"We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us."

-----C.S. Lewis, from "Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer"

In honor of U2's release of the relatively unimpressive new single, "Vertigo", here are a couple lines from the song:

"And though your soul it can't be bought, your mind can wander."

"Your love is teaching me how to kneel."

"Are our churches and broadcasts and books and organizations merely creating religious consumers of religious products and programs? Are we creating a self-isolating, self-serving, self-perpetuating, self-centered subculture instead of a world-penetrating (like salt and light), world-serving (focused on 'the least and the lost,' those Jesus came to seek and save), world-transforming (like yeast in bread), God-centered (sharing God's love with the whole world) counterculture? If so, even if we proudly carry the name evangelical (which means 'having to do with the gospel'), we're not behaving as friends of the gospel, but rather as its betrayers. However unintentionally, we can neuter the very gospel we seek to live and proclaim..."

-----Tony Campolo & Brian McLaren, from "Adventures in Missing the Point: How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel"

It's interesting to live in this country, living in the shadow and spectre of Vietnam. Every conflict inevitably gets measured by it. Some of the measurements are helpful, others are not so helpful. I think we're terrified as a nation to shed our own blood without everything going precisely to a plan, quickly, effectively, no mess. This is an absurd idea, based on the absurd notion that because we got it wrong once before we're likely to get it wrong every time after. I think it was this sort of thinking that led to the debacle in Somalia. I think it was this sort of thinking that made us turn a blind eye to Rwanda. I think it was this sort of thinking that gave OBL the guts to fly planes into our buildings. Since Veitnam many in this country have no stomach for war, and all that it entails. I probably would have included myself in that mix up until a couple months ago. Now I'm changing my mind.

To say that Iraq is equivalent or even similar to Vietnam is a huge mistake. There is no civil war in Iraq (at least not yet). There is no funding coming from other large countries bent on seeing us lose. There is no carpet bombing of innocent civilians. It's not us acting alone, we have allies, and at the least everyone wants us to succeed. Politicians now are much more accountable to the public. etc, etc.

What Vietnam teaches us becomes precisely what won't allow Iraq to go into a tailspin. The fact that people are cynical about leadership, that the media questions the policies of the government, that there is robust public debate. All of these things are the good that Vietnam gives us. We learned our lessons. We criticize our mistakes. We censure leaders and take them to task on every little detail. We have congressional inquiries ongoing in the midst of war. Documents are out in the open.

War is ugly and messy. Vietnam taught us how war can be grossly abused, and it also scared us. The question is, will we always be too scared to see any conflict through to the end? Nothing worth doing is easy, and I'm concerned that the spectre of Vietnam has made us think just the opposite.

Pastor Jim preached this morning at church. He talked about "the routinization of charisma." He said he stole the idea from one of his daughter's friends, a guy named Matt, and then he singled me out of the congregation and said, "you know him." I can only assume he meant Matt Eames, because Eames is the only Matt I know who would come up with such a pellucid turn of phrase on a camping trip. The guy wrote his dissertation on Chesterton, so you gotta cut him some slack.

Anyway, the phrase stuck with Jim, or rather was drilled into him through the course of a camping trip, and he used it this morning to point out that our culture gravitates toward losing awe for God because of this "routinization of charisma."

He then went on to outline something I was lamenting to Sarah the other day. He said, "I was trying to remember the name of this beautiful piece of classical music and all I could think about was an advertisement for beef because the piece was used as the jingle for a beef company."

Sometimes I try to think of God, and the best I can come up with in this culture is the theological equivalent of an advertisement for beef.

"We have seen only one [perfect] man. And he was not at all like the psychologist's picture of the integrated, balanced, adjusted, happily married, employed popular citizen. You can't really be very well 'adjusted' to your world if it says you have a devil and ends by nailing you up naked to a stake of wood."

-----C.S. Lewis, "The Four Loves"

The Alarm

The hundreds of windows filling with faces
Because of something no one is able to explain,
Because there was no fire engine, no scream, no gunshot,
And yet here they are all assembled,
Some with hands over their children's eyes,
Others leaning out and shouting
To people walking the streets far below
With the same composure and serene appearance
Of those going for a Sunday stroll
In some other century, less violent than ours.

-----Charles Simic

This was a painful interview to watch. Let me know what you think of it. Weigh in.

Bono on O'Reilly Factor

Madness

In this age of nearly perfect
madness, that has politicized
everything except politics, favored
minorities and women will be
driven mad by the suspicion,
whenever they are rewarded,
that they have been rewarded
beyond their merits by political
sentiment replacing judgment.
And Anglo-Saxon Protestant
heterosexual men will be maddened
by the suspicion that, if only
uncorrupted judgement prevailed,
they would be found more deserving
than they have yet been found to be,
and perhaps more than in fact
they are. This madness comes
when the lineages of faith
and craft are severed, and the truth
of anything cannot be known
because anything supposable
can be endlessly supposed.

-----Wendell Berry, from "Entries"