BLOG Revival!

Woot! Woot! Ring them bells...Banner is back on the blog.

I'm a stay at home Dad now and my goodness, I need some way to connect with something, someone outside of the house. So there is at least this space here. Right?

The deets: I put my notice in to the college last December 2013 and agreed to stay on through this past Fall semester so they would have ample time to put someone else in the position. They have just recently hired someone and this someone is a very exciting and interesting pick. I'll let the college make that announcement.

Susanna is now "on the market" applying for tenure track positions. She is a hero and quite brave right now.

The boys are a beautiful, loud, sweet, squirmy mess..

I have been learning much about what it means to be a FOUR on the enneagram, "the individualist" or a "needs to be special" person. I feel everything and that makes leading or overseeing four weekly worship services that put me in front of some 1200 people very demanding. The trouble is that in all this feeling, I am very capable of deep love. And as I have loved those college students so, it is insanely tough to be away from them.

I also need a space to share ideas. So here is something I care about from Jacque Ellul:

Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.

I bought and am now using a smartphone and that is interesting since I wrote this, "Dose of Techno-Pessimism.  More on that later.

I also recently wrote this music piece, "From Miley to Music: How We Listen. Check it.

Heschel on the Sabbath

The section below is very helpful and only from the beginning of the book. The question is how to live Sabbath everyday and pray without ceasing while still also protecting a single day.


From The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel pp. 1-2

When the Romans met the Jews and noticed their strict adherence to the law of abstaining from labor on the Sabbath, their only reaction was contempt. The Sabbath is a sign of Jewish indolence, was the opinion held by Juvenal, Seneca and others.

In defense of the Sabbath, Philo, the spokesman of the Greek-speaking Jews of Alexandria, says: "On this day we are commanded to abstain from all work, not because the law inculcates slackness....Its object is rather to give man relaxation from continuous and unending toil and by refreshing their bodies with a regularly calculated system of remissions to send them out renewed to their old activities. For a breathing spell enables not merely ordinary people but athletes also to collect their strength with a  stronger force behind them to undertake promptly and patiently each of the tasks set before them."

Here teh Sabbath is represented not in the spirit of the Bible but in the spirit of Aristotle. According to the Stagirite, "we need relaxation, because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end"; it is "for the sake of activity," for the sake of gaining strength for new efforts. To the biblical mind, however, labor is the means toward and end, and the Sabbath as a day of rest, as a day of abstaining from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering from toil, is not for the purpose of recovering one's lost strength and becoming for the forthe-coming labor. The Sabbath is a day for the sake of life. Man is not a beast of burden, and the Sabbath is not for the purpose of enhancing the efficiency of his work. "Last in creation, first in intention," the Sabbath is "the end of the creation of heaven and earth."

The Sabbath is not for the sake of the weekdays; the weekdays are for the sake of Sabbath. It is not an interlude but the climax of living.

Comments? Writing = Exact Thoughts

Apologies to Nick or any others who might not have expected me to reply to their comments in a full blog post. I realized that I might have breached some trust in this "online classroom" I am trying to develop here. I'm just overeager to have interaction. It is like having a student raise her hand in class. Get the discussion going!

From now on if you've got something that you'd like to interact about and don't necessarily want to go 'public' please feel free to email me bannerj@hope.edu.

If I am anything, I am a teacher. Five years in secondary ed. Five years teaching a few college courses. That is why it makes sense for me to be a worship leader at a college. I've got a huge classroom here. Mostly I hope this blog helps me interact with Hope College students more intentionally and thoughtfully. 

I spent three days earlier this summer reading with a student going into the 8th grade. I used to teach grade 6 language arts. I picked Touching Spirit Bear a book I used to teach and know well. He is a great kid. Very bright. A great reader with attention to details, but we talk about how hard it is for him to share his thoughts in discussion.

Here is my soapbox yet once again: we largely lack skills of conversation in our society. We are good consumers, but the only way for us to own ideas is to know how to take the thoughts bouncing around in our heads and put them into sentences. If it is helpful to say things out loud, it is even more helpful to write the thoughts out.

Sir Francis Bacon: "Writing maketh and exact [person]."

W.H. Auden/ E.M. Forster/ Saul Bellow: "How do I know what I know until I see what I say?"

I'm At The End Of The Final Section! Here's Another Bit

A week of staring at a computer screen will make you a little (or a lot) crazy. Susanna has been a trooper. I've had some more time with Casper than regularly. He is a good excuse for a break.

I'm happy to say I must be 10-15 pages from hitting the end. Then I've got a week or so of editing/revising. The hardest thing for me is to not have an immediate audience, a class of students to share these thoughts with, or a good friend to listen. I haven't bothered Susanna this week with any of this. In fact the other night I spent an hour reading through one of her short stories. I had a great phone chat with Will Lightfoot though on Thursday. He is always curious and it was good to hear myself try to verbally rephrase what I've been writing. That was a good exercise--a way to see if I'm making any sense.

But I can't help myself. I need to think/to know NOW that some of these things will matter to other people. I'm sure other grad students do this. Someone tell me I'm not too much of a weirdo. These two excerpts pretty well summarize of what I'm doing:


From IV.ii Revisiting/Re-framing: Dynamic Obstacles

Let me clarify that proper use of technology is not matter of either indwelling or not indwelling the tool or whether it is or is not meditative. It is impossible to use a tool without indwelling it. Tools will always mediate something. We might say that the technologies form us in their image; technologies are not benign; they are not value neutral; technologies not only encourage certain conversations, they can shove us into a narrowed, specific conversation. The question is how we are indwelling the tool and to what end—how richly we engage existence and how our affections are being formed. In Augustinian terms: “Those things which are to be used help, and as it were, sustain us as we move toward blessedness in order that we may gain and cling to those things which make us blessed.” It is as impossible for us to escape technology as it is to escape culture, and to escape culture would be to escape being human. The question isn’t if we are cultural or technological, but how and to what extent. In order to make sure we use our tools instead of being used by our tools, we have to subvert the capacities of technology and reform its power to order our lives and affections for the sake of “blessedness.” Some of us will decide that certain technologies are a waste of time and are not worth the dangers they pose. Others will find great surprise in renegotiating certain technologies and discover capacities and purposes for those tools that may have never been considered previously. Our posture towards technology depends upon the optimism we have theologically about God’s participation in culture, but it also depends on our faithfulness to actively participate in the work of redemption.


From IV.iii The Uniqueness of Music

I have spent many words arguing against the prominence of science. Is it fair to put music on a pedestal or is this just another type of reduction? Homo musicus instead of homo sapien? Is it unfair not only to single music out among all the sciences and humanities, but also unfair to the other arts? I don’t think so. How can I make so bold a claim? The primary uniqueness of music is its universal appeal, its historical and geographical ubiquity. “There have been cultures without counting, cultures without painting, cultures bereft of the wheel or the written word, but never a culture without music.” [1] Remember that music dates back as early as 45,000 B.C. Of course there are some people who don’t enjoy music, but they are rare. Neurologist, Oliver Sacks, writes about musicophilia, our shared love of music:

We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one. This takes many different forms. All of us (with very few exceptions) can perceive music, perceive tones, timbre, pitch intervals, melodic contours, harmony, and (perhaps most elementally) rhythm. We integrate all of these and “construct” music in our minds using many different parts of the brain. And to this largely unconscious structural appreciation of music is added an often intense and profound emotional reaction to music. [2]

Sacks explains that neuroscience has discovered how music is continually running in the muscle motor of the brain; we continually have access to songs in our head. While Walker Percy in a thought experiment imagined that visiting Martians would find speech the most peculiar identifying characteristic of humanity, Sacks points to the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke. In Clarke’s novel Childhood Ends the Overlords, curious alien beings, visit earth and identify music as the most distinctive human behavior. Of course I reconcile the two—linguistic and musical impulses—by assuming that the are both of the same outward impulse of homo colloquens/musicus. Homo adorans extends herself into musical conversation; she reaches out to the other for love’s sake. Yet, I do want to specify an elevated place for musical languages—poetry over propositional prose and poesis over sciencia because these preserve the fuller dignity and extravagance of the cosmos and a robust humanism.

---

[1] John D. Barrow quoted from Begbie, 15.

[2] Oliver Sacks. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007) xi.

Walker Percy on Violence and Alienation

I'm back at this comprehensive paper. Almost finished with section three. Then on to the final fourth section and lots of revisions and editing. Publishing an excerpt here will perhaps help me believe that this this is really almost finished (and it serves as a distraction). Can't say that I wasn't jealous of all those seniors who graduated on Sunday. It feels good to finish things.

I've selected this bit to share in light of the assassination of bin Laden. I've been struggling to decide what I think about it. Yes I feel a sense of relief, but should I? I was sick in bed at the end of last week with bronchitis and watched Die Hard on Netflix. I felt emotionally worn out afterwards and the next day. I'm not a pacifist, but I wonder if I'm getting close.

My overall argument in the essay is that music at its best draws people together. The argument that follows this section below is that in popular culture we largely use the technology of music according our fallen nature, to separate and alienate rather than to draw near and commune. Admittedly popular music is capable of drawing particular crowds, but how easy is it to gather a crowd? Instead, how difficult is it to form a communion of beings, a fellowship of saints? 

.............................................................

Comprehensive Paper To Be Submitted to Regent College

For the Completion of the Masters In Christians Studies

Interdisciplinary Studies

By Joshua Banner

From Section Three: Obstacles of Communion

Walker Percy is as insightful into the human condition as any. He articulates alarmingly the questions surrounding what has been known as the “Age of Anxiety.” He wrestles with the conundrums of modern existence, “why does man feel so sad in the twentieth century?” And he follows it with several pages of similar revealing questions.

Why does man feel so sad in the very age when, more than in any other age, he has succeeded in satisfying his needs and making over the world to his own use?

Why has man entered on an orgy of war, murder, torture, and self-destruction unparalleled in history and in the very century which he had hoped to see the dawn of universal peace and brotherhood?

Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments?

Why do people often feel so bad in good environments that they prefer bad environments?

Why does a man often feel better in a bad environment?

Why is a man apt to feel bad in a good environment, say, suburban Short Hills, New Jersey, on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon?

Why is the same man apt to feel good in a very bad environment, say an old hotel on Key Largo during a hurricane?

Why have more people been killed in the twentieth century than in all other centuries put together?

Why is war man’s greatest pleasure?

Why is man the only creature that wages war against its own species?[1]

This list of questions continues on for some eight pages as Percy subversively rants about the poverty of our existence. It would not be possible for us to alienate and exploit each other if there was not within us a common thread of violent unrest.  Lasch seems to acknowledge this violence in his sporadic reference to Thomas Hobbes’ reflections on a “war of all against all,” a state of nature where persons have retreated from the culture’s institutional supports. Lasch anticipates this as an understandable reaction to our “overorganized society” with its bureaucracy, its medical sophistication, and psychiatry that can foster a deeper animosity than the raw wilderness of a world Hobbes intended government to preserve us from.[2]

At the end of Percy’s list he restates his primary question: “why is it that scientists have a theory of everything under the sun but do not have a theory of man?” With all of our ‘overorganization’ and sophistication, violence—how we cut ourselves off from each other—turns out to be the most distinct example of our alienation. According to Erazim Kohak’s description of the modern condition, “Grief and remorse are reflected from [the artifacts of modern civilization], ever reinforced, until the human, crazed by pain, strikes out and kills those around him or himself, or both.”[3] The violence of the twentieth century has left us with little optimism and no ability to identify a coherent, unifying theory about ourselves. We can only agree on what is rhetorically present in Percy’s questions, that we are alienated, that what we share most is our isolation, our tendency to separate and even kill.

---

[1] Walker Percy. Message In A Bottle. 3,4.

[2] Christopher Lasch. Culture of Narcissism. 49.

[3] Erazim Kohak. From the Embers to the Sky. 45.

Bohoeffer quote of the day

I've been thesis-ing today. Somewhat productive. Truly.

We must never speak one-dimensionally of God, but rather in terms of statement and rejoinder, or point-counterpoint.  For we must remember that God can absolutely never be captured even in the grasp of a dialectical mode of expression.  Real dialectic is humble. It contrasts statement with rejoinder and knows that the truth lies beyond this mode of expression in the imperceptible center. God remains free in relation to the dialectic.[1] 

---

[1] Quoted in Huntemann, Georg. The Other Bonhoeffer: An Evangelical Reassessment of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989) 35. This is Huntemann’s translation of the Gesammelte Schriften.

Thanksgiving Readings

From The Supper of The Lamb: A Culinary Reflection by Robert Farrar Capon

Section from Chapter One: Ingredients

Permit me now to wipe my hands and introduce myself. I am an author who has always intended to write about cooking, but who has never gotten started in a way that didn’t carry him out of the field in two paragraphs or less. This time, as you can see, I have outwitted the muse. My beginning, if confusing, is the most auspicious thus far.

Next, my qualifications.

First, I am an amateur. If that strikes you as disappointing, consider how much in error you are, and how the error is entirely of your own devising. At its root lies an objection to cookbooks written by non-professionals (an objection, by the way, which I consider perfectly valid, and congratulate you upon). It does not, however, apply here. Amateur and nonprofessional are not synonyms. The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers—amateurs—it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes, and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight. It is far more often that it should be, boredom.  And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral—it is the fertilizing principle of all un-loveliness.

In such a situation, the amateur—the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy—is just the man you need. More than that, whether you think you need him or not, he is a man bound, by his love, to speak. If he loves Wisdom or the Arts, so much the better for him and for all of us. But if he loves only the way meat browns or onions peel, if he delights simply in the curds of his cheese or the color of his wine, he is, by every one of those enthusiasms, commanded to speak. A silent lover is one who doesn’t know his job.

Section from Chapter 8: Water in Excelsis

The bloom of the yeast lies upon the grape skins year after year because He likes it; C6H12O6=2C2H5OH+2CO2 (fermentation) is a dependable process because, every September, He says, that was nice; do it again. 

So let us pause and drink to that, to a radically, perpetually unnecessary world, to the restoration of astonishment to the heart and mystery to the mind, to wine because it is a gift we never expected, to mushroom and artichoke for they are incredible legacies, to improbable acids, and high alcohols since we would have hardly thought of them ourselves and to all being because it is superfluous, to the hairs on Harry’s ear and to the 768^th cell from the upper attachment on the right gluteus maximus on the last girl on the chorus line. Prosit, dear hearts. Cheers, men and brethren. For we are free. Nothing is needful. Everything is for joy. Let the bookkeepers struggle with their balance sheets. It is the tippler who sees the untipped hand. God is eccentric. He has loves, not reasons. Salud.

From For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann

From Chapter One Section Three

To love is not easy, and mankind has chosen not to return God’s love. Man has loved the world, but as an end in itself and not as transparent to God. He has done it so consistently that it has become something that is “in the air.” It seems natural for man to experience the world as opaque, and not shot through with the presence of God. It seems natural not to live a life of thanksgiving for God’s gift of a world.

When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the “sacrament” of God’s presence.

PRAYERS & PRAISES

(join in the sections in bold)

*Give us, our Father, a sense of your presence

as we gather now for worship.

Grant us gratitude as we remember your goodness,

penitence as we remember our sins,

and joy as we remember your love.

Enable us to lift up our hearts

in humble prayer and fervent praise,

through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

PSALM 100

¹Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
²   Worship the Lord with gladness;
   come into his presence with singing.
³ Know that the Lord is God.
   It is he that made us, and we are his;^*
   we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.
⁴ Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
   and his courts with praise.
   Give thanks to him, bless his name.

*Great God of our lives,

for all that is gracious in our lives,

revealing the image of Christ,

we give you thanks.

For our daily food and drink,

our homes and families, and our friends,

we give you thanks.

For minds to think and hearts to love and hands to serve,

we give you thanks.

For health and strength to work, and leisure to rest and play,

we give you thanks.

For all valiant seekers after truth, liberty, and justice,

we give you thanks.

For the great mercies and promises given to us in Christ Jesus our Lord;

to you, O God, be praise and glory. Amen.

⁶PSALM 4

There are many who say, ‘O that we might see some good!
   Let the light of your face shine on us, O Lord!’
⁷ You have put gladness in my heart
   more than when their grain and wine abound.

*Prayers are from The Worship Sourcebook.

From Bonhoeffer's Letters & Papers From Prison

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience--and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as "religious" do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by "religious."[1]

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the "religious a priori" of mankind. "Christianity" has always been a form--perhaps the true form--of "religion." But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless--and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any "religious" reaction?)--what does that mean for "Christianity"?[2]

---

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison (New York, Touchstone: 1997) 279.

[2] [Tegel] 30 April 1944 To Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison, 281.

Reading excerpts from Rowan Williams' Wound of Knowledge

Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to Saint John of the Cross.

p. 17 

To believe in Jesus' God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality. Because it is menacing and painful to be confronted with the knowledge that our constructions of controlled sense are liable to be empty self-serving, we readily turn to violence against the bearers of such knowledge: in Johannine terms, we have decided we want to stay blind when the light is there before us, claiming we can see perfectly well (John 8:41). And the New Testament (especially the fourth gospel) suggests that only when such naked collision of interest occurs can the un-compromising reality of God over against our patterns of "religious control" become dear. God provokes crisis to destroy our self-deceiving reliance on "Law;" our dependence on what we as individuals can make and sustain, or what we as societies can administer for our own unchallenged interest. Self-dependence is revealed as a mechanism of self-de-struction; to cling to it in the face of God's invitation to trust is a thinly veiled self hatred.

p. 18

The Spirit's work is to make the believer like Christ, and being like Christ means living through certain kinds of human experience--not once, but daily. The second letter to the Corinthians is Paul's most passionate meditation on this. Here he speaks of the daily affliction, the daily rejection, the daily dying by which the Spirit works, transforming us "from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:18). The veil of the law is removed, illusion is stripped away, but only slowly does this penetrate every area of human living. And it penetrates by means of the pervasive and inexorable experience of failure, by the "wasting away" (2 Cor. 4:16) of the instincts that look for clarity, ease and effectiveness and the acceptance of the hiddenness of God's working.

p.19 

Here is the transfiguration from glory to glory, realized daily in the absurd, the biter, even the comical; this is, surprisingly, what it is to live in the Messsianic age and to be conformed to the pattern of the Messiah. When the future breaks into the present order, it shows itself in Paul's "folly" for Christ, in the stupid incongruities of this curious life in two worlds.

 

Baby-Making, Peace-Making, Patience & The Creative Process

Yesterday was the due date for the baby. For some nine months we've been waiting for that day to come and now it's gone and this morning it is raining outside and we can't take our  hour-long walk to help coax the baby further down into Susanna's hips. I've been joking about this darn nine month arrangement that God designed. Some actually argue that it ends up being closer to ten months, but I'll leave those details for Susanna and the midwives to discuss. My point is this: six months is hard; nine months is excruciating.

I'm starting to work on my final comprehensive paper for my Regent degree. I've been hacking away at this coursework for over seven years and now it is all coming down to one single 40-page paper. Of course I'm glad to finally earn my Masters, but I'm also sad. This is not something that I've waited eagerly to finish and be done with. I love being a student. I need the accountability of a syllabus, a classroom and an instructor to push my learning further than it could go by itself. I love the process of learning.

It has been three weeks since our final Sunday evening service. I've had some bits of work to do for Hope College, but for the most part, I've had access to large amounts of time. Yet, I haven't begun any work on the Ordinary Neighbors record. I know this is the final "push." I could be done with it in just a few weeks--done with this project that I've obsessed over for four years. Part of me is scared to be done, to let go of control, to call it finished. It's a typical struggle of an artist, to decide when the work is finished, to know it is ready for "publication." Another part of me is sad to be done with this particular creative process. I love fiddling around in the studio. I love fiddling around with these songs.

I've been reading through a couple books to get my mind and heart back into the flow as I prepare to write this final paper. Makoto Fujimura's Refractions: a Journey of Faith, Art and Culture is really nice in this regard. His first section has been lingering inside of me the past few days. He works off of some thoughts from Tolstoy on art:

"The task of art is enormous. Through the influence of real art, aided by science, guided by religion, that peaceful co-operation of man which is now maintained by external means--by our law-courts, police, charitable institutions, factory inspection, and so forth,--should be obtained by man's free and joyous activity. Art should cause violence to be set aside."

There is much to think about here about the relationship between art and peace. I want to dive into Nicholas Wolterstorff's work on justice. I heard him speak a few years ago about justice and art. I'd like to go further with Derrida on these things too. There could be a lifetime of reflection on these things. I like where Makoto starts his thoughts on this topic:

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God" Matthew 5:9

He explains that one way to translate "peacemakers," eirenepois, is "peace poets." Makoto comments:

"We need to seek ways to be not just 'peacekeepers' but to be engaged 'peacemakers.' In such a definition, peace (or the Hebrew word shalom) is not simply an absence of war but a thriving of our lives, where God uses our creativity as a vehicle to create the world that ought to be. Art, and any creative expression of humanity, mediates in times of conflict and is often inexplicably tied to wars and conflicts."

Why do people resort to violence in the first place? Perhaps it is because they are impatient with the other means that are at hand. Love requires more patience than violence. Peacemaking requires more grace than violence-making. It has occurred to me that my impatience with the baby coming is in its small way a kind of violence, a violence that brings anxiety, stress and even strife into my home and my psyche. It is easier to be short with Susanna and myself, with the dogs...with the weather. Patience and peacemaking are partners. When choosing peace and patience, we chose to trust something that is greater than our own powers and resources. If God is my greatest means, then prayer becomes my main priority.

Here is a broad speculation: I doubt that families prior to the industrial revolution struggled to be patient during nine months gestation of a baby. They were closer to the patterns of nature and didn't know any different. Today we are so cut off from the natural order of creation. Our machinery has made us an impatient society because it convinces us that we have so much control. My joke in the past month has been this, "Come on, God. Don't you know I'm an American?" I've learned patience in my learning process and in my own art making (okay, perhaps I need to be a bit more impatient with the music and just get it done), but this baby making has revealed in me a whole other layer of striving, an ache for control. That is why I like the story about the fish farm in southern Spain that I posted last (skip halfway through the video to get straight to it). This is a perfect illustration of the kind of "conversation with the land" that Wendell Berry advocates that I mentioned earlier.

To say all of this again more succinctly: as human creatures we need to learn how to live within the created order and not over and against it. If we can learn how to live within creation, then we will learn the peace making, joyful patience that will allow us to be effective stewards of creation, nurturers rather than exploiters. If I can learn this, then perhaps I'll be a more patient and loving father and husband as well.

So, there is of course a lesson of patience in this nine months. The next few days (post due date) seem likely to be long. I'm trying to love this idea that God, our Creator, is the most magnificent of artists as he fashions this child. I've said that I enjoy the creative process even in watching other artists work. I pray that I can continue to patiently enjoy this particular creative process. Here's one way to look at it: how many artists could consistently turn out work on a nine month deadline and have each piece turn out to be completely unique and original? What artist could do this several billion times?

David Foster Wallace on Worship...?

My father in law recently mentioned to Susanna that he had read David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement address at Kenyon.  I barely know anything about David Foster Wallace. Wiki says he's been compared to Thomas Pynchon, but if you aren't a Lit major or a writer yourself, generally these are not authors that make it into table talk. So, we thought it was pretty cool that Susanna's dad was familiar with Foster Wallace, so suprised in fact that we hunted down the speech and found it in the library in a collection edited by David Eggers. I read it to Sus night before last. It has been troubling me ever since.

First, and I'm not saying this to suggest that I'm anywhere close the rank and file of a writer like Foster Wallace, but what really strikes me as eerie about the speech is that I have written something kinda similar myself. Specifically, he beat me to the punch with a description of the grocery store as a kind of domestic hell of tedious drudgery. Here is a snippet from Foster Wallace:

You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day-rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

In 2004 I was working on a set of essays that I had hoped to from into something publishable. Here is an excerpt of my attempt to describe the same kind of impatience in a grocery store (and yes, it does feel weird to quote myself):

If I am able, after becoming exhausted from gathering my items for purchase, after walking up so many long isles, after walking past so many strangers, after treating all these strangers like strangers, after standing in line next to these strangers, after glancing over the covers of several exhaustingly ridiculous magazines, after looking at chocolate, after convincing myself that the women on these magazine covers are really not real, after paying with a debit card, after grabbing my bags to leave, and if right at that moment when I don’t need anything else from him or her, if right then I make an awkward attempt at being human by forcing a smile with a really sincere “you have a nice day too” maybe I will somehow change the world.

I swear, I've never read David Foster Wallace before this. I've always wanted to. Thought I should, but his suicide in 2008 has kept me from following through. I have had my own history of depression, and--I'm not trying to be cute here--I don't need another Elliot Smith in my life right now.

I'm further spooked by Foster Wallace's commencement address because he seems to get so much right--to see so honestly and clearly--yet his ultimate conclusions are so flabby. He so appropriately speaks a sobering word about the reality of adult life, that much of life is not glamorous but is the challenge of enduring the daily grind, the monotony of our jobs and domestic chores, chores like grocery shopping. Our work is primarily a labor of perspective, of seeing properly. Either we can hate our trips to the grocery store or we can re-envision the encounter with a kind of humble, somewhat optimistic patience. Yet the life lesson he offers is offered sheepishly, almost on the sly. He is so keen to offer his insight, yet he is even more keen to not assert his perspective on the listener. He attempts to say so much, yet he's reluctant to say anything with more than a whimper of conviction.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to.

And I take it that he assumes that this kind of passive, sage voice is suppose to be admirable. This seems to be the voice of our age offering college graduates something that in sum goes like this: "here are some thoughts I've had about life and learning, but ultimately what I think doesn't matter dude...ultimately it's all up to you to figure it out for yourself."

Here is my final example of what spooks me about the Foster Wallace address: he stumbles upon some language that could come straight out of an evangelical sermon:

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Foster Wallace's definition of truth is straight out of William James' pragmatism. He goes on to offer pluralistic disclaimers--that each of us can choose which spirituality or religion we prefer, but essentially he is saying that we become like the object of our worship whether it be money, our own bodies or our intellects. 

Christian wisdom teaches that the daily grind of our lives, the tedium and boredom of each day is fundamentally a result of the Fall. From the Genesis account, the strain and monotony of daily existence are a consequence of our rebellion. It is "by the sweat of your brow, you will earn your daily bread." Yes, we are called to re-envision each day, to redeem it from the grip of soul-sick repetition, but this isn't a task we have the power to accomplish on our own. The only God who can redeem the long hours of our days is the God who entered into time, lived under its curse and triumphed over time's greatest threat, death. It is the uniqueness of Christianity's incarnate, time bound, time redeeming God that gives me the courage to hold my convictions--with conviction.

Another book excerpt/ pre-order/ Sentimentalism defined

If you are so inclined, THE book can be pre-ordered here.

And David recently posted another excerpt this time from Jeremy Begbie. Begbie also addresses the issue of sentimentality in Christian art in another anthology:  The Beauty of God: Theology and the Arts edited by Daniel J. Treier, Mark Husbands and Roger Lundin. The excellent essay is titled, “Beauty, Sentimentality and the Arts.” The gist of the essay is that sentimentality is un-earned emotion or emotionalism when emotion is an end in itself. Begbie identifies three problems with it:

Sentimentalism:

1. misrepresents reality by evading or trivializing evil.
2. is emotionally self-indulgent.
3. it fails to take appropriate action.

I really appreciate his use of a quote from Milan Kundera:

“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: 'how nice to see children running on the grass!' The second tear says: 'How nice to be moved, together with all mankind by children running on the grass!' It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.” 

These thoughts can go a long way in serving the discussion on Christian music that I'm developing here on this blog.

What Music Feeds Your Soul? Part V

Alright. My hiatus from my more favorite music is over. As I write this, I’m listening to Wolf Parade’s “Apologies to Queen Mary,” and yeah, its “doing it” for me. Other interesting news: I don’t know if anyone noticed that John Michael Talbot posted a comment on the first of these “What Music Feeds Your Soul” posts. I looked around on the net and he does have a facebook account and actively writes blogs himself. So, there is reason to believe it was really him. Pretty cool. I’m just trying to figure out how he found my blog. Hmm…?

Oh, and speaking of news, Susanna is now 18 weeks pregnant. I can honestly agree that she is officially showing. I felt the baby night before last. It was two slight taps.

Continuing the discussion on what Christian music could become….

Here is a tough question that arises regularly in the course I teach, and it’s also something the worship team struggles with too: when does worship music become manipulative? My students, rightfully so, are very aware of the power they wield in creating a mood. Speed up the tempo, turn up the volume and get people excited, or slow things down and work a ballad for a somber, reflective state. Either way it is obvious that music can influence us by shifting our moods. Marketing specialist know this. Moviemakers know this. Party throwers know this. So, what is the difference between a worship leader and the rest?

Here I affirm once more the importance of the biblical and theological training of the leader. He/she needs the training to be able to discern when and how to use the power of music, to be able to identify what biblically sound music is. It is this kind of discernment that motivates me to keep writing out these thoughts. I want to imagine a kind of Christian worship that does not rely on the same over worn, and in effect, sentimentalized and manipulative instrumentation and arrangements.

Remember the road trip experience with the radio, how you can tell while flipping through radio stations which is the Christian music even before listening to the lyrics? I was in a studio in Dallas a few years ago watching a friend record the vocals of a popular Christian artist you have most likely heard of (but who I will not name here). The final tracks were sent off in the middle of the night to Nashville. In the morning the song came back fully mixed and ready for radio release as a single of the artist’s forthcoming full-length release. The mixing engineer’s compliment to my friend, the tracking engineer, was “your tracks have got that Nashville sound!” Of course, I was happy for my friend, a very talented studio engineer and producer, yet the gadfly in me begs the question: why is “the Nashville sound” the standard of success? The studio becomes a place that does, it seems, work hard to manipulate a song so that it matches the Nashville radio sound. So yes, I sympathize with what my students fear about being manipulative, that music be forced into what is predictably ‘feel good.’

Yet, to play the devil’s advocate, much of what worship should offer a Christian is a definite sense of the assurance of their faith. We should be nurturing peace and hope. What is the difference then between ‘feel good’ music and the appropriate sound of hope and joy? How does the worship leader acquire the ability to tell the difference between the two?

Let me pose the question in a different way. Instead of thinking of the power of music as manipulative, why not think of music’s power as formative? Formative is a less pejorative, careful word. Yes, the leader does use the powers of music to influence, yet in the proper, loving and discerning hands the affect of music can be appropriately formative. The question that I want my students to ask is how do we properly use the powers of music to form Christians in the faith?

C.S. Lewis has a chapter in Mere Christianity titled “Let’s Pretend” that really helps us get at the difference between manipulation and formation. He recounts two fables. The second one reads like this:

The other story is about someone who had to wear a mask; a mask which made him look much nicer than he really was. He had to wear it for years. And when he took it off he found his own face had grown to fit it. He was now really beautiful. What had begun as disguise had become a reality.

This is in sum what I mean by formative.

I’ve heard Christians say that they will not sing the lyric of a song that they are not genuinely convicted to profess or even feel. The assumption is that God is more pleased with the genuine state of their hearts instead of empty repetition of religious words that do not “connect” with their present self. The problem with this is circular in its reasoning: when will such a person be genuinely in a condition then to profess the true words of faith? What will inspire the worshiper into such a space? We are in trouble as a church when faithfulness begins with our own personal, sincere and genuine condition.

Lewis in essence is saying that worship is a practice of pretending. Is this hypocrisy? No, not at all. When we as Lewis says are “dressing up as Christ” in worship, when we move beyond our current, personal emotional state to worship God in faith, we are fundamentally practicing that which we truly are. We are throwing off the old self and literally putting on the new.

Music then aids us in this work of helping the Christian to “dress up” and play the part of the Christian. Yes it is manipulative, or better, it is formative to create an environment that can stimulate the senses and awaken the worshipper to their true identity in Christ within the fellowship of the saints.

My concern is that what is most commonly offered in Christian worship music is not capable of nurturing a full enough diet in worship. If anything it is not formative enough. It’s too narrow and is not inspiring the proper fullness of Christian worship.

In the next post I’ll outline what that fullness should look like by considering the Psalms as our model, a map for the full breadth of Christian worship.

I’ll leave this post with a bit more from Lewis for you to chew on:

You see what is happening. The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man (just like you) and God (just like His Father) is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretense into a reality. This is not merely a fancy way of saying that your conscience is telling you what to do. If you simply ask your conscience, you get one result; if you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a different one. There are lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you will see at once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person. It is more like painting a portrait than like obeying a set of rules. And the odd thing is that while in one way it is much harder than keeping rules, in another way it is far easier.

The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to 'inject' His kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.

Open Letter to Sam and Andy

“We must play. But our merriment must be that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.”

-from C.S. Lewis' "The Weight of Glory"


It is that time of the year when I need to start thinking about new recruits for next year and how to position leaders to take over for you and the graduating seniors. This is all quite an enormous shift for me at this point after spending the first half of the semester preparing for and then pulling together all the pieces of our chapel recording. I wear many hats. Head coach, big brother, shepherd, intercessor. I get busy, fatigued. I grow reclusive, the classic introvert who needs to hide from everyone in order to gather myself back together. No matter, I continue to think about you two—how you are and who you are and who you are becoming.

Don’t be surprised by who you are becoming, but prepare yourself for surprise. You have no idea where you will be in five years. The setting, the major and minor characters, the details of the plot and the themes will morph, fold and expand, twist, turn and ripen; but the thread of your being, the essence of who you are will remain. That essential being is the goodness of you that has and will always remain in Christ.

In the musical Man From La Mancha, Dulcinea is Don Quixote’s beatific vision. Her real name is Aldonza, a destitute, failing lady of the night. As Don Quixote continues to romance her with a new and beautiful name, she begins to re-imagine herself through his eyes as a princess, something more splendid than she could have imagined herself before.

I’ve wanted to be Don Quixote in some way for you. I’ve wanted you to be Don Quixote for each other. I’ve wanted your time at Hope College to be an experience of looking and seeing each other, this ministry, this campus, your text books, exams and papers, the music, the instruments, the art, the world—all—“back to grace.”

Indeed, where will you be in ten years? Who will be your people? What will you be doing with your hands? What name will you answer to? True one? Hopeful one? Blessed one? Promised one? Healing one? The seeds of your tree, your roots and trunk are here before me, and what I see is tov, very good.

Both of you are sequoias and I pray you will plant sequoias too. Mind your time. Resist panic. Restlessness is like the night. Your morning will come. It will come on its own without your straining.

Beware of what is quixotic, but don’t believe for one minute that this is not a fairy tale. Once you’ve found Buddah, kill him, and so it should be with Don Quixote. If you try to live in a fairy tale, you’ll most likely end up having yourself a tragedy. You must yield and after surrendering you’ll look back and realize that all is well, all is well and all manner of things are well.

Much of what I’m trying to say comes down to music. Remember that music is not only an ethereal form. It’s arguably the most physical. It is both beat and melody, dirt and wind, and so are you. Make sure you do not neglect the record store. This is not a logical fallacy: once you start downloading music, it’ll all start evaporating. I wish I had the nerve to get into vinyl. It makes sense. I played that Stan Getz record before I bought it for Tryg. The stereo had a single speaker hanging crooked by a single nail. What an event! I was at a store that let me pull out a record and drop the needle. No one worried that my hand might slip. The store allowed me to freely take in that which a record can give. We need to touch music, to feel the static from the record raise the hair on the back of our arms. We need to turn the album around, to read the liner notes and study the artwork. We need to smell the cardboard, judge the balance of the needle arm and to feel it slide into the record’s grooves. We’ve lost the imprint of a record. We’ve lost the oscillating hiss and we’ve lost a world.

Buy used CDs unless of course it is a favorite that you can’t wait for. Buying used CDs not only saves money, but it helps you avoid the illusion that only the newest is the best. Try to collect all of the CDs put out by a few bands. Buy even the discs that don’t get critical praise. Listen to those CDs at least three or four times. Try to imagine why that music excited that artist and how it connects to their later work.

Buy your books used too. Take good care of your CD cases and liner notes, but get coffee stains, Gatorade, grease, dirt and even blood on your books. You’ve got to find a few books that you will read at least three times in the next four or five years. Let them be a security blanket that you pull apart to the nubbins both literally and figuratively. They should be capable of helping you fend off the loneliness and angst of being in your twenties. They will help you realize that restlessness is universal and it is overrated.

Please continue to make things with your hands: picture frames, bookcases, cards, lanterns, sushi, matzo balls. If you run out of time and energy to do things with your hands, you are most likely too busy. Learn how to say “no” to even the best of people and events otherwise you’ll find yourself sitting down with a friend at a coffee shop and you will not be able to taste him or her and you won’t be able to taste the coffee either. Everything will become a nuisance. All beer will be skunky. All wine corked. The necessary patience will require you to trust yourself and others. Trust that not only will they invite you again, but especially trust that you are worth being invited again.

That being said, there will be a few seasons to burn at both ends. Count the cost and make sure you are done burning like this by the time you are in your thirties. Your restlessness can inspire a kind of hard work that you may never again duplicate. These seasons will give you a sufficient bump forward and will provide you with much to reflect on during your thirties. Make sure that you know how to hit the eject button during these seasons otherwise you will become your busyness, your self-importance, your self-power and you will miss the Sabbath and an opportunity let your story be narrated by the greatest, most cosmic story teller.

Most relationships will take much longer to develop than you could possibly imagine. You can be intentional about meeting people, but you have very little control over who will love you. And you can’t hold a grudge against those who don’t love you the way you’d like them to. You have to forgive them. If you can’t forgive those who don’t love you, then it will also be hard for you to forgive those who actually do love you. Everything is an opportunity for grace and a reminder that beggars can’t be choosers; and we are all beggars.

Keep risking on the local church. Keep at it. Believe in both the reality and the idea of the church. Go. Be the church to others and be a church yourself. Accept the loneliness of the notion that you are a church already and hope that many will come and find their place in your communion, birds nesting in the expanse of your branches. It will happen as sure as the snow will thaw here in West Michigan. It’s that kind of wintertime longing, and it will never go away this side of heaven.

I like our habit of toasting everything. Teach it to the others you love along the way. The toast is a thankfulness that gives weight to communion. At the least it is ceremony. And if it is true that we Westerners are adrift, our lack of ceremony and etiquette is surely a sign. Discover, recover, or even create rituals that will make our being together more regular and more accessible. Showing up is the start of all discipline. Show up then “dwell in the land. Do good and cultivate faithfulness,” and if you find that you must leave, “never leave any place easily.”

The "System"

This [the current state of our health care system in America] may explain our strange, indeed neurotic, sense that the needs of "the system"--whether it is the system of governance or the system of markets or the system of technological innovation--are now more important than the needs of individuals such systems were once assumed to serve. We are a nation of Pythagoreans, ashamed of and enthralled by our secret desire to assume the secret eternal nature of numbers, and made powerless by that shame.

From "Sick in the Head: Why America Won't Get the Health Care System it Needs" by Luke Mitchell in Harpers Magazine, February 2009



"If you look at the world as a whole, we have to admit life is good here where we live. But in an evil Twilight Zone kind of way there's nothing else to choose. In the old days there was always a bohemia or a creative underworld to join if the mainstream life wasn't your bag--or a life of crime, or even religion. And now there is only the system. All other options have evaporated. For most people its the System or what....death? There's nothing. There's no way out."

Karen speaking to Hamilton in Girlfriend in a Comma by Douglas Copeland published 1998

Robert Farrar Capon's Supper of the Lamb

I recently found this blog with an excerpt of one of my favorite passages in writing ever. I wanted to put the link there to give this other blogger credit. But I've cut and pasted it here too. I hope I'm not breaking copyright laws!

His definition of an amateur has helped me grasp my life vision more clearly. Oh that we'd all be better lovers! I've used Capon's chapter on cutting into an onion twice now at the college level and once for my sixth graders years ago. I retyped the whole chapter to simplify some of the language for them. I wish I had some of the pictures of those poor students as they teared up from all that onion in their eyes! So precious. We did the exercise as part of an outdoor education project one long weekend in the southern hills of Oklahoma. Several parents came to help chaperon. The whole gist of the exercise is to see the beauty in creation, even something as ordinary and repugnant as an onion. It was fantastic to watch these parents standing around behind the students--these highly affluent, the elite of Oklahoma City, some of them even on their cell phones. Such quizzical expressions. I was half embarrassed and half amazed that many of them did not "get it." I don't know if there is a better hands on teaching experience that reveals the idea of sacramental beauty.

I have a recording of me reading "Water in Excelsis." I sent it to Susanna early in our relationship when she lived in Tallahassee and I lived in Oklhaoma. I'll post it somewhere if I can find a good way to share it for downloading.

This below is only a few pages into the book.

The world may or may not need another cookbook, but it needs all the lovers–amateurs–it can get. It is a gorgeous old place, full of clownish graces and beautiful drolleries, and it has enough textures, tastes and smells to keep us intrigued for more time than we have. Unfortunately, however, our response to its loveliness is not always delight: It is, far more often than it should be, boredom. And that is not only odd, it is tragic; for boredom is not neutral–it is the fertilizing principle of unloveliness.

In such a situation, the amateur–the lover, the man who thinks heedlessness a sin and boredom a heresy–is just the man you need. More than that, whether you think you need him or not, he is a man who is bound, by his love, to speak. If he loves Wisdom or the Arts, so much better for him and for all of us. But if he loves only the way meat browns or onions peel, if he delights simply in the curds of his cheese or the color of his wine, he is, by every one of those enthusiasms, commanded to speak. A silent lover is one who doesn’t know his job.

Therefore, the man who said “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” was on the right track, even if he seemed a bit weak on the objectivity of beauty. …Like Caiaphas, he spoke better than he knew. The real world which he doubts is indeed the mother of loveliness, the womb and matrix in which it is conceived and nurtured; but the loving eye which he celebrates is the father of it. The graces of the world are the looks of a woman in love; without the woman they could not be there at all; but without her lover, they would not quicken into loveliness.

There, then is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits–witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little, and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling.

Or conclusively, peel an orange. Do it lovingly–in perfect quarters like little boats, or in staggered exfoliations like a flat map of the round world, or in one long spiral, as my grandfather used to do. Nothing is more likely to become garbage than orange rind ; but for as long as anyone looks at it in delight, it stands a million triumphant miles from the trash heap.

That, you know, is why the world exists at all. It remains outside the cosmic garbage can of nothingness, not because it is such a solemn necessity that nobody can get rid of it, but because it is the orange peel hung on God’s chandelier, the wishbone in His kitchen closet. He likes it; therefore it stays. The whole marvelous collection of stones, skins, feathers and string exists because at least one lover has never quite taken His eye off it, because the Dominus vivificans has his delight with the sons of men.

In a recent email my dear college professor Dr. Lundin has admitted to me that he's not the biggest fan of this idea of the amateur. Richard Wilbur's poem "Lying," Dr. Lundin says, gets closer to his "aesthetic center of gravity." I assume his concern is that Capon's approach gives too much power to the viewer rather than the viewer's surrendering to the object itself. This is definitely a concern I share. I'll have to do some more thinking on this!

Prayer of St. Francis

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much
seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand;
to be loved as to love.

That is my favorite section of the prayer. I return to it often. There is so much of the giving giving giving giving power of Christ in it.

Forgiveness is the most extravagant idea in the whole of the cosmos. Only God could think of it. The rest of us are too selfish, busy keeping score of who has wronged us, working hard to prove our point.