Well, I missed seeing Flogging Molly this weekend a few miles away. Oh well. The university newspaper had an interview with some of the band members. I found this part enjoyable:
Q: The Evergreen: What are some common misconceptions people have of the band?
A: Casey: That we get f—ing drunk out of our minds every night and that all we want to do is drink whiskey with everybody.
A: Schmidt: And that we’re all Irish.
Q: The Argonaut: Isn’t it just Dave (King) that’s from Ireland?
Rolling stone announced today they are changing the physical format of their magazine from it’s large tabloid size to that or all other glossy magazines.
Let’s see. The last issue’s covered was trashing McCain. The new cover is praising Obama. In fact, the interview reveals this is the third time in seven months that Obama has graced the cover. And you thought it was about music. Uh huh.
“Switching the format to attract more readers is a logical decision that will continue Rolling Stone’s tradition of revolutionizing society’s way of thinking,” Barbu [an avid reader] said.
A tradition of revolution? Sounds like the same old shtick to me.
Obeying God has to be done from the basis of our conscience before the Lord, not in rules or principals that have been boiled enough to be written down, even if they’re true and good. God has put eternity in our hearts. Part of our heart touches the bare metal (excuse the software terminology) of God’s will and what is right and wrong. The more layers of abstraction we wrap it in, the more likely we are to actually end up actually missing it. Wrapping things in abstraction is absolutely necessary for teaching and understanding and any kind of written communication, but when that dictates our actions, we miss the heart of God, either a little or a lot.
The bible itself is abstract from the heart of God, wrapped in the OT law and squeezed into the restraints of words and language. (Theology writings and commentary even more so). It’s the best thing we have and everything we need to know about him is in there, but it’s still not him. Knowing him in theory is wise, and a doorway for many. But we must know him in our hearts. Conscience is a good place to start.
If, in trying to do the will of God, we always seek the highest abstract standard of perfection, we show that there is still much we need to learn about the will of God. For God does not demand that every man attain to what is theoretically highest and best. It is better to be a good street sweeper than a bad writer, better to be a good bartender than a bad doctor, and the repentant thief who died with Jesus on Calvary was far more perfect than the holy ones who had Him nailed to the cross.
And yet, abstractly speaking, what is more holy than the priesthood and less holy than the state of a criminal? The dying thief had, perhaps, disobeyed the will of God in many things: but in the most important event of his life He listened and obeyed. The Pharisees had kept the law to the letter and had spent their lives in the pursuit of a most scrupulous perfection. But they were so intent upon perfection as a abstraction that when God manifested His will and His perfection in a concrete and definite way [Jesus] they had no choice but to reject it.
Lest they risk (at the worst) blasphemy, or (at the least) stepping on someone theological toes, throughout the ages people have been hesitant to try and guess what what actually going through Jesus’ head. Any approach that imagines him to only be thinking high mystical ideals is effectively denying his manhood. This is gnosticism. Anything that skims over the fact that he had the full measure of the Holy Spirit (at least from age 30 on) and never entertained sinful thoughts is denying his divinity. Tricky business!
Anne Rice (of fictional vampire fame) has recently taken a serious swing at it in her Christ the Lord novels. These are narrated by Jesus in the first person. I haven’t read them but they are, from all accounts, carefully researched and fairly convincing. The first chapter of the narrative begins:
I was seven years old. What do you know when you’re seven years old?
An excellent question!
The wise Bishop of Durham also can’t resist exploring this a bit in his apologetics:
I do not thing that Jesus “knew he was divine” in the same way that we know we are cold or hot, happy or sad, male or female. It was more like the kind of “knowledge” we associate with vocation, where people know, in the very depths of their being, that they are called to be an artist, a mechanic, a philosopher.
Drop that Starbuck’s milkshake you uncultured swine! (Just kidding)
On true gourmet coffee vs. everything else:
Great coffees, he [Peter Giuliano] says, should be brewed one at a time. “It isn’t consistent with the specialty coffee aesthetic to pre-brew and store coffee in the kind of thermoses you see in gas stations, hotel lobbies, or bullshit coffee shops where they sell French Vanilla.”
In the charismatic church I was part of in college, there was a prophet. We’ll call him Marc Mason. Now I know some of you think these prophet guys are a joke or worse. I’m not going to get into that here except to say that he was as legit as they come. He didn’t ever make silly predictions ala Chuck Pierce, and that’s a very good thing. He had an uncanny knack for speaking words of encouragement and admonition in such a way that it was hard to ignore: Like it was God speaking and not just the words of a friend or the preaching of a pastor.
Anyway, I got to hang out with Mr. Mason a few times. I remember helping him repair the fence in his back yard. I also visited him at work, where he administered databases, something which I didn’t realize at the time that would later become my career. People had always told me that Marc was really different in person than he appeared giving bold prophecies at church. Man, was it ever true. I was amazed at how, well, weak he seemed at so many things. He was no handy man. I was used to the mechanical skills and insight of my father. His kids were around and he didn’t have a grip on parenting them. His teenage daughter was largely in a state of rebellion. He himself was timid in speech. He would stutter frequently, but more often would not say anything at all.
Merton talks about different stages in the life of prayer:
So too there is another stage in our prayer, when consolation gives place to fear. It is a place of darkness and anguish and of conversion: for here a great change takes place in our spirit. All our love for God appears to us to have been full of imperfection, as indeed it has. We begin to doubt that we have ever loved Him. With shame and sorrow we find that our love was full of complacency, and that although we thought ourselves modest, we overflowed with conceit. We were to sure of ourselves, not afraid of illusion, not afraid to be recognized be other men as men of prayer.
-Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island, p.48
Marc was more a man of prayer than anyone I knew, yet he himself was very uncomfortable being known AS a man of prayer. I questioned him at length about prophecy and how he thought he ended up with that particular gift. He felt in his prayer time that things would come to him to say. But he felt so stupid saying them. He said he would practice in front of the mirror in the bathroom – trying to put into words what he thought he was hearing in prayer. The less he thought about it the better it went. He was the last person in the room inclined to get up and speak about ANYTHING, but he felt compelled by the holy spirit to somehow say SOMETHING of what he was hearing in prayer.
I think the Lord continually kept him humble along with this. He was to have no claim to fame in himself. In fact, by the traditional elder standards, he was to forever stay unqualified. His wife of 20 years left him about this same time. And yet, I don’t see these things as his fault so much. Yes, they were the result of his own personality weaknesses and sin (just like all my own problems, and yours too). But I think God picked him to speak to in prayer because God always uses what is foolishness to the world to confound the wise. Even the wise who know their bible so well. I can hear people saying right now: “Bah! This guy couldn’t take care of his own family. Why should I listen to anything he says? Pardon me while I get back to me Jonathan Edwards commentary.” Exactly. But if you heard him speak, you would find yourself listening regardless. They are not his own words. Merton tried to get at what this communication may feel like:
Finally, the purest prayer is something on which it is impossible to reflect until after it is over. And when the grace has gone we no longer seek to reflect on it, because we realize that it belongs to another order of things, and that it will be in some sense debased by our reflecting on it. Such prayer desires no witness, even the winess of our own souls. It seeks to keep itself entirely hidden in God. The experience remains in our spirit like a wound, like a scar that will not heal. But we do no reflect upon it. This living wound may become a source of knowledge, if we are to instruct others in the ways of prayer; or else it may become a bar and an obstacle to knowledge, if we are to instruct others in the ways of prayer; or else it may become a bar and an obstacle to knowledge, a seal of silence set upon the soul, closing the way to words and thoughts, so that we can say nothing of it to other men. For the way is left open to God alone. This is like the door spoken of by Ezechiel, which shall remain closed because the King is enthroned within. (p.50)
I had taken little more than a year and a half, counting from the time I read Gilson‘s The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy to bring me up from an “atheist”-as I considered myself-to one who accepted all the full range and possibilities of religious experience right up to the highest degree of glory.
I not only accepted all this, intellectually, but now I began to desire it. And not only did I begin to desire it, but I began to do so efficaciously: I began to want to take the necessary means to achieve this union, this peace. I began to desire to dedicate my life to God, to His service. The notion was still vague and obscure, and it was ludicrously impractical in the sense that I was already dreaming of mystical union when I did not even keep the simplest rudiments of the moral law. But nevertheless I was convinced of the reality of the goal, and confident that it could be achieved: and whatever element of presumption was in this confidence I am sure God excused, in His mercy, because of my stupidity and helplessness, and because I was really beginning to be ready to do whatever I thought He wanted me to do to bring me to Him.
But, oh, how blind and weak and sick I was, although I thought I saw where I was going, and half understood the way! How deluded we sometimes are by the clear notions we get out of books. They make us think that we really understand things of which we have no practical knowledge at all. I remember how learnedly and enthusiastically I could talk for hours about mysticism and the experimental knowledge of God, and all the while I was stoking the fires of the argument with Scotch and soda.
This excellent comment on growing up by Billy Collins:
On Turning Ten
The whole idea of it makes me feel like I’m coming down with something, something worse than any stomach ache or the headaches I get from reading in bad light- a kind of measles of the spirit, and mumps of the psyche, a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.
You tell me it is too early to be looking back, but that is because you have forgotten the perfect simplicity of being one and the beautiful complexity introduced by two. But I can lie on my bead and remember every digit. At four I was an Arabian wizard. I could make myself invisible by drinking a glass of milk in a certain way. At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.
But now I am mostly at the window watching the late afternoon light. Back then it never fell so solemnly against the side of my tree house, and my bicycle never leaned against the garage as it does today, all the dark blue speed drained out of it.
This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself, as I walk through the universe in my sneakers. It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends, time to turn the first big number.
It seems only yesterday I used to believe there was nothing under my skin but light. If you cut me I would shine. But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life, I skin my knees, I bleed.
Before discussing a subject, Wright often begins by dealing with the potential pitfalls of contemporary linguistics:
This is where our word “belief” can be inadequate or even misleading. What the early Christians meant by “belief” included both believing that God had DONE certain things and believing IN the God who had done them. This is not belief that God exists, though clearly that is involved, too, but loving, grateful trust.
