River-Rat Recycling

Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

2011-11-10T08:30:00.001-08:00

Today is the 36th anniversary of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald that cost 29 lives.

Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down

of the big lake they called "Gitche Gumee."

The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead

when the skies of November turn gloomy.

With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more

than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,

that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed

when the "Gales of November" came early.

The ship was the pride of the American side

coming back from some mill in Wisconsin.

As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most

with a crew and good captain well seasoned,

concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms

when they left fully loaded for Cleveland.

And later that night when the ship's bell rang,

could it be the north wind they'd been feelin'?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound

and a wave broke over the railing.

And ev'ry man knew, as the captain did too

'twas the witch of November come stealin'.

The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait

when the Gales of November came slashin'.

When afternoon came it was freezin' rain

in the face of a hurricane west wind.

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin'.

"Fellas, it's too rough t'feed ya."

At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in; he said,

"Fellas, it's bin good t'know ya!"

The captain wired in he had water comin' in

and the good ship and crew was in peril.

And later that night when 'is lights went outta sight

came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Does any one know where the love of God goes

when the waves turn the minutes to hours?

The searchers all say they'd have made Whitefish Bay

if they'd put fifteen more miles behind 'er.

They might have split up or they might have capsized;

they may have broke deep and took water.

And all that remains is the faces and the names

of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings

in the rooms of her ice-water mansion.

Old Michigan steams like a young man's dreams;

the islands and bays are for sportsmen.

And farther below Lake Ontario

takes in what Lake Erie can send her,

And the iron boats go as the mariners all know

with the Gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,

in the "Maritime Sailors' Cathedral."

The church bell chimed 'til it rang twenty-nine times

for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down

of the big lake they call "Gitche Gumee."

"Superior," they said, "never gives up her dead

when the gales of November come early!"

Great Quote from Tolstoy

2011-08-17T10:12:00.000-07:00

“There is something wrong with the order of this world when the rich live off the labors of the poor. They are fed by them, live in the houses they build, and are served by them—and if that isn’t enough, they establish charities for them and think themselves benefactors.”

"At the Smithville Methodist Church" by Stephen Dunn

2011-04-27T07:47:00.000-07:00

It was supposed to be Arts & Crafts for a week,
but when she came home
with the “Jesus Saves” button, we knew what art
was up, what ancient craft.
She liked her little friends. She liked the songs
they sang when they weren't
twisting and folding paper into dolls.
What could be so bad?
Jesus had been a good man, and putting faith
in good men was what
we had to do to stay this side of cynicism,
that other sadness.
OK, we said, One week. But when she came home
singing “Jesus loves me,
the Bible tells me so,” it was time to talk.
Could we say Jesus
doesn't love you? Could I tell her the Bible
is a great book certain people use
to make you feel bad? We sent her back
without a word.
It had been so long since we believed, so long
since we needed Jesus
as our nemesis and friend, that we thought he was
sufficiently dead,
that our children would think of him like Lincoln
or Thomas Jefferson.
Soon it became clear to us: you can't teach disbelief
to a child,
only wonderful stories, and we hadn't a story
nearly as good.
On parents' night there were the Arts & Crafts
all spread out
like appetizers. Then we took our seats
in the church
and the children sang a song about the Ark,
and Hallelujah
and one in which they had to jump up and down
for Jesus.
I can't remember ever feeling so uncertain
about what's comic, what's serious.
Evolution is magical but devoid of heroes.
You can't say to your child
“Evolution loves you.” The story stinks
of extinction and nothing
exciting happens for centuries. I didn't have
a wonderful story for my child
and she was beaming. All the way home in the car
she sang the songs,
occasionally standing up for Jesus.
There was nothing to do
but drive, ride it out, sing along
in silence.

Ascribing Good Fortune to God--and Angels

2011-04-25T16:29:00.000-07:00

I tire of people speaking of God's blessing them, especially when I contemplate so many people who are not enjoying such good fortune. This poem from The New Yorker earlier this month says it far better than I can.

NEW YEAR'S EVE

However busy you are, you should still reserve
One evening a year for thinking about your double,
The man who took the curve on Conway Road
Too fast, given the icy patches that night,
But no faster than you did; the man whose car
When it slid through the shoulder
Happened to strike a girl walking alone
From a neighbor's party to her parents' farm,
While your car struck nothing more notable
Than a snowbank.

One evening for recalling how soon you transformed
Your accident into a comic tale
Told first at the body shop, for comparing
That hour of pleasure with his hour of pain
At the house of the stricken parents, and his many
Long afternoons at the Lutheran graveyard.

If nobody blames you for assuming your luck
Has something to do with your character,
Don't blame him for assuming that his misfortune
Is somehow deserved, that justice would be undone
If his extra grief was balanced later
By a portion of extra joy.

Lucky you, whose personal faith has widened
To include an angel assigned to protect you
From the usual outcome of heedless moments.
But this evening consider the angel he lives with,
The stern enforcer who drives the sinners
Out of the Garden with a flaming sword
And locks the gate.

Carl Dennis, "New Year's Eve" (TNY, 4-11-11, 58)

When the Dam Breaks

2010-01-23T06:11:00.000-08:00

Here is the opening poem in God is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself, edited by Andrew David, Christopher J. Keller and Jon Stanley.

Praise Him by Brad Davis

As for idols, they are impotent. Not
one can see or speak or feel

a neighbor's ache--her dog dead
and child missing below the levee. I read

headlines and feel more
than all the idols that there ever were.

Even the idol that is our idea
of God is impotent--B is not A--

yet God does what he pleases,
the earth what is true to its nature.

We build cities and pay scant attention
to either, then cry foul when the dam breaks

Idols cannot save, nor theologies.
Only God, and that is no great comfort.

Memorable Words

2010-01-18T18:39:00.000-08:00

I was listening to Bobby Kennedy tonight---his announcement of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. Many in the crowd had not yet heard. He was calling for calm. He made reference to his brother's death, pointing out that he too had been killed by a white man. He quoted his favorite poet, Aeschylus, a playwright who lived in Greece in the sixth century B.C. Here are the memorable words Kennedy quoted:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart . . . falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.

Marcus Borg on Christianity

2009-11-02T19:29:00.000-08:00

Here are excerpts from The Heart of Christianity: Re-discovering A Life of Faith (2003). He is discussing three affirmations that are central to Christian faith, those being "the reality of God, the centralty of Jesus, and the centrality of the Bible."

--"God is real. There is a 'More,' to use language I will also use in Chapter 4. . . ."

--"Christian faith means affirming . . . Jesus as the decisive disclosure of God and of what a life full of God looks like. It means affirming Jesus as the Word of God, the wisdom of God, the light of the world, the way, and more, all known in a person. . . . Affirming the centrality of Jesus for Christians need not lead to Christian exclusivism."

--Just as Jesus is for us the Word of God disclosed in a person, so the Bible is the Word of God disclosed in a book. Being Christian means a commitment to the Bible as our foundational document and identity document. The Bible is our story. It is to shape our vision of life---our vision of God, of ourselves, and of God's dream for the earth" (pp. 37-38).

Borg goes into depth on these three foundational aspects of Christianity. The following is under the sub-heading "Metaphor as Bridge":

A Metaphorical approach to the Bible has the potential to be a bridge between the earlier and emerging paradigms. In Christian history, the more-than-literal meaning of biblical texts has always been most important. Only in the last few centuries has their literal factuality been emphasized as crucial.

Moreover, much of conservative Christian preaching today emphasizes the more-then-literal, the more-than-historical meaning of biblical texts. From my recent experience, I provide two brief examples.

The first was in a Pentecostal church. The preacher's text was the story of Jesus healing a paralyzed man in the second chapter of Mark's gospel. The "punch line" of the text and his sermon was, "Jesus said to the paralytic, 'Rise, take up your bed and walk.'" The preacher told several brief and moving stories of people paralyzed, immobilized in their lives, by addictions of various kinds, by long-term unemployment and giving up on ever finding a job, by abuse the prevented intimate relationships, and so forth. And after each story, he paused dramatically and then said emphatically, "And to that person Jesus says, 'Rise, take up your bed and walk!'" It occurred to me that he was preaching the text as metaphor; that is, he was preaching the more-than-literal, the more-than-historical meaning of the text.

The second was an Easter sermon in a conservative Baptist church. The pastor's sermon repeated one sentence over and over again, with great emphasis on the last four words: "They went to the tomb, but the tomb was empty!" In between the repetitions, he told stories of people who had encountered what felt like the "end" of their lives and hopes bitter disappointments, devastating griefs, tragic betrayals, children killed in accidents or imprisoned, financial catastrophes--the whole terrain of human trouble. And after each, often with his eyes getting big, his voice lowering to a hushed but loud whisper filled with amazement, he said, "And they went to the tomb---but the tomb was empty." His point was clear: what they had feared was the place of endings and death was the place of beginnings and new life. It was enormously effective (pp. 56-57).

Prince of Tides, A Novel by Pat Conroy

2009-07-10T04:44:00.000-07:00

Two Thought-Provoking Quotes

[Black children in the segregated South] who have tested their resources in the bitter milieus of white kids trained from birth to love Jesus and hate niggers with all their hearts (400).

That night we lay on our backs on the floating dock and felt the whole river fill up with the grandeur of completion as it neared the headwaters of the sea. In the scant light of a new moon, we could see every star that God meant the naked human eye to see in our part of the world. The Milky Way was a white river of light above me and I could lift my hand in front of my face and annihilate half of that river of stars with the palm of my hand. The tide was dropping and the fiddler crabs had arisen from their mud caverns and the males waved their large audacious claws in eerie harmony. They moved their claws in synchronization with the tides and stars and winds. They signaled with their ivory arms that the world was as it was always meant to be. Thousands of them gestured to God that the tides had fallen, that the Pagasi shone with the proper magnitude, that the porpoises were singing of the hunt in the racing waters, that the moon had been faithful to its covenant. This movement was a dance, a trust, a ceremony of divine affirmation (409).

HAUNTING LINES FROM EMILY

2009-03-31T16:21:00.000-07:00

EXCEPT the heaven had come so near,
So seemed to choose my door,
The distance would not haunt me so;
I had not hoped before.

But just to hear the grace depart
I never thought to see,
Afflicts me with a double loss;
’T is lost, and lost to me.

I don't begin to understand what dear Emily Dickinson meant by these lines and I can't find any interpretation, so I'll take a stab.

It is well known that Emily resisted conversion during a revival when she was enrolled at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. Of those converted, she wrote, "They seem so very tranquil, and their voices are kind, and gentle, and the tears fill their eyes so often, I really think I envy them."

I wonder if the above poem speaks to this kind of revival that came so close to home ("seemed to choose my door"). Is she saying that God's distance, in light of this new closeness, haunts (or hurts) her? Did she have hope on this occasion that she had never hoped before? Did God's grace depart once the revival was over? She implies this elsewhere. Is the loss double because the grace (perhaps meaning the revival) has ended and her opportunity to accept the grace has passed her by?

Here's another poem that may have a similar theme:

JUST lost when I was saved!
Just felt the world go by!
Just girt me for the onset with eternity,
When breath blew back,
And on the other side
I heard recede the disappointed tide!

Therefore, as one returned, I feel,
Odd secrets of the line to tell!
Some sailor, skirting foreign shores,
Some pale reporter from the awful doors
Before the seal!

Next time, to stay!
Next time, the things to see
By ear unheard,
Unscrutinized by eye.

Next time, to tarry,
While the ages steal,—
Slow tramp the centuries,
And the cycles wheel.

Jim Harrison, SAVING DAYLIGHT

2009-03-18T06:41:00.000-07:00

This morning I'm reading some poems from Harrison's 2006 book of poetry. Here are some lines worth pondering.

I can freely tie myself up without rope.
This talent is in the realm of antimagic
and many people have it. . . . (p. 10)

He's [God] so tired of hearing about this ditzy Irishman,
Bishop Ussher, who spread the rumor that creation
only took six thousand years when it required twelve billion.
Man Shrunk himself with the biological hysteria
of clocks, the machinery of dread. You spend twelve billion
years inventing ninety billion galaxies and who appreciates
your work except children, birds and dogs, and a few
other genius strokes like otters and porpoises, those humans
who kiss joy as it flies, who see though not with the eye. (72)

The church says God is spy
who keeps track of how we misues
our genitals. . . . (115)

Wendell Berry's JAYBER CROW

2009-02-04T05:57:00.001-08:00

John, in his wonderful down-home Kentucky accent, just finished reading Jayber Crow this morning. I had read it years ago, but it's well worth reading a second time. Here is a quote (p. 321) that's worth pondering. Jaber, after more than thirty years, has been pushed out of his barber shop by government inspectors and has moved to a little shack on the river:

I kept on as janitor of the church, which is scheduled work. I still walk up on Fridays to clean, as I have always done, and on Sunday mornings I go up to ring the bell and sit through the service. I don't attend altogether for religious reasons. I feel more religious, in fact, here beside this corrupt and holy stream. I am not sectarian or evangelical. I don't want to argue with anybody about religion. I wouldn't want to argue about it even if I thought it was arguable, or even if I could win. I'm a literal reader of the Scriptures, and so I see the difficulties. And yet every Sunday morning I walk up there, over a cobble of quibbles. I am, I suppose, a difficult man. I am, maybe, the ultimate Protestant, the man at the end of the Protestant road, for as I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here. Well, you can read and see what you think.

A Thought-Provoking Poem

2009-01-15T17:31:00.001-08:00

John read some poetry to me last night and began reading The Picture of Dorian Gray all from an anthology of Oscar Wilde (1854-1099), born in Dublin. Here is a cartoon drawing of him. He was a most controversial character and often made the news. He was also a profound writer. Below is a poem that we both thought to be most profound.

"On the Massacre of the Christians in Bulgaria"

Christ, dost Thou live indeed? or are Thy bones
Still straitened in their rock-hewn sepulchre?
And was Thy Rising only dreamed by her
Whose love of Thee for all her sin atones?
For here the air is horrid with men's groans,
The priests who call upon Thy name are slain,
Dost Thou not hear the bitter wail of pain
From those whose children lie upon the stones?
Come down, O Son of God! incestuous gloom
Curtains the land, and through the starless night
Over Thy Cross a Crescent moon I see!
If Thou in very truth didst burst the tomb
Come down, O Son of Man! and show Thy might
Lest Mahomet be crowned instead of Thee!

Reasons A Reverend Resists Church Attendance

2008-12-11T07:49:00.000-08:00

"One reason I don't [go to church] is very often when I go I am bored out of my wits. They're not telling me anything I haven't heard before. They are not moving my heart. Plus it gives birth in me to the worst of me. I keep thinking how much better I could do it. And what a terrible thing to go to church and come away thinking, "God, I wish I had gotten up there. I could have really told it the way it is." Rev. Frederick Buechner

Can Atheists Worship God?

2008-12-07T16:37:00.000-08:00

Ursula Goodenough, who closes this volume [The Faith of Scientists], speaks of the "sacred depths of nature." Goodenough's worldview is shaped by the values of the scientific community. Yet she very much enjoys worship and even sings in a church choir. She is inspired by cathedrals. But she cannot believe in the supernatural: "Such faith is simply not available to me."

I wonder what God thinks of Ursula Goodenough. Can God be worshiped by those who celebrate the Creation without acknowledging the Creator? In conversation, someone once praised one of my books but could not remember the author's name. The praise was strangely more genuine for its inarticulate anonymity. I suspect, as C.S. Lewis once speculated, that God may have more connection with honest atheists than many think. [Karl Giberson in Christianity Today, 12-08, 62]

Who is Dr. Goodenough? She is a professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and the author of the bestseller, The Sacred Depths of Nature. She does not believe in God, calls herself a religious naturalist, and wants believers and unbelievers work together to save the earth.

A Failed Conspiracy

2008-11-07T07:06:00.000-08:00

Cecil John Rhodes (1853-1902), known today as one of the all-time meanest imperialistic despots in Africa—raping its land of its mineral wealth—hatched a grand conspiracy in his younger years. [King Leopold II of Belgium probably ranks higher than Rhodes as an evil pariah in Africa.] In his first will, Rhodes specifies his money be used as follows:

To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire. . . .

LEAVING CHURCH

2008-09-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

Excerpts from Barbara Brown Taylor, LEAVING CHURCH: A MEMOIR OF FAITH (Harper, 2006)

"By now I expected to be a seasoned parish minister, wearing black clergy shirts grown gray from frequent washing. I expected to love the children who hung on my legs after Sunday morning services until they grew up and had children of their own. I even expected to be buried wearing the same red vestments in which I was ordained.

"Today those vestments are hanging in the sacristy of an Anglican church in Kenya, my church pension is frozen, and I am as likely to spend Sunday mornings with friendly Quakers, Presbyterians, or Congregationalists as I am with the Episcopalians who remain my closest kin. Sometimes I even keep the Sabbath with a cup of steaming Assam tea on my front porch, watching towhees vie for the highest perch in the poplar tree while God watches me. These days I earn my living teaching school, not leading worship, and while I still dream of opening a small restaurant in Clarkesville or volunteering at an eye clinic in Nepal, there is no guarantee that I will not run off with the circus before I am through. This is not the life I planned, or the life I recommend to others. But it is the life that has turned out to be mine, and the central revelation in it for me--that the call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human--seems important enough to witness to on paper. This book is my attempt to do that."

Stephen Mitchell on Thomas Aquinas

2008-07-16T05:13:00.001-07:00

Stephen Mitchell, Meetings with the Archangel, pp. 122-123:

During the three weeks when I submitted myself to the discipline of inhabiting Aquinas' thought, of seeing with his eyes and breathing through his nostrils, I came to understand how comfortable the world view of the Church could be. "Just give your assent to a few little preliminary ideas," the Summa whispered, "and I will take care of everything else; I will settle all your questions, even the questions you don't know how to ask; I will order the world into a total structure, a magnificent architecture of hierarchically interconnecting ideas. Everything will be decided forever. Let me do it for you. Trust me." I could feel the satisfaction this kind of system provided; at least, for several pages I could feel it. There I was, standing in the downtown of Christian culture, with the great emporiums of belief lining the granite boulevards. Reason and Revelation strolled arm in arm beside me on a spring afternoon, window-shopping. All the floor-managers and salespeople patiently displayed their wares and answered us in the politest newspaper Latin. Somewhere, on some top floor, the Holy Spirit occupied His revolving chairmanship, on the lookout for safe investments. In every president's office of every building, God the Father leaned back in a leather chair, His ankles crossed on the desk, while in the room with the bare lightbulb His Son added up figures for the final inventory.

I SMOKE MY PIPE AND WORSHIP GOD

2008-06-03T17:40:00.000-07:00

A POEM BY J.S. BACH

Whene’er I take my pipe and stuff it
And smoke to pass the time away,
My thoughts as I sit and puff it,
Dwell on a picture sad and grey.
It teaches me that very like
Am I myself unto my pipe.

Like me, this pipe so fragrant burning
Is made of naught but earth and clay;
To earth I too shall be returning,
It falls and, ere I’d think to say,
It breaks in two before my eyes,
In store for me a like fate lies.

No stain the pipe’s hue yet doth darken;
It remains white. Thus do I know
That when to death’s call I must hearken
My body, too, all pale wilt grow.
To black beneath the sod ’twill turn,
Likewise, the pipe, if oft it burn.
Or when the pipe is fairly glowing,
Behold then instantaneously,
The smoke off into thin air going,
Till naught but ash is left to see.
Man’s frame likewise will burn
And unto dust his body turn.

How oft it happens when one’s smoking:
The stopper’s missing from its shelf,
And one goes with one’s finger poking
Into the bowl and burns oneself.
If in the pipe such pain doth dwell,
How hot must be the pains of Hell.

Thus o’er my pipe, in contemplation
Of such things, I can constantly
Indulge in fruitful meditation,
And so, puffing contentedly,
On land, on sea, at home, abroad,
I smoke my pipe and worship God.
- Johann Sebastian Bach

[Found in Drinking With Calvin And Luther! A History of Alcohol In The Church]

A GREAT POEM

2008-04-29T19:23:00.000-07:00

"Slum Lords"

by John Updike, from Americana: and Other Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001)

The superrich make lousy neighbors—
they buy a house and tear it down
and build another, twice as big, and leave.
They're never there; they own so many
other houses, each demands a visit.
Entire neighborhoods called fashionable,
bustling with servants and masters, such as
Louisburg Square in Boston or Bel Air in L.A.,
are districts now like Wall Street after dark
or Tombstone once the silver boom went bust.
The essence of superrich is absence.
They like to demonstrate they can afford
to be elsewhere. Don't let them in.
Their riches form a kind of poverty.

MY DEAR FRIEND EMILY

2008-04-12T17:02:00.000-07:00

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant

Emily Dickinson

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

JOHN ADAMS

2008-04-01T17:43:00.000-07:00

Here's a wonderfully warm and thoughtful quote from that crusty and cranky old curmudgeon of an American Founding Father, John Adams. To his son (and later President) John Quincy, he wrote: "I have been called lately to weep in the chamber of my birth over the remains of a beautiful baby of your brother's, less than a year old. . . . Why have I been preserved at more than three quarters of a century, and why was that fair flower blasted so soon, are questions we are not permitted to ask."

Jerome and Giovanni Bellini

2008-02-21T07:18:00.000-08:00

Here is old Saint Jerome studying near his monastery in Bethlehem--a real sexy guy. Word is that there was a scandalous relationship between him and Paula a very smart lady who worked alongside him in his scholarly pursuits. He of course got all the credit.

Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430 – 1516), whose work this is, is an interesting character in his own right--and a fantastic artist. He was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. His father was Jacopo Bellini, his brother was Gentile Bellini, and his brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna. He is considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it towards a more sensuous and colouristic style. Here at the age of 85, he has depicted Naked Young Woman in Front of the Mirror.

Another painting produced in old age also departs from traditional Christian themes. Here is his absolutely wonderful Feast of the gods.

TERTULLIAN: CHURCH FATHER, 160-235

2008-01-20T13:54:00.000-08:00

Tertullian’s perspective on women is most interesting. He was married and he became part of a movement where women in leadership outnumbered the man by a ratio of two to one. Yet his scurrilous statements about womanhood are shocking. Women, he charged, are the “devil’s gateway. . . . You destroyed so easily God’s image (man).” In his icy denigration of heretical groups, he marshaled forth proof: “The very women of these heretics, how wanton they are! For they are bold enough to teach, to dispute, to enact exorcisms, to undertake cures—it may be even to baptize.” Women, he argued are daughters of Eve: “Every woman should be . . . walking about as Eve mourning and repentant, in order that by every garb of penitence she might the more fully expiate that which she derives from Eve—the ignominy, I mean, of the first sin, and the odium . . . of human perdition.”

Yet, Tertullian stands out in the early church in his profound understanding of the potential beauty of Christian marriage—a quote appropriate for a wedding program in the twenty-first century:

"How beautiful, then, the marriage of two Christians, two who are one in hope, one in desire, one in the way of life they follow, one in the religion they practice. They are as brother and sister, both servants of the same Master. Nothing divides them, either in flesh or in spirit. They are, in very truth, two in one flesh; and where there is but one flesh there is also but one spirit. They pray together, they worship together, they fast together; instructing one another, encouraging one another, strengthening one another. Side by side they visit God's church and partake of God's Banquet; side by side they face difficulties and persecution, share their consolations. They have no secrets from one another; they never shun each other's company; they never bring sorrow to each other's hearts."

HIGH WATER MARK by David Shumate

2008-01-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

With flooding in the forecast here along the Grand River on Abrigador Trail, I have a special appreciation for this poem.

"High Water Mark"

It's hard to believe, but at one point the water rose to this
level. No one had seen anything like it. People on rooftops.
Cows and coffins floating through the streets. Prisoners
carrying invalids from their rooms. The barkeeper consoling
the preacher. A coon hound who showed up a month later
forty miles downstream. And all that mud it left behind. You
never forget times like those. They become part of who you
are. You describe them to your grandchildren. But they think
it's just another tale in which animals talk and people live
forever. I know it's not the kind of thing you ought to say...
But I wouldn't mind seeing another good flood before I die.
It's been dry for decades. Next time I think I'll just let go and
drift downstream and see where I end up.

"Snow" by Anne Sexton

2007-12-07T18:33:00.000-08:00

Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don’t bite till you know
if it’s bread or stone.
What I bit is all bread,
rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.

DOROTHY SAYERS

2007-11-14T04:44:00.000-08:00

Dorothy Sayers (1893 – 1957) was a well-known British author, translator, and Christian humanist. She is best known for her mysteries, a series of novels and short stories--and also her songs. Here is one of them.

Christ walks the world again, His lute upon His back,
His red robe rent to tatters, his riches gone to rack,
The wind that wakes the morning blows His hair about His face,
His hands and feet are ragged with the ragged briar’s embrace,
For the hunt is up behind Him and His sword is at His side,…
Christ the bonny outlaw walks the whole world wide,
Singing: “Lady, lady, will you come away with Me,
Lie among the bracken and break the barley bread?
We will see new suns arise in golden, far-off skies,
For the Son of God and Woman hath not where to lay His head.”

-Dorothy Sayers, Catholic Tales and Christian Songs

For full text go here

FASCINATING BOOK ON PLAGIARISM

2007-07-20T06:47:00.000-07:00

For anyone interesting in protecting words, here's a great book: WORDS FOR THE TAKING: THE HUNT FOR A PLAGIARIST by Neal Bowers.

Neal Bowers has published three volumes of poetry (most recently Night Vision), two scholarly books, and a nonfiction memoir, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper's, Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and other journals. He lives in Ames, Iowa with his wife, Nancy (also a writer), and their five cats.

Amazon.com
In Words for the Taking author Neal Bowers takes the reader on an unusual hunt for a literary stalker. A poet and teacher by profession, Bowers became a detective out of necessity when he discovered one of his poems had been plagiarized and repeatedly published by someone calling himself David Sumner. Later, he learned Sumner had stolen more of his work and the poems of other writers as well. Here he describes his almost surreal search for the plagiarist and its surprising aftermath.

For Neal Bowers, David Sumner--a.k.a. David Jones--became an almost mythic adversary, and Bowers's quest for justice a kind of heroic quest. The character of the plagiarist is at the heart of this story: who was "David Sumner" and why did he steal another man's words? The answers to these questions prove as troubling as they are startling.

From Publishers Weekly
In 1991 Bowers, an obscure poet, discovers that someone is stealing his work from the pages of Poetry magazine and republishing it in smaller journals across the country. Terrified that posterity will confuse him with the thief, he writes letters to dozens of poetry journal editors, retains a lawyer, even hires a private eye. After a long search, the detective identifies the plagiarist, an ex-con and one-time school teacher from Oregon, who strikes up a correspondence with the poet, even writes a letter to Bowers's wife. Bowers finds himself lifted out of obscurity, when the New York Times reprints his American Scholar essay on the ordeal. By the finale of this book he's famous?because of a plagiarist he never met and a few stolen poems that few will likely ever read. Imagine Pale Fire as written by Kinbote, or The Trial written by K., and you'll have a sense of Bowers's weakness as a narrator: he's too aggrieved to see his story's irony. And he never explains why he is bitter at what others consider a kooky kind of flattery. Bowers's tendency to cast himself as the guardian of the Text seems misguided. In the end it's the sheer bathos of the narrator's obsession?not his (quite competent) poems or (less competent) reflections on the state of American scholarship?that lends the book its chief interest and charm.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Christ Entering into Brussels

2007-06-13T19:41:00.000-07:00

Here is James Ensor's most famous painting.

James Ensor was born to an English father and a Flemish mother, shopkeepers in the coastal town of Ostend. They kept a store or market stall there which catered to the tastes of holidaymakers, selling bricabrac, toys, beach articles and the grotesque carnival masks which were traditionally worn in the local Shrove Tuesday processions. These parades and the masks were to figure prominently in Ensor's work, notably his monumental painting, Christ Entering into Brussels, monumental not only for its size but for its merciless depiction of the cruelty, vanity, hypocrisy and fatuousness which the artist perceived all around him in mid-19th-century Belgian society.

But the young artist, an acknowleged master in his 20's, did not silence his disgust. He expressed it in some of the most scathing and original works of art ever created. His reviled and renowned Christ Entering... is only the most famous, but the whole body of his work, which includes more than 160 etchings as well as hundreds of paintings and drawings, is a brilliant denunciation, not only of the morally bankrupt Belgian--and by extension European--society of his day, but also an advance on the homicidal folly which was to ensue in the 20th century.

A Minister Contemplates Nothingness

2007-06-05T12:55:00.000-07:00

One of George McDonald fictional characters is Thomas Wingfold, an Anglican curate who is asked: "Do you still think of giving up your curacy?"

Wingfold responds:

"I have almost forgotten I ever thought of such a thing. Whatever energies I may or may not have, I know one thing for certain, that I could not devote them to anything else I should think entirely worth doing. Indeed nothing else seems interesting enough--nothing to repay the labour, but the telling of my fellow-men about the one man who is the truth, and to know whom is the life. Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. No facts can take the place of truths, and if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and John and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go further . . . and say, I would rather die for evermore believing as Jesus believed, than live for evermore believing as those that deny him. If there be no God, I feel assured that existence is and could be but a chaos of contradictions, whence can emerge nothing worthy to be called a truth, nothing worth living for.--No, I will not give up my curacy. I will teach that which IS good, even if there should be no God to make a fact of it, and I will spend my life on it, in the growing hope, which MAY become assurance, that there is indeed a perfect God, worthy of being the Father of Jesus Christ, and that it was
BECAUSE they are true, that these things were lovely to me and to so many men and women, of whom some have died for them, and some would be yet ready to die."

Flammarion Woodcut

2007-02-07T10:52:00.000-08:00

Flammarion Woodcut

Check this out! Isn't it wonderful? Here is depicted an inquisitive young adult (must be a woman with a dress like that!) peeking through where the sky meets the heavens. Don't we all wonder what's out there beyond the beyond. It looks like a medieval woodcut but apparently comes from a nineteenth-century volume. The caption to this woodcut in Flammarion's book is translated: "A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he [or she] had found the point where the sky and the Earth touched...." See this Wikipedia article.

Here's another version of the woodcut, colorized by Roberta Weir.

My friend Sarah from London sent me this:

I like this quotation from Camille Flammarion:

What intelligent being, what being capable of responding emotionally to a beautiful sight, can look at the jagged, silvery lunar crescent trembling in the azure sky, even through the weakest of telescopes, and not be struck by it in an intensely pleasurable way, not feel cut off from everyday life here on earth and transported toward that first stop on the celestial journeys? What thoughtful soul could look at brilliant Jupiter with its four attendant satellites, or splendid Saturn encircled by its mysterious ring, or a double star glowing scarlet and sapphire in the infinity of night, and not be filled with a sense of wonder? Yes, indeed, if humankind - from humble farmers in the fields and toiling workers in the cities to teachers, people of independent means, those who have reached the pinnacle of fame or fortune, even the most frivolous of society women - if they knew what profound inner pleasure await those who gaze at the heavens, then France, nay, the whole of Europe, would be covered with telescopes instead of bayonets, thereby promoting universal happiness and peace."

- Camille Flammarion, French astronomer, 1880

More Kennedy Scandal?

2006-12-03T05:16:00.000-08:00

So, now we read of Bobby Kennedy's love affair with Edith Hamilton. This from NY TIMES columnist David Brooks (11-26-06). What will the media dig up next! Brooks is commenting on the recent film "Bobby."

Who is Edith Hamilton? Well, who among us who took a liberal arts education in the 1960s didn't read her little paperback books on ancient philosophy and life? It is in this vein that we read about Bobby and Edith. Says Brooks:

"Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless 'all the glory that was Greece' mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy’s life. He carried his beaten, underlined and annotated copy around with him for years, pulling it from his pocket, reading sections aloud to audiences. . . . Kennedy found in the Greeks a sensibility similar to his own — heroic and battle-scarred but also mystical. He shared the awful sense of foreboding that pervades the work of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and that distinctly Greek awareness of the invisible patterns that connect events to one another, how the arrogance men and women show at one moment will twist back and bring agony later on."

Brooks continues:

"Hamilton is at her best describing the tragic sensibility, the strange mixture of doom and exaltation that marks Greek drama. It was based on the conviction that good grows out of bad, virtue out of hardship, and that wisdom is born in suffering. Kennedy memorized a passage from Aeschylus, which Hamilton quotes twice in her book:

'God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.'

Kennedy, recovering from his brother’s murder, found in the ancient Greeks a civilization that was eager to look death in the face, but which seemed to draw strength from what it found there. The Greeks seemed more convinced of the dignity and significance of life the more they brooded on the pain and precariousness of it. . . .

The story of Kennedy’s grief is the story of a man stepping out of his time and fetching from the past a sturdier ethic. He developed a bit of that quality, which greater leaders like Churchill possessed in abundance, of seeming to step from another age. Kennedy became a figure in the 1960s, but was never really of the ’60s. He promoted many liberal policies but was never a member of a team since he drew strength from somewhere else. . . ."

[The only site I could find with the entire column--that does not require a password is here--though I'm not recommending the site itself.

Treasure on the Web

2006-10-30T04:59:00.000-08:00

Early this morning John and I began a conversation related to a comment on one of my blogs that came in last night. As so often happens, the conversation moved down a rabbit trail and ended up with the topics of muckraking and yellow journalism and Ida Tarbell and others. Our combined memories from American History courses soon ran out and I got on the computer and began googling.

What a treasure I found: "History of Journalism" with the option to click on the 20th century decades. The decade of 1900 is worth it all, with wonderful biographical references to Ida Tarbell (pictured on the left) and Nellie Bly, among others. If you love history or have any interest at all in the history of journalism, check it out. http://ehub.journalism.ku.edu/history/1900/1900.html

From that site, I went to the definition of muckraking. I had forgotten where that term came from. Test your own IQ on great English literature. I was reminded by Teddy Roosevelt. Here is a short portion of a speech he gave--well worth reading.

April 15, 1906

Over a century ago Washington laid the corner stone of the Capitol in what was then little more than a tract of wooded wilderness here beside the Potomac. . . . The material problems that face us today are not such as they were in Washington's time, but the underlying facts of human nature are the same now as they were then. Under altered external form we war with the same tendencies toward evil that were evident in Washington's time, and are helped by the same tendencies for good. It is about some of these that I wish to say a word today.

In Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck Rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck rake in his hand; who was offered a celestial crown for his muck rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor.

In Pilgrim's Progress the Man with the Muck Rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing.

Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck rake, speedily becomes, not a help but one of the most potent forces for evil.

There are in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man, whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, business, or social life. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform or in a book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful.

The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. . . . http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/presidents/26_t_roosevelt/psources/ps_muckrake.html

"THE PROPHET" by Kahlil Gibran

2006-10-24T09:36:00.000-07:00

As I was studying Woody Guthrie for the Folk Music course (See www.3holepunch.net) John and I are teaching, I came across this quote in Joe Klein's biography, Woody Guthrie, p. 68:

One day in the library, he discovered the long narrative poem The Prophet, by Kahlil Gibran, and it was a revelation. He was amazed to find in it a philosophy that mirrored his own exactly; it was as though Gibran had tapped his soul. He felt the same way reading it--tingly and alive--as he had in the desesrt. He loved the sonorous verities, the heavy mists and rhythms of it, the idea of the unity of all things, the idea that every living thing had value. Sometimes it seemed the Prophet said things that Woody knew but hadn't yet formulated in his mind: "The lust for comfort murders the passion of the soul, and then walks grinning in the funeral."

Here is photo and an excerpt for Gibran's poem:

On Religion

And an old priest said, "Speak to us of Religion."

And he said:

Have I spoken this day of aught else?

Is not religion all deeds and all reflection,

And that which is neither deed nor reflection, but a wonder and a surprise ever springing in the soul, even while the hands hew the stone or tend the loom?

Who can separate his faith from his actions, or his belief from his occupations?

Who can spread his hours before him, saying, "This for God and this for myself; This for my soul, and this other for my body?"

All your hours are wings that beat through space from self to self.

He who wears his morality but as his best garment were better naked.

The wind and the sun will tear no holes in his skin.

And he who defines his conduct by ethics imprisons his song-bird in a cage.

The freest song comes not through bars and wires.

And he to whom worshipping is a window, to open but also to shut, has not yet visited the house of his soul whose windows are from dawn to dawn.

Your daily life is your temple and your religion.

Whenever you enter into it take with you your all.

Take the plough and the forge and the mallet and the lute,

The things you have fashioned in necessity or for delight.

For in revery you cannot rise above your achievements nor fall lower than your failures.

And take with you all men:

For in adoration you cannot fly higher than their hopes nor humble yourself lower than their despair.

And if you would know God be not therefore a solver of riddles.

Rather look about you and you shall see Him playing with your children.

And look into space; you shall see Him walking in the cloud, outstretching His arms in the lightning and descending in rain.

You shall see Him smiling in flowers, then rising and waving His hands in trees.

T. S. Eliot

2006-10-14T04:05:00.000-07:00

This morning John read poems from T.S. Eliot. For those of you out there who may think he is not approachable--too deep for regular folks--the "Journey of The Magi" is a good place to start. The powerful sensual images almosst make you feel like you're going along on the journey.

Journey of The Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

I copied this from a great website that has interesting material on Eliot's spiritual journey---especially his "conversion" in Rome--the city we left only a few days ago.
The site: http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/eliot.htm

John also favored me with his interpretive reading of another one of Eliot's profoundly descriptive poems:

A Song for Simeon

Lord, they Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winder sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us they peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's
children?
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat's path, and the fox's home,
Fleeing from foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let they servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

FAULTY MEMORIES

2006-09-27T07:05:00.000-07:00

Next month husband John and I will be teaching a course in Italy to American college students (semeste abroad). It is a fascinating course: Memoirs: Reading and Writing the Stories of Our Lives. The students will be reading selections from dozens of memoirs, including St. Augustine, John Bunyan, Carrie Nation, Frederick Douglas, C.S. Lewis, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Maya Angelou, Anne Lamott, Donald Miller and many more.

The best book I've found on memoirs and memoir writing is Maureen Murdock: "Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory."

By her title, she is stating very clearly that memory is faulty. We all know that, but it's good to read her own case and see her examples.

Here is a short quote from her first chapter that relates to a story of her own skewed memories:

"Memory is rarely whole or factually correct. If the image of the events we have participated in does not match the image of the self we have carefully constructed, then we rarely remember the facts of the event at all. What we remember is a reconstruction of image and feeling that suits our needs and purposes."

So, then how can our students write memoirs that are factually correct? Documents, documents, documents. Are there letters, journals, emails, etc. that help in the reconstruction of a life. I have found documents to be a critical factor in the retelling of a recent period of my own life. Apart from such documents, we must be ever aware that our memories are often very skewed-----and always very subjective. (There's no other way memories can be!)

That doesn't mean that, without documents, we shouldn't write our memoirs. It simply means that we must be very conscious of our subjectivity.

TIME Magazine: "Does God Want You to be Rich?"

2006-09-15T11:41:00.000-07:00

"Most unnerving for Osteen's [Joel, megachurch minister of Lakewood in Houston] critics is the suspicion that they are fighting not just one idiocyncratic misreading of the gospel but something more daunting: the latest lurch in Protestantism's ongoing descent into full-blown American materialism. After the eclipse of Calvinist Puritanism, whose respect for money was counterbalanced by a horror of worldliness, much of Protestantism quietly adopted the idea that 'you don't have to give up the American Dream. You just see it as a sign of God's blessing,' says Edith Blumhofer, director of Wheaton College's Center for the Study of American Evangelicals. Indeed, a last-gasp resistance to this embrace of wealth and comfort can be observed in the current evangelical brawl over whether comfortable megachurches (like Osteen's and Warren's) with pumped-up day-care centers and high-tech amenities represent a slide from glorifying an all-powerful God to asking what custom color you would prefer he paint your pews. 'The tragedy is that Christianity has become a yes-man for the culture,' says Boston University's Prothero." (Sept. 18, 2006, pp. 55-56)

This is a great cover-story in TIME, well worth reading. John read it to me this morning. It focuses on megachurches, an interest of mine, especially in my book "Left Behind in a Megachurch World." See Ruth Tucker's Books at www.ruthtucker.net.