Perhaps, just perhaps

one shouldn't post when there is nothing new or perhaps intriguing or even vaguely witty to say.  I guess everyone hits the places in the road where the scenery becomes less than transfixing and the dryness of soul leaves even the remarkable sentenced to the mundane.

I could never describe it to you, but just this Saturday evening, on the heels of a storm, I watched a sunset.  I stood on the cold, rusted bars of a cattle guard between a gate and an old fence, the dead grass, grown tall between its lines and I watched and I felt and I wondered.  Straight above me was the line, the haggard line of the retreating storm, beat back by the skirmishers of light so that in the west was the picture of a perfect, summer, sunset.  High clouds like feathers stretched across the sky and began light show, reflecting the setting sun.  To the east, headed over the now dark and distant mountains of Lesotho, the storm crept ever onward.  Thick clouds, so low on the horizon I felt I could nearly touch them poured heavy rain on the city lights that looked like a curtain stretched from earth to sky.  Where I stood was just the gentle rain, the last bit of resistance to the persistent drought.  And I wondered.

It was magic, it was wonder itself, it was God painting a masterpiece in the quiet of the evening while the distant fury of His fiery spears crashed against the mountains and came rumbling like a deep, rich, bass from the deep.  

I guess I  did have something to say, I just wasn't sure how to say it.  I don't think we realize just how amazing is this God we serve.  I think the greatest picture of what we don't see when  we focus only on the Father and grace, is what David describes in Psalm 18.  I think I saw both that Saturday night...in a sense I think I saw a slight moment in eternity.  That is, if there were moments in a place where Time isn't even a memory.  

Good night. 

I don't consciously think...

that anyone spends their days with my blog in their favorites and checking ever so often in a day to see if I have updated; however, I think perhaps everyone who writes a blog or regularly posts pictures suffer from that malady of egocentricity in thinking that since they were just engaged in updating, others surely are already engaged in reading...enough of that.

I say all that to say that if anyone is still reading this after the previous two less-than-cheerful posts and checks now and then in this time of silence, I commend you.  This is not really an update, but then again, any blog that centers on random synapses or thought patterns-snapshots-should not have "updates."  

I could tell you about what I've been doing, riding the bus route between here and Cape Town.  Anyone that follows facebook may have seen the updates a little over a week ago as I sat next to a very sprawled out, heavy sleeper in scratchy-looking Mr. Rogers sweater.  That was fun.

For more info I could tell you how I was in Cape Town for a week, or rather, in Stellenbosch.  How I conquered my fears and went into a library that's bigger than my entire college building and even posed as a five foot something female named, Delani, in order to check out nearly all the books they had on the life of C.S. Lewis.  How I sat next to a wannabe, rasta-esque figure with bleary eyes and an unhealthy distaste for weather while I typed on a keyboard that had enough grease from previous users to supply a small mechanic shop.  How I picked up a biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky that I unfairly had no time to read and may have considered for just a moment the possibility of relieving the library of it...with a payment of course.  I could tell you of the deep sadness I felt for the students I saw everyday, usually filling the emptiness inside with liquor.  How I became a photographer for five girls in pretty dresses that kept turning heads and how I nearly was dispatched during the process by a fast moving, yet unseen bicyclist.  

I could tell you I suppose of the cafes, the coffee shops, the conversations, the flicker of candles on rough face of concrete walls.  Of neighbors who do stomach-turning belly dances in front of their large, pane glass windows.  Of mountains shrouded in clouds and a wind that almost never stops its constant fury on trees, grass, windows and doors.  

I could tell you of Delani.  Of a hundred little memories that keep playing in my head.  I could tell you of a thousand looks, but then I would waste my time for their simply isn't the words.  The wind through her hair, the corners of her mouth beginning to dance before a smile and the sudden breaking of the silence when she laughs at something I said.  Of an ice cream parlor, a beggar on the street, a curio shop, silk worms, and a thousand adventures that one has in the ordinary ticking of the clock in a twenty-four hour day.  

I could tell you of all these things, but there simply isn't the time and I don't suppose you would understand.  Try as we may to live vicariously, these are things that can only be understood by the one who stood there, who drank in every moment and whose eye was carefully hidden behind the lens.  

P.S. I got an idea for a book, perhaps two.  If it pans out and God grants me the wisdom and inspiration to write something that could help someone...I will forever be in debt to a certain veranda in Stellenbosch and a stack of old pictures Delani shared with me.  Until then, just remember the name, Emilie...if all goes well it could mean something someday.  

09-16-09

I have wanted to write.  I have thought about writing and in my mind dealt with subjects that I thought would produce the type of comments I desired.  Pride is a fire that requires constant fuel and when that blaze is stoked enough by that oxygen of the pride of life, it needs more than just the kindling that ones own ego is able to produce and so it seeks out the praise of others—bigger sticks to feed the blaze.  Such a fire can never be quenched, but the desire grows ever stronger until we are consumed.

 So I see I read my Bible to find more places to highlight and then feel a sense of “righteous” pride when I sit near someone that I perceive as spiritually inferior so that I can silently gloat about the depth of my personal devotional life.  I seek to unravel greater points of doctrine in my journal (secretly hoping someday someone will want to publish it) rather than seek the truth—that two-edged sword that slices right to the root of sin.  I have fed my “suckfish[1]” and he grows fatter each day, like an algae-eating fish in a tank that is never cleaned.  I feel the weight of this decaying body of sin. 

No, I have not willfully turned my back on God and I have not tried to sin against Him or grieve His Spirit, but I see under the searing, scintillating search light of Truth, through the divination of God’s perfect Spirit, the Interpreter of Bunyan’s dream, that I have sought the dizzying, temporary and soul-damning praise of man (I feel it in tiny things like that illusion to Bunyan).  I have been reading the spiritual journeys of many men far greater than I and I see parallels in my life to the things that all of these men had grown to loathe in themselves and ultimately shunned.  Augustine’s love of eloquence and the praise of man, Brother Lawrence’s distractions from prayer and God’s presence, the lack of the love that Drummond sought as the very highest good.  And in Lewis’ “The Screwtape Letters” I see myself as the fool of devils that have so convinced me of my own righteousness that I somehow thought I had something to do with my regeneration. 

Even in this confession, as raw and self-revelatory as it seems, I fear this pride.  I fear that I have found pride in my humility, a sense of satisfaction in my debasement[2].  I seek out noise and clutter, the perfect “greenhouse” for self-righteousness and self-love.  It is in those screaming, quiet moments of the soul that I feel naked and exposed before a God whose gaze pierces flesh and matter and into the very darkness of the soul.  In these moments I see my depravity and my complete lack of any goodness sans His grace and mercy.  I fear the quiet, but I long to desire it because I know when I can desire it, truly in the depths of my heart, than I have no fear of His gaze and it is that that I seek. 

I pray I take no pride in this confession.  I want to do it in humility and though to all who read this it may seem to be an embarrassing, self-revelatory journal entry, but please, I beg you, don’t judge to harshly.  God knows my heart and this is what the Light of His Word[3] has been showing me in those dusty corners of my heart that I had been carefully avoiding.  Please do me a favor.  Do not comment on this entry.  If you are revolted or think me out of line, fill free to let me know via facebook, or e-mail.  If you have been helped by some good pleasure of a God who inconceivable loves us, then thank Him for it and leave me in the dark. 

This one truth I know; when I look at myself and look at God, I am not deserving of His mercy and grace and the more I see in my heart that I have thought I somehow deserve it.  I have bought into the diabolical lie that I am entitled to something.  But really, what is man that God should be mindful of him[4]?  I am nothing.  I have said enough.  When confession goes too long, one becomes impressed by his own thoughts of humility and then the very sin that was confessed has turned into a “Kick Me” sticker stuck to his back.  God’s Word tells us to confess our faults to one another and maybe it is cowardice that has me saying this impersonally via blog rather than to the face of a brother, but here is my confession, none-the-less before God and man.  Goodnight.

---

[1] In “Utopia,” Sir Thomas More described pride as a suckfish.

[2] Lewis, C.S. “The Screwtape Letters” [ Letter 14 2^nd paragraph]

[3] Psalm 119:105

[4] Psalm 8:4

09-09-09

I am weary of this town.  My gate feels like bars and the incessant sound of cars into the night are like a lullaby to which I can never seem to fall asleep.  I don’t understand people who long for the city, for its lights and cafés and perpetual motion.  To me it’s the symptom of a soul that is lost and doesn’t want to be found.  I have walked on that open road toward the infinitude of an unmarked horizon and stopped to breath deep on freedom and felt the cool reassurance as it filled my lungs.  To watch the sun retire and the stars begin to fill that ceaseless expanse called sky and feel…small.  This town wants to take me down bit by bit and I, ever faced with this haunting specter of responsibility, feel that panic welling up in me.  This self-induced imprisonment gives me the illusion of control, but I know better; I cannot leave.  So I sit here, night after night and look through the narrow bars of my windows, past the rusted, whitewash of my gate unto a dusty street full of people on their way home from the mundane, meniality of a pointless existence and I have to fight back tears.  Soon…  

the shorthand of a fairly productive week

I feel like doing what most people actually do with personal blogs, tell about what is happening in life.  I’ll start with Wednesday morning since that is when things went singularly well and also not so well.  Don’t expect high prose, this is short hand.

Wednesday:

Went to school.  Performed my usual duties but was suffering greatly from a pulled muscle in my back (from playing a game with the kids) which would suddenly make me stop short, nearly double over, breathing hard and bring tears to my eyes.  That subsided.

9:30 am. Went to Bloemfontein.  Alternately stood and sat in lines at Home Affairs, got a stamp in my passport that says December.  Thanked God.  Had the requisite giant Blueberry Muffin and coffee at Mugg & Bean. 

1:12 pm.  Received another in a long line of phone calls from home.  That same dread beginning, same bad ending.  Still thanked God.

Thursday.

Went to Living Life and had coffee with Christelle and Michelle.  Christelle insisted on buying me a decadent piece of chocolate truffle cake.  I hate to disappoint friends. 

Friday.

During staff prayer at about 7:35 AM, God finally gave me an idea for the end of the year drama.  7:40 AM, I quickly wrote down the first few lines that I had composed in my head during prayer.

After school.  Living Life.  A French press half full of coffee and feverishly putting down more stanzas for this drama.  The smoke from a fire that’s burned all day is in my eyes and floating everywhere.  The fire is now visible it just came over the ridge.  So much smoke.

Here is the rough draft of the first ACT, of the play, of which there is no name.  The shepherd and the angel’s narratives. (A Molamo is a shepherds fighting stick here)

 

Shepherd:

 

I am a lonely shepherd, the least in Israel. (14)

I watch my sheep, under the moon, (8)

Out on these lonely hills. (6)

My Molamo is the only wall between me and the dark. (15)

I sing under these silent stars, to calm my frightened flock. (14)

 

At times I hear the wild dogs cry, they’re hungry for my sheep.

So I must stand and keep good watch,

I dare not fall asleep.

Beside a fire my friends and I often laugh to fight the fear.

Because out in these lost, lonely hills, the night can feel so near.

 

But tonight feels different—somehow wonderful and strange.

There is excitement in the air,

The wind begins to change.

In the distance I hear a song come floating with the breezes.

Is that a cry I heard just now, or just a sheep that sneezes?

 

(In the distance voices are heard singing.  An angel approaches the Shepherd.)

 

I see a lone man walking here, his body clothed in flame.

He motions with his hand to me,

And calls me by my name.

I’m sure I must go to him and hear his midnight letter.

A message from an angel now, nothing could be better.

 

Angel:

Good tidings and good news I bring

To you and every living thing.

In this so calm and sleepless night,

A thousand angel wings in flight,

To sing a special, angel song,

And tell the world it won’t be long—

The Christ is born tonight.

 

Yes, he who is from David born,

Messiah in a stable born.

You’ll find him there asleep I think,

In tender cloths, in hay so sweet.

Go greet Him now, our newborn King.

And with your heart this new song sing.

“Hosanna in the highest.”

 

 

 

Shepherd:

Yes, there is something to this song that breaks this silent night. (14)

I hear the sound of many wings— (8)

The angels fly tonight. (6)

And what is this? The skies, they blaze with sudden, holy fire. (14)

A thousand voices fill the night from this eternal choir. (14)

 

Angels:

“We sing glory to God in the highest,

On earth peace and good will,

Peace and good will to all mankind.

In whom the Lord is pleased.”

 

Shepherd:

If I were not on this hill and wrapped in night’s dark cloak,

And felt the wind here on my face,

I’d think it was a joke.

But I must wake my friends and we must run to Bethlehem.

So kill the fire, let’s join this choir and go and worship Him.

 

(The shepherd ends his speech as the curtain falls)

I feel the desire to change it to lofty speech, but that would never work in contextualization…all grandiose design is put aside.  It must be functional and understandable.

Friday night.  The smoke has lays across Ladybrand like a thick blanket.  I have a headache and I can feel the smoke in my nose and throat. 

Saturday.

6:45 am.  Read Ephesians Chapter 1.  I love the way Paul is constantly returning to Christ as the only means of salvation and continually reaffirming His deity. 

7:30 am (give or take) begin course work.  11:30 am, take an intellectual break for lunch and watch an episode of  “Crocodile Hunter” on my laptop. 

1:00 pm. Go to Living Life.  So many Americans here, but I don’t want to be associated with most of them.  Embarrassing.  Read “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.  Tolstoy was a total genius.  The way he weaves the vanity of all of Ivan’s friends in wanting his position when he dies.  Then he expertly ties in the life of Ivan and his own vain pursuit of the comfortable material life.  Then there  is the end as he wastes away and is so humbled as to sit all night with his feet propped up on the dutiful shoulders of his peasant servant to get comfortable somehow; the hatred, then the forgiveness and that final peace that comes and sadness at seeing his family, still living that vanity.  The best piece I have read in years.  Chapter 11 is like a parody of Ecclesiastes. 

I finish up by writing a summary on some of the authors I just studied.  I am joined by a sociable, grey cat whom I call simply Madam.  She is singularly proud in nature, but pleasant and proceeds to lay on the cushion next to me in the sunshine through the open window.

Return to the apartment.  Watch the afternoon sun through the window painting golden squares on the faded blue carpet and shoot suddenly upward and in an odd angular motion up the wall.  

I miss Delani..I miss discussing all this with her with a cup of coffee. 

I love Africa.

For a man who hates the self-revelatory nature of our culture, today you may point your finger and say, “Ha! You have fallen prey to your own disgust.  What’s next, crocs?” 

  

more thoughts on art and morality

I should first like to thank Travis for his kind rejection of some of my first statements.  I welcome that.  I don’t claim to be an oracle of absolute wisdom and you are more than welcome to disagree with me.  Nor am I a philosopher or one who has carefully thought out the arguments.  As I said, that was a stream-of-consciousness take on the subject as it came to me.  This is much the same, but more dealing with my views on the idea of “self-expression” as the ends to the means in all art.  The sole reason we “create.”

 

Often the greatest virtues attributed to art is its subjective nature that allows us to use self-expression.  This “self-expression” is in this man’s opinion one of the most damnable concepts to ever sink deep into the human psyche.  We were never created for “self-expression” and if you read the Bible carefully (that is assuming you at least verbally regard this as the source of all Truth) you will see that “we” are not the key players on the board.  Our lives from the very beginning were merely threads in the grand train of God’s glory.  We began as the crown of His creation, but we have turned the tables and instead of inviting God to come and dwell among us, we sup together as gods and invite our own egos to worship at this self-destructive shrine.  Art is merely the vehicle that this deception has come.  In much of art’s philosophy (which has slipped into the church and into its incense, thwarting all chance of a delicate savor to reach our Father’s nostrils) we see this pride, the very pride that was the impetus to Lucifer’s tumbling flight from the halls of the Eternal and scintillating Light of God’s presence.  Pride.  It is this “suckfish” as Thomas More said, that has come into Art and as Dostoevsky spoke of in saying that, “first art would imitate life, then life would imitate art and then life would find the very reason for it’s existence in the arts.[1]” 

In the past year or two I have done quite a lot of reading, particularly in the field of English Literature, but more recently into the very history of the Western literary tradition and I have found a frightening discovery.  A discovery that has made me reevaluate my understanding of art and beauty and what I look for or look to convey or gain when my pen and paper meet.  I find that we have rapidly, just in the last century sought to create an amoral entity with no regard for God in the form of the arts.  Even in a non-Christian framework that developed some of the early narratives and epic poems, deity was always at the forefront and the very essence of the work.  From the epics of Homer to the Annalects of Confucius and everything in between, there was a sense that we as humans were indebted to a higher power and all that we could do was to be poured out in a drink offering to their greater glory.  In the Christian tradition (or Truth) we do not find David glorying in the magnificent self-expression of his psalms or Solomon delighted with his own wisdom in the Proverbs.  At the heart of all they said and there displayed in some of the richest poetic tapestries ever weaved by human thought and literary power is one common and undeniable thread; the person of an Omnipotent, Omniscient and Omnipresent God. 

Now I fear we have tumbled into a dark and oppressive abyss where our rope bridge of human “goodness and reason” has failed to be substantial enough to hold the weight of our eternal souls.  A place of emptiness so vast that it caused the very face of art, culture and morality to be changed.  It was a shift in our national and international conscience that began with one former seminary student in the person of Charles Darwin.  As a digression, I find that some of the greatest evils in the pages of human history has come through those who would “buy three dollars of God” as the poem says and when done with him, use this knowledge to weave deceit so masterful that it trips up even the brightest minds.  It seems almost absurd to link drip paintings and the rise of evolutionary thought, yet I through study say that the two have been married by modernist thought and are inseparable.  When the idea came that God no longer existed and we had merely risen as the highest primates from a primordial soup, thus owing neither tribute nor service to a Creator (contrary to being “bought with a price”), then this religion of self-expression was born.  The Enlightenment has been one of the darkest blots on the page of human existence.  It is almost impossible to see how this has happened because our reasoning has been so married to this modern idea that we no longer can see the danger.  If, however, we could divorce ourselves from this tunnel vision and see through the haze of our mirrors to a clearer day, long enough to realign ourselves with the words of the Apostle Paul who denied all but ‘Christ and Him crucified,’ then perhaps we would know how far our steps have gone from the path of Truth. 

Stepping out into this at all is like taking a step on those high mountain slopes, covered in shale rock.  The surface looks solid and impenetrable, but as soon as those first faltering footsteps rock the shallow foundations, the shale begins to slide and we find ourselves racing towards whatever lies below.  In this way, the sliding slopes of aesthetic debates seem so treacherous as to hardly warrant the danger.  All this conjecture with no final thought is like Hugh Laurie’s “Protestor’s Song” but I don’t write this for a conclusion…I write without a destination driven by a fear that we have lost our hold on reality by becoming bedfellows with the humanism of our current culture.  We are the measure of all things and therefore our “self-expression” is most greatly to be prized, but I say as a follower of Christ that this cannot be so.  Anything done to immortalize myself or my genius will only live as long as this world turns but one day, like everything else tied to Time, it will burn.  All that self-expression will turn into an acrid smoke that has nowhere to land and is swallowed in a cosmos more infinite than finite man will ever be able to probe.  We are standing on the verge of anarchy where we have made ourselves both deity and suppliant and the incense of our altars is choking the life from our soul.  Art, if taken in a Biblical framework, has nothing to do with self-expression.  The expressions of the soul, like the quickened pulse from a casual glance, is merely a byproduct of something with a far greater scope.  If the expression of my soul is existential chaos than it cannot be glorifying to God and since that is what we were created for, it cannot be art.  This is why I said you must divorce yourself from modern thought because it looks like complete foolishness in the dim, red light of a culture that praises the well sculpted phrase above the truth of plain speech.  Better to lie well than to speak the truth in mundane simplicity.

I think art was created out of wonder.  Wonder in a cosmos too great to be defined by the plain speech of market talk and common conversation.  Man needed a way to convey his “soul-ishness;” the wonder that he felt when looking at what was around him.  The problem is this fact of depravity and as man looked for wonder, he found that it took greater and greater amounts of moral degradation to slake the lust of his heart.  To quote Ravi again, he said, “The older you get the more it takes to fill your heart with wonder and only God is big enough to fill it.”  We see the end of such a search in the complete degradation of the human body in the name of art where a human being is left exposed and naked for the world to see without thought or conscience.

 I think perhaps it is this sickened state the makes us fill up the quiet moments with noise; anything to defray this horrid emptiness and its ironically crushing effect on our souls.

I end with this for now.  If the essence or meaning of art is founded upon the emotions and my inner feelings than it is the most transient, fickle and pitiful of disciplines.  Nothing in my emotions, those chemical balances or imbalances within my mind, provide the kind of framework for anything lasting.  I don’t discredit my mind or the wonders of God’s creation, I merely say that fallen man is in such a state of inner discord and self-destruction that anything that is rooted and grounded within his ever-changing mind denies the presence of the Absolute.    

---

[1] Taken from Ravi Zacharias “Can Man Live Without God?”

spring is coming, clothed in peach blossoms

These are a couple of my attempts to capture what the peach blossoms are to the end of winter here...sorry it's so pale in comparison to the original.