Reading and remembering

Posted on by albrooke

Alan Jacobs writes:

  • Though I am unloveable, God loves me, and is willing to pay an enormous price to reconcile me to Himself. God loves me and hopes – “hopes” is a strange word to use with regard to the Omnipotent and Omniscient, but it’s the best word I have – God hopes that I will love Him in return.

“Adam Atheist,” The Homebound Symphony (Oct. 27, 2022) [link]. This reminded me of Will Campbell’s definition of grace: “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.” The quote is from Brother to Dragonfly, but you can easily find more about Campbell and his definition online, for example at Philip Yancey, “Apostle to the Rednecks,” philipyancey.com (June 7, 2013) [link].

Sarah Rowell writes:

  • Stories [remind us]. They bring people together, shy at a dinner party, weeping on a bench. They remind us that although we cannot see our own way, there is a good purpose, for in the very best stories the way is dark at times and we cannot imagine a happy ending. They give us hope and make us brave.

“The Stories of His People,” Blind Mule Blog (Oct. 24, 2022) [link]. Sarah is thinking of her grandfather, and Wendell Berry, and a newly recognized friend.

Brad East gives charitable rules for reviewing and being reviewed, notably

  • 3. A review should give the reader some taste of the prose, some sense of the voice of the author and not only the author as mediated by your voice.

“Rules for reviewing and being reviewed,” bradeast.org (Oct. 24, 2022) [link], but I was then much taken by an older post about why believers should see the Bible as trustworthy:

  • The third reason for trusting the New Testament as God’s word is that the church does. What do I mean by this? Simply this: Christianity precedes us. We don’t make it up ourselves. We certainly don’t build it from scratch. It’s not a DIY project. It’s just there, waiting for us before we come on the scene. It possesses something truly precious, or so it claims. That something is the good news of Jesus.

“Trusting the Bible,” bradeast.org (Sept. 3, 2022) [link].

Also well worth reading this week: Ted Gioia, “9 Facts About Guitarist Pat Metheny as a Youngster,” Substack: The Honest Broker (Oct. 25, 2022) [link]; Andrew Sullivan, “The British Barack Obama?” Substack: The Weekly Dish (Oct. 28, 2022) [link]; Freddie deBoer, “Mad Max in Park Slope” Substack: FdB (Oct. 28, 2022) [link].

Pastoral Prayer 10/23/2022

Posted on by albrooke

We serve a God who is vastly more subtle than we understand.

When we think we understand what he is doing in our lives or in the world, he is often acting with purposes and to ends which we have not seen or comprehended.

The grand narratives of the Bible are full of events in which it seems that God is doing one thing when in truth he is doing something else. Think about:

  • Joseph being sold into slavery, wrongly accused and thrown into prison . . . and then being elevated to a high position in which he could deliver mercy to his family: “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” It appeared that God had abandoned Joseph, but in reality he was delivering Joseph (and his family as well).
  • The nation which came from Abraham being enslaved in Egypt, . . . and after 400 years becoming a large nation united and able to endure hardship, prepared to enter a covenant with God. It appeared that God had abandoned the nation, but in reality he was preparing it for the Law and the Land.
  • That nation eventually rebelling in so many ways and over such a long period of time that first Assyria and then Babylon invaded . . . and then after many years returning, chastened, to the Land. Again, it appeared that God had abandoned the nation, but in reality he was purifying it for true worship.
  • The people of God declining into subjugation to mighty, cruel Rome . . . and then after many years being given a delivering Messiah. Yet again it appeared that God had abandoned his people, but in reality he was preparing them for Messiah. (And yet, even then, God was not doing the thing they expected, since the Messiah had not – not yet – come to make a physical deliverance, but to offer a spiritual deliverance.)

I could go on and on. I could tell you about the lives of Job and Jacob and David and Daniel and Paul and John Mark . . . .

I remind you of these things which you know quite well, because we tend to forget that this subtlety is a part of how God acts in our own lives.

Or at least I forget it all too often, and so I miss giving God glory for the unexpected ways he delivers. I forgot yesterday.

Mostly, then, this is a prayer for me. I invite you to make it your prayer as well.

Let’s pray.

Holy Father,

I come to you who are the Master of the Universe, for you made it and sustain it and direct it, and you are in the process of redeeming it and delivering it in ways too deep and subtle for me to comprehend.

When I am frustrated and irritated and angry with the events in my life, when I blame my clients or co-workers, my family, the waiter, the cashier, the President, the governor, the society . . . Let me remember that you are the God who delivers – not often in the way or time I expect, but always completely and in your own time.

When I am frightened and uncertain about things clearly outside of my control, including my health and the health of those close to me, the economy and world affairs . . . Let me remember that you are the God who delivers – not often in the way or time I expect, but always completely and in your own time.

When I am discouraged and weary of struggling against my own sin and despairing of my own failings, and nothing seems to change . . . Let me remember that you are the God who delivers – not often in the way or time I expect, but always completely and in your own time.

Let me remember that you are God . . . and I am not,

And your ways are not my ways,

And you see more and further than I,

And you are the God who delivers,

Always,

Completely,

In your time and in your way,

Because you are the one who loves me more than I ever comprehend.

Help me to rest in your love this day and this week.

AMEN.

Reading

Posted on by albrooke

Sarah Willard, “Come Ye Sinners,” Blind Mule Blog (Aug. 11, 2022) [link]:

What is endlessly comforting to me as a Christian is that the first step in God’s provision is emptiness. What qualifies you for Christ? Need, lack, want. These are things I have, so this is good news. A lack of love and strength is exactly what I can bring to Christ.

In her winsome, humble way, Sarah writes about on why feeling tired and empty is not necessarily bad place to be. A wise young woman.

Freddie DeBoer, “Hard Work is Only Sometimes Necessary and Never Sufficient, But What Else Can You Do? (yes, the system is rigged, but you’re in it all the same),” FdB (Aug. 15, 2022) [link]:

Life’s not fair. But that doesn’t mean that you get to just opt out of it. And you know what? Congrats to that guy who doesn’t work hard and enjoys more success, seriously. Te salut. Bottom line: hard work can’t ensure your success but a lack of hard work can ensure your failure. 
                             * * * 
[B]eing a socialist never entailed a belief that nothing we do matters or that we were exempt from the need to work. The fact that so many people have come to believe that the only options before us are a witless rise-and-grind work fetishism or an utterly fatalistic belief that nothing we do matters… it doesn’t say good things about our culture. Personally, I blame capitalism.

That last bit is tongue-in-cheek, if the post title didn’t give it away.

Alan Jacobs, “Tolerance,” Snakes and Ladders (Aug. 15, 2022) [link]:

[Washington is saying] I . . . do not offer “toleration” to you and people like you, because it is not in the power of some Americans merely to tolerate the exercise of other Americans’ rights. To be an American is to be on the same footing with every other American. This is the view that Yenor rejects: he’s explicitly pursuing an America in which Protestant Christians have the power to tolerate of others, and the liberties of those others depend upon the sufferance of their Protestant rulers.

If I may take this one more (theological) step, those who believe in the Imago Dei should not view others with toleration (as those who are permitted to be wrong) but almost with reverence (as those who are called to choose). C.S. Lewis has something to say about this, too. [link]

And finally, one more from ayjay if you are at all interested in the technical aspects of music recording: Alan Jacobs, “untitled,” Snakes and Ladders (Aug. 12, 2022). [link]

Flannery

Posted on by albrooke

Today would be Flannery O’Connor’s 97th birthday.

  • “I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.” Mystery and Manners, p. 112.
  • “The stories are hard but they are hard because there is nothing harder or less sentimental than Christian realism. I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them, and when I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror.” Mystery and Manners, 117.
  • “Wise blood has to be these people’s means of grace—they have no sacraments. The religion of the South is a do-it-yourself religion, something which I as a Catholic find painful and touching and grimly comic. It’s full of unconscious pride that lands them in all sorts of ridiculous religious predicaments. They have nothing to correct their practical heresies and so they work them out dramatically. If this were merely comic to me, it would be no good, but I accept the same fundamental doctrines of sin and redemption and judgment that they do.” The Habit of Being, p. 350.

I recommend again Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor (Thomas Nelson 2012) [link].

Worth your time

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The Trinity Forum, The Rabbit Room, and the WindRider Institute sponsored a conversation with Makoto Fujimura yesterday, and it was a delight to “get to know” this painter. Here’s the [link].

Makoto Fujimura, “Walking on Water: Azurite II” (2016) (Taipei City).

He spoke generally about “Art + Faith: A Theology of Making” but these nuggets especially caught my attention:

  • how “forced binaries” (conservative-progressive, left-right, etc.) satisfy our “lust for certainty”;
  • how the Japanese art of Kintsugi (which “repairs” broken pottery and calls attention to the repair, where the Western goal is to make it appear that there was never any break) may inform how we are to receive other broken people; and
  • how there are still “burning bushes” though we have stopped taking our shoes off.

Well worth an hour of your time. Watch, don’t just listen, for Fujimura’s delightfully expressive and joyful face.

I hope you have been following the ever reliable Sarah Willard (Blind Mule Blog) and Alan Jacobs (Snakes and Ladders), as both have been amazingly prolific over the last few months. Don’t wait for me to point you to specific posts!

October reading

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We all know that it is the worst of times . . .

If I vote for Biden, I will be complicit in abortions on a mass scale.

If I vote for Trump, I will be complicit in cementing a worldview in which the ends justify the means, power replaces truth, and thus the very truths by which we define and understand ourselves as human are at stake.

Karen Swallow Prior, “Voting for Neither,” Christianity Today (Oct. 28, 2020) [link].

Here’s your semi-regular reminder: You don’t have to be there. You can quit Twitter and Facebook and never go back.

Alan Jacobs, “it’s time,” Snakes and Ladders (Oct. 28, 2020) [link].

but it is also the best of times:

There have been many men on the court who seemed deep and were celebrated for their scholarly musings but were essentially, as individuals and in their conception of life, immature. But this is not a child, a sentimentalist, an ideological warrior. This is a thinker who thinks about reality.

Peggy Noonan, “Everyone Has Gone Crazy in Washington,” The Wall Street Journal (Oct. 15, 2020) [link].

Sad tales are generally accepted, but when you share joy it is likely that someone somewhere might be hurt by it, especially in a year marked by such sweeping stress. We are all secretly afraid that there might not be enough happiness to go around, and that we will perpetually be that kid that gets left behind.

Sarah Willard, “Reader, I Married Him,” Blind Mule Blog (Oct. 27, 2020) [link].

and indeed, it is like all times:

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one

T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” The Four Quartets [link].

It is not how we vote, or what we read, or who we support or oppose, or even how well we love. We live in a comedy, not a tragedy, for there is One to rescue us from ourselves.

There is One who does good, and the world is certainly in his hand. He will judge and he will redeem.

Reading & viewing links

Posted on by albrooke

current reading and viewingMore than usual, sorry, I usually post when I have three, this time I have five for you. Please don’t miss the last one.

Stephen L. Carter, “How We Got to Capital-B ‘Black’: America’s long conversation about race has often stumbled over which specific words to use,” BloombergOpinion (July 1, 2020) [link]:

small quotes blueSo black is now Black. In the wake of the protests following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and too many others, editors everywhere have decreed with sudden and remarkable unanimity that the formerly common adjective referring to African Americans will henceforth be a proper adjective.

I’m all for the change. Yes, as a card-carrying Grammar Curmudgeon I have a few curmudgeonly concerns. But before we get to that part, let’s do a little history.

Over the past half millennium, the U.S. and its predecessor colonies have invented all sorts of ways to refer to the Africans they bought and sold and their many generations of descendants. Many of those terms were derogatory at the time; most are considered derogatory today. The nation’s difficulty in finding the proper word to describe a people dragged unwillingly to its shores itself mirrors the difficulty the nation has had in digesting the original crime.

Carter continues to look at the history and significance of the usage, with his usual insight. Alas he is behind the Bloomberg paywall, and (so far as I am aware) his earlier columns are not released after a period of captivity like some other writers. See, e.g., Peggy Noonan [link]. Choose your one free article for the month wisely (now I will have to wait until August).

Sarah Willard, “Remember This,” Blind Mule Blog (June 29, 2020) [link]:

small quotes blueIn January I wrote the word Eucatastrophe down on a scrap of paper and propped it up on my desk. A sudden turn of good events, it means, which ensures the protagonist does not meet some very probable doom. It was with barely a mustard seed of belief that I wrote it down. Really I just liked the way it looked on paper. I didn’t name it and claim it. I didn’t presume to pray for it. I was, in fact, avoiding it personally.

Great word, Sarah, and one we need to remember. She gives us a scrap of story about unexpected grace.

Nadia Nadim, “The Outsiders,” The Players’ Tribune (June 18, 2020):

small quotes blueAlthough I’m encouraged by the Black Lives Matter protests, I still feel that too many people have become numb to what’s going on in certain parts of the world. Take one of them aid campaigns about Africa, where children are suffering from hunger. People see it, in the literal sense, but they don’t really see it. You know? But then let’s say that you live in Denmark, where I arrived when I was 12, or in any other privileged country. If two Danes die or get killed in Africa or Syria or wherever, that’s suddenly big news. You’re like, “Oh my God. They were Danish!!” 

This is a different story than we are used to.

Rebecca Manley Pippert, Stay Salt (2020) [link]:

small quotes blueOur task is learning how to apply all that we have received from God so that we can witness to the truth about him in ways that are effective and that truly connect with people today. We do not need to get angry, shouting at our culture. We do not need to feel defeated, staying silent in our culture. We can be hopeful, as we share the message that the whole word so desperately needs to hear. To put it another way, we can still be disciple-makers. We can—we must—stay salt!

Voddie Baucham, “Racial Reconciliation,” YouTube (2019) [link]:

small quotes blueIf God can reconcile those who have real and God-ordained distinctions between them, He can certainly reconcile people who have arbitrary and artificial differences and distinctions between them.

This is a very powerful sermon—by the way, Dr. Baucham is not (1) saying there is no problem, or (2) reading books is worthless, or that (3) we can experience no peace with non-believers. What he does say is worth multiple hearings.

Dr. Baucham has many online sermons—does anyone have other suggestions? This was the first I had heard.

Returning to reality

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O'connor TSOMI have been reading about Flannery O’Connor in Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor (2012), which is excellent.1

During her life O’Connor was often rebuked for the violence in her fiction, but she explained how it was not at all inconsistent with her Christian faith:

small quotes blueI suppose the reasons for the use of so much violence in modern fiction will differ with each writer who uses it, but in my own stories I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work. This idea, that reality is something to which we must be returned at considerable cost, is one which is seldom understood by the casual reader, but it is one which is implicit in the Christian view of the world.2

I was struck by this, I think, because it seems particularly apropos to our current situation in which our lives have been violently reduced, and much that was extraneous has been torn away from us.

It seems to me that O’Connor echoes C.S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain (p. 81: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”) and in “Learning in War-Time” (The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it.”).

O’Connor, as diligent “sub-creator,” looked for ways that her character might be brought to grace — our creator (and hers) is now doing the same.

1Isn’t that a perfect title? The Terrible Speed of Mercy is a great place to start a study of O’Connor. [Ed. note: It turns out that “the terrible speed of mercy” is a phrase of Flannery O’Connor’s.]

2Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose (ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (1961) (emphasis added).