in search of gladness
Tony Woodlief in Image:
It’s a galling irony that I am frequently asked to speak to young people, to tell them something about life, and what I have learned in mine, and what they should therefore go and do with theirs.It is an irony because my life feels like a slow-moving disaster, and most nights all I can hope is that if the second half doesn’t bring redemption, perhaps it will bring something different than what I have lived thus far.
I don’t tell them this, because young people don’t want to hear about your mistakes, other than the salacious details. Our mistakes are usually more interesting to us, and they don’t help anyone anyway; mostly we each commit our sins thinking we are doing right, or that we can’t bear for another second whatever it is that’s crushing us. What good is someone’s else’s cautionary tale in the face of false virtue or aching hunger?
via Andrew Sullivan.
So I warn them that while I have hopes for them, my greatest hope is that they can live better lives than I.
Then I direct them to the words of Frederick Buechner.
I love Fred. More than once, when I’d thought too long about where I could go to put my 9 mm in my mouth, how I might arrange it so my children wouldn’t be the ones to find the corpse, it was Buechner’s words that assuaged my impulse to self-destruction.
Buechner, who found the body of his own father, a suicide. Sweet, tortured Buechner, the minister who does not preach in a church, but in pages.
The particular words of Buechner’s to which I direct them concern vocation. What he says is that our vocation is that place where our deep gladness meets the world’s great hunger. “In a world where there is so much drudgery, so much grief, so much emptiness and fear and pain, our gladness in our work is as much needed as we ourselves need to be glad.”
These are scandalous notions, that we need to be glad, that the world needs our gladness. Our Puritan forbears were certainly suspicious of gladness, and their modern, secular inheritors of grimness—professors and politicians and preachers—demand not gladness, but utility.
Finally:
Do you know what brings you gladness?
It would be a pity to reach the end of this life not having known, not having stretched out our hands toward the gladness for which we were surely crafted. But it’s a frightening thing, to look fully at our work and relationships and amusements, to gauge whether they bring us true gladness, or just momentary respite from fear, from hurt, from regret.
So here’s my offer to you, dear stranger: I’ll look if you look.
And may we each have the courage to embrace what is good for us, what draws us nearer to ourselves and to God, no matter from what it draws us away. Because if we don’t find our gladness, and pursue it to the deep-running needs of this world, how will our children ever know to do the same?
I just returned from a bike ride with Micah. That makes me glad, every time.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/2 11:07 am
"I should like... to utter an express warning against certain passages and contexts in my commentary on Romans"
"revelation will never be discovered by anyone who undertakes to arrive at a kind of timeless core by abstracting from all times..."
"revelation has its time, and only in and along with its time is it revelation"
"when I really give anyone my time, I thereby give him the last and most personal thing that I have to give at all, namely myself"
"as law, the covenant is grace, exactly as qua grace, it is law"
"it is not with pure, good, moral men that God makes & keeps covenant, but with transgressors, & incorrigible transgressors at that"
bits of barth
Barth CD I/1
"...inscrutability, hiddenness is of the very essence of Him who is called God in the Bible"
"when the Bible gives an account of revelation it means to narrate history"
"the threefold yet single lordship of God as Father, Son and Spirit is the root of the doctrine of the Trinity"
"The situation would be hopeless if it were our task here to say what is really meant by 'person' in the doctrine of the Trinity"
"revealer, revelation, being revealed; holiness, mercy, love; good friday, easter, pentecost; creator, reconciler, redeemer..."
"none of the Three may be known without the other Two but each of the Three only with the other Two"
"[the Trinity] ...we should not be surprised at the incomprehensibilty in which it remains for us as it becomes comprehensible to us"
"God is unknown as our Father, as the Creator, to the degree that He is not made known by Jesus"
"Jesus did not proclaim the familiar Creator God & interpret Him by the unfamiliar name of Father. He revealed [His] unknown Father"
"God [as] Father denotes the mode of being of God in which He is the Author of His other modes of being"
"the Son is from the Father & the Spirit is from the Father & the Son, while the Father is from Himself alone"
"the Father is not only God the Creator, but with the Son and the Spirit He is also God the Reconciler & God the Redeemer"
"It would be just as improper to say that God the Father died as to say that Jesus or the Spirit of Pentecost created heaven & earth"
"this Father of His is God. He who reveals Him, then, reveals God. But who can reveal God except God Himself?"
"only the son who is already recalling his father's house knows that he is a lost son"
"reconciliation or revelation is not creation or a continuation of creation but rather an inconceivably new work above and beyond..."
"Jesus is the revelation of the Father and the revelation of the Father is Jesus" word.
"As we owe life to God the Creator, so we owe eternal life to God the Reconciler"
"We believe in the one Lord Jesus Christ. He has a claim on us and control over us. He commands and rules"
(3) "...in the process in which creation & sin... are not interfused but opposed even as they exist together"
(2) "He has come into being as the worm has come into being... He has come into being as man comes into being"
(1) "begotten... He has come into being in the context of sex and the nexus of the species..."
"it is not true that these names [Father & Son] are just freely chosen and in the last analysis meaningless symbols"
"We can speak of the truth only in untruth. We do not know what we are saying when we call God Father & Son"
"He is the eternal Word of the Father who speaks from all eternity, the eternal thought of the Father who thinks from all eternity"
"The Holy Spirit is the authorisation to speak about Christ... He is the summons to the Church to minister the Word"
"The Holy Spirit is the Lord who sets us free and by receiving Him we become the children of God"
"Even in receiving the Holy Spirit man remains man, the sinner sinner"
"eternity comes first and then time, therefore the future comes first and then the present..."
"God remains the Lord even and precisely when He comes into our hearts as His own gift, even and precisely when He fills us"
"No other intercedes with Him on our behalf except Himself. No other intercedes with us on His behalf except again Himself"
"The Holy Spirit is the fellowship, the act of communion, of the Father & the Son"
"The Holy Spirit is the love in which the Father loves the Son, and in which the Son loves the Father"
"[God] is the Father of the Son in such a way that with the Son He brings forth the Spirit, love, and is in Himself the Spirit, love"
Paul Lehmann: the angels are alone among God's creatures in having the time to read Barth's Dogmatics. one down, twelve to go.
time
Although Eagleman and his students study timing in the brain, their own sense of time tends to be somewhat unreliable. Eagleman wears a Russian wristwatch to work every morning, though it’s been broken for months. “The other day, I was in the lab,” he told me, “and I said to Daisy, who sits in the corner, ‘Hey, what time is it?’ And she said, ‘I don’t know. My watch is broken.’ It turns out that we’re all wearing broken watches.” Scientists are often drawn to things that bedevil them, he said. “I know one lab that studies nicotine receptors and all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control and they’re all overweight.”
via The New Yorker.
bits of barth
Barth CD I/1 9:44 am
"fear of scholasticism is the mark of a false prophet"
"the sword of God's real judgment does hang over our heads when we take up and pursue this work [dogmatics/theology]"
"what finally counts is whether a dogmatics is scriptural. If it is not, then it will definitely be futile..."
"the path of Roman Catholicism & the path of Protestant Modernism differs from the path of the Evangelical Church"
bits of barth
Barth CD I/1 8:05 am
"in my work one is compelled as believer & theologian to do the impossible, namely, to jump over one's own shadow"
(3) "...a stimulation by the inner life, a basing of man's whole life on this mystery that is beyond himself"
(2) "...a making present of remote times, an obedience, a decision, a halting before the mystery..."
(1) "as man knows God's Word... there takes place an understanding, a personal involvement, an acceptance, an assent, an approval..."
"if [we] think we can handle the Word and faith like capital at our disposal, we simply prove that we have neither the Word nor faith"
"when we have them, we do not regard them as a possession but strain after them, hungering & thirsting, & for that reason blessed"
"faith is not one of the various capacities of man, whether native or acquired. capacity for the Word of God is not among these"
"the possibility of faith as it is given to man in the reality of faith... is loaned to man by God, and loaned exclusively for use"
"in faith man is capable of receiving God's Word... the Word of God is now the W heard by him & he is now the man addressed by this W"
barth & the soggy bottom boys. exclusively available at starbucks.
"he has not come to faith; faith has come to him through the Word. he has not adopted faith; faith has been granted him through the W"
"the Word of God becomes knowable by making itself known"
"what we had in view... should now have become provisionally comprehensible in all its incomprehensibility" hmm...
"even and precisely in the depths of unbelief faith hears the new summons to faith"
"to the extent another standard is applied here and not the Word of God itself, only confusion and destruction can result"
"this supreme authority which addresses the Church... is the free Bible, the Bible that remains free in face of all interpretation"
"we cannot speak as prophets or apostles. we cannot speak with the full assurance of the biblical witness: 'we beheld his glory'"
"the Word of God is above dogma as the heavens are above the earth"
"for the sake of dogma, dogmatics must deal with dogmas" :)