I've been reading through the Psalms for the last few months. A couple things have struck me that never really struck me before. 1) People in old testament times lived externally. They lived among the particulars of life and when they asked God for something it usually had nothing to do with their internal landscape or their psychology. Their prayers are more about concrete things like real enemies, war, natural disasters, money, love from other people, etc. 2) They have an incredible sense of wonder about the physical world and God's role in it. They are freightened by billowing storm clouds, perplexed by the wind, scared of the limitless sea, etc.

I've been thinking quite a bit about what this should mean for me living as a Christian in the 21st century, and I've come up with a few things I'd like to share. The first and foremost is that I think we're guilty of internalizing our faith too much (see the Son Volt lyrics below). As moderns we live in our heads and tinker with our psychology until we're almost unable to act. Admittedly this is because we're quite fractured in this day and age, and I don't mean to discount therapy or anything like that (Lord knows it helps me). But I don't get the impression from the Psalmists that they struggled with these sort of things in their daily lives, and certainly not in their spiritual lives (you won't find Niehbur's serenity prayer in the Psalms). People in ancient times lived amidst their necessities, not their wants or their egos.

The second thing is that we've largely lost our sense of wonder at the world. We think that because we can describe or explain how something works that we've divested it of mystery and meaning. We look at the moon and it's small because we've been there. We watch the weather man describe a hurricane and we're not afraid any more. We look at religious people and we psychoanalyze their belief away reducing their thoughts of God to mere wish fulfillment. The Psalmists don't do this. They see the hand of God everywhere in nature. They don't spend too much time trying to divine why things happen, they just believe that God is in control, and that he's powerful and majestic beyond our wildest dreams. That he's something to be worshipped, something not to be trifled with.

Most importantly what I take away from the Psalms is something I heard Johnny Cash say a few years back, "There are many aspects of God, as He revealed Himself to many, but to bring it back down to earth and to keep it simple for all of us, God is a God to sing to or to sing about. Songs of praise, songs of wonder, songs of worship."

I can think of no other more fitting description of the Psalms.

Windfall

Now and then it keeps you running
It never seems to die
The trail's spent with fear
Not enough living on the outside
Never seem to get far enough
Staying in between the lines
Hold on to what you can
Waiting for the end
Not knowing when
May the wind take your troubles away
May the wind take your troubles away
Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel,
May the wind take your troubles away
Trying to make it far enough, to the next time zone
Few and far between past the midnight hour
You never feel alone, you're really not alone...
Switching it over to AM
Searching for a truer sound
Can't recall the call letters
Steel guitar and settle down
Catching an all-night station somewhere in Louisiana
It sounds like 1963, but for now it sounds like heaven
May the wind take your troubles away
May the wind take your troubles away
Both feet on the floor, two hands on the wheel,
May the wind take your troubles away.


-----Jay Farrar

"It is yearning that makes the heart deep."

-----Augustine

"But why doesn't the heart want God, trust God, look childlike to God for life's joys and securities? Why doesn't the heart seek final good where it can actually be found? Why turn again and again, in small matters and large, to satisfactions that are mutable, damaging, and imperiled?....Because the heart wants what it wants. That's as far as we get. That's the conversation stopper. The imperial self overrules all. Inquiring into the causes of sin takes us back, again and again, to the intractable human will and to the heart's desire that stiffens the will against all competing considerations. Like a neurotic and therapeutically shelf-worn little god, the human heart keeps ending discussions by insisting that it wants what it wants....The trouble is that this is only a redescriptioin of human sin, not an explanation of it----let alone a defense of it. Our core problem, says St. Augustine, is that the human heart, ignoring God, turns in on itself, tries to lift itself, wants to please itself, and ends up debasing itself. The person who reaches toward God and wants to please God gets, so to speak, stretched by this move, and ennobled by the transcendence of its object. But the person who curves in on himself, who wants God's gifts without God, who wants to satisfy the deires of a divided heart, ends up sagging and contracting into a little wad. His desires are provincial. 'There is something in humilty which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it.' (Augustine, City of God)"

-----Cornelius Plantiga Jr., "Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin"

"Devotion to what is wrong is complex and admits of infinite variations."

-----Seneca

"It is also notorious how self-deceiving we are about our needs. By definition, a person must know that he desires something. It is quite possible, on the other hand, to be in need of something and not know that one is. Just as we often desire what we do not need, so we often need what we do not consciously desire."

-----Michael Ignatieff, "The Needs of Strangers"

I love this chapter of Acts. Check out Festus and Agrippa's response to Paul at the end.. . .

Acts 26

1Then Agrippa said to Paul, "You have permission to speak for yourself." So Paul motioned with his hand and began his defense: 2"King Agrippa, I consider myself fortunate to stand before you today as I make my defense against all the accusations of the Jews, 3and especially so because you are well acquainted with all the Jewish customs and controversies. Therefore, I beg you to listen to me patiently.
4"The Jews all know the way I have lived ever since I was a child, from the beginning of my life in my own country, and also in Jerusalem. 5They have known me for a long time and can testify, if they are willing, that according to the strictest sect of our religion, I lived as a Pharisee. 6And now it is because of my hope in what God has promised our fathers that I am on trial today. 7This is the promise our twelve tribes are hoping to see fulfilled as they earnestly serve God day and night. O king, it is because of this hope that the Jews are accusing me. 8Why should any of you consider it incredible that God raises the dead?
9"I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. 10And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the saints in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. 11Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. In my obsession against them, I even went to foreign cities to persecute them.
12"On one of these journeys I was going to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests. 13About noon, O king, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions. 14We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic,[1] 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.'
15"Then I asked, 'Who are you, Lord?'
16" 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,' the Lord replied. 'Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and what I will show you. 17I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them 18to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.'
19"So then, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the vision from heaven. 20First to those in Damascus, then to those in Jerusalem and in all Judea, and to the Gentiles also, I preached that they should repent and turn to God and prove their repentance by their deeds. 21That is why the Jews seized me in the temple courts and tried to kill me. 22But I have had God's help to this very day, and so I stand here and testify to small and great alike. I am saying nothing beyond what the prophets and Moses said would happen-- 23that the Christ[2] would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would proclaim light to his own people and to the Gentiles."
24At this point Festus interrupted Paul's defense. "You are out of your mind, Paul!" he shouted. "Your great learning is driving you insane."
25"I am not insane, most excellent Festus," Paul replied. "What I am saying is true and reasonable. 26The king is familiar with these things, and I can speak freely to him. I am convinced that none of this has escaped his notice, because it was not done in a corner. 27King Agrippa, do you believe the prophets? I know you do."
28Then Agrippa said to Paul, "Do you think that in such a short time you can persuade me to be a Christian?"
29Paul replied, "Short time or long--I pray God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am, except for these chains."
30The king rose, and with him the governor and Bernice and those sitting with them. 31They left the room, and while talking with one another, they said, "This man is not doing anything that deserves death or imprisonment."
32Agrippa said to Festus, "This man could have been set free if he had not appealed to Caesar."

"I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine."

-----C.S. Lewis, "Mere Christianity"

"I heard a guy, Shane Claiborne, speak one time and he was talking about how so many Christians say their lives were a mess and then they met Jesus and everything is all better now. He said that his life was ruined when he met Jesus because all the hopes and dreams he had of making a bunch of money and being successful were dashed in an instant. I was struck by that then, and I’ve been chewing on it a lot since I’ve been back from my trip. How did this trip change my life? I don’t know, and honestly, I’m a little scared to find out . . ."

-----my friend Brad's closing thoughts on his recent trip to Africa with World Vision

"If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday."

-----Isaiah 58:9b-10

if you don't like Bono, like Johnny T, then go here: World Vision

Bono gave the commencement speech at Penn a short time ago. It's moderately long, but worth a read.

Read the article HERE

The Palace


Rudyard Kipling

When I was a King and a Mason-a master proven and skilled-
I cleared me ground for a Palace such as a King should build.
I decreed and cut down to my levels, and presently, under the silt,
I came on the wreck of a Palace such as a King had built.


There was no worth in the fashion-there was no wit in the plan-
Hither and thither, aimless, the ruined footings ran-
Masonry, brute, mishandled; but carven on every stone:
"After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I, too, have known."


Swift to my use in my trenches, where my well-planned ground-works grew,
I tumbled his quoins and ashlars, and cut and reset them anew.
Lime I milled of his marbles ; burned it, slacked it and spread;
Taking and leaving at pleasure the gifts of the humble dead.


Yet I despised not nor gloried; yet as we wrenched them apart,
I read in the razed foundations the heart of that builder's heart.
As though he had risen and pleaded, so did I understand
The form of the dream he had followed in the face of the thing he had planned.


When I was King and a Mason-in the open noon of my pride,
They sent me a Word from the Darkness-They whispered and called me aside.
They said-"The end is forbidden." They said-"Thy use is fulfilled,
"And thy Palace shall stand as that other's-the spoil of a King who shall build. "


I called my men from my trenches, my quarries, my wharves and my sheers.
All I had wrought I abandoned to the faith of the faithless years.
Only I cut on the timber-only I carved on the stone:
"After me cometh a Builder. Tell him I, too, have known."

The Hand that Signed the Paper Felled a City
by: Dylan Thomas

 

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand the holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

"It's a dog eat dog world and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear."

-----Norm, from Cheers

My friend Don, who is a 60 something professor of political philosophy at Cal State Fullerton, had this advice for me as we ran this morning:

1) Never play poker with a guy named "Doc."
2) Never eat at a place called "Mom's"
3) Never go to bed with a woman that has more problems than you do.

Good advice Don. I'll keep that in mind. Old guys rule.

Bernstein: "How can you keep going at something past the point when you believe it?"
Woodward: "You just have to start over again."

----- "All the President's Men"

"Now, friends, you who want to be good, to be just, to be faithful, where lies your hope of deliverance? I do not speak to you-as a motive-of a hell, for I do not think you need it. But, do you know, I think from the extreme of the old-fashioned teaching that God made men on purpose to damn them, some modern theologians are much exposed to the going over to a very dangerous opposite extreme, and teaching that God will not damn men at all! I do not seek to drive you towards goodness with this fear of God's damnation, but let the man who persists in hardness and impenitence, and who goes on and on and out of the world scorning and neglecting the mercy of our Heavenly Father, be sure that there will be for him a future condemnation terrible to bear. But you, who are tender-hearted, and who want to be true, and are trying to be, learn these two things from our text: never to be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here, and never to fail to do daily that good which lies next to your hand. Do not be in a hurry, but be diligent. Enter into the sublime patience of the Lord! Be charitable in view of it. Be earnest in the faith of it. God can afford to wait, why cannot we-since we have Him to fall back upon! Let patience have her perfect work, and bring forth her celestial fruits. Trust God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern show it not yet. When God's people are able and willing thus to labour and to wait, remembering that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, the grand harvest of the ages shall come to its reaping, and the day shall broaden itself to a thousand years, and the thousand years shall show themselves as a perfect and finished day!"

-----George MacDonald, "Sermons from the Pulpit"

"Blessed be God, who hath not turned away my prayer, nor His mercy from me."

-----Psalms 66:20

"You are what you love, not what loves you."

-----Charlie Kaufmann, "Adaptation"