The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Ash Wednesday 2009

Lent: the last Christian season to be colonized by Hallmark and other trinket-making industries. It hasn’t happened yet, but I’m sure it will. It’s only a matter of time. First, they took Christmas from us. Then they took Easter with that ridiculous bunny and those disgusting Cadbury eggs. Then they moved on to snag All Hallows Eve. Next they started chipping away out our saints, like St. Patrick and St. Valentine.

But the season of Lent is difficult terrain for our capitalistic society to colonize into a profit-making season. After all, “tis the season to be… fasting” is hardly a motto that could stir the masses into a buying frenzy.

But it is for these very reasons that Lent just might be all the more significant for Christians to practice in our modern culture. There is something about it that cuts across some of the most powerful currents in our society. If for nothing else, it reminds us that we as a church are shaped by disciplines and practices that are utterly foreign to our dominant culture.

Now, to be sure, we hear Jesus state in no uncertain terms that we are not to practice our piety in a way that draws attention to ourselves. This seems to be in tension with putting the sign of the cross in ash on our forehead of all places. But it is important to remember that this tradition arose out of time when nearly everybody in a given town would have this very sign on their forehead, and so it hardly drew attention to anybody in particular because it was as normal as the clothes their back. We however live in a different time and place and should rightly ask whether such an act will be one that draws attention to ourselves in a similar way as the hypocrites on the street corners who want to be seen by others. Yes, this is indeed a danger. However, there are countless Christian practices and disciplines that could potentially be twisted into this sort of perverted act.

It is also helpful to remind us of the full range of rituals we engage in on a yearly basis. Getting together in groups on December 31 to eat junk food and watch digital numbers change from 11:59 to 12:00 and at that moment singing a song, all in order to celebrate the unseen reality something new has begun. There is also the ritual of standing for specific songs in public places, and maintaining silence at specific times so as to point to the unseen, and not always remembered reality, of the identity of the nation. There is the ritual of doing something out of the ordinary to celebrate the reality of the event of a friend’s birthday.

These are realities that are always with us, but it is enriching when we take time to experience those realities in an out-of-the-ordinary way. Every day when I wake up, I’m aware of the reality that I’ve been married to Angie. But there is something very enriching to our relationship when we plan for our anniversary, and then share in that occasion in order to celebrate one particular day that happened over a decade ago. It is hard for me to imagine carrying with me on a daily basis the intense reality of the fact we have made a covenant of faith and all of weight that entails. And yet it is important for us to yearly remember and relive that important day, and that life-altering decision.

Likewise, our faith is too big to be profoundly aware of all of its nuances everyday. Our faith is so big that we stretch out our memory across an entire year so as to be aware of it all, because we cannot possibly have the awareness of all of the aspects of what God has done for us on a daily or even a weekly basis.

I’m always thinking about Jesus, but there is just too much to what he said and did to be mindful of it all on a regular basis.

The Lenten practices are intended to be an aid to experience Holy Week, and the Passion of our Christ in a heightened way that we might not otherwise experience. For just as it is out of deep darkness that the dawn shines most brilliantly, so too do we come to a better awareness of the splendor and glory of our king’s greatest morning when we set it against the backdrop of his darkest night. Lent is a season when we work into the rhythms of our lives practices that remind us that Christ left the beauty and safety of heaven in order to take on the beauty and brokenness of humanity. Just as my wife and I have both given up many things in order to share our lives together, so too has our relationship with Christ entail a similar type of giving up and taking on. As we give up and take on during lent, we remind ourselves not only of Christ’s giving up the goodness of heaven to take on the brokenness of humanity, but that Christ’s call to confession, repentance, and return enables us to give up our brokenness in order to take on his divinity.

During lent, many of us alter our lives in small ways, so as to help bring this particular reality of Christ into our lives. These things that we may give up are usually things that are not in themselves bad things. In fact they are everyday common things, sometimes mundane things, things that are a part of our every day rhythm of life. But when we give these things up, or take these things on, the cycle of our lives hits a slight bump, jarring us out of cruse-control and making us think, reminding us of Jesus’ words, Remember me? Remember me.

But this is no easy task because in our act of remembering Christ, we also remember the declaration of “remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This may at first glance seem morbid and hopeless. Indeed, all of Lent seems to be depressing. The Lenten themes are usually things that most people try their hard not to think about. So why do we go to such great lengths to remember it? Because buried under the ash on our forehead is the reality of the life of Christ. In acknowledging our death and mortality, we set the contrast by which the resurrection may be seen in our lives so that the world may know it is not us that live, but Christ who lives within us.

It is a reality of our faith that is with us all year, every year, but now is the time where we allow our lives to cycle through this aspect of Christ at a slower pace. Like an anniversary, we both remember Christ’s commitment to us, as well as our commitment to Christ.

All of our texts today emphasize that the significance is not so much on the practice as much as it is on how those practices enables us to not only return to God, but to be a people who beckons all of creation to this same return. Our acts of worship, and the symbols we use, from the waters of baptism, to the table of Christ, to the ashes on our foreheads, are acts and symbols that are to enable us to see the reality of the kingdom of God. If these acts aren’t turning within us the desire to serve the homeless, visit the lonely, speak out and stand up against oppression, then we had better think twice about doing them. However, if done in the right spirit, these cyclical and yearly practices can not only strengthen us to be the people God would have us to be, but they also enable us to come to a deeper awareness of the life to which all creation is returning so that, as T.S. Eliot wrote,

…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

May the symbol of the ashes bring about a better awareness that in dying we are born anew; and in leaving life we are actually returning to it.

New Depressant Drug about to Hit Market

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Blurring Borders in a Nation that Fears Its Neighbor

or, The Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37)

Every year the National Wildlife Association faces the challenges of regulating the rules and guidelines of deer hunting. It seems that the prospect of getting that 8 point buck is so tempting that many hunters are willing to break the law in pursuit of this great prize.

But back in 1942, something happened that caused a dramatic drop in deer hunting. You know what it was…Bambi. That’s pretty hard to believe, isn’t it? How in the world is Bambi going to cause some big burly deer hunter to not go hunting? Two possible explanations, either they just couldn’t bring themselves to putting Bambi in the cross hairs of their thirty-alt-six, or little Jonnie Jr. wouldn’t let daddy out the door with the knowledge that he intended to blow Bambi’s head off.

It is so intriguing that one story, could so dramatically transform the way people see deer, that it would even transform a deer’s greatest enemy? But that is power of story, Bambi being the more ridiculous example. But think of the ways in which stories transform not only the way we see, but many times the way we act. Think about how stories like Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced the ways whites viewed African Americans. Think about the way in which the Movie Philadelphia or the play Angels in America helped to transform the way many American’s viewed Aids and even Homosexuality. We could all mention stories that hit us at certain times and quite literally transformed the way we see things.

It is this transformative power of story that Jesus harnesses in his parables. Jesus is not interested in giving rules and regulations, Jesus is interested in transforming the way we live and understand our lives, and more importantly, how we understand our neighbor...
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Prayer

Louis Untermeyer

GOD, though this life is but a wraith,
Although we know not what we use,
Although we grope with little faith,
Give me the heart to fight—and lose.

Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.

Open my eyes to visions girt
With beauty, and with wonder lit—
But always let me see the dirt,
And all that spawn and die in it.

Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring's first flutes and drums—
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.

From compromise and things half done,
Keep me with stern and stubborn pride;
And when at last the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.

Wariness of The Truth Project

Unlike my previous statement, I’ll try to ratchet back my sour tone. To be sure, I do not think the people at Focus on the Family are a bunch of ninnies looking to make an extra buck by pawning off clever lesson series on overeager churches willing to buy anything that glitters with their logo. They do care for the church and have rightly pointed out the need for the church to reconsider her identity within our current cultural context. As they quote from Romans 12, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” And as they highlight in The Truth Project series, part of the way Christians renew their minds is by reapplying and reinterpreting scripture into our current cultural context. In other words, how can scripture help us to discern what is the will of God in the here and now?

However, the fact that they have some helpful insights and suggestions concerning the church’s faithfulness today does not exempt them from critique of several glaring problems in their presentation. I think that it is obvious that there is a great deal of solid Christian teaching found in The Truth Project, and I don't feel the need to point those out. What is not obvious are the pitfalls, dangers, and errors found in this project. So here a just a few observations that should give Christians pause before taking the teachings of The Truth Project at face value.

1. Faulty Assumptions
An example of the type of fallacy at work throughout The Truth Project is the way they will base an argument and a solution on an erroneous observation. For instance, if I were to say that Darwin’s theory of evolution states that God is a monkey. Then, based on this observation, I go to great lengths arguing how Darwin is wrong, as well as state all of the important reasons why we as Christians should not consider God as a monkey. While my argument might be sound, and my reasons my be important, all of this is for not because it based on a false understanding of Darwin's theory. How helpful would that be to anyone? I’m not suggesting that we not critique Darwin, but in order to give the best critique of Darwin, we must first be so well acquainted with his theory that we are able to give it a fair summary that even Darwin would agree with.

Postmodernism
One faulty assumption at work in the Truth Project is their notion of what postmodernism is. But I’ve already blabbed about this one in my previous post. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, you can disagree with and critique aspects of postmodernism, but this must done out of a solid understanding of what it is you are critiquing.

Unhelpful Categories
Another faulty assumption is they way they categorize the conversation on truth, namely that all of reality can be located in two eternally consistent categorical columns – True vs. False; Fact vs. Fiction; History vs. Myth. This sort categorization is a living monument to naiveté. Contrary to popular belief, the people of God have not categorized reality in this way for thousands upon thousands of years. But don’t take my word for it, take the fairly conservative historical theologian Thomas C. Oden and his book After Modernity...What?. In short, he critiques both modern and postmodernism from the perspective of a multimillennia old community called the church. He also points out from this perspective that the tendency for the church to categorize in this two-columned fashion is relatively new (200 years old) and definitely not a perspective that is grounded in either scripture or historical theology. This, compounded with the fact that this sort of categorization does not take into account the ways in which fiction can be true, while cold hard facts can be misleading and even meaningless.

2. Ignorance of the Broader Conversation in Theology and Philosophy
Cartesian Categories
If they were truly acquainted with a broader scope of theology and philosophy they would know that when they break down reality into two categories, they are perpetuating a way of thinking and talking that was formulated by Rene Descartes and further developed by countless other Enlightenment thinkers. While this might seem to be a simple and helpful way to understand reality, it oversimplifies the highly nuanced way God’s people have understood what is good, right, just, and true. In the process of this oversimplification they have actually created a distorted understanding of how we come to know things as true. Descartes wanted to ground all truth in one foundational concept. While that is very appealing, it is fundamentally misguided. We come to know that 2+2=4 is true differently than how we come to know that a friend loves us with agape love. We are using the word “true” in both instances, but we come to that knowledge in very different, but valid ways. Both Descartes and the Truth Project assume that we validate and ground all truth in one foundational method of discernment that can help us on the grail-like quest for certainty. In short, the way in which the Truth Project claims to validate truth is one that is found neither in scripture nor in the historical development of theology, but rather in a philosophical view that was born in the 17th century.

Veritology?
Another clue that The Truth Project is not all that well acquainted with the very philosophy they attempt to teach is their use of Veritology. They mention in their study guide:

Those of you who are very astute will recognize that “veritology” does not exist in the dictionary. The reason for that is simple: I made this word up. I was in need of a word for “the study of truth” or “the truth about truth”… So, I decided I would do some combining as well. I took the Latin term for truth, “veritas” and combined it with the derivation of the Greek suffix, “logos” and the merger resulted in “Veritology”, the “study of truth”.

This is all well and good. The only thing is that there is already a word used to describe that activity. It’s called epistemology:

Epistemology – (noun) The theory of knowledge, esp. with regard to its methods, validity, and scope. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion.

The fact that this is a well-known branch of philosophy coupled with their obliviousness to its existence makes me dubious at best as to their competence in presenting this material.

3. Stifling dialogue
People have the choice to accept or deny Christ and his body, the church. However, we have a responsibility of making sure that all people taste, see, hear, smell and touch Christ. It has been my experience, on countless occasions, that the focus-on-the-family way of talking and presenting Christ has not only disgusted people who are looking for God, but even worse, they have given people a distorted understanding of Christ. I find that they disagree not with the way of Christ, but rather a false understanding of Christ. As I mentioned before, everyone has the freedom to accept or deny Christ, but they can only truly do that once Christ has been clearly embodied before them. And how can Christ be truly embodied before them if they cannot understand him. The Truth Project might present Christ in a nice-and-tidy way to believers, but to many non-believers it is not only unintelligible but also repellent.

Christians can do better (and are doing better) at asking these two monumentally important questions:
1. What does it mean for Christians to be a faithful embodiment/incarnation of Christ in the current cultural context?
2. How can we faithfully dialogue with people who are otherwise lame, mute, blind, or deaf to the "good news" of Jesus Christ?

Other Posts on The Truth Project:
1. The Truth Project?
3. The Truth Project: Simply a Bad Way of Talking
I also want to include this link to Hackman's Musings. He has honored me with a link to these pages, and I would be remiss not to link back to his thoughts on this topic. He makes numerous spot-on critiques and observations, as well as facilitates a much larger conversation in his comment section.

1. The Truth Project: Part 1
2. The Truth Project: Part 2

Book of Hours

by Rainer Maria Rilke
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

Rilke's Book of Hours, translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

No Country for Old Men

Synopsis and Recommendation

This movie is for anyone who might need a cheerful reminder of what W.B. Yeats describes as a blood-dimmed tide being loosed and everywhere the ceremony of innocence being drowned. Who is doing the drowning you may ask? The answer my friends is blowing in the air-powered cattlegun of Anton Chigurh. The passionate intensity of this man’s malevolence is second to none. He makes Hannibal Lecter look like Dr. Phil. The second this man entered the screen I was filled with the urge to run sobbingly to a corner and soil my breeches. Without a doubt this character will top the all-time most vicious villains list.

Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem, is a hit man who is after good-ol-boy Llewelyn Moss who happened upon a boatload of cash left over from a drug deal gone bad. The wrath of Chigurh sends Moss (Josh Brolin) on the run. All the while Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is pulled along in the wake trying to make sense out of all the mayhem.

While much of the movie plays off of the interaction between Chigurh and Moss, Sheriff Bell is the one that carries us through the story. While he tries to piece together the fragments of madness of a busted drug deal and a man on the run with Satan on his heels, he also tries to make sense of his actions as a man of justice in a world seething with dark atrocities.

The acting is flawless. The direction and flow of the movie keeps the viewer wound tighter than a golf ball. The themes and storytelling, adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel, are vivid and are worthy of moviegoers who are interested in a movie that will probe the heart of darkness and lay bare what a hero must face – what we must face.

Direction – Superb
Performance – Brilliant
Aesthetics – The sparse score and the cinematography of the arid Texas landscape perfectly frame the story.
Story – Needs to be in the hopper a bit longer
* See how I rate movies


My Musings on the film
(Spoiler Warning!)

The movie begins overlooking the sparse dry West Texas landscape and a voiceover of sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) describing a heinous massacre that happened some time back. Some said it was a crime of passion. However, the man who committed the crime was sure to clarify that passion had nothing to do with it but that killing someone was something he was going to do since the time he was born. He said he would do it again if they let him out. There is a brief pause as the wind moans slightly over the parched countryside. “I don’t know what to make of that” he says, and so begins the movie and sheriff Bell’s odyssey along a path of darkness and bewildering evil that will be his last walk as a lawman in an overwhelmingly lawless land.

The movie/book takes its title from a W.B. Yeats poem entitled Sailing to Byzantium, who's opening line reads, "That is no country for old men." The poem explores themes of growing old in a land that perpetually celebrates youth, as well as how one can attain immortality by attaching oneself to something that will remain after one dies. In the movie, it is not youth and vitality that cause the main character to feel out of place, but the perpetual existence of evil.

The movie could have been a silent film with its minimal dialog and its visual dramatic tension, and I mean that in every good way possible. The structure of the entire movie as well as every shot of every scene is cinematic architecture at its finest, not because of its beauty, per se, but because it frames the story perfectly. At no point was I looking at my watch wondering when it was going to end. The silence, the close-ups of candy wrappers or shoeless feet, and the cold face-offs between characters made the scenes more pregnant than a hippo with triplets.

The movie has several scenes of graphic violence that would make even the most bloodthirsty of Old-testament-loving Christians queasy. However, it is neither gratuitous nor a glorification of violence. It is rather a raw portrayal of a man who is the personification of evil. The evil violence vividly conveys not only the gravity of the situation in which Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds himself, but also dark gloom in which an old sheriff feels he’s swimming and maybe even foundering. This movie continually gestures at epic and archetypal questions without overtly asking them, and that in part is the power of the movie. Nothing is laid bare. Every detail of the movie is ambiguous. We know next to nothing about the drug deal gone bad in the desert. We can guess that Anton gets the money, but we don’t know for sure. We can only assume we know what happens to Moss’s wife, but we don’t know for sure. And worst of all, we don’t know if Anton Chigurh ever gets what’s coming to him. All of this seems to give us a view from sheriff Bell’s perspective – feeling like we are caught in the wake of a title wave of evil and having trouble making heads or tails about it.

But any movie can point to the darkness and despair in life, that is no real feat. What makes this whole movie worthwhile, and even noble, are two short scenes at the end of the movie – namely the final monologue. We follow this character through hell and are led right up to the cusp of a resolution. But in character with the movie we are only given a gesture rather than a straightforward and painfully trite soliloquy such as “believe in yourself,” or “good will overcome.” Rather, we hear sheriff Bell retelling his dreams.

I had two dreams about him after he died. I don’t remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothing. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carryin fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that when ever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.

If the dream is equating the evil that sometimes seems to surround us like a cold dark night, then it would not be far off from St. Augustine’s notion of evil. Augustine articulated that evil is not a force that is diametrically opposed to good and that the two must duke it out and it’s up for grabs as to which side will win. Rather, evil is an absence of light. While at first this may not seem like a very helpful metaphor, if we press it we come to a similar point as the sheriff in his dream. If evil is an absence of “good”, then it would be absurd to think that you can somehow control it, or outrun it, or stop it. The only way to eradicate darkness is by the presence of light. Light does not have to fight darkness, only be a presence in it.

To say that the world if full of bleak darkness is not the sad revelation of this movie. The sad revelation is how few people there are who are willing to carry a little fire in the darkness and make their camp for wayfaring strangers.

Marriage As a Living Image of God's Character

Delivered at the wedding of Emily Banks and B.J. Krug

All love has its source in God’s love. All relationships are extensions of God’s relational character. We love because God loves. We nurture relationships with others because God nurtures a relationship with all creation. As God’s children, these two activities are in our blood. All life is wrapped up in love and right relationships things.

Our being able to love and to receive love in relationships is made possible because God seeks a relationship with us. And the world comes to know this by the presence of that reality being seen in us. As we just heard the words of Jesus, “that they may be one, as we are one…so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

And one of the ways in which the world is made aware of this reality is not in eloquent sermons, or philosophical essays, but in relationships. As much as Jesus loved to talk, he demonstrates in this prayer that the way in which the world comes to know one of the most important realities about God is through relationships that are one in love.

This is why some traditions call marriage a sacrament, which is a fancy word for an outward expression of a divine reality. To which people from our tradition respond, ‘yea, that too.’ Of course, some would argue that everything in our life ought to be an outward expression of a divine reality, and in that case everything is a sacrament. And if everything is a outward expression of a divine reality, then there is no point in distinguishing one over and against another. Why point to marriage as a sacrament when everything is, and ought to be, a sacrament.

Indeed, as Christians, every aspect of our life ought to be lived in such a way that it expresses the nature of God. But Jesus reminds us that there is something unique about people being one. And this image of being one is seen most intimately in the context of marriage.

“For this reason a man and a woman will leave father and mother, and the two will become one flesh.”

And so what is unique about marriage is that it is a living and active sign of the divine reality of God’s love found in his relationship with all creation through Christ. God’s love is not a single act, but an eternal reality that is perpetually nurtured.

And so it is in marriage, this living, active relationship that reveals and proclaims God’s character in a way that cannot be proclaimed in other places. This is your primary responsibility.

This ceremony is not a rote procedure, or a mere formality but a time to declare to God our awareness of this reality. This is also a time for us all to make known that the nurturing and sustaining of this divine reality is not yours alone, but one that we all share – from our youngest child to our most seasoned elder. All of us have a stake in the cultivation this relationship so as to maintain a faithful proclamation of the character of God.

Our hope is that you will live this reality. May this marriage be God’s reply to Jesus’ prayer in the garden. May you take the love that God has given you through Christ, and give it to each other through the power of the Holy Spirit, so that the world may know of God’s redeeming love.

A Good Movie is Hard Defined

Aristotle waxed eloquently on what it means to be good, as well as how to attain it. While the same rigorous process ought to be endeavored by someone to lay out what it means to be a good movie, that person is not me. However, I will briefly lay out my own criteria for evaluating a movie. The reason for these categories is that different movies a worth watching for different reasons. I personally find that a movie is worth watching when it is strong in at least one of these categories.

Direction - How the movie flowed from scene to scene; how the story unfolded; how it was told

Performance - How well the actors acted

Aesthetics - The cinematography, musical score, and all of the other sites and sounds that carry the movie

Story - Is this movie a story worth telling? What was the movie trying to do, and did we need this movie to do it?

Socialism Meets Capitalism

Chris Matthews finds a clip of delicious irony as multimillionaires come to Washington in their private jets to ask for a multimillion dollar handout.




I don’t understand how so many Christians can assume the superiority of capitalism while simultaneously holding the conviction that socialism is evil to its core. Personally, I think that that they both can be employed and lived out in such a way that can be either prosperous and peaceful, or oppressive and unjust. Isn't it ironic that while capitalism in its fullest has led this economy to the state that it is currently in, we are looking for a socialist solution to deal with this problem?

Are these two approaches commensurable? Can a socialistic approach be used to solve a problem that capitalism created? Or, are we creating an even bigger problem, which is being portrayed here in this video – that is, the wealthy are only going to prey on this multibillion dollar bailout not as an opportunity to address this problem, but as an opportunity to make yet another profit.

Christian or not, all would be wise to consider that Darwin based his theory of evolution on capitalism. Dr. Gerry Lower makes an interesting observation in his article, Religious Capitalism's Embrace of Social Darwinism:

In ideological terms, religious capitalism rejects evolutionary theory in favor of faith in Biblical creationism and "intelligent design" (which is truly not intelligent because it provides no meaningful insight into design or purpose). In operational terms, however, and despite all loathing of evolutionary theory, religious capitalism begins and ends by following an agenda explicitly defined by post-Darwinian political theory, i.e., "Social Darwinism"

International Relations?

I thought this was an interesting clip. Bush is at the the G20 summit with other world leaders and while everyone else is shaking each other's hands, he passes by like an ex-husband.

Ulysses

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees. All times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vext the dim sea. I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known,-- cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honor'd of them all,--
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,
to whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,--
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfill
This labor, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail;
There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me,--
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads,-- you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honor and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks;
The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Wine from These Grapes

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.

Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.
Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.


Reflections on the poem
Stephanie A. Hart

This is one of my favorite poems, but why would the author, a wildly promiscuous woman living in bohemian Greenwich Village at the height of the roaring 20's, care to write something which seems to evoke such a powerful image of Christ. Perhaps, Edna never meant it to be Christian, but in reading her work, I often discover religious themes coming through the pages.

Yearly around Easter time, this poem pushes its way to the foreground of my thoughts. This year, my books boxed away, I searched four libraries and the internet to find a copy. When I finally found it on a dusty shelf and turned its brittle pages, its words hit me again with their rich themes.

Wine from these grapes I shall be treading surely
Morning and noon and night until I die.
Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.

Christ was in the business of redeeming the ordinary, of taking on the hard, messy work of transformation. He did not shy away from the pain and stain of the labors that he knew would ultimately produce something wonderful. Christ was a true winemaker, from his first miracle in Cana to his last days, Christ was working in large ways and small at turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. No time for rest, his work goes on morning and noon and night.

If you would speak with me on any matter,
At any time, come where these grapes are grown;
And you will find me treading them to must.
Lean then above me sagely, lest I spatter
Drops of the wine I tread from grapes and dust.

Christ was in the business of transforming people, his work was in the vineyard. We are all welcome, but if we seek his council, we must be careful, Christ is in the business of transforming the ordinary. If we ask for advice, we must come to where the work is, and we may find ourselves spattered and stained and changed by it. Be careful, Christ is in the business of redeeming the ordinary morning and noon and night.

Stained with these grapes I shall lie down to die.
Three women come to wash me clean
Shall not erase this stain.
Nor leave me lying purely,
Awaiting the black lover.

In death, his body bore the physical markings of his work. With dirt under his nails and wounds in his flesh, he could not be washed clean of all that this world had done to him. Christ was stained by his work, and as much as it transformed the ordinary around him, it also transformed his body. That body became a sign pointing to the extraordinary work of his life.

Death, fumbling to uncover
My body in his bed,
Shall know
There has been one
Before him.

And then there is the resurrection. The duping of death who comes to find only bedclothes where a broken body should have been. This master of re-creation and transformation finds himself the ultimate example of the transforming power he came to show us all.

It is a beautiful tale for the Easter season. That Christ was in the work of redemption and resurrection of taking the ordinary and making it holy should seem an odd theme for the poetical meanderings of this wild woman of words, but maybe that is precisely where his story is best told. After all, it was a woman of ill repute that Christ met at the well, a sinner that washed his feet with her tears, a tax collector in whose house he dined, a betrayer, a doubter and a denier with whom he shared his last days and it is to us, the broken, unfaithful, dispossessed, lost, wandering, stumbling souls that he continues to come and work his redemption, looking into our lives and seeing us lost, seeing our disobedience, the searching and seeking and sulking for pleasure. It is the self-entitled rantings with which we justify our selfish actions to which he listens, as exhausted as to Peter's persistent missteps and mis-theology, continuing to offer his measured and long-suffering way to peace each time we return to him unchanged.

Christ is in the business of redeeming us, of trampling us into wine. We drift along unaware of the forces shaping us, we glut ourselves on the wrong kinds and wrong minds of thought we turn from instruction that would heal us and play the physician to our own ailing souls. And yet he is there morning and noon and night treading grapes into wine, waiting for us to join him.

I imagine that if we were to come, to lean over the Savior sagely, hoping to avoid getting spattered by this messy work of transformation, we might seek his council for a time and might even find him attentive, but eventually he would need to get back to work and eventually we would need to either join in or leave him to his labors. Christ is in the business of redeeming the ordinary in us all—morning and noon and night. But we are not invalids in this process, not helpless. Christ waits for us to join the work, which is daily transforming our ordinary into something divine.

We find ourselves at Easter going to the Lord's house again and again and again, to eat and be fed by this transforming, resurrecting power. We find ourselves scurrying around following the Savior, trying to keep up, trying, by our mere presence, to glean the wisdom and worth of the season without getting messy in the process. But more often than not, Christ does not transform us in this way, at least not in the long-haul. Christ has very little interest in hearing our sob stories again and again or having us trail along, trying to parse out the mundane meaning of our day-to-day, because Christ is about transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary, of engaging us in the hard and often messy work of transformation.

It happens when we feed the poor or heal the sick, it happens when we listen to the lonely and comfort the dying, it happens when we visit the prisoner and pray for the struggling, and it happens when we bite our tongues of selfish words, and keep our path from selfish ways and die to ourselves for the sake of our friends, our families and even complete strangers. It happens when we take on the passion of Christ and learn to walk the way of the cross each and every day, to take the pieces of us that are ordinary and trample them into the extraordinary. It happens when we decide to stop tiptoeing around the border of Christ's work, roll-up our pant legs and step in.

From his first acts of public ministry to the final footwashing, Christ was getting dirty doing the hard work of transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary morning and noon and night. The lord of the harvest, the lord of the labor and the lord of the rich reward beckons us to become a part of that service. To descend into the winepress and to arise transformed by the work. Christ longs for us to surrender ourselves to the work of the church, not because we are martyrs who thrive on discomforting ourselves, but because we are Christians, followers of Christ, and that is where Christ is leading us.

We know that Christ led a full life, we know that he had friends he held as dear as family, we know that he suffered for the Lord, and ultimately received the reward for his labors and is seated at the right hand of the Father in glory, and yet, we are still reluctant to follow in his footsteps and engage in the work he started, not because we doubt who he was, but because we are unwilling to risk the discomfort of change for the reward of transformation. We are too scared to inconvenience ourselves with the poor to receive the redemption it would bring, and we are too greedy to give up our own personal vices of hatred, of excess, of secret sin in exchange for the life altering transformation we might find. And because we live in this fear and lazily wait in the shadows for Christ to leave the vineyard, we remain unchanged—morning and noon and night.

We are content to lean sagely over the savior, allowing Christ to do the real work, gleaning anecdotal stories of service and sacrifice to continue rubber-stamping our sorry secluded and sepulchered lives, instead of joining Christ on the trampling floor and staining ourselves with work. Lord save us from the complacency of self that keeps us ordinary, save us from the complacency of the poor that keeps us unchanged and save us from the complacency of your sacrifice that keeps you in the grave all these many years.

May we join Christ where the grapes are grown, may we learn to take up the hard task of changing the ordinary into extraordinary, may we learn to daily tread grapes into wine—morning and noon and night.

Ash Wednesday

It’s about at this time of year when we become disgusted with ourselves for not being able to maintain our New Years Resolution… again. It is so frustrating to continually go through the cycle of failure, hitting rock bottom, wallowing in it for a while, wondering if there is any hope for us to be something other than we are. We then get the courage to get back up and try to overcome ourselves, usually around New Years, only to slowly slide back down the slimy slope into the slop of our miserable lives. Well…that might be a bit of an exaggeration.

For some of us our lives can often times seem like a cycle of despair, ever turning on its axis, always repeating the same things, encountering the same things, and being the same thing. As the Godfather once remarked “Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.” Sometimes I wonder if it is easier to get out of the mafia than it is out of some of our sinful, despairing, and sometimes even destructive cycles of life.

It is the very cyclical nature of our lives that make us sometimes wonder how we can even hope for anything else. Hope is the belief that things can and will be different. But a cycle seems to doom us to turn around to the very thing we were going away from.

How often do we let the current of the world turn us in its direction? On a global scale, we are constantly reminded of the cycle of violence in which the nations perpetually spin. On personal level, our daily lives rub up against children, coworkers, and employers who turn out the hate that has been turned into them. Racism and oppression seemed to be passed down from generation to generation as if it were as established as DNA. The cycle of violence seems to turn under a flood of ignorance and hate. Love, forgiveness and peace seem only to be a mist that is lost in the tidal wave of coercion.

How can we turn the tide that turns the wheel? How can I stop one violent act in the Middle East? How can I stop the poor from being oppressed? How can I keep parents from abusing their children?

This is the cycle in which the world has always been.
This is the cycle in which many of us have always been.
This is how our lives turn. This is how the world turns…

…this is how the world turned.
As the world turned,
Jesus turned into it,
turning the world into something new.

The old cycle, that turns off of violence and hate, is loosing power and passing away. The new cycle is gaining momentum. We do not turn the world, nor do we turn our own lives. But we place ourselves in one these two cycles: either the one that is a cycle of death, destruction, and despair, or the one that is the cycle of birth, resurrection, and new life.

Lent is a time when we show the world that our lives turn by a different flow. And of all the Christian observances, lent is the one that goes against that flow the most.

In Lent, and in other traditions of our worship as Christians, we place ourselves within a different cycle. Every year we come to remember an aspect of Christ that has already happened. Today in particular, we use ashes to help our cycle of remembrance.

These aids to remembrance are already a part of our every day lives. We use all sorts of things to aid our remembrance, as well as to aid in making a past event a present reality: fireworks in remembering a countries birth, cake and singing and gifts to remember a person’s birth, a black arm band to remember the death of a loved one, a flag at half-mast to remember the death of a political leader, a yellow ribbon to remember soldiers on foreign soil.
We even remind ourselves of things that have not yet happened: a yellow sticky note to remember an appointment, wedding invitations to remember an upcoming day in the community’s life, all sorts of electronic gizmos that hold our future of where we are to be at what time and the things we are going to do.

And so the cycle of lent turns us around to remember Jesus’ call to repentance and discipleship; a call that leads through the cross. And the cycle also turns us forward towards the resurrection and the coming of our Lord, and the braking in of the kingdom of God. These remembrances of past and future events turn around our present reality.

Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. At first glance this seems bleak. Indeed, all of Lent seems to be depressing. The Lenten themes are usually things that most people would want to forget. So why do we go to such great lengths to remember it? Because buried under the ash on our forehead is the reality of the life of Christ. In celebrating our death and mortality, we set the contrast by which resurrection may be seen in our lives so that the world may know it is not us that live, but Christ who lives within us.

It is a reality of our faith that is with us all year, every year, but now is the time where we allow our lives to cycle through this aspect of Christ at a slower pace. This cycle, unlike the cycle of our lives, is a cycle full of hope because it is always turning towards resurrection. There can be no crippling despair when the wheel will always turn towards resurrection.

It is also important to note that we are not the axis on which everything turns. The texts that we read on Ash Wednesday makes sure that our lives are not only being turned in the right direction, but that the turning is doing something. Our acts of worship, and the symbols we use, from the waters of baptism, to the table of Christ, to the ashes on our foreheads, are acts and symbols that are to enable us to see the reality of the kingdom of God. If these acts aren’t turning within us the desire to serve the homeless, visit the lonely, speak out and stand up against oppression, then we had better think twice about doing them. Jesus disciplined himself, Jesus gave things up, Jesus fasted, all to enable him to faithfully live out the kingdom and administer justice.

During lent, many of us alter our lives in small way, so as to help bring a particular reality of Christ into our lives. These alterations, the things we may give up, or take on, are usually things that are not in themselves bad things. In fact they are everyday common things, sometimes mundane, things that are a part of our every day life cycle. But when we give these things up, or take these things on, the cycle of our lives hits a slight bump, jarring us out of cruse-control and making us think, reminding us of Jesus’ words, Remember me? Remember me.

Unlike New Years resolutions that seem to remind us that no force of our own will is able to transform our lives, Lent teaches us that only the Holy Spirit is able to bring about any substantial transformation in our lives. While major themes of lent are discipline, repentance, and confession, these are not acts that remind us of our cyclical failure. Rather, they remind us that all of our past and future failures are followed by God’s grace and Christ’s resurrection. Lent prepares us for Easter.

The Holy Spirit moved Jesus to fast for 40 days in the wilderness to prepare himself for acts of justice, mercy and power that ultimately led to the cross. As we give up and take on during lent, we remind ourselves not only of Christ’s giving up the goodness of heaven to take on the brokenness of humanity, but that Christ’s call to confession and repentance enables us to give up our brokenness in order to take on his divinity.

Christ gives new birth to our cyclical journey through our cyclical lives, so that, as T.S. Eliot wrote,

…the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

May the symbol of the ashes bring about a better awareness that it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.