Carpe Cakem!

Every word, every command, every affirmation, has an implied “No” alongside it. But unless the nature of the negative is also articulated with the word, (and it often is not), then the “No” comes wholly from the context – a context invisible to distant hearers and all but buried to readers centuries later. But the context was the shape the original message was poured into. It gives the word shape and meaning beyond it’s fuzzy interior.

This is why it is important to know that when early Christians said, “Jesus is Lord”, it was also implied, “and Caesar is NOT.” If you were a farmer in early Mesopotamia, your temptation would be idolatry toward some agricultural fertility god. To say, “God is God”, or, “YHWY is God”, implied, “and Baal is not.” The word is the same, but the meaning is expanded in one direction or another. The same is true for us as well. When we say, “Jesus is Lord”, we must also add, “and the State is NOT.” The government, the president, congress, the judiciary – their power is highly limited. They cannot save us. They cannot do jack squat. They are not Lord. Jesus is.

—

Yesterday, my wife and I took all our children to the local science center. In one area are tables populated with brain-teaser puzzles. On of them asked to move one rectangular piece from a group of blocks to make a square. It seems impossible and I was stumped until my wife showed me the answer. The instructions for the puzzle contained a trick question. You assume that you are supposed to make a square with the pieces, which is, in fact, impossible. But a square can be made in the EMPTY space between the pieces when configured a certain way. This got me thinking about negative space – an idea used not so much in geometry as in architecture and graphic design.

This morning then, I listened to a sermon that dealt with the brief and rather vague instruction in Ephesians 6:4 to bring up our children in the “instruction of the Lord”. This was contrasted with the prevailing culture in the city of Ephesus (part of modern-day Turkey) at the time it was written. This is the context and any “do this” present has a “and not this” surrounding it, whether verbalized right then or not. Ephesus was subject to a strict Greek caste system and the exposing of infants was widely practiced. For those receiving this word, one of the first things to come to mind would have been to resit the temptation to infanticide. This may seem like the most ridiculous sort of no-brainer to us today, but they might think our own propensity to accomplish the same through abortive pregnancy of similar obviousness. But their context is not ours. Our modern age has raised egalitarian individuality as the chief sacred right. Disciplining our children, especially corporeally, is highly unfashionable right now. It was rarely this way in the past and will not be again some day, but for us right now, this is our temptation.

The Bible doesn’t work as a manual for parenting or marriage or business or much else because so much of  the really useful advice is implied from the negatives of the context. We don’t have that information – nor would it actually be that helpful if we did! What we need is wisdom to figure things out on our own – both individually and in community. You know what he says about wisdom:

If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. (James 1:5)

 

I took my notebook to the concert and ended up scribbling these down during the show.

———–

Confined to six strings
An aged man
Finds joy in a long encounter
with occasional glances to a woman outside

———–

The magic of a live performance:
If it sounded exactly as in the studio,
then what a failure!

———–

The image of youth
Still present in the veins
and stretch of the neck.
Like a child stretching forth
to bite a juicy apple from a branch
he may not reach.
Reaching forward to sing forth Romance,
Like it might walk through the door if you said the right words.

———–

There’s nothing new under the sun.
So mine the old, where the diamonds have been growing
for more generations than could come
from a thousand summer wedding nights.

———–

Who is the innovator? The one who does it first. What is it? Not some undreamed novelty, but what nearly everyone was thinking all along but could never get past their lips or out to their fingertips.

———–

Love songs give lip service to love. Scholars give lip service to love songs but would understand more if they would open their mouths, close their eyes, and repeat after me:

Oh ma mignonne y venez vous ?

On Sunday I got to hear Pierre Bensusan play and Lindaman’s in Spokane. The food was wonderful. The Old Fashioned put others to shame. Pierre played fantastically. I overheard his roadie telling someone that this was the best performance of the tour so far. It was a really small joint holding only about fifty folks so nobody was far from the action. Husband-wife guitar-vocal duo Sidhe opened with some really great tunes as well. A good friend of mine came with so the whole event doubled as an engaging road trip as well.

This time, I didn’t care about the guitar technique as much as it’s been years now since I’ve treated the instrument with any discipline. Instead, I thought a lot about growing older, romance and love songs – wondering if the old ones are maybe the best already – so just sing those!

Early on, Pierre took a shot at critics of his style and guitar tuning:

“The first guy who accidentally tuned his guitar to DADGAD invented ‘New Age’! – Where the guitar plays all by itself. You can even go to the beach and it’s still there playing.”

I took my notebook and ended up hacking some poems together during the show. I guess I’ll put them in the next post.

In the meantime, can “weariness” be communicated through a composition? Yes.

 

Over here, Leithart gives criticism of B.B Warfield’s particular flavor of Reformed theology. Thought I was only familiar with about half of the points of discussion myself, the questions Leithart raised ring true to some of my own troubles with Warfield over the years.

Warfield, as far as I can tell, is the chief source of anti-charismatic sentiment within the Reformed tradition. I think it goes hand in hand that he is also, against Calvin, not much of a sacramentalist either. To have even a moderately high view of the bread, wine, and water of baptism, one has to (though he may be loth to say it this way) ascribe some sort of magic powers to them. Warfield will have none of that, nor anything else that smells a bit magical, be it strange tongues, healings, and the like. He is quick off the blocks to all but dismiss much of the book of Acts at the earliest opportunity. Virtually all meaning the Lord’s table and the baptism waters may play in the life of a Christian are naturally obliterated and chalked up as collateral damage to his view of the Spirit working without mediation.

I say no. The Triune God works VIA a great number of persons and things, even though He doesn’t have to. In fact, it seems that He delights to do so at times – for his own reasons.

After being reminded of it by Capon, I got a couple chapters through Charles William’s The Figure of Beatrice before I had to admit that I just don’t know Dante well enough to deserve it. Maybe again some time later.

Nevertheless, I came across this interesting passage:

St. Augustine is reported to have said that he often could not make adulterers understand that they where doing wrong. There was perhaps more excuse for them than the great doctor altogether guessed, especially if among the cares of the church (and there was every excuse for him) he had forgotten his African love, or had perhaps loved her without the quality of the new life. However much excuse, they were still wrong. But perhaps denunciation is not the best way of correcting the error; or perhaps the error cannot be properly corrected until jealousy is denounced as strongly as adultery (whether with or without divorce).

-Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice, p.50-ish

Williams, like Dante, sees in romantic love a divine dimension beyond just raw lust. There is that too, but that isn’t all there is and some of what drives our desire for the other (be it the mystery of the female figure or whatnot) is really quite special and in it’s own category. He sees Augustine, for all his greatness, being a bit allergic to this truth due to his circumstances.

Here and in other places he iterates, and Capon follows suite in Bed and Board, that divorce is actually impossible. It doesn’t do what it claims to do. The relationship with the spouse cannot be metaphysically annihilated, only neglected or nurtured.

The last sentence is of interest to me as something Girard would whole-heartedly agree with. The reason we cannot preach effectively against lust is because we have failed to preach against jealousy. The second part of the ten commandments are inverted. The tenth is the most important, not the least. Instead, we have chopped it off as a given. Envy is our economic, social, and emotional engine.

 

The structure of the Summa [of Aquinas] and of the universe, is dynamic. It is not like information in a library, but like blood in a body.

-Peter Kreeft, from the introduction to his abridged Summa, emphasis mine.

Aquinas the ox,
enthroned in some grand seat,
angels swarming ’round him,
pouring wisdom
into his tonsured gourd.

How saintly a thinker,
that men today
should aspire to his level of scholarly output,
imagining angels
to be swarming ’round their heads as well

as they take out a second mortgage
for some distant graduate school

Here is another fantastic (and relieving) passage from Capon here that deserves to be reprinted. (Also, Charles Williams strikes again with two instances of “coinherence” in this passage.)

In the eighteenth chapter of the Book of Genesis, it is reported that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost sat down once and had lunch with Abraham in the plains of Mamre. The table has been the hallmark of the Trinity ever since. The world is about the mystery by which the created order of pieces and parts is to become the image of the coinherence of the three divine Persons; about the forming of the Body of Christ, the building of the City of God. And the Board is the first of the places at which it happens. If that sounds a little fancy for your own table full of upset glasses and brawling children, remember Abraham: He set God the best table he could, but his wife embarrassed him by being rude. From his point of view, the occasion was hardly a success. As it turned out, however, it didn’t matter; he became the father of the people of the coinherence anyway. The City of God began with a meal that didn’t go right; your spilled milk isn’t going to hold up the building of it too much.

-Robert Capon, Bed and Board, p.82

(This one is a bit rough and I found it sitting in my notebook gathering dust since it was written during a long hospital visit a couple months ago.)

—–

The glory of man is his ability to compartmentalize. This allows him to fight ferociously until his sword handle is fused to his palm (1 Samuel 23:10). It enables a soldier to shoot and suffer fire all night long without being distracted by thoughts of his wife and children back home.

Put to ill use, it allows the same man seemingly faithful in a thousand ways to have an affair on the side. He is so good at dividing reality, it is as if the other woman still doesn’t exist when he’s in his wife’s arms.

A kindly man can be wholly empathetic and then walk away and cease to give a damn. This can be the source of both cold false love and astonishing bravery.

Someone is always using knowledge of a man’s vices to wholly discredit his life’s work, but this practice is often illegitimate and dishonest. Augustine had a sexual problem; does that negate his saintly life? Some of it, ye, all of it, no. Luther spouted hate in his senile old age. Does that redact all those prior years of grace and bravery? Barth had a mistress (maybe), so everything he wrote about God is just a bad joke, right?

All of these people, including every saint on the books was a sinner until the day he or she died. But dirt bags are the only sorts of folks Jesus saves. And save them all he did. And rise to often greatness while still living on this old earth while their eyes were fixed on him, they did that too.

These attackers have real ammunition, but they always aim for the whole continent of a person’s life and work assuming their one bomb will vaporize a thousand square miles and send the whole thing to the bottom of the ocean. They forget that the glory of man is his power to divide his mind and give undivided attention.

This is Adam’s lot. Eve was given other more balanced treasures.

I think one could argue that man should NOT be divided and certainly that is often the case, but I think it must still be a pre-fall power, something tied to the heart of creativity. It gets twisted and corrupted and abused to enable great sin and shield the horror we perpetuate from our own consciences. However, it also frees us from chains, focuses the light we receive like a lens, and makes possible the Bach Partita for Violin, The Cathedral of Notre Dame, Apollo 11, Aquinas’s Summa, and Robin Hood’s archery.

Lewis’s space trilogy is often forgotten in the shadow of the Chronicles of Narnia. There are many reasons for this: It’s confusing at times, the first book is the weakest (preventing people from continuing), it doesn’t appeal to children and it feels a bit too influenced by Charles Williams. The third and final book in the series, That Hideous Strength is still by far the best and can be read all on it’s own.

Somehow my mother gave me these books to read when I was about 13. The first book was fairly forgettable. The second, Perelandra seemed to drag on and on in the middle and then… WHAT!!! This book sticks in my mind so strongly because of it’s climax. It’s the first (and maybe the last) time I’ve ever been truly SHOCKED at way a story turned. I remember sitting in the chair in my bedroom some quiet summer afternoon and standing up with wide eyes. Holy smokes. Dare I even say what it is lest I spoil it for someone who hasn’t read it?

*** Spoiler alert ***

The hero, Ransom, is stranded on Venus. His job is to talk the Eve character on this new world into keeping God’s command and not falling into sin. Arguing with him is essentially the devil, possessing Dr. Weston, another man from earth. They argue back and forth. Sometimes Ransom’s reasoning appears to have the upper hand. At other times the evil force appears to be gaining ground with her. The problem is, Ransom is growing increasingly weary. He can’t sleep and the evil seems tireless. The Eve character is close to falling. It drags on and on – so much talking. How on earth is this going to be resolved? Lewis is famous for being a Christian apologist and one of the most brilliant and well-read men of the 20th century. Isn’t his hero going to come up with some sort of clever way to talk down the devil’s advocate? Ha. That’s what you think.

Suddenly, Ransom wakes up one morning and realizes what he must do. He must KILL the evil man, with his BARE HANDS. What follows is a brutal strangulation attempt and chase. Ransom is permanently wounded, but completes his task. Maybe someone saw that coming, but I didn’t. It still gives me shivers many years later.