Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

This book. I can't say enough about it right now. I just finished it last night in bed, and may turn around and read it again this week.

I've read only a few things by Deitrich Bonhoeffer (mostly Life Together and his Prison Poems) and a little about him, but his faith impresses me deeper every time I come across him.

Life Together would make a fabulous Bible study book, personal devotional (about as close as I get to that is reading a couple pages or chapters in something late at night just before sleeping, when the words can sink into me as I drift off to sleep moments later), or I don't know, just something to give as a gift or read on a plane. So many encouraging words for how to deal as a Christian with other people. Encouraging and challenging and convicting and then encouraging again. The best kinds of teaching words. His style sometimes is a bit stifling, ancient, or preachy; but he IS preaching, and it I DID only say sometimes, and you can definitely get past that to find much good.

Often I think of books on this topic (the Christian life) only in the vein of Christian-to-Christian interaction, but while reading this I was struck by how much of it can be used in every area of life, even Christian-to-nonbeliever.


* * * * * 

"The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God's Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged... He needs his brother man as a bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation. He needs his brother solely because of Jesus Christ. The Christ in his own heart is weaker than the Christ in the word of his brother; his own heart is uncertain, his brother's is sure." (from the chapter Community)

 "For Christians the beginning of the day should not be burdened and oppressed with besetting concerns for the day's work. At the threshold of the new day stands The Lord who made it." (from The Day With Others)

"Word plunges men into the world of things. The Christian steps out of the world of brotherly encounter into the world of impersonal things... an instrument in the hand of God for the purification of Christians from all self-centeredness and self-seeking. The work of the world can be done only where a person forgets himself, where he loses  himself in a cause, in reality, the task, the 'it.'" (The Day With Others)

"Each by itself has profound pitfalls and perils. One who wants fellowship without solitude plunges into the void of words and feelings, and one who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-infatuation, and despair. Let him who cannot be alone beware of community. Let him who is not in community beware of being alone." (The Day Alone)

"To make intercession means to grant our brother the same right that we have received, namely, to stand before Christ and share in His mercy." (The Day Alone)

"I can never know beforehand how God's image should appear in others. That image always manifests a completely new and unique form that comes solely from God's free and sovereign creation. To me the sight may seem strange, even ungodly. But God creates every man in the likeness of His Son, the Crucified. After all, even that image certainly looked strange and ungodly to me before I grasped it." (Ministry)

Ted Kooser, awkward poet

I do like Kooser. Simple words, sharp images, hard situations, crazy humor. This poem reminds me of the end of Ecclesiates. So vivid, too. From Flying at Night.


Uncle Adler

He had come to the age
when his health had put cardboard
in all of its windows.
The oil in his eyes was so old
it would barely light,
and his chest was a chimney
full of bees. Of it all,
he had nothing to say;
his Adam's apple hung like a ham
in a stairwell. Lawyers
encircled the farm like a fence,
and his daughters fought over
the china. Then one day
while everyone he'd ever loved
was digging in his yard,
he suddenly sucked in his breath so hard
the whole estate fell in on him.

Fallen Hearts

Bohun staggered back against the wall, and stared at him with frightful eyes.
"How do you know all this?" he cried. "Are you a devil?"
"I am a man," answered Father Brown gravely; "and therefore have all devils in my heart."

- G. K. Chesterton, The Hammer of God




The heart is deceitful above all things,
And desperately wicked.

- Jeremiah 17:9




For from within, out of the heart of men, proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders, thefts, covetousness, wickedness, deceit, lewdness, an evil eye, blasphemy, pride, foolishness.  All these evil things come from within and defile a man.

- Mark 7:21-23

Annie Dillard: when she's optimistic in spite of it all

"I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I've come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not *in* its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down. Simone Weil says simply, 'Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.'

I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live maggots in amber, there are shells of worms in the rock and moths flapping at my eyes. A wind from noplace rises. A sense of the real exults me; the cords loose; I walk on my way."

-Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p242

Gilead (a novel)

This is one beautiful book. Marilynn Robinson, where have you been all my life? Here are a few quotes from this afternoon's reading.

"I could never have imaged this world if I hadn't spent almost eight decades walking around in it. People talk about how wonderful the world seems to children, and that's true enough. But children think they will grow into it and understand it, and I know very well that I will not, and would not if I had a dozen lives. That's clearer to me every day. Each morning I'm like Adam waking up in Eden, amazed at the cleverness of my hands and at the brilliance pouring into my mind through my eyes - old hands, old eyes, old mind, a very diminished Adam altogether, and still it is just as remarkable." (p66)

"In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try." (p57)

"You and Tobias are hopping around in the sprinkler. The sprinkler is a magnificent invention because it exposes raindrops to sunshine. That does occur in nature, but it is rare. When I was in seminary I used to go sometimes to watch the Baptists down at the river. It was something to see the preacher lifting the one who was being baptized up out of the water and the water pouring off the garments and the hair. It did look like a birth or a resurrection." (p63)

"...There is nothing more astonishing than a human face. . . It has something to do with incarnation. You feel your obligation to a child when you have seen it and held it. Any human face is a claim on you, because you can't help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it. But this is truest of the face of an infant." (p66)

To Wake Up

Reading Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk. Wow.

"We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up. We teach our children to look alive there, to join by words and activities the life of human culture on the planet's crust. As adults we are almost all adept at waking up. We have so mastered the transition we have forgotten we ever learned it. Yet it is a transition we make a hundred times a day, as, like so many will-less dolphins, we plunge and surface, lapse and emerge. We live half our waking lives and all of our sleeping lives in some private, useless, and insensible waters we never mention or recall. Useless, I say. Valueless, I might add - until someone hauls their wealth up to the surface and into the wide-awake city, in a form that people can use." (pp22-3)

a novel

I've been reading Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina for a while now (you must pardon me; it's nearly 990 pages long and I've been reading other things too), and as I read I am impressed with his art and perception. The story is tragic, follows more than one adultery, plagued with depression and hatred, but Tolstoy shows these characters as real and complex, their stories in motion and with conseqeuences, and their falls and stumblings for what they are and for how they destroy life.

Not only that, but it is full of striking metaphors and some realizations and generalizations that are really great. Take this paragraph about Levin (the character I probably like and sympathize with the most) in Chapter Fourteen:

"Levin had been married three months. He was happy but not at all in the same way as he had expected. At every step he found himself disillusioned in his former dreams while also discovering new, unexpected enchantments. Levin was happy, but on entering into family life he saw at every step that it was not at all what he had imagined. At every step he felt as a man might feel who, after admiring the smooth, cheerful motion of a boat on the water, actually gets into the boat himself. He saw that apart from having to sit steadily in the boar without rocking, he also had to keep in mind, without forgetting for a moment where he was going, that there was water beneath his feet, that he had to row, that his unaccustomed hands hurt, and that it was easy only when you looked at it, but that doing it, though it made you very happy, was very hard."

planks of thanks

"Trust is the bridge from yesterday to tomorrow, built with planks of thanks. Remembering frames up gratitude. Gratitude lays out the planks of trust. I can walk the planks - from known to unknown - and know: He holds."

from One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp

#110-122

110. a sister who comes and wakes me up if I oversleep in the morning
111. the bliss of sleep after insomnia
112. a wedding and its attendant gladness, tears and bittersweet memories
113. Luke and Theresa's smiles as they turned to face one another over the rings
114. my mom putting a check into my hand
115. fresh cow's milk
116. latin conversations all the way from Bucer's to Garfield Street
117. tortillas fried
118. Billy Collins
119. reading someone else's poetry and being lifted by it
120. old computers that still run
121. a zip-up hoodie with long enough sleeves
122. the satisfaction of paying rent on the exact day it is due

A time for books

One of the joys of being home for most of this summer has been the world of reading-for-fun that I have been able to be a part of. Maybe that is one of the joys of being out of school in general, but I hesitate to say that because so much of the assigned reading at New St. Andrews was the sort of thing I thoroughly enjoyed and probably would have been interested in reading on my own (excepting things like Euclid's Elements, and Athenaze, and Brunelleschi's Dome). But I digress.

Two weeks ago I took some of the girls to town, returning library books and selecting 25 more to bring home. Yes, twenty-five. Novels and biographies and poetry. Today Maria and I returned about half of those, and grabbed a few more to replace them. It's one of the tragedies of living in (or merely near) such a small town that the library contains far fewer titles than it should for a family of this size where everyone has an appetite for reading.

I love seeing people with a love for books. I love it in anyone, whether it's the kids I babysit asking repeatedly for "another story," or my dad finally reading some of the stacks on his bookshelves, or just someone waiting at the tire shop who pulls a novel out of their bag instead of picking up the nearest celebrity magazine. But it is the most wonderful to see my little siblings reading hungrily. Becki reading The Hobbit to Abel and Seth. Naomi laughing out loud while reading Pippi Longstocking or Ramona, just as I used to. Laura telling us things we've never heard about Johnny Cash and Julia Child and Eleanor Roosevelt. Maria and Becki reading Harry Potter for the first time, as junior and senior college students. Silas finishing Martin Luther's Bondage of the Will, and discussing it with Dad. Lydia and Abbi shrieking about their stories about ninjas or witches' spells, and taking turns reading Lois Walfrid Johnson. Jonathan's histories and wars. Emili and Elsi's historical fiction. The horse stories, the Sugar Creek Gang, the Mandie books and the cooking books.

The books can get a little tyrannical at times, which is evidenced by their interruptions to 'life.' The longer it takes for us all to get to bed at night because we all have a chapter to finish, the kids that whip a book out from the couch cushion as soon as we pause the movie, the stories that make the reader late for breakfast and then pull them back out of the kitchen before the dishes are even washed. It is a tyranny that ruled me once when I could zip through a paperback chapter book like Sadie Rose in less than a day, that grips me even now with the Count of Monte Cristo or the tale of a murder in Cyprus, or of Alyosha Karamazov and his nice little family. It is the tyranny like your favorite dog begging for a pat, of the conversation with a friend you see every day, of the sunshine that pumps happiness into your whole body. It is the tyranny of love.

Shakespeare and Huck Finn

Collaborating with The Erratic Muse (http://theerraticmuse.blogspot.com/) for Shakespeare celebrations, and studying Mark Twain in class this week, I take this opportunity to quote them both. Oh, Mark Twain, you crack me up.

"To Be or Not To Be" (from Shakespeare's Hamlet 3/1)

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.--Soft you now!
The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd.

"To Be or Not To Be." (from Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Ch 21)

   "To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
  That makes calamity of so long life;
  For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do
    come to Dunsinane,
  But that the fear of something after death
  Murders the innocent sleep,
  Great nature's second course,
  And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
  Than fly to others that we know not of.
  There's the respect must give us pause:
  Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
  For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
  The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
  The law's delay, and the quietus which his
    pangs might take,
  In the dead waste and middle of the night,
    when churchyards yawn
  In customary suits of solemn black,
  But that the undiscovered country from whose
    bourne no traveler returns,
  Breathes forth contagion on the world,
  And thus the native hue of resolution, like
    the poor cat i' the adage,
  Is sicklied o'er with care,
  And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
  With this regard their currents turn awry,
  And lose the name of action.
  'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
    But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
  Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
  But get thee to a nunnery -- go!"

Hopkins' and the Greeks: perfect circles and sin

“The circle image," James Cotter says, "also provided Hopkins with a traditional figure for the triune godhead: ‘The immortals of the eternal ring/ The Utterer, Uttered, Uttering.’ Since only God himself is perfect completion, every finite sphere must show its imperfection of being in asymmetrical form.” (Inscape: the Christology and Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins)

“All the world,” Hopkins says in a journal entry of 1973, “is full of inscape and chance left free to act falls into an order as well as a purpose.”

Cotter again: “God gave things a forward and perpetual motion, but Satan, his counterfeit image and Antichrist, projects a rival spiral... [which] draws toward non-being instead of mounting toward its target of truth... sin is inscape gone awry, a self-centered enthronement of strange gods in one’s own God-likeness.”

Was Hopkins successful?

“I am sweetly soothed by your saying that you could make any one understand my poem by reciting it well. That is what I always hoped, thought and said; it is my precise aim.” Gerard Manley Hopkins, letter to Everard Hopkins Nov 5 1885

morning monastics pt 2

Remember the monastic routine we're doing for our history class?
I usually remember it.
I did forget one day until after 10 am, and another day I messed up and copied down the wrong Bible verse... in pen of course. Nastiness. I've got to get better about this. It's going to be pure humiliation to hand in my finished copy if I make any more mistakes.
Mr. Schlect encouraged us to do this in groups. I never have. I think it's probably a good idea, but most days of the week I stay here until about 11... and I have made a habit of doing the reciting, reading and writing the same time & place every day (after breakfast in the study). Yes, that is one suggestion I have taken.
Another suggestion was adding one small bit. I poked a little 5-or-8-minute Latin Bible reading into it. Usually I only read a few verses, but I flatter myself I may keep the language partially green and alive in doing so.

St. Benedict and monastic routine

Perhaps I should feel like a monk right now, but I really don't. Maybe it takes some time.

In history, we're studying the medieval growth of Christianity, and as part of that we have a little book called St. Benedict's Rule for Monastaries. We read portions of this every morning, along with reciting (reading, if we don't know it) a psalm and a Christian creed, and copying down scripture passages. At the end of the term, our small historigraphical paper will be due on reenactment or routine, discussing the difference in reenacting the past rather than just reading about it.

For a taste of Benedict, here's one snippet about starting his monastary.

And so we are going to establish a school for the service of the Lord. In founding it we hope to introduce nothing harsh or burdensome. But if a certain strictness results from the dictates of equity for the amendment of vices or the preservation of charity, do not be at once dismayed and fly from the way of salvation, whose entrance cannot be but narrow. For as we advance in the religious life and in faith, our hearts expand and we run in the way of God's commandments with unspeakable sweetness of love. Thus, never departing from His school, but preserving in the monastary according to His teaching until death, we may by patience share in the sufferings of Christ and deserve to have a share also in His kingdom.

Good fat book quotes

I have a quoting urge.

I apologize for how long this might be, and for the fact that I must elide between a few important quotes... if you want to see the rest, read the book! We are reading about original sin and he delves into a discussion of community here.

"Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals but an organic unity, one race, one family. Angels, on the other hand, all stand side-by-side, independently of one another...God created all of us from one man (Acts 17:26); we are not a heap of souls piled on a piece of ground, but all blood relatives of one another, connected to one another by a host of ties, therefore conditioning one another and being conditioned by one another."

(a couple pages later)

"All the members of such a body can either be a blessing or a curse to one another, and increasingly so to the degree that they themselves are more outstanding and occupy a more pivotal place in the organism. Fathers, mothers, guardians, caretakers, teachers, professors, patrons, guides, princes, kings, and so on have the greatest influence on those under their jurisdiction. Their life and conduct decides the fortunes of their subordinates, elevates them and brings them to honor, or drags them down and pulls them along to destruction. The family of the drunkard is ruined and disgraced because of the father's sin. The family of a criminal is widely and for a long time identified and condemned along with him. A congregation languishes under the faithless conduct of a pastor. A people decline and are eventually destroyed as a result of the foolish policies of a king. 'In whatever thing the kings go crazy, the Achaeans [homer's greeks] are punished.' Among people there is a solidarity for good or ill: community in blessing and in judgment. We stand on the shoulders of earlier generations and inherit the things they have accumulated in the way of material and spiritual wealth.
We enter into their labors, rest on their laurels, enjoy the things they have frequently aquired at great cost. We receive all this undeservedly, without having asked for it. It is waiting for us at our birth; it is bequeathed to us by grace."

Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics vol. 3, Sin and Salvation in Christ, 102 and 104

For starters...

The only profound thing I can think of to begin with is the origin if my blog title. The book is The Supper of the Lamb by Robert Capon, the most inspiring "cookbook" I've ever read, and the most appetizing theology book! He says, after peeling and cutting an onion:

"You see, I hope, how hard it is to rush past even a single detail. The world is such an amiable place."