Blue homespun and the bend of my breast
keep warm this small hot naked star
fallen to my arms. (Rest …
you who have had so far
to come.) Now nearness satisfies
the body of God sweetly. Quiet he lies
whose vigor hurled
a universe. He sleeps
whose eyelids have not closed before.
His breath (so slight it seems
no breath at all) once ruffled the dark deeps
to sprout a world.
Charmed by doves’ voices, the whisper of straw,
he dreams,
hearing no music from his other spheres.
Breath, mouth, ears, eyes
he is curtailed
who overflowed all skies,
all years.
Older than eternity, now he
is new. Now native to earth as I am, nailed
to my poor planet, caught that I might be free,
blind in my womb to know my darkness ended,
brought to this birth
for me to be new-born,
and for him to see me mended
I must see him torn
Philosophers have measur’d mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.
Who would know SIn, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skin, his garments bloody be.
Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach, then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
—George Herbert
Thanks to poet Malcolm Guite for mentioning this poem during a conversation hosted by the Trinity Forum.
This week, I started the winter term of the Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) residency. That means I’ve been at it for three months. The final assignment for the Fall was a comprehensive self-evaluation. I found simultanious relief in not having to cram for a final on one hand. On the other, I struggled to give the assignment a fair shake becuase of the simple and searching prompts given to stimulate reflection. One of the supervisors of the program told me that, next term, he would hold my feet to the fire about “Naming what your’e good at.” I heard the words of W.H. Auden:
You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.
I’ve also learned that the road to full-time hospital chaplaincy requires board certification from BCCI. Along with board certification, one is required to have denominational endorsement. The Presbyterian Church in America offers great resources for that here.
groans in gratitude, grows with awe, and walks
hand-in-hand with imagination. Joy
bouqueted as lavish larkspurs of light popped into sulfur
tang. She’s a tart pickel bit in
the dark of your mouth, tasted like the sight of life, shaped
apple whose thin, green skin beckons one’s teeth. World delivered
in blood and tears, beautiful in song. Sung from the start that
was then, this is
now the story of a baby. Wait, we wait,
now for then. Patience is a woman’s grin
grown, no longer thin. So, when?
The question one can
see in the shrug of a tree.
I’m entranced by this beautifully produced video on reorientation thru birding as a spiritual practice. I sent the video to my neighbor and he said, “Let’s be birders!” I couldn’t agree more.
I’ve been using Goodreads for a few years now to track my reading but more to catalogue books I want to read. The more I use it, the more I realize that it’s not the tool I’m looking for (Jedi spell on myself).
Today I found some alternatives tools:
LibraryThing(of which Amazon is part owner). And their minimalist and polished interphase
Do not build towers without a foundation, for our Lord does not care so much for the importance of our works as for the love with which they are done. When we do all we can, His Majesty will enable us to do more every day.
Why has our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners of an authoritarian technics? …The bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe. Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract, each member of the community may claim every material advantage, every intellectual and emotional stimulus he may desire, in quantities hardly available hitherto even for a restricted minority: food, housing, swift transportation, instantaneous communication, medical care, entertainment, education. But on one condition: that one must not merely ask for nothing that the system does not provide, but likewise agree to take everything offered, duly processed and fabricated, homogenized and equalized, in the precise quantities that the system, rather than the person, requires. Once one opts for the system no further choice remains. In a word, if one surrenders one’s life at source, authoritarian technics will give back as much of it as can be mechanically graded, quantitatively multiplied, collectively manipulated and magnified.
— Lewis Mumford in “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics” via The Convivial Society
“He never lost the wonder.”
This new Oliver Sacks doc looks great. I’ve watched the trailer half a dozen times now. It feels timely, since I started my new work of hospital chaplaincy this month.
I recenlty considered opening a coffee shop nextdoor to Austin’s famed and beatiful Mozart’s Coffee Roasters. I would call it, “Salieri’s.” The sign over the shop would read, “We’re not as good.”
Blogging should sound like talking to myself. But it’s not journaling becasue, while talking to myself, I’m also talking to you. The most “virtuous” (because I’m a virtue ethicist of my own behavior) thing I can do is help you, others, pay attention…to my own words, which I hope hold value for their thoughtfulness and to the Word of God. It’s what the poet, G.M. Hopkins invites himself and others to do: pay attention to the Kingfisher and the dragonfly, consider what they say. “Pay attnetion to what you pay attention to,” says, Amy Krouse Rosenthal.
Well, If you’ve found yourslef here, in my clouster of the internet, you might have noticed…I pay attention to poetry. Why is that? I grew up with my mom reading it aloud. I studied it in university. etc (on my past experience). Most of all—and this is thanks to re-reading Hopkins just now— I hear Christ “lovely in [voice] not his.” I swim upstream of poets to the scripture they read. I remember God. Usually in by body. Today, it was with tears while reading Hopkins aloud. I get that I’m weird for crying at poetry, I accept it and you’re free to as well.
As Kingfishers Catch Fire
BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS
As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.
I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.
Fish: “I believe that if you sit quietly, like you’re fishing, you will catch ideas. The real, you know, beautiful, big ones swim kinda deep down there so you have to be very quiet, and you know, wait for them to come along.”
Flash: “If you catch an idea, you know, any idea, it wasn’t there and then it’s there! It might just be a small fragment…but you gotta write that idea down right away. And as you’re writing, sometimes it’s amazing how much comes out, you know, from that one flash…And in your mind the idea is seen and felt and it explodes like it’s got electricity and light connected to it.”
The explosion is an agrarian one, like the moment germination errupts from inside the dark walls of a…
Seed: So, you get an idea and it is like a seed. And…it explodes…And it has all the images and the feeling. And it’s like in an instant you know the idea, in an instant [a flash]…Then, the thing is translating that to some medium.
Lynch talks of waiting for the ideas like fish and cathing the big ones that live deep takes the most time. The poet Ted Hughes talks about ideas like both foxes and fishes. Ideas are critters to be actively waited for and sniffed out. A practice that, Hughes says, requires surrender:
And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don’t somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can’t fish.
The classic poem Beowulf begins with the Old English word “hwæt,” which has proven tricky to translate; it’s a call to attention, something like “hark!” or “behold!”
Tolkien chose the musty “Lo!”
Seamus Heaney, in his translation published twenty years ago—the first Beowulf I encountered—brought it up to date, opening with a winning “So!”
Now, Maria Dahvana Headley, in a bracingly contemporary translation, does Heaney one better. Her Beowulf begins with—wait for it—“Bro!”
Beowulf always was a little bro-y, wasn’t it?
I love the way these translations speak to one another; neither Heaney nor Headley’s choices would be as appealing without the knowledge of what came before. Lo/So/Bro: a perfect progression.
Sloan’s commentary of casual Beowulf translation reminded me of John Gardner’s book Grendel. I read it for the first time last year and really enjoyed the rhapsodized re-telling of the Beowulf story from the point-of-view of the monster. Seems to me on the first reading to stand in the tradition of the unsettling groteesque characteristic of Flannery O’Connor.
After reading the book, I stumbled on some insightful commentary from Gardner in a letter he wrote to a group of young students. I appreciate when authors help readers understand their stories without nuetering the story.
"...to desire the help of grace is the beginning of grace..."
Benedict, Bombadill, Gandalf, and Beck—
Treebeard “supposes.” His option: “must do.”
Given no choice, with the threat to his neck,
he heralds his plan and follows it through.
Tim Ferris interviewed Chuck Palahniuk on his podcast recently. Not long into the interview, Palahniuk explains the phenomenon that some readers of his story, “Guts” experience. They pass-out. Maybe that shocking detail made me lean in to hear, what I think to be, a profound summary of what Palahniuk understands his calling to be. He says:
The goal is to make people laugh and then to really break their heart.
This, of course, makes complete sense coming from the man who wrote Fight Club. A movie that holds much of it’s college-aged-viewing charm after first viewing. I think because even after you have been whiplashed by the surprise ending, you ache to see old forms of personhood and institution crumble (while a Pixies song plays) to death.
At the same time, hearing the master of modern-grotesque describe his aim as an author, I was suprised. His words stunned me for their uncanny resemblence to a few lines of rhyme from C.S. Lewis.
Have you not seen that in our days
Of any whose story, song or art
Delights us, our sincerest praise
Means, when all’s said, ‘You break my heart?
“Laughter through tears.”
Writing on the subjects of diversity and inclusion for some new job stuff, I came across this Love-Actually-type video on inclusion. It’s a great artifact of rhetorical mastery: logos and tear-worthy pathos.
Thou hast exalted thy mercy above all things; and hast made our salvation, not our punishment, thy glory: so that then where sin abounded, not death, but grace superabounded; accordingly, when we had sinned beyond any help in heaven or earth, then thou saidest, Lo, I come! then did the Lord of life, unable of himselfe to die, contrive to do it. He took flesh, he wept, he died; for his enemies he died; even for those that derided him then, and still despise him. Blessed Saviour!
Thank you, Jenzia Burgos, for the incredible resource of a Black Music History Library. Today, I read Greg Tate’s review of Ashley Kahn’s book A Love Supreme.The article includes this block quote describing how Coltrane’s album begins:
Elvin Jones leans to his left and, striking a Chinese gong, opens the album with an ethereal, exotic splash. “It’s the signal of something different,” remarks [Alice and John Coltrane’s son] Ravi. “You don’t hear that instrument anywhere else on any other John Coltrane recording.” … In one stroke, the hammered metal’s distinctive shimmer clears the air of standard jazz practice… . Coltrane enters with a brief fanfare. Whether blown from minarets or at military barracks, as a call to prayer or to arms, it’s a time-honored device with a timeless function …
Now I’m gonna go listen to “Psalm” and read Coltrane’s liner-notes poem. Salud!
Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a bath in the sea. Entering the unconscious, entering yourself through dreams, is touching nature from the inside and this is the same thing, things are put right again.
This Jung quote grabbed my attention for its Emersonian charm and near narration of what I hope this weekend to be. On second reading, I found myself remolding some of the pastoral platitudes. At the risk of over-spiritualizing, here are my thoughts:
When one enters a dream, more than one's self is present. We enter the unconscious in the compony of the invisible. There, not all are benevolent. Yet, when we humble ourself to the good, true, and beautiful one, we bath in the sea, walk in the calming compony of the woods and are consequently washed, calmed, and put right, in the compony of The Man of Sorrows. In him, we get clean. In him, we touch nature from the inside.
Nick Cave is batting 1,000 on his last few Red Hand Files newsletters. I shared a highlight from the last issue regarding writers block. This week, he connected the principle and practice of "mercy" to the problem with cancel culture. He wrote:
Mercy allows us the ability to engage openly in free-ranging conversation — an expansion of collective discovery toward a common good. If mercy is our guide we have a safety net of mutual consideration, and we can, to quote Oscar Wilde, “play gracefully with ideas.”
...It is a value we must nurture and aspire to. Tolerance allows the spirit of enquiry the confidence to roam freely, to make mistakes, to self-correct, to be bold, to dare to doubt and in the process to chance upon new and more advanced ideas. Without mercy society grows inflexible, fearful, vindictive and humorless.
The picture of a society without mercy reminds me of something I heard about mercy defined linguistically. The Hebrew word associates the experience with pregnancy. Mercy is like being pregnant. "Bearing with" the other in mercy requires genuine selflessness.
Ethicist and Church Historian, Walter Brueggemann makes the case that the most fundamental, human enemy of mercy is "the pattern of self-preoccupation." Krista Tippett interviewed Brueggemann some time ago on the podcast "On Being" and asked him, as Nick Cave was asked, to define "Mercy." Here's Brueggemann:
You may know that the Hebrew word for — Phyllis Trible has taught us that the Hebrew word for mercy is the word for womb with different vowel points. So mercy, she’s suggested, is womb-like mother love. It is the capacity of a mother to totally give one’s self over to the need and reality and identity of the child. And mutatis mutandis (translation: "things being changed that have to be changed"), then, mercy is the capacity to give one’s self away for the sake of the neighborhood.
Now, none of us do that completely. But it makes a difference if the quality of social transactions have to do with the willingness to give one’s self away for the sake of the other, rather than the need to always be drawing all of the resources to myself for my own well-being. It is this kind of generous connectedness to others. And then I think our task is to see how that translates into policy. Now we’re having huge political storms about whether our policies ought to reflect that kind of generosity to people other than us and people who are not as well-off as we are, or whatever.
I think that a community or a society, finally, cannot live without the quality of mercy. The problem for us is, what will initiate that? What will break the pattern of self-preoccupation enough to notice that the others are out there and that we are attached to them?
"Others are out there" means that mercy requires love as defined by Iris Murdoch. She says, "Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than yourself is real." Love initiates and invites mercy
Here are a few of John Coltrane’s words from “A Love Supreme” liner notes:
This album is a humble offering to Him. An attempt to say “THANK YOU GOD” through our work, even as we do in our hearts and with our tongues. May He help and strengthen all men in every good endeavor.
Like a good jazz fan (in the mode of a good jazz musician), Tim Keller stole and used the same for the epigraph to his book. The “THANK YOU GOD” in all caps has, lately, been reminding me that the best attitude is gratitude.
My anxiety shortens my breath. The fundamental instinct of respiration thwarted by fear, worry, too much time just in my head. I've learned, through the trauma of a couple panic attacks and a steady breathing practice—in thru the nose, out thru the mouth—that breathing consists in waiting (thanks for humoring the personal example).
It might sound weird that I'm relearning how to breath as an adult. Mindfulness, meditation, contemplation, prayer-all forms of attentive breath train one to wait. I use the personal and fundamental example of patient breathing to claim that to wait is to be human. Our journey through time waits for an end.
The idea of lyrics ‘not coming’ is basically a category error. What we are talking about is not a period of ‘not coming’ but a period of ‘not arriving’. The lyrics are always coming. They are always pending. They are always on their way toward us. But often they must journey a great distance and over vast stretches of time to get there. They advance through the rugged terrains of lived experience, battling to arrive at the end of our pen. In time, they emerge, leaping free of the unknown — from memory or, more thrillingly, from the predictive part of our minds that exists on the far side of the lived moment. It has been a long and arduous journey, and our waiting much anguished.
Then just call me Joe Exotic and my verse cagey tigers.
Netflix jokes aside, I really dig this poetry resource. Poetry as 'performance', I think, serves to bring it out of the learned towers of academia and, in that way, breath life and longevity into it.
Some time ago, I was lucky enough to catch Dana Gioia at a poetry reading hosted by the Dallas Institute. That evening, I witnessed firsthand a master 'performative' poet recite his work to his guest. He looked down only once to his written material. Otherwise he spoke his lines as the living drama that they are. I can't help but think that poetry can act like a thin spot between something like Aristotelian particulars of people in a room (with one man's voice) and Platonic forms of heavenly, language flowers dropping their petals to the here-and-now.
Lately, I've been obsessed with the Lone Bellow's latest album, "Half Moon Light." Alongside Bob Dylan's latest and "Easy Rider: The best of the Mercury recordings" by Johnny Cash, New York's finest country-folk band has my heart and ears. A favorite track titled "Wonder" asks,
"Should I let go of the wonder? Let go of the wonder? I'll find it out beyond the trees."
The question is a good one because it seems to be asking two things at the same time.
What can I keep from the childlike (not childish) awe from before now, when all I got from growing up was getting old?
How am I holding on to an imagined person, place, or thing that isn't leading me to hope and love? Is it best for me to let that go? If so, where will I find the strength to do so? What do I hold on to instead?
Thinking about wonder and seeing that Austin Kleon was recently asked by the Corita Art Center to speak about Sister Corita Kent in a conversation about her influence on his own work, reminded me of her great collage using Wonder Bread branding (image above). In that collage Sister Kent incorporates a hearty quote from Camus. The tiny script in her collage reads:
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, received, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works everyday negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.
As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joys, builds for all.
Wood begins his lecture on Heidegger by first illustrating the priority of Renee Descartes's philosophy. He draws a tree on a whiteboard and names some branches.
As Wood draws, he tells the philosophical story that has shaped—how and what we think—us modern folk, and the world in which we find ourselves.
By using Descartes's own 'Tree of Knowledge' illustration, Wood explains Heidegger's priority for tilling the soil in which the tree is planted. Heidegger wants to know what the tree of knowledge is planted in. His answer?
Being in the world. This is the soil. Humanness by virtue of being is the terra firma of knowing. Being is the ground of knowing.
For the Christian, 'being' is of course foundational in the three-person-ness of, "I believe: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." God is being and he gifts us his being by virtue of his forming us in his image, in the act of creation and Incarnation.
Matthew B. Crawford's Book The World Beyond Your Head has helped me understand this very fundamental fact.
[Of the Cross] Its breadth lies in the transverse beam on which the hands of the Crucified are extended; and signifies good works in all the breadth of love: its length extends from the transverse beam to the ground, and is that whereto the back and feet are affixed; and signifies perseverance through the whole length of time to the end: its height is in the summit, which rises upwards above the transverse beam; and signifies the supernal goal, to which all works have reference, since all things that are done well and perseveringly, in respect of their breadth and length, are to be done also with due regard to the exalted character of the divine rewards: its depth is found in the part that is fixed into the ground; for there it is both concealed and invisible, and yet from thence spring up all those parts that are outstanding and evident to the senses; just as all that is good in us proceeds from the depths of the grace of God, which is beyond the reach of human comprehension and judgement.
St. Augustine: On I John.
"Concealed and invisible" alluding to the depth of the cross—its victim, and work— reminds me of (1)Jesus' and (2)Wendell Berry's words:
"Listen carefully: Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come...Practice resurrection.
It seems like Augustine cannot but help himself from interpreting St John's letter with the language of the apostle of the cross, St Paul. Did Paul have the multi-dimensionality of the cross in mind when he wrote to the Ephesians, Dear Bishop of Hippo?
that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
To believe in God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Miracle of God's Love
When we come to a point in our lives where we are completely ashamed of ourselves and before God; when we believe that God especially must now be ashamed of us, and when we feel as far away from God as ever in all our lives—that is the moment in which God is closer to us than ever, wanting to break into our lives, wanting us to feel the presence of the holy and to grasp the miracle of God's love, God's nearness and grace.
a book about how Oakland has been shaped by great floods of money and power. It’s a crossroads. Railroad, highway, ocean. Tectonic plates. Social movements. Racial groups. Ideologies.
Toni Morrison's "chaos contains...wisdom" idea of growth in despair
AND
Gerard Manley Hopkins poetic line, "Wisdom is early to despair."
Hopkins line comes from his poem "The Leaden Echo And The Golden Echo." In which, he seems to borrow heavily from the Hebrew poet Qohelet, who says this about his work of philosophizing and writing (making art you might say):
So I turned about and gave my heart up to despair over all the toil of my labors under the sun.
We have to recognize that this very act of Qohelet writing his despair is artful. As a product of his salty lament, a book was birthed titled Ecclesiastes.
Toni Morrison, of course, had a very different lived experience from Hopkins (white, Victorian, priest (SJ)) and Qohelet (10th or 3rd C BCE, Hebrew, poet)1 for that matter. And yet, her case for finding wisdom in the midst of despair, harmonizes with the poetic tradition of lament.
Morrison seems to possess a righteous anger that keeps her from strict despair. Instead, she is thrust into lament—dispair with a vocabulary; hurt articulate in wail, "We do language." She gives voice to a primeval wisdom that speaks despair in the midst of chaos and rises on wings of hope into lament that sings. Wisdom rejoices in lament.
The ancient literature of Proverbs tells the story of wisdom in the midst of primordial chaos, in the beginning, at the birth of the world. Here Hokma is personified as the creator's first offspring. Like a protege marveling in the virtuosity of her master teacher, lady wisdom "rejoices" in the work!.
The Lord fathered/created (LXX) me at the beginning of his work the first of his acts of old...When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above...when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command...then I was beside him, like a master workman, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world, and delighting in the children of man.
Here is a charge for the artists who weep for injustice and cry for the mercy of justice: In lament and despair, love beauty, make beauty, live and eventually die for beauty.
I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa constrictor? Make good art. IRS on your trail? Make good art. Cat exploded? Make good art. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil or it's all been done before? Make good art. Probably things will work out somehow, and eventually time will take the sting away, but that doesn't matter. Do what only you do best. Make good art.
In his recent newsletter, Michael Sacasas re-articulated Marshall McCluhan's argument that new technology/media reconfigure society. Reconfiguration takes place, not by an ex nihilo big bang, but by rearranging the pre-existent material. New media rearranges "the public" culture (Kierkegaard). Sacasas gives the example inviting us to:
consider the effect of digital media on memory. If collective memory is a crucial element of a cohesive, well-functioning society, if, as Ivan Illich has observed, what we call different cultures are merely the manifestations of different means of remembering—then what are the consequences of the radical re-ordering of how we remember occasioned by digital media?
Cultures, as shared-memory communities (Ivan Illich), might be radically disrupted by this media re-arrangement of shared memory. Cultures are shaped by memory and memory is the story of the past. In other words, Media has the power to reshape the stories we tell about our past.
Some examples of media and what they've reshaped:
Cable news, entrenched two-party system
Social media, fundamentalist religious and ideological terrorism.
The digital scroll-feed, what an individual sees as most important (no temporal bandwidth).
A follow up:
Another instance of media shaping memory came to mind, when I watched the documentary "13th." The film begins with an extended discussion of the film "Birth of A Nation" and it's shaping of the race imagination in the US. Towards the end of the documentary, after a lengthy and sad discussion of disproportional incarceration, the interviews return to a discussion of how media shapes the telling and remembering of black history.
Some time ago, a small detail from the Road to Emmaus story in Luke's Gospel surprised me. It occurred to me that the theme of "new" exodus which is vital to Luke's telling of what Jesus came to do, finds a climax in the Road to Emmaus. Let me explain.
The two travelers walk from Jerusalem and discuss the report that some folks saw the tomb empty, in addition to angles who said Jesus is alive. While they travel, a man they don't recognize (who Luke narrates is Jesus) joins them. He inquires as to the topic of conversation. Cleopas explains and the stranger takes the news in stride. Without browbeating as to who he is, Jesus proceeds to cite evidence from the Hebrew bible that it's all true of him. He says:
"Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?"
After which Luke picks up narration:
And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.
Here's what I learned.
Cleopas and possibly his wife, as two representative disciples, journey west toward a new, recreated world having the true story of redemption and forgiveness recounted to them, by Jesus. Since Adam and Eve were exiled to the east from the garden, humankind suffers to be back with God. He comes to us. Not since Adam and Eve has a couple walked with God out from exile into new creation. He frees us to travel through the ordeal into eternal rest with him, in the City of God. The way has been given.
Of course we can't know for certain where the city or village of Emmaus stood. However, the map below offers three possible sites of the historical Emmaus, all of which sit west of Jerusalem. While it's true that the two travelers return east to Jerusalem to share the good news of Jesus' appearance, this, theologically, fits with the centripetal, sending nature of God—an incipient story of the command to go and initiate disciples into the community with a God bath.
I say that not only they who labor for the defense of the gospel but they who in any way maintain the cause of righteousness suffer persecution for righteousness. Therefore, whether in declaring God’s truth against Satan’s falsehoods or in taking up the protection of the good and innocent against the wrongs of the wicked, we must undergo the offenses and hatred of the world, which may imperil either our life, our fortunes, or our honor.
Here is a meeting made of hidden joys
Of lightenings cloistered in a narrow place
From quiet hearts the sudden flame of praise
And in the womb the quickening kick of grace.
Two women on the very edge of things
Unnoticed and unknown to men of power
But in their flesh the hidden Spirit sings
And in their lives the buds of blessing flower.
And Mary stands with all we call ‘too young’,
Elizabeth with all called ‘past their prime’
They sing today for all the great unsung
Women who turned eternity to time
Favoured of heaven, outcast on the earth
Prophets who bring the best in us to birth.
I love reading about the lives of the Inklings—the 20th century group of Oxford eccentrics. Some time ago I came across this website of quotes culled from two seprate devotional books collected by Charles WIlliams. Since I added the feed to my RSS Reeder, the snippets act like the best kind of desk calendar full of dank quotes each new day. Here’s two Pentacost Sunday gems:
A gift is properly an unreturnable giving … hence it is manifest that love has the nature of a first gift, through which all free gifts are given. So since the Holy Ghost proceeds as Love, He proceeds as the first gift. Gift … is the proper name of the Holy Ghost.
Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica.
The Holy Ghost is He whereby the Begotten is loved by the One begetting and love His Begetter.
Concerning social memory in particular, we may note that images of the past commonly legitimate a present social order. It is an implicit rule that participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory. To the extent that their memories of a society’s past diverge, to that extent its members can share neither experiences nor assumptions.
— Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember
Today, M. Sacasas reminded me that the one thing we, the people, might collectively do, as a united whole, is lament —be sad, together. It’s not easy work.
This morning a listened to a podcast discussion on the work of Hans Urs von Balthasar that sadly seems to be inactive. Despite truncated production, the one episode that was published gave an invigorating introduction to Balthasar’s book Christian Meditation. From which, the hosts highlight VB’s theology of meditation, IN Christ. I have two takeaway thoughts and one takeaway prayer:
Thomas Torrance’s The Mediation of Chirst might make a great reading companion to VB’s Chirstian Meditation for their mutual, high christology. Torrance holds a reformed catholic view of the atonement that leaves much to mystery, while staying firmly trinitarian in upholding the hypostatic union. Jesus the Christ is cosmically inclusive by way of his exclusice mediation on the cross. In a similar way, VB maintains the particular mediation by the person of Christ, in prayer. By Christ’s mediation, one does not empty the mind in order to incite God to come near. Rather, Jesus prays for us as the incited action of God, particularly when he came near in space and time to pray for us in death (Lord, Jesus, pray for me now and in the hour of my death). “Why am I forsaken,” can only be prayed by Christ on his cross.
VB and Torrance might hug or, at least shake hands, in saying: even now, the risen, slain-Lamb is behind the veil, praying to his father, in the love of the Spirit, for his people.
Prayer is inviting one’s soul into the presence of Chirst and finding one’s home in the triune God. AND Prayer is kneeling, at the trough of our sin, sadness, misery, and self-love, in/with Christ, long enough to find satisfaction in a father already running to meet us—coming to our senses…in the words of George Herbert, “Something understood.”
Our Father, in whom we surrender our perceived control, your self-revelation is heavy with value. Please bring your crowned king to rule, here and now, like it is there and always, in heaven. Give us grace enough for our next breath and decision, in remembrance of you. Please wash us with the clensing blood of your son, Jesus, as we wash others with the water of your word. Don’t steer us into the songs of the Sirens but sail us away from the rocks into the open sea of your love. Because we journey, fight, and serve your purpose, by your strength, and for your praise. Amen
OSDB Sports is a new startup that, as the the name suggests, acts as an IMDB for sports. An interesting concept that enables players, unions, teams, and leagues democratized space to tell stories and share conent. I wonder if it will catch-on with fans in a way that other sports platforms have struggled to.
Book Recommendation 📚 Challenge Sprint: 6 and 7
The Man Who Was Thursday —G.K. Chesterton The Power and The Glory —Graham Greene
“Push and Pull” are Chris Dixon’s simplifying patterns of the internet named for the action that users enact on the tool. “Push and pull” classifies how we lay claim and opt-into the digital world.
This participation with the internet reminds me of what ends up shaking out over time and what Austin Kleon calls “Stock and Flow.” In fact, Dixon categorizes push and pull as stock and flow, respectively, under the category of “Content Durability.” To help us understand content durability here are Robin Sloans’ defenitions of flow and stock:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
Princeton and its Center for Digital Humanities has worked to “recreate the world of the Lost Generation in interwar Paris.” The group that included Joyce, Stein, Benjamin, and Hemingway all darkened the doorway at the Shakespeare and Company lending library.
Below is Walter Benjamin’s library card and a Shakespeare pulling out his hair.
I also thought it might be cool to map all the notable book borrowers whereabouts in ArcGIS. Although, the banner image on this analysis page of the SCP website makes me think that they might be up to the same.
Bernadette Sheridan developed a synesthesia visualizer that colors words—specifically names —based on the colors she perceives for each letter of the English Alphabet.
Since moving to micro.blog for my personal website, I’ve thought about web design and it’s relationship to the written word (medium and message). Today, I was happy to doscover two amazing examples of well designed webpages that, in the words of Robin Sloan, behave more like a “digital book than do Kindle and Kobo.”
There is the inner life of thought which is our world of final reality. The world of memory, emotion, feeling, imagination, intelligence and natural common sense, and which goes on all the time consciously or unconsciously like the heartbeat.
There is also the thinking process by which we break into that inner life and capture answers and evidence to support the answers out of it.
And that process of raid, or persuasion, or ambush, or dogged hunting, or surrender, is the kind of thinking we have to learn, and if we don’t somehow learn it, then our minds line us like the fish in the pond of a man who can’t fish.
In Leading in Prayer: A Workbook for Ministers, Hughes Oliphant Old describes the kind of things he did to improve his prayers…
He set aside time to pray. For example, he used Saturday mornings to prepare prayers for Sunday. Similarly, the puritans prayed well because they prayed a lot. They prayed alone, with their families, and in their churches.
He learned through emulation. Like an apprentice painter that learns by first painting the great works of art done by others, Old used prayers he admired from others for his own praying. He used the Psalms and the prayers of the Reformers and church fathers.
Old also practiced his ability to identify the qualities of good prayers (tone, parts, logic, imagery, etc.) and the deficiencies of poor prayers.
Old would also practice by rewriting or reworking prayers to fit modern English and the particular needs of the moment.
Gabriel stood stockstill for a moment in astonishment and then followed her. As he passed in the way of the cheval-glass he caught sight of himself in full length, his broad, wellfilled shirt-front, the face whose expression always puzzled him when he saw it in a mirror, and his glimmering gilt-rimmed eyeglasses.
…
Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous, well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts, the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror. Instinctively he turned his back more to the light lest she might see the shame that burned upon his forehead.
…
The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live. Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any
woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering
existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling. A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was
general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the
spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
A friend from church directed me to this Washington Post article about “Aging in place.” She said that reading a torrent of age-diverse people sharing their powerlessness made her less lonely. The article features a song by Kora Feder with the lyric:
I look in the mirror and all I can see is a worried old woman in a young person’s body.
The strangeness of not recognizing oneslef in the mirror reminds me of the ending to James Joyce’s story “The Dead.”
You may remember that a day used to take place over the course of 24 hours. We felt this was too much. A day is now over the moment you first ask yourself, “What time is it?”
It does not matter what time it actually is when you do this. As soon as you ask or think, “What time is it” for the first time that day, even if it is still ten in the morning, it will suddenly be eight at night. Does that make sense?
Alexander Graham Bell believed that his greatest achievement was the photophone, a device that could transmit speech on a beam of light. The speaker’s voice would strike the back of a mirror, modulating a reflected ray. When the ray reached the receiver the process was reversed, producing sound waves.
“I have heard articulate speech by sunlight!” Bell wrote to his father in 1880. “I have heard a ray of the sun laugh and cough and sing! … I have been able to hear a shadow and I have even perceived by ear the passage of a cloud across the sun’s disk. You are the grandfather of the Photophone and I want to share my delight at my success.”
That idea interested me to the point that I had to shake some of the imagined, unscientific particulars out of my head. Consequently, a poem fell out:
Laundry Day
In the sun’s setting shaft, lighted
dust and my mother’s voice I hear. My living
room full of it, which is skin, and it smells like soot
sweat, burned-out in glowing effigy. I fold. Her
voice: minivan ArmorAll and Twizzlers tasted
with Dolly Parton. Her Voice: heard over yellow
linoleum in the kitchen, greased black and scuffed. So
also, here and now it travels, as it did with car, dinner
steam, and curled plastic floor, she rolls into my ear
marbles into a black velvet bag, kept with a cinch. Leapt on
the sun stream while skating on the black
frozen pond of space’s pool, she phoned
me with light. The light and she
spoke in harmony; thus
they traveled well. Diamond-taught dance she
rasps from smoky lungs. Voice plods with camel
strength, breathed at speed, leaping
particles like lily pads
in order to sound, four
simple words, we know them well. “I love you, child,
so I’ll tell you what I just heard her
say, “Put away your socks.” Her
voice: A moth with lighting for wings
thundered thru the deep, one arc at a time.
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.
A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.
Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.
Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.
