At the level of the individual, there is wisdom in my friend’s aversion to marriage, which she stated the other day as “I don’t know why people would want to get married.” I prefer to reword it as: “Don’t make a commitment you don’t think you can keep.” But at the level of society, there needs to be a complementary wisdom: Cultivate people who are capable of making lifelong commitments.

My new motto is: “Live every day like it’s your last.” And no, that does not mean find a hospital, go there, find a room and lay down, eyes twitching…

— Sullivan

Provided we forgive others, God forgives us if He observes our:

• repentance,
• hopeless ignorance, or
• incapacity.

We should do the same.

Perhaps journaling has lost its shine to me because it’s naturally ego-boosting—and by that I mean it enlarges one’s sense of self—and thus, in a time when I have a strong sense of self and am quite happy to boot, it seems superfluous and self-centered. There are times when journaling is good—like through my doubt of God—and times, like now, when it’s not really a must. I could tell you about all the good that’s happening in my life right now. But what good would that do?

Yesterday on our drive home from Sullivan’s band concert at Park Forest Middle School, Carla asked what our distinguishing traits were within the family. We ended up calling her hilarious, Sullivan inventive, Éa strong, and, after “stinky” was offered, “kind” and “loving.” How about that! My life is complete.

“It is obvious that all marriages are imprudent marriages; just as all births are imprudent births. If prudence is your main concern, or if (in other words) you are a coward, it is certainly better not to be married; and even better not to be born.”

— G.K. Chesterton

I exist to serve.

“To get” has replaced all instances of “to give” at Christmastime:

• “I’m going to get Sullivan a mortar and pestle” instead of “I’m going to give Sullivan…”
• “I hope I get a Wii” instead of “I hope I receive a Wii” or “I hope someone gives me a Wii.”

The change has removed all generosity from the concept of gifts. Strange.

I feel a certain reorientation in my reading life these past two days, and it has to do with love. If I am to do everything in love, then I am to:

• choose what to read in love, that is, in thanksgiving that there are so many good books from which to choose,
• choose what to read for love, that is, thinking of the books’ relative capacity to facilitate or express my love for God and love for others—by which I mean specific others around me, not just books that will answer questions raised by what other people on the Internet are thinking about,
• read savoringly, because to do so any other way is a waste of time that benefits no one, including myself, unless I’m reading purely for information, and is therefore unloving. Reading for understanding, entertainment, or aesthetics doesn’t even happen if I don’t read savoringly.
• read only at times when I can read savoringly, a constraint which will have the added benefit of making my responsiveness to the actual world around me much better and thus my actual total quantity and quality of love in any given day.

Also, when I switch to reading articles, I should be selective enough with my Instapaper queue that I find it easy to pay close attention to each article I do read and I get through it all in a timely manner. Basically a miniature version of the above rules.

With movies, it is easier:

• I love God while watching movies because I watch them in thanksgiving.
• I love Carla while watching movies because she wanted time to watch movies together to be a part of our life. We wouldn’t be watching movies together if I didn’t like her.
• Movies are shared activities, if passive ones. They are much easier therefore to meet the “to the enjoyment of relationship with” portion of my definition of love.

Our own present culture has harnessed [fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self] in ways that have yielded…freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. […] But…the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

— David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

Flow, Scott. Have your agenda, yes. It is important. But go with the flow. Inevitably, life happens in the flow.

love noun 1 fondness and esteem that leads one to act toward the good of and the enjoyment of relationship with

“I no longer spend most of my time with college professors like myself. I’ve traded in the PhDs for Kristi and my friends at Highland.”

— Richard Beck

“The dark paradox, then, is this: the more we seek to alleviate our loneliness through digital connectivity, the more lonely we will feel. Along the way, we will forsake solitude as a matter of course. Curiously, it may not even be loneliness as a desire for companionship that the design of social media fosters in us. Rather, it is a counterfeit longing that is generated: for stimulation rather than companionship. In the end, we will be left with the most profound loneliness: perpetually feeling a need for connection that we cannot satisfy and finding that we have not even our own company. To recap: no abiding sense of companionship, no solitude, no place for thought.”

— Michael Sacasas, “Solitude and Loneliness”

“I’m not Atlas, on any conceivable level.”

— Tom Belt, in a pithy, poetic expression of our dependency of God and others

“It’s almost as if sex is not just a meaningless commodity traded between the consenting but, in fact, is an act so deeply powerful that we should consider wrapping it in an institution of personal commitment and public accountability.”

— Matt Popovits

friend:

In the next chapter Jesus seems to switch from Salvation by “what they do” to belief in Him. In chapter 5 he indicates that he’ll raise people who did good deeds up to life and those who did bad deeds to judgement, and then in Chapter 6 it’s those who behold and believe in him that he’ll raise up….

A bit conflicting…How do I get raised up to life!?

Also while I was in the US, one of our leaders here gave a passionate talk about the evils of homosexuality and how the bible “clearly” states this is sin. So that is causing some waves…

Fun fun.

me:

Hi Ethan –

I find my eleventh-grade math-class logic lessons useful here. First of all, there is no p → q statement in John 6:40. It does not say, “If you see the Son and believe in him, then you will have eternal life and I will raise you up on the last day.” So no need to worry about that one. But, you’ll say, at least two other verses in the chapter can be formulated as such:

1. “[W]hoever believes has eternal life” (v. 47) becomes “If you believe, then you have eternal life” and
2. “[T]he one who eats this bread will live forever” (v. 58) becomes “If you eat this bread, then you will live forever.”

So, the point is granted. But neither of these statements are “if and only if” statements. The only other thing you can say for sure from these statements is their contrapositives ('q → 'p):

1. If you don’t have eternal life, then you don’t believe.
2. If you aren’t living forever, than you haven’t eaten this bread.

You can’t say the original statements’ converses:

1. If you don’t believe, then you don’t have eternal life.
2. If you don’t eat this bread, you won’t live forever.

So nothing Jesus says here contradicts his earlier statement. Given this subset of verses, at least, there may be other ways to eternal life—indeed, as you’ve noted, in the earlier, John-5 statement, Jesus says so explicitly, insofar as “the resurrection of life” (ch. 5) and “eternal life” or “living forever” (ch. 6) are synonymous: He says, in effect, that if you do good, then you will come out of your grave to the resurrection of life.

So, assuming being raised up to life is synonymous with having eternal life, how do you get raised up to life? We have two ways that Jesus gives us here: Believe (eat this bread), and do good. Both appear to “work.”

All of the logical analysis above may be moot, however, if we observe that faith without works is dead and that it does no good to call Jesus Lord but not do what He says. Given those two additional data, it may be best to simply conflate the concepts of “believing” and “doing good." In other words, John, like many places in the New Testament, may be a great place to translate pisteuo as “to give allegiance.” Mere belief is no good.

Also, I’m sorry to hear about the waves! I hope your one gal there is OK. Hopefully your leader guy at least made a distinction between same-sex attraction and same-sex sexual activity.

Much love.

“Being incarnate was an embarrassment, a design-fault that God may have intended in the Italians but surely not in the English.”

On the English supposed “quiet suspicion of sensuality” that he saw in the old English. It made me laugh out loud.

“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”

This captures why my sexual ethics.

“Much as we should be grateful for the language and liturgy of the Anglican Church, we must deplore the weird interdiction which killed of polyphony at the very moment when Tallis and Byrd…had learned to rival Palestrina and Victoria in this supremely religious art form.”

The Anglicans outlawed polyphony?

“Jesus, the first and last, On thee my soul is cast: Thou didst the work begin By blotting out my sin; Thou wilt the root remove, And perfect me in love.

“Yet when the work is done The work is but begun: Partaker of thy grace, I long to see thy face; The first I prove below, The last I die to know” (105, from the Book of Common Prayer).

It’s the last couplet that excites me most.

“…we belted out this famous hymn…to the music of Mendelssohn, that gentle fellow-traveller of the Christian faith whom Queen Victoria, then head of the Anglican Church, took to her heart, as the Church did also, despite the fact, and also because of the fact, that he was a Jew.”

Mendelssohn was a Jew!? He has written some of the strongest Christian sacred music of all time!

“…and the very irrelevance to the surrounding world of everything he knew made the learning of it all the more rewarding” (167).

Is this true?

“By devoting their formative years to useless things, they made themselves supremely useful” (170).

A rhetorically fun point that Scruton makes about English Liberal Arts education. I do wonder if it’s true.

“How, for example, can you represent the interests of dead and unborn Englishmen, merely by counting the votes of the living? And how, in a system where important issues are determined by majority voting, do we protect the dissident minority, the individual eccentric, the person who will not or cannot conform?” (174)

I love the idea of thinking in terms of representing future, unborn compatriots in one’s government. And I appreciate Scruton’s praise for the common law in England which enables such lawmaking.

“Without what Freud call the ‘work of mourning’ we are diminished by our losses, and unable to live to the full beyond them” (244).

I know this to be true. I wonder whether I’m doing it for my mom. I want to make sure I make plenty space for others to mourn when I die.

“For dead civilizations can speak to living people, and the more conscious they are while dying, the more fertile is their influence thereafter” (244).

The same is true of dead people. I wish to be conscious while I’m dying.

Scruton, Roger. England : an elegy. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Print.

“Next time, before you proclaim that ‘we never talk about X’—remember this only unveils how small your ‘we’ is.

— James K.A. Smith

love verb 1 to esteem someone or something as to be gladly willing to donate of one’s self (e.g., attention, energy, time, material resources, money) for the their good 2 to esteem someone or something as to prioritize their needs

“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”

— Roger Scruton, “English Character” in England: an Elegy

“I often think our broken church/social structures reflect our homes. Families teach us that even when are different and disagree, we are one.”

— Mike Friesen

For us who are heterosexual, the task as it regards the sexual behavior of our brethren who are homosexual or bisexual is to support their clean conscience. If I am open and affirming of chaste homosexual expression but my gay friend is not, I will not try to persuade my gay friend toward my point of view. I will support him in his efforts to keep to the ethic he thinks is right. See Romans 14.

You know, I just queued a recurring task for Sunday evenings: “Set this week’s read-and-reflect time.” But methinks it a better approach to remind myself that the apt time is almost always now for stopping at whim for people, God, rest, or recreation. Do what you want.

Next someone asks “How’ve you been?” and you’re about to reply “busy,” try saying “overcommitted” instead. It might serve as a humbling, epiphanic, change-enabling confession.

It’s a really good idea to swear off screens for Sundays, at least through bedtime.