Author: Matthew

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Lewis on literary ghosts

“I mean the damned have holidays-excursions, ye understand.”
“Excursions to this country?”
“For those that will take them. Of course most of the silly creatures don’t. They prefer taking trips back to Earth. They go and play tricks on the poor daft women ye call mediums. They go and try to assert their ownership of some house that once belonged to them: and then yo get what’s called a Haunting. Or they go to spy on their children. Or literary Ghosts hang about public libraries to see if anyone’s still reading their books.

-C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, p.66

And the ghosts of internet writers hang out on their stats and analytics page to see if anyone is still reading their blog.

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Merton on the timing of grace

On wondering why God did not reveal his grace to him earlier in life:

It is easy to say, after it all, that God had probably foreseen my infidelities and had never given me the grace in those days because He saw how I would waste and despise it: and perhaps that rejection would have been my ruin. For there is no doubt that one of the reasons why grace is not given to souls is because they have so hardened their wills in greed and cruelty and selfishness that their refusal of it would only harden them more…But now I had been beaten into the semblance of some kind of humility by misery and confusion and perplexity and secret, interior fear, and my plowed soul was better ground for the reception of good seed.

-The Seven Story Mountain, p. 210

Just like God allowed Satan to tempt Job, he allows our pride to be broken and our hard hearts broken by “evil” circumstances. Jesus told Peter that Satan had asked to sift him like wheat. Jesus didn’t tell Peter that he had said “no” to the devil, just that he would pray for him. Peter was sifted I think. So are we. Some would complain that this makes the Lord the author of evil. In an indirect sense maybe, but he is most loving toward his creation (us), and gives us grace when it can flower.

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Dreams (the sleepy kind) are so odd

Last night I dreamed one of our neighborhood cats snunk into our house and night and tipped over several of my heavy bookshelves. Our new kitten was there too, watching. I threw the cat back out into the alley because I didn’t want him to be a bad influence on our own cat. I’m not sure how he tipped the shelves over. They are pretty well anchored.

My Billy Collin’s kick is not over yet! Here is part of an homage to old Siggy that struck me as funny.

Freud

I think I know what he would say
about the dream I had last night
in which my nose was lopped off in a sword fight,
leaving me to wander the streets of 18th-century Paris
with a kind of hideous blowhole in the middle of my face.

But what would be his thoughts about the small brown leather cone
attached to my face with goose grease
which I purchased from a gnome-like sales clerk
at a little shop called House of a Thousand Noses

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Beating your music with a hose

For the first ten years life, my parents were largely successful and shielding me from the wiles of pop culture. I was only familiar with classical music up until then. I had heard a little bit of country (Garth Brooks I think it was) and was not at all interested. I was unbelievably naive about all but a very narrow world of art. Then, ironically enough, on the bus to a church youth event, the driver had the radio tuned to a local pop station. I was 11 years old and starting 5th grade.

I’ll never forget it. They played “The Sign” by the Swedish group Ace of Base several times on the way to and from the hockey game or whatever it was we were going to see. The tune seems a bit cheesy looking back on it, but it had me captivated. I began listening to the radio in my bedroom in the evenings just to hear it again. And would you believe it, amidst the noise, I found other music I enjoyed too. This is all years before internet and file sharing, so the next logical step for me was to go buy an album. I remember running off in Walmart, fingering that CD with the $13.99 price tag, wondering on earth I was going to convince my mother to let me purchase it. Somehow, I must have gotten a hold of it, because I remember what came next.

Oh the horror. My parents listening to the CD. Reading through the lyrics on the liner notes. Trying to figure out what the songs where about. Seeing if they were about drugs, or sex, or gang-bangin’. Remember, this is Ace of Base we’re talkin’ about here. The high drama of “my boyfriend left me” was about as seedy as it got. I remember having to explain how the line “All that she want’s is another baby” on another one of the tracks was about how the girl is anxious to find another lover, NOT declaring some kind of serial pregnancy obsession. Really. I don’t mean to put my parents in a bad light. That’s not what this post is about and they were doing the best they could. But I’m not making that part up. It was ruled that I must get rid of the album. Actually, I can’t criticize them too much anyway – a few months later, someone had to explain to ME that Tom Petty’s “Last Dance with Mary Jane” really WAS about smoking marijuana.

Anyway, what bought this all to mind was another wonderful bit of verse by Billy Collins titled Introduction to Poetry:

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

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The failure of eschatology

Here in Moscow, we live in a hotbed of postmillenialist Christians. The reformed congregations here (Christ Church and Trinity Presbyterian) both have prolific author/pastors who promote this particular flavour of future thinking. (That would be Doug Wilson and Peter Leithart).

Having grown up Baptist, I was spoon fed the exact opposite (premillenial dispensationalism) for many years. This included things like “The Late Great Planet Earth“, Left Behind, and the ilk.

It turns out there are lots of positions in the middle between these two as well. The primary ones being historic premillenialism (like pre-mil but without all the complicated prophecy charts and theories), and amillenialism (like post-mil but more vague).

Anyway, Josh S (a Lutheran) at the Boar’s Head Tavern had a spot on comment the other day about all this:

I wonder if any differences between dispensationalists and postmillennialists is more cultural than specifically theological.  The latter tend to be more educated, more historically aware, and more interested in premodern art and literature, and thus have more positive attitudes toward top-down political structures and the syntheses of church and state we find in the Byzantine and Holy Roman empires, which tend then to be a subtext under the “kingdom” speak.  Dispensationalists tend to be right-leaning Americans with the attendant strong suspicion of exaggerated political power, especially the state imposing its will on religion, and a tendency to speak of the Bill of Rights in the same way that they speak of Scripture.

IMO, they’re both a little loony.  On one hand, you have the people who want to create the imperishable and ideal Christian society where Jesus reigns supreme.  On the other, you have the people who are predicting Jesus will come back some time in the next two weeks based on some sign or another.  Both projects have parallel, uninterrupted, 2000-year old histories of failure.

This observation reinforces my theory that the theology of a particular group of Christians is more determined by their own subculture than it is actual systematic arguments. So along these lines you have Leithart writing an essay titled For Constantine (which is still quite brilliant in many ways) and on the other hand back-woods preachers shunning all forms of environmental conservation and foreign-conflict resolution because “it’s all going to hell any day now” when Jesus comes back. Fascinating.

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The trouble with…

I just checked out Billy Collins latest poetry book. It’s titled The Trouble with Poety of course. The centerpiece poem comes on the second to the last page. I won’t quote the whole thing here for these parts are sufficient:

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry

I thought how fun (and possibly true) it might be to write this about other arts and disciplines…

the trouble with music is
that it encourages the playing of more music
more songbirds fluttering and chirping brightly
pooping on your windshield

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have played every note four bars
before, after, and with every other note

Music fills me with hope
and I rise high over the world on the wings of Icarus
Music fills me with despair
and I hit the ground hard as the curtain closes

But mostly music fills me
with the urge to play music

Or try this one:

the trouble with theology is
that it encourage the writing of more theology
more chickens crowding the roost
more crossing of the sea
to make one more disciple

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have measured the Trinity
down to the last parsec

Theology fills me with understanding
and the foundations of my city are laid deep
Theology fills me with confusion
and I despise my brothers

But mostly theology fills me
with the urge to write theology

And to end on a lighter note:

the trouble with cooking is
that it encourages more cooking
more fish out of the ocean
more rabbits hopping onto your plate

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when every taste is paired with every other
like Elk sausage in blueberry sauce
that was quite delicious
at the French place last night

Cooking fills me with joy
and I rise like a savory aroma
Cooking fills me with frustration
and I hit the fan above the range
distracted by the cost of ingredients
the mountain of dishes

But mostly cooking fills me…

That was fun!

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Approaches Christian apologetics

My wife was having a discussion with some friends online on how to go about proving the existence of God. One person was playing the devil’s advocate atheist to challenge the others. Many of the first replies were predominately accounts of people’s own life experiences and how they came to faith. The challenger complained that these were all completely subjective and therefore irrelevant. My contribution goes something like this:

I think faith has objective and subjective components. So, because others can’t actually relate to our own experiences (the holy spirit moving in us, Jesus appearing to us in a vision, “burning in the bosom” (the classic Mormon phrase), etc.), then apologetics is limited in it’s ability to turn people’s heart toward the Lord. Maybe you can describe these things in a way that is helpful, or can relate your personal experience to them in a way that is moving, but it’s 1/2 of the mystery of faith that can’t really transfer to the next person so well.

However, I think much of our faith, (the other 1/2 if you will, though it’s not a math problem), actually can be treated objectively. These things appeal to our rationality, logical intellect, and our God-given ability to think things through. So on THAT front, there is much that can be done. Articulating these things can be difficult though, even for people who are strong Christians. People who have had very strong subjective experiences, often don’t feel so much need for their faith to be reinforced (so to speak), but systematic arguments for the existence of God. Or other theology for that matter.

Romans 1:20 is a really good place to start with and one of the key verses here:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities— his eternal power and divine nature— have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

There are a few different ways to approach this to the secular unbeliever. C.S. Lewis goes from the angle of morality. Is there such a thing as right and wrong? Well, it had to come from somewhere. It’s built in. God built it in. And so on.

N.T. Wright, in his newer apologetic Simply Christian cuts a wider swath and in addition to morality (the longing for justice), brings up questions of relationships (there is something deep inside us that makes us not want to be alone), and also the desire for beauty (there is something that makes music, art, sunsets, etc. stir something deep within us.) These are “echoes of a voice” – the voice of our creator.

In both cases, the apologists don’t even bring up the idea of Christianity or Jesus until way later in the discussion. We are just trying to establish the possibility that a generic “god” is out there. And not just out there, but actually might care about the race of man on earth.

-1. I think it’s very hard intellectually to be a pure atheist. It’s an exercise in faith against what is hard-wired in our minds.

0. I think most people who “don’t believe in god” are actually agnostic. That’s a lot easier. There maybe is a god, but we can’t possibly figure it out, so it doesn’t matter.

1. The next step up is deism, which believe there probably was some higher power that made everything, but he’s distance and doesn’t actually interact in the affairs of man. He wound up the universe, and maybe it has some kind of purpose, but we can’t do much more than make up stories about what that might be. So again, it doesn’t matter.

2. After that, you start to wonder if this creator actually IS more involved in the actual lives of his creation. And there you have most religions. (Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hindu, tribal religions, etc.)

3, 4, 5…Only after all that do you take the step of saying God cared about his creation, and specially about a group of people called the Jews, and that he was directly involved in their history for hundreds of years, eventually incarnating himself in the person of Jesus do you get to Christianity. Whew!

There are a lot of steps of stuff to believe in between agnosticism and that. Good thing we have the Holy Spirit and that subjective experience to jump-start people. Arguing through all that stuff would be tiring!

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With an apple I will astonish Paris

Paul Cezanne, the great painter said “With an apple I will astonish Paris.” What could possibly turn the heads of late 19th century French art critics? Something simple, done incredibly well. Cezanne ended up painting quite a few apples. Here are some:

I looked up other quotes by Cezanne and came across this one:

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Postmoderns would of course reject his definition of”art” in this case, but I do not.

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No wonder he was eaten by turtles

Today I clicked the link to one of those “20 ways to make more freetime” blog posts. However, I lost interest in the article when I saw the opening quote:

“The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure.” – Henry David Thoreau

Riiiiiiiiight. OK. That’s helpful. Try telling that to a mother of toddlers. Or a lot of other folks too. What was this guy thinking?

Dave Barry, in his excellent history of the United States, sheds some light on this character:

“Meanwhile, culture was continuing to occur in some areas. In New England, for example, essayist Henry David Thoreau created an enduring masterpiece of American philosophical thought when, rejecting the stifling influences of civilization, he went off to live all alone on Walden Pond, where, after two years of an ascetic and highly introspective life, he was eaten by turtles.”

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Are all the adventures over?

There is a question, sometimes posed as a lament, in many of the writings I’ve come across lately. I could write down quite a list, but I don’t actually remember all the places. Another one came at me today though. It is the idea that there used to still be adventures to be had, unexplored places to chart, great feats to accomplish, but that for the most part, they are all gone. I remember reading as a child about the mysterious jungle of the Congo and how there was still things in there that no man had ever seen and lived to write about. That was an exciting prospect. But now, we have GPS, and I can pull up Google maps and grab the satellite imagery of my own car parked in the lot of my office building. Then I can swing it over a few degrees and peer deep into Africa and see right where that dangerous path by the waterfall leads. What’s the point in going there now?

Thomas Merton, in his book Mystics and Zen Masters, (which is about 90% straight-up history and reads like a graduate dissertation), discusses the story of St. Brendan‘s expeditions and how he found an island paradise somewhere beyond the Atlantic. Nobody could ever find it again though, but tales like this fueled exploration and also deeper desires inside of us. Christopher Columbus would have been well aware of this particular (myth?) when he set out to the new world. Merton (writing in the 1960’s) discusses how the complete mapping of the earth has changed the face of spiritual pilgrimage and wandering. Searching for that special place has forever lost some of it’s potency. Nevertheless, we will pilgrim on because the thing that drives us inside of has not diminished one bit. We are still looking for our creator.

The protagonist in Arturo Perez-Reverte’s novel The Nautical Chart wrestles with this same deep issue:

Because after so many novels, so many films, and so many songs, there weren’t even innocent drunks anymore. And Coy asked himself, envying him, what the first man felt the first time he went out to hunt a whale, a treasure, or a woman, without having read about it I a book.