Happiness, in no particular order or genre

• I just spent the past two hours seated in a coffee shop on the denton square surrounded by local art that i actually liked, listening to the soundtrack from juno, feeling the cool night breeze from the open door, wrapped in a shawl that i brought back from italy and which consequently feels like home when i wear it, drinking an excellent cappuchino and reading a handwritten series of essay/conversations from two of my favorite people (ryan beaver and kyle collins) on the subject of music in church. two words: utter contentment.
• realization: good beer, the best of company, live celtic music, midnight rainstorms and sheltering under the eaves of the courthouse, and well-lit benches make for a great evening.
• Recognizing that sometimes a mistake can serve to highlight a trend of growth is a good feeling. So is suddenly realizing just how much i am learning, instead of being overwhelmed by how much i have left to learn.
• the future feels exciting again. that is neat.
• The other day, i entered a large used bookstore with the intention of only purchasing any particular books that called my name in some specific way. It was an experiment. The first one i found was in the philosophy section: it was a collection of poetry and proverbs by kahlil gibran, whom i enjoy. when i opened the cover to explore it, i found a handwritten note dated 1965 detailing someone’s past appreciation of another book of gibran’s poetry, and their hopes that the recipient of this book would find equal inspiration and enjoyment in it. I dont know who the person was who received this book as a gift or how it ended up in the used bookstore, but i know if i had a book of poetry that was a treasured gift from someone that somehow made its way back out into the world, i would want someone to treasure it. so i knew this book was coming home with me. I also found a book of poetry by michaelangolo, and a book called “the green hat”, which i’d never heard of, but which snagged me with its non-descript cover (published in the ’20s, it was completely faded) and brilliant first line.

All of these things make me happy. i thought i would share.

Hope in Abandonment

A friend of mine lately introduced me to the following poem by Rumi:

One night a man was crying,
Allah! Allah!

His lips grew sweet with the praising,
until a cynic said,
“So I have heard you
calling out, but have you ever
gotten a response?”

The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.

He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls,
in a thick, green foliage.

Why did you stop praising?”
“Because I’ve never heard anything back.”

“This longing
you express is the return message.
The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union.”

I was struck by its relevance to my life, especially right at this particular moment. However, my overriding reaction was one of disgust. what sort of evil, twisted relationship forces you to be grateful for and take comfort in a sense of abandonment? Everything about that is wrong, and unhealthy, and sickening.

Then i read the following:

proverbs 27:6 — Faithful are the wounds of a friend; profuse are the kisses of an enemy.

Let me begin by throwing this statement out on the table: I feel incredibly wounded by God right now. Maybe that sounds like a heretical thing to say: after all, God is perfect and can do no wrong, so how can He act in a way that is hurtful to us? But no matter how perfect God is, I most certainly am not. Neither do i have His perspective or His knowledge. Regardless of the heresy factor, I feel like He has abandoned me, broken promises to me, lead me wrongly, and left me in the dark. Right now, my biggest struggle has been a daily fight not to give up. I have to actively choose every moment to believe in His goodness. I have to actively reject the sneaking suspicion that keeps rising in the back of my mind that He is capricious, flighty, careless and selfish. And at no time is this struggle more difficult than then i compare my feelings of abandonment by Him with the actions of some others in my life lately who have actively sought to pursue and comfort me, but have done so by encouraging destructive behavior. “profuse are the kisses of an enemy.”

“faithful are the wounds of a friend” — im coming to terms with the fact that its ok to say that He has hurt me, that i am hurt by His actions towards me. What is not ok is to lose faith in the fact that He is faithful, and that His wounding me is for my ultimate good. im going to type that again, because i need to reinforce it in my mind. He has hurt me deeply, but He has done it for my good, even though i dont know and cant imagine what that good is, or why He is doing this to me. If all i have to hold on to is that simple knowledge, then i’ll hold on to it as long as possibly can, and hope and pray that He doesn’t leave me in this place one second longer than my strength to hold on will last.

i know ive been brutally honest here, and a lot of what i’ve said is far from bright, hopeful, sparkly encouragement. But i’m finding hope in this place, however minute, and i desire that these words somehow communicate a sense of that to you as well. feel free to discuss.

————————————————————————–

incidentally, here’s another brief poem by Rumi that i enjoyed:

I called through your door,
“The mystics are gathering
in the street. Come out!”

“Leave me alone. [you answer]
I’m sick.”

“I don’t care if you’re dead!
“Jesus is here, and he wants
to resurrect somebody!”

A Kingly Calling

A few days ago, I was once again confronted with the fact that I am not nearly as familiar with scripture as I like to think I am. As in so many other contexts, the lens through which i view the bible is one that i am usually unaware even exists. And of course, when one is unaware of one’s preconceived notions and biases, one can’t very well break through them. It is always a blessing when someone presents the word in a way that makes me sit back and realize how much of it ive been missing, and helps me to come back to it with fresh eyes and a new perspective. Something like this occurred for me a few days ago, and I want to share it, because I have a feeling I’m not the only one who sometimes needs a swift kick in the bias.

Sunday morning, one of the elders at my church gave a sermon on the creation of Man. He pointed out something extremely pertinent, but easily overlooked, in the creation story.

Genesis 2:5-8 tells us that “When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature. And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed.”

In other words, God deliberately created Adam and gave him life and sentience in a place that was quite clearly incomplete. Not fallen (yet), but clearly barren and in need of life and growth. A blank slate, as it were. God allowed Adam to see and experience this land before placing him in Eden.

Genesis 2:18 then records for us God’s purpose for Adam once he was in the garden: “The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

In other words, Adam had a lot of work to do. He wasn’t created to sit idly beneath a palm tree eating pomegranates and listening to the birds. He was to be the caretaker of this entire expanse of life, and that is a task the magnitude of which I doubt our minds can even fully comprehend.

Thirdly, Genesis chapter 1, which gives a more detailed account of the order of creation, informs us that God had issued a commandment to Adam and Eve from the very beginning: verse 28 tells us that “God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

As if Adam didn’t have enough work on his plate naming the animals and working the garden, he and his wife have been given perhaps the most monumental task imaginable: to fill the entire earth, and subdue it completely, and rule over it. In other words, man has now been called to leave the light and beauty that is the garden of eden, and go out into the darkness of the yet-unformed earth, and bring order and life into barrenness and chaos.

This is beautiful. Let your mind wrap itself around this idea. Man wasn’t created to sit idly in the light and do nothing. Nor was he created to wallow in the darkness. Man was created, WE were created, to seek out the places where light meets darkness, to make that place our home, to work with our very lives to bring light and life and order to the barren, broken places of the world. what a glorious task! what a heroic calling!

Isaiah 61 describes this calling with a beauty that only poetry could achieve. All my life I have read this passage as a description of what the Lord does for us in our lives through His spirit, and that is true. But He also chooses to use us to fulfill this calling in the lives of others. This is what we were created to do:

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor;
he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;
to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor,
and the day of vengeance of our God;
to comfort all who mourn;
to grant to those who mourn in Zion—
to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness instead of mourning,
the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit;
that they may be called oaks of righteousness,
the planting of the LORD, that he may be glorified.

Philippians: Chapter Two

Philippians Chapter Two:

Rather than going verse by verse, I’m just going to address the major theme of this passage (especially of vs. 1-18), and my personal response to it.

Reading this passage, despite its old familiarity, still makes me ache. In fact, I think it hurts a little more each time I read it. Part of this is, of course, the fact that I fail to live up to these verses. I fall short of them every single day, most days before I even manage to get out of bed. But the thing that really makes it hurt is the vision it creates in my mind of what the church could be, of our potential, of how absolutely, awe-inspiringly beautiful the church is meant to be. One of my biggest daily struggles with my faith is with the church: I have to fight with all I’ve got not to hate the church, not to just go wandering off on my own in pursuit of Christ without the church, which is of course and impossible and ultimately deadly route to take. Often I don’t fight very hard, but just sit here in a pool of bitterness, hurt, and anger against the church, all it has done and all it stands for, not just to me personally or to my family, but to the world at large. And it is true, for someone looking for reasons to hate the church, well, their task is painfully simple. But we were, and are, called to something as infinitely beautiful as our current condition is infinitely wrong. We were called to be the visible portrayal of these verses. Imagine how beautiful a thing the church would be if we could only live in this manner, imagine how lovely and lovable. This distance between our reality and what we have been called to is what makes this passage feel like a stab in the heart. And, contrary to what you may expect, I have no answer, no nice conclusion or pacifying generalization to make. I’m still here in this place where my gut response to the church is one of disgust and bitterness, and where this passage calls forth more pain than joy. All I have to offer in the way of a cheerful ending is the sure knowledge that someday, in a world that I honestly can’t even imagine, this state of things will change, and I will be able to admire the church as the glorious and glorified bride of Christ.

Just a few thoughts

on art and creativity, and what comes post-post-modernism.

Obliterationism, or: The human desire to smash things to bits

It seems to me that this generation’s version of creation is actually destruction. I don’t mean deconstructivism, but something more, something active, something that hearkens back to the four-year-old’s glee as he reduces his lego castle to tiny pieces, or, in a darker sense, the satisfaction the Joker experiences in watching the world burn. Something that glories in the purposeful obliteration of all that is beautiful and sacred, and of all that is common, everyday, familiar and therefore valuable.

Art, ever since it has been conscious of itself as “art”, has achieved its various purposes through one universal methodology: shock. The artist, beginning with Michelangelo and Leonardo (who first began to realize the scope of genius that is contained in the artist), has sought to create images that will startle, that will surprise, that will cause the viewer to stop, take notice, and examine. Artists have used all the means at their disposal to accomplish this effect: when perspective was new, artists placed their focal characters on a background that seemed to continue forever into the distance. When Michelangelo discovered the secrets of the human body, he painted and sculpted his characters in ever more complicated and twisted positions. When the audience became tired of perfection and balance, artists began to crowd their paintings with characters in as unbalanced a position as possible, and began painting even the ugliest of truths as faithfully to reality as they could. And when viewers at last began to tire of art as a whole, Duchamp stampeded onto the scene carrying a urinal, and our attention was captivated once more. But at the tag end of the age of postmodernists, who rejected the absolute and sought to escape the overriding truths of generations before, what is left to create that can possibly shock? We have become completely desensitized, we have seen it all and nothing can give us pause.

Except the destruction of the things we value.

Imagine the David lying in a heap of rubble on the floor of the Academia. Imagine the Taj Mahal burning to the ground. Imagine taking hold of the canvas of the Mona Lisa with your own two hands and ripping it to shreds. If you can actually force yourself to truly imagine these experiences, the thought should turn your stomach. And yet there is something deep within our very nature that craves such destruction. We want to be behind the controls of the wrecking ball. We wait with great anticipation for the ocean tide to rise and obliterate even the most carefully constructed of sandcastles. It is only when such thoughts are dragged from their hiding places in our subconscious mind and presented to us as actual, real, active possibilities that we cringe, we shy away, we are disgusted and offended.

We are shocked. We, who have watched human beings leaping from burning buildings, who have seen one of our own great cities dissolve into chaos and anarchy, who are completely accustomed to the sound of a gunshot and the meaning that it holds, we are brought to a dead halt at the thought of something priceless, something that holds our respect and reflects what is beautiful about our own nature as humans, being reduced to rubble and debris. We no longer have the ability to create something that will stop us in our tracks. Only the utter obliteration of the things we have come to value retains this ultimate power over us.

What now?

New PotW

check it

Thoughts on Philippians — part 1

While in Italy, I have been reading through the book of Philippians. Shortly before leaving the states, i purchased a new Bible, largely b.c i had covered the old one with all sorts of notes in the margins, half of which i dont agree with anymore and all of which i was sick of reading. This is the first time I’ve read one of Paul’s letters in quite a while without my own notes distracting me and keeping me from seeing things in a new light. It’s been fun, and, as always, extremely pertinent and applicable to where I am right now. I’ll probably post several times about it, instead of one long novel-length post. And im not going to go in-depth with the whole thing, just post random thoughts that struck me as i read. Maybe i’ll go chapter by chapter? Sure, lets do that.

Chapter One

Vs. 3 — i like how he talks about “making his prayer”, as though a prayer is something to be carefully constructed, like a poem or a work of art.

Vs. 9 — i really love the cause and effect in this verse: “that your love may about more and more with knowledge and all discernment”. In other words, his prayer for them is that with increased knowledge and discernment comes increased love, not increased self-righteousness or increased pride or increased judgment. If you think about it, this is a bit backwards from the general trend. I love it…this has become a prayer of mine for the church as a whole, as well as for myself and my own life.

vs. 15-18 — here paul talks about how various people preach the gospel out of different motivations: some from sincere desire for the glory of God, others out of envy or rivalry or pride. This made me think about how so many people preach the gospel not just for different reasons, but in different ways as well. I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about the different ways the gospel is preached in our world. (when i say different ways, i dont mean different messages, but just different methods). I live in terror of the negative effects that various ways of sharing the gospel can have on the lost. I need to learn to let go of this fear, to acknowledge that my way is definitely not the only good way, or even the best. I need to trust the Lord, to admit that He can use all different methods to get his point across, and that if someone’s methodology is hurting His message, well, then He will be sure to defend His truth in His timing and in His way.

Summer Travels

Well, as you’ve no doubt noticed, I have utterly failed up update my blog whatsoever whilst in Italy. This is not a complete failure to document my trip, though, b.c I have been sending out regular updates with photos and stories to an email list. Said updates were put together in indesign, and i can’t exactly post an indesign or .pdf file here. However, if you want to see the updates and you haven’t been getting them in your email, leave me a comment here and I will happily send them to you!

Pilgrimage and Community

My parents recently returned from a two-week trip through Israel. They visited tons of famous biblical sites, walking where Jesus and His disciples walked and seeing (somewhat, anyway) the things and places that they saw. It all sounded great — interesting, spiritually edifying, educational — but, to be honest, i was far more jealous of the chance they had to visit modern-day Israel than i was about the ancient biblical significance of the places they were seeing. After all, the nation of Israel is hugely significant in world politics: in many ways it is the center of a lot of storms. The chance to be there, to view the nation through a modern lens, as a place where the world is changing at blinding speed and daily events are likely to take on massive historical significance, seemed far more interesting to me than the chance to view it through a historical, biblical lens.

I started wondering why the biblical significance of the trip didn’t seem more valuable to me, and the whole situation got me thinking about the idea of pilgrimage. You see, most religions assign great value to physical locations: Muslims travel to Mecca, Sikhs travel to Nankana Sahib, Buddhists travel to four sites significant in the life of the Buddha, Hindus travel to a plethora of holy cities, mountains, rivers, and caves, even Catholicism has a history of pilgrimage that has left behind winding paths throughout much of Europe. But somehow when protestant Christianity threw out ideas like the selling of indulgences and confession to a priest we threw out the idea of pilgrimage too. I’m not sure how it came to be included in the list of “no longer necessaries” but the fact remains that very few protestants would even think to include a pilgrimage on a list of spiritual goals or disciplines. Even trips like the one my parents took aren’t really a pilgrimage, involving personal toil, sacrifice, labor, self-examination and, through these things, spiritual growth. They are simply an exercise in religious tourism.

This saddens me, because i think that it might be at least partially responsible for the fact that protestant Christians, unlike members of most other world religions, very seldom seem to think of themselves as part of anything bigger than their own home church, or perhaps a national denomination. There is something about a pilgrimage that, by its very nature, creates and sustains community. There is something about treading a path that millions of other believers have tread before us that serves to remind us that we are, truly, just one small part of a much larger whole. There is something about visiting a foreign place, letting oneself really get the feel of its soil and the taste of its air, that serves to remind us that our faith goes far beyond the borders of our nation and our church worships in many different tongues.

I don’t pretend to understand or grasp the full spiritual significance of taking a pilgrimage. I’ve never done it. But i think that it is, at least, an idea well worth considering. Should we recognize the idea of pilgrimage as one of the many things we lost by westernizing Christianity? More importantly, should we recognize it as something worth saving?

New PotW

check it out

It is pretty long, but i’d really love to see your reactions. I found myself deeply identifying with this poem, despite the fact that it is defiantly atheist. go read it and leave a comment!