Holy smokes. Beloved is not remotely a Christ figure. Claiming as much amounts to literary malpractice.

So far, Potts’ Forgiveness seems beautiful…and spurious.

Idea for a novel: Upon His arrest, Jesus goes ahead and does appeal to the Father to send twelve legions of angels. Then what happens?

Today was the first day I had “If reading a book, read the book” on my to-do list. It appears at 5 PM instead of at the beginning of the day so I’m not prompted to read a book over lunch, which is always a matter of divided attention and never long enough to give the book the time it needs to actually enter my mind and be fully enjoyed. I’ll read articles over lunch when I’m eating alone, sure. But sometimes I even question that, wondering whether the time might be better spent fully enjoying my food or allowing my mind to wander.

Anyway, I just dedicated all my attention to reading a mere half a chapter of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper. My reading pleasure in doing so, was, like triple that when I was reading the same book while also eating. This is the way.

•• ¡ spoiler alert ! ••

The most remarkable thing about The Night Watchman, which is a good friend’s favorite book ever, is the suggestive congruence between Bucky’s paralysis, brought on by his sin, and Thomas’ stroke, brought on by his struggle against others’ sin.

I suppose it’s more accurate and parallel to say it’s Patrice’s vengeful unforgivingness that brings on Bucky’s paralysis. But may be wading into dicey discussional waters.

Hypothesis: A big reason we love books, movies, and recorded music is that they offer to our lower brains a passable simulacrum of company. Inspiring, beautiful, mind-expanding they can be. But they are, at their root, an inferior substitute for basic emotional and relational goods that come from real, live, human company…

…writes the man whose wife of twenty years hasn’t been home in a week and is currently incommunicado on a sailboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Dr. Seuss should’ve entitled it Oh, the Mistakes You’ll Make!

Finished reading: How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told (2023) by Harrison Scott Key. A breezy, raw, comic, winsomely Christian cuckold’s memoir.

headlamp + summertime + living next to a large park → reading a book while meandering outdoors at night 🔦📚

Pretty much everything written in this book about adolescents could be written about any of us (except the course of development stuff and the added intensity and volatility it brings).

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner; to fight his impulses and to accept them… to love his parents and to hate them … to revolt against them and be dependent on them … to be more idealistic, artistic, generous, and unselfish than he will ever be again, but also the opposite: self-centered, egoistic, calculating. Such fluctuations between extreme opposites would be deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life. At this time they signify no more than that an adult structure of personality takes a long time to emerge.

Anna Freud is quoted as saying the above in 1958 in the front matters. It is good to keep in mind.

Perhaps most important, this book will ditch the dangerous view that adolescents are mentally healthy only when they can sustain a sense of feeling good. In its place, we’ll get to know a truly useful and psychologically accurate definition of emotional health: having the right feelings at the right time and being able to manage those feelings effectively (xxiv).

The above is the main point of the book. And a good one not only for adolescents, but for all people. A good corrective to some of what you hear out there, and a good corrective to how I think sometimes (although I never put it in the exact term “mental health” but rather in my constant quest for happiness).

First and foremost, we want our teenagers to regard their feelings in this important way: as data. Whether painful or pleasant, emotions are fundamentally informational. They bubble up as we move through our days, delivering meaningful feedback. Our emotions give us status reports on our lives and can help guide decision making (10).

Love the above.

Emotional pain promotes maturation Feeling the emotional impact of difficult experiences helps us to grow up (17)

Ethan? Paging Ethan? She wrote that one having heard it from you.

People stop maturing at the point when they start abusing substances…when substances come into the mix…maturation halts. Whatever else can be said about drugs and alcohol, they are very good at blocking emotional pain, and therefore the maturation that comes with it. (17)

Handy to keep in mind when interacting with anyone.

Remaining calm when teenagers become undone communicates the critical point that we are not frightened by their acute discomfort, and so they don’t need to be frightened by it either (20).

More good advice above! Read it again!

“I can tell you from both the research and my own clinical experience that emotional intensity actually peaks around age thirteen or fourteen and then slowly tapers down from there” (78).

Got it.

As for effective apologies, researchers have found that they include six components: explicitly saying that you are sorry, offering an explanation, acknowledging responsibility, promising not to repeat the mistake, trying to make amends, and requesting forgiveness.

Memorize the above! SERPAF is a good mnemonic.

[S]leep is the glue that holds human beings together (160).

Hear ye, hear ye!

“Love is never any better than the lover.”

— Toni Morrison

Remember: Jon Levenson says that the controlling metaphor in the Hebrew Bible for the relationship between Israel and YHWH is that of a suzerain and vassal or a king and subject and that love from the Israel side is therefore primarily expressed as glad, grateful obedience. When we say we’re going to love the Lord our God with our all hearts, minds, souls, and strengths, what we’re saying is we’re going to gladly obey Him with all of ourselves.

On having “enough” time to write songs:

One of the main ways we cheat ourselves out of creating is the widely held belief that we need the right amount of time to make something of value—to make something worthwhile. We often resist a moment of inspiration because we’re aware of a limited time window that might interrupt the flow and therefore think, “It’s not even worth it to get started because I know I won’t be able to finish it.”

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

On just creating, damnit:

But all the time spent creating, if I’m in the right frame of mind, is not really so much about “Is this good or bad?” There’s just a lot of joy in it, in having created something at all. I don’t feel as bad about other things. I don’t necessarily feel high, or overly joyed. I just feel like, “Oh, I’m not wasting my time.”

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

On writing without thinking about what you’re writing about:

Creating something out of nothing is the important part. And maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you’re often better off learning how to write without much concern for what you’re writing about. And through that process, you’ll discover what is on your mind. “Jesus, Etc.” was never about anything specific to me until I sang it live for the first time and learned how sincerely it conveyed my wish for a better sense of unity with my extremely devout Christian neighbors. So do some free writing. Write without thinking. I’m sure there will be some things that will surprise you, along with some nonsense.

— Jeff Tweedy • How to Write One Song: Loving the Things We Create and How They Love Us Back (2020)

The death of a spouse after a long and fulfilling marriage in quite a different thing. Perhaps I have never felt more closely the strength of God’s presence than I did during the months of my husband’s dying and after his death. It did not wipe away the grief. The death of a beloved is an amputation. But when two people marry, each one has to accept that one of them will die before the other (xii–xiii).

Such insightful and poetic words from Madeleine L’Engle. It is true: Either Carla or I will predecease the other, and that will feel like an amputation.

Reading A Grief Observed during my own grief made me understand that each experience of grief is unique (xiii).

I must remember that as I age and my friends’ spouses die.

Like Lewis, I, too, kept a journal, continuing a habit started when I was eight. It is all right to wallow in one’s journal; it is a way of getting rid of self-pity and self-indulgence and self-centeredness. What we work out in our journals we don’t take out on family and friends (xiv).

I appreciate her recognition that, as Carla has taught me, it is important to vent so that we don’t hurt those around us.

I am grateful, too, to Lewis for having the courage to yell, to doubt, to kick at God with angry violence. This is part of healthy grief not often encouraged. It is helpful indeed that C. S. Lewis, who has been such a successful apologist for Christianity, should have the courage to admit doubt about what he has so superbly proclaimed. It gives us permission to admit our own doubts, our own angers and anguishes, and to know that they are part of the soul’s growth (xvi).

Geez. Had I only known people were so comfortable with their own doubts about God and Jesus and the whole shebang when I was going through my throes of existential doubt!

And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job—where the machine seems to run on much as usual—I loathe the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. Even shaving. What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth? (5)

Warning! When Carla dies, still take your walks. Call people to hang out. Do your work. Unless you want to just die, too.

The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. (11)

Lewis is not outshone in poetry by his formidable foreword writer. I am certain Carla’s death will seem just like he describes. It will (dis)color everything.

But her voice is still vivid. The remembered voice—that can turn me at any moment into a whimpering child. (16)

Again, I suspect the same will be true of me when Carla dies.

‘Because she is in God’s hands.’ But if so, she was in God’s hands all the time, and I have seen what they did to her here. Do they suddenly become gentler to us the moment we are out of the body? And if so, why? (27)

The poor Calvinist!

Sometimes it is hard not to say, ‘God forgive God.’ Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn’t. He crucified Him. (28)

Wrong.

Come, what do we gain by evasions? We are under the harrow and can’t escape. Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. (28)

No, it’s not.

Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite [of God being good]? (29)

No.

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.’s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned—I had warned myself—not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing I haven’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No, And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards (36–37).

Crucial, both for those who know they are doubting because of the problem of evil and for those who think they aren’t.

In which sense may it be a house of cards? Because the things I am believing are only a dream, our because I only dream that I believe them? (39)

That’s an important distinction of which I’d never thought.

They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal? (41)

An excellent one-liner. Ah, but it was Lazarus’ experience that brought us the Gospel according to “John”!

A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made brighter (42).

Who knew belief in purgatory existed among Protestants? Certainly not I. But now I do: Richard Beck, Jerry Walls, C.S. Lewis, Brad Jersak—heck, all the universalists, I suppose. Thinking of the afterlife makes so much more sense with a purgatorial hell.

What do people mean when they say, ‘I am not afraid of God because I know He is good’? Have they never been to a dentist? 43

I love it when Lewis zings.

You can’t, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately; anyway, you can’t get the best out of it. ‘Now! Let’s have a real good talk’ reduces everyone to silence. ‘I must get a good sleep tonight’ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when think about our dead? (45)

I remember those October laps around the Holiday Inn in Orlando.

For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress, but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. :perhaps more. (47–48)

This is how I view Carla, and I told her so.

Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis in one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again. (52-53)

My, but does his man has a knack for finding the right metaphors to explain his thoughts! L’Engle and Lewis agree: Losing a spouse to death is an amputation.

The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not have been. And I see that I have nowhere fallen into that mode of thinking about either which we call praising them. Yet that would have been best for me. (62)

God, You equipped me to not repeat Lewis’ mistake here. Thank You.

An incurable abstract intellect

Excuse me, Mr. Lewis. Did you call me?

To me, however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images—sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? (66)

Sure seems like it.

And now that I come to think of it, there’s no practical problem before me at all. I know the two great commandments, and I’d better get on with them. (69–70)

Amen, preach it, Brother.

To make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a ‘spiritual animal.’ To take a poor primate, a beast with never-endings all over it, a creature with a stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, ‘Now get on with it. Become a god’ (72)

Indeed. Thanks a bundle, God. No really, I mean it: It’s absurd and exactly what I want at the same time.

My overall takeaway: It scares me a little that I have read this and Dementia in the same year. Carla may very well predecease me, and I appear to be attempting to get ready for that contingency.

The main way to be ready: Remember to continue to live after she dies! But remember to grieve ferociously in order to do that!

On the interconnectedness of everyone and everything:

I live in a web of dependence, at the center of which is God in whom all things hold together (34).

That’s a good way to explain to myself how it is I can be grateful to God for everything that is good, including existence itself.

On prayer as worship:

Prayer is a declaration of dependence upon God (35).

An idea from my girlfriend my freshman year of high school returns: Making requests of God is a form of worship. It has proven one of those stick-with-you, life-shaping ideas. Thanks, Katie.

On emotion being teachable and malleable:

But consider what Rabbi Abraham Heschel said to the members of his synagogue who complained that the words of the liturgy did not express what they felt. He told them that it was not that the liturgy should express what they feel, but that they should learn to feel what the liturgy expressed.

My super-culture insists that emotions just happen and should not be repressed or feared. I agree with the overall message, thanks in no small part to Carla and to Milan and Kay Yerkovich, who wrote How We Love. But I don’t hear much from anyone about directing and changing emotion. Incidentally, I also don’t hear much about directing and changing libido. But these things are subject to the will. The tricks to success in bending one’s emotions and libido are to no hate the feelings when they come, acknowledge weakness, expect failure, eschew shame, and never give up. It reminds me of something I read by Melinda Selmys about the Catholic line on chastity being impossible. She argued that its impossibility doesn’t entail its uselessness. Rather, it serves as a well of gravity, as fuel for an aspirational more asymptote. As long as we avoid legalism, we are the better for the impossible ideal. Life in God is aspirational. I should note that the thing Heschel as quoted by Ben Patterson as quoted by Yancey is trying to say here is it is good to learn unpleasant emotions from the Psalms.

On distractions and desires in prayer:

Distractions [in prayer] are nearly always your real wants breaking in on your prayer for edifying but bogus wants. If you are distracted, trace your distraction back to the real desires it comes from and pray about these. When you are praying for what you really want you will not be distracted.

Twentieth-century Dominican priest, theologian, and philosopher Herbert McCabe wrote that. It jibes well with the “Q: What should I do? A: Do what you want!” mantra that God gave me two decades ago. I should try it. These days, it’s distractions from planning changes to my strength training workouts. What is the real desire there about which I can pray? A long life of good health that makes for a long, wide potential for good deeds as I age.

On conceptual copouts born of the conflict between exegesis and experience:

“Come near to God and he will come near to you,” wrote James, in words that sound formulaic. James does not put a time parameter on the second clause, however.

But I jest. Yes, Yancey’s gloss could be taken as a copout. But I take it as helpful truth.

From British convert Jonathan Aitken:

Trusting in God does not, except in illusory religion, mean that he will ensure that none of the things you are afraid of will ever happen to you. On the contrary, it means that whatever you fear is quite likely to happen, but that with God’s help it will in the end turn out to be nothing to be afraid of.

Again, pap to satiate the naive among us when first confronted with reasons for doubting God’s goodness? Sure. But also good, solid truth.

On psychosomatic healing being no threat in my book:

“It doesn’t diminish my respect for God’s power in the slightest to realize that God primarily works through the mind to summon up resources of healing in a person’s body. The word psychosomatic carries no derogatory connotations for me. It derives from two Greek words, psyche and soma, which mean simply mind (or soul) and body. The cure of such diseases demonstrates the incredible power of the mind to affect the rest of the body…Those who pray for the sick and suffering should first praise God for the remarkable agents of healing designed into the body, and then ask that God’s special grace give the suffering person the ability to use those resources to their fullest advantage. I have seen remarkable instances of physical healing accomplished in this way. The prayers of fellow Christians can offer real, tangible help by setting into motion the intrinsic powers of healing in a person controlled by God. This approach does not contradict natural laws; rather, it fully employs the design features built into the human body” (254)

That’s Dr. Paul Brand. I find piquant novelty in his approach to thanking God for what’s already natural in the human body and for seeing that natural stuff as the stuff of healing. Yancey goes on to report that Brand eventually came around to believing in the utterly miraculous as well, but the man still holds that most healing is psychosomatic. For the longest time, I thought healing being psychosomatic took away from healings as evidence for God. But I suppose it doesn’t have to.

On the limits of healing prayer:

In terms of physical health, you could say that the power of prayer has limits: no prayer will reverse the aging process, banish death, or eliminate the need for nourishment (256).

Several other quotations I don’t have time to comment on:

I have come to see the very selectiveness of biblical miracles as a sign of God’s personhood (258)

I never make a list of what to pray for. I pray instantly, as soon as something comes to mind, and I trust God to bring it to mind (315)

I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world (324).

“‘Come near to God and he will come near to you,’ wrote James, in words that sound formulaic. James does not put a time parameter on the second clause, however.”

— Philip Yancey

I don’t enjoy fiction as much because I don’t spend hours at a time with it like I do movies! This calls for a change.

[after Éa enters the room having found a book that had been lost for a year and half]

Carla: Oh, Éa, where did you find it?! Éa: It was where all the lost books are: in a responsible place! 📚

Everyone seems to have more time to read books than I do.

I remind myself how much richer a reading experience is when it is read aloud. I missed Ahab’s boat in Moby Dick; I’m not going to miss Licona’s resurrection train.

New protocol: Whenever I lend something, I will note that I have done so as a task to get it back, not in a standalone list of things lent, which never gets looked at. Similar thing for borrowed items.

This afternoon and evening were unhappy. It could be that I stayed up till a bit past 11 last night chitchatting with Carla in bed. But I think it’s more because I hewed too closely to my daily task list. More importantly, I didn’t hew very closely to You. There are times when I get “too efficient,” as Carla says, capturing task items very well but ignoring priorities, ignoring my heart, ignoring my desires, ignoring You. Why, today I could swear Carol requested my help in her remembering her frozen water bottle before she leaves tomorrow morning on her bus ride home because she saw that I am so robotically dedicated to my very reliable task list. But I’m a man, not a machine. I don’t ever want to lose my connection to You, or to the people around me. Let me be alive, not always working.

Maybe Watchman Nee is more correct that I thought, with his proposed dichotomy between living by the principle of right/wrong versus living by the principle of life. I still think it sounds too mystical.

The capsule reflection on that pamphlet that I posted to Goodreads: “I object strongly to the dichotomy introduced between decision-making based on right vs. wrong and making decisions based on “life,” whatever that is. Nevertheless, the pamphlet served as a reminder to me to not trust in my to-do list and trust instead that God is inside me, at work, and that referring to Him is the best way to make decisions.”

Since Licona will be using plausibility “as the most important criterion” (p.113), his chapter entitled “The Historian and Miracles,” which comes up next, had better be good.

He also says that since to hypothesize a real resurrection of Jesus is to hypothesize a singular event, you can’t apply Bayes’ theorem because you can’t asses the prior probability of a unique event (p. 120). But what if your hypothesis is that the report of Jesus’ resurrection is false? Couldn’t you assess the prior probability of a resurrection report’s falsehood by looking at other the veracity of other resurrection reports?