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Realizing the presence, promise, and power of the Kingdom of God.
The Week

The Week Nov. 10-16, 2014

Beauty, history, reason, personal loss, and more.

Vision
Death and Life
The sudden passing of our beloved toy poodle, Boudreaux, has tapped into springs of emotion, imagination, and spiritual sensitivity seldom experienced. I am arrested at the way God used this small servant for nine years as a living icon of His steadfast love and faithfulness. And I wonder at the suddenness of the disease which took him within a few short days. What a wonderful, terrible world we inhabit, where such boundless joy and love can co-exist with such horror and sadness. Boudreaux is gone, and his absence summons Susie and me to pay more attention to the many and continuous icons of grace with which the Lord fills our lives each day, and to seek His presence, delight, comfort, and assurance more earnestly and gratefully through them all. I wondered also, watching him close his eyes for the final time, whether we would see him again? And though I cannot affirm with Biblical or theological certainty that we shall, I cannot in my heart but hope that it will be so. Boudreaux’s passing, those sad, suffering, but comforting eyes staring out at us through his deep distress, reminds me of my own mortality, and compels me to remember that, while I am here, I am here as an icon of grace, to bring the love, comfort, delight, beauty, and fun of God to all I meet – a mission I have not begun to fulfill with anything like the consistency we experienced from Boudreaux. Some may think me childish, prattling on and blubbering over the death of a dog. But this was no ordinary dog. Indeed, nothing in our lives is ordinary, except our failure to see and celebrate in everything the presence, promises, and glory of the God of love. Boudreaux reminds me in his dying that I must not live an ordinary life. Our extraordinary God, Who fills our lives with such emissaries and emblems of His love as Boudreaux, must be declared, must be made known by all our words and deeds. To miss His grace is the greatest disaster, and to fail to share that grace at every moment, regardless of one’s limitations or sufferings, is the most tragic failure of purpose.

Thou hast made me, and shall thy work decay?
Repair me now, for now mine end doth haste,
I run to death, and death meets me as fast,
And all my pleasures are like yesterday;
I dare not move my dim eyes any way,
Despair behind, and death before doth cast
Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste
By sin in it, which it t’wards hell doth weigh.
Only thou art above, and when towards thee
By thy leave I can look, I rise again;
But our old subtle foe so tempteth me,
That not one hour I can myself sustain;
Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art,
And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart.

    - John Donne

Scaredy Cat Nation
Americans have become a frightened, anxious people, whose vision of the future is filled with terror and uncertainty. So argues Mark Edmundson in the Fall 2014 issue of The Hedgehog Review (“One Nation under Fear”). Our preoccupation with security and happiness has skewed our vision of the world, ourselves, and the future: “we now have a nation that is comprised largely of field mice, prone to quiver when they detect an unfriendly shadow.” As a people, we seem to value security and prosperity above all. We “simply cannot abide risks” and our preferred way of dealing with our anxieties is to drug them away. He says “we no longer aspire to be a courageous people.” We are not interested in virtue but in preservation. The typical American “is generally uninterested in abstract qualities such as compassion, little drawn to the pursuit of truth, and largely indifferent to true artistic creation. He is interested in himself.” His response to this situation is to wish it were not so. We should help our children to become brave, like the Athenians of old. But wishing will not make it so. As long as the horizon toward which most Americans journey is no more luminous and expansive than mere self-interest, we will continue to value security over virtue and prosperity over risk. We need a new vision, and only the Church is able to provide this. Yet the state of the Church’s vision seems no more expansive or inspiring than that of the nation as a whole. Pastors hold the key here, but they have chosen not to unlock the vision of courage, virtue, faith, and risk which is the Kingdom of God. Of what are they frightened?

Vision and History
History can be a useful tool for sharpening one’s view of the future. This is the argument of two historians whose new book is reviewed by David Abulafia in the November 2014 issue of Standpoint magazine (http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/5784/full). More important than the review, however, are Mr. Abulafia’s observations about the state of history writing today. He agrees that an understanding of history can help in clarifying our vision of the future. That being so, he laments the state of historiography, which is obscuring rather than illuminating the past by a focus on arcane studies, professional jargon, and the endless compilation and comparing of data. What is lacking in history writing today are compelling stories of our human past, related as grand narratives that help us to understand who we are and how we have come to this state. It makes sense that ignorance of the past can prevent us from seeing the future more clearly. Those who are ignorant of the past are doomed to repeat its mistakes and failures (Santayana). And this makes the present, widespread ignorance of and indifference toward Christian history and culture a drag on our ability to envision the future of the Kingdom with any more on-earth-as-it-is-in-heaven clarity than is evident at this time.

Disciplines
Seeing Beauty
Beauty is either a difficult and elusive idea, or it is ordinary and as common as every person’s opinion. I think that might be a fair summation of the general view of this difficult but important and inescapably human subject. For the Christian, understanding beauty, and thus, learning to appreciate things beautiful and to be and do beautiful things, begins in God, Who is supremely and perfectly beautiful. For this reason, created things also partake of beauty, even though their beauty may not be immediately evident. Giving and bringing forth the God-given beauty of things is the work of the Holy Spirit, as W. David O. Taylor explains in the Fall 2014 issue of Christian Scholar’s Review (“Spirit and Beauty: A Reappraisal”). Because the Spirit works with the Creator God and His upholding Word, everything in life is beautiful in its own form, context, and complexity. Yet this is not always immediately apparent, in part because of the presence of sin in the world and in part because of our inability and reluctance to discern the beauty of things. But as the Spirit works to reconcile all things to their Creator through Christ, the beauty of things emerges, and we can learn to discern and imitate it. Dr. Taylor’s brief article provides some helpful insights into how to think about beauty and challenges readers to give more place in their lives for the Spirit to form them in and for beauty. In particular, he helps us to see why beauty must be considered as both objective and subjective, and why context is as important as form, proportion, and other traditional notions associated with beauty. Perhaps believers might appreciate and contribute more of beauty to the world if, a la Frank Burch Brown, we regarded developing appreciation and expression of beauty, like taste, as a spiritual discipline (Good Taste, Bad Taste, and Christian Taste).

Careful What You Say
Christians have been warning for some time now that our freedom to proclaim God’s truth, wherever it speaks, is in jeopardy. The category of “hate speech” is expandable, depending on who’s offended. John O’Sullivan fills in more of the details of this looming threat in his Wall Street Journal article, “No Offense: The New Threats to Free Speech” (November 8, 2014). He writes, “Christians have to endure explicit denunciations of their faith all the time from such writers as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. And so they should. If you can’t stand the heat, don’t listen to hellfire sermons from atheists.” The problem comes when Christians and others want to speak their minds on matters in ways that don’t agree with prevailing sentiment. Mr. O’Sullivan: “Preventing open debate means that all believers, including atheists, remain in the prison of unconsidered opinion. The right to be offended, which is the other side of free speech, is therefore a genuine right. True belief and honest doubt are both impossible without it.” What were experiencing is “the slow erosion of freedom of expression”. Using the argument that “words hurt”, universities, courts, legislatures, and others are determined to bridle certain kinds of content, namely, that which does not agree with their particular agenda. The danger is real. Mr. O’Sullivan asks, “Would a U. S. Administration that is discussing an international blasphemy law with the world’s Islamic states tell the Court that burning a Quran is also protected speech?” Protections for free speech are being eroded and replaced with codes and protocols for monitoring and regulating what we can say. I suggest that, as Christians, we be very careful here to speak God’s truth plainly, clearly, comprehensively, and in love, and dare the powers-that-be to do something about it.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/no-offense-the-new-threats-to-free-speech-1414783663

Get Moving
“We live amid a sea of killer chairs: adjustable, swivel, recliner, wing, club, chaise lounge, sofa, arm, four-legged, three-legged, wood, leather, plastic, car, plane, train, dining and bar. Thats the bad news. The good news is that you do not have to use them.” James Levine summarizes studies taken over many years extolling the health benefits of movement as opposed to sitting (“Killer Chairs,” Scientific American, November 2014). It is abundantly clear that humans were not meant to sit as much as we do. Standing and moving about burns calories and fights the tendency to become overweight and, thus, become susceptible to the diseases that accompany obesity. Sitting is easier, and we don’t think twice about doing it as often as we can. But if we want to be slimmer, healthier, and to live longer, then we do well to look for ways to get more movement into our lives. Good advice for Kingdom-seekers.

                           The SOFA suits
The gouty limb, ‘tis true; but gouty limb,
Though on a SOFA, may I never feel:
For I have loved the rural walk through lanes
Of grassy swarth close cropt by nibbling sheep,
And skirted thick with intertexture firm
Of thorny boughs: have loved the rural walk
O’er hills, through valleys, and by rivers brink,
E’er since a truant boy I pass’d my bounds
T’enjoy a ramble on the banks of Thames.

        - Willuam Cowper, The Task, Book I

Clear Thinking
Leon Wieseltier encourages a more thoughtful approach to issues and policy, as opposed to our present practice of appealing to opinion or feeling. He insists, “We are governed by what we think.” And he wants us to be better thinkers (“Reason and the Republic of Opinion,” The New Republic, November 11, 2014). People today are averse to serious thought. Most folks think it’s more authentically human to be merely sincere or passionate. Thus, Mr. Wieseltier explains, “The task is not to intellectualize humanity. It is to humanize intellectuality.” He continues, “A democracy imposes an extraordinary intellectual responsibility upon ordinary people. Our system is finally determined by what our citizenry thinks. This is thrilling and this is terrifying.” We need to learn how to move our opinions to the stronger position of being beliefs: “What is the difference between an opinion and a belief? Let us say that a belief is an opinion with reasons. One of the objectives of public debate in a democracy should be to promote opinion into belief.” This is not to negate feeling, but to bring it into submission to reason: “A lucid mind, an engaged heart, a thick skin: the equipment of citizenship.” Ideas shape history, and bad ideas make for bad history. If we want a better society and life, we’ll need better ideas, ideas more fully shaped by reason and debate rather than by propaganda and emotion. There’s no getting away from having to deal with ideas: “Even people who live with no intellectual engagement live in an intellectual climate. There are never no ideas. Ideas are everywhere. They are experienced by everybody. A concern about the intellectual condition of a society is a kind of environmental concern, an anxiety about the atmosphere and the damage to it.” As Christians we claim our ideas are good, but we cannot simply assert this. We must be able to show people, beginning with our lives and communities, that they are as we claim, and then we must be able to explain to them why this is so: “But to claim a social good is to hold a concept of society and a concept of goodness. There is no other way, in a society that determines its course by persuasion, to convince you that my advantage is also your advantage, if I seek your support for my advantage.” Here are good reminders about the place of reason and persuasion – both of which Paul and Christians throughout history employed freely and effectively – in seeking and advancing the Kingdom of God.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120197/defense-reason-new-republics-100-year-anniversary

Envoi
Cup of Daisies

This cup has served us all our one-flesh years.
It bears the nicks and superficial cracks
which come with wear and tear, and while it lacks
the sheen it once possessed, still it appears
and is as solid as it was the day
we said “I do.” These daisies, by your hand
selected, trimmed, arranged, and made to stand
here, radiant like the new day’s sunrise, say
to one and all that beauty does not scorn
the scars of age and trial, but faithfulness,
in spite of wear, makes love to thrive and bless
this happy union, as the sun the morn.
  The daisies wilt, the cup may one day break.
  Love tried and solid will new beautie make.

T. M. Moore

 

T.M. Moore

T. M. Moore is principal of The Fellowship of Ailbe, a spiritual fellowship in the Celtic Christian tradition. He and his wife, Susie, make their home in the Champlain Valley of Vermont.
Books by T. M. Moore

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