Spring Hill Cemetary (poem, revised)
Spring Hill Cemetary is on a hill overlooking my old home town of Huntington, WV. In the center is the oldest section from before the Civil War, and as you walk out from the center through the headstones you find groups of Union and Confederate soldiers. It’s a shady and quiet one hundred acres.
Here is more, and a picture of the little white brick chapel that stands at the top of the knoll.
New Bracelet Acronym: JPTT (Just Preach the Text)
From the Fearsome Pirate:
The Human Face is a Set of Liturgical Conventions
The Internet Monk is told he needs to smile more. Comments follow. I like mine the best:
Everyone is right, of course, to say that an insincere smile is bad, and right that just smiling alot is not a useful goal in itself. But there is a common assumption in all this that is not false but just not true enough — the assumption that your smile is true if you feel happy, false if you do not. No, it’s not always just about you.
Your face, I mean. It’s not just about you. It’s not just an instrument of self-expression; it is also an instrument of community. So a smile can be a sincere liturgical act even when you are inwardly sad. A liturgical act, I mean, in the sense of an authentic ritual performed to make a connection with another person.
WE — we post-evangelicals — have all had such awakenings in recent years that formal, planned acts in worship can not only be real, but can be blessed. The liturgy delivers us from the murk of our own subjectivity — Yeats’ “rag and bone yard of the heart” — into the clear, bracing air of the community. We pray what the church prays. We sing what the church sings. And then, like a grace, we disover we feel what the church feels. The act first, then the feeling.
Why is a smile any different?
We teach children to shake hands, don’t we? We teach them to open doors? Have you ever told your child to “smile at the nice lady, and say thank you”? What would you answer if he replied “I don’t feel it.”? A good father would say “I don’t care. It is an obligation of love. Smile, and mean it.”
In none of this am I defending Joel Osteen, car dealers, or other fake smilers. I hate fake smiles. But these fakers fail in their smiles not for smiling too much, but for smiling too superficial. Think final cause instead of material cause: just like a written, liturgical prayer can be become authentic if the one praying brings his whole intention into the act, so a smile, acted in the face first but sincerely, will lead to its final cause: a connection between persons.
So, maybe, Michael, what the lady at the post office is TRYING to say — admittedly, poorly — is “you are not connecting with me, and I’d like us to connect.”
Jesus smiled on us when we hated Him, and I very seriously doubt He “felt” it.
The Heresy of Action
The minute you become a Calvinist you begin to spot heresy everywhere, because it is easy to find believers Doing Something, even yourself. This pernicious bug is so common it pops up not only in explicit thought but even in the way phrases are turned. The Christian side of the internet features many long, complicated arguments over whether such and such a person is a works person or not. It’s all quite nuanced. There are Christians who spend their lives at it. There are categories within categories.
I recommend, to wipe out heresy for all time, that all human action be expressed in writing by means of the passive voice.
Credo ut Intelligum: I Affirm Before I Solve The Puzzle
In spite of what the Reformers did or didn’t intend, the Protestant world in fact does now have a canon-within-the-canon — let’s call it a canonlet. It is comprised of about 3 sentences from Paul which you can recite in under thirty seconds, and these perennial struggles for “the heart of the gospel” are simply defensive actions to keep the literal meaning of other texts out of the canonlet.
“Heart of the gospel”? The instant you utter that phrase, you have a canonicity problem and you are about to whack a book or two off.
There is no meaning within the meaning. In the same way that the meaning of a poem is the poem itself, the meaning of the NT is the NT itself. It cannot be paraphrased, summarized, distilled, or focused without being falsified. When someone reads a great sonnet, and says “what does it mean?”, the only response is “here, let me read it again for you.” There is a tendency when stunned by a great work of art to want to mentally clutch it, fold it up, and take it with you; but you soon realize that in so owning it you will destroy it. So you finally understand that the only responses to art are acts: tears, laughter, your own art.
The Saints Say the Same Thing
posted at Boar’s Head Tavern:
About 30 years ago I was stunned when I read Watchman Nee argue that there is simply no biblical basis for dividing the church for any reason other than geography. Nee has been demonized in some evangelical quarters, but read his vision of overcoming denominationalism by working together in practical ministry, and be amazed.
Incidentally, this “Become friends with people from other denominations in your area.” (Alastair) is this:
“If I can unite in myself the thought and the devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russians with the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians. If we want to bring together what is divided, we can not do so by imposing the one division upon the other or absorbing one division into the other… We must contain all divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ.”
(Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1965), p. 21.)
As you know, Merton set out intentionally to do this (not just write it) by his cultivation of such diverse friendships. He saw his friendships as ecumenical praxis, the propoganda of the deed.
What, Merton and Nee and Alastair saying the same thing? Yes, the saints always say the same thing. They just don’t always know they do, because they use different dialects.
The Bible Is what God Intended (my title)
Confessing Evangelical » Blog Archive » “The Bible is exactly as God wanted it to be”
That is faith in the Bible as the voice of God, so that if you read it to hear what God would say to you, you actually hear God speak. For my part, I have the simple belief that the Bible is exactly as God wanted it to be. That does not mean, perhaps, that every detail is set forth systematically for science, as in an academic treatise. But it does mean that every little detail has been given such a form that a human being who seeks salvation will be helped to find the truth.
John is actually quoting another writer, Bo Giertz.
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Captured by the Gospel
Hard Times for the Gospel « Eating Words
I wholeheartedly recommend Michael Spencer’s essay “Hard Times for the Gospel: A Rant.” Simply outstanding. A few choice lines:
“The Gospel is simple. It’s free. It overturns us and our little party. It says things we don’t want religion to say, but that’s ok, because it’s not religion. The Gospel upsets people who are startled by its power and universal application. The Gospel can get you crucified, and then it’s even more powerful.
The Gospel breaks your heart over your own sin, and shuts you up about the other guy’s sin. (Yes, it opens our mouths for the victims of suffering, but it gives us humility before those legalism calls “real sinners.”)
It’s not a new law. It’s not a new set of rules. It’s not a plan, a program or a personality. The Gospel is the son of God, eternal mediator, crucified substitute, doing for us what we cannot do for ourselves. We receive the Gospel, we don’t use it. We don’t make it a principle or a priority. We’re owned by the Gospel.”
I’ve trotted out a little apologetics lately in response to Dawkins and Hitchens and Harris – an exercise for which I am unqualified and which brings me little pleasure. It’s not my style. It’s not why I’m a Christian. I am a Christian simply because I’ve been captured by the Gospel. Honestly, I can see both sides of the arguments for the existence of God. No amount of argumentation ever has or ever will keep me in the Christian faith. Jesus Christ scattering grace like confetti at a birthday party, loving me and saving me despite my stupidity and failure – that’s the reason I’m a Christian. It just sounds like something God would do.
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The Soft Bigotry of Tourist Environmentalists
Excellent article on rich environmentalists who want to keep third world villages “quaint”.
Townhall.com::Enemies of the Poor::By Roy Innis
Why haven’t the UN and its Human Rights Council spoken out about the institutional racism that is being perpetrated in the name of “saving the planet”? Where are the US civil rights groups, news media and churches? The leaders of these poor countries?This intolerable situation cannot continue, and people of conscience must no longer remain silent.
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