Normality?

From the moment we get up in the morning until we go to bed at night, we race from place to place and from one obligation to the next.... When we submit to this sort of schedule we are consenting to cultural patterns long in the making, patterns that have become so ingrained that we accept them as normal and thus beyond question or critique. But is it normal to think that our pace of life should be one that leads to exhaustion, hypertension, anxiety, boredom, and despair?

Norman WirzbaLiving the Sabbath

Negative theology

Negative theology is not dressed up Buddhism. It is the necessary anesthesia of Christian theological work - quieting the mind so that God can get on with the surgery of the soul. What theologically inclined folk need most is not the next great book, but someone to tell them that compared to the spiritual life, mastering the most advanced theological concepts, including their Greek, Latin, Syriac or German nuances, is a piece of cake. “Those who have been most enlightened by the Holy Spirit,” writes Thomas Dubay, “are the least inclined to consider this enlightenment easy to come by.millinerd.com: The Power of Negative Thinking

The values of drinking

The third place tavern combines drinking with conversation such that each improves the other.  The talking/drinking synergism is basic to the pub ... The art of drinking is not acquired with the purchase of Old Mr. Boston's guide to mixing drinks.  It is learned in the company of those who combine moderate intake with scintillating conversation, for just as conversation is enhanced by the temperate use of alcohol, the artful and witty game of conversation moderates consumption of liquor.

Ray Oldenburg
The Great Good Place

Be merry!

Intriguing piece of advice from Luther...

Whenever the devil harasses you, seek the company of men or drink more, or joke and talk nonsense, or do some other merry thing. Sometimes we must drink more, sport, recreate ourselves, and even sin a little to spite the devil, so that we leave him no place for troubling our consciences with trifles. We are conquered if we try too conscientiously not to sin at all. So when the devil says to you: "do not drink," answer him: "I will drink, and right freely, just because you tell me not to."

Martin Luther
The Life and Letters of Martin Luther

Creative

God makes wine.  For all its difficulties, there is no way around the doctrine of creation.  But notice the tense:  He makes; not made.  He did not create once upon a time, only to find himself saddled now with the unavoidable and embarrassing result of that first rash decision.... It was St. Thomas, I think, who pointed out long ago that if God wanted to get rid of the universe, He would not have to do anything; He would have to stop doing something.  Wine is -- the fruit of the vine stands in act, outside of nothing -- because it is His very present pleasure to have it so.  The creative act is contemporary, intimate, and immediate to each part, parcel and period of the world.

Robert Farrar Capon
The Supper of the Lamb

Fatherhood

George MacDonald's dedication to his father, in his first volume of Poems (1857):

Thou hast been faithful to my highest need:
And I, thy debtor, ever, evermore,
Shall never feel the grateful burden sore,
Yet most I thank thee, not for any deed,
But for the sense thy living self did breed
That fatherhood is at the world's great core.

quoted in George MacDonald and His Wife, by Greville MacDonald, pg 31

Drinking

Vespers sometimes finds us at the neighborhood bar, a little place attached to the beautifully renovated historic theatre.  Here we pass the peace in the form of conversation or euchre, over a Michigan microbrew or a favorite bourbon or, on a very special occasion, a local whiskey with innumerable layers to its complex, north-woods personality.  As opposed to drinking to forget ourselves by drowning our worries in the cheapest anesthesia, at our best, we are drinking to remember: to remember the value of lifelong friendship, to remember the astounding creativity of human beings with such stuff of earth as hops and grapes, to remember what it feels like to be loved.

Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma"Drinking to remember" from catapult magazine

Richly inclusive and non-dogmatic

[Marilynne Robinson] makes an atheist reader like myself capable of identifying with the sense of a fallen world that is filled with pain and sadness but also suffused with divine grace. Robinson is a Calvinist, but her spiritual sensibility is richly inclusive and non-dogmatic. There’s little talk about sin or damnation in her writing, but a lot about forgiveness and tolerance and kindness. Hers is the sort of Christianity, I suppose, that Christ could probably get behind. I’ll never share her way of seeing and thinking about the world and our place in it, but her writing has shown me the value and beauty of these perspectives.

from:

THE FIRST CHURCH OF MARILYNNE ROBINSON

by Mark O'Connell

Craftmanship

Because craftsmanship refers to objective standards that do not issue from the self and its desires, it poses a challenge to the ethic of consumerism ... The craftsman is proud of what he has made, and cherishes it, while the consumer discards things that are perfectly serviceable in his restless pursuit of the new.

Matthew B. Crawford
Shop Class as Soulcraft

The unchildlike child

Would it not be the evil-faced child, because he needed it most? Yes; in God's name, yes. For is not that the divine way? Who that has read of the lost sheep, or the found prodigal, even if he had no spirit bearing witness with his spirit, will dare to say that it is not the divine way? Often, no doubt, it will appear otherwise, for the childlike child is easier to save than the other, and may come first. But the rejoicing in heaven is greatest over the sheep that has wandered the farthest--perhaps was born on the wild hill-side, and not in the fold at all.


George MacDonald, in Unspoken Sermons

Locked out of Eden

As creatures made from and for the earth, our deepest loves have nowhere else to play themselves out but on this stage, with these props, as these characters who have been locked out of Eden and face certain death. To me, it’s a great mercy that even within this play with its predictable ending, there are infinite potential symbols and meanings. Life is playful, indeed! And among my joys, I would include our halting efforts to cultivate a home that is full not just of stuff, but of love and of all of the good things that sprout from such a foundation, made real in the forms of chairs and rugs, books and baubles.

Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
"Love seat" in catapult magazine

Transforming culture

Human culture will someday be transformed.  Does this mean, then, that we must begin that process of transformation here and now?  Are we as Christians called to transform culture in the present age?  Not, I think, in any grandiose or triumphalistic manner.  We are called to await the coming transformation.  But we should wait actively, not passively.  We must seek the City which is to come.

Richard Mouw
When the Kings Come Marching In

Transforming culture

Christ will transform culture at the end time.  The ships of Tarshish, presently vessels that serve rebellious designs, will someday carry the wealth of the nations into the presence of the Creator.  Political power will be gathered into that City wherein the saints will rule forever.  The peoples and tribes and nations of the earth will sing praises to the Lamb who was slain.  In short, the "filling" of the earth will be harnessed and remolded for the sake of God's glory.

Richard Mouw
When the Kings Come Marching In

The King who dies...

The death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus -- especially the Ascension, since it is the final affirmation of the hands-off policy implicit in the other two -- proclaim that no meddling, divine or human, spiritual or material, can save the world.  Its only salvation is in the mystery of the King who dies, rises, and disappears, and who asks us simply to trust his promise that, in him, we have the kingdom already.

Robert Farrar Capon
Kingdom, Grace, Judgment

Grounded in the church

Another gift God gives is the church and Christian community.  Of course the church is always full of problems and weakness.  Yet it is critical for leaders to obediently connect themselves in faith to her vitality and gifts.  By being grounded in the church's life and worship and in the unique story and vision she alone holds, we are shaped within a journey, task and community that is bigger than "me."

Emmanuel Katongole & Chris Rice
Reconciling All Things