physical life » life

Learning to say…

mshedden — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:32:47 +0000

Eugene Peterson once told some younger clergy to find a theologian or two to keep company with as they pastor. Allegedly, one of his criteria for choosing someone was that they be dead and of course, if you are going to be a pastor a long time you want to pick somebody who has written a lot. When I first heard this I thought it was pretty sound advice and went about buying Church Dogmatics by Karl Barth (somebody who is both dead and has written more than I might be able to handle in my lifetime). Ideally, I think you are supposed to think with this person, be against this person, struggle with them, curse them, love them, and have them lead you. All things Barth has proved more than capable of doing for me.
And while I still love my Barth, I think I have also picked Stanley Hauerwas to walk with me on this journey. The writing of Stanley Hauerwas always manages to keep me engaged and continually pulls on me. Someone who was interviewing author Marilynn Robinson noted that when confronted with question sometimes she would shrug her shoulders and say “Calvin, again” (John Calvin) as if he was standing in the room. I often feel the same way about this combination of Barth and Hauerwas. While Dr. Hauerwas isn’t dead, he has written quite enough to keep someone engaged for a long time.
One of the reasons I am sure I can’t escape his writing is because of paragraphs like the one below. If you have read Hauerwas this line will hardly appear as revolutionary to you, but since reading it Saturday morning I have turned it over and over in my head. It has caused me to consider if I am dependent with a sigh or without regret, that if knowing this has it opened up room for prayer in my life, have I become capable of seeing the beauty of existence, and what would such a thing mean for us?
• Learning to say “God” requires that I learn to acknowledge that I am a “dependent rational animal.” It may be possible to acknowledge that we are rational dependent animals without learning to say “God,” but to learn to say I am dependent without regret at least creates the space the practice of prayer can occupy. To be human is to be an animal that has learned to pray. Prayer often come only when we have no alternatives left, but prayer may also be the joy that comes from the acknowledgement of the sheer beauty, the absolute contingency, of existence.
o Working with Words, Hauerwas, Stanley. xiii. Wipf and Stock.

mshedden — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:11:44 +0000

How does one begin blogging again? It seems the more energy poured into the announcement that someone is going to start blogging is directly related to the lack of blogging they will actually do following said announcement. So there.

Albums of the Year

mshedden — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 04:48:31 +0000

My much hipper than I friend in Seattle, Andrew Galore, recently posted his top 10 albums from 2010 and 2011. They are pretty good lists minus the amazing, unbelievable, unexplainable, incomprehensible exclusion of Kanye West from his 2010 list (that is unless he has a secret number one that is too great to mention: Kanye’s album.) As part of the deal of him posting his lists, I told him I would post my best albums from the past year. Mr. Galore’s lists are probably better for helping you discover some hidden gems and music you haven’t heard of, whereas my lists contain things you have heard and the fact that I do listen to some CCM (Contemporary Christian Music). I’m sure I am missing plenty of things I really enjoyed over the past two years but these are the ones that stick out right now (Isn’t that really the fault of digital that I can’t really think of everything I listened to?).

2011

Pick of the Year

Fiest, Metals: I just love this album. The lyrics, the music, the depth, and top of that it’s a much different type of style than her previous music. It was kind of a weak year compared to last year but this is just the most complete album of the year.

Christian: For Christian music I listened to two artists who released albums in back to back years. Individually the album are pretty good but if they had take the best from each album we would looking at some of the top CCM of the last 5 years.

John Mark McMillian, Economy & The Medicine

Gungor, Ghosts Upon the Earth & Beautiful Things

Rap: All in all I spend more time listening to Kanye’s album more than any other rap album. But I found Drake’s album last month and I have really take to it.

Drake, Take Care

Indie-ish: I am not really sure what to classify these albums are but I am sure you have heard of most them and seen them on plenty of lists.

Florence + the Machine, Ceremonials

Iron & Wine, Kiss Each Other Clean

The Head the Heart, The Head and the Heart

Pomo Crooners: I wanted to list these two together because I think they represent a new genre of music for me. The style, at first, was something I had to adapt my music listening tastes to, but in the end they are both amazing albums. Bon Iver was close to pick of the year but was knocked off by Fiest in December.

James Blake, James Blake

Bon Iver, Bon Iver

Adele, 21

For fun what I would listed for 2010

Kanye West
Sufjan Stevens
Mumford & Sons
The National
Sara Groves
Over the Rhine
The Black Keys
Brooke Fraser, Flags

January Newsletter

mshedden — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 18:06:32 +0000

“Will you pray for us tonight Mark?” She asked the room.

Silence.

“Are you asking me to pray for us tonight?” I responded.

“Yes.”

“Ok. But before I start I want to say my name is Matt.”

This was the scene this past Monday as I prayed before the meal at the Lebanon Soup Kitchen. It hadn’t been long since I started serving every Monday and it is understandable that my name was lost in the shuffle that is Monday night. Normally I arrive at 4:15pm to the wonderful smell of food that has been cooking all day and begin to help by pouring the milk for the diners to grab after they get their food. After doing this we all stand around in clumsy circle and wait for Janet to pray for our meal, our service in community, and for those who will partake in the food the volunteers have prepared. Janet, the soup kitchen coordinator, wasn’t there this week so the praying instantly fell to the pastor in room. Except only one person knew I am a pastor and she was the one who asked. Normally I like to put thought into my prayers, but I was caught off guard so I led us out in a feeble short prayer, nothing like the one Janet offers.

Afterwards, we broke into our jobs, worked swiftly but efficiently for the next hour as people poured in from the cold rainy conditions, grabbed something to eat, and enjoyed the warmth within the church hall. This week a young man from church played Christmas hymns on the piano as people ate and I couldn’t help but sing along looking at the people whom we were serving, people who might know more intimately what a “Silent Night” feels like when there is no room in the inn. I couldn’t help but imagine what side of the table we might find Jesus on in this situation. Of course Jesus fed the poor so he would be helping right? But he also was without a home, an itinerant preacher, who seemed to wander with people like the ones I was serving. Would he be outside waiting to be invited in while I offered up a feeble prayer within the empty hall? And I remember the words of Matthew 25 in which the those gathered ask “Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?” only to have the response be, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.” Lost in the wondering of what it all means, I can forget that answer. Christ is here amongst the poor and that even in feeble prayers before a short time of volunteering I have a chance to do something for the least of His brothers, and in that sense, I am doing it for him.

mshedden — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 04:40:26 +0000

This is the ultimate context into which we are born: God’s hospitable generosity, creatively relating, to us, free of creatures in creating and attenively delighting in them in their otherness to God, self-committed to that which is created.
David Kelsey, Eccentric Existence.

“USE WELL THY FREEDOM”

mshedden — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 00:19:18 +0000

I just finished Freedom by Jonathan Franzen this weekend and if you are looking for a good Christmas gift this time of year I would recommend this novel. Although I read a couple of reviews that said by the end you still don’t care for any of the characters I found too much of myself and others in many of characters to dismiss them so easily (although early in the book I felt that exact way). As the book stands quite well as just a reflection on messed up a family can be in the modern world but it also lives well as a essay on its title. One of my favorite scenes is when the mother is visiting her daughter at college and see a big sign that says: “USE WELL THY FREEDOM.” And reflecting on the novel I think that is one the real interesting concepts to both view the book through as well as modern life. Here is quote from Franzen himself on why he choose the title:

And I will say this about the abstract concept of ‘freedom’; it’s possible you are freer if you accept what you are and just get on with being the person you are, than if you maintain this kind of uncommitted I’m free-to-be-this, free-to-be-that, faux freedom.

It was a blast to read and I was kind of sad to goodbye to family as the book came to a close. I do think that these words from Dr. Carter work well as a postscript for the Christian reading the book:

God-with-Us means we are free to be for another, for their good, for their flourishing, for their well-being. In this sense, Christmas is liberation, which is love.

“Jesus is Lord”

mshedden — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 17:32:42 +0000

“This reminds me of a comment I heard Bruce McCormack make about a year and a half ago at a meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society, in a paper addressing the question, “Why Should Theology Be Christocentric?” In explaining why it is that we must resist the temptation to abstract from the stark claim that “God is what Jesus does,” he paused to say, “Because the church should not stutter when it says, Jesus is Lord.”

Halden’s Interview wit Nathan Kerr

“We need to be people confident that God will help us speak and live appropriately to the speech we have been given. So I hope what we do in the divinity school is give the confidence that you can use the language of the faith “Jesus is Lord” without apology because if you do that God will show up and scare the hell out of you.”

Stanley Hauerwas in an Interview with David Crabtree

Write your truth with your life

mshedden — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 19:03:13 +0000

“So here’s my own Zen koan: we can do things we don’t think we can do if we don’t about doing them. I also learned that if you can’t write a book, write a lot of essays. If you can’t write an essay, write a lot of paragraphs. If you can’t write a paragraph, write a line or a word. And if you can’t do that on the page, write your truth with your life, which is far more important than any book.”

Parker Palmer, Christian Century, September 7, 2010.

Choose any hour on the clock.

mshedden — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 02:02:05 +0000

“Choose any hour on the clock. It is possible, then, to conceive that the clock’s purpose is to return the hands back to that time, a time which, from the moment chosen, the hands leave and skate across the rest of the clock’s painted signs and calibrations and numbers. These other markings on the face become irrelevant in the themselves; they are now simply clues point in the direction of the chosen time. It is then possible, too, to conceive of the clock’s gears and springs as each having its own intrinsic function, but within a whole mechanism, the larger purpose of which is to return to the chosen time. In this manner, the clock resembles the universe. For is it not true that our universe is a mechanism consisting of celestial gears, spinning ball bearings, solar furnaces, all cooperating to turn man (and, indeed, what other, unimagined neighbors of whom we are ignorant!) to that chosen hour we know of from the Bible as Before the Fall? And as an ignorant insect crawling across the face of that clock, who see not the whole face, the full cycle of numbers, the short hand and the long (which pass in his sky with predictable orbits, cast familiar shadows, offer reassurance through their very repetitions, but which ultimately, puzzle and beg for the consideration of deeper mysteries), but who merely treads over the surface which hides the greater gear train and the spring without any but the most indirect conception of what lies beneath, so does man squirm and fret on the dusty skin of our earth, ignorant of the purpose of the world, indeed, the cosmos, beyond the fact that there is one, assigned by God and known only to Him, and that it is good and that it is terrifying and that it is ineffable and that only rational faith can soothe the desperate pains and woes of our magnificent and depraved world. It is that simple, dear reader, that logical, and that elegant.”

This quote from The Resonable Horologist contained within Tinkers by Paul Harding is one of the many joys of spending the short amount of time it would take to read. This past Thursday, I took a trip up to Powell’s in Portland to see Harding read from the book and take questions. There were only about 40 of us in the room and it was an insightful and wonderful time with the author. His reading was a passionate act coming from the book and he was extremely kind in answering our questions.

I asked him about the role Karl Barth and Jonathan Edwards play for him in writing and reading. In response, he talked about his wonderful teacher, Marilynne Robinson (and one of my favorite authors). As a skeptic of faith he realized that if he asked her about where her writing came from and why she wrote one of the most important reasons she would give is her faith. And because of her influence he felt that he should give those writers his time as well. When he did that he found some of the most interesting and beautiful reflections on the world that he had ever read. This, he said, is even clear in the Bible and that its story was ruined by people putting numbers all over it (chapters and verses).

All in all, it was worth the trip and I would recommend taking the time to read Tinkers.

Extra

mshedden — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 21:31:05 +0000

The Other Journal has also just posted one of the better reviews of Hipster Christianity by James Smith that also talks about what I am discovering on the quest for larger gospel:

They have simply discovered a bigger gospel: they have come to appreciate that the good news is an announcement with implications not only for individual souls but also for the very shape of social institutions and creational flourishing. They have come to appreciate the fact that God is renewing all things and is calling us to ways of life that are conducive to social, economic, and cultural flourishing as pictured in the eschatological glimpses we see in Scripture. They resonate with all of this, not because it’s cool, but because it’s true.

And for good measure here is Smith at his best in talking about Hipster Christianity. Go read the whole thing for all the fun:

In contrast to the Christian bohemian commitment to a good life that reflects the shape of kingdom flourishing, McCracken’s concluding chapters read like a naive, slightly whiny appeal to protect Jesus-in-your-heart evangelical pieties—which, of course, can sit perfectly well with the systemic injustice that characterize “normal” American life. While McCracken is focused on what he takes to be the hipster fixation on appearance (do we really need any more confirmation that McCracken doesn’t get it?), he calls us to remember “what really counts: our inner person” (203). This is the beginning of pages of tired evangelical clichés (“People should look at us and want what we have” [209]) that culminates in his individualist account of “being a Christian” which means “being transformed,” et cetera. So “how can we go on living like we did before once we have become Christians? And how can we possibly live like everyone else in the world when something so radical and transformative has happened in our lives?” (212) Yes, Mr. McCracken, that is indeed the question. And that’s exactly why my Christian bohemian friends refuse to live like all of those American evangelicals who have just appended a domesticated Jesus to the status quo of the so-called American Dream. Whereas it turns out you’re just worried that young Christians might be (gasp!) smoking and drinking a bit too much and have not sufficiently considered injunctions about dress in 1 Peter 3. Well, yes, indeed: those do seem like quite pressing matters for Christian witness in our postsecular world. By all means, let’s get our personal pieties in line. For as McCracken sums it up, “the Christian hipster lifestyle has become far too accommodating and accepting of sin” (200)—and by this, he means a pretty standard litany of evangelical taboos (did I mention sex?). It’s funny: my Christian hipster friends think conservative evangelicals have also become too accommodating and accepting of sin, but they tend to have a different inventory in mind—things like the Christian endorsement of torture and wars of aggression, evangelical energies devoted to policies of fiscal selfishness, and lifestyles of persistent, banal greed.