I spent last Christmas wondering whatever happened to Chris Rice, whose music played a big part in my college experience. Finally found him on Twitter, which led me to this new song written for the Christmas season, “Christmas Party.” Always good to hear a new Chris Rice song.
This looks to have the right blend of intense and absurd. Ho ho ho- two weeks to go!
Again from Bonhoeffer’s Life Together:
Do not object that the purpose of common devotions is profounder than to learn the contents of the Scriptures, that this is too profane a purpose, something which must be achieved apart from worship . . . A child hears and learns the Bible for the first time in family worship; the adult Christian learns it repeatedly and better, and he will never finish acquiring knowledge of its story.
Because the Scripture is a corpus, a living whole, the so-called lectio continua or consecutive reading must be adopted for Scripture reading in the family fellowship. Historical books, prophets, Gospels, Epistles, and Revelation are read and heard as God’s Word in their context. They set the listening fellowship in the midst of the wonderful world of revelation of the people of Israel with its prophets, judges, kings, and priests, its wars, festivals, sacrifices, and sufferings. The fellowship of believers is woven into the Christmas story, the baptism, the miracles and teaching, the suffering, dying, and rising again of Jesus Christ. It participates in the very events that occurred on this earth for the salvation of the world, and in doing so receives salvation in Jesus Christ.
From Bonhoeffer’s Life Together:
Almost all of us have grown up with the idea that the Scripture reading is only a matter of hearing the Word of God for this particular day. That is why for many the Scripture reading consists of only a few, brief, selected verses which are to form the guiding thought of the day . . . But there can be equally little doubt that brief verses cannot and should not take the place of reading the Scripture as a whole. The verse for the day is still not the Holy Scripture which will remain throughout all time until the Last Day. Holy Scripture is more than a watchword. It is also more than “light for today.” It is God’s revealed Word for all men, for all times. Holy Scripture does not consist of individual passages; it is a unit and is intended to be used as such.
As a whole the Scriptures are God’s revealing Word. Only in the infiniteness of its inner relationships, in the connections of Old and New Testaments, of promise and fulfillment, sacrifice and law, law and gospel, cross and resurrection, faith and obedience, having and hoping, will the full witness of Jesus Christ the Lord are perceived. This is why common devotions will include, besides the prayer of the psalms, a longer reading from the Old and the New Testament.
My Faith & Literature class is reading C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce as our final major work of the course. It’s a brilliant book, one that I’ve bought multiple copies of. Caedmon‘s Call recorded a Sandra McCracken-written song based on the book called “The High Countries.” And here’s Living Water, an a cappella group from Yale, performing the song last Christmas.
A just-released preview scene from this month’s The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. The clock is ticking.
From Simone Weil’s “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies”:
Happy then are those who pass their adolescence and youth in developing this power of attention. No doubt they are no nearer to goodness than their brothers working in fields and factories. They are near in a different way. Peasants and workmen possess a nearness to God of incomparable savour which is found in the depths of poverty, in the absence of social consideration and in the endurance of long drawn-out sufferings. If however we consider the occupation in themselves, studies are nearer to God because of the attention which is their soul. Whoever goes through years of study without developing this attention within himself has lost a great treasure.
Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbour, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance. Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention. The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. Nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, pity are not enough.
In the first legend of the Grail, it is said that the Grail (the miraculous stone vessel4 which satisfies all hunger by virtue of the consecrated host) belongs to the first comer who asks the guardian of the vessel, a king three-quarters paralysed by the most painful wound: “What are you going through?”
The love of our neighbour in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him: “What are you going through?” It is a recognition that the sufferer exists, not only as a unit in a collection, or a specimen from the social category labelled “unfortunate,” but as a man, exactly like us, who was one day stamped with a special mark by affliction. For this reason it is enough, but it is indispensable, to know how to look at him in a certain way.
This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own contents in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he is, in all his truth.
Only he who is capable of attention can do this.
From Bonhoeffer’s Ethics:
In Jesus Christ we have faith in the incarnate, crucified, and risen God. In the incarnation we learn of the love of God for His creation; in the crucifixion we learn of the judgment of God upon all flesh; and in the resurrection we learn of God’s will for a new world. There could be no greater error than to tear these three elements apart; for each of them comprises the whole.
From Alan Jacobs’ “Lewis at 100”:
Many years ago V. S. Naipaul noted a peculiarity of the Indian attitude toward Gandhi: everywhere in India Gandhi was venerated as a saint, but the social conditions against which he railed for so long remained unchanged. It would be sad if the same fate were to befall Lewis, if people were to revere his achievement so much that they fail to devote the quality of attention to the challenges of their time that he devoted to the challenges of his. This is a real temptation for those of us who love Lewis, because to read his books is to dwell in an atmosphere of moral and spiritual health that offers dramatic relief from the confusions and frustrations, petty and grand, of modern life. But Lewis himself always strove to encounter and interpret the world in which he lived. His admirers should remember that the achievements of the truly great are best honored not by the one who praises their work but by the one who follows their example.
It’s kind of sad that I find this so funny. May it never be.
Space Enough, and Time 