Friday Quick Takes (ala Jennfer Fulwiler)

A few "why is my bookbag so heavy" entries:

Mark Ward on the Bible:

I have found that motivation for Bible study is circular: You can’t get excited about the Bible until you do some serious study in it. You can’t do serious study unless your excitement about Scripture motivates you to do so. Sometimes my circle breaks down. I don’t maintain a constant excitement (or study) level. I get tired. I get sick. I get busy. I drift. But because I have a new heart, good teachers, and the continuing grace of God, I can never stop trying to enter the circle again.

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Quote and interesting comment from Cath blogger Eric Scheske:

Professor Morson puts it: “Dostoyevsky believed that lives are decided at critical moments, and he therefore described the world as driven by sudden eruptions from the unconscious. By contrast, Tolstoy insisted that although we may imagine our lives are decided at important and intense moments of choice, in fact our choices are shaped by the whole climate of our minds, which themselves result from countless small decisions at ordinary moments.” At some point in life, I think, one has to decide if one is, in one’s belief in the shape of his or her life, a Dostoyevskian or a Tolstoyian. …I would think any person who has given it much thought is a Tolstoyian, whether one comes to such a worldview via the spirituality of St. Therese Lisieux or modern scientific studies about the cumulative effects of the ordinary on a person’s personality, spirituality, disposition, attitude, etc.

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From a 1921 Herman Melville bio:

With [America's] outstanding symptoms of materialism and conformity it drove Emerson to pray for an epidemic of madness: “O Celestial Bacchus! drive them mad.—This multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving for symbols, perishing for want of electricity to vitalise this too much pasture, and in the long delay indemnifying themselves with the false wine of alcohol, of politics, of money.”

Throughout Melville’s long life his warring and untamed desires were in violent conflict with his physical and spiritual environment. His whole history is the record of an attempt to escape from an inexorable and intolerable world of reality: a quenchless and essentially tragic Odyssey away from home, out in search of “the unpeopled world behind the sun.”
     
“Ah, muskets the gods have made to carry infinite combustion,” he wrote in Pierre , “and yet made them of clay.”

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This FB comment is exactly what I was musing on the other day. Not specifically torture, but how God hates sin because of what it does to self:

“I sincerely believe that the greatest victim of every evil act is the person committing it–which is one argument against torture, that it turns men and women into torturers, which is a deep and serious injury.”

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This, found via Verbum.com, was cool;

This is a difficult message to accept, for it means accepting not only the real humanity of Christ, but also our own humanity. And many of us do not wish to be human. Perhaps we would like our religion to be more “mysterious,” more other-worldly, less attached to the messy, complex realities of everyday life. Perhaps we would prefer a more majestic God, who becomes manifest in supernatural wonders and triumphal manifestations. But the Christian message—the message of Advent—directs our hearts toward humble humanity.

This does not mean that there is no glory, no mystery; but it means that we must seek them not in an external divine intrusion into the world, a triumphal interruption of human history, but rather in the transformation of that history from within by God’s presence in human hearts.

It seems to me that to have a visible or sensory experience of God, is not a cure-all: You still have to work out your salvation with fear and trembling. St. Paul received visions of Jesus but also went on to be beaten, shipwrecked, almost stoned, rejected and laughed at, etc… Surely he must've had some low moments when the experience of God seems like a hallucination. Similar Mary, who had a sword or sorrow pierce her heart despite receiving a visit from an angel thirty-three years prior. Jesus had the Transfiguration but still sweat blood on Holy Thursday night. So a vision can't seem to take away the harshness of life and human memory could erode even these visions to some extent. Perhaps it's like how you can't store up warm summer sun for a day when it's ten below. You may remember how great that 80-degree day was, but it can't really change the fact that you're freezing.

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I like Advent more in recent years for the most materialistic of reasons: Logos Bible website offers a free electronic book every day of Advent and the affiliated Verbum site offers a free one every week. Thus every day I hurry-scurry to the website and see what I'm offered, and 7 times out of 10 it's something I want. It's sort of like the 12 days of Christmas only there's a lot more days in Advent. I could wish they'd do something like this during Lent in order to make that season more palatable, ha.

Today I got The Word In and Out of Season, a collection of homilies for all the Sundays of Advent and Lent.  The other day The Blessings of Christmas by Pope Benedict.

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I'd always wondered why “Behold the Man” in the passion account seemed to be disproportionately emphasized. A google search helped illustrate a pleasing symmetry between Old and New Testaments:

John 19:5 Behold the man. Pilate, evidently trying to show the crowd that Jesus was a pitiable shell rather than a king (thus demonstrating the absurdity of their charge), urged them to behold Him in this forlorn state and ridiculous caricature of kingly apparel, thinking thereby to displace their hatred with pity. But when he said, sarcastically, no doubt, “Behold the man,” he was unwittingly using prophetic language. Through the prophet Isaiah, God had said concerning the coming Messiah, “Behold your God!” and “Behold my Servant” (Isaiah 40:9; 42:1). Through the prophet Zechariah, God said concerning Him, “Behold the Man” and “Behold, thy King” (Zechariah 6:12; 9:9). Note how these four scenes we are urged to behold correspond to the respective pictures of Christ in the four gospels—“King” in Matthew, “Servant” in Mark, “Man” in Luke, “God” in John. Pilate sarcastically used two of these titles: “Behold the Man” in John 19:5, and “Behold your King” in John 19:14.

Also like the one word pictures of gospels. Does it say anything about a person if their favorite gospel is Jesus as servant instead of King, or God instead of man? Be interesting if someone studied the correspondence of favorite gospels to Myers-Briggs personality results.

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The iPad-ization of the nation is turning kids into introverts, or at least poor conversationalists inadequately socialized says a 3rd grade teacher in the WaPo.

I can certainly see the truth of that both intuitively and experientially, but I wonder if reading does the same. Reading tends to get a pass merely because it's seen as a much higher value than, say, playing computer games on iPad. But in both cases the result would seem the same socialization-wise.

“Sherry Turkle, the author of 'Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age,' writes about how we are sacrificing connections, one quick check of our screens at a time. Her research finds that college students, with their ubiquitous phones, 'are having a hard time with the give-and-take of face-to-face conversation.'

It can be hard for kids to sustain their attention in a small group discussion when their own personal portal beckons from the back of the room…Later, when I allowed their devices to hum to glowing life, conversation shut down altogether.

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Saw a coyote along the fence-line. Our dogs were barking at it like crazy but like Cool Hand Luke he just sauntered along looking attractive and majestic. When I went back he made himself scarce. They generally eat rats, mice, rabbits, cats. Not dogs fortunately.

We've seen now seen in the field behind our house at one time or another: coyote, red fox, deer, possum, groundhog, Coopers hawk, mallard ducks, geese.

Let's Play....Why's My Bookbag or E-Reader Equivalent So D*mn Heavy?

From NW: A Novel by Zadie Smith

She is in terrible mourning. She is unfamiliar with the rules concerning the mourning of animals. For a cat: one week. For a dog, two will be tolerated, three is to begin to look absurd, especially in the office where—in the Caribbean spirit—all animals smaller than a donkey are considered vermin.

In the end, all the things Grace claimed to like about Marlon—that he was not a “playa,” that he was gentle and awkward and not interested in money—were all the reasons she left him.

Rodney had in his hand an abridged library copy of an infamous book by Albert Camus. Both Keisha Blake and Rodney Banks sounded the T and the S in this name, not knowing any better: such are the perils of autodidacticism.

They were going to be lawyers, the first people in either of their families to become professionals. They thought life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization.

She didn’t approach Frank, nor did he approach her, despite their keen awareness of each other. A poetic way of putting this would be to say: “There was an inevitability about their road toward each other which encouraged meandering along the route.”

It is perhaps the profound way in which capitalism enters women’s minds and bodies that renders “ruthless comparison” the basic mode of their relationships with others

Natalie was enthralled. The idea that her own existence might be linked to people living six hundred years past! No longer an accidental guest at the table—as she had always understood herself to be—but a host, with other hosts, continuing a tradition.

“MTV Base. Music videos are the only joyful modern art form. Look at that joy.”

Natalie Blake had become a person unsuited to self-reflection. Left to her own mental devices she quickly spiraled into self-contempt.

Many things that had seemed, to their own mothers, self-evident elements of a common-sense world, now struck Natalie and Leah as either a surprise or an outrage. Physical pain. The existence of disease. The difference in procreative age between men and women. Age itself. Death.

 From Moby-Dick: 

He was the elected Xerxes of vast herds of wild horses, whose pastures in those days were only fenced by the Rocky Mountains and the Alleghanies. At their flaming head he westward trooped it like that chosen star which every evening leads on the hosts of light. The flashing cascade of his mane, the curving comet of his tail, invested him with housings more resplendent than gold and silver-beaters could have furnished him.

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But not only did each of these famous whales enjoy great individual celebrity—nay, you may call it an ocean-wide renown; not only was he famous in life and now is immortal in forecastle stories after death, but he was admitted into all the rights, privileges, and distinctions of a name; had as much a name indeed as Cambyses4 or Caesar. Was it not so, O Timor Tom! thou famed leviathan, scarred like an iceberg, who so long did’st lurk in the Oriental straits of that name, whose spout was oft seen from the palmy beach of Ombay?5 Was it not so, O New Zealand Jack! thou terror of all cruisers that crossed their wakes in the vicinity of the Tattoo Land?6 Was it not so, O Morquan! King of Japan, whose lofty jet they say at times assumed the semblance of a snow-white cross against the sky? Was it not so, O Don Miguel! thou Chilian whale, marked like an old tortoise with mystic hieroglyphics upon the back!

From America 3.0 by James Bennett...

Over centuries, in a roundabout way, the slow and grudging English religious toleration led to an American constitutional guarantee of “the free exercise of religion,” which then “blew back” and substantively impacted the way the Catholic Church itself came to understand religious freedom all around the world.

...the Protestant settlers of America also brought their medieval constitutionalism with them as well, which they had inherited intact from the Catholic centuries in England. In that sense, and ironically, the colonists carried ancient Catholic notions of political liberty with them into the American wilderness, even though they were the very “Protestants of Protestantism.”

Excerpt Corner

From: My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard 

Seeing her grow up also changes my view of my own upbringing, not so much because of the quality but the quantity, the sheer amount of time you spend with your children, which is immense. So many hours, so many days, such an infinite number of situations that crop up and are lived through. From my own childhood I remember only a handful of incidents, all of which I regarded as momentous, but which I now understand were a few events among many, which completely expunges their meaning, for how can I know that those particular episodes that lodged themselves in my mind were decisive, and not all the others of which I remember nothing? 

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When I was growing up I was taught to look for the explanation of all human qualities, actions and phenomena in the environment in which they originated. Biological or genetic determinants, the givens, that is, barely existed as an option, and when they did they were viewed with suspicion. Such an attitude can at first sight appear humanistic, inasmuch as it is intimately bound up with the notion that all people are equal, but upon closer examination it could just as well be an expression of a mechanistic attitude to man, who, born empty, allows his life to be shaped by his surroundings. 

It is not the case that we are born equal and that the conditions of life make our lives unequal, it is the opposite, we are born unequal, and the conditions of life make our lives more equal.

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When I think of my three children it is not only their distinctive faces that appear before me, but also the quite distinct feeling they radiate. This feeling, which is constant, is what they “are” for me. And what they “are” has been present in them ever since the first day I saw them. 

Their character traits, which slowly began to reveal themselves after only a few weeks, have never changed either, and so different are they inside each of them that it is difficult to imagine the conditions we provide for them, through our behavior and ways of being, have any decisive significance. 

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When we said no, she [my child] asked if it was the day after tomorrow; that was about the furthest extent of the future horizon for her. 

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All the young women drank water in such vast quantities it was coming out of their ears, they thought it was “beneficial” and “healthy,” but all it did was send the numbers of incontinent young people soaring...they were confusing food with the mind, they thought they could eat their way to being better human beings without understanding that food is one thing and the notions food evokes another.

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At this juncture in the conversation we were handed a brochure from one of the town’s speech therapists. They are crazy in this country, I thought, a speech therapist? Did everything have to be institutionalized? She’s only three! 

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But I liked the most ordinary of the sky’s manifestations, even the very smooth, gray, rain-filled ones, against whose heavy background the colors in the backyards beneath me stood out clearly, almost shone. The verdigris roofs! The orangey red of the bricks! And the yellow metal of the cranes, how bright it was against all the grayish white! Or one of the normal summer days when the sky was clear and blue and the sun was burning down, and the few clouds drifting by were light, almost contourless, then the glittering, gleaming expanse of buildings stretched into the distance. And when evening fell there was an initial flare of red on the horizon, as though the land below was aflame, then a light, gentle darkness, under whose kind hand the town settled down for the night, as though happily fatigued after a whole day in the sun. Stars lit the sky, satellites hovered, planes twinkled, flying into and out of Kastrup and Sturup.

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Or perhaps it was the prefabricated nature of the days in this world I was reacting to, the rails of routine we followed, which made everything so predictable that we had to invest in entertainment to feel any hint of intensity? 

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I took Dostoyevsky with me, first Demons, then The Brothers Karamazov. In them I found the light again. But it wasn’t the lofty, clear and pure light, as with Hölderlin; with Dostoyevsky there were no heights, no mountains, there was no divine perspective, everything was in the human domain, wreathed in this characteristically Dostoyevskian wretched, dirty, sick, almost contaminated mood that was never too far from hysteria.