I’m not a big fan of lyric videos, but I’ll make an exception for the first song from U2’s forthcoming album, Songs of Experience. Here’s “You’re the Best Thing About Me.”
It’s upbeat with a melancholy undertow. I’m curious to see how long it sticks in the consciousness.
Last weekend I spent some time in my classroom trying to catch up in hopes of getting ahead. To help with this, I put Parks and Recreation season two in the DVD player. The show is immensely re-watchable. I haven’t really spent much time with season two since it aired, though. I vaguely remember the show not being that funny until Chris Traeger and Ben Wyatt arrive. So it’s been nice to find that the show’s second season actually holds up quite well. There are a lot of nice moments in the season, including the budding relationship between April and Andy.
In the episode I just finished, unflappable Leslie Knope starts to see something unexpected in Justin Anderson, the guy she’s dating. This moment between Leslie and Ron Swanson doesn’t just epitomize the quality of their friendship, it says something significant about the people we surround ourselves with.
A few weeks ago, I posted a quick reflection on Wendell Berry’s thoughts on community and health. I think about that essay often, which is why another chunk of it shows up here today. This is from 1994, before the ubiquity of the internet and cell phones.
If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live. Anyhow, we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.
Of course, growing up and growing older as fallen creatures in a fallen world can only instruct us painfully in division and disintegration. This is the stuff of consciousness and experience. But if our culture works in us as it should, then we do not age merely into disintegration and division, but that very experience begins our education, leading us into knowledge of wholeness and holiness. I am describing here the story of Job, of Lazarus, of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, of Milton’s Samson, of King Lear. If our culture works in us as it should, our experience is balanced by education; we are led out of our lonely suffering and are made whole.
In the present age of the world, disintegration and division, isolation and suffering seem to have overwhelmed us. The balance between education and experience has been overthrown; we are lost in experience, and so-called education is leading us nowhere.
Like so many other authors, something about what Berry articulates connects with some part of my own experience, helping me name it and own it. That’s true here, as well. While no place or time is perfect, I was definitely fortunate enough to grow up in the kind of culture Berry writes about here. I found it in college and in bits and pieces in seminary, too. The idea of wholeness, though, has been a bit more elusive these last few years. Existential experience is there, but the education than can frame it healthily is mostly missing. I do see a kind of wholeness in the lives of others, but it’s not the kind of wholeness that expands and welcomes. It is temporary at best . . . maybe even fleeting.
So if you cannot find that kind of wholeness at home, you have to become something of a turtle, able to carry it around with you, even as it serves as a kind of isolating factor.
Berry’s inclusion of figures like Job and Lear and Samson strikes a kind of chord. They are a reminder that sometimes life offers you a full-circle moment. Not always, but sometimes. Their ‘education’ was in no way easy. But it is something to think about, something that can help frame our experiences in a way that other parts of our more ‘formal’ culture cannot.
When I think of the “undivided life,” the words of Psalm 86 come to mind:
Teach me your way, Lord,
that I may rely on your faithfulness;
give me an undivided heart,
that I may fear your name.
An undivided heart may be reflected in an undivided life. Both, I think, are good things for which to pray.
One of the highlights of each week this semester is Thursday morning chapel prep. It’s the putting things together, the talk and camaraderie from testing out mics and speakers. And it’s being around music, too.
This morning included a nice exchange between students and teachers about the merit of U2. Here’s a live performance of “The Little Things That Give You Away,” from their upcoming Songs of Experience album.
At this point in the year, fans of network television are playing a slow-reveal guessing game. So we get the names and occupations of players in the new season of Survivor. We get some general network-montage advertisements that highlight the best that the “Big Five” have to offer. But then, bit by bit, we get full trailers with more footage with bigger hints of what to expect. Case in point: this new trailer for DC’s Legends of Tomorrow.
That it’s been just short of twenty years since the passing of Rich Mullins is difficult to believe. Here’s a just released rendition of “Hold Me Jesus” performed by Cindy Morgan and Andrew Greer.
Six weeks feels like a long time from now. But that’s how long until the newest season of super-hero television hits on the CW. Here’s a quick promo for it’s four major DC Comics shows: Supergirl, The Flash, Legends of Tomorrow, and Arrow.
If The Flash can perform a fourth-season course-correction and Legends can build off its season-three strengths, we’ll have at least two quality shows to enjoy.
Here’s a live rendition of Andrew Peterson’ “The Reckoning” from the Community Coffeehouse in Danbury, CT. A beautiful weaving of the created-yet-groaning world and that for which we all wait.
The folks over at Comment Magazine have posted the first half of a conversation between James K. A. Smith (You Are What You Love) and Tim Keller (recently of Redeemer Presbyterian Church). A great conversation about the church and the reality of contemporary pastoral care ensues, particularly in the tricky reality of pastoral care.
When asked about growing healthier congregations, Keller says:
One challenge is pastoral care, primarily because of transience. There is an indication—though it’s hard to prove—that, say, thirty years ago, the average member probably came to church four out of five weeks or five out of six weeks. Now it’s like one out of two. People are travelling more; their attention is divided. Also costs are such that it’s very expensive to have a full-time staff. Frankly, it’s seductive to have a larger church with fewer pastors where people are basically consumers. They’re not really being watched or cared for. There’s pastoral triage, which means that when your life’s falling apart the good churches will be there. They’ll be at the hospital, they’ll be at the funeral parlour, they’ll be in the counselling office. They can do triage. But when it comes to the ordinary kind of positive, proactive pastoral care and intervention where you are actually examining people, only in a nice way—How are you doing? Where are you going? How much do you know about the Christianity? Where could you grow?—that’s just not happening at all.
A few years ago, I was serving on a pastor search committee. As the youngest member of the group, I knew that I wouldn’t be searching for a pastor for myself. I would only have real contact with my pastor if my life or health fell apart, which is really heartbreaking for someone who holds the pastoral office in high esteem. But that’s the way it is in many churches, which Keller seems to affirm here.
I like what Keller says about his denomination’s approach to exhortation:
My denomination actually does talk about general and specific discipline. “General” discipline is exhortation and oversight. “Specific” discipline is where you actually have an offense and there’s a dispute and now the elders have to figure it out. Some people think only that’s discipline, but actually exhortation is discipline as well.
I do not envy pastors their busy lives. And a pulpit-only approach makes getting to know parishioners almost impossible. That’s one reason why the classroom can be such a great place: regular contact with individuals over time.
I look forward to the rest of the conversation between Smith and Keller. You can check out the first half here.
(image from uhsystem.com)
We just wrapped our third week of the school year (not including a week of meetings). Thanks to a state holiday, this three-day weekend has been something of a “pause” button for me. Most of my class curriculum is turning from unit one to unit two at this point. More than that, I’ve finished three weeks of chapel and now enter a few weeks where I serve as “emcee” but not key speaker.
The stretch has been good for me. The work day begins pretty early, and I find myself working almost non-stop through the day. It’s good for me, though, to stay on my toes. The unexpected part of things has been the amount of meetings that I attend or lead-out in. That will ebb and flow throughout the semester, I think. I am grateful that I have a couple of prep periods back-to-back to help out.
I have now spoken in chapel more in three weeks than I did in 14 years. Week One focused on “Why School.” It was a bit broad and abstract, but I wanted to try and cast the work that students do across a broader horizon, one that sees academic work as something that points to something intellectual (in the best sense) with the assumption that what we do with our minds matters.
Week Two focused on “Why the Biblical Story.” For years now, we have used N. T. Wright’s “five-act play” image in our Bible classes. This was my opportunity to point out how the concept keeps us from seeing the Bible as a rulebook or a magic mirror (or even a Rorschach test, really). Instead, it is a narrative that we live into and out of. And while I used a clip from Disney’s The Sword in the Stone to help illustrate “Why School,” it was the “It’s all true” scene from Star Wars: The Force Awakens that served as a lead-in for “Why the Biblical Story.”
Week Three was my opportunity to kind of “pull back the curtain” and explain the reasoning behind some of the things that have been made in chapel under the wisdom of the team that I work with. And so after a student-performed game of “90-Second Alphabet” with connections to the biblical story, I walked students through the why of things like starting with Scripture, having moments of silent prayer, and ending the time with a blessing (this year from 2 Corinthians).
I’m looking forward to a few weeks contributing without doing the heavy-lifting of speaking. I’m grateful for the experience and excited to engage with others as they bring their thoughts and concerns “to the table.” So far, this “temporary vocational stretch” has been a good way to reframe the other work that I do.
(image from independent.co.uk)
Space Enough, and Time 