Two poetry postings in the space of a few days? I must be going soft.
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
Thou art, in the agony of death, more powerful than one thousand generals in one thousand wars.
With thy sorrows, thou art more joyous than Spring with its flowers.
With thy suffering, thou art more bravely silent than the crying of angels of heaven. Before thy lashers, thou art more resolute than the mountain of rock.
Thy wreath of thorns is more brilliant and sublime than the crown of Bahram. The nails piercing thy hands are more beautiful than the scepter of Jupiter.
The spatters of blood upon they feet are more resplendent than the necklace of Ishtar.
Forgive the weak who lament thee today, for they do not know how to lament themselves.
Forgive them, for they do not know that thou hast conquered death with death, and bestowed life upon the dead.
Forgive them, for they do not know that thy strength still awaits them.
Forgive them, for they do not know that every day is thy day.
So I’m not sure what one says when they want to wish people a rewarding Lenten season… Happy Lent? Merry Lent? Somber Lent? How about this prayer from the Book of Common Prayer for Ash Wednesday:
Almighty and everlasting God, who hatest nothing that thou
hast made and dost forgive the sins of all those who are
penitent: Create and make in us new and contrite hearts, that
we, worthily lamenting our sins and acknowledging our
wretchedness, may obtain of thee, the God of all mercy,
perfect remission and forgiveness; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Not really knowing what to say about the tragedy taking place in Haiti, I’ve made the mistake of saying nothing.
Part of my silence is born out of the recognition that anything I might say wouldn’t do justice to the magnitude of loss and suffering taking place there. As if to put words to it would take something immensely catastrophic and make it less than that.
That said, a very few things could and should be said. So with an economy of words, here goes.
Pray – A short video here might help us get barely in touch with the suffering taking place there.
Also, World Vision UK has issued a call to pray for forty days on behalf of the Haitian people…
Give – Two worthy relief organizations that the Chino’s love are:
Go – I am hearing stories of individuals and churches who are doing what needs to be done in going down and being the hands and feet of Christ. Those stories are as good as they are humbling.
“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”
It is no secret to those who know me that I’m organizationally challenged to say the very least. I’ve long since accepted it as an unfortunate attribute and have decided to live with it. And yet, like you, I process an avalanche of information on any given day. So how can a person be expected to stay on top of the stuff he or she is expected to stay on top of?
I am a compulsive list maker, which might lead you to believe that I’m something approaching administrative. You would be wrong. No, my lists are born out of a nagging fear that I’m going to forget something that I’m suppose to get done. Even with all my lists, I still manage to let a bunch of stuff slip. Right this second, as I write this post, I’m letting slip the reason I started typing in the first place. Which was to share a few valuable (at least, in my opinion) resources to manage information.
1) An RSS Aggregator – This goes by various names I think – RSS Reader, Feed Reader, Blog Reader, etc… But the idea is simple. If you keep up with several blogs (or anything that uses RSS feeds), this thing collects them all in one place. So you don’t have to go visit the sites you like on a daily or weekly basis to see if new stuff is there. It “checks” it for you.
I realize that since you are reading a blog right now that you probably already know about these. But you may not, and if you follow more than two blogs, you should get going on this. I use Google Reader. It does what it is suppose to do and does it well.
2) Evernote– This is the ultimate electronic information keeper. To do lists. Projects. Ideas. Movies to see. Books to read. Articles or website you find online. Anything that you might be tempted to scribble down on a piece of paper.
The real beauty of this is that you can access it a ton of different ways. There is software that you can install on your computer. There is a web-interface. There is even an iPhone app. And each device is constantly keeping in sync with all the others. So… my home computer, work computer, and phone all have the same info going.
Also, if you collaborate with people on projects, you can easily share information with other Evernote users. But my favorite means to collaborate is Google Docs. Google Wave promises to be even better, but I haven’t really looked that closely at it.
3) Zotero – This is primarily a research tool, but I think it is for anyone who reads lots and wants to keep notes, quotes, annotate the books they read.
It is a Firefox add-on, but it also syncs stuff to online servers so that if you have it installed on multiple computers… well, I think you are starting to get the idea.
Ok, so there’s plenty of overlap with some of these tools, but hopefully it will help slow the continual leaking of things I used to know.
Yesterday, I gave away a game called “1000 Places to See Before You Die” at one of those Christmas parties where you unload stuff that you don’t want anymore but someone else might. It occurred to me that giving it up was more than just getting rid of some stuff cluttering our home. For some time now, I’ve been giving up the idea as well.
The concept is simple enough. Just as the title suggests, they (whoever “they” is) have compiled a collection of the top 1000 places one would want to visit in the world before they die. I do understand the appeal. We live in an amazing world. I’ve had the good fortune to travel to a number of pretty incredible places both in North America and abroad. I say good fortune, but let’s admit it, my opportunities to travel far and wide are as much economic as luck. Only the very wealthy (when compared to the rest of the world population) have the necessary funds to make trips around the globe.
Wealthy or not, I’ve enjoyed the places that I’ve been to. And yet, even without checking the list of 1000, I’m pretty sure that I’d only be able to cross of maybe somewhere between one or two percent. I realize that this is probably one or two percent more than most, but the point is that there is a bunch of the world that I haven’t seen.
And recently, I’ve come to accept that. I know that for some seeing the world is something of an obsession. They have a compulsive need to check-off all the places they’ve been. Who knows what motivates this desire? Perhaps it simply is a love of seeing new places. Or maybe bragging rights in front of certain friends. Regardless of what it is that drives a person to “see the world,” I think that get it done before I die is sub-biblical.
That line of thinking makes the assumption that if I don’t do it before I die, I won’t ever. Even people who believe in an afterlife think that whatever their life after death is going to look like, it isn’t going to be spent on earth. I’ve recently been helped to understand that there is going to be greater continuity between the new heavens/new earth and their predecessors. That thought has been helpful for me in realizing that I don’t need to see it all now. I really do have eternity to not just go some place and check it off a list, but if necessary or desired I can stay for a couple years or a couple millennium.
To be sure, it will be a world transformed, but I’m growing more convinced that it will still be this world. As N.T. Wright contests, God made a world that he was pleased with, so it seems unlikely that he is going to scrap it to start all over. Of course, no one is exactly sure how the world will be changed. But I suspect the difference will be like going from black and white television to color (only more so). Or going from 2-D to 3-D (only more so).
I like to think it will all still be recognizable. But that it will be so new, that even if we had been there before – take the Canadian Rockies for example – then we’ll want to go again. Back to the television analogy. If we had seen the Wizard of Oz in black and white, when it came out in Technicolor, we wouldn’t skip going to the theater to see it again because we had already seen it colorless. The addition of color was enough to make it a “new” experience, even if in many ways already familiar.
And this also means (finally getting back around to the point of the post), that if I missed it on the first go around, I won’t be lamenting not having seen the “b&w” earth. The “new earth” will suffice and more.
Each year, as a family we try to be proactive in our celebration of Christmas. This go around we are choosing to focus on the “joy” that Christmas brings. For us that will mean doing things like finding joy in our time in the Word, having family times of worship, and of course joy-filled celebration with loved ones.
Our efforts have been multiplied this year by something several friends are taking part in which is conveniently named The Joy Project. While I’m not the sort of person who takes great delight in dancing, the rest of my family is. So for that reason, I love it.
But I’ve been on the lookout for anything else that brings a smile to my face this Christmas season.
Here’s one I saw today that I’m not quite sure what to make of. It is equal parts amusing and disturbing. I love when classics are updated… not so sure about this one. That said, we could probably all use a little more techno in our lives.
First, I’m not sure I got word out to everyone, but the pace of one chapter a week was killing me softly. So we are going to ratchet it up to a whopping two per week.
Second, it seems that an apology is necessary. Any book that has the words – epistemology, postfoundationalist, constructivism, hermeneutic, propositionalism – all in the same chapter has intruded on one’s right to read books without requiring the use of wikipedia in order to understand it. Maybe if he had started with the Crystal Meth to Christ bit, this transgression could have been overlooked. But he didn’t, so it isn’t.
Third, he is right. As far as I’m concerned, his description of how we know truth really isn’t up for debate. To put it as succinctly as I can… there is a Reality, and yet that reality comes to us filtered. Our backgrounds, experiences, levels of understanding, mood all color how we “see” things. And naturally, our groups (church, family, school, peers, etc…) are crucial for forming our understandings of reality. Like Belcher, I would be hesitant to go along with the thinking that reality is determined by our communities. Instead, I would affirm that there is a reality, but it always comes interpreted.
If that is so, then the it seems like “Deep Evangelism” is the logical next step. Since our perception of reality is hopelessfully shaped by community, then it just makes sense to allow belonging to precede belief. Not that beliefs don’t matter, but how can one sort our what they believe unless they have a place in which to do so? The image of Rodin’s Thinker which captures the ideal of the individual’s ability to discern truth simply isn’t true. Not now… and not then.
So I’m not sure any of this invites much conversation. Maybe the questions are more along the lines of “so what?” If that’s all true, then how does that affect the way we live? How we worship? How we pursue friendships? How we parent? How we live out mission?
I have had the benefit of being able to discuss the content of the book with individuals and groups. I wish you the same.
For several years now, my understanding of “place” has been developing. That is to say, where we live, work, worship, and play matters. My thinking on this is still relatively scattered, and I’ll share some auto-biographical comments in this post. But my thoughts were stirred again when I came across this article. It is a little dense, but it should appeal to the poet, farmer, and theologian alike. I’m not suggesting that those are mutually exclusive categories either. Most theology would likely be improved by a healthy dose of poetry… and farming. I digress. Read the article. You won’t might not be sorry.
I was also reminded of a friend in Seattle who is pushing on this question in a highly rigorous fashion, albeit from a somewhat different angle. In fact, it was living in Seattle that the wheels first began to turn on this. Alison and I were living in a suburb some twenty minutes (over thirty in traffic) away from work and worship. I realize that in today’s society, traveling long distances to do either of those activities (and a host of others) isn’t uncommon. But the thought was firmly lodged in my mind… there is something different about actually being in a community. “In” being more than just a preposition of location, but carrying the full significance of all that “in” possibly can. “In” in the sense of “fully invested in.”
So when we moved from Seattle to here, living in close proximity to the place I would work and we would worship (which for me happen to be the same place) was a high value for Alison and me. Even the choice for where our children would go to school was driven largely by the same conviction. It is right across the street from the church, and while it isn’t “the” school, it isthe school in the community to which we felt called to sink roots. So we bought a house that is within walking distance from all the above.
I couldn’t be more grateful that we were led/compelled to choose this home. The house itself is nothing special, but as they say in business – “location is everything.” We could have built a life in nearly any home in our city, but we have done so here. This few block radius is by and large where life happens for us, and so there is a deep sense of connectedness to our (holy?) place. Our home is centrally located in the city, which means it is highly accessible for friends and family and on the way to anywhere they might be going. It is affordable, simple, warm, and sufficient. It truly is and has been God’s provision for us.
I’m not saying that this is the house we’ll live in for the rest of our lives. There are numerous reasons for considering moving… where our children attend school is starting to spread geographically, our family has grown – not just numerically – but in the sheer volume they take up, not to mention my on-going fascination with forming an intentional-missional-community. But every time the question of moving comes up, we always end up responding… “Why would we want to move from here? This is our place.” With an appropriate stress on each word of that sentence.
When you have eaten and are satisfied,
praise the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. Deuteronomy 8:10
(grossly out of context, but there is some truth for us in there.)
Tonight, I was engaged in one of my main roles as a pastor… teaching. And it wasn’t on any ordinary run-of-the-mill topic either. It was on the rather thorny issue of “How can a good all-powerful God exist when there is so much evil and suffering in the world?” Envying me yet?
Frequently after teaching, I will come across someone who says in writing the same thing I say – but better. Rarely though does that discovery come so quickly. So, not two hours later, I read from N. T. Wright’s Surprised by Hopethe following:
If creation was a work of love, it must have involved the creation of something other than God. That same love then allows creation to be itself, sustaining it in providence and wisdom but not overpowering it. Logic cannot comprehend love; so much the worse for logic.
