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I resolve to treat Asian people as persons from now on.
It was really nice to have Lynton stay Friday Saturday.
I read the first four chapters of Michael King’s Penguin History of New Zealand in my brother James’ bed. So far, it is very excellent.
I think I might attempt to engage the author of the recent Faith in Focus article on twice-a-Sunday church attendance in dialogue.
He enters the tall church alone
and leaves quickly, weeping with visions
of us —
quiet children holding hands against the dark.
Buber says dialogue is the most basic form of thought. Even when we are ‘thinking in our heads’ we are usually (maybe always) talking to an imaginary dialogue partner, practicing to tell someone something.
Thomas Merton said:
If you want to identify me,
ask me not where I live,
or what I like to eat, or
how I comb my hair;
but ask me what I am living for,
in detail, and ask me
what I think is keeping me
from living fully for
the thing I want to live for.
[from Bruderhof]
In an article in C/A Douglas Jones said:
Over a lifetime, the goal is to match our emotional mythologies to the colors of creation, to the color of judgment with which God has dyed every event, person, and thing.
In The Philosophy of Martin Buber I read today of a conversation between Buber and an old man. Said the old man to Buber:
“What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this! All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the injustice that it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear the highest called ‘God’ it sometimes seems almost blasphemous.”
Buber replied:
Yes, it is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. Generations of men have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. The races of men with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their fingermarks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I look to the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby and unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of Him whom the generations of man have honoured and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean Him whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations of men mean. Certainly, they draw characitures and write ‘God’ underneath; they murder one another and say ‘in God’s name’. But when all madness and delusions fall to dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say ‘He, He’ but rather sigh ‘Thou’, shout ‘Thou’, all of them the one word, and then they add ‘God’, is it not the real God whom they all emplore, the One Living God, the God of the children of men? Is it not He who hears them? And just for this reason is it not the word ‘God’ the word of appeal, the word which has become a name, consecrated in all languages for all times? … We cannot cleanse the word ‘God’ and we cannot make it whole; but defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”
And then:
The old man stood up, came over to me, laid his hand on my shoulder and spoke: “Let us be friends”. The conversation was completed. For where two or three are truly together, they are together in the name of God.
Gomez was neat. They’re a really talented bunch. Good showmen, tight harmonies, really interesting rhythms and they rocked quite hard. Starlight Ballroom is a stinky venue though; too big, bad sound system and sticky floor.
What do people think of Peugots? The 106, 206, 306 range. Any horror stories? Any super amazing experiences? Should I ever consider buying one?
I’m thinking Radiohead’s Life in a Glass House is Adbusters in a bottle.
The other day a friend told me that New Zealand currently has 60 troops in Iraq, and Australia has 90 (though it has many more in the surrounding countries). I had the impression that we are pretty much neutral in this particular conflict, while Australia is fully on-side with America, but if those figures are accurate, we are three times more committed (per capita) than the Aussies.
My favourite contemporary apocalyptic prophet, in this week’s update [naughty words]:
Michael Moore gives me the chills and the creeps. I see America’s future in his ponderous, slovenly, lurching figure, stalking congressmen with his video camera and his childish rhetorical questions. I see a nation of feckless, clueless overfed crybabies building up to tantrum.
Thinking about the ‘principalities & powers’ in Ephesians 6 before going to sleep the other night, I realised I’d forgotten the previous bit ‘we don’t wrestle against flesh & blood’. And I wonder if it’s fair to paraphrase Paul thusly: We’re not fighting individuals, the people on the street. They are to a large extent pawns in larger systems of evil, and it’s the systems that need to be battled.
I have two (2) Gmail invitations left. Sing out if you’d like one.
My nose used up one (1) whole toilet roll a square at a time yesterday.
For those who don’t take part in the ridiculous Ford vs. Holden battle:
I have read mixed reports about TX5s like this. Feel free to judge and comment from past experiences/rumours/hearsay etc.
In an excellent sermon [Real Audio or MP3], Brian McLaren points out that the Hebrew word shamar is found in both the following passages, and translated ‘keep’. I would say that this is significant. Our relationship with creation is analagous to God’s with us.
Numbers 6 –
The Lord bless you and keep you;
the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
Genesis 2 -
The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.
If you like, help me write a glorious poem.
I start:
I ran aground on the sandbar of your love,
Rest homes for old people and car parks for churches are similarly abominable.
UPDATE: I don’t say cars are similarly abominable. I say of all places/times, surely a church service should be a small picture of ‘how things ought to be’, God’s will done on earth according to the pattern of heaven. Presumably the gathering of God’s people on Sundays is the symbolic high point of the week – we have a chance to slow down, plan it ahead of time, think about how this time will direct coordinate focus the rest of our lives.
Thank you all very much for your contributions to this post and all the others too, I appreciate you all, and I’m not just having a laugh.
From Lamentations 3:
For men are not cast off by the Lord forever.
Though he brings grief, he will show compassion,
so great is his unfailing love.
For he does not willingly bring affliction
or grief to the children of men.
Wednesday I went to Richie’s ENGL 249 “Special Topic: Creating and Destroying Worlds in Children’s Fantasy” lecture on CS Lewis’ life. It was great. The lecturer (who described himself as a ‘pious agnostic’) obviously really likes Lewis. He mentioned something interesting: CSL used to debate and win against all comers at The Socratic Club until he met his match, a Catholic woman who was a follower of Wittgenstein. Lewis, defeated, apparently gave up debating and argument as a means of proving Christianity, and turned to story instead. This is approximately when he started writing the Narnia series.
Said Thomas Merton
The importance of detachment from things, the importance of poverty, is that we are supposed to be free from things that we might prefer to people. Wherever things have become more important than people, we are in trouble. That is the crux of the whole matter.
(in a recent Daily Dig)
Said Fyodor Dostoevsky:
At some thoughts one stands perplexed—especially at the sight of men’s sin—and wonders whether one should use force or humble love. Always decide to use humble love. If you resolve on that, once and for all, you may subdue the whole world. Loving humility is marvelously strong, the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.
Every day and every hour, every minute, walk around yourself and watch yourself, and see that your image is a seemly one. If you pass by a little child, and pass by spitefully, with ugly words or wrathful heart, you may not notice the child, but he will see you, and your image, unseemly and ignoble, may remain in his defenseless heart. You may not know it, but you may have sown an evil seed in him, and it may grow, all because you were not careful before the child, because you did not foster in yourself an active, benevolent love.
Brothers, love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is hard to acquire; it is dearly bought; it is won by slow, long labor. We must love not only occasionally, or for a moment, but for ever. Everyone, even the wicked can love occasionally…
[via dd]
I can’t find my notebook. This is distressing as approximately 40% of life is in there, my vegetal memory.
Doves song Far From Grace by itself is worth the $24.95 for the Lost Sides b-sides & remixes 2-CD set.
The notebook came back by some anonymous angel’s efforts, huzzah!
I’ve just finished the Archbishop of Canterbury‘s book Lost Icons. It was worthwhile. Quite esoteric language, but perhaps that is necessary when making the kind of sytem-wide critiques of ‘North Atlantic society’ that he does. He concludes the book with the following:
The ‘lost icons’ of this book have been clusters of convention and imagination, images of possible lives or modes of life, possible positions to occupy in a world that is inexorably one of time and loss. But as the discussion has developed, it has hinted more and more at a single, focal area of lost imagination, what I have called the lost soul. And this loss, I’ve suggested is inextricably linked with the loss of what is encoded in actual icons of Christian tradition and usage – the Other who does not compete, with whom I don’t have to and can’t bargain; the Other beyond violence, the regard that will not be evaded or deflected, yet has and seeks no advantage. What has been culturally lost, the sense of being educated into adult choice, the possibility (tantalisingly both political and more political) of social miracle, active appropriation of a common good, the possibility of letting go of a possessed and defended image of the moral self, abstractly free, self-nuturing – all this will remain lost without a recovered confidence in the therapeutic Other, not ‘there’ for examination, for contest, even for simple consolation; so hard to say anything about without risking the corruption of the consolatory voice. But sometimes, whatever the risk, we have to force ourselves to talk, not of consolation but of hope, of what is not or cannot be lost. We can choose death, but we don’t have to. What we are present to is neither created nor extinguished by our will. The iconic eye remains wakeful.
I saw the second half of Troy a couple of weeks ago on pirated DVD. I really liked it. The fight between Achilles and that other guy outside the city walls was choice. I even liked Achilles’ wee speech (“the gods envy us”) to his really pretty girlfriend.
Suzuki RAN, ’90, 50cc, just had exhaust system cleaned and choke fixed, red, cool ‘retro’ shape. “A real goer”. Offers welcome.
Woot! all food poisioning or whatever it was is gone and I am going to work SO HARD today.
This site, although not on the same deep philosophical level as many of the other links referred to on this blog, is nevertheless good for understanding a few of the Psalms. In fact, for my tired brain it was refreshingly simple.
Aaron and I went to Richie’s CS Lewis lecture this afternoon. Today Harry Ricketts focused on The Last Battle. Very stimulating again. I was particularly struck (between the eyes, even) when he read a quotation featuring the stable which is bigger on the inside, and Lucy mentions a stable in our world that once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world. That bit had always seemd a bit trite and obvious to me in the past, but today it hit me that we are living in the Narnia world, everything that’s true in the books is at least as true here. So the books are bigger on the inside too.
“Love for God that does not result in Christian education for Christian children is not love for Him at all”
- Douglas Wilson, The Case For Classical Christian Education
Paul Graham, in Taste for Makers said:
Strangely enough, if you want to make something that will appeal to future generations, one way to do it is to try to appeal to past generations. It’s hard to guess what the future will be like, but we can be sure it will be like the past in caring nothing for present fashions. So if you can make something that appeals to people today and would also have appealed to people in 1500, there is a good chance it will appeal to people in 2500.
[via Psybertron]
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