A kind of cyber-winter

There is a season for everything, or so says a wise man.

I've entered a season, which I'll awkwardly term a cyber-winter, during which I will no longer be posting blogs at this site. (You, perceptive reader, have probably noted that I've not been doing much of late anyway...)

The reason for my hibernation? In this season, my Lord, his people, my wife and my daughter have a greater call on my time.

Thanks to those who have sauntered with me over the last few years.

PS The picture above conveys how I feel about this cyber-winter.

Quotes I've appreciated

"In the new economy* there were [are?] three kinds of people: the haves, the have-nots and the-have-not-paid-for-what-they-haves" (Sarajit Das, Comment in "The Nation Reviewed" in The Monthly, April 2009, p. 10).

* i.e. the one in which consumption financed by borrowing is rife

I like the following pithy response to the question: what is Christian faith?

... Christian 'faith' is not mere acknowledgement of 'facts'. Faith is not even apprehension of a person. It is, however, the spiritual appropriation of relationship with that person. Therefore, to appropriate relationship with the person of Christ (which, because he is a person, must be done on his terms) requires spiritual re-creation.
(Matthew Brain, unpublished PhD, ch. 4: "Newbigin, Paul and Generation Y in Dialogue -- Part One: The Plausibility Structure", p. 31 )

As I said, I like this: appropriating a relationship with someone, which, because they are a person, to be reasonable, must be done on their terms. My "to be reasonable" flows from what I think is a key epistemological principle, which I got courtesy of T. F. Torrence, via Marty Foord, and in Torrence's book Theological Science. The principle is that in order to truly / reasonably know a thing, we must let it reveal it to us on its on terms.

As far as I can tell, this principle holds widely: it applies to rocks, to people, to animals, to sub-atomic phenomena, to the environment, to wine, to art ... the list goes on.

For example, if I really want to know my wife, I must let her be the person she is, including all the history, emotions and different ways of seeing, doing and responding to things -- i.e. different to me! -- that she brings. That is, I must not presume to know her; I must not project some cardboard cut-out of her and relate to this, rather than to the real person -- no matter how much the real person cuts across my view of how the world, or to be more specific, my view of how a woman or a wife, should be. (Ed.: I guess this is one of the not-so-small-challenges of marriage!)

Anyhow, there endeth my musings on what it means to know an object. On a lighter note, I have some cracker stories from my time with the five- and six-year-olds today. Hope to post them soon.

Called to Hope

A friend of mine has just published his first book, Called to Hope: Overcoming Depression.

Most of us probably feel the same way about reading a book on depression that we feel about reading a book on broken legs: if ours isn't broken, why bother; but if it -- or the leg of someone dear to us -- is, then give us the book, quickly.

Of course, this attitude is silly for lots of reasons. First, if the incidence of broken legs is high, and getting higher, it's worth knowing why this might be so and how to treat said sore legs. (According to the book's blurb, 1 in 10 will suffer depression in their lifetime, i.e. about 4 people out of those on a full Transperth bus. And, for those who revel in being Gen X or Gen Y, my hunch is the statistical likelihood is higher.)

Second, as anyone who has had a broken limb, or, for that matter, a garden variety flu or cold, knows, prevention usually would have been far better than cure. How much more for the person who is carrying around a numb mind, a glum heart and a mangled psyche.

Yes, I think psychological health is important. Elusive, but nonetheless important.

Anyhow, this post is sounding rant-like, so I'll stop. Do check out the book: from what I've read, it is clearly written, informative and entertaining -- far more helpful than my ranting. You can read some of the first chapter at the above link.

Too cool for school

A very smart friend of mine once told me that one of contemporary western society's major ills is the valorisation of cool. By this, he meant (don't worry, I had to ask him too) that being cool is one of the things people strive for. Whereas, previously, people might have sought to cultivate thrift, nobility, charity, manners -- that peculiar 'virtue' of the Victorian Era -- moral rectitude or, dare I say it, godliness, today, cool is what many of us are after.

As I've reflected on my friend's statement, and on my life and the lives of those around me, I've become convinced he is on to something. I haven't thought much about the particular shape of our cool-lust (see my last post on neologisms :-]) or about what drives it, though I think the ubiquity of visual images must be one important driver. (Think 2 to 3 TVs per household, kids walking around glued to their portable DVD players, digital cameras that enable us to take hundreds of pictures in a single hour, iphones that produce an array of images at the press of small buttons.)

The following excerpt from Jonathon Franzen's The Corrections puts its finger on this pursuit of cool, and, on its perhaps more insidious older sibling, the 'pursuit of feeling extraordinary':

Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary -- of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There werer further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have the money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was tht not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool? (p. 197)

Words and People

A group I'm part of has been watching a series of talks by the English Christian John Stott, called The Bible and the Christian Life. We've just taken in "The Problem of Culture", the fourth of six talks. What we've seen so far has been excellent: crystal clear, comprehensive, engaging, judicious -- and sometimes even funny. All this from a man who is 87 years old!

The following are loose paraphrases of three propositions from Stott's second talk ("The Double Authority of Scripture"), which I find helpful, thought-provoking and reassuring:

1. There is no ladder by which our finite minds can climb into the infinite mind of God.
2. Our words clothe our thoughts.
3. God has condescended to clothe his thoughts in human words.

By "clothe" I take the primary meaning to be disclose; though I realise our words can often cloak, i.e. hide, our thoughts.
I'd also like to broaden 2. and 3. a little by suggesting that words not only clothe thoughts, but people -- including people's characters, feelings etc.

I haven't thought long and hard about my sense of "clothes" or 'people-disclosing words', so refinements, extensions and criticisms are most welcome.

Street Corner Advice

Don't take life too seriously,
It's not permanent...

The blackboard in front of the hairdresser's shop told me. Thanks hairdresser. I mentally erased this message and replaced it with:

Take life very seriously;
it stretches forward into eternity.

Not quite the feel-good message that would make passers-by want to enter your shop:
"Come in, take a seat, grab a coffee. Let's talk about eternity, while I set your perm."

God's thoughts and ours

What follows is the first one-and-a-half paragraphs from a short piece, written by John Piper, primarily for people who teach and preach the Bible. It's entitled, "Preaching as Concept Creation, Not Just Contextualization" (Thanks Chris B.).

At the end of the article, Piper lists ten God-given truths that would seem ludicrous to some. I'd add to Piper's ten -- for example, that into this distorted, frustrated world, God's new creation has been brought by Jesus and now exists within it. Nevertheless, I find his main point helpful and suggestive.

As we think seriously about contextualizing the message of the Bible, let’s remember that we must also labor to bring about, in the minds of our listeners, conceptual categories that may be missing from their mental framework. If we only use the thought structures they already have, some crucial biblical truths will remain unintelligible, no matter how much contextualizing we do. This work of concept creation is harder than contextualization, but just as important.

We must pray and preach so that a new mental framework is created for seeing the world. Ultimately, this is not our doing. God must do it. Read rest of article (Desiring God Ministries).

If Piper is on to something, questions like the following could help us think about sermons -- before, during and after them: How might God be stretching or overturning the ways in which we think about the world? Or, more to the point, what entirely new ways of thinking might He be suggesting?