Carpe Cakem!

I’m reading the (relatively) new Beowulf translation by Irish poet Seamus Heaney. I didn’t know what to expect actually. I was surprised to find it much more “prosey” than the old Gumerre translation that is in the public domain. This new one is much easier to read and understand and certainly still maintains the fun alliterative verse. It’s very different though and after reading Tolkien’s version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight last year, I can’t help but find the old alliteration-laid-on-thick version a bit more strange and enjoyable at times.

Here is a comparison Heaney translation (first) with the Gumerre, starting at line 115.

So, after nightfall, Grendel set out
for the lofty house, to see how the Ring-Danes
were settling into it after their drink,
and there he came upon them, a company of the best
asleep from their feasting, insensible to pain
and human sorrow. Suddenly then
the God-cursed brute was creating havoc:
greedy and grim, he grabbed thirty men
from their resting places and rushed to his lair,
flushed up and inflamed from the raid,
blundering back with the butchered corpses.

and

Went he forth to find at fall of night
that haughty house, and heed wherever
the Ring-Danes, outrevelled, to rest had gone.
Found within it the atheling band
asleep after feasting and fearless of sorrow,
of human hardship. Unhallowed wight,
grim and greedy, he grasped betimes,
wrathful, reckless, from resting-places,
thirty of the thanes, and thence he rushed
fain of his fell spoil, faring homeward,
laden with slaughter, his lair to seek.

Stolen from a great stack of quotes posted at the Rabbit Room:

“To be grateful is to recognize the Love of God in everything He has given us – and He has given us everything. Every breath we draw is a gift of His love, every moment of existence is a grace, for it brings with it immense graces from Him. Gratitude therefore takes nothing for granted, is never unresponsive, is constantly awakening to new wonder and to praise of the goodness of God. For the grateful person knows that God is good, not by hearsay but by experience. And that is what makes all the difference.”

-Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude, Ch.8

I’ve explored this topic before here:
What is an acceptable level of syncretism? (Mixing folk religion)

syncretism – noun
1 the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought.
2 Linguistics the merging of different inflectional varieties of a word during the development of a language.

All religious practice is syncretism. Really. Its participation is by human beings and human beings mix things up, group them, categorize them, and cross-pollinate ideas CONSTANTLY, whether they are thinking about it or not. People that talk about how their tradition is free from syncretism are talking nonsense. This time of year, some folks like to point out how putting up a Christmas tree is syncretism since it has pagan origins. Who cares? Everything you are doing probably has some sort of origin outside of the most ancient orthodoxy you can dig up, or outside of the accounts of scripture.

Why do some priests wear a collar? Why do some pastors where a tie? Why are some pastors dressed like hip-hop artists? Why do some bishops where funny hats?

Why do we sing 4-part harmony? Why do they play guitars? Why do we meet in a building with pews? Why do we pray before meals? Why do we light candles? Why do we place our hands on a bible to swear an oath? (Aren’t we not supposed to swear oaths?) Why do we have an American flag in our sanctuary? (Or another flag for that matter, depending on where you live.)

Why do some Christians pray to Mary and always call her The Blessed Virgin Mary? Why do some absolutely insist on using a particular 17th century English translation of scripture (1611 KJV). Why do we meet on Sunday? Why do they meed on Wednesday night? Why do we try to get our kids married young? Why do they do the opposite?

Why does this group speak of old saints like they are demi-gods? Why does that group speak of old authors like they are demi-gods? Why does that group sing so loud? How come those people drink liquor at every festival? How come those folks never even have any festivals? How come those people Tweet during the sermon? How come those people just spank their kids during the sermon? Heck those people over there only have a 3-minute sermon. Waa?

Those folks have a Christmas tree! Pagans! My gosh, then even have Jack-o-lanterns! Boo! Those other people live in a McMansion. Materialists! Those people live in a yurt. Hippies! Those people live in a yurt too. Oh, but their yurt is in Africa and they live on $0.50 a day. That’s different. Their kids are well behaved too, but they can’t read. Hmmm.

(At a Christmas festival in Ethiopia) Wow, those people play trumpets when they worship God! Cool. God is worthy of trumpets. It’s really simple though – just long blasts. Are they real musicians? Maybe that’s all they know.

(At a church in Texas) Hey, there are some more people playing trumpets to worship God! Cool! But why are they playing old 70’s funk licks? I mean, I hope God likes that. But maybe that’s just all they know too. OK.

All of this is an overlap of culture with metaphysical spiritual truth. We are humans – made in His image and we can’t get ourselves out of our thinking and acting and living. It’s like trying to see your own eyeball and then make sure you have a theology that gets rid of the eyeball but keeps the seeing. You can’t do that. You are who you are. You are your parents blood, and your grandparents. You are your country and your education and the air you breathe and the food you eat. You are everything you know, and some of it, maybe more than you know, is by Revelation – not something you can put your finger on if you were to study it.

Syncretism is always denounced as heretical. This is just, but do we know what we are talking about? African charismatics are accused of mixing in old animist folk superstitions into their Christianity. Is this happening sometimes? Absolutely, maybe even really badly in some place. Is there any way to make it go away completely? No. Not unless you wipe their memory, take them away from their families and ship them to the moon in a space pod. Good luck. God works with us right now where we are, whether fearful or greedy or broken or more sound than not.

Christians in the middle east and north Africa might have developed some bleed-over in their culture from Islam. How could they not? If the presence of crypto-Christians in these countries is even half true (and I think Jenkins and other folks do a good job of arguing that it is), then it is impossible for this not to happen.

American Evangelicalism has absorbed all kinds of uniquely American ideas – rugged individualism, civic religion, etc. The church in the U.S. has been shaped by its immense wealth and its immense size. A community on the great plains HAS to look substantially different than one in a city on the coast. We have both and they are over a thousand miles from each other, but we are family. That situation is different from many other places on earth. This context is not without consequence.

There is all kinds of evidence that the extreme veneration of Mary seen in especially Latin America is syncretic of old forms of pagan goddess worship. This sort of thing is nowhere to be found in the official Catechism – in fact it is denounced. Yet it persists on the ground level because it is deeply ingrained in the psyche of the people there – from mother to daughter and more.

Does God just really really hate this stuff? (He says so very strongly in some places.) Or does he just roll his eyes and love us silly people anyway? Even while we were (rebellious!) sinners, Christ died for us. Surely he also died for the stupid sinners too.

So is there any value in drawing lines of orthodoxy? I believe so. I think the Apostles Creed and the Nicean creed and the cannon of scripture are very useful lines to draw with a sharpie. I am not as excited about larger documents like the Westminster Confession or the Roman catechism. Those are good documents for robots and mythical super saints, but not for stupid people like me and just about everyone else.

We cannot escape syncretism. We are doing it right now with (fill in the blank) tradition or cultural practice. And that is just fine. But that is also a FANTASTIC reason to be always reforming (ecclesia semper reformanda). Ideas have consequences. The love of Christ can be obscured or amplified by all the things we do day-in and day-out.

If we listen to the holy spirit, we will slowly, over generations, keep the noise down and let our hearts be shaped to make our thought sharper and truer but our speech and hands more graceful and less bloody. We will not cease to be our own people though. Jesus came to save people of ALL these nations and at least for the foreseeable future, they stay people of these nations, regions, etc. The plant and animal kingdom is wildly varied. I do not believe that God made Adam and Eve to be parents to a monotone race. What that means is that our relationship to God is always going to look a bit different across the spectrum. And He takes joy in that. (How else could David and Peter and Elijah and Paul all be God’s men?)

We are always going to be be mixing things up a bit too much, but love covers a multitude of sins.

Disclaimer: I am not advocating syncretism – just the opposite in fact. But I am advocating reformation with patience.

It is hard to discipline yourself, but very much worth it. (I’m exhorting myself here.)

I can be a hard worker, but more than that I am a procrastinator. I can get a lot of things done when someone is beating my butt. Gosh, that’s why school was so great, especially when the teachers were hard and the deadlines were strict! Success success success! – expending energy and seeing real results. But when the whip-cracking dries up, so does much of the accomplishment. It’s just so dang hard to motivate yourself to (fill in the blank) learn a new language, learn to play a new instrument, write a novel, etc.

What is school at the adult level except just paying for someone to beat you with a stick? Way back in the day, you maybe really needed to pay for the opportunity to learn from a tiny handful of really smart people or to have access to an incredible library. Now, all of that stuff is online. There are years worth of fantastic tutorial videos on YouTube that will teach you virtually ANYTHING you want to know. If you can self-motivate, the sky is about the limit. Unless your dream is to be a surgeon and you need a thousand of hours of practice suturing real live human abdomens, that grad degree is probably just an expensive whip cracker.

Everyone wants to write a book. So why the heck are SOOOOO many people going $100K into debt for a largely useless Ph.D.? Well, it’s like paying a personal trainer $100/month at the gym. Sure, you can probably figure out how to lift those weights on your own, but having someone there to make you do it increases the change by ten times that the lifting will actually happen.

A Ph.D. program is really just paid practice in research and book writing. You pay a bunch of money for someone to force you to write a book in 2 years. Can you do it? You had better!

Could you do it without chaining to a lifetime of debt? Figure out how to do that instead and save big!

Here are some excerpts from this recent article on mental health:

Mental health is the biggest modern malady.

Psychotherapy is key but is currently a luxury product that must be democratized. Although psychotherapy has been proved to be highly effective, it is prohibitively expensive and inaccessible; paying $150 for a session is a huge entry barrier that must be disrupted. Imagine a session for $15.

Therapeutic conversations in groups are the future and will be key in solving many of the barriers mentioned here. Groups are essentially communities, and just like with group therapy, they create a sense of belonging, of continuity, of mutual support — of the safety of not feeling alone with our problems. Groups also allow modern participatory platforms to reduce the cost of the expert by splitting it between multiple users, and allow synchronous and asynchronous access — anytime and anywhere.

Wait, what’s wrong this line of thinking? It aims to treat the symptoms of a disease with the same tools that came out of the disease itself. Solution: Let’s pay (hopefully less money) to talk to someone with a 8-year specialist medical degree. Yeah, that will fix it – like cutting the price of bread in half so the poor won’t starve. Their completely broke. Zero dollars buys zero bread whether it is $4 or $2.  And what is the future? Group therapy(!) – invented community support groups. News flash, it was also the past, in fact, nearly all six-thousand years of our past. It was built around family (that cooperated and lived in the same tent, tribe, house, or at least town). It was built around shared worship of God. It was built amongst coworkers who lived where they worked or close by and who had the fruits of their labors overlap greatly with what their neighbor consumed.

Instead, we in the modern west have boldly asserted our liberty and independence with ear-splitting volume. We hop in our cars and move days away from our family at the earliest convenience. Our work frequently has nothing tangible to do with anything we interact with the other majority of our life – the time not spent at the office or the factory. We have abandoned the faith of our ancestors or we have let it morph into casual participation with a motor-business zoned inspirational message and concert in the ‘burbs. Free from close proximity and likely free of sacraments, it has also lost it’s power to keep community glued together. Even when its orthodoxy is technically maintained, its form thwarts itself.

We have listened to modernity’s preachers for so long and now we are free. And what do we have to show for our freedom? Loneliness and its cousin, despair. Community building specialists, come they with Ph.D.s or M.D.s or even M.Div.s cannot save us. They are a product of the same age. Only Jesus can save us, and he will do it through his own work in sanctifying us and our neighbors and finally by coming himself.

And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.

(1 Corinthians 15:17-19 ESV)

As an exercise a few days ago, I thought about what some possible answers to saint Paul’s “if Christ is not raised” question.

If Jesus isn’t risen what options do we have left? Also, (secondarily) why still go to church?

Imagine some alternatives:

1. Judaism
2. Islam
3. Buddhism
4. Naturalism/Materialism/Nihilism/Humanism

—

1. We can still believe in YHWY, convert to some form of Judaism and continue to wait for a Messiah while living according to the OT law and communing with God to some degree – from a distance. The shadow of grace is still there. Always was.

Why keep going to church with Judaism? You probably shouldn’t. We’ll just confuse you with a bunch of hope in a false Messiah. To learn about God and how to live like he wants, you are better off studying the Torah at home or at the Jewish center on the other side of town.

—

2. Next, we could covert to Islam. Work hard to follow God’s (Allah’s) laws, especially those revealed to us through the prophet Mohammed in 610 AD. We can still study Matthew, Mark, and Luke because they are full of good advice from Jesus, who was, after all, a remarkable prophet.

Why keep going to church with Islam? Don’t. You’ll learn a lot more about how God REALLY wants you to live by listening to the teaching at the local Islamic Center. You can also start reading the Koran as it’s going to be much more helpful and prescriptive than what we study all the time in the New Testament.

—

3. We can continue to acknowledge Jesus as a great teacher and perhaps even prophet of some sort, but follow only a more generic spiritualism – akin to Zen Buddhism. Free yourself from what weights you down. Minimize your desires. Believe in yourself as you already are. Believe “God” loves you, sort of, as he loves all living things.

Keep going to church for Buddhism? Nah, you’ll probably hear too much about Jesus (who isn’t really a savior and whose significance is overblown). You are better off going to the meditation center, or perhaps the Unitarian Universalist church where you can get sort of a “best of” playlist of advice from various world religions and traditions, Christianity included. Why limit yourself?

—

4. Throw all this stuff out! Jesus was a fraud or mostly an idea invented by later religious leaders grasping for power. Religion is the opiate of the people (Marx). Jesus is potentially a force for good, but he’s largely imaginary. (Oprah, Deepak Chopra, etc.) You just worry about yourself. The cosmos is all there ever was and ever will be (Carl Sagan). Soon, you’ll be dust again, so have some fun (whatever that means to you) while you are here (just about every Black Eye Peas song).

If you really feel like going to church and hanging out with some stupid people, then go ahead. Whatever floats your boat. I’ll do what floats my boat and if I have to lie, steal, and break promises to do it – who cares? I got one life to live before my atoms return to the void. Can anyone talk me into leaving an inheritance? I hope not. I’m enlightened with regards to our meaninglessness. Go me! Also, I wish I had more money.

—

An intelligent or intellectual book this is not. The whole first chapter is, what else? His personal testimony. “I thought I had it figured out but it was all fake. Now I’m tellin’ the truth!” Really? Sounds like more of the same. I mean, I’m glad you’ve found Jesus and all. I think understanding his grace and learning to fear God is the beginning of wisdom, but that doesn’t mean any of the next things you are about to say is worth listening to. How about I judge that by it’s own merits? If your reasoning is good then I will consider it. If it is weak, I will dismiss it. I know that what you say and believe and work toward are inseparable from you as a person, but understand that I AM NOT YOU. Your work must stand on it’s own. I don’t want to hear about YOU unless it’s directly relevant to your work. A true writer or artist doesn’t need to talk about themselves all day. Their work says everything far better than they could.

The book, published in the early 1980s is a couple hundred pages trying to prove in a quasi-scientific manner the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. You’d think he might cite Josephus at least once. Nope. It’s just the four gospel accounts mixed with commentary from very contemporary psychologists and law professors. The whole of Church history – what everyone, everywhere, has believed about the resurrection for two-thousand years – there is no mention of those things at all. I was curious so I looked up some things that Augustine had to say about the resurrection. All kinds of great stuff, but it’s completely off his radar. Practically everything except the last 50 years of American evangelism might as well not exist. It’s like the church started with him and Jesus in nineteen-seventy whenever when he got saved in college. Parents don’t matter. Elders don’t matter. Great thinkers and saints of the past don’t matter. Despite the assumed conservatism, what could be more liberal and hyper-independent than this myopic self-centered narrative? “It’s ME. I’m the center of the universe. Let me try to impart some of ME – it’s all I got!”

This book drove me nuts. This stuff can’t stand up to criticism AT ALL, and in the 21st century west, your faith NEEDS to be able to stand up to criticism. This is not terribly hard really, but not any old thing will work. I suggest you skip Evidence that Demands a Verdict and it’s ilk. Instead, read just about anything from C.S Lewis (including his fiction), or N.T. Wright’s Simply Christian, or if you find biographies more engaging, The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. Better yet, read the gospel of John again and ask God to change your heart.

So, sorry to say mean things about your book Josh. I know you’ve been real successful as an author and speaker and that a lot of folks have found your work helpful. That’s great. I just think we really need something better, and fortunately, we have it. Maybe your new material is better. Probably is. Not sure if I’ll get around to it though. Peace out.

The United States presidential election is in two days time. The bulk of my thoughts on the two candidates is along the lines of what Brad Littlejohn says here.

In the meantime, this is about all I have to say.

Gandalf for President!

 

NPR had a long piece a few days ago on the death the conductor Georg Solti. The person being interviewed went on and on about the uniqueness and “power” of his performances. They played lots of clips. My thought was, “I can’t tell what the heck they are talking about and frankly I listen to a lot of classical music, so I bet most other people can’t tell either.” That may be true, but it bothered me the rest of the day that in all the years I had spent listening toand performing music, I had almost nothing to ground myself in when it came to trying to figure out who was conducting an orchestra just by listening.

I have spent countless hours paying attention to individual performers. Recording quality and styles something I’ve been aware of for a long time. I can always tell when Itzhack Perlman is on the radio because his Stradivarius violin sounds kind of strange – unusually delicate. I can tell when Pablo Casals is playing or Andrea Segovia (way too much rubato), or Angel Romero (way too fast). I know what Wynton Marsalis trumpet sounds like. (Bell tones. Good classical, mediocre jazz). You can always tell if a symphony recording is older than about 20 years (you can barely hear the bass violins). Etc. I’ve spent a lot of years paying attention to this stuff. But the conductor? I’m completely lost. I can’t tell one from the other.

So I stared to pay attention. Only a few days later, I heard the third movement of Beethoven’s 5th on the radio – great stuff of course. On this performance though, when the french horns came in, I was jarred. They were WAY overblowing as loud as they possibly could. The tone was blaring and buzzy and unstable. Pretty cool, but also unconventional. Now wait a minute. No brass player would EVER get away with blasting like that. They would get chewed out and told to play a nice solid forte. There is no way that just happened on its own. Then it hit me. THE CONDUCTOR TOLD THEM TO DO IT. And most conductors wouldn’t. Here is something unique about this performance right here that comes from the silent man holding the baton.

I stayed in the parking lot at work and waited for the piece to finish and for them to announce who it was. Turns out it was Georg Solti.

I couldn’t find that particular performance on YouTube. This one is pretty good though.

Modern science seems to often function as a means of cutting ties with our sires. We use psychology to explain how we think in a self-contained way instead of pointing to what our parents and grandparents taught us in pattern. We are children of God, sub-gods and sub-creators ourselves, but we have hated Him and hated his title for us. So we have expanded our study of chemistry and living cells along such a path as to self-define ourselves as something uncreated. “I think therefore I am”, but when I stop thinking, I stop being. From my own thought I came from and from my own thought I will return – a meaningless material existence, except for the temporary meaning I fabricate for myself as I tweet, “New season of Game of Thrones starts tonight! #booya”.