Archive for October, 2010
My internet connection is down for the next few days so i’ll store up posts until it’s back – which should probably be sometime around Thursday. Sorry about the onslaught of posts then, but please check back soon to see what shows up.
Alternatively, if anyone wants to write a guest post and still has internet access, do drop me an email (i can still get email via. my phone) and i’ll send you the details.
See you in a week or so.
Posted by Wordmobi
Taken from Kierkegaard’s “Speech in Praise of Abraham” in Fear and Trembling:
But Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life. Yes, had his faith only been for a future life it would indeed have been easier to cast everything aside in order to hasten out of this world to which he did not belong. But Abraham’s faith was not of that kind, if there is such, for a faith like that is not really faith but only its remotest possibility, a faith that has some inkling of its object at the very edge of the field of vision but remains separated from it by a yawning abyss in which despair plays its pranks. But it was for this life that Abraham believed, he believed he would become old in his land, honoured among his people, blessed in his kin, eternally remembered in Isaac, the dearest in his life, whom he embraced with a love for which it was but a poor expression to say that he faithfully fulfilled the fathers duty to love the son, as indeed the summons put it: ‘the son whom thou lovest.’ Jacob had twelve sons and he loved one; Abraham had just one, the son whom he loved.
But Abraham had faith and did not doubt. He believed the ridiculous. If Abraham had doubted – then he would have done something else, something great and glorious; for how could Abraham have done other than what is great and glorious? He would have marched out to the mountain at Moriah, chopped the firewood, set light to the fire, drawn the knife – he would have cried out to God: “do not scorn this sacrifice, it is not the best I possess, that I well know; for what is an old man compared with the child of promise, but it is the best I can give. Let Isaac never come to know, that he may comfort himself in his young years.’ He would have thrust the knife into his own breast. He would have been admired in the world and his name never forgotten; but it is one thing to be admired, another to be a guiding star that saves the anguished.
But Abraham had faith. He did not beg for himself in hope of moving the Lord…
Thoughts?
There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.
Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no-one gave him anything.
As he sat in the dirt, he spotted a figure approaching from the distance. As the figure got closer, he recognized his elder brother walking towards him. “Brother!” the elder son shouted from the distance, “I have come to bring you home!”
The elder brother drew close to his sibling and said, “Brother, I have come to fetch you home and restore honour to our family, as is my duty. If you come with me now, you will be welcomed back into the family and you can work alongside me in the family business. It will be as though all our shame will be redeemed!”
The younger brother looked up from where he was sitting, and to his brother’s shock, simply said, “no. I will not return with you.” The elder brother was dumbfounded, but he saw that his brother was resolved. So without a word, he respected his brother’s choice, turned from where he had come, and set off for the journey home.
The younger brother sat in the mud watching him go, wishing with all his heart that he had been able instead to see his Father coming to call him home, with tears of joy in his eyes.
So did the elder brother.
Today’s Sunday music comes courtesy of Gungor, who make Christian music for winter – hearty, warming folksy stuff that you could imagine going well with butternut squash and log fires. Maybe that appeals to you and maybe not, but whatever the case, let the title track from their new album “beautiful things” convince you. It’s on spotify, grooveshark and itunes now and it’s rather good, with shades of Rend Collective Experiment:
You can also listen to “the earth is Yours”, another top track from the new album, here:
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I’ll try and post again tomorrow, until then enjoy your Sunday.
There was once a man who had two sons. One day the younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.
Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no-one gave him anything.
When he came to his senses, he said, “how many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son: make me like one of your hired men.’ So he got up and went to his father.
But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.
The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’
But the Father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
Meanwhile the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing. So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. ‘Your brother has come,’ he replied, ‘and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.’
The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, ‘Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!”
‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found’…
And then, with a sharp slap around the head, the younger son is rudely awakened. ‘Stop your daydreaming and get back to work,’ the servant says to him. ‘We’re not paying you to sleep, are we?’
The younger son looks across at the fields, shimmering in the midday heat. He picks up a jar of pig feed, straightens his shoulders and takes a deep breath. This is no time for dreams, after all.
There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father, give me my share of the estate.’ So he divided his property between them.
Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no-one gave him anything.
When he came to his senses, he said, “how many of my father’s hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son: make me like one of your hired men.’ So he got up and went to his father.
But while he was still a long way off, one of his father’s servants saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He went to his master in the fields and told him, ‘Master, the son who left you has returned.’ But his master said nothing.
So the servant went out to the younger son on the road and told him, ‘your father is old, and did not believe me when I told him you had returned. But if you go to him, his heart will be softened when he sees you and he will surely welcome you back into his family’. So the younger son walked fearfully towards the house of his father.
When he arrived at the door of his father’s house it was dark, and he found the gates locked. In desperation and hunger he knocked until his father answered. “Father,” the son said, “I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son: make me like one of your hired men.”
The father said nothing, but looked down at the man on his doorstep, caked in mud and filth, and shook his head sadly.
“No,” he said. “I have no need for servants here.” And with that he shut the gate.
The younger son shrugged sadly, sighed, and set off down the road he had come on.
The father rejoined his remaining son at the dinner table. “You made the right choice, Father,” his son told him. “People like that need proper boundaries.” The elder man smiled wearily, and nodded.
“I know, son. I know,” he said. “By the way, son, thanks for cooking dinner. The lamb is delicious.”
One of C.S. Lewis’ best passages in the classic The Screwtape Letters today, focussing chiefly on time, perspective and eternity. In the event that you don’t know, the book is written from the perspective of a senior demon, and so any references to “the Enemy” refer to God…
He wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present – either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.
Our business is to get them away from the eternal, and from the Present…
To be sure, the Enemy wants men to think of the Future too – just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. This is now straw splitting. He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do. His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future – haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth – ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by doing so we make him think he can attain the one or the other – dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap on the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present…
What are your thoughts? Do you recognise yourself in that?
My old friend Christine Jensen, who has been studying theology in California with her family for the past few years, has just started a new blog called holding fireflies.
It’s well worth checking out and has some exciting stuff on it already, and it looks to be one to watch over the course of the next year. If you’re already using Feedburner, Google Reader or similar, why not add it to your RSS feeds?
Give it a look and give her your support by commenting on her posts so far.
There’s no denying that it’s getting towards Winter, and there’s no better way to mark the transition than with the epic melancholy of Explosions in the Sky, one of the best imports ever to come out of Texas. Check out “your hand in mine”, a highlight from their second album The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, below.
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It’s £4.99 on Amazon MP3 at the moment, and i guarantee that if you buy it today, you won’t regret it.
Another real post to follow tomorrow.
Somebody pointed out that Nigel Slater made an appearance on yesterday’s blog, and slightly unexpectedly at that. Part of the reasoning behind that is the fact that I have just discovered his cookbooks, and the philosophy behind them appeals to me more generally, in a way that seems to tie in with the general themes of this blog. Previously I’ve tended to swear loyalty to Jamie Oliver when it comes to cookbooks, but when I cook from Jamie I often feel like I’m trying to impress somebody, even if I’m alone in the kitchen at the time. In contrast, what I respect about Nigel Slater is his ability to communicate the evocative power of food and also the pleasure of good food with good friends. He manages to do it in such a way that it reminds you why food is a gift in the first place, and that’s a real skill.
I’ve often wondered what it is about cooking that makes it so pleasurable, to me at least. It’s one of those activities that consistently succeeds in turning off my brain (and those are activities that I am always grateful for, as there aren’t nearly enough of them). Lately a couple of friends told me in a couple of different contexts that they think I am, in their words, “too intelligent” to deal with, or that I think too deeply about things for them to be able to understand where I’m coming from (there’s a backhanded compliment if you ever heard one). Occasionally I have been tempted to believe that this is true, that my personality is simply such that normal social interaction is impossible for me, but if anything it is the purity of good food, oddly, that serves to counteract that.
There is just something so simple about it. Good food stands on its own. You don’t make it taste good, you just combine it in such a way in such a way as to accentuate certain flavours and textures. And you don’t always need to have a full meat and two veg planned out each night, just something that reminds you of how food is a blessing as well as a necessity. Nigel Slater lists a number of occasions in The Kitchen Diaries where dinner consists of nothing more than a tomato and some good bread, and there is a glorious simplicity right there. It is only pressure, or habit, that compels you to do things in a certain way.
I like that as a philosophy, because it keeps cooking from being a chore and it also keeps you deeply appreciative of what you have been given. It is consistently amazing to me that God does provide for us in the way He does, but the regular and mundane trips to the clinical aisles of the local Tesco don’t half strip away any sense of His provision (or wonder, for that matter). The way Slater sees things, though, you can simply focus on how amazing it is to have been given anything at all, let alone food that is as good as we have it, and to have been given the capacity to appreciate it too. Too often we forget to give thanks for what we have, whether or not we say grace before meals. In my eyes, home should be the place to stop and to rest – to appreciate things as they really are, which is good. Too often I make it manic and exhausting instead, and so in the midst of that the rhythm that is offered by cooking properly is joyous, in itself a gift.
But it’s something to be shared, too. By instinct I am both an introvert and something of a depressive, and so my tendency in the evenings is towards comfort food, and to simply eating alone. There is arguably little that is so disheartening as eating good food on your own and, conversely, there is little that is as pleasurable as sharing your table with good friends – irrespective of what you’re eating. Every culture on earth recognises that, and it pays to do so, as well. It’s a place to remember that life doesn’t revolve around you, no matter how often it feels like it – that the food you eat is given by God, that the home in which you prepare it is a gift from God and that the context in which you can enjoy what you have been given is always, and only, God. It is all about Him.
I want my home to be a place of hospitality and appreciation, a place where I use what I have been given to honour God, and it’s not at present, for the most part – at least for me (to be fair, though, my housemates are doing noticeably better than I am).
Instead it’s currently a place of Bird’s Eye Chicken Dippers in front of the TV and dammit, even if I have to fight to change that – and, no doubt, I will – I am determined to.
So – who wants to come for dinner?
worship music should sound like this 