I want to return to Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams by Benjamin Myers 📚

…A book that I read some time ago but want to note a few key quotes.

In a discussion on Rowan Williams formation by Orthodox theology, Myers notes the profundidty of the theology of the cross and the ‘Eastern’ approach of “Negative Theology” (What God is not):

Crucifixion: >Looking into the darkness of Golgotha, he lurches back into the brooding depths of creation, where the swirling galaxies take form in his own congealing blood. His wounds cut deep into the sinews of eternity; he has bled forever, crying while his blood brought forth the ‘heat and weight’ of all the worlds. ‘There was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill outside Jerusalem.’

Apophatic approach: >Negative theology, he argues, can never be ‘a move in a conceptual game’; it is not a technique, or a linguistic trick, or a clever way of circumventing obstacles in our language about God. It is rather a process of transformation, a conversion of the intellect – or rather, a conversion of the whole self – whereby we are drawn outside ourselves into the presence of someone who is different. According to Lossky, the doctrine of the trinity is a crucifixion of the intellect, ‘a cross for human ways of thought.’ If the cross is a revelation of God’s identity, then personality itself – what it means to be a person – is revealed as a ‘kenotic’ reality. In the trinity, there is no self-interest, no ‘individual will,’ but only an enormous movement of painful, ecstatic self-renunciation. This self-renouncing pattern of life is the root of all personal being.

Lastly, a key passage about Williams as a poet:

…Williams argues, the poet confronts the failure of language with complete honesty, and then endures this failure in order to go on speaking: ‘The return to language requires an act of faith, and an acceptance of the probability of failure.’Such a return to language is grounded in a Wittgensteinian awareness that there are no private or individual meanings, only the shared meanings that we exchange with one another. Part of the vocation of poets is to share with others their experience of the difficulty of language, their hurtful awareness of limitation, frustration, and inarticulacy. It is not the successes of poets but their failures that matter most: poets expand our human capacities by exposing us to the sheer objectivity of language, the way it enables human community while resisting human mastery and control.

I want to revisit Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection. After sharing a Wendell Berry poem written in response to the painting, I again came across the image in Benjamin Myers’ book, Christ the Stranger: The theology of Rowan Williams. In Christ the Stranger, the fifteenth century work helps introduce the intellectual history of the former archbishop of Canterbury. Myers notes that the “mute eloquence” of visual theology, like frescos and icons, serves as “a leitmotif” in Williams’ poetry.

And so, it turns out, there exists at least two poems in response to this masturful image, by at least two wise and thoughtful contemporary thinkers in Berry and Williams. An embarrassment of riches! What kind of poetry blog would this be if I did not let poetry speak for itself and give the last word. Here now is Rowan Willams poem, “Resurrection: Borgo San Sepolcro.”

Today it is time. Warm enough, finally
to ease the lids apart, the wax lips of a breaking bud
defeated by the steady push, hour after hour,
opening to show wet and dark, a tongue exploring,
an eye shrinking against the dawn. Light
like a fishing line draws its catch straight up,
then slackens for a second. The flat foot drops,
the shoulders sags. Here is the world again, well-known,
the dawn greeted in snoring dreams of a familiar
winter everyone prefers. So the black eyes
fixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
imperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
their flood can be decanted, look
for rooms ready for commandeering, ready
to be defeated by the push, the green implacable
rising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
in his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
and the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
exhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like
drops
from a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
paralysed as if in dreams, for his spring.

A funeral hymnn cited by Fr John Behr in this talk on the economy of God:

I weep and I wail when I think upon death, and behold our beauty, created in the likeness of God, lying in the tomb, disfigured, bereft of glory and form.

O Marvel! What is this mystery concerning us? Why have we been given over unto corruption? And why have we been wedded unto death? Truly as it is written by the command of God, who gives the departed rest

Prayer for Persons Troubled in Mind or Conscience

Blessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all comforts: We beseech thee, took down in pity and com- passion upon this thy afflicted servant. Thou writest bit- ter things against him, and makest him to possess his former iniq- uities; thy wrath lieth hard upon him, and his soul is full of trou- ble: But, O merciful God, who hast written thy holy Word for our learning, that we, through patience and comfort of thy holy Scriptures, might have hope; give him a right understanding of himself, and of thy threats and promises; that he may neither cast away his confidence in thee, nor place it any where but in thee. Give him strength against all his temptations, and heal all his distempers. Break not the bruised reed, nor quench the smok- ing flax. Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure; but make him to hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast broken may rejoice. Deliver him from fear of the enemy, and lift up the light of thy countenance upon him, and give him peace, through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

-The Book of Common Prayer (1662).

A nineteen year old Ken Myers interviews Johnny Cash.

Tessa Carman (on Rowan Williamses book Looking East in Winter):

To recover wholeness means both seeing aright and desiring aright. This includes seeing the material world, creation itself, “as communicating the intelligence and generosity of the creator.” For the self to be whole, notes Williams, is not to be “self-actualized” or to be metaphysically self-sufficient in the modern idea of autonomy, but rather for each human self to “move in the mode for which it was created … in alignment with the purpose of God, habitually echoing in finite form the infinite ‘desire’ of God for God, of love for love.”

I’m posting this mashup video as an example of what Jeremy Begbie calls “hyper hearing.” My beloved wife was spinning Zeppelin’s first album, when she heard a Green Day song in the progression under “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You.” So, I gave it a quick Google.

It must be that the church is in Eastertide that I keep thinking about New Creation. I added a tag for it some time ago and just today posted a favorite Robert Jenson quote. To go along with that, I just skimmed this article that details Makoto Fujimura’s gaze toward New Creation in his recent book Art + Faith.

I think, almost daily, of this passage from Robert Jenson:

The truly necessary qualification is not that the City’s streets will not be paved with real gold, but that gold as we know it is not real gold, such as the City will be paved with. What is the matter with gold anyway? Will goldsmiths who gain the Kingdom have nothing to do there? To stay with this one little piece of the vision, our discourse must learn again to revel in the beauty and flexibility and integrity of gold, of the City’s true gold, and to say exactly why the world the risen Jesus will make must of course be golden, must be and will be beautiful and flexible and integral as is no earthly city. And so on and on.

“Cleansing the Temple” Malcolm Guite

Come to your Temple here with liberation
And overturn these tables of exchange
Restore in me my lost imagination
Begin in me for good, the pure change.
Come as you came, an infant with your mother,
That innocence may cleanse and claim this ground
Come as you came, a boy who sought his father
With questions asked and certain answers found,
Come as you came this day, a man in anger
Unleash the lash that drives a pathway through
Face down for me the fear the shame the danger
Teach me again to whom my love is due.
Break down in me the barricades of death
And tear the veil in two with your last breath.

From the last lines of “On Fairy Stories” (PDFs of the article are easily unearthed), JRR Tolkien:

But in God’s kingdom the presence of the greatest does not depress the small. Redeemed Man is still man. Story, fantasy, still go on, and should go on. The Evangelium has not abrogated legends; it has hallowed them, especially the happy ending. The Christian has still to work, with mind as well as body, to suffer, hope, and die; but he may now perceive that all his bents and faculties have a purpose, which can be redeemed. So great is the bounty with which he has been treated that he may now, perhaps, fairly dare to guess that in Fantasy he may actually assist in the effoliation and multiple enrichment of creation. All tales may come true; and yet, at the last, redeemed, they may be as like and as unlike the forms that we give them as Man, finally redeemed, will like and unlike the fallen that we know.

Mark Sebanc’s article makes the case that Tolkien deployed the serious and learned device of play in his fantastic, or what Tolkien called ‘Enchanted,’ stories. Sebanc:

It seems to me that of all the ways of looking at Tolkien’s mythopoetic genius, at the truths that he breathes with praeternatural elvish craft through silver, the most comprehensive and overarching way would be to see it as falling into the category of a game-something that the ancients saw as being far from shallow and sophomoric, merely a children’sthing, as we might be tempted to see it. Plato links play with culture, denominating these two ideas as the things he deems most serious. These two words, “play” and “culture,” are, moreover, closely cognate in the original Greek. This is no accident of etymology. There are untold and fascinating intellectual depths to this idea of play, which Huizinga’s magisterial work, Homo Ludens, goes far towards explicating. It strikes me as being one of modern intellectual history’s idkes mnitresses, a superb interpretive tool with the help of which we may arriveat a better understanding of Tolkien’s achievement and, adver- satively, a keener insight into the poverty of thought and form that blankets modern literature like a miasmic counterpane of marsh gas.

It occurs to me that a profound sense of play requires the work of improvosation. What seems to link play together with improvisation is the element of surprise. Surprise unfurls reality with a sense of ‘all-of-the-sudden-ness’. All of the sudden, something concealed is revealed; yet, in being revealed, the reality is simultaniously uncovered and made strange.

The juxtaposed paradox of coming to know and being left wondering leaves the knower with a sense of delight. The surprise and delight of play and improvisation act something like the lowest common denominator of that allusive quality we term humor. Steve Wilkens: pulls some of these threads together:

It is hard to define humor itself. A dictionary definition such as ‘something that is or is designed to be comical or amusing” hardly seems to capture the richness and variety of humor. Instead of attempting to define humor, it seems more helpful to focus on how it works. Humor builds on punch-line surprises, disruption of the conventional, reversal of expectation, juxtaposition of seeming incommensurate things, challenging boundaries, misinterpretation, redefinition of the familiar, satire, paradox, irony, and other related devices…Doesn’t it seem possible that these incongruities and surprises share common ground with humor, and isn’t the delight we should feel at the oddity of these stories akin to the delight we experience in a good joke?

Nick Cave’s Sacred Space. Joseph Campbell spoke of the sacred place as that place where:

…a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there.

By Czeslaw Milosz

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.

There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.

Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.

They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for the humans invented themselves as well.

The voice — no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with the lightning.

I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:
day draws near
another one
do what you can.

After listening to a reading of Mark Sebanc’s article on the Logos in Tolkien on Mars Hill Audio, I set to some reseach on the author. Alongside a brief interview, I found a blog of his centered around his sci-fi series which he coauthors with a friend. With promo and process blogs, Sebanc also includes some personal notes on the work of writing. I enjoyed this post on the “ten commandments of writing” from John C. Wright. Here are rules one and seven which I found helpful.

1. In order to be a writer, you must write.

2. If your manuscript is good or bad, send out your manuscript again. Genius does not count. Only persistence counts. The world will not recognize your genius until after you are dead. But the world can recognize your persistence now.

To reinterpret into Austin Kleon’s (Kleonees) jargon:

1. Forget the noun, do the verb
2. There is no genius, there is social genius that abides thru the persistance of individuals in community.

Karl Barth: Epistle to the Romans, iii. 22:

Jesus stands among sinners as a sinner; he sets himself wholly under the judgement under which the world is set; he takes his place where God can be present only in questioning about him; he takes the form of a slave; he moves to the cross and to death; his greatest achievement is a negative achievement. There is no conceivable human possibility of which he did not rid himself. Herein he is recognized as the Christ; for this reason God has exalted him; and consequently he is the light of the Last Things by which all things are illuminated. In him we behold the faithfulness of God in the depths of hell.

A friend of mine is fond of saying, “It’s Jesus’ failure we feast on every week.”

Helmut Thielicke (via Alan Jacobs):

You will never learn who Jesus Christ is by reflecting upon whether there is such a thing as sonship or virgin birth or miracle. Who Jesus Christ is you learn from your imprisoned, hungry, distressed brothers. For it is in them that he meets us. He is always in the depths. And we shall draw near to these brethren only if we open our eyes to see the misery around us. And we can open our eyes only when we love. But we cannot go and do and love, if we stop and ask first, “Who is my neighbor?” The devil has been waiting for us to ask this question; and he will always whisper into our ears only the most convenient answers. We human beings always fall for the easiest answers. No, we can love only if we have the mind of Jesus and turn the lawyer’s question around. Then we shall ask not “Who is my neighbor?” but “To whom am I a neighbor? Who is laid at my door? Who is expecting help from me and who looks upon me as his neighbor?” This reversal of the question is precisely the point of the parable.

Anybody who loves must always be prepared to have his plans interrupted. We must be ready to be surprised by tasks which God sets for us today. God is always compelling us to improvise. For God’s tasks always have about them something surprising and unexpected, and this imprisoned, wounded, distressed brother, in whom the Saviour meets us, is always turning up on our path just at the time when we are about to do something else, just when we are occupied with altogether different duties. God is always a God of surprises, not only in the way in which he helps us — for God’s help too always comes from unexpected directions — but also in the manner in which he confronts me with tasks to perform and sends people across my path.

Thielicke’s words on the parable of ‘The Good Samaritan’ bring two things to mind.

1. Some time ago, I wrote on Ivan Illich’s interpretation of this same parable here. Illich makes the point that hospitality is not owed out of obligation, particular to ethnic constraints but is, rather, “A free creation between two people.” The sense of “a free creation” seems to suggest that hospitality is gift, an aspect of the given life. In this way, I find a great connection between how Thielicke talks of “This reversal of the question,” into “To whom am I a neighbor” and Illich’s “free creation”.

2. The second thing might be joined to the first by tracing a theme of improvisation (more on this later). “God’s tasks,” says Thielicke, “Always have about them something surprising and unexpected.” In this way God calls us to improvise. Often we take the opportunity for improvisation as an inturruption to the planned form we fantasize our days to hold. Some time ago, I posted some quotations about ‘time managment’ here. one of those quotes came from CS Lewis who had a lot to say about how the present moment is the place where we make contact with eterninty and encounter the grace sufficient for the time. About work ‘interruptions’ he says this:

The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’, or ‘real’ life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life – the life God is sending one day by day.

Laity Lodge has just published their retreat schedule for this summer! What a thrill. To that end, I’d like to share a bit of poetry from one of the speakers who, one day, I hope to meet.

On being told my poetry was found in a broken photocopier By Malcolm Guite

My poetry is jamming your machine
It broke the photo-copier, I’m to blame,
With pictures copied from a world unseen.

My poem is in the works -I’m on the scene
We free my verse, and I confess my shame,
My poetry is jamming your machine.

Though you berate me with what might have been,
You stop to read the poem, just the same,
And pictures, copied from a world unseen,

Subvert the icons on your mental screen
And open windows with a whispered name;
My poetry is jamming your machine.

For chosen words can change the things they mean
And set the once-familiar world aflame
With pictures copied from a world unseen

The mental props give way, on which you lean
The world you see will never be the same,
My poetry is jamming your machine
With pictures copied from a world unseen

Also: A lovely video from Laity Lodge wherein Guite recites his poem.

Gerard Hopkins, Letters:

‘This mind was in Christ Jesus’—[St. Paul] means as man: being in the form of God—that is, finding, as in the first instant of his incarnation he did, his human nature informed by the Godhead—he thought it no matching-matter for him to be equal with God, but annihilated himself, taking the form of servant: that is, he could not but see what he was, God, but he would see it as if he did not see it, and be it as if he was not, and instead of snatching at once at what all the time was his, or was himself, he emptied himself so far as that was possible of Godhead and behaved only as God’s slave, as his creature, as man, which also he was, and then being in the guise of man humbled himself to death.

via FPR, Wendell Berry:

Time is said to flow like a river. I have said so myself, and perhaps it does. But time is a great mystery, not to be declared by one simile, or by several. It flows also like molten metal, cooling and solidifying even as it passes. The past is as it was. As it was it is forever. It cannot be changed, not by us, not by God. No doubt it is forgettable. We do surely forget some of it, and surely all of it in time will be forgotten. Maybe we can forgive ourselves, or be forgiven, for our wrongs that we remember, but they remain nonetheless wrong. This is the true rigor mortis, this rigidification of all that is past. Under the rule of time, the past is as it was.

Listening to some interviews with John Swinton, I noticed him, more than once make reference to what he called “The Sacrament of The Present Moment.” After a quick search, I found that the idea seems to come from Jean Pierre de Caussade, a Jesuit who lived in the 17th century.

In this conversation, former nurse and now professor John Swinton mentions the theme of accompaniment. Speaking of the experience of a depressed person, he said that accompaniment might not mean sitting with someone in their depression but rather helping them find the right medication for their condition. Much of the work I did as a chaplain could be characterized as accompaniment.

I found that each room I visited held a new way for me to journey with someone. Never was the company predictable in their need. That might sound obvious; yet, in doing the same thing of “showing up” to hospital rooms, one could easily assume that’s where the job ended. The essence of accompaniment is to move with another for a time.

Toward the city of God or man? Pilgrims paired for a time. “Love has its speed…” as Kosuke Koyama would say.

Mary Townsend:

One perennial human obstacle to virtue, Aristotle observes, is that most of us think rather less of ourselves than we ought – a surprising sentiment to hear from the otherwise solidly self-loving pagan world. For if the pagans can’t appreciate themselves, how on earth will we? We are capable of more than we give ourselves credit for, he says, and when we decide with much grinding of soul to stand aside from the sorts of projects and honors we are more than capable of carrying off, we are, as he puts it, small-souled. Of course, people who overestimate what they can do or have done are vain. But there are those who are capable of great things and know it, and it would be wiser of humanity, flirting not so much with proper humility but with self-humiliation, to aim toward something more like this state of greatness, toward largeness, toward expansiveness of being. To do so is to have megalopsychia – to have, literally, a large soul.

Now, who ever ran across a person more capable of great things, and who knew this capability, than Dolly Parton? Here is goodness that one could never accuse of being pedestrian. Her very hair is explicable on these grounds. Larger than life, it announces her before she arrives, and signals that someone has at last understood the proper task of the human, to reach out with all our hearts toward the divine in the ways that we humanly can.

Jean-Pierre de Caussade:

God’s order and his divine will is the life of all souls who either seek or obey it. In whatever way this divine will may benefit the mind, it nourishes the soul. These blessed results are not produced by any particular circumstance but by what God ordains for the present moment. What was best a moment ago is so no longer because it is removed from the divine will which has passed on to be changed to form the duty to the next. And it is that duty, whatever it may be, that is now most sanctifying for the soul.

· · ·

The divine will is the wholeness, the good and the true in all things. Like God, the universal Being, it is manifest in everything. It is not necessary to look to the benefits received by the mind and body to judge their virtue. These are of no significance. It is the will of God that gives everything, whatever it may be, the power to form Jesus Christ in the center of our being. This will knows no limits.

· · ·

Divine action does not distinguish between creatures, whether they are useless or useful. Without it everything is nothing, with it nothing is everything. Whether contemplation, meditation, prayer, inward silence, intuition, quietude, or activity are what we wish for ourselves, the best is God’s purpose for us at the present moment. Souls must look upon everything as though it were a matter of complete indifference, and, seeing only him in all things, must take or leave them as he wishes so as to live, be nourished by, and hope in him alone and not by any power or virtue which does not come from him. Every moment, and in respect of everything, they must say, like St. Paul, ​“Lord what should I do?” Let me do everything you wish. The Spirit wants one thing, the body another, but Lord, I wish only to do your divine will. Supplication, intercession, mental or vocal prayer, action or silence, faith or wisdom, particular sacraments or general grace, all these, Lord, are nothing, for your purpose is the true and only virtue in all things. It alone, and nothing else, however sublime or exalted, is the object of my devotion since the purpose of grace is the perfection of the heart, not of the mind.

Yet the noble despair of the poets
Is nothing of the sort; it is silly
To refuse the tasks of time
And, overlooking our lives,
Cry — “Miserable wicked me,
How interesting I am.”
We would rather be ruined than changed,
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die.

— Malin, in The Age of Anxiety

Father Zossima:

…be not forgetful of prayer. Every time you pray, if your prayer is sincere, there will be new feeling and new meaning in it, which will give you fresh courage, and you will understand that prayer is an education.

I snapped this photo during my first retreat to Laity Lodge. I hope to return there soon.

Here are five things I've learned from Kyle Strobel after listening to a smattering of podcasts with him. Two of my favorites were:

• A breakout session published on the Gospel Coalition Podcast AND
• Gravity Leadership Podcast
  • Wherein the interviewer mentions an article by Kyle's mentor and colleague, John Coe titled, "Resisting the Temptation of Moral Formation."

1. "When you are in the presence of God and your heart condemns you, God is greater than your heart." I John 3
2. Because the Spirit prays our reality to the Father, Strobel says, God hears us "In stereo".
   • Me: "Everything's great here, God...I hope you're doing will. It's all super."
   • Spirit in me: "uuuuggghhh"
3. We come to the father, in Christ, by the Spirit.
4. Contemplation: "Being with God in his temple," setting the mind on things above.
5. Use the method of prayer that the Psalmist does. The Puritans prayed this way and called it soliloquy.
   • Psalm 42, "Why be downcast, O my soul, hope in God..."

J.R.R. Tolkien:¹

Actually I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory.

Some time ago I snagged this quote from the blog of professor Richard Beck. Today, after learning the name Paul Farmer thru news of his death, the phrase "long defeat" resurfaced. The medical anthropologist was known for using it to describe the work he did with the poorest of the poor. Here he is in his own words:

I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. . . . You know, people from our background — like you, like most PIH-ers, like me — we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.²

From Alan Jacobs:

Useful thinkers come in three varieties. The Explainer knows stuff I don’t know and can present it clearly and vividly. This does not require great creativity or originality, though Explainers of the highest order will possess those traits too. The Illuminator is definitionally original: someone who shines a clear strong light on some element of history or human experience that I never knew existed. (Though sometimes after reading something by an Illuminator I will think, Why didn’t I realize that before?) The Provoker is original perhaps to a fault: Ambitious, wide-ranging, risk-taking, Provokers claim to know a lot more than they actually do but can be exceptionally useful in forcing readers to think about new things or think in new ways.

Some 20th-century thinkers who have been vital for me over the years:

Explainers: Charles Taylor, Mary Midgely, Freeman Dyson
Illuminators: Mikhail Bakhtin, Iris Murdoch, Michael Oakeshott
Provokers: Gregory Bateson, Kenneth Burke, Simone Weil

Jacobs later claims that one makes a vital error mistaking one roll for another. For example, he says of Rousseau the Provoker, "God help the reader who takes his purported illuminations seriously." In thinking of this potential mix-up, one general, Rousseauian principle comes to mind.

Because he thought that everything was good the nearer it was to the "hand of the Maker", Rousseau generally left his children to be taught by nature itself. He once neglected, with one group of his children, to record their dates of birth or genders upon their birth. This led to all sorts of problems that he later detailed in a letter, saying that the oversight would kill him.

According to Kyle Strobel's reading of Jonathan Edwards and Puritan spirituality, there is a vital difference between Contemplation and meditation (31:07 min mark in podcast).

Meditation

A holding of one's attention on scripture and doctrine. "When their mind wandered they would wrestle with themselves, naming the truth." "Being watchful" of your heart.

Contemplation

Here he makes the distinction between "natural" and "supernatural" contemplation.

a) Natural: Set mind and heart on an object of our attention and desire so that we can be one with it. b) Supernatural: Ps 27, Contemplate: "temple with" To be with God in his temple.

Here is what proves most particularly Puritan: Attending to God. If the heart wanders, bring it back to God. Set your mind on things above.

A second type of contemplation grows out of the quiet, solitude habit and into the practice of the presence of God.

Thomas à Kempis:

Gifts of nature are common to good and bad, but grace or love is the peculiar gift of Thine elect, and they that bear this mark are accounted worthy of eternal life. This grace is so excellent, that neither the gift of prophecy, nor the working of miracles, nor the understanding of deep mysteries, is of any worth without it. But neither faith, nor hope, nor any other virtue is acceptable to Thee without charity and grace.

Robert Farrar Capon:

I said grace cannot prevail until law is dead, until moralizing is out of the game. The precise phrase should be, until our fatal love affair with the law is over — until, finally and for good, our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. As long as we leave, in our dramatizations of grace, one single hope of a moral reckoning, one possible recourse to salvation by bookkeeping, our freedom-dreading hearts will clutch it to themselves. And even if we leave none at all, we will grub for ethics that are not there rather than face the liberty to which grace calls us. Give us the parable of the Prodigal Son, for example, and we will promptly lose its point by preaching ourselves sermons on Worthy and Unworthy Confession, or on The Sin of the Elder Brother. Give us the Workers in the Vineyard, and we will concoct spurious lessons on The Duty of Contentment or The Moral Aspects of Labor Relations.

Restore to us, Preacher, the comfort of merit and demerit. Prove for us that there is at least something we can do, that we are still, at whatever dim recess of our nature, the masters of our relationships. Tell us, Prophet, that in spite of all our nights of losing, there will yet be one redeeming card of our very own to fill the inside straight we have so long and so earnestly tried to draw to. But do not preach us grace. It will not do to split the pot evenly at four A.M. and break out the Chivas Regal. We insist on being reckoned with. Give us something, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance.

Today is the feast day of Isaac the Syrian. Here is one of his works included in a volume compiled by the poet Scott Cairns.

Love’s Purpose
by Saint Isaac of Nineveh

In love did He bring the world
into being, and in love
does He guide its difficult,
slow-seeming journey now
through the arc of time. In love will He
one day bring all the world to a wondrous,
transformed state, and utterly
in love will it be taken wholly up
into the great mystery of the One
who has performed these things — and all of this so that
in love absolutely will the course
and form and governance of all creation
at long last be comprised.

Rowan Williams:

We are used to plaintive cries that not enough students opt for scientific subjects, and related worries about the supposed drift of our culture towards an anti-scientific relativism or, ultimately, a post-truth mentality. But one of the things we have learnt in the past ten months is that we set ourselves up for profound confusion if we talk about “science” as a source of self-evidently clear and effective solutions, as if narratives and values played no role. Bland claims to be “following the science” have acquired an unhappily hollow sound.

[…]

What does it mean to “fail our children” in this broader context? It means backing away from the scale of change that we face, and from the job of resourcing young people to respond with intelligence, imagination and honesty. It would be ridiculous to pretend that there are a few simple restructurings that will achieve this. We need a courageous rethinking of our ingrained assumptions about education. We need to pay some critical and sympathetic attention to those despised and frequently attacked parallel worlds of the Montessori and Steiner systems. We need the issue of resources for the human spirit to be at the heart of educational vision – including craft, drama, sport, exposure to the raw natural world, community service. And anyone who thinks this is somehow in tension with responsible scientific training has not understood either sciences or humanities.

Love’s as Warm as Tears
C.S. Lewis

Love’s as warm as tears,
Love is tears:
Pressure within the brain,
Tension at the throat,
Deluge, weeks of rain,
Haystacks afloat,
Featureless seas between
Hedges, where once was green.

Love’s as fierce as fire,
Love is fire:
All sorts–Infernal heat
Clinkered with greed and pride,
Lyric desire, sharp-sweet,
Laughing, even when denied,
And that empyreal flame
Whence all loves came.

Love’s as fresh as spring,
Love is spring:
Bird-song in the air,
Cool smells in a wood,
Whispering “Dare! Dare!”
To sap, to blood,
Telling “Ease, safety, rest,
Are good; not best.”

Love’s as hard as nails,
Love is nails:
Blunt, thick, hammered through
The medial nerves of One
Who, having made us, knew
The thing He had done,
Seeing (what all that is)
Our cross, and His.

C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed:

My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.

Alan Jacobs:

So maybe a “general account” is not what is needed so much as equipment for acting wisely and lovingly — in a Christlike way — this day. A Franciscan-Daoist ethic for a surveillance-capitalist hate-media world. What that might look like is something I plan to think about a lot in the coming year.

I often think of surveillance capitalism as the Eye of Sauron. Maybe the needed equipment would look something like a fellowship. Franciscan-Daoist sounds to me like a hobbit and wizard ethic, earthy and ethereal.

Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.

I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.

There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii

The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.

These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.