The Wing-Beat » Oh

Swallows’ Sortie

Jerry — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 15:25:06 +0000

Buzzing swarms, snatched crisp;

Sing! Swoop! Swish! Wing syncs with beak,

Swallows’ dusk sortie.

-js

The Wing-Beat

Jerry — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 14:22:36 +0000

I have read lovely phrases recently; e.g., in Franz Rosenzweig’s writings on the “literary and human aspect of the Scriptures” and on translating the Scriptures (he collaborated with Martin Buber on a new OT translation in the 1920s); first, his reference to the painters’ depiction of St. Francis’ halo (Latin nimbus) as an “aureole of light”, second, his metaphor about the deep spirit of translation. After noting the “history of translation” starting with the translator’s attempt to achieve the essential meaning of the text despite its spirit being lost in the process, he wrote,

”Then, one day, a miracle happens and the spirits of the two languages mate. This does not strike like a bolt out of the blue. The time for such a hieros gamos, for such a Holy Wedding, is not ripe until a receptive people reaches out toward the wing-beat of an alien masterpiece with its own yearning and its own utterance, and when its receptiveness is not longer based on curiosity, interest, desire for education, or even aesthetic pleasure, but has become an integral part of the people’s historical development. . . .”

[Franz Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, 3rd ed., presented by Nahum N. Glatzer (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 257, 259.] Emphasis mine.

I do still need to compare the passage with the original German, when I find a copy. I wonder, did you think “oriole” when you saw the word aureole as I did? Yes, they are related (aureolus=golden). The passage above suggests far more than words, including Rosenzweig’s reverence for the Jewish Scriptures, what he called the “Only Testament.” When I reflect on his conviction the Scriptures used words-beyond-words to reveal the proper relationship between God, Man, and World, I find his passage and its translation into English to have been inspired.

Wing-Beat, Wingborne . . .

Jerry — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 14:10:19 +0000

Some loved ones create delight by keeping their bird feeders stocked (with the avian-approved, “good stuff”) and waiting for the delight. Hours of it come in flashes of cardinals, blue jays, orioles, finches, variegated blackbirds, black-capped chickadees, mourning dove, sparrows, and the seasonal many others. They are delight on the wing, “wingborne” snatches of a common grace present in the general environment but focused at the feeders. Yes, there are the fat squirrels and the after-dusk racoons, interlopers in something not intended for them, but who are they to turn down a good deal in that extension of common grace? All are distinctive, and all take part in what is offered.

That wingborne delight comes from the givers’ provision. The “good stuff” is not cheap, nor is it second-rate, the kind some birds turn away from–they understand stingy giving and simply choose something else. The givers give for the sake of present and anticipated joy, liberally, and they get to share in grace redoubled. It all comes from a life-attitude, not a singular, selfish desire just to enjoy the local wildlife, but to show they share somehow in a common life borne of a common provision. It is so with the birds and is potentially true for all their relationships! As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.

The Father provides, and so do his children. Grace is a gift received and given. Providence is divine, but people pass it on to others. It is not only spiritual or only material, mostly these are inseparable in the gift. Either way or together, through the Spirit there is provision and there is delight. It is the wingborne foundation for a life of joy.

Our international culture lore and our use of domesticated birds abounds with the birds and the “wing-beat” of their work and significance: storks bring children to parents; the hummingbirds–Mayan divinities incarnate–do they not sip the gods’ nectar? The gospel dove descending upon the Son of Man (or in gospel songs on people as the Great Speckled Bird or the Snow White Dove); the swallows heralding spring at San Juan Capistrano; the American Bald Eagle, bird of peace first, then war; the albatross of Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”; the California Sespe condors–a weak flock though they are outsized fowl. The pampered peafowl of India. Moving closer to our hearts, and table habits, the Thanksgiving Turkey (the wild turkey does indeed fly, yes, Sir, Mr. Franklin of Philadelphia and the Pilgrims of Plymouth!), and, just as with the chicken-domesticators of the Indus Valley, 6,000 b.c.e., do we not all (well, most of us) partake of the yardbird, aided these days by the Arkansas Tysons and the Texas Pilgrims? And eggs, too.

About the wing-beat, in another entry.

The Birds of Spring – Swallows at Our Place, front and back, their mud-daubed and feather-lined nests bearing young and leaving quite a mess! That is how it will be until I find a way to prevent them lodging with us, though outside the walls.

Jerry — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:51:44 +0000

two new hatchlings

The Chinese Dream

Jerry — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 02:57:35 +0000

Ah!–the sinuous path of pragmatism on the way to the “Chinese Dream.” Unique? Oh, no. Actually sounds American. We did, after all, build an interstate highway system that allows us in our powered conveyances to conquer the heights and hollows that Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, Jedediah Smith, and many others — not to mention the American aboriginals — took centuries to “discover” and to name. So, China wants to build a highway to the base camp on Mt. Everest. (By the way, one may ask, isn’t Everest in Tibet? Oh, no, not that Tibet, but the one now located within Greater China.) Tourists will benefit, they say. They deserve to see it. I imagine the pique of world-class mountaineers on hearing such a statement, climbers who trained for years for a shot at Everest, took their opportunity, and were lucky to come down alive. Knowing the life-and-death risks involved in climbing earth’s highest peak, elite adventurers have marveled at the presumptuousness of others less well prepared who seemed to take Everest too lightly and who all-too-readily paid for their misjudgment with their lives.
At least now adventurers will be able to conserve energy by taking the road to the base camp located at 17,000-plus feet (so said the spokesman quoted in the AP report). To possible altitude sickness they would add carsickness!
But in 2008 the Olympic torch will be taken to the summit of Everest! That’s an astonishing goal–possible surely, but the tortuous drama of it, and with no guarantee of success, makes it seem so improbable. Could that be just the point, though? Back to the dream, then . . . . In the world’s largest country, with the longest “Great Wall,” with the largest dam–the Three Gorges, and there are myriad other superlatives, one might be excused for being audacious. Having been named the host country for the 2008 Olympics after a long wait (actually twice, their 2000 bid having been denied), China will put on the world’s greatest show in Beijing and other venues. In fact, China itself will be the great venue, and China will be proudly, resplendently on display, and the world will be impressed. Guaranteed. The arrival of the Olympic torch in the hand of a climber will punctuate China’s grand statement that the Chinese have indeed stood up (Mao Zedong) and in a spectacular way (yes, in yet another way) long prepared for, long dreamed of, indeed, long anticipated.

What, you say, about the ways China has not and will not have arrived by August 2008? Yes, there will be many ways, but they will be less visible. On this point China warrants credit, even if not every Chinese has an equal slice of the dream, or even knows anything about it. Suffice to say for now that more Chinese will become acutely aware of the world beyond the borders of the Middle Kingdom — Zhongguo — and their thinking; their dreams will respond to the pull both of their own land and the recognition coming from lands beyond. At no time in human history will the world have paid more attention to China — no, not even at the time of Liberation in 1949, nor even during the height of Chairman Mao’s power in the Cultural Revolution, nor even during the Tiananmen Incident. No, the Olympics will be the height of exposure, and accomplishment, to date. You will know it when the climber and the torch reach the Everest summit.

How would you like to be on the media crew?

Valentine’s Day, Part 2

Jerry — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 06:10:07 +0000

Ah, perfect love! For today, let us relegate the classical, sacrificial charity-love to a wall seat where it shall surely remain, but for a few lines. Take up (as C. S. Lewis did in his The Four Loves) the subtle joys of Affection (Storge) or the often-neglected, sometimes scorned, virtues of Friendship (Philia) or the state-of-being-in-love, that is, one’s desire for the Beloved, that is the essence of . . . Eros! But Eros is not what most people think; they do have in mind, actually, Venus, what Lewis referred to as “the carnal ingredient within Eros.” Lewis has much more compelling stuff in the pages following that comment, and I recommend him to you: for example, his astonishing comments on Ephesians 5:25 and context on the husband as the head of the wife:

This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is–in her own mere nature–least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bride-groom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely. The chrism of this terrible coronation is to be seen not in the joys of any man’s marriage but in its sorrows, in the sickness and sufferings of a good wife or the faults of a bad one, in his unwearying (never paraded) care or his inexhaustible forgiveness: forgiveness, not acquiescence. As Christ sees in the flawed, proud, fanatical or lukewarm Church on earth that Bride who will one day be without spot or wrinkle, and labours to produce the latter, so the husband whose headship is Christ-like (and he is allowed no other sort) never despairs. (Harvest Book edition, 1960, 1988, pp. 105-6)

I said astonishing. And so it is. Moreover the kind of headship described here is impossible apart from the pre-eminent and sacrificial headship of Christ himself. It is in fact the comparison between the husband and his wife, and Christ and his church that is so vast; Christ’s love for the Beloved is such that the husband’s love for his wife pales by comparison. That which so consumes the lover and beloved as Eros ultimately can be fulfilled, that is, perfected, only in the Charity-love (Agape) modeled in Christ. Eros is fundamentally powerful and effective, but cannot be pre-eminent without being demonic, and if demonic, then not truly Eros: Eros is terrifyingly imperfect and unsatisfying unless fulfilled by obedience to God.

Lewis’ commentary catches the hyperbolic emphasis of Paul the Sent: here, an emphasis on complete sacrificial commitment, and there, the fact of its impossibility unless Christ makes it happen. In the broader context of Paul’s teachings we can make sense of this by recognizing the pervasive life of Christ not only in individual believers but in his church, which is (again, astonishing!) :

his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. Ephesians 1:18b, NET Bible

This is no obscure spiritual mysticism but a spiritual theology that flows from life (the life of God) to life (the life we are given in God), and which touches all of our human, natural loves, to, and beyond, the point of fulfillment in the source of love. I would struggle to describe it adequately; perhaps for now it is enough to call Charity-love back from the wall seat, to be the center of attention as that perfect love.

More on “Cosmonut”

Jerry — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 05:54:50 +0000

On a previous post from December 3 I mentioned the conception of “god” or “God” in the Chinese tradition. The emperor could be seen as a god of sorts. I have visited all too briefly with my Chinese academic friends about this, but one comment resonates with my growing understanding of the ages-old “secularity” of Chinese society and belief: even without the modern, naturalistic, atheistic world view of most educated Chinese today, to have “God” is something very difficult. In traditional China, the emperor–Son of Heaven or tianzi–dominated over the people, and together they constituted the main reality of the world. There has been no “emperor” since at least 1912, but there has been no lack of authoritarian government. Beyond mundane boundaries, though, and subordinate to the world itself, is the traditional Chinese conception of a god or God, and it is well-nigh inconsequential: “It’s hard to be a god in China,” said one friend. And I must say it can be hard to accept the idea of a loving, redeeming God and along with that idea, the concept that a Chinese person would need such a god.

I am inquiring whether the god-concept is not just so much like western, Greek daimoniae, or aeons, or the anthropomorphized Olympic gods. I expect to find parallels, but I assume some key differences. For one, the inhabitants of heaven or tian, seem mostly to be the departed-yet-somehow-present ancestors. Buddhist developments have strengthened and shaped that belief. And heaven has other entities, including gods, but they seem inferior in the scheme of it.

I find that my contemporary Chinese friends don’t worry themselves too much about these things, whether out of lack of interest or the lack of concern with it in their modern, secular social experiences. I’m sure if I could speak Chinese fluently it would be easier for them to speak about it. Thankfully they are gracious enough, and quite competent enough in English to share what they understand. Yes, I am grateful for that.

I am also beginning to understand the depth of the Christian influence on any modern Chinese who decides to follow Jesus. Perhaps there is no exceptional radicality to it–no more so than in any other social and cultural context–but it does seem no less remarkable because of the basic secularity of traditional China, to which also is added the post-socialist, authoritarian, aggressively capitalist secularism of 21st-century China. I hear and read that apart from the secularism, and the paradoxical presence of traditional folk religion blended with Daoism and Buddhism, there is a gaping, hungry emptiness specifically shaped for filling by the eternal, Creator God in Jesus Christ. Wherever in the world one finds such great need, there one finds divine activity beyond mere human understanding or expectation.

This line of thought links to another set of comments elsewhere on these pages (link: Doc Summers–Believing in Past and Present), but it also achieves a parallel with–and supersedes–ancient Chinese virtues relating to the responsibility of the emperor/king or Son of Heaven to create and maintain the conditions for peace and prosperity among the people who depend on him. Even in Zhou times, before the first emperor, an ideal ruler was to assure peace, justice, prosperity, and harmony on the earth.

This is not a foreign concept. It is rather universal. Here is a quotation from Eberhard Arnold’s Inner Land:

On the basis of justice that can serve nothing else, God creates peace. The Lord of Peace consecrates every aspect of man and human lilfe to His perfect purity and unity. He demands the surrender of all the goods of this life and of life itself. His new justice gives the poor and the wretched the land they never had; great peace shall be their joy. Without justice there is no peace. If the land of this stolen earth is not given back to the poor, justice will remain lost. For the poor who have been robbed of land, justice demands that everything amassed in self-will and opposition to God’s will is handed back again. God’s justice overcomes self-will and private property. What men own hinders God’s unity. With the doing of good deeds, the peace of God supplants the evil of discord and unpeace. (241)

I need to say that Arnold wrote from two important contexts: the first was his position of leadership among a Hutterite group living by biblical and communal principles; the second is that he lived and wrote in Germany during the early twentieth century, particularly the 1920s and 1930s. It is no surprise that he had “difficulties” with the authorities of the Third Reich, and they with him. His comment comes from a chapter focused on “The Peace of God,” a topic of great importance for him and his community. His words have much to commend to believers around the world in places where peace and justice do not exist, or where, sooner or later, they will be challenged.

Now I get back to a point ill-made earlier: I recall the imagery of Juliana of Norwich in her Revelations or “Shewings” — the poignant image of the hazelnut that she held in her hand, much as the Creator God holds all Creation in his own hand. I see there a truth starkly realized in contrast to the extent of human graspings, especially the graspings of those who think themselves powerful but are not (as Boethius once remarked in his Consolation of Philosophy). In such hands there is far too little grace, or providence, or assurance.

Boundaries / Bondage

Boundary living–bondage to limits, those things I have adored and pursued, straining after far beyond all right.

Boundary living–bondage, in restraints, to imaginings and dreams built up yet so far short of grander vision.

Boundary living–bondage to inadequacies of my own striving, selfish grasping, trusting foolishly my own powers.

Boundary living–boundless should be, free from bondage, If I have, trusting, committed all pursuits to the Righteous Giver, all dreams to the Provider, all weakness to the Only One Strong.

About the New Buzz This Year

Jerry — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 13:19:05 +0000

It’s no secret to my extended clan that BuzzFever is alive and growing. I want to congratulate son Curtis and supportive, collaborative daughter-in-law Crystal for a truly interesting business site with The Lord-Only-Knows potential. It’s just one idea, but it is REAL.

This is my first entry for 2007; I hope to have more to say about BuzzFever, among other things more typical of my own and some other common interests. Today is the Ninth Day of Christmas according to my lectionary . . . the ChristCelebration continues! Jesus’ death was a scandal to the world and still is. But, says Paul the Sent:

For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. (For rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person perhaps someone might possibly dare to die.) But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, because we have now been declared righteous by his blood, we will be saved through him from God’s wrath. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, how much more, since we have been reconciled, will we be saved through his life? Not only this, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation. (Romans 5:6-11, NET Bible)