Category: Miscellany
Sunday reflections
Curated insights 7/3/17
Potpourri 6/28/17
Escape from ennui
[A]s James Baldwin put it, Americans were “afflicted by the world’s highest standard of living and what is probably the world’s most bewilderingly empty way of life.”
(Pankaj Mishra, America, From Exceptionalism to Nihilism) That quote was new to me, though the thought was not. My “standing advice” at the end of each blog episode includes these:
The consumer society is in fact the most efficient mechanism ever devised for the creation and distribution of unhappiness. Lord Jonathon Sacks, chief rabbi of Great Britain.
I think a great many of us are haunted by the feeling that our society, and by ours I don’t mean just the United States or Europe, but our whole world-wide technological civilisation, whether officially labelled capitalist, socialist or communist, is going to go smash, and probably deserves to. W.H. Auden, 1966.
Then I also read this today:
While the news waves groan with stories about “America’s Opioid Epidemic” you may discern that there is little effort to actually understand what’s behind it, namely, the fact that life in the United States has become unspeakably depressing, empty, and purposeless for a large class of citizens.
… None of the news reports or “studies” done about opioid addiction will challenge or even mention the deadly logic of Wal Mart and operations like it that systematically destroyed local retail economies (and the lives entailed in them.) The news media would have you believe that we still value “bargain shopping” above all other social dynamics. In the end, we don’t know what we’re talking about.
But one of the odd blogs I find irresistible is Granola Shotgun. “Johnny” populates his blog with loads of photos and sparse commentary. Most recent:
At the end of my first year at university I was approached by an engineering student who asked if he could be my room mate next year. We didn’t know each other particularly well and didn’t have much in common, but he seemed harmless enough. I shrugged. Sure. We went our separate ways over the summer and in September he appeared at my door. After a few months of successfully sharing accommodations I asked him why he came to me when most guys in his situation would have gone in a very different direction. He explained.
The average college freshman tends to have an adolescent understanding of what a good independent life might be like. Young men are motivated by peculiar impulses and the siren song of the frat house calls. Beer. Parties. Girls. Sports cars. The prestige of hanging out with rich kids, athletes, and really popular older guys. He said that was usually a big mistake. The furniture is made of plastic milk crates. The place smells like a locker room. People eat ramen and cold day old pizza out of the box. They wear flip flops in the shower because no one has ever cleaned the bathroom. Ever. And when you bring a girl home there are a dozen bigger richer guys with fancier cars than you hovering around. You sit there trying to get your romance on with posters of naked women taped to the walls next to a collection of empty bottles. And you pay extra for all this… It’s just not a great situation.
Then he made a sweeping motion with his hand indicating our apartment. A pleasing mixture of antiques and modern pieces. Smells like lemons. When he brings a girl home I’m in the kitchen cooking brisket and home made bread. Soft lighting. Ella Fitzgerald is playing in the background. No competition. And it’s cheaper. For him, doing the unorthodox and socially uncomfortable thing was just… rational. [Yup. That sounds like an engineer’s approach to the world. Tipsy]
Back to Springfield. Steve [and Liz Shultis] took a version of the same strategy. He and his family live in a gracious four story French Second Empire mansion. The place is huge and everywhere you look there’s a level of detail and quality you can’t find in any home built today. There’s a legal apartment on the lower level that they use as a guest suite. I looked up the address on a real estate listing site and he paid less for this house than many people spend on their cars. His family has a quality of life and a degree of financial freedom that none of his suburban piers (sic) can comprehend.
Most people load themselves up with massive amounts of debt in order to live the way they believe they’re supposed to. You wouldn’t want to put your kids in a substandard urban school with the wrong element. You wouldn’t want to buy a house that never appreciated in value. You wouldn’t want to have to explain to your friends, family, and co-workers that you live in a slum with poor black people and Puerto Ricans. And where do you park?! It’s so much “better” to soak yourself in debt to buy your way in to the thing you believe you can’t live without.
Pretty dry without the pictures, I’ll admit. But go check the original, The Springfield Strategy. That four story French Second Empire mansion is pretty amazing. Sample:
From their own blog, it appears that Steve & Liz (perhaps Steve and his ex) actually did raise children, now adults, in that urban environment, though the children are not visible or mentioned in Johnny’s story.
I don’t want to romanticize, let alone make a panacea of, a good, walkable and sociable living environment, but it appears (scroll on down the long page) that the urban dwellers of Springfield, Massachusetts may have escaped some aspects of the “bewilderingly empty way of life.”
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Men are men before they are lawyers or physicians or manufacturers; and if you make them capable and sensible men they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers and physicians. (John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address at St. Andrew’s, 1867)
“Liberal education is concerned with the souls of men, and therefore has little or no use for machines … [it] consists in learning to listen to still and small voices and therefore in becoming deaf to loudspeakers.” (Leo Strauss)
Interesting Epistle & Gospel for this auspicious day
The Epistle and Gospel appointed for Liturgies January 20 in the Orthodox Church are interesting:
These two passages — one on partiality (particularly toward the wealthy to the disadvantage of the poor), the other on “how hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God”— were appointed long, long ago, not sometime after November 8.
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Christmas 2016
All join to praise this holy feast, beholding the Godhead here on earth, and man in heaven. He Who is above, now for our redemption dwells here below; and he that was lowly is by divine mercy raised.
(The Nativity Sermon of St. John Chrysostom; H/T Aaron Linderman at The Guild Review)
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This always, for some obvious reasons, brings joy to my heart. It also brings a smile to my face.
Today is born of a Virgin He who holds the whole creation in His hand.
Today is born of a Virgin He who holds the whole creation in His hand.
Today is born of a Virgin He who holds the whole creation in His hand.
He whose essence none can touch is bound in swaddling clothes as a Child.
God who in the beginning established the heavens lies in a manger.
He who rained manna on His people in the wilderness is fed on milk at His mother’s breast.
The Bridegroom of the Church summons the wise men. The Son of the Virgin accepts their gifts.
We worship Thy birth, O Christ.
We worship Thy birth, O Christ.
We worship Thy birth, O Christ.
Show us also Thy divine Theophany.
My Arabic is essentially non-existent, but here’s a rendition of the same hymn (I think) in a concert setting by an aging Lebanese Cantor who’s a real inspiration:
I sang this Saturday morning — in English, to different music, and not nearly as well.
Let no one be so indevout, so ungrateful, so irreligious, as to say: This is nothing new; it was heard long ago; Christ was born long ago. I answer: Yes, long ago and before long ago.
No one will be surprised at my words if he remembers that expression of the Prophet, in aeternum et ultra, “for ever and ever,” or “for ever and beyond it.” Christ, then, is born not only before our times, but before all time. …
That this mysterious Nativity might to some extent be made known, Jesus Christ was born in time, born of flesh, born in flesh, the Word was made flesh.
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Tomorrow, therefore, we shall see the majesty of God, but with us, amongst us, not in Himself. We shall see Majesty in humility, Power in weakness, the God-man. …
He chose a stable and a manger – yes, a despicable hut, a shed fit only for beasts – that we may know that He it is “Who raises up the poor one from the dunghill” [and] Who said, “Unless you be converted and become as this little child, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
(Bernard of Clairvaux via jbudziszewski’s blog)
Michael Barone hosts Public Radio’s Pipe Dreams, a program featuring pipe organ music much of which is Christian sacred music. Yesterday morning, Indiana time, he hosted a live broadcast of the Festival of Lessons and Carols at King’s College.
He made what I consider a telling slip-up at the end, referring to the people who were leaving the Festival as returning to the real world.
“The real world.”
He’s far from the first to use that trope to distinguish the fallen world we inhabit from the foretaste of the real world, the world as God intended it, which we enter in worship at its best. Often, that trope is used to excuse all kinds of venality, price-gouging, adultery and the rest of the gamut — all as simply the way of “the real world.”
My spiritual trajectory has been shaped powerfully by C.S. Lewis, and particularly by The Great Divorce, an allegorical tale about a bus ride from hell to heaven. One of the powerful images was of the substantiality of heaven, the wraith-likeness of the visitors from hell, for whom merely walking across heavenly grass was difficult and painful.
One of the wraiths, on that basis, pours cold water on the idea of staying in heaven:
Narrator: “You don’t think of staying?”
Wraith: “That’s all propaganda. Of course there never was any question of our staying. You can’t eat the fruit and you can’t drink the water and it takes you all your time to walk on the grass. A human being couldn’t live here. All that idea of staying is only an advertisement stunt.”
For him, presumably, the real world is the hell to which he expects to return, where you can without effort or perseverance eat fruitoid, drink filtered and bottled water, and walk on the astroturf.
Eventually, the narrator — Lewis himself, it appears — was approached by his guide, George McDonald, who among other things said “Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.”
It seemed like a good idea to start, as much as possible, getting ready to stay in reality, as by leaving Lessons and Carols with the regret of leaving the antechambers of reality and returning to something (relatively) ghostly and unreal.
I wanted today’s blog to be all positive, warm, fuzzy and pious. But then a teachable moment arrived:
The pastor of one of America’s largest megachurches stirred up Christmas controversy after preaching that the story of Jesus’ virgin birth is not crucial to the Christian faith.
“If somebody can predict their own death and resurrection, I’m not all that concerned about how they got into the world,” Andy Stanley said in a Dec. 4 sermon at North Point Community Church, which draws 36,000 attendees across six locations in suburban Atlanta. “Christianity doesn’t hinge on the truth or even the stories around the birth of Jesus. It hinges on the resurrection of Jesus.”
(Kate Shellnutt, Washington Post) That (fortunately) isn’t Stanley’s final word on the topic. He tap-dances around and even makes a decent point or two.
But the idea that Christianity hinges (solely) on the resurrection of Jesus — with his having predicted his death and resurrection as proof that he’s someone really special — is wrong. Al Mohler, after obscuring the view with inerrantist slippery slopery, gets more or less to the point:
[W]ithout the virgin birth, you end up with a very different Jesus than the fully human, fully divine savior ….
(Emphasis added)
That Jesus was fully God and fully human isn’t a pointless dogma — adiaphora as compared to sinlessness, crucifixion, death, and resurrection. His humanity is necessary because “that which is not assumed is not redeemed.” (Gregory Nazianzus) His deity is necessary because God very concretely reconciled humanity to deity, to make it possible for us to become partakers of the divine nature.
If Stanley is merely trying to say that maybe you can “get saved” without grokking the virgin birth, I have no particular problem with it. But he apparently keeps sowing confusion as a sort of megachurch Pope Francis. He really should oughta try to cut it out and stop snarking at people who fault him for it.
And he ought to consider this, too: instead of pondering and pandering about how little people need to believe to be Christians, in a sort of bartering with God, try to impart the fullness of the Christian faith.
Oh. That’s right. He hasn’t got it to impart. Never mind.
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 