Author: Matthew

While watching a German propaganda film about their conquest of Poland, Merton marvels at how peaceful and devoid of death all the footage was. Then, he catches a scene the censors should have thrown out:

…but there was one shot of some Germans riding by on caissons, dead tired, and some of them slumbering. Suddenly one man got in the eye of the camera, and gave back the straightest and fiercest and most resentful look I ever saw. Great rings surrounded his eyes which were full of exhaustion, pain and protest. And he kept staring, turning his head and fixing his eyes on the camera as he went by demanding to be seen as a person, and not as the rest of the cattle…You began to realize how tired and disgusted all those soldiers must have been. It added great weight to the effect of all the garbage that had gone before. What a thing to be proud of! To have turned one whole country into a junk heap!

Later on, he comments:

The most actively obscene shot in the whole picture was one of a bomber releasing a stick of bombs which fell away from under its belly in a group: it was like some vile beetle laying eggs in the air, or dropping its filth.

I grew up watching exactly things like this on the show Wings on the Discovery Channel. This was some of the best TV I ever saw growing up: an examination of mechanized warfare. How Sidewinder Missles worked, how the Stealth fighter was invisible to radar, how the Harrier could take off vertically and hover, how the C-130 super cargo jet was equipped with solid state rocket boosters to help it take off on a short runway, and more. Men, and boys love this stuff. It makes us want to be soldiers, or mechanical engineers at least. To bad at the end of the day it’s just serves to make families fatherless on the other side of the world.

Donald Miller speaking with his friend Laura a while before her own conversion to Christianity:

I don’t think there is an explanation. My belief in Jesus did not seem rational or scientific, and yet there was nothing I could do to separate myself from this belief. I think Laura believed that all things that were true were rational. But that isn’t the case. Love, for example, is a true emotion, but it is not rational. What I mean is, people actually feel it. I have been in love, plenty of people have been in love, yet love cannot be proved scientifically. Neither can beauty. Light cannot be proved scientifically, and yet we all believe in light and by light see all things. There are plenty of things that are true that don’t make any sense. I think one of the problems Laura was having was that she wanted God to make sense. He doesn’t. He will make no more sense to me than I will make sense to an ant.

-Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, p.54

Christianity is largely within the grip of rationalism. I have a lot of threads to pull together on this one and don’t have the time to do it today. Travis Prinzi at the Rabbit room explores a facet of it (related to myth and story) today. Augustine’s God was huge. However many times he said his God was even larger, Calvin’s God was actually a smaller then Augustine’s. The God of the Westminster Confession is even smaller than Calvin’s. God is plenty rational, but the whole world cannot contain him.

In the preface to his early secular journals, Thomas Merton warns that much of his youthful arrogance has survived in the following pages. This is apparent in his account of a visit to the World Fair Art Exhibit in 1939. Nonetheless, is observations while people-watching near one his favorite paintings (Fra Angelico’s “Temptation of St. Anthony” and something by else by Breughel) is intriguing:

There were a lot of people who just read off the name, “Broo-gul,” and walked on unabashed. But at least they must have thought it important. They came across with the usual reaction of people who don’t know pictures are there to be enjoyed, but think they are things that have to be learned by heart to impress the bourgeoisie: so they tried to remember the name.

I propose that much of the appreciation of Jazz in some circles doesn’t go much deeper than this.

I heard an old lady with a fairly harsh voice saying behind me, “Look, nobody laughs in these pictures. They must have been mighty unhappy people in those days.”

In the El Greco room, people were shocked beyond measure, violent and bitter, especially women. Their voices got shrill with fear and indignation, and one old woman cried out: “They’re all dying of the TB.”

Of course there were plenty of comments on the misery and unhappiness of the ago the painter lived in. What would be the good of turning around and asking the old lady: “If the world was dying then, what do you supposed it is doing now, in this age of hypochondriacs and murderers and sterilizers? How about OUR pictures, are they dying of anything? Or can they be said to die, when they can’t even come to life in order to do so?

It seemed that the religious pictures sometimes shocked people into talking not like people, but like the possessed.

Remember the Anthrax scare in late 2001? Everyone was on edge from 9/11 and suddenly mail laced with concentrated Anthrax spores showed up all over the country, killing five people and infecting 17 others. After 7 years of investigations, the FBI recently declared who probably did it: Dr. Bruce Ivins, senior biodefence research scientist, publisher of 44 scientific papers and one of the key developers of the Anthrax vaccine. He’d spent his whole life studying the weaponized form of the bacteria. He must have been deeply discouraged that it had never been unleashed in any kind of attack. It turns out all his knowledge and services was never to be in demand. All that work down the drain, so to speak.

It reminds me of another poem by Billy Collins:

Flames

Smokey the Bear heads
into the autumn woods
with a red can of gasoline
and a box of wooden matches.

His ranger’s hat is cocked
at a disturbing angle.

His brown fur gleams
under the high sun
as his paws, the size
of catcher’s mitts,
crackle into the distance.

He is sick of dispensing
warnings to the careless,
the half-wit camper,
the dumbbell hiker.

He is going to show them
how a professional does it.

A few days ago on Sunday, our church small group met in our house. The discussion wound it’s way into politics and some people were rather emotional – dismayed about the election of Barak Obama and especially at the likely rise in the permissiveness and number of abortions. I was concerned along with them. I’m not very excited about stepping on the gas as we drive down the road to socialism. I had a hard time getting as worked up though.

The next evening I read this in Thomas Merton’s early journals. They were from when he was a young man, before he entered the monastery. They were published late in his life in 1958 at the insistence of others. He decided that any money generated from it’s sale would go to a charity run by a friend of his, Catherine de Hueck. In the preface he describe her ministry and her background. She used to be rich, but lost everything when she fled from Russia in 1917 as the communists were taking over, about to murder 47 million of their own citizens.

The revolution had made her poor. Far from resenting the fact, she embraced it with prodigious good humor and fervent thanksgiving as a marvelous grace from God.

She is not the kind of person that gets overexcited at the thought of communism. The Reds do not upset her, and never will. She knows that if there was a revolution in Russia, there were reasons for one: she has not ceased to believe in cause and effect, just because the revolution happened to enter, quite brutally, into her own personal life. She knows from experience why communism to some extent appeals to certain elements in the western working class. Above all, because she is a Christian, she is thoroughly aware of the futility and inner contradictions of a dialectic that is purely materialistic. The Reds do not worry her, because she knows that they will end up in another one of those ashcans, further down the street of history.

-Thomas Merton, Secular Journals, preface

And in many people’s same lifetime, they did end up in the ashcan. Now I think that’s the kind of hope we need. Not a complacency (she devoted her life to serving the poor), and not freaking out. We’re a small slice of history. Jesus is Lord.

Keen insight can come from an amateur. Keep your eye out for it. Sometimes the celebrity is mediocre.

Let not the authority of the writer offend thee, whether he be of great or small learning; but let the love of pure truth draw thee to read. Search not who spoke this or that, but mark what is spoken.

Men pass away, but the truth of the Lord remaineth for ever. God speaks unto us in different ways, without respect of persons.

-Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book I, Ch. 5

In this passage Donal Miller explored why he didn’t like church, at least ones he went to for the first few years.

Here are the things I didn’t like about the churches I went to. First: I felt like people were trying to sell me Jesus. I was a salesman for a while, and we were taught that you are supposed to point out all the benefits of a product when you are selling it. That is how I felt about some of the preachers I heard speak. They were always pointing out the benefits of Christian faith. That rubbed me wrong. It’s not that there aren’t benefits, there are, but did they have to talk about spirituality like it’s a vacuum cleaner? I never felt like Jesus was a product. I wanted Him to be a person. Not only that but they were always pointing out how great the specific church was. The bulletin read like a brochure for Amway. They were always saying how life-changing some conference was going to be. Life-changing? What does that mean? It sounded very suspicious. I wish they would just tell it to me straight rather than trying to sell me on everything. I felt like I got bombarded with commercials all week and then went to church and got even more.

And yet another thing about the churches I went to: They seemed to be parrots for the Republican Party. Do we have to tow the party line on every single issue? Are the Republicans that perfect? I just felt like, in order to be a part of the family, I had to think George W. Bush was Jesus. And I didn’t. I didn’t think that Jesus really agreed with a lot of the policies of the Republican Party or for that matter the Democratic Party. I felt like Jesus was a religious figure, not a political figure. I heard my pastor say once, when there were only a few of us standing around, that he hated Bill Clinton. I can understand not liking Clinton’s policies, but I want my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it. I couldn’t deal with that. That is one of the main reasons I walked away. I felt like, by going to this particular church, I was a pawn for the Republicans. Meanwhile, the Republicans did not give a crap about the causes of Christ.

-Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, p.131

It’s pretty much all standard things from the evangelical circus. Nearly all developments within the last 40 years. Is it any wonder there are so many movements against this kind of setup? (House churches, neo-litergical movements, neo-reformation movements, neo-monasticism movements, etc. All over the board too. Young people, old people, intelligensia and non. A lot of people want to follow Christ, but really can’t stand it looking like THAT anymore.

The online arts and culture blog The Rabbit Room has a great interview up with Steve Turner, author of The Gospel According to the Beatles and Imagine: A Vision for Christians in the Arts.

This part sounded familiar:

We have just developed a very narrow idea of what “Christian” is. I saw an entry in a directory for Christian artists where someone had advertised themselves as writing “poetry both Christian and non Christian.” I think he meant poetry that was specifically religious and poetry that was about everday life but he had unconsciously betrayed the fact that, when he wrote asbout ordinary events in his life, he thought of these things as somehow outside his experience as a Christian. As though God is not interested in us walking, eating, fishing, playing ball, shopping, etc.

Where have we heard that? To quote Leithart again:

Theology keeps Christian teaching at the margins and ensures that other voices, other languages, other words shape the world of temporalities. Politics is left to politicians, economics to economists, sociology to sociologists, history to historians, and philosophy to madmen.

Theology ensures that Christians have nothing to say about nearly everything.

-Peter Leithart, Against Christianity, Ch.2 Sec. 4

Turner goes on, raggin’ on the monks and the fundamentalists for being like the monks. Actually I think he’s right on in this case:

Hank Rookmaaker the Dutch art historian used to say, “Christ didn’t die in order that we could go to more prayer meetings.” People would gasp at this. Then he would add, “Christ died to make us fully human.” That’s right. He didn’t die to make us religious, but to make us human. In our fallen state, we lack the completeness of our humanity. The monastic tradition makes the mistake of thinking that God is best pleased with us when we cut ourselves off from the world, deny ourselves pleasure, refrain from marriage and devote ourselves totally to religious activities. This almost assumes that God made a mistake in putting us in a world of pleasure, culture, art, nature, work, companionship, etc. Fundamentalists would hate to be compared with medieval monks but, in many ways, they suffer from the same split.