Incredibly beautiful practice book (most likely) of the German calligrapher Johann Hering c.1620s.
Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com
Source: Flickr / slumbernaut
Christ Was the Wizard of All Wizards
“MacLennin wouldn’t let him off the couch without first hearing the manner of king this Christ was that made Brendan’s heart so good, and I doubt Brendan ever preached the Gospel in just such a pickle again.
The fuzzy naked bard with his gilly flowers over one eye took Brendan on one of his knees, his arms clasped about him, and t was there Brendan did it, perched like a bot fly on a bull’s hump. It’s a wonder he could keep a grave face. …
Christ was the king of all kings, Brendan said from Mac Lennin’s knee. He was the wizard of all wizards. He turned water to beer easy as breathing. When he commanded the foaming waves to lay flat, they laid flat. He straightened the bent legs of cripples out and peeled the blue milky scales off the eyes of the blind. When he called out of darkness the first light as ever was, the morning stars sang together at the sweet ring of it and all the sons of heaven shouted for joy.
‘Ah well, he was a bard then,’ MacLennin said. It was the part about Christ’s voice that struck him hardest.
‘MacLennin, he was so mighty a bard his songs have ravished the hearts of men from that day on,’ Brendan said. ‘He was a song himself you might say. King Christ is a song on the lips of the true God.’
It sent a new batch of tears flowing down MacLennin’s cheeks. ‘I’ll be Christ’s bard myself, then,’ he said.”
[Frederick Buechner, Brendan, 76, in a happily-common beautiful passage]
Exeter Cathedral, England
(by meheal badem)
Source: Flickr / mike-a
A Well-Intentioned Business
“Do you understand what monotheism in the Christian faith means? God knows, not the number ‘one,’ but with this subject in His sheer uniqueness and otherness over against all others, different from all the ridiculous deities whom man invents. Once we have realized this, we can only laugh, and there is a laugh running through the Bible at these figures. Once the true God has been seen, the gods collapse into dust, and He remains the only One. ‘I am the Lord thy God…thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ This ‘thou shalt not’ has the force of ‘thou canst not.’ He who calls himself god alongside Him becomes the mere shadow of man’s extravagant longing, which has ill results.
And the Second commandment also becomes quite clear then: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image nor any sort of likeness. Thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them.’ that too is not a sign of Israelite ways of thinking and there is no philosophical concept of invisibility in the background. But God has Himself done everything in order to present Himself. How should man make an image of Him after He has presented His likeness Himself? A well-intentioned business, this entire ‘spectacle’ of Christian art, well-intentioned but impotent, since God Himself has made His own image. Once a man has understood ‘God in the highest’, it becomes impossible for him to want any imagery in thought, or any other kind of imagery.”
[Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 40 - 41 (not sure I agree with the extreme conclusion, though)]
With regard to the sharpest and most melting sorrow, that which arises from the loss of those whom we have loved with tenderness, it may be observed, that friendship between mortals can be contracted on no other terms, than that one must sometime mourn for the other’s death: And this grief will always yield to the surviver one consolation proportionate to his affliction; for the pain, whatever it be, that he himself feels, his friend has escaped.
Source: wesleyhill
Not Responsible for My Own Being
“To live the life of active fellowship with God is, therefore, to live out of the event of freedom from sin and death. Evangelical freedom is the freedom that comes from not being finally responsible for my own being: by the mercy of God I am restored to know myself to be a creature in fellowship with my creator and savior. And to such freedom I cannot liberate myself: self-liberation is precisely the ‘yoke of slavery’ (Gal. 5:1) from which I have been set free.”
[John Webster, Holiness, 94
“Should you shake all my ash to the wind? Lord, forgive all my sins…”
Mumford & Sons Performs “Lover’s Eyes” (at iheartradio) (by iheartradio)
Source: youtube.com
The Annual Best Of Post
Best Books of 2011
As usual: this is a list of the best books that I’ve read this year, not books published this year (also applies to the below Best of Music).
- Heavenly Participation: Reweaving the Sacramental Tapestry by Hans Boersma. Enjoyed this book because of the oddity of trying to combine Protestant theology with non-Thomist medieval Catholicism in order to recover a fuller, truer view of the cosmos that God has created. Not entirely convinced, but Boersma has some right visions of what Christian theology and life should be like (you can read my petered-out blog series here and here).
- The Myth of Religious Violence by William Cavanaugh. Easily the most provocative thing I’ve read in a long time. In prepping for a class at BCS on the Wars of Religion, I read thru this book which totally convinced me that the modern state and the modern idea of religion is incredibly false, and thus incredibly damaging. I wish every churchman, politician, and commentator would read this book.
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling. What can I say? This book moves me to tears every time I read it, and it has, more than nearly anything else in my life, illuminated the humanity of Jesus Christ and His sacrifice for me. This, despite the fact that harry is not an allegory of Jesus—he is portraying a good Christian life of love for us to see. These 7 books will likely be an annual event for me, much like The Lord of the Rings has been.
- Tree and Leaf by J. R. R. Tolkien. A lovely collection of some of my favorite shorter items from my good friend Dr. Tolkien: Mythopoeia (a poem about humanity, creativity, and the image of God in us), “Leaf by Niggle” (a short story concerning the comedy of being a niggling artist with a limited number of years to live), “The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth” (one of many ‘re-constructions’ of Anglo-Saxon poem fragments that Tolkien wrote; this one focusing on death as equalizer), and “On Fairy-Stories” (a lecutre in defense of the fairy-tale genre against its cultured despisers; it has not been refuted even though literary types still poop all over his work as ‘escapist,’ ‘simple,’ and ‘childish’).
- Inverting the Pyramid: A History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson. So much fun, and a great learning experience since I know nothing of soccer history and strategy. Caveat: after reading this and then watching Liverpool this season, my blood pressure is substantially higher than last year.
- J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey. Incredibly insightful and knowledgable defense of Tolkien against his detractors. Tons of insanely interesting discussion of English grammar, words, place-names, and other nerdish stuff that I love so much. Shippey, however, could use a good systematic theology refresher so that some of his conclusions could be strengthened.
- The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto. More Old English nerditty! A set of excellent translations done in teams of linguists and English poets that really bring out the sound and sense of (most of) these poems. “The Seafarer” and “The Vision of the Cross” are worth the price of the book.
Best Music of 2011
I KNOW I’M A HIPSTER DOOFUS. You don’t have to tell me. But: these artists and their work have really impacted me, and this indie folk/rock/post-rock stuff is the only popular music that doesn’t irritate the crap out of me.
- Love and War and the Sea In Between by Josh Garrels. I can’t say how much this album has meant to me in this 2011 full of trial and tribulation. Musically diverse and lyrically rich, Love and War tells the story of the hope of “that far country” beyond the blue to which Christ has brought and will bring us fully one day. In the interim, we struggle and are sustained by grace, hope, and love that come to us in so many varied forms. He’s even giving it away for free for another 5 months. “Farther Along” kept us going this year.
- Sigh No More by Mumford and Sons. Yes, up for multiple Grammys. Yes, top seller on iTunes. Tons of folks love it. I just don’t care. There is so much depth in the writing, so much feeling poured into the music that these boys are our favorites. I think the reason Mumford are so popular is because the biblical illiteracy in the West is so pervasive, that all the deeply Christian lyrics and narratives in their songs go totally unnoticed. I pray my kids keep listening as they get the Bible into their bloodstream. Even though he doesn’t know what it means, I love hearing our youngest sing while doing dishes: “So give me hope in the darkness that I will see the light, ’cause O they gave me such a fright. And I will hold as long as you like, just promise me we’ll be alright.”
- The Head and the Heart by The Head and the Heart. First heard these guys when they opened up First Ave. for Iron & Wine (which greatly disappointed). They blew the lid off of it, and we were hooked. Lots of stomping and driving guitars, while the harmonies are wonderful. Plus, they mention Oklahoma in one track so we have to love them.
- Helplessness Blues by Fleet Foxes. The texture of this new album is incredibly detailed, and still sounds like it was made 35 years ago (in a good way). You need about 10 listens to let it really begin to sink in and work its magic, but you should let it. Good, good stuff.
- Bon Iver by Bon Iver. Again, my tiny, North-Woods-of-Wisconsin-esque indie secrets like Justin Vernon have been discovered by the mainstream of American (and European) music. This is up for multiple Grammys this year as well. While I enjoy Bon Iver, and do so in spite of its difference from Justin’s first release For Emma…Forever Ago, it is mainly the sounds themselves that have affected me. Such delicate landscapes are painted here it almost doesn’t matter that you can’t understand over half of the lyrics. Different, but good.
Secretly Surrounded in All Lowliness
“The truth of Jesus Christ is not one truth among others; it is the truth, the universal truth that creates all truth as surely as it is the truth of God. For in Jesus Christ God has created all things, He has created all of us. We exist not apart from Him, but in Him, whether we are aware of it or not; and the whole cosmos exists not apaprt from him, but in Him, borne by Him, the Almighty Word. To know Him is to know all. To be touched and gripped by the Spirit in his realm means being led into all truth.
If a man believes and knows God, he can no longer ask, What is the meaning of my life? But by believing he actually lives the meaning of his life, the meaning of his creatureliness, of his individuality, in the limits of his creatureliness and individuality and in the fallibility of his existence, in the sin in which he is involved and of which daily and hourly he is guilty; yet he also lives it with the aid which is daily and hourly imparted to him through God’s interceding for him, in spite of him and without his deserving it. He recognises the task assigned to him in this whole, and the hope vouchsafed to him in and with this task, because of the grace by which he may live and the praise of the glory promised him, by which he is even here and now secretly surrounded in all lowliness.
The believer confesses this meaning of his existence. The Christian Creed speaks of God as the ground and goal of all that exists. The ground and goal of the entire cosmos means Jesus Christ. And the unheard-of thing may and must be said, that where Christian faith exists, there also exists, through God’s being trusted, inmost familiarity with the ground and goal of all that happens, of all things; there man lives, in spite of all that is said to the contrary, in the peace that passeth all understanding, and which for that very reason is the light that lightens our understanding.”
[Crikey. Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline, 26–27]
Everyone who has to contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously; and if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, that suffices for the devil to have lost his game.
The great modern enemy of friendship has turned out to be love. By love, I don’t mean the principle of giving and mutual regard that lies at the heart of friendship. And I don’t mean what Saint Paul meant by love, the Christian notion of indiscriminate and universal *agape* or *caritas*, which is based on the universal love of the Christian God. I mean love in the banal, ubiquitous, compelling, and resilient modern meaning of love: the romantic love that obliterates all other goods, the love to which every life must apparently lead, the love that is consummated in sex and celebrated in every particle of our popular culture, the love that is institutionalized in marriage and instilled as a primary and ultimate good in every Western child. I mean *eros*, which is more than sex but is bound up with sex. I mean the longing for union with another being, the sense that such a union resolves the essential quandary of human existence, the belief that only such a union can abate the loneliness that seems to come with being human, and deter the march of time that threatens to trivialize our very existence.
The centrality of this love in our culture is so ingrained that it is almost impossible to conceive of a world in which it might not be so. And this is strange in a society in which the delusions and dangers of such love are all around us: the wreckage of many modern marriages, the mass of unwanted pregnancies, the devastation of AIDS, the social ostracism of the single and the old. Even those sources of authority that might once have operated as a check on this extraordinary cultural pre-eminence have caved in to the propaganda of *eros*. The Christian churches, which once wisely taught the primary of *caritas* to *eros*, and held out the virtue of friendship as equal to the benefits of conjugal love, are now our culture’s primary and obsessive propagandists for the marital unit and its capacity to resolve all human ills and satisfy all human needs. Far from seeing divorce and abortion and sexual disease as reasons to question our culture’s apotheosis of *eros*, these churches see them merely as opportunities to intensify the idolatry of *eros* properly conducted and achieved. We live in a world, in fact, in which respect and support for *eros* has acquired all the hallmarks of a cult. It has become our civil religion.
Source: wesleyhill
Let us, then, meditate upon the Nativity just as we see it happening in our own babies. I would not have you contemplate the deity of Christ, the majesty of Christ, but rather his flesh. Look upon the Baby Jesus. Divinity may terrify man. Inexpressible majesty will crush him. That is why Christ took on our humanity, save for sin, that he should not terrify us but rather that with love and favor he should console and confirm.
Behold Christ lying in the lap of his young mother, still a virgin. What can be sweeter than the Babe, what more lovely than the mother! What fairer than her youth! What more gracious than her virginity! Look at the Child, knowing nothing. Yet all that is belongs to him, that your conscience should not fear but take comfort in him. Doubt nothing. Watch him springing in the lap of the maiden. Laugh with him. Look upon this Lord of Peace and your spirit will be at peace. See how God invites you in many ways. He places before you a Babe with whom you may take refuge. You cannot fear him, for nothing is more appealing to man than a babe. Are you affrighted? Then come to him, lying in the lap of the fairest and sweetest maid. You will see how great is the divine goodness, which seeks above all else that you should not despair. Trust him! Trust him! Here is the Child in whom is salvation. To me there is no greater consolation given to mankind than this, that Christ became man, a child, a babe, playing in the lap and at the breasts of his most gracious mother. Who is there whom this sight would not comfort? Now is overcome the power of sin, death, hell, conscience, and guilt, if you come to this gurgling Babe and believe that he is come, not to judge you, but to save.
Source: wesleyhill
