Mystery and Miracle

We have 4 chickens. These are the eggs they lay for us.
Every day it blows my mind. Every time it's a miracle.

Can you drink the cup?

"But this is togetherness with sharp differentiation... One of those present must die, and their togetherness has to incorporate that- or, rather, be incorporated into it. They are approaching something which will test the bounds of their community past breaking points."
[David Ford in Self and Salvation]

Community, Relationship and Solidarity... with the Other.

I had a classic "driveway moment" this week- where the story on the radio kept me from getting out of my car for another 15 min after I had arrived home. I was surprised, moved and brought to tears by this tale of how relationship bears more weight than morality or values. Enjoy the story and I'd love to know your reaction, too.

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).

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).

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.

Ghost Town Revival

My brother has two buddies that write short stories and songs that (in my imagination) are told and sung on the stage that Flannery O'Connor built called the "Christ-Haunted South." Really great stuff to poke through. Two of my favorites: The Preacher on Saturday Night and Weather Report.

Image Details: "The Church without Christ," Ink on Board by Phil Nellis. Inspired by O'Connor's Wise Blood.

Bazan at MHGS

Bazan at MHGS

re-reading a psalm

"la escapadita" - phil nellis (2006)

i was a part of a great conversation last night around psalm 23. we read it 5 times and then did some reader-response. there was a range of responses- anything from "i find comfort in this text" to "this is bullshit" and everything in between. i mostly responded to the text out of a place of disconnect and disillusion regarding the imagery and promise being offered- it is a psalm so worn out that its' words have no traction in my heart, they only trigger memories of poorly crafted songs and lame sunday school imagery.

i have to find a way back into the text. what i have found helpful is to handle it almost as a creed, which to me feels a lot like fantasy. i read it and submit myself to it not because it is my experience but because i have to believe that it could be. certainly, there is something deep down that resonates in the memory of my soul, but it is primarily the imaginative task that can lead my fools' heart to hope. and that is the risk of course.

earlier this week i was internally preoccupied with "the valley of the shadow of death" and was at the same time being invited into imaginative play by my 4-year old son. there was a deep cynicism that resisted this, i even projected it upon him thinking, "play while you can, kid, someday life won't be so fun." but in the end, i let him pull me out of my "real world" into a world that proved to be more real in that our play changed my perception of the valley. we were lions, there was a parade with foxes and hedgehogs, we had a picnic in the jungle. i began to feel the comfort of a rod and a staff. i sensed a table prepared before me.

when the play was over, my soul had been restored and reality had been altered. fantasy had spilled back into my world of anxiety and despair, reorienting what i could say to be true in that moment. i had recited a creed that was not mine and i found myself in it. take my cynicism and give me the prophetic imagination that affirms as real that which could be, that which my heart longs for- give me eyes to see more than i see right now.

mhgs advert

a recent viewbook for mars hill graduate school featured my "la danse revisited" (2008)- a permanent installation in the lobby.

Bifrost Arts

The Bifrost Arts music project "Come O Spirit" is available for pre-order. It ships on 9/8. Buy it here. YAY!

*UPDATE*
to my surprise, it shipped on the 1st and arrived last Friday- and after 20 spins, i think everyone should buy a copy. go now- iTunes or the link above... GO!

Bulletin Board of the Brain

my friend kj is sharp. she is well-versed in the realms of psychology, theology and the arts. this makes her a great reviewer of books, films and theater as far as i'm concerned. i've enjoyed her recent reviews of the twilight books-turned-movies [which i havn't read or seen but whose rabbid-rappid rise to POPularity i've been intreagued by- the phenomenon of it and what that may indicate in regards to understanding ourselves as a media-consuming-culture].
part I, part II, part III.

Come O Spirit!

this is exciting and wonderful and i can't wait. i won't write anything about it because you can read about it here, here, here and here. [thanks for the heads-up blaine].