And among the four groups — the Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — does the denomination suggest its members vary in their ability to cope with “the noonday demon” called acedia?  Do the Millennarians, who are allowed to emerge once every thousand years, have a special gift of focused discipline that allows them to endure?  Or do the others do better?  How do they vary in their encounters with boredom, or depression, or apathy?  Stephenson may have some answers from the geek-sci-fi- side; I’m reading Norris for hers.

9/16–The primary reference is to Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, which should be in release since September 9th.  (See the article in the Sep 2008 Wired .) Set on the planet Arbe where the people are either the Saecular (anti-environmental consumerist, sybaritics) or the monastic avaunts or auts who live and think amid ritual in the mathic world inside walled concents (sounds a bit like “cloisters,” eh?).  The four divisions of auts — Unarians, Decenarians, Centenarians, and Millennarians — are free to venture out of their assigned or chosen (?) concents according to classification:  by year, decade, century, and millennium.

Time is the central focus.

Already this sounds restrictive.  But suppose there could be an inversion of socio-cultural values that prized slowed time rather than life-lived-at-ever-increasing-velocity-with-no-end-in-sight — and decreasing returns on one’s efforts?

Some things to consider short of further comment for today:

First, the Christian tradition holds and provides an ideal, or varieties of the ideal, for maximizing time:  one in forms of the monastic tradition; another in expressions of Pietism; and another in personal expressions of piety and devotion, to name three examples.  And then — shall we never forget? — Sabbath, with an extra bolt of wisdom from the Israelitic/Judaic tradition.

Second, Jesus said something about rest; perhaps we should attend to that, too.

More later . . . .

Some older readers could dismiss him and others like him as careless reactionaries. But would they dare say that to an entire generation of twenty-somethings? Some older readers should recall themselves in the 60s and 70s; I invite the comparison.

But what of the “us vs. them” noted in the AP article — Christians against non-Christians? Not entirely true, I’m sure, but true enough, and often enough. Practices belie professions too facilely made. Some older commentators have helped (and challenged me with their words), so I invite you to read on:

Jacques Maritain (in The Peasant of the Garonne, trans. Cuddihy & Hughes, 1968, pages 79-81), writing as a Catholic, primarily to Catholics. The topic was loyalty to the law of the cross of Christ; he wrote,

The more a Christian . . . gives an absolute primacy in his heart to a fully liberated brotherly love, and in dealing with non-Catholics or non-Christians, sees them as they really are, members of Christ, at least potentially, the more firmly he must maintain his positions in the doctrinal order (I don’t say he should brandish them at every turn), and must make clear the differences which, in the realm of what is true or false, separate him from these men he loves wholeheartedly. In acting thus, he will be honoring them. To do otherwise would be to betray Truth, which is above everything.

Maritain refers to the difficulties, the great discomfort, of practicing “brotherly love and the love of the One who is the Truth.” He continues,

To begin with, it is at the very core of brotherly love that inevitably we suffer in our hearts, because those non-Christians whom we love like members of Christ, of the beloved Saviour, do not know Christ. There can be and certainly is much of truth in their baggage. But they do not know the Truth, the Truth that frees, and it is a great misfortune for them, and one great joy less for heaven and for Jesus. They continue to struggle with many chains, they still collide against many barriers along their road; there are for them still many traps in the shadows. Would we love them truly if we didn’t suffer because of what they lack? The more fraternal love grows, the more this suffering also grows. Clearly, if anyone delights in loving them, and receiving the gift of their friendship in return, but without experiencing any of this suffering, there is something unreal about his love.

Maritain seeks the “natural joy” (Psalm 85:10 is in the background)

to contemplate in quite a few of our Christian brothers, entranced to be able at last to rub their noses, all atremble with enthusiasm, with the noses of all the sons of Adam.

I don’t soon expect to see my denominational brothers, or most American Christians, delighting to exchange a holy kiss or to practice certain other European or Middle Eastern forms of greeting among themselves, let alone with unbelievers. But I think Maritain is suggesting the rightness of just that kind of thing — of so delighting in the non-Christian as a brother or sister that we could all the more delight in him or her as a believer and full member of God’s household. Psalm 85 is about the restoration of a broken relationship — that between the LORD God and his people. So Maritain’s point is potent, poignant: in keeping faith with God, and with his gospel in the cross of Christ, how could the Christian not love thusly?

Maritain is not naive: a breach is possible when a non-Christian may reject doctrine — it could be a barrier. I agree. Perhaps, then, his point about the necessity of brotherhood, of true friendship, is chief. Jesus did say a thing or two, did he not, about friends and friendship? (John 15:13-15) Difficulties? You bet.

Novelist Will D. Campbell, in The Convention, in the novel’s closing scene at the home of Exell and Dorcas Rose McBride, at prayer time with their three mixed-ethnic foster children, including Leanne:

Leanne prayed the way she always did, for everything and everybody: the new kitten that Volene had gotten to replace Doshie: the Dominique rooster in a cardboard box on the back porch, his broken leg having been splinted by Dale Alan and Volene. Then Leanne called the names of everyone in the family and all the neighbors she could remember–especially for “Mister Leland who lives in the tar paper house on the left, just before you cross the river on the way to town who is bad sick and ain’t . . . uh . . . excuse me, God . . . I mean . . . and isn’t expected to live very long.” She thanked God for bringing Mama and Daddy home safely. She prayed for the fireflies in the jar and promised God that she would turn them loose in the morning if they didn’t smother.

When the prayer ended and they were getting to their feet, Denise whispered, “Leanne forgot to pray for the church.”

“No she didn’t,” their mama said.

Woe to us for the lack of holy imagination to envision a more inclusive church; where that statement might be misinterpreted, I say, then, that we must envision the possibility that Jesus is calling more people to his church than we are able to imagine.

More, later, perhaps.

The Baby is Paradox itself, himself: God the Son limiting himself to become a human person, growing up, showing the way to full personhood, all the time relying on the Father, all the time cradling culture’s captives in his arms of truth, mercy, and grace. Sinless. Yet, at the end is the cross, a cruel cradle, and the cradling Sufferer does his work, though with, only with, both arms nailed wide apart as if helpless, and indeed so, but for the moment. It is a work unto death, yet the grave does not cradle Jesus Messiah long; his cross-work paradoxically is not yet his completed work; the Father does not orphan the Child who in resurrection, his work now complete, again takes his rightful place in the Cradle of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And yet a greater Paradox: you and I are invited to the Cradle. Would we embrace the Child? But we need his embrace more: Can we embrace and be embraced? Now is the time to embrace the Paradox and settle your mind, down to the core of your life. Consider the song by Bailey and Larson:

Cradle the Baby, cradle the Child, sing to Him softly and gaze on His smile.

Infant of mercy, envoy of grace, look at His eyes and you’ll see heaven’s face.

Come to the manger, cradle the Light. Jesus is waiting with arms open wide.

Cradle the Savior, fell His embrace. Hold close the gift of God’s infinite grace.

God reached in mercy from heaven above, sending Christ Jesus to hold us with love.

With grace so amazing and love so divine, He merits our praises, devotion, our lives.

So cradle the Baby, worship the King, join with the angels and joyfully sing.

Love Him and serve Him, bring Him your praise. Cradle the Child, Messiah of grace.

Cradle the Messiah of grace.

(Lynn Shaw Bailey and Lloyd Larson, Glory Sound, Nashville, (c) 2007)

We’ll be singing this at Central Baptist Church, Marshall, Texas, on the 16th.

Nothing surprises us anymore. But the advent and more recent recognition of Pentecostal Scientology reminds me of some persistent verities:

(1) People continue to seek help; whatever is therapeutic holds a primary place in past and present;

(2) People in pain and need tend not to discriminate rationally or theologically — what works, sells;

(3) People need to hear and know truth consistent with ultimate truth, which we Christians in our orthodoxy must not only be able to explain but to demonstrate — and that involves the capacity to meet needs. That should help us to focus our prayer and preparation.

As with most traditions we have choices for celebration here, both of them worthwhile and affirming. Leaving aside the scattershot patterns of giving Valentine’s cards as children (though one might reserve a special card for some One), the feast (festival) day celebration recognizes the sacrifices of ancients willing to die for a glory far greater than themselves yet a glory in which they had been given a non-negotiable part; or Valentine’s Day recognizes the glory of men and women held together in a commitment far greater than the bonds achieved through their own (or society’s) strength and resolve. Of course at best I do mean Christ-ian marriage, and if we may not celebrate it on Valentine’s Day, then how could we be satisfied, or inspired, by anything less? How better to picture sacrificial love than in service to one’s beloved? Paul the Sent said no less about it when he described Christ as laying down his life for his bride the church.

You married men must love your wives, just as Christ love the church and gave Himself for her, to consecrate her, after cleansing her through His word, as pictured in the water bath, that He might present the church to Himself as a splendid bride without a blot or wrinkle or anything like it, but to be consecrated and faultless. This is the way married men ought to love their wives, as they do their own bodies. The married man who loves his wife is really loving himself, for no one ever hates his own physical person, but he feeds and fosters it, just as Christ does the church, because we are parts of His body. Ephesians 5:25-30, Williams Translation

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.

We begin at the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy. This primal love is Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. The doctrine that God was under no necessity to create is not a piece of dry scholastic speculation. It is essential. . . . But to be sovereign of the universe is no great matter to God. In Himself, at home in “the land of the Trinity,” he is Sovereign of a far greater realm. We must keep always before our eyes that vision of Lady Julian’s in which God carried in His hand a little object like a nut, and that nut was “all that is made.” (Harcourt, Brace and Co. edition, 126-7)

Well, my conception of God grew a bit when that image entered my mind. The greatest human minds of recent and present centuries, even in working groups, have not drawn the cosmic bounds, but Julian of Norwich described the universe shown to her as something like a nut in the hand of God — or in her own hand. Quibble — say she means the entire created order — and you may be right about that. But I doubt that her fourteenth-century cosmology differed much from the conception of its boundedness and limitations relative to the Creator God who so transcended it. She was writing about God’s love for his creation and created ones.
Consider her words on the matter in an older translation:

Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.

In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover,€”I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned [that is, in essence united] to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.

Lewis mentioned the thing in the hand of God; Julian placed it in her hand. I have no explanation for that, though Lewis’s prodigious memory may simply have remembered the analogy to the hand of God and that was what he wrote. But either way, the analogy is clear: if the Creator holds the entire Creation, as it were, as a tiny thing in his hand, Julian’s hand-with-tiny-thing is just as good an analogy.

These days I am thinking through this vision of God compared to the traditional Chinese vision of God in relation to the world. Actually, that is so difficult, for I am given to understand that the closest functional conception of God in traditional Chinese thought is not a transcendent, at the least “that beyond which a greater cannot be conceived” kind of God, or God revealed in Jesus Christ, but God in a limited, rather secular sense, that is, as the emperor. I am given also to understand how difficult it is for a Chinese to conceptualize the matter from the other direction. I’ll have more to say on it, later.

~ Well, the very idea of the Incarnation, and by extension the death, burial, and resurrection of the God-Man Messiah Jesus could be offensive to some folks. Jesus of Nazareth and Paul of Tarsus did have a thing or two to say about that, so why all the surprise? Christmas — once we cut through all the cultural and commercial excelsior — implies a great deal some folk don’t want to talk about, no, not at all.

~ Chicago’s wary magistracy can do what it wants, of course, in order to be most responsible and, hopefully, to avoid the aggravations of criticism, complaint, yea, even conflict and undesirable media attention, while facilitating what is at least as much a consciously public and commercial festival of the quasi-holy-day season.

~ Meanwhile most folk who have anything to do with the actual “Christ celebration” will do so apart from the most-public-square, that is, in their Christ-ian congregations and in their homes. Christians do, after all, distinguish between the congregation-as-body-of-Christ and the public arena as something without and separate from the Church. Though I think Christians should, properly, be redemptively present in our society, serving the greater public good, and doing so in exceptional ways.
~ Still, isn’t it disappointing that the public square preaches equanimity, brotherhood, toleration, yet there is such a bent to restriction for the common good? Seems paradoxical. Yet, also paradoxically, here is yet another reminder that in matters of religion the magistrates should best have no involvement, as is usually the case with the churches, synagogues, and mosques. Yet government in this case did not hesitate to protect against a perceived religious incursion into the “public” sphere. Has Chicago overstepped? Was it an issue, really?

~ What did Chicago prohibit? Most obviously, a film display — no doubt impressively developed, as on the web site — for advertising purposes. In the Christkindlmarket. If the film were not about the Nativity of Christ, there would be no issue. Do you agree?