A New Move

To the few who might come by and care, I've moved over to wordpress. The addy is my (shortened) first name smooshed up against my last name dot wordpress dot com. That blog is going to be more directed than this one was (so I hope) and I'll probably be looking for contributions as I go along. After looking around there, let me know if there's anything you might be willing to offer the readers I may garner there...

Cheers!

Prospects

At this point I've decided to take a year after graduation from seminary to research and write some of my own stuff. I think the pace of seminary has exhausted me and I'm finding myself needing some space to move in. While seminary has been great in many respects, there are some ways in which it doesn't seem to make the study of theology an enjoyable endeavor. Unfortunately, for this reason I feel like I've lost some of the motivation and excitement about scholarship. I don't think it's because I find theology boring now or anything, but because there isn't a community here that engages theology at the points where I'm most interested in theology. The conversations happening at the seminary are more about protecting traditional reformed doctrine rather than engaging the contemporary theological landscape. Also, the readings assigned in class seem to be meant to establish a rootedness in our particular tradition, but don't encourage us to dialogue with theologians outside our tradition. I realize it's difficult to do both well at the same time, and the nature of a conservative seminary causes it to default to the former, but my own attempts to do both well have tired me. All that among various and other sundry things--so it sounds thrilling to do some writing jobs (which I have lined up) and to take the time to read beyond the horizons of the reformed tradition in the next year so I can set out a good proposal for research at the doctoral level.

Today was the first day in about three months that I felt like contacting more professors and potential supervisors about the areas of research that I'm interested in. It was actually relaxing to put some of my ideas out there. Previously, it's been stressful and I've felt like I've had to overstate myself so I 'stand out.' But if I--as me--don't stand out, then okay. But if I do, then that's what I want to get in on. Not on some false pretenses that I put forward. I've been challenged a lot lately to be increasingly comfortable in my own skin. Today I felt some of the benefits of that.

Soundtrack Appreciation

I've always enjoyed making my studies more dramatic through the use of instrumental soundtracks from various action movies. They tend to create an arc that keeps me focused and provides natural study breaks--often timed well to my reading selections as well, surprisingly enough. Theology usually feels dramatic to me, but when it has Hans Zimmer movement behind it, there's a different aura altogether in following a line of reasoning.

But as Steve and I work late into the night on a soundtrack for a 3 minute short, I have a newfound appreciation for original scores. The complexity and movement that makes movie music good almost feels unnatural -- things shouldn't move that fast, it can't build too quickly, there's not enough tension for this scene, etc. Creating music for something other than the music is no easy task. Rather, the music here plays an illustrative role; it has to enhance and support what's happening on screen but not distract from it. Assembling music that fits the mood is difficult because fittingly representing the some aspect of the complexity of humanity in the space of 3 minutes--or 120 for that matter--is just hard.

Previous to working on the soundtrack this evening, I was completing an ethical position paper for a class I took this January. I found myself very wary of how I was wording things and cautiously choosing my terms. I could tell that, on this particular topic, it seems that the words Christians use ought to be more like the soundtrack to our ethos and pathos. Our speech has to be fitting and supportive--even enhance at times--but can never distract from the life being lived. In reality, it seems that we try to make up for the lack of good action on screen by pumping out high energy or overly emotive descriptions of how things are; we make our speech primary when it should play a supporting role. This is odd in the same way that dropping the Gladiator soundtrack under the first Lord of the Rings would be odd. It's not entirely inappropriate, it's just a bit heavy-handed for the kind of epic movie that Lord of the Rings is. And it's not designed for that. Rather, our words must be tailored to our lives, representative of our lives and bringing new light and nuance to our own complexities.

Can I Think for Myself?

It's getting late and I'm trying to process some of what I'm readnig in Richard Niebuhr's book Christ & Culture. If nothing else, I find myself torn as I approach this book. It's sort of paradigmatic in how I feel about a lot theological issues--I really respect people who land all over the spectrum of opinions regarding how Niebuhr works out his ideas and it's hard for me to hear my own voice in my head because I hear so many others. I certainly want my thoughts and opinions to be impacted by my teachers, pastors, leaders, friends, theologians, various authors and just those who see things differently than I do, but sometimes I get lost in the faux dialogue that they all have with each other in my head. There's a sense in which I can't find my own thoughts in the drone of theirs. It usually takes me stepping away from the book/lecture/article/program to get the space to hear my own thoughts on it, though. Not that my own thoughts aren't influenced by theirs, but more that there's still a mediating factor in how I think sometimes. I haven't fully reckoned with their positions such that I can integrate their insights into a position of my own. Something that seems to come out here is my fear of being wrong or having an overly-simplistic view of something. I tend to want to nuance my understanding of things so that I can fully see and present all sides involved in the discussion. This desire sometimes conflicts with another desire of mine: to come to a conclusion. And this makes me tense up while I'm reading and gives me a headache--like right now. While I say claim to love the process of doing theology and the perpetual conversation it involves, I think I'm still very much learning how to let my philosophy and theology be in a state of development and growth, to be in progress so that conclusions can be fluid and subject to change. This, along with trusting that God guides me in the process helps me relax while I read, and enjoy rather than dread evaluating ideas.

Well, on with it now.

Penumbra

Penumbra. In short, this is the fuzzy edge of light around stars. It’s the shining of the stars, but it’s come to mean anything that had indistinct edges due to a spilling out of light. It’s light that lets our vision be clear. We see best when light shows us distinction, line, curve, shape, depth, movement. Basically, we see when we can see. But all this has to do with the object and the environment—the stuff outside that we perceive. What happens when our vision is bad? Without glasses or contacts or some form of aid, everything has penumbra for me. I’ve often wanted to paint the perfectly circular blur of brightness that car headlight and tail-lights form. When I was little I liked to take my glasses off when we would drive at night—everything had a perfect shape with a distinct center out of which came sharp spokes of light that all ended abruptly in the same blurry manner at the perimeter. There were larger ones, brighter ones, red ones, green ones, yellow ones—some were affixed in front of houses, others along streets.

There was a sui penumbra to all this—my own penumbra, a penumbra that originated in me and not the things out there. It’s not that the lights themselves were indistinct the way the stars seem indistinct to us—but my eyes couldn’t (and still can’t) see the distinction, can’t see the squareness of headlights—only the perfect roundness of the light. All light was shaped the same, even if the colors were different. Whereas light usually brings better perception, in these cases—when I let myself see with my natural, unaided eyes—light precluded perception. I couldn’t tell distance or speed; movement and motion seemed imperceptible—everything was both threatening and safe at the same time and in the same way. Knowing I was in the car with some licensed adult driving made that collapsing of categories okay since there were other things that guaranteed my safety in the midst of these various sui penumbra. But if I were to drive without my glasses now, it would be a simply terrifying experience for everyone involved—it would be foolish and cause untold trauma for me. I wouldn’t know how to feel about which lights—I wouldn’t know when to feel safe or when to feel scared, when to drive straight and when to use an evasive maneuver, I wouldn’t know when I could safely pull out of my driveway and when to wait for traffic to pass. Even if I know not to pull out in front of a semi in my little red, 1990 Eagle Talon, I wouldn’t know when the opportunity was presenting itself so that I could apply that piece of wisdom.

Seeing rightly and living rightly are inter-dependent matters. I can have wisdom, and I can know how to feel when a semi is barreling down on me, and I can desire to protect myself and my passengers, but if I can’t see the world around me for what it is, I can’t apply that knowledge correctly. My thinking can be directed rightly, I can have wisdom and understanding about what to do in certain situations, I can have the skills necessary, and I can even desire the right things—but if I see with penumbra all around, then life gets very scary, frustrating, and confusing and my opportunities to exercise foolishness instead of wisdom increase manifold. In this way, I feel blind. What good is seeing at all if it doesn’t let me interact accurately with reality?

The only times this penumbra goes away—or becomes insignificant—are when I get really close to the light source or the object I want to observe. When I remove the distance factor, then I see reality—I see the body of the star and not the bursting of light all around the gaseous entity that’s emitting the light. When I let myself get close, I can accurately assess reality. It’s either risking like this or—sometimes the better option until I start to see better—ask someone who can see!

A short not so meditative post on Christmas decor

Having just taken down our Christmas decorations, I think I'm feeling like spring can officially start. In Florida, it feels like winter just started in mid-January. It didn't get cold until then, save for the bit of a cold front that came through on Christmas day sparking some tornadoes. Now it's cold, but it feels like we should be moving on. It was in the eighties for the entire time we had our Christmas decorations up.

A Sudden Return and a Barth Quote

I've been gone for a long time. Mostly because I can't get my thoughts organized enough to want to post them. We've just had some good friends come through town, though--Liz and Micah Hoover--and I'm feeling somewhat inspired to post briefly.

Most of what I think about these days comes directly from what I'm reading. Today I'm reading Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics vol. 4 on reconciliation. Barth brilliantly flirts with orthodoxy and lands himself within the bounds of the Reformed tradition in most instances. If we remember the context and time in which he was writing, I think we can appreciate his theological acumen for what it is. In the midst of the section I'm in, he says something that caused me to stop. It's something we say a lot in the Reformed tradition--our actions, attitudes, emotions, etc. towards God are to come out of gratitude, not guilt or some sense of inducing his favor towards us. But here's how Barth says it:

"The thing which we maintain when we describe the covenant as the covenant of grace is that the covenant engages man as the partner of God only, but actually and necessarily, to gratitude. On the side of God it is only a matter of free grace and this in the form of benefit. For the other partner in the covenant to whom God turns in this grace, the only proper thing, but the thing which is unconditionally and inescapably demanded, is that he should be thankful. How can anything more or different be asked of man? The only answer to karis (grace) is eukaristia (thankfulness). But how can it be doubted for a moment that this is in fact asked of him? Karis always demands the answer of eukaristia. Grace and gratitude belong together like heaven and earth. Grace evokes gratitude like the voice an echo. Gratitude follows grace like thunder lightning. Not by virtue of any necessity of the concepts as such. But we are speaking of the grace of the God who is God for man, and of the gratitude of man as his response to this grace. Here, at any rate, the two belong together, so that only gratitude can correspond to grace, and this correspondence cannot fail. Its failure, ingratitude, is sin, trangession. Radically and basically all sin is simply ingratitude--man's refusal of the one but necessary thing which is proper to and is required of him with whom God has graciously entered into covenant."

A Prayer to Christ

A poem by Gregory of Nazianzus
(trans. Brian E. Daley, SJ)

Where's the injustice? I was born human--well and good!
But why am I so battered by life's tidal waves?
I'll speak my mind--harshly perhaps, yet still I'll speak:
Were I not yours, my Christ, this life would be a crime!
We're born, we age, we reach the measure of our days;
I sleep, I rest, I wake again, I go my way
With health and sickness, joys and struggles as my fare,
Sharing the seasons of the sun, the fruits of the earth,
And death, and then corruption--just like any beast,
Whose life, though lowly, still is innocent of sin!
What more do I have? Nothing more, except for God!
Were I not yours, my Christ, this life would be a crime!