Cross to bear?

For quite some time I've been bothered by the way we folk often use the expression, "that's my cross to bear."  We say that to refer to our hangnails, difficulties at work, hard to handle children, or any number of life's miscellany that presents us with an inconvenience or challenge.  In the book From the Library of C.S. Lewis I came upon this passage from C.H. Dodd this morning.  He says what I've felt but been unable to articulate as well.

It has been taken to refer to habitual forms of self-sacrifice or self-denial.  The ascetic voluntarily undergoing austerities felt himself to be bearing his daily cross.  We shallower folk have often reduced it to a metaphor for casual unpleasantness which we have to bear.  A neuralgia or a defaulting servant is our "cross," and we make a virtue of necessity.  What Jesus actually said, according to our earliest evidence, was, quite bluntly, "Whoever wants to follow me must shoulder his gallows beam" - for such is perhaps the most significant rendering of the word for "cross."  It meant a beam which a condemned criminal carried to the place of execution, to which he was then nailed until he died.  Jesus was not using the term metaphorically.  Under Rome, crucifixion was the likeliest fate for those who defied the established powers.  Nor did those who heard understand that He was asking for "daily" habits of austerity.  He was enrolling volunteers for a desperate venture and He wished them to understand that joining it they must hold their lives forfeit.  To march behind Him on that journey was as good as to tie a halter around one's neck.  It was a saying for an emergency.  A similar emergency may arise for some Christians in any age.  In such a situation it is immediately applicable, in its original form and meaning.  For most of us, in normal situations, it is not so applicable.  But it is surely good for us to go back and understand that this is what Christ stood for in His day.  We shall then at least not suppose that we are meeting His demands in our day bearing a toothache bravely or fasting during Lent.

"Neil Young" (aka. Jimmy Fallon) & Bruce Springsteen perform "Whip My Hair." Brillian! [VIDEO]

Marcel The Shell With Shoes On [VIDEO]

MARCEL THE SHELL WITH SHOES ON from Dean Fleischer-Camp on Vimeo.

Hauschka & his prepared piano via NPR [VIDEO]

On NPR's All Things Considered this evening there was a fantastic bit about an artist who goes by Hashka & puts a bunch of junk in the grand piano creating fascinating sounds. Amazing stuff. CLICK HERE for the whole story & other videos @ NPR.

Reading & what the world wide interwebs have done to it

I was recently given a Barnes & Noble Nook. It's raised a myriad of questions...

What constitutes a book? Who owns the "book" on my device? What's an eBook "worth"? Shouldn't there be some way for me to get the hard copy books I own onto my device? Will reading on a device have the positive effect on my kids that we know setting an example of reading codex forms of books do? Don't I have an obligation to the environment and to stewardship of the earth to give reading on a device a shot (after about a dozen books the eReader becomes greener, as long as you aren't upgrading devices every year)? And more...

At his blog Scott McKnight discusses the ideas from the book The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time. (I checked to see if it was available on the Nook. It is not). McKnight summarizes some of the books thoughts:

The distraction of the internet age is one that seduces us into thinking that we can, if we read more e-mails or more tweets, be in the know or more up-to-date. There is a genine anxiety about not keeping up. 15 years ago we didn’t try to keep up with most of what drives us.


The internet provides mostly information, endless and never-ending. Reading probes into wisdom through reflection. Internet reading is an emotional hit and run; reading a good book, undistracted, for hours at a time digs deeper. There is a difference between an informed brain and a literary brain.


Reading a book well means entering into a history of conversation into which that book fits. The internet is not a conversation but a buzz of information, disconnected and disconnecting.... 

Real reading generates memory because it leads us into the world of an author and a story and a book that is interconnected to other books. Why remember when you can look it up? ...

Internet reading is about being connected; real reading, book reading, means being disconnected and lost in the world of the book.

I certainly feel the anxiety when I am not "keeping up" with the stream of information, whether that's the daily articles in my email inbox or the blogs I read used to read or my twitter feed or the newspaper I try to read on my phone. Distraction. Yeah. That's pretty much the issu...woah...a video of a kitten...

Missionary Builds Flying Car. For Reals. [VIDEO]

Baby Quinn Learning to Walk [VIDEO]

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

Forgive My Family | Sermon 10-24-10 [VIDEO]

Forgive My Family | 10-24-10 from Anderson Hills United Methodist on Vimeo.

Doggie Duathlon 2010, Cheryl & Dylan [VIDEO]

Rock Show? Worship? What's the difference these days. What's "good" worship?

 

On the twitter this week this picture was posted by a church-leadery-business-thinker-type-of-person I ended up following along the way somewhere. The caption said this: "Top picture is from the inside cover of my new #Rush DVD, bottom is #OneLife worship from tonight."

Now...I can't tell for certain but it sounds like that's a good thing to him.

Is it really a good thing (or is it a bad thing or doesn't it matter) that our worship services look like a Rush show (or any other rock concert for that matter)? Do our toes have to tingle & chests feel the thump of the bass & the chord progression have to be catchy like a rock show? Hmm...

The Rise of Text Messaging [INFOGRAPHIC] (via @mashable)

Woody Guthrie pictures from LIFE.com

It's a Book [VIDEO]

Why Everything Sucks by my Favorite Scotsman (other than Brian Mitchell of course) [VIDEO]

NYT: Can We Build in a Brighter Shade of Green?
For more: http://s.nyt.com/u/mrO0

Infographic: Are Books or E-Readers More Environmentally Friendly (via Slate)

Acquire used books. Or use an old eReader someone gave you. And get a little solar panel that will charge your eReader. Or let your hamster charge it by running on his or her wheel.

Wendell Berry Quotes from The Way of Ignorance

Finished reading The Way of Ignorance by Wendell Berry. Berry has been on my "to read" list for...years maybe? I connect deeply with his ethos and worldview. Not because I farm. I don't and have a "black thumb" destroying just about anything I try and grow but I connect with Berry's holistic view of the world. He writes the world as he sees it. And I hope I can learn to see the world more and more like he does. Here are some quotes that were particularly meaningful or provocative to me as I read. There's always some danger in taking little quotes out of context but hopefully the speak well on their own and maybe breed a desire to read Berry.

"Creatures who have armed themselves with the power of limitless destruction should not be following any way laid out by their limited knowledge and their unseemly pride in it. The way of ignorance, therefore, is to be careful, to know the limits and the efficacy of our knowledge. It is to be humble and to work on an appropriate scale."

~

"One mind alone, like one life alone, is perfectly worthless, not even imaginable."

 ~

"Our destructiveness has not been, and is not, inevitable. People who use that excuse are morally incompetent, they are cowardly and they are lazy.Humans don't have to live by destroying the sources of their life. People can change; they can learn to do better."

~

"The corporate mind knows no affection, no desire that is not greedy, no local or personal loyalty, no sympathy or reverence or gratitude, no temperance or thrift or self-restraint. It does not observe the first responsibility of intelligence, which is to know when you don't know or when you are being unintelligent."

~

"The logical end of the ain't-it-awful conversation, as of the life devoted merely to opposition, is despair. People quit having any fun, they begin to talk about the 'inevitability' of what they are against and they give up. Mere opposition finally blinds us to the good of the things we are trying to save. And it divides us hopelessly from our opponents, who no doubt are caricaturing us while we are demonizing them. We lose, in short, the sense of shared humanity that would permit us to say even to our worst enemies, 'We are working, after all, in your interest and your children's. Ours is a common effort for the common good. Come and join us.'"

~

"By indulging a limitless desire for a supposedly limitless quantity, one gives up all the things that are most desirable. One abandons any hope of the formal completeness, grace and beauty that come only by subordinating one's life to the whole of which it is a part, and thus one is condemned to the life of a fragment, forever unfinished and incomplete, forever greedy. One loses, that is, the sense of human as an artifact, a part made imaginatively whole."

~

"...if we work with machines the world will seem to us to be a machine, but if we work with living creatures the world will appear to us as a living creature."

~

"There is nothing deader or of more questionable value than facts in isolation."

~

Embarrassing questions that the gospels impose: (1) "If you had been living in Jesus' time and had heard Him teaching, would you have been one of His followers? To be an honest taker of this test, I think you have to try to forget that you have read the Gospels and that Jesus has been a 'big name' for two thousand years." (2) "Can you be sure that you would keep his commandments if it became excruciatingly painful to do so?" ... "Those are peculiar questions. I don't think we can escape them, if we are honest, I don't think we can answer them. We humans, as we well know, have repeatedly been surprised by what we will or won't do under pressure. A person may come to be, as many have been, heroically faithful in great adversity, but as long as that person is alive we can only say that he or she did well but remains under the requirement to do well. As long as we are alive, there is always a next time, and so the questions remain."

~

"...there are limits to what a human mind can know, and limits to what a human language can say. One may believe, as I do, in inspiration, but one must believe knowing that even the most inspired are limited in what they can tell of what they know. We humans write and read, teach and learn, at the inevitable cost of falling short. The language that reveals also obscures."

~

"The Gospels, then, stand at the opening of a mystery in which our lives are deeply, dangerously, and inescapably involved. This is a mystery that the Gospels can only partially reveal, for it could be fully revealed only by more books than the world could contain. It is a mystery that we are condemned but also are highly privileged to live our way into, trusting properly that to our little knowledge greater knowledge may be revealed. It is this privilege that should make us wary of any attempt to reduce faith to a rigmarole of judgments and explanations, or to any sort of familiar talk about God. Reductive religion is just as objectionable as reductive science, and for the same reason: Reality is large, our minds are small."

~

"If Jesus only meant that we should have more possessions or even more 'life expectancy,' then John 10:10 is no more remarkable than an advertisement for any commodity whatever. Abundance, in this verse, cannot refer to an abundance of material possessions, for life does not require a material abundance; it requires only material sufficiency.That sufficiency granted, life itself, which is a membership in the living world, is already an abundance...in speaking of more abundant life, Jesus is not proposing to free us by making us richer; he is proposing to set life free from precisely that sort of error. He is talking about life, which is only incidentally our life, as a limitless reality."

~

"...opposition to evolution, abortion and homosexual marriage does not constitute an adequate religion. It does not even constitute an adequate set of 'values." The great moral issue of our time, too much ignored by both sides of our present political division, is violence."

~

"We make make war, we are told, for the love of peace. We subvert our Bill of Rights and impose our will abroad for the sake of freedom and the rule of law. We honor greed and waste with the name of the economy. We allow ever greater wealth and power to accumulate in the hands of a privileged few only to provide jobs for working pwople and charity to the poor. And we sanctify all this as Christian, though the Gospels support none of it by so much as a line or a word."

~

"(In a time when it is the fashion to propose amendments to the Constitution, I would like to propose an amendment requiring (1) that when war breaks out the president and all consenting members of his administration as well as all consenting legislators,whatever their ages, should immediately be enrolled as privates in combat units; and (2) that for the duration of any war all executives and shareholders of corporations contributing to the war effort should be restricted to the same annual income as the workers in their factories - no sacrifice being too great in a time of national peril.)"

Flossing = Reading the Bible

Flossing is reading the Bible.

Wednesday morning I got to go to the dentist. Leading up to Wednesday morning I fretted over the fact that I had not been flossing. I knew that during the cleaning that moment would arrive when my gums would be torn by the hygienist's floss. And then would come the requisite chastisement: "Have you been flossing? No? You need to floss."

Boom.

But we were out of floss. And who thinks about buying floss except when it's 7 minutes before bed and you just brushed your teeth. If then.

Of course we should floss. It's good for gums, your teeth won't fall out and stuff and somewhere I heard it even makes you age slower. We all know we ought to floss. But I brush? Isn't that good enough? It's a start. But I really ought to floss.

Sunday mornings I go to worship. I know that during the worship service that moment would arrive when out of the preacher's mouth would come the requisite chastisement: "Have you been reading your Bible daily? No? You need to read your Bible daily." 

Pretty much every Sunday since the Bible has been available in the language of the people and affordable (maybe 150-200 years after the Gutenberg Bible?) it is the obligation of evangelical, and even some other, pastors worldwide to mention in their sermon at least once the need to read the Bible daily. Or have a quiet time (which has always sort of sounded like a punishment to me). Or have devotions. Pick your nomenclature. 

If reading the Bible/having daily quiet times has been something you have struggled with during the week you know it's coming, you are expecting the burn of the "read the Bible" floss on your gums at some point during that sermon.

Of course we should read the Bible daily. It's good for our souls, it helps us know the God we profess to follow, it teaches us about life and godliness. We all know we ought to read the Bible. But I attend a worship service every week or so? Isn't that good enough? It's a start.

There has been nothing, absolutely nothing, that has been as beneficial in my life as reading the Bible daily (or almost daily). All kinds of research has shown that reading the Bible is the most significant factor in spiritual growth. Period. We NEED to do it. I actually like it when the preacher tells us to do it. Because my gums are used to that. But for some (most?) people the read your Bible challenge is like the challenge to floss.

Me? I'm going to start flossing.

The Gospel of Wealth | New York Times Article

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/opinion/07brooks.html

Banksy-esque Threadless T starring Ronald McDonald. Scathing.

CLICK HERE to buy this T

God is not a white man & Earth is Yours by Gungor. A couple videos.

Best Religion Joke Ever?

In class tonight my professor told this classic Emo Phillips (what a creeper...loved that odd 80s guy) joke. Fantastic. Hypocrisy of Denominating, Todd?

Once I saw this guy on a bridge about to jump. I said, "Don't do it!" He said, "Nobody loves me." I said, "God loves you. Do you believe in God?"

He said, "Yes." I said, "Are you a Christian or a Jew?" He said, "A Christian." I said, "Me, too! Protestant or Catholic?" He said, "Protestant." I said, "Me, too! What franchise?" He said, "Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?" He said, "Northern Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?"

He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist." I said, "Me, too! Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region, or Northern Conservative Baptist Eastern Region?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region." I said, "Me, too!"

Northern Conservative†Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879, or Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?" He said, "Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912." I said, "Die, heretic!" And I pushed him over.

Where the Magic Happens

School starts on Monday so I thought I'd share some pictures of my classroom. The desks are for some minilessons and individual writing and reading workshop. The tables are for group work and reading workshop. The back room is for peer writing conferences, the middle shelf for writing supplies, and the bookshelf for, well, books. Special thanks to Jeff Davis for inspiration for the small book board, where students will post recommended books.

It's not nearly as exciting as pictures of Switzerland and India, but it's my life. At least I get to hang with the President.

the Power of Disconnection

A challenging word:

"If your eyes are glued to your Blackberry and your ears stopped up by your iPod, it's hard to hear what might be going on inside you. Cutting back on these gadgets and not answering every single email and phone call right away may lead to a measure of calm...sometimes you have to disconnect to connect. Likewise, if you're completely absorbed in the electronic world, obsessively checking email and constantly returning phone calls, it becomes impossible to experience the quirky surprises in the world around us."

James Martin, SJ | The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything