Today was a classroom wrap for me. The tests have been graded, paperwork turned in, and final questions asked. Now it’s a matter of one more chapel and beginning the planning for next year. But there are still tests and grading for many. Which brings this recent Sunday FoxTrot to mind. Ah, equivocation.
(image from gocomics.com)
I’ve been holding onto this one for a while, if only because I keep planning on doing a “best of Songs of Innocence and Experience” list. This is one of my favorites, for sure.
You kind of get the sense that U2 is in a place of transition philosophically. This song, though, still captures something of the band that has at least hints of the timeless.
Yesterday marked the end of the Easter season. A week and a half after marking the ascension of Jesus, the church celebrates the day of Pentecost, a commemoration of the birth of the church through the presence of the Holy Spirit. At the church service I attended last night, the sanctuary was accented with red and leis were exchanged during the passing of the peace. It was a nice way to mark the end of a particular part of the church’s liturgical calendar.
While I’ve taken part in bits and pieces of the liturgical calendar throughout the last few years, this is my second and attempting to be present for a majority of services from Advent to Pentecost. I’ve started to the see church’s liturgical calendar as something to help my devotional practices for the rest of my life. It provides a good and (many would argue) necessary rhythm to the year that transcends the other holidays that mark our cultural calendars.
And so now we enter what has been dubbed “ordinary time.” In Ancient-Future Time, Robert E. Webber points out that this name is intended as a contrast to the six months of the calendar of “extraordinary time” that crescendoes with Christmas and Easter. Which isn’t to say that nothing special will happen in the church for the next six months. Webber sees this part of the liturgical calendar as a real reminder of why Christians worship on Sunday.
Sunday worship expresses Christian truth through remembrance of the God who acts . . . Sunday worship, every Sunday, is a celebration of God’s story. And the constant bathing of our worship in this story– songs, preaching, baptism, Eucharist, and the Christian-year celebrations– form and shape our conscious and unconscious living in this theater of God’s glory!
From Webber’s perspective, this “ordinary time” is an opportunity to remember God’s saving action in history, experience God’s renewing presence, and anticipate the consummation of God’s redeeming work in the New Heavens and Earth. Webber concludes:
Here the church calls to mind the teaching of the church and the practices of the Christian life as recorded in the New Testament writings.
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I am sad, really, to see this part of the year come to an end. There’s something about the intentionality of the time that is both challenging and refreshing. There’s a real sense that time and timing matter, that church members are on the same page by more than just whim. But ordinary time is also an opportunity to put into practice what you have learned, almost like an echo of time on the mountain top as opposed to time in the valley. I’ve definitely felt and learned a lot this time around the calendar of extraordinary time. And I greatly look forward to entering it again in December.
(image from arrowelectronicsfitness.com)
So my friends and I are a chunk of the way through the “remixed” season four of Arrested Development. “Fateful Consequences” is a re-edited version of the season that saw most of the key actors making individual episodes, which didn’t work all that well for such an ensemble-fueled show. And now, just before the fifth season drops on Netflix, the “remixed” version is here to remind us of what made the show great in the first place.
Here’s the “trailer” for the upcoming season, which seems to have a couple of interestingly absurd plot threads to draw us in.
Break out the fruit juice, I suppose!
The spring season of television is coming to an end. You can always tell because of the big Survivor finale, which is next Wednesday. Tonight Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD came to a fifth season conclusion titled “The End” (just in case the show didn’t get a last-minute renewal). And it was a wild ride that ended with a tear-jerker moment. While the show hasn’t always delivered the “big moments” that fans have come to expect from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it has been a consistent effort with a great cast that has found themselves in a multitude of amazing situations over five seasons. Which is part of what made tonight’s episode so sad to watch.
The only other show that needs a season’s wrapping at this point is The Flash. It’s fourth season will come to an end on Tuesday. The show has done a great job of staying away from Speed Force villains, which has been nice. And while the last couple of episodes have felt a little like treading water, the season has had a mostly-engaging through-line with some nice twists. Here’s the trailer for that season finale.
For the last year or so, I have often found myself thinking about my “pet false distinction” when it comes to church life: either “eat the body” or “be the body.” The former points to a heightened place of liturgy that crescendoes in communion. The latter points to a heightened place of the church program that crescendoes in mission. I totally admit the false distinction, what I communicate to my students as the “either-or fallacy.” Both of them, too easily and too often, are missing out on something that we neglect to our danger. Henri Nouwen points to it in the “where do I begin?” chapter of Spiritual Direction.
Through the discipline of spiritual direction, we explore in the presence of another wise Christian companion or two God’s claim on our lives, what has been and what may now be. We recognize God’s activity and again say yes to the direction in which the Spirit calls us. The direction might be fearful or even quite radical, but we might also be surprised to see that the call of God is a call that is very attractive and that we are able to respond to it because we are being drawn by a loving force.
It is not enough, Nouwen asserts, for us to be content with something like this conversation of “spiritual direction” as a rare and limited thing. And it’s not just “psychological questions with psychological answers.” There is a deeply spiritual reality at play in between the programs and pews of our churches. Nouwen continues:
It is important that we start to think about a ministry in which we help one another to practice spiritual disciplines and thus live in such a way that we become more sensitive to the ongoing presence of God in our lives. What finally counts is not just that there are good spiritual men and women in this very chaotic world, but that there are communities of Christians who together listen with great care and sensitivity to the One who want to make this healing presence known to all.
This is no easy thing, definitely not as tactile as communion or as measurable as programs and projects. And while it’s always been necessary, many of us have done a good job of making it optional at best and irrelevant at its worst. Maybe it’s a “chicken or the egg” situation: we do not have people asking the questions because we are not practicing and showing a better way. The sooner we can start practicing the better way, the sooner we will, perhaps, find people asking better and deeper questions.
(image from sojo.net)
One of the best contemporary fiction reading experiences I’ve had over the last few years was with Justin Cronin’s The Passage. The book was one of those rare “first in a trilogy” books that was so well-done that a continuation seemed almost unnecessary.
So I’m pleased to hear that FOX has picked up The Passage (with Mark-Paul Gosselaar as Wolgast) for a run this next season. It’s been long enough that I don’t remember all of the details (and it’s no small book), so this trailer is engaging without giving too much away (or making too many easy call-backs).
FOX did a great job this past season with The Gifted, a comic book property that was basically X-Men without the X-Men. If The Passage is anywhere near as good, as well-paced and well-acted, then it should be a great television experience.
In his recent interview with New York Magazine, futurist Jaron Lanier responded to a question about his “urgent” arguments against social media. And while he has a whole book about the topic dropping at the end of the month, he ends the interview by positing a concern based on the spiritual consequences of digital life. From the interview:
The argument is that social media hates your soul. And it suggests that there’s a whole spiritual, religious belief system along with social media like Facebook that I think people don’t like. And it’s also . . . phony and false. It suggests that life is some kind of optimization, like you’re supposed to be struggling to get more followers and friends. Zuckerberg even talked about how the new goal of Facebook would be to give everybody a meaningful life, as if something about Facebook is where the meaning of life is.
It suggests that you’re just a cog in a giant global brain or something like that. The rhetoric from the companies is often about AI, that what they’re really doing — like YouTube’s parent company, Google, says what they really are is building the giant global brain that’ll inherit the earth and they’ll upload you to that brain and then you won’t have to die. It’s very, very religious in the rhetoric. And so it’s turning into this new religion, and it’s a religion that doesn’t care about you. It’s a religion that’s completely lacking in empathy or any kind of personal acknowledgment. And it’s a bad religion. It’s a nerdy, empty, sterile, ugly, useless religion that’s based on false ideas. And I think that of all of the things, that’s the worst thing about it.
Just because it’s “phony and false” doesn’t mean that there’s nothing there, and I think Lanier knows it. Like any emergent system, the network of social media apps has become something bigger than any one thing. Even if it is a shadow of true living, it is still a kind of life. Strange to think, but we’ve created and nurtured a culture of so little substance that social media has become a necessary substitute from which only some kind of people can afford to refrain.
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And so we might find ourselves hollowed out on both sides: socially and spiritually, on both the outside and the inside. But the inside is vital. The Three Ages of the Interior Life speaks of the complete necessity of a healthy interior life, of an interior space and conversation where creation and Creator meet.
This interior life thus conceived is something far more profound and more necessary in us that intellectual life or the cultivation of the sciences, than artistic or literary life than social or political life . . .
This shows the the interior life, or the life of the soul with God, well deserves to be called the one thing necessary, since by it we tend to our last end and assure our salvation . . .
The interior life of a just man who tends toward God and who already lives by Him is indeed the one thing necessary. To be a saint, neither intellectual culture nor great exterior activity is a requisite; it suffices the we live profoundly by God.
For many of us, the ubiquity of technology has accelerated the chipping away or obliteration of any kind of interior life. Evidence of “living profoundly by God” isn’t always easy to come across in the current climate.
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This dovetails nicely with the second question posed in Henri Nouwen’s Spiritual Direction: where do I begin? Or, perhaps for some of us, where do we begin again when trying to make space for an interior life that serves as a well from which God’s Spirit can flow? This is especially pertinent if so much of our lives now happen online. Nouwen asserts:
There is a real tendency to think of the spiritual life as a life that will begin when we have certain feelings, think certain thoughts, or gain certain insights. The problem, however, is not how to make the spiritual life happen, but to see where it actually is happening. We work on the premise that God acts in this world and in the lives of individuals and communities. God is doing something right now. The chipping away and sculpting is taking place whether we are aware of it or not. Our task is to recognize that, indeed, it is God who is acting, and we are involved already in the spiritual life.
And so the question arises: what space can we carve out from our routines that makes room for a God bigger than our technology? And how do we put technology and its attendant apps back in the place of “tools” instead of the place of “masters”? That will be a question good for us to wrestle with as we move deeper into the 21st century. So the perceived “desert of the moment” brought on by the digital is the place that most of must start from. That or we have to set up places of rescue on the desert’s edge, ready and waiting for the exiles and refugees of digital life.
(image from amazon.com)
A common theme from the last few weeks of news articles and essays and reading points to the issue of loneliness as a real fruit of our modern era. I suppose we’ve known this since the release of Bowling Alone, at least. But loneliness has its many facets, makes appearances in surprising ways at every stage of life.
The folks over at Comment Magazine are putting together a summer issue dealing with loneliness and social isolation. They’ve already posted this editorial from James K. A. Smith and this essay from Wesley Hill about loneliness and celibacy. It is good to see difficult things addressed well.
Henri Nouwen also has something to say about loneliness in his collected writings on Spiritual Direction. From the chapter on “Who Will Answer My Questions?” Nouwen writes
To live the questions requires that you first look within yourself, trusting that God is present and at work within you. This is a very difficult task, because in our world we are constantly pulled away from our innermost self and encouraged to look for answers outside of ourselves. If you are a lonely person, you have no inner rest to ask, wait, and listen. You crave people in the hope that another will bring you answers. You want them here and now. But by first embracing solitude in God’s presence, you can pay attention to your inner, clamoring self before looking to others for community and accountability. This has nothing to do with egocentrism or unhealthy introspection because, in the words of Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice to a young poet, “what is going on in your innermost being is worthy of your whole love.”
Sobering words, yet true. And they hold out the hope of being some kind of corrective for a society and culture of growing loneliness.
You can learn more about Comment Magazine here.
I was glad this morning to read the Daily Office reading of Daniel 7:9-14 (ESV).
9 “As I looked,
thrones were placed,
and the Ancient of Days took his seat;
his clothing was white as snow,
and the hair of his head like pure wool;
his throne was fiery flames;
its wheels were burning fire.
10 A stream of fire issued
and came out from before him;
a thousand thousands served him,
and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him;
the court sat in judgment,
and the books were opened.11 “I looked then because of the sound of the great words that the horn was speaking. And as I looked, the beast was killed, and its body destroyed and given over to be burned with fire. 12 As for the rest of the beasts, their dominion was taken away, but their lives were prolonged for a season and a time.
13 “I saw in the night visions,
and behold, with the clouds of heaven
there came one like a son of man,
and he came to the Ancient of Days
and was presented before him.
14 And to him was given dominion
and glory and a kingdom,
that all peoples, nations, and languages
should serve him;
his dominion is an everlasting dominion,
which shall not pass away,
and his kingdom one
that shall not be destroyed.
The day, of course, got away from me, as Thursdays often do. But it’s been nice this afternoon, with the day slowly fading, to remember the significance of this day in the biblical narrative. It is a good reminder, in this time removed from Easter, to be redirected to what is beyond us and ahead of us. I thank God for the Son who rises.
Space Enough, and Time 