{ "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1", "title": "Poetics of Prayer: Nudus nudum Christum sequi", "icon": "https://micro.blog/Izak/avatar.jpg", "home_page_url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/", "feed_url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/feed.json", "items": [ { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2024/03/05/finished-reading-doors.html", "content_html": "
Finished reading: Doors in the Walls of the World by Peter Kreeft đ
\n", "date_published": "2024-03-05T13:43:32-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2024/03/05/finished-reading-doors.html", "tags": ["Books"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2023/07/24/poet-and-painter.html", "content_html": "Poet and painter via AJ:
\n\nPicture of a Nativity
\nBy Geoffrey Hill
\nSea-preserved, heaped with sea-spoils,
\nRibs, keels, coral sores,
\nDetached faces, ephemeral oils,
\nDischarged on the worldâs outer shores,
A dumb child-king
\nArrives at his right place; rests,
\nUndisturbed, among slack serpents; beasts
\nWith claws flesh-buttered. In the gathering
Of bestial and common hardship
\nArtistic men appear to worship
\nAnd fall down; to recognize
\nFamiliar tokens; believe their own eyes.
Above the marvel, each rigid head,
\nAngels, their unnatural wings displayed,
\nFreeze into an attitude
\nRecalling the dead.
Rouault
\n", "date_published": "2023-07-24T14:06:53-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2023/07/24/poet-and-painter.html" }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2023/05/24/rip-dr-keller.html", "content_html": "RIP Dr. Keller. Thank you for your faithful work.
\n\nI would like to pass along this white paper on church renewal. This mostly acts as a bookmark for myself and a semi-public “thank you” to Dr Keller.
\n", "date_published": "2023-05-24T12:54:56-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2023/05/24/rip-dr-keller.html" }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2023/05/12/albert-borgmann-but.html", "content_html": "\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2023-05-12T13:08:08-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2023/05/12/albert-borgmann-but.html", "tags": ["Tech"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2023/01/15/rev-mlk-jr.html", "content_html": "\n\nBut why did such occurrences remain episodes also? The reason lies in the mistaken assumption that the shaping of our lives can be left to a series of individual decisions. Whatever goal in life we entrust to this kind of implementation we in fact surrender to erosion. Such a policy ignores both the frailty and strength of human nature. On the spur of the moment, we normally act out what has been nurtured in our daily practices as they have been shaped by the norms of our time. When we sit in our easy chair and contemplate what to do, we are firmly enmeshed in the framework of technology with our labor behind us and the blessings of our labor about us, the diversions and enrichments of consumption. This arrangement has had our life-long allegiance and we know it to have the approval and support of our fellows. It would take superhuman strength to stand up to this order ever and again. If we are to challenge the rule of technology, we can do so only through the practice of engagement.
\n
\n\n", "date_published": "2023-01-15T13:45:19-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2023/01/15/rev-mlk-jr.html" }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2023/01/12/finished-reading-how.html", "content_html": "Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation
\n
Finished reading: How to Be Normal by Phil Christman đ
\n", "date_published": "2023-01-12T22:15:37-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2023/01/12/finished-reading-how.html", "tags": ["Books"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/12/22/a-xmas-shopping.html", "content_html": "A Xmas shopping day out.
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-12-22T22:32:19-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/12/22/a-xmas-shopping.html" }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/12/19/finished-reading-atomic.html", "content_html": "Finished reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear đ
\n", "date_published": "2022-12-19T22:58:44-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/12/19/finished-reading-atomic.html", "tags": ["Books"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/11/20/notes-on-christ.html", "title": "Notes on *Christ the Stranger*", "content_html": "I want to return to Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams by Benjamin Myers đ
\n\n…A book that I read some time ago but want to note a few key quotes.
\n\nIn 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):
\n\nCrucifixion:\n>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 âheat and weightâ of all the worlds. âThere was a cross in the heart of God before there was one planted on the green hill outside Jerusalem.â
\n\nApophatic approach:\n>Negative theology, he argues, can never be âa move in a conceptual gameâ; 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 â or rather, a conversion of the whole self â 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, âa cross for human ways of thought.â If the cross is a revelation of Godâs identity, then personality itself â what it means to be a person â is revealed as a âkenoticâ reality. In the trinity, there is no self-interest, no âindividual will,â but only an enormous movement of painful, ecstatic self-renunciation. This self-renouncing pattern of life is the root of all personal being.
\n\nLastly, a key passage about Williams as a poet:
\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-11-20T13:55:08-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/11/20/notes-on-christ.html", "tags": ["Poetry","Cruciformity","Books","Rowan Williams"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/11/04/some-time-ago.html", "content_html": "…Williams argues, the poet confronts the failure of language with complete honesty, and then endures this failure in order to go on speaking: âThe return to language requires an act of faith, and an acceptance of the probability of failure.âSuch 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.
\n
Some time ago, I posted a hauntingly beatiful meditation on death that I heard shared from Father John Behr. In leafing thru Nicholas Wolterstorff’s Lament For A Son, I found the same words credited to John of Damascus. The meditation comes at the beginig of a requiem that Wolterstorff assembled with his wife for their son Eric, after his death at a young age.
\n\nHere, again, are the sobering words addressed toward Death:
\n\n\n\n\nTruly terrible is the mystery of death.
\n
\nI lament at the sight of the beauthy
\ncreated for us in the image of God
\nwhich lies now in the grave
\nwithout shape, without glory, without consideration.
\nWhat is this mystery that surrounds us?
\nWhy are delivered up to decay?
\nWhy are we bound to death? Â
â John of Damascus
\n", "date_published": "2022-11-04T05:00:00-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/11/04/some-time-ago.html", "tags": ["Prayer","Suffering","Cruciformity"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/11/03/finished-reading-the.html", "content_html": "Finished reading: The This by Adam Roberts đ
\n\nIt’s been some time since I read any fiction. Alan Jacobs and The Big Read Podcast introduced me to Adam Roberts and I’m so grateful they did. Thanks guys!
\n", "date_published": "2022-11-03T10:26:50-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/11/03/finished-reading-the.html", "tags": ["Books"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/11/03/quid-pro-quo.html", "content_html": "Quid Pro Quo
\nPaul Mariani
Just after my wife’s miscarriage (her second
\nin four months), I was sitting in an empty
\nclassroom exchanging notes with my friend,
\na budding Joyce scholar with steelrimmed
\nglasses, when, lapsed Irish Catholic that he was,
\nhe surprised me by asking what I thought now
\nof God’s ways toward man. It was spring,
such spring as came to the flintbacked Chenango
\nValley thirty years ago, the full force of Siberia
\nbehind each blast of wind. Once more my poor wife
\nwas in the local four-room hospital, recovering.
\nThe sun was going down, the room’s pinewood panels
\nall but swallowing the gelid light, when, suddenly,
\nI surprised not only myself but my colleague
by raising my middle finger up to heaven, quid
\npro quo, the hardly grand defiant gesture a variant
\non Vanni Fucci’s figs, shocking not only my friend
\nbut in truth the gesture’s perpetrator too. I was 24,
\nand, in spite of having pored over the Confessions
\n& that Catholic Tractate called the Summa, was sure
\nI’d seen enough of God’s erstwhile ways toward man.
That summer, under a pulsing midnight sky
\nshimmering with Van Gogh stars, in a creaking,
\ncedarscented cabin off Lake George, having lied
\nto the gentrified owner of the boys’ camp
\nthat indeed I knew wilderness & lakes and could,
\nif need be, lead a whole fleet of canoes down
\nthe turbulent whitewater passages of the Fulton Chain
(I who had last been in a rowboat with my parents
\nat the age of six), my wife and I made love, trying
\nnot to disturb whosever headboard & waterglass
\nlie just beyond the paperthin partition at our feet.
\nIn the great black Adirondack stillness, as we lay
\nthere on our sagging mattress, my wife & I gazed out
\nthrough the broken roof into a sky that seemed
somehow to look back down on us, and in that place,
\nthat holy place, she must have conceived again,
\nfor nine months later in a New York hospital she
\nbrought forth a son, a little buddha-bellied
\nrumplestiltskin runt of a man who burned
\nto face the sun, the fact of his being there
\nboth terrifying & lifting me at once, this son,
this gift, whom I still look upon with joy & awe. Worst,
\nbest, just last year, this same son, grown
\nto manhood now, knelt before a marble altar to vow
\neverything he had to the same God I had had my own
\nerstwhile dealings with. How does one bargain
\nwith a God like this, who, quid pro quo, ups
\nthe ante each time He answers one sign with another?
Bitter-Sweet
\nBy George Herbert
AH, my dear angry Lord,
\n Since Thou dost love, yet strike;
\nCast down, yet help afford;
\n Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
\n I will bewail, approve:
\nAnd all my sour-sweet days
\n I will lament, and love.
Thank you, Robin Sloan, for sharing this video about the small band of vital craftsmen, the lesser-known SNL cue-card crew.
\n", "date_published": "2022-10-13T11:53:33-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/10/13/thank-you-robin.html" }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/10/12/resurrection-poems.html", "title": "Resurrection Poem(s)", "content_html": "\n\nI 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.
\n\nAnd 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.”
\n\nToday it is time. Warm enough, finally
\nto ease the lids apart, the wax lips of a breaking bud
\ndefeated by the steady push, hour after hour,
\nopening to show wet and dark, a tongue exploring,
\nan eye shrinking against the dawn. Light
\nlike a fishing line draws its catch straight up,
\nthen slackens for a second. The flat foot drops,
\nthe shoulders sags. Here is the world again, well-known,
\nthe dawn greeted in snoring dreams of a familiar
\nwinter everyone prefers. So the black eyes
\nfixed half-open, start to search, ravenous,
\nimperative, they look for pits, for hollows where
\ntheir flood can be decanted, look
\nfor rooms ready for commandeering, ready
\nto be defeated by the push, the green implacable
\nrising. So he pauses, gathering the strength
\nin his flat foot, as the perspective buckles under him,
\nand the dreamers lean dangerously inwards. Contained,
\nexhausted, hungry, death running off his limbs like
\ndrops
\nfrom a shower, gathering himself. We wait,
\nparalysed as if in dreams, for his spring.
\n\n\nThe sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, - and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!
\n
-Willa Sibert Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop bk vi, ch 4 (1927)
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-10-10T09:31:16-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/10/10/the-sky-was.html" }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/10/06/potolka-prague-christian.html", "content_html": "PoĹtolka (Prague)
\nChristian Wiman
When I was learning words
\nand you were in the bath
\nthere was a flurry of small birds
\nand in the aftermath
of all that panicked flight,
\nas if the red dusk willed
\na concentration of its light:
\na falcon on the sill.
It scanned the orchard’s bowers,
\nthen pane by pane it eyed
\nthe stories facing ours
\nbut never looked inside.
I called you in to see.
\nAnd when you steamed the room
\nand naked next to me
\nstood dripping, as a bloom
of blood formed in your cheek
\nand slowly seemed to melt,
\nI could almost speak
\nthe love I almost felt.
Wish for something, you said.
\nA shiver pricked your spine.
\nThe falcon turned its head
\nand locked its eyes on mine.
For a long moment I’m still in
\nI wished and wished and wished
\nthe moment would not end.
\nAnd just like that it vanished.
A funeral hymnn cited by Fr John Behr in this talk on the economy of God:
\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-10-05T14:22:28-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/10/05/the-mystery-of.html", "tags": ["Prayer","Cruciformity","Beauty","Narrative Medicine"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/10/04/212151.html", "content_html": "\n", "date_published": "2022-10-04T20:21:51-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/10/04/212151.html" }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/09/30/the-quality-of.html", "content_html": "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.
\n\nO 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
\n
The Quality of Sprawl
\nLes Murray
Sprawl is the quality
\nof the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
\ninto a farm utility truck, and sprawl
\nis what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
\nto buy the vehicle back and repair its image.
Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
\nor driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
\nIt is the rococo of being your own still centre.
\nIt is never lighting cigars with ten-dollar notes:
\nthatâs idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
\nNor can it be bought with the ash of million-dollar deeds.
Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
\nSprawl almost never says Why not? With palms comically raised
\nnor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
\nwith mink and a nose ring. That is Society. Thatâs Style.
\nSprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
\nor anyway the fourteenth.
Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
\nbisecting an obstructive officialâs desk with a chainsaw.
\nNot harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal
\nthough itâs often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
\nat a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know his own.
\nKnowing the manâs name this was said to might be sprawl.
Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
\nlines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings;
\nI have sprawl enough to have forgotton which paintings.
\nTurnerâs glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
\ncomes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl â
\nexcept, he didnât fire them.
Sprawl gets up the nose of many kinds of people
\n(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures donât include it.
\nsome decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
\ndividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
\nIf he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.
Sprawl is really classless, though. Itâs John Christopher Frederick Murray
\nasleep in his neighboursâ best bed in spurs and oilskins
\nbut not having thrown up:
\nsprawl is never Calum who, drunk, along the hallways of our House,
\nreinvented the Festoon. Rather
\nitâs Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
\nNo Lewd Advances, No Hitting Animals, No Speeding,
\non the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
\nAn image of my country. And would that it were more so.
No, sprawl is full-gloss murals on a council-house wall.
\nSprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
\nReprimanded and dismissed
\nit listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
\nof possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
\nBeing roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
\nand thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.
Prayer for Persons Troubled in Mind or Conscience
\n\n\n\n\nBlessed Lord, the Father of mercies, and the God of all\ncomforts: We beseech thee, took down in pity and com-\npassion upon this thy afflicted servant. Thou writest bit-\nter things against him, and makest him to possess his former iniq-\nuities; thy wrath lieth hard upon him, and his soul is full of trou-\nble: But, O merciful God, who hast written thy holy Word for our\nlearning, that we, through patience and comfort of thy holy\nScriptures, might have hope; give him a right understanding of\nhimself, and of thy threats and promises; that he may neither\ncast away his confidence in thee, nor place it any where but in\nthee. Give him strength against all his temptations, and heal all\nhis distempers. Break not the bruised reed, nor quench the smok-\ning flax. Shut not up thy tender mercies in displeasure; but make\nhim to hear of joy and gladness, that the bones which thou hast\nbroken may rejoice. Deliver him from fear of the enemy, and lift\nup the light of thy countenance upon him, and give him peace,\nthrough the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
\n
-The Book of Common Prayer (1662).
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-09-30T10:08:15-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/09/30/prayer-at-the.html", "tags": ["Prayer","Suffering","Cruciformity","Narrative Medicine"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/09/22/finished-reading-being.html", "content_html": "Finished reading: Being Christian by Rowan Williams đ
\n", "date_published": "2022-09-22T14:20:22-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/09/22/finished-reading-being.html", "tags": ["Books"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/09/07/finished-reading-christ.html", "content_html": "Finished reading: Christ the Stranger: The Theology of Rowan Williams by Benjamin Myers đ
\n", "date_published": "2022-09-07T14:04:32-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/09/07/finished-reading-christ.html", "tags": ["Books"] }, { "id": "http://izak.micro.blog/2022/08/26/death-is-not.html", "content_html": "“Death is Not The End” Bob Dylan:
\n\n\n\n", "date_published": "2022-08-26T05:00:00-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/08/26/death-is-not.html", "tags": ["Holy Spirit","Trees"] }, { "id": "http://Izak.micro.blog/2022/02/21/finished-reading-just.html", "content_html": "The Tree of Life is growing where the Spirit never dies
\n
\nAnd the bright light of salvation shines in dark and empty skies.
Finished reading: Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung đ
\n", "date_published": "2022-08-25T08:54:49-07:00", "url": "https://www.theirlonelybetters.com/2022/02/21/finished-reading-just.html", "tags": ["Books"] } ] }