A friend sent me this poem by Anne Sexton. I’m adding it to my contemporary psalter for the doubting hearts. “Need is not belief.” Amen.
Category Archives: Noted In Passing
The FishBike Scale of Big Mistakes
The best thing I’ve read on the internet today, from Metafilter user FishBike. Below is the G-rated version, the original has an instance of more intense profanity.
This is probably as good a time as any to publish the FishBike scale of Big Mistakes. Basically, you rate the size of a mistake by which field of study is affected by it.
Category 1: Journalism. Your mistake is big enough to be reported in the news somewhere.
Category 2: History. School children decades from now will be reading about your mistake in their textbooks.
Category 3: Geography. Your mistake is bad enough that maps are different afterwards. Entire towns or cities may have disappeared, or people change place names so they can forget about your mistake.
Category 4: Geology. Millenia from now, scientists will be wondering what made that giant hole in the ground or why that mountain isn’t there any more.
Category 5: Astronomy. Scientists on other planets, peering at our solar system through their telescopes, will see a bright flash and ask themselves “What the heck was that?”
I am happy to report that I have made no big mistakes this week, and I bet you haven’t either. Be gracious and don’t sweat the small stuff.
Filed under Noted In Passing
The Struggle For Authenticity
“In the world to come I shall not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
– Rabbi Zusya
Filed under Noted In Passing
The Vagaries of Google
These are some things that people who stumbled upon my blog searched for yesterday:
- the water cycle start to finish
- alice disney
- who to get to dimantel a barn and to rebuild into a house
- princess games
- why did fundamentalists oppose all forms of evolution
- alasdair macintyre are we entering a new dark ages
By my count, that’s four completely disappointed people, one fairly disappointed person, and one semi-satisfied surfer.
Filed under Noted In Passing
Saint Jack on Irksome Prayer
I knew that I was echoing something C.S. Lewis wrote when I mentioned the “irksomeness of prayer.” I looked up the original passage, from Letters to Malcolm. He was dealing with a different kind of frustration, but I still appreciate it when the dear don acknowledges that prayer, for him, isn’t a stream of endless delight.
Well, let’s now at any rate come clean. Prayer is irksome. An excuse to omit it is never unwelcome. When it is over, this casts a feeling of relief and holiday over the rest of the day. We are reluctant to begin. We are delighted to finish. While we are at prayer, but not while we are reading a novel or solving a crossword puzzle, any trifle is enough to distract us. And we know that we are not alone in this. The fact that prayers are constantly set as penances tells its own tale.
It should also be noted that “irksome” is a delightful word and needs to be employed more frequently, whether in reference to prayer or anything else. Like “the irksomeness of Yo Gabba Gabba.”
Filed under Noted In Passing, This Is Good
The Myth of Spielbergian Sentimentalism
Image via Wikipedia
Not one of my normal topics, but I loved this insightful comment from Prospero at Metafilter:
But see, the thing is (and I love ET, just as I love almost all Spielberg movies) that when people talk about “Spielbergian sentimentalism,” and so on, I don’t quite agree. Steven Spielberg is one of the bitterest commercially successful directors working. No mainstream director is as consistently subversive; no director is so fully committed to depicting the failure of the ideal of the 1980s American nuclear family.
Time and again in his movies you get a nuclear family that’s abandoned by its father figure to chase some wild-eyed fantasy, because in Spielberg’s world families just aren’t meant to hold together, for people prefer idle idealistic fantasies to the family structure that’s supposed to be the realization of the American dream. In Jaws the family gets abandoned for some guy to chase a giant shark. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind the family (which is even more deliberately annoying, especially the screaming kids) gets abandoned for some guy to chase a spaceship. In Hook the family gets abandoned for some guy to play Peter Pan. And ET is a pretty clever trick, because while you, the audience member, are distracted by the little animatronic alien making its quirky noises, just as if you’re the standard Spielberg protagonist, you don’t have your eye on the ball–you’re not noticing the single mother in the kitchen who drifts off to the edge of the frame and cries for a little while, then turns and re-enters the action with a false smile on her face as if there’s nothing wrong. And listen to the wisecracks that the doctors make over ET’s corpse–that is a complicated and bitter movie, with a deliberate sugarcoating to make the subversion commercially palatable.
The further in Spielberg’s career we go, the more cynical he gets, and he still gets a sentimental rap. In A.I. we even get a movie that ends with [spoiler] a child cheerfully climbing into bed with the corpse of his own mother [end spoiler] and the general consensus is still, “Well, that movie was great, until it turned into a Spielberg movie.”
Filed under Noted In Passing
Thought for the Day
“He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”–Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Filed under Noted In Passing
Caring For Your Introvert
A classic essay from Jonathan Rauch.
A sample:
Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?
If so, do you tell this person he is “too serious,” or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?
If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren’t caring for him properly. Science has learned a good deal in recent years about the habits and requirements of introverts. It has even learned, by means of brain scans, that introverts process information differently from other people (I am not making this up). If you are behind the curve on this important matter, be reassured that you are not alone. Introverts may be common, but they are also among the most misunderstood and aggrieved groups in America, possibly the world….
Filed under Noted In Passing, This Is Good
Congregations Gone Wild
This editorial hits the nail right on the head. I don’t think I have a single quibble. Here’s a taste:
THE American clergy is suffering from burnout, several new studies show. And part of the problem, as researchers have observed, is that pastors work too much. Many of them need vacations, it’s true. But there’s a more fundamental problem that no amount of rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.
The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.
As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through congregants’ daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy.
Filed under Church Culture, Noted In Passing, This Is Good
God and Grieving
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.
C.S. Lewis
A Grief Observed
Filed under Noted In Passing
God Told Me To Tell You To Read This
A classic from Bill MacKinnon: No Voices in My Head
Update– This is my favorite bit, and it hit me like a 2×4 when I first read it a few years back:
It is curious to me that if someone in a typical evangelical church stood up and said an angel spoke to him and told him that God wanted him to be a missionary to Africa, we would be very skeptical at best. Yet if that same person stood up and said that he “just really feel led to go to Africa to be a missionary”, the “amens” and applause would be deafening. Yet the former is biblical and the latter is not.
Filed under Good Theology, Noted In Passing, This Is Good
Is There Poop in the Eschaton?
I was in the Duke Divinity School library yesterday doing some research, and noticed this theological discussion conducted via graffiti near the study carrells.
Is there poop in the eschaton?
I think I’m going to poop
I did!
I can’t! Even after ex-lax! Help!
SERIOUSLY- What do you think? Is there pooping in the eschaton?
Depends: at the resurrection, yes. Not at any disembodied intermediate state, though.
RESURRECTED BODIES WILL PROCESS NUTRIENTS PERFECTLY, PRODUCING NO WASTE
Is feces waste? It puts nutrients back into the soil. Could the interconnectivity of life needed to make heaven edenic truly be present without a little poop?
I just hope this doesn’t eventually lead to a church split. The last thing we need are poop-in-the-New-Earth Methodists squaring off against no-poop-in-the-New-Earth Methodists.
Until I know otherwise, I’m going to assume this is the work of pre-law students. Divinity students should all know the real answer already.
Filed under Bad Examples, Bad Theology, Noted In Passing, This Is Bad
Smelly Bibles
When I was eight years old, I was given my first Bible at Hollywood Presbyterian Church by a minister who looked like a football star/leading man. Around the same time my beloved dance teacher gave me a small bottle of perfume, which I loved too much to use. After reading the story of Mary pouring her best perfume oil on Jesus’ feet, I decided to pour my whole bottle of perfume on the Bible. Since that perfume was my only treasure at the time, it was an extravagant expression of faith. That smelly Bible was one of my first attempts to make art.
Filed under Noted In Passing, This Is Good
Kirk Cowell 