More Than Meets the Eye

Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid

Maestro of Mise-en-Scène

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN 5:44 PM ET

The Jacopo Tintoretto show at the Prado Museum in Madrid is a model of connoisseurship and smart editing
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The True Rule of Poverty

Evelyn Underhill

The true rule of poverty consists in giving up those things which enchain the spirit, divide its interests, and deflect it on its road to God - whether these things be riches, habits, religious observances, friends, interests, distastes, or desires - not in mere outward destitution for its own sake. It is attitude, not act, that matters; self-denudation would be unnecessary were it not for our inveterate tendency to attribute false value to things the moment they become our own.

Mysticism

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"THE DEVIL QUOTES SCRIPTURE"


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The Devil Quotes Scripture

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you...' -- Luke 4:9-10

It's true that we read this on the first Sunday of Lent every year to remind ourselves that Jesus was tempted as we are, yet did not sin. But this year I was struck by something else: The devil quotes scripture to the Son of God. That must have been an edifying experience for Jesus. And somehow I don't think this particular temptation was hard to resist: it wouldn't be all that difficult for me to decide not to throw myself from a church steeple. The loaf of bread would have been tougher for me.

The devil quotes scripture. Probably goes to church, too. Probably never misses -- probably pretty proud of that. Probably finds plenty of work in the precincts of the holy: there are so many opportunities for pride and malice in the Church, it's not funny.

Oh, do be careful. Remember the sin of pride, how easy it can be to mistake your loyalty to your group for your ethics. How habit-forming it can be to look down on people, how perversely good it can feel, how easy it becomes to define yourself almost totally by the people and things you oppose. And how good we are at finding reasons not to do the things that we know will cost us dearly.

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Lent I, Year C
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
Psalm 91:1-2,9-16
Romans 10:8b-13
Luke 4:1-13

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Off to NY for a few days. For some reason blogger won't allow me to post to
Life Goes On?! so I will just leave things here if I get a chance.

The more I think about the struggle within the Episcopal Church the more I am convinced that this is a classic example of misdirection. Red herring. That a small group of well funded individuals has been allowed to direct both the agenda and the theological reflection of the Episcopal Church. The agenda is to Third Party, and eventually "eliminate" the progressive church.

Follow the money. There is more going on here than meets the eye.

Following the Money

Cross Posted to Life Goes On ?!

Anglican Communion? Come and sit down a second. I'm going to give you a link to two articles that you may have read, and then again, maybe you haven't. But you should. Right now. Or -- have a cocktail, print out the pieces at both links, sit down in front of the fire, put your feet up, put your thinking cap on, and just read them . They are:

http://www.edow.org/follow/part1.html
Following the Money Part One

http://www.edow.org/follow/part2.html
Following the Money Part Two

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Now , reflect on your reading. There is an ancient wisdom that revolves around following the money. Heard of that. Check. There 's another piece to that, which is that for a dispute to remain in play and unresolvable, look for the HIDDEN third party who benefits from the dispute.


You know, everyone in TEC need to read http://www.edow.org/follow/part1.html and
http://www.edow.org/follow/part2.html.

And there will be a TEST.

Just like our pals on the political right, this "We hate gays" campaign is no grass roots movement, no groundswell of hatred and prejudice that appeared mysteriously out of a clear blue sky. This has been nurtured created and birthed by the very self same self-annointed dictators of protocal on the right that we have to thank for SOOO much -- death and destruction in Iraq, incompetent bureaucrats, nonexistent diplomats, war on the middle class and poor people. Lots more. Lots.

Follow the money. This is CLASSIC third party thinking. Think about it. It is not about women or gays particularly -- it is more about power. It is about unelected people who CHOOSE NOT TO PARTICIPATE IN THE PROCESSES OF THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH -- who put themselves above such processes -- dictating agenda, budget and theology of the Protestant Church. People who are too cowardly to fight for their beliefs in the light, out in the open, through the processes of the Church. People with the means and the desire to seize power through underhanded and secretive conspiracy. Well , what would you call it then? It is divide and conquer. Then pump up the money the fear -- I am amazed that a bright chap like the ABof Canterbury has been taken in by such an old scam. Throw in brown people, black people, queers, women, immigrants --- all of the "other" that the gospels seem to be pointing to as the Inheritors of the Kingdom of Heaven -- and pretty soon everybody is in an uproar of indignation -- so much so that they don't even notice that the perps are carting away the family jewels.

ABofC should have kicked Akinola to the curb a long time ago. He's (Rowen) a good writer, but a terrible leader. He has listened and dined with and hand held with people seeking to destroy the EC for way too long. You know neocons. Any display of compassion is considered WEAKNESS.

NOTE*

"Millions of dollars contributed by a handful of donors have allowed a small network of theologically conservative individuals and organizations to mount a global campaign that has destabilized the Episcopal Church and may break up the Anglican Communion.

The donors include five secular foundations that have contributed heavily to politically conservative advocacy groups, publications and think tanks, and one individual, savings and loan heir Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr., who has given millions of dollars to conservative causes and candidates.

Contributions from Ahmanson and the Bradley, Coors, Olin, Scaife and Smith-Richardson family foundations have frequently accounted for more than half of the operating budgets of the American Anglican Council and the Institute on Religion and Democracy, according to an examination of forms filed with the Internal Revenue Service and an analysis of statements made by both donors and recipients.

The AAC and the IRD have worked together in opposing the Episcopal Church's consecration of a gay bishop with a male partner, its practice of ordaining non-celibate homosexuals to the priesthood, and its willingness to permit the blessing of same-sex relationships. Their campaign has entailed extensive international travel, heavily subsidized conferences and the employment of a professional staff and consultants to coordinate and publicize their efforts."

AND:

NOW -- read about our boy Ahmanson:

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Howard F. Ahmanson Jr.
http://www.edow.org/follow/part1.html


"Ahmanson also helps sustain organizations in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that support removing the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada from the Anglican Communion unless they change their policies regarding same-sex relationships.

The full extent of his contributions cannot be determined because most are made through his private foundation, Fieldstead and Company, whose records are not open to public scrutiny. And neither the AAC nor the IRD discloses the names of its most significant contributors or the amounts of their donations.

As a result, Anglicans have no full accounting of how much money is being spent, and for what purposes, in the struggle for control of their Communion."

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You following the money so far? You know, sometimes I wonder what these people think the Gospels are about?

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Howard F. Ahmanson Jr.

"Unlike the leaders of the secular foundations that donate to the IRD, Ahmanson and his wife, Roberta, a former religion reporter for the Orange County Register, are deeply involved in current Episcopal and Anglican controversies. For the last ten years, Ahmanson has significantly-and, for much of that time, secretly-underwritten internal opposition to the Episcopal Church's policies on homosexuality.

Ahmanson and his teenaged son David are members of St. James, Newport Beach , one of three parishes in the Diocese of Los Angeles that declared itself part of the Anglican Church of Uganda because of differences with its bishop, the Rt. Rev. J. Jon Bruno. Bruno voted to confirm Gene Robinson, who lives with his male partner, as Bishop of New Hampshire, and supports the blessing of same sex relationships.

Previously, Ahmanson was a disciple of the Rev. Rousas John Rushdoony, the father of Christian Reconstructionism. Rushdoony died in 2001 with the Ahmansons at his bedside. 9 He advocated basing the American legal system on biblical laws, including stoning adulterers and homosexuals. 10

Ahmanson, who suffers from Tourrette's syndrome, rarely grants interviews with the media, but he and his wife cooperated with the Register on a five-part profile that appeared in August 2004. 11 "I think what upsets people is that Rushdoony seemed to think--and I'm not sure about this--that a godly society would stone people for the same thing that people in ancient Israel were stoned," Ahmanson was quoted as saying. "I no longer consider that essential." 12

"It would still be a little hard to say that if one stumbled on a country that was doing that, that it is inherently immoral, to stone people for these things," he added. "But I don't think it's at all a necessity." 13

Ahmanson emerged as a political force in his home state of California in the early 1990s. Research conducted for The Los Angeles Times found that he and his wife had contributed $3.9 million to Republican candidates in state and local races and $82,750 in federal races between 1991 and 1995. 14 They also contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars to ballot initiatives that banned gay marriage and affirmative action. 15 Campaign finance records indicate that the couple continues to contribute heavily to Republican candidates nationwide. 16

Ahmanson is a member of the secretive Council for National Policy, an elite group of politically conservative national leaders who meet several times a year to coordinate their efforts on a common agenda. According to a New York Times report, the dates and locations of the group's meetings are kept secret, as is its membership. Participants in the group's discussions promise not to reveal their content. 17 Members in recent years have included Gary Bauer, Tom DeLay, James Dobson, Bob Jones, III, of Bob Jones University, Tim LaHaye, author of the Left Behind series, Grover Norquist, Oliver North, Ralph Reed, Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly. 18

Ahmanson also supports several think tanks. He was a major benefactor and former board member of Rushdoony's Chalcedon Foundation. He also contributes heavily to the Discovery Institute, the intellectual flagship of the Intelligent Design movement, 19 and the George C. Marshall Institute, which disputes research indicating that human activity contributes to global warming. 20

In what may be his only published article, Ahmanson advanced a Scriptural case for opposing minimum wage laws. 21

Ahmanson's views are considered controversial enough that two Republican candidates, Linda Lingle, now governor of Hawaii 22 and Virginia Congressman Frank R. Wolf have returned his contributions to their campaigns. 23

The Institute on Religion and Democracy and the American Anglican Council have shown no such reluctance.

Ahmanson gave the IRD more than $528,000 in 1991-92. In 2001, after a five-week vacation in Turkey with Knippers and her husband, the Ahmansons became the principal supporters of the IRD's Reforming America's Churches project. Howard Ahmanson made five gifts totaling $460,000 to the institute that year. In addition, Roberta Ahmanson agreed to join the IRD's board. 24

In 2003, Knippers told the Washington Post that Ahmanson continued to give the IRD an average of $75,000 a year. 25

From 2001 to 2004, the IRD spent more than $2.1 million on its church reform project, $449,182 of it on activities related to the Episcopal Church. 26

While Ahmanson was cementing his relationship with the IRD, he was also building up the American Anglican Council."
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I'm telling you, get a nice stiff drink, sit down read part one and part two linked above, get a friend to read them too, and discuss.

And this info has been available for years. Good old boy Ahmanson and his ilk (see above) just love seeing all of the bishops and gay members weep and rage and rail --- because that means more division more wrong targetting, classic undermining of the PB voila!! More Death in the Cathedral for our times.

How do you buy yourself a Church? I think if progressive Christians would get their panties out of a VERY tight (and may I say very satisfying) wad -- turn that search light around and shine it on Mr. Ahmanson and his co-conspirators and pepper them with attention, questions, accusations, etc. etc. you would see some very shadowy cockroachy shadows scurry for dark corners , so that they could spin out some new conspiracy.

Why are there so many conspiracy theories? Because people like to conspire, they do it all the time.
Nothing wrong with that, it's fun.

But when these holier than thou bastards seek to purchase subversion of the entire structure of the Protestant church , and all the muckety mucks with their mitres, robes, funny hats, PhDs. and pilots liscenses can't see the forest for the trees -- well hell, honey , what's all that high priced education for?

You get my drift?

Atheist

Mad Priest Thought For The Day
(with thanks to Bill)

Unencumbered by religion
the atheists were free
to follow Jesus.

Into Great Silence

Talking about Into Great Silence

26 February 2007
http://www.therevealer.org/archives/main_story_002784.php

"The film should become a monastery..."

By Angela Zito

Tiny bottle of Chartreuse in hand, I emerged in mid-town a few weeks ago from watching Into Great Silence, my promised dinner date long-gone. The two-hour documentary about a monastery that I'd thought I was going to see had morphed into an amazing three-hour experience of silent imagery. Groening’s documentary (he hates the term) of life among the Roman Catholic monks of the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps opens this week at the Film Forum in New York city, its U.S. theatrical debut. (Visit their site for Zeitgeist Film’s trailer )

Groening requested permission to shoot in 1984. Sixteen years later they got back to him, inviting him to come on in. He did so alone, managing the camera-work and sound as a one-man filmmaking team while keeping the rules of work and silence of the monastery. Their conditions of no artificial light, no additional music, no commentaries, fulfilled exactly Groening’s own initial treatment. The Order of the Carthusians, founded in 1084, supports itself on its green, herbal liqueur so it can devote the lives of its monks and nuns to perpetual, contemplative silence—they live alone together, each in a cell (really a suite of several rooms, with a tiny garden) meeting only for regular prayer vigils. The resulting film, a mix of HD video and super-8 film, is so exquisite and so surprising that critics rave while viewers return as often as they can during its European runs.

Groening, 48, was born in Dusseldorf. He studied medicine and psychology for three years while working in film before turning completely to his life’s work. Into Great Silence is his sixth film and won the Sundance Special Jury Prize in World Cinema Documentary last year, along with four prizes so far in Europe. In a noisy world, full of information, he is after some other effect: The few voices we get in the film are not so much heard as overheard, when Groening follows the monks on their weekly hike together off the monastery grounds together. Sound thus takes on a different quality, it communicates, but not through language—instead there are rustlings and bells, and birdsong.
The film hovers at the edge, on the one hand, of representing a world, and on the other, of abstracting its colors, sounds and feeling tones into new forms that we can experience freshly, with no reference but our perceptions. Wide shots of the monastic setting in snow or blooming trees, of monk’s at work or prayer, alternate with close-ups of fabric on flesh, fruit afire with morning light on a bare wood table that are painterly in their impact. Into Great Silence rearranges reality so that we can find something new in ourselves, and reminds me of the work of Nathaniel Dorsky. Dorsky’s small masterpiece, Devotional Cinema addresses film itself as “the spirit or experience of religion…where film itself became the place of experience and an invocation of something meaningfully human.”

When I talked with Philip Groening a few weeks ago in New York, he explained that he “didn’t want to shoot a film that informs people about a monastery, but a film that transforms into a monastery. The film should become a monastery.”

Following is our conversation, which took place on February 6, 2007, in Washington Square.

BEING ALONE

AZ: The monks refused you permission to shoot this film, then later granted it--What did that 16 year time-lag mean for the film?

PG: I wanted to go into a silent monastery, re-centering and a re-encountering my Catholic background ,which I was fighting. I thought I might see something of the pure center of that religion instead of the very pragmatic and very social version in the everyday church. By the time they called me in 99, I thought a lot of whether or not I still wanted to do it, whether it still fit into my life. I took out the outline again and it’s like five pages of a perfect concept. I thought OK, if it seems so perfect 15 years later, there is something to this.

But it was actually lucky—all the technical stuff I used to shoot the film did not exist in ‘84, so in ‘84 this film was basically impossible. I had been in a monastery in the south of France with a friend, one more luminous than the Grand Chartreuse, because it was much smaller and less constructed as a castle. We were thinking about shooting there on 16mm B&W but I doubt that we could have done it because there was just not enough light, and I certainly could not have done it alone .

AZ: Why?

PG: To go back to the basic concept: It was to go there, go through certain experiences, to have my perception, my senses, altered by what I encounter, use those altered senses, the altered sense of rhythm, of hearing, of seeing as a tool for creating something that really filters this altered perception into the audience, and opens up the space for them. So in order to do that you have to live there, for at least three months.

But they are hermits, hermits who live in a community. If you go there as two people, you are already a group. And if you have those moments of despair, those moments of really falling into the Nothing—which are usually the moments before you then suddenly find an image of extreme beauty—you would always find a reason to go to the other one and ask him if he also had problems. And you would just not pass through those things, get to the other side of them. You would not find those images of pure presence.

AZ: That sense of aloneness….

PG: It’s very important that they are actually alone and that you do not go in with a group of two or three outsiders. In a monk’s cell, nobody goes. Only the prior and the master of novices. Nobody else—they don’t visit each other in the cells. That’s a very intimate room. Filming somebody in that intimate room when he prays, if you would be two it would already be totally impossible—such an intrusion—it would be the classic destroying of what you want to film by setting up for filming it.

THIS IS NOT INFORMATION

AZ: My own experience of viewing your film felt like you transformed time through repetition and juxtaposition of people and things. The moment when I wept in the film was towards the end when you took objects into the lens as portraits. You had shot the monks in silent close-up and then, suddenly, I realized that the fruit was being framed in the same way. I got the sense that the shooting must have been wonderful. But what about editing?

PG: Editing was a complete nightmare. I am still recovering. It was 2 ½ years, with no interruption, to find that structure—where the film transforms for you, and things happen, like you start to cry when you see certain objects. I knew I wanted to get there. But I’ve never seen a film that gets there. So there was no example to follow at all. Me and my advising editor—every time we applied rational rules…the film just totally fell apart.

AZ: Like what kinds of rules?

PG: Like why don’t we put the African monks coming into the order earlier? Or, when which caption appears. In a version just before the Venice Biennale, a caption explaining that the Carthusians are very strict, and that I applied in ’84, and that they answered in ‘99 . was put right at the beginning, and it just wiped out the film.

AZ: Why?

PG: Everybody knows it a documentary, and it’s about a monastery. Everybody knows in a documentary, usually you get information. If you give a little bit too much, add some little scene about what really happens when they take in a novice, you start setting up that desire—or even certainty— of the viewer. Once you give him that caption, the viewer says “OK this is a documentary; he’s playing a game now; its twenty minutes, there’s no new information, there’s going to be new information.” But there’s never any new “information”, and it just collapses. This was so incredibly difficult.

AZ: If you let audiences go down the track of “This is a documentary and I’m getting information” that’s it…?

PG: Then you’re lost, completely lost. Of course I shot lots of stuff about where they produce that liqueur—people always ask, Why didn’t you show that? But it’s so complicated how they produce it, you would either have to enter into language or unresolved puzzles, and this would give the liqueur extreme importance, something like a magical symbol.

AZ: They gave out the little bottles of Chartreuse at the advance screening in NY and I thought -- this is so perfect. This is how to introduce the liqueuer: not in the film, but bottled, so you can have a drink after the three-hour experience…

PG: The liquor is what they ‘re famous for, but for them it’s not so important. For the DVD I did an additional thing about the fabrication. It’s very funny, because I ask the monk in charge: What’s the significance of the liquor for you? And he thinks... “Uh, the significance of the liquor for us…? Hmmm well, it’s something that makes the money we need.” It’s not a magical thing.

AZ: What is most important to you about film as a medium?

PG: I always wanted to do this film because only cinema completely controls the time of the audience, no other medium can do that. It is the medium that comes closest to what religious rituals are. So I had the confidence even in 1984, although no camera in the world could have filmed at night then, that you can transform cinema into a monastery. Because all religion, by structuring time, can open up spaces in the viewer or in the participant. And this is exactly what you can do in a cinema. If you dare to do it, if you throw away all the additional construction and the supposedly helpful things like ”follow one person.” It’s not about following another person. Then you don’t think about yourself. It’s just a waste of time.

AZ: It’s information?

PG: It’s information. And getting information is not the same as encountering yourself. Nobody goes to a monastery to become a specialist in monasteries—you go to a monastery to become yourself. A film about a monastery that is really about a monastery is a film where you come out of the film and you know a little bit more about yourself but you know nothing about a monasteries because you have been in a monastery. If you want know about monasteries, go to a good historian.

From the point of view of what’s media and religion, this is where they are really joined. And this is why it’s really a cinema film. You need the confinement of the audience that they are not free to go in and out like all the time in an exhibition—you need the confinement of time and the darkness of space.

This is where the amazing parallels come in: cinema is like a monastery. It’s the only medium that discards everything apart from what is in the cinema and that really confines you— you go in there and the door is going to be closed behind you. Basically it should be locked by we don’t do that.

DESPERATE MOMENTS

AZ: What did you learn through such a long filmmaking experience?

PG: I learned a couple of things: to have confidence as an artist, and as a human being, in what comes. This experience of living with these people, who are very free individuals because they are extremely themselves, and happy. They live in an absence of fear, not afraid of death, of things going wrong. They think everything is being taken care of –that is something that has stayed with me.

As an artist I came there and I thought: Well, what can I film? There were moments over and over again when I was totally desperate, thinking I can not go and shoot another thing in that cloister, one more monk ringing a bell. I just can’t bear it any more. I thought: I have to quit filming, because nothing is coming up, and then—and this is why it was so important to do it alone--- being not able to discuss that with anybody and sitting there in my cell, or wandering around the cloister, I would suddenly see something like the fruits on the table that would be of such an extreme beauty, I would think—OK here you are, stupid, thinking about where you can go to find a great image instead of just looking around. This is something that I hope will stay –we’ll see in the next film—this confidence that things are always already there.

I hope I gained confidence going through the editing. This was very scary, sort of being out there on the open sea for 2 ½ years with no rules to apply to anything. The only one who was an influence on that were Mark Rothko’s paintings because I met those paintings as though they were persons two-thirds of the way through the editing –and it changed the editing a lot—seeing someone trying to go to something very absolute and actually he’s managing to do it, he’s not failing. OK he falls apart later on, kills himself. But first he’s managed to do that. He touched the absolute by getting rid of all the safe constructions that could have helped him to know what he was doing. He must have gone through hell not knowing because this is the only way he could do what he did.

And I had an accident on the shoot. I fell off a cliff wall, 18 feet down, vertically onto a patch of gravel, and I thought I was dead but I wasn’t. There were 40 seconds—I studied medicine and lying there, I had no pain, and I thought, OK 18 foot cliff, vertical fall, no pain. You broke your neck, you have 45 seconds and it’s going to go dark, another 50 seconds and it’s going to go silent. So I was looking up and thinking, everything is so beautiful. Then once it was clear that I could move, I started thinking about a broken cable on the camera. And then I had a total breakdown and started to cry, because I was so overwhelmed by having lived, and on the other hand, by how quickly I was willing to go back into efficiency. What are we really doing with this obsession with efficiency, what are we doing with our lives?

AZ: The well-trained mind…

PG: You barely survive and the first thing you do…. It’s the adrenalin that does it.

AZ: I see. Like when I am coming home and my mind is ahead of me, taking out my key and rehearsing exactly how it will fit into the lock… Trying to grasp and control the future.

PG: The amazing thing about being there, in the absence of speech your inner structuring of constantly turning to the future also disappears, and my capacity for planning has been drastically reduced. A monastery is about getting rid of speech. Speech is constantly implying this logical way of structuring time and thought. Silence throws you into the present, in the sense of not thinking about how you get your key out of your pocket.

The immediate object, the presence of immediate things, becomes much more luminous. It’s really like a consolation. The material world, the creation, helps you to be in the world, it’s as if God had created the world in order for us to feel at home. But that sort of future planning capacity really drops.

This is what the monastery is about; this is what I tried in the film.

I’m always really nervous when the moment comes when you just see this fruit on the table because I think sometimes it makes you really happy—it’s really a joyful experience—and then I know the film is working because there is no way you’re going to ask yourself, as an audience, what is the significance of these fruits, who do they belong to, where am I, which cell is this? You’re just looking at them. That’s when the monastery happens in the film because you’re just in the moment of perception. You’re just perceiving what is around you.

Basic happiness is just perception of what is around you. Without spoiling it. If you can do that, you’ve done It.

SMALL BUT DEEP

AZ: What about repetition for you as an artist?

PG: I think repetition is the absolute core of all art. I teach at a couple of film schools, like Cal Arts, at the Academy in Germany, I always say: you have the choice, the repetition is always there, what Hollywood cinema does, genre film, is export it. You have the classic action film opening shot, and you immediately know: this is a certain genre. And so the repetition is outside, in the other films you’ve already seen of the same genre. But if you don’t do the genre thing, then you need some repetition because it gives you as the viewer the rhythm. Repetition is the only element of style that is recurring need through all my films. The only way we have of perceiving time is through rhythm. We can’t perceive linear time. We can only perceive ripples of water, the swinging of leaves.

And repetition, on a personal level, is the deeper way of understanding. Learning something new every day is not getting you very far. Looking at the same thing again and again is actually the way of insight that contemplation goes toward. So this is why it’s in the film—the monks’ life is repetition.

It’s a different approach….you say to yourself, I’ll just look at a very limited field, and looking at that field over and over again will change me, and that field, and it will make me join with the world at a deeper level than looking at different things all the time. Which is maybe broadening your horizon, but lessening your touch.

AZ: I felt that very keenly in your film. Not so easy or so simple to convey, because the monastery itself is built upon repetition. How to restructure the repetition so that it is not just documentation of repetition, but maybe overlays two styles of repetition?

PG: Absolutely! There was a moment when we tried just simply to edit the film along how their day was structured, and then you fall flat, And it doesn’t open up.

A STRUCTURE TO CARRY YOU

AZ: What is your fondest wish for your audience?

PG: If the audience, while watching the film, get to know themselves, be put into possession of their own time. If in the viewer, personal things come up—questions or images that have nothing on the surface to do with the film, but that are things you would not usually dare to have come up because you need a structure to carry you to have them come up.

AZ: Did you get surprising responses?

PG: Many. People go and see it often. The mother in law of my exec producer went to see it 8 times. She’s a psycho-analyst. A person in Rome saw it twelve times. Then the reaction I was surprised by most, was that so many people come up to me or go on the website and express gratitude—it’s not that they say “This is a great film” they say “thank you for the time we had.’ And now in France, it seems like a phenomena of people going in and starting to pray in the cinema Maybe this is a misunderstanding… But on another level, I wanted the film to transform into a monastery and this is what happens.

AZ: It feels very Buddhist, but you are not Buddhist—do you have a meditation practice?

PG: Oh no. I’m Catholic. And it’s very deliberate that I did not do this film on Buddhist monasteries. This is where the collaboration with my friend Nico ended. When we could not get into the monastery he asked, why don’t we go to Tibet? I said I want to do this for myself, to find out why I am so anti-religious, having being brought up so strictly Catholic. I want to heal some wounds and go back and understand where I’ve come from. I cannot understand that by going into a Buddhist monastery. I was not a Buddhist child, and my audience did not have a Buddhist childhood either. There is a problem with all those beautiful films which are for us a sort of religious tourism. Nice, but it’s not really going very deep.

Just on a theoretical level there is a mistake in going from the background you come from to an entirely fresh background. The way you know that a religion is your religion is that you have problems with it. If you don’t have problems with it, it’s not your religion.


Angela Zito is co-director of the Center for Religion and Media and director of NYU's Religious Studies Program.

Auden

Auden

Let's not forget that yesterday (Feb 21st) was the centenary of the birth of W.H. Auden, particularly in juxtaposition with Eliot. As Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, observed last week in an article in the Church Times, whereas Eliot's poetry tends to focus on the Eternal Now, Auden's poetry is more celebratory of the (one of his great poems) "Precious Five" (i.e. the five senses). Eliot's poetry, Harries suggests, "is a via negativa. Auden's is a via positiva." You could also say that Eliot is the more tragic poet, Auden the more comic.

In a splendid essay in his collection Shaming the Devil: Essays in Truthtelling (2004) entitled "Auden's Happy Eye", Alan Jacobs asks: "Why are Christians so indifferent to Auden?" (he has a contrast with Eliot in mind). He considers Auden's homosexuality to be a factor, but finally suggests: "More important, perhaps, is his Kierkegaardian emphasis on indirect communication. This emphasis stemmed from Auden's determination to repent of his, and his fellow poets', prideful assertions of their own importance. But Christian readers, for the most part, don't want their poets to be humble: their tastes are pretty thoroughly Romantic, and they want their poets to be seers, prophets, 'unacknowldeged legislators of the world' (as Shelly put it) - just as long as they are Christian seers, prophets, legislators. As they often say, they like poems that are 'redemptive'. But Auden understood that nothing and no one is redemptive except Jesus Christ."
{Comments by Kim Fabricus, Faith and Theology}

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Le Penseur Réfléchit

. . Not too long afterward, he [Auden] wrote of his conviction that Jesus is Lord: “I believe because he fulfills none of my dreams, because he is in every respect the opposite of what he would be if I could have made him in my own image.” But why not one of the other great teachers, like Buddha or Muhammad? Because, Auden wrote, chillingly, “none of the others arouse all sides of my being to cry ‘Crucify Him.’” . . .

I always used to wonder why it was that Jesus warned His followers that they would be persecuted for His sake, that others would hate them because of Him. How could such a gentle, caring, and compassionate man who never did anything but help others arouse such hostility? Yet, in my own way, I hated Him too. I now realize, however, that this hatred—often manifesting in the way I used to bitterly spew His name from my lips any time something happened that even slightly inconvenienced me—was due to my own blind rebellion. There are really only two gods: on the one hand there is God, on the other ourselves; most of us would prefer to worship ourselves. God cramps our style and shows the truth where it is most unwelcome, namely in revealing that the worship of the latter is at the root of all evil. Show me the most evil man you can find; I’ll show you a man consumed with his own selfishness. The two are inseparably linked.

Most people prefer to gather around them a great number of “teachers” to say what their itching ears want to hear. Jesus, on the other hand, claims that the world hates Him because He testifies against it saying that its deeds are evil; He doesn’t tell people what they want to hear, He tells them the truth, for it is the truth and only the truth that will ever set them free. Indeed, this is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Light’s very nature is to expose the secrets hidden in the darkness, like the child who flips on the light and watches all the frightening creatures go scurrying back to their dark sanctuary under his bed.

And yet, once a person’s mind is given over to Christ, he no longer conforms to the pattern of this world, but is transformed by the renewing of his mind. His whole mentality, his whole inner psyche, begins to be (often painfully) remolded until he becomes more and more a lover of the truth, more and more virtuous and pleasant to be around, and paradoxically more and more scorned because he reminds others of the unwelcome truth. Kathleen Norris offers a compelling epigraph in her entry “Good Old Sin” from The Cloister Walk (125):

The heart itself is but a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and there are also lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. But there too is God, the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the apostles, the heavenly cities and the treasuries of grace—all things are there.

—Psuedo-Macarius

You see, it is not so much the heart itself that is good or evil, but the god it is motivated to serve. If it turns its gaze to the shining radiance of divine light, it will draw out the dwelling place of God; if not, if its gaze is centered only on itself, it will bring forth the most perverse and treacherous evils ever dreamt. If it turns its gaze toward God, it will become aware of both God and the perversion still left within it; if it turns its gaze only upon itself, it will become less and less aware of either until both begin to fade away from sight as if in a dream, a hot iron searing the conscience into blissful oblivion. Such a one is as worthless chaff to be gathered up and cast into the fire.

With these thoughts in mind, let’s briefly recap what we covered in Part I, then move on to Part II without further ado. Auden was talking about the problem of “freedom and necessity”: the irony of being encased in physical bodies that are part of the natural world, yet entrusted with the freedom to chose and be held accountable for those choices. After quoting part of Auden’s “Their Lonely Betters,” Jacobs continues with these two paragraphs which smoothly segue into today’s send:

The robin cannot decide what song to sing; the flowers cannot select their mates. These creatures, living wholly in nature, neither celebrate the wisdom nor lament the folly of their choices, for they have no choices to make. We, on the other hand, must and do choose, and thereby enter into the historical world of accountability (“responsibility for time”). We know what it means to have “promises to keep”—and what it means to break them.

But we are not just historical beings. We are also participants in nature, and in that sense we too are part of the Creation. And Mendelson shows, as no other critic has yet shown, how Auden came to wrestle with—and ultimately to accept, with gratitude—the limits and circumscriptions of our natural, our bodily, lives.

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In 1948, Mendelson notes, Auden

began to write poems about the inarticulate human body . . . : the body that never asks to be regimented or idealized, feels no abstract hatred or intellectual envy, believes no theories, and is moved by impulses that, fortunately for us, are not exactly the same as our own. He dedicated to the body some of his most profound poems, works whose depth and breadth have been underestimated because their treatment of their subject matter was novel and unexpected in an age whose writers hesitated to see the body as “simply, publicly, there.” And because he learned to value the body as sacred in itself, Auden learned to believe in it as the means and promise of salvation.

“Means” is perhaps not quite right. It is not through the body that we are saved, but we are saved as embodied creatures, and saved for a future of embodiment. Auden came to believe the doctrine of the resurrection of the body a vital one and a necessary corrective to the implicit Gnosticism and Manicheanism of his existentialist influences. But Mendelson’s argument is compelling, and if there is any justice in the world it will put an end to the ill-informed dismissals of Auden’s later verse.

Auden’s poems about the body are often poems of gratitude and thanksgiving. In a poem dedicated to his senses, “Precious Five,” he concludes by invoking

That singular command
I do not understand,
Bless what there is for being,
Which has to be obeyed, for
What else am I made for,
Agreeing or disagreeing?

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Auden came to insist over and over again that one cannot in poetry speak the Truth directly and unequivocally. In one of his most powerful poems, “Friday’s Child,” he remembers, in a characteristically oblique way, the martyr’s death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. (The title is typical of Auden’s approach: he trusts us to remember that “Friday’s child is loving and giving,” and trusts us also to understand that the old Mother Goose rhyme draws on the memory of Good Friday, when God loved and gave most fully.) The poem concludes with an invocation, and a recommendation, of silence in the face of an evil that cannot be comprehended and a faith that, as Kierkegaard said, can be neither explained nor justified:

Now, did He really break the seal
And rise again? We dare not say;
But conscious unbelievers feel
Quite sure of Judgment Day.

Meanwhile, a silence on the cross
As dead as we shall ever be,
Speaks of some total gain or loss,
And you and I are free

To guess from the insulted face
Just what Appearances He saves
By suffering in a public place
A death reserved for slaves.

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Le Penseur Réfléchit

Human

A Humanist Jesus, Ctd

21 Feb 2007 {Andrew Sullivan}

A reader eloquently described his own faith in a humanist Jesus here. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for whose magazine I now work, wrote something similar. Money quote:

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think.'

But what a distortion did his doctrine and memory suffer in the same, in the next, and the following ages! There is no doctrine of the Reason which will bear to be taught by the Understanding. The understanding caught this high chant from the poet's lips, and said, in the next age, 'This was Jehovah come down out of heaven. I will kill you, if you say he was a man.' The idioms of his language, and the figures of his rhetoric, have usurped the place of his truth; and churches are not built on his principles, but on his tropes. Christianity became a Mythus, as the poetic teaching of Greece and of Egypt, before. He spoke of miracles; for he felt that man's life was a miracle, and all that man doth, and he knew that this daily miracle shines, as the character ascends. But the word Miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression; it is Monster. It is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain.

A challenging thought for Ash Wednesday.

Permalink

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"Christian spirituality is flesh-based spirituality. So the Incarnation is not merely a doctrine; it is a principle of life, and it is the root of Christian prayer. All our prayer is centred upon and operates within the redeemed humanity of the Word made flesh."

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"For the true image of God is humanity."

{From Kenneth Leech True Prayer}

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When the people of the NT asked Jesus what must they do to be saved, they weren't talking about "going to Heaven."

They were asking something like: "What should I do to get my life together?"

It was the full spectrum of their human life that Jesus offered them. And that was everything.

Desert

Deuteronomy 32:10

In the wasteland He adopts him, in the howling desert of the wilderness. He protects him, rears him, guards him as the apple of His eye.

Paula's House of Toast Lenten Photo Essay

Desert Fraction

If landscape were a primary religious category -- like God, love, redemption or mercy -- then I'd have to be a Zen Buddhist. A lifelong New Englander, I resonate with the mountains, valleys, meadows and seasides in Japanese and Chinese paintings and poems. They go straight to my heart, bypassing word and concept, like the sound of a tolling bell or of water running over rock.

*****

Tonight , Ash Wedsnesday, went to the service, sat next to someone I 've known for awhile but not well. After the service , she said the first time she went to Ash Weds. Service, the priest had preached about , at the service next year, probably at least one of them wouldn't be there any more -- in other words, would have died.

She said, "Well, I thought, I'm not coming back here again. The odds are not good. There are only 17 people here and I'm the oldest one!"

Ash Wednesday

VI
Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

This is the time of tension between dying and birth
The place of solitude where three dreams cross
Between blue rocks
But when the voices shaken from the yew-tree drift away
Let the other yew be shaken and reply.

Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the
garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated

And let my cry come unto Thee.

Ash Wednesday
T.S. Eliot

Not Turning Your Back on Your Own

graphic by the mad priest
(more at the link)

Isaiah 58:6-7

This, rather is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly, untying the thongs of the yoke: setting free the oppressed, breaking every yoke; sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless; clothing the naked when you see them, and not turning your back on your own.

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from comments at Fr. Jake

"I deal with the petty vanities and tempers of artists all the time; and with the panics and anxieties of students.

They are both very small potatoes compared to the neuroses, the grand illusions, the pettiness, the craziness, and the sheer malice that I've experienced in religious circles."

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Julian of Norwich said, "Sin is behovely, but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well."

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From the Presiding Bishop

A Season of Fasting.
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A Fast for All

The Rev. Susan Russell and Canon Kendall Harmon were on the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour tonight. The transcript is here. Note this statement by Susan:

...From my perspective, the American Episcopal Church has now been very strategically and very intentionally painted into a corner by those in the American church who have been advocating for a schism for many years.

And we're now faced with what I would call a Sophie's choice of having to choose our vision of the inclusive gospel over our inclusion in the communion. It's a profoundly un-Anglican way to make decisions, given that historically we have been a people of God who have not required common belief in order to be in communion with each other.

So I think the greater challenge we face has much less to do with gay and lesbian people or bishops or blessings, but how we're going to be church together. I think that is really under attack by the radical religious right, who is willing to split this church if they can't recreate it in their own image...

That's a good summary of the situation, in my opinion.
{from Fr. Jake Stops the World}

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From California

A response to the Communique from the Rt. Rev. Marc Handley Andrus, Bishop of California:

_______________________________________________________________________________

I am writing in response to the Communique coming out of the primates meeting in Tanzania. While many are reacting to the words of the Communique, I would like to respond from an awareness of the foundation of the day-to-day ongoing commitment of Christians to the gospel of Jesus. As bishop to the Diocese of California, I make the following affirmations:

The inclusion of gay and lesbian people in the full life of the Church is a matter of justice: as we are all part of the world, and the kindom of God is like a net laid over that same world. All on the earth are connected by this net, whether perceived or not. Actions of justice and injustice reverberate throughout the whole, promoting either integrity, remembering, and shalom, or diabolic isolation.

Understood as expressed above, our task in the Church is not actually to include or exclude anyone, but to show forth an intrinsic co-inherence that simply is, created and sustained by God.

Gay and lesbian people who come to the Church seeking the blessing of the Church for their unions are people seeking to lead holy lives, exactly like heterosexual couples. The Church must respond to gay and lesbian people seeking the blessing of counseling, community support, prayer, and sacrament in the same way it does to heterosexual couples.

The Diocese of California is a place within the Church -- not alone, but prominently -- where gay and lesbian people have been freer to offer their gifts: Both professional gifts and those of lay and ordained ministry. As a result, the Diocese of California has been immeasurably enriched. As bishop of this diocese, I know very well that the Christian rights of gay and lesbian people are intrinsic and must be supported, and that without these gifts, this diocese would be as immeasurably impoverished as it is now enriched. Immeasurably as the spiritual gifts of all God's people know no measure.

The polity of The Episcopal Church requires the deliberation and consent of two bodies, the House of Bishops and the House of Deputies, to properly respond to the requests made by the primates in their Communique.

The Episcopal Church should make every effort, including an extraordinary meeting of the two houses, and redoubled efforts to help the other provinces of the Communion understand both our theology relating to marriage and human sexuality and our polity. We should make these efforts, and at the same time not compromise the essentials of theology or our polity.

I will call on the Diocese of California to come together at Grace Cathedral during the Easter Season (at a time and on a date to be determined) when we affirm the triumph of Christ over all that destroys the creatures of God, filling that great house of prayer for all people with the full diversity of the people of God: people who differ in mind but not heart; gay and straight people; men and women; the young with the old; the poor and the rich; people of every ethnicity, all together to show our understanding of Christ’s gift of new life in the Church.

+Marc Handley Andrus, Bishop of California
Shrove Tuesday, 2007

Incurable Obsession With Sexuality

From the Admiral of Morality:

The Covenant proposal elevates these primates to a level they have not heretofore enjoyed, but which they have been more than willing to grab. If these are the primates whom the Covenant envisions will provide more and greater unity, then the communion will be tacking into a wind that may be too stiff for it to bear.

It is also these selfsame primates, and a subset of them, that their own communique recommends be given some say over the governance of the Episcopal Church. Their results and behaviors at their triennial meetings, do not bode well for any role they may play in the life of our church, indeed in any church beyond their own borders, advisory though it may be. If the only way they can guide and direct is through force, the ignoring of entire populations, and angry letters and threats, we should all be concerned.

As symbols of and real maintainers of unity, the primates overall get an "F." They create more discord than any other 1,000 Anglicans put together. Thankfully in America, we have a strong and visible ministry of the laity to keep these troublesome bishops in check. As part of any Covenant, such an informed and equipped laity in other national churches is something else our Church needs to call for.

Because Lord knows, when you have bishops calling in "sick" to mass and sitting by a pool being served iced drinks when just 100 feet away stare underfed and underclothed children, having someone hold them to account should be at the top of our list.

posted by The AoM

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Open Shores

Anglican Primates - no venturing outside the city walls for them

Towards the end of his book Strangers and friends¹, the late Michael Vasey, writing as tutor in Christian liturgy at the University of Durham, called the portrait of Jesus to be found in the letter to the Hebrews ‘one of the tenderest in scripture’.

The people addressed in the letter, Michael wrote, were undergoing a harrowing experience of exclusion, trapped between two identities, that of being both Jew and Christian. They were in danger of giving up altogether on Jesus. But the writer of Hebrews points them to Jesus as the one who shares with them their experience of exclusion:

Jesus also suffered outside the city gate in order to sanctify the people by his own blood. Let us then go to him outside the camp, and bear the abuse that he endured. For here we have no lasting city, but we are looking for the city that is to come. (Hebrews 13.12,13)

Michael ended his book with a prophetic word for both LGBT people and the wider church:

Gay people, in their experience of exclusion, need to know that they have in Jesus one who shares with them the same flesh and blood and is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters. The wider church of Christ needs to ask itself whether it is willing to follow his example.

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Times Online:{UK}

Pray lift your eyes above the belt

The Churches’ sexual obsession makes me despair

Libby Purves

Oh, the heart sinks! The Times revealed yesterday some radical proposals to reunite the Anglican Church — or part of it — with Rome. Twenty years ago this outbreak of ecumenicism might have caused unaffiliated Christian believers like me to cry “Halleluiah!” and whirl thuribles round our heads in glee: it is a scandalous absurdity, in an increasingly secular age, to have the loving simplicities of the Christian faith fragmented into squabbling cliques.

The obsession with authority structures and ritual quibbles always was irritating, so moves towards unity and cooperation were once welcome. One fondly remembers the twin bishops of Liverpool, Worlock and Shepherd, and their kamikaze attacks on the nastier aspects of 1980s market capitalism.

But this time, we know what it’s all about, don’t we? Not joyful, simplified Christianity but a pulling-up of drawbridges. Anglican archbishops in Dar es Salaam are struggling to avoid “schism” in their vast communion over the issue of ordaining, or indeed tolerating, Christians whose unsought orientation is to pair up with others of their own gender. And it will be the illiberal, genitally-fixated wing of Anglicanism that sidles towards unity with Rome. It will do this because it thinks — accurately, more’s the pity — that Rome is where you find the most intolerant attitudes towards homosexuality.

We have seen this crab-scuttle towards Rome before. When the Anglican Synod accepted women priests in 1992 numbers of high-profile Anglicans turned Catholic in disgust. The other theological differences — the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Papal infallibility, priestly celibacy — seem suddenly no longer to matter, compared with the horrible prospect of women priests. That weaselling flexibility was echoed by the way that Rome accepted Anglican priests even if they were married with children; meanwhile, lifetime Catholic priests continue to suffer (and sometimes give up) because of the strict enforcement of celibacy. Neither side covered itself with glory.

And now we have the threatened schism over homosexuality, and another drift towards Rome. For the detail of the leaked report — some of it, in fact, quite encouraging — I can only direct you to Ruth Gledhill’s blog on The Times website . For myself, as an irritable cradle Catholic on the run, all I can express for now is frustrated rage at both Churches’ incurable obsession with genital sexuality. It cripples every good intention, impedes every good work.

You can see why the obsession began. Nomadic Old Testament Judaism had to differentiate itself from ritual pagan and Greek practices; even so, translations of the interdict in Leviticus are uncertain. In the Christian era various earthy, bundling peasant values needed to be corseted and codified, as much for the sake of social coherence and property law as for any moral reason (priestly celibacy has its origins in the difficulty of providing for large Catholic families on priestly stipends: the theology is merely bolted on). Cruelty, snobbery, avarice and injustice have been tolerated (at times practised) by clergy and their cohorts, while sexual sins were berated with unholy glee.

It would be refreshing if the Churches would step back from this stance, and make it clearer that the evil in adultery is not the sexual act but the betrayal of trust, the cruelty, the endangering of children’s happiness. The deep wickedness of rape and paedophilia is not about desire but about misuse of power, invasion, oppression and injury. The sinfulness of promiscuity and prostitution is not about sex but about using another human being for transient pleasure without caring for the physical and emotional damage you do. The Church’s ministry to gays could preach only honesty, gentleness, and commitment, rather than agonising about genital practices. Christianity could just grow up, and stop treating sex as if it were innately toxic or radioactive and yet irresistibly interesting.

Science is trying harder than religion to make sense of the genuine mystery of why some people are hard-wired to love their own sex, in defiance of biological usefulness. From the study of gay penguins in Bremerhaven zoo to numerous psychobiological, genetic and neurological findings, we edge ever closer to an explanation of gayness: the conviction grows that being homosexual is not “unnatural” but just something that occurs in creation, whether we like it or not. The present Pope’s use of expressions such as “objectively disordered” is not only cruel, but unfounded in any solid fact. Nor is real homosexuality, as evangelicals love to claim, “curable”. You can persuade, inspire or bully people out of committing crimes, but not out of perceiving a particular kind of beauty, loveability, caressability and companionableness more in one sex than another. You can condemn people for doing bad things, but you cannot dictate where they will see beauty, a reflection of divinity.

Let the Churches concentrate on condemning promiscuity, infidelity, exploitation, predation — whether gay or straight. Nobody asks them to go the full Gay Pride, bathhouse-culture route; but let them recognise kindness and mutual support as virtues, and bless all honest unions. Let them condemn proselytising from either side, making it clear that there is nothing cool or clever about random sexual tourism, any more than there is anything evil in being born gay. It just happens. Being gay can, without doing any violence to the Gospels, be accepted as a potential route to holiness.

It won’t be. They’ll squabble and fudge and cling to their hierarchies and their terrors, and some will scuttle to Rome and Rome will feel smug. And the rest of society will sigh and turn away, thinking that Christianity has nothing to offer. Howl, howl, howl!

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Humpty Dumpty

One thing I've noticed over the last week is that OCICBW... is definitely regarded as an in-house publication and one that should not be shown to the outside world. It's weird. I know that I put up some very funny stuff yet everyone seems to go for a blander diet of humour. My humour also makes, concisely, some very serious points but it is rarely used as ammunition in any debate.

I am widely read but rarely cited.

Fair enough, I suppose. I should be grateful. But the fact is, if people outside the Church knew about the bog standard rabble that populate this neighbourhood, I think we'd get more bums on pews. The Church never seems to realise that people don't go to Church because they think Christians are wet and we make it worse by presenting ourselves as wet and oh so controlled and uncontroversial.

It may be time for us to break outta the ghetto.

Why is this post called "Humpty Dumpty?"

Because I've tried to sit on the fence but I soon fall off.

posted by MadPriest

Of course, I could be wrong...: Boys will exagerate

Of course, I could be wrong...:
Boys will exagerate

Mad Priest

One laugh after another....

Of course, I could be wrong...:
For my good friend, counterlight

A word of warning: If all you want is a picture of a donkey, never type the word "ass" into Google Image Search. I did and I may never be the same again.

posted by MadPriest

Americans

"One doesn't have to be an American to be a backward conservative, although it does come in handy."
{from comments at} Raspberry Rabbit

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other responses:

Many people saying many things

Father Jake: The Primates Strike Out

Mark Harris: The Standard and its Cost

The Admiral of Morality: Tacking in the Wind

Tobais Haller: Of the Products of the Primates

Caught by the Light: Pastoral Scheming

The Anglican Centrist also weighs in.

And several funny things from the Mad Priest

Posted by Jim Naughton

Response by the Community

Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and “one body,” will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives. My successes are not my own. The way to them was prepared by others. The fruit of my labors is not my own: for I am preparing the way for the achievements of another. Nor are my failures my own. They may spring from the failure of another, but they are also compensated for by another’s achievement. Therefore the meaning of my life is not to be looked for merely in the sum total of my achievements. It is seen only in the complete integration of my achievements and failures with the achievements and failures of my own generation, and society, and time. It is seen, above all, in my integration in the mystery of Christ.

Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island

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Daily Episcopalian

Early reactions

Integrity has responded forcefully:

The primates of the Anglican Communion have utterly failed to recognize the faith, relationships, and vocations of the gay and lesbian baptized, said Integrity President Susan Russell, responding to the communiqué released today from Dar es Salaam.

”Let us pray it doesn't take another hundred years for yet-unborn primates to gather for a service of repentance for what the church has done to its gay and lesbian members today, as they repented in Zanzibar yesterday for what it did to those the church failed to embrace as full members of the Body of Christ.”

The Rev. Michael Hopkins, immediate past President of Integrity had this reaction: “Jesus weeps, and so do I. If the House of Bishops (or any other body with actual authority in this church) capitulates to these demands and sacrifices gay and lesbian people to the idol of the Instruments of Unity, it will have become the purveyor of an “anti-Gospel” that will (and should)repel many.”

Integrity encourages its membership and allies to directly contact their bishops’ urging them to reject the demands of the primates. Our leadership will seek an immediate meeting with the Presiding Bishop to express our deep concerns and encourage the Executive Council to insist on the inclusion of all orders of ministry in the ongoing process of discernment on Anglican Communion issues.

The Anglican Scotist says ""Just say No."

Here's Scott Gunn. And Mark Harris. And Kendall, and Jake.

Raspberry Rabbit has also responded.

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"The standard of teaching on human sexuality set out in Resolution 1.10 of the Lambeth Conference of 1998 has never been one that Christian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered (LGBT) people have accepted. It was drafted and agreed in our absence. The bishops who drafted the original version of the Resolution refused to meet us and hear our testimony. It is not possible for us to be bound by teaching drafted by a largely male, heterosexual body of bishops. The Anglican Communion can never come to an integrated teaching on human sexuality until it has listened with open mind and heart to our experience and Christian testimony. We subscribe to a high Christian sexual and relational ethic. We object outright to the idea that it is possible to divide our innate sexual identity as lesbian and gay people from what the church insists on calling 'genital activity'. Like heterosexuals we believe the love between two mature adults should be expressed in a faithful, life-long partnership in which sexual expression is integral.

The Primates request that the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church 'make an unequivocal common covenant with the bishops that they will not authorise any Rite of Blessing for same-sex unions in their dioceses or through General Convention'. The request not to authorise any Rite of Blessing in the Episcopal Church will be an intolerable burden for LGBT Anglicans. The Episcopal Church is not alone in having many faithful lesbian and gay couples who seek God's blessing on their relationship. We know that in England, the USA and Canada as well as other Provinces, priests will continue to find ways to bless such relationships. If the church can condone the blessing of so many inanimate objects, it is surely right to bless the love of two people of the same gender. We pray for the day when the church can support the authorisation of same-sex

The Primates also request that the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church 'confirm that 'a candidate for Episcopal orders living in a same-sex union shall not receive the necessary consent'. There is no prohibition on a single or celibate lesbian or gay priest receiving the necessary consent. Dioceses who wish to nominate a partnered lesbian or gay priest and such priests themselves are being asked to make a great personal sacrifice. In England, priests who are gay will also continue to be nominated and consecrated as bishops, as they will in other Provinces.

The Revd Giles Goddard, chair of Inclusive Church, said:
"The arguments over human sexuality have been dominating the life of the Anglican Communion for too long. We need, urgently, now to find a way to move on, so that the Gospel for all people can be freshly proclaimed in a changing world. The Primates meeting has begun to show us a way forward. We trust that the Lambeth Conference will be allowed to be a restatement of the heart of Christ’s message of love for the world.”

The Revd Scott Gunn, TEC representative to Inclusive Church, said:
"I am grateful that Bishop Katharine is recognised as the legitimate ecclesiastical authority in the United States. My hope is that the Anglican Communion can return to its focus on mission and evangelism. I hope they will shift the focus of attention away from a legalistic examination of the Episcopal Church towards a Gospel life of hope, reconciliation, justice and love."

The Revd Colin Coward, Director of Changing Attitude England, said:
“I rejoice that the Primates are committed to the continuing unity of our world-wide Communion of churches. We LGBT Anglicans in Changing Attitude England and Nigeria are also faithfully committed to our church. We know the pilgrimage journey to our promised land of full inclusion is going to be long and hard. There are millions of Anglicans who have yet to learn about the deep faith of LGBT people in the Lord Jesus Christ and of our lives committed to prayer, worship, justice and evangelism. We are present in every Province and country of the Anglican Communion and we want to participate in the listening process in order that our stories of faithful obedience to God can be heard. We have been misrepresented for too long. Now is the time for people across the world to learn about LGBT Anglicans in Africa, Asia and South America.”

“I am saddened that our brothers and sisters in the Episcopal Church have been asked to carry a burden on behalf of us all. With the Episcopal Church and the Canadian Church, we in England are also seeking honesty in the ordination of priests who are lesbian or gay priests and the consecration of bishops who are gay. We look forward to the day when we can include our lesbian sisters among those who will be consecrated as bishops in England.”

Davis Mac-Iyalla, Director of Changing Attitude Nigeria, said:
"Our presence here in Dar Es Salaam at the Primates meeting demonstrates our loyalty to the Communion. We are committed to participating in the listening process and we want to be heard. We hope the Anglican Communion office and Canon Philip Groves, facilitator to the listening process help us communicate our experience directly to them if the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) refuses to participate."

"My own Primate received me warmly the first time we met on Wednesday 14 February. I had hoped the next time we met we would have been able to develop our first meeting and have some conversation together but it didn't happen. I hope we will meet again and he will be able to hear the voice of one of his own gay Nigerian members."

STATEMENT ON THE PRIMATES’ MEETING OF THE ANGLICAN COMMUNION

Full Inclusion
We celebrate the fact that the majority of Primates have modelled what it means to be an inclusive church this week, welcoming Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori from the Episcopal Church of the USA. Bishop Katharine has brought hope to many lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Anglicans across the world. She is committed to the full inclusion of all people in the Episcopal Church. Her voice will remind other primates that Gospel justice will not have been accomplished until the church is fully open to everyone, including LGBT people. Her presence has changed the Primates’ Meeting from being an exclusively male club. Another step has been taken towards the full inclusion of women in our church. We long for the day when all people are welcomed into the church, without regard to race, sexual orientation, economic means, gender, physical or mental challenge, or any other division.

Listening Process
We approve of the progress made by the Revd Canon Philip Groves as he develops his work on the listening process, inviting every province in the Communion to demonstrate how they are responding to the Lambeth 1.10 commitment to listen. We look forward to the development of his proposals for the Lambeth Conference 2008 and offer our full support to him in his work.

We hope that the Listening Process will be undertaken by every Province with the awareness that to listen properly means being open to the possibility of change by all involved. We trust the Holy Spirit, through this process and through our common Anglican life, to lead us into all truth.

The primates and the bishops who will gather at the Lambeth Conference 2008 have yet to hear directly from LGBT people. This remains a major challenge for the church. The listening process needs to be undertaken in every province and by every primate and bishop. We urge renewed emphasis on the listening process throughout the Communion.

Same-sex blessings
The cost of the decision not to authorise any Rite of Blessing for same-sex unions in the Episcopal Church is a serious means that LGBT people in America are being asked to carry an intolerable burden. As in England and other parts of the Communion which acknowledge that God blesses covenanted, faithful relationships, we know that priests with the courage of their own spiritual convictions will continue to welcome those who come for blessing.

Covenant
We welcome the framework of the draft covenant for the Anglican Communion. For 500 years Anglicanism has been a creedal, rather than a confessional church. We believe that the ancient creeds of the church are sufficient now, as they have been for over 1,600 years. We remain concerned about the increased tendency in Anglicanism to centralise authority.

In particular we welcome the commitment to ensure that 'biblical texts are handled faithfully, respectfully, comprehensively and coherently' [3(3)], to 'nurture and respond to prophetic and faithful leadership and ministry to assist our Churches as courageous witnesses to the transformative power of the Gospel in the world' [3(4)] and 'to seek to transform unjust structures of society' [4.1].

Theological Diversity
From its inception, the church has been diverse in its theological understanding. We believe that in our many diverse cultures it is to be expected that people will experience God and express their faith in a variety of ways appropriate to their own culture. In our conversations with Tanzanian Anglicans from local congregations, we have heard that while they may not agree with our own view of human sexuality, there is a high level of understanding and acceptance of diversity. They view the threat of schism as posing a great danger to local mission and evangelism, while they continue to hope for a global, diverse Anglican Communion.

As we work to build up the Kingdom of God, we urge sensitivity in our diverse cultures, that not all cultures people are prepared to welcome LGBT at this time.

Working together
Members of Inclusive Church, Integrity USA, and Changing Attitude Nigeria and England have worked together in harmony this week. We have prayed for the Primates. We have given many interviews to the press and media. We have built friendships with other Anglicans across our diversity of opinions. We have talked to many members of the Tanzanian press and helped them some of them begin to understand the experience of LGBT people. We have made contact with LGBT Anglicans from Tanzania and we hope to build on our new friendships. Those Primates who spoke with us encouraged us to work for the unity of the Anglican Communion and for the full inclusion of all, and especially LGBT people.

Prayers
We encourage all people to pray for the primates, bishops, clergy, and people of the Anglican Communion. We especially urge prayer for the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Primate of Nigeria Peter Akinola, and the Primate of the Episcopal Church Katharine Jefferts Schori. Each of these three Primates faces tremendous pressure of leadership, and we pray that the Holy Spirit will guide them.

Conclusion: Hope for living the Gospel
We look forward to a time when our conversations will be dominated by concerns of mission, evangelism, and service rather than by threats of discrimination, persecution, and schism.

We read the Gospels as commending radical inclusion. Jesus again and again shared meals with outcasts, treasured those whom the culture rejected, and taught that religious practice must be loving. St. Paul urged the earliest Christian communities to be people of Gospel love and hope, rather than people enslaved to the Law. We firmly believe that LGBT Christians belong at the centre of our common life in Christ, not at the margins.

We hope that the church will live this vision. In short, we seek a church that embraces all people as God’s precious children. We want an inclusive church.

END

MEDIA CONTACTS:

The Revd Colin Coward
Director of Changing Attitude England
+44 7770 844302
Email colin@changingattitude.org

Davis Mac-Iyalla
Director of Changing Attitude Nigeria
+234 8025866133
Email davis@nigeria.changingattitude.org

The Revd Scott A Gunn
ECUSA representative to Inclusive Church
+255 762 400949 (in Tanzania until 2 p.m. GMT Wednesday 21 February)
+1 508 720 1500 (in the US any time)
sgunn@swingspan.com

Posted by Jim Naughton on February 19, 2007 06:16 PM | Permalink

****************************************************************
Elizabeth Adams at The Cassandra Pages

"I am most concerned about the message this gives to homosexuals everywhere - not just in Christian denominations - and the tremendous psychological and emotional damage it has done and continues to do, even to people who have long since left their religious communities or been forced out. Having seen this so closely, I'm dedicated to trying to redress this damage in my own communities through whatever means I have at my disposal. Those of us still in the church are responsible, I believe, for undoing the damage she has caused throughout her history -- and we shouldn't wait for a schism to give us a sufficient reason to begin.

PROFILES IN COURAGE: This news just came in. Davis Mac-Iyalla, the leader of the Anglican LGBT group "Changing Attitudes" in Nigeria has gone to Tanzania, despite threats on his life, to lobby the Anglican primates against the anti-gay bill which will be debated tomorrow in the Nigerian Parliament. I've written before about the courage of this man and the members of his group, who will be criminalized if the bill, which the Anglican Archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Akinola, supports, is passed. Read the article if you think the actions of American conservatives, aligning themselves with Akinola, don't have any effect on real people. And if you pray or meditate with intention, I hope you will hold Davis Mac-Iyalla and the African LGBT community in your thoughts during the next few days.

Episcopal Drama Update

February 11, 2007

New Episcopal Leader Braces For Gay-Rights Confrontation

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

At a book party last week at the New York headquarters of the Episcopal Church, a line of more than 100 fans waited to have the church's new presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, sign copies of her new book of sermons, ''A Wing and a Prayer.''

Bishop Jefferts Schori, the first woman presiding bishop in the history of the Anglican Communion, appeared a bit surprised at the celebrity treatment but clearly enjoyed the sentiment.

She is about to head off to a hostile reception.

This week, Bishop Jefferts Schori will represent the Episcopal Church at a meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, with the presiding bishops of the 37 other provinces in the global Anglican Communion, the world's third-largest church body. Some of those bishops, known as primates, have broken their ties with the American church after it ordained an openly gay bishop and permitted the blessing of same-sex unions.

Some primates have said they will not sit at the same table with Bishop Jefferts Schori. Some have threatened to walk out of the meeting.

In an interview in her office last week, Bishop Jefferts Schori said the conflict was more about ''biblical interpretation'' than about homosexuality.

''We have had gay bishops and gay clergy for millennia,'' she said. ''The willingness to be open about that is more recent.''

She said that what she wanted to convey to her fellow primates was that despite the highly-publicized departure of some congregations (a spokesman said 45 of 7,400 have left and affiliated with provinces overseas), the Episcopal Church has the support of most members, who are engaged in worship and mission work, and not fixated on this controversy.

''A number of the primates have perhaps inaccurate ideas about the context of this church. They hear from the voices quite loudly that this church is going to hell in a handbasket,'' she said. ''The folks who are unhappy represent a small percentage of the whole, but they are quite loud.''

In the global picture, however, those unhappy with the Americans are a significant bloc, and some are ready to cut off the American branch of the Anglican Communion. Conservatives were emboldened recently when an influential bishop, N. T. Wright of Durham, England, said in an interview, ''Even if it means a bit of pruning, the plant will be healthier for it.''

Bishop Jefferts Schori said the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, had accommodated the conservatives because he also presides over the Church of England, where the conservatives are a more substantial presence than in the United States, and are increasingly assertive.

Bishop Jefferts Schori, who is 52, exudes a cool presence, sitting erect in a crimson shirt and white clerical collar. She uses few words to make her points. In her previous career, she was an oceanographer, specializing in squid and octopuses.

Ordained a priest only 13 years ago, she is the former bishop of Nevada, where she permitted blessings for gay couples and voted to confirm the Rev. Canon V. Gene Robinson, who is openly gay, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003. She was elected presiding bishop last June, a nine-year assignment.

She said opposition came primarily from a ''handful of primates,'' led by Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, with support from those in Uganda and Rwanda. She said they had made it appear as if the bulk of the Anglican Communion was arrayed against the Americans, when that was not the case.

''It's abundantly clear that there's a diversity of opinion in the provinces of the Communion'' she said. Asked why they are not more vocal, she said, ''I think that has to be tenderly nurtured. You don't want to put people in a precarious situation'' by encouraging them to speak out against their own primates.

One African bishop recently did so. After the House of Bishops in Tanzania voted in December to cut ties to the Episcopal Church and stop accepting its donations, Bishop Mdimi Mhogolo, who leads the Diocese of Central Tanganyika, wrote a letter saying, ''The issue of homosexuality is not fundamental to the Christian faith.''

At the meeting in Tanzania, Bishop Jefferts Schori is to sit down with the primates of 13 provinces that do not ordain women as priests, not to mention as bishops. But she said her sex was not the reason some primates were preparing to shun her. The problem is that some bishops say the Episcopal Church has failed to repent or to declare a moratorium on gay blessings, steps required by a committee of officials commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2004.

She is likely to be face to face with Archbishop Akinola, who has created a rival network of conservative churches in the United States.

Bishop Jefferts Schori said that if she is rebuked at the meeting, it will not be anything new; she experienced that before as an oceanographer: ''The first time I was chief scientist on a cruise, the captain wouldn't speak to me because I was a woman.''

Asked how she would respond if primates walked out on her, she said, ''Life is too short to get too flustered.''

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from Paul's letter to the Romans:

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

**********

quote to ponder from King Lear:

Love is not love
When it is mingled with regards that stand
Aloof from the entire point.

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AND

February 19, 2007

Archbishop of Canterbury Appears to Chide Faction of Anglicans

By SHARON LaFRANIERE

JOHANNESBURG, Feb. 18 — Facing a possible church fracture over the issue of homosexuality, the spiritual head of the Anglican Communion reminded bishops of the need for humility as church leaders gathered Sunday for services on the island of Zanzibar.

“There was a great saint who said God was evident when bishops are silent,” the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, told hundreds who packed a 173-year-old stone cathedral. “There is one thing a bishop should say to another bishop; that I am a great sinner and Christ is a great savior.”

Nearly three dozen leaders of the world’s 77 million Anglicans have gathered in Tanzania in an attempt to resolve the long-simmering conflict over homosexuality. The most conservative archbishops, led by Archbishop Peter J. Akinola of Nigeria, are demanding that the group take firm action against the Episcopal Church of the United States, which consecrated a gay bishop in 2003 and has not banned blessings of same-sex unions.

On Friday, Archbishop Akinola and six other archbishops refused to celebrate the Holy Eucharist with Katharine Jefferts Schori, the presiding bishop of 2.3 million members of the Episcopal Church, the American branch of the Anglican Communion. To celebrate communion with Bishop Jefferts Schori, who supports gay clergy and church blessings of same-sex unions, “would be a violation of Scriptural teaching and the traditional Anglican understanding,” said a statement on the Nigerian church Web site.

Some observers interpreted Archbishop Williams’s sermon as an implicit rebuke of those archbishops. If so, though, Archbishop Akinola was not there to hear it.

He was the only archbishop who did not show up for the Sunday service, according to James Rosenthal, a spokesman for the Anglican Communion. “No one has told me any particular reason,” he said in a telephone interview from Zanzibar.

Reuters reported that at least one archbishop, Emmanuel Kolini of Rwanda, refused to share Holy Communion at the Sunday service. Asked who participated, Mr. Rosenthal said, “We didn’t check.”

He portrayed a joyous service, with archbishops pitching in to serve communion to a congregation that overflowed into tents outside the church.

The archbishops are expected to return to the mainland of Tanzania and, when their conclave ends Monday, issue a communiqué that deals, in part, with how to react to the Episcopal Church.

**********

I haven't been following the latest Episcopal News -- I have reached a point with all of this where I figure the individuals involved will do what they feel that they need to do.

Those of us outside the walls of the city, so to speak, will continue on , in our own way.

As in so many things, it is up to the leadership to preach love. This is the time and the place.
Are we a "Christian" nation, i.e., are we to govern in truth and in love, or in force, distortion and violence? Are we to lead other Christian denominations by putting our focus on God's love , and human love for our own kind? Is this love strong enough to sweep away that which is "aloof from the entire point."?

********

Listening {via Monastic Mumblings}

I agree with our Primate who says that we need to "figure out how to tell our story in language that a person who doesn’t know anything about Christianity can begin to understand.

I’m going to suggest that our telling of that great story has to begin in listening. Not only does it say to the other person, “Your story is of great importance, and I recognize your equal dignity by listening,” but it also gives us an opportunity to discern where to help connect that story with the larger story of God’s love known in Jesus Christ."

So the questions, as posed by Fr. Jake would be:

1. How would you tell the great truths of our faith without using overtly theological language?

2. How would you tell a new neighbor that God loves him or her without measure, and invite him or her to learn more?

Secular Humanist

From Andrew Sullivan's enlarged dialogue with Sam Harris:

A reader writes:

I am an atheist (who was once a Christian) and wanted to comment on your latest missive to Sam Harris.

I would describe my own embrace of science and secular humanism as being motivated by a form of faith that is deeper than Christian faith. I believe that if Jesus lived today, he would be a secular humanist and would reject Christianity, just as he "rejected" Judaism and inspired Christianity. Christianity was once the vehicle for the boldest and most honest thinking about reality, the brotherhood of man, and the human condition. I think in light of the advances in science and our exposure to other religious traditions, it is time again to humanize further our understanding of "God" (or the source of all truth, goodness, and beauty) and come to a more universal understanding of religion.

It's time again to look beyond the letter and literal interpretation of immortality, heaven, hell, and miracles, and see the essence and spirit of these ideas. What is it about love that survives death? What is the ideal world? What is eternal separation from all that is good? Where do fundamentally new ideas and relationships come from? In the 21st century, we are able to see more clearly than the saints before us (just as Jesus was able to see more clearly than prophets before him) that deeds of love live on forever in the hearts and minds of all those who are transformed by such love and by those who value loving acts of goodness and justice. This is the immortality of the saints.

Heaven is not some place where we will go when our body dies. It is the world that we all yearn for and that each man of faith and good helps to realize in his small way through the march of human history. Hell is not some burning pit for the doomed and unsaved. Rather, it's a metaphor for the eternal separation from this community of the saints that the wicked are doomed never to realize by their rejection of what is good and beautiful. What are miracles? They are not supernatural gifts from an all-knowing God. Rather, they are what men of faith and good appreciate in this universe, despite all that is broken, evil and ugly.

I find that I am better able to love and appreciate Jesus as a humanist imagining him as a man than when I was a Christian and imagined him as a God or a spiritual presence. Jesus was a man therefore he is one of us and we can truly become like him.

I feel that I have lost nothing by rejecting the doctrines of Christianity. Rather, I have rediscovered what it means to have true faith and true understanding by embracing humanism and science. Humanism then does not reject Christianity, it completes it. Paul was wrong. Our faith is not foolish if Jesus is not literally and physically risen from the dead. We know our faith is true, because we know that death has not defeated him. As a humanist, I do not discard the rich legacy and richness of the Christian tradition, rather I claim to be the true heir to the Christian patrimony. Christians embrace a shallower version of Jesus. I know this because I continue to be transformed by Jesus's love and he continues to inspire my humanist faith - faith that there is yet some good in this earth, that we can all be redeemed by love, and that we should all choose life and should try to live it fully in a spirit of peace and brotherhood with all mankind. It makes no difference to me whether Jesus was born of virgin or rose bodily from his grave after three days. These are signs that the wicked demand because they do not have the heart to see the divine in Jesus and in all of us without such signs. Blessed are those who follow Jesus not having seen and without any need for signs and wonders.

Permalink

Satyana

Principles of Spiritual Activism

The following principles emerged from several years' work with social change leaders in Satyana's Leading with Spirit program. We offer these not as definitive truths, but rather as key learnings and guidelines that, taken together, comprise a useful framework for "spiritual activism."

1. Transformation of motivation from anger/fear/despair to compassion/love/purpose. This is a vital challenge for today's social change movement. This is not to deny the noble emotion of appropriate anger or outrage in the face of social injustice. Rather, this entails a crucial shift from fighting against evil to working for love, and the long-term results are very different, even if the outer activities appear virtually identical. Action follows Being, as the Sufi saying goes. Thus "a positive future cannot emerge from the mind of anger and despair" (Dalai Lama).
   
   
2. Non-attachment to outcome. This is difficult to put into practice, yet to the extent that we are attached to the results of our work, we rise and fall with our successes and failures—a sure path to burnout. Hold a clear intention, and let go of the outcome—recognizing that a larger wisdom is always operating. As Gandhi said, "the victory is in the doing," not the results. Also, remain flexible in the face of changing circumstances: "Planning is invaluable, but plans are useless."(Churchill)
   
   
3. Integrity is your protection. If your work has integrity, this will tend to protect you from negative energy and circumstances. You can often sidestep negative energy from others by becoming "transparent" to it, allowing it to pass through you with no adverse effect upon you. This is a consciousness practice that might be called "psychic aikido."
   
   
4. Integrity in means and ends. Integrity in means cultivates integrity in the fruit of one's work. A noble goal cannot be achieved utilizing ignoble means.
   
   
5. Don't demonize your adversaries. It makes them more defensive and less receptive to your views. People respond to arrogance with their own arrogance, creating rigid polarization. Be a perpetual learner, and constantly challenge your own views.
   
   
6. You are unique. Find and fulfill your true calling. "It is better to tread your own path, however humbly, than that of another, however successfully." (Bhagavad Gita)
   
   
7. Love thy enemy. Or at least, have compassion for them. This is a vital challenge for our times. This does not mean indulging falsehood or corruption. It means moving from "us/them" thinking to "we" consciousness, from separation to cooperation, recognizing that we human beings are ultimately far more alike than we are different. This is challenging in situations with people whose views are radically opposed to yours. Be hard on the issues, soft on the people.
   
   
8. Your work is for the world, not for you. In doing service work, you are working for others. The full harvest of your work may not take place in your lifetime, yet your efforts now are making possible a better life for future generations. Let your fulfillment come in gratitude for being called to do this work, and from doing it with as much compassion, authenticity, fortitude, and forgiveness as you can muster.
   
   
9. Selfless service is a myth. In serving others, we serve our true selves. "It is in giving that we receive." We are sustained by those we serve, just as we are blessed when we forgive others. As Gandhi says, the practice of satyagraha ("clinging to truth") confers a "matchless and universal power" upon those who practice it. Service work is enlightened self-interest, because it cultivates an expanded sense of self that includes all others.
   
   
10. Do not insulate yourself from the pain of the world. Shielding yourself from heartbreak prevents transformation. Let your heart break open, and learn to move in the world with a broken heart. As Gibran says, "Your pain is the medicine by which the physician within heals thyself." When we open ourselves to the pain of the world, we become the medicine that heals the world. This is what Gandhi understood so deeply in his principles of ahimsa and satyagraha. A broken heart becomes an open heart, and genuine transformation begins.
    
    
11. What you attend to, you become. Your essence is pliable, and ultimately you become that which you most deeply focus your attention upon. You reap what you sow, so choose your actions carefully. If you constantly engage in battles, you become embattled yourself. If you constantly give love, you become love itself.
    
    
12. Rely on faith, and let go of having to figure it all out. There are larger 'divine' forces at work that we can trust completely without knowing their precise workings or agendas. Faith means trusting the unknown, and offering yourself as a vehicle for the intrinsic benevolence of the cosmos. "The first step to wisdom is silence. The second is listening." If you genuinely ask inwardly and listen for guidance, and then follow it carefully—you are working in accord with these larger forces, and you become the instrument for their music.
    
    
13. Love creates the form. Not the other way around. The heart crosses the abyss that the mind creates, and operates at depths unknown to the mind. Don't get trapped by "pessimism concerning human nature that is not balanced by an optimism concerning divine nature, or you will overlook the cure of grace." (Martin Luther King) Let your heart's love infuse your work and you cannot fail, though your dreams may manifest in ways different from what you imagine.

The Time and Energy to Hate

February 18, 2007

The Way We Live Now

Narrowing the Religion Gap?

By GARY ROSEN

Try a quick political thought experiment. First, form a mental picture of the Democratic front-runners for president — Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Now do the same for the leading Republican contenders — John McCain and Rudy Giuliani. Next (and this is the key step), imagine each of them in church, sitting in a pew, head bowed, or better still, at the pulpit, delivering a homily or leading the congregation in worship.

Strange, no? It’s not hard to envision Clinton and Obama among the faithful. She is a lifelong Methodist and self-described “praying person,” and he belongs to a church where some years ago he found himself (in his own words) “kneeling beneath that cross” in submission “to His will.” Both slip easily into the earnest, humble-of-the-earth mode of liberal God talk.

But McCain and Giuliani? You somehow imagine them fidgeting during the hymns and checking their watches. The senator is an Episcopalian, the former mayor a Catholic, but neither man, you have to think, would be caught dead in a Bible-study group or could possibly declare, à la George W. Bush, that his favorite philosopher is “Christ, because he changed my heart.” In the piety primary, the Democrats win hands down.

None of this is likely to reverse the “religion gap” in our politics — that is, the fact that regular churchgoers identify by a wide margin with the G.O.P. Come election time, the personal religiosity of the Democratic candidates won’t matter nearly as much as the positions they take in all the drearily familiar theaters of the culture war. What a matchup between churchgoing Democrats and secular-minded Republicans may supply, though, is welcome moderation in our debates over issues like abortion, gay marriage and stem-cell research. God knows, both sides of the ideological divide have fundamentalists in need of taming.

On the right, the culprits are familiar, having become stock characters in our politics. In his unsuccessful run for the Republican nomination in 2000, McCain called them “the agents of intolerance,” singling out Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. For a taste of their views, you can visit the Web site of Concerned Women for America (C.W.A.), which bills itself as the “nation’s largest public-policy women’s organization.” Its mission is “to protect and promote biblical values among all citizens,” the Bible being “the inerrant Word of God and the final authority on faith and practice.” As for dissenters from C.W.A.’s stand on issues like the “sanctity of human life,” a handy link to Bible passages explains “why you are a sinner and deserve punishment in Hell.”

A number of observers on the right, including Jeffrey Hart of National Review, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute and the blogger Andrew Sullivan, have performed a service lately by denouncing the G.O.P.’s pact with such authoritarian bullies. But the problem can be exaggerated. Whatever their private views, most of today’s big-time social conservatives speak in public as faith-based policy wonks, not as preachers of fire and brimstone. Consider James C. Dobson, the controversial founder of Focus on the Family. In a recent article titled “Two Mommies Is One Too Many,” he objected to the impending parenthood of Mary Cheney and her partner. The core of his argument? What he trumpets as “more than 30 years of social-science evidence” showing that children do best with a married mother and father.

Is Dobson persuasive about the supposed evils of gay parenthood? Not to me. But the case he makes is based on an asserted set of facts — facts that are open to challenge and dependent on neither revelation nor church writ. Yes, he also avers in passing that traditional marriage is “God’s design for the family and is rooted in biblical truth,” and this is probably what motivates him. But is there anything wrong with so frankly religious a premise? Does it somehow disqualify his arguments?

Here is where the dogmatists of the secular left come in. Looking to fend off Bible-toting conservatives, the philosopher Richard Rorty argued more than a decade ago that in a modern democracy, faith should be a strictly private matter and has no place in public discussion. Traditional religion, he wrote, is a “conversation stopper,” a source of values before which nonbelievers can be only mum. The same rigid divide informs a recent manifesto “in defense of science and secularism” signed by such academic luminaries as Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, Peter Singer and Edward O. Wilson. They urge the country’s political leaders “not to permit legislation or executive action to be influenced by religious beliefs.”

So categorical a rejection of faith in the public square is impossible to reconcile with our political traditions, of course. It sweeps away not just today’s social conservatives but also abolitionism, women’s suffrage and the civil rights movement. Dr. King without the almighty? Unthinkable. Conceding the extremism of his earlier view, Rorty himself has backtracked. Citizens should feel free to speak as believers, he now suggests, so long as they don’t simply “cite authority, scriptural or otherwise.”

It’s a reasonable standard. After all, very few of us, whether religious or secular, can easily articulate our views about fundamental things. On questions of human dignity and human ends, we tend to sputter and assert, setting out propositions that are difficult to justify to those who don’t share them. Invoking secular values like “autonomy” or “self-realization” can be just as much of a “conversation stopper” as appealing to the Bible. What we owe one another are concrete explanations, grounded in terms we might hope to share.

Can the rising field of presidential hopefuls move beyond the collision of orthodoxies to which we have grown accustomed? Maybe in some small way, if only because of the peculiarities of the personalities involved, but even that would be progress. At our present cultural moment, it is hard to think of a more edifying prospect than a campaign that will feature a running debate between churchgoing Democrats and vaguely impious Republicans.

Gary Rosen is the managing editor of Commentary.

************

This "type" of article sets out a great many false equivalences. The type of argument that says "both sides are equally wrong/bad/mistaken." But there has been a political calculation in driving the political debate that cites religiosity as an absolute -- as if it is one thing. It's the false either/or thinking that cannot expand to both/and. Both/and sees that when we say religion, God, Jesus, or any other religious word, that word is interpreted very very differently, depending upon who is hearing or citing. There has been an intention to divide, an intent to create a polarization in American culture.

Belief always informs decision, both political and otherwise. But to seek to enshrine particular
beliefs into law or policy goes against both tradition and law in this country. There is a difference. To legislate one set of beliefs as the arbiter of both culture and private decision making is unlawful in terms of the US Constitution. And those seeking just that know that what they seek is unlawful. It is an emotional martyrdom that drives the issue, not reason, not rationality.

My brother, who does some lobbying for gay rights, says that the fire-breathing fag haters who used to show up used to say shocking hateful things. But lately , it's as though they just aren't inspired any more. My brother's group really didn't have to say anything. The state legislators finally shook their heads and said, "You know, we're about building roads, helping people live their lives, we have no business passing legislature against any group of people. It's a waste of our time. It's not what we're about."

Hating takes up a lot of time and energy. The venom must be draining out of some of the groups who have put forth these agendas. Maybe they can find something else to do.

Encounter

I set off to a retreat on Saturday, to a place where I had been many times before, with plenty of time to spare. I had a map, but didn't consult it because I felt that I intuitively knew the way.
Time passed, and continued to pass then passed some more and , paying closer attention, I saw that things that by now should look familiar did not. Or to be more accurate, everything looked equally familiar but this seeming recognition had not brought me to my destination. I pulled out my map, and made some course corrections, ticking off time, noting to myself that now the program had started, now , it had moved forward to the 1/2 hour mark, then the hour. By the time I stopped and found a human being who could counsel me, I found that I was hurtling down the highway in the wrong direction.

Angst and humiliation fought a duel for my endocrine system, and on the trip progressed. At this point, it seemed silly to continue, I should simply return home. But I decided to go on and arrive, no matter how pointlessly and hopelessly tardy.

Part of my reasoning was that I knew the person convening the retreat would greet me affectionately , even if I showed up breathless for the final five minutes. I thought that this was a good teaching and one worth showing up for. The other was -- I felt that in some strange way this tortuous detour that was completely my own fault WAS in fact , an encounter with the very spiritual principle and to some degree, an encounter with the person that I was seeking.

The meeting, the people, the stories, the rest of the day was fine.

As a result of the confusion of the morning, I had a strange exhaustion and bone deep fatigue the rest of the day and into the evening. I went home and slept long, with what I call "kid dreams" which are the kinds of dreams I had as a kid -- breathless chase events with a cast of thousands.

I wrote a poem about this.

B R E A T H L E S S

The difference between
blessing and cursing

is Infinitessimal.
A screen perhaps
or a veil’s thickness alone.

O Gracious One
That I not disappear
along the road
At least -- to you.
That I remain
Specific
Although lost.


*********
AND .......

F R A N C I S

As we paint
and clean the room
There is a picture,
an old painting painted over.
Like the story in you
painted and painted over and painted again.
What was it to begin with?

What our fathers don’t understand about us
Is what the world doesn’t understand either.

Someone comes
and your heart turns
The turning heart instructs
Showing people the face of God --
Coming up empty and then
Perfect Joy.
There is not a mystical melting
but the shocking encounter
with this tree

This one.
And you.
And me.

Theodicy

The latest list of "10" from down under:

Sunday, 18 February 2007

Ten propositions on theodicy

by Kim Fabricius

1. Unde malum? Primers on theodicy easily put the question: God is supposed to be both all-loving and all-powerful, yet evil and suffering demonstrably exist. Therefore either God can do something about it but won’t – in which case God is not all-loving; or God wants to do something about it but can’t – in which case God is not all-powerful. Gotcha! Or so it would seem.

2. It is quite astonishing that Christians have allowed themselves to be set up in this way – or at least post-Enlightenment Christians. For or as Kenneth Surin points out, “It is no exaggeration to say that virtually every contemporary discussion of the theodicy question is premised, implicitly or explicitly, on an understanding of ‘God’ overwhelmingly constrained by the principles of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical theism.” And Surin goes on to observe that the ‘God’ this discussion seeks “to justify is the very ‘thing’ that the adherent of a properly Christian ‘understanding’ of God will find herself being disposed to abjure.” Of course pre-modern Christians wrestled with the reality of evil and suffering, but their faith was not intimidated by it, nor did it throw their belief in the divine goodness into a crisis of coherence. Unde malum? Rather Quis Deus! Not the god of theism who is discussed remoto Christo, but God the Trinity, the Deus incarnatus et crucifixus, who is known in worship.

3. Alas, many Christian theologians themselves do not seem to know this God. They think God requires an apologetics, and their defence takes the form of accusation and explanation. First, they are Job’s comforters, resembling “a circle of police around a suspect” (Girard), reading a list of the charges to the suspect from Uz; and then they are attorneys for God in the dock, arguing the case of their client in absentia with cool calculation and untroubled conviction. The irony is that in explaining evil and suffering, theodicists inevitably explain them away. Wittgenstein said that “What’s ragged should be left ragged,” but the post-Cartesian theodicist, intent on “reducing the muddy and mixed to the clear and distinct,” not only “idealizes the reality of evils” but also, in his theoretical detachment, connives in the conditions that give them purchase (Terrence Tilley); and in making a pact with death in order to defend the deity, he unwittingly turns God himself into a capital criminal.

4. Process theologians are the greatest explainers. Their strategy turns on free will. Evil, they urge, is the inevitable risk of human agency, and if it results in free-fall and its attendant wreckage, well, (a) we can’t blame God; and (b), still, this valley of death is also a vale of soul-making (i.e. suffering has pedagogical or therapeutic value). But even apart from the question “How real is our freedom?”, can bad choices alone account for the sheer scale of suffering, and therefore can the buck be so easily passed? And can so-called second-order virtues bear the burden of vindication that is placed upon them? Marilyn McCord Adams declares that, given “horrendous evils” – the physical agony, the eclipse of meaning (what Simone Weil called “affliction”) – this putative god would be paying us “an inappropriate respect,” and indeed “would not thereby honor but violate our agency by crushing it with responsibility for individual and cosmic ruin.” And D. Z. Phillips refers to the argument from character development as “the outward-bound school of theology,” and suggests that “to rescue sufferings from degradation by employing cost-benefit analysis is like rescuing a prostitute from degradation by telling her to charge higher fees.”

5. Calvinists are the greatest defenders. David Bentley Hart writes of a Calvinist minister who, “positively intoxicated by the grandeur of divine sovereignty, proclaimed that the Indian Ocean disaster – like everything else – was a direct expression of the divine will, acting according to hidden and eternal counsels it would be impious to attempt to penetrate, and producing consequences it would be sinful to presume to judge” (with chapter and verse, of course). More extreme still are the false prophets who thundered that the denizens of the Sodom of New Orleans only got what was coming to them when the whirlwind of Katrina tore into the city. I admit to finding this whole track of retributive thought so unbearably desolate that I will only say, in answer, that here we see the dead and deathly end of late medieval nominalism, see that potentia absoluta is at best a theological solecism, and at worst sheer satanic power. It is also the inevitable result of the deity known in abstraction from the concrete reality of Christ. God cannot will evil and suffering, either directly or indirectly.

6. And here we come to the nub of the matter. The divine nature is the grammar of the divine will. “God’s action has been held, in orthodox Christian thought, to be identical with God’s being – that is, what God does is nothing other than God’s being actively real” (Rowan Williams). And in being and act, God is love – all the way down and all the way out. The conundrum of the divine love and the divine power that theodicists accept and then attempt to resolve is thus a false one. God is not all-loving on the one hand and all-powerful on the other: no, the only power of God is the power of love:

Here is God, no monarch he,
throned in easy state to reign;
here is God, whose arms of love
aching, spent, the world sustain.
(W. H. Vanstone)

7. Rejecting, then, the Calvinist collapse of secondary into primary divine causality, shall we say that God permits the evil that is contrary to his will? Philosophically (with Aquinas) it would seem to be a necessary distinction to make, but I remain uncomfortable with the language of permission, and for two reasons. First, because it suggests that God has a psychology like ours only bigger, conjuring up an image of one who has to make allowances for the world to be other than he really intends it to be, “on the lines that the poor fellow couldn’t help it, he’s only God after all” (Herbert McCabe). And, second, because we are still playing the game of explanation. Evil, we must insist, cannot and must not be explained. If the language of permission still seems inescapable, then continuing to insist that the free-will defence is a busted flush, we must confess that we don’t have the faintest idea why God permits evil. Ultimately we can only gaze at the iconic image of the crucified and, like a rabbit caught in a car’s headlights, freeze at the mystery of iniquity – and then, in faith, be drawn into the more unfathomable mystery of a love that is stronger than death.

8. We must also be modest with the discourse of eschatology. Certainly we must hold fast to the vision of “a new heaven and a new earth,” when God “will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21:1, 4). But two points. First, hell. Whatever the Bible says to the contrary – and the Bible actually says many things to the contrary of the contrary – it beats me how an eternal Auschwitz (under a righteous commandant to be sure) could provide an adequate retributive balance to the temporal Auschwitz. If for some the idea of hell performs a successful operation in the theatre of theodicy, for me it kills the patient. And, second, children. When we speak of the glory of ultimate, we must not out-shout the cries of the penultimate; we must speak softly and tenderly, and never say anything that we could not say, paradigmatically, in the presence of parents who have watched their child torn limb from limb by a pack of hunting dogs, or tossed to and fro on soldiers’ bayonets.

9. The images, of course, come from Dostoevsky’s unsurpassable The Brothers Karamazov, as Ivan challenges the faith of his little brother, a novice monk, with a rending litany of human depravity, and then declares that “It is not God that I do not accept, Alyosha. I merely most respectfully return him the ticket,” i.e. to the slaughter-house of history. Mark well that Ivan is not an atheist, he is a rebel. He has been to the house of God and knows its liturgies better than many a believer – but he cannot kneel and he will not pray. And also mark well that Alyosha accepts Ivan’s argument that human freedom, ultimate victory, everlasting punishment, all finally fail to persuade: he concedes the case that the universe is not morally intelligible. Theoretically, nihilism triumphs…

10. … But, practically, nihilism fails. It can be thought, but not lived: Ivan himself becomes a monster, twisting the mind of his half-brother Smerdyakov, turning him into a patricide – and he himself finally commits suicide. But Father Zosima presents Alyosha with an alternative – not an alternative explanation but an alternative praxis, presupposing conversion, issuing in awe at reality (Job) and compassion for others, and mediated by the church, the harbinger of horror-healing. It is participation in God’s own triune love overflowing in the cosmos, and in the universal salvation wrought by the atoning death of Christ. It is “joy over the abyss” (Barth). The logical problem of evil and suffering is not thereby solved, rather it is dissolved in the existential narrative of discipleship. As a hymn of mine concludes:

Answers aren’t in explanation,
answers come at quite a cost:
only wonder at creation,
and the practice of the cross.

Artists & Saints

February 18, 2007

Lives in the Arts

By KATHRYN HARRISON

TWENTY-EIGHT ARTISTS AND TWO SAINTS

Essays.

By Joan Acocella.

Illustrated. 524 pp. Pantheon Books. $30.

How many artists subscribe to the notion that creative success depends on input from the fickle muse or her modern avatar, mental illness? Probably very few. Like all romantic conceits, it fails to acknowledge the grubby reality of mortal life, in this case the dedicated, often torturous labor a writer or dancer or sculptor invests in what he or she makes. Among the lucid and often delightful observations Joan Acocella makes in her new collection of critical essays, “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints,” none is more important than this: “What allows genius to flower is not neurosis but its opposite ... ordinary Sunday-school virtues such as tenacity and above all the ability to survive disappointment.” In fact, Acocella suggests, the remarkable and sustained career of a prodigy like George Balanchine, to name one of her subjects, proves this artist “not an example, but a freak, of ego strength.”

Which doesn’t make the creative process any less mysterious. What emerges from a reading of “Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints” is Acocella’s — and through hers our own — respect and in certain cases even reverence for the dogged faith on which an artistic career is built. We know the seductive alchemy of art. To transform private anguish into a narrative of truth if not beauty; to make sense where there was none; to bring order out of chaos: these are the promises art makes. Fulfilling them requires something else entirely, an attribute closer to blindness than to inspiration — the refusal to give up when the odds predict defeat, again.

In these highly readable essays, most of which appeared in The New Yorker (where, as a staff writer, their author covers dance and books), Acocella addresses not single works so much as whole lives in the arts, her point of entry either the most recent novel by, or a new biography of, the writer (or dancer, or choreographer) under consideration. Many of the essays draw on interviews with her subject as well as on the work itself. Knowledgeable without being a show-off, meticulous in her research and energetically conversational, Acocella leaps immediately into the piece at hand, offering a few toothsome biographical morsels as she unpacks text or dance steps. Then, having captured her reader’s interest, she goes back to the early life and earlier work, examining those experiences she sees as having had an impact on the art. Her typical essay thus functions as a tantalizing biographical sketch, as well as a critical study, inviting us to pursue a deeper exploration.

Ultimately, there are as many different forms of criticism as there are critics, but if one were to make the broadest distinction, on one side of which lie those hypercritical critics who tend to eviscerate and disable creative efforts, often while advertising their own erudition and good taste, Acocella would fall firmly on the other side of this divide. She is a celebrant of art, not blind to the flaws of what she admires nor so inclusive in her praise that she fails to discriminate between the lesser and greater novels of, for example, Saul Bellow, but a critic whose enthusiasm is infectious. Clearly, she reviews only what she finds worth her time to review — work she loves.

Particularly, Acocella is interested in artistic careers that include break and recovery, and how the work changes in the wake of trauma, including the chronic, compounding trauma of rejection. She is a keen and sympathetic observer of the ways in which corrosive disappointment can strip away the veneer of culture and refinement that an immature artist typically acquires, revealing the more genuine sensitivity, the art, beneath.

The most engaging of the essays collected here is “The Soloist,” which follows the career of Mikhail Baryshnikov. As Russian as he is, Baryshnikov has achieved the stature of an American icon by that most reliable means — his own bootstraps. We love stories of overcoming hardship; really, the only way to improve on them is to multiply the hero’s woes, and Baryshnikov endured decades of crises and abandonments that only his obdurate investment in ballet allowed him to transcend.

Twelve years old, Baryshnikov had been dancing for three years when his mother hanged herself and he became “a child workaholic.” Drudgery paid off: at 19 he was accepted into the Kirov Ballet as a soloist, and then, Acocella writes, “his troubles really began.” In the wake of Nureyev’s 1961 defection, the Kirov became, in effect, “a mini police state” that rewarded its dancers “less on the basis of merit than according to one’s history of cooperation” with Communist witch hunts. The pinnacle of success for Russian dancers, it left them vulnerable to a “mixture of impotence and cynicism” that destroyed one brilliant career after another.

In 1970, Alexander Pushkin, celebrated teacher and surrogate father to the young dancer (whose own father never understood or supported his ambitions), died suddenly and left Baryshnikov feeling bereft of protectors. That same year, Natalia Makarova defected and the Kirov descended into panic, with the result that the K.G.B. came calling whenever Baryshnikov had so much as a meal with a visiting Western dancer. It was clear that to remain in his homeland would amount to creative suicide and so in 1974, Baryshnikov, too, defected.

Summarizing his subsequent career with the American Ballet Theater, with Balanchine, with Twyla Tharp, Acocella says of Baryshnikov: “Homelessness turned him inward, gave him to himself. Then dance, the substitute home, turned him outward, gave him to us.” It’s an astute observation — the kind of simple and clearsighted remark that distinguishes Acocella’s criticism — and it applies to almost every artist, conscious or not of an alienation assuaged only by the consuming effort art demands. The sculpture of Louise Bourgeois; the wickedly funny, anguished novels of Hilary Mantel; the memoirs of Primo Levi, of M. F. K. Fisher; the choreography of Jerome Robbins: in each instance, Acocella shows us how artists live within their creations.

Three essays in particular demonstrate Acocella’s acuity as a cultural critic. There are her two meditations on female saints, Mary Magdalene and Joan of Arc, both so distant and ultimately unknowable that our shifting visions of these women and their roles in the church and society reveal more about the times in which particular views emerge than about the women themselves. And there is her wonderfully insightful history of writer’s block, which “like most of today’s recognized psychological disorders,” Acocella observes dryly, “is a concept that other cultures, other times, have done fine without.”

Of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” Acocella observes that Sontag’s nonfiction performed the “essential function of criticism, that of introducing readers to new work, strange work, things they wouldn’t ordinarily encounter — a duty no major critic had undertaken consistently since Edmund Wilson quit regular reviewing in the late ’40s.” What’s more, “it did so in a notably unstrange manner.” This praise applies to Acocella’s criticism, as well.

“The relation between morality and imagination may be a complicated one, but it does exist,” she writes, analyzing the narrowness of Dorothy Parker’s vision, a function, she believes, of her selfishness. “Hope, forgiveness — these are not just moral actions. They are enlargements of the mind. Without them, you remain in the tunnel of the self.” Like Sontag, like every great critic, Acocella is subjective, uncompromising. She has a distinct point of view, a refreshingly not-fashionable one — she salutes Sunday-school virtues! — and writes from her conviction that beneath its hectic, irresponsible, even intoxicated surface, art makes singularly unglamorous demands: integrity, sacrifice, discipline. Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?

{Kathryn Harrison’s most recent book is a novel, “Envy.”}

*****

You can extrapolate this out to entrepreneurship, spiritual discipline -- all of those areas outside the walls of the city, so to speak. In a way, any path can become a complete path of discipline, if one is determined to use everything -- life experience, relationships, hardships, victories, epiphanies. Everything becomes a teaching, something to both add to your life, and to surrender back to God. Nothing is excluded or left out.

Thus spiritual direction, reflection, prayer, become art forms that teach us just by our participation in them. Maybe there is no other way to really learn these things, except the "trial and error" method. Having the humility to accept all life as the teacher.

******

Just live that life. It doesn't matter whether it is life or hell, life of the hungry ghost, life of the animal, it's okay; just live that life, see. And as a matter of fact no other way. Where you stand, where you are, that's what your life is right there, regardless of how painful it is or how enjoyable it is. That's what it is.

- Taizan Maezumi

Nothing More

N O T H I N G M O R E

Todd Davis

He was used to writing
poems during meetings
and student presentations,
voices droning like bees
when the azalea blooms,
or while driving his car,
trucks only inches away,
death in tow. As Graves
tells us, "To be poets
confers Death on us."
But death to self, or
to the world, or to each
moment passing away
irretrievably, irrevocably,
like the same azalea
days later, blossoms
black with decay?
What he liked most
was writing in church
while the minister
explained why Christ
said the child had
not died but only slept.
Poetry is nothing more
than lucid dreaming:
awake aenough to change
the course of things
by merely desiring it,
asleep enougth to know
the pleasures of the dead.
A poem can't say what
the girl wished for
after Christ called
to her, "Talitha kum."

But from what poem
would anyone willingly
awake? In the room
where Christ composed,
she slept undisturbed
until his words woke her
from a dream of mustard
grown taller than any
plant, of birds roosting
in its branches, shielded
from the day's harsh light.

******** **** *******

B L A S P H E M Y

Garret Keizer

Sometimes I can imagine Jesus swearing
with his own name. "Jesus Christ,"
he says, "not another book about Jesus."

Really, I wonder how he can stand it.
If it makes me sick, how must it make him
mad, mad enough to take his own name

in vain. "Why not? I hear him ask.
"Why not the name when my life is taken
in the same vein. How about taking

just one of my ideas and trying
it out for half a minute? Why not a search
for your own historical asses and leave mine be?

Make a decision instead of a goddamn book."
I can honestly hear him say it: "Jesus
H. Christ, and now another poem besides."


{Poems from Image Journal - A Journal of Art, Faith and Mystery}

Funny....?

Humor -- or Not

Humor, they say, is tragedy plus time.

But humor is also a something else.

Over John McQuaid from HuffPo asks the question: Why Aren't Conservatives Funny?

…
Why do conservatives have such a hard time with humor? Just take a look at this clip from the new Daily Show wannabe on Fox News, The ½ Hour News Hour, produced by 24's Joel Surnow. It generates a few half-chuckles, maybe, but it's basically just lame.

Yes, this is a serious question.

And no, I'm not saying there aren't funny conservatives. Just that, generally speaking, "conservative humor" tends to be an oxymoronic term.

Sometime early in the Clinton presidency Rush Limbaugh appeared on David Letterman. Letterman was pretty generous (as opposed to his more interesting, confrontational approach to Bill O'Reilly), and lobbed some easy setups Limbaugh's way. Though Limbaugh obviously considers himself to be a witty fellow, he ignored them. The whole segment wasn't even amusing, just weird. Limbaugh gave a skeptical, somewhat bemused audience his take on Hillary Clinton. Letterman did his "dumb guy" impression.

One answer is that a sense of grievance underlies much of the conservative media. Limbaugh, Fox News and many in the right-wing punditocracy trade on the sense of being excluded and demeaned by elites, who are thus deemed to deserve nothing but scorn and mockery. So their attempts at humor - at least, the ones that get broadcast - tend to be pretty blunt and obvious, sometimes mean-spirited. That is, not funny. Dennis Miller seemed to lose it when he put himself in the Bush camp and started announcing his fervent desire to blow our enemies up. Ha ha!

Surnow, to his credit, seems to recognize that harshness doesn't do it. But he's got a long way to go.
…

My answer to McQuaid’s question goes like this.

The greatest humorist in American history was Mark Twain, and even as he wickedly ripped American mores and culture one new one after another, he never put himself above or outside of the human clown college he mocked so mercilessly.

In the Great Parade of Fools he made it clear that he was right out front flingin’ poo and coveting his neighbor’s wife’s ass as big and loud as any other of us bewildered monkeys.

In the end, great humor – the kind that makes your bones hum -- is a child of intelligence, a sometimes-unwanted empathy for your fellow simians, and the eye for the telling detail honed guillotine-sharp on that whet stone of painful outsiderhood.

In other words, three of many, many, many humanizing features that Conservatives seem to lack at the molecular level.

posted by driftglass

******

I'm reminded of the character Jorge de Burgos in U. Eco's The Name of the Rose (the Movie).

William of Baskerville: But what is so alarming about laughter?

Jorge de Burgos: Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith, because without fear of the Devil there is no more need of God.

Jorge de Burgos: Laughter is a devilish wind which deforms, uh, the lineaments of the face and makes men look like monkeys.

William of Baskerville: Monkeys do not laugh. Laughter is particular to men.

Jorge de Burgos: As is sin. Christ never laughed.

William of Baskerville: Can we be so sure?

Jorge de Burgos: There is nothing in the Scriptures to say that he did.

William of Baskerville: And there's nothing in the Scriptures to say that he did not. Why, even the saints have been known to employ comedy, to ridicule the enemies of the Faith. For example, when the pagans plunged St. Maurice into the boiling water, he complained that his bath was too cold. The Sultan put his hand in... scalded himself.

********

“Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”

(Mark Twain)

Embrace Our Differences

Image from Diversity Arts

Embrace Our Differences

Kofi Annan

February 13, 2007

Kofi Annan is former secretary-general of the United Nations.

Currents along the Bosphorus are notoriously strong, flowing one way on the surface and the opposite way underneath. Yet for centuries the Turkish peoples successfully rode these currents as they navigated the boundary between Europe and Asia, and between the Islamic world and the West; they have prospered as a result. The report on the Alliance of Civilizations rightly stresses that an embrace of differences—in opinion, in culture, in belief, in way of life—has long been a driving force of human progress.

During Europe’s Dark Ages, that was how the Iberian peninsula flourished, through the interaction of Muslim, Christian and Jewish traditions. Later, the Ottoman empire prospered not only because of its armies, but because it was an empire of ideas, in which Muslim art and technology were enriched by Jewish and Christian contributions.

Some centuries later, our own globalized era is regrettably marked by rising intolerance, extremism and violence. Closer proximity and improved communications have often led not to mutual understanding and friendship but to tension and mutual mistrust. Many people, particularly in the developing world, have come to fear the global village as a cultural onslaught and an economic drain on their way of life. Globalization threatens their values as well as their wallets.

The terror attacks of 9/11, war and turmoil in the Middle East, ill-considered words and drawings have all helped to reinforce this perception, and have inflamed tensions between different peoples and cultures. They have especially strained relations between followers of the three great monotheistic faiths.

Today, when international migration has brought unprecedented numbers of people of different creeds or cultures to live as fellow-citizens, the misconceptions and stereotypes underlying the idea of a “clash of civilizations” have come to be more and more widely shared. Some groups seem eager to foment a new war of religion, this time on a global scale; the insensitivity, or even cavalier disregard, of others towards their beliefs or sacred symbols makes it easier for them to do so.

The idea of an alliance of civilizations could not be more timely, for clearly we do not live in different civilizations in the sense that our ancestors did. Migration, integration and technology have brought different races, cultures and ethnicities closer together, breaking down old barriers and creating new realities. We live, as never before, cheek by jowl, bombarded by different influences and ideas.

Demonization of the “other” has proved the path of least resistance, although healthy introspection would better serve us all. In the 21st century we remain hostage to our sense of grievance and to our feelings of entitlement. Our narratives have become our prison. Many people throughout the world, particularly Muslims, see the West as a threat to their beliefs and values, their economic interests and their political aspirations. Evidence to the contrary is just disregarded or rejected as incredible. Many in the West dismiss Islam as a religion of extremism and violence, despite a history of relations in which commerce, cooperation and cultural exchange have played at least as important a part as conflict. It is vital that we overcome these resentments. We should start by reaffirming, and demonstrating, that the problem is not the Qur’an, not the Torah, nor the Bible. The problem is never the faith; it is the faithful and how they behave towards each other.

We must stress the basic values that are common to all religions: compassion, solidarity, respect for the human person, the golden rule of “do as you would be done by.” At the same time, we need to take care not to let crimes committed by individuals or small groups dictate our image of an entire people, an entire region or an entire religion.

We all know the benefits that migrants can bring to their new homelands, not only as laborers but as consumers, entrepreneurs and contributors to a more diverse, dynamic culture. But these benefits are not evenly distributed, and are often not appreciated by the pre-existing population, parts of which tend to see immigrants as a threat to their material interests, security and traditional way of life.

Governments have been slow to grasp the need to develop strategies for integrating new arrivals and their children into the host society. They have expected new communities to conform to a static vision of a country’s national identity, instead of being willing to rethink how far values and culture need to be shared by different communities living together within a democratic state. Turkey has found its path to membership of the European Union strewn with obstacles, behind which we can often detect a concept of European identity that implicitly or explicitly excludes Muslims.

As a result, many second- and third-generation migrants have grown up in ghettos, often facing high rates of unemployment, relative poverty and crime, and regarded by their “indigenous” neighbors with a mixture of fear and contempt.

Unlearning intolerance is in part a matter of legal protection. The right to freedom of religion, and to freedom from discrimination based on religion, has long been enshrined in international law and incorporated into the domestic law of many countries. Any strategy to build bridges must depend heavily on education, not just about Islam or Christianity, but about all religions, traditions and cultures, so that myths and distortions can be seen for what they are.

We must create opportunities for young people, offering them a credible alternative to the siren song of hate and extremism. We must give them a real chance to join in improving the world order, so that they no longer feel the urge to smash it. We must safeguard freedom of expression, while working to prevent it being used to spread hatred or inflict humiliation. We must convince them that rights carry with them a responsibility and should be exercised with sensitivity, especially when dealing with symbols and traditions that are sacred to other people.

Public authorities should not only raise awareness, but take the lead in condemning intolerance and extremism. It is their job to see that pledges of non-discrimination are enshrined in law, and that the law is enforced in practice. But their responsibility doesn’t exclude ours. All of us, as individuals, help to form the political and cultural climate of our societies. We must always be ready to correct stereotypes and distorted images, and to speak up for victims of discrimination.

All of this will have little impact if the current climate of fear and suspicion continues to be affected by political events, especially those in which Muslim peoples, Iraqis, Afghans, Chechens and, perhaps most of all, Palestinians, are seen to be the victims of military action by non-Muslim powers. No conflict carries such a powerful symbolic and emotional charge among people far removed from the battlefield as does the one between Palestinians and Israelis. As long as the Palestinians live under occupation, exposed to daily frustration and humiliation, and as long as Israelis are blown up in buses and in dance halls, passions everywhere will be inflamed.

It may seem unfair that progress in improving relations between fellow-citizens in Europe should be held hostage to the solution of one of humanity’s most intractable political problems. But the link cannot be wished away and it is imperative to work on both fronts at once, seeking to improve social and cultural understanding between peoples, and at the same time to resolve political conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere.

© 2007 Le Monde Diplomatiqu

e

Whether or Not I am Lost

For Tavis Smiley, Promises to Keep

By BOB HERBERT

One of the better-kept secrets in the U.S. is the wide reach and extraordinary commitment of Tavis Smiley.

Mr. Smiley is reasonably well known as a media personality. He’s the host of a television talk show broadcast on PBS five nights a week and a weekly radio show. He’s also a regular commentator on the widely syndicated black-oriented radio program “The Tom Joyner Morning Show.”

But that doesn’t begin to capture the ever-widening swirl of activities, projects, programs and initiatives set in motion by this energetic, fast-talking, charismatic advocate and mentor, described by The Times’s Felicia R. Lee as “a cultural phenomenon.”

Largely out of the sight of the broader public, Mr. Smiley has quietly become one of the most effective black leaders in the nation. He’s always in motion, giving speeches, meeting with national leaders, conducting annual seminars on the “State of the Black Union” and offering how-to tips on important aspects of daily life for African-Americans.

Mr. Smiley constantly exhorts his followers and admirers to make better use of the traditional tools of advancement — education, hard work, citizen activism — to transcend the barriers of continued neglect and discrimination.

Next June, thanks to Mr. Smiley, the major presidential candidates will meet in a pair of prime-time debates on PBS — one for each party — to focus on issues of concern to African-American voters. That has never happened before.

About a year ago Mr. Smiley, who has written several books, edited a paperback titled “The Covenant With Black America.” It’s a guidebook, on matters large and small, for African-Americans, offering information and advice on issues that range from the importance of a healthy diet to closing the digital divide.

No one, except perhaps Mr. Smiley, expected much from the book. There’s nothing in the way of pizzazz in it. There are no celebrity scandals, no sex, no drugs, no rock ’n’ roll.

“I said let’s put a book together that’s easy to read,” said Mr. Smiley, “and that lays out what each individual can do, what the community together can do and what the body politic should do about these problems.”

Published by a little-known black-owned company in Chicago, Third World Press, the book became an astonishing success, rising to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list.

“That book went to No. 1 without any mainstream exposure,” said Mr. Smiley. “I didn’t mention it on my NPR and PBS shows because I don’t do that — I don’t use the shows to promote things that I’m connected to. Other than that, though, I drove the book as hard as I could.

“But Oprah wouldn’t touch it. ‘The Today Show’ wouldn’t touch it. ‘Good Morning America,’ NPR, Larry King — not a single mainstream media outlet said or did anything with that book. And it still went to No. 1. That tells me that there is a hunger and a thirst in black America for trying to turn this mess that we are in around.”

For all of his 21st-century media savvy, Mr. Smiley is in many ways an old-fashioned, idealistic leader who has managed in an era saturated with cynicism to cling to the eternal verities. His hero is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He believes it is still possible for ordinary citizens to hold public officials accountable. (“I’m still baffled, befuddled,” he says, “by how the president did not even mention New Orleans or Katrina in his State of the Union speech.”) He speaks openly about the importance of bringing love — yes, love — into the public discourse.

“When I was 13,” he said, “I vowed to God that that if I ever got the chance to make something of myself, I’d spend the rest of my life trying to love and serve other people. I still believe that love is the most powerful and transformative force in the world today. I love people and I get joy out of serving people.”

The cynics, of course, will have a field day with this. But Mr. Smiley, on his way to catch a flight, or hop a train, or racing down the highway to his next event, will no doubt be too busy to notice. He’s eager to do what he can about the sorry state of the public schools in the big cities, and the fact that there are too few jobs that pay a living wage, and all manner of other issues: child care, health care, the environment.

He is trying to do nothing less than generate a movement among black Americans that will “help make all of America better.”

The companion volume to “The Covenant” was published two weeks ago. It’s called “The Covenant in Action.”

*************


It is I who must begin...

Once I begin, once I try --
here and now,
right where I am,
not excusing myself
by saying that things
would be easier elsewhere,
without grand speeches and ostentatious gestures,
but all the more persistently
--to live in harmony
with the "voice of Being," as I
understand it within myself
--as soon as I begin that,
I suddenly discover,
to my surprise, that
I am neither the only one,
nor the first,
nor the most important one
to have set out
upon that road ....

Whether all is really lost
or not depends entirely on
whether or not I am lost....

--Vaclav Havel

Clover

Sowing Hope

By Wendell Berry

In the dark of the moon,
In the flying snow,
In the dead of winter,
War spreading,
Families dying,
The world in danger,
I walk the rocky hillside
Sowing clover.

Source: “February 2, 1968″

****

"White clover blossoms were used in folk medicine against gout, rheumatism, and leucorrhea. It was also believed that the texture of fingernails and toenails would improve after drinking clover blossom tea. Native Americans used whole clover plants in salads, and made a white clover leaf tea for coughs and colds. White clover is thought to clean the system, decreasing irritation and muscular activity of the gastrointestinal tract. It is also used to decrease the activity of the central nervous system. Like red clover, it was thought to give anyone who carried its leaves the ability to detect witches, sorcerers and good fairies in his presence. It also was seen as representing the Trinity by Christians. "

****

Living Life in Clover

The old-fashioned idiom to be "in clover" means living a carefree life of ease, comfort and prosperity." Okay, count me in. And everyone knows that clover of the four-leaf variety is good luck.

But we're gardeners here, so what about planting the stuff in our lawns? Here's what Less Lawn has to say about it:

"Clover is often planted by gardeners as a soil conditioner. It grows quickly and easily, chokes out weeds and is easily 'turned in' to the beds when planting time draws near. The deep root system reduces soil compaction. Clover is also a nitrogen-fixing plant, which enriches the soil with natural fertilizer.

*****
Sowing clover. Trying to put good stuff into the world no matter what. No matter what. Hundreds dead in Bagdhad this morning. Insanity coving the world, polluting us all -- and yet what to do? How do I live my life? How do I pray? The prayer has to be the clover, the goodness that we are able to initiate and acknowledge. The good people doing good work in the world. Wendell Berry and his metaphors from farm life are filled with truth -- they radiate the truthfulness of someone who is living life in a concrete way.

I attended a training this weekend about Vocation and calling. In the midst of the world's suffering and madness, we are called to something. Everyone is. It's helpful to direct attention to that place of possibility. That place where our contributions can take hold and be generative -- like clover. If we sow it in well, it'll perpetuate itself.

Prayers for the world today. Prayers for people in danger, in the midst of war.

Artistry

Being Artistic

By Vincent Van Gogh

There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Heart-Warming Lies VI

Change Agents

"It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are."

~Wendell Berry

*******

You Can Change Your Life

You've probably already improved your life a great deal, and you're no stranger to change. You're able to make very difficult changes in your life. It's all about state of mind. And even if you have some trouble changing, you're smart enough to get support or take a different approach. So go ahead and dare to make things better. You know you can do it!

Can You Change Your Life?

*******

No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

~Terry Pratchett, Reaper Man

Crowley was in Hell's bad books. Not that Hell has any other kind.

~Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

An ancient proverb summed it up: when a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life.

~Terry Pratchett

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

~Terry Pratchett


There are, it has been said, two types of people in the world. There are those who, when presented with a glass that is exactly half full, say: this glass is half full. And then there are those who say: this glass is half empty. The world belongs, however, to those who can look at the glass and say: What's up with this glass? Excuse me? Excuse me? This is my glass? I don't think so. My glass was full! And it was a bigger glass!

~Terry Pratchett, The Truth

It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things.

~Terry Pratchett, Jingo

Blogalogue

Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?

Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism.

Most Americans oppose violence spurred by religious fundamentalism, but few agree on how to address it. In books like The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, author Sam Harris contends that religion itself--not its more extreme forms--is to blame. This week, Harris debates blogger and Conservative Soul author Andrew Sullivan in a no-holds-barred blogalogueTM. Return here to see Harris' next post--and check Andrew Sullivan's blog for his responses.

Sam Harris

Andrew Sullivan

Culture? Tradition? Faith? Christian?

Slacktivist:

Teetotalist gift shops

Following up on the discussion of "Christian fiction" in the comments to this post ...

Question: What do the following books have in common?

• Jayber Crow; Godric; The Emperor of Ocean Park; The Man Who Was Thursday; Teaching a Stone to Talk; Crime and Punishment; The Bishop and the Missing L Train; Monsignor Quixote; A Prayer for Owen Meany; WLT: A Radio Romance; Traveling Mercies; While I Was Gone; A Good Man Is Hard to Find; The Thanatos Syndrome; Anna Karenina; Saint Maybe; Brideshead Revisited

Answer: You won't find any of them on the shelves of a "Christian bookstore."

That's a bit odd, isn't it? You expect the selection in any niche bookstore to be limited by the scope of it's particular niche, but it's strange when so many books that would seem to be part of that niche are still excluded.

Imagine walking into something called a "Mystery Bookstore" and not finding anything by Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler or Ross MacDonald. So you ask at the counter and the clerk says, "I'm sorry, we don't carry those. This is a mystery bookstore and we only carry mysteries"

You try again -- "Yes but these are ..." -- but it doesn't get you anywhere. The store simply isn't using the word "mystery" in the usual accepted way. That word, for them, apparently means something else.

That's exactly the sort of experience you would have if you walked into a "Christian bookstore" assuming that either of those words was being applied in the usual accepted way. These words, here, are not meant to mean what they usually mean.

Your first hint of this will be the fact that books are a rather small fraction of the inventory in this "bookstore." You'll see row upon row of Precious Moments figurines and all manner of gadgets for God, but far fewer actual books than the word "bookstore" might have led you to expect. You'll soon recognize this general selection as a kind of inventory you have seen before and you'll realize that despite their use of the word "bookstore," it's really a gift shop, one with the same ratio of books, cards and knick-knackery as you would find in a Hallmark store or in the gift shops found in airports and highway rest stops.

OK then, by "bookstore," they mean "gift shop." What do they mean by "Christian"?

One possibility is that they're using this word to signify only a particular subset within its broader religious meaning -- that by "Christian" what they really mean is "evangelical Christian." That would help to explain why some of the books above -- those by authors such as Flannery O'Connor or Walker Percy -- are nowhere to be found. Such authors may be "Christian," but they are not evangelical Christians, and so their books are not carried by the gift shop.

That is part of the explanation, I think, but it only leads to a trickier question, one that is notoriously difficult to answer: How do we define "evangelical"?

This seems like a religious question -- a matter of doctrine, creed and theology. But the apparent meaning of these apparently religious terms is the heart of the confusion here. The word "evangelical" -- like the adjective "Christian" as applied to this gift shop -- is not religious, it's cultural.

This is why attempts to come up with a doctrinal definition of "evangelical" are so notoriously misleading. A former colleague of mine expressed this point succinctly when explaining why the Dutch Reformed -- a conservative Protestant group that might seem to fit any such doctrinal definition -- were not evangelicals. "We drink beer," he said.

That distinction isn't wholly adequate as a definition of "evangelical," but because it is cultural and not strictly religious, it comes closer to the mark than does any attempt at a doctrinal/theological definition.

Remind me to return to this point as I want to attempt to offer a functional, cultural definition of "evangelical" -- one that can account for why so-called Christian bookstores don't carry most Christian books. (We'll also need to explore how a beer-guzzling Oxford don became an evangelical icon.)

For now let me just say that in the case of such bookstores, that word "Christian" -- I do not think it means what you think it means.

Posted by Fred Clark

Thunder on the Mountain

Bob Dylan

Thunder On The Mountain

Thunder on the mountain, and there's fires on the moon
A ruckus in the alley and the sun will be here soon
Today's the day, gonna grab my trombone and blow
Well, there's hot stuff here and it's everywhere I go

Feel like my soul is beginning to expand
Look into my heart and you will sort of understand
You brought me here, now you're trying to run me away
The writing on the wall, come read it, come see what it say

Thunder on the mountain, rollin' like a drum
Gonna sleep over there, that's where the music coming from
I don't need any guide, I already know the way
Remember this, I'm your servant both night and day

The pistols are poppin' and the power is down
I'd like to try somethin' but I'm so far from town
The sun keeps shinin' and the North Wind keeps picking up speed
Gonna forget about myself for a while, gonna go out and see what others need

Thunder on the mountain rolling to the ground
Gonna get up in the morning walk the hard road down
Some sweet day I'll stand beside my king
I wouldn't betray your love or any other thing

Thunder on the mountain heavy as can be
Mean old twister bearing down on me
All the ladies in Washington scrambling to get out of town
Looks like something bad gonna happen, better roll your airplane down

Everybody going and I want to go to
Don't wanna take a chance with somebody new
I did all I could, I did it right there and then
I've already confessed - no need to confess again

Gonna make a lot of money, gonna go up north
I'll plant and I'll harvest what the earth brings forth
The hammer's on the table, the pitchfork's on the shelf
For the love of God, you ought to take pity on yourself

Music and words by Bob Dylan
Copyright 2006 Special Rider Music

**********

Slacktivist

Two beautiful daughters

Chris Hedges appeared on The Colbert Report to talk about his book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.

Crooks and Liars has the video:

COLBERT: They're all full of love, and you sound very angry, so who's the Christian here?

HEDGES: I don't think anger is a bad thing. I mean, Augustine said hope has two children, anger and courage. Anger at the way things are and courage to make them better. And I look at [the Christian Right] as a movement that is destroying a faith that I care deeply about. I mean these people don't speak about compassion. They don't speak about the poor. They've perverted the religion into this gospel of prosperity where Jesus will make us all rich and blesses bombs dropped ...

Posted by Fred Clark on Feb 09, 2007

*****
Andrew Sullivan:

"I have never doubted the existence of God. Never. My acceptance of God's existence - of a force beyond everything and the source of everything - goes so far back in my consciousness and memory that I can neither recall "finding" this faith nor being taught it. So when I am asked to justify this belief, as you reasonably do, I am at a loss. At this layer of faith, the first critical layer, the layer that includes all religious people and many who call themselves spiritual rather than religious, I can offer no justification as such. I have just never experienced the ordeal of consciousness without it. It is the air I have always breathed. I meet atheists and am as baffled at their lack of faith - at this level - as you are at my attachment to it. When people ask me how I came to choose this faith, I can only say it chose me. I have no ability to stop believing. Crises in my life - death of loved ones, diagnosis with a fatal illness, emotional loss - have never shaken this faith. In fact, they have all strengthened it. I know of no "proof" that could dissuade me of this, since no "proof" ever persuaded me of it"

*****

Friends

“Prayer is the act and presence of sending this light from the bountifulness of your love to other people to heal, free, and bless them. When there is love in your life, you should share it spiritually with those who are pushed to the very edge of life. The more love you give away, the more love you will have. Love is the source, center, and destiny of experience.”


A FRIENDSHIP BLESSING ~

May you be blessed with good friends.

May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.

May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where

there is great love, warmth, feeling and forgiveness.

May this change you.

May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold

in you.

May you be brought into the real passion, kinship and

affinity of belonging.

May you treasure your friends.

May you be good to them and be there for them;

may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth,

and light that you need for your journey.

May you never be isolated.

May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your

anam cara.

*****

In the midst of a training event for EFM. It is exploring vocation.

We all want to have a big purpose for our lives. But mostly what that purpose is, is what we have been doing all along......

10 Propositions

From Faith & Theology

All of the "10 Propositions" series by Kim Fabricus pose interesting and provocative questions. I see them as not so much something to "agree" or "disagree" with as to sit with as a sort of rhetorical question or metaphor.

Try it and see.

*********

Thursday, 8 February 2007

Ten propositions on self-love and related BS

by Kim Fabricius

1. There is a lot of BS talked about “self-love.” Allow me to wield a pitchfork and begin a cleanout of this particular Augean stable, the whiff of which has become unbearable in our shamelessly therapeutic culture.

2. It is often said that self-love is commanded in the Bible itself: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Such a reading of this text suggests either wishful thinking or exegesis gone on holiday. Luther and Calvin read more accurately and insightfully: they saw that neighbour-love begins only where self-love ends, and vice versa. As Robert Jenson observes: “Though it is sometimes supposed that Scripture’s famous mandate makes self-love a standard which our love for the other is to emulate, the relation in Scripture works the other way; Scripture contains no mention of self-love except as a foil for love of the other. The object of love is always other than the love.”

3. How, in fact, do we love ourselves? With a passion – the passion of distorted desire – which is to say with utter self-absorption. How are we to love others? With precisely that as-myself absorption – but directed entirely to the other-than-myself. The paradigms are the Trinity and the cross. Self-love looks inwards; in contrast, observe the gazes, the looks of love of Father, Son and Spirit, in Rublev’s famous icon. Self-love is full of itself; in contrast, other-love is empty of self, i.e. it is kenotic (cf. Philippians 2:1-11).

4. Am I saying, then, that we should hate ourselves? Heaven forbid! Self-hatred simply plays Tweedledum to self-love’s Tweedledee: both are equally forms of self-centredness, of the homo incurvatus in se. We must be delivered from self altogether – and in Christ we are: “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).

5. By the way, what about the nostrum “Love the sinner (the neighbour) but hate the sin”? It sounds so intuitively right as to be unquestionable. But is the person so easily separable from the work? Is sin merely accidental, or is it not dispositional, if not ontological? An anthropological can of worms opens! Suffice it to say for this discussion that even if it is a distinction that can be drawn in principle, “loving the sinner but hating the sin,” as a populist ethic, is usually more honoured in the breach than the observance, amounting to the sheerest humbug. Look at the way the rhetoric of evil is deployed to deny the human rights of terrorists or the dignity of paedophiles. Or simply ask a gay Christian if he feels loved by the church that regards him as a sinner.

6. But to return to the main thread, “self-esteem” is the particularly modernist version of self-love (not postmodernist: in postmodernism there is no self to love or esteem!). It goes with the demise of the discourse of sin and guilt, and the ascendancy of the culture of narcissism (and victimhood): the crap of “I’m okay, you’re okay” (but that other bugger is blameworthy). Here we lose all contact with reality, because I’m not okay, I suck – and you do too. Well, don’t you? (If you don’t think you do, I refer you to Jeremiah 17:9.) Alcoholics Anonymous is closer to the truth: “I’m not okay, and you’re not okay, but that’s okay.”

7. But why is that okay? Because – and only because – Christ died for our unokayness are we okay, okay with God and therefore really okay – which is a rather vulgar restatement of the Reformation doctrine of the iustificatio impii. Ours is an “alien” okayness, an okayness extra nos, but this is not a fiction, and indeed it is precisely on the basis of the divine imprimatur that we are freed from self-love for other-love (which is why AA’s “but that’s okay” requires a supplement: to Luther’s iustificatio impii, add Calvin’s iustificatio iusti, or regeneratio). In more felicitous non-religious language, Paul Tillich rephrased the justification of the sinner as the “acceptance of the unacceptable.” Given – but only given – the sola gratia, perhaps “self-acceptance” is the word we are looking for. But even that is not the end of the matter…

8. I suggest that there are huge implications here for so-called Christian spirituality. I say “so-called” because in fact much of what now passes for Christian spirituality is simply cod psychology with a halo. Who, for example, needs the desert fathers when you’ve got John Fowler’s “Stages of Faith” (faith without an object), or the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (personality without character – or spirit)? And “inner healing” remains a big buzzword on the spirituality circuit. The presumption would seem to be that God only loves those who love themselves (cf. managerialism’s “God only helps those who help themselves”), with its corollary that only as we love ourselves can we love others.

9. But this is a formula for the crassest form of works-righteousness, indeed practical atheism (cf. managerialism’s relentless pelagianism), as well as a recipe for spiritual pride – or despair. Or were the Reformers not right that God’s love for us is a free gift that has nothing whatsoever to do with self-feeling or self-construction? Can we not trust that God’s grace is sufficient to all our needs? And have not the great saints taught us that the capacity for love embraces an askesis of self-denial and the experience of woundedness?

10. Writing of the nineteenth century Abbé Marie-Joseph Huvelin, Rowan Williams observes that he “was not what many would call a whole man,” that he “lived with a sense of his own worthlessness almost unrelieved by the hope and assurance he transmitted to so many others.” And the question Williams poses is this: “can we, with our rhetoric of the identity of holiness and wholeness, begin to cope with the ‘sanctity’ of a man whose mental and emotional balance was so limited? A man less than perfectly sane. We do not here have to do simply with the question of the holy fool, but the question – harder for our day – of the holy neurotic.” A question we’d better answer before we sell a great theological heritage and spiritual tradition for a mess of Jungianism.

Ginsberg

Song

By Allen Ginsberg from Collected Poems 1947-1980. © Harper Collins.

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human—

looks out of the heart
burning with purity-
for the burden of life
is love,
but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love—
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
—cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

—must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye—

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

*****
I love the first four stanzas of this poem, then , it's as if time has elapsed, like, years of time. As though another person is writing the rest. The first is luminous, then it gets more jaded, it loses the mood.

Allen Ginsberg , who wrote, "Is it you and I who are pefect and not the next world?"

Homeless

February 6, 2007

No Altar, No Pews, Not Even a Roof, but Very Much a Church

By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 — Homeless off and on since 1991, Rickey Robinson figures he needs to get close to God as often as he can. So on an especially icy Tuesday afternoon, as on many Tuesday afternoons, he bundled himself in a long black coat and joined a small group gathered in a corner of Franklin Square Park, where they prayed, sang a hymn and recited the 23rd Psalm.

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” the men and few women standing in a circle said. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

Some men could not bring themselves to look up from the grass. Others could not stand still. Most are homeless. They sleep at a nearby shelter and spend the daytime, when the shelter is closed, looking for warmth and food. They are the parishioners of Street Church, an outdoor worship service held on Tuesdays by the Church of the Epiphany, a downtown Episcopal parish.

“This gives me strength to deal with things,” Mr. Robinson, 49, said of the service and the meal that follows it. “I think God is with me. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I could survive all this.”

While churches have long provided meals, occasional shelter and indoor worship services for the urban homeless, a small but growing number of congregations now recognize that many homeless people will not attend traditional services indoors. So these congregations now go outdoors to bring church to the homeless and anyone else who happens along.

“When you become homeless, you become very aware of how people treat you,” said the Rev. Anne-Marie Jeffery, who runs Street Church. “It’s hard to walk into a church, and it’s even harder when you are homeless because you’re worried about how you will be received, or if you smell bad. Some people never go inside at all, because they worry that they can lose all their stuff,” as in shopping carts that must be left outside, “or be sent to a mental hospital or to jail.”

Street Church began last February. Though Epiphany keeps its doors open during the day for everyone, and offers breakfast and an indoor service for the homeless on Sundays, the rector, the Rev. Randolph Charles, had wanted to expand into some type of outdoor worship, Ms. Jeffery said. So Mr. Charles met with the Rev. Deborah Little Wyman, another Episcopal priest, who started an outdoor worship mainly for the homeless in Boston 11 years ago and who wanted to find a church in Washington to begin a similar service.

Ms. Wyman, trying to introduce outdoor worship elsewhere as well, says she is working with churches and other groups, about half of them affiliated with the Episcopal Church, in 40 cities in the United States and abroad. Already some such worship is under way in cities including Asheville, N.C.; Atlanta; Cincinnati; Portland, Me.; and San Francisco.

“Our theology is to love and not try to fix them and just to be present where they are,” Ms. Wyman said of the outdoor congregants. “We’re not trying to sell any one theology or denomination.”

If people do ask for help, Street Church, like others that work with Ms. Wyman, refers them to social service agencies. In addition, an outreach worker attends the Sunday indoor breakfast at Epiphany.

A small homemade sign hanging from a shopping cart announces Street Church to people at Franklin Square Park, and volunteers hand out fliers alerting prospective congregants to the service. In the summer, Street Church has drawn 40 or so people, in winter about half that.

The worship service lasts 15 to 20 minutes. People line up for Communion (expect grape juice, not wine) and then lunch on two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches each, along with chips, fruit and water. Office workers sometimes stop by. Street Church volunteers hand out bulletins as they would to congregants at a Sunday service, and stay afterward to eat and talk with whoever shows up.

All this is not without considerable effort. Epiphany must get permits from the city, find and train volunteers, and withstand problems among the homeless that may cause some of them to ask for money, or a stay at someone’s home, or a date, or whose mental illness leads them to threaten and swear. As for the homeless themselves, they must sometimes walk for miles to get to the service. They must brave the weather. They open themselves to strangers and to God.

Billy Ray was sitting out Communion on a park bench the other day. His legs hurt from walking across the city that morning to get to Street Church. He has a hardness to him, which he admits to, but he said he considered the service a blessing.

“I was way out of touch with the Savior,” Mr. Ray said, looking at the Communion line. “This here keeps me in touch. Otherwise I’d be thinking devilish thoughts, and this helps me stay positive.”

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We are fixers and problem solvers.

The thing that I always liked about the Hindu and Buddhist approach is the sense of not judging, not looking down on people, leaving judgment to God. Not that those cultures (especially vis a vis the caste system) were so much better, it's just that their standards of judgement were more invisible to me.

When I visit my family, it makes me more aware of how much I was brought up to judge others constantly. By how they dress, smell, look, talk, so many many measuring sticks. Most of that indoctrination was unconscious, but I still knew. Having no money is hard, hard. Being a subsistance kind of person in a culture with great wealth and plenty where people spend money lavishly can be very anxiety producing.

Needing Some Wisdom

The Abyss

The mind creates the abyss,
and the heart crosses it.

-- Sri Nisargadatta

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Annie Dillard:

If God does not cause everything that happens, does God cause anything that happens? Is God completely out of the loop?

Sometimes God moves loudly, as if spinning to another place like ball lightning. God is, oddly, personal; this God knows. Sometimes en route, dazzlingly or dimly, he shows and edge of himself to souls who seek him, and the people who bear those souls, marveling, know it, and see the skies carousing around them, and watch cells stream and multiply in green leaves. He does not give as the world gives; he leads invisibly over many years, or he wallops for thirty seconds at a time. He may touch a mind, too, making a loud sound, or a mind may feel the rim of his mind as he nears. Such experiences are gifts to beginners. “Later on,” a Hasid master said, “you don’t see these things anymore.” (Having seen, people of varying cultures turn—for reasons unknown, and by a mechanism unimaginable—to aiding and serving the afflicted and poor.)

For The Time Being

******************

Anne Lamott:

I heard Marianne Williamson say once that when you ask God into your life, you think he or she is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a little cleaning – and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch.

Bird by Bird

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Barbara Kingsolver:

I'd like to stake my pride on a nation that consistently inspires rather than bullies, that brings unconditional generosity to the table, and that dispenses justice over the inevitable bad deal with diplomacy and humor rather than with more bad deals. If this were the humane face we showed the world and the model we brought to working with it, every time, I believe our children might eventually be able to manage with a military budget the size of Iceland's.

Small Wonder

Love letter to the world (via Rumi)

We are pain and what cures pain, both.
We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours.
I want to hold you close like a lute,
so that we can cry out with loving.
Would you rather throw stones
at a mirror? I am your mirror
and here are the stones.

-- Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

Who Do You Say I Am?

February 6, 2007

Rickie Lee Jones Receives Some Divine Inspiration

By ALAN LIGHT

“Whatever it is Christ said doesn’t get a fair shake,” Rickie Lee Jones said. On a rainy December day, she was sniffling and coughing, fighting a bad cold and losing. “There’s not much written, it was done 150 years later, and it was used to create an empire. So can we get rid of all that and just see what the guy said?”

Ms. Jones was explaining the premise behind her new album, “The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard,” out today on New West Records. The project is an attempt to explore the words and ideas of Jesus in a contemporary context, backed by the most rocked-up music of her almost-30-year career.

In a taping at Sirius Satellite Radio immediately before Ms. Jones’s interview, the intensity of her relationship to this material was evident. With eyes closed, shoes off and raggedy socks rolled down to her ankles, Ms. Jones sang, gesticulated, directed and cajoled her four-piece band. She started the session crouched in a three-point stance — one fist on the floor, the other clutching a microphone — and proceeded to pace and stalk around the tiny studio, fully possessed by the music.

“Sermon” began in 2005 when Robert Lee Cantelon, a close friend of Ms. Jones’s, organized a recording of various people reading from his book “The Words,” a new translation of everything actually attributed to Jesus in the Bible, published in 1991. When it came time for her to read, she began to sing instead, improvising a complete song; that first, spontaneous take is “Nobody Knows My Name,” the album’s opening track.

“It was a spectacular event for us,” she said. “You don’t usually deliver a song whole, much less live onto tape.”

Ms. Jones set off with this new direction and inspiration, setting unscripted lyrics to the Velvet Underground-derived drones of the band Mr. Cantelon had assembled. Though the songs were all somehow based on the teachings of Jesus, her intention had nothing to do with proselytizing.

“Lee is a devout Christian, and I’m not,” she said, “but I noticed that he won’t say he’s a Christian because people make these assumptions about what kind of person he is. You have these awful preachers, these creepy and terrible people, maligning and distorting the message, so who wants to be associated with that? I wanted to talk about how these people have absconded with these ideas.”

Her approach is varied, sometimes obscure. The song “Where I Like It Best” is an attempt to interpret the Lord’s Prayer “in a new way, in my own language, how it would happen now.” For “Falling Up,” Ms. Jones sings from the perspective of a villager in the crowd during the Sermon on the Mount.

It’s unlikely territory for a woman who shot to fame in 1979 as a beret-topped inheritor of the Beat tradition — the “Duchess of Coolsville,” as she titled a 2005 anthology. Ms. Jones, 52, is also active in liberal politics, maintaining an issues-oriented Web site, furnitureforthepeople.com, in addition to her own site, rickieleejones.com. But she says her beliefs are precisely what fueled “Exposition Boulevard.”

“Prayer in general is used as a kind of secret word for ‘Republican,’ ” she said. “Nobody is really saying, ‘Show me how I can serve and help me find my way’; they’re saying ‘Give me this.’ For the most part, people use God as Santa Claus.”

Before “Exposition Boulevard,” Ms. Jones had released only one album of new material in the last 10 years, concentrating instead on covers of standards and rock classics. She finds the incantatory, churning sound of the album — occasionally reminiscent of the exploratory, hypnotic grooves of Van Morrison or Patti Smith — unsettling but exciting.

“I don’t dig the Velvet Underground myself,” she said, “but I dig being part of a raw force of music. I feel much more comfortable there than in a jazz setting. I’m just too wild to be there.”

Despite her continuing efforts to challenge herself and her work, to most of the world, Ms. Jones will forever be defined by her breakthrough hit, “Chuck E.’s in Love,” which was a Top Five single and led her to a best-new-artist Grammy Award in 1980.

“It was a phenomenon; it was like a Beatle hit,” she said. “And that’s burdensome, because then there was no event that matched that — and how could it? So regular folks out in the world go, ‘Are you still singing?’ And I say: ‘What am I going to do? Go work in a Kmart?’ ”

“As a musician,” she continued, “I’ve accomplished what I hoped to accomplish. I’m respected, I’m still working, what more could I ask? I was walking over here today, and people were holding umbrellas over my head. I thought, this is a good job!”

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So ..... what is a "devout Christian"? We think that we know what that looks like, but that process of what's called euphemistically "conversion" is mysterious and never over. The Gospels seem to have a life of their own, and Orthodoxy that keeps trying to settle things for good is doomed to frustration. The finding is in the flow, the movement, the travel from place to place, age to age. God is on the move, that's for sure. Or at least, that is one way for us to know that we're at least in the ballpark.

The "Word of God" may be the Bible, but what if the Bible is just a signpost, just a clue , left behind and stammering out a few metaphors to hint at what was known and seen. Reading about these songs makes me curious about them. I wonder what the songwriter hears and sees?

Nature and You

I talked to a friend yesterday who is a practitioner of TCM. He said that he took a very expensive course once in TCM and felt that he didn't learn much. But he said that the price of the course was redeemed in the one thing that he did learn. And that was that, in our childbearing years, we are surrounded by a cocoon of chi that protects and nourishes us. I suppose that would be the feeling you have as a teenager that you are immortal, untouchable, that nothing can harm you.

But when the childbearing years are through, that protective cocoon of chi leaves us. As he put it, "Nature is through with us." I thought that that was an interesting metaphor for a feeling. The sense of the coming of our mortality, our mortal self, and what peace we are able to make with that.

What happens , when "Nature is Through With Us"?

From Bob Dylan

Born In Time

In the lonely night
In the shadows of a pale moonlight
I think of you in black and white
When we were made of dreams.
I walk alone through the shakin' street,
I'm a-listenin' to my heart beat
In the record breaking heat
Where we were born in time.

Not one more night, not one more kiss,
Not this time, I'll have no more of this.
It's much too cruel, it's much too cool, way too revealing.
You came, you saw, just like the law
You married young, just like your ma,
Oh babe, how you left me reelin' with this feelin'.
Up on the rising curve
Where the ways of nature will test every nerve,
I held you close and got what I deserve
Where we were born in time.

You pressed me once, pressed me twice,
You hang the flame, but you'll pay the price.
Oh babe, and that fire is still smokin'.
You were snow, you were rain
You were striped, lord and you were plain,
Oh babe, truer words have never been spoken or broken.
In the hills of mystery,
In the foggy web of destiny,
You can have what's left of me,
Where we were born in time.

Prayer

"Any idiot can face a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out."

~Anton Checkhov, Russian writer born Jan 29 in 1860.

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"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography."

Italian filmmaker Frederico Fellini, born on Jan 20 in 1920.

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Prayer of St. Anselm

"There's no end to the publishing of books, and constant study wears you out so you're no good for anything else."

--Ecclesiastes 12:12b, as paraphrased/translated by Eugene Peterson in The Message.


Prayer of Saint Anselm

Lord teach me to seek you and show me yourself
when I look for you.

I cannot seek you unless you show me how;
I cannot find you unless you reveal yourself.

So let me look for you in hope and with longing,
let me long for you as I seek.

But let me find you in love
and love you as I find you.

Peace