of course more likely in my case, her), but must see them in the fulness of their (fallen) humanity, as nevertheless bearers of the Image; otherwise we fall into idolatry either by the elevation of the other to a place they should not occupy or ignoring the frailty of our perceptions and self-deception and raising our subjective knowledge to objective truth. We must acknowledge that we do not, cannot know the other fully, nor ourselves, yet in this hidden, inarticulate part we are beloved and may be saved in Christ Jesus. Neither may we associate the other so fully with their sin that we are constrained to reject the person themselves. It is precisely in the inarticulate, 'dearest freshness deep down things' [note- this is a line from G.M. Hopkins- "God's Grandeur"], the originality of their creation, declared as good' it is here that they may be saved and it is this which we must not reject in them. To desire change, their existential freedom from that which yet enslaves them is not rejection, but acceptance of their created goodness, their declared belovedness by God."

The Pulley by George Herbert

2009-08-28T21:52:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-24T22:00:00.000-07:00

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?"

2009-08-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-08-22T07:34:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-21T20:08:00.000-07:00

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...

2009-08-21T18:59:00.000-07:00

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

2009-08-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

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.