mccarthyism

I’m working through T. F. Torrance’s “Trinitarian Faith” for a class. Really wonderful. Historical, evangelical, creedal, plenty of Barth but with a strong natural theology. He writes theology with reverence, dignity and great care, which accords with his own discussion of lex orandi, lex credendi. Nothing else would do. “We have to decide what we ourselves say of the truth under the direction of the biblical statements, and how we are to formulate our statements in such a way that they are established as true through their adequacy to the truth itself. This involves what Athanasius called a ‘freedom of religious discourse’ on the basis of the Holy Scriptures when we pass beyond what they literally say to the truth of God which they convey, and seek to express that as accurately and precisely as we can. And we dare not do that except in the most cautious and reverent way and with much prayer.” I wonder sometimes how a lot of the current popular theology can be constructive at all, with its poor writing and slovenly presentation. Do they think it doesn’t matter?  “At bottom,” Lewis says, “every ideal of style dictates not only how we should say things but what sort of things we may say.”

Outside it’s cool but not cold, slate gray and very still, with all the leaves down and the branches craggy against the sky. No one is out in the streets. It’s a very, very quiet afternoon. At church this morning we were both pretty quiet, too, sunk deep in our own thoughts, and after the service we sat with Aiden and didn’t talk much. Sometimes it’s such a chore. When we got home we played with Aiden on the floor for a long time without saying much to each other. He was very happy and kept smiling and laughing and touching our faces. The service was beautiful, even more than usual, and I wasn’t thrown off even by the man singing off-tune and too loud just behind me, or by the songs I didn’t care for.

Something from Lee Bozeman, again. He says things the way I'd like to say them.

I’m playing music again, with Ryan, Nate and Phil. Good and loud, lots of energy, fairly mindless. Grinderman and the Stooges. Not the kind of drums I’m used to playing, so I keep it simple and hopefully don't hold everybody back too much. It’s a real thrill to play again, after thinking I probably never would, and to feel the wall of noise and hear the ringing in your ears. Put some more miles on the drumset. They’re good guys and good fun. Not the same vision or vibe that Contrail had, but then there will never be another Contrail, not for me anyway. Certainly less stressful than Contrail got to be at times. Obviously I'm biased.

I'm not real happy with this but I did work darn hard on it. I should say that a couple lines are lifted from Lee Bozeman, the “moving leaves” and the thunderclap being a "gorgeous sound" in particular. I couldn't think of a better way to say it.


“Glorious Appearing”
One morning, just at dawn I had a sense
And turned, felt the air shimmer
Turned quick to the lightness, the moving leaves.

Then felt the tremor ebb and the air’s inertia flag,
Saw only wind waving the branches,
Only sun on the table, oblong beside the flowerpot,
Pooling on the linoleum, and opening
The chrysanthemums on their stems.

Do you always move through ether,
Filter through interstices and greenness of leaves?
Do you move by bending waves
By suspended particles refracting
Through rays angling in space?

A storm at twilight, the air heavy
It threatened and broke, a revelation
Strong thrills of light and green darkness
The fat wet drops and the thunder clapping,
That gorgeous sound
And afterward, mauve-gauze blue and hazy
I felt the tremor subsiding and the light returning,
A mackerel sky, like a beach at low tide.
The cloud wrack moved away.
 
I made sure it was you
Who permeates all space,
Whose vibrations are light

We’ve been listening to some of Beethoven’s music for cello and piano. Very beautiful. The strings and piano doing such different things, like two different songs at once. Sudden bursts of volume and then falling back, but all carefully controlled, unhurried and regular. I’d like to listen to more classical music, but I don’t have the head for it it seems. It takes a lot of focus and time, and you’ve got to know some musical theory, some history and background. It could be a really engrossing hobby. Maybe when I get older.

It’s a beautiful summer afternoon in Highwood, hot and still. I roasted coffee this morning with Seth at Newport for a few hours before lunch. Just walked up to Poeta’s Market for some drinks and to get out for a little. It was very quiet. A north shore woman was buying Italian pastrami and blade loin at the deli. Outside she got into a black Lexus and drove south on Green Bay, toward Highland Park. Five or six Hispanic kids came past talking in Spanish in high voices and drinking bottled water. They smiled at me and I smiled back. Burchell Avenue was completely quiet with no cars or people walking except me. Jenni and Aiden were still napping in the bedroom when I came back in, and Beethoven was still playing.

Here are a few lines from Hopkins that I found yesterday, about art and fame, which pertain to what I wrote before. “Fame whether won or lost is a thing which lies in the award of a random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust judge, the public, the multitude. The only just judge, the only just literary critic, is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more the receiver himself can, the gifts of his own making. And the only real good which fame and another’s praise does is to convey to us, by a channel not at all above suspicion but from circumstances in this case much less to be suspected than the channel of our own minds, some token of the judgment which a perfectly just, heedful, and wise mind, namely Christ’s, passes upon our doings. Now such a token may be conveyed as well by one as by many.”

Hopkins burned all his poems when he became a Jesuit, and resolved “to write no more, as not belonging to my profession.” Very hard to understand. The priesthood seems to me very amenable to writing poetry, and if anyone was aware of that, I would have thought it was Hopkins. On the day he burned them, May 11, 1868, his journal entry is, “Dull; afternoon fine. Slaughter of the innocents.” A funny way of putting it. A fine afternoon, a column of smoke, and the innocents slaughtered. Maybe he was right, though. It’s all worthless in the end, all inadequate and grasping. Anyway I’m far too in love with what few things I’ve written to admit to myself that it’s really all rubbish.

For seven years he didn’t write anything, and then only started again at the behest of his Father superior. His poetry was passed among friends, but he begged them not to publish it. It’s hard to imagine all the time and effort spent on those poems without any thought of publishing them. He was afraid they’d be misunderstood. It’s only through his friends that we have these, and they were published only after he died. The joy was in doing a thing well. “For Christ plays in ten thousand places/Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his/To the Father through the features of men’s faces.” It’s easier to burn all your poems when you aren’t preoccupied with their being read and praised. It was whom they praised, and He had already seen them all. It’s a very foreign way to think about your writing, but an honest one, and once you see it it’s evident all through his poetry. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” said the Preacher, and St. Paul wrote, “I count everything as loss…”

Summer is winding down, and we’ve moved into a new place, in Highwood. Much more pleasant, with light blue walls, wood floors and air conditioning. The baby is laughing now, and rolling over. He’s very happy most of the time. It’s still hot but not too hot. I have a lot of work to finish up for my summer courses this week and I’m feeling the motivation ebb and sputter. Sort of dreading the next year for that reason, and wondering often what’s next. I think we’ll stay here for a while longer, at least while Jenni finishes her nursing program.

“To Christ our Lord.”

“By Its White Light May I Find True The Place”

A cold coming, and a bright star to guide
(At times I've lost it, but it sailed again in the clear)
By its white light may I find true the place
In the company of angels, or the lowing of the kine
For I've a gift to bring
Harmed and hurt by my own clumsy hands
(Wrapped in my own tired arms)

It was still pretty early on after they started dating that he took her upstairs in the old West building. It was a room behind a lawyer’s office on Doyle Street that his band rented for a practice space. The lawyer’s name was Jon West and his office was downtown. You went in a green door, and up a tall cement stairway painted green. The band had to carry all their gear up and down the stairway every time they played a show. At the top of the stairway there was a narrow hallway leading left, with dark wood paneling, ugly orange carpet and a musty smell. Mr. West’s offices were to the left, at the front of the building. Past his offices the hall turned right again, leading back into the building, and to the back rooms that Mr. West rented to the band for practice space. Before his band there had been another band, a much better one, and he always remembered coming to their practices with his brother when they were in high school. That back hallway and the rooms to either side always held a strange and inexplicable meaning for him, even after the other band had left and he and his friends had rented them for years.

The room had a long couch and chair, both brown plaid, that his brother had picked up from beside a dumpster. It had a small desk with a computer, which they used to record – he had also used it to write papers for college very late at night. On the paneled walls were several colored throw blankets hanging over egg-crate foam to deaden the sound. There were a few show posters, some watercolor color charts and an old painted window hanging from a nail above the couch. The real window, facing opposite, looked out over the kind of old and untidy parking lot you typically find behind storefronts in small Southern towns. At the end of the hallway a door opened on a rusty metal fire escape that led down to the parking lot. Taking breaks from practice they would sit out on the little stoop at the top and watch the summer nights fall. Past the parking lot were train tracks, and when the trains came through the snares would buzz.

Except during practices the room was quiet and oddly peaceful. He used to think it had something to do with its being on the second story. It had a musty smell from the old carpet. It was a very small Southern town, and few people came downtown even during the day.

He brought her up on a late summer evening, after classes had started. They took some books to read for class, and some Cokes for the minifridge. There was no air conditioning, and the box fan only blew the heat around. He put some music on on the computer and for maybe two hours they read, sometimes chatting shyly or complaining about the heat. They sat on the couch with the Cokes sweating in their hands and the summer dusk falling outside the window, and they both felt very happy and content.

After a couple of hours it was really dark outside and they were finished with what reading they had come to do, but they didn’t want to leave. The West building was dark and very quiet around them. Two desk lamps shone up on the walls, the music kept playing and the fan blew across the room. Without thinking he put his arm around her shoulders and felt a hot shudder pass through his body. After a moment she wrapped her small right hand around his side and they sat there without moving for a long time. On the computer the music changed from song to song, and a train passed by outside, buzzing the snares.

Driving her back to campus he was shaking. Neither of them spoke. He kept feeling he should say that he was sorry, but he couldn’t really think why. When he dropped her at her dorm he meant to tell her something but the words stuck, and she said “Goodnight,” and went inside before he realized what he had meant to say.

Last week we went down into the city to see Low in Millennium Park. It probably wasn’t the best place to hear them, in the open air, with so many people coming and going. They were terrific, though. “The price is too much, but it’s nothing to us. My love is for free, my love.” As good a new song as I’ve heard in a long time. Low, Low, Low. Minimalism and understatement, a deep sense of mystery. Beautiful voices and indie rock. All my favorite things, in other words.

Aiden is 10 weeks old now, although it feels like he’s been here a lot longer than that. I’m still not sure what to make of it all. He’s a pretty good-natured little guy but he does keep his brow furrowed a lot of the time. There’s a Luxury song that says:

I would that I were made new
The scars on my belly undo
And the blood that I have in my veins
Could be mine and not stranger unnamed
Cause I once was perfect as you
Pink-skinned and full-flaming youth

I think that does a good job of getting at the seriousness of it, the grave sense of responsibility and of his being mine, my own flesh. The inevitable scarring and spoiling will happen to him just like everyone else, and I’ll be largely at fault. “Pink-skinned and full-flaming youth.” And then a blood transfusion.

I’ve been trying to write more but I mostly just throw it away. Trying to write some stories. I have some ideas but they haven’t gone anywhere yet. When they do you’ll be the first to know.

I’m listening to Orient Is His Name again, and thinking about the distance between the life the Church offers, and life as it persistently is. It’s a recurring theme in his writing and one I’ve thought about quite a bit myself.

I would like to end all this darkness
All the time my mind is filled with it
But I am a child of light and not death
I am a Son of God
Hear this! Hear this!

or,

But I am this way, I am this way
I’ll wear the cassock and I'll take the name

I like the way he presents the Christian symbols, as universal verities, but at a respectful distance. Too often modern writers re-appropriate them for their own purposes, or piggyback on the sense of “mystery” they convey. Or else Christian writers use them too confidently or with too much familiarity. What you don’t often get is this good respectful distance, accepting them as true realities but realizing that we can apprehend them only gradually, only with great effort, and never completely.

It’s disconcerting, that distance. And repeating the truths to yourself, or pondering the imagery, doesn’t always help, or shake you from whatever rut you’re in. This morning at the Eucharist, going forward with the congregation, I was repeating to myself the confession, and reminding myself how badly I needed this, how beautiful and true it was. The most beautiful and the most true thing. But I was still angry, and self-absorbed. I still felt very wronged. It was still distant even as I ate it and drank it. We participate in realities we don’t comprehend, or comprehend only very little, and it takes courage or even audacity to do that.

Thought about my brother again during the prayers, as I always do, and at the end of the service while singing about light and mercy. "Let not my doubt and my darkness speak to me." He never returns my letters, which is fine. But he’s so far away; I never know quite what to write. My parents say he’s been depressed but doesn’t want medication. He’s unsure about the next step. They get to visit once a month and it’s always pretty traumatic for them. He's been through things I can't imagine - how long do you keep striving before you give in? But even as I think it I'm implicated in it. It's the same distance, for him a little further maybe. Kyrie eleison.

I had a conversation with an old lit professor recently about free verse and form in poetry. He insisted that free-form poetry isn’t art, or at least is seriously wanting as such. A little frustrating, and eventually the discussion got pretty circular. But he has a point and hopefully I’m not too stubborn to take his hint. I’ve decided to push myself harder in that direction. Art as discipline is a fairly foreign concept these days, and I think we suffer the consequences more than we’d care to admit. But oof. It’s hard enough to write at all, even without further restrictions.

Bundled up like the Michelin man tonight against -4 temps, coming down with the flu I fear, headed for the library to start working on yet another exegetical paper. To which I say ‘Uncle’ already. It's not that I don't value exegesis, but I think that its constant emphasis could be balanced by a little more guidance in critical method, historical theology, systematics. By itself it can get a little overweening. Turning us loose in the library time after time with just a few commentaries and word studies is frankly a little scary, especially considering how poorly most of us learn our Greek. Also considering that many of our Biblical survey courses consist largely of the professors preaching their own convictions. I’ve been in Biblical studies for nearly six years now – shouldn’t I feel more adequate to this? Probably I’m just projecting… I am taking a course in contemporary theology this semester, and it’s refreshing to learn once in a while the kinds of things I’d hoped to be learning all along.

Not doing what I’d intended to do here academically. I probably should have done an MA, but I didn’t know at the outset that an M.Div would overlap so much with my college degree. They told me it was the requisite degree for students wanting to do academic work in theology. It’s a little disheartening. But now it’s too late to switch without spending another year: not worth it, especially since I don’t think I’ll ever be going further in theology. The future is a blank. I’d love to do literature but it still feels pretty restrictive of other dreams, other potentials. Jenni and I are expecting a baby in late April. She’s due on Easter Sunday in fact. We’re very pleased, though it does seem like a bit much sometimes. “Too much at once,” Matt would say.

“Though I fall I’m safest here” And oh, and oh…

Listening:
Slowdive: Souvlaki
Slowdive: Pygmalion
The Beatles: White Album, Revolver, Abbey Road

Light leavings from my treasures I lift
Nor too heavy for my arms
Sluggish, I raise them in symbol of gratitude
Passion and dispassion
Toward the bloody spectacle
And sing heaven weightless in my gut

How will I remember this
Six days from now, when weight too grim
Though feather-light to thee
Bears through me its sad child
And my chained distraction unencumbers?
Could I not have offered
Some small treasure-trinket
Dumbly and divinely leaping,
If only by command,
And if only to fall again, twice as heavily?
And my wife heavy with child
(I feel the weight of it in my own belly too)
Could I not lift her burden skyward
And meet it lighter, on Easter day?
See what weights hang on our legs
What thrust and force I cannot raise
Nor inertia overcome

Who tells us sin takes us up
And swings us sunwise
From sin unfettered

Some overambitious and cheeky poetry for ya, with too many exclamation points. Ripped mostly from Dostoyevsky. The ideas seem a little simple and sententious to me, but I like the imagery. In the future I should maybe let it speak for itself a little more. In any case…

Lovely fall weather we’ve been having, and my motivation is at low ebb. The colors have never seemed so bright, fiction so engrossing, music so snappy, and academic reading so unappealing. You see my problem.

Music:
Sun Kil Moon: April
Slowdive: Souvlaki
Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence

"At Ilyusha's Funeral"

The Captain:
I remember he said to me:
“Father, when my grave is filled up
Crumble a crust of bread over it,
So that the birds will alight above me,
And when I hear them, they will cheer me up.”

Alyosha:
What a wonderful idea! We must remember
To scatter breadcrumbs over his grave often.

The Captain:
Every day, every day! I will not forget!
From the sleep of death may he hear them,
Hear their light scratchings and the beating
Of their wings: swiftly may the earth
Carry its gentle message down
By vibrations: may it be like a tuning fork,
Like a struck fork may the earth carry it down to him.
Come, fly down, birds! Fly down, sparrows!

Alyosha:
Like the wings of the mother hen shall their wings
Be to him, who gathers her brood beneath her.
Like the wings of a mother hen, softly beating
The quiet earth.

The Captain:
May it carry faithfully its message!
Let not its hardness betray my son, or leave him
Alone in the darkness, in the silence six feet down.
For it is not all hardness and indifference.

Alyosha:
No – it feels and vibrates, it groans in travail
With your son. It waits with him in eager longing.
It will not betray him, though it is hard.
Have I not myself lain upon it and kissed it?
Have I not watered it with my tears?
For if we fall to the earth in weakness
We are raised in strength. So shall he be raised.

The Boys:
Father, when our graves are filled up
Crumble thy bread upon them, and
Come! fly down, birds! Fly down, sparrows!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!

Jenni woke me up this morning all excited about some baking she wanted to do. She had about four different things she wanted to try and was on her way out to the store to pick up some things she’d need. Not really a bad way to start the morning. Domestic excitement. The cooler weather is here, with the accompanying air of excitement and energy coming in the open windows. It was ten so I thought it was a good time to get up. I had some oatmeal and tea and watched a trailer online for the new Belle and Sebastian record. Very invigorating. People out there being creative, chasing their ideas down, getting things done. Their new album sounds very promising by the way. There’s no more indie hip band out there than Belle and Sebastian… and they do it by being pretty doofy.

So now Jenni’s pirouetting around the kitchen making breads and whoopie pies while I sit on the couch getting up my motivation to do some work. We had “The Fellowship Of The Ring” on earlier, a cassette version of some old British guy reading it. I like it quite a bit, and on nice cool mornings it’s just the thing. It was the “flight to the ford” part. I always like the travelogues best. Something about the mundanity, the suggestion of all those hours spent just walking, the changing terrain, pending danger.

Had a long social day yesterday. Worked early, then church, and lunch with church folk. Went to Jeff’s in the afternoon for beer and more church society. Listened to baseball on the radio driving to get Jenni from work, and went to the Greeners to watch Inspector Lewis. Pleasant but tiring. Wrote to Muffy last night, told him all the big news. I think about him quite a bit, and hope he’s doing well.

“Though I fall I’m safest here”


Watching:
Mogwai “Burning” Sweet Lord…

Listening:
Mogwai “Hawk is Howling”
Sun Kil Moon “Tiny Cities"
Sun Kil Moon “Ghosts of the Great Highway”
Starflyer 59 “Play the C Chord”

from 6.17.10

It’s summertime in Chicago and beautiful down in the city. Heard Vivaldi in Millennium Park this evening. "The Four Seasons" on a wide lawn strewn with picnickers, with their expensive cheese and champagne. Classy. You can’t beat a beautiful woman playing Vivaldi on a ten-thousand dollar violin. With the high cumulus, the skyscrapers behind the amphitheater, the lake breezes. The crush of happy people. We ate hot dogs and read the program. I talked with a Polish woman who told me she’d travelled to five continents but Chicago was still the most beautiful city in the world. I don’t believe it for a second, but hey, it was Vivaldi. Maybe she got a little carried away. We walked through the gardens in the dusk, under the giant reflective arch, and looked off a wide terrace down madison avenue, colonnaded with lamps in the busy dusk. Down the streets marked off with blinking hands and painted pavement, past skyscrapers full of big business – then the station, Waugh on the gliding train. And so home.

Reading:
Evelyn Waugh "Brideshead Revisited"
Dostoyevsky "The Brothers Karamazov"

Listening:
Starflyer 59: Dial M, Everybody Makes Mistakes, Silver
My Bloody Valentine: Ecstasy and Wine
Orient Is His Name: Hidden Mansions

Finished “Brideshead Revisited” and liked it quite a bit. It’s always good to read someone who is at least thinking about the right things. There were some really lovely passages and I was touched by the ending in particular. Beyond some general abstractions though I’m not quite sure what to make of it. I’ll have to do some more thinking and read up on him some more. A good writer to know. Read his “Man Who Liked Dickens” too last night and it reminded me of Flannery O’Connor in its bizarreness and monstrosity. Those Catholics…

Apparently Eliot wrote this to a friend in 1931, shortly after his conversion. “I have [Beethoven’s] A Minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly or at least more than human gaiety about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.” And the Four Quartets were structurally modeled on Beethoven’s later string quartets. Something I didn’t know. Makes you want to hear the A Minor Quartet, and read the Quartets. I’ve read them several times and I still feel like I’m getting about 1/17th of it. So perfect though. It makes good sense that it was patterned after a piece of music, and that Eliot described it the way he did. He isn’t just writing about ideas, there’s music there: tone, quality, vibe. Good vibrations. “All manner of thing shall be well/When the tongues of flame are in-folded/Into the crowned knot of fire/And the fire and the rose are one.”

I like Starflyer 59 more and more. I’ve been dosing myself pretty heavily this summer, especially with “Dial M.” I like the way he talks about his faith, with simple courage. The true indie rock in fact. I also appreciate the clarity and simplicity of the production, and his voice and the melodies and the way they complement – or embody – what he means. Very listenable, and I’m a real sucker for that. You can have your long boring post rock that I’m not hip enough to suffer through. You can have it all. Sing to me, use words that mean something.

I’m trying to do better with my reading this summer and thinking with growing seriousness about switching gears after TEDS and doing something in English Literature. Not sure where I could get with my specs...I’d enjoy it a lot more anyway. I’m not sure how heavily that ought to weigh in the scales. Jenni still wants to go overseas and it’s something to consider. Just thinking. You only live once.

Things are not that bad
You know we had a hell of a dad
This is what we need
To live out all the love that we read

This ain't no new kinda story

The Tall Liatris

Reading Housman late into the evening,
My wife asleep, the false bugbane, the white
Camas on the table, wilting

The ashy sunflower in a mug beside
Old magazines. Morrissey
Looks approvingly down from the wall

Who said, “Take me out tonight” and
“The pleasure and the privilege is mine,”
Meaning the same, more or less

As “About the woodlands I will go” –
Who liked Housman, liked his cherry
Hung with snow.

Who understood it, like I do, like my sleeping
Wife understands it. Driving to church,
Or sitting alone in the living room

In the late afternoon light.
Like we all understand it, like my
Brother, drawing to pass the time

Better pictures than I’ll ever draw,
Taking pleasure in things a way
I’ll never take: having (you might say)

Nothing more beyond. I found some harebell
And tall liatris, up behind the baseball fields
Between I-295 and Route 22,

Their tiny, sticky leaves opening to spring.
Shaking against the blue sky I
Found them, brought them home –

Found them incongruous, but made
A home for them on the kitchen table
On checked and soiled cloth.

Some find amid such beauty only
Empty pleasure, an end in itself.
I’m left to find amid such emptiness

Sticky green leaves, the tall liatris shaking,
The harebell tender, thin green and blue,
Wilting against checked cloth.

Oh I’ll pick them again, and again,
As many times as I must –
I’ll find them again, now I know where they are.

I threw myself down on the ground,
Weeping I embraced it.
I kissed it like Alyosha.

I’ve been reading Singer and thinking about the moral life of the Jew. On the whole I think we’ve failed in piety, in self-discipline. I know I have. “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gate.” Someone recently asked me if Americans were taken from their native country and scattered across the globe how long did I think we would remain recognizable as Americans? The Jews have lasted two thousand years. I think these verses are the reason why. Of course they haven’t always or even often been truly pious, of course there is the tendency toward empty ritualism. But piety has become a bad word for us Christians. Any moral stricture is immediately regarded with suspicion as legalism. Speaking for myself, and for most of my friends: we need it. The flesh is weak. If you give it a few minutes it will take hours, days. And time is precious. My body needs a schedule, my mind needs paths to walk in. There is an admirable heritage of monasticism, of rigorous self-mortification in Christian history but we’ve forgotten it, or we disregard it. We’ve done it to my own personal detriment I’m afraid.

Reading “The Slave” I came across this lovely paragraph: “He continued to walk. How strange and feeble was man. Surrounded on every side by eternity, in the midst of powers, angels, seraphim, cherubim, arcane worlds and divine mysteries, all he could lust for was flesh and blood. Yet man’s smallness was no less a wonder than God’s greatness.”

We’re attending an Anglican church now, of the Anglican Mission in America, and it’s a good place to be. We’ve celebrated Lent, the first time I ever really did, and now a beautiful succession of services during Holy Week culminating, in a few hours, in Easter morning. I've found the Anglicans to be in a good position to draw on the best of several traditions without slavish traditionalism, and I’m glad we’ve found a place that strikes a good balance. Typical of such places most of us didn’t grow up in Anglican or even liturgical traditions. Well, it makes for a renewed vigor, and a certain amount of liturgical shyness. Not necessarily a bad thing.

Reading:
Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Slave
Dostoyevsky: The Brothers Karamazov
Old Testament text criticism, sheesh

Listening to:
Starflyer 59: Everybody Makes Mistakes
Sixpence None The Richer: Self-Titled, Divine Discontent. I forgot all about this delightful band for the last few years, nice to rediscover them
Sonic Youth: Sonic Nurse, Rather Ripped, Daydream Nation
Contrail, finally got the demo of what we recorded last February in Blacksburg from Matt, man do I miss it.

may the sun that rises, yellow, in comfort stay
and green these costly seeds, and all i say

and if i’ve things to do and they’ve nothing to do with you
then tie to my neck the stone that i first threw

9:15 on Monday morning. Woke up at half-past six to take Jenni in to work determined not to just fall back in bed when I got home. Took a shower and passed the time since with music and coffee, the early morning stillness. Heard the Great Lake Swimmers and put off making up my mind about them. Then I put this on, a mix of Dead Meadow and the new Lee Bozeman stuff, which I’ve definitely made up my mind about. Spot fucking on. Read Updike, “Rabbit Is Rich.” Getting on towards the end. I have a long day ahead today, with a fair amount of work to do, mostly Hebrew. I don’t actually mind it all that much, once I get started. It’s getting started that’s the hard part.

Updike is a little darker than my own personal experience but all the more real for that. I was never quite satisfied with my reading of him, I never quite feel like I’m getting it. I mean it’s realistic fiction, realism, which I lean heavily toward in my own tastes. The meaning implicit in the mundane, lit up by subtlety, turns of phrase, beautiful prose. It’s all right up my alley taste-wise. But what is actually meant? He seems just too essentially cynical at bottom. I don’t care if he did have Barth’s commentary on Romans on his bedside table. What’s the point in weighing down so heavily, in such a bleak outlook? A great faith in honesty, I guess you could say, honest prose is it’s own excuse for being. But behind that you wonder how honest he’s actually being. Of course the critics rave. It’s just the kind of stuff they would rave about. Christianity buried so deep in cynicism and “reality” you can barely tell it’s there if it is at all. Ok fine I know there’s a lot there, a lot going on, all the modern motifs of stasis and self-love, perversion, stupefaction. The alienation of the lower-class male, cowardice and blind instinct. But how great can an essentially static novel be? That’s the question, I guess. You do feel it pretty deeply at times. I often wonder about that third person in the room in the first novel, when the baby drowns. That was beautiful, really lovely, the hardest-hitting passage of all. It ached. I guess at bottom there’s a lot of me still old-fashioned, which still likes things more cut and dried, like Solzhenitsyn or Tolkien. My life is already fractured and static enough, I don’t need Updike to tell me. I need someone to help me sort it out, to transcend.

Oh the long winter. I’m actually a little disappointed though, there’s not as much snow and it’s not really as cold as I expected. I wish we lived in Canada. I mean if I’m going to live in the “north” I want real snow, short days, bleak landscapes, the works. And then the payoff, the heightened relief and beauty of April. Here it’s suburban sprawl, temperatures in the thirties and only a few inches on the ground. Mediocre all around.

I miss my family, so badly sometimes I can’t focus on anything else. It saps my motivation to work. No one understands you like your brothers and sisters. No one else “gets it.” Here I’m in the long slow process of forging a new family, a new identity. It’s a strange feeling. I feel like I’m working just for the future, putting daily little deposits in an account I won’t access for years to come: my own family, distinct from my parents’ and yet not. I don’t feel it much, yet; my loyalties are still in Toccoa, Georgia. My little brother is still in jail, my mom cries on the phone. A long long eight hundred miles.

Been a while since I’ve written anything, anything at all really, aside from papers. I used to do a good rambling journal entry about once or twice a week in college and for a while had them all stockpiled in the drafts folder of my TFC email account – a funny place to keep them I’m aware, and in the end a bad one because TFC switched its email server and they were all gone. Four year’s worth of random angsty embarrassing college age stream-of-consciousness, touching on rocknroll, girls, Greek class and good times. It’s a pity, because I’d like to look back over them, relive the memories. I’d likely like it even more ten, fifteen years from now. To spend some time in the mind of the person you were, wince a little, feel nostalgic. Since college I’ve had less time, less impetus to ramble on like that. The greater the issues with which you’re occupied, the more difficult it is to sit down in a library between classes and tap them out for the release of it, for catharsis, to spend a moments’ thought so thoughtlessly, so cheaply. It takes more time, more effort, to adequately address the kinds of things I’m thinking about now, the kinds of things I’ve been occupied with since May of two thousand ought eight. Not that it isn’t nice to sit down and ramble for a while just the same.

It’s slow getting settled, meeting people, feeling the new ground underfoot. It can’t feel comfortable so far from home; the feeling of displacement isn’t going anywhere any too soon. It’s what I expected, though I guess I did expect to like the school, the town more. That’s ok. What do you do? You do your best, and with grace maybe a little better even. You give up the war.

Got back to Deerfield on Friday evening, after thirteen hours on the road, with the prospect of working a couple consecutive days hanging over both of us. In some ways a pretty dispirited homecoming: the real pain and doubt we left behind, and then to be so suddenly forced back to the drudgery ahead. But something has changed I think. Maybe it’s just the passage of time – those interminable six months – or maybe the thirteen-hour reminder that home is now, like it or not, firmly in the rear-view mirror, and that our lives now consist of this new place. I think we realized over five brief and heartbreaking days that the eight-hundred miles are more than merely spatial, that the relationships with family and friends kept up previously without effort, simply because they were inevitably there, will never again have the same inevitability, must from now on be kept up with purposeful and even taxing effort. A long long eight-hundred miles, each mile stretched interminably longer, out of the spatial realm entirely. And on this side a comfort, subtle and indistinct enough to believe in. The fuzzy, newly hatched nearness of this place, a new home in fact, magnified the small comforts (which we’d previously scarcely scoffed at) till they were genuinely comforting.

its getting cold in chicago. snow in the forecast but it has been off and on for the past week and we’ve yet to see any. there are only three weeks left in the semester. a greek paper to write, a couple of scary tests to prepare for, that final push and then you’re through. caela is coming to visit over the new year. we’re pretty excited about that.

the glow has gone out of life lately. the dead grey sky, the wealthy suburbs stretching out of sight in every direction, the biting wind. my own lack of discipline, fears for the future, self doubt. i miss playing music, just being at college and knowing people, knowing my own place. the greater responsibilities have not brought on greater joys, not just yet. i am working hard though, and learning quite a lot i believe. there are lots of what ifs which don’t bear thinking about. so i try not to.

not sure what to think about this space. i’ve had it for a long time and it represents a period of my life, but i really don’t see the value in keeping a public (sort of) quasi-journal or space for reflection. if i were a scholar of some merit maybe my theological ramblings would be worth reading but i’m so not and they so aren’t. i don’t know that anyone reads it. that isn’t the point really.

music:
fugazi, dead meadow, sonic youth: not exactly good for improving the mood
new radiohead, which i’m finally starting to appreciate
yo la tengo, very good for the mood, especially this which is “the story of jazz”

reading:
a stack of colossians commentaries as high as my head
“in the first circle” by solzhenitsyn. maybe i’ll quit seminary, learn russian and study solzhenitsyn. just the best ever
bainton’s biography of luther, also excellent

in chicago. we’ve been here about a month, and it’s really been pretty quiet. we miss a lot of people. our apartment is very small, and the area very suburban and discouraging. we've explored chicago a good deal, though as yet we haven’t found much that’s exciting. no money to spend. riding the el was enjoyable. saw the university of chicago’s campus which was very lovely, and the frank lloyd wright house on campus there, which was lovely too and which made me wish i was good at a lot of things i’m no good at.

i’m taking review greek, too much too fast for my poor mind i fear. wish i had kept up better with it. i was a poor student in college. but i do have a decent grade which will get me into my new testament courses without being set back. disappointed (but not surprised) to report that my study habits have not improved much over the past two years; i’ve been up too late most nights. not much about the new school excites me at the moment except, oddly enough, the prospect of hard work and diligence. i'm also looking forward to the cold weather.

jenni has started work and will start school soon. i hope she'll be happy here.

reading:
saul bellow: humboldt’s gift

listening:
sun kil moon
low

“losing touch with everyone…”

6-18-09
5:55pm

Off work, and alone in the apartment. Jenni left this morning to her grandparents’ in North Carolina for the weekend. I’ve been putting in overtime every day this week and I’m pretty tired. One more day and then a quiet weekend. Supposed to go to Carson and Sarah’s Saturday night. It’s too bad we’ve gotten to know them just before we leave for Chicago.

Reading the Lothlorien chapters of “The Fellowship of the Ring” just now, probably my favorite in the trilogy. “Namarië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar. Nai elyë hiruva. Namarië! Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!” Why are the things I feel the most always in fantasy, in music I can’t enjoy without reservation, in images so quickly gone? The basic disconnect. If I could be perfectly objective, could really divorce myself from environment, presuppositions, and fear, then maybe that disconnect would drive me to some scary conclusions. But no it wouldn’t, either. To divorce oneself entirely from all context, from all others: from, in my case, the Church, whatever that has or hasn’t meant to me; would be to abandon myself to utter subjectivity. The distrust I have of my own thought or speech when I’ve been separated from any immediate context, whether by a social situation, beer or tiredness, is not invalid I don’t think. It may be of value where it abolishes social or prideful inhibitions, sure, but whenever I’ve retreated into myself, selfishly or otherwise, and let my mind have free run of itself, I have little to no confidence. I need constructs, however faulty; my mind needs paths to follow.

We’re supposed to have glimpses, fleeting images of what’s to come. And I guess that’s true – I suppose I do. But most times the spaces between stretch out broader and duller than I have the wherewithall to see beyond. Glimpses so fleeting they only tease, and belittle. “Memory is not what the heart desires.” If even in memory the fullness could be found. The heart desires more: and often, on the lathe, or driving to church, or sitting in the living room in the late afternoon, it despairs. I don’t ask much. Only for enough to get me through.

“Farewell! Maybe thou shalt find Valimar. Maybe even thou shalt find it. Farewell!”


6-1-09
5:24pm

Here’s a letter I wrote to the Dean-o a couple of months ago. Parts of it summarize my thoughts over the past year quite well. This journal is getting terribly repetitive, which I guess is a little damning of my thought patterns. Oh well.

Dean,

I was going to send this via email, but I think there’s something to writing it out and mailing it. Not quite sure what it is, but it seems worthwhile.

Hm...there's a fine distinction to be made between the faith we've inherited, and the faith we participate in. You write that "the faith we've inherited is lacking...we've been given a piece and are expected to be content with just that piece." I can commiserate with that kind of thinking. We sustain, in our daily experience, wounds from the shortcomings of the institutional expression we've grown up in. We've been enculturated in it. After all, we’re products of fallen humanity, both cause and effect. But we also have, dwelling within us to animate and vivify, the Holy Spirit of God, the "perfecting cause" of the Trinity (as Lossky puts it), perfecting in us the perfect work of Christ, completed and all-sufficient. And that is not lacking at all. The writer of Hebrews encourages us to "strive to enter that rest" (4:11). This theological rest, the provision of Christ, is always waiting and eager for us to enter into it. It’s the picture of the rest, perfect, and of us, imperfect, struggling, persisting. You ask, "why it is that God keeps Himself such a secret?" I think it is not so much that God keeps himself a secret as that we cannot see him in our present state until we are made like Christ. We can't meet the gods face to face "till we have faces."

Because I don't think that true knowledge of God begins or ends with intellectual questions and answers, or with "right practice" (as in, the ideal worship service). It begins with a posture. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." In other words, the paradigm we've inherited may be faulty in many aspects, but the way forward is not through a search for "the right expression of the faith" (could we ever find it the way we've idealized it anyway?) but through a renewed participation in the perfect salvation we've recieved from God. Like I wrote in that piece you read, I don't believe truth to be external or dogmatic only, or even primarily (that is, a particular institution or expression of belief, other than the Church Universal of course) but internal and pneumatic. Without being the least spooky or pantheistic, I believe that the truth is within us. Obviously it is outside us as well, in natural theology, in the "God-breathed" Scriptures, in our brothers and sisters. But all these venues have to be interpreted, and interpretation is always subject to the human mind. "The kingdom that's within is true." Inward to the infinite microcosm of the Kingdom of God within us; outward to the macrocosm of the world and even the universe. For He fills everything in every way. An inner silent mystery, an outer clamoring reality. It must be both (since to deny one or the other you'd have to be some sort of Manichean); but it must begin within, in submission, in silence.

That's an awfully grand and arrogant way to start off a letter. I'm sorry...you just pulled my string I guess. Forgive my presumptuousness. It's certainly not my intent to "tell you how it is" - I barely understand any of that myself. Just what I've been thinking lately. As you know, I've thought a lot in the past months about Orthodoxy, and I have a big tendency to get all angsty and freak out, as though my decision is due tomorrow. But I've reached the conclusion that God is far more concerned with my heart, my inner response to his Spirit, than with what tradition of faith I allign myself with. You're right, of course, our inherited faith is imperfect. Frustratingly so. But there is no perfect tradition. Maybe one day I will find one which I believe is more accurate, more holy - fuller, I guess - than Evangelicalism. Maybe not. But it will always be the same Christ, the same work of redemption, and the same task laid on me. To strive to enter into that rest.

You said that one of the things you like about Evangelical thought is there is so much freedom to form your own convictions. I don't know that I can agree with you there...in fact, that is to me the scariest thing about the Evangelical paradigm. I don't want to form my own convictions. I don't trust my own mind that much, I guess. I'd rather let the true faith of the apostles and fathers form them, and I will just walk in them as best I can. Just a thought.

So Carson told me today that Joel is presenting a paper at the conference here in February. Any chance you were tagging along? Just wonderin. I will be presenting a paper on "Evangelical Patriotism and the Kingdom of God" - something I'm increasingly dreading. I do have strong feelings about that subject, but they're not very well developed and the more I've read on the subject the more bored I've gotten with it. I had a different idea - I wanted to do something on the apophatic vision of the East - but Carson suggested this as being more relevant to the subject matter of the conference. And he's right, of course, but I'm just not jazzed up about it. Maybe it will come.

Thanks very much for taking the time to write. I need this kind of interaction. It's funny how little time I spent in college talking with my friends about things that actually mattered. We were too busy talking smut and making fun of people. It seems like it was actually awkward to jump into something really serious a lot of the time. That's one of the reasons I've valued your friendship. Not that we didn't talk our share of smut too.

Take good care,
Ethan


My apologies to Dean for airing his private mail, to the three people who will ever happen across it.

I was pleased, at the time, with the previous entry as an admittedly incomplete but (I fancied) honest and fairly insightful summary of my own thought regarding the Biblical paradigm of truth. Since then I've had occasion to rethink it quite a bit and I find it has some glaring inconsistencies and imbalances. Rather than rewrite it, though, I'll just add a couple of editorial comments.

First, I wrote that "'internal and pneumatic' is a fair expression of my own reading of the New Testament". This was an overstatement of a position which was already something of an overreaction. Clearly, truth must be both internal and external, pneumatic and dogmatic. And so we find it to be in Scripture. This is so obvious as to be not worth saying: my intention was not to deny dogmatic (or even objective) truth in Scripture, but to suggest that the common evangelical teaching of "the Word" is out of balance, and that the internal, pneumatic aspect is often neglected. To make the truth purely dogmatic leaves us utterly at the mercy of our own interpretation of the text. But neither is there any concrete certainty in the indwelling Spirit. Our interpretation of external dogma is certainly flawed, but so is our obedience to the Spirit. Both the Spirit and the Scriptures are perfect and infallible; neither offers (what I seem to be so determined to find) a foolproof application of divine truth to our lives. We still "see through a glass darkly." It is no good trying to escape this tension, either by fancying that we can understand the Scriptures perfectly or by elevating the Church to infallibility. Both sides must be involved; but we don't have perfect access to either.

Second, my word study of "logos" was incomplete at best. It served its purpose in pointing out that in the New Testament the "Word" is not limited to Scripture alone (something we all knew already) - it didn't do much else. My intent was to show another aspect of the Word: the Word multiplying, growing, living and active, dwelling within us richly. To be convincing even on that level would require a much more comprehensive study.

So, it is back to work I guess. My persistent interest in this topic stems from a general discontent with the evangelical paradigm of truth. Ironically, the doctrine of sola scriptura seems to be inconsistent with Scripture itself, for the reasons I gave below. The evangelical placement of Scripture as the be-all end-all of divine revelation seems contrary to Scripture itself, and tends to put the believer at the mercy of his own interpretation of the text. This is complicated (rather than simplified) by the modern interpretive milieu. I can't help seeing sola scriptura as a reaction to modernism: a deduction from perceived necessity rather than an application of historical and recorded revelation.

An amendment to the previous post is forthcoming. At the time I was pretty pleased with it but looking back there are a few gaping holes in logic, as well as some things I'd like to add. I'll throw it up here when I find the time.

Meanwhile I have been working some overtime, and trying in between to finish up a paper I'll be presenting at this weekends' American Evangelicalism conference at TFC. A privilege, and one I hope I won't completely blow off. My paper is entitled "Evangelical Patriotism and the Kingdom of God" and I'm afraid it reflects my utter lack of interest in that topic. I'll be glad to have it over.

Reading:
Is there a meaning in this text?/Kevin VanHoozer
A good man is hard to find/Flannery O'Connor
Orthodox Theology/Vladimir Lossky

Listening:
The Cure, Low, Belle and Sebastian, ad infinitum, ab absurdum

Sleeping:
precious little

“The truth,” writes the apostle, “abides in us and will be with us for ever: grace, mercy and peace will be with us, from God the Father and from Jesus Christ the Father’s Son, in truth and love” (II John 2-3). I’ve given a fair amount of thought, sometimes a little frenzied and panicked, to the paradigm of truth in Scripture. For the Orthodox, the truth is “internal and pneumatic” versus (what they call) the “external and dogmatic” model in the West, whether seen in the Reformation formula sola Scriptura or the Catholic hierarchy of authority. As a good Evangelical (sic) I begin with Scripture. Do we find sola Scriptura there? Most importantly, what does the New Testament claim for itself?

While the Scriptures are “God-breathed” and “useful”, (II Tim. 3:16) they are never the fullest embodiment of truth. For that is always found in the person of Christ. Christ is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), and “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (2:8). Of the three persons of the Trinity, the Son is revelation, communication, and that in human form (“bodily”); as such he is Truth for mankind. Of Scripture no such claim is made. At best the term “Word of God” has been muddied in popular evangelical culture, and applied far more freely than is warranted by the Scriptures themselves. For the Word of God is always Christ first and foremost, per John’s Prologue, and if it is also applied to the Scriptures, it is only as an expression of the fact that God’s self-revelation in Christ is present there in inspired form. (That is, “God-breathed”, a term which deserves a certain amount of attention.) The Word of God is a broader (but no less clearly defined) thing than I have been conditioned to believe. In Acts, the Word of God can “grow” and “multiply” (12:24, 19:20). It can “dwell richly” in the believer (Col. 3:16). And it is also present in the “tradition” which Paul exhorted the Corinthians to maintain (I Cor. 11:2, 23, 15:3), and later encouraged Timothy to guard (I Tim. 6:20, II Tim. 1:14). But how is this tradition maintained? Was it based solely in the apostles, so that it is no longer extant except in their writings? Or has it really been handed down to us through the Church, that is, the succession of true believers in whom dwell the Holy Spirit of God?

The truth cannot be made abstract; it cannot be limited to something written down, quantified, interpreted. It must be enacted. Against the “philosophies and human traditions” Paul places, not the Scriptures, but the redemptive work of Christ on the believers’ behalf (Col. 2:8-15). “You have come to fullness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority” (10). In Christ, Paul goes on, redemption was accomplished. In Christ we were circumcised “without hands”; in Christ we were buried and raised again through faith in the working of God (11-12). And in Christ were the principalities and powers “disarmed” (15) – those same principalities which comprise the human traditions, the philosophies, the elemental spirits of the universe (8). In other words, against all the human effort and teaching which mislead and construe, we have, not the Scriptures as such, but Christ, the ultimate Word. And not Christ as a mystic concept, either, but as a person, as the Person, in whose accomplished work we participate daily. We do not know an abstraction of truth, or a corpus of writings which must be interpreted. We know a Person (Philippians 3:9-10). “Authentic gnosis,” says Vladimir Lossky, “is inseparable from a charisma, an illumination by grace which transforms our intelligence. And since the object of contemplation is a personal existence and presence, true gnosis implies encounter, reciprocity, faith as a personal adherence to the personal presence of God Who reveals Himself.” The divine Word is not to be studied, so much as practiced, and in practice, substantiated and defended. In his second epistle, John warns us: “Look to yourselves, that you may not lose what you have worked for, but may win a full reward (8)”. Paul adjures the Philippians to “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (2:12), and the writer of Hebrews tells us to “strive to enter that rest, that no one fall by the same sort of disobedience” (4:11).

The divine Word, then, is not so much “understood” (intellectually) as submitted to, in obedience. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 1:7). Apprehension of the divine begins with the right posture, the posture of faith. In Christ’s own teaching we often hear the formula, “he who has ears, let him hear” (Matthew 13:9, 43, elsewhere). The self-same revelation of Christ can both condemn and vivify, depending on the heart of its hearers (Matthew 13:11-17). In other words, the knowledge of the Word of Christ, whether its means be the Scripture or some other lesser venue, is dependent not on the right interpretation so much as on the condition of its hearers. Can one submit to a text? Is not the goal of reading or interpreting texts a mere intellectual understanding? But we submit to a Person.

This is a half-baked paradigm at best of the New Testament teaching on divine truth. Still, it’s what I am going on for the present. Which tradition best expresses it is a question I’ve troubled over for some time, but I am beginning to think that that is less important than my own persistence in it. To “convert” may or may not happen. Any decision now would be premature and rash. To enter (an evangelical) seminary, for better or for worse, will at least continue the process: not of the development of my mind, or of my own imminent “decision”, but of “looking to myself”. Come what may.

There was a narrow window of time when I was writing things that I can look back on now and be pleased with. For some reason that window has closed lately, and the odd thing is that what's closed it has been the progress of my mind, into new realms, new patterns of thought, new books I'm reading and ideas I'm having. I try to write about them, but I can never do them justice, so I end up frustrated. Strange. What happened? I used to be so much better at this.

I'm married, and living in Toccoa, probably the last year I'll spend here. And that's bittersweet. It's odd knowing that you're going to miss a place horribly very soon, but not being able to do anything about it, and in the meantime not being able to really appreciate it as it is. I work at a woodshop, for forty hours a week, making wood turnings on a CNC lathe. I enjoy it. Nothing I'd like to do for the rest of my life, but I won't be, so I don't have to worry. It is a lot of time to myself, a lot of time to occupy my thoughts. I try to be mentally productive. I've memorized some poems, some Hopkins and Macleish, as well as some Scripture. I've thought a lot about the Lord of the Rings, and just about every other novel I've loved. I tell the stories again in my head, and sometimes get mixed up. I sing Belle and Sebastian songs to myself. Belle and Sebastian because, for one, I probably know more of their songs all the way through than any other band, and two, they are so persistently uplifting. I sing some other stuff too, and feel a little foolish when my co-workers walk past. I think about theology, about Ladd and Bonhoeffer, Lossky and Schmemann. I nick up my knuckles and sand the tips off my fingers. I do battle with the computer.

My parents live in town so we've enjoyed their proximity. Gives us another house to go to, the one I grew up in but no longer live in. I'm there now, in the stuffy heat from the wood stove after a long Sunday afternoon nap on the library couch. In about half an hour I'm going to drive across town and pick up Jenni from work. She gets in the car, gives me a kiss, and I ask her how her day was as her co-workers walk past us to their own cars. It's a tidy domestic scene. Tonight I think we're going to decorate our tree. Funny how little I have to do these days, and yet how little time I have for reading. There's always something.

Here's a comprehensive list of what I've read in the last month or two, and what I'm still reading now:

Poetry and Experience, Archibald Macleish
Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, with Jenni. We've been reading it aloud and we're just past halfway in the second book.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity, Daniel B. Clendenin
Orthodox Theology, Vladimir Lossky
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The Plague, Albert Camus
The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Adam of the Road, Elizabeth Janet Gray
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

And to go with it a list of music I've particularly enjoyed since we've moved into the new place.

A mix of British Sea Power B-sides and EPs from Muffy, really great
Heaven or Las Vegas, The Cocteau Twins
Feathers, Dead Meadow
Trust, Low
The Curtain Hits the Cast, Low
Things We Lost in the Fire, Low
If You're Feeling Sinister, Belle and Sebastian
Tigermilk, Belle and Sebastian
The Boy With the Arab Strap, Belle and Sebastian
Another Day on Earth, Brian Eno
Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
The Best of Simon and Garfunkel
Diary, Sunny Day Real Estate
Old Mogwai stuff, also from Muffy

A couple of boring old lists to bore the two people who probably read this.

There is a lot on my mind and a lot I'd like to try and write it out. I'll see if I can't do some of that in the near future. In the meantime Jenni is getting off work.

"By sheer grace, God will not permit us to live even for a brief period in a dream world. He does not abandon us to those rapturous experiences and lofty moods that come over us like a dream. God is not a God of the emotions but the God of truth. Only that fellowship which faces such disillusionment, with all its unhappy and ugly aspects, begins to be what it should be in God’s sight, begins to grasp in faith the promise that is given to it. The sooner this shock of disillusionment comes to an individual and to a community the better for both.

"A community which cannot bear and cannot survive such a crisis, which insists upon keeping its illusion when it should be shattered, permanently loses in that moment the promise of Christian community. Sooner or later it will collapse. Every human wish-dream that is injected into the Christian community is a hindrance to genuine community and must be banished if genuine community is to survive. He who loves this dream of a community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.

"God hates visionary dreaming; it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. The man who fashions a visionary ideal of community demands that it be realized by God, by others, and by himself. He enters the community of Christians which his demands, sets up his own law, and judges the brethren and God Himself accordingly. He stands adamant, a living reproach to all others in the circle of brethren. He acts as if he is the creator of the Christian community, as if his dream binds men together.

"When things do not go his way, he calls the effort a failure. When his ideal picture is destroyed, he sees the community going to smash. So he becomes, first the accuser of his brethren, then an accuser of God, and finally the despairing accuser of himself."

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Life Together"

It's been a long time since I've written anything on here, I know. I haven't been so much busy as preoccupied, if that makes sense. I'm not really busy now, but I am preoccupied, so I'm not going to write much.

Preached last Sunday at Foothills. I felt like it went well, despite my own deep misgivings about the whole preacher-text paradigm. In my opening prayer I asked that God would forgive me for misrepresenting him in any way. That will have to do for now.

Muffy and I have been playing some music up at the old studio in the West Building. pretty different from Contrail but I do like it a lot. He is writing really terrific stuff. It's a little bit darker than I tend to like: more random and directionless. But it is fun, and stretches me musically. We've still got a lot of work to do. Hopefully we'll get a few good shows out of it in the coming months. Can't say how much I would enjoy that.

"Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wogdog"

Reading:
"Orthodox Theology" Vladimir Lossky
"Life Together" Dietrich Bonhoffer
"Dandelion Wine" Ray Bradbury
"The Lord of the Rings" Tolkien, with Jenni

been living stubbornly in the past, and a little bit in the future, reluctant to live in the moment out of impatience and boredom. i'm tired of it. i really don't want to go on this way. i am frustrated, though, with people, with circumstances, and especially with that ever-present divide between life as i've idealized it and life as it persistently is. tired of that, too. that is a selfish thing to think and a selfish thing to write. i do long for the kingdom of our Lord in the flesh. i long for what i don't understand. dear Christ, grant me courage, persistence and eyes to see. amen.

dean and i went fishing this afternoon on a little river behind the property of some friends at crestmont. a beautiful place. clear brown water full of bass, the dense green of late summer. a couple of cokes and deep quiet. dean caught one sizable bass, while i came up empty as usual. thoroughly enjoyable, though. as enjoyable a time as i've had this summer. i'm going to really miss that kid.

another chill evening in aliquippa, keeping tally with the braves via MLB gameday and reading a little bit of solzhenitsyn on the side. still no score in the third, with jurrjens on the mound for atlanta. his control is a tad shaky this evening which worries me. he needs to settle down and give us a good chance. and on our side we've got to give him a little run support.

the solzhenitsyn ("the first circle") is good but slow to start. he is always worth the effort once you get a hundred pages in or so, but as a russian he is bound by some national agreement to write only long novels with slow starts. his characterization is lights out as a rule. it's thoughtful fiction; you always get a lot to take with you. he doesn't so much create as show you a very real world, intricate and believable. it takes a fair amount of work, of self-investment, but it rewards you richly. i was surprised when i read "cancer ward" by how touching the ending was, with kostoglotov in the town, and then on the train. so perfectly handled. i think of that when i think of real aesthetic experience - the emotional impact is really almost incidental to the action, to what solzhenitsyn is trying to accomplish. it is a byproduct of how real the story is, and how much he has invested in it all along. nothing the least bit artificial. so i will stick with "the first circle" in spite of the difficulty of all those russian names and complicated politics.

it always feels good to be at the end of a camp day. camp days kick my butt. i wake up on mornings that we have camp with a nervous hollow in my chest. i'm going to stick it out this summer but i won't lie, i don't much enjoy it. working with headstrong, smartass junior highers. it's because i don't enjoy it that i've been forced to get out of myself a little bit, to be a person i'm not accustomed to being. i still couldn't say just how much i've learned but it has been a great thing, i know, and i'm very grateful. just terribly stressful at times.

a lovely 3-RBI double for escobar in the fifth gives jurrjens a little cushion. now we'll just follow our noses home.

good night, campers, see you in the morning. i might put another 20 pages or so of solzhenitsyn behind me before i check out.

growing a beard. i guess it was just time. i'm still in the scruffy stages but i think it's going to wear pretty well. makes me look a good deal older, which is something i've needed i suppose. i've graduated from undergrad and begun to move on a little bit and i guess it was time for a change. going to grow my hair out a little bit too.

also i'm getting married in about four months. yea, getting married. you're telling me. it should be alright.

listening:
fleet foxes, eno, mogwai, joy division.

reading:
singer, solzhenitsyn, macleish. i am in such a rut honestly.

I'm in Aliquippa, PA. Temperatures have been in the mid-90s and our house has no air conditioning. What a convenient invention that was. It's easy enough to talk about the idol the west has made of convenience but this week I've begun to waver a bit. It's the long, sweaty nights that do it I think.

I've surprised myself by feeling a little skeptical of the levels of spirituality here. Is it just cynicism? I have to wonder. My idea of faith, of the church, always seems to be a little bigger than the circles I find myself in. Or maybe it's smaller? Most likely it is caused largely by my own arrogance and pettiness; but at the same time I feel the need of something else, an aesthetic clarity, a transcendence. Which is not to say that this isn't a terrific place, or that these aren't wonderful people. The week I've spent here has been both refreshing and deeply convicting. At our prayer service last night I was moved at the sincerity of these people, and the reality of their faith, it's strong connection with the world. Joel and I had an interesting conversation a few nights ago in which we admitted that there are no perfect churches, no perfect communities. The ideal which I've nurtured and hoped to live out someday is pretty unrealistic. It will have to wait until the eschaton. In the meantime, what do I want? Higher church? Eastern Orthodoxy?

For now, I'm here, in this place. I'm beginning to be afraid that my own carefully conditioned ideal really does not exist in this reality, and it's from this frustration that my cynicism comes. Either way it's couched in my own pride, a pride I almost cannot bear to root out. It's just that I'd like my highest ideals of beauty to come from the Church, not from secular poets and artists, or even from Christians of different branches of the faith. Odd that the reasons I don't convert to these "other branches" of the faith are intellectual ones.

Christianity as I want it to be, versus the transcendence which it must be, by definition. Such a fine line - too fine for me, in my present condition, to make such a judgment call. The thing to do is to press on toward my ideal, and in the meantime to attend with discipline to the task at hand, in hopes of greater light, of clarity through service. I've been thinking about Benson's "Graven Ideologies," especially the chapters on Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion. The transcendent Other making its demand on the Self: the loving violence. And because the other is intrinsically foreign to me, greater than me, it requires faith. I cannot "approve" or "disapprove" of it since any act of approval places me as the arbiter of what is acceptable and what is not. So it really is a kind of violence, and no less painful for being for my own ultimate good.

"Little children, keep yourselves from idols."

Listening:
Red House Painters
Low
Sonic Youth

Reading:
Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories
Kevin VanHoozer: Is there a meaning in this text?
Archibald MacLeish
Gerard Manley Hopkins

It's hot summertime in Pittsburgh. Just finished up tour with Contrail about a week ago. With about four shows to go we realized that they would most likely be the last shows we ever play. Matt has been accepted into medical school at Virginia Tech and has decided to go in this fall. And in the end I think he's made the right choice. Either way it was his choice to make and it's not for me to say anything one way or the other. But it has been a little tough to come to grips with the thought that it really is all over with. Played our last show in Chapel Hill. Mediocre, and very depressing. We drove all the way home that night and got in at around eight in the morning. I guess we've always known that this time was coming but in the end it has come all too abruptly, and just when we were gaining momentum, writing better than ever before, playing better concerts. There may be other musical projects in my future, but nothing like this band. This was my band. Thinking about all the songs we've written, all the songs we might have written. Places gone, people met. I've been in this band for a long time. We've tried to make beautiful music, as best we could. Sometimes we have.

Bought Low's "The Curtain Hits the Cast" in Chapel Hill. It's a beautiful record. Low has helped to define my own approach to music as much as any other band. Nothing extra, with great attention to detail. A great sense of mystery. I've been listening to it over and over and over.

One, or two, or three
bring praise to thee,
or welcome ceasing death
without renewal.
The reach of life, backward
into my own clamoring strife
(I knew you were here, I saw your signature
I saw the moving leaves, saw the closing door)*
is hope unconfirmed,
but neither denied.
Rather, crucified.
Crucified, and then interred:
the incarcerated word.

*These lines are taken verbatim from Lee Bozeman's song, "The four quartets"

a good pleasant evening, spent reading at charles' house. i read some of benson's "graven ideologies" for my contemporary philosophy class. good, challenging reading, of the sort i need to be doing a lot more often. listened to interpol, talked with charles, and after he left, enjoyed being alone for a couple of hours. read a little more of solzhenitsyn's "cancer ward," the chapter called "bad luck all around." i was touched by the ending, the scene between dyomka and asya. they're so sad, so misguided. such gratuitous pain, and yet its very very real and i can empathize. all the senseless pain in the world, all the people who are so wrong, who've brought it on themselves usually, but i can understand them and i can pity them. sometimes it feels like there's no one i couldn't love in an instant, out of deep pity and reciprocity; reciprocity flowing from the very fact that i can no more know their pain than they can know mine. then there are other days when i judge everyone i see angrily, dispassionately. and so i reciprocate.

going to watch a movie with jenni, and maybe practice later on with the fellas. it's a terrific semester. it really is.

1:39am.
This semester has been treating me fairly well so far. Fifteen hours feels awfully light compared to the eighteen or more I've been floating for the past couple of years. I actually don't have homework due every single day. The downside is that I've been enjoying my free time just a little bit too much - leaving projects till the last minute, putting off reading. But it doesn't bother me. I just have to pass five classes and I'll graduate, in only three months. Crazy.

I should probably be asleep right now. It's after one and I still need to run over my notes for Sunday School tomorrow morning. But I like staying up, and I drank a coffee and a Coke at work tonight. I remember David Bloomer telling me that he had started going to sleep at ten and waking up at 5:30. "I'm not a kid anymore," he said. "I can't be always staying up late and sleeping in. I've got to grow up." I respect that; a great deal, actually. But the pleasure of staying up in the quiet small hours still outweighs the dragging tiredness I'll feel tomorrow in church. What's a little discomfort, right?

Thinking a lot today about the next year or so. Today, laying sod with my Grandpa out at his property, I tried to plan out how the next six months are going to pan out financially. I had thought about selling my car; had actually decided to, but now it looks like it won't be necessary. I guess I'm relieved. I do like my car, although I was warming up to the idea of having about three grand in the bank and no more insurance payments creeping up on me, no more gas to buy. It's growing up. David Bloomer is right: we're not kids anymore. And it's that thought, more than anything else, which I've been facing over the past several weeks. I'm full of doubts about myself: my own ability to deal with bills, with seminary, with all of it. And it’s so close, just around the corner.

I finished my book last night, Wendell Berry's "A Place on Earth"; all 550-odd pages. It's satisfying to finish any novel of that length, but for me the satisfaction was tempered a good deal by a growing frustration with Berry in that novel. For one thing, the whole book felt very much like an early attempt. For literary quality, I prefer "Old Jack" by a long ways. And I'm ok with that; it's to be expected. What bothered me most was his tone in the novel, and the way he developed characters. I felt that all of his characters were cast in his own image. He likes his characters because they're all him; they all fit, either positively or negatively, into his mold of how the world should be. When they write letters, or talk, they all sound the same, down to the way they form sentences. Anything which strays outside of that mold (like his pathetic caricature of the Church) he is surprisingly vindictive of. Don't mistake me; he's got many, many good things to say. And maybe he did straighten some things out later in his career; reconsider them, or at least flesh them out a little more. My parents got me a book of his essays for Christmas and I've been working my way through them now and again. They, too, seem not so much wrong as incomplete. For him the Church, and economics, environmentalism, etc., are primarily concerned with the earth in a very temporal sense. I have to wonder how he takes such verses as I John 2:15, "The world is passing away, and the lust of it." Pastor Monty has often frustrated me by seeming to make the Kingdom of God out to be something predominantly future: our hope as believers, our great reward. To me the parables of Christ seem to be emphasizing something far more immediate and imminent than that: "The Kingdom of God is at hand." But Wendell Berry makes the opposite mistake. His faith is so much concerned with the immediate as to despise the eternal. "A Place on Earth" is by no means a Christian novel. It is actually fairly hostile to Christianity; or at least to the distortion of Christianity which it portrays. I'm talking more about his essays here, with the novels I've read to help inform and illustrate them. It's a beautiful picture he paints, but it is an inconsistent and unrealistic one. The novel ended on a hopeful note, but I had to wonder where the hope was coming from given the philosophy leading up to it. The Kingdom of God must be concerned with the eternal to be of any value at all. It is this transcendence which gives meaning to the every day struggle of life on the earth. But (and Wendell Berry is right here), we still live on the earth, and if our actions do not engage and address the plane on which our lives are lived out, we have missed the entire point. It is the very eternality of the Kingdom of God which makes it so concerned with the every day; for our lives are, in spite of their appearance of mundanity, filled with the eternal.

Or something.

Musical Rediscoveries:
Low: Things we lost in the fire
Interpol: Turn on the bright lights