I have heard thy voice

Each time I pray these days, I make sure to pray that what I do, I do to God’s glory. That’s a pretty frightening prayer, actually, since I spend a lot of time not really being “good” (not being “bad” per se, but sort of neutral). For example, as a grad student, I spend some portion of my day surfing the Internet. Unless I stick with strictly enriching/edifying websites, how does that give glory to God? And what about the time that I spend trying to work but just getting frustrated? I am not sober enough in temperament to spend all my time intensely goal-driven. I generally find self-help books annoying. Am I missing something?

I remember quite well one moment in a church in 2003, when I had just finished my Peace Corps service and was traveling before returning home. One spends a lot of time reflecting on how the service went and what it revealed about one’s character in that situation. I realized I had been struggling with increasing anger and self-doubt. I had nowhere specific I was going, and I needed to take some time to pray. I told God, “Whatever I am or become in the next few years, I am yours.”

Which reminds me of another story I enjoy telling. A friend several years ago asked me her favorite conversational question: what one word would you use to describe yourself? It posed an interesting, theretofore unencountered, challenge, because I had had opportunities (say, in English class) to describe myself in three words or something like that. One word is an entirely different issue. After thinking for a while, I replied, ”God’s”. Which really is the only answer I can give, because whatever else I am, I owe to him.

It’s not only to myself that I enjoy applying this adjective. I drew a sketch in my youth of all the pieces of the universe I could then conceive of, and included a “quote” which I attributed to God: “Man cannot describe the wonders of creation—the sun and moon, the planets and the stars—with his mortal words. I can. It is—they are—mine.” When something belongs to God, it isn’t constricted by anything. It becomes fully itself. God will bring glory to himself, and if we make ourselves his, then what we are becomes a reflection of and a testament to his glory. So perhaps a better way to phrase that prayer I’ve been trying to get at is, God, please make us yours.

in cloud and majesty and awe

I wasn’t sure what to write about this evening, so I went over to Sacred Space for inspiration; this is a website run by a group of Jesuits in Ireland, intended to guide daily prayer through contemplation of a Bible passage. Today’s passage was from Matthew chapter 5:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter, not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.”

Each passage comes with an optional aid in understanding the message. This one included the following:

The law is good only because it leads to Christ. All of religion is good only insofar as it leads us to God and through Christ.

This comes back to something I’ve mentioned before but haven’t had the chance to properly develop: namely, that religion isn’t about making us look or feel good, or beating ourselves or others down. It is about connecting with God. If God gave us a law, it wasn’t to provide a gauge of spiritual superiority; it was to bring us closer to him. Arbitrary? Hardly. We sort through the legal minutiae of the Old Testament to try to determine “what still applies today.” But if we’re simply arguing over whether or not to wear clothes of mixed fabrics to prove our dedication, we’re once again missing the chance to ponder what God has in mind for our way of living. How do we give glory to God?

I can’t say this is the most comfortable selection from Jesus’ words. For one thing, what does Jesus’ fulfillment of the law have to do with our keeping it? And how firm is this dichotomy between being “least” and “great” in the kingdom of heaven? At least a little law-breaking doesn’t seem to cast us out of the kingdom, although it does change our standing there. In a place where faithfulness is the ultimate expression of love—where God, who alone is perfect, alone is perfectly loving and faithful, having already demonstrated how far he will reach to fulfill his promises—our faithfulness will shine like silver, our weaknesses having been burned away (like dross in a refiner’s fire, as an image from the Bible suggests). If we are faithful with what God has given us (as I wrote about on Sunday), then we may be rewarded with the words “Well done, good and faithful servant”—back to the parable of the talents.

What’s clear is that we are not immune from responsibility after Jesus’ coming. Our freedom cannot come at the cost of our faithfulness, or we are building up lives of chaff. God gave us the law to chasten us, but also to save us through and from the law. Much goes into that statement; I hope it has some kind of clarity, since I don’t have the energy to expound more. I hope you all have a good night, and find a way to honor God by being faithful.

phone call from abroad

At 4:00 this morning, I received a phone call. From “Unavailable”. The first time, the rings cut short and I thought it was a mistake. The second time, I picked up.

“Hello?” I said.

“Allo? Daouda?” came the response.

“Oui! C’est Daouda!” I exclaimed.

You see, Daouda was the name given to me by the people in Kérouané. It’s quite common for Peace Corps Volunteers to adopt or receive new names from their village as part of the welcoming process. “Daouda” is just the Arabic form of “David” (it’s a palindrome in Arabic, too, just three letters da-wa-da, which is exciting). My new family name was Camara, which is one of the dominant family names around there.

The phone call was from Sery, the father of the family I had lived with. He is a blacksmith and farmer; his forge, a low hut with a bellows in the middle, was just behind my hut. Since today is Wednesday, I expect he was about to head down to the market to sell the tools he had made. Annie had told me she would try to arrange a phone call from Sery, when she described the weird alternate-reality Kérouané where everyone carries cell phones, old men in their boubous and kaftans shouting “Inike!” into their (or their grandchildren’s) phones.

If this doesn’t make sense to you, the notion of a rural town in a third-world country suddenly becoming equipped with cell phones, consider the following: when phones first started being used, there was a lot of physical infrastructure that had to be installed. Precisely the sort of thing developing countries had no manpower or use for. Now it just takes building and powering the appropriate kind of tower—no digging to lay down cables or anything like that. Why did cell phone use arise so much more quickly in Guinea (or, say, India, where some of the same effects held)? They weren’t already invested in the old technology. Plus, there are lots of people working right now to bring the “information gap”, which has been predicted to be at least as important in hindering development in this era as the “income gap”.

Sery sounded quiet and tired. We just talked for three or four minutes, mostly exchanging greetings. Greetings are an essential part of maintaining relationships in West Africa. At the time Annie and I were serving there, it seemed like such superficial conversation. But every society has glue, and some vocabulary that forms part of that glue. It’s just rude to cut the greetings short. I wanted to be able to talk more, but I hope the time we had was meaningful to him. He said he received the notes I had sent (via Annie), and he asked about Hannah, whom I had mentioned in my letters. He said his family was doing well. He asked if I could still speak Malinké (which I probably could, but not well enough to use it over a phone). It was sort of an incredible experience. I just thought I’d share it with you.

the birds their carols raise

We’ve been talking about creation in our Monday night Bible study. It’s led to some very broad and challenging topics—the nature and character of God, the problem of evil in the world (viz. Job), the Fall, the resurrection, evolution, predestination, eschatology, and so forth. Tonight we touched on most of those. At the end, we spent time in worship with the hymn from which the following verses are taken:

This is my Father’s world. O let me ne’er forget
That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.
This is my Father’s world: the battle is not done:
Jesus Who died shall be satisfied,
And earth and Heav’n be one.

This is my Father’s world, dreaming, I see His face.
I ope my eyes, and in glad surprise cry, “The Lord is in this place.”
This is my Father’s world, from the shining courts above,
The Beloved One, His Only Son,
Came—a pledge of deathless love.

The first of these two verses is often the concluding verse in hymnals. The latter I had never seen until I searched on Cyberhymnal (somewhat justifiably, because although the text isn’t bad, it doesn’t scan well with the traditional tune).

When I was younger, I thought the phrase “though the wrong seems oft so strong” meant that, when we are making choices, the wrong option is frequently attractive. “God is the ruler”, and so we should take that into account when we are trying to make the right choice. The context of the verse shows that, rather, a fundamental question is being addressed: why are things still going wrong all around us? It answers only with hope: we have plenteous evidence of God’s presence, not least in the natural world, and we have faith that Jesus’ sacrifice and God’s sovereignty will conquer at last sin, and death, and sorrow. (Another line reads, “This is my Father’s world, should my heart be ever sad?”) This is the constant problem one finds people in the Bible facing, particularly in Job, Ecclesiastes, and the psalms: why do the wicked prosper? And usually the only answer we receive is that God is waiting for the proper time to intervene and stop the world with its suffering. Not good enough, we want to say. But when we turn from the question of why is God allowing these things to why are we carrying them out, we have to face some dark features of ourselves. We can’t fix them; somehow, we can’t stop ourselves from being bad. We will need God. Maybe he’s just waiting for us to realize that. Once we do, we realize that all we ever needed was God.

small things

It happens time and again, naturally and often quite correctly: dreams start out small. Which is to say, their fulfillment does. The folks who won Academy Awards tonight got them for deeds small (e.g., the musical duo that won the “Best Song” award) and great (e.g., Robert Boyle’s “Lifetime Achievement” award), all done well. Doing a job well is what earns you respect and professional trust. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I draw nearer my graduation. I have a few phrases from the Bible posted in my office; the main one is simply a printout of Psalm 103 (which I read a meditation about some years ago at a time that made it particularly touching):

Bless the Lord, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits,
who forgives all your iniquity,
who heals all your diseases,
who redeems your life from the pit,
who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy,
who satisfies you with good
so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s.
…
As for man, his days are like grass;
he flourishes like a flower of the field;
for the wind passes over it, and it is gone,
and its place knows it no more.
But the steadfast love of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him,
and his righteousness to children's children,
to those who keep his covenant
and remember to do his commandments.

These are reminders I need daily.

But lately there’s been a quote from a parable of Jesus that I’ve thought about adding to the wall (almost certainly the thinking is more important than the putting up the words):

One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much, and one who is dishonest in a very little is also dishonest in much. If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been faithful in that which is another’s, who will give you that which is your own?

To be honest, I had remembered this in my head as a paraphrase: “If you cannot be trusted with small things, how can you be trusted with great things?” This question is simple and direct, and very useful for a struggling grad student. Jesus’ question is more complex, particularly given the context. This, too, I had slightly misremembered, thinking it came from the story of the talents, which instead has the exchange:

And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, ‘Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more.’ His master said to him, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a little; I will set you over much. Enter into the joy of your master.’

And later:

‘You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sown and gather where I scattered no seed? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. So take the talent from him and give it to him who has the ten talents. For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance. But from the one who has not, even what he has will be taken away.’

Already this is a bit puzzling, but it is at least clear that we will be accountable for what we have done—how we have “invested”—the gifts and resources God has given us.

The actual story from which the quote I had in mind is taken is even more confusing:

There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. And he called him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.’ And the manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’ So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings.

Here is a man who has been lazy and careless, yet when he finds himself at risk, through “shrewdness” (which seems like even more mismanagement and cheating) he gains his employer’s approval (although it’s not clear whether he gets to keep his job). This story seems to pick up thematically where the other left off (despite appearing earlier in Luke’s gospel than the parable of the talents). What it seems to be telling is that we should prove ourselves trustworthy of the worldly goods we are charged with, and that we should learn to be cunning (while remaining honest).

My work is time given to me, entrusted to me by God, but more directly by my university. If that’s not encouragement to use it well, I don’t know what is. What it leads to is how you can be trusted with greater things—higher posts, more prestige, better tasks—once you’ve shown how you handle the lesser ones.

There are other aspects to the phrase ”small things,” as well, such as in understanding. One grasps the greater things only upon a firm foundation of more elementary matters. Sometimes the genius of a master’s work is in making what seemed far off and distant more immediately accessible. But my devotion for today and for always in my work is to try to live up to the potential of what God have given me. Goodness knows I find it hard, and I feel inadequate plenty. But let me at least turn back some interest to my earthly and heavenly investors.

word of the eighth day

For no good reason (nor do I have a good reason for still being awake), I came across the word zenzizenzizenzic. As a service to those who collect such words (you know who you are), I now make it available to you. If you don’t want to read the essay I linked to, then I’ll sum up: it means the eighth power of a number; it’s so antiquated that it only has one entry in the OED (from 1557); and its root is “zenzic”, meaning “squared”, which comes from the Latin “census”, through German, as a translation from Arabic, with an implication of area (the way one measures property).

my lord is near me all the time

Inspired by my previous post on the moon, I’m going to use it as the focus of my Lenten meditation this evening, too. It appears pretty early in the Bible, by any reckoning:

And God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs and for seasons, and for days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. And God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

(That passage still reminds me of one of my favorite sections from Copland’s “In the Beginning”, which we sang in the Chorale last spring.) The Israelites were not, I think, very good astronomers. That phrase—“the lesser light to rule the night”—echoes through dozens of conversations I’ve had with people who don’t understand how the solar system works and think the moon is only/always out at night. Even in Guinea, which is the closest situation I’ve been in to ancient Israel, and where people’s schedules depend immensely on the phase of the moon, most people had no idea that when the moon isn’t out at night, it can be visible in the day. I don’t blame Moses, or whoever authored Genesis, for not saying something more precise about the nature of the moon; they had much more important things to discuss, like the fact that God is an amazing creator.

Once you do know something about the moon, though, it becomes a wonderful metaphor. It’s like the mirror Robert Fulghum wrote about in It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It: not producing any light of its own, it takes the light of the greater light and shares it when the sun is inaccessible. It’s a physical manifestation of grace in the darkness.

This light is also genuinely the most peaceful place I’ve ever found to be. The expanse of stars is terrifying. But the moon is a neighbor, and it feels that way. While the Guineans would dance during the full moon, because it allowed them to stay up all night without fear of darkness, I would stand in awe. Moonlight feels like forgiveness. Debussy’s “Clair de lune” is gorgeous and almost captures it, but walking in moonlight gives an immense feeling of calm and starkness and security.

Tonight I just thank God for the moon, for all the dreams it has inspired and joys it has supported, for its beauty, and for the challenges it poses. May we treat it well, and may it always be a firm stepping stone to the rest of the cosmos.

will we find Alice there?

This evening, a friend asked if I saw the lunar eclipse last night. No, I said, because I didn’t know about it. This was actually an unheard of state of affairs for me; for a few years, I caught every lunar eclipse I could, some unexpectedly. Here’s an email I sent to a friend after the last one I saw (October 2004):

Well, although it seems somewhat unfair to me, I only got to watch about the last 20 minutes of eclipsing. To make up for it, I think I have to stay up past midnight to watch the emergence of the moon from Earth's shadow. I missed the first part because I was teaching. Ah, well.

This is, I think, the sixth total lunar eclipse I've seen since 2000, but right now I can't remember where I was for one of them:

January 2000: Minnesota. A group of friends (who were still attending college in a town a little over an hour from Minneapolis) organized a eclipse-watching bonfire. Which is a good thing to have around when one plans on spending two to three hours outside on a January night in Minnesota.

January 2001: Guinea. This one was completely unexpected. I was sitting around with my host family having dinner, when we noticed it was time for the moon to be out yet remained quite dark. A few minutes later, we realized the moon was rising and eclipsing as it rose. It was incredible. I was super exciting [sic—but not inaccurate as you’ll see], hopping around and shouting in English, French, and Malinke how excited I was. The Guineans were afraid: their story for an eclipse is that a cat is eating the moon, and you have to play drums and beg for the moon to come back. I got to explain the process to a few people, however. It was not only a great astronomical experience, but a great cultural exchange.

May 2003: Memphis. My dad and I went out to a field to watch. On the way there, just a few minutes into the partial eclipse, our tire blew out, and we were changing it as the moon grew darker. We arrived at the field about halfway through the process, and stayed basically until it was done. The other time I went out to that field with my dad was when the Leonids were especially bright, in November 2002.

November 2003: Ithaca. I talked my friend Matt into driving out to Varna, where Cornell has an off-campus observatory. We figured there would be someone there manning the observatory, but no one was. About twenty or thirty other people showed up with the same idea, so we just enjoyed being out there together. I played resident astronomy expert for some folks, which was easy since I was basically explaining rotation and revolution. Also, of course, I took the opportunity to point out my favorite constellations. :-)

May 2004: ? This is the one I don't remember, even though it's the most recent. I figure I must have made an attempt to see at least part of it, but I can't for the life of me remember now where I was.

Tonight: I guess this is the last one until sometime in 2007 or 2008. I'll still be here then.

“2007 or 2008” seemed so far away back then. And now I’ve missed the last three I had a chance to see (since I was in Europe last March I could have watched that one—although as I think back, I may have known about it but it was cloudy—and I didn’t get up last August; see the link above for the list of eclipses this decade). The next one for me will I guess be in 2010, unless I’m in Africa this August.

A bit perturbed at myself for being so ill-informed, and remembering that I used to know when these things were coming because I used to visit Space.com much more often, I hopped over to that site and signed up for their RSS feed. Here’s the first headline I came across: Private Race to the Moon Takes Off. It turns out, Google and X Prize (the latter of which awarded a $10 million prize in 2004 to the creators of a privately-funded spacecraft that successfully reached >100 kilometers altitude twice) are jointly offering $20 million to anyone who can send a privately-funded robot to the moon and complete a set of tasks. It’s called the Google Lunar X Prize, and—to express the obvious—it’s awesome. It’s another example of how Google really is working to make the world of technology better in all the ways we’ve dreamed about. The competition is in the Space.com headlines right now because nine teams have just joined the competition, to join the first team that entered back in December. I imagine there are a few Cornell students aching to make their way onto one of these teams.

There has been a spate of moon-related media lately. Last fall, Hannah and I went to see In the Shadow of the Moon, a documentary that interviews the astronauts who were on the moon, which at this point in history was certainly essential to accomplish. (This movie, inexplicably, is not nominated for an Academy Award. Seriously, this is a fantastic movie. In the metaphorical, not the literal, sense, because it’s not fantasy.) It made Hannah want to watch Apollo 13. Almost everything makes Hannah want to watch Apollo 13. In 2005, Tom Hanks released Magnificent Desolation, an IMAX quasi-documentary that, while it had some good moments, was not the best IMAX film I’ve seen, mainly because so much of it was CGI and sound stage stuff rather than actual footage. (We just saw it this past winter in Memphis.)

And just in the last couple of days, with the landing of Atlantis just in time for the U.S. government to shoot down a potentially dangerous satellite, space activity in general has gotten a lot of news. I personally am still thrilled that we have a permanent human presence in space with the International Space Station. (I along with many others was nervous back in 2003 that the Columbia disaster would abruptly end that promise of a permanent presence.) And who wouldn’t be inspired by the immense success of the Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, which are still chugging along (and providing images processed by—guess who—the Cornell Pancam Team).

I believe this work in space has to remain a priority. And I’m pleased Google has taken it on, as well. As usual, I don’t have any dreams myself to make it into space, but I will cheer and in fact support in any way I can.

lift me up and let me stand

I have heard that non-Christians may complain the Christian faith is overly simplistic. It gives too many glib answers without taking into account the way the world really is, they say. Yet as I read the Bible and talk with pastors and other believers, it keeps coming up that the record we have of Christianity considers all aspects of human life. Take the Psalms: not only do you find devotion, trust, and piety, you also find fear, hatred, and accusations. The heroes of the Bible are sometimes the most fantastic sinners—proving that God really can work his will through dire circumstances, and that we have hope he can work in us, unworthy though we are. Questions are raised, such as in Job or Ecclesiastes or Romans, and left unanswered. What is constant, and miraculous, is the assurance that God loves us and wants to bless us. If we don’t wrestle with the questions of how God’s love is revealed, how we should share it with those around us, and why God doesn’t operate the way we expect him to, then that is our own shortcoming, not the religion’s. Faith is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” says the writer of Hebrews. It is not a blindfold. We can trust and still inquire. We can pray and still not understand. The benefit in this life of being a Christian is that we gain, sometimes slowly but always in increasing measure, the “fruit of the Spirit”: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control; as Paul points out, “against such things there is no law.” And we have the story and the promise of a God who is carefully involved in our history and our lives. There’s nothing simple about that.

because he lives

Somehow, things seem to keep coming back to Romans…

In our Bible study tonight, we began reading parts of Job. We’ve been discussing creation this semester, and the claim from Romans 1 that “what can be known about God is plain … his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made” led into a proposal that we discuss the final chapters of Job, in which God speaks to Job in response to Job’s desire to face God with an accusation of injustice. If you haven’t read those chapters recently, I recommend them as an exceptionally rich depiction of God’s hand in creation and his continued work in the natural world. It is good fodder for discussion, too, as God’s rhetoric is tinged with sarcasm and indignation, while still revealing his great care for the world and the majesty of which he wants Job to be aware. Job has been asking for a chance to accuse God; God reveals that there are so many things in the world that Job can’t understand, he can’t begin to grasp the place and the justice of God.

After the study, I asked about another passage from Job, related more to the theme of justice than to creation. In one of his earlier discourses, Job complains that he has been abandoned (he has friends there with him, but at this point in the book he is finding less and less comfort in their words, which weren’t terribly comforting to begin with) by everyone in his family and household. Then he makes the declaration, using the words Handel chose to open the third part of the Messiah: “I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last he will stand upon the earth.” Who is he talking about? I asked. Who is it, when he has been abandoned by everyone who should defend him, that will come and save him, will stand with him before God? The standard Christological interpretation (the one used by Handel) is, of course, that the Redeemer is Jesus. But even if you don’t assume that from the outset, it’s hard to interpret the text as indicating anything other than that Job knows he needs God to intercede with God. He must be asserting someone supernatural, or at least not an ordinary human, will come and rescue Job from his suffering, and take him so that he can “see God.”

Which brings me back to Romans. Because, if the good man Job (and he was emphatically good, no question about it, not at a single point is it even hinted that he did anything wrong, except perhaps to question God’s wisdom and justice) was left by all he loved and cared about, what shall become of us, who are so much less good? Paul answers: “one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” This must be the Redeemer that Job looked forward to. The one who gave Job hope can give us hope, too, even when we feel worthless or abandoned.

Coda: if you’ve made it this far, then as a reward let me lead you to the MySpace page of a musical based on Job. You can hear selections from the musical on the site.

wait

I could use some running and not being wearing about now…

Even youths shall faint and be weary,
and young men shall fall exhausted;
but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
they shall walk and not faint.
(Isaiah 40:30–31)

I know what it is to be exhausted. I have faced that in my life, primarily in my college and Peace Corps years. I am not now exhausted. I am tired. I am productively busy. I am keeping up with most things, and falling behind on others. I am, in these aspects, leading a normal life, as far as I can tell. I go to church, and I yawn a bit from not sleeping in, but I focus on the sermon and I pray. Except that these meditations have been making me more thoughtful during the day, I may not seriously pray much by myself during the week. I want that strength Isaiah spoke about. How do I get it? By waiting? What does that mean?

In fact, this whole chapter of Isaiah, despite being beloved and well-known, is perplexing in its logic. It begins with comfort and the proclamation that God will even out the ground, making rough places plain, and his glory will be known throughout the earth. Then it talks about how fleeting human life is, no more enduring than the grass of the field. Next, a return to good news: the shepherd of Israel is returning! He is coming with strength and compassion! There follows an extended discussion of how no other god or creature is worth comparing to the Lord, the God who is. And because of that, we are nothing before him. Nothing we do can be hidden from him. He is all-powerful and inscrutable. Yet that means he knows us intimately, and he can and will uplift those who are struggling. This already is good news and a promise: that God saves his people from their struggles; later he will save them from their guilt.

So can we wait for the fulfillment of our hope? That we will know God and his immense power? I guess that big picture can lift us from any dreariness we might find in daily living. I want that promise. I have it. I will wait, and hope, and maybe with that I’ll find my feet moving more lightly in the present. I can tell that I barely even understand the promise, because my faith is so small. I’m glad God is more patient than I am, and that he will continue to pursue me to give me blessings.

Have you not known? Have you not heard?
The Lord is the everlasting God,
the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He does not faint or grow weary;
his understanding is unsearchable.

a wonderful savior

To pick up where I left off last time (and yes, I know I’ll have to catch up a few days sometime; I started this entry on Wednesday, and have been hung up finishing it)… Here’s an excerpt from the second chapter of Philippians, which I linked to last time:

…being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name…

Jesus’ martyrdom (and resurrection, which I’ll address in a different entry) is qualitatively different from the others I mentioned before. Everything in Jesus’ life was supernatural, in the sense of stretching beyond what what is possible for each of us. I can imagine he had charisma (that’s part of what I think was meant when people said he “spoke with authority”) and compassion (favorite verse for elementary school kids to memorize when required to choose one: “Jesus wept.”), but that he displayed them in ways just enough subtly different that every act was miraculous.

At this point, to further contemplate who Jesus was requires a bit of mysticism. I generally make no secret of the fact that I spent several years, at the end of high school and the beginning of college, holding onto anti-Trinitarian theology. I couldn’t make sense of Jesus being God incarnate—not just from an essential perspective, but from a redemptive perspective. I mean that I wasn’t just confused about how Jesus could be both God and man (that’s a mystery never to be explained), but why Jesus could be a savior if he was something so different from us. In one of Paul’s most meaningful but most perplexing metaphors, he describes Jesus as the “last Adam”, exactly paralleling Adam in that sin entered the world through Adam while the world is saved from sin through Christ. For that to be so, I reasoned, Jesus had to be just like Adam in the beginning—wholly created, without any mark of wrongdoing—so that he could choose the right way on behalf of humanity and lead us back to God. (Which reasoning, at the time, obliged me to believe in an historical Adam.) Jesus was still to be exalted as our eternal ruler (good, just, and able to perfectly instruct and uplift us) and our intermediary with God (only the righteous can be in God’s presence and live). But it made no sense for him to be God, as well. (The time when I began to turn from a strong anti-Trinitarian position was when my dad explained to me that Trinitarianism isn’t an answer to the question of God’s nature—it’s simply a statement of that question.)

That position doesn’t really stand up to other parts of the Bible, however. The opening of John’s gospel and the opening of the letter to the Hebrews, among other places, acknowledge that God (the Father) made the world through Christ. I have no idea what that means, but it at least means Jesus is eternal. And Isaiah prophesied that his suffering and death would in fact take the place of our punishment; he humbled himself, then was humiliated.

So much more to say, but it’s gotten late once again and I’ve taken too many days off. So I’ll pick up some of these threads later.

skaters and flying saucers

This one isn’t about Lent; it’s about math. I’m going to describe some excellent examples that came up in Thurston’s seminar this morning. To do so, I’m going to have to assume some pretty sophisticated manifold theory, so this isn’t really a “general interest” post. For those who have some knowledge of manifolds, however, these examples may prove enlightening.

We were talking about different kinds of admissible structures on a manifold $M$—specifically, what kinds of local homeomorphisms can be used to define structures. The last two we discussed were symplectic and contact structures. The former is fairly well-known: you have a non-degenerate, closed 2-form on $M$ that lets you do things like Hamiltonian mechanics. Thurston’s examples of symplectic transformations were flinging a chair around (position + momentum of an object gives a manifold, called the phase space of the object, with a canonical symplectic form) and light passing through lenses (presumably also a phase space-type manifold, but my grasp of Hamiltonian mechanics is relatively weak, having been acquired almost entirely in symplectic geometry classes).

Contact manifolds are less well-known. They’re often brought up to illustrate a “sister” geometry to symplectic geometry: symplectic manifolds are always even-dimensional, while contact manifolds are always odd-dimensional. Here’s the definition: a contact manifold $M$ has a non-degenerate 1-form $a$ whose exterior derivative $da$ is non-degenerate on the kernel of $a$ in each tangent space to $M$. Okay, flung that all out there at once. Here’s the geometry: since a 1-form restricts to a linear functional on each tangent space, its kernel (if it is non-degenerate) is a codimension 1 subspace of the tangent space—i.e., a hyperplane. So a contact manifold has a special collection of “tangent hyperplanes”, and the condition on $da$ tells in what way this field of hyperplanes is special. Here I’m not really interested in the technical reasons this definition is chosen. I just want to give the examples Thurston described.

The first was of an ice skater. On a skating rink, one has both position and direction: that gives a three-dimension manifold $M$, which can be thought of as (rink)x(circle of directions), or can be unfolded into $R^3$ if, as Thurston put it, you keep track of the winding number of the skater. However, at a given position and direction, you can’t move arbitrarily in $M$; the skate can move forward and backward in the direction it’s facing, or it can change direction. So you have a hyperplane $H_x$—i.e., a plane—in the tangent space to $M$ at $x$, which describes these possibilities of movement: one direction in $H$ points in the direction you’re currently facing, and one points in the “direction of changing direction”. This is a contact manifold. Skating a path around the ice rink means tracing a curve in the contact manifold that always remains tangent to the hyperplanes.

The second example shows how the first might be generalized. Suppose you have a jet, or a flying saucer, which can be at any point in $R^3$ and can take any orientation at any point, but can only move to a different point in a direction of the plane of its current orientation. The position-orientation manifold is a product of $R^3$ and $RP^2$ (the real projective plane)—or $S^2$ if you keep track of which way is “up” for the flying saucer—and hence 5-dimensional. The contact structure at a particular pair (position,orientation) is the product of the plane in $R^3$ corresponding to the current orientation and the tangent space to $RP^2$/$S^2$, which corresponds to the fact that you can roll either up-and-down or side-to-side.

Thurston went on to remark that many physical systems with some sort of dynamical possibilities can be described by contact structures, and the dynamics of the system are represented by diffeomorphisms that preserve the contact structure. I know more can be found in his book Three-Dimensional Geometry and Topology. I’m going to have to go look that book up soon.

keep me near the cross

I am currently listening to Messiaen’s organ piece L’ascension. I first heard this piece in a cathedral in England—I believe it was in Canterbury—in the summer of 1998, while I was traveling after the St. Olaf Orchestra tour. I already loved Messiaen at the time. It is a cycle of works essentially about prayer and the presence of God. It seemed appropriate as I try to think more about the cross and drawing close to Christ.

As I said before, for Jesus’ death to have the meaning we impart to it, it matters that we know who he is/was. I cannot hope in the death of a martyr or any other merely good man. I can only mourn them, and be inspired by what blessings they may have left behind. I may work to right injustice that led to their death. I may study their lessons more closely, having been brought to a realization of my own mortality and shortcomings. But I do not obtain hope from it.

What led to Jesus’ death? Lots of answers here; I’m going for the ones that don’t just appeal to God’s inscrutable wisdom. It seems that he garnered the ire of community leaders in two ways: firstly by challenging their authority, and secondly by raising genuine concern that he was blaspheming. As one of my pastors has pointed out, he didn’t just set up new rules or tear down old traditions, he “loosened what had been made too tight, and tightened what had been made too loose.” Thus by definition he had to be acting against the establishment. It turned out that in the process he had to lift the burdens of the common Jewish believer while chastening the leaders who had become lax in their morality. The prophet Micah had reminded the people generations before: “what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?”

The example of Jesus has led me to wonder if it is inevitable that a truly good man will be persecuted and perhaps killed. I know this idea is influenced by my reading of both Kierkegaard—for whom true belief and morality are impossible unless they stand in sharp contrast to the milieu—and Gibran—who writes many tales and poems about the oppression of people and the insistence of leaders, political and religious alike, to maintain their power by oppression. If so, it would add a different spin to the statement that “Christ died as a victim because it was God’s will that he do so”—namely the nuance that God willed Jesus to come to earth not only in order for him to die, but in spite of his inevitable death. He foresaw it, but declared that Jesus would come anyway; “the cup” would not pass from Christ untasted.

It is a bleak view of the world that it would be unable to restrain itself from killing a good man. It is not so far from the world we know, however. Consider Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., JFK, Benazir Bhutto, Thomas Becket, Thomas More, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Itzhak Rabin, and so on. I could certainly list many genuinely good men and women who were not killed by either an individual or a government, but being good is no bullet-proof vest, and indeed often draws unwelcome attention due to one’s unwelcome message.

There is more to Jesus than this, however. Something in the way he humbled himself in life and death makes those unique; there is also the resurrection. These will probably be the things I reflect on in later days.

my hope is built on nothing less

The crucifixion makes very little sense to me. It is the emotional and theological core of our religion; it simultaneously echoes pagan myths and completely contrasts with them in import; it is the basis of our hope for salvation, yet for all we depend on it, even as great an event as it was seems at times insufficient. Whole sermons, whole weeks and years and lifetimes of sermons, are devoted to what it means that the Son of God came to earth and died for you and me. Paul writes in one of his letters:

[W]e preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

I still get stuck on the stumbling block sometimes.

Here’s the thing: yes, it was terrible. Yes, it may have been the greatest evil ever perpetrated by humankind. But you can’t tell that from the externals. Jesus suffered a unfair trial and half a day or so on the cross. Plenty of people have been tortured way beyond that since. One can look at either the individual or the cultural level and find grotesque acts of violence, hatred, contemptuous murderous evil. We as Christians claim the murder of one good man is the hope for our forgiveness. Every evil deed ever done by any one of us, we claim, can be struck from our record because of the crucifixion. For this to make any sense, it matters who Jesus was.

I’m trying to avoid the “churchy” language, and put these things in my own terms (the way I do with math ideas I barely understand). The language we use shapes our understanding and perception of any topic. Talking (or writing) about our records before God or the perfect sacrifice to redeem humankind seems to dismiss the issue, just because it’s talking with a different set of vocabulary. I want to know how it is that I can hope in the death and resurrection of Jesus—His “blood and righteousness” as the hymn from which the title is taken continues. That means, for now, I don’t have any way to wrap this up, and I’ll probably be dealing with this in writing over a few days.

it is finished

To finish up this first week of writing for Lent, I want to return to a hymn we sang during the Ash Wednesday service. The text is a poem by John Donne, “A Hymn to God the Father,” and is better than the tune, so that’s all I’m going to write about.

I.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin where I begun,
Which was my sin, though it were done before?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin, through which I run,
And do run still, though still I do deplore?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

Three main ideas here (as in each of the stanzas). First, Donne starts by inquiring about original sin. This is the guilt of Adam and Eve’s first sin, which is imputed to each of us as their descendants. Nothing to do for it except ask God’s forgiveness. Theologically, I don’t believe in original sin, although I do find the story of the Fall of Man a useful narrative. Let me briefly argue against St. Augustine. He famously declares (in the Confessions, Book I, chapter 7) that infants must be sinful, because they demonstrate such wanton selfishness. In support, he quotes David in Psalm 51: “I was shapen in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” Conception, therefore, is the point at which we become guilty of sin, hence Donne’s phrase “where I begun”. But infants are not moral beings. They are entirely dependent, and if they don’t cry out, they will suffer neglect. (Augustine mitigates his argument with the acknowledgment that he can’t remember his infancy, so he can’t remember what it was like to be that selfish.) And I don’t think Adam was a historical person. He represents our right relationship with God, which becomes spoiled by our self-worship. No sooner does consciousness arise but we start rebelling, which is where Donne turns next.

The second point of the poem gives more convincing evidence of what Calvinists call “total depravity”—we want to be good, we even try to be good, but we consistently fail at it. As St. Paul says in Romans (quite extensively, but a single sentence sums it up), “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.” This seems to be the main (extra-Biblical) argument put forth for the doctrine of original sin: why, if we are not naturally born to sin, would we keep doing it? Even if one posits the existence of a Satan, an arch-devil (which I do), this does not remove the responsibility and the guilt we bear for our persistent wrongdoing. I do not know why we do this. Paul doesn’t give an answer, either; he simply asks and answers, “Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! … For the law of the Spirit of life has set [me] free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death.”

But Donne isn’t there yet in this poem. Even once those persistent or occasional sins of which we are aware are forgiven, more remains.

II.
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I have won
Others to sin, and made my sin their door?
Wilt Thou forgive that sin which I did shun
A year or two, but wallowed in a score?
When Thou hast done, Thou hast not done,
For I have more.

We are all gateways. I don’t think even the most reclusive of us has no affect on other people. We are encouragers, for good or for evil. Jesus taught that when we tempt others, we are guilty if they sin: “Stumbling blocks are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble. Pay attention to yourselves!” Jesus declared Himself to be a door, as well, through which those who enter are saved, and the good shepherd who enters by the door. He guides us, His sheep, in good paths. We can do either: lead people rightly or wrongly. And when our sin leads others to sin, we are doubly guilty.

Perhaps we have made amends. Perhaps we have turned from some particular evil behavior. Or maybe we gave something up during some past Lent, had a good year where we were on better behavior, “proved” we could give it up and don’t need to prove it anymore. It’s still incredibly difficult to overcome the guilt of these sins. If even a moment of weakness can haunt us years later, what about protracted obstinance of which we eventually repent, but still can’t bear to think about the damage done? I think the Catholics and Orthodox are on to something in the human psyche with ritualized confession and absolution. If a human can hear our deepest secrets and forgive us, it’s conceivable that God will, too. Jesus said that we cannot love God, who is unseen, without loving our brothers and sisters, who are seen. Conversely, it is easier to feel loved or forgiven by God when we know we are loved or forgiven by people.

But again, even if these particular transgressions are lifted from our record, something remains. We are not good enough; our actions continuously make this clear. If we depend on ourselves to earn God’s grace, we are lost. If we depend on asking God at each moment to forgive each sin, and thereby show that we’re sufficiently sorry, we are lost. And we know it.

III.
I have a sin of fear, that when I have spun
My last thread, I shall perish on the shore;
But swear by Thyself, that at my death Thy Son
Shall shine as he shines now, and heretofore;
And having done that, Thou hast done;
I fear no more.

Disbelief, lack of faith, doubt that God has fulfilled His own promise to us to save us—this is our final error and our final separation from God. It is interesting that at this moment of fear, Donne harks back to the pagan image of the spinning Fates, though he casts himself as one of the weavers. Paul tells us to run the race so as to receive the prize, but our strength is never enough. An athlete may deliver a perfect performance. We cannot deliver a perfect life.

Forgiveness—complete, eternal, and effective—is the light of Christ’s life and message. It is the “good news” after which the gospel is named. Jesus teaches us to live better lives, and we owe Him obedience to those teachings, but “what you should do to be nicer to people” isn’t news. That you are made holy by no work of your own—that is news. It is a glorious radiance for us to enjoy. It is the greatest sign of God’s love. I can hardly believe it. Indeed, on my own strength I can’t believe it. I need God’s illumination. I have the promise of it. I have God’s sworn oath that Christ will remain “a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek,” and the author of Hebrews adds, “This makes Jesus the guarantor of a better covenant.” Better than the law, which condemns us, that is. The law (“do unto others” and all that) is not abrogated; it is fulfilled, just not by us.

Donne makes the usual wordplay on “Son” and “sun” as Jesus shines His light. It has been noted that the entire poem could be viewed as wordplay on “done” and “Donne.” (A weaker wordplay may be present in the word “more,” because Donne’s wife’s maiden name was “More.”) In the end, God has the poet, and the believer, and fear along with death and hell is cast away.

new mercies

Last night’s events led me to think about God’s faithfulness. And the more that happened, the more that seemed the right course for this reflection. Once when I gave a selection of hymns, I included Chisholm’s “Great is Thy faithfulness.” The inspiration for that hymn comes from one of the darkest books in the Bible, Lamentations (3:22-24). The author (probably the prophet Jeremiah), weeping over the destruction of Jerusalem, knows to look for God’s mercies at all times. Last night was not at all bleak, however, and it along with other times in my life leads me to contemplate another aspect of God’s faithfulness.

The events. (First, a notice: nothing here is as epic as the destruction of a city. My point will be to have an awareness of God even in small things in life.) Following dinner, Hannah needed to drive to the Lansing girls’ detention center for their weekly Bible study. I needed to go to the store to get ingredients to make a dish for a potluck tonight. My car isn’t working, so I was going to get dropped off at the grocery store, and would either have to walk (~25 minutes) or catch the bus (~5 minutes) home. Hannah and her comrades in the ministry had planned for an Ash Wednesday service with the girls. Time was rather important in all this. When we got out to Hannah’s car, however, we found the trunk was frozen shut. It contained the usual items for the Bible study—a basket holding a bell and an icon (it’s a Catholic study)—as well as Bibles they were taking to the girls and the ashes for the special part of the service. We tried for ten or fifteen minutes to get it open, which meant we were quickly getting late.

Finally, we gave up. Trying to pry the trunk was only bending the metal, and we had no idea where it was stuck. So we left; Hannah picked up the other woman going out to Lansing, and I was left at the grocery store. I did my shopping in about six minutes, and ran out to the bus stop—just in time to catch the bus to my house. No walking home with heavy bags for me that night. Now, I know that’s coincidence. But the fact of coincidence can obscure, I think, common grace. “Common grace” refers to God’s general work in the world, not for the individual or the church in particular. It is well summarized by saying, “God causes it to rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” Sometime God’s grace comes in rain, sometimes in not rain (like when that window of sunshine opens just long enough for you to walk home). Like I said, I don’t think all this is any sign of God’s favor (most of the time); these are signs of God’s love. Conversely, when things go badly, it’s not that God doesn’t like you. God wants you to be mindful of Him. In those terrible, horrible, no good, very bad days, there is something else to be thankful for: that we only need God for contentment, not opportune weather. These different kinds of times are all jumbled up and come at random, it will be argued. But I ask, can grace not come even through randomness?

Hannah arrived at my apartment a couple of hours later and told me what happened with the rest of the evening. When they arrived at the detention center, she tried the trunk one more time, and it opened. They went inside, and a staff worker (whom they would not have encountered if they’d gotten there earlier) saw them with the ashes and asked if they were going to have an Ash Wednesday celebration; she had not been able to go the day before, she said. They said yes, and she was able to join them for a short while. Before telling me all this, Hannah prefaced with, “God is faithful.” And that sealed my decision to meditate on that phrase this morning.

holy, holy, holy

Today, I can hardly start any better than with the sermon we heard last night at Cornell’s Episcopal service. The priest, Barb Schmitz, spoke on “observing a holy Lent,” in keeping with the conclusion to the preface of Ash Wednesday:

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God's holy Word.

She never defined “holiness,” so let me try to begin with that.

Etymologically, the word “holy” is related to the German “heilig” and the Greek “hagios” (as in “hagiology,” the study of the life of a saint). It doesn’t appear to be directly related to the word “whole,” but it does in origin mean that which must be kept whole, or must not be violated. I was raised with the teaching that “holy” simply means set apart and devoted, specifically to God.

Barb began by telling about an interview she heard a year or so ago with Nancy Pelosi. When asked if her parents would be proud that she was going to be the first woman Speaker of the House, she responded,

They'd be proud, but they didn't raise me to be the speaker. They raised me to be holy; they raised me to care about other people.

How many parents, she asked, would have holiness as their primary desire for their children? And what do we know about God’s desire for us? God has made us into “a royal priesthood, a holy nation.” St. Peter makes this description after talking about how Christ sets the foundation and the standard for the church, but it is still easy to reject Him. He lived a perfect life in this world, and we should seek to be holy as He is holy (as God commanded the people of Israel long before).

Barb pointed out that the Book of Common Prayer lays out the ways for us to practice holiness in the season of Lent: see the first quote above. The preface of the day also mentions that, historically, the penitential nature of Lent was in preparation for the celebration of Easter. That, for anyone who wonders, is why we have six weeks of fasting. But there is a greater resurrection ahead—the time when God will make all of us perfectly holy—and we should strive in the interim to become more like Jesus. Not to “prove” ourselves to God (or, for that matter, the world), but in awe and gratefulness.

orange crosses on the Cornell arts quad

When I got home last night, I hoped that phrase (the title above) would produce some results on Google. I was walking to choir rehearsal along the diagonal path that goes from the clock tower to Goldwin-Smith Hall, and saw the crosses resembling roadside markers where someone has died in an accident. (Except they were orange.) They had names written on them; the ones I read appeared to be Hispanic in origin—Sanchez, Morena, etc. They were clearly temporary, as a few were already fallen into the muddy ground. But I found no indication of what they were placed there for. Google, it turns out, didn’t help. So I don’t know their purpose and can’t share it with you.

Is it ever helpful just to be mindful of people? Not issues, but people you’ve never heard of, nor know anything about? I can imagine a half-dozen reasons for those crosses to be there, although I won’t post those particular speculations. If the crosses really were orange, and that aspect wasn’t just the result of my walking past them in the dark and rain, them there is conceivably a connection with orange ribbons, although I don’t see many convincing ideas in Wikipedia’s list. In the absence of such information, what do I do with those crosses and those names (besides internally chastise whoever organized to put them up with no additional information)? I can enter into prayer.

My regular prayer life is spotty, but since middle school I’ve tried to take time during brief flashes when I am made aware of the lives of others to pray for them. Each time I hear a siren going by, I pray for those involved: whose houses or lives may be endangered; who may be confronting a violent situation as police, victim, or perpetrator; who have come to a point I imagine must be confusing, terrifying, or infuriating. I don’t even have a name, just a noise, and I know they need God’s presence. Last night I had a whole collection of names before me, names that I couldn’t fully take in and whose unifying feature I couldn’t identify. Is it helpful for me to pray for them? I have to believe so. I have to believe God is wise enough to intervene magnificently in situations I can’t adequately address; I am of course strengthened in this conviction knowing that the Holy Spirit speaks for me when I can’t speak.

That said, if anyone knows why these crosses were there, please let me know.

Lenten writing

Today begins this year’s (very early) season of Lent. I’ve decided to pick up the discipline of writing something reflective here every day. Becky did this last year, with some really great results, and it seems very appropriate to spend time each day this month/40 days plus Sundays thinking intentionally rather than idly and sharing those thoughts in a hopefully productive manner. So here goes.