Me and Job

I loathe my life; I would not live forever.  Leave me alone, for my days are a breath. -- Job 7:16

I am always skittish of verses from Job because you have to be very aware of the context.  In this case, though, it is Job himself speaking, and we pretty well know the context.

Perhaps it is only me, but there are days when I could say this.  Just let me die.  Why does this have to go on and on?  I shouldn’t complain because I don’t have health issues.  Everything in my life is fairly stable.  Yet, I cannot help feel that I disappoint everyone.  I don’t mind screwing things up for myself.  I don’t like to fail other people, cause anguish to others, or cause other people more work or to be burdened in some way.  I would just like for everyone around me to be happy. 

You might look at my desire and think it’s noble or self-sacrificing, but there’s something amiss with it.  Obviously, no matter what I do, it’s not going to make everybody happy.  It’s kind of like the political concept of utopia.  It’s unrealistic.  There’s an aspect of it that attributes more power and significance to my life than is appropriate. 

Job was a wealthy, powerful man.  He was a man who took charge of things and took care of his family.  When Job spoke, people listened.  Surely such a successful man must be wise, and he was.  Even the wisest of us, though, are fools compared to God. 

It’s been my practice since I was a kid to take the heavy end of the load.  I have always taken the hardest, dirtiest part of any task when I could.  Part of that stems from the fact that I worked so much with my father and that he was in his forties when I was born.  He was tough and all for his age, but he was also ready to take it a little easier by the time I was old enough to do man-sized labor.  He let me have those rough jobs, not only because my main skills were brute force and awkwardness, but to toughen me up and teach me.  The older and stronger and tougher I got, the more work I was able and expected to do.  There was nothing wrong with that, but I did get to thinking that I should be able to do about anything and handle it all myself.

That was a pretty simple world on the old farm.  I could have most of the answers most of the time.  The world I live in now is not so simple.  I feel a kinship with Job in this, too.  Job was doing what he knew to do.  Everything worked the way it was supposed to work.  Everything made sense.  Job’s world was straightforward:  Do right and be blessed; do wrong and suffer. 

Except that’s not the way the world is. 

I am not the center of things.  There are billions of other humans alive at this moment.  Billions of others have lived and died while creating, shaping, and shading all that we must face and interact with today.  Aside from humanity, all of creation impinges upon us, from the deer that darts in front of our car to the virus that makes our heads hurt and our noses run. 

My job, the purpose and destiny of my existence it not to fix all that.  I am not a failure if I can’t.  God asks only that I do what I can, that I play my part, and endure.  We really are in something bigger than us, and that’s what the Lord showed Job in the end.  He never answered all of Job’s questions.  He never explained the reasons for his loss and suffering.  He just revealed Himself as the center of it.  It was not about Job.  It’s not about me, either.    

Read the Sign

Jesus answered them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you are seeking me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves.  Do not labor for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you. For on him God the Father has set his seal." -- John 6:26-27

I am still more than moderately fried, and today was supposed to be a vacation day.  I was going to get the bike out and cruise for a few hours.  That's not going to happen.  I might get off early enough to ride over to Lambert's and catch a biscuit.  I suppose that leaves me laboring "for the food that perishes".  Paul, though, said if I didn't work, I shouldn't eat, so there's that. 

I don't think Jesus is chastising anybody for honest work or for fielding a "throwed roll".  This passage follows John's account of the feeding of the five thousand, the fourth miraculous sign recorded in his Gospel.  The first sign was turning water into wine at Cana, the second was healing an official's son at Capernaum after He had returned to Cana, the third sign was healing the sick man at the pool of Bethesda.  Signs were given and miracles wrought not so much to convince those who refused to believe but to assure and encourage those who did.  A sign does not create faith; it is more like adding a catalyst.  Faith is activated when it sees a sign.

Those to whom Jesus spoke were not people who had faith in Him, whose faith had been quickened by seeing His power and authority impacting their material existence.  They were people who had eaten, filled their bellies, and started thinking that their days of having to work for a living were over.  They did not care who Jesus was.  They would have followed the devil himself just as quickly and devotedly if he had fed them.  It has happened before, is happening now, and will happen again.  Far too many people -- and many who sit on church pews, have their bellies as their god, living, so it seems, only to consume.  They try to fill their emptiness with everything from food and drink to all manner of material possessions to the life force of other people whom they would drain dry. 

Jesus offers only Himself.  He is the Authentic, the one sealed by the Father.  He will do things in our lives to demonstrate His presence, His love for us, His goodness and mercy.  None of these things, though, have ultimate meaning apart from Him.  What He gives us is His body, His blood, His life.  For our wandering spirit, its homelessness and loneliness and sense of isolation, He gives His body.  For our sin, shame, and guilt, He gives His blood.  For our death, He gives His life. 

Another Listening Post

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. -- John 1:1

God spoke all into existence, and His Voice is speaking still.  Everything He says is true, and the true is – that is, the true and the real correspond perfectly.  Living as we do in a derivative material world, we have lost the connection between speaking and truth and existence.  In Genesis 2:19, God brought all the animals to the man, not yet fallen, that he might name them, and whatever Adam spoke was what they were called.  Adam was not merely labeling but affirming and “recreating” in cooperation with God.   This is not affirmation in the silly sense that people sometimes use it.  We can’t affirm something that is contrary to the truth – that’s bearing false witness.  We can, however, like Adam, be active participants in God’s creative process as agents, speakers and witnesses, affirming in our lives – thought, word, and deed, the truth He reveals in and to us.     

Once God was silent, and there was a void.  Even His silence is creative.  Into that void, He began to speak and energy boiled through the nothing, laying out and forming the matrix of time and space that will be charged with holding what is to be birthed.  And what He speaks coalesces into matter, dust swirling in the emptiness to form individual bodies, clusters, some ignited with molecular fires that will burn on for billions of years, sparks of life spreading light.  We wonder that there is life in the universe when God’s voice is life?  God spoke ultimately in Christ who is the Word – the Way, the Truth and the Life – the Word wrapped in flesh, walking around in the dust and mire and confusion of human existence. 

It's like what GB was talking about yesterday with regard to the birds and life, ongoing vibrations of the Word.  I started to say that’s all it is, but the too common human view is the restrictive and limited one.  It’s seeing the relationship between life and God’s voice that is the expansive one.  Instead of that’s all it is, we should say, it’s all that -- more than we can comprehend.  At least we are on the right track.  That which will someday be born stirs within the cosmic egg, developing into something more like Christ.

I think God still has His prophets.  I hear people who claim to be prophets talking about “what I saw.”   I don’t pay much attention to them.  I listen for the ones who sound more like poets.  Their words may not be pleasant; they may drop like great hailstones, cold and hard.  They may burn white-hot as lightning and flatten me like thunder’s hammer.  But they are real and alive.  As a hungry traveler may catch the fragrance of quickened bread baking and know he is nearing home, we catch the aroma of life and know we are near the truth.  To the careful hearer and seeker, the voice of the prophet may be separated out from the cacophony of everyday chaos and turmoil.  

So out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens and brought them to the man to see what he would call them. And whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. (Genesis 2:19)

A Better Place

For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life – John 3:16

This has to be the most famous (can a verse be famous?) verse in the Bible. This is the reference on the homemade endzone signs. It’s the Billy Graham closer. It contains within it the secret of man’s creation, fall, and redemption. I would be willing to wager that more Christians know this verse by heart than any other – not counting “Jesus wept”. The nearest contender would likely be the initial lines of the Shepherd’s Psalm. “Judge not” seems to have an edge among non-believers who never bother to finish the sentence: “that ye be not judged”.

I am thinking of this well-known quote because one of my older cousins, D.A., passed away Sunday. He is what they call a double cousin. Our fathers were brothers and our mothers were sisters – not much genetic variation there. My mother once mistook a picture of my brother for one of the other set about the same age. We lived only a few miles apart, went to the same school, the same church. D.A. was, unlike some of the rest of us, a mild-tempered, easy-going man. I mostly picture him in his younger days with the stubby remains of a well-chewed cigar sticking out of his mouth. He had a distinctive drawl – I would say exaggerated but he spoke the same way when he was a small child. It was perfectly natural for him. He did a stint in the Army, but mostly he just lived out in the country and worked and raised three boys. And that’s where the verse comes in.

His oldest son was named Mike. My cousin was a few more than twenty years my senior. I was only three or four years older than Mike. I remember. Mike was a big, blond, blue-eyed, perpetually happy kid. He had just crossed over into puberty and started to stretch in height when he began to have unusual pains in his legs. No one took it seriously at first. When they did, the results were grim. It was bone cancer. His right leg gone to his hip, he shaved off the hair that didn’t fall out right away and hobbled around the yard at fourteen calling himself ‘Kojak’, while gleefully proclaiming that he had an organ longer than his leg. We knew that no one so young and otherwise healthy, no one with such a positive outlook, with so much love and support and prayer surrounding him could possibly be beaten by cancer. Before school started in the fall, Mike died.

D.A. was shattered. He had done all the right things. He had gone to church, served his country, married the girl next door. He was not a drinker, not a womanizer, not a cheat or a thief. As far as I know he never did any harm of any kind to anyone. It was impossible to imagine him doing so. But Mike was gone. D.A. did not want to hear words of comfort. Especially, he did not want to hear that Mike was “in a better place”. There was no better place for a boy than with his father.


The years dragged on. D.A. went to church and even served as a deacon. He was mostly in charge of keeping up the cemetery – a job to which he was appropriately devoted. I don’t suppose that he ever ceased to be a Christian. That would have been to him unthinkable – doubly so for he thought as little as possible of God.

Death did not cease its harvest. D.A. saw this one pass on, and that one. His older brother, very much unlike D.A. in most ways, was diagnosed with cancer himself. Tough and unrepentant to the end, the brother refused treatment, buying whiskey by the gallon to help him endure the pain. I don’t know if D.A. got a chance to talk to him. What would he have said? Yes, God is cruel and merciless, but at least you can go to heaven to live with Him forever when you die. I’m sure the hardened skeptic would have bought that ticket.

Still his brother’s passing and possible descent into hell must have gotten D.A. to allow some thoughts in, or rather out, that had been locked down in the hole for forty years. The thoughts were bent and pallid, rat-gnawed, weak, and filthy, but they were there and they lived. Their existence was an accusation against him, against his years of living in rebellious obedience to a Master who had the right to refuse service not rendered in love. D.A. realized that, and he realized, moreover, that the Master had not rejected and punished his hateful rituals. Those thoughts had not been locked in a dungeon but in a temple. D.A. had closed the door and bolted it against them, but he was the one denied access. He began to see that what he was denied and what he denied ruled him nonetheless. The doors had to be thrown open, the windows uncovered, the floor swept, and the altar restored. He’d taken good care of the graveyard, but the sanctuary had been neglected.

I don’t know if he would have had the courage or the heart to begin except for the first ray of grace shooting through a crack somewhere to light the temple’s dusty floor at the base of a cobwebbed column. To his eyes, the column ignited into a tower of fire with a voice crying out from the midst: The one who gains the victory, him I will make a pillar in the Holy of Holies, and he shall go no more out. D.A. was stunned with revelation. All along Mike had been there, standing tall and glorious in the inner sanctuary with God’s own unutterable Name written upon him. He had not gone down in defeat; he had not been beaten. A boy’s place was with his Father.

David wept and fasted when his son was ill, but when the boy died the king rose up, ate, and resumed his duties. The people around him were confused. David replied, “He cannot return to me, but I will go to him.” A man’s place is with his Father.

Cosmic Constants Vary by Location

Space.com reports the constants may be inconstant. It seems that researchers checked out different areas of the universe and found what appear to be variations in the fine-structure constants. Looking from the Keck telescope in Hawaii at the northern sky, the fine-structure constants decreased, while observations of the southern sky from the Very Large Telescope (yes, that's really the name -- kind of like The Ballpark in Arlington) in Chile revealed apparently larger values for the constants.

Flambaum said he was particularly interested in what the result could tell scientists about the origin of life.

"This is a puzzle which has existed for many years," he told SPACE.com. "A minor variation of the fundamental constants forbids life to appear – we just could not exist."

For Flambaum and others, it seemed like too much of a coincidence that the universe's constants – which includes the alpha constant and others like the value of the strength of gravity, or the strength of the strong interaction that binds atomic nuclei together – should be perfect for building stars and planets and life.

"Now we have an explanation," Flambaum said."If fundamental constants vary in space, we just appear in the area of the universe where constants are good for us."

In other regions of the universe where the constants are different, life may be absent, he said.

This apparent variation may not really exist except as an artifact of the methodology, as has turned out to be the case in the past. Nevertheless, it is interesting to think that Earth might be a rather special place in the universe.

Love You Long Time

As a deer longs for streams of water, so I long for You, God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I come and appear before God? – Psalm 42:1-2

For the vast majority of man’s time on earth, the main concern must have been lunch. At least that’s what Maslow’s hierarchy of needs postulates. The physiological needs, such as air, water, and food, form the base of a typical pyramid. The base includes all the “animal” aspects of life like sleep and sex. As best I can figure, sex is the only thing in the base that we can live without for very long. Of course, if you assume that the reason for animal life – including humans – is reproduction of selfish genes, then those that do not have sex to pass along their DNA do not live as long as those who do.

Some critics of Maslow’s pyramid argue that the hierarchical structure is a false. While all the listed needs may be more or less legitimate, the idea that sleep is more basic, somehow, than friendship or security is misleading. In real life, most of us have given up a lower level need for a higher level need. Morality is on the capstone of Maslow’s pyramid, implying that morality only becomes important when all the lower level needs are met. In a coherent, sensible society, the satisfaction of lower level needs is controlled by morality. A desperately hungry man may violate his morals to eat, but he knows he is doing something extreme.

God is trying to make us whole, to put us back together, to defragment us. If we are only a body, then we are mainly concerned with satisfying animal needs. If we recognize that we have a soul, then our needs change to emotional and relational objects. At the innermost is the spirit man who recognizes that the most intense hunger and thirst we can experience physically are but a mirage compared to that which gives us true satisfaction in life -- that gives us life.

For the person who seeks after God, hierarchies become meaningless. Needs are more like ripples in a pool, concentric circles leading us back to the point of origin, created by our entrance into material existence. The only thing that matters is His presence in our lives, His voice speaking to our spirit, His life flowing through us and out of us.

“… out of his innermost being shall flow rivers of living water …”

Let It Flow

For My people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns – broken cisterns that can hold no water. – Jeremiah 2:13

A cistern is not a bad way to store water if it is properly constructed. It should be covered, not open and exposed. There is a flow in but there should be no independent flow out. It is fairly easy to get water out of a cistern either by drawing or pumping as the reservoir is just below the surface. There are, though, negatives. The inflow is dependent on external sources. The cistern cannot replenish itself. If the sealed reservoir cracks, it is best to let the cistern go completely dry before attempting to repair it. After that, one must wait on the rains for the needed refilling and restoration. We can get by with cisterns, but wells are better, and bubbling springs are better still.

A person is free to work hard and create a deep, dark hole in which to store a hidden reserve of that which makes life possible. He can build a clever means of channeling the general grace of God, as rains that fall on just and unjust alike, into that occult void. He can carefully hoard and preserve his precious store. The problems come with the seasons as the earth shifts and settles, freezes and thaws. The reservoir is prone to leaking under the best of conditions. Even more troublesome, what is one to do in case of a prolonged drought? The wisest of humankind have struggled for as long as we have been human to build better collection and storage systems. Some of them are very effective and nearly foolproof.

Still, anyone who has ever drunk from a cistern knows that the water tastes like, well, cistern water. It will quench the immediate thirst, but it is often stale. Even the very best systems are still limited. The bottom can always be found, and it is not wise to draw too much. A man might be able to share with his family and a neighbor or two, but he can’t provide for the whole community or water everyone’s livestock or irrigate a field.

There is one source of spiritual water that is unlimited. Once we are connected with Christ in faith, we have access to life that is fresh, pure, and everlasting. At the Feast of Tabernacles in Jerusalem, there was a tradition on the last day of the festival that great jars of water would be poured out on the steps of the Temple so that the water would flow down in a rush as if a spring had suddenly opened. Ezekiel prophesied about it (Ezekiel 47) telling of a stream that flowed from under the threshold becoming a mighty river. In John chapter seven, we are told of Jesus attending the Feast and being moved by the Spirit to cry out: The one who believes in Me, as the Scripture has said, will have streams of living water flow from deep within him.

In Christ, our thirst is not merely slacked. Through Him, we are meant to be a source of this living water, springs in the desert, to bring life to all that is around us. There is no hiding and protecting this water under a cover to cautiously pump out a cupful at a time. There is no scarcity. Our source is not some cracked leaking, stagnant pool. This is the spring that watered Eden. This is the headwater of all the rivers of earth. It will never run dry. It lives because it flows ever outward.

An Interpreter of Life

This is from the introduction to an old anthology of poetry. It struck me as being quite coonish and as expressing what used to be fairly common knowledge but now seems almost wildly radical.

Poetry, music, and painting are three correlated arts, connected not merely by an accidental classification, but by their intrinsic nature. For they all possess the same essential function, namely, to interpret the uninterpretable, to reveal the undiscoverable, to express the inexpressible. They all attempt, in different forms and through different languages, to translate the invisible and eternal into sensuous forms, and through sensuous forms to produce in other souls experiences akin to those in the soul of the translator, be he poet, musician, or painter. That they are three correlated arts, attempting, each in its own way and by its own language, to express the same essential life, is indicated by their co-operation in the musical drama. This is the principle which Wagner saw so clearly, and has used to such effective purpose in his so-called operas, whose resemblance to the Italian operas which preceded them is more superficial than real. In the drama Wagner wishes you to consider neither the music apart from the scenery, nor the scenery apart from the acting, nor the three apart from the poetry. Poetry, music, and art combine with the actor to interpret truths of life which transcend philosophic definition. Thus in the first act of "Parsifal," innocence born of ignorance, remorse born of the experience of temptation and sin, and reverence bred in an atmosphere not innocent yet free from the experience of great temptation, mingle in a drama which elevates all hearts, because in some one of these three phases it touches every heart. And yet certain of the clergy condemned the presentation as irreverent, because it expresses reverence in a symbolism to which they were unaccustomed.

But while it is true that these three arts are correlative and co-operative, they do not duplicate one another. Each not only speaks in a language of its own, but expresses in that language a life which the others cannot express. As color and fragrance combine to make the flower, but the color expresses what the fragrance cannot express, and the fragrance expresses what the color cannot express, so in the musical drama, music, poetry, and painting combine, not by duplicating but by supplementing each other. One may describe in language a symphony; but no description will produce the effect which the symphony produces. One may describe a painting; but no description will produce the effect which the painting will produce. So neither music, nor painting, nor both combined, can produce the same effect on the soul as poetry. The "Midsummer Night's Dream" enacted in pantomime, with Mendelssohn's music, would no more produce the same effect on the auditors which would be produced by the interpretation of the play in spoken words, than would the reading of the play at home produce the same effect as the enacting of the play with what are miscalled the accessories of music and scenery. The music and scenery are no more accessories to the words than the words are accessories to the music and scenery. The three combine in a triple language to express and produce one life, and it can be expressed and produced in no other way than by the combination of the three arts in harmonious action. This is the reason why no parlor readings can ever take the place of the theatre, and no concert performance can ever take the place of the opera. This is the reason why all attempts to suppress the theatre and opera are and always will be in vain. They are attempts to suppress the expression and awakening of a life which can neither be expressed nor awakened in any other way; and suppression of life, however successfully it may be accomplished for a time, is never permanently possible.

These arts do not truly create, they interpret. Man is not a creator, he is only a discoverer. The imagination is not creative, it is only reportorial. Ideals are realities; imagination is seeing. The musician, the artist, the poet, discover life which others have not discovered, and each with his own instrument interprets that life to those less sensitive than himself. Observe a musician composing. He writes; stops; hesitates; meditates; perhaps hums softly to himself; perhaps goes to the piano and strikes a chord or two. What is he doing? He is trying to express to himself a beauty which he has heard in the world of infinite phenomena, and to reproduce it as well as sensuous sounds can reproduce it, that those with duller hearing than himself may hear it also. Observe a painter before his easel. He paints; looks to see the effect; erases; adds; modifies; reexamines; and repeats this operation over and over again. What is he doing? He is copying a beauty which he has seen in the invisible world, and which he is attempting to bring out from its hiding so that the men who have no eyes except for the sensuous may also see it. In my library is an original sonnet by John G. Whittier. In almost every line are erasures and interlineations. In some cases the careful poet has written a new line and pasted it over the rejected one. What does this mean? It means that he has discovered a truth of moral beauty and is attempting to interpret his discovery to the world. His first interpretation of his vision did not suit him, nor his second, nor his third, and he has revised and re-revised in the attempt to make his verse a true interpretation of the truth which he had seen. He did not make the truth; it eternally was. Neither did the musician make the truth of harmony, nor the painter the truth of form and color. They also eternally were. Poet, musician, painter, have seen, heard, felt, realized in their own souls some experience of life, some potent reality which philosophy cannot formulate, nor creed contain, nor eloquence define; and each in his own way endeavors to give it to the world of men; each in his own way endeavors to lift the gauzy curtain, impenetrable to most souls, which hides the invisible, the inaudible, the eternal, the divine from men; and he gives them a glimpse of that of which he himself had but a glimpse.

In one sense and in one only can art be called creative: the artist, whether he be painter, musician, or poet, so interprets to other men the experience which has been created in him by his vision of the supersensible and eternal, that he evokes in them a similar experience. He is a creator only as he conveys to others the life which has been created in himself. As the electric wire creates light in the home; as the band creates the movement in the machinery; thus and only thus does the artist create life in those that wait upon him. He is in truth an interpreter and transmitter, not a creator. Nor can he interpret what he has not first received, nor transmit what he has not first experienced. The music, the painting, the poem are merely the instruments which he uses for that purpose. The life must first be in him or the so-called music, painting, poem are but dead simulacra; imitations of art, not real art. This is the reason why no mechanical device, be it never so skillfully contrived, can ever take the place of the living artist. The pianola can never rival the living performer; nor the orchestrion the orchestra; nor the chromo the painting. No mechanical device has yet been invented to produce poetry; even if some shrewd Yankee should invent a printing machine which would pick out rhymes as some printing machines seem to pick out letters, the result would not be a poem. This is the reason too why mere perfection of execution never really satisfies. "She sings like a bird." Yes! and that is exactly the difficulty with her. We want one who sings like a woman. The popular criticism of the mere musical expert that he has no soul, is profound and true. It is soul we want; for the piano, the organ, the violin, the orchestra, are only instruments for the transmission of soul. This is also the reason why the most flawless conductor is not always the best. He must have a soul capable of reading the soul of the composer; and the orchestra must receive the life of the composer as that is interpreted to them through the life of the conductor, or the performance will be a soulless performance.

Into each of these arts, therefore--music, painting, poetry--enter two elements: the inner and the outer, the truth and the language, the reality and the symbol, the life and the expression. Without the electric current the carbon is a mere blank thread; the electric current is not luminous if there be no carbon. The life and the form are alike essential. So the painter must have something to express, but he must also have skill to express it; the musician must have music in his soul, but he must also have a power of instrumentation; the poet must feel the truth, or he is no poet, but he must also have power to express what he feels in such forms as will create a similar feeling in his readers, or he is still no poet. Multitudes of women send to the newspapers poetical effusions which, are not poems. The feeling of the writer is excellent, but the expression is bad. The writer has seen, but she cannot tell what she has seen; she has felt, but she cannot express her experience so as to enkindle a like experience in others. These poetical utterances of inarticulate poets are sometimes whimsical but oftener pathetic; sometimes they are like the prattle of little children who exercise their vocal organs before they have anything to say; but oftener they seem to me like the beseeching eyes of a dumb animal, full of affection and entreaty for which he has no vocal expression. It is just as essential that poetical feeling should have poetical expression in order to constitute poetry as it is that musical feeling should have musical expression in order to constitute music. And, on the other hand, as splashes of color without artistic feeling which they interpret are not art, as musical, sounds without musical feeling which they interpret are not music, so poetical forms without poetical feeling are not poetry. Poetical feeling in unpoetical forms may be poetical prose, but it is still prose. And on the other hand, rhymes, however musical they may be to the ear, are only rhymes, not poetry, unless they express a true poetical life.

But these two elements are separable only in thought, not in reality. Poetry is not common thought expressed in an uncommon manner; it is not an artificial phrasing of even the higher emotions. The higher emotions have a phrasing of their own; they fall naturally--whether as the result of instinct or of habit need not here be considered--into fitting forms. The form may be rhyme; it may be blank verse; it may be the old Hebrew parallelism; it may even be the indescribable form which Walt Whitman has adopted. What is noticeable is the fact that poetical thought, if it is at its best, always takes on, by a kind of necessity, some poetical form. To illustrate if not to demonstrate this, it is only necessary to select from literature any fine piece of poetical expression of a higher and nobler emotion, or of clear and inspiring vision, and attempt to put it into prose form. The reader will find, if he be dealing with the highest poetry, that translating it into prose impairs its power to express the feeling, and makes the expression not less but more artificial. If he doubt this statement, let him turn to any of the finer specimens of verse in this volume and see whether he can express the life in prose as truly, as naturally, as effectively, as it is there expressed in rhythmical form.

These various considerations may help to explain why in all ages of the world the arts have been the handmaidens of religion. Not to amplify too much, I have confined these considerations to the three arts of music, painting, and poetry; but they are also applicable to sculpture and architecture. All are attempts by men of vision to interpret to the men who are not equally endowed with vision, what the invisible world about us and within us has for the enrichment of our lives. This is exactly the function of religion: to enrich human lives by making them acquainted with the infinite. It is true that at times the arts have been sensualized, the emphasis has been put on the form of expression, not on the life expressed; and then reformers, like the Puritans and the Quakers, have endeavored to exclude the arts from religion, lest they should contaminate it. But the exclusion has been accomplished with difficulty, and to maintain it has been impossible. It is neither an accident, nor a sign of decadence, that painting and sculpture are creeping back into the Protestant churches, to combine with poetry and music in expressing the religious life of man. For the intellect alone is inadequate either to express that life as it exists, or to call it into existence where it does not exist. The tendency to ritual in our time is a tendency not to substitute aesthetic for spiritual life, though there is probably always a danger that such a substitution may be unconsciously made, but to express a religious life which cannot be expressed without the aid of aesthetic symbols. The work of the intellect is to analyze and define. But the infinite is in the nature of the case indefinable, and it is with the infinite religion has to do. All that theology can hope to accomplish is to define certain provinces in the illimitable realm of truth; to analyze certain experiences in a life which transcends all complete analysis. The Church must learn to regard not with disfavor or suspicion, but with eager acceptance, the co-operation of the arts in the interpretation of infinite truth and the expression of infinite life. Certainly we are not to turn our churches into concert rooms or picture and sculpture galleries, and imagine that aesthetic enjoyment is synonymous with piety. But as surely we are not to banish the arts from our churches, and think that we are religious because we are barren. All language, whether of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, poetry, or oratory, is legitimately used to express the divine life, as all the faculties, whether of painter, sculptor, architect, musician, poet, orator, and philosopher, are to be used in reaching after a more perfect knowledge of Him who always transcends and always will transcend our perfect knowing.

-- From “An Interpreter of Life” by Lyman Abbott, the introduction to a 1904 collection called The World’s Best Poetry, Volume III

Thoughts for a Black Friday

But godliness with contentment is great gain.

For we brought nothing into this world, and we can take nothing out. But if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation, a trap, and many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil, and by craving it, some have wandered away from the faith.

Now you, man of God, run from these things; but pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, and gentleness.

Fight the good fight for the faith; take hold of eternal life, to which you were called and have made good confession before many witnesses.
1 Timothy 6:6-12

When we begin to see security in gold, or worse, fiat money, we are in grave danger. Certainly there is the spiritual danger that Paul speaks of to Timothy, but also alarming is the danger to liberty.

I just watched President Bush give a news conference and attempt to stabilize the markets with an assurance that no one needs to panic because the federal government is buying up private assets. During the New Deal, FDR’s administration bought hogs and drowned them to try and drive up the market price for farmers. That didn’t work either. The only thing that pulled us out of the Great Depression was World War II. Despite what you might read in the history books, all the efforts by the government only prolonged the agony.

What is being done by the Bush administration and Congress will not bring us out of this crisis. Going farther down the road of socialism under an Obama presidency, or, I fear, even under a McCain administration, will make matters that much worse. The American consumer has been keeping the world afloat since 1980. How long can China and India continue to grow without the flow of dollars? Will socialist Europe’s “planned” economies keep things going?

The world does not think so. All the world markets have followed Wall Street down. There are no celebrations in the streets of Saudi Arabia as crude drops below $80 a barrel. The speculators, unable to finance their futures trading, and in the face of a potential decline in demand, are running from oil. Crude is not far from a 50% drop in two months. Part of the decline is due, not only to a pullback in speculation, but to a strengthening dollar, which seems odd.

Tighter credit, fewer dollars available for a proliferation of goods, results in lower prices – a stronger currency, deflation. This seems like a good thing to me, but then I am sitting on a little cash. If I were in hock up to my elbows, paying out the nose for my Lexus and my granite-countered McMansion, I, too, might be thinking the government should do something. A modest amount of inflation is always good for the debtor since he is paying back a fixed amount with “cheaper” dollars.

In any case, he who dies with the most toys still leaves them behind. “Bury us in the damn garden next to the stupid lion,” so read the will of Hub and Garth in Secondhand Lions, while their yacht floated serenely on the lake. In the end it is not about what we had but whether or not we really lived.

“Take hold of eternal life,” the Apostle said. He could have said, “Take hold of life that is Real.” Eternal life is everlasting, not merely in quantity, but in quality – it is Real and True – truly life everlasting. It is up to us, daily, to make the choice between a derived, imitation life where we seek to be the “envy” of our like-minded neighbor in flatland, or to embrace the Way, the Truth, and the Life by faith in Christ.

The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

“He is not the God of the dead but of the living, because all are living to Him.” – Luke 20:38

Did you ever read something in the Bible and think, “How did that get in there?” I’ve read the Bible through many times in my life and it still happens. It happened when I read this yesterday. I had to go back to my old KJV and check to make sure it was there. It is. I also went to Wuest’s translation which sounds like Yoda might have said it:

“Now God He is, not of dead people but of those who are alive, for all live with respect to Him.”

MacDonald says it like this in What’s Mine is Mine:

The brothers believed most devoutly that the God who is present at the death-bed of the sparrow does not forget the sparrow when he is dead; for they had been taught that he is an unchanging God; "and," argued Ian, "what God remembers, he thinks of, and what he thinks of, IS."

I suppose the quickening of that particular verse is related to my father’s passing. This is the Holy Spirit coming along with a subtle sprinkle of reassurance and comfort.

Even a heathen like Robert Heinlein believed something similar. If you read Farnham’s Freehold -- not an RAH novel I recommend – he expresses the idea that those who have died are alive as they were in the past.

Jesus goes beyond that, assuring us that those we think of as dead are fully alive to God in the present. God knows no past or future, except as He relates to us. He dwells in the eternal unchanging now, and so shall we. The passing joys of this life will be translated into perfected, eternal joy while the sorrows and suffering will fall away like the husk on the grain, or perhaps will become as a salt or spice to enhance the joy further.

When I was a kid and had nothing better to do, I would take my rifle and go for a walk. An old two-rut excuse for a road led off a hillside and along a branch that was always dry unless it was raining. There wasn’t much space between the steep wooded hillsides, just enough for the branch and the road, so we never bothered to clean it out. It was a tree-lined tunnel, a tube of shade from May until October. After a few hundred yards, the bottom began to widen out. I would go over a little rise and come out from under the trees facing east into the morning sun above and the dew-jeweled grass below. No matter what else was going on in my life, I always felt an overwhelming peace viewing that scene. I feel it now as I see it again.

Somehow I connect that with heaven and eternity. Death is no more than passing through a shady holler with light and life waiting at the end. I’ll walk that road someday and it will be just as I remember, except when I top that little rise, Jesus will meet me there. We’ll talk for a while about one thing and another. I may shed a tear or two, but He will wipe them away. Then He’ll say, “Let’s go on down to the Old Spring. Some folks are waiting there to see you.”