broken eikon

I told myself I wouldn’t make this confession, but I have been so darn busy I haven’t blogged for a bit. There. I said it. Blogging will resume, I promise. Please tell life to slow down, though, ok?

I was listening to this song today, and I had a religious experience that I hadn’t had in a while. My desire for God overcame me and I was deeply saddened by my lack of love for God. Right around the word “marrow” in the first verse, I began to weep for how much I was loved, and how much I can love back but choose not to. My crying lasted until the song was over and I reflected on how to love God more and more. Check out the lyrics, and do yourself a favor and try to find this Five Iron Frenzy song to listen to…

Dandelions

In a field of yellow flowers, underneath the sun
Bluest eyes that spark with Lightning, Boy with shoes undone
He is so young, so full of hope, Reveling in tiny dreams
filling up,his arms with flowers right for giving any queen,

running to her,beaming bright boy cradling his prize
A flickering of yellow light, within his mothers eyes,
She holds him to her heart, keeping them where they’ll be safe,
Clasped within her very marrow, Dandilions in a vase,

She sees love where anyone else would see weeds.
All hope is found. Here is everything he needs

Fathomless your endless mercy, weight I could not lift,
Where do I fit in this puzzle, what good are these gifts?
Not a martyr or a saint, scarcely can I struggle through
All that I have ever wanted, was to give my best to you

Lord, search my heart, Create in me somthing clean.
Dandelions- You see flowers in these weeds.

Gently lifting hands to heaven, Softened by the sweetist hush,
A father sings over his children, Loving them so very much
More than words could warrant, Deeper than the darkest Blue
More than sacrafice could merit

Lord,I give my heart to you!

i was at the mall the other day, and as I was trying to find a parking space, I saw a woman begin to walk to her car, so I angled my car to follow her so I could grab her parking space. Now, this next part may or may not be appropriate, but you can be the judge. The woman was in her twenties and she was wearing a sweater on her torso, but her shorts were cut-off sweat pants that were cut very high, so that her panties were showing from underneath them. I honestly try very hard not to focus on sexual aspects of women besides my wife, and I genuinely wish to care about people as people, not objects. However, I did see her panties, I don’t know how I could not have. What made me even more uncomfortable was that she kept looking back when she realized I was following her. I have followed many people to their cars before, and I usually don’t get that reaction, and my gut feeling is that she was expecting me to be checking her out, so I made a point to look past her so she didn’t feel like an object.

The whole episode did make me wonder about some things. Do we have a right to wear whatever we want? I personally felt bad, even though I wasn’t trying, I saw another woman’s undergarments. That is something personally, I would rather keep between myself and my wife. Is she to blame? Am I? Is there any blame to place? Is this even a big deal?

I don’t judge this woman. It looks as if she might have been working out, perhaps these are the only clothes she had that she felt appropriate wearing. Perhaps she has been taught that men will look at her if she wears certain things, adn maybe that is shy she kept looking back at me to see if I was looking. Did I treat her with respect? Should I have done something else?  I think I was ok. I saw something i considered inappropriate, but since my sexuality is conceptualized in terms of my wife, I didn’t have thoughts that I consider impure.

The whole situation left me feeling uncomfortable.

I hope this makes a bit of sense…

Darwinism puts forth that the chief end of change is survivability. Which may or may not be biologically true (although I tend to believe it is more or less true). When we have taken this survival instinct and have applied it to non-biological and specifically human interactions, it is called social Darwinism. Magneto and Apocalypse (X-men villains) are social Darwinists.  I wonder if the reason social Darwinism made its way into our culture is a meta-narrative that says that surviving is the highest good one can achieve. This narrative puts Darwinism (social or otherwise) in conflict with Jesus’ Kingdom talk. Of course, Jesus views the greatest good as laying down one’s life for another. So the real disagreement between Darwin (or at least the social proponents of his theory) and Jesus is not Creation Vs. Evolution, but whether or not you believe that humanity will be made better by having an “every person for themselves” mentality or a “me for everyone else” mentality.

This may not be a decision we can try to convince people of. It may be that some people simply won’t ever care. And then we followers of the way  have to care more than enough for everyone to be cared for…

When I was a kid, I absolutely hated school. My real friends lived in my neighborhood, but at school I had friends who were like life jackets. They weren’t there because I wanted them to be there, they were there simply because I didn’t want to feel as alone as I would have otherwise. Beyond the social aspects of school (from which I still have scars), I hated learning. I couldn’t tell you why, perhaps I will reflect on it and post later, but I was so bored the entire time. I doodled on paper, made things out of paperclips, created Dungeons and Dragons characters that would never be used, etc… Perhaps this is why I didn’t learn hardly a thing about grammar.

Which brings us to why I am having such a hard time in Greek. Participles, accusative forms, tenses, active infinitives. I have no earthly idea what those things are, but they are part of the everday language for the class. I was doing ok up until yesterday at which point I fled the class in horror that I am such a dumb butt.

Lesson: Kids, pay attention in school so when you take greek, you at least have a chance at understanding it.

I just finished reading John Caputo’s “Philosophy and Theology”. Great read. Nine short chapters.

outline in a nutshell:

Theology and Philosophy used to be nearly one and the same, and ruled the intelligencia.

Modernity broke them up, and relegated philosophy to a back room at uniersities. Theology was now irrellevant to science.

Postmodernity has now shown “pure science” for what it is, limitations and strengths, and brings back philosophy and theology into the public discussion with equal force to the other “sciences”, each with thier own languages.

Caputo shows how the popular deconstructionists of philosophy are estranged brothers of our theologians, and they have been in dialogue intentionally and unintentionally throughout history… and that is great.

Do yourself a favor and pick this book up if you are at all interested in  theology or philosophy. Great read, and short.

I wonder how many of you who read this have seen the movie (or heard the album, or seen the musical) “Tommy”. It is a concept album by the Who, written to be a rock opera, which became a movie, and excellently, now a musical that is playing in Dallas.

Brandon brought it to youth group Tuesday and asked if we could watch it “Jesus at the movies” style and talk about it in light of God. So, being the strict youth leader I am, I said, “sure”.

I won’t ruin the movie for you, but Tommy is a quasi-messianic figure, sometimes paying homage to Christ, sometimes mocking religion altogether. I understand that Pete Townsend wrote it reflecting on his time with a mystic name Meher Baba, but the themes go beyond any simple tip of the hat he might be giving.

What I really enjoyed were two things. One, I saw a really powerfull critique of the world’s domination system. Throughout the movie, people try to “fix” Tommy by telling him what to do and think and also by trying to help him have experiences that “should” make him normal. The powerful thing for me is that Tommy gained his strength completely apart from the “normal”, and that is what made him so threatening to those around him. Much like I see Jesus being and doing. Tommy was cut off from what the world was telling him, and in effect was able to be who he was apart from the system, and the results are really cool to watch.

Second, I really like the ending. It can seem like a scathing critique on religion, and while I think that is very much there, I take it as a critique on religion that offers grand promises, but in the end tries to make everyone the same, give everyone the same spiritual journey, and reveals the emptiness of religion that doesn’t help or change anyone.

Go see Tommy. It is worth it.

I was in the Brite reading room in the TCU library the other day and I found something that was fascinating to me. They had the entire Talmud translation there. The Talmud is a collection of various Rabbinic commentaries on the Mishnah (which is a bunch of Rabbinic commentaries of the Hebrew Bible).

At any rate, I was browsing through volume 1 (I think), and I came across some commentaries on various passages of scripture dealing with pooping. For example, the story of David cutting Saul’s robe while he pooped in cave. This led to a discussion about modesty while pooping.

One Rabbi commented that as long as no one sees you, you are modest enough. Another councils that you should politely excuse yourself in such a fashion that no one knows where you are going. My favorite though, was the advice that anyone may poop freely behind a fence, but if you are in an open field, you need to go far enough away that no one can hear you fart. And yes, it said “fart” in the Talmud. Love me some Rabbis.

Here is a little bit of what I have been learning in Greek this week. Unfortunately,  cut and paste works terribly with Greek fonts, so instead, here is a transliteration of the Greek Hebrew Bible’s version of Genesis 1, with my translation (let’s call it the CIV (complete idiot’s version, or Chad’s irresponsible version, etc..)

This is what the ancient Greek would sound like to us:

                      en arche epoiesen ah theos tawn ouranon kai tain gain.

This is a literal translation of the Greek, word for word:

                      at origin produced the God the sky and the land

Here is what it might look like when translated into our speech:

                      at the origin, God produced the sky and the land.

A few interesting things that I found when researching this small bit of scripture.

In the Hebrew version (the original), the word for ”origin” implies a starting point or first fruits, kind of looking forward to much more good stuff. The Greek implies a kind of domain that was set up. I think that is an important theological difference.

The Greek word for “produced” means produce, manufacture, make, act accomplish. The Hebrew word means to create or to fill. Some Rabbi’s have implied that God did more “filling” than creating from nothing. An interesting thought. What if God and the universe have existed side by side throughout eternity and then God one day decided to have some fun….

the word for sky in Hebrew is simply that. The place where air is, the place where the stars are, the place above the ground. The Greek for sky comes from the same word where we get “Uranus” (lol), implying sky or where the gods are.

one last thing, in the Greek and the Hebrew, the word for land is land, soil, ground. It seems like when we say it, we imply the planet earth (heavens and earth). I think what was in mind here was a creation that we humans were very in touch with. This is a God who is involved with the stuff right below our feet and the stuff that gets into our fingernails, not just the big abstract planet thing we can see from space.

you dig? What are your thoughts on some of these observations?