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Hasn’t everyone whose spent a lot of time vacuuming the church done this? My own chanting history is steeped in lawn mowers.

It’s convenient to stereotype monks as either oddities or holy men, but in pigeonholing them we impede their marvelous hospitality. A few years ago a journalist doing an Easter story about a monastery on the Great Plains insisted that he needed a photograph of a monk with a broom. The scholarly monk who finally agreed to pose was quickly dubbed Brother Broom by his confreres as they laughed over the article at breakfast on Easter Sunday. It didn’t help that the monk wa misquoted in the story so that he seemed to be taking a heretical position on the Incarnation. This ludicrous situation could have been avoided, and the reporter might even have gotten a better story, had he photographed the young monk who worked the abbey’s industrial vacuum. The tapes on his Walkman were of the pass tones of the monks resonated well with the deep vibrato of the vacuum. “A perfect blend,” he joked, “of prayer and work.”

-Kathleen Norris, Dakota, p.199

The Bible doesn’t SAVE you (as some fundamentalists border on preaching), but it isn’t just a book full of information either. Being the core of the special revelation to mankind, it’s actually part of the gospel itself. N.T. Wright explains here.

…for Jesus’s death to have the effect it was intended to have, it must be communicated to the world through the “word” of the gospel. (As we saw [earlier], God’s “word,” for the early Christians, was the powerful proclamation of Jesus’s lordship.) And the Bible, in setting out the roots of the Christian story in the Old Testament and its full flowering in the New, was seen from very early on as encapsulating that powerful word – the word which communicated, and so put into effect, what God accomplished in Jesus. The Bible, in fact, is not simply an authoritative description of a saving plan, as though it were just an aerial photograph of a particular piece of landscape. It is part of the saving plan itself.

-N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, p.185

My four-year-old daughter asked this out of the blue yesterday. We were sitting in the minivan, waiting for Mom to return from the grocery store.

Can you condense all of your faith, theology, and the gospel into a short answer a child could understand?

I opened my mouth to say, “Well, you go to heaven to live with Jesus”. That’s what most people would have told me as a child. But I stopped myself for a moment and thought.

From reading a lot of N.T. Wright, I’m pretty convinced that God is going to redeem both heaven and earth and that we’ll live here, not in some ethereal city of gold in outer space.

Also, I know from even the most basic eschatology of the bible, that we actually wait until the fulfillment of the redemption of mankind before Jesus resurrects all of us for the final judgment and glory. Nobody is quite sure what happens in the meantime. Paul calls it sleep. Some have come up with more elaborate holding-tanks like purgatory. Come to think of it, Jesus calls it sleep too. Everyone laughed at Jesus when he said the little sick girl had fallen asleep when everyone clearly knew she was stone cold dead.

Also, not EVERYONE goes to heaven to live with Jesus. Whether they choose to or God chose them or some mix of both, not everyone makes the cut. Universalism is not the gospel.

I didn’t want to feed her watered down pseudo-truth. But obviously any kind of theology talk would be useless at her age. I really had to stop and think for a sec. I’d never put it into those words before.

I finally came up with:

“Well, when you die, it’s like going to sleep. You die and they put you in the ground to sleep for a really long time. And someday, Jesus will come and wake everyone up! If you love Jesus, he’ll take you to live with him forever. But if you don’t love Jesus than you’ll just be alone.”

“And just your bones will be left?”

“Yeah, your body will turn into dust and just your bones will be left. But that’s OK because when Jesus wakes you up, you’ll have a new body.

“Do sometimes people die when they get really old?”

“I hope I die when I’m really old. Sometimes it’s sad when someone dies when they are really young because they didn’t get to live a whole long life. And sometimes it’s sad when people die because we’ll miss them. But that’s OK because we’ll see them again when Jesus wakes everyone up.”

In hindsight, I think this was a pretty good answer for now. She seemed to accept it.

Ora et labora, pray and work, is a Benedictine motto, and the monastic life aims to join the two. This perspective liberates prayer from God-talk; a well-tended garden, a well-made cabinet, a well-swept floor, can be a prayer. Benedict defined the liturgy of the hours as a monastery’s most important work: it is, as the prioress explained it, “a sanctification of each day by common prayer at established times.” Many people think it’s foolish to spend so much time this way, but the experience of Benedictines over 1500 years has taught them that doing anything else is unthinkable. It may be fashionable to assert that all is holy, but not many are willing to haul ass to church four or five times a day to sing about it. It’s not for the faint of heart.

-Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, p.185

I have mixed feelings about Kathleen Norris’s memior Dakota. But the chapter on monastacism and visitors is excellent. I’d reprint the whole thing here if I could.

Not all silent somber faces, monks apparently have a lot of inside jokes and some can be rather playful at times.

One of my favorites is an ancient story of a gathering of bishops in Antioch, one of whom is the monk Nonnus. He scandalizes the other men by daring to thank GOd for the beauty of a notorious courtesan who has ridden naked through the city. The others look away as she passes by wearing nothing but jewelry but he asks, “Did not her great beauty delight you? Truly, it delighted me.” Then he chastises his fellow bishops, commenting that he only wishes he had the desire to please God that she has to please men.

To one contemporary monk, this story is at the heart of monastic contemplation, in that it calls a monk not to refuse to look at the world but to discover God at work in it. The story is also a subtle evocation of monastic hospitality as an invitation to new self-awareness. As the story goes, the courtesan heard of the monk’s remark and came to him in disguise, seeking to change her life. She became a nun, and the church acquired a new saint, Pelagia the Harlot.

-Kathleen Norris, Dakota, p.197

Well, I discovered that when I am inspired I can blog quite a bit! 43 posts last month – about triple my usual dripping output. 24 on the Inklings. 10 on Leithart’s theology challenge. But now I’ve run dry. I think I’m going to shift gears and work on some guitar for a while. That means very little reading (and thing to talk about) and also not much time to talk about them anyway. So Carpe Cakem might be pretty quiet for a bit.

A few of the better posts so far in 2009:

• Why explaining faith is complicated
• Social class bitterness in action
• Owen Barfield lays the smack down!
• Describing changed thinking
• Leithart’s Challenge: Conclusion
• Naming your stuff “Ron”

Owen Barfield, in tracing the history of the word “genius” (from which comes “ingenious” and “engine”) notes that from it we also get the word “genie”. That’s the kind of genie that might live inside a magic lamp by the way.

He mentions in passing that using the Arabic spelling “djinn” can infuse it with the “deepened strength and mystery of the older word”. It harkens back to the root word’s supernatural origin (God-given skills), instead of the more contemporary, strictly intellectual meaning of the root. We process these kinds of subtle metaphors in language usually without thinking. There is so much wrapped up words. These are little clues into what makes poetry (and to a lesser extent prose) potent (or not).

It was Charle’s Darwin’s 200th birthday recently. There were special events on campus, posters everywhere, etc. I encoded some video lectures about him at work to post on the web. Despite the fact that Darwin’s work was certainly interesting and can be helpful in explaining SOME things, I’m afraid the bulk of it is psuedo-science, his intellectual descendants now often engaged in conjecture of the silliest sort.

Owen Barfield, in exploring epistemology (the philosophy of knowledge), had this to say about Darwin:

There is no more striking example than the Darwinian theory of that borrowing from the experimental by the non-experimental sciences, to which I referred at the beginning of this chapter. It was found that the appearances on earth so much lack the regularity of the appearances in the sky that no systematic hypotheses will fit them. But astronomy and physics had taught me that the business of science is to find hypotheses to save the appearances. By a hypotheses, then, these earthly appearances must be saved; and saved they were by the hypotheses of – chance variation. Now the concept of chance is precisely what a hypotheses is devised to save us from. Chance, in fact, = no hypothesis. Yet so hypnotic, at this moment in history, was the influence of the idols and of the special mode of thought which had begotten them, that only a few – and their voices soon died away – were troubled by the fact that the impressive vocabulary of technological investigation was actually being used to denote its breakdown; as though, because it is something we can do with ourselves in the water, drowning should be included as one of the different ways of swimming.

-Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, (1957), (Owen Barfield Reader p.156)

You get that? I had to read it twice.

“Saving the Appearances” means to explain why something is one way, despite appearing to be another. Like explaining that the Sun does not circle the earth (despite the appearance that it does), or explaining that your sister isn’t ugly (despite the appearance that she is rather fat). In this case, it’s explaining that all life is derived from chance, despite the appearance that it is designed.

Barfield contends that Darwin was borrowing scientific ideas from astronomers, who (as far as I can tell), lacking the ability to really test much of what they saw, had to come up with hypothesis so as to save face, that is, not to look stupid.

Actually, Barfield’s commentary in this case is so good, I’m probably just digging myself in a hole by trying to talk about it. I’ll stop that now!

Photo credit

I always thought it curious that someone should write love songs or poetry outside of their own experience. Tom Petty wrote a lot of standard rock material: break-ups, one night stands, etc. I remember being surprised that he had been married to the same gal for 20+ years. I shouldn’t have been surprised though. If all a songwriter had to explore was their own first-hand experiences, they would run out of material pretty quickly.

Charles Williams wrote 84 romantic sonnets for his wife:

She read them carefully. ‘So lovely they seemed,’ she said. But she also noted – and it puzzled her – that, thought they were addressed to her, their theme was the renunciation of love.

Why should he have consider renouncing love? In part it was simply his awareness that marriage with its many obligations and strains might destroy love: he was never easily optimistic. But, more than this, he was discontented about the very ordinariness of ‘being in love’. His mind was too subtle and self-aware, too capable of seeing endless possibilities in every human thought and action, for the state of loving to seem enough. He asked himself ‘whether love were not meant for something more than wantonness and child-bearing and the future that closes in death’. He meditated on the notion of achieving some spiritual advancement through renunciation, speculating in the sonnets he wrote for ‘Michal’ whether they might not ‘put off love for love’s sake’. And there was another possibility. Turning to his Christian beliefs, he considered the idea that love for another human being might be a step towards God – ‘the steep’, as he expressed it in the sonnet sequence, ‘whence I see God’.

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.79

Williams went on to find a lot in common with Dante and his love for Beatrice. Later in life he wrote about that extensively.

(I quote this passage on Tolkien’s relations in full from page 168 of The Inklings.)

Friendship with other men played as important a part in Tolkien’s life as it did in Lewis’s. Unlike Lewis, Tolkien encountered romantic love at an early age, for when he was sixteen he fell in love with a girl of nineteen, a fellow orphan who lived in his Birmingham lodging house. But he and Edith Bratt were soon separated by his guardian, and in late adolescence Tolkien was thrown back on friendship with others of his own sex, so much so that by the time he was reunited with her he had, as it were, lost touch with her, and had devoted the greater part of his deepest affections to his male friends.

He and Edith were eventually married and had four children, but family affairs (though of great interest and importance to Tolkien) seemed to him to be quite apart from his life with his male friends. This division of his life into water-tight compartments inevitably caused a strain, and Edith Tolkien resented the fact that such a large part of her husband’s affections were lavished on Lewis and other men friends, while Tolkien himself felt that time spent with the Inklings and in other male company could only be gained by a deliberate and almost ruthless exclusion of attention to his wife.

‘There are many things that a man feels are legitimate even though they cause a fuss,’ he wrote to a son who was about to be married. ‘Let him not lie about them to his wife or lover! Cut them out – or if worth a fight: just insist. Such matters may arise frequently – the glass of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc. etc. If the other side’s claims really are unreasonable (as they are at times between the dearest lovers and most loving married folk) they are much better met by above board refusal and “fuss” than subterfuge.’

Edith Tolkien was capable of responding to this attitude with equal obstinacy, and as a result the atmosphere in the Tolkien household at Northmoor Road was sometimes as difficult as that in the Lewis-Moore menage at the Kilns.