I knew something was up a couple of weeks ago when the icon for The Rings of Power suddenly returned to the front of “Amazon Originals” on my TV (after being conspicuously absent for some time). Earlier this week, Amazon release the teaser trailer for the show’s second season, which will drop in late August. Check it out:
The most noticeable thing to me is the absence of the Harfoots and the Stranger Who Fell From the Sky at the beginning of season one. I’d have no problem if that storyline was shelved for a while. I’m more interested in seeing how they make the creation of the remaining rings plausible after the end of season one.
Visually, this looks great. As with season one, I am hopeful. More tentatively so, I’m afraid. But it’s almost always good to dip your toes back into some part of the ocean of Tolkien’s work, even if the water isn’t “just right.”
In the Eastertide narrative, today marks Ascension Day, forty days after Jesus’ resurrection and ten days before Pentecost. Erik Varden reflects well on the day in Entering the Twofold Mystery when, using Luke’s account of the moment in the book of Acts, he draws a parallel between God’s presence and guidance via cloud in the Old Testament (especially in connection with the Exodus, the Tabernacle, and the Temple. He writes:
On Ascension Day, Christ does not disappear beyond earth’s orbit. He enters the glory of the Father whereof the earth is full. He effectively fulfills his promise not to leave us as orphans. To apprehend this new mode of Jesus’ presence among us, special grace is called for. We need the Counselor, the Caller-to-mind, who will be our source of strength. Christ promises to send him ‘soon’. Throughout Eastertide we have verified that what he says is sure. This word, too, will be fulfilled. Like the apostles, then, let us savour Christ’s Ascension ‘full of joy’, waiting with eager expectation for the Father’s promise of Pentecost.
On another level, or in another way to commemorate the day, here’s U2’s “Window in the Skies.”
I caught a late-afternoon screening of The Fall Guy yesterday. It is a great movie, one that works on practically every level. It really is the kind of movie you really want people to see: it’s funny, thoughtful, action-packed, and twisty in just the right way. Beyond that, the faces are familiar enough and a real affection for stunt work and for movies in general is palpable and, in a way, reassuring.
As I sat in the theater watching the credits roll, I remembered that this is the weekend each year when Marvel would drop a major hit. The only real deviation, especially for The Avengers, was when Endgame was pushed up one weekend to close out April. (Last year, it was Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 and the year before it was Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.) All that to say, this is an odd year for movie-going in the sense that there is no major Marvel tentpole for the beginning of the summer movie season. (One could argue that Deadpool 3 fits the bill, but it doesn’t drop until the end of July and it’s rating, in my mind, will keep it as a kind of tangent to the overarching MCU narrative.)
So this year really is the test to see if a blockbuster summer season is possible without Marvel. Like I said, The Fall Guy is the kind of movie you want to succeed, to do really well (I mean, it so masterfully works in “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins). And I found myself wanting the whole slate of summer movies to succeed (even as The Fall Guy is expected to have a softer open than anticipated). The new Planet of the Apes movie and the prequel to A Quiet Place are just a couple that I am most looking forward to. Beyond that, there are some “re-issues” that look to be enjoyable. Marvel/SONY are releasing all of the modern Spider-Man movies one a week for a couple of months (and Spider-Man 2 really is as good as you remember it being). June sees a quick re-release of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. North by Northwest, Run Lola Run, and The Muppet Movie are also making their way back into theaters. And today, of course, is the 25th anniversary release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.
So here’s to the movie-going experience and to the stories that many will hopefully enjoy and share with others! Excuse me while I go grab some popcorn in anticipation of seeing ‘The Duel of the Fates” scene from The Phantom Menace again for the first time in years …
I appreciate how well Erik Varden works with phrases: both how he unpacks them and how he coins them. Consider a recent reflection on “living vastly“ (his words, not mine).
First, he mentions the source of his reflection: a prayer given as part of their liturgy that involves a phrase Google translates for me as God, the life of the faithful, the glory of the humble, the happiness of the righteous. Based on this, he says:
true life unfolds in response to fidelity and trust; glory, the conforming of our being to divine nature, is a function of illusionless self-knowledge, known in tradition as humility; beatitude, the durable perfection of happiness, correlates to just reasoning and action.
God is where we start, and these things describe Him well.
Then, as he often does so well, Varden reminds us of our own condition, and not just the difficult parts of it. As much as anything, he calls us to reality, that
sublime aspiration presupposes realism and calls out for implementation in positive action.
Lots of big words and even bigger ideas, obviously. But he uses those words to locate us well in the life of faith. He concludes:
To be a Christian is to learn to live vastly, to be drawn towards a horizon that forever broadens, though its coordinates correspond precisely to the intimate motions of our heart of hearts.
Back during Lent, one of my plans was to read shorter books only. And I kept that, for the most part, which was nice. Since then, though, I’ve taken the plunge with a few longer books (and one short book that I started during Lent and am almost, finally, about to finish).
As I write this, I’m about 16 pages away from being done with Oliver O’Donovan’s The Disappearance of Ethics. It’s the holdover from Lent. And it’s good, but it’s also one of those books that requires me to read and reread things a few times. The book has definitely been good food-for-thought for me, both for the classroom and for day-to-day life. For being such a small book, it’s quite the big-picture account of ethics and the Christian life (but not in a handbook kind of way).
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I’m about 2/3 of the way through Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. His basic assertion is that over the last couple of decades society has gone too far in protecting kids in the real world but not far enough in the virtual one. Lots of charts and statistics, for sure. The last chunk of the book, which I just started, is more about what can be done to make a better societal correction with things like smartphones and social media. Funny enough, a recent episode of Abbott Elementary had an opening scene that dealt with students and technology. It was both funny and worrisome:
Perhaps one lesson is this: let’s not be naive.
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My other longer read is the book that can be found on the right column of the page: Leif Enger’s I Cheerfully Refuse. It came across my radar the same time as The Anxious Generation; I thought it would be a nice counter-balance. It’s a great book: compelling narrator, short chapters, and some quality world-building (and it’s a rather small world being built, which is nice). Turns out I misread the dust jacket blurb about the story: what I thought was a main character simply “going missing” turns out to be much darker. But Enger is a reliable storyteller, even if everything sad in the story doesn’t get to become untrue. It’s my bus reading, so I’m still a week or so from finishing the novel. It really is a good story, both heavier and more beautiful than I had expected.
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I’m not sure where I’ll go next book-wise. New novels are always a little hit or miss for me (which is why I tend to read the same authors and rarely branch out to new ones). Ephraim Radner released a new book that I just came across a week or two ago. It looks a little dense, which is tricky because his style is also somehow elusive to me on a first read. I’m also really interested in Why Everything That Doesn’t Matter Matters So Much by Charlie Peacock and Andi Ashworth. It’s been years since I read anything from Peacock, but I’ve always respected his perspective. Both books have a strong practical edge to them (they look to balance the practical and ideal well, really). We’ll see what happens next.
Eastertide continues, of course, up until Pentecost, which is just under a month away. Here’s another great Easter song. Andrew Peterson did that rare but great thing (almost George Lucas-like) by releasing Resurrection Letters Volume One years before releasing Volume Two. This song, from the second volume, is one of my favorite AP songs lyrically, which is saying something.
Today is Birthday 48 for me. Not quite as cool a number as 47, which is prime , or as 49, which only has three factors, but it is what it is. I’m hopeful for a mostly normal day: early morning at the gym, a day of work, phone calls and messages from family and friends, and some time with the neighbors. But as I write this, who knows what the day or the year ahead will bring?
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I’ve mentioned the work of Erik Varden often over the last few months. The Bishop of Trondheim, Norway, he’s also a monk, which means he brings an interesting perspective to life and how it is lived. In a recent homily, Varden tried to articulate something about freedom and the religious life that I thought was interesting. He writes:
All of want to be free, naturally. But freedom may seem to us elusive. We’ve an understanding of freedom that is limited. For us, freedom is normally a matter of the absence of constraints. We think that a given circumstance, a given person, a given wound prevents us from being free. We spend our time moaning about that circumstance, that person, that wound.
He then mentions the three “stages” of what he calls the monastic pedagogy of freedom. First, he says the monk must “make a preferential option for the real.” This means accepting things the way they are given as an act of humility. The second stage, then, is “to trust that God can do something wonderful with this particular reality.” In this stage, humility is joined with a sense of self-abandonment that “gives God freedom to act.” Finally, we learn to practice a “readiness to wait.” This brings patience into the mix. As monks live into these three stages, Varden suggests, they will find themselves living in a kind of “perfect freedom.”
Which I think is also true for those of us not living the “religious life” but who are trying to “know ever more intimately Jesus Christ, the Truth who sets us free.” That is a key aspect of life after Easter, of life through the end of the fifth act of God’s Story. I would like to do my best to cultivate this perfect freedom with this next journey around the sun. You can read the whole homily by Varden here. It definitely a good way to continue to reflect on Easter.
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Something I’ve been practicing over the last few months has been putting thoughts and ideas into graphic form: timelines, something I call “line spectrums,” simple sketches (as I can do nothing better), and what Andy Crouch calls 2x2s. I first encountered Crouch’s 2x2s in Strong and Weak, where he used the concepts of vulnerability and authority to think through questions of leadership and human flourishing. Two boxes across, two boxes down, the axis in the middle. I’m still working out how to do that easily with my simple word-processing program, but I think I’ve got something basic that I can use to some effect. I thought I’d share some of them here over the next few weeks, if only to get a sense of my own current “location in life.” My first “four square” (as I will call them from now on) is about the dynamic relationship between freedom and faithfulness. Both of these are key aspects of living well in the Biblical Story. But they are also often seen as being at odds with each other, and understandably so. So I’ll put this right here to whet the appetite for later in the week:
There’s definitely a sense of connected between this “four square” and the ideas mentioned in the quotes from Varden above. For now, it’s enough for me to put this “out there” and come back to it later, I think.
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It’s always good to celebrate with a song, I think. So here’s a song from Steven Curtis Chapman about looking back and preparing for what’s ahead. A good way to start a new year, I think. This is “Remember to Remember.”
This semester in class we’ve started each period with a reading from the New Testament letter of James and prayer. This week, as we’ve come to the end of the letter, we’ve read and briefly talked about what James says about prayer and its effects. Yesterday’s verses were about Elijah and his prayer for rain. A student mentioned how odd it is that God would allow that, and what would have happened if Elijah had not prayed. How would it be possible to change God’s mind, he wondered.
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In his post on the same day, Richard Beck wrote about prayer, particularly praying at the beginning of his classes. His reason for doing this?
Two years ago, I made the intentional decision to pray before all of my classes. I’m in agreement with Andrew Root: the most critical and pressing spiritual formation task facing the church today is teaching ourselves how to pray.
To be clear, this isn’t about some pious “add-on” to make my class “Christian.” It’s not really even about practicing a “spiritual discipline,” some grueling work we engage in to become better Christians. Prayer is, rather, simply an enchantment.
I definitely agree with Beck and like his reminder that prayer is, on multiple levels, an enchantment. Granted, it’s also a discipline and what Jamie Smith would call a “habitation of the Spirit.” But it is the reminder that there is more going on than what we see. Beck’s is a good post and a great reminder.
A couple of weeks ago, back in my fifth Lenten reflection using Erik Varden’s The Shattering of Loneliness, I mentioned his use of the church father Irenaeus, particularly his “notion of God and man getting used to each other.” I think that’s a good picture of the entire Biblical story, really, from God walking in the Genesis garden to manifesting as a pillar and cloud in Exodus to the still and small voice of Elijah. I imagine the assertion that Jesus’ divinity was an odd pill to swallow, even as it made a good deal of sense to those who had followed him, and then to those who had seen Him after the resurrection. It’s no small thing that post-resurrection-Jesus appeared throughout the days leading up to His ascension. Paul makes a list of Jesus’ appearances as part of his discussion of resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15:
3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles,8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (NIV)
The resurrection is definitely a reality that the followers of Jesus had to get used to.
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Varden recently posted an Eastertide homily reflecting the the resurrection from John’s Gospel and one of those odd facts that’s always interesting but not one talks much about: the appearance of Jesus’ grave-clothes in the tomb. From the NIV:
6 Then Simon Peter came along behind him and went straight into the tomb. He saw the strips of linen lying there,7 as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus’ head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.
Varden writes about the cloth (or napkin) “lying in its place”:
There’s a striking contrast in today’s Gospel between what goes on outside the empty tomb and the ambiance within. Outside there’s a great to-do. Everyone is in agitated motion. Mary Magdalene runs. The apostles run, one faster than the other. The snippets of conversations we hear let us sense great perplexity. The absence of the Lord’s Body, that had carried a Presence that changed everything, represents a total loss of orientation. The result is anxiety — and in isolated moments flashes of mad hope.
In the tomb reign order and calm. John and Peter see, when they look in, the linen shrouds used for the burial of Jesus, not just put away, but folded. As for the napkin that had covered his faced, it is carefully rolled up apart.
These details are important.
There’s not much time to linger in the tomb, of course. And yet, in a way, maybe all the time in the world. Lots to ponder, to think about, even if it wouldn’t be clear to the women and the apostles for a while. And yet John mentioned the details of the grave-clothes in a way almost too easy to take for granted. Varden continues:
They let us understand that God vanquished death without violence. Violence pertains to the world of human beings. God acts in peace. The evidence of the tomb suggests a peaceful awakening, as if the resurrection were a matter of course: ‘I have slept and taken my rest: and I have risen up, because the Lord has received me’ (Ps 3.6).
Jesus, rising from Sheol, serenely put off death as if were an old pyjamas for which he had no further use. He did not cast it off with disdain. He folded it neatly, showing even this last enemy (1 Cor 15.26) divine respect, a kind of tenderness due, not to death as such, that’s for sure, but to the wounds death has imprinted on human experience.
It’s an interesting assertion, obviously somewhat speculative, and yet somehow in light with the facts that John leaves with his readers. And, quite honestly, I’ll take whatever I can get when it comes to “getting used” to the reality of resurrection on the other side of death, not just for Jesus but for you and me, too. I like the prayer Varden closes his homily with, as he brings the Easter morning assertion into our day and time (and the day and time of all of us in the “fifth act” of God’s Story):
Brethren, let us then serenely, but decisively, fold away anything in our lives that may still pertain to the reign of death. Let us leave this in the tomb once for all. We are made to live. Let us not seek the Living One among the dead (Lk 24.5).
In the Eastertide narrative, today marks Ascension Day, forty days after Jesus’ resurrection and ten days before Pentecost. Erik Varden reflects well on the day in Entering the Twofold Mystery when, using Luke’s account of the moment in the book of Acts, he draws a parallel between God’s presence and guidance via cloud in the Old Testament (especially in connection with the Exodus, the Tabernacle, and the Temple. He writes:
I caught a late-afternoon screening of The Fall Guy yesterday. It is a great movie, one that works on practically every level. It really is the kind of movie you really want people to see: it’s funny, thoughtful, action-packed, and twisty in just the right way. Beyond that, the faces are familiar enough and a real affection for stunt work and for movies in general is palpable and, in a way, reassuring.
Space Enough, and Time 