Why liturgy? Some initial thoughts

My husband pastors a very strange beast in this day and age--a conservative, orthodox, liturgical church. It seems these days that many people assume that liturgical means "liberal." That those who keep the forms of historical Christianity do so to mask the fact that they've lost the heart of it . And it seems that those who pride themselves on being "evangelical" are intent on stripping out anything from theier liturgy that can't be passed off as spontaneous*. There's this idea that because something is rehearsed, it's not as genuine. It's a dominant attitude. So why are we as a church making the deliberate decision to worship in a manner which we can expect people to mis-understand? Why keep all the formal elements of read prayers and a call to worship and reading the creed?

1. It emphasizes that our worship is not about us. It's about God. The very structure of the liturgy reminds us that we do not come to worship on our own--we come because God calls us to him. It is not our initiation, it is his, and that reality shapes our understanding of what we are doing and the logical way to do it.

2. It emphasizes that worship is something we do corporately. I can sing along to a worship CD and listen to a sermon podcast by myself at my computer (and sometimes I do). God calls us as a people, not just as individuals. I cannot pray with my brothers and sisters by myself. It's a logical impossibility, like a square circle. The liturgy forces me to place myself in community in a very particular way.

3. It trains our understanding of ourselves. A worship service is not something in which I am the consumer and the church staff the provider. God is the recipient, the audience, and we all together are the performers.

4. It prevents us from leaving the hard parts out. And we're not very good performers to boot. We would prefer to think that our offerings are acceptable to God on our own, and our own understanding and effort will get us there. They won't. We have the prayer of confession, because we come into God's royal throne room in pretty sorry shape. We have the prayer for illumination, because unless the Spirit opens our blind eyes and softens our stone hearts, we won't be able to understand what God's on about in the Scripture.

5. It keeps us polite. In this hustle and rush culture of ours, we have lost a good understanding of hospitality. We don't have each other into our homes very much. But imagine, for a moment, going to a friend's house, and simply walking through the front door and starting to unload on them without taking the time to knock, say hi, take off your shoes, and let them pour you a cup of coffee before plunging into the conversation. But often, that's what we want to do with God. We call the church "the house of God," and when we gather, we structure things in such a way as to remember that we are guests (even while we are family members) in his house. Call to worship? Open the door and come on in! Been looking forward to seeing you! Prayer of confession? Sorry my shoes are filthy--it's pouring rain and splattering mud out there. You're right, I don't want your muddy shoes all over my house, God answers. But I've taken care of it. I've got all that you need to get clean right here. And before we leave, the thank you and goodbye and let's set out when we're going to see each other again.

6. It cuts through the cult of spontaneity. As I noted above, we live in a culture which likes to equate "genuine" with "off the cuff." They're not the same, but many people like to think they are. At the same time, these same people want excellence and a good show. So what we end up with are churches that try to project authenticity by making it appear unstructured and unplanned. But the truth is that most all worship services are planned. The musicians rehearse (Some of you may have noticed on the Sundays that they didn't get a chance to.) And the preacher? Even if he's not up there reading from a text, or even looking at an outline, he's thought about what he's going to say ahead of time. He planned. He prepared--however conversational his presentation is and how much he makes it sound like he's just telling you these insights as they occur to him. The liturgy, on the other hand, reminds us that excellence is planned and rehearsed (ask any musician). In fact, the liturgy reminds that our worship services are in fact a rehearsal themselves--a practice session for heaven's music.

Yes, it's easy to let doing the same things the same way become a rote exercise in form. But consider a child at the piano flying through the scales as fast as she can rush through them, hurrying to get through her practice time and on with everything else. Now consider the concert pianist, going through the same scales. Taking her time. Fast and slow. Major and minor, varying the dynamics, never bored but aware of just how much time and effort and practice it takes to get even scales up to the musical standard . . .

* Definition of liturgy: a form of public worship. Ritual. A particular arrangement of services. Most every church has a liturgy--even if it's only "we sing for 30 minutes and then the pastor preaches for 30 minutes.

Seven

So our four year old has a thing for They Might Be Giants. Best of all, she loves their song "Seven," (I think because she gets to go around shouting "Where's our cake? We want cake!" with impunity for days afterwards.) It was with great delight that she realized that the seven song was originally podcast on . . . March 7th. Her birthday. Apparently that's her birthday cake that all the sevens are devouring.

Fear and Grace

From Pursuing Titus 2, via Jennifer F.

When we are simply imagining chilling scenarios, we are facing the horrible emotions without any of God’s sustaining grace. Every time we imagine something, we put ourselves through agony of a kind we will never have to go through in real life. Because when awful things are actually happening, God walks with us through them and gives us His grace and strength. The peace of God’s presence through a trial is something I can never conjure up in my imagination, and something that only comes with real trials, not the pretend ones I make up while driving.

Worry really doesn't serve us well. God calls us to live in each moment--which means to take the time and energy to actually be present in each moment. And each day has enough troubles of its own . . . when we actually go to the trouble enjoying God today, it doesn't leave us with time or energy to be making contingency plans for all sorts of situations which will never actually happen.

maybe there's more to all those images of the great tapestry of history . . .

We glorify God by working out our own salvation. God has twisted together his glory and our good. What an encouragement is this to the service of God, to think, while I am hearing and praying, I am glorifying God; while I am furthering my own glory in heaven, I am increasing God’s glory. --Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philipians 2: 12-13)

One of those theological paradoxes that my mind persists in trying to untangle is that of our free agency and God's sovereignty. God is sovereign, and only he accomplishes our salvation--but somehow what we do and think and say matters in there too. It is not by works that we are saved, but Paul clearly tells us to work out our salvation, and James tells us that our works are the evidence of our faith. One word in that Watson quote this morning gave me what I think may be a useful mental image. "Twisted." As in thread, or rope.

Our actions are not, in and of themselves, enough . . . for much of anything, really. Not to accomplish those things which can only be accomplished by the work of the Spirit. But if the Spirit is the one spinning into being those things which the Father wills, perhaps our actions are one of the strands being spun. Twisted. Even as we work, we are being worked upon, and our works are being included in the work of God . . .

being like Christ

Theological confession: I'm guilty of the NT's idolatry of self. Of identity. Which is to say, I read all those New Testament passages about being transformed into the likeness of Christ and think, "but I'm not sure that I want to become Jesus. I really like being myself." Yes, I know that a proper theological understanding doesn't mean the abrogation of the self, but its fulfillment--God doesn't strip us of who he made us to be, rather, through Christ, he transforms us into who he intended us to be all along. But still--in the image of the Son. Shouldn't be scary, but it is. I don't want to be turned into something other than what I am . . . but it didn't occur to me until this week to look at it from the flip side.

Christ became sin for us. "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God." Jesus Christ--the second person of the Trinity--let himself be transformed into--not us, just the worst parts of us. Our sin. Holy God inverted himself into that . . . and in so doing, actually exemplified the true character of who he is. By becoming sin, he became saviour. By becoming the sacrifice, by accepting death, he became life and redemption.

And all so that we could become the righteousness of God. Our transformation into the likeness of Christ is nothing less than the perfect inversion of Christ's initial transformation into us. He who was born into the likeness of men. Perhaps it is only through our transformation that we become that which we truly are? Perhaps that is one of the ways that we actually become like Christ?

Honest faith

MckMama has a rant up this morning--why is someone criticizing her whatever she chooses to share or not share? Why don't people just believe her? People say they want honesty, but do they really? It made me want to post a comment on her thread with a Mark Driscoll clip I listened to a while back. (But I can't find it). He made the comment in one of his sermons that there are only a select handful of people from whom he will take criticism--his elders, a few mentors, his wife. People who he trusts to have his best interests and God's best interests in mind. All the rest, he can't afford to take the time and energy to chase down all the anklebiters, naysayers and sour grapes and convince them to like him. There's wisdom there.

Say what you will about Driscoll. I certainly have issues with the man. But I give him this--he is who he is and he offers himself to the church and he doesn't take the time of day from critics who say, essentiall, that who and what he is needs to change (let them tell you how!) in order for his life to be something fit to offer to the church.

There's a tension in the church between deep and surface living. How much of ourselves do we expose to each other? And how much is appropriate to tell and under what circumstances? Am I willing to tell you when I'm just having a lousy day? (And when is it honest for me to do that, and when am I just being self-indulgent in my complaining?) How about things like financial problems, or marital problems? Is it honest to talk about those? Dishonest to hide them? Are there times when talking about such things to someone you don't know very well might be a betrayal of intimacy? What about issues of faith and doubt? Worry. Parenting. All mixed up with "I don't feel like doing the laundry," and "What's for dinner?" and "Did you see the new Harry Potter movie?" and "I'm having a great day because my potty-training child did NOT have an accident today." (The thing about "small talk" is that most of most of our lives are honestly made up of wonderful mundanity. We might say we want honesty . . . that we want things to be genuine . . . but what are we after, really?

The thing is, I don't think that most of us understand people in general, or the world, or our own lives, or other people's lives nearly as well as we think we do. We don't understand how the mundane and the profound are woven together as the warp and woof of life. We don't understand the ways that sin breaks us. We don't realize that someone we know has dealt with that--that among my 200 Facebook friends, probably every "that" is covered. We don't understand the reality that "that" is going to take years to heal, and is going to leave scars--and that there will be days that that seems really important, and plenty of days that I'm more concerned with what's for dinner.

We want honesty, but we're not prepared for it when we get it. It's too raw. Too scary. Too boring. Too threatening. We want to think we understand. Honesty shows us we don't. We want to think we have the answers. Honesty shows us we don't. We want the world to be a safe, manageable, controllable place. We know that we ourselves are buffetted and thrown about, but we want to think that someday, somehow, we'll get to a place of answers. But when we really interact with each other, we discover that none of us is one self-help book or one good sermon, or one inspirational song away from having it all together. We discover that giving or receiving a bellyful of honesty requires humility and commitment far beyond what most of us are willing to give most days. It means saying things like "I'd never thought of that before," and "I don't understand, but I'd like to." It means expecting to find that we're all sinful, complex, broken people in a sinful, complex, broken world.

Too often, when we say we want honesty, we just want to be voyeurs. Too often, when we get honesty, we try to trim off the edges so that it will fit back in the box. But we were made by a God bigger than we are, who placed us in a world too complex for us to understand. And he made each of us unique. Different. Should it be any surprise to us when other's individual experiences and stories seem alien to us? When our finite interactions with an infinite God seem too big to handle and comprehend?

modern culturally acceptable idolatry

Flipping through my comics reader this morning, I was averaging one comic out of every four mentioning earth week.  Did you know it was earth week?  Apparently we're all supposed to help out by turning off the TV to save electricity and using recyclable lunch boxes instead of disposable lunch sacks.  (I find this ironic on a morning that we had to make sure to NOT use our daughter's lunch box because her class is going on a field trip and they all have to bring a completely consumable/disposable lunch.)  Deny yourselves.  Save the earth.  Reduce, reuse, recycle.  Spend your time, attention and money . . . does this sound like worship to you?

Now, I'm all for stewardship.  The first job God gave people was to tend the Garden, and that never changed.  But when our focus is on the gift instead of the giver, the created rather than the Creator . . . isn't that nearly the definition of idolatry?  Can going green be syncretistic?  Alan Jacobs certainly suggests it in his excellent review of the Green Bible in the latest First Things.  

Because what are we on about with "saving the earth" anyway?  You know and I know (and you know that I know) that whether or not I send my kids to school with their lunches in a lunch box or a paper sack doesn't really make any difference.  Or does it?  If it makes a difference in the bent of my heart, if it makes a difference in my attitude, is that a net gain--even if no actual conservation is accomplished?  We are being called to lay our offerings at Gaia's altar.  

And it can be a tricky thing.  Many of the actions that the modern druids call us to, are, in fact, appropriate offerings for a Christian seeking to be a faithful steward and caretaker of all the gifts which our Creator has given to us.  But it's a question of orientation.  Do I take the actions I do for the glory of Christ's name and the furtherance of his kingdom?  Or is the highest good I can imagine merely earthly?

Easter Sunday Comic round up

It's always interesting to see which of the Sunday strips acknowledge the existence of Easter Sunday and which don't.  On this, the feast of the Resurrection, the most important day of the Christian year, should we even expect the world to acknowledge it?  I was surprised that many of the strips which have previously made a point of establishing their families as church-going--Jump Start, Curtis, Baldo--ran completely generic Sunday strips.  There were the spattering of generic "Easter means spring" and Easter egg themed strips . . . mostly from grandparents of the funnies pages.  Family Circus, of course.  FBoFW, Blondie, and Mutts.  Rhymes with Orange wins the kudos for secular acknowledgement.  The pastel camo just makes me laugh.

And for a blog in which I have publicly affirmed my love for peeps, this year's Foxtrot deserves special notice.

B.C., of course, has traditionally held the position of being the most outspokenly Christian strip in the funny pages.  With Johnny Hart dead and his grandson writing the strip, I was curious to see what Mason Mastroianni would come out with this year.  I was pleased to see his honoring his grandfather's spirit by one-upping the delivery.

And Mallard Fillmore wins the prize for succinct theological accuracy.  If the glory that God deserves is infinite, the finite amounts of glory we can give him in any setting are vastly inadequate (they taught us in algebra that 1 / infinity and 1000 / infinity are both effectively 0) . . . then it strangely, wonderfully, fitting to honor him in this way.

My favorite strip this morning though goes to the erratic "One Big Happy," which it appears took the occasion of Easter to make some rather different religious commentary.  Namely, how completely ridiculous and self-contradictory the various popular beliefs about angels are.  Kudos to Mr. Detorie.  

A blessed Easter to everyone.  Christ is risen--he is risen indeed!

some thoughts on zoos

I love zoos.  I love animals.  The medium sized city I grew up in had a really nice zoo for its size, and I remember many wonderful, sunny trips there.  Sometime around the time that I was in junior high, they even overhauled and modernized a number of their exhibits, giving the big cats more space and that kind of thing.  I even hauled three of my good friends to the zoo for my 18th birthday.  I figured, I it was my birthday and I could do what I wanted.

Since then, the zoos and aquariums I've had access to have been major metropolitan ones.  Vancouver's aquarium is world class (birthplace of Baby Beluga), and their zoo is huge.  In one sense anyway.  The Vancouver zoo has the largest ratio of acreage to animals of any animal out there.  If you go there, prepare for a hike.  And pack your binoculars.  If the animals are at the back of their enclosures, you won't be seeing much.  One of my favorite parenting memories is of taking our oldest daughter--then sixteen months old--to the Vancouver zoo and watching her discover elephants.  They were right next to the parking lot.  Her eyes went up . . . and up  . . . and up.  She planted her hand on her nose, baby-signing "elephant."  She "talked" about the elephants for days.

Our visit to the Seattle zoo was nice, even while it was pouring rain.  While we were living in the mountains in Colorado, our "home" zoo was the one in Denver.  The pride of that zoo, if you'll pardon the pun, is their lion exhibit.  And they do it right.  We saw a baby giraffe only a month old there, and usually planted ourselves in the ape house to watch the gorillas for a while.  (The elk zoo out our front door in Colorado was good as well, though limited in its variety.)

Omaha.  Oh my gosh.  If you ever get a chance to spend the day there, take it.  Our day at the Omaha zoo will remain in my mind as one of those God-sent grace notes in my mind.  The zoo is about half a mile off of I-80, and we had passed it several times driving back and forth from Colorado back to see family in the Midwest.  When we planned to make the move, I decided that I wanted to block in an afternoon to stop there and give our family a break.  We left the mountains Wednesday evening, and stayed Wednesday night with friends.  We spent all Thursday driving the length of Nebraska, and the kids were troopers, but I figured by Friday the kids would need a break, and so they did.  So Friday afternoon was the Omaha zoo.  In mid-December.  Thirty degrees and spitting.  And lo and behold, the Omaha zoo is about half indoor terrariums.  There's a full indoor tropical building at eighty degrees and humid, with birds flying free.  A full desert building.  An aquarium nearly as good as Vancouver's.  And we had it all to ourselves.  We spent ten to fifteen minutes just sitting in the tunnel section of the aquarium, where all the fish swim over and around you, while our middle daughter fell in love with the sharks.  We watched the bobcats and our youngest daughter watch each other with equal interest.  We didn't even to get to the monkey house.   (And the indoor sections were only half the zoo--the front half.  The back half had all the large enclosures for things like elephants, giraffes, and zebras, and we didn't tackle those.  I could easily have spent 2-3 days exploring Omaha's zoo.)  We got each of the girls a stuffed animal from the gift shop and went on Friday evening much refreshed, and ready for two more days of driving.  (Side note:  one of the things I most appreciated about the Omaha zoo was that they don't just care for their animals--they care for yours too.  As I noted, we were in the middle of a move when we stopped there, and had our cat sitting in her carrier in the truck.  When my husband checked with the gate people to make sure that his admission stamp would get him in and out during the day so that he could check on the cat, they said, "Oh, just bring her inside to the kennels!"  Apparently, the Omaha zoo has a number of large-dog sized kennels in the basement under their offices so that guests don't leave their dogs over-heating in the car during the summer.  And what's good to keep a dog cool in the summer is even better to keep a cat warm in the winter.  Kitty enjoyed a quiet nap away from the children for the afternoon.)

So this all brings me round, in a long, meandering way, to yesterday's disappointing visit to the South Bend zoo.  We'd been going to go to Ft. Wayne's zoo, which I've heard is excellent, but it's not yet open for the season.  So we drove the other way, to South Bend, and found . . . not much.  Given how much I love to sit and watch the animals, I figured that even with a small zoo, we could burn most of an afternoon.  But we'd seen everything in an hour and a half.  It took longer to do the drive back and forth than it did to see everything the zoo had to offer.  Part of that was that they had large number of the animals not out yet because the weather was too cold for them--but isn't having the indoor enclosures guest-accesible a pretty basic zoo thing these days?  And a lot of the animals that were out, especially the bigger ones like the big cats, didn't look like happy animals.  The didn't have enough space.  They acted either neurotic (the frantically pacing leopard, and the camel chewing his wooden fence to tatters), or else bored.  A lot of them were asleep.  My youngest didn't even realize that she'd seen a bear because it was just a black blob in the corner.  (Some excuse on that one anway--we learned that that bear is the oldest living in captivity . . . 33 years old, when that kind of bear lives to about 7 in the wild.)  I drove home in the afternoon feeling uneasy about the fact that some of our money had gone to support an organization that doesn't do well what it's supposed to be doing.  Talking to my husband about it yesterday evening, he said that he feels that way about most every zoo--that none of them do a good enough job with the animals, with the possible exception of San Diego's Wild Animal Park.  I wouldn't go that far.  But it has me thinking today about things like stewardship of the earth and the fact that we were meant to live with the animals from the beginning.  They offer us friendship and a connection to God that we are supposed to have that our sin ruined.  And how do we answer that need to be with them in a way that is fair to them?  Maybe more later.  This post now done due to chronic distraction.  :)

Breast feeding or not

Hanna Rosin has an aggressively provocative piece in this month's Atlantic.  I'm irritated with the (male) editors of the Atlantic titling it "The Case Against Breast-Feeding" when it's no such thing.  Rather, it's something of an extended whine . . . "why should I have to when I don't want to?"  There is no actual case against--rather, Rosin makes the argument that there isn't a strong case for breast feeding.  That in fact, it doesn't make much difference.

I've been thinking about this piece for a while and have really settled out what I want to say about it.  Certainly, if she has experienced the sort of harassment that she reports from using formula, I can see how that would be irritating, though the circle of moms that I've been around have been pretty easy going about formula.  And her contention that breastfeed is "only free if a woman's time is worth nothing" is problematic.  As my husband pointed out--the baby has to be fed.  Someone is going to be spending their time doing it.  And whoever that is is not using that time to be doing something else.  The cost of the time is part of having children.  It is the question of the additional cost (or not) of the milk.

I have said before that one of the reasons that God gives us children is to make it clear to us just how selfish we really are.  Hanna Rosin sounds in this piece like a woman who has run up against the horrible fact that parents really need to be selfless in an awful lot of ways in order to do their job and doesn't like it.  Breastfeeding a third child is one sacrifice too many--why should she be inconvenienced?  What right does anyone have to tell her how to raise her child?  My own battle with parenting involves regular use of the prayer "Dear Lord, am I really this self-absorbed?  Please forgive me and help me get my priorities straight."  Rosin sounds like someone who has realized that her self-absorbtion can't withstand too much more battering and is desperately trying to shore up her defenses.  

I will note here at the end, that I really don't get how formula can be viewed as more convenient on a regular basis than breast-feeding, at least before the kid is sleeping through the night and has a sizable portion of solid food in their diet and so is down to a handful of milk feedings per day.  Washing and sterilizing all the bottles and paraphenalia is a pain.  There's no mixing and getting the temperature all right.  Breastmilk is always clean and always perfect body temperature warm.  You can't forget it anywhere.  Breast milk is the perfect solvent for pregnancy fat.  And newborn formula diapers are horrible, breastmilk diapers comparatively inoccuous.  Formula has the advantage of . . . letting the mother delegate  the job of full time parenting to someone else.  Not the reason I had kids.

messing with things we don't understand

For those unfamiliar with the comic strip "Brewster Rockit," Dr. Mel is the resident Evil Mad Scientist on the Space Station R.U. Sirius, some hundreds of years in our future.  (A future which seems to consistently  paralell our present.  :)  )  His experiments consistently backfire on him to the detriment of everyone on the space station, most especially the hapless lad Winky.  That Dr. Mel is recreating Frankenstein is no real surprise.  That it is bound to go as badly as the original is inevitable.  That our own scientific establishment's arrogant, self-assured assumption that it should and could hold the keys to life and death; that any line of experimentation that they want to pursue should be without moral consequences is alternately frightening and nauseating.  Kyrie Eleison.

the rocks will cry out

This article from the New Scientist prompts this response from Neil Gaiman--

Picked up my copy of New Scientist over breakfast this morning (which, along with Fortean Times, is my favourite publication) and found myself puzzling over an article that began

That a complex mind is required for religion may explain why faith is unique to humans.

Which left me amazed and potentially delighted that journalists at New Scientist had succeeded in interspecies communication to the point of being certain that dolphins and whales have no belief in things deeper than themselves, that ants do not imagine a supreme colony at the centre of everything, and that my cats only believe in what they can see, smell, hunt and rub up against (except for Pod, of course, who when much younger would react in horror, with full fur-up, to invisible things), and that there are no Buddhist Pigs, Monkeys or whatever-the-hell Sandy was.

which in turn has me thinking this afternoon of all the wonderful passages in scripture from which we know that all creation gives God the praise which he is due.  The mountains break forth in singing and the trees clap their hands.  The seas roar and the fields exult.  Jesus assures us that if we decline the privilige of singing praise to God the stones will do it for us.  For the Holy One will make his glory known, and will not leave a seat at his banquet empty.  (Tough luck for you if a rock gets your seat.)  Do the dolphins and whales have a belief in something deeper than themselves?  I rather expect believe in God about the same way that they believe in the water in which they swim.  They don't need religion--they do not have the awesomely dubious privilege that we humans have of being able to defy God.  And they can no more fail to worship their creator than they can choose to not have gravity hold them down.  Balaam's donkey saved his master running himself into an angel delivering the wrath of God.  The animal saw the truth clearly, when the guy with the complex brain and the hot-shot reputation for being able to really curse people couldn't see what was standing right in the middle of the road in front of him.

I think that there are times that if we weren't so eager to slice and dice what we know and don't know, to put it under a microscope and over-analyze that we wouldn't miss the obvious.

For what can be known about God is plain . . .  because God has shown it to [us].  For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So [we] are without excuse.  (Romans 1:19-20)

some musing on free speech

Neil Gaiman put up a piece last week on the First Amendent. It's had me thinking. He starts off with this: "If you accept -- and I do -- that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don't say or like or want said." This makes me more than moderately uncomfortable. It sounds an awful lot like "the ends justify the means" to me. Still, Gaiman is an intelligent, articulate man and I read his piece all the way through. He's coming from a thoroughly secular viewpoint. From a country (England) where they don't have a first amendent, but do have things like the "Obscene Publications Act" where any customs officer can sieze things from you if he thinks you shouldn't have them. He points out that "The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out."

The case that sparked this latest manifesto on his part involves pornagraphic comic books. It's got the whole conversation going again with the usual suspects for viewpoints. What is pornography? (SCOTUS Judge Potter Stewart: "I can't define it--but I know it when I see it). What is erotica? (Is there a difference between the two?) What is art? What specifically is the role of the government in regulating these things?

I don't have any grand or spanking new opinions on this can of worms. I admit a bias toward less regulation--I don't generally think that it's the government's job to micromanage an individual's moral behavior. That said, I think that pornography is a blight on human society and far too easily available. Saying that we must defend the indefensible sounds an awful lot to me like "the end justifies the means," which is a dangerous place to go . . . Every election I'm tempted to vote libertarian . . .

shameless plug

my cousin and his family are some of the extras in the background of Brandon Heath's phenomenal new video "Give Me Your Eyes." (The reuniting family).



I've written before about what it would mean for us to deliberately look and try to see each other as Christ sees us. To see the checker at the grocery store as made in the very image of creative God. To see the brand new baby as the one whose sin Christ died for. To see the pain and hurt and frustrations that drive seemingly inexplicable bad decisions. And now, how do I be Jesus for them into their lives? Indeed, give me your eyes, Lord.

Oh, and if you need a first class Christian magician, check out my cousin Curt.

Now for something completely different . . .

some thoughts on the differences between what we think we're saying and what other people actually hear. I'm actually posting this for an old college friend I was talking with recently . . . by way of making a point, I referenced a poem I'd written in college . . . she'd read it then, but of course didn't have it now. The poem, in both versions, is titled "After Jeremy's Wedding." Note: I judge the first version to be an utter failure, and the second mostly a failure. Taken together, they were an interesting learning experience for me though . . . the only reason I'm posting the thing is to give context to what I want to say about it afterwards. :P (Note: these had to be scanned in and posted as images because Blogger wouldn't handle the formatting. Click on the image to get a larger, readable, version.)

Version 1:

Version 2:

The story is this. When my brother married, my parents moved his twin bed (black iron) to my room and my double bed (white wood) to his room, which had become, of course, the spare room. My grey cat, Chester, didn't like it. And the white cat we had when I was little, Kitty-kitty, figures in there too.

Now here's the thing. When I wrote that first version of the poem, I thought I was saying something. I thought I was communicating something. Turns out the only thing I was communicating was confusion. I over-reacted against my natural tendency to run on by trying to clean the idea down to the bare bone . . . and ended up with bone powder. Or something. When I expanded on the idea for the second version, I felt like I was explaining the idea in excruciating and over-obvious detail. Frankly, I felt exposed. But in retrospect, the second version isn't all that clear either. It's possible at least to get an idea of what's going on, but I did not succed in loading in the paralells, the emotion and the history that I was shooting for.

But I learned (let's not get too obvious here) that in order to say something, you have to actually say it. What a startling insight! I realized the degree to which I think that I'm saying something, but what actually comes from my mouth or fingers is only decipherable within the massive amount of context that's rattling around in my skull. Often what I end up speaking is some sort of code . . . or something that seems obvious to me . . . and I forget all the internal conversation with myself that made that conclusion meaningful . . .

Taken a step further, I wonder how often we blame each other for not listening or not being interested, when the real problem is that we're not actually communicating what we think we are.

What if?

Among the various theological wranglings that float around Christian circles is this one--why would God create people if he knows that they're not going to choose him? Or more extreme--why would God create people ultimately simply to damn them? These sorts of questions get tossed around in Calvinist/Arminian debates, exclusivist/inclusivist wranglings and other places . . .

It recently occurred to me to wonder if part of the answer is this: what if God just doesn't want to rob all of us of the good that so many of these people bring to our collective existence? There are great works of music written by pagans, writings by agnostics, great works of architecture by atheists. The world would be a poorer place the spiritism driven art of Native American cultures, the slave-built aqueducts and Colosseum of Ancient Rome, Faulkner's "Sound and Fury." God seeks to give us all good things--first of all, himself, of course. But next in line, each other . . .