“After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story . . . . Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom. The art of storytelling is dying out because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.”
Psalms and Advent
Doctrine instructs the mind. Instructions guide the hands. But music gets into the heart, the soul. Kant calls music “the quickening art” because it restores life to us. It makes us who were were supposed to be.
As God prepares us for advent, he uses a hymnbook to do it. Psalm 85 is meant to be sung, so that the longing for righteousness and peace to kiss can get into your soul.
The King is coming.
Social Media and the Neighborhood
How did it happen that the thing which was supposed to bind us together is the thing that drove us apart? What if (digitally) leaving the neighborhood to associate with like-minded people actually increases our loneliness, instead of ameliorating it?
There is a better option: stay in place, and associate with people different than you. Bari Weiss and Eve Peyser are trying it out- getting together, not to fight about things they disagree with, but to live in the physical world, and eat physical bread. As critics have pointed out, this sort of relationship is hard, its costly, and there is only one thing that can sustain it: the meal with the God who left the place of power, comfort and authority, and moved into our neighborhood (John 1).
What sort of guest are you?
The holidays are upon us, which means food, travel, and family. Some of us are hosts, and some of us are guests. And there is nothing worse than a terrible houseguest: they smoke in your rooms, they threaten to spank your children, and they never leave.
The book of 1 Peter is written to encourage Christians to be a different sort of guest. To be the sort of people who are self-controlled, and seek the good of their hosts- even when the hosts are malicious gossips. The motivation for being this type of guest? That one day we are going home. Or to be more precise, home is coming to us. Sort of like this:
Becoming the People of God
The language 1 Peter uses to describe his readers is fraught with tension- sojourners and priests, exiles and royals, not a people and yet now a people. How do this radical transformation occur? How do we see ourselves as the home in which God lives, while we don’t have a home ourselves? How can we proclaim his excellencies as his priests when we long and wait for him? It is only as we see his love for us, the love of him who saw our need and saved us, that we can ever express our praise (1 Peter 2:10). Sorta like this epic story:
Become a Better You
To become the best version of yourself, go on an archaeological dig deep within yourself. Excavate your desires, and express them to the world. This last bit will be the hard part- the world will try to keep you down. Here’s a helpful guide on your way:
But what if this doesn’t work? What if “Excavate and Express” depends on a false set of assumptions? What if we aren’t stable, coherent, calm, individuals? What if we our desires are unstable and paradoxical? What if pretending like they aren’t makes us freaked out and anxious?
What if we need other people? What if pretending we are individuals instead makes us slaves?
If that’s the case, then becoming the best version of yourself is going to be an entirely different process. We will need our identity to be conferred- given to us- confirmed- by somebody who loves us- and conformed to- worked at.
What if worshipping Jesus is the only way to become the best version of yourself (1 Peter 1:13-21)?
Love the Bomb?
Life in exile is full of trials. That’s 1 Peter’s point- though you don’t have to be a Christian to connect with the themes of that letter. In this article in Rolling Stone, Stephen Colbert says that to be human is to learn to love the thing you most wish hadn’t happened. Get the Kleenex ready. (Warning: saucy language.)
A Frictionless Life?
Farming and Philosophy
In an excellent interview in the New York Times, Wendell Berry poses the question: What if our modern desire to live with total freedom, without limits, is the thing that is destroying our culture economically, agriculturally, and environmentally?
A deeper question: what if that desire isn’t just modern?
What if the incarnation of God (and his body throughout time) into a particular place is the only hope?
“We will have to go back to tradition. I am unsure when we began to think of, for instance, the 15th Psalm and Jesus’s law of neighborly love as optional. They are not optional, as I think the Amish example proves, and as proved by present failure.”
What We Sing This Week
All Creatures of Our God and King
Take Us O Lord