One of the spiritual practices that I have been engaging in over the last few months has been to utilize the Liturgy of the Hours. While I have had a passing a familiarity with this over the last few years of my life, my present health circumstances have lent a new impetus to the practice.
Much of my medication over the last few months has made it extremely difficult to concentrate and focus, which has made it challenging to read for any length of time, which has had deleterious effects on my ability to really engage the scriptures as much as I would want.
All that being said, I came across a podcast that recites the Liturgy of the Hours every day which has been an incredible blessing, since it has given me the chance to have some measure of exposure to the scriptures on a daily basis, probably even more so than I would in a normal state of life. Continue reading →
I wrote a guest article for CreationSwap entitled Toward the Beautiful on the metaphysical underpinnings of beauty and how that relates to the role of an artist in the work of creating art. Check it out here.
Every once in awhile one stumbles across a video that displays such a lack of critical thinking that it’s hardly worth even bothering to dignify it with a response. However, sometimes it is equally entertaining to engage in what might amount to a rather satisfying fisk of the aforementioned video, if not for the reader than at least for the fisker.
I ran across this video on another blog, and after about 30 seconds was ready to turn it off, but decided to suffer through the entire thing. It’s not that it isn’t well produced or that there aren’t some small kernels of truth buried in there. Rather, this video feeds upon creating absurd polarities that simply do not exist and dogmatically sets them against each other, leaving the viewer with little more than a choice between what amounts to two equally ridiculous and fuzzily sketched caricatures.
Basically, the movement is this: Identify a negative thing that can be linked to religion. Granted, ‘religion’ is never really defined as anything concrete or specific, but is left in some kind of nebulous state that serves as a catch-all for everything that is opposed to Jesus. The upshot, of course, is that anyone who identifies with religion (whatever it is actually supposed to be- an institution? rituals? something other than what the poet is?) is automatically polarized against Jesus. Be watching for this consistent tactic, which unfortunately doesn’t really give this video much meaningful content, as it pits some nebulous entity against Jesus, without really allowing for any robust engagement.
Let the fisking begin!
“What if I told you Jesus came to abolish religion?”
I seem to remember Jesus saying something about that in the Gospels. He said something like this:
Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 1
The notion that one could be Jewish without being a part of Judaism was inconceivable in Jesus’ day. While there were certainly plenty of Jews who may not have practiced their religion, (to one degree or another, which is part and parcel of any religion) to bifurcate oneself from one’s religion in this way was simply not something that happened. This belies the video creator’s extreme individualism which was a foreign concept in Jesus’ day. But I digress. Continue reading →
Through the years I have been perplexed by a great many passages in the Scriptures, but perhaps none so more than Hebrews 5:5-10. It had always struck me as one that seemingly flies in the face of a lot of theological commitments about who Jesus is, at least on the surface of things.
In the same way, Christ did not take on himself the glory of becoming a high priest.
But God said to him,
“You are my Son;
today I have become your Father.”
And he says in another place,
“You are a priest forever,
in the order of Melchizedek.”
During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek. 1
One of the aspects that had always given me difficulty is where Jesus is spoken as being a Son, yet still had to learn obedience from what he suffered. By doing so, the Son is said to be made perfect. Now, one might say that this is referring to the human nature of Jesus being made perfect, but at the same time the human nature of Jesus is hypostatically united with the Son who is perfect, which makes such an answer seem a little too easy. Continue reading →
The last 4 months have been an absolute blur. Most of the time I have trouble keeping track of where the time went, how fall so quickly turned into winter, how Christmas has come and 2012 is bearing down upon us with breakneck speed.
When life moves that fast, it can bring things into a strange sort of focus and change the way you perceive life. When every day brings a new clinic visit, going to the hospital, having some kind of procedure, etc., it sort of feels like every movement forward is a victory, every setback a defeat, but still every moment and every day is so crucial, so important. In such a context, there is both excitement and anxiety, hope and trepidation.
Not quite a month ago I was on my back in the hospital, barely wanting to move and feeling at the lowest point of my life. Now, I am back at home, feeling better and actually having some form of a normal life. To have such a dramatic change in such a short period of time, to be on an upward swing was an amazing experience, both going through it and in retrospect.
Eventually the dramatic changes stop, especially with stem cell transplants. After about 45 days post-transplant I have entered a period of relative stability where counts ebb and flow very gradually as I am slowly incorporating my brother’s stem cells, my immune system is rebuilding itself and steroids are both suppressing that immune system and preventing rejection. It has become (and will remain) a very slow, drawn out ordeal in which progress is agonizingly slow.
And that’s when it hits you. What I like to call The Grind.Continue reading →
I’ve gone through three intensive rounds of chemotherapy, the last of which was meant to eradicate my immune system so I could get a stem cell transplant. Not an easy process.
I certainly don’t intend to bore you with all the details, but it has involved a lot of clinic visits, blood transfusions, medications, hospital stays and the like. Needless to say, it’s given me a lot of time to think and contemplate a lot of things, and in the moments of lucidity between mind-altering medications I’ve been trying to compose some very rough and raw thoughts about the whole process, mostly as a way of thinking things through for myself, but also perhaps to be a helpful insight into some things I have learned and discovered through this whole process, especially as I am still very much in the midst of it. The Prednisone makes my head spin quite a bit, so bear with me! Continue reading →
Every once in awhile you read something that really sticks with you, and even as the days and years move on in their inexorable course you find your mind’s thoughts always gravitating back for some intangible reason.
Wisdom 7:24-26 is one of those instances that has struck such a chord that I find myself always coming back to it, even in the most random of moments. Similar in scope to the personification of Wisdom in Proverbs 8:21-32, Wisdom (sophia in Greek) is here described in the highest of terms, a cascade of appellations that crescendos in the victory of light over the darkness, in which Wisdom is fairer than the fairest of lights.
Throughout Christian historical theology the sapiential descriptions of wisdom have been seen as pertaining ultimately to the Son. Paul speaks in 1 Corinthians 1:24 about how Christ is the wisdom of God, and John uses similar language along a similar vein of thought in describing the Son as the Logos. The author of Hebrews even seems to allude to Wisdom 7:24-26 by speaking of the Son as the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being.
One of the most powerful aspects of Wisdom is how passing into holy souls from age to age, she produces friends of God and prophets. Our relationship with and toward God is not meant to be some esoteric exercise, but is a true and vibrant reality that was from the beginning the desire of God for us. In the Incarnation we find the initiation of this descent, where the wisdom of God who is fairer than the sun comes to dwell with us.
For Wisdom is mobile beyond all motion,
and she penetrates and pervades all things by reason of her purity.
For she is a breath of the might of God
and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty;
therefore nothing defiled can enter into her.
For she is the reflection of eternal light,
the spotless mirror of the power of God,
the image of his goodness.
I pray we could come to this darkness so far above light! If only we lacked sight and knowledge so as to see, so as to know, unseeing and unknowing, that which lies beyond all vision and knowledge. For this would truly be to see and to know: to praise the Transcendent One in a transcending way, namely through the denial of all things.
It is always a difficult thing to talk about God, for a moment’s reflection on the language we might use brings to light its utter lack of adequacy. After all, words are mediated through experience and the cognitive limits of our intellects. Thus, any word about God would seem to fall infinitely short of saying anything meaningful about God.
To think about God is little better. While our thoughts may be able to abstract realities from the limits of language in some manner, nevertheless thought and conception still falls under the limitation of the mind which cannot fathom the intricacies of the material world, let alone that which by nature is supposed to transcend it.
Is there thus any value in saying or thinking anything about God? Is not the entire project doomed from the beginning, negated by its very endeavor? Continue reading →
This is a video for rezlife’s 2011-2012 Sunday School curriculum, Character.
This year is a focus on the Old Testament, as related mostly through the people who encapsulate most of its story. Thus, characters like Moses, Abraham, David, Adam and Eve, etc., form the nucleus of the curriculum’s content. Of course, the title Character is multi-faceted, since it not only deals with the characters of the Old Testament but also the character that is evidenced through their lives and the choices they make.
As I was thinking about what to do with this video, I tried to break down the Old Testament into some basic ideas that would reflect both aspects of character. Since there are too many people and stories in the Old Testament to make into a 35 second video, I opted for using some of the stories and essentially abstracting them from their particular contexts to sort of revolve around this one idea that comes at the end: Everything we do matters.
And I think that is one crucial lesson we learn from the Old Testament. It is full of stories of people who, through many different circumstances, come face to face with a choice- to do good or to do evil, to stay or to go, to obey God or to harden their heart, etc. And through these choices many different things are realized, from the fall of humanity to the wandering in the desert to the dividing of a kingdom.
The bottom line is that all these things come about because of the choices we are given every day. While the decisions we make may not seem that grand, it is perhaps in the seeming banality of these day-to-day decisions that we make to follow God or to not follow God that our true character is revealed and developed.
Anyway, those were just some of the thoughts that were going through my head as I was developing this piece.
