[overheard]

Sylas (4): Lets hurry up the stairs so the bears don't get us!
Judah (2): Yeah, lets hurry up the stairs so the... Hey! There's no bears in the house!

this is problematic

"We have counted on preaching, teaching, and knowledge or information to form faith in the hearer, and have counted on faith to form the inner life and outward behavior of the Christian. But, for whatever reason, this strategy has not turned out well. The result is that we have multitudes of professing Christians who well may be ready to die, but obviously are not ready to live, and can hardly get along with themselves, much less with others." - Dallas Willard (2006).

Current [NonStop] Soundtrack

Wendell Berry says...

...the Food System is firmly grounded on the following principles:

• Food is important mainly as an article of international trade.
• It doesn't matter what happens to farmers.
• It doesn't matter what happens to the land.
• Agriculture has nothing to do with "the environment."
• There will always be plenty of food, for if farmers don't grow it from the soil, then scientists will invent it.
• There is no connection between food and health. People are fed by the food industry, which pays no attention to health, and are healed by the health industry, which pays no attention to food.
• It follows that there is no connection between healing and health. Hospitals customarily feed their patients poor-quality, awful-tasting, factory-made expensive food and keep them awake all night with various expensive attentions. There is a connection between money and health.

Wendell Berry (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community, 1994).

Your Body belongs to the World of Love

"A body, love insists, is neither a spirit nor a machine; it is not a picture, a diagram, a chart, a graph, an anatomy; it is not an explanation; it is not a law. It is precisely and uniquely what it is. It belongs to the world of love, which is a world of living creatures, natural orders and cycles, many small, fragile lights in the dark." - Wendell Berry (Health is Membership, 1994).

Being and Utility

Perhaps it was Max Weber who first made the connection between the development of capitalism and the puritan work ethic in his 1905 classic text. The links he draws feel obvious to me and I believe that today, the reverse influence of capitalist culture back upon the church is also true. The more we "run" churches like businesses, the more cues we begin to take (unchecked) from the corporate world. How should we organize without rigidity? How do we program without using eachother? How do we strategize without loosing sight of faces? How do we hire, fire, promote and demote within a worshiping community, called beloved by God? How do we encourage eachother to live into our spiritual gifitings without defining people by their utility? Are we more than simply cogs in the Kingdom of God? These are some thoughts on my mind these days that connected with these words by Moltmann in which I experience comfort and rest.
“When a man sees the meaning of life only in being useful and used, he necessarily gets caught in the crisis of living, when illness or sorrow makes everything including himself seem useless… Whoever lays hold of the joy which embraces the creator and his own existence also gets rid of the dreadful question of existence: For what? …We are evidently supposed to be busy with something, as if our existence were justified or rendered beautiful by this. The opposite is true: Our existence is justified and made beautiful before we are able to do or fail to do anything." - Moltmann (Theology of Play, 1972)

How do you Play?

We no longer know how to do nothing. We have mastered our work and now must master our leisure. “Yet those who would master their leisure merely manage to violate their own freedom. Freedom has a way of coming by itself to those who are open and receptive. Those who feel they must master it are destroying freedom even in their leisure.” - Moltmann (Theology of Play, 1972).

ikon christian community

A sweet church plant called IKON down in San Francisco is using a few of my "Fruit of the Spirit" series to advertize for their community (they just launched last Sunday- congrats!). I sent Longbrake down to take pictures- these are in the SF Subway system.

Hello, My name is _______ and I delight in ______.

“People in the United States define themselves by their work, says [a man from the Netherlands], who is self employed. ‘Europeans define themselves by hobbies and other things. Work is just a means.’... At parties in the US, he says, the first question is, ‘What do you do?’ In the Netherlands, the opening question is, ‘Where have you been on vacation?’ or ‘Where are you going on vacation?’”
Where I rest and what I do for pleasure reveals more about me than what I do "to pay the bills." I must derive my identity not from what I do, but from who I am. I discover who I am by listening to the voices of my community and paying attention to what brings me delight and causes life to flourish around me. My name must be separate from my utility- my name must come from Love.
Quote from Marilyn Gardner, "The Ascent of Hours on the Job," Christian Science Monitor 97, no. 110 (2005).

Time has Nothing to do With You

Lewis Mumford was an American historian and philosopher of technology and science- he wrote this in 1934: “The clock… is a piece of power-machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes: by its essential nature it dissociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequence: the special world of science.”

Rememberance as Anticipation

Walter Benjamin was a Jewish philosopher who wrote this in 1940 as a prisoner in a refugee camp in occupied France: “We know the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”

Time Turned Its Back on Me

We are all casualties of the mechanistic and militant advancement of purely linear conceptualizations of time. Franz Kafka articulates this sense of alienation and the impact of disembodied time upon all things (words, things, people, actions) as they loose their meaning in his stories. In a letter to his sister he wrote: “In fact the clock has certain personal relationships to me, like many things in the room, save that now… they seem to be beginning to turn their backs on me, above all the calendar… Lately it is as if it had been metamorphosed. Either it is absolutely uncommunicative- for example, you want its advice, you go up to it, but the only thing it says is ‘Feast of the Reformation’- which probably has a deeper significance, but who can discover it –or, on the contrary, it is nastily ironic.”

oh hell

head on over to nathan's blog to read his sermon on hell. it's a well-researched piece that is very much worth sitting with and bringing to conversation with others. let the un-learning begin!
photo by bryan nixon.

The Subversive Economy

I just completed this piece. It was commissioned by Epiphaneia for a conference they are putting on this coming April in Toronto- "The Evolving Church: Kingdom Economy."
India and Acrylic Inks on Watercolor Paper, by Phil Nellis (2009).

UPDATED: Here's the website for the event.