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Benediction from inauguration of Barack Obama yesterday. Transcript here.
Now playing: Dear Mr President – Pink
Montaigne, having studied the world’s cultures and conversed with a cannibal, knew that one man’s meat was another man’s person.
From Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Experiments in Ethics
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Freaky economics. Go watch.
One quote from the post-war restructuring of the US economy and the need for a new way of consuming:
Our enormously productive economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.
Victor Lebow 1955
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Now playing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe – What Is the Soul of Man?
via FoxyTunes
The Writers Room piece in the Saturday Guardian has pictures of famous and famousish writers’ rooms with an explanation of why they put that Afghan rug just so, or have a Mozambique desert scene to ponder on, or whether they sit side-on, back to, or facing a window or wall. The seduction of the piece is that you might think if I did that, I too would be writerly, prize winning and featuring in a Guardian feature.
I have a bit of desk envy when it comes to Al Gore’s work space:
TDS has got our household on a carbonfast for Lent. This means I’m honour bound to simplify and not mug the planet further so will be unable to add the plasma tv and three cinema display screens to the disorder and chaos of our house which looks not unlike a Turner Prize installation.
My consolation:
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries. A.A. Milne
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Now playing: The Kooks – She Moves In Her Own Way
via FoxyTunes
‘The categories of optimism and pessimism don’t exist for me because I am a prisoner of hope’ Cornel West (who might or might not have been commenting on the American political process). Being imprisoned by hope isn’t a bad way to start the new year. It also helped to finish the year in looking at the Magnificat, and Mary being imprisoned by hope of a bigger story.
Mary’s Song
And Mary said:
“My soul glorifies the Lord
and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has been mindful
of the humble state of his servant.
From now on all generations will call me blessed,
for the Mighty One has done great things for me—
holy is his name.
His mercy extends to those who fear him,
from generation to generation.
He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
even as he said to our fathers.”
Luke 1
We said the Magnificat most days of the week in college chapel and it’s one of the first things I remember remembering as someone new to the stuff of Christian hope.
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Now playing: Findlay Brown – Come Home
via FoxyTunes
Geoffrey Stephenson ran an event on preaching yesterday. There was a great quote from Barbara Brown Taylor on the place of imagination. Imagination is not only permitted, it is required in living the story we’re trying to tell. Taylor writes:
Imagination has no point to make, no axe to grind. It’s more like a child roaming the neighbourhood on a free afternoon, following first the smell of fresh bread in an oven, then the glint of something bright in the grass- led by curiosity, by hunger, by hope, to explore the given world from its highest branches to its deepest roots because it is wonderful and terrible and because it is there. When imagination comes home and empties its pockets, of course there will be some sorting to do. Keep the cat’s eye marble, the Japanese beetle wing, the red feather, the penny. Jettison the bottle cap, the broken glass, the melted chocolate with lint. But do not scold imagination for bringing it all home or for collecting it in the first place.
And it’s from the messiness that order and shape in preaching might emerge – rather than the other way round as it so often is. The quote is from The Preaching Life. (Barbara Brown Taylor’s also the author of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, which might give the flip side to her preaching advice.)
Taylor’s quote about preparing to preach – however she feels about it now – reminded me that preaching is like writing just about anything – prose, drama, music, poetry. (Well perhaps not anything, although some of my report writing and income tax returns have been fantastical.) One of the best books ever on anything is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird where she quotes a preacher as saying hope is a ‘revolutionary patience’. ‘Let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.’ Just like preaching.
The light through the woods was great too, and there was the non smokers’ equivalent of a fag break to nip out and roam the neighbourhood.
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Now playing: Amy Winehouse – Tears dry on their own
via FoxyTunes
Reading over the weekend Geoff Mulgan’s book Good and Bad Power
Politics is ‘the art of swallowing toads without making a face’
Carlos Fuentes
Frederick Buechner writes about vocation:
It comes from the Latin vocare, to call ….There are all kinds of voices calling you to all different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which is the voice of God rather than of Society, say, or the Superego, or Self-interest.
By and large a good rule for finding out is this: The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done. If you really get a kick out of your work, you’ve presumably met requirement (a), but if your work is writing cigarette ads, the chances are you’ve missed requirement (b). On the other hand, if your work is being a doctor in a leper colony, you have probably met requirement (b), but if most of the time you’re bored and depressed by it, the chances are you have not only bypassed (a), but probably aren’t helping your patients either.
Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place Go9d calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
Rilke was asked by someone whether or not he should become a poet. He replied, ‘The question is not ’should I be a poet, but can I bear to do anything else?’
And Thomas Merton in Seeds of Contemplation writes ‘Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get round to being the particular poet or the particular monk that they are intended to be by God.’
Quoted in Finding Sanctuary
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Now playing: Denison Witmer – Little Flowers
via FoxyTunes
We’ve been traveling recently. I found this prayer/poem/blessing which sort of makes sense of why we wonder about wandering, and why we welcome home coming.
Please bring strange things.
Please come bringing new things.
Let very old things come into your hands.
Let what you do not know come into your eyes.
Let desert sand harden your feet.
Let the arch of your feet be the mountains.
Let the paths of your fingerprints be your maps
and the ways you go be the lines on your palms.
Let there be deep snow in your inbreathing
and your outbreath be the shining of ice.
May your mouth contain the shapes of strange words.
May you smell food cooking you have not eaten.
May the spring of a foreign river be your navel.
May your soul be at home where there are no houses.
Walk carefully, well loved one,
Walk mindfully, well loved one,
Walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us,
Be always coming home
Ursula K. Le Guin
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Now playing: Carlos Gardel – Por Una Cabeza
via FoxyTunes
Go to the people
live with them
learn from them
love them
Start with what
they know,
build with what they have…
But with the best leaders
when the work is done, the task accomplished
the people will say….
‘We have done this ourselves.’
Lao Tsu 700BC
Put up at the end of a community development event today.
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Now playing: Peter Gabriel – Book of Love
via FoxyTunes
