How Long: A Psalm of Waiting.

How long, O Lord, shall we wait for you?

Until we see your face in glory,

and behold the fruit of your harvest?

 

Long we have sojourned, strayed and returned;

Are you pleased with our songs?

With the sacrifices of our lips?

 

Have we waited so long that we have forgotten to wait?

Do we hear you or our own voice?

Do we love you or pretend it is so?

 

Here we run to and fro and nowhere,

At once charging with trumpet blasts,

At once evading where they lead.

 

Is this the bride you sealed in love and blood?

Has absence made you fonder?

Or are we fonder of your absence?

 

Return O Lord, for our frailty is great!

Too quickly we doubt,

Too quickly we forget.

 

Arise lest we spurn our first love,

Lest like sheep we go astray,

even as the shepherd is within reach.

 

Once the wind blew and we knew from whence it came,

Once we spoke in tongues of fire,

O that we would burn again!

 

What became of the former day, when even hell could not prevail?

Are not the sick in need of healing?

Do not the blind still require sight?

 

If you move, O God I pray we wouldn’t miss it!

Strike the stone that we would drink,

ignite the clouds that we would see.

 

If you are Lord why then do princes mock?

Why does the victim eat salt for healing?

Why does the predator wander free?

 

With fear, we hear of wars and rumors of wars.

Come and judge like you have promised!

Darkness falls, come out of hiding!

 

O God our cries have reached your ears;

So in silence we will trust you,

yet in darkness we will follow.

 

You reign over calm and hurricane,

Beneath the soil the tree is growing,

its leaves will heal the present wound.

 

We cannot grasp You, and yet You are.

Infinite upon Your throne,

though invisible you are not far.

 

Once more the earth will tremble,

The nations will gather in witness,

from east to west they will bow low.

 

We shout hosanna for the King has come!

Let us remember that we would endure,

let us endure that we would reign.

 

How long O Lord, shall we wait for you?

Quickly you are coming,

already you are here.

Late Night Musings of the Poetic Kind…

“We’re but vapor dancing on stringed bows of light – shadows coalescing with the hymns of moments past; standing on the shoulders of all that came before – leaving echoes in the eyes of what is yet to be. So tonight if a moment is all I have to hold – and if no alibi could contravene the sentence of its passing; let me hold the hand that holds unfolding time – and in the shadow of your wings let this evanescent soul abide.”

 

The antecedent poem is a short sketch I wrote a few weeks ago on Canada day while reflecting amidst a beautiful barrage of national festivity on the notion of time, history, and our place within it.

Abridged Response to a Regular Reading: Jacques Derrida

“We are all mediators, translators.” ~Jacques Derrida

To comment on the short and decontextualized quote I am reminded of the statement made by the teacher of Ecclesiastes, “Is there a thing of which it is said, “See this is new?” It has already been said in the ages before us.” (Ecclesiastes 1:10) This is the first basis upon which Derrida’s assertion can be understood; for all of the work of study and instruction is but the interpretation of what already exists—either in reaction, affirmation, or meditation of it, but in any case certainly derivative in one way or another. A second basis upon which the assertion (that we are but mediators and translators) rest is in the fact that no pure transmission of thought exists: the moment our words are expressed either in speech, art or writing, it is for the hearer, viewer, or reader to translate and interpret through their own individual understanding.

 

To be sure, there is a poignant sense of uncertainty that can be experienced in response to such a statement; if it is detached from any affirmation of a certainty to be interpreted there would vanish any reason to hold or argue anything. Still, as a Christian and as one who has been given the responsibility of a teacher in matters of biblical instruction there is much for me to consider in this. There is a reason why Paul said to Timothy, “Not many should teach since those who teach will be held to higher account,” and “pay close attention to yourself and to your teaching, for in it you will ensure salvation both for yourself as well as those who hear you.”  The fact of the matter is that the best I have to offer is not original thought but mediation and interpretive translation of what I perceive; this is furthermore derived from many layers of the mediation and translation of others replete in the traditions, narratives, and sources which surround me. For my own part, this is an unavoidable call to humility before those I teach as one who is himself searching and far from the possession of all answers; but above all else, it is the call to humility before the God of all truth apart from whom I can be certain of nothing.

 

Abridged Response to a Regular Reading: Hans-Georg Gadamer.

“The essence of the question is the opening up and keeping open, of possibilities.” ~Hans-Georg Gadamer

There are several ways in which we can perceive questioning: a question can be a challenge or invitation, an expression of doubt or an optimistic curiosity. Our questions might arise out of tension seeking resolve, or they might be birthed from the continual desire to escape that same resolution; the question is what arouses the scholar to seek, and it is the multiplication of questions that keeps him seeking. The objective of the question will shape the reception of the answer received—which is why a cold skepticism will yield different results than the one truly seeking to learn: the latter is willing to hear out many perspectives while the former resists anything presented.

 

Jesus said that the one who seeks finds and to the one that knocks it will be opened to them. In this way, before we ask a question of external to us we must first begin with the internal question, “Am I asking with the openness to be changed by what I find, or is my ‘keeping open of possibilities,’ a means of escaping such a commitment? Because we see through a mirror dimly our questions are a means to continually search out more of what we will only ever see in part in this life; however, we must not ever use our questions as an excuse to remain paralyzed by infinite possibility.

Abridged Response to a Regular Reading: Mary Midgley

“Fatalism is not just a belief in causality or an expectation of disaster. It is essentially a view about effort.  Fatalism says that our efforts must always be useless because a power outside ourselves controls our destiny and will override all our attempts to act.” ~Mary Midgley.

Fatalism is a rather interesting concept to me because of our rather complex relationship to it: intellectually we reject it while traces of it remain.  As an “ism” it carries with it a great deal of negative connotations by virtue of what Midgley identifies as a systematized declaration of the futility of effort; nonetheless, it is something that we often default back to in moments of failure or uncertainty. How often has it been said, “oh it was meant to be,” “I couldn’t help it,” or “it was her time,”? Whether we are aware of it or not, the language and thought-system of fate is in different ways intertwine within in our collective consciousness because of its root causes which are indifferent of our cultural apprehension to fatalism as a system of thought.

What this highlights is our pervasive tendency to lay the blame of our actions on any scapegoat necessary. Beginning with the shifting of Adams guilt upon Eve—and by extension God—and continuing to the scapegoats of fate, government, environment, thought, or circumstance, we have proven that we are deftly skilled at using the freedom of our will to blame its expression on anything other than ourselves. Fate can indeed be, as Midgley observed, a worldview of apathy; but such apathy is given existence when the responsibility of all actions (egardless of the role played by those whose hands are actually dirty) are placed upon whatever force is chosen to be the puppet master.

 

Abridged Response to a Regular Reading: Alexis de Tocqueville

“In a democracy, people acquire the habit of always considering themselves as standing alone, and they are apt to imagine that their whole destiny is in their own hands…Thus, not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from him: it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens, in the end, to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.”

—Alexis de Tocqueville

Tocqueville in this excerpt identified what can be known with paradoxical apprehension; that the thing pursued so interminably as the great ideal of Western society has turned to offer its own list of entrenching malaises. To be sure it was by virtue of individual value that literacy and education were made accessible beyond the elite, that the single conscience was given the freedom to act upon its own conviction, and that the governing voice extended to embrace those formerly excluded on the basis of class. Even so—as we can now presently see—when the individual is detached from the collective, the sense of individuality provides room for latter systemic egoism.

The egotistical “solitude of the heart” of which Tocqueville spoke, has come to be—as he predicted elsewhere—the catalyst for political disengagement: an egoism spawning paralysis—something that each political election reveals this in ever decreasing voter turnout. This must not, however, be misconstrued to be an inevitable outcome of democracy itself; rather it must be seen as an outcome of the individual value which first demanded democracy—at least that value stretched beyond its reasonable limit to preclude accountability and belonging within the past, present, and future collective. It is not Democracy, as some nefarious edifice, which causes Man to forget his ancestors, hide his descendants, and separates contemporaries; such an accusation can only lie with the individual who chooses to make himself out to be the world while the world exists unknown by him. Unfortunately, in large measure, this “individual” in so many ways has come to be our universal principle.

Abridged Response to a Regular Reading: Hans Urs von Balthasar

  “Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient world refused to understand itself, a word which both imperceptibly and yet unmistakably has bid farewell to our new world, a world of interests, leaving it to its own avarice and sadness. No longer loved or fostered by religion, beauty is lifted from its face as a mask, and its absence exposes features on that face which threaten to become incomprehensible to man. We no longer dare to believe in beauty and we make of it a mere appearance in order the more easily to dispose of it. Our situation today shows that beauty demands for itself at least as much courage and decision as do truth and goodness, and she will not allow herself to be separated and banned from her two sisters without taking them along with herself in an act of mysterious vengeance. We can be sure that whoever sneers at her name as if she were the ornament of a bourgeois past—whether he admits it or not—can no longer pray and soon will no longer be able to love.”

~Hans Urs von Balthasar

  Of what use is Wonder, that simple response to the apprehension of the beautiful? For that matter, what is beauty itself? How might it be defined, predicted, or quantified? What is it that so arranges the form, color, taste, aroma, sound, harmony, memory, texture, symbol, and placement of things, that in their coalescing we deem them to be as such—beautiful? There are few places so dark that the whisper of beauty cannot penetrate them; her notes are found in the wrinkles of weathered cheeks and in the faces of flowers hidden where no explorer has yet set foot. Beauty is the echo of her Creator, the accompaniment of the good and the true which baffles categorization or separation from her infinite source. We rightly call a thing beautiful when we perceive through it something of our God who is beautiful.

  It is, as Urs von Balthasar observes, the way of the modern notion to pass over beauty—to write it off as a distraction or a waste. This dearth of wonder is the murderer of prayer because it moves us to spurn the wonder of simply being with the Wonderful, demanding instead a transactional profit or detached understanding. Likewise, it dries up love because it stands at a distance, seeking the profitable merits of a thing rather than the reward of the thing itself. Beauty, however, refuses to be so commodified or manipulated; it demands the response to wonder that can only come when we dare experience its mystery. To love we must encounter, to pray we must behold—tasting and seeing that our God is good and true, and in the union of these two, altogether beautiful.

Abridged Response to a Regular Reading: Mary Midgley

“At the Renaissance…the invention of real complex machines such as clocks gave the human imagination an immensely powerful piece of new material. Machine-imagery changes the worldview profoundly because machines are by definition under human control. They can in a sense be fully understood because they can be taken to pieces. And if the world is essentially a machine, then it can be taken to pieces too and reassembled more satisfactorily.”

~Mary Midgley

 

  The other day I spoke with my brother about the frustration of working on a skid-steer repair when the problem concerned the electronics rather than the machinery itself. Whereas the latter is a predictable, and tactile piece of equipment with visible signs of distress, misalignment and wear—the former is an amorphous “energy” which in the absence of the technical knowledge to work with it, has the capacity to render void any adjustment made to the more tangible aspects of the machine. I cannot comment further than this because my knowledge of mechanics extends only as far as what can be observed in the 30 second span between opening the hood and calling a professional, but I digress; even if only theoretically for some of us, the idea of being able to break down a whole into the individual, reducible parts which constitute it, is a wondrous defense against the frustration of mystery—the reality of being a part of the world rather than transcendent over it.

 

  The difficulty with this view of the world is the way it stuffs what is intangible or unquantifiable into the ever shrinking corners of what has not yet been explored: the “god of the gaps” becomes the illusion of brains. Mary Midgley says that the machine imagery profoundly changes the worldview, “because machines are by definition under human control;” so what do we do then with those things which are indeed beyond human control? It was Karl Barth frequently spoke of the nature of religion (quantified Divinity) as nothing more than a reaction to the trauma of encountering the God who is in every way beyond us; the crisis of God shatters our neat manuals of mechanistic explanation and bids us stand with Job with no answer in hand but the person of the Infinite God before us. We may want to mechanically quantify all that is, but like my brother frustrated by the electronics of a skid-steer, the world which God has made—filled and held together by Him—is not so tame that we may be unscathed by the crisis of His mystery. We are secure, not when we understand and have control over all things, but when we rest in the hand of the one who does.

Abridged Response to a Regular Reading: Harold Kushner

“Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.”

—Harold S. Kushner

Mankind lives to give an answer for why he lives, and in the absence of an answer, he lives to divert his attention from the question. Now, the attainment of pleasure, or power, may, in fact, be the meanings ascribed to “why” of one’s life; but such hollow answers beg further questions—not the least being whether it is the quest for or the temporal grasp of power or pleasure that informs meaning? I would argue that the best these things can offer is meaning in diversion from the terror of having no ultimate answer.

If I might stretch his words beyond the framework within which they reside, Kushner’s definition of life as a quest, and that a quest in pursuit of meaning, for me conveys a sense of the infinance of desire. In life, meaning is never a static commodity that once grasped remains forever in hand; it is continually being defined and redefined, understood and expanded, lost and found again. We may know our meaning but we are ever seeking to affirm it in an unfolding experience. Ultimately, this inexhaustible search for an answer is owed to the reality that our answer is birthed from our being made by the One who is infinite for Himself: meaning in life is found in union with the giver of life. Such an overarching telos is refracted in a thousand manifestations within the individual and collective endeavors of Mankind—the often minuscule things that are made supremely meaningful as they are permeated by and for communion with the infinite God.

Abridged Response to a Regular Reading: Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Parable of the Madman.” (1882)

“How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives; who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?”

~Friedrich Nietzsche

The blow was struck, but to whom was the damage done? Could Divine blood really stain the hands of the created? To declare the death of God is not remove His existence, it is only to shut one’s eyes to that which defines reality; in this, the true only casualty is humanity itself who would cut itself off. Here I believe that Nietzsche understood deeply what the implications of “the death of God” would be: nothing short of a collective leap into an oblivion of self-defined nothingness if we cannot ascend to His place. As those things which come from Him are cut off, (meaning, hope, value) we may declare that God is dead, but it is really humanity who suffers the blow.

It is the height of absurdity for the created ones to claim the obliteration of the One who called all things into existence; how ironic it is then, that the murder which calls us out as irreparably guilty is, in fact, the initiation of our cleansing! What Nietzsche spoke of in an existential sense rings with analogy to what was pounded with blood stained realism onto the record of history: with a hammer stroke, “What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death.” We pierced Him unknowing that the blood and water flowed would turn to drown us in a cleansing flood. God never died at the philosopher’s hands—it is too late to repeat a history swallowed by resurrection. And so we stand with no weapon but our doubts in hand, but where else can we go? He is the Word of life and it is only our death to leap from His grasp.